Home Schoolers are Looking for the Simple Life | Organic Farming
An AP Member Exchange Feature By MILA KOUMPILOVA
The Forum, The Associated Press - Sunday, August 10, 2008
The Bartletts started out with 150 weed-covered acres, a pop-up camper and a thatched-roof outhouse where, to the sound of coyote howls her first night, Lynn Bartlett wept with fear and qualms about abandoning city life.
Lynn, her husband, Jim, and their four home-schooled sons moved from Fargo to a remote homestead in the Turtle Mountains four years ago. They didn't make the transition easy on themselves: They plucked weeds by hand. They squished pesky potato bugs with their fingers. They let some chickens roam free.
Jim Bartlett, who heads the North Dakota Home School Association, half-jokingly calls his breed of Christian home-schooler "the new hippies" a growing group of converts to organic farming and the simple life that defies political labels.
"The hippies live like this because they're trying to protect Mother Earth," said the Bartletts' friend, Sid Hughes. "We live like this because it gives us an opportunity to be in communion with God in nature."
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In the winter of 2005, Sid and Twilla Hughes moved to the 52-acre Valley Vegetables farm outside Minot with their 10 home-schooled children. When the snow melted, they found waist-high weeds and a scrap-metal dumping ground. The family tackled the weeds with bare hands.
Home-schoolers say it's no coincidence they're fueling what some call a Christian agrarian movement - a hands-on, back-to-the-land extension of the wider push for environmental stewardship within evangelicalism.
"The public school system is so omnipresent in our society that once as a home-schooling family you decide you don't want to go down this road, all of a sudden you see all these other roads you don't have to follow," Mesko said. "If I can teach my own kids, maybe I can grow my own food."
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2 years ago, Linda and Dick Grotberg, longtime owners of a large confinement hog operation in Wimbledon, went organic. They now raise free-range antibiotic- and hormone-free cattle, and press sunflower seeds into biodiesel for their tractors.
The Grotbergs are devout Christians who once battled their school district in court over the right to home-school their now-grown children. They had an epiphany that organic farming helps them fit more seamlessly in God's intricate design.
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The Bartletts have met about 30 North Dakota Christian agrarian families since moving west. Mesko, whose Lighthouse Farm offers workshops on anything from how to butcher a hog to how to make hay, said he fields inquiries each month from several religious families contemplating farm life.
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Editors Comment:
Wow, how inspirational. Not that I am home schooling for religious reasons, far from it, we only have organic food in the house. My dream is to live in a self sufficient environment, far from the hum drum of modern life, yet not too far from ‘modern’ amenities if needed, where I grow my own food, have solar power and my own clean water supply, surrounded by animals which I wouldn’t eat…
