We are the Mann family. We’ve decided we are going to give up all of our electricity, appliances, smartphones and more. We are going to fully convert our entire home to a pre-electric homestead. We will trade in our minivan for a horse and buggy. We will empty our closets of modern clothing and replace it all with simple, hand-made clothing. For 90 days, we will grow our own food, study the Bible, and focus on our family and living a sustainable and earth-friendly life.
While a technological herd of billions march forward with their lattes in one hand and faces buried in their smartphones, our family of six will stray from the safety of the paved path and instead create our own. Our 90-day journey will start Summer of 2019 and it will be filmed and shared with the world as weekly YouTube videos and afterwards a full length documentary. Our goal is to change the world by living the best lives we can, in harmony with each other, our neighbors and the Earth.
Why Go Non-Electric for 90 Days?
We want the Earth to be sustainable for our children. We also want to provide for ourselves. Imagine you wake up one day, you go to the grocery store and the shelves are all empty. The average person wouldn’t be able to survive for a few weeks (and that includes our family). It’s amazing and pathetic that In this day and age, with all of the progress humanity has made, absent someone essentially feeding us (a grocery store or restaurant), most of us would be dead in a matter of weeks if we had to fend for ourselves.But not our ancestors who lived a self-sufficient lifestyle by need.
The population (including us) is pulling 90 million barrels of oil from the Earth every single day. It feels like we are accelerating faster and faster, producing more and more “stuff” and yet we are not happier or more fulfilled because of it. More and more, people are overworked, stressed and generally unhappy.
Meanwhile population is exploding and in the coming decades most human jobs will be replaced with robots and artificial intelligence. This monumental shift may not bode well for humans.
Beyond what the future holds for mankind, currently our privacy our freedom, our family time is all being eroded and replaced by technology and materialism. And so to is our purpose in life. My wife and I don’t want to close our eyes and open them up as 90-year-olds, on our death beds having wasted our lives away,working ourselves to death all while taking more from the Earth than we gave-back.
We want our girls to know how to protect and provide for themselves and be prepared for whatever the future may hold good or bad. We want to focus on our family and ourselves and our stake in this world. We want to feed ourselves, grow our own food and be the best people we can be living in a balance with the world and what we take from it. And we want to inspire others to do the same.
What Will We Do, Exactly?
We will give up all of our electricity and modern technology, and convert our home into a non-electric homestead. We’ll grow our own food. We lll get a dairy cow and a horse and buggy. We will get more chickens (we already have a few hens). We will make our own bread and cook over a wood cook stove. We will study the Bible for 90 days and focus on God and our family. For the first 31 days, we will specifically seek wisdom by studying Proverbs each and every day. We will film it all and share a weekly YouTube video—the one and only technology activity we may partake in— and afterwards we will produce a full length documentary.
We want to inspire others. Do we think everyone will become homesteaders again? No, although if things collapse, there may be no choice. We want to study the Bible and focus on God and family. We want to grow and produce our own food. We want to have an amazing adventure and share it with the world.
Follow our 90-Day low-tech living challenge atwww.90daysamish.com.
Kerry W. Mann, Jr. moved to a 20-acre homestead in 2015, where he and his family use modern technology, including YouTube and Instructables.com, to learn new skills and teach homestead projects. Connect with Kerry on his Homestead How YouTube page, Instructables, Pinterest, Facebook, and at My Evergreen Homestead. Read all of Kerry’s MOTHER EARTH NEWS posts here.
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