Inside The Prepper Compound Behind Black Autumn Books, Homestead Shows

(Photo by Kelly Neish – Bella Day Photography)

Homestead is real. And by “Homestead,” I mean the sprawling, largely self-contained and -sustaining compound in the Rocky Mountains that inspired and informed the best-selling post-apocalyptic Black Autumn books and Homestead movie and series.

The rest of season one of Homestead the series returns today on niche streaming service Angel, about a year after the original movie debuted in theaters, grossing $20.8 million in box office on a modest production budget. Much of it was filmed in and around Homestead too, though that ridge line with three crosses on it isn’t a real graveyard.

The movie starring veteran actor Neal McDonough is set after “The Collapse,” and serves as a super-sized first episode for the series’ first season, which resumes today with new episodes, though McDonough’s character is out of commission during the series.

Collectively, Angel says the Homestead programs have accumulated one in eight minutes watched on Angel’s streaming platform, 81 million minutes in all, and attracted 253,000 new subscribers to its 1.6 million-member Angel’s Guild. The guild’s involvement is a vital part of Angel’s unusual business model, its members voting to approve each movie acquisition, receiving tickets to each theatrical opening, and even weighing in on Homestead scripts.

“What really gets me excited as a marketer is hyper, or let’s call it highly, attenuated demographic matches,” Ross said of Angel’s approach. “So we have the ability to pipe content and stories into the perfect fit demographically. And in the case of Angel, I would call it red state, Christian adjacent, family oriented. For me, what’s really, really exciting is to tell stories that introduce ideas that are red-state Christian conversant that ask new questions.”

While Provo, Utah-based Angel’s executives tend to avoid saying the company’s programming is faith-based (they prefer to say their “values-driven” shows “amplify light”), an explicit Christian faith (along with some religious prophecy/clairvoyance) is more obvious in the Homestead series.

Angel also announced this month that it acquired control of the Homestead series and two of its other hits, Tuttle Twins and The Wingfeather Saga. Season two of Homestead also just began production.

All of which brings us back to the actual Homestead, a sprawling multilevel house with many, many outbuildings and food-related operations, tucked high on a ridge next to National Forest land, overlooking the Great Salt Lake Basin and Salt Lake City, Utah.

The vast home sits on 300 acres, with its own solar-powered well, reservoir, trout ponds, greenhouses, “food forests,” saw mill, machine shop, gardens, bee hives, rabbit hutches, goat herd, chicken coops, massive containers of shelf-stable wheat and pinto beans, an industrial kitchen and cold storage, plentiful nearby mule deer and elk herds, among so much else. Also, an armory. A serious armory.

It’s the brainchild of Jason Ross, a relentlessly serial entrepreneur who estimates he’s helped start more than 100 companies. Some, such as Black Rifle Coffee Company, have been big successes; others, he says, were “abject failures.” Somewhere in between (a “double,” not a home run) is ReadyMan, a preparedness-focused company that came out of Ross’ friendship with two retired Green Berets.

ReadyMan is the ur-company that led to Black Autumn and Homestead, though Ross traces his own prepper background to his father, who was definitely one, and a bit to his own Mormon upbringing. The Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints has long strongly encouraged members to set aside a year’s worth of food and other stores, perhaps not a surprising suggestion from an organization with such a bloody and difficult first few decades.

Ross, now an evangelical Christian ,left behind the Mormon church in his 30s. But in Utah, the church is pretty much everywhere. Ross is even head of a preparedness committee for the local Mormon stake. And Ross estimates as many as three-fourths of his neighbors living in other equally huge homes along the ridge line near Homestead are Mormons, likely with their own prepper inclinations and at least moderate food stores.

“I’ve become a Jesus follower, like tectonically, through my life, through work in Africa, through raising a family, and I see, like a lot of really interesting questions about how we live our lives in America, that Jesus is asking (for which) we have very terrible answers in the American church. So I like to ask those questions. So if I show a post-apocalyptic America, and I can say, is this ‘kill or be killed,’ or is this ‘be prepared to share?’”

Ross came by his preparedness inclinations naturally enough. His father was one, and the younger Ross even wrote a piece for American Survival Guide at the age of 15 on the virtues of training with paintball guns, he says. Preparedness, more generally, has been around for a long time, elevated to a particularly anxious level during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear devastation was everywhere.

Those concerns eased after the Berlin Wall fell, but the dislocations of the Great Financial Crisis and definitely the Covid epidemic realigned many people’s attention.

“Before, people had bug-out bags,” Ross said. “When Covid hit, the whole market shifted.”

Nonetheless, as Ross, a long-time digital marketing specialist noted, ReadyMan has been challenged to become more than a profitable, smaller business for him and his partners.

“Prepper people are impossible to influence,” he said. “They’re hard-headed and anti-social.”

What’s worked a lot better was his turn to co-writing, with former long-time Green Beret Jeff Kirkham, who’d been writing in his downtime while stationed overseas. Ross brought a more narrative turn to Kirkham’s ideas about a group trying to survive the days immediately after a nuclear weapon is detonated by terrorists in the Los Angeles harbor, followed by Russian hacking of the U.S. power grid.

That setup led to 10 books, which have collectively sold well more than 1 million copies, though that doesn’t include lost sales data from the books’ original publisher. Then came Homestead, the movie, where Ross was one of three writers of the screenplay, a new writing approach that has gotten him excited to do more.

Ross, definitively, is not anti-social. Whatever your stereotype of a “prepper,” Ross likely wouldn’t fit. A lanky 50-something with graying stubble and a distinct resemblance to actor Steve Carrell, he’s self-deprecating, thoughtful, and engaged with complex questions about how to reconcile his own open-hearted faith with the inward-focused Christian nationalists who dominate the American church.

“So I get to ask these phenomenally interesting questions of my people,” Ross said. “I’m a red-state person, but I’m a permaculturist, and I’m a sustainable ag person. I’ve lived a lot of places in the world, and I realized that, the American worldview, the sort-of xenophobic worldview, is very poor, and there’s a much wealthier worldview, like in Eswatini.”

There in southern Africa, where Ross owns a 70-acre farm and Christian mission, farmers live on small homestead farms and “co-work” on each other’s properties to help maintain the community. That’s a model for surviving the kind of event that can turn modern life into a messy struggle for the bare necessities.

“This is a highly disruptive of modernity notion,” Ross said. “So (in Black Autumn and Homestead) we show the Apocalypse, and it just exudes peril and hope all in the same breath.”

Ross’s work ponders a classic prepper question: whether to be an “ark,” allowing in and sustaining others beyond your fence line, or a “fortress,” keeping all out, at the point of a gun, if necessary. Ross’ mammoth investment in preparing for a “black swan” event –while setting aside enough to feed those beyond a core list of 200 highly competent but also highly social and “convivial” people and their families – suggests how seriously he takes the question.

“Like in this season that we just did,” Ross said. “We show a modern compound with every modern convenience there…against this messy disaster of a homestead where they can’t get along, save their lives, they don’t agree about anything, and they’re co working the fields and the gardens together and mucking their way through relationships. I think that is the path to God that modern America and modern Christianity really walls us out from. I like being able to speak to that, to these people who I understand.”

That said, there is that really, really big armory in Homestead, alongside an equally big second room filled with spare parts, ammunition, a library of how-to manuals for basic skills, and much else.

Inside the armory are walls of rifles, shotguns, pistols, and other weapons modern and otherwise. He even has numerous light and heavy machine guns from WWII and more recent vintage. Those latter, which are tightly controlled by the U.S. government, are allowed only because Ross also has a Tier 3 firearms dealer license. Suffice it to say, though, if stuff went down after an apocalypse, the compound has defensive resources.

The bigger initiative, however, is figuring out how to farm sustainably at scale, without the costs, impacts and challenges of modern industrial agriculture.

It’s called “permaculture,” and means growing largely perennial, local/native plants and animals in a way that can sustain the land for years or even decades if needed. Ross and his brother Daniel are constantly experimenting with new plantings and combinations of a dizzying array of specific plants that can feed the soil while feeding humans. He acknowledges that it’s more like what you’d see at a hippie commune outside Portland, but it’s what a post-Apocalypse would need.

At Homestead, that includes what Ross calls food forests, densely covered and fenced growing areas with plants such as black locust trees, raspberries, strawberries, asparagus, chokecherries, Jerusalem artichokes, legumes, and much else. The “forests” look more like an English garden run amok, but each plant has a role sustaining the soil while providing nutritional elements for the humans who tend it.

Years ago, Ross first got into permaculture when he bought a failed mission in Eswatini, a tiny kingdom tucked between South Africa and Mozambique, that has been devastated by the continent’s HIV epidemic. That revived mission is focused on figuring out sustainable agricultural methods for Eswatini’s surviving generations and teaching them financial skills to boot.

Ross also has a place on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he’s also trying to figure out permaculture techniques for the very different ecosystem of a ssubtropical volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific. All are designed to reshape farming, in a process that he says is in “massive agreement with the hippies” on how to approach and work with the land.

Lanai, by the way, is mostly owned by one of the world’s richest men, Larry Ellison, whose son, David, is the new CEO/owner of Paramount Skydance. David Ellison lives a couple of doors down from Ross’ place, with Larry’s prepper retreat on the island’s other side. The Ellisons aren’t the only billionaires with Hawaiian hideaways either. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been building his own doomsday getaway a couple of islands down the Hawaiian archipelago, on Kauai’s north shore outside Hanalei.

The deal with Angel represents another big swing for Ross, but one he’s enthusiastic about at a point he’s still starting companies, now with his adult children, experimenting with more permaculture techniques alongside his brother, and figuring out what’s next if the world doesn’t end. The screenwriting work with Angel is an exciting new opportunity, but so is the company’s business model, especially if the world doesn’t end.

“It’s exciting, but it’s reinventing,” he said. “We are in the process of heavily disrupting the Hollywood model.”