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At Sovereign Homestead Design we help homesteaders develop their properties into regenerative family heirlooms – legacy properties that work for them by working with Nature.

There are 5 distinguishing characteristics of Sovereign Homestead landscapes:

  • Productive – A truly sustainable landscape is an intentionally designed network of living systems that produces what you and your family need to survive and thrive with minimal external inputs.
  • Profitable – A sovereign homestead must generate a surplus yield (profit) from its productive systems. This profit is the energetic surplus that allows for maintenance, reproduction/replacement of living systems and infrastructure and incentivizes multi-generational stewardship of the land.
  • Beautiful – Building sovereign homestead requires love, devotion and a long time-preference. Beauty is the physical manifestation of love and devotion in your landscape. Make your property beautiful and you will want to engage with it more and your kids will want to carry it forward.
  • Anti-fragile – Truly sustainable systems are anti-fragile – they grow stronger and more robust because of disturbance and disruption. We are living into a time of rapid ecological, economic and social change (upheaval), and the more independence we can create from centralized systems of production, distribution, communication, and value transfer (control points), the greater our ability to live healthy, wealthy, and free will be.
  • Regenerative – A sovereign homestead enriches and strengthens the ecology of which it is a part such that the land on which it exists is better for it – i.e. a truly sustainable landscape grows soil by default and enriches the ecology around it.

Any truly sustainable system embodies all five of these characteristics, and is by nature regenerative.

A Sovereign Homestead produces the things you need to live your highest quality of life.

It is designed and managed at the intersection of 3 things; 1) the Immutable Laws of Nature and Natural Pattern, 2) the site-specific context that is unique to your property, and 3) your vision for your Highest Quality of Life that is unique to you.

Sovereign homesteading is more about orientation than destination.

It’s about what lives in your heart and mind – and how you choose to apply that orientation in the physical world with your hands.

By choosing to orient towards personal sovereignty, you are choosing to accept maximum responsibility for everything in your world. The degree to which your homestead is ‘sovereign’ (free from external control) depends on the degree of personal responsibility you take for everything in your life.

In this way, the physical form of your landscape and home and how you manage them become a direct reflection of your values.

As within (your values), so without (your land and home).

The way to maximize sovereignty from a homesteading perspective is to design your land and home to harmonize with site-specific natural patterns.

“Order and harmony produce energy for other uses via deliberate integration of chosen and natural functions, and the supply of essential needs. Stress, on the other hand, may be defined as either prevention of natural function, or of forced function. Stress creates disorder, and disorder consumes energy to no useful end.”

– Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual

That means a Sovereign Homestead is designed to work with Nature, not against it.

This limits stress, disorder and wasteful energy use, which puts time back in your day and keeps money in your wallet.

“If we throw Nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork.”

~ Masanobu Fukuoka

Nature is constantly showering us with gifts for free. A Sovereign Homestead is designed, built, managed and grown to accept and leverage this steady stream of gifts, and return them in kind by mimicking Nature in how it captures, stores and cycles energy and resources throughout the landscape and surrounding ecology.

This is accomplished through active management of the four universal levers for homestead productivity: Light, Water, Soil and Life.

  • Water = The Circulation Of Earth’s Lifeblood: Water is the universal medium for life.
  • Light = Energy Flow: How much sunlight your landscape captures and turns into usable biomass.
  • Soil = The Mineral Cycle: The circulation of life-sustaining nutrients.
  • Life = Community Dynamics: The living organisms that leverage light, water, carbon and soil minerals to produce the primary forms of wealth.

These four ecosystem processes undergird all human endeavor. We humans are utterly dependent upon them, and they are the most universal leverage points for creating a healthy, resilient ecology capable of supporting abundant life.


No matter where you are, or what scale you are working at, how you manage these four aspects of your landscape will determine its baseline productivity and function. Each ecosystem process is a different aspect of the whole system that is your homestead landscape – making a change to how you manage one will affect them all. Think of each ecosystem process as a different window looking into the same room – each showing it from a different perspective. When managed together as a whole (i.e., holistically) the potential for creating positive compounding cascade effects is HUGE.

By intentionally designing our lives and landscapes to harmonize with natural pattern and leverage Nature’s gifts, we create resilient systems of production that provide an abundance of what we need to live a high quality of life…today and 100+ years in the future.

This means that sovereign homesteading goes far beyond ‘sustainable living’ into the realm of regenerative – meaning the ecosystem of which your homestead is an integral part will be richer, and capable of expressing more life, because you are a part of it.

Degenerative Systems

  • Life expression capacity decreases year over year
  • Less soil of lower quality each year
  • Takes out more than is put back
  • Simplified, single or few species, systems are separated and managed separately
  • Requires greater external inputs to make up for progressive loss of living capital as system ages
  • Fights the forces of natures
  • Reliant upon centralized systems of supply
  • Finite lifespan
  • Fertility must be brought in from outside

Regenerative Systems

  • Life expression capacity increases year over year
  • Builds healthy soil by default
  • Puts back more than is taken out
  • Complex, multi-species systems are integrated and managed as a whole
  • Requires fewer external inputs as system matures
  • Self-replicating
  • Aligns with natural pattern
  • De-centralized systems of production
  • Can continue indefinitely
  • Fertility sourced & generated on-site

We get to choose where how we spend our life energy on the continuum illustrated above.

Whether we create a world worth inheriting or a diminished future for our children is entirely our choice – and that is a very good thing. We are human beings. We are native to Planet Earth. It is our home and we belong here. We can choose the regenerative path anytime we want. We just have to choose.

Meet Casey Pfeifer

Hi, my name is Casey Pfeifer and I believe that homesteading is the way to live free in an increasingly un-free world.

We are living amidst unprecedented changes happening across every facet of our lives and culture.

How we feed ourselves, supply our energy, engage in commerce, create livelihood and govern ourselves (individually and collectively) is changing at a scale and pace that no person alive today (maybe ever) has experienced.

Simultaneously, we face many predicaments with serious outcomes that will substantially impact our actions if we are to live as healthy, intact, sovereign human beings in the coming decades. Everywhere we look there are ecological, energetic, financial, social, economic and spiritual black swans coming home to roost.

All around the world governments and corporations are on a mad dash towards more centralization and more top-down control which means less choice, less privacy and less autonomy for us…if we passively accept what they are pushing.

I want something different than what the ‘powers that were’ have chosen for me – and I’m pretty sure you do too.

I believe homesteading is the BEST way to break free from increasingly fragile centralized systems of production, distribution and communication and value transfer. You can do this by:

  • Optimizing your land to retain and infiltrate water, capture and convert sunlight into living biomass, and build rich, fertile soils by default so that it increases its productive capacity and ecological health year after year.
  • Creating sources of income under your control that leverage Nature’s broad shoulders and strong back and give you the power to choose who you work with, how you get paid, and when and how much you work.
  • Building resilient systems of production de-coupled from global commodity supply chains – in-sourcing and localizing your required inputs so that your production systems keep functioning when things become unavailable.

My mission is to equip people with the mindset, design process and skills to develop productive and profitable homesteads that support their highest quality of life.