What would it look like to buy land alongside other families while still owning your own homestead? For families who want to grow food and establish a place for the next generation, the cost of land and the work of getting started can feel overwhelming.
In this episode of the Homesteaders of America podcast, Amy Fewell sits down with TJ Visiodei, founder and CEO of ACTS Decentralized Real Estate. TJ describes an approach that brings families together around a larger land purchase, with individual buyers receiving deeds to their own parcels. He explains how shared resources and coordinated support fit into that vision.
TJ shares how summers with his extended family in Puerto Rico shaped his understanding of life in community. Years later, becoming a father just before a severe Texas winter storm changed how he thought about providing for his own family. Those experiences helped lead him to ask what families could accomplish by working together.
We talk through the practical questions that follow: Who owns the land? How are purchases organized? What happens with roads, equipment, livestock, and construction? TJ also introduces the planning step in his PROSPER framework and explains why knowing what you want to build—and who you want involved—comes before setting a budget.
Christian faith is woven throughout this conversation. Amy and TJ discuss taking territory, generational family life, and the perseverance required to keep working through hardship. They also speak about grief, identity in Christ, and finding strength in the Psalms, closing with encouragement to take one meaningful step toward your homestead each day.
In This Episode, We Discuss
- The family experiences in Puerto Rico that helped shape TJ’s vision
- How a Texas winter storm changed his understanding of family preparedness
- Working together on land purchases while maintaining individual property ownership
- TJ’s example of families combining their purchasing power
- His explanation of contracts, escrow, and deeds to individual parcels
- The role of shared equipment, labor, and infrastructure
- Questions about community spaces, roads, and responsibility
- Seven challenges TJ sees families encounter when starting a homestead
- Why the first step in PROSPER is planning
- Defining what you want to build and who you want beside you
- The land auction model and TJ’s plans for expanding ACTS
- Faith, taking territory, and building for the next generation
- Leadership, personal loss, and finding strength in Christ and the Psalms
- Making progress through one practical step each day
About TJ Visiodei
TJ Visiodei is the founder and CEO of ACTS Decentralized Real Estate, which he built with his wife, Kara. His work brings together rural land ownership, homestead planning, and support for families seeking to establish homes, raise livestock, and develop off-grid resources within a wider community.
His vision is shaped by his Christian faith, childhood experiences with extended family in Puerto Rico, and the responsibilities of being a husband and father. In this conversation, he shares both the practical thinking behind ACTS and the personal experiences that continue to shape his approach to family, community, and the work of building a homestead.
Links and Resources Mentioned
ACTS property information: https://actsdereal.com/properties
ACTS Decentralized Real Estate: https://actsdereal.com/
Listen to or Watch the Podcast
Podcast Transcript
Editorial note: This interview has been edited for readability, with repetition, false starts, and recording interruptions removed. The conversation’s meaning and voice have been preserved. Auction dates and countdowns reflect the time of recording.
AMY: Welcome back to the Homesteaders of America podcast. I have a really cool guest with me this week, and we’re talking about something we probably haven’t discussed on the podcast before. I have TJ with ACTS Decentralized Real Estate. Welcome to the podcast, TJ.
TJ VISIODEI: Thank you so much for inviting me.
AMY: TJ and his wife, Kara, have built several connected ventures intended to help families privately own rural land while receiving off-grid support, infrastructure, home construction, and livestock management. You guys have a ton of things you’re doing. This podcast episode could probably go on forever with all the things you’re accomplishing.
Today we’re going to try to cover a lot of questions and information that you guys can benefit from. TJ, after the basics, I also want to look at this from a prophetic Christian standpoint, because you and I have a lot we could talk about there. Whether you’re a believer or not, I want you to listen to this from all angles. We’re going to get into the biblical side of this, and it will probably be woven throughout the whole thing.
Why don’t you start by telling us who you are and what you do?
TJ VISIODEI: My name is TJ Visiodei. I’m the founder and CEO of ACTS Decentralized Real Estate, along with my wife, Kara Visiodei. The vision behind our project is to help build heaven on earth. There are millions of families across the country who listen to podcasts like Homesteaders of America. They feel a calling deep in their hearts to buy land, grow food, and move to a fully decentralized location, meaning they’re fully off-grid and in control of their resources.
The problem for these families is that when you look at what’s necessary to have independence and a life focused on God and freedom, away from the central control system, there are almost 28 different things you have to include. All 28 are important, and any one of them could be a person’s entire career.
For example, one is managing livestock. That’s just one out of 28, and it’s a person’s entire career. Another is installing off-grid utilities. That’s another person’s entire focus.
We built ACTS by interviewing over 300 families about what they needed. Then we asked what it would look like to get as close as humanly possible to an experience where people wave a magic wand and go from scrolling on Instagram, Land.com, or HorseProperties.net listings to being on the homestead of their dreams. How could that happen for someone with no previous farming experience, a busy mom or dad with a career or business, or even a retiree?
What would it look like for someone scrolling on the internet to make it through all the decisions necessary to start their homestead remotely? What services would they need to go from start to finish without getting stuck on the snags that ruin the progress of the majority of people?
When we talk about someone who’s successfully able to complete this lifestyle, there are about six criteria I consider: a person who’s an entrepreneur, a homeschooler, a home birther, who grows their own food, and who lives in a multigenerational home that generates its own utilities. Statistically, that’s less likely than being a billionaire in the United States of America. It’s more difficult than making it into the MLB, the NFL, or the NBA, or making your first million, $10 million, or $100 million. It’s as difficult as becoming a billionaire.
How do we make a pipeline that simplifies that process and removes all barriers to entry for families across the country? That’s ACTS.
AMY: That’s a huge undertaking, and we’re going to unpack it a little more in a second. But what’s your story? I know people are going to say, “Take us back to the beginning. How did you guys even come up with this idea?” I think you have a pretty incredible history outside of this, right? What was the turning point? How did you get here?
TJ VISIODEI: The story goes all the way back to my grandparents. I’m 100 percent Puerto Rican. My mother and father both grew up in Puerto Rico. Every summer, I would go down there, and that allowed me to see a different lifestyle than what we’re used to in the United States of America.
On my mother’s side, my grandfather had a farm. We called it La Finca. He had passion fruit trees and guava trees. I remember being three, four, five, six, and seven years old and helping him on La Finca.
Then I would go to my grandmother’s house on my dad’s side. In total, there were 18 brothers and sisters who all bought homes next to each other in Levittown, Puerto Rico. They didn’t consciously say, “Let’s put together a family compound.” They weren’t consciously trying to buy a farm and homestead together. It was out of necessity. They were dirt poor, and they bought these homes next to each other because they all went to the Army and got assigned homes right next to each other.
Even at a young age, I noticed how different it was. I would go to visit my grandma, and I couldn’t just visit my grandma. I had to see Tonya and Banchita. I had to visit all my aunties and uncles, and they would all give you food. If I visited my grandma, I also visited my great-aunt, great-uncle, and so on, and they would give me dinner.
Eating chicken wasn’t just going to the grocery store. I remember, as a kid, that eating chicken meant going out and killing a chicken. My grandma lived to 96 years old. Her brothers and sisters were all in their eighties and nineties, thriving and getting about, doing things on their own. There was something to that. It translated later in life and was always in the back of my mind.
The second piece of what created ACTS was that I went to Johns Hopkins University and wanted to become a neurosurgeon. I got a degree in behavioral biology and did my internship, getting ready for medical school, at an addiction neuroscience research laboratory. I started working with rats, and, believe it or not, I ended up doing brain surgeries on them. I would put the rats to sleep, inject fiber-optic cables into their brains, and control their behaviors.
The research I did during that internship was funded by DARPA and the Army. That research was for technology now used in Neuralink and microchip technology that goes into the brain.
Most people listening to this podcast don’t expect me to start talking about what sounds like science fiction, but it’s real. Ten years ago, it would have sounded like I was crazy, but it’s real now. There are clinical tests being done on humans with artificial intelligence chips implanted in the forehead that connect to the human brain and change people’s behaviors in real time. I wanted to be part of that.
At the time, I was very indoctrinated to believe that was a good thing. But it hit me about 10 years ago that the technology was the mark of the beast, that it was an evil technology. That’s part two of the story.
Part three is that, after deciding not to go to medical school and still having that background, I remember researching all sorts of things during COVID in 2020 and 2021 and understanding what was going on. We had my daughter because I knew there was a depopulation agenda. When she was born, it was in the middle of the worst winter storm in Texas history. That storm hit 24 hours after her birth.
My first days being a dad, there was no heat, no water, and no electricity. All the food had to be heated up. We had no guns. I hadn’t stocked any logs or made preparations with the neighbors. This was in a very nice gated neighborhood, and I was doing pretty well as a marketer at the time. I thought I was providing for my family, and God showed me I was completely unprepared to provide for them.
It was the last straw. I thought, “I don’t want this ever to be the case for my family again.” I thought about my family memories, all the Neuralink stuff, and all these things. Sometimes God speaks to me with ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere but become obvious. This idea came to me: “The answer is found in the book of Acts. We need to recreate what they do in Acts chapter two.”
I can’t afford the land I really want. I don’t just want a one-acre parcel, a two-acre parcel, or 10 acres. To do the regenerative systems I want with the amount of livestock I need, I need access to hundreds of acres without being able to afford hundreds of acres. The only way for us to do that is by working together.
What would it look like for people to come together to buy land and set up infrastructure? That’s how we started ACTS.
AMY: That’s an incredible story. We have a friend from Guatemala who says the same thing. The culture there is still so different. When he was growing up there, and I think he’s in his fifties, it was very community-minded, even within families.
He always says things like, “I can’t believe you guys send your elderly to nursing homes. We don’t do that. We take care of our people. Nursing homes don’t even exist in Guatemala because we live in community with each other. This is just the way we live.”
Hearing you say that about your grandparents resonates with me, because we have this friend from a different culture who doesn’t understand American culture.
I love that you said they weren’t trying to build a family compound. This was just how it was. I think we’re seeing a lot of people getting back to that. Especially in homesteading, people want the generational homestead and the generational land. Biblically speaking, they want to take territory in different areas. What does that look like? How do they do it?
They’re running up against the financial issue, especially during inflation and with all the crazy costs of things nowadays. What does it look like to use you guys to get started? I know that’s probably a loaded question, but start wherever.
TJ VISIODEI: That’s not loaded at all. Let me show you, because I think a visual representation will be helpful for anybody watching or listening. Let’s look at the fundamental problem. I’m not trying to brag about myself or say the only way is ACTS. It’s more a logical, “Hey, guys, we actually need to do this.” It’s a logical series of steps and processes.
In my opinion, the answer is that we need to stop working against each other. We need to stop being in competition with each other and find a way to work together. I believe that’s part of what God wants for His children.
As parents, we can feel some of the emotions God has. One of my greatest feelings is seeing my kids work together out of their own volition. I believe God feels the same way. He wants to see His children working together.
Let’s look at the math. Little G Ranch has 40 properties on it. But look at what’s happening everywhere else across the country. This is what’s creating inflation. We have 40 families in Texas who all want land and are listening to this podcast. There’s a listing for one high-quality piece of land. If it’s a solid piece, all 40 are going after it.
When you have 40 families going for one piece of land, what happens to the price? It’s going to go up. This creates several huge issues. Number one, the family that wins just lost, because they were in competition with 40 other people over one parcel and overpaid. Two, all the other families lost because they didn’t get that parcel. And three, the price of the land went up. It’s a double loss because not only did these guys overpay and you lose that opportunity, but the comps in the area went up as well.
Let’s say we had 40 families interested in paying $200,000 for that piece of land. That’s a very normal amount for a 10-acre piece of land. Now that $200,000 piece might be $250,000 or even $300,000 because of all the competition. Does that make sense so far?
What hit me with the ACTS model, even if it’s not us as a company, is that this is what we have to do. We need to work together. It’s simple. What happens if those 40 families, instead of working against each other and pushing the price up, find a way to work together while maintaining individual property rights?
We do the math: 40 families times $200,000. You end up with about $8 million of capital available across those families.
What’s neat about having $8 million of capital? When you go to Land.com or any of these places that offer land at the lower price point of $200,000 for a parcel, there are 10 times or 100 times as many people who can afford it. The price per acre is much higher. But when we work together, we’re getting into land at a price point of, for example, $5 million or more.
The secret number is $5 million or more. Very few people can buy this land. I know because I’ve seen it and talked to the lenders. When you go past $5 million for raw land, you need a 50 percent down payment. What does that mean? Anyone who can buy $5 million or more in land must have $2.5 million cash in the bank that they could use to buy it.
The number of people who have $2.5 million cash in the bank to buy land and then service a loan of another $2.5 million is vanishingly small. We’re talking about 0.001 percent of the population. It’s a very tiny percentage. The only people who can afford this are developers or the ultra-elite. Those are the only people who can otherwise afford it.
Land at the $5 million or more mark may be more expensive as a whole, but per acre, it’s far less. It’s probably two to three times less money per acre, even if it has a higher price tag. That’s the key. When we have 40 families working together, they’re competing against those developers and elites.
But there’s more. If we find high-quality land with natural features in an agricultural location, ideally 90 minutes outside the city, developers don’t want to touch it. They don’t care about that land or want to be out there. It’s too far away. Now you’re only competing against one group: the elites, because it’s not ideal for developers.
You have the opportunity to get the best land in the world for homesteading, land that’s completely virgin and untouched, sometimes for hundreds of years. It’s perfect for everybody to use, and it’s at a lower price point. Before, at $200,000, people might only have been able to afford 10 acres, and that land might not be very good. With this model, we can afford land that’s Grade A quality, larger, and better. You also have like-minded community right there to help you.
The same logic extends to every part of the process. If we think through livestock, what happens if we work alone? Forty families individually have to buy 40 sets of equipment, 40 tractors, 40 fences, and 40 different things to get their livestock up and running. But if we have a community, we only have to buy one set of things that can be used and managed for all 40 families. It’s the same with livestock.
It’s the same with road crews. We’re seeing inflation on land, livestock, livestock equipment, and labor. Construction is the last piece. If you’re trying to homestead on your own, you’re a one-off project. If I’m in construction, what do you think I want to do?
As a builder, Amy, do you think I want to choose a job 15 minutes from my house for the highest bidder who wants to do a million-dollar project? Or do you think I want to go 90 minutes from where I live every day to work for someone with a tiny budget? That’s what we’re finding with most homesteaders. They’re outside the city, and it’s a tiny budget. I’m obviously going to choose the closer job that pays more.
The only way to get the attention of these builders is to set up a project where, instead of just one person, you can say, “We’ve got 40 families. You never have to do marketing again, and you can stay on location without moving equipment.” If I’m in construction, that’s much more enticing.
AMY: That’s a big project.
TJ VISIODEI: I would much rather be part of a community where I don’t have to keep moving things around or do heavy marketing. I can focus on building for the next two, three, or four years. That’s how we’re able to bring in builders, and that’s why I believe the ACTS model is better than pretty much anything else.
We can work together to buy the best land at the best price. We can get the best equipment, labor, livestock, utilities, wells, solar deals, and general contractors, and we get the benefits of having like-minded community all around us at the same time.
AMY: That sounds like a massive project, which you’re obviously not doing alone. But I can already hear homesteaders saying, “How does that even work?” What does the process look like for the homesteader? Say someone wants to buy into this. Where do they begin?
TJ VISIODEI: When I talked to people, I found seven main problems getting in their way. We’ve created a language and a working system called PROSPER that addresses those seven problems. These are the things that make homesteading about as difficult as becoming a billionaire.
Each makes it 10 times more difficult. Another way to put it is that addressing each issue makes things 10 times easier, and it multiplies every time. You add another zero to the ease of it until you can finally get it done.
Problem number one: people are completely overwhelmed. There’s too much to do. They don’t know where to start and feel like they can’t catch their breath. It’s like, “I know what I want, but I don’t even know where to begin.”
Problem number two is money. “I have no idea where I’m going to get the money to start a project like this. How am I going to do this?”
Problem number three is land selection. People get overwhelmed trying to find a good piece of land. How do you vet it? How do you know it’s good land? Does it have good soil, grasses, water, and location? Is it a good price?
Problem number four is livestock management. People get overwhelmed by the idea of taking care of animals. If they do take care of them, it becomes what we call a ball and chain. They got into this for freedom and now realize it’s not so free, because they still have to be there to care for livestock. They want to take a vacation, but they can’t. That’s a major problem.
Problem number five is sustainable production. How do you make the farm sustainably pay for itself without operating at a loss? How do you avoid losing tens of thousands of dollars a year while putting in hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, without having to go to the farmers market?
Problem number six is income generation in general. How do you make a ranch like this start paying for itself? How do you make cabins work on it? How do you make it a sustainable business practice so it’s more affordable? You didn’t get into this to worry about your career and paying a mortgage. It’s scary to think about what happens if there’s an economic downturn.
Problem number seven is everything related to construction: design, engineering, construction, utilities installation, and exterior management. How do you get all of that done?
For many people, it’s a big step just to write that down and understand, “Those are the problems I face.” The PROSPER system is our design language. It’s like our operating system for solving those seven main problems. PROSPER is P-R-O-S-P-E-R. We say “prosper” because those are the steps people need to take to create a powerful homestead, in very simple language.
For each step in the PROSPER system, we see it as one step, one problem, one solution, and one company. We repeat that across the board. The first step, P, stands for planning, and that breaks down into a few things.
Step one is knowing what’s necessary and what people actually want. People need to understand what they want from the lifestyle and their homesteading experience. Then they need to figure out who they want as part of their homesteading plan.
When you think about what you want and who you want there, that’s powerful. Figuring out the “who” helps you set out the vision statement. When you know what you want to do and who you want to do it with, you can write the vision for what you want to create on your homestead.
The P for planning is about sitting down and making a game plan for the homestead you’d like to build. We do this through an online school focused on helping people create that game plan. Once it’s written down, you have a physical document you can use. You can take it to friends and family to recruit them. You can put it into AI to think through ideas.
You can use it to go to step two, figuring out your budget, because we can’t figure out the budget if we don’t already know what we want to do. Does that make sense so far?
AMY: Absolutely. That brings me to a question before we move on. People are going to think, “We’ve got our plan and our vision.” Let’s say they’re ready to buy, whether it’s through you, on their own, or through someone else. In your situation, with your business, how does it work? You don’t have to go into detail, but who owns the tractors, the roads, and all those things? How do you sort that out?
TJ VISIODEI: What we do is acquire 500- to 1,500-acre properties. We put them under contract, then bring families in and sell the parcels through auctions and individual sales.
To answer your question, we have a seller. This is person A. That seller is almost always a retired CEO, age 65 or older, who owns a large amount of land. It’s not like we look for these people. We’ll find a listing, and almost every time I talk to them, they’re retired CEOs who own thousands upon thousands of acres, and their kids just don’t want the land. Their kids are little yuppies; they’ve moved off to California.
They want to create a trust inheritance for their children. So we go to them as ACTS, and we are party B. We’ll say, “You’ve got this listing for $5 million. We want to place a full-price offer for your land. I’m not going to lowball you.”
Everybody else in land development tries to lowball people. In our case, we say, “Look, I’m going to get you your full $5 million, but here’s what I need: I need you to give me the time to find enough families to pay that $5 million.”
I now have it under contract, and that legally gives me the rights to get all the families necessary. Imagine C1, C2, C3, C4, and C5. That gives me time to basically crowdfund the purchase of the property from these individual families.
We use an escrow company to keep the money safe. I might contribute a small amount of money for the deal. The other families find their parcel through one of our auctions, and they send their money into escrow.
When we hit, in this example, $5 million—enough for the purchase price—that money gets transferred from the escrow company to the seller. The escrow company can handle the paperwork to ensure all these families get the deeds to their individual parcels of land. They are the owners. They get the deed to their land, period.
What’s left over might be a community area, which is considered part of ACTS. You have roads that are private easements going through the whole property. Part of what we do is talk to property owners about what they’d like to work on and what they’d like to do. One of the newest things we’re going to be doing is setting aside funds for them to deploy and make decisions. But you own your individual parcel of land.
Any unsold lots are part of ACTS, and we continue to sell them until we’re done.
AMY: That’s incredible. Of course, you have multiple businesses falling under this to sort these things out. We won’t go through all of that because we’ll send people to you so they can sort through it. But it’s an incredible undertaking and a huge vision. I think people can see that it’s attainable for them, even if you’re not in their location.
What you just shared is priceless because it makes sense. Visually, it makes sense. But you are looking for more locations, right? You’re looking to expand to different states. What does that journey look like for you guys right now?
TJ VISIODEI: One of the newest and most powerful things we’re doing is switching to a model that focuses on land auctions. I’m excited because it allows us to expand much faster than before. Up to this point, I’ve basically been doing it myself. It’s been me and my wife trying to do all these things, and that makes it much more difficult.
But I read this wonderful book called 10x Is Easier Than 2x. I’d done two properties up to this point, and I thought, “What’s 10x from here?” I was thinking about expanding to four properties. But 10x is, “Instead of getting to four, what would it look like to get to 20 or 40?”
What we’re focused on now is land auctions. I’ll show you the land auction site we have. This is our website for the Texas land auction, for the fall 2026 ACTS land auctions.
If you click here, for example, you can see there are 28 days left on this PanoplÃa Ranch land auction. People can go in, take a tour of the property, and click on individual parcels of land. They can watch a walkthrough and place a bid on that parcel, whether it’s a cash or a financed bid. It’s like eBay, but for land.
What’s really cool is that it’s also like Kickstarter. First, people bid on their parcels. Then, when we have enough people bidding to be able to buy the lot, we’re able to get started. That’s more powerful and faster for me as an individual developer.
It’s so funny: God gave me that idea in the middle of the night. That’s how I can say, “God gave me this idea. It’s not me.” Most of the cool things you see, I’ll get them in the middle of the night at 3 or 4 in the morning. I’ll wake up with it. I can’t possibly take credit because I was too busy being asleep.
It comes prepackaged, preloaded: “Here you are.” This whole thing, with pages and pages of information. How can it be that I created it if it would take hundreds of pages of material just to explain, and it’s given to me in under one second? That’s God. That’s the only possible way.
The same week he gave me the idea for the auctions, he sent people to me. That was a big confirmation. There were operators and developers in North Carolina, Virginia, Montana, California, Panama—the country—and Hawaii, all at the same time, who wanted to get started working with us.
It wouldn’t have been possible for me to go to North Carolina, Virginia, Montana, Hawaii, and Panama with my previous way of doing things. But with this auction model, I don’t have to be in all those locations to launch an auction.
The operators are excited because they’re thinking, “If I partner with TJ, he’ll bring me all the people I need. He’ll handle the sales and auction operations. I can focus on what I want to do, which is the actual operations and development, and we can get started.”
I can do my part while spending more time with my family. We can expand faster while traveling less.
AMY: That’s incredible. That’s exciting for you and others. It brings in the spiritual side of this: You’re starting to take territory in major ways. From a faith perspective, that means there’s going to be a ton of spiritual warfare. What has that looked like for you guys?
Leaders in the homesteading community come to me with ideas all the time. The first thing I say is, “Are you prepared for the amount of spiritual warfare you’re going to face? You really need to pray about that and think about it. God’s going to refine you now.”
I know you’ve been through it. What does that look like for you guys?
TJ VISIODEI: It’s been a lot. Let me show you what our vision is, and then it’ll be clear. This is an attack on the heart of all these satanic operations. As we do what we’re going to do, and what we’re already doing, it strikes out a lot of the problems you find across this country and the world.
As this auction model gets up and running, I mean, this is the single strongest model. It allows us to expand worldwide. We get these auctions running, and suddenly we can be in every country in the world, not just every state.
A gentleman reached out to me from Tanzania in Africa. We could do this in Asia right now. I could do it in Thailand. I could do it in Europe. There are castles in Europe to buy.
This is the final vision, and then we’ll get to the warfare around that vision. When I say “build heaven on earth,” this is what I mean: From the beginning, there’s been an attack on fatherhood and manhood to distract the men while snakes come in and distract the women, to break apart the family and cause murder between the children. That has been the story going all the way back.
At the individual level, when one person decides, “I’m going to start this homestead,” they are breaking generational curses by getting that land. Now they’re inviting their family members to be around them. They have their friends, family, and loved ones there. That’s just one homestead.
But they’re surrounded by neighbors who are also bringing their families together. Now the family unit is able to stay together, and there are others around them who can support each other.
By creating other communities, the conversation isn’t just, “Great, we’ve got this one cluster of families.” We’re doing the same thing from community to community. It’s a chain reaction where they’re all able to interact in a beautiful way. You’ve got cross-pollination between these different clusters.
Then you grow it to an even larger level, from nation to nation. These people can interact and send resources. They can send medicines and food. You can create entire economic systems that are alternatives to the standard economic system: trading gold, cryptocurrencies, information, and educational materials.
If there’s a grid-down situation, it doesn’t matter. You can still travel. You can go from ACTS property to ACTS property, knowing that at each one you have people who share your values. Of course, that’s going to be a major system to attack. They want to kill this and kill me to prevent it from happening. That’s why it’s so important to document these things.
What does spiritual warfare actually look like? What does it mean? Part number one—and this is found in Moses and Elijah—is to try to get you to quit or kill yourself. It tries to make you feel so bad, so stupid, so ashamed, and so miserable that you have no moves to make to go forward.
People hear “spiritual warfare” and think it’s woo, crazy, or weird, or that you’re just blaming things and being a victim. To ground it in simple terms, it’s largely distractions and shame. For five years, there have been distractions, little fires, and false crises to put out. There has been shame to try to suppress me and this project every step of the way.
“Who do you think you are? How dare you even try to do this? You’re so stupid. What an idiot. He’s going to fail. This is ridiculous. He’s crazy. He’s insane. He must be a narcissist. He must be a piece of garbage.”
And there are distractions, internally and externally: family members, outsiders, neighbors, employees, even people within the community. It’s destruction from within. That’s one aspect of it: the distractions, the manufactured crises, and the shame.
At the beginning of a project, it’s trying to distract you or shame you so you never start. In the middle, the distractions come as shiny objects: “Let’s try this new project. Let’s work with this other person. Let’s do this new thing.”
Toward the finish, there’s perfectionism, redundancy, and doing things all the time. Physical ailments can happen. Deaths can happen.
What has that looked like for me? My summer, and really this whole year, has involved dealing with people you bring in who, if they’re not spiritually grounded in the right place, can be agents of the matrix who try to completely distract or control. You can have people rise up to become your second in command who are actually agents of chaos, maybe wolves in sheep’s clothing. They’re taking care of something, but secretly sabotaging everything you’ve had up to that point. That’s one thing we experienced.
I’ve experienced so much death and hospitalization. I’ll never forget the day we figured out a major farming operation plan and solution, and we’d gotten approved for major financing so we could move forward on an $8 million project. We got that approval and solution, and less than 30 minutes later, my son was dead in my arms.
Imagine working for three years on a project, getting the approval, and as they’re closing things out, having your nanny walk in the door freaking out because they just hit your son in your driveway, and having to be there as he takes his last breaths.
Then came the realization that your company had been completely sabotaged by your own second in command in a political coup attempt by people at the next levels down. One step away from embezzlement, but hiding documentation and omitting all sorts of information. You don’t even have time to grieve your own son’s death because you have to recoup and recover through all these issues.
There are smear campaigns when you get rid of those bad actors, creating dissent within your community and leaving you ostracized. I created Little G Ranch and then had owners try to gather together to hold individual trials against me for a project I’d created. I had to go through forensic audits to show that I was exactly who I said I was and that I’d been trying the best I could.
I had to lay off three-fourths of our operations, but I actually saw that those layoffs were necessary. There were people going off and copying ACTS, doing ACTS as a Catholic community, copying ACTS and the franchise to create other little projects that were the same thing. Stealing ideas.
Financial theft, intellectual theft, smears of your reputation, infighting within families, marriages, employees, and the community—the whole thing. There’s one goal: to make you feel ashamed for even trying and get you to quit.
It’s making you feel like, “Amy, you’re so stupid. How dare you work with Homesteaders of America? Who do you think you are? By what authority are you doing any of this? You think you’re going to make a change? Who are you to try? Is this even worth it?”
It creates a guerrilla war of attrition that makes you doubt God’s presence, God’s vision, and whether this is worthwhile. It’s making the choice every day to die on the cross as you bear your own cross, to get the necessary information out there and battle through doubt the whole time.
You think, “Maybe I am just insane. Maybe God’s not there for us. Maybe all this is for nothing. Maybe I’m a narcissist or a megalomaniac. Maybe I’m some horrifying person. Maybe I should never have tried. Maybe I should stop. Maybe I should let go. Maybe I should give up.”
That’s what spiritual warfare is like. You have to be ready and focused on something bigger. Here’s the root of it: If you think there’s an arrival point, like I did when I started this—”When we finally get on the land, have livestock, have the build, have a million dollars in the bank, have $10 million in the bank, hire this guy”—there’s no arrival point.
The belief that there is one is fake. You just trade up on the problems. You think something’s wrong with you, but there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s about switching your perspective and understanding the source of your self-esteem. Your supply, your self-esteem, can’t come from anything outside.
I used to think, “One day people are going to be appreciative. One day they’re going to say thank you. When I’m on the Russell Brand podcast”—and I’ve been on that podcast now—”when I’ve got that first million or that first $10 million, there’s going to be this thing.” It doesn’t happen.
That’s the spiritual warfare right there. Will you continue when you want to lie in bed crying, give up on everything, and say, “This isn’t worth it for my family’s sake”? Will you still get up and say, “No, I’m going to do it”? That’s it right there.
AMY: A big part of that is knowing your identity in Christ. Your identity is through him and knowing it’s for him, not for us. I think that’s where so much of the body of Christ gets it wrong.
“What can God do for me? How does this work out for me? I did this. Look at what I built. Look at what I created.” You partnered with God in it, but really, the only reason is that God allowed it. God gave the wisdom, the connections, the network, and all those things.
I think this is a good place to stop because it gives people a lot to think about. You’re not just doing this physically; it’s happening spiritually. You’ve built such an incredible organization. It’s more than a company. There are multiple facets to it.
It’s a story of hope while also being realistic. When you start doing these things and really shaking that system, chaos can come. It can happen. But I say this all the time: I don’t know how people do this without Jesus. It is crazy.
TJ VISIODEI: It’s crazy. You really do need God. You need Jesus. You need to pray to him. He’s the only rock.
If I may, I want to share a last-minute tip. Some of you will be thinking, “At the very end, I can’t believe I listened to this whole thing.” But I cannot emphasize this enough. This is like a cheat code: Psalms. Open the book of Psalms throughout this journey and this process.
I had no idea. I used to ignore the Psalms. I didn’t pay attention to them. Now I listen on repeat daily, on Spotify. There are great playlists of people turning the Psalms into songs. They’re supposed to be songs, so you can listen to them as songs.
Listening to the Psalms and praying to Christ through this journey—I wish someone had told me earlier. It’s so powerful to see it and understand it. He will be your rock. He needs to be your rock. When you are weak, he will be strong, and he’ll be right there with you every step of the way. If you haven’t, listen to the Psalms. It’s going to be so powerful.
AMY: This is the final part where I open it up to all our guests. If there’s something you could tell our audience, whether it’s about what we’ve discussed or something totally different that’s burning inside of you, what would you share with the HOA community or encourage them in right now?
TJ VISIODEI: At this point, I believe the procrastination and putting things off have to be done. Action is more important than words right now. We’re at an incredibly important and critical juncture.
When I say it’s time to take action, it doesn’t have to be in a hurry. If the Lord does not build the house, it’s going to be done in vain. But the time for sitting around is done.
I think most people listening to this podcast probably realized they wanted to start a homestead back in 2020 during COVID. A lot said to themselves, “I’m going to get started within the next five years.” It’s 2026. You said we’d be done in five years, and now it’s been six.
I believe this is the great unveiling. That’s not to make people scared. I think it’s an unveiling of the nonsense matrix we’ve been living in. There are resources. You can work together with other people. You can get it done. But it’s time to take it very seriously.
It needs to be something you’re thinking about and working on daily. By this point, with AI, you can write down one thing to do every day and tell yourself, “It’s a good day if I get this one thing done.”
You can make a lot of progress one day at a time. You can get 365 things done over the next year. If you took 365 steps toward your homestead, you’re going to be able to do it. I don’t care who you are or where you’re coming from; you’ll be able to do it.
Have faith, have encouragement, hypnotize yourself, listen to Psalms. Do it on repeat and just get started.
AMY: So good. All right, guys, you’ll find all the information we talked about in the show notes. We also have the transcript on our website, on a blog post, and you can find TJ and all the things they do in the links below. If you have questions, be sure to ask them. Until next time, happy homesteading.
