Resharing this here for anyone new who hasn't found us over on the new server yet, because it's really very worth sharing:

https://rancholibertad.com/on-community/

For anyone new following, feel free to join us @stewards, or sign up for the newsletter. We share a lot of wonderful knowledge and have some enormous updates to share very soon!

I'm keeping this account alive until (hopefully) the new instance is able to support porting over our current followers, but it's not really being updated and may disappear eventually. I might pop in from time to time to check in, though ✨

In the meantime, feel free to dialogue about our latest article. We'd love to hear your perspective, and if there are any opinions on a future installment to cover some of what we had to omit in this one.

#Community #RanchoDeLaLibertad #CommunitySovereignty #IntentionalCommunity #Commune #Liberation #Indigenous #Liberatory

So... pigs! (a thread)

I want to do a full post about them soon, and what we're planning on doing with them, but, some background:

Homesteading is trendy right now, if you didn't know. There are influencers making entire six figure or higher salaries making small-scale farming look cute, and other factors -- like increasing cost of living in cities, the ability to do remote work for some people, disillusionment with "society" or fears of climate collapse -- are pushing a lot of people to try to buy land and get on the bandwagon (or get on the bandwagon in their small suburban lots). It's wonderful that more people are interested in producing their own food and evaluating our reliance on industrial, extractive food systems, but if we're being honest, lots of these people are doing this without a psychological basis for intense physical labor, consistent work ethic (i.e: working around the clock and not quitting or skipping chores because it's cold or they're hard or you're sick or whatever), and appropriate ethics around animals as being sentient living beings deserving of care but who also are a critical part of a whole and who ultimately serve a purpose (usually food production) and instead see animals as accessories, pets, or status or novelty items.

One of the very unfortunate side effects of this is that lots and lots of people are purchasing and then breeding livestock... and then deciding that they can't actually kill them because that would be *awful*, continuing to breed them, and ending up in basically a cycle of overwhelm where without new animals coming in the novelty is worn off to the point where they don't want to do it anymore, so they keep breeding them, but then they're overwhelmed and cannot provide adequate care or afford all of the animals they have.

Livestock "rescues" are popping up left and right, diverting resources to "saving" these animals, all while many rural communities are still impoverished (despite that their tax base is increasing with upper middle class people flooding their housing markets) and without decent food.

There's a solution to this: actually producing food. We could also, then, divert some of this food to urban communities who are also without food.

The vegan debate is enormous (and I cover some of my thoughts in this post: https://rancholibertad.com/on-the-ethics-of-livestock/) but also a little ridiculous. We can pretend all we want that a vegan diet reliant on industrial food systems is actually a diet that *doesn't cause harm*, or that farming without commercial inputs is possible without animals (it isn't) or that somehow wild-sourcing all of our food is feasible in any ecosystem in the US (it isn't -- not at scale, as in, this isn't a meaningful lifestyle change any large percentage of us could make without *any* agriculture, and this isn't a lifestyle that's been lived in a very, very long time regardless of how people wish to categorize Indigenous peoples as "hunter gatherers").

So this is how we're orienting to this issue:

What we have capacity for, we're attempting to procure from these failed homesteads, where they are "calling it" and attempting to dump all of their animals.

The goal is to provide a high-welfare environment, correct any health issues, leverage the animals' instincts to support the land (i.e: pigs love rooting and can help decompact soil and clear rocky areas, turkeys and chickens help with pest control and can consume most cover crops that we plant in garden areas too small for ruminants, etc.) and then to humanely dispatch them when it is time and feed our community (or sometimes our omnivorous or carnivorous allies, like our or community members' dogs, cats, etc. that also support similar land regeneration projects through guarding or other contributions).

#Pigs #Homesteading #RegenerativeAgriculture #CommunitySovereignty #FoodProduction

We finally have an update for you all on what has been going on here! This gives a little info on why we've been so distant, what we've been navigating, and some very exciting additions to the Ranch.

https://rancholibertad.com/quarterly-updates-awaiting-the-return-of-the-light/

I hope to share some very fun pictures of our new animal residents soon, and I feel like I have a lot to say about this season as a whole that I'd like to share here rather than in a longer form newsletter.

Please email us your questions if you'd like to participate in this quarter's paid sub Q&A. Last quarter we were able to give some very in-depth answers to wonderful questions, so if you have something pertinent to your own project or goals now is a great time to learn from our experiences! Paid subscribers have also been promised a gift for the Solstice season, and if you're one of them please send us your address so that we may send you some goodies from the land.

I hope to be more active here very soon, I wish to catch up on all of your posts and updates and be a little more participatory in this community. It is almost the season, we have one more push before we'll be settling back into a routine and having more leisure time.

#RanchoDeLaLibertad #Community #RegenerativeAg #Livestock #Animals #Farm #Homestead #IndigenousOwned #MutualAid #CommunitySovereignty

Another update! These are the same locations as the previous post in this thread. Beans setting, squash setting fruit, gorgeous glorious nitrogen fixation and groundcover - all fed from the rain we were blessed with and very little supplemental water.

#Gardening #Permaculture #Food #CommunitySovereignty #RegenerativeAg #Alt4Me

Thank you to all of our subscribers for being so patient: I just released our late paid newsletter for October. I look forward to getting back on track for November!

October's paid newsletter is a brief intro to home fermentation with a recipe for preserved lemons that is definitely worth trying!

Please share with a friend and let them know paid subscriptions help us support our residents and our mission of building a sovereign community and regenerating this land for future generations. Our residents are some of the most vulnerable under this current regime, and now more than ever we're relying on your support to keep going and continue to support them in having a place to live and good food to eat so they may continue to spend their time working on community liberation.

https://rancholibertad.com/wild-fermentation-an-intro/

#IndigenousOwned #Indigenous #RanchoDeLaLibertad #CommunitySovereignty #MutualAid #Sovereignty #Liberation #Queer #POCOwned #FoodSovereignty

I've been a little less active lately, it's been a busy season here at the Ranch! Though, I am excited to share that we just shared our free October newsletter: Eating Ethically on a Shoestring Budget. In it we share some important information and ideas about eating more ethically without falling for greenwashing and ridiculous price tags on, let's face it, products that probably aren't *that* much better than the cheaper alternatives.

Share it with a friend if it helps you out, because that helps us out!

https://rancholibertad.com/eating-ethically-on-a-shoestring-budget/

#Food #Economy #EatingWell #EthicalConsumption #Ethics #FoodEthics #FoodSovereignty #CommunitySovereignty #Tips

A passionate, provocative, and very nuanced take on whether or not it is ethical to keep livestock just sent out to subscribers. I've thought about this for years, and hope that my thoughts spur your own pontification on your relationships with all animals - pets included - and the broader context you live in.

Please consider subscribing and sharing if this is valuable, to help support our mission.

Thank you as always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

https://rancholibertad.com/on-the-ethics-of-livestock/

#Livestock #Animals #AnimalRights #Regeneration #RegenerativeAg #Agriculture #Farming #Homesteading #SmallFarm #RanchoDeLaLibertad #CommunitySovereignty #Environment

If you're interested in learning how you can more deeply participate in or support our mission of building community sovereignty and stewarding abused land, you can find options for in-person or financial participation on our website:

https://rancholibertad.com/participate

We just opened our Supporter tier, and look forward to offering more opportunities to support locally and from afar in August. Those who subscribe at the Supporter tier receive a twice yearly gift basket of goodies from the Ranch (the first will be sent in December) as well as access to participate in quarterly Q&A posts.

You will also know (perhaps most importantly) that you are tangibly supporting projects that enable us to better serve residents (now and in the future), guests seeking sanctuary, and the land. Projects such as tree planting, renewable energy infrastructure, sustainable building, animal stewardship, sustainable and place-sensible food production, and more.

We are so grateful to you for your interest and collaboration ✨

#MutualAid #ClimateDirectAction #ClimateChange #Renewable #Regeneration #RegenerativeAg #Permaculture #RanchoDeLaLibertad #Community #CommunitySovereignty #IndigenousOwned #WomanOwned

Thank you for your patience as we've taken a few steps back to evaluate our approach to communication in the context of, well, everything.

We are standing on a precipice, or so, at least, it seems. There is a shattering occurring of what we deem "normal" to be, and what happens next will depend largely on how we choose to relate to instability and uncertainty, and what we choose to do about it.

Rancho de la Libertad stands on this precipice, gathering materials to build a bridge to a yet-unknown other side. We are continuing to take steps towards building a sovereign community insulated from geopolitical and climate instability, insofar as we can be. We wish to nourish, provide space and sanctuary for, and educate our community and those who join our community from afar - to empower and enable all of us with the skills we will need to establish distributed networks, remain safe, feed and house ourselves, and thrive.

By the end of this week I hope to release a website and free newsletter offering, but also a paid subscription that will help support this project. While we may keep this account, it will not be very active. We are trying to rigorously protect our energy and time so that we can focus on real direct action, while simultaneously ensuring we maintain communication with our community and those interested in our mission. Creating one central source of contact feels like the best way, at this time, to build and maintain relationships and community.

Stay tuned for the release in a few days with more information about what we're offering our community at this time. If you'd like to send me your email to be added manually in advance, you can send it to ranchodelalibertad@protonmail.com.

Be safe, and don't forget to take a few steps back from your online spaces to check in and be present alongside your regional community.

#RanchoDeLaLibertad #DirectAction #ClimateChange #Newsletter #CommunitySovereignty #MutualSupport #MutualAid

There are a lot of discussions currently happening in the US around politics, and generally what I'm seeing is a lot of fear, anger, hopelessness at the outcome of this last election cycle. It feels relevant, then, to perhaps offer a different perspective.

First, your feelings are valid. It makes sense to feel frustrated that you have little control over this so-called "representative" government of ours, and it makes sense to feel uncertainty or fear about what this means for the future. It's right to be pissed that you had, yet again, a terrible choice to make between bad and much worse, and that the outcome you were hoping wouldn't happen, did.

But now what? Should we stew for another four years? Share vindicating memes about someone's aging, their body, their faults? Do we even have the luxury to A) participate whole-heartedly once every four years, share some outrage online, and then call it good? or B) pretend that the problem with our standard of living is a president and not the structural whole?

I invite you to consider changemaking as a function of sovereignty. If the political stage is a spectacle (and Guy DeBois or Noam Chomsky may say) that we aren't even intended to meaningfully engage with, if climate change is ocurring and there isn't anything we can do to stop the actions of the few *or* the many to slow it down, if the world is going to be dominated by one form or another of authoritarianism, then we need to stop pretending that meaningful change can come from unjust institutions and begin considering what we can do to ensure our communities are not subject to the whims of such institutions. We need to begin considering what we could do to be more resilient in the face of a changing climate, more natural disasters, and increasing political instability and extremism.

There are no perfect generalizable solutions to nuanced and context-informed issues, but we see the formation of sovereign communities with the capabilities to provide for their members as a strong step towards resilience & the ability to maintain harmonious interdependence in the face of greater societal strife.

This is not doomsday prepping, nor do we believe in some impending apocalypse. Instead, this radical action involves critically evaluating our dependencies, resources, and access needs as well as how we believe we (and these dependencies) fit into or are met by the broader social context. We can then take steps to extricate and re-source our dependencies in ways that ameliorate our subjugation by and dependence on delicate and/or oppressive institutions.

Once we take steps to identify dependencies, we can connect with aligned community members to source resources and, importantly, to position ourselves to also provide for the needs of others in our community. This allows for a mutual give and take that can develop organically at the level of individual relationships, growing into a network of sharing and holistic need-meeting and space holding beyond just mutual aid in crisis. When we take the time and assert our energy in the direction of forming such networks, we strengthen the ability of the collective to withstand political, social, economic, and ecological turmoil.

Some examples:
- engaging in place based food production & sharing your harvest in exchange for assistance with land cultivation
- utilizing community "waste" as compost, solving sanitation needs while enabling food/shade/fiber crop production
- creating spaces for individuals to stay safely and recoup their health, access information, and/or learn new and vital skills

And these are just a few of many, many examples. We do all of the above, so they're top of mind, but other of our community members are better at networking and building relationships, putting on workshops, creating herbal products (salves, tinctures, medicinal food & drinks, etc.), designing energy infrastructure, building structures, and so on.

How can you extricate your needs from existing institutions and support the growth of such a network? Do you have the support in your life to do so?

#ClimateChange #CommunitySovereignty #USPol #RadicalAction #DirectAction #Activism #CommunityBuilding #FoodProduction

@siin #communitysovereignty needs local medical services.