The latest data from a Map the Meal Gap study shows that more than 1.8 million people in Ohio are food insecure, which accounts for over 15% of the population. As hunger rises and food access shrinks, some Ohioans have taken matters into their own hands—and yards.
Taite and Ben Kyle of Huber Heights in southwest Ohio had gardened for years, but two years ago they decided to take things a step further.
“We have the aspects of wanting to do our part in making the world a better place and using what's left over from the consumerist society that we're in and also with the aspects of providing our family the solution to a broken food chain,” Taite Kyle said.
So, they filled their front yard with rows of 40-foot-long raised garden beds, which they built with recycled wood. The array is crowned by a garden archway near the entrance to their ranch-style, suburban home.
Taite’s youngest daughter hugged her mother’s hip as she walked us through the mulched pathways between each box—full of raspberries, lettuce, tomatoes and pollinator plants. A spiral garden at the corner of their property rippled down a raised section of earth, framed by a coil of stacked bricks, and offers a variety of microclimates in a small space for diverse plant growth.
The Kyles are urban homesteaders, which means they grow their own food on their own land in an effort to rely less on industrial food systems. They are one of many who have started the practice in recent years.
A growing trend
Lauren Craig is a homesteading consultant in southwestern Ohio. She has offered detailed guidance and garden designs to over 300 urban homesteaders nationwide since she started her business, Humble Hive Consulting.
“Once I started my business, you know, three and a half, four years ago, it was just kind of off to the races,” she said. “People really came out of the woodwork desiring to homestead and to garden, but not really having the resources and skills and experiences to back that up.”
Her goal is to build a more attainable, resilient way to access nutritious food in the face of climate change.
“All of my designs, they come with step-by-step installation instructions and shopping lists for materials and vegetation just to make it as easy as possible for the average busy human to be able to become more self-sufficient,” Craig said.
Craig says when fewer families rely on the fluctuating food system in the US, our climate stands to benefit. She pointed to the recent impact of rising egg prices due to avian flu and farm fallout from Ohio’s drought in the previous year.
“If your food is as local as your front yard, there is no petroleum being utilized in transporting that to you as a human,” she said.
Margaret Rivera is the Agriculture and Natural Resource Educator for Summit County. In August of 2020, she co-hosted an educational series through OSU Extension that addressed the motivations and key obstacles in urban homesteading during the pandemic.
While they have not offered any similar classes in recent years, Rivera said she plans to reach back out to class attendees as new motivations for self-sufficiency arise.
“With the tariff uncertainty and talk of store shelves being empty and now with global conflicts that are going on, I can see that same anxiety returning,” she said.
Barriers to entry
Rivera said a few barriers crop up again and again for would-be homesteaders: a lack of land and a lack of time.
“For the most part, most farm families work and farm, right,” she said. “So at least one person in the household has an off-farm income, and sometimes it's both of the heads of household that have an off-farm income.”
That’s true for families like the Kyles: Taite homeschools their children and Ben works as a warehouse manager. But despite those challenges, homesteading continues to grow in popularity. People like Christine Irby partially attribute that to concerns over the quality of food available in stores.
“We have no clue what they're using in the cornfield, period,” she said. “What's going in our air? What's in our water? What's going through the soil? We just don't know.”
Irby owns Irby’s Old School Farm in Montgomery County and is part of the Black Indigenous People of Color Food and Farming Network, or BFFN. She said she hopes to encourage others to become more self-sufficient as our climate, food systems and access continue to change.
“It is not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity,” she said.
For urban homesteaders like the Kyles, widening their reach is essential to making a difference.
“Our individual action can do so much, but really the big impact lies in community support,” Taite Kyle said. “We need to join together and make things change because nobody's gonna do it if we don't.”