THOUGH it used to happen more frequently, Shannon Hayes still feels belittled when a customer sneers at her prices. At a weekly farmers market, Ms. Hayes sells meat from all natural, grass-fed lambs, cows, pigs and chickens she and her family raise on their upstate New York farm.

   ”It can be really insulting having someone standing in front of you at the farmers market and suggest you don’t earn a fair wage for your labors,” the third-generation farmer says, adding that last year her family of four lived on about $43,000.

   Ms. Hayes, who has a doctorate in sustainable agriculture from Cornell, cans fruit, makes soap, grows vegetables and hand stitches her daughters’ Halloween costumes. She wouldn’t want it any other way.

   ”Maybe (defending my prices) makes for a bad day but it doesn’t make for a bad life,” she says. “I’m a very happy, well-satisfied person because I’m so well supported (by my family). Someone who goes to work at a meaningless job everyday feels meaningless all day long.”

   The lifestyle Ms. Hayes has chosen epitomizes what she believes is a movement to create change through a family’s home life. “The movement is about men and women who are making the choice to forego conventional work and focus on the home as a way to bring about social transformation,” she says.

   Her book about the movement, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, is charted to be released next spring. Ms. Hayes, who is also the author of the cookbooks The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook and The Farmer and The Grill, will visit central New Jersey June 16 to 17 for a series of events designed to explore her pastoral lifestyle. She’ll host a grass-fed, gourmet wine dinner at Eno Terra in Kingston; a conversation about Radical Homemakers at Whole Earth Center in Princeton; and a sunset grass-fed grilling workshop at Cherry Grove Farm in Lawrence.

   In returning to work at Sap Bush Hollow Farm after completing graduate school, Ms. Hayes made a decision that is less radical than it may appear. Most people from an urban or suburban background would find it difficult to step into a farmer’s world, but Ms. Hayes learned those necessary skills growing up.

   ”All I’ve done is continue on in my culture,” she says. “None of these skills were lost in my family’s memory. Most of these other people have had to start with nothing. They come from urban backgrounds, suburban backgrounds, corporate America, and they have to start from the very beginning.”

   The beginning starts with learning to grow food, cook, mend clothes, knit and change a tire. “Most people don’t know how to do simple things,” Ms. Hayes says. “We’ve just become consumers. We buy all the things we need, including entertainment. We rely on movies, we rely on shopping, rather than knowing how to play an instrument or how to tell a story or share in creative acts as a family. All of these things are skills we’ve lost from the American culture.”

   Not that everyone has to become a farmer to reclaim those skills. At its heart, the movement is about transforming the household from a unit of consumption to a unit of production. Growing tomatoes on a terrace is a place to start. Even a hobby like knitting can produce something useful.

   ”These radical homemakers are very keenly aware of consumer culture and they’re turning their home back into a unit of production, even if it’s on a simple, rudimentary level,” Ms. Hayes says. “They’re realizing even the simplest changes can have a great impact.”

   Anyone can learn to knit, Ms. Hayes points out. But she’s discovered radical homemakers possess a deeper set of skills and traits that allows them to live this kind of life. These include a motivation to learn on one’s own and independence from outside approval. The most important, Ms. Hayes says, is the ability to develop functioning relationships with neighbors and family members.

   ”I think the dysfunction of families is promoted very heavily in our culture,” she says, noting the long-standing joke of monstrous in-laws. “We’re consistently taught that it’s impossible to have good and supporting — maybe imperfect — but good and supporting relationships.”

   One way to develop relationships, she says, is to depend on people rather than money for support. For example, young people would be better off living with their families until they marry because they could build equity instead of going into debt. Also, from Ms. Hayes’ perspective, the independence of a single person living alone is false.

   ”What we consider independent is actually making us very dependent on a corporate culture because we have to buy all these services,” Ms. Hayes says. “The only people we’re independent from are the people who love us. Families should be supporting one another, that’s what they’re there for.”

   At Sap Bush Hollow Farm, Ms. Hayes works with her husband, mother and father every day. They make decisions together, always trying to strike a balance between family, community, health and ecology. They own one car and live in a solar-powered house. They try not to buy much.

   ”I think the biggest thing Americans have learned is whatever you need can be bought,” Ms. Hayes says. “The biggest thing we need to re-learn is that most of what you need cannot be bought. And most of what will make us happy cannot be bought. That’s the biggest challenge. We have equated money with happiness in this country. Money has very little to do with happiness.”

   Ms. Hayes has never before given a public talk about Radical Homemakers. Over the past two years she chose 20 households and spent hours conducting interviews and gathering research to learn about the movement.

   ”These homes were just so full of creativity that when you first look at them you think, These people are loaded,” she says. “And then you realize it wasn’t money that made this, it was time and love.”

   Ms. Hayes witnessed homemade furniture, handmade food and self-made art. “What makes a home beautiful is inhabiting it and filling it with nothing more than you need,” she says. “They were not cluttered and filled with junk. The things that were there were chosen because they helped the family to live. And they were so warm and so comfortable and so innately beautiful.”

   Also, they weren’t immaculately clean. Laundry hung on the line, pots bubbled over on the stove, weeds thrived in the garden. If the homes weren’t immaculate, they weren’t sterile environments, either. “They were living systems,” Ms. Hayes says.

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  Shannon Hayes will host the following three events: The Grass-fed Gourmet Wine Dinner, Eno Terra Restaurant, 4484 Route 27, Kingston, June 16, 6 p.m. The cost is $80 plus tax and gratuity; 609-497-1777; a conversation on Radical Homemaking: Politics, Ecology and the Domestic Arts, Whole Earth Center, 360 Nassau St., Princeton, June 17, 9-10 a.m. Free. Registration suggested; 609-924-7429; Sunset Grass-fed Grilling Workshop, Cherry Grove Farm, 3200 Lawrenceville Road (Route 206), Lawrence, June 17, 6-8 p.m. The cost is $35. Registration suggested; 609-219-0053. Shannon Hayes on the Web: www.shannonhayes.info