Marissa Ames

Marissa Ames began her editorial career in 2013 as a freelance writer for Backyard Poultry magazine. Since then, she has taken on roles editing multiple livestock and homesteading magazines before moving into the position of Editorial Director for Ogden Publications. Her “career” as a homesteader began long before that. At age 10, her mother quit her day job and raised 90 percent of the family’s food in order to save costs, while Marissa spent evenings and summer vacations working in the garden and caring for small livestock. Those skills became lifelong habits as she grew vegetables, raised meat and eggs, and made her family’s food to avoid high prices at the grocery store.

Marissa and her husband travel to Zambia to teach sustainable farming to rural villages and schools, where they have partnered with villages to trial saffron as a potential cash crop that doesn’t compete with local farmers. Currently, she is working on sustainable methods by which Zambian farmers can battle devastating armyworm infestations without purchasing cost-prohibitive pesticides. She volunteers on the board of a local nonprofit that protects food sovereignty and sustainability in rural communities, and she teaches homesteading classes for her local chapter of the National Grange organization. Marissa works to save a critically endangered American breed by keeping rare San Clemente Island goats. Her small homestead has a large vegetable garden where she studies and develops drought-tolerant crops, and makes her own cheese, bacon, soap, bread, and much more. She spends her free time eating lunch.