Amid global food supply and sustainability concerns, Angel Studios has released an episodic reality series called “Homestead: Family Survival” about how families nationwide are taking steps to be more self reliant.
The first episode, streaming on the Angel Studios mobile app, focuses on farming, animal husbandry, and holistic living.
“We’re traveling around the U.S. talking to families who are using different survival strategies like how to create food and calories and how to protect their children and their families from modern culture,” Jason Ross told The Epoch Times.
Between 1862 and 1934, homesteading meant the federal government distributed land for private ownership to farm the land. In modern times, the term has come to signify self-sufficient micro-farming and small land-holding farming but without livestock.
“Anybody can homestead,” Ross said. “A quarter-acre backyard will keep you very busy in terms of self-reliance. Most suburban lawns would be fantastic homesteads and in urban areas, people who are using planters and containers to grow their own food are interesting to us.”
Ross attributes the increase to angst about the government.
“We have much less confidence in the government than we once did and that has driven us to look at baking our own bread and raising our own eggs,” he said. “Also, we’re watching our kids become more depressed, isolated, less happy with their lives, more lonely and suicidal.”
The reality show is a spinoff of the feature film “Homestead,” which will premiere in theaters on Dec. 20. But the concept and each episode of the unscripted reality series was approved separately from the feature before being produced.
“Sometimes, it’s one family in an episode, and then it’s multiple families,” Ross said. “In one episode, we’re comparing and contrasting two homesteads in Nashville. One style is a pair of grandparents who built a hunting homestead so they could bring grandkids in versus a young couple who is very, very focused on homeschooling.”
No film project, series, or screenplay is undertaken by Angel Studios unless first approved by the Angel Guild, a 300,000-strong worldwide network of creators who choose which projects to fund. Last year, out of 550 projects submitted to the Angel Guild, 13 were accepted, and $82 million was crowdfunded.
“Homestead: Family Survival’s” first season was filmed in Texas, California, Nashville, Georgia, Chattanooga, Hawaii, and even abroad in Eswatini, Africa.
“We have a lot of footage from a Christian missionary group in Africa that’s helping women homesteaders adopt permaculture methods in the deep rural but also learning from them what are the best homesteading methods and bringing those back to the U.S.,” Ross said.
Permaculture involves living storage, where food is in the ground waiting to be harvested as crops, as opposed to dry food storage methods like those practiced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).
The LDS church has some 100 home storage centers nationwide and in Canada, where members can shop and build their reserves of dry food.
“I grew up LDS, which is why I lean heavily on the institutional knowledge of BYU [Brigham Young University] in studying food storage and water catchment,” Ross said.
Also known as water harvesting, water catchment is the practice of storing rainwater after collecting it. Brigham Young University offers graduate studies in Food Science, which includes food processing and food storage.
The show’s biblical approach to homesteading and community building is designed to resonate with current discussions on the role of faith and spirituality in navigating uncertain times.
Ross, who maintains a 300-acre homestead above Salt Lake City, is now an evangelical Christian who holds an emergency preparedness position in his local congregation.
“The Bible is right there, ready for us to pick up and restabilize our families, but it is just so far out of vogue now,” he said. “Go back and look at what we ditched, start adding that back in, and see how that works. My family is one hundred percent engaged in a faith journey with a church as a way of being well together.”
