Undead Ag: What We Can Learn from Zombie Victory Gardens

At Kathy Voth and Leah Esser’s site Zombie Victory Gardens, you can learn how to survive a world of the undead through agriculture, whether that means learning about optimal winter seed-sowing or just building a good raised bed. In addition to managing Zombie Victory Gardens, Voth has spent a few decades teaching cows to eat weeds, and farmers and ranchers how to train their cows. Modern Farmer caught up with her to find out what Zombie Victory Gardens is all about.

Modern Farmer: So it’s called Zombie Victory Gardens. What kind of farmers or gardeners are you going for here?

Kathy Voth: We’re trying for the urban farmer market. Those kinds of people are the same as the people during World War I and II: they’re living at home and they need to grow a little bit of extra food, be a little bit more self-sufficient or just have better access to vegetables. So, in essence, the people who think of themselves as farmers if they’re growing things in their back yard.

MF: How did you settle on the name “Zombie Victory Gardens?”

KV: Well, my friend Leah and I had been gardening together for a couple of years and we were starting to tell people about it and give instructions and a few things like that. We were just having a lot of fun with it. One day we were sitting around and she was telling me all about zombies one day – she’s a big fan of “The Walking Dead” – and we were trying to figure out a kind of a niche where we could get more people interested, and all of a sudden we just thought, “Oh, it’s the big preparation for the zombie apocalypse. We’ll be Zombie Victory Gardeners.” It was one of those little flashes that you have; we thought it was a funny way of catching people’s attention and getting them to think about growing something in their back yard.

MF: In one of your blog posts, you allude to farmer Forrest Pritchard and his methods of raising livestock on pasture. Do you consider Zombie Victory Gardens to be part of the national pasture-finished farming movement?

KV: I think that right now, there is a huge movement towards doing things with less technology and more naturally and we would definitely be part of that movement because we show people how you can get a garden going quickly and easily with stuff that you probably already have at home like pop bottles and old wood to raise beds. So we would definitely be part of that kind of movement.

MF: You write that, after three years of raising chickens, “The biggest lesson we’ve learned is how important the industrial food complex is to all of us.” Can you elaborate on that?

KV: It’s easy to think that I can raise my own chickens and that I don’t really need all those people out there. But then the reality started to hit home – I can probably put enough chickens in my freezer to last me an entire year, but the problem with that is that sometimes it doesn’t work out. It made me grateful that there were other people out there raising food and we’ve actually started figuring out, “Do we want to continue raising chickens and ducks any longer or do we maybe want to partner with somebody else?” So we would raise some things and let them raise the chickens and then pay them or trade with them. I even look at my twenty tomato plants and think, “Those will never be enough to get me through the year.”

The “industrial food complex” comment was kind of a tongue and cheek thing. We were talking about the fact that, yeah, there are a lot of people out there raising chickens in a big way and there are lots of people out there raising broccoli in a really big way, and oftentimes I don’t think we appreciate them, while we’re all worrying about the other potentially harmful things they’re doing. We kind of discount them and maybe instead of discounting them, we should try and be more cooperative and find a beneficial way to get what we all want, which is good food.

MF: You have another blog post entitled “Goats: The Perfect Post-Apocalypse Livestock?” You conclude they’d make pretty good companions for the end of the world. What farm animal would come in second?

KV: Cows. You can pack with cows, you can ride cows, you can milk them, you can wear their hides, you can make glue out of their hooves and they’re actually a lot easier to get along with than a goat too. They’re a lot more docile.