One of my granddaughters is graduating from high school next weekend, she won’t be 17 until a week later. Yes, she’s extremely smart and plans to be a surgeon, has already been accepted to an excellent school with most of her costs covered by scholarships. The two eldest grandsons will be starting their final year in college this coming fall, though of course no one knows in this economy if there will actually be jobs for them when they graduate.

As the world and national situations get continually worse and worse, the subject of education and its value in whatever kind of society we all end up with when the chaos of massive changes is finally over is a pressing consideration for a great many parents, not just dedicated homesteaders who are at the leading edge of change. As the reactionary forces embodied by right-wing Republicans in state governments and in D.C. seek constantly to destroy the system of public education, parents are often left to wonder if the kids are learning anything at all that might help them do well in life.

Public schools, private schools, charter schools, magnet schools… the choices often boil down to how much money parents have to spend, and out on the rural homesteads of America there usually isn’t a lot of money because it’s all gone into establishing and constantly improving on the choice to go back to the land and ‘ground’ the children in a way of life we consider more honest and broad-ranging than the more urban lifestyles we left behind.

Depending entirely upon the family situation, income, distance from schools and transportation, there is another choice that many parents both urban and rural are making these days – Homeschooling. This can involve parents teaching their own children, or it can involve certified tutors/teachers who manage a group of children from large families or cooperatives of families in a one-room schoolhouse situation. Or it can involve rotating parental teachers each offering their own knowledge and specialties over periods of weeks or months.

Children who are home schooled still have to take those approved achievement tests every year and demonstrate proficiency in the basic subjects required by legislation such as NCLB. There are websites that offer tools and lesson plans, shops in many towns offering books and supplies, and there are organizations for home schoolers where issues can be discussed, other people’s experience can be shared, and hints on the best approaches can be formulated. I’ve included some links below for those interested.

For whatever reasons, it is safe to say that the home schooling movement does include a good many rural homesteaders. If you are among them, and your child has reached the level where higher education comes next, many would ask how hard it is to get home schooled children into college. Do all colleges take home schooled children? Do state colleges welcome home schooled students? What about private colleges? Are scholarships and grants available to home schooled students?

It takes a good deal of dedicated research for families to find answers to all their questions. Depending on your reasons for home schooling, you may find SuperScholar’s list of The Ten Best Colleges for Homschoolers to be a valuable resource. Check with a local organization as well for state colleges and community colleges that welcome home schooled students, and with the proprietors of materials distributors in your area for information about financial aid. Many religious denominations offer scholarships through their private schools, as do some organizations.

As the summer progresses I’ll take a look at some of the educational alternatives homesteaders in my region have established, how well they’re working (or not), and what I can find out about colleges here and what they require – besides the SATs – to accept home schooled students. Along with hopefully helpful lists of resources, forums and advice for homesteaders who wish to educate their children outside the government system. The sooner parents start thinking about their options and doing their own homework, the better prepared they will be to accomplish this very important life-task while doing right by their children. So stay tuned, homesteaders!

Useful Links:

Best Colleges for Homschoolers
Homeschool.Com Community
Homeschool Central: Resources
Wiki’s Extensive History and Overview

Here we are nearly halfway through 2008, and the 2007 farm bill is slowly but surely making its way through House and Senate disagreements on its way to the chamber floors for vote this week or next. The final compromise, USDA chair Ed Schafer bluntly informs us, will be vetoed by President Bush.

If farm legislation doesn’t directly affect many of us rural and semi-rural homesteaders, it’s a sure bet that it will affect our neighbors who do farm on a commercial scale. Thus it’s something we should be paying attention to. According to lawmakers nearly 3/4 of the spending in this bill over the next decade will be for feeding the needy. Another 16% goes toward commodities, crop insurance and disaster relief. Increasing nutrition spending (feeding the hungry) 8+% over the previous farm bill is reasonable given the worsening food crisis both in America and world wide.

This farm bill addresses biofuels diversion of food crops (like soy and corn) by providing more than a billion dollars to expand alternate use of biomass (like switchgrass and algae) and crop by-products (cornstalks, wheat straw, etc.) rather than diverting the grain itself. It also tightens payment limits, eliminating the “three-entity rule” that the previous bill contained as justification to funneling most ag payments to huge agribusiness concerns rather than smaller farm cooperatives or family farms. It limits subsidies to anyone making more than $500,000 in non-farm adjusted gross income [AGI] per year, and entirely ending direct payments to anyone with an AGI of more than $750,000 from any source. This will effectively put Big Agribusiness in the business of actually doing business instead of simply sucking up free corporate welfare as smaller family farms disappear.

New homesteaders usually aim to grow an increasing amount of their own food, as this is part of the whole homesteading impetus in the modern world. Those who have been at it for awhile – and have managed to secure ~10 or more acres for their homestead – are increasingly producing food for local markets and even joining the CSA movement by allowing individuals and families to “buy-in” to the season’s crops. The nation’s farm bill policies (the 2002 bill expires on Friday, May 16th) usually don’t affect what homesteads of 50 acres or less produce, and nobody from the government tries to tell them what they can or can’t grow. And as long as production remains tied to the local/regional market the government isn’t likely to interfere.

So why, one might reasonably ask, has President Bush promised to veto the legislation? First, he’d wanted a $200,000 AGI cap on ALL farm subsidies, essentially getting the government fairly well out of the business of subsidizing agriculture altogether. The politicians claim their $750,000 figure is more realistic as a way of weaning farmers off support payments. Which under the present soon-to-expire bill allows an AGI of $2.5 million. Surely then the higher cap is reasonable as a step-down without throwing US agriculture into total turmoil just when food is becoming a precious commodity.

And while the amount of money American taxpayers must provide to farmers in order to have a safe and ample supply of food is certainly too much in real terms under the 2002 bill, that’s not the most controversial aspect of the 2007 bill. That would be the “commodity title” – the program through which the government tries to smooth out the financial uncertainty of farming itself. Bush wants those out altogether because they’re a sticking point in global trade deals (and, presumably, because we don’t have any money left from his oil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). These payments usually go to the biggest farming concerns, so serious economic recession should be a factor in their continuance.

However – and most important to rural homesteaders producing or planning to produce within the next few years food for local/regional markets – this bill contains $5 million in annual mandatory funding for “Community Food Projects [CFP]” over the next 10 years. The bill also allows public school to favor local farms in bids for school food supplies, and this can significantly improve both local markets as well as school nutrition in general. It eliminates a major barrier for schools and will make Farm to School programs much easier to establish county-wide or even regionally. This will help producing homesteaders significantly.

While schools are still limited to spending a mere 70¢ to $1.00 per day per student for food, communities could get creative with other subsidies and program funding that would pay local farmers a decent price for their produce (including meat, dairy and chicken/eggs). The Conservation Title in this bill will tend to reward small farmers and producing homesteaders for their land and water conservation efforts too, and since we’re doing it anyway it’s nice to think that we could enjoy a small stipend to maintain the practice.

There are significant boosts in funding for organic agriculture, including a quintupling of payments to cover the heavy price of organic certification, and a seven-fold increase in funding for organic research and extension. It’s not a lot (and nowhere near the cash devoted to industrial-scale agribusiness), but it’s something. Something is always better than nothing, particularly since most of us homesteaders are growing food anyway.

I’ve been encouraging homesteaders to network with their neighbors and communities in a number of ways, and food production, distribution, nutrition programs in schools and for the needy in our communities are important aspects of local governance and planning homesteaders can contribute much to. We don’t HAVE to be paid by the government to love where we live and do what we do, but if our areas can manage to lasso some help from the big guys then we should be attempting to get all we can. Farm and rural policies are important even though we are striving for independence. So keeping up with what affects farmers in our areas is very important.

Links:
Farm Bill Heads for Congressional Passage
Farm Bill Conferees Near Goal Line
Congress (almost) passes a farm bill