On their 23-and-a-half-acre farm in Tennessee, a homesteading mom is teaching her four kids the self-sufficiency lessons that her parents’ generation missed out on, in hopes of keeping alive the skills that served her ancestors.
High school sweethearts Cortney, 32, and her husband, Samuel Black, were raised in the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee. Currently, they live at Highway Homestead, a small family farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, with their four kids, aged 9, 7, 4, and 2.
Cortney and Samuel follow a permaculture-style model for the family’s plot. Cortney homeschools the kids in an unconventional way, enriching their curriculum with cooking, preserving, goat and cow milking, and tending to their numerous animals including egg-laying chickens, goats, and poultry for meat.
Samuel, a mechanical engineer, works full-time outside the homestead during the day, and on the land after dark.
When Cortney and Samuel were younger, their maternal grandparents’ farms were adjacent, thus they have always known each other.
After getting college degrees and tying the knot, the couple moved to Cajun country, Louisiana, where Samuel worked in the oil industry.
When the couple became parents to their first child, Cortney began to think about the self-sufficiency skills that she had learned from her maternal grandmother while growing up.
She told The Epoch Times her grandmother would can thousands of jars of green beans, tomatoes, peppers, and pickles grown on the land every year. As a little girl, Cortney would also accompany her grandmother to the woods, foraging for blackberries to make a pie.
“So the self-sufficiency part was already ingrained in me from the get-go,” Cortney said.
While studying agriculture in college, Cortney further learned about gardening and preserving her own food.
Thus after the birth of her first son, she questioned herself.
“We grew up this way, but now we were living in a subdivision in Louisiana,” Cortney said. “We grew up on 100-acre farms in the mountains ... so it was a big deal for us not to be able to provide our own food.”
When Samuel got laid off during the oil crisis of 2015, the family moved back to Knoxville, Tennessee where they bought 5 and a half acres of land.
“I didn’t care what the house looked like, I just wanted land,” Cortney said. “We had to have land to be able to produce our own food ... we worked really hard to renovate it.”
During this time the couple built a barn, put up fences, and kept goats, pigs, ducks, geese, and a full egg-laying flock of chickens, as well as 150 organic meat birds.
Through the process, they learned a lot.
In 2021, Cortney and Samuel sold their former 5-acre plot and upgraded to their current homestead. Once on their new property, they acquired a milk cow, but Cortney agonized over how to make butter.
“I wasn’t getting the temperature right, it wasn’t mixing the way I wanted ... I just cried because I knew that my grandmother knew exactly what to do but she wasn’t here,” Cortney said, whose grandmother passed away just five days after her third child was born. Cortney couldn’t even turn to her mom because her mom had never learned.
“[She] didn’t want anything to do with the farm,” Cortney said. “There are skills like this ... cyclical seasonal living, that we’re not passing down because we’re not living it anymore.”
Thus Cortney felt the need to pass down these skills to her children. Through teaching them, she has also learned a lot herself.
“Now I can make butter like no big deal,” she said. “I’ve done it for months now and we haven’t bought butter from the grocery store since June. We have been completely self-sufficient in our butter, yogurt, and mozzarella cheese. I’m working on hard cheeses.”
She believes that if one day, her kids are unable to get to the grocery store, she wants them to have the skills to take care of themselves. While all her children want to learn, they all have different approaches.
Cortney said: “My 4-year-old, when she was 3, told us that she wanted a purple knife and she was going to kill a chicken ... my 7-year-old daughter, she’s a little more withdrawn from it, her heart is a little softer, especially when it comes to harvesting our animals. My older son is interested, but he’s definitely a boy and would much rather be outside with Daddy, using a gun.”
Besides hands-on farm work, Cortney’s children are also learning how to plan meals and understand the long process of growing and harvesting crops, raising and slaughtering animals, and, finally, putting food on the table.
“For me, I want our entire homestead to work together; the animals provide fertilizer and compost for our plants, the plants will provide back for the animals, and the animals provide for us,” she said.
But homesteading with a growing family has not been without its struggles.
Cortney said: “Difficulties in homesteading typically come in the form of death, and I don’t say that lightly. You could have a plant that you didn’t water and it dies, or you have an animal that doesn’t thrive and it dies.”
Cortney is against the use of chemicals and has had to investigate herbal wormers for her herd of Kinder goats, a Nubian-Pygmy mix prone to parasites. The entire family had a hard time harvesting their goats in spring 2021 since the cared-for herd was born on the farm.
“They were our babies,” Cortney said. “But then the main reason we want to raise our own meat is because we do not want to support factory farming; I showed [the children] a video of a factory farm harvesting goats and sheep, the callousness ... you could see the tears in their faces.”
The lifestyle can be expensive too. When Samuel took a 10 percent pay cut in 2019, the couple panicked; would they be able to feed their goats through the winter, or would their children miss out on Christmas? But Cortney rose to the challenge and started a small business selling homemade goat milk caramels.
Most people love learning about canning food, harvesting chickens, and raising goats holistically, Cortney said. However, there have also been some naysayers.
“Vegans do not like what we do at all,” Cortney said. “Even though in all reality, when you start comparing the carbon footprint of an almond versus a cow, or tofu versus raw milk, and the fact that I go outside in my back yard and harvest my milk, and there’s never any plastic used, it’s all reusable glass ... the carbon footprint is so much different.”
The family however has the support of family and friends and has even made new homesteading friends through social media.
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