Little Willow Homestead

Today I'm talking with Jessica at Little Willow Homestead. You can also follow on Facebook.

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00:00
listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together.  Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality,  and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.

00:29
At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful. If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care, you'll feel right at home with Greenbush Twins. A tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Greenbush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Jessica at Little Willow Homestead in Idaho. Good afternoon, Jessica. How are you? Good. How are you? A little dumb today. I'm not going to lie. It's all right.

00:59
Maybe both of our brain cells together  will accomplish something.  Maybe. I think it's allergies. It's very sunny here in Minnesota and there's a light breeze  and I think all the things that are really starting to bloom are just ruining my brain. But my husband sent me photos of the apple  trees that are blooming today.  So I'm very excited. Our apple trees never do very well  in

01:29
end of April, 1st of May, because we get these big wind storms or we get thunderstorms and the blossoms get blown off. uh And I'm just, the weather's supposed to be good for the next five days. So  I'm praying  that the weather is good for the next five days. So we get apples on the trees on the far side of the property that we've never gotten apples from in the five years we've been here. Hey,  we can pray.  That's awesome. Yes.  So I think the allergies are kicking my butt.

01:59
And I got a really quick thing I want to share with you and listener. um I went out on my porch and looked out the window and one of our chickens was over by our useless garage. We don't use it for anything. It's ready to fall down.  And we have this one chicken who escapes the run every day. And I decided that her name is Hopper because she hops the fence.

02:24
I have a few of those and uh one of them,  she is ultra determined. She's a coffee agger and she loves to jump the fence and lay in this one particular spot.  But  I know it's going to be there every day, so I go and collect it every day.  Yeah, I don't think the chickens are actually laying outside of the coop, but this one just has to go explore after she lays her egg in the nesting box.

02:55
She's a little crazy. She's a little free spirit. She is and she looks so fat. I know if I went out there and picked her up, she probably only weighs about three and a half pounds. She's so feathered out that she just looks round. I love it. So I want to talk about the coffee agar thing, but first, would you tell me a little bit about yourself and about your homestead? Oh my goodness, where do I start?

03:24
So I really want to share with you the why why we moved out here to begin with. Yes. um So we  we kind of homesteaded a little bit before in our hometown, which is a little tiny town in Idaho.  And  I  don't know, I just  that was back in 2009. And I got chickens. I had a ton of chickens. I was doing meat birds, taught my kids how to process meat birds and all the things.  And my daughter

03:54
My youngest of, we call her the youngest of the  first batch. was the youngest of our five.  She was really struggling in school. And so we made the decision  because she was the only one  at home that we would um sell our house, move to a different town and get her into the best school in the area that worked well with children on an IEP.  And so we  sold our house, moved into a subdivision, stayed there for four years.

04:21
During that time we did foster care and then we  adopted our daughter. Well that daughter the daughter that we moved there for graduated from high school and a month later we put our house on the market  and and we had our daughter that we adopted from a foster kiddo  she had asked us to take her and and and raise her and so  we wanted to give her a life  away from the city teacher where her food came from and just

04:50
for me to be able to homeschool her and,  you know, just teach her all the things, you know, things maybe that I didn't learn and  just, I don't know, I just really wanted to raise her out in the country. I felt really strongly about it.  And I had this like idea that you move out into the country, far out into the country, because we do, we live 30 minutes away from anything,  a gas station, anything.  And so you have this like mindset, at least I did.

05:19
that you move out into the country and things are gonna be slow and peaceful and serene and all the things.  And that's not what it's been like for us being out here.  It's actually been really, really hard. When I first  got here, we got chickens right away, of course. And then I started to raise meat birds and  what have you. And then...

05:47
Shortly after that, um that daughter was 19 years old, was actually convinced to go into uh Washington state, get on a plane and fly into Washington state and she uh was trafficked while she was there, she was sold.  And so this whole time I'm thinking like, it was supposed to be easier being out here, but things seem to be getting harder.  And  I um struggled with um being diagnosed with lupus after that.

06:17
And then  really having a hard time with breeding my birds and trying to take care of my daughter,  struggling with lupus. But my husband was so amazingly, like, patient and loving. And  he saw this desire in me to do this. And so he would step in when I couldn't. so we just really learned to work together as a team. em you know,  we were doing really well. We were

06:47
building our business, creating the rainbow eggs and what have you. And while I was doing that, I came across that really deep dark brown color. And I was like, I know how I can make that, but what am I gonna call it? Because it needs to be something different. And so I looked and looked and I'm a coffee drinker. So I was like-

07:12
I love coffee and I have like coffee signs, have a coffee bar, like all the coffee things, right? And it just hit me one day, it was like coffee agar. And then I felt like God was like, go look it up  and make sure, know, dot all your I's and cross all your T's, make sure that it's not being used in commerce. And it wasn't, I couldn't find it anywhere.  It's just like, this is awesome, this is so cool. So I actually had the name for it before I ever even had the color, which I thought was funny.

07:42
pretty cool. And then I got the  color that like six months later, as soon as I figured out like how to do it, I got that color and hence that's where the coffee acres came from.  And so we were, we just started to breed like those colors and whatnot  and things were going well. We were selling to a local  like feed store, our birds and stuff. And  it was like literally in the height of like hatching season, you know, it was the end of April and I got a phone call.

08:11
at six o'clock in the morning on April 26th that my son had overdosed and died of a fentanyl overdose. And I was completely wrecked.  when was this? This was five years ago, April 26th, 2021.  And I told my husband, I couldn't catch my breath for one. And it felt like I was getting kicked in the gut daily. And I told him, said, I can't, I can't do this anymore. I can't, I can't breathe.

08:41
I'm going to cry.

08:45
said, want to sell everything. I don't want to do this. um And so I started to list things and he said, you're not selling the incubators and you're not selling your best. I'll let you sell, but I won't let you sell your best. I need you to keep back your best.  And he knew what I was trying to accomplish. And so I sold all but 10 birds  and I grieved hard, hard, hard for eight months.

09:14
And then I just felt like God's saying, go back into the brooder, like get back into this.  And I walked back, I just remember walking back out into the brooder and going, this is it. This is what is going to bring me healing. Like I just need to take all of that grief and pour it into genetics. So that's what I did. I just dumped it into genetics and  like that's all my brain really thought about, you know, and I was able to mass produce the coffee acres  and

09:44
I figured out how to do it and I figured out which ones were laying that egg without even having genetic testing done  just by the look of the bird. And so I posted a post one time. I mean, I didn't have very many followers. We weren't big or anything. And then I just said, these are our coffee agers. And it blew up after that.  And my husband was like, you're going to need to trademark that name.  And he said that from the beginning.

10:14
he saw interest in it. And so did my father-in-law. I said, no,  no, I'm okay with that.  And they just kept pushing me. And finally this last year, he was like, no, we're going to do this. And I said, okay, but you got to get all of  the duckies in a row because that's not my thing. I just want to breed the birds.  so he did. He found an attorney and we  filed our application and we had to prove.

10:42
When we started, like when we started using it, how long we had been using it, how long we were using it in commerce and stuff like that.  just this last, just uh in January it was finally approved and we, um it went, um it went live that it's now a registered, registered name under Little Will Homestead.  How did that feel?

11:08
Well,  with the hatred that I have had towards it,  it was actually like, God, you did this.

11:19
I never intended for  our business to get big. I never intended to even ship  out of the state.  really,  my whole goal when  I started to homestead was just like, I just want to feed people. Like I want to teach people how to butcher a bird and I want to teach people how to  raise chickens and,  you know, grow a garden and do the things, you know. I never had this like big plan of

11:48
this is what I'm gonna do.  And so  I was kinda,  I was kinda taken aback, you know, like, this is real. Like, this name now  is always gonna be tied back to little Willa Homestead, you know? And so  it was amazing. And you know, I don't think that  the biggest thing with coffee acres is  what it affords us to do.

12:16
with the funds that come into our business. We don't have a  5013C,  but we have a ministry where em we feed the homeless. We go every single week and  we meet at a  local burger place  and  we bring them in and  we don't feed them burgers every week.  We actually will bring food and supply all the stuff. We just have a place to do it.  And then we go out into uh our community, which em

12:46
is our homeless population  is bigger than Portland, per capita in this little tiny town in Ontario, Oregon.  It's about 30 minutes from us. And so if you could just imagine, you know, per capita, you've got this small town and a huge portion of this town is homeless people,  you know? And so we go out into what are called uh the flats or tent cities.

13:15
and we minister and we feed these people and we don't just feed them like food. We sit and we talk with them, they love on them, we pray over them. We're  just trying to be the hands and feet of Jesus  and do what God calls us to do. he, coffee acres afforded us the ability to financially support this.  How fabulous. It's  far bigger than that even, Mary.

13:44
Like I said, was telling you, I got on a plane and went over, I went to Bangladesh and it's a 91 % Muslim country and there are so many women and children are being trafficked over there. So we got to actually rescue a girl from trafficking while I was there. And if it weren't for my business, I would have never been able to afford to go to another country and do something like that.

14:14
just  do what  God is calling me to do. so every door that he opens, and I know it's of him, I just keep walking through it.  so, yeah.  So that's where we're at and they want us to come back.  So, yeah. Nice. Okay. So, uh are you mainly poultry focused on your homestead or do you grow gardens and have other kinds of animals?

14:42
I uh only have chickens, that's it, as far as animals are concerned. We did have a giant garden. The chickens now get that area  because we've grown so much.  We literally live on an acre.  We  can't  expand anymore. The people that own all of the property around us have it in a trust and they don't want it broke up. They don't want anything done to it, which I think is amazing. um

15:11
I think what they're doing is amazing and it keeps us being able to do what we do with somebody not coming out here and saying, you can't do that.  yeah, we only,  right now we're only doing our rainbow layers, our coffee acres and all of our other colors.  We  used to do meat birds and we used to sell them.  And uh I just had to mention, I saw that you had Joel Saliton on your, uh that's his name, right? Am I pronouncing his name?

15:40
And he uh was  my guy as far as being able to learn how to track your meat birds and do it efficiently and how  to process a bird even. I used to sit there and watch all those videos over and over until I could figure it out. He is the kindest man. Yep, I believe that. I do. If you ever have the chance to go...

16:06
Anywhere near Polyphase Farm, should set up a time to meet him and tell him thank you for teaching you.  Yes.  On video, nonetheless. Yes. Yes.  Absolutely. He is a darling soul. I like him very much. Yeah, I've really enjoyed watching his videos and learning. Are we still there? Yep. Okay.  I'm not sure why that popped up. It might, oh, it might've been my watch. I like, why is my camera popping?

16:36
Squirtle.  yeah, he, I used to watch countless hours  of his stuff and listen to him and very, very knowledgeable man. So.  all he wants to do is help people.  Just like you want to help people just in a different way. uh So uh how many chick, I've got two questions.

17:04
How many chickens do you have  and do you sell the eggs to people who want to eat them?  I have just over 200 birds. We just did our testing  and we never sell eating eggs. We only give eating eggs away. Okay. So if people want them for eating, we give them away. We do not sell them as eating eggs. We don't have very many eating eggs  because we

17:33
we sell our hatching eggs.  We ship them so people can enjoy  having the rainbow colored eggs and stuff.  And then the other question I have is do you actually ship chicks? We just started.  We just started shipping chicks. Yeah, I did my first shipment  almost two weeks ago and every chick made it.  Wow.  Every chick survived. So I was really, really excited. Yeah, we had.

18:03
We had  across the board  babies that went all over the United States and they all made it alive. And so, yeah, it was pretty awesome. It was very nerve-racking.  uh... Yeah, that doesn't happen very often.  No, it was... Well, I prayed over those babies like no other did, so...

18:22
I was like, Lord,  I feel like you're calling me to do this, so please let these babies survive, because  that would hurt my heart to send babies in the mill and see that they didn't make it.  Yeah. Yep. It's sad when that happens.  Mm-hmm. For sure.  Yeah. I've heard a lot of horror stories with  shipments and stuff, and so  that's why I was so reluctant to do it.  But I had so many people begging me to ship chicks.

18:51
and people that maybe didn't have good hatch rates with their coffee acres and they really, really, really wanted the coffee acres.  And so I opened up just a few slots for the end of spring and summer to ship some babies and  they actually already sold out. So  most of our stuff is sold, well,  I'm sold out of everything pretty much until fall. um

19:19
Or yeah, and even into the fall now.  Okay, since I'm not an expert on any of this, I'm going to ask you some some questions that might seem obvious, but they're not obvious to me. um When people buy the coffee egg or hatching eggs or the coffee egg or chicks, are they buying them because of the color of the egg because they want that color egg? Or are they buying them because the

19:48
because they want to sell the eggs as food?  What's the draw?  There are a lot of different reasons, actually.  I have had a lot of breeders that have  bought my birds, bought my eggs.  And then a lot of people, they do, they love to put the eggs in their mix that they sell, like maybe they have a farm stand. Yeah.  they...

20:15
they want to be able to, you know, offer that color inside of the mix of  their eating eggs.  so,  yeah, and they're pretty neat because when you crack them open, they're coffee on the outside, but they're blue on the inside. oh snazzy. I didn't know that.  There are some neat looking eggs. yeah. Okay. um Sorry, nose is trying to run.

20:43
It's allergies, I know it is. ah So  what do the chickens that, what do the coffee agar chickens look like? Are they a dark chicken? And the way I breed, there's a lot of different ways to get that chicken, right? There's a lot of different ways that you can go about getting that  specific color. The way I breed, my birds are blue and black.

21:11
and sometimes white, and that is a recessive white gene that they would have carried from one of the parents.  I don't get the whites that much anymore. I don't breed for it, but I didn't ever breed away from it just because I actually had people  would specifically come to me and say, I want all of your white birds because they thought it was neat that I had these white birds that would lay all these different colors. And so, um

21:40
But now, for the most part, they're mostly blue, which is gray in the chicken world.  Just so people know, because a lot of people don't know what a blue is, it's a gray chicken.  And then blacks. And then  some have muffs and beards, some don't. Some have pea combs, some don't.  Most of them have  feathered feet. em

22:07
Some of them have some really beautiful lacing in their feathering. It just varies. Not one of them looks exactly the same as another, which is kind of cool. You figured this out all on your own or you studied genetics to get to this?  I'll be honest with you. I'm not that smart.  I really truly believe it was God.  I would dream it.

22:34
I would dream genetics, would dream colors, I would dream how to put  two specific birds together to create a color. And  this is another thing that I have not seen in any other farm, and I'm not saying that it's never happened or people don't do it,  but  my entire rainbow of eggs was created with just two colors, and it's only been just two colors, and I do not buy in other birds.

23:03
to add to that, I started by making an olive agar chicken.  And everything else has been developed from that in the seven years I've been doing this. Wow. Wow. That is so freaking cool.  It's God. It really is.  It's amazing.  You can randomly stick some birds together and, you know,  if

23:31
they're colorful layers, you're gonna get some colorful layers out of them, you know what I mean? But what I've been able to do is literally  ban my birds. We're now even using  these like little uh vegetable bags, I guess, like uh netting.  And  I am putting very specific eggs into each one of them so that I can even  narrow things down even more.

23:57
so I can get speckles on specific ones. can get blooms on specific ones.  We now have been able to um create what we call  little willow lilacs,  which is like this just beautiful pink  egg with this really heavy bloom. And we're looking into um just some other names for colors.  I have another color.

24:26
I have a name and I haven't created the color yet.  we'll see how that goes. It's so far so good. It's always like panned out, which is pretty awesome.  um,  your story is so interesting. Like I have never, I've been doing this podcast for over two and a half years and have never heard a story like this before. uh Yeah. Well, you know,

24:55
That's God for you.  I just think that, you know,  he's had his hand in this the whole time. yeah,  it's just been neat to watch it unfold. It's been hard.  know, two years ago, I don't know how long you've seen my farm or followed it or whatever, two years ago,  we had a fire around our entire farm  and we were supposed to evacuate. I mean, we were...

25:24
We were told to get out of here and get out quick.  And uh the fire was burnt back on us four nights in a row. So it was coming at every angle.  And one night it  literally came within an acre and it was flying off  the trees. And you could just see the embers just flying through the air.  40 mile an hour winds were pushing it in our direction. And not one of those embers hit the other side of the road. I mean, that in and of itself is a miracle.  hours those trees were burning, for hours those

25:53
those winds were pushing those flames. And even the fire department guys that were sitting in our driveway said that was a miracle. I've never seen anything like that ever happen. but God, he's powerful. he was like, nope, far enough, far enough. And other people lost their homes, they lost their farms, they lost a lot, they lost cattle.

26:23
My birds didn't even get sick from the smoke, which was  pretty awesome. So  yeah, it's been crazy to see the things that have happened and to see God's hand in all of it. And I think that's why he gave me the name. I think that's why he called us to trademark it was because he wants his glory, you know, and he doesn't want other people taking it. he...

26:50
He deserves to get the glory for what he does in our lives, you know, and he's used my life  just to show people how good he actually is and that  though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you don't have to fear any evil, that he's always with us, you know, and so, yeah, he's been faithful.

27:13
He's been faithful, you know, I talked about having lupus before. I don't even have it in my body anymore. It's undetectable and has been  for many years.  There's just so many things that he's done that it's like  only him, you know, so. Well, I am  so  glad that you have found something or God gave you something. Let's put it that way.

27:41
that brought you out of the depths of despair and gave you something so positive to focus on. Amen. Yeah. Yeah. And  I mean, chickens of all things, know, egg colors of all things, you know, but that's just how he works.  You know,  it could have been many horses. One acre.  It could have been that probably wouldn't have gone very well.

28:09
No, no, would not have because you would only be able to have maybe one and a half mini horses on an acre. Exactly. Yeah. yeah, it's it's and I even thought about it like when we moved out here, of the things because I used to do ministry a lot, you know, like I said, we did foster care and we would work in the church and stuff like that. And when we moved out here, I was like, God, how on earth are you going to use me out in the middle of nowhere where I didn't even get

28:38
phone service at the time when we first moved out here.  And it felt kind of depressing to be honest. I wanted my daughter to grow up out here, but I also still wanted to be able to serve  in many ways and felt like there's no way I'll ever be able to serve out here.  And God's like,  oh honey. Hold my beer.  Yep.  Yep. Yep. And so.

29:09
Yeah, it's just,  it's amazing. is. I love your story so much, Jessica. Thank you for sharing it. I try to keep these to half an hour. We're at 2838. So uh where can people find you?  At littlewillowhomestead.com.  And also we are on Facebook  at Little Willow Homestead.

29:34
And  I am also sometimes very little on Instagram. I try to stick to one platform,  but you can find me on Instagram as well.  Little Willow Homestead there as well. yeah, those are our places.  Fantastic. As always, people can find me at a tinypodcast.com.  A tinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Again, brain and tongue not working today.

30:04
Um, this was great, Jessica. Thank you for sharing your story with us. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Oh, absolutely. This was really fun. And I learned stuff again. This podcast  has been the joy of my life because I learned something  new with every person who talks to me. That's so awesome. It really is. It's really fun.  All right. You have a great rest of your weekend. All right. You too. Thank you so much. Yes, ma'am. All right. Bye bye.