It goes without saying—this year has been a whirlwind of crazy. We’ve been holding our breath since March of this year. With each passing month—with one homesteading conference after another being cancelled—we thought for sure that we’d be in the clear this coming October.
Sadly, our optimism has faded.
We have watched the world go through a pandemic, food shortages, violence, and more. We have witnessed the crumbling food and health system, and we’ve learned a lot. What a year it has been.
We tried everything we could within our power to make an in-person conference happen this year, but we were faced with opposition in more ways than anyone could imagine. Nothing could’ve prepared us for the year we’ve had.
Now, more than ever, the country needs homesteading. They need people to teach them—to tangibly show them—how to live a better and more self-sufficient life. How to grow their own food. How to raise livestock, even on small acreage. It’s all possible. And more importantly, to help them understand that choosing to live a simple way of life is not a step backward, in fact, it’s a major step forward.
But the safety of our attendees and our community (due to the virus and the current state of the country) is more important than anything else to us. And because of this, we’ve made the extremely hard decision to cancel the in-person event for 2020.
Stay with me though, we do have some amazing things happening, and some encouragement at the end. And if you already bought tickets, I’ll tell you what your options are.
Mark your calendars for the 2021 Homesteaders of America Conference on October 8 & 9, 2021!
So, what does that mean?
Well, that means that we’re still having conference!
Wait, what?
While we aren’t having the in-person conference, we ARE taking the conference ONLINE. Completely, 100% online. In fact, we’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks now to make sure it goes flawlessy.
Why?
Because as I said, now, more than ever, people across the country (and beyond) NEED homesteaders. They need the knowledge and information that we’re sharing. They need access to a community that is willing to embrace them and say “hey, I’ve been there, let me teach you how to do this!”
They need a community that shows them that a simple way of living isn’t weird or uncommon—it’s liberating.
So, we’re counting on you.
We’re counting on each and every one of you to help grow this community like never before. To share the heck out of the event with your family and friends. To share and spread homesteading education within your own little communities.
If you’ve never been able to make it to a conference, here’s your chance to attend it online!
If you need to get information from one of our experienced teachers, here’s your chance to ask your question to them during their lecture.
Here’s How the Online Conference Will Work
The online Homesteaders of America conference will take place on the same dates, October 9 & 10, 2020. But you’ll have access to it for an ENTIRE WEEK, even after the videos are streamed.
Our amazing conference teachers will present their lectures to you in a couple of different ways. We are still compiling that information and will have a schedule out sometime in August.
Here are the ways videos can be viewed:
- Pre-recorded lectures: some lectures will be pre-recorded and available for you to view starting Friday October 9th. These lectures will not air live or have a live chat. They will already be uploaded for you starting that Friday morning. No need to wait for a specific day!
- Pre-record LIVE lectures: some lectures will be pre-recorded and will premiere LIVE at a designated time. This will give attendees a chat area where they can chat LIVE with other attendees, as well as the speaker! You’ll also have a Q&A tab where you can specifically ask your questions so that they don’t get lost in the live chat.
- LIVE Speaker Lectures: last but not least, some of our lectures will be COMPLETELY LIVE. Some speakers, like Joel Salatin and Rory Feek, will be doing their lecture right from their own farm. You can interact with them in the live chat, in the Q&A tab, and more!
We will also be having our very popular LIVE speaker panel Q&A with a few of our speakers that Saturday. You’ll definitely want to mark that on your calendar!
If you are a conference ticket-holder, you’ll have access to the online conference starting Friday October 9th through Friday October 16th. That’s an entire week! If you don’t catch the live-streams when they first air, you can go back and watch the replays during that week.
After that week, if you want to view all of the lectures that you missed, or go back and watch something again, you can sign up for a 1-year VIP membership and have FULL ACCESS for an entire YEAR. Not just the rest of 2020, but an entire 365 days from when you sign up. That’s over 45 hours of video content and more from past conferences!
>> Whether you bought a ticket or not, join us that Saturday evening for a live show on the HOA Youtube Channel with Rory Feek and more! Free for all! We want to close out our conference year bringing the entire community together.
What if I Already Bought a Ticket?
This is a question we plan to get a lot of, so I wanted to talk about it here first. Many of you have already bought your tickets for the 2020 in-person event. There are only a few of us working this show, so we’re going to try and make this as easy, and as valuable, as possible for you.
If you bought a conference ticket before July 24, 2020, you will have a few options.
- First, you can simply transfer your 2020 ticket(s) to the 2021 conference (and ONLY the 2021 event). Please note that there are no refunds on 2021 tickets that were sold in 2020.
OR - You can transfer your ticket(s) to the virtual online event. If you bought a single one-day pass, you’ll get access for the entire week. If you bought multiple tickets or a two day pass, you’ll get something extra. Because of the price difference, should you decide to do this (as a multi-ticket or multi-day holder), you’ll automatically get a 1-year VIP Homesteaders of America membership as well. That means you will not only be able to watch the conference for the rest of the year, but you’ll be able to watch all of the past conferences, get access to freebies, and more. There’s over 45 hours of video content on our website, it’s a great resource!
If you already have a membership, your membership will be extended 1-year from the date your previous membership expires. But please make sure you let us know in the form I’ve linked below.
Our VIP-membership has lectures from EVERY conference year! This is a pretty great option and such a valuable resource!
CLICK HERE to transfer your tickets to the online event or to 2021. Of course, if neither of those options work for you, you can always fill out our refund request form in that same link.
We will be sending out an email to you to let you know how to access the conference dashboard once that time comes. Again, we appreciate your patience as we finish building this platform.
Please also note that we are finalizing our speakers and who will be participating. Some of our speakers don’t have the ability to send in video or do a livestream. So they will not be participating. However, we are adding new speakers and topics (for those who aren’t able to provide a lecture). Some of the new speakers will be assuming the same or similar topic, while others will be bringing in a new topic altogether! The possibilities really have us excited!
Have you Checked Out Our New Homestead Forum?
In other news, have you checked out our brand new Homestead Forum!? If you’re tired of the censorship of livestock sales and homestead talk on social media, this is the place for YOU!
Make sure you check out our completely free forum by clicking here.
This is a great way to connect with fellow homesteaders across the country, and even in your own state! You can also join our Homesteaders of America Facebook community here.
In closing…
More than anything, we are so inspired and encouraged by the outpouring of support and encouragement we have received and continue to receive from our attendees, sponsors, vendors, and speakers. You guys truly are the salt of the earth. You have been understanding and encouraging from day one. For this we are incredibly grateful and appreciative.
As we continue to learn and grow with you, we hope that, more than anything, you’ll inspire and encourage others in your local communities. If you have a skill that someone else doesn’t have—share it. If you have the ability to teach a small group of people how to grow or preserve food—do it. If you have the ability and know-how of raising livestock for meat and dairy—teach others how to do it too.
Right now our country, and world, needs the skills you and I have. The skills you want to learn and grow. While we understand that an online conference doesn’t take the place of a tangible, in-person event—it is still a way for us to provide information to a world that is extremely hungry for it right now. It allows us to still be a filling voice in the place of a void deeper than we know.
As we begin to come into the last few weeks of summer and prepare for the autumn weeks ahead of us, we hope you’ll take this time to intentionally and purposefully homestead. Take a look at your gardens and see how you can do better, or more, next year. Take a look at your food storage and prepare for what you need now, not later. Make sure you have enough wood to last you through the winter—and enough feed, too.
And while you’re at it, reach out to your community and see what they need as well. Homesteading takes a village. And while most modern villages in today’s world aren’t anything any of us want to be a part of, the homesteading village is something that’s definitely essential in this day and age.
Here’s to 2020. We’re sorry that it has been such a mess, but we know that through this messy time, there is still greatness. What an incredible time to be a homesteader, and to share knowledge and education with a world that is so hungry for food and health security.
It’s in times of adversity and change that we truly discover who we are, what we want, and what we’re made of.
As C.S. Lewis once said,
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”
—C.S. Lewis