
In the twentieth century, each major wave of the back-to-the-land movement has been triggered by some kind of crisis. In 1939, that crisis was World War II—and one of the most famous back-to-the-landers at the time was Louis Bromfield. Author of numerous best-selling novels and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Bromfield was living a comfortable expatriate life in Senlis, France. He nostalgically remembered his grandfather’s Ohio farm that he had often visited as a boy and even wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about it, titled simply The Farm. He later said that it was a combination of homesickness and romanticism that inspired him to move back to Ohio. But it wasn’t a coincidence that he made the actual move in 1939, just as Hitler was beginning to invade Europe. As much as he loved Senlis, it just wasn’t safe to live in France anymore.
“Many of the fellow countrymen to whom I talked on my return seemed almost childish in their naiveté and their lack of understanding concerning the significance of what was happening in Europe and in the world,” Bromfield recalled in his 1955 book From My Experience. But he knew that “rationing, food shortages and other hardships were already in the cards for America,” he wrote in his 1945 book Pleasant Valley. “Even disorder and civil conflict were not beyond the realm of the imagination after the war.”
“If and when such things did come, I wanted,” Bromfield explained, “to be on my own land, on an island of security which could be a refuge not only for myself and my family but my friends as well.” He wanted his newly created Malabar Farm to be “a place which, if necessary, could withstand a siege and where, if necessary, one could get out the rifle and shotgun for defense.”
Bromfield was never the type to hoard canned goods in the basement. He didn’t just want to survive the war; he wanted to live abundantly and not worry about food shortages or rationing. That meant raising dairy cows for milk and butter; chickens for eggs and meat; every kind of vegetable and fruit that could be grown in Ohio; ponds full of fish; maple sugar from the forest and honey from the beehives. “It had to be a world in which there was plenty, which ration books and scarcities such as I had known in Europe could never touch,” he insisted.
In Bromfield’s case, the impending crisis turned out to be a real one. There was rationing in the United States, and while nobody starved, the families living at Malabar certainly had access to more meat, butter, and sweeteners than the average city dweller. “During the war years the self-sufficiency goal was a satisfactory and sound policy,” Bromfield wrote in his 1950 book Malabar Farm. But once the war was over and normal economic conditions returned, Bromfield admitted “that we could not at Malabar afford a program of 100 percent self-sufficiency.” Instead, he focused on grass farming, selling milk and meat and purchasing many of the items that he had originally planned on producing himself.
It was a pattern that many future homesteaders would follow—after an initial period of attempted complete self-sufficiency, those who remained on the land usually focused on a small number of market crops. But they never quite forgot the crisis that had spurred them to go back to the land in the first place. “In the case of another war or the disruption which might arise from political disorders, the self-sufficiency program would again be useful and economic and could be quickly re-established,” Bromfield emphasized. There was always a bit of comfort in knowing that if there was a crisis, self-sufficiency was still possible.
Good reminder about motivations. Also, about how homesteaders often move into a production/commodity-type economy as time moves on. (No judgement intended.)
Well this is the case for me too,,,, I feel that we are in a crisis so I got myself a farm, chickens, cow cats and horses. We press sun flower oil from our crops of sunflowers and produce spelt flour. Certainly the best food and we are self sufficient in fuel (burn sunflower oil in our tractors) and the horses eat our oats and grass in the pastures. But it is hard work now at 76 years old but still farming.