A Tiny Homestead

Go Green With Alexa

Today I'm talking with Alexa at Go Green With Alexa.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Alexa at Go Green with Alexa. Good morning, how are you? Good morning, I'm well, how are you? I'm good, you're in Florida? Yes, I am. I know it's a little colder than it should be there, but I bet you're not as cold as Minnesota this morning. Yeah, I bet I'm not.
00:30It's, I think it's minus 13 and I think the real feel or the wind chill or whatever they're calling it now is minus 32. Oh, wow, quite the difference. Yeah, it's 65 here and it's raining, but otherwise can't complain. Okay, what's the nearest city to you? I would say Fort Lauderdale, about 20 minutes away, north. Okay, all right. My daughter's in St. Petersburg. Yeah.
00:57So she's been like, it's kind of cold here. And I'm like, I don't want to hear it, kid. I was just there last week and it was freezing. Yeah. My definition of freezing. Yeah, I said, you grew up in Minnesota. You know what real freezing feels like. I don't want to hear it. Just stop. She's laughed. She's like, OK, fine. So tell me about yourself and what you do, ma'am. Yes. So I am a sustainability copywriter by trade.
01:26And I also create sustainability content on my own for the world to see and really just to show people how fun and exciting and how you can get creative with sustainability in your daily life. Awesome. I'm going to pull a page out of my other podcaster friends. Podcast she actually does a podcast about sustainability. And then one question she asks on every episode is,
01:54What does sustainability mean to you? So what does sustainability mean to you, Alexa? Yeah. So sustainability means to me is what it means is making the least amount of impact on the planet. And that means by, by, by the means of reducing our waste, reducing our purchases, reducing, or not even just reducing the purchases, but being more mindful of the purchase.
02:23where we're purchasing from and what it's supporting. And really just thinking about the end of life of everything before we make that purchase. It's just being a conscious consumer and also an advocate for the environment. That is an excellent answer. I love that. Thank you. So how did you get into this, the copywriting and sustainability? Yeah, so for copywriting, basically it was a, out of,
02:522020 out of the pandemic. I just realized that I didn't want to do what I was doing. I was, I went to school to be, I was pre-med in school to eventually hopefully be a doctor. I decided at the end of my college career that I did not want to do that anymore. I had degrees in biomedical science and public health. And while those might seem
03:19unrelated to sustainability, I would say that at least the biomedical science gave me a great foundation into science and the overall world of the chemical processes and biological processes of the natural world. And then also on the flip side, the public health degree gave me that foundation of understanding how our systems are currently in place and how they actually all work together.
03:47health, it's also about community, it's also about the way we live our lives. And the environmental aspect is also a piece of that. So it's something that always fascinated me. I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that really values sustainability and conservation. My parents are both immigrants from Brazil and I grew up in the scuba diving industry down here in South Florida. They had a business for 23 years of my life. They sold it when I was 25 and I was very much part of the business.
04:17and worked there most of my life. And just being part of that, it shaped me. We composted at home. We were very conscious about what we used and what we threw away. And my parents participated in a lot of conservation efforts as part of their business, because that was something that always was important to them. So just growing up in that environment always caused me to just, I think, view things a little differently than my peers.
04:46And I didn't really notice that until I went to college, to be quite honest. I obviously knew that my parents were, you know, different, um, than my peers and the way they thought about things and, and approach things was different, but I didn't really realize how different it was until I went to college and, um, was put in the position of, you know, cooking for myself, fending for myself, and then realizing that, oh, wow, I'm throwing a lot of this organic material into the garbage. And I obviously didn't feel.
05:15It didn't feel right by me. So that's when I started getting like a vermicomposter and making my own home, like body care products and things like that. So just to, that's a little backstory, but then 2020 came, I was working for my parents' business when they sold it right before 2020. And I stayed on with the business to just help with the transition and all that, and decided to keep working with the new owners for the.
05:44next couple years and that's when I transitioned into copywriting. They knew I was interested in that and they needed help with marketing. So it was kind of like two birds, one stone. And yeah, so I took a copywriting course online and figured out how to start my own business because that was really the goal was to work for myself and to live a life of more freedom and flexibility. So they were my first client. And then I just transitioned. I just decided that instead of just focusing on
06:10any business, I really wanted to focus only on sustainable clients and nonprofits. Wow. Okay. I was going to say back when you started answering my question, what a pivot that was. But really, I don't feel like it was a pivot. I feel like it was a sidestep into something that you already had some background to build on. Yeah. Yeah. I would say it's like coming back home because I...
06:36I always felt that I was destined to do something with sustainability, but I always thought that it was an industry and a career that you needed to be in for 10, 20 years before you really could make a living in this industry just because it's smaller and I guess so niche. But I was clearly wrong. Uh-huh. Okay. So I don't want to get too far in the copywriting stuff because it's not really what my podcast is focused on.
07:04But not everybody knows what a copywriter does. Do you have a simple explanation for what a copywriter does? Yes. So a copywriter is a professional that writes for businesses and organizations. Basically, all the words that you see associated with the business you interact with on a daily basis, any words on a website, captions on a social media post, voiceover scripts, or just scripts for video in general, blog posts, email campaigns, anything like that, that's what a copywriter writes.
07:34So you're sort of like a ghostwriter for businesses. Absolutely. Okay, cool. All right, so tell me about how you're practicing sustainability. Cause I did look at your Instagram page and you have some beautiful photos of things that you're doing. Yeah, thank you. So like I said before, I think it's mostly focused on buying less and being very discerning as a consumer. But in addition to that, I also grow my own veggies and herbs and
08:04That's just a few of the methods, but I also advocate for eliminating plastic in the day-to-day life. That's personally something that I've been on a journey to do. I wasn't always full of plastic in my life, but I've just realized that I don't want to contribute anymore to microplastics into our waterways, into our air. So I just try to minimize how I interact with plastic. And ocean conservation is a big part of my work, obviously.
08:32growing up in the scuba diving industry. And I really just try to show people that there are fun ways to be sustainable. It's like any area in your life, you can make more sustainable. It really just matters like which one you're trying to appeal to like the other day I had posted about ways you can digitally help the environment and that's like one by deleting emails or not using generative AI or using a search engine that is eco-friendly like
09:01and yeah, just like giving tips in ways that others can feel useful because I think for too long sustainability has felt like an ideal that you can never reach. And I just think that it's a journey more like getting healthy or anything else. Yes, absolutely. It's a process and a growth experience. Absolutely.
09:29And speaking of trying to be more sustainable when you're dealing with them, with technology, my web host for our website, for our home, our place, our business, I can't talk this morning, sorry, is GreenGeeks and it's greengeeks.com. And they have a whole thing about how they're trying to give back to the earth on their website. So that's who we use. And I don't get any...
09:59kickback for saying that either. I just like them. It's been great working with them. Yeah, that's how I feel. I don't get much kickback from anything and I just want to, I usually just spotlighting small businesses and things like that, but I'll definitely have to check Green Gigs out. Yeah. And it's just one word, Green Gigs. There's no space between. And also the way that you can cut back on the technology footprint that we all leave.
10:27is try not to get the newest thing every time it comes out. Yes. This whole Apple iPhone thing drives me crazy because people are like, oh my God, the new iPhone's coming out. And they just got the newest iPhone a year and a half before. Mm-hmm, exactly. And trade-ins are just another way to convince us that we're doing something good for the planet, but it's not really helping. Buying the new thing is never, never going to help.
10:54Right. I'm an Android fan, so I have never had an iPhone and I probably never will. And I beat my iPhone, my Android phones to death. Like they have to die before I will replace them. I love it. That's truly the best way to be sustainable is using what you have. Yep. And I'm not going to lie. I have a desktop computer that I do the podcast on and I have, I happen to have two laptops. One is dying. So that's why I have two right now.
11:23But I refurbished the one that was the best one of the two laptops. I literally set it back to factory settings a month ago and did all of the freaking updates. It took like two hours. Because this laptop is at least four years old and I wasn't gonna spend another $300 to have a third laptop. That's crazy. So there are ways to cut down on the...
11:51the technology clutter as well as everything else? Yeah, absolutely. And if you're looking, if you need something, because of course, like I don't want to ever put down somebody if they need something for their job or whatever. So if you need a new laptop or new device, check out refurbished sites like BackMark. I don't have any affiliation with them, but I just think it's great that they have certified refurbished options. Yep, absolutely.
12:20It is not, you don't have to spend thousands of dollars on the newest thing to have a functional machine in front of you that you can use. Exactly. So, and I don't, I mean, I'm not telling anybody what to do. I'm just saying I reset my computer because it still worked fine. It just was slow and it was cluttered with photos and things that I've written that I never submitted, things like that. And I was like, this is dumb. I have the photos elsewhere. I can just...
12:47dump this whole thing and start over and it will work just fine. And it does, it works great. So, okay. So is it hard growing vegetables and herbs in Florida or is it okay? No, it's so easy. We have a year round growing season and I don't have like, I live in an apartment so all my, anything that I grow is in containers, pots. So I, you know, I advocate for, you don't need much space, you don't need much time.
13:16you really just need to do it. It's rather easy. I really just have pots all over my staircase leading down to my place. And it's really that simple. Florida is the best place to grow anything, I would say, from tropical fruits and veggies in the winter. That's the thing when everyone else is hunkered down for the winter where that's our growing season for all our great veggies and tomatoes and strawberries and things like that.
13:47Is that because it's too hot and too muggy in the summer? Yes, exactly. Okay. Yeah, we don't have that problem here. It's too hot and muggy in the summer. It's too cold and dry in the winter. It's a trick growing things in the northern tier states and we do it, but sometimes we fail. I have been bitching for months about the fact that our summer garden this year, this past year was terrible because it rained and rained and rained. And my husband said to me the other day, he's like,
14:15I'm gonna go start some radish and lettuce seeds in the greenhouse. I said, it's not even February. He said, yes, but in the greenhouse, it's fine for cold weather crops. Yep. And I said, I could have pickled radishes in a month. He said, you sure could. I said, please go plant radishes. That would be great. So he's very excited. The greenhouse is new. It went up in May of 2024. Oh, that's awesome.
14:42So he's just dying to see how things are going to do in there with the sun pouring in the front where it's all, um, whatever he used, not glass, it's the polycarbonate sheets. Speaking of plastics, oops. So yeah, he, uh, he literally planted lettuce seeds and radish seeds yesterday afternoon when it was minus 32 windchill outside.
15:11Wow. So that was interesting. Got to work with what you have, you know? I love it. Yes. And he was practically dancing when he came in and showed me the photo. He took up the little packages on the little stick that he stuck them in the raised beds, you know, to mark where they were. Oh, I love that. It's really fun watching your 55-year-old husband act like he's five. It's kind of amazing. I think that's a huge part of sustainability is keeping that childlike wonder.
15:40I think if you don't have it, you're not going to do it. Yes, you're so right. It's motivation. Mm-hmm. Yes, you have to be curious. You have to have some courage and you have to be good with failure, I think, sometimes. Yes, absolutely. And that's the thing what I advocate for is imperfection. So there's going to be issues. There's going to be quote unquote failures, you know. But...
16:07The thing is that we learn and we grow from it and we don't expect perfection ever. Right. Because if everything was perfect, it would be so incredibly boring. Right. Yeah. And number two, if everything was perfect, everybody would just do everything right. And there would be no need for us to have grocery stores because we would just be growing our own stuff all the time.
16:29Hopefully eventually we get there, but even in the perfection of like policing each other and being like, well, you didn't do this and you're using a laptop right now and how could you be talking about sustainability when you're on an Apple laptop? Well, you know, that not everything is perfect. And I think that's, that is the beauty of it is understanding how it works in our modern world and not shaming people along the way.
16:55Well, just in general, Alexa, not shaming people along the way is a good premise to have, I think. Yeah, I'd agree. Shame does nothing but lock people up and they just stop and they don't try anymore. Yeah. It's just something that I have seen in the past and even I guess I've received the criticism in the past that, oh, well, what does it matter if you're not doing everything right? And
17:23I'm here to tell you that anything, any action you do does make a difference. Uh-huh. Absolutely. I have been sick for the last couple of weeks was with COVID. I might as well say it. And it's been hard getting over it. And one of the things that happened with it is that food didn't taste good at all. And I didn't lose my, my sense of taste or smell, but you know, you get sick, you don't want to eat and I knew I had to eat to get better. I knew I had to sleep to get better. And so I would.
17:52I would dish up my food and sit down to eat it and I get halfway through and be like, I'm not going to finish this. I'm not hungry. It tastes like cardboard. This sucks. And I would of course throw it away. And I felt really bad about throwing food away. That's fair. But at the same time, you're sick. Yeah. It's not like I was going to eat it the next day and it wasn't like my husband could take it to...
18:16work with him for lunch the next day because I don't know if COVID can get passed back to someone who's already had the same strain, but I sure as heck didn't want to find out. Right. So there are things that we do that we know are going to be successful and there are things that we do that they're not going to be successful. So you just have to find the offset and the balance I think. Absolutely. And yeah, just give yourself grace in the process. Yeah, exactly.
18:45So what do you grow? I'm really curious about what you grow on your stairwell. Like I will say, it's mostly herbs, just because that's the easiest thing for me to grow and I don't have a lot of space. I would like to get into potatoes next growing season, but I'm gonna have to figure that out. I'm trying to see if I can finagle a raised bed in my apartment complex. But for now I have jalapeno peppers, dill, thyme, mint,
19:15basil. I have a now a wild sweet basil variety that's like more for Florida. I have lemongrass, tomatoes, two different varieties of tomatoes that are popping right now, which is amazing. I have a cabbage that I don't think is actually going to produce, but we're watching it. Bok choy that I've been harvesting from. And then I also just got a Harwich product system.
19:42from my husband for Christmas. So we've been starting that and we're trying to grow some lettuces inside. Nice. Bok choy is one of the prettiest little leafy greens ever. It really is. I love watching it come in and so fast. Yeah. And it's so weird because it's like a lettuce and a cabbage mixed together. That's so true. Yeah. I'd never had it before. My husband planted it when we moved to our place that we live at now.
20:08We moved in four years ago and he put in bok choy and I was like, what's bok choy? And he said, it's like a, an Oriental, let us see thing. And I was like, I don't know that's the correct explanation, but I'm going to go with it. And, and he said, it's we'll use it in stir fry. And I said, okay. And he grew it and I tasted it raw after I'd watched some and I was like, Oh, this is amazing. It's crunchy. Yes. I love that. The texture is great. Yep. I had no idea. I had never had it before.
20:38And I don't know why I just hadn't, but I love it. And he's going to grow some more in the greenhouse. Yay. So we'll have that again, too. Again, I'm hitting 20 minutes and losing my train of thought because I'm still not quite on top of getting past this sickness. So I was going to say, if you need room to grow other things, are there any community gardens in your area or anything? Yes, there are. There's one not.
21:05far from me and I go there. I've gone there to volunteer and plant fruit trees. I do hope to spend more time there this year. And I think they I believe they rent out spots. And it's like very affordable for like a whole year and you can have a plot. But I just love having it accessible and next to me all the time. Me and my husband do share a car because we both work from home. So and also there's no need if we both work from home to have two cars.
21:34I prefer to have things closer to home. I'm not opposed to it. My parents grow a lot of things and I have the luxury of getting a lot of their produce that they hope grow at home. So I'm patient for now and the future. I have hopes and aspirations of, you know, having a property that it can grow things on, but for now this works for us. Sure, absolutely. Do what you can. What you have where you are is a mantra we use all the time.
22:04I will tell you if you get the chance to grow potatoes, it is so fun when it's time to harvest them because basically you pull the plant out of the ground and it doesn't bring the roots with it because they're heavy with potatoes. Right. And you take a shovel and you just lift the dirt and all these potatoes just roll out. It's so fun. Like I've seen it in person because we grow potatoes.
22:30and I've seen videos of it and every time I see it I'm just astounded. It's like nature is so freaking cool. It is so cool and yeah I would love to do like some canvas bags and then I've seen people like pour them out and then all the potatoes come out and I think that's so so funny as well like I would love to do something like that just we can't grow them I mean we can grow sweet potatoes year-round but have to wait on the regular potatoes until next year probably.
22:57Yeah, and we have trouble growing sweet potatoes here because the season just isn't quite long enough. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, so we've got the flip side going here. We've got, we do. You can't do potatoes and I can't do sweet potatoes, so we'll figure. It's really funny how different regions support different foods. Oh yeah, and in Florida in general, we have like three different zones. So like if you just go a couple hours north, not even an hour north, and it's a different.
23:25gardening zone and they can grow different things and can't grow certain things. So it's so fascinating. Yeah, my daughter is caretaking some avocado trees, bushes, whatever they are for her mother-in-law. And she can just go pick an avocado whenever she wants to when they're in season. And I'm like, I'm so jealous because we could never grow avocados here. We would have to have a room in our house designated for avocado plants.
23:54that was at a certain temperature and had a certain amount of light all the time. And we just can't, we don't have that. Yeah, that's the one thing I'm obsessed with tropical fruits, obviously, because I grew up with it. So my parents always, they have this amazing avocado tree that the avocados are so big, it's a different variety than like the Haas avocado. But the avocado avocado gets so big, it's like a butternut squash bigger than a butternut squash at times. Wow. Yes, it's huge. And it's like bigger than my forearm.
24:21and they're long and delicious, like creamy but firm. It's amazing. I'm jealous. Honestly, I didn't like avocado. I thought I didn't like avocado because I had guacamole when I was like 14. And when I was 14, I was really picky. So I didn't like anything anyway. And then I tried avocado like seven, eight years ago and had it in a salad.
24:48And I was like, I don't know why I didn't like this. This is great. Right? Avocados are, they don't necessarily taste like anything. It's what you put them in that makes them taste good. Yes. Yeah. And I grew up in Brazil, they eat it sweet. They don't even eat it salty at all. And so like I grew up with my mom always making it sweet with like, you basically mash it up and add brown sugar to it. But here in the U.S. everyone eats it with salt. So like, it's a really versatile vegetable. Or I guess, fruit vegetable, I'm not even sure.
25:17ehhhh fruit i think i can't remember it's kind of like lamb i don't know if you eat meat but lamb is one of the meats that takes the seasoning of anything you season it with takes the flavor and so you can cook it with mint jelly you can cook it with barbecue sauce you can cook it with salt and pepper and it's just going to absorb whatever the seasoning is that you use
25:41And so I always kind of liken avocado to lamb because avocado is just gonna take in whatever you season it with. That's a great point. So, you said you have hopes of maybe having some land someday. Is that like a dream or is that like a goal? I would say why not both, but.
26:05I guess a house is first and the house with like any amount of land would be enough for me. Like I said, I grow on steps right now in a garden so I can make any amount of land work. Yeah. And my parents have their own land so I don't feel like the need to get that unless it was .. I like living by the coast. I'll just say that and there's no coastal land near us. Yeah. That seems to be a problem on any coastal area right now. Right.
26:33I grew up in Maine and I can remember being able to walk along Sabago Lake, like for miles, just along the lake shore. And I guarantee you that's not the truth now. I bet that's not possible now. And in Minnesota, there are very few, I mean, it's the land of 10,000 lakes, but there are very few lakes where you can just walk the shoreline for miles because everyone owns the shoreline. Right.
27:01Yeah, and I'm not even talking about the shoreline because that's just not even, and I wouldn't want to do that anyway, but I live five minutes away from the beach right now and that's how I like it. So although it'd be nice to have land, I don't think I could give up the coastal lifestyle. Yeah, no. It was really hard leaving Maine and knowing that I would be so far from the ocean. But then I learned that there were so many lakes here that it was ridiculous, so that helped. And my father-in-law used to live on.
27:30a lake here in Minnesota. So I would get out of the car, walk to his backyard before I would even go on the house and just smell the air because air, air smells different around water. Absolutely. And so I would just stand there and breathe in for like five minutes and he'd be like, are you going to come in the house? I'll be right there. I'm just meditating for a moment with your lake. And he's like, Oh, I keep forgetting you have a thing about that.
27:57like, yes, yes, I do. Thank you for providing me a place to do this. He's like, I just need to get used to this. I said, uh-huh. Yes, if you could, that'd be great. And he said, you know, you could always just come in the house and go stand on the balcony out back and get the same fat. It's not the same. I said, but then I'm not rooted in the grass. And he's like, you're one of those. I'm like, yes, I am. I am absolutely one of those for sure. Have to ground. Yes. And I didn't even know it was called grounding bed.
28:27but now I do so intuitively you knew yeah it's I don't know I grew up in the Maine woods like my my lullaby was the wind through the pine trees at night because the windows were open so my parents raised me to be a nature baby and when people aren't raised that way they don't have the same understanding of it as I do you're so right and then trying to educate people on it they're
28:56I'm like, no, for real, you should try it. Yeah. And also they have to have their own experiences of nature to just realize how tremendous and amazing it really is. And then that's when I notice at least people become more catalyzed to be more sustainable and things like that. Yes. Yes, for sure. If I hadn't been raised the way that I was, I wouldn't be as interested and as practicing, I guess, as I am. No, same here.
29:23It never would have occurred to me. I just would have been like, I'm going to go to the store and buy pop and chips and not worry about it. It'd be great. And I try not to do that. I try to eat good or well, sorry, eat well. And I tried to drink a lot of water because we're what 90% water, I think. And the more water you put in, the better you feel. So. Same here. Yep. More, more nature.
29:49Yes, every day, every minute of every day, if at all possible, as I sit here and stare at my monitor. It's too cold to commune with nature today in Minnesota. I'm not going out there. I haven't been outside once today. That was more than enough for me. That's fair. Yeah. When your nose hairs freeze, when you step on your porch, you know it's cold. Yeah, that's enough. I'm over here and like I'm bundled up and it's just like in the 60s and just a little
30:17rainy, dreary, but I'm obviously not equipped. That's cozy napping weather. That's not freezing weather. It depends who you ask. I know, exactly. All right, Alexa, I try to keep you to half an hour and we're at 30 minutes. So thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day. Thank you. You too.
 

Shades of Green Urban Farm

Today I'm talking with Kimberlee at Shades of Green Urban Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Kimberlee at Shades of Green Urban Farm. Good afternoon, Kimberlee. How are you? I'm good, Mary. Thanks. How are you? I'm doing. I'm still alive. I'm telling you, I'm really glad to be through this sickness.
00:27My podcasts for the last three or four have just sounded like crap. I'm so sad about it. So you're in Phoenix? Yeah, I'm in Phoenix. Sunny, sunny Phoenix. Is it warm? It is warm. It's kind of well, I see that but it's been a little cool, cool for us. We've got down to like 30 degrees within the last few few days. But of course the
00:56at night. But of course, the days get a little bit warmer, you know, pushing 60s and upwards to 70s. But for us, that's kind of cool. Sure. Sure. Well, I guess just a little bit of background about me. Like I said, we're here in sunny Phoenix and kind of just the way we got started, just kind of always having a passion for plants.
01:24I love, love, love anything plants, mostly houseplants kind of a thing. Sustainability. Love the idea of building meaningful connections with the community and bringing the community together. And what kind of really started is this really kind of a small dream of mine of, you know, building this plant idea, the microgreens piece of things really kind of flourished into this.
01:50of multifaceted business idea of mine, which really focuses on the microgreens piece of things, the business side, houseplants, and then our homemade home goods that we do. My daughter is an amazing artist. She does fantastic pottery. She throws amazing pieces of pottery and she makes
02:19homemade rug, she's got this loom and she makes amazing rugs and she's just freaking incredible. With that, we just have this side business thing that we do with the home goods piece of that and the house plants that we do along with the microgreens, which is the side business type of thing. It's a broader aspect of things, but microgreens in and of itself I think is what you wanted me to talk about.
02:46Well, sure, but everything you just said falls under the headings of my podcast topic. Yeah. So we can talk about it all if you want, but you're multifaceted is what you're saying. Multifaceted, yeah. But really for the microgreens piece of things, kind of what we do with that is in a nutshell, we really specialize in growing and delivering the freshest microgreens to
03:12to people's homes, to restaurants, to local markets. We visit, as a matter of fact, I'm growing a crop right now for a farmer's market that I'm doing on Saturdays. We do a lot of farmer's markets. So our mission really is pretty simple. It's just to bring a touch of green into the lives of those that we're supporting. The community, we really wanna bring that touch of green into the community that we're here with.
03:41We deliver within 24 hours after harvest. So we ensure that our customers are getting the highest quality and the freshest flavor that they can. So it's pretty simple. It's a pretty simple business model. Harvest within 24 hours or deliver within 24 hours of harvest. So it's pretty simple. Most of our greens we can grow within 10 days, just depending on which green it is or which
04:09micro that they choose. We have a variety of different microgreens that we do grow. Our standard really can kind of grow within 10 days. So it's a pretty simple business model. Our customers love them. Sunflower is our biggest one. Pea is a big one. Broccoli, of course, is huge. Radish is huge. We have a really awesome variety
04:38Oh my gosh, it's a super food variety. And then we also have a spicy salad that is one of our customer favorites.
04:51Okay. So, so did you start out really small? Yeah, we did. Yeah. Started out pretty small. We're still pretty small, to be honest. The grow room that I have right now is probably, I mean, right now, I would say 600 square foot, maybe. Okay. Yeah. It's in our house. And so we've dedicated a spare room of the house. We kind of, you know, carved that out into this sterile little room that we
05:21We keep with just for the grow room. So it's pretty small. We've got four grow racks in here, all with lights and everything. We'll keep everything pretty much in this room. Nice. Is it warm in that room? It's warm in here, yeah. We keep it at about 72 degrees. Yeah. Yeah, I would love to have a room like that in our house in Minnesota because that would be wonderful on days when it's minus 20 degrees outside.
05:48Well, the beauty of this is you can grow microgreens year round. So when you're doing it in your house, you know, especially like, you know, with, with harsh climates, like Phoenix, like Arizona, we can grow year round. So in a harsh summer, we can still have fresh microgreens. And so we're delivering, you know, to customers, you know, year round, and we can do these, these, uh, farmers markets year round as well, because we're continuously growing them and within this 10 day span.
06:17you know, we are always able to have fresh microgreens and you in Minnesota can do it as well. So if you can have a space in your house, you don't have to have a very big space. You can have, you know, one, two grow racks and still be able to do it. You can grow them in your kitchen and have amazing microgreens. Oh, they're super simple. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. And we have, we, we have a huge kitchen. Like we have the biggest kitchen ever known to man. I don't know why they did the house this way, but I'm so glad they did. And
06:46They have a little eat-in area for a table and has three windows. And so up until last spring, we would start our seed starts, you know, our seedlings for the garden on that table. And you invariably have microgreens if you're starting seedlings. So we would have trays of seedlings, of lettuces and things, and I'd steal little leaves off of my husband's. Like they're never going to get big if you keep eating them. You keep snacking off them.
07:16And I was like, I only take one little leaf a day. And he's like, that one little leaf could be a big leaf in a month. I'm like, yeah, I know. I know. Yeah. And I mean, we started, we started them in February, the first year we were here four years ago, and he was like, we're not going to have any plant if you keep eating it. I was like, it's green food, honey. It's good stuff in February. It's good stuff. Yeah. They're so healthy too. Yup.
07:45And I just, I don't know, I really love the little baby lettuces and baby spinach leaves. They're delicious. So good. And the beads. I couldn't help myself. Couldn't stop. So good. I hear you. And so, I love it when we start seeds in the house because it's just so nice to have this tray of green on the table. Now the reason I said up until last spring is because we just built a hard-sided greenhouse this past May.
08:14And hopefully we'll be able to be getting our seed starting things happening in the greenhouse this year. That's awesome. We're very excited about this. This has been in the works for, I think we, I think I applied for the grant in the summer of 2023 that allowed us to build it. So it's been, it's been literally a year and a half, almost two, that this has been a hope and a dream.
08:43So the dream is going to come true in February. Oh, that's exciting. Oh, very nice. That's exciting, Mary. We're so tickled. My husband is losing his mind. He's like, we've got to get seeds ordered. We'll figure out what you want to grow. We'll order seeds, babe. It'll get done. Better get them now. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, so he's just so excited. He's just bouncing. He's dying to get to that time frame. How cute.
09:09Yes, and he's 55 years old a bouncing 55 year old man Who is acting like a five-year-old in a candy store is very entertaining to watch Yes, it's very fun so Here's what I want to know what you said what do sunflower microgreens taste like Well, they kind of taste they're they're like a nutty flavor kind of earthy nutty
09:38What I really love to do with them, and it's kind of funny because people think, wow, that's kind of an interesting concept. But one of the best things that you can do with them, or one of my favorite things is put them in a guacamole. The sunflower guacamole, it's incredible. Take two avocados, add some lime juice, salt, pepper, roughly chop up these
10:06put in some red onion, some jalapeno, and you've got an amazing sunflower guacamole dip. It's incredible. Nice, nice. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's some crunch. Yeah, how big do the microgreens have to be before you can harvest them, how tall? Oh, they get about, it just depends on the microgreen. Sunflower gets about two inches, maybe an inch and a half, two inches.
10:36Um, broccoli is not as tall. Some, you know, the, the superfoods gets a little bit taller. It just depends on what the green is. They don't, they don't get real big. They're tiny little guys. Okay. And then when you harvest them, how do you do that? Do you sell them with the roots still on them? How do you know? Nope. Um, I cut them and weigh them. I usually sell them by the ounce. So I package them in about like, uh,
11:05three ounces, four ounces, depending on again, the green. It's about six, three ounces for $6, four ounces for $6 typically, and then just package them in a clam shell with my label on it and then deliver them that way. Okay, so how do you keep them from wilting? Again, they're delivered within 24 hours. So I've got a little fridge in here, just pop them in the fridge and then they go out the next day.
11:34So stick them in the fridge and they're good for about 10 days, sometimes even a little bit longer. So they stay in your fridge and they stay in there for a good 10 days or longer. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. Huh. I thought maybe you would put like a damp paper towel in the clamshell or something, but it doesn't sound like you're doing that. You don't really have to. Huh. Well, goodness sake, so we're going to have to do some microgreens in Minnesota this summer. There you go.
12:04Now that I know they won't wilt in a day and a half.
12:09Because we sell at the farmers market. No, they're tiny, but they're pretty hearty actually. Yeah, I'm sure there's probably a market for them here at our little town in LaSore at the farmers market. So I'm going to have to talk to my bouncy husband and be like, how do you feel about microgreens, honey? Try it out. Mm-hmm. I'm sure he'll be thrilled. He'll be like, oh, a new thing to research. And I said that very flat, but he'll be excited. He'll be excited about it.
12:36Yeah, anything that he can grow that is a plant he's tickled with. So my kind of guy. Yeah, mine too. We've been together for over 20 years. I think he's a keeper. I think I'm pretty sure. Yeah, we have our moments because we're very different people, but for the most part, we're pretty aligned on the core values. So might as well. Yeah. Love that man a lot. Love the kid that we produced. I love the kids that came before the kid we produced and.
13:05Basically the four kids we have, we consider to be ours even though they all have different sets of parents. So yeah, it's a pretty good family. We did pretty good. They're all adults now, but they're still our babies. Absolutely. They always will be. Oh yeah, forever and ever. Amen. Yeah. And sometimes they still act like it too. It's amazing. So, okay. So,
13:34I don't want to be nosy, but I have a rather pointed question. Does the business support itself? It does because I have a variety of things that I do. And I say that because with the microgreens piece, what I really need to start doing and be able to do for that to sustain itself is to be able to scale.
14:02So what I'm really trying to do is really focus on really marketing towards the restaurant side of things. Because delivering to homes and to customers that way is fantastic. It's great. I love doing it. I love air quoting going to farmers markets. It's fine. It's good. It's great to be able to be with the community and talk about it and educate and all that kind of stuff.
14:31I think you can probably tell I'm kind of an extrovert and I kind of like doing that kind of stuff. I like networking. However, there's a lot of waste of product when I do that. I don't always know who's going to show up, who's going to be there. And so I've kind of got to play it by ear and like, okay, what we had, you know, this many people last week, you know, and it takes a minute because I've got a plan. I'm planning today for what's going to happen for next weekend. So it's a bit of a game. So
15:00what I need to start doing is really, really focusing on restaurants. Because if I can really get more restaurants under my belt and in my portfolio, I can start to scale better and be able to really just focus on those customers and be able to start scaling up better, if that makes sense. Yes, you'll have more of a quote unquote guarantee of what's going to be to be bought from you. Yes. Yeah.
15:29And that's the problem with this particular business model for anyone who grows produce. You end up with waste because you're not sure what's going to be bought. It's a gamble. And I've said this before on the podcast, but my husband wanted to do a CSA and he wanted to do the farmer's market. And he was like, so I'm going to plant this many of this and that many of that.
15:58hopefully will make this much money. And I was like, you do understand how much I despise gambling, right? And he laughed and he said, it's not gambling. And I'm like, no, it is, it is gambling. I said, it's not gambling like going to a casino and dropping coins into a machine, but it is a gamble. I said, I hate this. He's like, it's not a gamble, it's a dream. There are different things. And I'm like, okay, I have to think about it as a dream because I can't think of it as gambling. Yeah.
16:28And so it's really fun, but it's also really scary sometimes. It is. You have to get through that fear and be excited enough to fight through the fear, I think. Well, that's it. And you've got to think of it as, yes, it is a gamble, but it's a gamble in a way that you're continuing to put your name out there. You're continuing to
16:57reach more people. You're putting your card out there, you're getting your name out there to more people. It's another way to market. The really awesome thing about the farmers market that I go to, and I'm going to plug them, it's the Prickly Bazaar. They're out here in the west side of Phoenix. They're amazing. They offer free space to anybody that does produce.
17:22So it doesn't cost me anything to go there, so to speak. So I don't pay for any space, which is fantastic. So all it costs me is of course the greens that I take. Um, so it's fantastic in that. Yeah, they're amazing that way. So it's, it's just another opportunity for me to just network with people and, you know, take the product that I do. So what I'm doing, you know, again, for next weekend is like, okay, I'm looking through my seeds, looking through my product that I have the inventory of like,
17:52All right, well, I have a lot of this. Let's throw some of that in a tray. We'll see what that does. I've got a lot of that left over. I'm okay, I've got a lot of this done, Pete. Let's soak some of this and maybe let's get some of this. Get rid of some of this so we can make room for some new stuff or whatever it is. Keep the rotation going through. Yeah. So tell me what microgreens are good used in. I know you can use them in smoothies.
18:21Oh my gosh, you can use them just about in everything. Well, obviously they're great on a garnish. The restaurants really do is put them on a garnish, like fancy plated dishes have really awesome things in their garnish. In salads, I told you about the sunflower guacamole that I love to do. The spring salad, I have that spicy salad mix that I do, which is fantastic just in itself. You can have that just all by itself.
18:51Let's think of what else you can do with them. You can make, oh my gosh, it's amazing. Could you do like a pesto like you would do with basil? You can do, absolutely. You can do pesto. Yeah. Okay. Yep. There's this grilled cheese. I've heard about this restaurant that does this grilled cheese, like this ham and cheese with brie. And they have.
19:19these microgreens on it like this apple and Dijon mustard type of thing, it's supposed to be amazing. I haven't had it yet. They just throw a handful of microgreens on that and use it that way. My brother is an amazing cook. He doesn't do it for a living or anything. He just cooks here at the house. And he uses a lot of the greens that we don't sell. He uses a ton of the greens here, and he throws them in just about everything. And they turn out amazing.
19:48If somebody were to buy, I don't know, 12 ounces of microgreens from you and they can't use them right away, could they do the same thing that you can do with herbs and could they put them in olive oil and freeze them for future use? That's a great question.
20:06That's a great question. I don't know. I would assume so. Okay. I would assume so. I would assume like with broccoli, like just cutting just the, the tip of them off, just the, the floret off. I would assume so, but that's a great question. I'm going to research that. Yeah. Cause we, we make pesto and we freeze it because we make so much at a time. We're never going to eat all of it. And so we've learned to put it in ice cube trays and freeze it and then put it in the ziplock bags in the freezer.
20:36And once it thaws out, the basil is notorious for going black if it's frozen and the oil keeps it from blackening as it were. And so the pesto is just as good when you thaw it out and warm it up as if it was made fresh if you put it in olive oil and stick it in the freezer. That's really interesting. I'm going to research that.
21:03Honestly, we don't eat pesto often enough to have it be a problem because we don't love it enough to have it like every month. But man, when the basil is coming in from the garden in the summer, I want to use every bit of that basil we can keep. Yeah. Basil is not easy to grow. It grows great here. Does it? Yes. It does super well. And it only does super well for like two and a half months. So when it's coming in, I want to get it in.
21:32pesto. I want to freeze that. I want to dry it and put it in jars and stick it in my pantry. I want to use every last living piece of that basil coming in from the garden because I know it won't come back until the following June. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you can have a... I have basil micro green seeds, so I'm going to try those. I haven't tried them yet. So I'm going to give those a shot within the next...
22:02few go arounds here too to see how those work out for me. They'll probably taste exactly like regular old basil because I've kifed the leaves off of baby basils too to try them. So it'll just be little tiny basil. Little baby basils. Yeah. Little baby basils. You were talking about the clamshell containers that you put your microgreens in.
22:30What a lot of people who don't grow and sell produce, they don't know about this is that it's not the growing the stuff that kills you on price. It's the packaging and the labeling that kill you. It is. And it kills me when I have to throw those out. Kills me. Yeah. Because the outlay to start something like what you're doing is pricey.
22:57But I'm assuming that you can reuse your seed trays. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's an investment. It is. But the packaging and the labeling, it's an investment. But it's not a reasonable. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, one and done. And it kills me to see those go. Uh-huh. It's...
23:20It's so funny because people are like, oh, that must be great. You must be raking in the money. And it's like, no, because there are unseen expenses in every business. That's right. Doing it. No one's going to know that it costs you a dollar and a half per clam shell to, to sell the things in. It sure does. Yep. So, you know, you've got a, anybody who starts a business.
23:47that your accountant will tell you that your expenses are all of the things and that that cuts into your profit. Sure does. I think it takes a special kind of person and I don't mean that in derogatory way at all. It takes a really special person to start a business and have it succeed because it's so much to keep track of and understand.
24:14what is actually profit and what is actually cost of doing business.
24:20Right.
24:24So, and that's why I like talking to people like you, because you help me lead people down that road of making them understand what goes into it. Well, it's a commitment for sure. And it's a lot of research and it's a lot of, you know, talking to people and to families and businesses that are doing it. And like I said, just the research in it, like is this a viable business for me to get into?
24:51And after really looking at it and looking into the market here and the sustainability of it here, yes, I love it. I absolutely love what I do. But just because you love it.
25:06Can you make money doing it? Is the other thing of it too. And you have to be able to support yourself. Yeah, you love it. Yeah, I love doing what I'm doing, but I also have to support myself. So there's that balance of it as well. And so being able to have that conversation with yourself, okay, Kim, the clamshells do cost that. They're six cents a piece and the labels that you're doing and the ink that goes into making those labels.
25:35You know, and like I was saying earlier, you know, preparing for the farmers markets and the cost that goes into that and, you know, what waste that I might be doing and forgoing with within those farmers markets is like, does it make sense to do that? And so, you know, back to the restaurant side of things, you know, is it better to just not do those farmers markets?
26:03and just stay within, you know, just continue marketing the restaurants and, you know, keeping your head to the grindstone and just, you know, keep hammering it and keep going in there and taking those samples to the restaurants and just, you know, just hammering it away and making sure that, you know, you're doing everything you can to win that business, which you can do both. Don't get me wrong. But, you know, you've got to be able to make that.
26:30that decision of what is better for you as a business, what makes more sense to you as a business that's going to be for you for the long haul, what's going to make more sense for you. Yes, absolutely. You cannot do it any other way. It will fail. It will. You've got to be true to what you're trying to accomplish and what you're capable of doing. You mentioned labels. I...
26:57I am so impressed when people have these beautiful labels that they have made for them. My husband and I were talking and he was like, I really would like to have some cute labels. I was like, cute labels cost money. He said, how much money? I said, more than you're going to want to pay. He said, like three or four dollars a label? I said, it could be. I said, what are you thinking? He sort of drew up this design for our...
27:27our place for our labels. And I said, do you want it in black and white or color? And he said, well, color. And I said, color costs more. You work with printers, you know this. And he said, well, I work with the actual machines that print things. And I said, yeah. I said, doesn't the company that you work for charge more for colored documents than black and white documents? And he said, yeah. I said, so do label companies. And he was like, oh. And so.
27:55What we realized very quickly is that black and white is the way to go. And simple design is the way to go. If you're not flush with cash. Right. And it's really sad. I saw the most beautiful Christmas labels because we sold them candles and soaps and things last year. Yeah. And they were so cute and I wanted them so bad and it would have cost us our house to get as many labels as we wanted to get. I was like, I am not trading my house for labels.
28:24because they're cute. This is not happening. But you can get really, really creative with black and white, can get really simplistic and modern looking black and white. I kind of like black and white better sometimes. Yeah, ours is just a little farmhouse that I sort of, I sort of kife the drawing of the farmhouse and then added things to make it ours to embellish it. And it's got little potted plants and a couple chickens on it.
28:52and it's black and white and that's our logo and that's what we use for everything and people like it's so cute and I'm like yeah we made a cute label this is awesome but yeah it's it's all the little accessories and pieces and parts around what you're actually producing that make it so difficult sometimes but it's also the thing that people remember. That's just it and you've got to be consistent with it and so with that logo that you have
29:20Obviously that's why you have a logo so it's recognizable. You know so you've got to be consistent with it too and that's the challenge of it as well. Yep, I use it on everything. It's the logo for the podcast because everything that we do is under the tiny Homestead LLC umbrella. So everything. If we make a new product, it's under our umbrella.
29:47And so that logo covers everything. And I'm so glad I sat down and made it when I did before, before we even moved in here. I had the idea for the logo for our business and my husband was like, we don't even have a business yet and you're already doing the logo. I said, well, yes, I am. He said, you're crazy. I said, no, I'm smart. I said, there's a difference between crazy and smart. They may go hand in hand sometimes, but I'm smart. We need to have.
30:14We need to have the idea before we jump into the middle of this. And he was like, I'm so glad I married you. I was like, yeah, I know. Thanks honey. So yeah, so there's a lot that goes into doing any kind of business, but especially your business, because it is such a quick turnaround and you do only have a certain amount of time to get the product moved. Right. So I commend you. It's a lot to take on.
30:44Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I love it. I really, really do. It is fun. I love being able to just, I love being able to talk to people about it because not everybody, you know, you know about them, you know about microgreens, you know about the health benefits of them. Not everybody does. And so when I'm able to talk to people about it,
31:11That's what I love doing. I absolutely love growing them. Don't get me wrong. I love preparing the trays. It makes me happy. I love getting my hands dirty and being in the dirt and doing that kind of stuff. It just makes me happy. Being in my grow room makes me happy. I love doing it. And so it makes sense for me. This business makes sense to me. So it's just like I said, it's just the...
31:39the way that I'm going to scale it is my challenge now.
31:45So yeah, um, my ideas, I've got ideas. Yes, absolutely. My cook greens are really good for you. But why is it that they're so good for you? Well, they're so good for you because they pack so much in the little bit of package that they are, because they're like 40 times more nutritious, they pack 40 times more nutrients than their more mature counterpart.
32:15because they're so dense, they're so nutritiously dense now as they grow. They have so much more, like I said, than their adult counterpart, if you will. They have everything that their adult counterpart has as well.
32:43I just talked to a lady this morning. She has many horses. And I feel like I've spent the whole day thinking about many things because, you know, microgreens are many plants and many horses are micro horses.
33:00It's been that kind of day, ma'am. All right, Kimberly, I try to... Huh?
33:09No, I didn't say anything. Okay. I try to keep these to half an hour and we're at 36 minutes. So I'm going to cut you loose. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for, for having me. I appreciate you. For sure. Absolutely. You have a great day, Kim. Thank you. I will. You too, Mary.
 

Moon Ridge Acres

Today I'm talking with Becca at Moon Ridge Acres. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Becca at Moon Ridge Acres. Good morning, Becca. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. You're in Alberta, Canada? Yes. Central Alberta, near Camrose. Is it super cold there?
00:28Today not so much. It's actually around minus two But for the weekend, we're going down to minus 25 minus 30, which is a horrible jump real temperature Yeah, yeah, that's Celsius. Oh Yeah, I'm so sorry It's it's it's the jumping around that makes it really challenging because we get used to the cold we're used to these terrible colds, but
00:57When you go from, you know, plus, in the plus degrees down to minus 30 within a weekend, it, it is hard on everybody. It's hard on the animals, it's hard on us. It's not fun.
01:12Yeah, the last couple of days here in Minnesota, it's been really, really cold for us. And today it's supposed to hit 30. Tomorrow it's supposed to be 35, I think. I'm talking Fahrenheit. Right. And then, uh, today is Wednesday. So Friday is supposed to be warm again.
01:29and then Saturday it's supposed to start to drop and then Sunday and Monday it's supposed to be super freaking cold again. I'm like, mother nature, could you stop with the basketball bouncing, Jesus. Yeah, exactly. It's these extremes. It's like, ease into it a little bit, you know? Or just level out for a while. I mean, if it's gonna be cold, stay cold for a while. If it's gonna be warm, stay warm for a while. That would be fine. Absolutely, and like.
01:55Here with the melting and the freezing and the melting and the freezing, it just makes the roads absolutely horrific for driving. My husband is a full-time trucker, so it makes his job a lot harder to have to deal with ice on the roads. The counties are not always the best at getting out there and getting salt on the roads and taking care of them. It can be pretty treacherous.
02:24And on the flip side, I bet summer is really beautiful where you are. Stunning, absolutely gorgeous. I was kind of laughing because I had made some videos about George and Katie Vanslake being in Tennessee and how right now they have two hours of daylight more than we have here in Alberta. But then come June, we actually end up with two hours more of daylight than them.
02:53So it's just always flip-flopping in every way.
03:01I'm so glad you brought up Katie. I love Miss Katie. I watch Miss Katie's videos every day and very excited that Kennedy just had her baby. Yes, I love it because Katie falls out right before my folding season. So she kind of like fills that gap and gets me super excited for when our babies start to come. And so yeah, watching new babies will never get old.
03:29No, and she makes me happy because I don't have any animals like that. So I get to live vicariously through her videos, which I'm sure a lot of people do. Right. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. She's brought the joy of, you know, animal ownership to a lot of people. Yes. And she's so... Let's just rave about Katie Vance like for a minute here. Most people won't know who we're talking about. She's a young woman who does videos on...
03:59Facebook and YouTube and she has mini horses and thoroughbreds and quarter horses and mini cows and goats and I don't even know and she has just been this shining light of How to learn how to take care of livestock and it's been a beautiful progression for her Yeah, if you're if you're interested in raising animals, she is very honest about not knowing everything
04:28and learning as she goes and trying to share that. So I really like her. Okay, so this isn't about Katie Vance. Like I would love to talk to her, but she's a very busy lady. Absolutely, absolutely. So Becca, tell me about what you do.
04:44So what do you do at your place? Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think we had a little internet connection there. So we raise miniature horses. So kind of when you asked me to be on the podcast and it was about homesteading, I kind of laughed because I consider myself a bit of a homesteader, but I'm like a really bad one because I do horses. No such thing. No such thing as a bad homesteader.
05:14Yeah, we do miniature horses and we show them and we are kind of like working towards being on the upper level of that showing and having super high quality animals. I have raised rabbits for a few years now and I dabbled in the meat rabbits a little bit and my pride and joy were my Holland Lops which
05:42not so great for the sustainability factor, but I love them. And then we have ducks and we have a couple pigs and most of them are honestly pets. Like I said, not so great in terms of homesteading, but I follow a lot of homesteading practices in order to kind of keep things going. We get really resourceful around here to be able to manage what we have.
06:10And that is definitely a homesteading skill. Every homesteader I've talked to has done workarounds and created new ways to do things. Absolutely. I mean, I think especially when you're starting out and you don't, you know, the animals aren't sustaining themselves yet financially, you have to get creative unless you have, you know, someone funding you or, you know, you have a really great nine to five job that is sustaining that.
06:39financial burden, at least for the beginning. Eventually, I do hope the horses will sustain themselves, but that initial upfront cost of getting going is astronomical. You have to be able to work around and use a futon as a hay feeder and make it work. Uh-huh. Yep, absolutely. We used... Someone had an old toddler bed and it had the spring part.
07:09You know? Yep. And we use that as a trellis for our cucumbers one year. Oh, absolutely. We actually have a like a crib. A crib like I think it's like a frame, a crib frame as a gate right now. It's not the sturdiest gate, but it just needs to keep the goatees in. Yep. And it works. It works. Absolutely. I mean, if we can keep things out of the landfills.
07:37and make them work for us, why not? Absolutely, that is something, I always laugh at my husband, but I admire him for doing it. Every time he goes to the dump, he goes around and he will pick, he will pick. And he's brought home some really good stuff. So it's amazing what people throw away. And one person's trash is another person's treasure. And we've really made a lot just from.
08:05going to the landfill and taking what's still good. Yes, definitely. And I don't feel any shame about what you just said because my parents used to find stuff when they would take stuff to the dump too. And my dad would bring things home and I'm like, what's that for? And he's like, well, number one, it's clean. And I'm like, good. And he said, I can use it for, and he would list off all these different projects for all these different things he would bring home. And-
08:34The first time he told me a story, I was like, oh, okay. And then like the 20th time he started telling me a story, I would just start to giggle because I thought that he was so ingenious with his plans. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we always laugh. We look through our yard and a lot of people will come over and be like, wow, like you have so much, you have all the energy. It's like we worked for it very hard. We broke our backs for it, but we didn't pay a lot of money. Yep.
09:03Yeah, and honestly, I feel like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace have become the not so yucky idea of dumpster diving these days. Oh, absolutely. We have multiple dog houses. We have, at this point, seven dogs. We have big, big dog houses. I think the most we paid for one was $25, but most of them were free.
09:33Like I have my goat shed, I went and picked that up for free, just people wanting to get rid of stuff. And I mean, you have to kind of be on the marketplace and paying attention for those when they come up. But the amount of money you can save just by being resourceful in that way and not having to do everything yourself is amazing. Yes, have pickup truck and trailer will travel.
09:58Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We've even considered putting up like an ad saying, hey, we'll come clean away your, clean up your yard for you if you want, if you have things that need to go to the dump or whatever, we'll come deal with it in exchange for us keeping what we want. Because there are treasures out there that are buried in some farmer's field, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
10:26For sure, you're not wrong. And I love this. I love it because one of the things that I don't really pound on on the podcast is sustainability, but what you're talking about is sustainability. And it's really important as part of homesteading. So thank you for illustrating that. Yeah, yeah, I think that's one of our biggest fundamentals here, like despite the fact that I'm into horses and show rabbits and things that maybe don't feed us.
10:55We are really, really big on the recycling and repurposing. And I mean, even just recently, we got approved for the Loop program here in Canada. Okay. So Loop is a program that connects grocery stores that have unsellable food. It's not sellable for human consumption. And typically, this would end up in a landfill.
11:26farmers with the grocery stores, so we go and pick up a truck box full or a trailer load of like for the most part perfectly good food that the grocery stores can no longer sell because it's at its best before date or there's one moldy orange in a bag or there's a banana that's a little bit darker, whatever.
11:55get to bring that home for our animals to enjoy. And that has been such an eye-opening experience, like just seeing the sheer amount of waste, because each one of these stores has this amount of food that they are giving us every single day. And that was all going into the landfill up until Loop started.
12:22I think they're like seven years in now. Okay. And like we've gotten, like we've completely eliminated our dog food bill and that's with two large Great Danes, a pit bull, a Rottweiler, a Great Dane puppy. And the Pomeranians do not eat the loop because they are sensitive. But you know, for those big dogs, like we've gotten meat.
12:52And like all of that would have ended up in the landfill. And so this has been such a game changer for our little homestead. Now we have more money to put into other projects. But it's been really just shocking to see the amount of food waste that's out there and to know that Loop has been working hard to get more grocery stores on board, but they're not all on board yet. So...
13:21And you know, and you think, I don't know if there's a program like this in the US, but the amount of food that goes to waste is, it's bananas. It's bananas. It's crazy. And it might literally be bananas too. Who knows? They might be passing out bananas too. Before Christmas, we got an entire palette of bananas one day. My goats rejoiced. They were so happy.
13:51It was crazy. And another one we had was that we had an entire palette of tomatoes. And we couldn't for the life of us figure out what was wrong with them. But I mean, sometimes it's just a matter of, oh, these ones weren't refrigerated properly or there was a surplus or, oh, the new truck came in and we hadn't sold those like it's crazy.
14:20blows my mind and I really, really hope that, you know, especially here in Canada, if people are aware of the loop program, I think they could make their shopping choices based on a store that is contributing to the loop program because it kills me to know that there are many stores that would just rather throw it away. And
14:47To me, I appreciate the stores that are at least doing this because I have friends on the Loop program that have raised pork for their family of seven for the last couple of years just feeding their pigs loop. I think that's beautiful. I think that's wonderful. It's fabulous, yes. Yeah. I really hope that Loop takes off and they go worldwide.
15:17I'd like to see a little bit more of them being able to donate to starving humans, for sure, but the animals are a great start. Yes, and if you're raising animals to feed your family, you are feeding your humans, so that works out nicely too. I don't know if there's a program like Loop here in the States. There's probably something, but I'm not aware of it. Yeah. I know I've talked to a few.
15:46people who have animals and they have talked to their local grocery stores and said if you're just going to throw that away, can I just take it to my critters and some grocery stores are fine with that. Yeah, it seems like a lot of the smaller local stores are really open to it. It's the big box chains that are, and I understand they're worried about insurance, they're worried about legality and all of that stuff.
16:16the food being put to its highest use. Right, yes, exactly. Okay, so I'm really glad you talked about that because if I didn't know about it, I'm sure a lot of my listeners didn't know about it, so that was awesome. Absolutely. I have a question about the mini horses, and I'm genuinely not being a smart ass, I just need to ask, what are the mini horses good for besides being pets and being lovely to be around? So...
16:44That's actually a really common question that we get because, yeah, like they kind of seem like they're just little glorified pets. But I think where they really shine is in the driving. And what I have really noticed just based on the community of miniature horse people that I have found is that for...
17:13One reason or another, these people could not continue with the big horses. So my mom and I kind of joke that it's an old lady hobby. It's not exactly. There's lots of young folk in it too, but there's a lot of older ladies who maybe couldn't handle a big horse anymore.
17:43Hanoverians for 30 plus years and she's in her 70s now and she just can't handle them and she didn't want to give up her horses. So now she's in a cart and she's doing the in-hand classes with the miniatures and she's still getting her horse fixed but it's in a much safer space than with a
18:11giant 18 hand Hanoverian. Yeah, for sure. There's also a lot of people who have had injuries or maybe they're scared of big horses, but they love horses. So the minis kind of bridge that gap. And then for someone like me, I don't have enough land to support big horses.
18:41So I really couldn't realistically have more than a couple big horses on my property. And if I wanted to get into a breeding program...
18:55Sorry, did I cut out there? Nope, you're good, keep going. Oh, okay, sorry. So, yeah, it connects those smaller acreage people with a horse hobby. Like I live in an area where there's a lot of small acreages and most of these people wouldn't even have enough land to have one big horse, let alone two or three.
19:24but they would have enough land to have a few minis. And I think it's a great way for someone starting out to learn. And then maybe they progress onto big horses, or it's the opposite, where they're coming from big horses, but the big horses aren't working for them anymore. That's kind of what I've noticed with the miniature horse community.
19:52There are a few people out there who are just fanciers. They just love miniature horses and that's it. But yeah, then I think they're just kind of that gap filler. And then they drive as well. So you can do all of the same things that you can do on a horse riding, but with a cart.
20:22And, um, oh, I'm so sorry. My child is interrupting here. That's okay. Hey honey, come down and go pee. Just be quiet. Okay, sweets. Sorry about that. It's okay. Like I tell everybody who has kids in the background on other episodes, I love kids. I love their little voices. So that's good. That's good. I was, I sent them upstairs and said, try and be quiet, but
20:52When nature calls, we can only do so much. Absolutely, I guess. And I'm sure that mom hearing that somebody needs to use the bathroom on their own is a positive. Absolutely, absolutely. We're not complaining. OK, so. Yeah, so with the driving, I am very new to driving myself.
21:21I'm still trying to learn it, but it looks like it's a lot of fun. A lot of people really enjoy it. I actually have friends who was competing in upper level dressage with a big warm blood stallion. She started driving a Mini and she's like, I think I'm going to sell my horse. I like this so much. It's so fun.
21:50It's interesting. It's a different world for sure, but I don't discount the minis just in terms of pure enjoyment. They are great. They're great little animals. They're super easy to work with. They seem to be really smart too. Very smart. Very, very smart. And a lot of people, I think they get
22:19because of the Shetland pony, like the UK Shetland pony, which is very different from the American Shetland pony. And the UK Shetland pony is kind of notorious for being stubborn. And a lot of people at first glance will associate the miniature horse with the Shetland pony and think that they are stubborn and hard to train. And that's just not the case at all.
22:49The miniatures are so willing to learn. They are they're honestly Fantastic. I some one of mine my stallions I wish I could just multiply him and turn him into a big horse for me to ride because he's so well-minded So smart and just wants to please Just a really really great animal all around
23:14From what I've seen of the many horses, they remind me of a really good cross between a very well-behaved dog and a very well-behaved horse. Yes, yes, absolutely. And I kind of, I think I've joked about it on my page a little bit of how they are, they're kind of like dogs, but you can leave them outside. And you know, they're like, I find them to be less work than dogs, personally.
23:43and a lot of people are just shocked when I say that, but you know, and that's not keeping them up in a stall and turning them out every day. Like obviously you can make them as much work as you want them to be, but mine are out 24 seven. And they, you know, they have a hay bale and they have water and I don't really have to do a heck of a lot for them other than provide that and give them love and cookies and you know, work.
24:13Sorry. Got to give them scritches, right? Absolutely. I mean, I am forced to have these pretty nails so that I can give them proper, proper scritches. For sure. So, so where did the mini horses come from? Are they, are they a specific, separate breed from a regular size horse or is it just the smallest horses that have been bred down to minis?
24:41That is a really interesting question. So with the registries specifically, like they are considered a breed, but you can hardship into AMHA, which is the American Miniature Horse Association, you can hardship, which just means having a judge and an official measure them at the last hair of their withers. And if they're under 34 inches,
25:11you can register them as a miniature horse. So that kind of lends me to consider them more as a height registry, because there would be nothing to say that you couldn't, let's say you had some random quarter horse that just didn't grow tall, you could register that as a miniature horse as long as it met the height requirement. So,
25:41Yeah, I would say they're a height registry. And if that registry ends up closing and then becomes more of a bloodline registry, then that's kind of when I would consider them more to be a breed. But it depends on your definition of what a breed is. Because one thing I always say is that it's all made up. They just make up whatever they want with these registries. Like.
26:08If you look at the quarter horse registry, you can breed in thoroughbred and then breed it back to a quarter horse and it's still a purebred quarter horse. And it is confusing, but it's all made up and technically they are their own.
26:29My definition of breed says that it's a height registry until that hardshipping is no longer allowed. So, yeah. All right. Humans are nothing if we're not catalogers and labelers. We have to sort things into piles. You can watch babies start doing it when they start to sit up and play with blocks. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, there's...
26:56We have to have a group for them to be in. And everybody's definition is going to be slightly different in terms of that. I just think of the Arabian Horse Association, which the Arabians are the longest standing breed registration, I believe. They're one of the oldest breeds that are still alive. And.
27:25they don't allow any kind of cross breeding. So that's what my head says is a breed. But again, it's all made up. It's so vastly different from any other species. It's very interesting. The whole horse world, we could have a whole podcast dedicated just to...
27:51the intricacies of the different breed registrations and how they work. You should start one, Becca. Oh, that would be fun. I have considered starting a podcast eventually. I think it would be very interesting. You would never run out of people to talk to. Never, ever, ever, ever. It would be a very fascinating topic to go on to. I think it is an idea.
28:21Yeah, I can't do another one right now. This one takes all my time. And if I started a podcast with you about horse breeding, I would end up with a horse because I would fall in love with it. So I can't. I cannot do one. My husband would kill me. You need a mini. No, I do not. I need to watch other people with minis. I don't need one of my own. OK. So the reason I asked about the whole breed thing,
28:51is because we have a mini Australian shepherd, or at least that's what we were told she is. Right. And I've talked to a couple of people who raise Australian shepherds. And they're like, there's no such thing as a mini or a toy. They're just all Australian shepherds. They're just different sizes. And it was really frustrating to me before, but now that I've talked with people who
29:19breed Australian Shepherds and have done some research. I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter. We love our dog. She is like 35 pounds and she's shorter than my knee and I'm five foot nine. Wow. And she's gorgeous and she's a good girl and we love her. So she's a good girl. Australian Shepherd is what she is. Yeah. Then it really doesn't matter that.
29:44the true thing of it all. Like we recently in our club shows, we started allowing grade classes for people who have miniatures that aren't registered. And I think that was one of the most important things that we could do as a club. Because what is it? What does it matter? Well, you know, sure, we want to have the sanctioned shows and promote our breed and all of that stuff. But
30:13Why not welcome everyone to come and enjoy these little horses the way we do? And funny enough, after allowing these great horse classes into our show days, lots of these people went out and bought registered horses so they could do the whole thing. So how great is that, right? That's a beautiful thing. Yeah. Wow.
30:42That's impressive, actually. Because the miniature horse community is truly one of the best communities I have ever been a part of. And with horse people tend to get a bad reputation of being nasty, and I have not seen that with the mini community at all. It's just everyone is so welcoming, eager to help show you the ropes.
31:10Everyone is friendly at shows and you truly just feel like you're a part of a family. And that's what keeps you going back. The horses are wonderful, but it's the people at the shows that you're so excited to see and excited to go back and see how they've prepped their horses for the next year. And it's really about that community. And I think the more people we can get into it, the better. Yep.
31:38Absolutely. I think that when you have something that is positive, that brings people together, you're all learning, you're all enjoying each other's company, you are raising an animal that you love and the other people are raising theirs and they love them too. You can't help but walk away from it feeling good and feeling happy. Exactly. Exactly. It's, you know, and
32:06absolutely minimal. You know, I can do an entire show for a thousand dollars, whereas that could be an entry fee at a big horse show. So it's a really a lot smaller barrier to entry with the minis. So I think that's a really good thing. Cool. Okay. Well, Becca, I try to keep these to half an hour, but I have one more question. Sounds good. Do you have babies coming this spring?
32:35I do. I have up to 10 potentially. Oh, yeah, we've got a few coming. So I bred hard last year because I, I had a new stallion that I really wanted to get babies on the ground for. And he was the 2024 Canadian national grand champion. And so we've got babies coming from him. And I,
33:04I don't ultrasound to preg check my mares for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the only vet that will do it on a miniature is over an hour away. And then you're adding stress to your mares and all of that stuff. And then there's the cost associated with it. If I were to preg check 10 mares, I've basically given one of my foals away for free. Yes.
33:33While I'm in this beginning stages of my breeding program, I need to be very cognizant of costs. I hope I get to a point where, you know, ultrasound becomes a no-brainer. But right now I didn't, so I kind of left a little bit of room for some of these mares to be left open.
34:00And so I'm okay if they don't all end up pregnant, but I'm expecting at least eight for sure. If they're not pregnant, then they've been eating really, really well. Pretty round, huh? Yeah. So you have fancy babies coming. Not only do you have babies coming, you have fancy babies coming. Very fancy babies. The first one is the most anticipated. It is
34:29probably my top mare and my top stallion so we're really looking forward to that one. But all of the rest are, they're no slouches either so it's going to be a good folding season and it's going to last for, it should be from April to June so we've got a good three months of baby love.
34:58Are you going to post pictures on Facebook? Absolutely. Absolutely. We're, um, I'm actually hoping to kind of model my following season. Very similar to how Katie does. Nice. Um, yeah, because I mean, she's my, she's my inspiration, right? I started social media quite literally because of Katie. Um, I, I, I found her when she had just bought VS code red and I was, I saw so much of myself.
35:28in her content, I was like, wow, that's something I could actually do that I could actually, that I would love forever. Like sharing my animals with people has always been something that I've enjoyed. And being able to share it in this capacity, it just, it inspired me. So I definitely have to give Katie the credit there. She was the inspiration. And
35:55She's someone I really look up to in terms of social media. She's built an incredible platform of mostly wonderful people. And it's just really cool to see. And I just hope that I can find my community and we can all enjoy baby horses together. I think that's wonderful. And honestly, I started this podcast mostly because I needed a project.
36:25I said to my husband, I said, there are people who watch YouTube videos of cats cleaning themselves. I think I can probably do a podcast that's worth more than that. I love that. And he said, I think you can too. You should do that. So that's why we're talking today a year and a half after I started. So, all right. So Becca, thank you so much for your time and don't leave when I stop recording because I need your file to upload from your side too. Okay? Absolutely. Sounds good.
36:53All right, and I will be looking forward to videos of baby horses starting in April. Absolutely. Absolutely. I look forward to that as well. Thank you so much for having me. It was truly an honor to be asked to be on a podcast. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Oh, you are so welcome and thank you too. All right. Have a great day. Yeah, you too. Bye.
 

The Brickson Family Farm

Today I'm talking with Jim at The Brickson Family Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jim at the Brickson Family Farm in Baudette, Minnesota, I think is how you say it. Good afternoon, Jim. Good afternoon. It is Baudette. Okay, cool. And you said it's right at the Canadian border?
00:27Yeah, we're about three miles from the Canadian border. Actually, the town we live in is Pitt, but there's not too many people. The township isn't that big, so they attach us to Bidet. Oh, okay, yep, that makes sense. So you said it's terribly cold up there. It is, it comes with the territory, though. It's the price we pay for solitude, stay away from all the rat race of life sometimes.
00:51Yes, I understand. We moved to outside of LaSore, Minnesota for exactly that reason because we lived in town, Jordan, Minnesota for 20 something years and we were done. So we moved out in the middle of soybean and cornfields and we love it. We've been here four years and it's so quiet. It's so wonderful. All right. So tell me all about yourself and what you do at your farm. Oh.
01:18We do a lot of stuff. Right now we're trying to do not so much because it's been cold. But my wife and I are both Navy veterans and work for the Salvation Army after our Navy career for well, until retirement as pastors. So we went back to college at a late stage in our life, became ordained and we thought nothing better to do than start a farm when you're 60. So we bought this
01:46little home set up here, 50 acres and a house and a few buildings and just kind of been feeling our way through and trying to find out what works for us and what doesn't work for us. And so right now what we're farming is Dexter beef cattle. We have a small herd of Jersey milk cows and I don't know, a couple pigs. I think the pigs are going to go this year. It's just too hard to maintain pigs in the wintertime.
02:15So we're probably just going to do like a finishing operation. Same thing with chickens during the summer. Yeah, we stopped our chickens back a couple months ago because we didn't want to feed them through the winter because they don't give us a lot of eggs over the winter so they don't earn their keep very well. So I understand what you're saying. It's tough. And they're expensive to keep too. People, you know, they're easy to raise but the bird, I mean chicken feed is expensive and...
02:44I think we were selling our eggs for like four bucks a dozen at the farmers market and people were kind of scoffing. I'm thinking, wow, that's cheaper than in the stores actually. But no, I think my wife said the other day, there's like 10 bucks a dozen because of this new H1N1 scare. So the price of eggs are going crazy up here. Yeah. My husband stopped at Hy-Vee on the way home yesterday and bought two 18-pack of eggs, two separate containers of 18 eggs.
03:11and he said it was $9.99 for 18 eggs. Oh, I ate the most expensive egg salad sandwich of my life today for lunch. Right. Yeah. Well, she freeze dried quite a bit of eggs before before we downsize our chickens. Actually, it was the chickens we didn't really didn't really go until. Oh, November, I think was the last of our chickens left here. So we were collecting eggs up until that point.
03:38Yeah, this inflation is no joke. I'm very worried about people who can't afford to eat right now. And there are people in the world who a year ago could afford to eat just fine. And I bet there's lots who cannot afford to eat right now. And it makes me really sad. We worked on this side of that for about 18 years, my wife and I, with the Salvation Army, trying to provide for those that can't or couldn't.
04:08And we were surprised because the stereotype that comes with that is that they've always not been able to but I was so shocked as we're going through our time there the amount of new people that were coming because Because life has just gotten too expensive and how humbling that is to have to ask somebody to help them out Yeah. Yep. It's it's a rough time right now and I am
04:32I am so glad that we moved when we did. We now have room to grow a garden. We canned tomatoes this year. So if nothing else, I will have spaghetti sauce and as long as I can afford pasta, we're good. But it's just crazy. Yeah, it rained up here so bad this year. We didn't really get much. Our garden really was kind of a fail. I don't think anybody's garden up here really did much because of the amount of moisture we had.
04:59Let's just say if you live in Minnesota and you got a good return on your investment on your garden this past season, I'm real happy for you because ours did not do great. It was rough. But like I keep saying, we're into 2025. I have everything crossed that this will be a much better gardening season. I'm really hoping. So did you have background in...
05:26farming or growing things before or was this a new thing for you? Well, kind of. We're from Mankato. My family and I, well, I grew up a little bit in Mankato and then in our younger years, we moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin and lived there. During the summers, I farmed with, there's always tobacco to be picked or corn to be detasseled. So I did a lot of that, a lot of milk cows during the summer times. So
05:52That was about the extent of our farming or my farming. And I brought my wife here. I imported her from New York City. Oh, good job. She's from Manhattan. Yeah, we haven't been back in a long time. So she, the person I thought would be the hardest to fit into this lifestyle, she's grabbed onto it a lot harder than I have. Oh, awesome. She's done well, going from, you know, one of the largest cities in America
06:23You know, what is, but at the whole county has 3000 people in the county, uh, Lake of the woods County. Um, and Pitt might have 20 people. I not maybe even not even that. In fact, they're the only county or the only, uh, you know, the only county in the state of Minnesota that does not have a stop and go light. Oh, really? Wow. Okay. So it's a little bitty town. Well, uh, the whole county is real small. Yeah. There's no.
06:51There's no even, you know, the big attraction up here is walleyes. The Lake of the Woods is very touristy. And when the fishing is good, our population quadruples overnight. And then when the fishing is not so good, it's back to just us folks again. Yeah, it's actually really interesting to hear you say that because I grew up in Maine and Maine is a tourist state. And I feel like Minnesota has tourist counties, but Minnesota is not a tourist state. No.
07:20So, but does your wife still have her accent from New York? No, she, uh, well, she does. If we go back to New York and she gets by her, her family and friends, she, it takes her about five minutes, but, uh, she sounds like she's from Minnesota. No, the extra O's and everything. Nice. I have tried really hard not to pick up any accent and dump every accent I ever had.
07:47And it's worked. Everybody's like, where are you from? And I'm like, nowhere. I don't have any accent. It's gone. So, um, okay. So your dexter's are your your beef cattle. Is that right? Yeah, we do dexter beef. And we chose dexter beef because actually we got into beef before we were one of the lucky ones before the price of beef went through the roof. So we were able to
08:16to start a small herd of beef cows and we went with dexters because we just plain couldn't afford to go the Angus route. The calves were way too expensive, maybe not so for the time. I mean they're a lot cheaper than they are now but we just didn't have that kind of money to invest into a herd so we bought a small herd of dexters and kind of based our herd on that.
08:46So we've since bought a few more. I mean, we've bought a couple more. We're starting to look at registering our herd for nothing more than just the ability to be able to look back and find out what's working and what's not working. So and our milk cows, I mean, we just bought a milk cow. I swore after milking when I was a kid, I would never milk again ever in my life. And I'm really finding that being part of the
09:14The nicest part of our farm right now is being able to milk. Yeah. Yeah. It's been, uh, it's a lot more calm if the, well, if the cows are behaving. So sometimes, sometimes the herd boss is not real happy and she makes everybody else not happy. Okay. And we chase them around a little bit. I mean, it's just, it's just a different life, I guess. But so that's probably pretty much our main thing. We do have some sheep too, but the sheep.
09:43We bought the sheep to clean up the pasture. And now that that's done, we're probably going to move the sheep on too. But the farm we bought was deserted for 20-some years. There was nobody here. And so the pastures were all overgrown. The house was dilapidated. We had to do quite a bit of work. So we tried to see what worked and what didn't work. And
10:09So far the beef cattle and the milk seem to be the thing to go do. Yeah, I'm surprised that your herd boss, as it were, is a pain in the butt, because I hear jerseys are actually really easy going cows. Oh, she is very easy going. But when she wants to be in charge, she lets everybody know. OK, so and I know it could be just something minor. We could change something in the barn. And when it set her off a little bit, so we try to milk every day at the same time. We were once a day milkers. We don't milk twice a day.
10:40We found that that transition was easy enough. Our oldest cow was already once a day milking when we bought her. And the other cows that we've been getting, we've been getting out of the Rochester area from a dairy. And of course they're twice a day milkers. So there's a little bit of transition time there. Oh yeah. But it seems like they're coming along real well. Uh-huh. The twice a day milkers, when they're going through the transition, do they yell a lot? Are they like, hey, come milk me? No. No?
11:09No, the Jerseys are pretty laid back. They really are a good cow. The cow, the other cow that we have right now, we got her, part of the reason we got her was we had a calf we needed to tie on her. Actually, it was the other way around. My wife will look at me funny if I say this wrong. Okay. We got the Jersey cow twice a day milking and we picked up a calf to put on her side to help us with the milk. Is that right? Yeah, I got the okay from that, yes. So we were like kind of.
11:38calf sharing for the first month or so day milking her. Doesn't make the calf eat and he's a happy guy. can't talk, how many gallons of milk do So our oldest cow is a Jersey and she's
12:08two and a half to three gallons a day. The other Jersey that we have right now is about at the same. We actually have another Jersey, but we only have one other one that we're milking. It's about the same. So we're bringing in almost five gallons a day, which has been okay. I mean, it does what we need it to do. And Minnesota gives us a good opportunity for selling raw milk too. So they're...
12:35there are provisions in the state of Minnesota for us to be able to not be overwhelmed with too much milk. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you is do you have a market for the extra because that's a lot of milk for a family to go through if you're not moving it on to other people. And it's just me and my wife and a couple dogs. We actually, our first thought was that we were going to feed the balance to the chickens and the pigs.
13:03because it's supposed to finish the animals off really nice. But the demand for raw milk has been so high that we really haven't been able to make butter since like October. The milk goes pretty fast. So we also don't leave anything in the display refrigerator for more than three days. So if it's cold, it's got to be cold. I mean, it has to be cold and fresh or it just goes away.
13:32I love raw milk. Oh my God. We don't have it very often for us. It's a treat and we maybe get a gallon once every couple of years just because we can. And we don't really use it to cook with. We just drink it or we have it in our coffee because we love it so much. Yeah. We just had one of our customers came and got milk and she's looking, trying to make sure that...
13:59What's the fact, Ken? I mean, what are we looking at? Good butter. And I think our cream has really started to improve because we've been feeding our cows a little bit better. So this whole thought of, you know, the regenerative farming is what we really wanna do. Or it's just really tough, especially up here, to be able to just grass feed your dairy cows. And we tried, we really tried to just grass feed them.
14:27And it just, it was the condition of our animals was really going downhill. So now our, our milk cows, the cows that are in the stanchion get, uh, they get about three pounds of, of, we call it their candy. They know exactly what the candy is and where it's at. So you have to get, and that's, that's really improved our milk quality too. So, um, and at the Jersey milk too, seems to be a little bit more golden or yellow. Um, which is.
14:54I mean, if you think about that, the milk you buy in the store that's homogenized and pasteurized is pure white and you get raw milk and it's got some color to it and you're like, huh, that's different. So it was a little different to start out. That was one of the observations I got when we first started that it was just a different color milk. Yeah, but it tastes so good. Yeah.
15:23And I think the taste comes from what you feed them too. We're feeding high quality alfalfa hay to the cows all the time. And I think that makes a big difference. Absolutely. And I'm just gonna say something. I don't think that grain is evil for cows. I mean, I know that there are a lot of people who want exclusively grass-fed cow's milk or grass-fed beef, I get it. But.
15:50I'm not one of the people who's like, oh, if you feed your cows grain, you're doing it wrong. I don't think that's true at all.
15:59Right. Well, to be clear about that, our beef cattle, our dexters are 100% grass-fed. We don't feed them any grain. We give them a mineral supplement that they can have at choice whenever they need it, and they have plenty of water. So there, we don't do any of that. The only reason we started doing the grain was because the condition of our animals was getting, it was really dragging them down, milking, or we had some that were on calves too. So it just was really hard on them.
16:29The long and the short is we started trying to find a feed that was better, something that we can give them that was going to be digestible and not just be zero benefit for the animal. We tried to go the non-GMO route and we can go that way. You'll pay a lot of money for it. And I would if I could. We really don't, we'd have to ship it from someplace else. We're buying a lot of our minerals and stuff from Mankato from a big gain.
16:59So, but we still can't get a full-time feed from them shipped up here. And if it was, it would cost us a lot of money. So, I was at the feed mill about a month ago and talking to the nutritionists up there saying, look, I just want to put together a non-GMO type of feed for our cows to where I can look at our customers and say, look, it's the best that you're going to get and we know that we're doing the best that we can.
17:24And he said, that's fine. He says, we can get you a non-GMO. And he said, there are some farms out here that have non-GMO. But his statement was, is if you knew how much stuff they spray on their property before they plant that, you wouldn't think much of the non-GMO. So the herbicides and the rest of the stuff that they put on it. So we've gotten to where we're more selectively trying to find a better quality feed or a grain that comes from a farm that we can trust.
17:51Yes, and in the meantime, you are doing the absolute best you can. I know you are. I can hear it in your voice. You are doing the best you can by your animals and by you and by your customers. So thank you. Yes, I it's so hard, Jim. I talk to so many people all the time with a podcast and every farmer, it doesn't matter whether they're raising livestock or produce or pecans. Everybody is doing.
18:20the best they can with the knowledge they have to put out quality products. And the, I don't want to say pain, but the angst that I hear in people's voices all the time about feeling like they're not, you know, like they're coming up short on what they're trying to accomplish is so sad. And I want you to be proud of what you're doing because you're doing something that is important.
18:49So you're doing the best you can. I'm proud of you. And we started a farm at 60, so we're now 62. There's a lot of great resources out there to start with. Going back to where Minnesota, the state of Minnesota is allowing farmers to sell raw milk from their property. That really, I mean, it really is a struggle, but it's a good deal in a sense. Now, if we bottled our...
19:18our milk, we'd have to have a bottling license. We don't have that. Right. So right currently, if I sold you a gallon of milk, you'd have to come to our farm and draw it off our tap. And that takes responsibility, I think, off of our shoulders. But it's still that might sound all good and dandy, but it still makes it to where you're still responsible for giving out a good product. You know, you get a whole bunch of attaboys and it just takes one old craft to make it all go backwards. So
19:48We really are very, we keep searching for a better way of doing things. Not that, and I think that's how me and you got together a little bit. There's got to be a better way to do it. The Facebook farmers that aren't farmers that have a lot of opinions and create so much controversy without having any education. Us raw milk producers have some great resources at our fingertips.
20:17Institute out of California. I'm just now looking into that and there's so much training and so much good resources through that group that I don't It can only help you. It can only help you be good. So if the idea is to give the quality product the best you can do then I think that you don't quit learning you keep learning and keep teaching because somebody gave to you so you need to give it back. Absolutely. Yes, I am in complete agreement with you.
20:45I am a big believer in people sharing what they know with the people who are coming up behind them because this has to continue. People who grow things are so important because without the growers, we're not going to eat. It makes me mildly crazy sometimes because people who don't know farmers don't know people who grow things.
21:11They're like, oh, well, we'll just get whatever we need at the store, whichever store has the thing. And I'm like, do you not understand that the food that you eat has to come from actual food? It has to come from produce and animals. And now like, well, yeah. And I'm like, no, I don't think you understand the way that this works. And I do spend time talking to people and trying to explain the process. Because
21:40We grow our food in our garden and I know the process. You have to do things a certain way to get a yield on what you put in the ground. So it's frustrating to me sometimes and that's part of the reason I started the podcast because I am not a farmer. I'm not, I just grow plants sometimes because I like tomatoes and cucumbers. I'm not a farmer. And spaghetti sauce. Yes, yes.
22:09And I love to cook, so. You know, I've got to say some of the, and I'm not, my wife and I are not strangers to hard work. But I will tell you that farming is pre demanding and I don't think it matters what kind of farming you're doing. If you're dirt farming or animal farming, it really, it's all hard work and it all has to be done whether you want to or don't. Like we're married to our cows. Oh yeah. We can't go anywhere without them. And I don't think that when.
22:39Somebody sits down, we're so used to like you said, going to the grocery store and getting a gallon of milk, sitting down and drinking a glass of milk and not thinking anything of that or how it got there. So we know firsthand how, what it takes to put it on our table. And sometimes it's not so glamorous like this morning when it was so doggone cold. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's hard work and.
23:05everyone who does it needs to be commended for committing to it because you can't do this without being committed to what you've chosen.
23:15And not without not without great failure you can't and even even those even us we've been very committed. How we could count the failures many times over of things that didn't go the way that we thought they would or the way that the textbook way of of having things happen. We just had two calves die this last week for no reason just died and. We had them in a barn they were well on their way that they were bottle calves so but that's quite a heartbreak.
23:44You know, it really is a heartbreak when you you put a lot into an animal and they just kind of don't make it It's not like you just walk out there and say oh that one's gone. So we'll just find another one They're not that easy to find They're not that easy to find and it's expensive to replace them and not just money wise you you put energy into that that You're not gonna get back, right? So yeah, very true. Yeah, it's hard. It's I don't want to be a bummer but
24:13this lifestyle is hard. You know when things go right they go really right but when things go wrong they go really really freaking wrong. Yeah you know the people you again YouTube is one of those things that we watch a lot of YouTube and have we didn't start the idea of a homestead because of YouTube but we found YouTube because we were trying to build a homestead and it was before oh gosh it was back
24:43I don't know, it's probably been five or six years now that we've been kind of planning this, making this go forward. So you hear all the right way or how these people that have been so successful, Greg Judy is from Moora, Minnesota. I don't know if you knew that or even who Greg Judy is, but he's a very big regenerative farmer down in Missouri now. And to listen to him talk and the way he thinks that it's a piece of cake, but I will tell you what, you can't grab a whole armful like that. And that was one of the hardest things.
25:13that I had to learn. My wife was like, you need to slow down, you need to slow down. And I was like, but you can't just do part without the other. And a lot of times I think humanists, we want to grab the whole pile and walk with it. And we end up dropping half the pile. So a lot of failure because of trying to not necessarily think too big, maybe dream too big, or misunderstand the way that it should be. So I'm glad they don't have room for a hundred milk cows. That's all I got to say about that.
25:41I'm really glad we don't have room for any cows because my husband would want 10 and I'm like, no, one is more than enough. Thank you. We'll pass. The other thing that I have found in our four years of living here at our little homestead is if you're married, you got to be able to talk with your spouse about decisions on the farm without getting into fights. Because if you can't communicate with your spouse.
26:09you're gonna break up over a living. All for sure. And I said, it's really difficult sometimes because my husband will come to me and be like, I was thinking I wanna do this. And I'm like, have you researched it yet? And he's like, no. And I say, okay, take some time. These are the answers I need from you to think about this. And then we can talk about it. And then he goes and finds me answers and then I go and look it up too.
26:38And we end up having debates about whether the thing that he wants to do is a good idea or not. We've had more discussions and debates in the last four years than we had in 20 years before that. And it's not a fight. It's just that we both have our ideas about how things work and what makes sense and what doesn't. And we have to come to some kind of middle ground on it. You know?
27:04Well, Lee and I had a little bit of a head start. We worked together in the same office building for, you know, 16 years, 17 years before and went to college together right next to each other for the two years to finish that off. So we've had a lot of experience. But even with that being said that if you both can't get your arms around it, it makes it very difficult. I'm not saying that it can't be done or that I haven't done things without Lee's blessing. But I'm saying when that happens.
27:31When that happens, not that if it'll happen, but when that happens, it makes it very difficult to pull through the other side because it does take both of you to run the farm. There's no way I could do this by myself. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. And in our house, two yeses is a yes, one no is a no. That's on the big stuff. That's how we've decided to resolve things. You're tough. It has to be that way because my husband is stubborn and...
27:59He digs his heels in and I try to explain things that I've looked up and found out about what he wants to do and how that plays out. And he doesn't, he can't hear it right then. So, so we do a lot of, have you considered? Have you heard what I said? Did you think about what I said? There's a lot of, of, um, repeating back to each other so that we know we're not just being mean and stubborn. We're actually considering the other person's opinion.
28:29Right? Sometimes I just have to go through things. I got it. I got to go through it and either win or lose. And I don't always win and I don't always lose. So that wasn't meant to sound arrogant. I'm going to use the example of we bought red wattle hogs. And my plan was is to create our own little herd or, you know, sows and a couple boars to create our own, you know, heritage breed hogs up here in Minnesota.
28:59And so we spent thousands of dollars, thousands, on getting the pens and everything we needed and the genetics from the boar. We drove to Michigan to pick up a boar, for goodness sakes, and he wasn't cheap. So we had probably, I don't know, $4,000 worth of animals that we went through trying to create that. This year, two of our three sows, we put in the freezer because they were with the boar all year.
29:28and didn't get pregnant. So, and they were proven self. So we bought them as guilts and then had, they all both had a litter. Well, the next year they decided they were gonna take the year off. And you spend all that money and these, I have these ideas of how it's gonna work out in the end. And it just never seems to work that way. So I really don't, the two chores I hate during the winter most is the pigs and the...
29:57chickens. I just don't like doing the extras on that. So we kind of got to, and my wife was happy I got to this point, but that we're going to just buy feeders and finish off whatever is whatever we have that our friends, families, customers would like to have. So if we sold six pigs, that's what we'll raise and not raise them during the winter.
30:25because oh my goodness, it's just busting water up and you can't have an automatic drinker for a pig in the winter because they will tear it up. Anything that the pigs just have a way that's part of the pigness is they tear stuff apart. So pigs will be shortlisted on our farm just because of that because it's been so much, we've lost so much. And again, at our age, I'm 62 this year. So if...
30:54If my children, one of my children, we have four of them, but if one of our children decided that they wanted to farm and came up here and farmed, that might change the outlook on it. But we have a son that's a chief in Hawaii in the Navy, and we have two daughters that have professional jobs down in southern Minnesota and northern Illinois, and none of them want to come up and farm. So it was kind of my dream.
31:24that they would want to do that. My youngest daughter married a farm boy. So I was kind of hoping that they would think about that. And of course with the parents come the grandchildren, which is the best part, but they just don't want to leave what they have to come up here and go farming. So if the question that was before my wife and I was, do we want to invest another three or $4,000 in another set of...
31:51of pigs and try to do something a little bit different. We learned a lot. And because we don't have anybody coming up, it turned out to be a big fat no. Because we already wasted three years on the ground with our pigs, we'd have to do it all over again. It would take us three years to get back to where we should start going in the black. And it just wasn't I just can't see myself doing that through the winter for three more years.
32:21when it's so cold up there by Canada. Yeah. It makes sense. So, to end this on a really good note, what is your favorite thing about this choice that you've made for your life? You know, it keeps me busy. A lot of people say, man, you are crazy for doing that. And maybe so. It keeps me engaged in life. And I'm not so sure that I would be able to engage in life without something.
32:49constructive to do with the responsibility. I'm a combat veteran and I don't want to wave that out there but sometimes life is a little bit difficult but through being able to farm for now it's helped me get through some of the things that I struggle with. So one of them is I would probably sleep all day long if I didn't have something to do outside. So I don't know, that's probably my favorite part. For now we're committed till we're 65.
33:18And the next jump will be until we're 70, but I think at 70, I'm going to be done farming. God willing that we're still alive and we're going to find a nice little place to retire and that gives some of our grandchildren an opportunity to grow up and say, you know, I'd sure like to farm, right? I don't want to farm. So it really, we don't really care that we don't have anybody coming after us because it wasn't, we didn't buy the farm and start the farm so we'd have kids to have the farm.
33:48When we started, we bought the farm to have the farm so that I could engage in life and be productive.
33:55Awesome. Well Jim, thank you for your service and thank you for your time and talking to me today. I've really enjoyed it Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day. Yep, you too
 

The Witch's Garden

Today I'm talking with Elm at The Witch's Garden. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Elm at The Witch's Garden. Good morning, how are you? Good morning. Doing just fine. Glad to be with you. Glad to be with you too. You said Tennessee is where you are, right? That's right. The west end of the state. About an hour outside of Memphis.
00:29Okay, and is it warm there today? It's warming up. We got incredible snow. I haven't seen it like this since we moved here, gosh, 16 years ago. We had a solid eight inches and it was beautiful. No ice, just, you know, felt like Christmas all over again. Well, I'm in Minnesota and you have gotten more snow this winter than we have, which is unheard of. I'm, I'm so confused by mother nature.
00:57this winter and last winter. Last winter I think we got maybe a foot total for the entire season. So I don't know what's up with Mother Nature, but she's having a lot of fun with us I think. Personally, I think she's a little confused with us as well. Well, I think that's been true since humans started, but you know, it's a thing. All right. So tell me about yourself and what you do at The Witch's Garden.
01:23Sure, we've been in business for about two years. The, uh...
01:29The head of the business, shall we say, is Sanctuary Apothecary. So I have a little apothecary shop out here. And I'm beginning to do workshops and tours and that kind of thing. The Witch's Garden started as our flagship subscription service. So four times or eight times a year on a seasonal cycle, we send out boxes of ritual and inner work items. So I'm from a pagan tradition, European pagan background. And uh.
01:58title it the witches garden but we're really at a point where we're working with energy healers we're working with with Yogi Yogi's and those with meditation backgrounds so you know I love our community it's really very party-colored and I wouldn't have it any other way awesome so I don't okay I wanted to talk to you because I tend to identify as pagan if anything
02:25because I'm not Christian, although people who know me tell me I'm the most Christian, non-Christian person they know. I have a lot of that myself. And I take that as a huge compliment because I try really hard to be kind and helpful and do good in the world. And if that's what they're getting from me, that's what I'm going for. But I also am just, I feel like pagan is so much.
02:55nature and being in the world and in the moment. And that's how I am with everything. So, Parla doesn't want to talk to you is because I saw that you grow a lot of the things that you use to make the things that you sell. And I'm all about growing things. So what do you grow? So for the last several years, we've been building out beds of herbs around the house in the garden.
03:23and now across the landscape. So we started, gosh, close to 17 years ago, as a CSA. And we live in a home that's been in my husband's family for seven generations now. My daughter is number seven. And we started with a CSA. So we had the huge market garden and grew vegetables for several years and sold at local farmers markets and then also did a subscription service.
03:52there that helped us, you know, understand what our costs were going to be for a whole growing season, understand what we could grow and know that we had an audience for it, know that we had families to deliver it to. And that was really satisfying, but it was an incredible amount of work for two people. We both, over the years, have taken on day jobs in other places because keeping up a house that was built in 1835 takes a lot of income.
04:20So in my day job, I work in tech and it just became a little too much. Um, over the years, we've really started learning how to work with the landscape here. We both have a background in anthropology and are fascinated by those, I guess, intersections with people and culture that have existed for as long as we've walked upright, um, the landscape.
04:52The landscape is a part of us to our core and that environment impacts every piece of who we are. This is the longest I've ever lived anywhere. And in that time, we've started a relationship with the land. We've really gotten to know it. Historically, the land in West Tennessee has changed so very much. We're at a point where...
05:18big agriculture has caused a lot of environmental issues, but it's also changed the fauna and flora here. So we've, I guess, pivoted, we've shifted our focus, we've found our passion, and we're working hard to turn probably the 250 acres of this historic farm back into a native prairie and the landscape as it would have looked three, 400 years ago.
05:48So, you know, there's trillium in the woods. There are.
05:55heal all and hand it and dead nettle everywhere. Heal all and dead nettle are actually in my head, they're synonyms. Although some people say heal all is a different plant. So I've got to clarify myself. But now we're fully into herbs. We will probably four or five times a year will split and dig up and pot.
06:23several things from across the landscape. We still have several things in containers that were growing out till they're a little larger. And we'll do plant sales just kind of to help us support that shift that we're trying to make on the land. And right now the larger family is still renting out the agricultural land to larger scale farmers. Our long term goal is to recover all that land to native prairie and pasture.
06:54So in order to support that, we've been building beds. Oh gosh.
07:03I'm so glad that we're moving away from the row crop style classic garden that we've gotten used to seeing because most of our land still really wants to be hayfield. So the herbs that we focus on are ground covers, are big, beautiful, bushy herbs that will keep the local. Some of the problems that we have are with...
07:31grasses that have come in and taken over. So things like Bermuda grass sedge are everywhere and we're figuring out what can out-compete them.
07:41So some of those are things like yarrow and rue have both done very well here and they're both excellent medicinal and magical herbs. We are overflowing with, I think we're up to 26 different kinds of mints, each of which can have their own purposes. We are...
08:06in love with blackberries and strawberries. We've been building out strawberry beds for years. And again, those can be dried. So everything that we do is focused toward one, the native landscape and plants that we know will thrive here naturally and that are glad to be home. And two on...
08:32items that have either medicinal or magical uses or both. And it's amazing what a large variety of those there are. So the landscape's becoming more and more varied over time and it's just incredibly satisfying. And honestly, so much easier to maintain. Yes, because you're working with nature, not against it. Exactly. Okay. You mentioned Roo. And every time I hear the word Roo.
09:02I am reminded that I think that it's used for a blue colored dye. Is that correct?
09:10Rue is not one that I know of in that capacity, maybe partly because the varieties that I have here are yellow flowered. There is also an African Rue, which is not the same plant. It's far more poisonous. That may be a plant dye, but I wouldn't know. What I use for blues are blue pea flower, which I can get locally.
09:38It makes a lovely gorgeous blue dye that I use in inks. Okay, a friend of mine was asking me years ago about Roo and he was sure that it was used to make a blue dye and I was like I don't know. I don't know the answer to your question and Google probably knows more than I do so I'm gonna have to go look it up to find out again. I'm sorry I can't answer that one. No, that's okay. So here's the thing with with magic and
10:07and quote unquote witches. I have a couple things about this. Number one, I have traced my ancestry back on my dad's mom's side to John Proctor, the first man who was accused, tried and hung for witchcraft in Salem during the Salem witch trials. And so I have a very special place in my heart regarding this whole witchcraft thing because I feel like I have a family line.
10:37directly back to it. And someone asked me one time how I define magic. And number one, I had to find out from them if they meant like sleight of hand magic or if they meant magic magic. And they meant magic magic. And I said, honestly, I said, I think that magic is science and raised awareness and intent all blended together. And they were like,
11:07is a supernatural thing and I said no I said it's all energy I said I said energy never dies it just changes form and so if you can if you can take what you know to be proven true and direct that energy to the result you want then that's magic and they were like oh oh
11:34and they had a whole new concept of how to think about it. And so when people talk about witches and it's a derogatory term, I just have to giggle because I'm like, you know, really that's not correct. And I'm always saying that nature is magic. I have said the word magic more in the last year and a half doing this podcast than I think I have in my whole life. So what's your take on all of that?
12:05I tend to agree with you completely, and I think that it is a capacity that every human has. I think it's largely driven by intent, and that intent is what creates the energy that you're talking about. So that comes with a regular practice, and part of what makes magic magic is
12:27Ritual is a way to harness and guide our energies and to speak to parts of our brains and our hearts that aren't necessarily influenced by words, but by scents or emotions or, you know, general impressions.
12:51When you...
12:55put together, let's say you're working on an herb bag and I'm going to pick three different herbs that have to do with this particular intent. I'm doing the research, I'm spending time with each of those herbs picking and crafting, I'm spending time in a sacred candle-lit space that makes my inner self feel settled and connected.
13:25and that all ties that intent to me and to the larger world around me. And it's also gonna make me pay more attention to that thing that I'm trying to draw into my life and do the work that comes with drawing that thing into my life. So it's not as woo-woo as people make it out to be, but it's also incredibly mysterious and beautiful.
13:53in the way that it connects us to something that's so much greater than ourselves. Yes, and I'm going to even venture further. The surprise that comes with this, if you're trying to do something and you do the research and you pull everything together and the energy's right and it works, I'm always just astounded when something actually comes together and works the way I wanted it to work.
14:23There is, there's always that delightful surprise. And then what is so powerful about that is the next time you do it, you have more faith and confidence in both yourself and in the universe.
14:40that you are supported and held and you're going to find what you need. And the more you can live in that space, strangely, the more things seem to work out. I do think we kind of have a habit of living in a space that puts our attention on the things we don't have.
15:06especially with the 24-hour news cycle where it is these days, the things that are scary in the world take up an incredible part of our brains. And magic helps us return to ourselves and to our space and to the present moment where we can kind of discover that right here, right now, things are pretty good. And that has power.
15:36that the only moment I have is now. So what am I gonna do now? Because the next moment isn't guaranteed. I might die in the next 10 minutes and no one will even know that I'm gone yet. So you've got to be in the moment. You've got to plan for the future, but you've got to live in the moment, I think. That's very right. And another piece of that mindset that becomes so powerful.
16:04And something that I try to talk about when I can is that
16:10Death loses its power when you are comfortable with that assessment. The way that you just phrased things, you know, I'm not guaranteed my next moment, that becomes almost a companionable thing. You know, I'm aware of it, it's a thing that could happen. It doesn't have to scare me. And a lot of the pagan traditions...
16:40are phenomenally good at helping us face those inner fears. And as we do, as we do that work on ourselves, our magic gets stronger and our comfort, our stability, our even happiness, our presence in the world changes.
17:00and we become.
17:05less fear-based. I do believe we live with less fear. We're in land that we love, we're in a home that we love, we have a strong family. And all of that is due in large part to the way we choose to live our lives.
17:30Yes, exactly. I feel like every time I talk to someone who's not like specifically a homesteader or a cottage food producer or a crafter, I find myself very, very deep in the weeds and it makes me really, really think about what I'm saying. And I don't know, I'm really happy with my life. Like I'm 55, I've raised four kids, they're all great people.
17:59We live in a home we love. We have like three acres that we love. We have a dog we love. We have barn cats we love. And our whole life in the last four years has just been this, this bubble of building the thing we want to build. And I feel like so many people are building lives that are about things, you know, about money or about the boat or the mansion or whatever. And.
18:28It doesn't have to be that big. You, you can be exceedingly happy and not have all these big, huge dollar signs attached to it. You're very right. And I do think a steady practice of any kind that, that leads you back toward the natural world leads you to that understanding, you know, we're, we're made to be in.
18:57a natural space. And in my husband's world, he's an anthropology professor, you know, there's a lot that's problematic about this divide between human space and quote unquote natural space. The whole world is...
19:18The whole world is nature. We are a human animal. Trying to separate that.
19:25I think that viewpoint has caused far more problems than it's helped.
19:31Yes. And I actually that that what you just said has actually been on my mind a lot over the last six months that people are animals. We are mammals. We're no different than the dog or the horse. I mean, we are, but we're all mammals. And the prime directive for every mammal ever produced by nature is to survive long enough to procreate. That's it. And so,
20:01The big difference between us and other mammals is that most mammals only know now. They're not planning for 20 years down the road like humans do. That's the big difference between us and the horse or the dog or the cat. And so in some ways that's really wonderful, in other ways it really holds us back as living beings. It can get in the way a little bit.
20:30That consciousness though, that great mystery in the world is what makes us unique. There are so many animals that have consciousness and that may even have a concept of self-consciousness.
20:53But I deeply believe that there is a spark in each of us that is divine.
21:05I believe that two of basically everything in the world, but I think it's a matter of decree.
21:15And I would say that we are.
21:20far more than just animals, the greater self that's accessible to us.
21:27I don't know that I would say is accessible to everyone. Every, every being. Uh-huh. The other piece that I wanted to kind of call out that I heard you say a few minutes ago was, um, talking to somebody who's not, not truly a homesteader. Yes. Where in, we're definitely in a middle space. You know, we're very, very connected to the modern world, but
21:58I think the piece of our lives that's involved with homesteading, you know, I keep Angora rabbits. I spend for, I'm like a full-time crafter. I'm all in. That's the part that keeps me sane. So just for the folks out there listening who have that dream, you don't have to be off grid or have 2000 acres to find that connection. You can.
22:28You can find it in the middle of the city. Oh, yes. Oh yes. I've talked to a lot of people about exactly that over the last year. Um, there was a person I talked to who has an apartment and, and she does all kinds of stuff that is homesteading skill. Stop. And, and I was like, I'm so happy that I'm talking to you because I'm trying to make the point that, that homesteading is not about having.
22:56200 acres and pigs and cows, it's about being self-sufficient and being curious and wanting to be able to take care of yourself in a way that the store isn't the place you go to get the thing you need all the time. Yes. So thank you for saying that. Absolutely. But my point was that, you know, I am going to be very honest.
23:25pagan stuff, witchcraft things, anything to do with witches, partly because of my family background but also just because it's part of it. It's very wrapped around nature. And Christmas time is very hard for me because everyone's all wound up about, you know, the birth of Jesus and da da da and the light of the world. And that's fine. If that is your paradigm, do it up.
23:51I'm thrilled you have faith in something. Everyone needs to have faith in something. If that's yours, good. But a lot of people don't want to hear about Yule at all. And Yule is about the light of the world, but it's about the light, the sunlight coming back, not Jesus coming into the world. And there are so many tie-ins and so many parallels with both traditions. But
24:20It's really hard to get someone who's Christian to listen to why the traditions of yule are important too. And I get so frustrated. Like I blew off Christmas completely this year. I didn't even put up my tree. I was just like, I'm not in the mood. I don't want to do this. I'm frustrated with the whole thing and just didn't. And we had the nicest, quietest Christmas day ever. It was lovely.
24:51So sometimes I think you can just step away from all the trappings and just, I don't know, reevaluate your take on what you believe in and then maybe change how you express it. I think that's what we tried to do this year. Yes. We've definitely found our peace and it has, I mean, it's taken almost two decades. But we...
25:18have a really lovely mix. You know, so many of the Christmas traditions are built on a pagan history. That's not new. That's not the first. You know, it happened with the Greeks and the Romans. It's...
25:35has happened, this sort of continuation of ideas of God and goddess energy and the conflating of cultures across time. You know, even the ideas of shapeshifters, it's...
25:50in a way it's all happened before. Yes. So I try to approach Christmas with that understanding. You know, it is, it's the...
26:02It is the light in the darkness. It's the importance of family and community in the coldest part of the year. It's allowing ourselves to slow down into winter as a verb. We don't really hibernate, but we do need to slow down in this time. And the celebration of light and the big family meals, you know, it can be a lot and it can also bring us joy in the dark. You know, our tree is.
26:32both Christian and pagan. And we have our own little Yule Log every year. And that ritual is just ours. Mm-hmm. Yep. I got into a very short and almost heated discussion with a relative at one point because they were like, I don't know why you're talking about Yule. Yule is not real. And Oh, I'm sorry. And I just took a breath and I said, okay.
27:03You're clearly not interested in hearing about how I think about this. So I think we're done talking about this and I'm done talking about Christmas too. And my response and positions like that tends to be, well, you know, I'm interested in it historically, the historical facts in the time period. And, you know, this is the way cultures flow together and meet each other. And that fascinates me. And
27:34Winter light festivals have been around far longer than Christianity. Yes. And it, it, the whole thing would have been fine, except that it was so clear that I was being shut down and shut up. When I am, anyone who knows me knows that I am terribly curious about everything. And that if I ask you something, I actually want to know. And so this person is the only way to be.
28:03Yeah, and this person had asked me an open-ended question and I was all excited to talk about what I knew and what I felt and why it was important and they shut me down in the first two words. And I was hurt and I was frustrated. And so I guess the reason I even brought this up is that it's so important for humans to
28:32each other and not be so short-sighted and so boxed that you can't entertain someone else's perspective. Yes. You know, and here's where all religions, I believe, somebody correct me if I'm missing something, tie together at this idea of deep listening and compassion.
29:02Uh-huh. You know, our divinities are examples. They're ideas of our best selves and what we can be. And when we bring that into a daily practice, when we practice deep listening with somebody else who disagrees with us, sometimes we can still find a way to connect. Not always. It's got to be two ways. You've both got to be willing to converse.
29:30But when it does happen, that really is magic. Mm-hmm. Yes, it is. And I've had it happen. And it is so amazing when you see the light bulb go on in someone's mind, when they've actually heard you, understood you, and processed it, and went, I've never thought of it that way. That's the part I love. Same. Absolutely the same. I read.
30:00Tarot at events as well and those conversations where you know you've really reached somebody are always the most powerful and the most fascinating when they reach you in the same way. Uh huh. Yes. And I personally hate the word convert. I don't. I never try to convert anybody to my way of thinking or doing.
30:29I just try to be a good example of the good that comes from whatever it is that I think or I'm doing. And if someone wants to pick that mantle up and run with it, that's up to them. And so it's really hard for me when people are like, you should come to my church every Sunday and become a devout whatever their church is. And I'm like, that's not really an invitation to.
30:56to try that sets a mandate and I'm not into a mandate. If you're inviting me because you think there's some value there for me, that's lovely. But if you're asking me to come because you need more members for your church, that's not cool. So it's hard. And I feel like we're getting really far afield, but this is all relevant because a lot of the people who are doing...
31:25Homesteading or cooking or crafting or whatever it is that they're doing They are throwing their energy into something they produced to benefit the people around them And so it does tie in to everything we've been talking about Absolutely, it's that whole concept of of bright living. I guess in the Buddhist sense that I think Would be a foundation we could say
31:55Most of all, homesteaders really are attracted to and build a life on. Yes, exactly. All right, Elm, I try to keep these to half an hour. This was very deep for a Tuesday morning, but I appreciate your time. Thank you so much and keep doing the good work. Thank you. All right. And have a great day. You too. Bye.
 

Promised Land Farms

Today I'm talking with Brian and Sarah at Promised Land Farms.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at a tiny homestead. The podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brian and Sarah at Promised Land Farms. Hi guys, how are you? Great, how are you? I'm okay. I'm starting to turn the corner on this being sick crap, so.
00:26I had to cancel two interviews last week because of it. So I'm really happy to be talking new friends today. You guys are in Elko, is that right? Yes. Okay, so tell me about yourselves and what you do. So yeah, we're in Elko New Market, just south of the Twin Cities, and we've got a small farm, 37 acres, and we are raising grass-fed grass-finished beef, pastured pork.
00:54laying hens, and then we're direct marketing all of our meat and eggs. Okay. What do you define direct marketing for me? So we are selling direct to customers. We had always, since we started doing this, we were, we were selling eggs before we even had a farm when we were living in the suburbs. And then, um, so we would just start, start it all with beef and selling quarters to friends, quarters and halves.
01:24And then that just kind of turned into kind of selling everything. So cuts of beef, quarters, halves, whole steaks, hamburger, same with pigs and then eggs and some chickens. And we were just using Facebook and word of mouth. And in the last year, we signed up for Barn to Door and we're using that as our kind of our marketing tool and inventory tool. And what do you...
01:53Think of Barnador.
01:57It's really helped us streamline our business. It helps us cut down on human error. If somebody Venmo'd us a deposit and then there was an oversight and them getting the next cut of meat. This has helped everything just to funnel into one place. They have got a lot of really great training. I've been very impressed with their support. Yeah, it's been good.
02:27It's helped us expand and get going with some email marketing and yeah, they've got a lot of great resources available. Awesome. I actually need to contact them and get them to talk to me because I'm hearing that they're a really good help and resource for people who are doing what you're doing. And they've contacted me, but I'm not a big enough place to need their services right now for what we do.
02:54It hadn't occurred to me to see if anybody from their place would want to chat with me. So I'm going to have to email them and be like, hi, don't need your services, but I would love to promote your services. Sure. They have a podcast as well, which is super helpful. I listened to it. I don't know if Sarah does, but, um, all the resources that they have, they're kind of putting out on podcasts too, and it's just good stuff. They're interviewing farmers all the time and best practices and yeah.
03:22Okay, I'll have to go look them up and see what they're up to. Okay, so how did you guys get into this?
03:31Well, I caught the farming bug before we were married. So Sarah's dad had a small farm in central Iowa. And when we just started first started dating, we were going down there for a funeral. And I stepped foot on that farm and, you know, walked out in the pasture down to the creek and look at cows and just something inside of me came alive. And I'm like, wow, I could see myself doing this someday. And that just kept growing in me and became a passion. And, you know, then I was looking for.
04:00the five or 10 acre fixer upper. And we were, we were doing a big garden in our, in, in the suburbs in our backyard and then doing backyard chickens and way too many chickens that we were supposed to have in our, in the city that we're living in. But, uh, yeah, just kept looking and then we just came, the Lord showed us a property that was amazing and we went for it. And so that's how we started farming.
04:25I love that. I hear that story or some version of that story a lot. You have no idea. Okay. So here's what I want to get into with the beef and selling the beef. Most people don't know how it works. So if you could run me through how someone could acquire a whole or a half or a quarter or an eighth. Yeah. So it's kind of a...
04:53It's kind of a clunky process actually. So if you're selling a quarter, half or whole of beef, the way it goes is we sell by the hanging weight. So somebody contacts us and says, hey, I would like to get a quarter of beef. And so we put them on our list for the next available. And I don't really know the weight of the animal until it's brought in to the butcher. And then we get the weight of the animal
05:23pay based on that. Okay, I'm going to interject and give you the simplified version of this. I don't think it's a clunky process at all. I think especially since we started with Barn to Door, it has streamlined it and made it very simple. So, if somebody wanted to purchase a quarter or half, then all they would do is go to our online link and they would select quarter beef, put their deposit down online right there.
05:52And then when the cow goes in to be processed, the processor will reach out and contact that customer and walk them through what cuts they would like to get. And then when it's ready, they will be contacted, they go pick it up, and their final payment is done through our website. We take care of it. So I think it's pretty simple. Yeah. And because you have barn to door, it is really simple. But there are lots of places that don't.
06:21use barn to door to sell their beef. So I'm going to interject too. We bought our first half a few years ago. And when the butcher called me for me to tell them what cuts we want, I was very lost because I didn't know what the cuts meant. And I apologize all over the place. I was like, I'm really sorry. I'm not educated in this. I don't know what that means.
06:50She was so great. She was like, Oh, okay. So tenderloin is this. Cube steak is that whatever. And she ran me through the whole thing. She spent a good half an hour on the phone with me, which I'm sure she was not planning on doing. So anyone who wants to do this, if you're, if you're lucky, and I think it's probably pretty common, the butcher will talk you through it. If you don't know what you want. Absolutely.
07:20Absolutely. They're super helpful. They get new customers, first timers all the time. So they're used to that and prepared for that and absolutely will guide people through the process. Yeah. And you don't have to get fancy cuts. I mean, if you want half of the meat as ground beef, they'll do it for you. Yeah. Some people even get the whole thing as ground beef. So yeah, there are a lot of
07:50that's tough. If you're going to buy beef in bulk, you probably should really learn how to cook it because it's so easy to screw up a steak if you don't know how to cook. Indeed. There's also a difference between cooking grass-fed versus corn-fed too. There sure is. You're absolutely right. The first half we got was grain finished. The
08:20was grass-fed and I didn't really like the grass-fed. My husband and my son were fine with it. I didn't love it. So it can be very different. And if I had known that there would be such a big difference for my taste buds, I probably would have been more picky in who I went with because I would have been like, is it grain finished or is it grass-fed finished? So there are things to educate yourself on if you're gonna do it.
08:49And the other thing is that right now, I'm sure you guys know, because you are in the business, buying beef in bulk is a lot more money than it was a couple of years ago. And that is not the farmer's fault at all. It is just the fact that everything has gone up in price. Exactly. Yep. Not just the beef, it's everything. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We were looking at
09:18getting another quarter here at some point and I looked at the prices and said, we can't afford it right now. We literally cannot put out that money right now. We don't have that money right now. And it just blew me away. The cost of a quarter right now is more than a half cost as two years ago. Well, you know, and to that point, we like to offer options because not everybody
09:46can afford to buy in bulk. And also not everybody has enough freezer storage. And so we do have individual cuts available that people can purchase online as well. So if you only want 10 pounds of ground beef or only want a few steaks, you can go ahead and go with that option too. That's awesome. Cause not everybody does it that way. I'm so glad you said that. Yay, you guys are great.
10:17Okay. And do you also sell chicken meat too? We do. Okay. And eggs? Yeah. There's always an interesting tension of supply and demand with the eggs. But yes, we do sell eggs. Yeah. I had somebody message me yesterday asking if we had any eggs and we got rid of our chickens months ago because we weren't going to feed them through the winter time. I felt so bad telling that person, no, we got rid of our chickens for the winter.
10:46Like I didn't answer them for two hours. I didn't want to tell them no. And I finally was like, I'm sorry. We don't, we got rid of our chickens for the winter. We'll be getting new chickens in the spring. And I didn't get any response back. And I'm like, Oh, I broke their heart. So yeah, it's, it's hard when you're, when you're trying to help your community and then you make a decision for your household that impacts your community.
11:16I don't enjoy it. I really want to get back to being capable of meeting people's requests with a smile and a yes, you know? Absolutely. But that's not where we're at right now. So it's going to be better this year, I think, I hope. Well, last year's been straight. Yes. Last summer was rough. I don't know how it was in Elko New Market, but here in
11:48We produced a lot of thistle last summer in our garden. That's for sure. Yeah. We, we had a lot of weeds too. We didn't even bother to weed anything because nothing was growing except weeds. We're like, okay, it's a great crop of weeds. What can we do with that? Oh, we can stare at it. Feed it to the pigs. If we had pigs, we would've gone. Yup. It was a rough year, but we're now into 2025. So everybody's got everything crossed that it's going to be a better season. Amen.
12:18So do you guys have jobs outside of the farm?
12:24Um, I work full time on the farm. I quit about four years ago. I was a carpenter and struggling to do both of them. We were just getting at the scale where I wasn't able to really do anything well between when I was at work, I was thinking about the farm and I wasn't getting enough farm work done and family life was struggling. So made the break about four years ago to focus on the farm and relying on Sarah's income right now for.
12:54carrying the farm through. Yeah, I work full time doing pampered chef. Fun, that is a fun job. It's super fun, I love it. So when you say you work for them, does that mean that you are an independent contractor and you go and show off their products and sell them, or how does that work? Yep, I am an independent sales consultant. I've been with them for coming on 20 years in May.
13:21And so yeah, I do parties for people. I do in-home, I do virtual. And my passion really lies in my team and training a team and helping them have success. So that's our bread and butter. That's my passion. And you're right, it is a ton of fun. So. Cool. So I have a question about that because so many people don't cook now, don't cook from scratch.
13:49Do you find yourself creating converts when you show off the stuff? Yeah, we kind of get the whole gamut. We get people who don't cook at all, people who want to cook but don't have time. That's probably the biggest one we get. And then some people who are total foodies and do everything from scratch. And so what I appreciate about this job and about Payward Chef is
14:17you know, showing people these tools and recipes that can make it doable to get a meal on the table with their families. And even with a busy schedule or even if they don't feel like they're great cooks, we can show them tips that make it easy and quick and doable. Because that's, you know, the meal time message is so important. That's where life happens is around the dinner table. And the more we can cultivate that, the better.
14:45families will be in the better the world will be really. Yeah, I think that if you sit down at a table across from each other and have to look each other in the face, there's a word, I hate this. I'm always gonna say something profound and I lose the word. It helps communication, it helps people open up and start talking. Yeah. Facilitate. There's a lot of interesting statistics too about families that eat together a few times a week. There's like higher grades.
15:13lower substance abuse, lower teenage pregnancies. It's really fascinating just by eating dinner together. Yeah, I think the kitchen table or the dining table is the touchstone for families. It's not the TV. It's the kitchen table. So the reason that I asked is because I was just talking to a guy. I haven't put the episode out yet. He started a magazine called Home Cooked Magazine. So nice.
15:40And I kind of pressed him on why in the world he would start a magazine about cooking when so many people don't cook. And he had the best answer. Like I'm not going to paraphrase it because I will murder it. But he was just like, it's not just for people who cook, it's for people who are interested in cooking. It's for people who love to eat. It's for people who like to look at pretty pictures of food. It's for everybody. And I just, I loved that. It was like, okay, so you hit on everything.
16:10Good job. You know, another thing with people who, you know, not everybody cooks is, you know, as you mentioned, the cost of everything has been going up so much that eating out typically is something that gets cut from people's budgets. And so sometimes they need to start to cook or eat at home just for budget sake. And so that's where we can come in and help too.
16:39on both ends of providing some clean food and some recipes and tools to make it easier. Sure. I keep saying that I need to write a cookbook of like 25 recipes that are from start to finish half an hour to start cooking it to on the table. Because I always hear that people don't have time to cook, but I also think it's that they just don't have the energy when they walk in the door. And so the shorter cook time.
17:08the shorter prep time. I'm not saying this right. The less time from starting to cook to eating it is the important thing there because the less time, the less energy expended. And so I really need to sit down for about three weeks and get my recipes that I've been doing for years into a book form and get it out on Amazon because I bet that it would sell. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think a big piece of that too is just
17:37having a plan, like if you take 20 minutes to plan your meals for the week. Brian and I just sat in the parking lot at church yesterday and said, okay, let's map out our meals for the week so we're not stressed the day of, because that's half the thing is not knowing what to make for dinner. But if you do have that plan, right, then it's easier to get it on the table. And then with your cookbook coming out, then it'll be super easy for people. Yeah, it'll be at least a year before it's out.
18:05I really should do it because I've had it down to a science for years because I've raised four kids and trying to keep those kids fed every evening, Monday through Friday was a trick and having dinner ready within 10 minutes of my husband walking in the door from work was like the goal for the day. Making sure everybody got something to eat that they liked and that food was on the table 10 minutes after he walked in the door from his job.
18:31because his job was stressful and I felt like he worked his ass off. The least I could do for him was have something he wanted to eat in front of him in 10 minutes. You're a good wife and a good mom. I tried. I still try. Um, so there was something else in that whole food thing. Oh, the other thing is that once you learn to cook, you can cook ahead and you can put stuff that tastes good, pre-warmed in the freezer. And.
19:00Then if you really don't have the energy or the time, all you have to do is pull it out, thaw it out and cook it. Like heat it up, it's all ready to go. Exactly. Yeah, we love leftovers. Yeah, we did that for years. Like I would cook for an army just so that I had stuff in the freezer so that I could be like, oh, you don't like what I'm making? In that freezer right there is something you like, take it out and nuke it and eat it. And that way everybody won. Everybody was eating something that was good for them that they enjoy.
19:30Exactly. I called it feeding the freezer. My husband used to laugh at me. He'd be like, you're cooking for 20 people. And I was like, yes, I'm feeding the freezer for six weeks from now when somebody wants this. Hey, I think that there's a title for your second cookbook. Feeding the freezer? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I gotta, I gotta get on this. I'm telling you. I'm not getting any younger and the days don't get any longer. So.
20:00But either way, cooking is really important. And cooking and the people that produce the food that we're gonna cook are even more important. So you guys are amazing. So we've got like 10 minutes. My brain is fried from being sick. I'm so sorry. I don't know what else to ask you. What would you guys like to tell me? Anything you can think of right now? I don't know if you wanna share about your...
20:28your practices, your rotation raising or how you your pasture raise pork or anything like that? I think so many people are interested in doing this. Getting on land, starting to raise some food and I grew up in the suburbs. We lived in the suburbs before we had this and honestly it was reading some books and YouTube and we figured out how to do it. We made a lot of mistakes along the way and learned a lot of things just by trying and starting.
20:59And now we're kind of getting into a pretty good rhythm with things where life is a lot easier just as far as animal husbandry and knowing what we're doing. So he mentioned that my dad was a farmer in central Iowa, but he passed away. And so it's not like Brian just learned from him. And additionally,
21:27Brian had very different farm practices than what my dad did. So even though my dad was a farmer, I didn't grow up on that farm. And so essentially, Brian was learning everything from scratch, from YouTube, from podcasts, from vlogs and blogs. So I think your point is anyone can do it if you have the desire, right? Yeah, for sure.
21:55If you have the desire and the physical capability. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Cause it's hard work. It don't, don't ever think that it's not hard work listeners because it is. It's, it's hard on your body and it can be hard on your brain. You know, you were saying that you guys had made mistakes. Well, that's where the learning happens, but it's hard on your brain and it's hard on your heart when you think you're doing it right. And then you find out that you screwed it up.
22:24That happens for sure. Yeah. We, uh, I bought my son one of those, um, those mushroom kit thingies that you can grow mushrooms in your house. Okay. And it was a cute little wooden log with holes dug in it. And then they would put the plugs of the stores in and you spray it. You put it in a plastic bag and you spray water in there and then you tie it off and you let it kind of hang out and get all
22:53rainy in there and we put it where it was warm because it said it needed to be somewhere warm. Well come to find out it was too warm and once the mushrooms started growing we pulled the plastic bag off of it because that's what it said to do. These beautiful little mushrooms dried out completely they were like petrified mushrooms. I know. Could not eat them. Prettiest little cedar log you've ever seen but they were useless as food. I was...
23:21I was so bummed out. I took a photo of it because it was beautiful. That's the best thing that came out of it. So that was a mistake. We learned our lesson and we're trying it again but we're being smarter this time. So I'll have to get photos of it this time when we actually use the mushrooms that grow that are edible. It'll be great. But silly things like that happen all the time and that was a minor in extensive fail. I can't imagine what happens when you've sunk.
23:49thousands of dollars into something and it doesn't go right. Yeah, it's definitely had punches to the gut for sure and you learn and you make it better moving forward. Yep. So do you guys, if you're doing beef cattle or beef cattle, do you also do dairy at all or is it just beef?
24:17Uh, so we currently just do beef. Um, our first four cows that we bought were dairy cows from a local grass-based dairy, because we were buying raw milk. We thought, oh, we're going to have a farm. Let's go ahead and milk some cows. Um, so our first four original cows were, uh, Dutch belted and milking shorthorn from a dairy. But we never milked them. Um, I was still working full time, trying to figure out how to add this milking enterprise.
24:44So ultimately, they just became good mamas and they could really great mamas with their milk supply. And through the year, in the last couple of years, I've really felt like I should add dairy to our farm. We have so many people asking us about if we do raw dairy. And I just know, you know, there's such a demand for it. And I just believe it's so beneficial that it's something we're going to add this year.
25:15slowly, slowly jumping into it. So I still have some cows that have the capability that I could milk. And then we'd probably add a couple other cows to the mix. But yeah, that's something that's coming on our farm this year.
25:30Well, that's exciting. I'm just slow to jump into it. Yeah. Um, the reason I ask is because I didn't know if you guys are breeding your, your cattle, or if you like go buy calves in the spring and raise them for a couple of years and then butcher them. I didn't know how that worked. Yeah. So we have a closed herd. We do. Um, we've, I've always had my own bulls. Um, and are basically almost all of our animals are born on this farm. And then.
26:00You know, they, um, to the point of when we take them to the, to the butcher to be slaughtered. So I do, I will calf my cows in the last week in May through June and first week in July. Um, and so that's when I would probably start milking some of my cows once they freshen up. Yep. Um, but we might add a dairy cow before that, or just take one of mine and work out the kinks in the system to get her in the barn.
26:30Yeah, and what breed do you guys have for your beef? Or do you have a beef? Beef is quite a mix. Our first four cows were Dutch belted and melting short horn. So Dutch belted is kind of the Oreo cookie cow, but it's the dairy breed. And then I bought belted Galway, which is the other Oreo cookie cow, but it's the beef breed. And then through the years I added some red Angus.
26:58So we have quite a mixture. None of our cows really look the same. A lot of them have a white belt to them, but they're a mixture of milking shorthorn, Dutch belted, belted Galloway and red Angus. So kind of an interesting looking herd. Yeah, and some really good beef there, I bet. I bet it's really great. So in the winter time, I'm gonna ask a dumb question cause I don't know the answer. In the winter time.
27:26Are your cattle in the barn or you guys have them out in the pasture? Ours are outside as much as possible. We do have some barn space that I can get them in. Um, you know, if we get this like freezing rain in the winter, that's probably the hardest thing on them. Snow is not that hard on them. As long as they can kind of get out of the wind, um, they're, they're better and they're healthier outside. So right now I'm actually, I feed my hay out on pasture whenever possible. So it just keeps them.
27:56kind of outside, separated. The more they're together in close confinement, the more likely if you've got any kind of viruses going around, respiratory things, they all get it. So I really try to keep mine outside as much as possible. Okay, cool. And then are they, such a weird question. Are they friendly or are they not friendly? Mine are very friendly. And I just try to be around them a lot. I try to handle them.
28:25peacefully. I try to never really get them too worked up. So I've got a lot of cows that I can just go up and you know, they'll come up to me to get their head scratched or get pet. Even my bull. My bulls have always been that way where they'll kind of come up and want to have their head scratched. So yeah, I just try to always be real calm and peaceful around them. I think that I think there's a couple things that go into that. One, the fact that your calves are all born and raised here, raised with you.
28:55in knowing you and then to just cultivating that peaceful atmosphere because you're gentle with them you show affection to them and so it just has created them to be peaceful and Yeah, we'll go out. We'll do farm tours and We've brought children and adults out into the herd And of course you have to be careful you right now, but it yeah, we've got a good hurt. Yeah
29:23There's a couple flighty ones, but just trying to be pretty calm and gentle around your animals just makes handling them so much easier. So even when I'm loading them, it's not stressful. And they just stay pretty calm. Wouldn't it be nice if people were calm and kind with other people like you are with your cows? Come on. That's right. Wouldn't that be amazing? I would love that. Okay. So.
29:51You guys, I am so sorry that I lost my whole train 10 minutes back. I'm sorry. It's been a hell of a week, I'm telling you. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today and I wish you all the luck in your business, and I love what you're doing. Hey, yeah. Thanks for just giving us the honor of being on your podcast. We appreciate it. It's a pleasure to chat with you. You too. I just wish I had been more on my game. Maybe we'll talk again in the fall and you can tell me about how all the babies did.
30:21That was good. That would be great. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks.
 

Homecooked Magazine

Today I'm talking with Mike at Homecooked Magazine. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking to Mike McCormick at Homecooked Magazine. Good afternoon, Mike. How are you? Good afternoon. Doing great. Thanks for having me. Are you in Oregon? Is that right?
00:24Yeah, our company is based in Oregon. I'm just south of Portland, our warehouse and a lot of our team is in Eugene, but primarily in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Oh, I've heard it's beautiful there. It is. And, you know, we get a lot of grief about the rain, but honestly, you know, most of the year it's pretty, it's pretty tough to beat. I've been around lots of places and I keep coming back. So. Nice.
00:49Okay, well, tell me about yourself and about the magazine. I see that it's very new. Yeah, so I've been in publishing for about eight years. We have three magazines. One we started in 2016 called Quilt Folk. And so I've been in the magazine space for a number of years, but Homecooked is really very new. In fact, we officially launched December 1st. So it's about, you know,
01:20month and a half old, but we've been working on it for well over a year. Okay. And how did it come about? Whose brainchild was it? Yeah. So, like I said, I've been publishing for a while and had had the idea for Home Cooked for a number of years. And really, the idea was pretty simple. We just wanted to try to create a print magazine that sort of embodied everything we loved about.
01:48home-cooked meals, we wanted to try to put that in print. So of course, the tastes that are familiar that we love, but also the faces and the people and the conversations, the plates, all the little things that go into making home-cooked meals feel warm and special. We said, well, can we recreate that in a print magazine? And so that was the simple kind of genesis of an idea. And then of course, it's just a lot of work to try to...
02:17to make that happen and we've got a great team of people who love print. So our company is fully committed to print magazines, which I know is a little bit different in this sort of era. But that was the idea. And we felt like we've been doing this for a while. We had a business model that kind of made sense. And so I felt like the right time to kind of dive in. Okay. So here's the question that I was left with after I looked at your Facebook page and your website. And I'm...
02:46I may be playing a little bit of devil's advocate here, but I don't think so. A lot of people these days don't cook anything from scratch. They don't use their beautiful kitchens for anything except a show place to have their friends come over and have a cup of tea or a drink of wine. And so why did you think there was a market for this magazine?
03:12Yeah, I think that definitely what you said is true, but I think it's a big world and there are a lot of people who use their kitchens in pretty interesting ways. And if you just look at my family or my friend group, we've got people who kind of run the gamut. And so, you know, it's a big enough space. Everybody eats food is kind of a cultural touchstone for all of us in one way, shape, form. And so the idea with Home Cooked was...
03:41It's not just for people who make everything from scratch or for people who maybe do it all the time, but it's for people who, like I said, appreciate a home-cooked meal, whether you're the person making it or enjoying it, all those kinds of things. And for that, I mean, there's just, I don't know, there's so many people who can resonate with that idea. And with home-cooked, it was kind of like, how can we create a big enough table where...
04:07everybody feels sort of welcome here, whatever their relationship to cooking or food is, you know? Okay, that's a valid answer. I just was very curious because my kids are all grown. My oldest is 35, my youngest just turned 23. Oldest is a girl, the other three are boys. And one of the rules in my house, I've mentioned on the podcast before, is that they all had to know how to cook a dinner and a dessert that they would be proud to serve their friends.
04:36before they moved out. And I cooked from scratch all the time with them growing up and they kicked in, they helped, they joined in. And every single one of them really does enjoy cooking from scratch. And I've been told that I was kind of weird making that a requirement. The other requirements were that they could do their own laundry and wash their own dishes because you know, being a human is important.
05:01I can tell you from my experience a little bit, and this might surprise you or not, but I was really fortunate. I grew up on a 10-acre berry farm. For a long time, we lived in a teeny little house there until I was 14. We didn't run the farm the whole time, but we did on the second half of that. From the time I was about nine years old. My mom was a really good home cook, I would say.
05:31didn't make fancy meals. They were simple, usually like protein, like mashed potatoes and green beans or something like that. But nine nights out of 10, there was something home cooked on the table and maybe that 10th night we would get takeout or something. But she was a great, great home cook. And so I was the benefactor of that. I enjoyed that, but I myself didn't pick up cooking and still to this day.
06:01really don't. When I was 18, I had the great joy of chasing my dream as a professional baseball player. I was drafted in high school and the week of my last final exam, I left for West Virginia and spent the next five years traveling the East Coast playing baseball. So I left this farm and this life and this wonderful mother who…
06:29made meals that I kind of took advantage of, or took for granted I should say, to a place where I was eating out basically 99% of the time. Whatever was open at night, it could be a waffle house or Applebee's or a gas station or something like that. So it made me really miss and appreciate what I had growing up and also later in life. It was one of the things that I kind of…
06:58long for and missed during those years playing baseball. So I didn't pick it up, but I appreciate it in a totally different way. And then fast forward, I ended up meeting my wife a few years later who comes from a large Italian family. And every Sunday we do family dinners where big meals are made and there's crazy cousins and chaos and noise and all these things. But it's a really important tradition to them. And now I get to.
07:26kind of benefit from that as well. So I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not a cook, but I'm somebody who appreciates food and what it means for families. And I've been very blessed to have a number of women in my life who make great food. Awesome. Italian food is the best. It's so versatile and you can make so much of it and feed so many people at once. I just, I think it's great. Okay. So food is...
07:56Food is wonderful. I have been sick for the last week, and food has been very boring to me because it doesn't taste like much. And I'm very much looking forward to the first meal I have next week, where it tastes like food again. And it reminds me every time I come down with something that messes with my taste buds, that food is an event. It should be something that is honored and cherished as you eat it. And so food brings people together.
08:26And when people ask me about why I wanted to cook from scratch, why I learned to cook, it was because if you eat out all the time, it's expensive. But if you learn to cook from scratch, it costs you less money to eat better food. And we had a family of six, my husband and I and the four kids. And trying to keep those little boogers fed was a trick. It's a lot of work to
08:55meet everybody's desires on what they want to eat six nights a week, you know? For sure. And so when people are asking me questions about, you know, my husband lost his job or I lost my job, how can we cut corners? The first thing I tell people is learn to cook. And also, there's real satisfaction in making food from scratch yourself and sharing it with people you care about. Because
09:24They're benefiting from what you made, but you're benefiting from the giving of it. And so when I saw your magazine, I was like, that is such a beautiful idea. And your magazine isn't just recipes, it's the stories of the people who are doing the cooking. And I looked at your description on your website of the different featured people and such great stories. I mean, you said,
09:52I read something that you guys make sure that you send your writers and your photographers to the place to interview the people in person. And that must be so much fun for them. It totally is. And to your first point, I mean, food is definitely a love language for a lot of people. And it's the way that people express creativity. It's the way that they get to your point. There's a practicality to it too, whether you're feeding your family.
10:20looting new skills or just seeing the joy on someone's face when they taste something for the first time. I mean, there are so many moments and powerful emotions wrapped up into, you know, great meals and great recipes and food. Um, and the thing is everybody has that experience to some degree, almost everybody. And so when we look at our magazine, you know, we're not just talking to people who are chefs or work professionally in food. Some of them do, but most of them are just kind of everyday people.
10:50who have a great recipe that brings them joy, it brings their family joy. And now we're able to kind of share that with the world. But in doing so, rather than just sharing the measurements and the ingredients and the X's and O's, we're traveling to their home and we're sitting down with them for three, four, five, six hours, whatever it takes, and we're getting their story. We're shooting them in their space with their kitchen, with their family, oftentimes.
11:18And so it's just trying to catalog that and document that and make it the most compelling, shareable recipe that we can for the rest of us to benefit from. And so yeah, the magazine's made up of all kinds of people. Each issue is 164 pages, zero advertisements, usually 15 or so recipes, give or take. And the other fun thing about it is...
11:46We can do this because rather than sending our crew all over the country at once, we focus on a particular region. So issue one, which is available now, is the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. So we'll spend 10, 12, 15 days with our crew there documenting that region and talking to 15 or so home cooks and then every issue at some place new. So issue two, which comes out in March, is Austin, Texas.
12:17very different people, different kinds of food and recipes, and that kind of makes every year a little bit unique. How do you find the people that you're gonna go talk to? It's harder, it was harder at first because nobody knew who we were, and when you're dealing with home cooks, they're not always people who are posting and talking about food online, but there was some of that early on where we were just doing a lot of sort of internet sleuthing.
12:46like the better term, a lot of research, a lot of word of mouth, and kind of getting a foothold at a place and then asking around and trying to find folks who had a story they wanted to share. So that was kind of early on. Now that we've started to establish a readership, we can start to get reader submissions, which is really helpful. And that's kind of how we see it growing ultimately is that as the community grows, people will
13:14our next kind of stops in that way. Okay, that makes sense. Um, so do you have a certain meal that's a favorite of yours that your mom made for you? Yes, I have many. There's, there's one in particular. Very simple. She called it chicken Eden aisle, but it was like rice, chicken and like cream cheese sauce.
13:44And I always had green beans with it. And then on the top, she would take like, um, dried beef, like that you get in a little jar at the store and she would like, uh, crumple that over the top. And. You know, I never had it anywhere else. I've just, she'd make it every month or so. And I was always excited as a kid. And so fast forward that first year that I was playing baseball in West Virginia and I was pretty homesick. My host mom. And.
14:13For those who don't know, a lot of young professional baseball players are 18, 19, 20. So you'll get assigned a host mom or dad or host family who will kind of just look after you a little bit. I was still living in a Super 8 motel, so I was still on my own, but I had a host mom there. And we grew to become really, really good friends. And actually, my mother and my host mom still to this day, however many 15 years later, are still very close.
14:40But that first summer when I was feeling homesick, she broke my mom. She said, hey, I wanna make Mike something that kind of reminds him of home. What would you suggest? And so she made that dish for me. And I remember after the game, coming out of the locker room and clubhouse and she had it in a little bag, keep it warm. And she opened it up and immediately it looked like my mom's, tasted just like my mom's. And it was just an experience I'll never forget because again,
15:10I was 18, which is still pretty young, and I'd never been away from home for more than a couple nights. So that recipe always kind of holds a place in my heart, particularly just because I got to have that experience with my house mom. It was pretty cool. That is so sweet. I teared up while you were telling me the story. I have a story, but it's not mine. It's actually my husband's. My husband is the bread baker in the house.
15:37He does the yeast threads because I kill yeast every time I try to do yeast threads. I don't know why. And there was this recipe, it's for Parker House Rolls. And he got the recipe from his mom who had gotten it from her mom. And he was like, I want to try making these, but they seem kind of fiddly. And I said, well, what's the worst that happens? They end up in the trash? Go ahead, try making them. And he made these rolls and they're basically like a
16:06like a twist and they're pull apart rolls. And they're really yummy. They're really soft on the inside. And he made a batch for us and we tried them and we love them. And I said, is it the same as what your grandma used to make? And he said, it's the same as both my grandma's used to make. And I said, both your grandma's? And he said, yes. He said, the recipe actually came from dad's side of the family, but then it got put in the church cookbook. And.
16:36my mom's side of the family adopted it. So both grandparents would make these rolls. And so my husband and I handled them dinner for Christmas dinner one year, and he made these rolls and brought them with everything else. And my husband's dad saw them and said, Are those the Parker house rolls? And my husband said, Yes. And
17:04My father-in-law didn't even miss a beat. He didn't even wait. He just grabbed one and tried it. And his eyes filled up with tears. He was like, just like my mom made. And I just watched this happen and I teared up. I was like, I had nothing to do with making these roles and I'm teary. I can't imagine how my father-in-law is actually feeling on the inside right now. So that's an incredible story. And to me that those are the kinds of stories we want to try to tell with
17:33you're getting the recipe, but you're getting that backstory. And, um, like if I, as an example, I had that recipe now and we shared that around the table and someone said, Hey, where do we get this recipe? We'd say, well, I got it from a home cook, but there's this woman and her family. And I would immediately dive into the story. And one of our beliefs at home cooked is that, um, recipes with a story just tastes better and I think that's true. I think it's true. And, um,
18:02I think it'd be true about that. It's an incredible story. Yeah, I was blown away at my father-in-law's reaction because he's not the most effusive or emotional guy ever. I mean, he's very nice, but he's just not the kind to tear up at things. And I just remember watching his face just melt, you know? And it was so funny because he's also very... He's very...
18:31proper, I guess is the word. And so when he just took one and tried it without even, there was no hesitation. It was just, I've got to do this now. And it was so out of character for him. I just, I was laughing and teared up at the same time. It was really funny. So yeah, food is, food is weird. Um, they say that, that memories are really tied to scent and sound, but
18:59But scent has a lot to do with taste. If you can't smell, you can't taste. A thousand percent. Yeah. So it makes sense that food would be such a trigger for people. And I think that's why, you know, a magazine about food potentially has the opportunity to resonate as well because it's very much a sensory experience and you're kind of getting it from all directions. There's the kind of, even there's that emotional cerebral
19:27thing that's going on within you. You're also smelling, you're seeing, you're tasting, obviously, all of these things. And it's not that unlike when you're experiencing that in print. I mean, our magazines have a very tactile, it's called a soft touch laminate cover. And the pages are this really high quality uncoated sheet of paper. And there's no ads, so you're going through it very uninterruptedly.
19:57And it's an experience. That's the way we tried to do it. And there's even a smell and some people hate it. Some people like it, but just from the print and the ink and whatnot. And so, I don't know. I think that food, magazines, things you can sit down with, things that you could take your time with, things that trigger stories and emotions and things for you, those are all powerful. They're always going to have a place in our lives.
20:24Absolutely. And we're so gadget focused these days that having an actual book or magazine in your hand where you're actually turning the page, you're not swiping the screen is, is a really nice experience now and then to have again. Um, the other thing that I was going to say is it's the same thing with cooking. If, if you're going to sit down and read an actual magazine in your hands, you can't be doing anything else.
20:54And cooking, you can't be doing anything else. It's the most, it's one of the most focused activities that there are available to you is cooking. Yeah, we look for those opportunities. I mean, I mentioned we have a quilting publication that's been around for eight years. We're on issue 33. We do a lot of different things with that company, but quilts and cooking are not that unlike one another in the sense that people do it for themselves. They do it.
21:22for artistic reasons, they do it for other people, they do it to show love. But it's also something that you can get a sense of mastery of, that you can get better over time. And to your point, you can do it and it's pretty consuming. It's like something that can sort of take you away from whatever else is going on in that day and get you in that sort of zone or in that flow state. And I think people obviously have things that help get them there, you know, individually. For some people it's different things. My brother, it's...
21:52gardening and he's like a real small scale farmer to this day. That's something that he can do. And so we have these things, whether it's food, cooking, quilting, reading, writing, whatever it is. And again, those things are always going to have a place in our lives. And with the thing with screens, I mean, we obviously are all on screens all the time, now more than, more than ever. But we also consume things.
22:20all day in different ways. It's not always online. We can listen to the radio, we're watching TV, we're talking to neighbors, we're reading a book, whatever it is. And so this idea that magazines, I've heard about print is dead or these kinds of things, it's just changing. And as publishers, we're trying to respond and make them almost like...
22:49re-birthing them, I guess, for the new era a little bit. I mean, we have this great opportunity to figure out what do magazines do for us and why were they so important for so many years? And, you know, what can we do now to kind of usher in a new sort of time for print? Yes, and print isn't dead. It's just expensive. True. Well, paper is expensive. Printing is expensive.
23:18And certainly the way that we gather stories is expensive. It'd be a lot easier to kind of phone it in, but expensive also is a little bit relative. I mean, it kind of depends on, is the reader getting the value that they, they feel like they're getting value and what does that mean for them? And what are they willing to kind of pay for that? So we just think about what's the best way
23:47possible thing that we like that we can put out and we just hope that that resonates with enough people who find it valuable that they're willing to kind of pay what it takes to produce because that's really what it is. It just takes a certain amount of capital to be able to produce a high quality magazine these days. Yes, exactly and that's why I do a podcast because I'm curating people's stories too but it doesn't cost me hardly anything to do.
24:14and I really enjoy doing it. And it's been really, I mean, we're not done yet, but it's been really wonderful talking with you about this because I really used to love magazines. And I think I have four subscriptions that come in right now. And I don't think I've looked at but one of them in months because I've been busy with other things. I have a whole stack that I need to get to. And you're reminding me that it might be smart to take a day and sit down and go through those and be like, oh yeah, this is why I like magazines.
24:43Well, I should ask you, what do you think it is about that stack that you've got there? You said you've been busy. Why do you think they've sat there? Hardly because I tend to read underneath the rims of my glasses because I refuse to get bifocals. And so for me to sit down and read a magazine, I have to be committed to sitting for a while because I'm switching my eyesight thing.
25:12is hard. Like, you know, if I'm going to read a magazine and I want to sit down and read it, and I want to read it quick, because I read fast anyway, and I will read like two articles and then stand up and walk around and look further away because otherwise I'm going to be blind. But I don't know, I just, I feel like it's a guilty pleasure to sit down and read a magazine for some reason. I think, I think you're not alone in that, you know.
25:40It is true. I mean, there's so many things you could or should be doing throughout the day, that this idea that you're going to sit down, like you said, change your glasses or do what you're going to do, and then have this sort of indulgent moment where you get to just sit and, and, and read for a while does feel like one of the first things that can get sort of skipped. And I think that just comes back to like, just a little bit of habits, you know, like, um, I think that we're, we're trying to make the case that
26:10whether it's our magazine or others or a book or whatever, that there are some of these things you can cultivate in your life that they've always been important, they're still important. I think we've abandoned them a little bit largely culturally and I think we're gonna find our way back to it. I mean, just because it's important for you to take some time during your week that is indulgent or that feels like some new time. And of course you have a lot of options to do that, but.
26:37If you find a topic or a magazine or a writer who optimizes that time for you most, you walk away and you feel joyful or empowered or inspired and it stays with you. I mean, that's something you're going to do more and more of. Yes, because endorphins are a wonderful thing. The more that you get them, the more you want them. And magazines will do that. If you read a really good article, you'll feel better and then you want to read more good articles.
27:06The other thing I wanted to say about your magazine is I obviously don't have a copy of it. I haven't gotten one. I haven't ordered one. But I was looking at the photos that you have of it and it's really pretty. And I'm guessing that it's going to be one of those magazines that people will have on their coffee tables when they have friends over as people used to do. That's definitely the idea. And I thank you for saying that. And that's not just big.
27:34because it's beautiful, but it's the same reason why we make food beautiful or anything else. I think we are aesthetic creatures. We like that. It's inspiring. It's reflective of the way we would like to live. So I think something should be beautiful. That's the whole, the medium is the message thing a little bit. I think when you say, hey, this magazine is about something I care about.
28:01It's beautiful, it's been created with joy, and I'm gonna put it on my coffee table. I think that says as much or more, more about you, the reader, than it does our magazine. I think people just want to be around that, whether we know it or not, and the more we can kind of connect to that in our lives, like the more joyful we can be. Yes, and I also noticed, I think, that it's sort of a sage green theme. The verse.
28:30This issue, yeah. So that'll change every issue. And so, as I said, it's region to region. So we have Pioneer Valley and that's actually like an asparagus green because that part of the Pioneer Valley was like the asparagus capital of the world. And so it was kind of fitting. Okay, that makes sense. I just happen to love that color very, very much. My kitchen in the old house that we lived in was sage green.
28:58I painted it sage green because I love that color so very much. So of course as soon as I saw the color of your magazine cover I was like, ooh, what is this? Nice. Yep. So you happened to hit one of the things I love the most and you had, you didn't even know I existed and you picked my favorite color. So I'm very impressed. Well, I think we need to get you a copy of the magazine then. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So we have like a minute left. Is there anything else you would like to share?
29:29I just think if anyone wants to try Homecooked, we have a 100% money back guarantee with anything that we ship all the time. We want you to love it. And so if you give it a try, you can use, we actually create a coupon code just for this podcast. So if you just use Tiny, I think it gives you $15 off your first year. And it's an exciting time to do so. You'll get Pioneer Valley.
29:57Issue one right now, it's shipping. Issue two, Austin will ship March 1st. And then we've got a great lineup for the rest of the year. So you're really getting five magazines for the price of four and saving 15 bucks with coupon code tiny. And just let us know if you love it. We'd love to hear from you. If you don't like it, we'd also like to hear from you. We hope you do. But I just super appreciate you having us on and hope people will check us out. I'm thrilled that you took the time to talk with me. I appreciate it so much. Is the code?
30:27All small letters, all capital letters, what is it? You can use either. Capital, none, should all work. Awesome. All right, Mike, thank you again for your time today. I really do appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Have a great day.
 

Sunnyland Farms

Today I'm talking with Staci at Sunnyland Farms. You can follow on Facebook as well.
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Staci at Sunnyland Farms in Georgia. Good morning, Staci. How are you? Good morning. I'm great. Thank you. Good. Is it lovely in Georgia? Because it's really chilly here in Minnesota. You know, it's...
00:28cold for Georgia actually, not normally this cold. So I'm kind of enjoying it actually. Well, I would be enjoying the cold and except for the fact that I've had some kind of upper respiratory things since Saturday. And when I go outside, I start coughing because the cold hits me and I'm like, Oh, okay. So sorry. Sorry.
00:51Sorry listeners, people out there, my voice is not the best it could be today, but that's okay, because Staci's gonna tell us all about what she does and about Sunnyland Farms. Yeah.
01:02Well, my name is Staci Wilson and I am from Sunnyland Farms, a Georgia pecan farm. We're way down here in southwest Georgia in the city of Albany. And we do say pecan many different ways down here. You will hear pecan, you will hear pecan, and it's truly tomato, tomato.
01:29And our farm actually started and was planted in the 1920s. And my connection to the farm is actually my husband's great grandfather planted the farm, planted the groves and the trees. And then his grandparents started to mail the pecans to their friends. And then the catalog mail order business grew from there.
01:58His dad began, moved back in the 70s to join the family. And I'll talk about him in a little while, but he had some pretty awesome innovations for the industry. And then Alex and I moved back about 10 and a half years ago. And I've been in the hospitality baking industry. So it really coincided with.
02:24a desire to live a simpler life and also join the family business. So that's just a little rundown. I love it when there's co-ink-a-dinks when your background matches up with the thing you're doing now too. And I always kind of disliked pecan pie when I was a kid because it was so incredibly sweet. And then
02:52I had some, um, couple of years back that someone made from scratch and they were like, you have to try it. It's not like the store bought super sweet kind. And I said, okay. And I took a bite and I was like, this is not pecan pie. And she said, well, yes, it is. And I said, no, no, no, you don't understand. This is wonderful. Right. So, so I'm a convert now as long as it's made in a way that's not super, super sticky, sweet. Just, that's the only, uh,
03:21It's the only pecan story I have. Right. And that's interesting because the industry itself is known for the pecan pie. And it's tried in the last because pecans are indigenous and it's something that Americans can be very proud of that this is one of our native nuts and has more antioxidants than most nuts. So
03:50The industry itself is really trying to get that nutritional information. Even the American Pecan Council, their marketing motto is beyond the pie, right? So anyway, using high quality pecans is always the key, in my opinion, especially for the pies. But anyway.
04:15What else would you like to know about we I can get into the To the planting and the different varieties and and all of that Well, we can start there and then you can tell me a little bit about the the history of the farm Yeah, absolutely Yeah, it is fascinating and it's the history of it is just the the pecans themselves are indigenous to the southeast native and it was a
04:45staple in Native American diets. Georgia actually is the top producer pretty much in the world. We are normally outproduced sometimes by Mexico. Pecans love heat and they love humidity. So, you know, Louisiana, Texas, all of those places, Georgia, obviously. But Georgia, I feel like, you know, just the
05:13The growing conditions are even better because of our humidity. Pecans themselves love humidity and heat. So anyway, our particular farm sits on about, it's about 1,700 acres of groves. And the farm was planted in the 1920s. And what a lot of people aren't aware of is that pecans are more than just one variety and the different.
05:43just like a, you know, a grape for wine or whatnot. And the different varieties have different oil contents and the higher the oil content, the better tasting the pecan. And just a little side note, because of the high oil content, you should definitely store your pecans or any nut really in your freezer.
06:09A lot of people don't know that because you freeze that oil content, whereas if it's sitting at room temperature, the oils are evaporating. So there's a little tip for you and your listeners. So the original acreage was planted with three different varieties, which were Stewart, Slice, and Moors. So those were the original pecan variety that were planted in our orchards.
06:38And when my husband's father moved back in the 70s, they pulled some of the moors out of the groves and replanted with a variety you might be familiar with, which is the desirable variety. And so if you see some of the larger pecan halves, not like the small ones, the very, pretty much the really large ones, it's most likely a desirable.
07:08somewhat developed into what it was because it was somewhat disease resistant and also big. That's what differentiates a Georgia pecan really or even a Southeastern pecan versus its Western cousins grown in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico. Nothing wrong with those either. It's just that the different varieties of course, just like a wine variety.
07:38you know, just develops better in different growing conditions. So our orchards are now mostly desirables. We do have some Elliot's and Elliot's are considered in the industry, they're considered junior halves. And they're really, really small and cute. That's what I love to make pecan pie with Elliot's because they're really small. You don't have to like cut them up into pieces.
08:06And a little insider trick too, is if you can get your hand on junior halves, use those for your Thanksgiving pies because Elliot's have the highest oil content of any pecan. And of course, again, oil equals flavor. So they're kindy, but they're the best. So if you can ever get your hands on junior halves, they're the best. So most of our orchards now are desirable in Elliot's haves.
08:36and something that a lot of people don't know about pecans is that of course they're trees and they're grown in orchards and how we harvest the pecan we harvest. Harvest normally starts from around in you know October, mid-October through pretty much Christmas we're harvesting and
08:59We harvest by a machine called a shaker and it looks like a giant tractor with a claw on it. That's the only way I can describe it. And it really, it just gently, it holds the base of the pecan tree and shakes it gently. And there are videos of this online, of course, if anybody wants to look it up. It's pretty cool because you see just this gentle vibration at the base of the tree and the nuts.
09:29just fall to the ground. And then we leave the nuts on the ground for just two or three days, just to let them rest for a minute, which is kind of a scary part of the harvesting process because of course squirrels and all other kinds of creatures love nuts. So anyway, so we, about two days into the process, we go through with what we call a sweeper and we sweep all of the pecans into nice little neat rows.
09:57And then we come through and picks the nuts up and they go into a processing plant where we, you know, of course pick out the branches and things like that. And then one thing about Sunnyland that's a little different than other pecan farmers is that a lot of pecan farmers would stop in that process. Like once they get the whole nut, because a nut, you know, it's in shell. So you have two halves in a pecan. You get two halves out of a pecan.
10:27But a lot of growers stop right there in the process and then shift their nuts off to be shelled because it's not a full product yet unless you wanna sell and shell. But Sunnyland actually has a shelling plant on site. And so our nuts go over to our shelling plant. And we just like that because, you know, we've always been extremely committed to high, high quality and we can keep our hands, we can truly say that, you know.
10:55our pecans, we have our hands in the entire process from tree to table really, you know? And so when we go into the shelling plant, the nut is then cracked into a half and then sometimes we go into, we grade them down. Like, you know, if we wanna do halves with a particular lot, we break it down into large pieces, small pieces, the things you see that people buy for smoothies and shakes and things like that, all the way down to pecan meal.
11:24which is also a very nutritious alternative to flour, if you wanna use it in baking and whatnot. But anyway, so that's a little bit of the process of how we move into just selling even our haves, which is our main business still. We sell a lot of baked goods now that we make in-house and handmade candies and things like that. And of course we sell other nuts as well now, but pecans are.
11:53are what we, our original nuts. So that's a little bit about the growing portion. One thing I will say that we're proud of too is that pecans really only flourish and grow to standard when they have enough water and something that we learned in Georgia is they really need 40 to 50 inches of rain.
12:23per year to fill out appropriately. And Alex's dad, Larry Wilson, I call him the farmer aficionado because he just knows everything about pecans, but he implemented one of the leading technologies for irrigation systems for the orchards. So he was one of the first farmers in the Southeast at least to implement that.
12:50irrigation system to make sure those pecans were filling out properly and getting being able to get to market The way they they did in like the 80s. So anyway, that's a little bit a little bit of pecan growing history if you will Okay that that left me with a couple of questions When when you put a baby pecans? Sapling in the ground. Mm-hmm. How long till it produces nuts?
13:17That's the hardest part. It normally will not produce until year five to seven. So five to seven is you might get a small harvest between year five and seven. You really probably aren't gonna be up until like top production to 10 years. Wow. Yeah. So when you lose the, we really suffered through Hurricane Michael. We lost a lot of trees. It was heartbreaking.
13:45And it gave us an opportunity though, we tried to look at the silver lining and to replant with some of the newer varietals that are even more disease resistant that some of the scientists have been able to craft. But those trees, I mean, Michael wasn't that long ago, those trees aren't producing yet. And a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of Georgia farmers that were hit.
14:11this past hurricane and in Hurricane Michael were really affected because we're very susceptible to weather because of that reason, because it takes so long for them to produce anything. Okay. And how big is a mature pecan tree? Oh gosh, it really varies. It really varies. But I mean, if you think of a very mature oak tree, that's probably a comparable size.
14:39Holy crap, I didn't realize they got that big. Oh yeah, no they're huge. They're huge. They're very, very big. A very mature 100 year old. I mean they can, and they, we have some 100 year old trees. Yeah, we do have some, but yeah, they last, they will grow very, very large. Okay, and then the other question I have is, we have wild plum that grows here in Minnesota. Is there wild?
15:06Are there wild pecan trees in the south? Yes, there are. Okay, and are they any good or are they just... Yeah, some people will say they are. I mean, some people definitely do, definitely still eat their, you know, in their yard pecans. I mean, they might not be particularly large or tasty, but yeah, I know a lot of people that collect in their yards, especially down here, and sit outside and crack their own pecans for sure. Okay, I was just curious because...
15:35The wild plums here in Minnesota are about the size of, just full the size of a golf ball. And they're really yummy if you get them at the right time. They're super sweet. But if you don't get them at exactly the right point of ripeness, they're very sour. I was going to say, I was going to think they would be sour, but yeah. Or they've just tipped into the beginning of the fermenting process that happens with fruit.
16:05And so if you don't get them right when they're perfect, you really don't want to eat them. They're kind of yucky. But they make fabulous jam. I bet. We have a mayhaw berry here in Georgia. I don't know if you've heard of mayhaw jelly. No. It's a very tart berry. It makes an excellent jelly. We actually sell some of it in our catalog as well. Just trying to keep it native to Georgia. Yeah. OK. So.
16:33When this started, boy, I hate the way my voice sounds right now. When this started, you guys were giving Peekhands away and now you're a fully fledged business. Correct. So my husband's grandparents met post World War II. And of course, his father already had the farm down here and they lived in Atlanta.
17:03And they moved down here and decided, they tried a couple of different things, to be honest with you. They tried to grow cattle, et cetera. And they started to ship some pecans as gifts and add to their college friends and whatnot in the Northeast. And they figured out, wait a second, a lot of people in the North and other parts of the country do not have access to these fresh pecans. And this was in 1948.
17:32So they figured that out. Like their friends were like, these are amazing. So they started to mail order just pecans, just pecans, just Sunnyland pecans. And that's where Sunnyland Farms was born. And they started to, that's where the business started. And then they morphed into, you know, creating a catalog yearly. And in the catalog they sold, of course, I think originally they sold halves.
17:59pieces and then in-shell. And we still do sell in-shell. A lot of people still like to crack their own. I prefer to buy them completely processed because it's like a tradition to sit around and crack pecans down here. But anyway, so then they started to, well, if they like pecans, then we're gonna start selling pecan pie.
18:22and pecan brittle and pecan pralines and all of those wonderful old-fashioned candies. We're going to make them the candies that we make on the farm just as delicious as our pecans. We're going to use real butter and fresh eggs and all that. It just continued to flourish from there. They started to, like I said before, replanting the groves with better pecans.
18:50really flushing out the shelling and keeping industry standard really. But yeah, they started to sell to my grandmother-in-law, her college buddies in New York. So that's really how it started. Okay. So now you guys, people can order pecans from you on your website, number one, right? Correct.
19:19Are you like selling bagged pecans to grocery stores and stuff too? We tend to not sell to grocery stores and I'll tell you why. Grocery stores really tend to buy the, you know, because pecans are a commodity, like they tend to buy the cheapest of the cheap and they do not shelve them properly. They don't keep them at proper temperature.
19:47And I mean, we would sell anything wholesale, like if you, you know, but even our wholesale is pretty high quality. So I just looked at the back of a Publix pecan bag and those Publix pecans, they're buying from Mexico. So they're trying to buy the, and there's nothing wrong with them. They're just not like the largest highest oil content and they haven't kept them at proper temperature again, which keeps the oil evaporates. So anyway.
20:16We sell wholesale, if you think, we sell our wholesale pecans to other candy companies that want like the best of the best, other food providers. And we've even sold internationally. We've sold our latest. We used to sell a lot to China actually. And then now recently we've sold other places in Europe.
20:44And so we've really fleshed out that wholesale side of the business as well. And especially people nowadays really want high quality things that, that, you know, are cared for from top to bottom. And that's how we sell our pecans. And we actually just opened, this is something that my husband and I've done, opened our first satellite retail store in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
21:11and introducing our pecans to a wider market. And really truly, if you try like a supermarket pecan and you try one of our pecans, you really will see the difference. Okay. That's what I was wondering about because I've bought pecans at grocery stores and I've bitten into them and been like, yeah. Yeah.
21:33Well, they're rancid because they've most likely been, any pecan sitting out in like the fruit section that's not even being refrigerated, they have them by like the croutons really. Yeah. They're rancid because all of the oil is evaporated and they're stale and rancid. Yeah, this may be why I haven't ever been a fan of eating them. Right. Once in a while they're okay, but I'm not getting them all the time. Right.
21:58And honestly, I can say the same thing about any nut. I really love honey roasted peanuts. And I think the only reason I love them is because of the honey roasting, not because of the peanut itself. So I need to get a better quality peanut and pecan, obviously. You have to send me some and you'll be sold for life. I'll be a converse. Not to mention, like pecans have more antioxidants than like a cup of pecans versus a cup of blueberries.
22:26They have more antioxidants than even blueberries. Crazy. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. So, so on this podcast, I talked to a lot of people who grow produce and we're always talking about how store-bought produce isn't as good as, as like, you know, the stuff that the neighbors grow in their gardens or I grow in my garden. And it hadn't occurred to me that peanuts or I'm sorry, any nut would fall under the same thing that you guys are putting your heart and soul into this. So.
22:56course your product is better. Right. And I think that that is something that's missing, particularly on the American market. I think it's one of the last like really ingredient, farm-grown ingredients that you still just walk by, you know, the grocery store. They have like, you know, the nut plastic thing where you can get like a cup of nuts, you know? And like all of those nuts are like dark, like a real fresh pecan is going to be like light golden brown, not dark, not it's going to be really, really light.
23:26Fresh looking and not like dried up at all. Yeah so it must be really pretty when you have like a bucket of Shell be of very much so very much so for sure Cool. Um, and the other thing I wanted to say is that you sound so I Don't know so warm immersed and so happy in what you're doing when you're talking about this there's a joy in your voice and
23:54I don't think I'm misreading that. I think you're actually enjoying this thing that you're doing. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I grew up, you know, I grew up in mostly cities and my husband's down from here. And when I met him, I just really appreciated the roots that he spoke about this place. And I just think it kind of goes back to a simpler time. And
24:22We're connected to the community in a way that I just, you know, you don't see that often, especially being multi-generational. You know, we're really connected to this community. We really try to give back and we really try to, I mean, usually when we have an employee, we have a really high employee tenure, you know, usually a lifetime employee. So we have, you know, we really are a family, a family business.
24:50And we mean that like from employees to Wilson's whatever, and it's just a different lifestyle. And it is really fulfilling for sure, for sure. We're really glad. I'm really glad that we, and when I met my husband, he was actually in, he was often his 20s doing his own thing. And I asked him, he was in the financial business, and I asked him, will you ever go back? Will you ever move back to the farm? Will you ever?
25:19And he could never say no. He could never say, absolutely not, I'm not going to do that. Like he always had this like look in his eye, like, you know what, you know, after, you know, I've kind of proven myself, because he wanted to get out there, of course, and you know, prove himself, but he would never rule it out. And one thing that he did say was, you know, there's just a connection to the land and the people. And I think that that's, you know, that route, you know, having those routes is so important, especially in this day and age, you know? So yeah, for sure.
25:49Okay, good. I was afraid that I was hearing things, but I didn't think I was because you sounded so happy. Yeah. Okay. So I have probably two more questions. Okay. When do the pecan trees bloom? They bloom in the spring. Yeah. They bloom in the spring and they're beautiful blooms. They bloom in the spring, but then we don't harvest until October normally. And summer is such an important time.
26:18you know, they desperately need that those 40 to 50 inches coming in, you know, of rain. And so if we have a dry summer, we pretty much know what the crop is going to look like. But again, like because of the irrigation that was that was placed, we can, you know, somewhat control it. But, you know, it's you can't control the weather. And, you know, fresh rain will, you know, outproduce irrigation any day. So in the summers when we're really like, we know what we're
26:47we're getting into in the fall by July, normally. Yeah. So what month are you saying for spring that they bloom? Because spring is relative here. Very much so, yeah. I mean, probably like late March. Okay. Yeah. So it's coming. It's coming in a couple months for you guys. It's coming. It is. Okay. Yeah. Our apple trees don't bloom until, oh, at the earliest mid-May. Oh, yeah. And they can...
27:15There's been years where apples don't bloom until June in Minnesota. So that's why I wanted to get an idea because it must be really nice to have spring hit in March. It is, but it means that summer comes so quickly and it's so hot quickly. Yeah. Which they love the pecans, love the heat, so I can't complain. I will say my favorite time in the pecan groves, and if you're ever down in this area of the country, please come because the groves are just beautiful.
27:44Um, is winter. I love walking through the groves when the trees are resting, you know, they're resting and you can just, I don't know, there's just something very peaceful about it in the winter time. Do they lose their leaves at all? Or do they keep them? Okay. So it's just, you can see them, you can see the real mistletoes up in the, you know, the real mistletoes up in the trees. Oh, awesome. They're beautiful. I love that people like try to buy them from us. Can we go out in your groves and cut down some mistletoes in the winter time? You know,
28:14Okay, and then what do the blooms smell like? I mean, clearly if you have 1700 acres, it must smell amazing when they bloom. Yeah, just really, really sweet and grassy, you know, really earthy. They don't smell like particularly fruity or perfumey, but they're very just earthy and grassy and a little bit mossy, I would say. Okay, and are they white? Are they white? Yes.
28:41I know nothing about pecan trees. I know about almond trees a little bit, because I've read about it, but I don't know, pecan trees have been under the radar for me for some reason, probably because they don't grow here. Right. Okay, so what's the future look like for you guys? Are you just going to keep it on, or do you have a plan? Yeah, just really, we're really involved nationwide with the American Pecan Association, and really, like what you just said,
29:11really educating Americans to this indigenous nut. It's one of, it's our pride and joy, and it's something that, just educating more Americans as to what a quality pecan looks like, and more awareness around, again, outside of the, using it as a snacking food, because it's such a healthy food. So it's just really increasing that awareness across the board, for sure. And then,
29:40for us specifically, using that freshness to, you know, just really develop our product line of candies and cakes and things like that, that people are looking for, you know, that homegrown goodness, you know? So that's what we're focused on for the future. Nice. And my last question, which is gonna probably be six different answers for you, is what can pecans be used for? You said you could grind them for flour. What else?
30:06Okay, so pecans can be used, pecans can be used. I love to use them in smoothies. They add just this nutty freshness and they actually really up the nutritional content in any smoothie. I love to use small pecan pieces on chicken. I like to bake chicken and crust it with like a nice pecan crust mixed with a little bit of flour.
30:34And if you really want to up the ante, we use an indigenous gallberry honey, and I like to finish the pecan breasts, the pecan chicken breasts with a little drizzle of honey. So you have that crunch, that saltiness and that sweet. And then again, of course, in baking, I mean, who I just this morning, I'm developed, I develop a lot of our recipes. And just this morning, I'm making a pull apart, like breakfast bread with some pecan pieces.
31:02um, pecans really are so versatile in baking in general. I mean, any kind of cookie or cake adding some pecans just adds like a really nice salty crunch. And one suggestion I would make, um, you know, a lot of people go too sweet in their pecan pies, just back to the, you know, back to the beginning. Um, just make sure you're using the freshest you can find. And also, um, my biggest thing is to make sure you're using salt in your baked goods because
31:29It will, it just, I mean, your baked goods need that season as well. And we use, I just use salted butter in our pecan pie that we sell in our catalog. And people are just like, oh, this pecan pie is so good. And I always tell people it's because we use salted butter in our pecan pie, because you need that flavor contrast with the custard and the pie to make it, you know, if it's too sweet, it's only hitting one note on your palate, right? So.
31:55That's my biggest. So yeah, we get we started with pecan pie. We're finishing with pecan pie, right? Yeah, absolutely. And what most people don't know is that salt tempers sugar, right? Sugar sugar isn't meant to be kick you in the face It's supposed to be a flavor and salt Salt brings out the flavor of sugar, but it kills the overkill right right interesting
32:24Yeah, I don't know why it doesn't. That's why I like it then. Yeah, I don't know how it works. It's science. I know what it is. I just haven't. It just works. Yep. All right, Stacey. Thank you so much for your time tonight. Well, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure and we'll have to send you some of those fresh pecans. I would love that. Yes, ma'am. We'll get on it. All right. You have a great day. All right. Thanks. You too.
 

Homegrown Show with Ben & Nicole

Today I'm talking with Ben at the Homegrown Show with Ben & Nicole. You can follow on Facebook as well.
If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee 
https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes
00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Ben at the Homegrown Show with Ben and Nicole. Good morning, Ben. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing great. Awesome. So we were just talking. You are in Canada.
00:25And you are in New Brunswick, which is north of Maine, which I knew, but I didn't know for sure. And what do you do? Goodness, I do a lot of different things. I guess you could call us influencers, homesteaders, farmers. I don't like the term influencer, but we do a lot of different things with regards to education from farming content. And we just, in 2020, we decided we wanted to live and try a simpler life. So.
00:53We've been documenting that journey and been able to share it with others ever since. Isn't it fun? Oh, we have, I never grew up on a farm and neither did Nicole. So it's been a crazy whirlwind of a journey. We were fortunate enough in 2020 to be picked up for a small TV show here locally. And it's been able to fund a lot of my antics to be able to buy things like a ton of chickens or goats before we're ready. So being able to document that and film our journey to
01:22learning how to figure that all out has been just chaos and hilarious. Yeah, I'm sure you're entertained every moment of every single day. And I don't do videos because I don't, I don't, I'm not good at it. Number one, I don't like being on video. Number two, but, uh, my husband takes videos here and there of the barn kittens when they're little or the greenhouse construction, when that was happening and he sends them to me and I'm like, I don't know what to do with these. I like.
01:51They're cute, but what do I do with them? So I commend you on your videos because it's hard work to make them. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun being able to document it properly. That's something I even spoke about in a recent YouTube video is just any type of documentation like what you're doing or writing it down is huge for being able to go back and reference because year over year, you don't really feel like you've done very much. But then when you can look back and see whether you've written it down or had a podcast about it.
02:17It's cool to be able to see, oh, I did grow from last year. I did grow from two years ago. And seeing that is just more beneficial to us. Yes, I have to sit down sometime this afternoon and do our end of year recap. I try to do it and have it posted on the first of the year. But I got up yesterday morning to the terrible news from New Orleans about a guy who ran his truck into a crowd of people at a market.
02:44New Year's celebration and I just lost all steam to say anything positive. So I apologized on my Facebook page and said, I'm just not in the right head space, maybe tomorrow. Understandably. So yeah, I just, I felt really weird about being like, so this is all the silly shit we did this year and this happened today, you know? So it was kind of a rough, quiet day here. I don't know why it hit me the way it did, but I'm just real tired of people getting hurt for no reason. It's really hard here in the United States sometimes.
03:14So anyway, I don't want to be a bummer. So I looked at your Facebook page and you do tons of stuff. And if you're above Maine, how far above Maine are you? So we're pretty close to Holton, basically. It'd be about a half hour from our place here to Holton, Maine. Oh, so you're over the border, not by much. Okay. So your growing zone must be like what? Three B or four? I think it's
03:43Four, Nicole is better. I'm more the animal guy. Nicole is better with the vegetables. I just do the labor for her. Oh, well, she's a very lucky woman. Okay, so is it easy? I mean, I know she's the one in charge of that, but is it pretty easy for you guys to keep yourselves stocked in produce?
04:03Yeah, we've been very fortunate, like I said, over the last few years to learn how to do this stuff. So it's this past year, recognize the biggest downfall was our short season. So we built a couple of greenhouses. We were originally just going to build one, but we decided to build two to be able to have basically a seed house to be able to use in the spring. And then to be able to have a secondary tomato house because we've learned that the best thing for
04:28for us is to have as much food as possible and to figure out what grows here as well. But to be able to can and preserve, you really need to have that longer growing season, especially for things like tomatoes and peppers, which don't really grow terribly well here. You can grow them, but to grow them great, you really need the greenhouse. So for us over the past few years, we've really recognized, okay, with our very short growing season, like our last frost is...
04:56early June, generally. I think even last year, our last frost was like middle of June. So being able to recognize when we can actually plant things and get things out and figuring out this year, our biggest plan is to figure out our cropping system. So how to sow things to be able to sow on top of them later in the seasons, so growing peas and beans early, early to be able to have a second production of them as well. So it's just been quite
05:25Difficult it sort of really is because this isn't our background We started back a number of years ago just because we want to know where our food comes from Nicole was a vegan for 10 years I back in college would have been 2016 2017 had a bad experience with some store-bought meat and from then my gut just can't handle it So we've really really just wanted to know where our food comes from. And so part of that is having to learn. Okay, how do we
05:52grow these things ourselves? How do we learn from other people to be able to figure out, okay, in our local area, how easy is it and is it easy? And I tell a lot of people that growing food is pretty easy. Growing a lot of food can be difficult. So it's learning how to grow certain things and how long they take, but throwing seeds in the ground and watching lettuce grow or watching tomatoes and carrots can be relatively non-trivial.
06:19It's when you want to grow a lot and be able to sustain yourself over the wintertime that it gets a little harder. Absolutely. When is the last frost date on average for you? Last? Our first frost in the fall is probably about...
06:37October, first heavy frost, it'd probably be about the first of November. But October is when things would start to get a little bit of frost and that, that way you'd lose some of your more delicate greens and stuff. And some greenhouses. Yeah. Basil and tomatoes really don't like it on that first light frost. They're like, um, excuse me. No. And they try really hard to hang on, but they don't do well. So we are, I'm in Minnesota and we are zone trying to think.
07:07five, might be five B now, I can't remember. And our last frost day is typically anywhere from May 1st to June 1st, it just depends on the season. And in the fall, it could be September for the first light frost, we never know. And so we put in a greenhouse this spring, a hard-sided greenhouse. And we would love to be able to heat it in the wintertime and
07:37the least expensive, most, what's the word I want? Sun powered heating source and it's not necessarily solar panels. Right now we have six IBC totes that are painted black and they're full of water. We got them in too late this year for them to really do their job but they definitely extended our growing season in the greenhouse till November, till mid November which was great. And then
08:06We're hoping to be able to get seeds started in mid February out there because it does get warm as long as it's sunny. So that was the objective, but I would love to be growing tomatoes in January in the greenhouse. I think that would be really cool. And what you were saying about trying to grow a lot of food to sustain yourself for the winter.
08:26It is, it's a lot. It's a lot of work and a lot of planning and a lot of looking at the forecast for a month ahead of time and being like, okay, so what are we doing? And we've tried to do it too. And we did pretty well up until this year. This summer was bad here. And so we did not put away our 80 or 90 pints tomato sauce like we did the last two years. We put away maybe 30 because our tomatoes did not do well at all. So I understand what you're saying.
08:55So tell me about your animals since you're the one that handles them. Oh goodness. Uh, we started with rabbits. Like we sort of went through all of the typical homesteadery animals that you kind of decide that it's super easy. You can be self-sufficient on rabbit meat and chickens with eggs. And we discovered that the rabbits weren't as fun or as easy to take care of. As we really thought, um, rabbits, if you're not terribly aware or anybody listening, they will die basically at the drop of a hat.
09:24So we were pretty devastated our first year and we had, I think we had a weasel break in, but I was away for work and Nicole called me and said, you need to come home because there's a lot of dead rabbits. And it's just a lot of needless killing. We've dealt with predators over the past few years, but we've really tried to discover what works best for us and our land, because we don't have very much land here. We've got three quarters of an acre, but we're able to use about another quarter acre from my uncle across the street.
09:51And that's largely where we keep our animals. So we've wished we could get into having a cow, having a dairy cow, and then maybe some beef. But for us, what we've been able to do is we have chickens and ducks. We have two goats now, and we have five sheep that I was supposed to butcher. And then we just decided that we kind of like them. So they've survived thus far. And we have four, five pigs.
10:20that we got two, I don't know how this continues to happen to us, the sort of chaos that just we attract, but in the spring of last year, of 24, I guess, we got two female pigs and then three months, three weeks and three days later, we had one give birth and we were very confused because we got two female pigs and we had a litter of five figlets pop out. Come to find out she was pregnant, even though she was quite young.
10:47And so we've been able to keep those over the last couple of months and we'll probably end up butchering those and selling off some of the meat, but it's been fun to learn about all of those animals. My, my favorite currently is probably our goat just for the possibility of having the milk and meat of being able to make cheese and yogurts and other dairy has been huge and really beneficial for us because the price of.
11:11milk here has been outlandish. And so being able to have that for the boys for their smoothies and for other foods has just been such a huge blessing for us. How much is a gallon of milk in Canada? Oh, I haven't bought milk in ages. It is $8, $10 ish. Canadian dollars? Yeah. So that what the Canadian dollar is.
11:3969 cents US so it would be almost half that but still it's been pretty ridiculous and especially the wages here Don't really keep up and then taxation and that's a whole other political issue. We could dive into but Uh-huh, we're not going to because I don't talk about politics on the podcast because it just makes things less crazy Here in in Minnesota our milk is going anywhere from five to seven dollars a gallon At the grocery store, that's about comparable then
12:08Mm-hmm, which is ridiculous considering we could get it for about three dollars and fifty cents a year and a half ago Yeah I'm I'm so over it like I wish that things would just ease up a little bit on this inflation kick because it's killing everybody It doesn't matter where in the world you are
12:27So, and that's about as far as I want to get on that topic because I have so many swear words that I'm not allowing myself to say on my podcast ever. And there's a whole lot wrapped around the inflation issue right now. Okay. So are you going to have baby goats? Are you just going to have the two and keep those? Yeah. We started originally with Nigerian dwarves. We started, oh goodness, last year, year before last with
12:54four Nigerian dwarves. We butchered one that was the boy for meat and he impregnated three girls that we brought into the spring of 2024. They all had babies. One had triplets, one had twins, and one had a single. It was a new experience for us. Animal husbandry is not something that we're well versed in. It was really cool to be able to see the babies being born and experience that with those moms. Then we sold those girls and the babies
13:24upgrade, I guess you could say, into some bigger goats. We wanted more milk for less work with one bigger goat. And then just having fewer animals around just made it easy. So we have a La Mancha right now that is our milk goat, and then a baby boar that was born this spring. And he, his mom unfortunately passed shortly after a childbirth due to some complications. So we've been keeping him sort of as breeding stock. He's a beautiful boy. And so we're hoping to have some babies pop out here in the next
13:54month or two from the La Mancha potentially. And we'll see, depends on whether or not he was actually able to get the job done. Uh huh. Yes, it's always a crapshoot, isn't it? Whether the boy did his job or not. The reason I asked about the babies is because I don't know if you've listened to the podcast at all, but I love baby goats more than any animal on earth. And don't tell my dog because she thinks she's my favorite, but I love baby goats.
14:20And we do not have any livestock here right now. We have two barn cats and a dog. That is it. We got rid of our chickens months ago because they were lazy and we were getting three eggs from nine chickens. And my husband said, I don't want to feed these chickens through the winter if they're not giving us eggs. And I said, that's fine. Cause I don't know what feed prices are like where you are, but they've gone up too. It's not great. So I would love to have goats, but my husband is not so into it. And he's like,
14:50don't want to and I asked him why and he said honey I love your heart. He said but if we get goats you're gonna want to have baby goats from the mama goats and invariably some of those baby goats are gonna die and it's gonna break your heart and I can't watch it and I was like I love you too and you're right so we're not gonna have any goats we're done.
15:12We're not ever going to have goats because he's right. I will lose my mind if a baby goat dies. I can't handle it. Yeah. Death has been one of the hardest parts that we've had to learn to deal with. Fortunately, Nicole and I are both versed in the reality of that now after the first couple of years. But I remember I even was talking about it recently that the first rooster I had to kill, which roosters are such a regular cull animal on a farm that I just remember how brutal that was.
15:42a life for no reason. But yeah, when it comes to baby animals, they just, they pass so easily. We lost one baby this spring, but I think personally I'd be more apt to have baby lambs because they're so fuzzy as opposed to little goats. But you're right. Having those little guys running around and trotting around about four to six weeks is when they start to get the, the really the cutest. And they're a lot more mobile.
16:08Yeah, my only real interaction with baby goats was within the first week of their life because my friend's parents raised goats. And she would call me and say, there's baby goats. Will your mom bring you over? And I'm like, yep. And we'd go over and they would be at that age where they're very small and you can just hold them in your arms like a baby and pet them. And they don't, they don't really fight you because they're not afraid.
16:31I would just sit and hold a baby goat for an hour in my lap and just pet it and kiss its nose and talk to it and play with its ears. And my friend was used to having goats around all the time and she's like, why are you so in love? And I'm like, I can't explain it. I just am.
16:49So that was my favorite thing to do in the spring from the time I was about 15 until I was about 18 was go see her baby goats. Yeah, there's really nothing better than seeing life be born. And we've been trying to be really strategic about us keeping animals because they can be, like that can be heartbreaking when you lose the babies, but then it's also the ability, like you say, for feed costs can get outlandish. And we've been fortunate that there's a program here called LOOP.
17:18that they take salvaged food from the grocery stores that's gone off that they can't either give it to the food bank or they can't sell. And so there's a farm every day that goes up to our grocery store and collects all the produce and all the food scraps that's able to feed our animals. So they eat lettuce and pineapple and from goats to pigs to everybody gets a little piece of stuff from the grocery store. So it's been huge in being able to cut down on the feed bill. That's fantastic. I'm so glad that
17:46that they do that. I'm sure that if we really wanted to dig and scrape and figure out how to make it cost, there's a word, make it worth spending the money to get animals, we probably could do it. But my husband has a full time job and I'm really not into mucking stalls and stuff. So we've just made the decision that we'll get chickens in the spring and we might try getting rabbits again. We tried rabbits.
18:15the second year we were here. We've been in our new place for four years. And our rabbits didn't get the memo they were supposed to procreate. So we were feeding rabbits for no reason. And that was the end of that. We were like, no, we're not feeding animals that don't earn their keep. So we don't have rabbits anymore. But we will get chickens again, because I really missed the eggs. The store bought eggs are not great compared to the eggs we were getting from our chickens. So
18:43So I'm stuck. What am I, what else can I ask you? Oh, so you said that you guys got into this because you had some, you had some health issues because of some bad meat. Is that right? Yeah. Uh, back in, what was I saying? It was 2016, 2015, 16, 17, somewhere in there. I bought meat from Walmart and it was just one of those simple things that you just.
19:07Kind of, I was in college and bought a pack of hamburger and then I ate it and it just ruined my stomach. And I was like, that's weird. And I tried to eat some more and it's still like, it was cooked well. It was fine. Seasoned well, tasted good, but it sat like a rock in my gut. And then I tried again. And since then I have not been able to eat any store bought meat. Like it's been crazy that any store bought meat that I consume, uh, will just ruin my gut.
19:33So we've started to go, whether it's our own meat or with a local butcher, to be able to get local meat because that just sits a lot better. And then it's just knowing where our food comes from. I think it's really no secret that our food system is kind of messed up. And we've really tried to take notice of how much we can grow, where we can grow it. And Nicole was vegan for 10 years,
20:03over the last few years that she was vegan, that her body was starting to change and she was starting to have troubles too. So she wanted to change in her diet. And we just really wanted to discover where all of our food comes from. And for us, that is largely knowing that we can grow it and we can figure this out. Thankfully that given my job and what we're able to do, we're able to do this full time. But that is where we found that community really comes in handy.
20:32people have only the grocery store to be able to go to. Like you say, there's really sub-par food, unfortunately, sub-par eggs and meat. And so we've really been keen on trying to educate people on knowing where your farmers are, knowing who your farmers are, and being able to have that community where you can either barter with somebody or you're able to find somebody that, hey, I don't have chickens anymore. Do you have eggs or do you have meat or do you have tomatoes? Because mine didn't do well. So whether it's you can't afford to grow something
21:02able to, don't know how. It's being able to have an awesome community of people together that you don't have to be a one-man island or a one-family island. You can really rely on your community around you to be able to help you out. Yeah. And in them helping you out, you're helping them out too. It's such a beautiful exchange of support and resources. Oh, absolutely. And
21:28As far as I really struggle to talk about sort of the factory farming grocery store thing versus your small scale family farms and stuff, because everybody kind of gets upset with regards to whenever you speak ill of a farmer. But I think it's really no secret that factory farming practices and modern agriculture is really detrimental to our ecosystems. It's really detrimental to our food systems. There's been a lot of studies that have come out over the last number of years that speak to the benefits of organic produce and, and how.
21:58whether animals are raised different or whether your produce is raised different and grown differently. Um, you're getting less nutrition in your factory farmed food than you would in food that you're able to either grow yourself or grow organically, uh, just based on the different cultivars. And so the more that you're able to eat real and good food, and the more that you're able to, uh, eat locally, the better your
22:25going to be off and the better you're going to feel as well. And I think that people really struggle because over the last 20 to 30 years, the grocery store has become so ubiquitous that that is where your food comes from. I'm working on a documentary right now called Eat Real Food. And I went out and interviewed a number of people just really quickly on the street to ask, do you know where your food comes from? And so many people either would say no, or would just say the store. And they don't know they're farmers anymore. There's that disconnect.
22:54There's the middle men in the middle that, you got to be careful here to not to go political, but the middle men are making a ton of money and making a lot of profits while the farms are suffering and they're having to cut corners and they're having to use a lot of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to be able to get the yields that they need to be able to pay their bills. If farmers had their say and the food was able to be sold at the price that it was valued at.
23:22It would be much better off for our farmers, but I think that more and more people, if farmers were in charge, would be better off because they'd have the potential to actually create something and grow something that farmers really have a passion for rather being told by these multinational conglomerates that it's not being told what they need to do, if that makes sense. Yes, absolutely. Yes. And that's not political. It's just truth. It's just the way it is right now.
23:52I think I missed something in the beginning or I didn't ask. Is this your job? Is what you're doing your job or do you have a job off farm as it were? Yeah, so I was very fortunate in 2020 to pitch our first television program. We were able to get a little bit of money for that. So I started out as a commercial videographer, did a lot of video work for TV programs and social media for some companies and over the past few years
24:21We've been able to generate enough revenue via our social media and TV to be able to do really projects that I want to do. We've got a couple of TV shows that I work on that are still passion projects, but mostly the farm and our content that we produce on social media is paying our bills. We've really pared down what we do over the past few years and really, uh, taking our bills as low as they can be so that we're able to go forward with whatever we want to do. And this year it's trying to grow as much food for.
24:51us and our community to be able to sell a little bit because we've discovered our passion for farming and gardening to be able to produce good high quality food for people. Awesome. So when you say TV shows, is that like local to Canada TV shows or is that TV shows that people everywhere can watch? There are a lot of TV shows that people can watch.
25:12Local to Canada for one of them. So we've really tried to broad spectrum scatter shot, get as many people as we can. We've distributed through Justin Rhodes, Abundance Plus. We've distributed through Canada's Wild TV, which they have a streaming app now. So with the internet, you can basically get anything anywhere. But through television, the way we get paid is through
25:40They don't have exclusive rights, so we're always looking to expand our knowledge and share with other people more places, whether it's Patreon or YouTube, a little bit where we share as well. And so for television specifically, it depends on what it means to some people because TV now means Netflix or Amazon to some people, whereas traditional television, which is largely what we're on with commercials and everything, is what pays the bills for now. Okay. That's what I was wondering about.
26:10And Justin Rhodes is one person I've been trying to get hold of to see if he would talk to me on the podcast. And I cannot figure out how to get hold of him. I've emailed, I've Facebook messaged, I've everything and have not gotten a single response from any of it. He must be terribly busy in his life. Oh, he's got so much going on. And especially with the last year with what happened in North Carolina has just been crazy. Yeah. Didn't his place get hit real bad?
26:38From the videos he shared, it looked like it pretty, not as terrible as some of the places, but definitely he lost quite a bit there. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a rough year in the States. I'm telling you, the weather's been insane. People have been doing crazy things. I don't know what's going on in the world right now. Okay, so I had no idea that you were so deep into the broadcasting of stuff. It's been a weird week here.
27:08I had a terrible migraine over the weekend, so I was down for two days. Then got up this morning and my husband came down and I said, are you okay? Because he coughed and he said, no. In this really weird voice and I was like, are you okay? He said, I'm sick. He said, I've got a fever of 101. I was like, oh, okay. So I spent the morning making orange juice and figuring out like.
27:35like chicken stock for him so that he has stuff to drink is even feel like eating. I was like, Well, there goes my time to dig into Ben and, and Nicole in Canada this morning. But either way, this has worked out great because I just was able to wing it and ask what I wanted to ask when I wanted to ask it. So what's your plan? Because we have like three minutes left. So what's your plan for the future? We really want to continue to
28:00I mean, I think everybody's plan is they want to make as much money as they can doing what they love, which is what our goal really is rather than I have no ideas. I don't want to get rich. I want to be able to pay my bills and be able to grow a ton of food. People say to follow your passion and the money will follow. We've really tried to do that with what we grow and what we do here, whether it's entertaining or educating people, we love being able to share what we do and being able to share our food and the discovery of real good.
28:29food. Like the peppers you buy at the grocery store don't taste anywhere near what our farms locally or what we're able to grow. So to be able to share that with people has been so incredible over the past few years. So we're hoping to be able to scale that up and do more of it and educate and teach more people. Nice. And I'm so glad that I'm not the only one who thinks the stuff we grow in our garden tastes better than what we buy at the store because at first I was just like, maybe it's just pride of ownership.
28:57Maybe I'm just assuming and projecting that my lettuce tastes better than the lettuce from the store or my basil tastes better. But I bought basil from the store this summer because we didn't have any ready to pick yet and it tasted like pepper, like black pepper. And I was like, basil doesn't taste like black pepper. What is this? And then our basil finally was big enough to cut some and I was like, oh.
29:23Yes, that's what basil is supposed to taste like. So I'm really glad that it's not just me thinking that the stuff that we grow tastes better. Well, there's some really interesting studies that have come out over the last couple of years. I have a bachelor's degree in biology too. And so I've been keen on researching why. I was one of those kids that would just say, why, why, why to every question or to every sort of response for people. And so I've...
29:47just been so curious as to why those things are the way they do. The reason in large part is quantifiable is because the stuff that is grown from the store is largely, like I mentioned, a different cultivar. It's a different type of basil, maybe even just slightly genetically dissimilar. What it means is that the micronutrients and phytonutrients, those plants are being able to suck up, whether it's the fruit, whether it's your grapes or tomatoes, that they're able to suck up and be able to have in different amounts.
30:16So one study I was looking at showed that the broccoli of years ago would have a, at least 40% reduction of the amount of nutrients, uh, then their counterparts that were grown on factory farms or large farms, like you could grow, or like you could buy in a grocery store. So similar for that, that basil, the stuff that you're able to grow yourself is likely not grown with artificial nitrogen or fertilizers, not grown with pesticide, not sprayed. Uh, and so you're able to have
30:44Quantifiably better tasting, probably more sugars coming up from your soil because it hasn't been terribly used year after year. So there's a reason for those things. And it's really cool to be able to discover and like I've said, educate other people on why this really is. Why does food taste different than it used to? Because some people, if you're old enough to remember what actual food at the grocery store tasted like, it used to taste like real basil. That's why you remember what basil tastes like other than your homegrown stuff.
31:14But it's just not the same anymore. And I feel bad for this next generation of people that have only tasted store-bought grocery store foods because that is truly not what tomatoes or peppers or basil tastes like at all. Yeah. They're going to be really confused when they get slammed in the face with what a tomato actually tastes like. I do want to say though, there is a place in Minnesota that grows tomatoes and they are the closest tasting tomato I can get.
31:43tomatoes in the wintertime. And they do a fabulous job. And they are a big tomato growing company. They grow them in the winter? Yeah. Yeah. It's big boy or something. Can't remember the name of the place right now. But I actually am going to send them an email and be like, thank God for you because you're the only tomato place that sells tomatoes I can stand to eat in the wintertime.
32:11They're really, really good. They taste like a tomato is supposed to taste because the tomato is supposed to have some sweet to it and some acid to it. And most Sorobot tomatoes, even in the summertime, suck. They don't taste like anything. And these guys that grow these at their greenhouses do a fabulous job. I don't know what kind of alchemy or magic they're working, but they do a great job. So there are some big companies
32:40job and don't destroy things in the process. So I got to throw that in there. Yeah, absolutely. I'd be really curious to know what their process is for fertilization. I wonder if it's a lot of organic compost. It would not surprise me at all because compost is magic. Compost is wonderful. We have three compost bins at our place that are big. Like my husband can use our small tractor bucket to flip the compost, you know, to stir it.
33:10And we use that in our garden every year and it just does amazingly well. And especially when we have the chicken poop thrown in the compost, because for anyone who doesn't know, chicken poop is the best fertilizer ever. It's great. High in nitrogen content. Have you thought about adding your compost to your greenhouse? I saw somebody recently that they were able to do a little bit of plumbing.
33:34to bring the water like the water you'd have in your IBC totes to be able to bring the water through the compost pile as it's decomposing to be able to heat those totes for more heating mass. I don't know because like the veggies and stuff are your wife's thing, the greenhouse and the heating the greenhouse is my husband's thing, but I will mention that to him because he'll wanna think about it.
33:58Because that's something we've noticed this year, just having the greenhouse with birds and stuff is we have one greenhouse that has the birds in them because, like you said, chicken poo is amazing for the garden. So we're going to scoop out most of that. Some of that latent nitrogen is still going to stay there, but we're going to take the birds out, put them in their chicken coop after that and plant the tomatoes there, but in our naked greenhouse without any chickens in it, it is about five to 10 degrees colder basically at all times than the one with the deep litter method.
34:28chickens and that have their poo decomposing there sort of underneath. Which is really cool. Yeah. And you, it's so weird. Like I don't want to take too much of your time, but we had no idea that the fact that you have, um, wood shavings or straw or whatever in your, in your chicken coop and the chickens are going to the bathroom in it and then scrap, scratching it down into it. So it is decomposing.
34:54and turning into compost, we didn't know that that would throw heat until we started doing the deep, deep litter or whatever you said method for the greenhouse. I can't talk. For the chicken coop in the wintertime. And yeah, it was a good 10 degrees warmer in the chicken coop than it was outside all the time in the wintertime. So it's a really good way to throw heat. I will mention that to him when he's not feeling like crap because he's not going to want to talk about it today.
35:21But yes, I will definitely mention that to him because we're trying to figure out a way to do this so that we can have tomatoes in January in the greenhouse. This is very important to me. It's going to happen in the next five years if it kills us. So Ben, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. No, thank you. This has been awesome. We'll have to do this again at the end of the season to see if you're gonna be able to carry those tomatoes through. Yes, I'm really...
35:49From your lips to God's ears that this summer goes well because we did really bad this past summer. And I'm so happy that it's 2025 because we have hope for the next growing season. Farming is all about faith and hope, right? Oh yeah. You're beholden to a lot of the weather and the weather changes and the chaos that that entails. Yeah, I'm just hoping that chaos eases up this year because last year sucked. I'm so ready for it to not be bad.
36:19I'm ready for like my herb garden to go in that didn't get put in last year. I'm ready for the first tomato at the end of June. I'm ready for good cucumbers. I think I had three cucumbers last year. That was it. So, yes, very excited. We're already looking at seed buying here in the next month. So, all right, Ben, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and you have a great rest of your day. Thank you. You too.
 
 

Acres U.S.A.

Today I'm talking with Taylor at Acres U.S.A. You can follow on Facebook as well.
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00:00This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Taylor at Acres USA. Good morning, Taylor. How are you? Good morning. I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm great. You're in Wisconsin? Yes. Did Acres USA start in Wisconsin? No. It's...
00:28It started in Kansas City and then moved to Austin, Texas. And then the company that acquired it from the founders had moved it to Colorado and that's where we ended up buying it from and then moved it to Wisconsin. Okay, cool. All right. So, tell me about yourself and Acres USA because no one who hasn't heard about it probably knows what it is. So, tell me all about it.
00:56Yeah, well, Acres USA was founded back in 1971 and the founder was Charles Walters, who truly was a visionary and he was inspired by his youth when he was a farmer in Kansas and then he ended up becoming an economist. So he believed from early on that farming had become disconnected from nature and it was becoming destructive to the soil and human health and the environment.
01:25So through Acres USA, he began to champion the principles of ecological agriculture and published some groundbreaking research by soil scientists, farmers, and thought leaders like Dr. William Albrecht. And then over the decades, Acres USA grew from just a magazine into a full movement. And we published books, host conferences, have digital resources. And the goal is to...
01:53empower farmers to work with nature and also profit from it. So today we remain committed to Charles Walter's original mission and that's to prove that ecological farming is not only sustainable but also economically sound. And I think that's always kind of a key part of Acres USA is, you know, we talk about ecological principles but we also focus on the economics behind it.
02:23Is that right? Correct. Okay. How did that happen? Well, that's kind of a long story. That's okay. We've owned it for just over a year now. I grew up in southwest Wisconsin and did not have much agricultural background at all. I always liked land though. My first introduction to land was through hunting.
02:51And I kind of have a little bit of an obsessive personality. So I was kind of obsessed with hunting and interacting with the land. I became a police officer when I was 20 and that was the first career that I jumped into. I knew, you know, shortly into that, that it probably wasn't going to be able to get me into a position to actually buy my own farm or have my own land to manage myself. So.
03:21I jumped into the entrepreneurship world, learned about business. When I was 25, I moved back in with my parents and said I was going to make a go of it in the business world. And then two years later, we were able to buy a farm. And while we had that farm under contract, the initial idea was still revolved around farming or revolved around hunting. And I knew I kind of wanted to create a.
03:49a media company that talked about managing land and interacting with land because I did love – I've always loved just interacting with land and manipulating it and doing different things with it. I found Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown and Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard and I got bit by the regenerative agriculture movement and I realized Mark was actually just 20 minutes from me.
04:19So I started, I probably listened to his book that winter five different times and I would just drive by his farm and try to figure out what all he was talking about in that book. And finally, I just knocked on his door and Mark and I have been working together ever since and Mark is, you know, like I said, the author of Restoration Agriculture which is probably the highest selling book that Acres USA has.
04:49So I got introduced to Acres USA, bought a ton of books, and that's how I began my journey into regenerative agriculture. My business world from the side had kind of morphed into marketing agencies and working with tech to help business owners create books and courses and events, but it was completely separated from agriculture.
05:17COVID happened, that business kind of took a little bit of a hit just because the majority of our clients were pretty affected by COVID. So I jumped into real estate, took our agency and began doing more of a local type marketing services and then became a realtor specializing in working with land and helping people find regenerative.
05:46or find conventional type farms with the plan of transitioning into organic or regenerative type practices. And Mark was always kind of in my ear because I had the experience with books and courses and different things that, you know, he kept pushing me towards this Acres USA idea. So it took about two years and of back and forth and negotiations and we finally acquired it last December. So we've been running it for about a year now.
06:16And that's how we landed with Acres USA. Wow. That is a lot of pivoting going on there. And I'm assuming you're in your 30s? Yeah, I'm 31. Yeah. That's a lot of things in 10 years. Sorry, not 20 years. Yeah, it's kind of like every different little pivot has led to these different things and put me in a position to...
06:44where I'm confident we can run a business like this. So every little thing throughout my life has given me either different experiences or perspective to be in a position to do this. Well, I think that's awesome. Not very many people your age have the, I don't know, luck, insight, brilliance to make those pivots to get to the situation that you're in.
07:14My dog is yelling at me. She'll it doesn't matter. She's always in the background. Um, So I have questions about the actual magazine because as I'm sure you've heard Print is dead, but print is not actually dead. So how there is a print version of the magazine. Yes, correct. Yep, and
07:37How is it doing? Because I looked at your website and I see that you share some of the articles on the website, but not everything. So how is the print magazine doing? Yeah, the first thing that we did last year was actually get the articles online. So anyone who has a print subscription gets access to the website. It's similar to newspapers that have articles and there is a paywall function. We release four to five articles a month that are free to anyone.
08:07and then the rest of them are reserved for our subscribers. So we have a digital option along with the print option. If we weren't in this specific niche, I would probably be a little bit more concerned about the print just because yes, in general, the print magazine world is struggling. The paper world is struggling. All of our printers and folks that are in that world, they don't seem to be having a very fun time.
08:36But we also have a little bit of a unique audience in the sense that our folks do tend to stay a little bit more disconnected from technology. And we have a plain community that is the fastest growing population in our country that only consumes information through print still. So that's part of our big plan to expand that audience.
09:04while also then giving all the digital offers that come from the magazine. Because the magazine is really a content-making machine, and you're forced to, you know, find these articles, find these stories on a monthly basis. So our goal is just to make sure that we offer those on digital avenues, but then also continue to support the folks who consume things in print. Okay. And how do you find your writers? Are you...
09:33Are you open to freelance writers or do you have staff writers or how does it work? We have a main editor who works with us, Paul Meyer. And he, well luckily that was a thing that we inherited that was actually moving pretty well. It's a good system. So we have a Rolodex of writers that have written for Acres USA for a long time. So we kind of rotate through them.
10:03four to five writers that will put a monthly piece together in specific type of areas that we're talking about. But yeah, we have freelance writers that if you ever have an article idea or something you'd like to submit, you can submit it to Paul. His email is editor at acresusa.com. He sifts through those ideas, matches them into the specific months of what we're talking about in the magazine. And if it doesn't...
10:32hit the actual print. That's also the good thing about the online articles is we end up publishing any type of overflow that doesn't hit the print online. Nice. You have just made every freelance writer's day in saying that because it's really difficult to break into writing for magazines. I have done it. I don't write right now, but I have written for some magazines and trying to get your foot in the door as a freelance writer.
11:00is a lot of work and a lot of patience and a lot of sad. So I'm really happy that you shared that because one of the things I've learned this past year about homesteaders and farmers and ranchers is they have stories and experience to share. And they don't quite realize that they could share it in a magazine if they knew how to get to it. So hopefully... Yeah. And that's something that we're trying to bring.
11:30a lot of just farmer type stories. I'd say right now we're publishing a lot more agronomy type columns and we do have a little bit of the high level science where a lot of these articles are even way over my head. But we do want to find those farmers that have a story and also if you mean if you're a freelance writer and you know some of these farmers too, a lot of the time they just need help getting their ideas out of their head and onto paper.
11:59That's where our editing team comes in handy too, because myself included, I'm no special writer, but I will kind of throw up ideas on a paper and it turns into a nice article. That's because of our editing team. Editors are the miracle of every print, everywhere. Yes. I should have gone to school to be an editor. I am.
12:23terrible about reading and just being thrown out of what I'm reading because there's something not right in what I'm reading. It drives me insane. Okay. So my podcast is about homesteaders and farmers and ranchers and people who grow things, whether it's plants or animals. And I try to throw in a topic that is adjacent to that now and then because I think it keeps it interesting. And I just, I don't know, I saw Acres USA and I was like, huh.
12:53That's something I haven't really delved into is a magazine that puts out stories about this stuff that I'm hearing about every day. But it sounds like you're also a publishing company. So what books have been put out? Yeah, we have 127 books that we've published. Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard is probably one of the most widely known ones. We also published...
13:22the Albrecht series, which Albrecht is kind of the first person that talked about mineral optimization in soil where if we optimize our minerals in the soil, you know, we can accomplish a lot of the same things that we end up doing with synthetic fertilizers without the chemicals. From that, people like Gary Zimmer, the biological farmer, is one of our books that we've published
13:52a form that's easier for folks to consume in today's age. And we have a laundry list of them. Charles Walters, our founder, obviously was an exceptional writer. I think if anyone sees some clips from our conferences past year, you had Joel Salton breaking down into the tiers just talking about how moved he would be by Charles Walters writing. So his name is on...
14:21I think 18 to 20 different book titles where he ended up just speaking with some of these farmers and people that were in the ag world doing these things and help them get a book written. So, we publish a broad spectrum of things. Most of it's evolved around ecological farming practices, but we're in the biodynamic world, radionic world, homesteading world.
14:51you know, 350 titles from either self-published authors or other publications. So our Rolodex of books is pretty large on our site and it's all in the name of organic and ecological farming. Okay. You mentioned radio, radionomic, is that how you said that? Radionics. What is that? I have not heard that one yet. It's kind of a...
15:20It's a parallel idea, similar to biodynamics. I'm not the person to give you the lowdown on it. We just have these subsets of practices. I think anybody in this world usually finds an avenue that they find themselves in. We try to carry all those different types of ideas.
15:49Some people might call it a little bit of witchcraft, but I think it's important that if people are getting results from things to allow their ideas to flourish and allow the people who consume that information to try it for themselves, you never know what people can get results with. It's another sub-segment of it's similar to biodynamics. Okay. I'll have to Google it. That's what I'll do.
16:15at later today. It was a rough weekend around here. I had a terrible migraine all weekend. So I'm just getting my brain back today because when that happens, I have no brain. I'm just like honey, honey, honey, don't talk to me. My husband, it's not going to go well. Just I'm going to go lay down, leave me alone. So later today or tomorrow, I will look up
16:41It's amazing to me how often Joel Salatin's name comes up with people I talked to on this podcast. I interviewed him back months ago. Fantastic guy. He's, he's so kind, but he's also a wealth of knowledge. And it's so fun to hear other people say that he's been part of whatever they're doing. Yeah. I'm, I mean, he, Acres was the first place that Joel got a start.
17:09So he was one of our keynotes at the conference. He talked about how the pinnacle for him was, I think it was in 1988, he finally got a chance to speak at an Acres conference. And that's kind of what Acres has been for a lot of these people. They're super well known. They took different paths. Like Joel self-published all of his books, but he always has been a big part of the Acres community. And we kind of brought him back into it once we purchased it.
17:39Because Joel has a little bit of controversy that surrounds him and, you know, it's not always the worst thing in the world. But his experience and the things that he's done for this movement, you know, it's hard to find someone who's done more. So he's an important part of this movement and he has an important history. He sure does, more important than I think he even wants to claim. He's very humble in a lot of ways.
18:09When I talked to him, I said, did you ever expect to become this famous? And there was this very self-deprecating chuckle out of him. And he was like, well, no, no, I did not. So I don't think, I don't think any of them did, you know, no one, because we are, we are in a time, you know, for me to have this company now it's easy because these topics are the cool topics to talk about. Well, when these guys came up, they were like the back room secretive type meetings that everyone sucked their nose up at and thought they were crazy.
18:39So they weren't exactly like the cool thing to talk about all through the 70s, 80s and 90s. Yeah, they were rabble rousers. Yeah, yeah. So we have it easy and I don't think any of these guys thought they would become what they are, but they are. They're in the centerpiece of one of the most important movements we have as civilization. Yes, absolutely. And it's always...
19:04Like I knew about a lot of this stuff before I started this podcast. I knew a little bit about a lot of this. And as I've talked to people and learned things from them, because it's the best part about having a podcast is I learned so much from everyone who talks with me, is it's so obvious to me that this all makes sense. Because if you work with nature and not against nature, nature is going to provide for you. And
19:31How we got away from it is just beyond me.
19:36Well, it was in the name of industrialization and efficiency. People went into the industrial movement in the 40s and 50s. As a society, we went to more of high production driving the economy. In order for us to feed the world without having a large percentage of the people making their own food, this is kind of what came of it.
20:05And you, you know, if you look at it from the perspective of these farmers is when someone walks up to you after farming for 25 years and they hand you this bottle of magic potion that you pour over your land and all of a sudden your corn crop turns into, you know, double what it used to produce without any information on really the effects of what that is coming from that. You know, any person probably would be easily sucked into that.
20:35And, you know, I think that's what happened is we pushed – we pushed – well, it became science. It became, you know, chemistry type farming. And, you know, we pushed more yields, more yields, more yields. Unfortunately, the profit thing never got drug with the yields thing. And that cut out a lot of small time farmers and it drove them away from the farm. And it's drove…
21:03you know, just higher production, lower margin. And you have these giant corporations that are part of that, that are really the ones that are making a lot of the money. Yes, and one of the things that I've been told more than once is that if you wanna be a rich farmer, you need to start rich. Yeah, I...
21:30Yeah, it's, I mean, that kind of is the way that things are going. But you know, you have to define rich, like what is rich, having a bunch of money in a bank account or actually being, you know, because I feel pretty rich every day when I go out and move my cattle and feel pretty connected to exactly, you know, how our foods are being produced. You know, our family consumes probably about 60% of the food, definitely 90% of the protein.
21:59that we eat because we have cattle, hogs, and chickens. So I feel pretty rich when I crack open an egg from our chickens versus buying store bought eggs and seeing the difference. I mean, even the high end organic, so to speak, free range eggs, crack one of those open and then crack one that you have on your homestead and it's, you know, I feel pretty rich.
22:24Yeah, we're feeling kind of poor right now. We got rid of our chickens a couple months ago because they were being lazy and they were getting old and the eggs were not coming in the way they should have been. And my husband was like, I don't want to feed the chickens through the winter if we're getting like three eggs from 12 birds. And I said, that's fine. It's fine. We just get more chickens in the spring. That's why you always have to plan a year ahead. So you get that new flock in the spring and then they start laying.
22:51right about the right time when your older flock start taking vacation. Uh-huh. Yes. And we didn't do that. And I'm kind of regretting our choice, our life choice regarding the chickens because we hadn't bought store-bought eggs in forever. And I'm sure there are people who really think that store-bought eggs are fine and they're just as good as eggs from your own chickens, but they're not as good. And I'm kind of angry. Not once you get exposed to that.
23:19Kind of angry about it. We bought four dozen brown eggs from the grocery store and I haven't eaten a single one. I'm just like, no, you guys can have them. I don't want them. I'll go without eggs for a little bit. It's okay. So yeah, eggs come up a lot. Chickens come up a lot on this podcast, clearly, obviously, because chickens are the gateway drug to everything else.
23:45Chickens are really important. The other thing that's going on right now, as I'm sure you're well aware of, is the bird flu thing that's happening. And I can't believe how expensive eggs are at the grocery store right now too. Yeah, I think my wife had to buy some around Christmas too, just because our chickens weren't producing enough. I think she made some egg bakes. And yeah, I think what organic eggs right now are $6, $7.
24:15or six dollars a dozen and conventional is like four. So we're not so crazy now asking the prices that the homestead type egg producers ask. Yes, and that's my other life choice regret right now is that we got rid of our chickens just when egg prices spiked. So that was kind of dumb too. But it's okay. We'll get more in the spring. Yeah.
24:44Chickens are a tough thing to, I mean, you can see it. Chickens are the easiest thing to test out in a type of business model where then you see that you really do need scale to then get in the positive. So I, you know, we've reduced our flock as well just to make sure that we have eggs, but it is a difficult thing to actually create a profitable income from.
25:14If you're buying all the feed. Yes. The feed was the other reason we got rid of them is because feed has gone up in price so much as well. I hadn't bought chicken food. I hadn't gone and actually bought it in over a year because my husband or my son had gotten it. And the last time I went in to get chicken feed, the guy was like, that'll be $30 for a bag. And I said, excuse me. And he looked at me like I was crazy.
25:40And I said, the last time I bought a bag of this, it was $20. And he said, when was that? And I said, over a year ago. He said, oh, well, there's your answer. And he wasn't being smart ass. He was just like, things have really gone up in price over the last year. So yeah. Really makes sense because the people who grew that grain have not been having fun because grain prices have tanked in the last two years. So how, how those prices fluctuate.
26:08That kind of comes back to the example that somebody is making money and unfortunately it's not the farmer. Yes, and that brings me to the dairy farmers who don't make any money compared to what milk costs either. Yeah.
26:28Yeah, it's a... we're just talking about depressing stuff all this whole episode. That's okay because it's okay though because most people who aren't in the business don't know how all this works. So yeah, dairy is definitely an issue because you have conventional producers. And if you think about a dairy business, I have some firsthand knowledge
26:59this thing that happens every two weeks or every month where you get paid for the milk. So you have this constant inflow of cash, which any farmer, you know, they're a little bit jealous of because most people who are, you know, if you do beef or hogs or chickens, you know, when you're in the protein world, a lot of the time you have big months of sales and then months without any income coming in. So I can see it from the dairy producer's perspective where it's difficult to give up that constant income that's coming in.
27:29Even though every time they get paid, if they actually sat down and did the math, you probably paid yourself about $3 an hour. They have such an overhead involved with that, that it's so difficult to get out of that rat race because you've invested a ton of money into the infrastructure and it's not easy just to walk away from that.
27:57Yes, exactly. And the thing that's, that just drives me baddie is without dairy farmers, without farmer farmers who grow produce without, without these people. We don't eat. And yet all these farmers are, are just getting by. I mean, if they're lucky, then yeah, they're making a profit and they're happy. But from the stories I've heard, that's not really the case all the time. And.
28:27I suppose that my husband and I could continue growing our 100 foot by 150 foot garden and we could have 20 chickens and we could get a milk cow. I don't really want one, but we can get one and we would eat, but the variety of eating probably wouldn't be very diverse and we would be fine, but it would probably be boring. So it makes me, it makes me bothered that.
28:55Most people don't understand what is happening behind the scenes of their food. And most people don't care. And that's part of the reason I started the podcast is because I want people to know the behind the scenes stories and how much work it is and how important farmers are. So that was part of the reason I wanted to talk to you because clearly Acres USA is very behind the scenes and very supportive of people who are trying to do this right.
29:26Yeah, I think it comes down to this. A lot of the financial issues come from not having a say in what you're able to sell your product for. If you think about any other business in the world, it's unlikely that people are creating a business where they essentially have all of this operating type of overhead and then they are not able to name their price at the end to make sure that the business makes money.
29:54You know, their prices are controlled by something that they have essentially no control over. And that's where Acres has always been in the position where if you do start farming more in the image of nature, then a lot of those things, a lot of that overhead cost then will be reduced. So if you can get 80% of the yield, but your overhead expenses are cut by 80%, you know, what is the actual...
30:23main goal in the end of the day. It's actually having a profit versus having a yield without a profit. That's what we've always preached and I think that is the future. As fertilizer costs go up, as people become more aware of what that is doing, farming this way is a value-added thing. The more that consumers become educated on it and actually go out and seek and want that value.
30:52It gives the farmers an opportunity then to start naming their prices and name them at a premium because they deserve a premium. But the cool thing about that is that they're unique in the sense that how they're raising it but they are also then able to charge more with having a little bit of less expenses if they farm within nature's image. So that at the end of the day, then they have bigger profit margins and may actually have successful farms.
31:23Yes, exactly. Thank you for saying all that in a much better way than I ever could. So you were saying that we were kind of talking about depressing things. Tell me something fantastic about what you love, about what you do, and we'll end it on a really good note. Well, I think technology and consumer knowledge is moving in the right direction for our industry. We have people designing tools.
31:49where I think in the next five years, people are gonna have an app on their smartphone where they can take pictures of produce and take pictures of meat and actually get a nutrient density profile sent back to them so you'd be able to tell the difference in the food before you actually eat it. And you'd be able to take that to the grocery store or take it on farm, wherever farm where you're buying stuff from, and actually see the difference. That's never been done before. I mean, that would be an enormous marketing.
32:18tool for not only farmers, but then it's an amazing tool for consumers. So technology like that is, that gives me a lot of hope. And consumer education. So we've seen in the last year this type of agriculture and people talking about these topics actually enter the mainstream. People are talking about it in the biggest stages where that really hasn't ever happened before.
32:48So I'm seeing it all the time. When people come out and buy meat or eggs from us, all you have to do is have a conversation with them and they're sold on it and they're willing to spend that extra money to do this. So I have to buy that food. So I think those are the positives. I think we're moving in the right direction as far as just societal information and education basis. I really hope so. And if that app comes out, I want it on my phone.
33:18Well, I think everybody will. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that would be amazing, other than people who don't really care about what they're eating. People who don't care about what they're eating aren't going to care, but people who want to know will love it. So we're at 33 minutes and 25 seconds. Taylor, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. And I am so looking forward to seeing what happens in the future for Acres USA. All right. Thank you a lot.
33:47Thanks a lot, Mary. You can find all of our information at acresusa.com too. Yep. I will put the links to that and your Facebook page and your Instagram page and all the things in the show notes. All right? All right. Thanks, Mary. Thank you. Have a great day. You too.