I’ve always believed that every homesteader is a prepper, but not every prepper is a homesteader.

By their very nature, homesteaders are more prepared than the average Joe to weather any storm; They have food put away and/or growing in the garden, and they tend to have a wide skillset that can help see them through hard times.

But “prepping” isn’t necessarily the main goal for many homesteaders. In fact, it may not be a goal at all for some.

Preppers, on the other hand, are focused on preparing for a potential emergency or even an all-out collapse. Their main goal is making sure they have what they need on hand to survive a long-term disaster, and while skill building is important, the focus tends to be more on buying or acquiring things to store away for later rather than on producing everything you need on your own land.

Still there’s a lot of overlap between the two groups, so I was pleasantly excited but not surprised to see everyone’s favorite homesteading mentor and lunatic farmer, Joel Salatin, on my favorite prepper YouTube channel, Canadian Prepper.

I love tuning into the channel for host Nate Polson’s take on the daily news, and practical tips on preparing for whatever may come next in today’s unpredictable world. I don’t love the click-bait titles of most of his videos … like this one, titled “LEAVE The CITY While You STILL CAN! Off Grid w/Joel Salatin” … but that’s what gets people’s attention, so I don’t blame him. 

He’s made multiple comments before about how he would rather simply share solutions to problems, but that most people don’t click on those videos like they do on the “doom and gloom” titles and daily news updates (which have now moved to his new channel, Prepper News.)

In his interview, Joel brings a unique perspective and experience to the prepping world. Just a couple years ago, he was being inundated with requests from literal billionaires asking him to help them build doomsday homesteads in case the “wheels fall off.”

Joel wrote about this in our second annual Collector’s edition issue in his article “You Don’t Need to Be a Billionaire to Prepare Like One.”

While Joel said in this most recent interview that the requests from billionaires pretty much dried up after COVID, he also said that “the number of people who are exiting the system continues to escalate.” 

As someone who travels the country doing speaking engagements and private consultations, Joel is as plugged in as anyone to the wider homesteading community. As a homesteader and farmer himself from a young age, he’s also successfully guided thousands of homesteaders on their own journeys through his books, articles, and teachings.

In his interview on the Canadian Prepper channel, Joel discussed many of the topics he regularly writes about in Homestead Living magazine.

As the editor, I couldn’t help but finish his sentences whenever he’d mention how more and more people want to “disentangle from the system,” how his “new 401K plan is knowing how, and living proximate to people who know how to grow things, fix things, and build things,” or how the top three things you need to consider on a homestead are “access, water, and control.”

Joel has written about all of these things in great detail in his monthly column for Homestead Living.

But what I appreciate about this sort of interview format is the ability to touch on many different topics in one conversation. It helps to paint a more comprehensive picture of how something like homesteading fits with the wider backdrop of the world we’re living in, and how homesteading and prepping really are two sides of the same coin.

“Homesteaders seem to be, for whatever reason, wanting to live closer to their supply chain, whereas preppers are building an ark of sorts,” Nate remarked in the interview, articulating my own thoughts on the main difference between homesteaders and preppers in a much more succinct way than I could.

The two discussed everything from what’s driving the modern homesteading and prepping movements, to the logistics of living a self-sufficient life in an increasingly complex world. The conversation was as dynamic as I would expect from any conversation with Joel, and was the perfect video to play in the background as I worked late into the night preserving the onslaught of fruits and vegetables that this homesteading lifestyle has afforded me.

I especially love watching videos on homesteading and prepping while I work on time-consuming projects like canning and preserving as they remind me why what I’m doing matters — why it’s not just a waste of time in a world where humans barely have to lift a finger if they don’t want to.

“There’s a yearning from the human soul to do something that’s authentic; that’s meaningful; that redounds to the overall benefit of humankind,” Joel said in the interview. I couldn’t agree more, and whether or not disaster strikes or society ever collapses, I’ll still be here preserving food late into the night, secure in knowing that this lifestyle and the work that inevitably goes into it is meaningful, and is of overall benefit to me, to my family, and to humankind.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out this interview yet, it’s well worth a watch and I promise there are all sorts of gold nuggets of wisdom and encouragement sprinkled throughout. It may even change the way you think of prepping, which has carried a bit of a stigma ever since the show Doomsday Preppers was popular.

The truth is, all homesteaders are preppers by nature, whether that’s the main goal or not. And let’s be honest, in this day and age, being a prepper might not be so crazy after all. Watch Joel’s interview with Canadian Prepper Nate Polson now.

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