Ms. Sowards is unafraid to dream big. Ever since she was growing up in Arkansas, romantic visions of farming filled her head.
“It was this unexplainable dream,” she said. “It was not something I was steeped in the culture of or was even familiar with.”
Raised in the suburbs, Ms. Sowards’s only exposures to farming were the ornamental gardens her mother planted and the small hobby farms of relatives. But her aspirations never faltered.
In 2011, Ms. Sowards made the first step toward realizing her agrarian yearnings. She married her husband, Jeremiah, who was the third of nine siblings and had a completely different childhood experience than that of his new wife. He had grown up tending to an acre garden, working the land, being homeschooled alongside his siblings, and hating every minute of it.
He had absolutely no desire to return to that way of life.
“But he really liked me,” Ms. Sowards joked, “so he said, ‘Sure, we can do that!’”
No longer dreaming alone, Ms. Sowards’s cravings for farm life grew with each passing year. Together, she and Jeremiah developed a humble but noble goal. They wanted to produce enough food to feed their large family.
In 2014, they settled into a four-acre foreclosure in rural Arkansas. They quickly established flocks of chickens and goats, and she began to sow an enormous garden, teeming with a diverse assortment of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Her long-imagined farm was becoming a reality.
However, Ms. Sowards felt called to something more.
Modeling Goodness
She had always had a desire to teach, something she credits to being an avid learner.“I think the two go hand-in-hand,” she said.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Sowards found viewers flocking not just to her channel, but to homesteading writ large.
“A lot of people are aware that our food system is very fragile, way more than they were prior to COVID,” she said. “One of the big things that I’ve hoped to be able to do is to very practically teach people, but also to encourage them to be very mindful of what’s driving them toward growing their own food. Because I think it would be very easy for people to look at the facts and get afraid. I really hope to encourage people, through education, that this [homesteading] is just a worthy lifestyle, no matter how great the need for it.”
As her channel grew in popularity, Ms. Sowards noticed an increasing amount of comments and discussions centered around the transparent, healthy family life she was showcasing. That was something she hadn’t expected.
The mother of five sons and one stepdaughter, aged 8 to 18, Ms. Sowards stressed that relationships stand at the core of her parenting philosophy.
“I want to have a connection with my kids over everything else. The more connection we have, the less discipline we need,” she said.
Ms. Sowards was able to foster these relationships with her children by first strengthening her marriage. She and her husband had come to each other from a divorce with children in tow.
“The odds were stacked against us,” she said.
But the couple made their relationship a priority, focusing on each other and never discussing divorce or separating their family in any way. The mutual respect that developed, as well as Ms. Sowards’s willingness to be open and communicative with her children, led to the wholly unique family dynamic that shines through in her YouTube channel.
“Because of the way entertainment has presented family, it’s very unusual to turn on the TV and watch people who have been married for over a decade and are still really in love with each other,“ she said. ”It’s very unusual to hear people have very respectful conversations with their young children ... and to see children who are very respectful of their parents. There’s just an obvious relationship.”
It wasn’t the kind of content she had originally intended to create. Yet the enormously positive response to her family life got Ms. Sowards thinking more about the vital role that human relationships play in homesteading. It’s a connection that goes far deeper than mere sustenance.
“I don’t think we can teach people homesteading only. I don’t think we can teach people canning and preserving, and cooking only; I think we have to teach people to be relationally minded,” she said.
That mindset was influenced by Ms. Sowards’s dedication to permaculture, the agricultural practice that stresses sufficiency and sustainability through the web of relationships between farmers, animals, and plants. The ultimate goal is a harmonious ecosystem. That goal is what Ms. Sowards sought to echo in all areas of her life and what opened her eyes to just how pervasive unhealthy relationships are in every area of modern culture.
“It doesn’t model healthy relationships in marriage or with children or with family or with friends. It models a lot of toxic relationships, and we’re in such a toxic relationship with the earth,” she said.
Community building through homesteading is a grand ambition of Ms. Sowards, who views individual self-sufficiency as not much more than a pipe dream.
“You need community sufficiency,” she said. “Having a community makes homesteading feasible.”
New Beginnings
In the summer of 2021, Ms. Sowards made a surprise announcement: Roots and Refuge was closing up shop in their native Arkansas and heading to a raw 27-acre patch of land in the South Carolina Midlands.“I had to go through a great process of grief to leave what I had always called home,” she said. “It was hard to put all these chips on the table and go start from scratch. But I’m also aware that, when you feel God leading you, there’s really no other good option.”
They settled on the outskirts of the merged town of Batesburg-Leesville and immediately fell in love.
“It’s the most home we’ve ever been,” Ms. Sowards said. “I love this place, I really do.”
The initial plan was to renew their homestead on the new acreage, building it up steadily over time and, eventually, constructing an enormous learning center. It was a plan that would take nothing short of 10 years to complete. But a more immediate opportunity presented itself in downtown Batesburg-Leesville that Ms. Sowards couldn’t pass up. It was an opportunity to manifest her community-building desire into something tangible.
Like many Main Streets in small-town America, downtown Batesburg-Leesville is filled with one too many empty storefronts.
The Exchange will serve as a mercantile store that caters to all things homesteading and farming. More than mere retail, however, the store will double as a classroom. Complete with a commercial kitchen and large learning space, the Exchange will host workshops on topics such as canning and preserving, cooking from scratch, and working in the garden.
For now, the Exchange operates as an online shop.
That’s just the beginning. Beyond the Exchange and learning center on her farm, Ms. Sowards envisions a revived Batesburg-Leesville, with plans for a coffee roasting company, cafe, and a full-blown farmers market. The aim, as always, is to help people build the strong relationships required for creating a sense of community.
For all of her ambitions and the countless hours of content she creates for social media, at the end of the day, Ms. Sowards is happy to be at home with her family and tending her garden.
“The hardest thing for me is not letting my vision run away with me,” she said. “It requires me to make a very real choice, on a daily basis, that I’m going to be a homesteader first and foremost. That I am going to choose home and family and connection and simple and less, day after day, and let the content flow out of that. I don’t want to lose what I’m doing this for.”
