Brooke and Chuck Anderson left a city to homestead on 285 acres. Their chickens keep getting eaten, but they've found peace like never before.
Brooke Anderson.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brooke and Chuck Anderson, 52 and 61, about their experience homesteading in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains with their two teenaged kids since 2021. The married couple document their progress building their ranch on YouTube and have over 39,000 subscribers, plus 101,000 followers on Instagram. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Chuck: I grew up on a fourth-generation dairy farm in Wisconsin, and my intention was actually to become a farmer. Ultimately I ended up moving to Raleigh in the '90s.
Brooke: We started dreaming of getting land for retirement purposes. Once the kids were out of the house, we were going to move and start having animals.
When I would go up to Wisconsin in the summers, I got a real taste of the lifestyle. It was something that brought me a lot of pleasure and peace.
So I got on board with doing this. As soon as we decided to take the plunge and purchase the property, I knew it was going to be something that was going to be very beneficial for us, even though I'd never done it before.
Chuck: We wanted a forest and pasture, and we wanted it to be within 30 minutes of a more developed town.
Even though we'd already purchased the land with a long-term plan to move up here, COVID fast-tracked that. It got people thinking about wanting to be outside and not be cooped up in a house.
My dad passed away from COVID. It was like, "What are we waiting for?" Life is short. We already had the dream. We knew what we were going to do, and those kinds of life events just change your timeline a bit.
Brooke: We're in southwestern Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just south of Blacksburg — the Virginia Tech area. The property is exactly three hours from Raleigh.
We have 285 acres. It was about $4,000 an acre — in 2020, it was a lot more affordable than it is now.
Chuck: Today, this property would probably go for more like $8,000 an acre.
Brooke: When we bought it, there was nothing. There was absolutely nothing. We didn't even have an address for a mailbox. There was no electricity, no water.
Chuck: Before my father died, I asked him for some white pine lumber from our farm in Wisconsin that he and I cut in the '80s. I said, "Can we take some of that lumber down to Virginia and use it to build a shed in your honor?" And that's our first building. So that's what we did. We named it Grumpy's Garage.
Brooke Anderson
We camped in it a lot while we were building the rest of the infrastructure. We built an outhouse.
Brooke: We moved here in the beginning of August of 2021 to get the kids in school. They started a couple days after we moved here, and we didn't have a place to live besides Grumpy's Garage. So we rented an Airbnb for a month. Then we started building a yurt.
We lived in the yurt with no electricity or running water or plumbing. We thought it would only be a four- or five-month adventure.
Chuck: We ended up being in it for two years as we got the log home ready to be occupied. We went through two winters in the yurt, heating with wood.
Brooke: It was a matter of getting a well put in, getting electrical put in, getting the mail to recognize us. It was so stressful getting an address.
We've got a horse shed, hog pen, yurt, outhouse, and the log cabin. We still have a lot of work left to do, but the cabin is livable now.
Brooke Anderson.
Then we built a huge kiln to dry logs in when we harvest them. That did not work. We turned it into a chicken coop and a storage facility. It was an epic fail by our own design. But it turned out to be a phenomenal chicken coop — way taller than most chicken coops need to be.
Chuck: For us, homesteading is being in a position where we can survive independently without outside resources if necessary.
Brooke: We have electricity and all the creature comforts of home. I still go to the store to get stuff, but we're in a position where we don't have to do all that if needed.
Chuck: Our beef cattle are going to be delivering calves in a few months. We've had baby chicks, we've had piglets.
Brooke Anderson
Brooke: We had 100 chickens. We're down to 35. There are animals that keep eating them.
Chuck: This is a wild kingdom. We've got bears, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, hawks — eating chicken. We're building stronger enclosures. We want them to be able to free range, but nature is pretty wild out here.
We've got a very large garden. We've had gardens that produce fruits, watermelons, cucumbers, zucchini, corn, potatoes, and tomatoes. We have apple trees that we planted, peach trees.
We haven't focused intensely on it just because of prioritization of all the other activities, like getting shelter built.
Brooke: In other words, the weeds took over.
Chuck: We've had a lot of failures along the way. So that's part of our journey. One of the things that Brooke does is to document not just the fun, good success stories, but also the things didn't go so well. It doesn't work out all the time very perfectly, but we're trying our best.
Brooke: All of the kids, they've learned how to run a drill, how to run a chop saw, how to drive a tractor, birth piglets. We've done it together as a family and grown closer because of it.
Chuck: The only thing we're missing right now is the dairy cow — and solar panels.
Brooke: We used to live a half-mile from a grocery store in Raleigh. Being able to say, "Oh, I forgot this for dinner, I'm going to run to the store real quick"? You can't do that here — the store's a half-hour away. That, for me, is the biggest downfall so far.
That's one of the things that's been challenging — especially because we have a daughter who's very social and doesn't drive yet.
I'm in the car for an hour almost every day. She goes to high school about a half hour away from here. Then if she wants to go to the mall, that's about an hour and a half away in Roanoke.
Chuck: She's riding horses and she's learning how to do cutting of cows, for rodeo.
Brooke: If you've ever watch "Yellowstone," they do that.
Chuck: She's doing really well at it. And most recently she took up bow hunting.
Brooke: We have dirt roads, and having dirty cars all the time is kind of annoying. A lot of dirt everywhere, but you get used to it.
Brooke: We're not very young. What we're doing is very physical — just feeding the animals and lifting up the heavy bags of food and carrying the big five-gallon buckets of water, and building things. It is a lot more physical work than I had thought that it would ever be.
It motivates me to stay in shape because if we plan on doing this for the next 10, 20 years, we can't lose any muscle mass. We got to stay strong.
Chuck: We have nine miles of trails that we've already mapped out on our property — just the absolute stunning beauty. It's almost like having our own park. We can hike for an hour or two and not run into another single person.
This place becomes part of our DNA. We just want to be here, and it's so peaceful.
