It’s late October in Sharon, New York. The hills are painted red, orange, and yellow. Mist hangs in the earth-scented air, far below the migrating birds.
“The retreat of bugs and peepers creates a pensive silence this time of year,” traditionalist farmer and cider maker Michael Thomas said in an Oct. 27 text message, one in a series of interviews with The Epoch Times.
‘By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them’
Anyone reading Thomas’s Twitter posts can see he’s no fan of the forces arrayed against small farmers like himself.But who, or what, are those forces?
Thomas believes Matthew 7:16—“by their fruits you shall know them”—could offer an answer.
The “fruits” of the World Economic Forum (WEF), for example, include lab-grown tissue or other “alternative proteins” intended to replace conventional meat.
Thomas thinks the current push for fake meat is grounded in a fundamentally optimistic view of technology—one he does not share.
“We’re becoming technological right down to our bodies,” he said.
That, anyway, appears to be the vision of WEF and its allies. One 2019 document from that organization trumpets the imminent arrival of “affordable biohacking.”
Thomas also worries about the influence of big agribusiness firms. Those companies, he said, could stand to gain from the hyper-technological future forecast by the WEF and other globalist groups, especially if that future favors a small number of well-connected private players.
To the titans of agribusiness, a world of a few massive buyers, effectively compelled to purchase their products, might look like paradise.
Like other homesteaders, Thomas came to farming in hopes of avoiding that particular dystopia. Among other things, he wanted to avoid running up the large debts that are common among bigger farmers.
“My idea was to grow slowly,” he said.
Thomas still has a full-time day job—not too unusual in the often precarious world of small-scale farming and ranching, and a sign, perhaps, of the limits to scaling his approach in a growing, hungry world.
Today, he grazes 15 sheep in a traditional apple orchard. He ferments his apple varietal of choice—an English bittersweet—in oak barrels.
His cider-making hearkens back to America’s deep past. Many of the Founding Fathers loved hard cider.
His practices align with what many environmentalists want to see on a much larger scale. For instance, he doesn’t irrigate his land, and he doesn’t spray his trees with fungicidal copper or sulfur.
On the other hand, Thomas’s reliance on sheep and other animals places him at loggerheads with the many powerful forces trying to curtail or even eliminate animal agriculture, on the stated grounds that it’s not environmentally sustainable.
One such actor is the Dutch government, which has sought to slash livestock numbers in the Netherlands.
Thomas voiced his solidarity with the Dutch farmers who protested that proposal, describing the government’s efforts as “just bizarre.”
Journey to Logos
Thomas’s opposition to the people and groups seeking world-spanning power didn’t start yesterday.As a young man during the early 2000s, he associated with the left-leaning anti-globalization movement. Back then, he was an anarchist.
“I mean, we were all kids once,” Thomas said.
He became disillusioned with that scene during the mid- to late-2000s, as woke politics first began to make headway in it.
In the mid-2010s, Thomas began to rediscover the Catholic faith in which he was raised.
Today, the former anarchist sees himself as a reactionary Catholic traditionalist.
“For me, homesteading and local agriculture are innately reactionary responses to the failure of modernity and global liberalism,” he said.
Thomas’s return to tradition, like that of many others, comes at a strange moment, one of ideological ferment on the periphery of American politics as usual.
Our understanding of who, or what, is left wing or right wing is rapidly changing. Fifteen years ago, who would have expected Democrats to celebrate the Cheney family or Republicans to embrace Tulsi Gabbard?
Thomas draws on a wide range of influences, including traditionalist farmer and poet Wendell Berry and Orthodox Christian environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth. Yet there are clear limits to what he tolerates. For one thing, he firmly rejects liberalism and communism.
“I think that liberalism is a dialogue with evil. And I think that communism is evil that uses that foothold to gain social acceptance,” Thomas said.
He believes the world is inevitably moving in a post-liberal direction. According to him, the specific path that post-liberalism follows could prove critical to the future of humankind.
“If it doesn’t manifest in the correct way, you can get these terrible convulsions of humanity,” he said.
A few potential futures glimmer just over the horizon.
One fate, Thomas believes, could involve the rise of Chinese Communist Party-style social credit scores in the service of authoritarian state control, aided and abetted by globalist capital.
“It’s obviously something the global corporate elite are pushing toward, and so it needs to be refuted,” he said.
From a Christian perspective, such attempts to establish omniscience and omnipotence in this world can look like a poor imitation of Logos—that is, the creative reason and Word of God, manifest in Jesus Christ.
“Is it the anti-Logos? It’s an echo of the original sins of pride and arrogance,” Thomas said.
“Man crowns himself master of all things and, in this arrogance, condemns himself to slavery of the State.”
Catholic Land Movement Rooted in Past
Thomas wanted an alternative to the futures on offer from the Chinese regime, the WEF, and the like.To move forward, he looked back. He found his way to the Catholic Land Movement, a response to rapid industrialization around the turn of the 20th century with new appeal in modern times.
Thomas thinks the pressures on people back then were similar to those today—in the modern case, from groups like the United Nations through its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Then as now, it seemed as though people were being herded into cities.
The original Catholic Land Movement gave people a framework to reject those pressures and seek a different path.
Its roots draw on Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum, which rejected hostility between labor and capital.
“Private ownership,” Leo XIII wrote, “is in accordance with the law of nature.”
Fr. Vincent McNabb is another source of inspiration. Thomas’s website reproduces McNabb’s article “The Catholic Land Movement.”
“On the land,” McNabb wrote, “the father of a family, which is the divine unit of human society, can seek liberty without himself falling into any anti-social selfishness.”
Catholic writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc also influenced the movement.
“For all of these thinkers, especially Chesterton and Belloc, it was important that men and women should have the dignity that comes from possessing property,” Dermot Quinn, a professor at Seton Hall University and editor of the Chesterton Review, told The Epoch Times in an email. “Property enables, indeed requires, self-reliance. It allows families to flourish together. It forms a protective barrier against the over mighty state.”
Thomas said, “At the core of the Catholic faith is the family—and at the core of the homesteading movement is the family.”
There is, of course, a raw, biological dimension to the success or failure of a belief system. A religion that commands its followers to be fruitful and multiply, whether Christian or otherwise, can be expected to win out over one that tolerates or even exalts barrenness. The former will produce offspring; the latter won’t.
Thomas doesn’t think that analysis conflicts with traditional Catholicism or the Catholic Land Movement.
Large families, he said, are beautiful—“and beauty will save the world.”
An inaugural conference for the revived movement, held this August on Thomas’s property, drew many faithful Catholics.
The movement, Thomas said, is still in “primordial emergence”—fitting language for the young, extremely online traditionalists who flock to Thomas and figures like him.
Against such an idealized virtual backdrop, complete with well-lit photographs of apple trees, sheep, and the upstate New York sky, it’s tempting to accuse many of those would-be homesteaders of live action role-playing—in other words, LARP-ing. The LARP, it follows, is somehow inauthentic or unserious.
For someone renting an apartment in some alienating, hive-like city, tethered to modern technology and burdened by social pressures large and small, it can be hard to imagine owning and cultivating a little piece of the country.
Thomas doesn’t fault young people for starting small on their journey back to the land. “They have to crawl from the wreckage of modernity,” he said.
His own slow growth toward greater independence wasn’t always worthy of a picturesque social media post.
“I tilled my own soul and tilled the land with my failures,” he said.
Quinn, of Seton Hall University, said the newest version of the Catholic Land Movement has many supporters.
“It represents a striking response to the spiritual poverty of our time, when, in the midst of material plenty, we find our deepest desires unmet by crude commerce and mere consumerism,” he said.
In a season of transition, an upstate cider maker hopes to tend something that lasts. His success could strengthen many other pilgrims from the system.
