IMO, the best defense for a homestead is location and stealth. During an extended crisis, you don't want to be along any evacuation route from the cities. But since I expect there will still be gangs roaming about, that is where stealth comes into play. To me, the critical time will be a few weeks following the event. During that time I will have no fires and will run no generators. Luckily, I live a mile off a rural road on the way to nowhere in Mississippi. I also have solar resources.
But if & when it comes time for fighting, then fight I will. I'm not leaving my farmstead. No bug out location for me. My farm is my Alamo. I will either live or die there. But I think many preppers don't really consider who they will have to fight. They think of roaming gangs but what about your neighbors? If you are properly prepared and they aren't, are you prepared to watch them starve while you eat well? You prepared to kill a neighbor kid trying to get food to eat? How are you going to keep your deer hunting neighbor from taking you out when you walk about your property? These are a few of the questions my adult son asked me, knowing I was prepping for our family.
So being the prepper I am, I took his questions to heart. I decided I could not watch folks I know starve while we ate. I decided I could never be safe if a neighbor was hungry & knew we had food. So to me the logical conclusion, if I REALLY wanted my homestead to be safe, was to build a small community of our neighbors on our rural lane. Our lane is somewhat isolated from other folks nearby and consists of 10 or so families. Two neighbors have medium sized farming & cattle operations. One neighbor down the lane is a dentist and another two neighbors are nurses. The folks closest to my house are the most redneck of rednecks. They don't farm or garden but are always hunting and fishing. Point being, I determined I'd rather have these folks as companions rather than enemies. I'd rather they be a resource for survival as opposed to a danger.
So at that point, my prepping style changed. As opposed to having a few years supply of resources for just my family, I switched my thinking over to having enough food for all these neighbors to survive short term... until we could ramp up food production. Thankfully, here in north Mississippi, we have very long growing seasons, especially if one grows the spring & fall cool weather crops. In my mind I figured the worst case scenario was the crisis starting at the end of the growing season, say late November, where we would have to largely live off of stores. So I set a goal of storing 150 lbs of long term food per person and immediately started doing so. Took me a couple of years but I reached my goal.
So my preferred method of protecting my homestead will be to communicate with my neighbors after they realize the extent of the crisis. My goal is to use my food/seed stores to provide hope and a plan for us to build a small community for self defense and for self reliance. As a group, I figure we can also protect and manage our resources, including abundant wild game, ponds & lakes stocked with fish, farm equipment, herds of cattle, chickens & plenty of land.
I personally don't think one can survive an extended crisis alone. Humans are social animals... always have been, always will be. My biggest chore as a prepper during such times will be as a manager. To communicate a plan & to communicate that if we work together we have hope.