A Tiny Homestead

Thieving Otter Farm

Today I'm talking with Rebecca at Thieving Otter Farm. You can also follow on Facebook.
Content Seeds Collective
https://www.homesteadliving.com/subscribe/ref/41/
https://homesteadliving.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-planner/ref/41/
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
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
Episode Show Notes
Guest: Rebecca LynchFarm: Thieving Otter FarmLocation: TennesseeHost: Mary Lewis
In this episode of A Tiny Homestead, Mary chats with Rebecca Lynch of Thieving Otter Farm in Tennessee. What starts with a conversation about unpredictable winter weather quickly turns into a fascinating deep dive into otters, quail, chicken genetics, deer hunting, ADHD superpowers, and planning ahead in homestead life.
In This Episode
The Story Behind Thieving Otter FarmRebecca shares the heartwarming story behind her farm’s name. After setting up trail cameras on her wooded six acres, she discovered river otters visiting her creek and pond. Despite their habit of stealing fish, Rebecca could not be happier. From spotting baby otters to watching an entire family swim by, these “fish bandits” inspired the name Thieving Otter Farm.
Raising 4,000 Coturnix QuailRebecca is primarily known for raising Coturnix quail, and she estimates she has around 4,000 birds. She explains:
The difference between domestic Coturnix quail and wild bobwhite quail
Why Coturnix quail thrive in smaller spaces
How they can be ideal for homesteaders in areas with HOA or city restrictions
The importance of understanding wildlife conservation when it comes to releasing captive birds
Rebecca also shares her journey from casually accepting a dozen quail in 2020 to becoming deeply involved in quail genetics, writing standards, and judging international shows.
Developing New Chicken BreedsRebecca is currently developing two new chicken breeds, with the ambitious goal of becoming only the second woman to have a breed accepted by the American Poultry Association.
She discusses:
How her first line, affectionately called “Mop Tops,” began with mixed breed birds with crests
The selective breeding process for temperament, egg size, body type, and color
A second accidental breed that started from a mystery chick that did not match its hatchery label
The long, detailed process required to stabilize a breed before applying for APA recognition
Her birds are known for sweet temperaments and prolific laying, including large brown eggs.
ADHD as a Homesteading SuperpowerRebecca was recently diagnosed with ADHD at age 47, and she reflects on how it has shaped her homesteading journey. From raising thousands of quail to out hunting the guys during deer season, she embraces her tendency to dive deep and go all in on new interests.
Mary shares similar experiences from her own homestead, including experimenting with rabbits, planting fruit trees, and considering quail after her husband fell down a research rabbit hole.
Avian Flu and Planning AheadThe conversation turns to avian influenza and how outbreaks impact egg prices and poultry availability. They discuss:
The risks associated with migrating waterfowl
Biosecurity challenges with free range systems
Strategic planning for adding laying hens before potential outbreaks
The importance of thinking one season ahead in homestead life
As always, homesteading involves balancing opportunity with responsibility.
About Thieving Otter Farm
Rebecca raises Coturnix quail and is actively working to develop two new chicken breeds with strong genetics, excellent temperaments, and productive laying ability.
You can learn more at:thievingotterfarm.com
Sponsor
This episode is sponsored by Steel Spoon Farm. Founder Jen Kibler teaches homesteaders how to build a sustainable blog or email list and use Pinterest for long term marketing without relying on social media algorithms. Inside the Content Seeds Collective, members receive weekly live coaching, a private community, and access to the Root Seller Resource Library. Join for $37 per month at SteelSpoonFarm.com.
Connect with the Podcast
Find more episodes and resources at:atinyhomesteadpodcast.com
Follow along on Facebook at:A Tiny Homestead Podcast
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a fellow homesteader and leave a review. It helps more people find these real conversations with farmers, food producers, and makers across the country.

Quirky Quail Acres

Today I'm talking with Caitlyn at Quirky Quail Acres.
 
Content Seeds Collective
https://www.homesteadliving.com/subscribe/ref/41/
https://homesteadliving.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-planner/ref/41/
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
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
00:00If you're a homesteader who wants to get paid for your content without living on social media, check out SteelSpoonFarm.com. Founder Jen Kibler teaches you how to build a real blog or your email list and use Pinterest for sustainable marketing. Inside her coaching group, Content Seeds Collective, you'll get weekly live coaching, a private community, and access to her Root Seller Resource Library full of tutorials and templates. Join today for just $37 a month and start building a business that doesn't depend on the algorithm.
00:26A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Seals Spoon Farm. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Caitlin  at  Quirky Quail Acres in North Mankato, Minnesota. Good afternoon, Caitlin. How are you? Hi there. I'm well. How are you? I'm good, except I can't get through an introduction without stumbling all over myself today. I don't know what's going on.
00:57Um,  so I would normally ask about the weather because that's the question I ask on every single podcast episode, but you're only half an hour away from me.  So I'm guessing it's sunny outside. Yep. Sunny and feeling balmy compared to yesterday. No doubt. Yesterday was terrible. I mean, it was pretty, but it was cold. Yeah, it hurt. It hurt, especially after  tank top weather last weekend. Yeah.
01:24Yeah, that was really nice. And I knew it was fall, spring, but I was like, I will take it. It's a good reprieve. All right. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. OK, so I again, I'm Caitlin and I am a mom and I work full time and we have our little farm here just outside of North Mankato, Minnesota. We
01:53He are kind of jack of all trades sort of farm. We raise quail and we raise chickens and we have an orchard and we have a very large garden. Hopefully this year we'll also have a greenhouse. We also tap all of our own maple trees and we make maple syrup. And we also have, we.
02:20We volunteer at a nearby shelter. So we have three rescue dogs.  Um, it's just chaos all the time.  It sounds amazing to me.  Well, we're right there with you on the big garden  and we have 20 apple trees. We have  one huge wild plum tree. have some Alden plum trees. We have peach trees. have rhubarb.
02:48We do have a greenhouse. have chickens, we have a dog and we have five barn cats. So  there's a lot of overlap there between you and I.
02:59I freaking love it. Yeah, no, I wouldn't choose anything different. um I'm so passionate about it. And it's I've never been one to like I don't want to go to the gym to exercise, but I want to be I want to be active all the time. I want to be I want to be moving and working. And I like I like the hard work and I like feeling accomplished at the end of the day.  Absolutely.
03:26So the reason that I asked you to be on the podcast, I have a little tiny ulterior motive and I don't usually.  My husband and I have been talking about maybe getting a few quail and seeing how they do.  And I'm guessing you know a lot about quail. So  can you tell me all about quail today? Yeah, absolutely. So we,  we raise Coturnix quail  because A, they are the largest variety that
03:56and that you can  own really. um You don't need a special permit like you do for other species of quail because they are considered a domesticated species. uh Whereas for like, bobwhite, you would need a game permit.  And also  they don't lay as many eggs. um They  are smaller birds, so they're not really good meat birds. Generally people raise
04:23Bob White for dog training and stuff. we're not,  again, our dogs are,  they're pound dogs there.  They'd be useless for that. um Anyway,  and  Coturnix quail lay about 300 eggs a year. um We  don't raise exclusively jumbo because we like to go for a good mix of colors in our birds too, just because it's, you know, it's nice to have a pretty bird that you're raising also. So we
04:53focus more  on um egg and feathering  color genetics, but they are highly productive.  are their eggs are so nutritious when you compare them  side by side with like an equal weight of a chicken egg.  The nutritional profile is just phenomenal because they are heavier in the yolk. So then they have all of that additional um
05:22nutrition to go with that. We find them very, very easy to raise. They were kind of our poultry introductory species. My husband had been wanting to raise birds for some time and I was kind, I knew, I knew that I would be doing the majority of the work and so I kind of said, whoa, hey, we're not going to dive in head first.
05:48until I feel really prepared for this, let's try quail first because they require less space, they mature faster, they're productive enough that it can  serve our family's needs off of that. We started with about 15 quail  and now  at any given time we're sitting at about 100 quail.  so quail math equals chicken math. Same thing.  very much so. And it's especially because it's so easy to hatch out your own.
06:17They're mature in eight weeks. uh Some mature faster, but generally they're all mature by eight weeks and laying. You know who's a boy, who's a girl. So within two weeks or within two months, you can vent sex them  and  separate the boys from the girls.  Unfortunately, they are not like chickens in you can't you cannot successfully have a bachelor flock. So  unfortunately, um
06:45The extra males do  end up in freezer camp because um they are very unkind to one another if you have too many roosters in the cubby. But yes, we  very quickly went from 15 in  a hutch to now we have an indoor aviary in our barn because they are very flighty birds. They are very prone to oh
07:11offing themselves if they get scared by anything. And so just with the number of predators we have around, we felt that it was best to keep them under stimulated a little bit in that sense.  And so they have an indoor aviary that we have a bunch of hidey holes and we have artificial sunlight and we keep them as entertained as possible and they get to run around but they you know, they just seem to live their happy little  lives they are.
07:42They're sweet, they're beautiful.  are  what I would refer to as a feathered potato. They do not have brain cells or personality  of some larger poultry, but that's okay. That's okay. Cause they are still lovable. Well, that was a very good introduction to quail. have a couple of questions.
08:04Is it a pain in the butt to crack quail eggs? Because I've heard that quail eggs, you need three quail eggs to equal one chicken egg if you're going to do scrambled eggs. So is it is it hard to crack the eggs or is it just like cracking a chicken egg? It's just smaller. So you actually are best off using an egg scissors for quail eggs because they are. It's not so much the size, it's that they have a much thinner shell, but a much thicker membrane than a chicken egg.
08:33So if you try to crack it, you kind of end up just crumbling it without actually breaking through the membrane. So um you can buy quail egg scissors and cut the top off and dump them out. So that actually makes it very slick and easy,  way less getting, you know, digging shell out of the bowl or the pan with your fingers um than sometimes I have with our chicken eggs. using the scissors is very simple.
08:59Okay, cool, I didn't know such a thing existed. So I have learned something new yet again on a podcast that I am doing. And then for the quail meat, my husband asked me to ask you this. said, can you ask her how she would describe how to cook quail meat and how it tastes? Does it taste like the dark meat on a chicken? What does it taste like? I can honestly, don't eat our quail.
09:28because I'm just not a big meat fan. My husband reports that it is like the dark meat. It's not a lot of meat per bird, but it is very rich. It cooks quickly. They're very easy to process. And typically the way that we cook them is in a crock pot, kind of with potatoes and spices and
09:58broth just sort of stewed. um But I know that a lot of people like to braise them and stuff. I will say generally it's just that my husband makes them more than I do because he eats them and he is a little bit lazier about the food preparation.  I understand. um My husband and I both love to cook, but  weeknights are kind of a pain in the butt because he doesn't always get home at the same time. um weekends are when we actually cook.
10:28And that's when we make things that we want to spend time making  together. um The reason he asked me to ask you is because I'm not a fan of the dark meat on chicken. And he was like, if we get quail, we can have quail meat like three times a week. And I was like, not if it tastes like the dark meat on chicken.  Maybe not. Yeah, I can say it definitely. um
10:53It has that game-ier smell to it when it's cooking. And so you can tell it is, you know, even though they are conventionally raised, is still definitely a game bird that you're eating.  Yeah, I had pheasant one time and it was really, really good. And I was like, why did I not know that pheasant is  yummy? I had no idea. um OK, so here's my here's my big question, because he and I have been going around about this a little bit.
11:22because we both have differing opinions about many things.  I don't know that there is a market in Minnesota for quail meat or quail eggs. And I also don't know how much it would cost, you know, a round number to get started with like a rooster and six hens just to try it out for ourselves. So  do you have answers on that? Yes. So I can say there is a market in Minnesota and in Southern Minnesota. We actually sell our quail eggs at the St. Peter food co-op.
11:52um And depending on the time of year, so like  around the holidays, we were selling a lot more. We were resupplying them pretty regularly. There are other times where it's, you know, we're only dropping off 10 dozen every few weeks.  So it's not, they're not necessarily flying off the shelves, um but there is a market for it.  And we are...
12:17going to be opening our own farm stand here in the next month once  we can  get all the ice cleared away and keep it cleared away for a little bit  to get that set up. there  is Soul Foods in Lower North Mankato, a Korean foods market. They sell quail eggs. ah I know that Rebel Rooster partners with some  wineries and they have
12:42quail egg pizzas and stuff that they get, they source their quail eggs from rebel roosters. So there, there is a market. I, we have not tried to sell our meat yet. Our meat, have mostly kept for ourselves or given away to friends and family. So I can't speak to that, but,  um,  the spaces I'm in online, does seem like there is definitely a market for that.  Okay. Cause
13:09I was just, he was all excited and he was like, we could get quail and we can  take the eggs and we can incubate the eggs and we can sell the meat and we can sell the eggs and that. And I was like,  um,  number one, cool idea. Number two, slow down for a minute. We need to some research. Yes,  absolutely. And that's where we started with so few.  Um, and where we started, I mean, we would have every, if my husband had his way, we would have every farm animal under the sun.  Um,
13:39that, as I mentioned before, I would end up taking care of because once it comes to that part, he's like, oh, well, I'm not that interested anymore. um But so we started small. We  ordered, I want to say from  Hoover Hatchery down in  Iowa.  We ordered some chicks to start with once they aged out. um
14:03We were able to figure out the hens from the roosters. Our kids had already named every single one of them. We tried to do the bachelor flock because  we did not have the kids permission to process the quail. That didn't work.  they did end up in freezer camp and we don't even bother with it anymore because we know it's not going to go well. But the  introductory cost, especially compared to  larger poultry, is  much lower.
14:31not only in the sense of the birds themselves being less expensive, or if you can find hatching eggs, even less expensive. And I will say, that sense, shipped quail eggs, so you might not be able to find a local supplier. Anybody who wants to look at hatching out eggs can feel very confident in ordering shipped quail eggs because
14:58they have a much higher success rate than shipped chicken eggs or goose eggs or whatever. They are safely going to  get an 80 % hatch rate on shipped quail eggs. They're very, very hardy.  So that's a good way to cut that introductory cost is just ordering the eggs because uh most of them will end up hatching.  And then just their space requirements. Each bird requires about a square foot. Some people will say
15:28three birds per square foot, but that  is too crowded and quail can be very, very vicious with one another. And we would never recommend anything less than one square foot per bird, um even in our aviary setting where they're running around all day long.  a  lot of people keep them in hutches are first because we just had so few.  We bought some two by fours at Home Depot and built our hutch, made a plywood floor. um
15:57And the, was a couple hundred bucks versus our chicken coops, which we all know you cannot build for a couple hundred bucks. Not unless you have your own trees and a sawmill. Exactly.
16:14Yeah, we bought some of the  already made garden sheds that they have at like Home Depot in Lowe's. our chickens have chicken mansions because they're bigger sheds.  so it's really funny when it snows because the front of the sheds look like little houses. so it's really pretty. And my husband will take pictures of the snow sticking to the doors.  And I'm like, oh my god, our chickens live in a castle.
16:43That's funny because we actually have the same setup for our coops. we just like that, A, they have more vertical space. They like getting up high to roost. ah It's functional. It's pre-made.  Handles the weather well. Yes. It's so easy to insulate. um So we actually do the same thing. They have like a little loft in there that they can go up and.
17:08hang out in. We have outdoor runs. We have such high predator pressure that we don't do free ranging. But we have massive runs that we were able to just attach to this pre-made shed that's very sturdy and build it out from there. ours too. And we've got the little like solar lights that are, it looks so fancy and it's just full of chickens.
17:35It's such a special building for such an average animal.  Okay.  Well,  I am so thrilled that you told me all those things about quail because now I have answers to give to my husband. Because I was trying to look everything up and I was like, why don't I just talk to somebody who knows what they're doing?  So much easier. um So when you  when you incubate the eggs, is there
18:03Is there a special incubator for quail or can you just get an incubator and it has trays that will fit the eggs?  No, you can put it into any  incubator. um You can get attachments, inserts for different incubators. So like a Matty Coop, you can buy  3D printed inserts that keep smaller eggs upright or  a Nurture Right 360 is another incubator lots of people have.
18:33you can buy an insert for that, or you can double up eggs in any incubator that has chicken slots. I find that they roll around a little goofy and sometimes they get crunched with that thin shell. So I prefer to get a quail specific insert when I can. But I've had 95 % hatch rate success in cheapo incubators I got off of Amazon. So you don't need anything special at all. They have a
19:02shorter incubation period than chickens as well. So they are an 18 day incubation period. Like a little over two weeks. Yeah. Yes. And I don't know that I've ever had them take the full 18 days. Usually we have them popping out like popcorn after about 16 days. um And they  do pop out like popcorn. They hatch so fast. You can hardly even catch them unzipping. just like, there's a quail. um
19:32They don't require different um humidity or temperatures or anything like that. So it's very much as set it and forget it as a chicken egg. You just got to put it in the lockdown a little earlier. Nice. And then do you have to put them in a brooder for a few days or a week after they're hatched?  Yes, we do keep them in a brooder  generally just because we um
19:59don't want to mix them in with the rest of the covey until we have been able to sex them. We keep them  in  a separate, we brood them in the basement for the first week or so when we want to keep a close eye on them. And then we move them out to the barn and they're  in a hutch situation where we can keep the heat lamps on them and keep them separate until they are grown out enough for us to tell who's a boy, who's a girl. And then  the girls and any boys we want to keep get.
20:28tossed in with the cubby.  And on the Hutch's, how tall do they have to be? Because you mentioned that they're very good at unliving themselves. how tall do they need to be? Yes, that's a really good question. this is, it's so specific. This is one of the very specific things when it comes to quail. You do not want any height that is between 18 inches floor to ceiling  or six feet floor to ceiling.
20:57So you can have them in a hutch that is no taller than 18 inches, Florida ceiling,  or  in our aviary, we have eight foot ceilings because um quail cannot control their flight. They get startled at their own shadows. They get startled at absolutely everything. um One time I had an extra nesting pad and I was like, oh, maybe they'll like this. I put that in their aviary. They did not lay for two weeks because that was such a disturbance to them.
21:25terrified them, they wouldn't do it. So they are very flighty  and they go straight up. So if they flush  and there is a ceiling  at say two, three, four feet above their head, they will hit the ceiling and break their necks. So  it's really important. That is the one most important thing with raising quail.  The other thing being their feed, which I'll touch on in a second, but
21:53that height is very specific. So I would say 15 to 18 inches floor to ceiling for a hutch. Okay. Cool. Go ahead. Yeah. Sorry. And then I would say the only, the one other really important thing I would say with quail is their feed requirements  are a little bit, well, they're quite a bit different than um other poultry. They require a higher.
22:19protein. So they do need be started on a 30 % game bird feed. We get ours, we source ours locally here in Minnesota  from a mill down in Mabel. And then  we  use Chick Starter for them in their adult life because that's at that 21 % and that keeps them a lot healthier. um We
22:47don't use a layer feed because of the roosters. So we provide calcium separately. We actually use uh a reptile  enclosure substrate that's calcium based  because they're so small.  can't handle the crushed oyster shells and we're not going to try to grind it up in a food processor.
23:10But so that  is another distinction to be aware of is that they do have different nutritional needs. So you can't start them  on a regular chick starter, a regular adult layer feed.  They do best when they have that higher level of protein.  Okay, good to know. Thank you. Hold on one second.
23:33I was gonna cough and I didn't want to cough in your ear. uh So we're looking at a little bit of  of fundage for the outlay to start this but once we get started it would be okay. Yes, yes and they're  they're so self-sufficient like you can just keep going you can just keep taking your own eggs especially because they lay so many.
23:59that it doesn't feel like you're cutting into anything to save a few to toss in the incubator. um And you  just keep going. There's never a point where  I feel like we have to invest anymore in new birds. We do like to. Every so often,  we will buy some hatching eggs from outside to just add genetics back into our covey to  keep things  fresh.
24:29But you can go several generations before that's even a concern. And certainly we have  more than the average person keeping some for their family would have. Yeah.  Cool. Oh, my God, Caitlin.  I was really hoping that you were going to be  a quail expert lady. And you are. I'm so thrilled that I got to talk to you because  this whole weekend, every other sentence was I was thinking about the quail question.
24:57I'm like, oh my God, we're obsessed. Okay.  And I just, needed somebody who does it because you  know things that Google doesn't know. Trial and error.  And I do,  I'm glad to info dump about  our uh quail anytime.  Yeah. And I was like, am I being  like, I don't know,  terrible? Am I a terrible person asking you when you're only half an hour away?  But
25:27But people aren't necessarily gonna drive from Jordan down to Mankato to get your quail eggs. No, absolutely not. And we don't expect them to at all. And again, you know, we know we're not even the only ones in the Mankato area. And I think that's great. And I think that's fine. And, yeah, definitely not a concern  on our front.  Good.  I just I always worry because usually people who are in
25:56agriculture because quails agriculture. They're pretty good about no, you should try it if you want to try it. Absolutely. But there's always one person somewhere that's like, oh, they're going to be competition. That's not cool.  Not not not my vibe at all.  Yes. And I didn't say anything to my husband about this and he's going to listen to this episode because it's full of information he wants. I'm going say it anyway.  He was talking about ducks and I was like,
26:24It wouldn't be fair to get ducks. And he's like, why? I said, because we have no running water on our property. There's no creek, there's no pond, there's nothing. And ducks like to swim.  Quail don't care. They don't want to swim. Nope, they don't at all. They just want to... We  have some... I bought some totes, some like decorative storage totes.
26:47Those are flipped upside down inside their aviary. You can cut some evergreen boughs down and create little hidey holes for them. They  don't even want to roost. They just want to run around on the ground and hang out and eat.  How do they handle the really cold weather in  Minnesota?  They do fairly well. Again, ours are indoors, but they are in an unheated barn. know,  they're...
27:17there have been times as you know this winter where it has been absolutely necessary to go out three times a day and give them some fresh water because freezing in 20 minutes. But aside from that, do well. I will say when we were having 40 below, we would lose one just from.
27:39shock to the system. were generally our older birds that  we would lose one after got super, super dangerously cold.  aside from that,  they do really well. just huddle up together, fluff up their feathers, especially because they're on the ground um and they can kind of  burrow down into the bedding. do great.  Good to know. Thank you. uh
28:04And then the other question I have, because I didn't think I'd look it up or ask my husband if he knew,  is are there wild quail in Minnesota? There are not wild quail in Minnesota. um We  used to have a small population  of Bob White quail in Minnesota, um but we do not have  an extant  population at this time of any species. OK. Hmm.
28:34Did people shoot them? Did they migrate? Do you know what happened to the quail? Yeah, they seem to be migrating to... Well, okay, so here's... I'll go on another tangent. I actually work for Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever also. That's my full-time job. I have a lot of information on this specific topic too.
28:58Most of it is because of our habitat loss. So the degradation of our native tall grass prairies has been  what has diminished quail populations across the entire United States and has condensed them to very small pockets around the country. uh And it's generally where they can find the best cover. So because we don't have the proper
29:26ecosystems for them to thrive in.  They've just left.  Well, they got to go where they want to be, just like humans do.  Okay. And then the last thing I want to bring up, because I saw it on your Facebook page and I was very impressed, was your post about chickens  and what  the definitions are for free range and cage free and all that. Because I am going to share that on my page.  Perfect. Yes. That was...
29:56something,  I was looking for sturdier  egg flats um for storing our eggs  before we packaged them.  And I ended up on the site  of a company that makes  products for conventional farm setups. And I just was struck by this is best case scenario. The pictures they're sharing on their website are.
30:22best case scenario. This is them saying, look at how humane this is. And it was just like  shoulder to shoulder room full of chickens with no room to move. And that's cage free.  And so I just think that people are going to the grocery store and they're spending extra money for these labels that do,  that don't mean a whole lot. They do not mean that these birds are living in more humane conditions. If they were more humane conditions, they wouldn't be de-beaked so that they don't.
30:50tear each other apart out stress. Even with free range, they just have to technically have access to the outdoors and two square feet per bird indoors. They do not have any minimum space outdoors. So it could be, you know, a teeny tiny run that only five of them can fit in at a time. But that meets the legal definition of free range. And that's what people are paying several extra dollars at the store for, is to have this label that doesn't actually mean those chickens are treated well.
31:21And so I  just thought it was worth pointing out because I don't think a lot of people understand that. And I know that some people will hear that we don't free range ours and think that that's  awful and abusive, but we do have 15, 20 square feet per bird, as opposed to  one to two square feet per bird.  keep constant enrichment. is exclusively for their safety because we are positioned
31:50along the river, m surrounded by woods. We have eagles, hawks, um raccoons, opossum, coyotes, foxes. We have red foxes, gray foxes. We have other people's barn cats. We have just so many things around all of the time. uh Plus  I am  doing breeding. so just from a biosecurity standpoint, we also have lots of wild turkeys that can bring disease. And um so for us, it's just
32:19it just is a safer thing for them. But we do our best to make sure they have the maximum amount of space. They have the best nutrition they can. They have constant uh enrichment that's very, important to us, constant interaction. They're well loved. um And that's just
32:41I just think that people should be aware that if  they're already paying extra at the grocery store for these labels, then they maybe shouldn't be turning their nose up at the fact that farm fresh eggs might cost a dollar or two more  because they are far exceeding those minimum legal expectations for a label to be slapped on an egg carton at the store.  Absolutely. And we sell our eggs.
33:06at our farm stand and I am so thankful to our customers who just swing in the driveway, park, go in, buy their eggs, leave their money in the bin and go home with really yummy eggs at $5 a dozen. Yes, and it's, mean, we're not making a big profit margin out of the $5 a dozen. It's very little really, but it feels good.
33:30It feels good to know that we're taking really, really good care of our birds. They are not de-beaked. They are well-loved. They get to go out and sit in a lawn chair with them, and they'll all climb up on my lap and get scratches. um we, again, we source our feed locally. We feed our birds on a certified organic diet. So we get a locally grown, locally milled certified organic diet um that we go straight to the mill for. We actually just picked some up a couple of days ago.
34:00Um, and it's just, I can say they, taste better. They, the, the birds are not stressed. And I feel like you can tell that when you're, when you're eating the eggs. Um, and I think that it's, it's worth the, it's, it's the $5 farm fresh eggs from birds that are well-loved is worth more than the $7 free range.
34:30eggs at the store.  Yes.  And as we all learned during COVID supply chains go down.  if you want to be smart, get to know your local growers and producers and buy from them. Yes. And that's  very much part of my motivation for,  what we're doing here  is not, not just self-sufficiency, but having the skills  and the means.
34:56to provide support for my community because I think community care is so important. And I think that people need to be able to oh make community. They need to be able to help one another. And this is what I feel like I can do to be part of that no matter what else is happening in the greater  scope of things. The only thing that has been keeping me sane in 2026 is the fact that we have chickens.
35:24that lay really good eggs and we get to sell them to people who want them. Yes. It's amazing. It has been a very, very long 2026 in Minnesota for us folk who live here. Yes, it has been. I can't it's only been two months. I can't believe that February is almost over.
35:46What the heck, it all went by at the speed of really cold molasses, but also in the blink of an eye. And I don't know how that works. Time is just weird. All right, Caitlin, thank you so much. Like if I was standing in front of you, I would hug you. For all the information you just dumped, because I really needed to learn about quail so I can give my husband some answers. Absolutely, I'm so happy to share. Where can people find you? We are on...
36:16Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. We are just quirky quail acres on all of those.  Did I say quirky quail farms or did I say... No, I believe you said quirky quail acres. I talked to so many people. I never know if I say the right thing. Pretty sure you did. If you didn't, I missed it.  All right. It's quirky quail acres. If I said farm at the beginning, I might have, who knows. um I really appreciate your time.
36:43And as always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Have a great day. It's so pretty. Get outside and have some fun if you can. You as well. Thank you so much. All right. Bye. Bye.
 

A Better Yard

Today I'm talking with Brad at A Better Yard. You can also follow on Facebook. If you use the code atinyhome, you'll get a discount on the price for the first month.
 
Content Seeds Collective
https://www.homesteadliving.com/subscribe/ref/41/
https://homesteadliving.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-planner/ref/41/
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
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
00:00If you're a homesteader who wants to get paid for your content without living on social media, check out SteelSpoonFarm.com. Founder Jen Kibler teaches you how to build a real blog or your email list and use Pinterest for sustainable marketing. Inside her coaching group, Content Seeds Collective, you'll get weekly live coaching, a private community, and access to her Root Seller Resource Library  full of tutorials and templates.
00:21Join today for just $37 a month and start building a business that doesn't depend on the algorithm. A tiny homestead podcast is sponsored by Seals Spoon Farm. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters.  I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Brad Tabke,  the founder of A Better Yard in Shakopee, I think, Minnesota.  Good morning, Brad. How are you?
00:49Good morning. I am happy to be coming to you from Shakopee. OK. And I forgot to mention that he's also a Minnesota state representative for Shakopee.  So ah how is your day? I would ask you about the weather, but since you're only about half an hour, an hour away from me, I know that it's sunny and warm. Warm. Warm is good. It is.  It felt so nice. Like  I was out this morning already. I had bird feeders to fill and do all that kind of stuff. And so I was out this morning and it was
01:19gorgeous and I hear we're supposed to get some snow later this week. So  that would actually be kind of nice to give some more moisture.  That would help a lot. Yes. ah My husband actually cut down an ash tree  last weekend and he was out there cutting it up this weekend in a t-shirt and like khaki pants and sneakers. But  it's a goofy February. Goofy is the weather's goofy all the time right now. We'll see what happens with that. it  yeah it was a gorgeous gorgeous weekend.
01:50It really was and I was like, why am I warm? And I looked up at the thermostat in the house, it was 75 degrees and the furnace was not on. I was like, oh, duh, when it's warm outside, it's gonna get warmer in the house. Go fig. Exactly. It's a good ambient heating there. Yeah, we've got lots of windows and so the sun was just pouring in the living room and I was like, why am I hot? And I'm like, oh, duh, I know I'm hot. It's not.
02:17It's February, but it's not February according to the weather. Okay, so you had a group called Minnesota Gardening and you changed the name to a better yard in January. So tell me the history on this. Yeah, so during COVID, it feels like all the stories now start with during COVID XYZ happened.
02:44We during COVID, I had a bunch of friends who were asking me they wanted to start doing planting vegetables and flowers and those kinds of things and wanted something to do. And so they knew that I was I have a horticulture degree from Iowa State and have been in the landscape industry since I graduated from college. Actually, since I was in middle school working in a greenhouse. And so I have been
03:10started that out helping just friends. they're like, Brad, we want to pay you to do this. And how do we do that? And I was like, I don't know. I'm not sure oh how we can do all this and make it make sense. And so we were just helping folks. And uh then we set up what we called Minnesota Gardening to grow that and stretch that to be  helping  with landscapes and helping make sure people knew how to  reduce their chemical use and just fundamental things like that,  along with
03:38fruits and vegetables and making sure to grow  those kinds of things. And so  we started that and was very Minnesota centric. It was very much here in  our thing that we wanted to be doing.  But then it continued to grow from there. And so it was the focus shifted  through COVID and after COVID to  focusing on  environmental landscape and making sure that people knew  how to  eliminate chemicals, how to feed pollinators, how important it was.
04:05that we have a diversity of  native and helpful plants in our yards  and making sure that those kinds of things, saving water, storing carbon  that are important for our future, that those kinds of things are  happening. And so  we grew beyond just Minnesota  and just gardening into focusing  on making sure that we're helping to  do, you know, little things like helping to reduce the risk of cancer from chemical use and those kinds of things. And so
04:33We switched to a better yard this year and it's been going really, really well. I'm excited about it. Awesome. I'm really happy for you because when you you when you rebrand, it's it's a it's a gamble. So I'm glad that it's going well for you. I want to tell a little story when when I moved in with my husband back over 24 years ago, I think now. Yeah, at least over 24 years ago, he lived in Jordan.
05:01And he lived on a 10th of an acre lot with a house and a four car garage on it. you can imagine how little room  there was for growing anything.  And the backyard was basically crab grass and weeds.  And his mom was moving and she gave us some  iris roots or whatever they call rhizomes  and some lilies and some violets.  And she was like,
05:29take these and plant them wherever you want to plant them. And neither my husband nor I had really considered putting in gardens as it were until that moment. And there was a pine tree growing in front of our bedroom windows between our house bedroom windows and the sidewalk. It was a little tiny, maybe six foot deep by 14 foot long bed where that pine tree was.
05:58And it was just all weeds in the pine tree. And so  I said, would you cut the pine tree and can we get some stuff to amend the soil and we'll put the flowers out front? Cause that would be really pretty.  And he was like, sure.  And so we took that tree down without breaking a window, which was amazing  and ah got everything going. And it was really a sweet little garden,  really pretty.  And after the first summer, that winter, I was like, you know, we have a backyard. And he said, he sorta.
06:28And I said, I know it's small. I said, but I said, if we tilled that up and amended the soil,  we could be growing food, not crabgrass and weeds. And we had four kids at the time.
06:42He was like,  oh, almost free food. said, yeah, almost free food. mean, that first year is going to be expensive, but after that,  it'll even out. So we ended up working on that yard all that fall, think. No, was spring, I'm sorry. Got some little beds planted. We had a huge,  can't remember, rhubarb patch that had been there for years already. That stayed. You do not want to dig up rhubarb that's over a hundred years old, because that's good stuff.
07:11and ended up growing tomatoes  and  summer squash and cucumbers in herb garden that first year.  And it did so great. And we were the only ones on our block doing this. Our neighbors thought we were nuts.  The reason I tell this story is because it got our neighbor right next to us. Her little girl was very interested in the cucumbers growing through the fence. And that got her interested in gardening.
07:40and our neighbors, our former neighbors across the street.  She,  for the last two years has been doing cut flowers in her yard that's even smaller than our former yard was.  Wow. So, so you can  be an influence, you can make a difference on the, in the smallest ways and it becomes a movement. Exactly.
08:02And it's so, important for people just to get  started with something, right? It's just so important that people find a place and find just a little thing. And what  we find happens a lot with people. So we do a lot of teaching around this getting started  concept of things. And  we help people understand that  it doesn't need to be this big grandiose. You don't need to have huge plans. You don't need to have all these things.  You just need to get started with one thing. uh
08:31And just like with with Iris, um getting that out there and getting that going and learning,  learning the rhythms of how that plant grows and when you can expect to have  Iris, like beautiful Iris flowers for yourself and what you need to be doing. And then you can take and go to the next step and go to the next step. And it's a  it's a ladder to get to  really great things.  It really is.  And  there is something really special.
09:01about planting a seed, nurturing it, and watching it become something different. And I think that's true in anything. I mean, if you want to write a book. uh A book is not a book until the idea comes out of your head,  onto paper, onto the computer keyboard, and gets printed and people can read it. A garden is not a garden until you plant a seed. Right. Absolutely.  right.
09:28Now is like a lot of people don't realize it, right, especially for like native and local plants to be growing in your areas. Like right now is a really, really great time to be planting those seeds. So like coneflowers and things like that and planting those during the winter is is the time to be doing it. And so just grabbing a packet of seeds and tossing it in your backyard or tossing it into a milk jug for some winter sowing is a beautiful way to get started.
09:58Yes, and it's all simple. I think the reason that people drag their feet is because they think it's going to be  a lot of time and a lot of hassle and a lot of energy expended for very little return. And I'm going tell you right now,  it can be a lot of work. And it can be a lot of time, but it doesn't have to be.  And even if it is, it's so worth it when that cone flower blooms and you're the one that put it where it is. Right. It's so rewarding, especially if you have like
10:27kids and family around and that kind of thing or grandkids or wherever you're at in your stage of life, like involving them in these processes is always so like we have when we start things for the garden from seed inside like tomatoes and that kind of stuff, which I don't think I'm going to end up having enough time to get done this year, which is terrible. But I know it's it's been rough. And so we'll see what happens with it. But like my youngest, she's 14 now.
10:56And uh we  check on the babies. call the babies  the little plants coming up. We call those the babies. And we check on the babies every morning and just seeing  who sprouted overnight and where it's at and all that kind of stuff.  we'll see what we can get done there.  we're a little behind our schedule with life.  Yes. And actually, we can talk about that in the last five or 10 minutes.
11:22I usually do these for half an hour or so at about 20 minutes. I'll let you know we can  you can share what you would like about why things have been so crazy  for you. um I'm going to lose my kitchen table this weekend to seedling trays.  Oh, beautiful. What kinds of stuff do you grow?  We will be growing. I'm sure we will be growing thyme because I love it and I cook with it a lot. So we'll have thyme babies.  Beautiful. Tomatoes, cucumbers, squash.
11:51um Probably chives. Chives are a really easy thing to start and grow for anybody listening. um Rosemary. Rosemary from seed is so fun because half the time it doesn't take and half the time it grows like crazy. So  when you plant rosemary seeds, there's a 50-50 shot whether you'll get the seedlings and when you do, it's like hallelujah, they came up.
12:15I'm always like, Hallelujah, they came up on all of them.  It's just amazing to me to think about like  how  seeds are just this little  packet and this little bundle of everything you need for a  tree to grow or a plant to grow or however that is.  And just that it's all contained, especially when you put like a little, you know, a poppy seed down or you put a little  tiny tomato seed and what that grows into is just uh a wonder the whole time. And it's it's amazing to watch.
12:46It's miraculous. is the epitome of the word miraculous. Exactly.  I love it. I  am not the gardener. My husband is. I always make sure I say that because I used to be  in it with him. And as I've gotten older, I'm not nearly as entertained with it as he is. He is an avid, ridiculously obsessed gardener. Like he just loves it.  And every spring he's like, I'm going to go get seed trays. And you can just see him bouncing on his heels because he's so excited.
13:16Well, it's such a  great thing for this time of year, like  when everything just feels,  I mean, we had a great weekend here, but it's going to get cold again and we're going to get snow again and  we're going to have whatever our uh suffer through our  third or fourth winter, whatever we end up doing and just having that little bit of hope and that little bit of excitement  that we know the warmer days and being able to be outside are coming  and make it through. March is my least favorite season of the year.
13:44And it is just the hardest. And so those are always great to help us get through. Yes, the having the little green babies in the kitchen just makes my heart happy. Every March and April while they're taking over my kitchen table, which I'm not happy about, but I am very happy to have the seedlings.  One of the things I would say is if you have a dog that is tall enough to reach wherever you have your seedlings growing,  you might want to figure out a way to put them out of a dog's reach because a dog will eat
14:14babies seedlings. They will. I've never heard that before.  Ours have always been out of reach of our dog, but  she's never shown much interest in them. Oh, well, our dog is short. She's only about, I think her back is just below my knee and I'm five foot nine.  She can't reach the table. But the first year that she was full grown and we had seedlings on the table, she was very interested in all the smells coming from the plants. Oh, funny.  I wonder if it's the fertilizer maybe.
14:44I don't know, but as soon as we had mint growing, she was always coming out the kitchen with me and sniffing the air by the table. And I'm like, you must like mint.  Funny. Yeah. So be careful. And cats will eat stablyngs like crazy. Oh, that definitely I've heard that for sure. And we're not cat people. So I don't have that issue. Yep. We don't have cats in the house anymore. We have barn cats. Barn cats are great because they're friendly,  but they're outside.
15:14Yep. Doing their job. It's a good thing. Oh, we have three six month old kittens right now. I was watching them play in sunshine yesterday and one of them popped out of a bunch of wood that we have stacked for our wood burning furnace and had a mouse in its mouth. And I was like, all right, six months old and catching mice. I'm impressed. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah, it's they know what they're supposed to be doing.
15:40Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And they're gorgeous cats. Two of them are long-haired. One of them is short-haired.  And I'm so in love with these babies. And  I suspect we'll probably have kittens by fall. And we didn't have kittens last summer at all because we didn't have a female cat on the property. So I'm very excited to have some more barn kittens come fall. Fun. Yeah. And we always find homes for them. So it all works out great because  other farms need barn cats too. Right.
16:10We don't feel too bad about having more kittens because it's  once or twice a year and then we find homes for them at new farms. So it works out okay. Exactly. So  what  what do people get out of this a better yard  program because it costs money and I want people to know what they're getting for that money. Yeah. So we are um it's thirty seven dollars a month or people can get a huge discount if they do an annual
16:39membership. so what we do is we teach folks how to grow with a focus on the environment and focus on our local ecosystems. Because as we as we know, cancer rates are skyrocketing. And those have been proven now to be mostly, or I don't know, mostly is the right word to use. many of them have been proven to be
17:05chemically induced by other chemicals we use on our landscape and our properties and in the environment.  And  we need to make sure to protect ourselves and we need to make sure to protect those around us. I'm doing that. And so  this is  one way  we teach people how to reduce and eliminate chemical use in their landscape and in their lawns. then as well  from there, we work very hard on  on
17:29feeding pollinators songbirds because we insect populations that are collapsing, partially due to chemical use, partially due to habitat destruction,  as well as songbirds. And the it is just amazing how uh much those populations in United States have dropped over the  course of last three decades.  And it's up to us to help  figure that out and out to  provide the habitats to support these things.  And the fun thing is by
17:57doing this by eliminating chemicals and by  feeding pollinators and by doing that work.  What happens from there  is that  that also ends up saving our clean water, which we know that we also need to do because we have uh polluted water systems and we are uh having an epidemic of non clean water available for people.  And then also stores carbon to help eliminate and reduce climate change and everybody.
18:25does their part. So it's a really good thing to kind of go back to our roots and go back to where we started.  And so we teach people how to do those things. So we have a monthly theme  every month where we talk through like this month is all about ecology and understanding  what our uh local ecosystems need and how they work. And then we give tools every weekend for people  knowing how to  enact these things and do them. But the  biggest thing, is that
18:54It's a community of people who  care about similar things and who uh want to build a similar world together.  That is  safe for our kids to play in the grass and safe for  insects to come and  use our backyards or front yards as habitats and making sure that we're doing those things  to make the world a better place. I love oh it. And if I didn't already have a handle on all that, I would be joining your community.  However, I have a handle.
19:24And I don't have time, I don't have the resources right now to join another thing. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't, but I'm probably not going to just full disclosure.  the  focus is on people who are  in a transition and focus on people who are, ah you have just purchased a new house or just moved or that kind of thing, or you've come to some sort of like, there are so many people that are having these
19:51I mean, I'm sure that everyone listening to this knows of someone who's having a health scare right now or something going on or worse. uh And know that they want to start doing these things. It's always been in the back of their head that they want to start uh reducing the amount of  weed killer that they use on their lawn because it's bad for everything.  And so it's those kinds of folks who  need the help and need to know where to start and just how to get going on these things so that it's a
20:21It's a livable practical ecosystem. And it also ends up reducing the amount of work your yard takes for yourself. It also reduces the amount of uh time and energy and money that it takes to  to get things going.  Yes. And as I always say, you can't eat grass. Right. Exactly. And nothing can eat grass, not even like  we as humans can eat grass. But it
20:48Our lawns do nothing to support any sort of uh other living creature.  so it's really important that we provide that like  our...  So like if we talk about monarchs and monarchs are now on the endangered species list  because they are, there's too many chemicals being used and not enough  milkweed that is available for them to eat across their migratory patterns. And so it's really important that we...
21:14all work together to develop these kinds of things so that not just humans can eat, but also  that we have things that are, you know, aesthetically pleasing and happy and great to look at that provide ah that piece for us. Also, you can do that  and do more with your landscape in your  Absolutely. I love what you're doing, Brad. It's amazing.  Thank you. All right. So you were saying actually, before we get into this.
21:41The one thing I will tell people is that if you really get into gardening, don't be surprised if chickens show up on your property fairly soon because that's what happened to us. We started gardening and then we got chickens. that's funny. It's a natural follow through a lot of the time. Exactly. Yeah. mean, that whole thing of taking care of yourself and like and working and knowing where your food is coming from and knowing what is actually in your
22:11landscape that your dogs or your kids or your grandkids are, are rolling around in and playing because we should be able to do that with a clear conscience and clear mind. And that's, that's what we, that's what we help people get to. it's, like you said, it's called a better yard and people can find us at a better yard.org. And there is a $37 to get started and we have a $30 discount that I forget exactly. this up on you, Mary.
22:38I there's a discount that people can get and I don't know if you can send it  just to start for seven bucks for the first month.  I can put in the show notes if you can get me a code. I will do that for sure.  Okay, cool.  Um,  and  yes, I agree with everything you just said about being able to just be out and playing and be safe. That's a good plan.  Um, okay, so I don't know how much you want to say about why you've been so busy.
23:06and why it's been so hard,  if you want to take the floor and talk about what's been going on, it's up to you. So we just came back from  Washington, D.C. and was working there with our senators and with a coalition of just absolutely incredible humans who are working  to help make the world a better place, which is what we all,  at least I hope that we all want to accomplish on things our communities have been  under assault by ICE and uh Shakopee specifically has, along with the Metro. um
23:35and then other places outside the Metro, Lesour, uh Winona, other places have been just  rocked by ice and for no  apparent reason  all the time. so it's the people have been literally plucked off the streets, uh trapped on roofs uh and just lots of terrible, terrible things have been  happening in our communities. And we have to  work together to protect them and work together to make sure that we are uh
24:04doing the best for our people that we possibly can. And so I just couldn't be more proud of Minnesota and  the amazing things that people have been  coming together to do and building these communities. And so it's a lot like we do at A Better Yard, which uh is  building  systems and building people together to find a path forward. And so that's uh what we've been doing  with pushing back against ICE here. ICE has a job to do. there are uh
24:34without a doubt, uh people who have committed crimes and bad people that we don't  want to have in our communities. There are uh reasons for having laws and having public safety and those kinds of things,  but that is  well uh underserved by what uh ICE is doing in our communities. And so it has been  super proud of all of our people and it has just been  overwhelming and taking up a ton of time. So I appreciate everybody.
25:02sticking with us and  being part of that journey as well  at A Better Yard.  Yeah, I really hope that this drawdown as they're calling it  continues because watching this from the outside has been, it's been really frightening and I can't imagine living in Minneapolis right now. I just can't. Yeah, it has, it's just been so unnecessary and um
25:30The scariest part to me is just that there's absolutely zero accountability, zero recourse. And from a lawmaker perspective,  like there's no way for us to hold people accountable for their actions. Like they  are uh doing  many, many illegal things and  in the name of  safety, right? And so  it is really  difficult to watch and difficult to experience. And just the number of
26:00drones that are constantly flying over my house. then  one day where I had a Blackhawk helicopter hovering  over my house ah and uh just the fear and intimidation tactics seem  well beyond anything that we have ever,  ever experienced  here in Minnesota and  anywhere else. And so  ICE, yeah, is going after ah the other day, just a quick story is that
26:27They stopped the family for no reason whatsoever other than their skin was brown. And they took that family and intimidated them, pulled them out of the car. And they had citizens that are all citizens. And so they let them go. And then they went, and this happened on the road. They pulled them over. And a couple hours later, they went to their house and started yelling at them and screaming at them and said that they would only leave this
26:56family of US citizens alone  if they  help them find five people and then they'll leave them alone. So it's extortion. It's just  horrible, horrible tactics  that just should not be who we are. And so it's really important that we hold,  we do everything we can to hold these folks accountable and make sure that they do actually leave. haven't seen uh evidence of that in Shakopee yesterday. We had dozens and dozens of agents here in town.
27:26and it's still as bad or worse than it was because they're extremely aggressive right now and we want them gone. Yeah, it's like when you kick a hornet's nest. Yeah, yeah. They visit my house often, not to make it about me because we need to make sure that we are centering this on people who are immigrants in the United States, who are the ones that really have...
27:54significantly less resources and ways to combat this than I do. And so I'm  doing everything I can to pull every lever  possible. We'll have a ton of bills with the legislature this year  to work on this issue and to help  Minnesota stand up in the face of this onslaught if it ever were to happen again, which I obviously hope it doesn't.  But I just don't know how we trust the federal government and all the people involved for this  moving forward.
28:24Yes. And for the listener who doesn't quite understand, Minnesota is a sanctuary state as in, as in we're okay with people coming here no matter where you're coming from, right? uh Yes, we are a very, very welcoming state and we want to make sure  that we're welcoming to immigrants and people who want to be here. Shakopee is uh built on
28:50immigrants and we have  a very large native population. We have Asian population. have  Somali folks. We have East African. We have  Hispanics and uh it makes our community who it is and it beautiful and wonderful and really, really great.  And, but that being said, like the, the sanctuary, what the federal government is saying on the sanctuary state  side of things  is just  not  accurate. Like we work.
29:16together if there are uh bad people and if there are things like that that should happen, we work together. But we also want to make sure that nobody is left  behind and they are,  if they, someone needs healthcare, we want to make sure because it's better for all of our communities and better for all of our kids in schools.  If everyone is fed and if everyone is healthy and everyone is going that direction.  And some people just genuinely don't agree with that. And I.
29:46I get it, but I disagree vehemently.  And we  should just be able to  do our thing. we should just,  they should leave us alone. And if the federal government had done their job  in making sure that we had secure borders, and this is not just a  Republican or a Democratic thing, this is  a uh United States of America federal government thing,  that if they had done their job, then this wouldn't be  a problem. But this is not the way.
30:13to fix the problem that they created. This should be a uh civil kind of uh path forward and find a way to make sure that the people who are incredible, wonderful, loving people and families and supporting families here are able to continue that. And it's a federal government issue to fix.  It is. And  I guess I want to end this off by saying that unless you can for sure positively track
30:40your ancestors back to the indigenous people of the United States.  We all have immigrant blood running through our veins. Absolutely. And that's a  really important piece of this is that we should  all love and trust and uh do the best we can  together because it's really important to recognize where we all came from. And like this work that we're doing here in Minnesota is uh standing on
31:08that work from  that's been going on for  centuries in the United States and making sure that we're protecting our people and making sure that we're protecting our neighbors and making sure that our communities are  as safe as we can possibly make them. Yep.  And uh we learned all of our growing things from the indigenous peoples who live near us. So that ties it back into gardening and homesteading and a better yard. How's that?
31:37That was really well done.  Okay. I'm not great at segues or  conclusions, but I tried really hard, That was perfect one. I'm proud of you for that one.  Thank you so much for being honest and straightforward and telling me what you think, because that's hard to get out of someone who is in politics. So  I very much appreciate it.  And this isn't, I want to say this, I don't know how to say it right.
32:05This is not about politics. This is about being good humans to each other. Right.  Exactly. And, uh, and, and,  and  working together with our community, like that's, that's what this  all, all is. And we can all do better when we all do better. Yes, absolutely.  So go out there and be a good human today, folks, cause it might make things better.  Um, so you can find Brad at abetteryard.org.
32:33And I highly recommend going and checking it out because it sounds like there's some fantastic knowledge and resources there. Thank you, Brad, for doing that.  Yeah, there is. And you can find me at AtinyHolmsteadPodcast.com.  And you can find, if you want to support the show, sorry,  you can do that at AtinyHolmstead.com slash support.  This was  really fun, Brad. You have the most wonderful radio voice. I told you that when we first talked. Thank you.
33:03I appreciate it. before we go, just want to make sure we can do the $30 off for the first for all of your listeners. If people want to go, it would just be $7 at and we can just use a tiny home and use that as the coupon code. we'll be go for those. So people use use the coupon code to get $30 off the first month and they can just check us out and see how wonderful our happy little community is. All right, I'm writing it down because I will forget a tiny home. Okay. Awesome.
33:32Thank you so much. appreciate your time and I hope you have a good day at your job. Thank you so much.
 

Steel Spoon Farm

Today I'm talking with Jen at Steel Spoon Farm. You can also follow on Facebook.
Content Seeds Collective
https://www.homesteadliving.com/subscribe/ref/41/
https://homesteadliving.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-planner/ref/41/
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
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
00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Jen Kibler  at Steel Spoon Farm  in Ohio.  And good morning, Jen. How are you? Good morning. Good. How are you? I'm good. How's the weather in Ohio this morning? Oh, it is beautiful. I think we're on fake spring round two already. It's going to go back to winter again this weekend, but I'll take it.
00:29Yeah, they were saying this weekend on the news that we would be getting snow this week, but I'm looking at the forecast and I'm like, I think LaSore, Minnesota is going to get rain. I don't think we're going to get snow. Yeah. We had 16 inches dump on us about three weeks ago now. So I'm glad to see the snow piles gone. We actually have grass again. So that's nice, but now it's mud season straight into mud season. So yeah, God love mud season. We have a, we have a dog and
00:59She freaking loves spring because she can go out and roll in the grass again. But she has these cute little feet and the cute little feet leave cute little dirty footprints all over my floor downstairs. And I'm just like, you know what? I'm not mopping the floor until the weekend. I'm going to it all at once. And then she's going to come in and walk on it again and I'll do it the following weekend because I am not mopping that floor every two hours. We have four.
01:25and two of them are great Pyrenees, then the other two are black labs. And the Pyrenees, of course, are like horse size.  And they just clobbed in so much mud into the kitchen this morning to eat breakfast. Oh my gosh. Yeah, Maggie's a 35 pound, well, maybe pushing 40 pound um Australian shepherd. So she's got these adorable little footprints, but they're not adorable when they're mud on my floor. tell me what tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do at Steel Spoon Farm.
01:55So we have kind of everything here. I've had horses my whole life. So I've got my three big old horses that are all retired now. And then we have two little  feral mini mules. And I say feral because I've literally never touched the one in the two years she's been here.  We'll just take her time. She knickers at me now. She does her little mule money. So we're making progress, but mules and everything has to be on their time.  And then we have a little mini pony too named Apple for my daughter. So she's so sweet.
02:24So we've got them and we have Angora goats  and then a bunch of just miscellaneous Nigerian dwarf goats too that are just, you know, they're pets. to sell some of the mohair off the Angoras. Haven't had time to even process it lately because I've been so busy with all my other business things. ah But I do really love spinning when I have the time. I've spun my own yarn, did a bunch of crochet with it.  Actually made the shawl that I wore in like our maternity pictures with
02:54hand spun mohair from our own goats. So that was really neat. um That's a needle felting with it, all kinds of stuff. I've sold it to all kinds of different people online on Etsy and then on my own site too.  Everything from fly  lure creators, they use the mohair for their fly lures, which was really odd. um To of course the reborn dolls, which is amazing to see how realistic those are, but they've used mohair for those.
03:22mask makers for theater mass in New York City, all kinds of stuff. So it's amazing to see how far that can stretch just from my little farm to all across the world.  is one of the reasons I love this podcast so much because  I hadn't even considered the fact that  that mohair would be used on the dolls. Yeah, they use it.  It was a local lady actually, and she  literally plucks one single hair at a time into these silicone doll.
03:51It's the patience I do not have  for that, but she does.  And if they have really fine hair, like if she's doing a memorial doll, she actually paints the hair on and uses a paintbrush that's one hair width and paints these tiny little baby hairs on these dolls. It's incredible. And then the mask maker in New York City. This is a crazy crossover, but my husband is a lifetime wrestling fan and
04:19this guy actually made the masks for mankind, for Mick Foley, mankind, and Undertaker, which are two of his favorites. And here he is buying mohair from my goats to make these theater masks. I thought, what a crazy small world that is. That's not small, that's miniscule world. Yeah, that was very niche. that was super cool. Wow. Wow. I just, every time I talk to somebody new, I find out something either
04:49I either learn something new that actually can be used in my life, or I find out something that has  nothing to do with anything that I do, but it's a really neat trivia fact.  So thank you. I now have a new trivia fact. oh I've never actually pet a mohair goat and I've never touched mohair in my life.  What does it feel like? hear it's really, really soft. Oh, it's so soft. And everybody thinks they're sheep.
05:18which  just because they're so fuzzy. uh But so I have to correct people all the time that they are actually goats.  They're in full fleece right now. We still call it fleece. Like there, if you take it the whole thing off, still collectively, it's called their fleece.  But it is  mohair. It's not fur. It's not wool. It's its own material. uh It's extremely fine  and quite slippery. Now that's that's kind of like a spinner term for like the slip or the feel of
05:47the material that you're spinning, it's so super fine. So a lot of the times people will blend it with wool  or some other material to make it a little bit more grabby for when they're spinning. But the Kidmo hair especially, so on the babies that are usually under a year, um have the finest, finest hair. It is like a cloud in your hands. It's so thin. That's the stuff that you're gonna use for knitting like your close to skin wear.
06:15kind of a thing. It's so fine and so high quality. As they get older, the hair quality sometimes goes down a little bit, but I have one of my oldest does, Patsy,  for everybody out there who knows Patsy.  She has  like  no grease  to her hair and  they have grease called a yolk. It's kind of like lanolin in wool where it has like a little bit of a greasy texture. That's what protects their skin, protects their hair. So goats have the same thing.
06:43but hers is so clean and so fine. She has hardly any curl. She's just like this big white cloud.  And her hair is my favorite to spin because I can spin it literally straight off of her. It's so clean and so nice.  But then I've got some of my goats that have  really, really tight curls. ah I've made like Santa ornaments, especially with those ones,  with the needle felting I've done. I needle felt their.
07:09curly little white locks on for Santa beards on the ornaments and things. So that's really fun. um Personality wise, they're very calm and quiet. um So if you're somebody that's used to the dairy goats, like especially Nubians are really loud. ah Even my Nigerians are pretty loud and friendly. uh The angoras are so super calm and quiet. They're just peaceful. They're really, really nice animals to have. And I'm glad that we got them.  Are they
07:36probably a weird question, but are they more expensive than any other goat? They are, but the same with any other breed. ah Depends on where you buy them from, what their bloodline is. We have all colored angora goats, which is a different breed set. Then there's also like the American white angoras, which is  the ones that you typically find like running in the herds by the thousands down in Texas. Those are the ones that are bred like for  commercial mohair. I actually have two of those.
08:05ah Their hair is totally different too. Those are the ones that have like they're really really tight curls their whole face is covered in it their legs They've got the pom-pom tails whereas the colored angoras because back in the day the colored angora used to actually be uh a Defect because if you had a hundred white angora goats, then you had one black one come through You can't put that black mohair in the same bundles as the white hair. So
08:31they kind of bred the color out of them for a long time. And then a couple breeders started breeding the color back in and grabbing those colored ones. So now there's all kinds of different colors of colored Angoras.  So it just depends on the breeder, where you find them,  the quality of the mohair too, body size, everything. But same with any other breed of goat, any other breed of animal, it just depends on where you get them from. ah Mine, I'd say mine are all pretty pet quality. We got a couple from breeders.
09:00And, I'd say now there,  I didn't breed specifically for like this goat needs to pair with this goat because of this bloodline cross and all these things. We just did it for part of our hobby farm and just to have the babies. Cause there's nothing cuter than a baby goat other than a kitten. Yeah.  Yep. Just had this conversation with another person for the podcast a couple of days ago and
09:26I  literally said there's nothing cuter than a baby goat and I was like, eh, kittens are pretty cute too. Yeah, kittens and baby goats, we had those at the same time too. That was pretty ridiculous.  So are uh Angora goats any good for milk as well or not?  Technically, no.
09:45Because they put so much energy into growing that mohair. They grow an inch per month. So they're putting, yeah, they're a high production breed. They put a lot into just growing that mohair. Most of them typically only even have singles when they're bred. All of mine have had at least twins.  We got the four  in summer of 2020. I  bred three of the four that fall, cause the one was still too young.
10:15And all three of them had twins right out the gate. So we doubled our herd in like overnight. They all had their babies within 24 hours of each other. And then the one year I had triplets too. And she actually did raise all of them herself. She had enough milk and she's a great mom. So she actually did raise all of them herself. And then two of them.
10:37The first year they had boy-girl twins. So when I pulled the boys off to put them in, because they were too young to castrate yet. So I just pulled them off, weaned them early and put them in their own pen.  So I was milking those two Angora moms for a little bit just to keep their utter balance and everything with going to the single twin.  And they actually milked out pretty well. ah I was kind of impressed with it because I had a Nigerian that I was milking at the time too. And honestly, the quantity was about the same.
11:07Um, I did breed then  a couple of them back to a Nigerian dwarf buck and made some Niagara's, which is just a half and half cross of that.  Um, and the two girls that I had, they, actually sold them to a lady in Arkansas and they just had their first babies just this past week. So I'm excited to see how they milk out because their mom was one of my angoras that I was milking and she had pretty decent teat size and pretty decent capacity.
11:35So, and then plus with the Nigerian then coming in too,  the one had triplets. So, and she said that their udders look really nice. So I'm curious to see how well they milk out,  cause they have the fiber then in the milk.  Yeah. That's what I was wondering about because how great would it be to be able to have the fiber and the milk cause you can make, you have a double income off one animal. Yeah. That would definitely, that's what the Niagara's are more for. And I liked them too, because they had.
12:02Like everybody with the angoras, they want the big fluffy face and the fluffy bell bottom legs and then the fluffy poof tails. But all of that stuff is what you usually skirt off anyway, when you're cleaning the fleece to process the hair. So  I like them. The niagoras that I had, they had a totally clean face, clean legs, and even their belly was pretty naked. They looked like little Nigerians with puff.
12:26They were so cute. So all of those areas that you would normally skirt off the fleece anyway were already just normal Nigerian hair and then they kind of shed also So you didn't even really have to shear them if you got them early enough They would shed that hair instead of needing sheared. So that's a nice dual purpose. There's those nigoras  Yeah, and  I'm sitting here listening to you completely captivated
12:51And in the back of my head, I'm thinking never in my life did I think I would be having a conversation like this. And it's all because I started a podcast about homesteading. It's so funny. Yep. And never in my life did I think that I would be so entertained talking about genetics. We have, we had, she's gone now. We don't know what happened to her. We had a calico cat show up on our farm a couple of years ago.
13:19longest haired cat I've ever seen in my life.  Black, bright orange and white.  Gorgeous, gorgeous animal.  And she ended up getting bred by a stray  and apparently that stray had the dilute gene  and one of her kittens ended up being like silvery gray  and beige and a little bit of white, like hardly any white.
13:49And I could not figure out why this kitten came out looking like that. So I actually looked up genetics  on calico cats and why some of them are end up being gray and beige  and learned about the dilute gene. And I was like, Oh my God, genetics are so freaking cool. Yeah. It's like she ran out of printer ink. Yeah. And I was like, God, I think I missed my calling on another thing. Science is really fun too. Yeah. The pun of doing the pun at squares for  color codes. Yeah.
14:19Yeah, it's crazy. And so, so entertained and captivated with these conversations because I find out things that I did not have any concept of. just tickles me. So how did you get into raising goats and critters? Well, I've had horses my whole life. Ever since I was a little kid, we've had these horses. We moved down here to this farm.
14:47when I was just starting high school, we had them boarded somewhere else earlier when I was a kid, and then we moved down here to bring the horses home. So they've kind of always been here. um But that's like its own brand of having a farm, right? Like not everybody has those. We never even had chickens or goats or anything before that until me and my husband then moved back here. We bought, we had our own house with our first chickens and everything, like the perfect little backyard homestead, right? The half acre with my favorite coop ever.  It was such a gorgeous coop that he built me in.
15:16our little raised beds and we had my perennial landscaping I put in everywhere. It was a gorgeous little first house for us. And then we moved back here. We bought my farm, my family farm then back from my mom. And so brought the chickens with us then. And I had been a farrier to roll back way to the horses. I had been a farrier years ago, a barefoot trimmer specifically. So working with owners that want to keep their horses more holistically. And
15:45I had trimmed a couple goats hooves too. Some of them had them just as pets with their horses. And I always thought, I am never getting goats. Like, this is not my thing. I am never getting these goats, right? Well, fast forward to 2020 and this artist that I followed on Facebook for a long time, she makes these amazing dolls with their hair, like these just crazy, like Tim Burton looking kind of dolls and uses their hair to make their, the mohair to make this hand spun yarn for their, the doll hair.
16:14And she was posting it, she was liquidating some of her herd. And I thought, you know what? I had written in my phone notes a couple years prior that  I wanted to at some point get fiber animals, either Angora goats or Angora bunnies. And I looked back on that note and thought, well, I think now's the time then. So we drove up there  and I told my husband we were getting three and we ended up bringing home four because the one was a baby  of one of the moms.
16:43So we ended up with four goats because you never go and just get what you wanted. You're always going to find something else. So we got those  and honestly, we brought them home and then I just kind of looked at them like,  Oh boy, now what?  Like  we had kind of set up fence for them because we have a ton of round pen fence from the horses. And I tell everybody that when they're starting a new property, get yourself some round pen panels and use that as for any like large animal. And even the goats can't really get through it.
17:12And then we have added welded wire, just rolled welded wire to it for some of the go pens. But that is the most flexible fencing option that you can get when you're trying to figure out a new property because you can move it. You know, so we had set up a pen for them and a little shed, little run and shed in the field. But I just kind of looked at them because they weren't super friendly. The ones that we had picked, were so they were handled enough that you could like catch them and to shear them and trim their hobs and things, but they weren't like in your pocket friendly.
17:40And so we just kind of all looked at each other like, okay, now what?  Like  we kind of had planned ahead, but didn't really plan. And so that was kind of just, that's how I learned to is just kind of get thrown into it.  actually did the same thing, the exact same experience then. I didn't learn from it ah with a baby goat. Then the following year, I thought, okay, I've got these goats that I'm going to breed. Anyway, I had found some Nigerian dwarfs.
18:07And cause I thought, okay, I've already got the place set up for goats now a year later. Let's go ahead and get some dairy goats. Like what's the, what's another goat  added to this herd anyway. So then I found a little Nigerian dwarf buck, just a tiny buckling.  And so we went and drove him, got him. was like, Oh, I'll just put him out with the moms and all the other baby goats and they'll take care of them, right? Wrong.  The mom goats of course, wanted nothing to do with this little baby. This is Ozzy, Ozzy Ago. He was part of the Cheesier. So this is baby Ozzy.
18:37So I put him out with them and of course the other mom goats hated him because he wasn't their baby. So we had a house goat for about six weeks. He lived in the house. He literally was sleeping in my bed. This was prior to having a human kid. So I had my little goat kid in the bed because he would not stay in the bathroom. I had a little baby gate up for him to keep him in the bathroom in his own little pen and he was screaming all night about it.  you know, as a parent.
19:05sleep deprived does, you just grab the baby and put him in the bed. And then he slept all night. So that was kind of how that worked. But  he went out to potty with the dogs. He thought he was a dog. It was the cutest thing ever. So, and he's still one of the most friendly ones, but yeah, it's like you learn these lessons and then you don't learn.  So we did the same thing. Like didn't really plan ahead to what we're going to do with the baby goat, but we got it. So that was fun.  The thing is baby animals will train you before you train them.
19:35Oh, for sure.  Our dog that I mentioned, we got her when she was a day short of eight weeks old. And she had, she was born into a home with seven children  and I think six siblings, six, six litter mates. So she was never alone and it was never quiet.  Uh-huh.  And uh friends of ours had the mom and the dad. And when we went to pick her up,
20:03My friend said, do you have a crate for her? And I said, of course we do. Cause I've done all the research on getting a puppy. Cause I thought I was smart. And she said, okay. She said, she said, I, I, um, have a, was a piece of cloth that was with mom.  She said, and I'm sending this home, put it in the crate and that way Maggie will, will smell mom and hopefully she'll settle down for you.  Um, that dog, our dog.
20:33barked and whined  and screamed  all night every night for five nights in a row in the crate.  On day six, I was like, I cannot do this.  Cannot do this. And my husband was like, what are we going to do? And I said, we're going to bring that cute little six pound puppy to bed with us.  he said, she's going to be in our bed for the next however many years. And I said, she's only going to be about 30 pounds. It's fine.  Right.
21:02I said, because we're both going to die from sleep deprivation if we don't do something. And we even got her the heartbeat puppy.  Didn't do any good. I mean, she loved it. She loved to play with it, but it did not help.  Finally, she was old enough to have the run of the house. And finally she learned that she could sleep downstairs if we were sleeping upstairs.  Now, now she's five and a half  and she sleeps on the stair landing outside the bedroom doors.  And so.
21:32So if you can just get through that first year  with a puppy  or that first couple of weeks with a house goat, you're good. Yep. We just got a Black Lab puppy this past fall because I lost my heart dog. He was an Aussie doodle. He's Bloomer, Aussie doodle chief. I lost him.  He's 13, but still it was very unexpected ah back in June. And my husband had always grown up with Black Labs and he told me forever, like we had plenty of dogs. We didn't need another one.
22:01But he's like, you know, we should really get a black lab. And so finally it was, we had, you know, kind of an opening in the pack.  And so I found this guy and he has been the biggest I told you so ever  because  like from the second we brought this guy home, he's just so good. And I'm used to the Pyrenees, right? Who are bred for their entire lifeline to not listen to humans and to make their own decisions and to be stubborn.
22:30And you know, they're smarter than you. They know more than you do. And so then to get a dog that is just so purely a dog and just wants to do whatever you want him to do.  It is such a breath of fresh air.  But he was the same way. Like the first couple days, I put him straight in the bed. I was like, there is no way any of us are sleeping. And now he sleeps in his crate. He loves his crate. He goes in there and it's because it's a nice break for him, you know, to go and that's his spot. Get away from the other big dogs too. But those first couple days, man.
23:00But it's funny though,  when we got, I think it was the second Pyrenees is when my husband said this. It was like just a random Tuesday and we're driving three hours to go get a dog. And he said,  you know, for most people, this is like kind of a big life event to get a dog, like, you know, 15 year commitment. And for you, it's just a Tuesday. m it's, it is a big thing and we, we love them all the same, but we're, I'm so much calmer about it. uh
23:28So like even adding the puppy in this fall, like I'm plenty busy. Like I did not need the extra busy of a puppy and potty training and chasing my kid around, like all this stuff. But he just melted into the half the routines here so nicely. So just another Tuesday.  a new puppy.  Yeah. It was not just another Tuesday when we got Maggie, because we had been wanting a puppy forever and we did not have a yard to have a dog.  And so the first thing we did when we moved to our homestead.
23:57five years ago  was see this post from my friend that they had puppies coming.  I was like, do you want a Daisy and Diesel puppy? Cause that's her parents name.  And my husband was like, how much are they? And I said, I don't know. wanted to ask you if you would consider it before I even asked him anything.  And he was like, find out how much they are. So I messaged my friend and I said, how much? And she said, 500 bucks. And I was like, cool.
24:25didn't know puppies cost that much money in my head. And I said, we'd like one of Daisy and Diesel's pups. I said, we just moved to the new house and 3.1 acres. I think maybe we can have a puppy now.  And she was like, okay. And they weren't born yet. And it was the first litter from Daisy. Daisy is my friend's heart dog and Daisy's still around. Daisy's only like nine months older than Maggie. I guess she's my first litter.  And, uh
24:52Jean posted when the puppies were born and I was like, oh my God, they're little potatoes. Yeah. And from that minute I was just like, okay, I have to learn everything I can about how you handle a puppy. Cause I had no idea.  So it was not another Tuesday when I went, when we went to get Maggie  and it wasn't another Tuesday for Jean either. She had already given up like three or four of the seven to their new owners. And she's standing there just holding Maggie and petting her and
25:21not letting go. And I said, are you going to cry when you hand her to me? And she's like, probably. She said, I cried the first four. And I said, yeah, I'm probably going to cry when you put her in my hand. So we might as well just start crying now. literally laughed and then started tearing up. So it was not another Tuesday for me. But the thing that I have learned is that my husband and I are both in our mid fifties and
25:48When Maggie gives up the ghost, we probably won't get another puppy. We might get a dog,  but we probably won't go through the puppy stage again because it's just so much.  It's a lot. Yeah.  But it's the same with anything like same with kids, same with any kind of farming, like new farm animals that you bring on. It's so much in the front end  of training them and it's so intensive. But then once you get that groundwork laid,  oh,
26:16then you've got a buddy for life. And then you've got that foundation in place and then everything just runs so much smoother. Yeah, that's the sweet spot that you're hoping for when you're going through the terrible tantrums of a puppy, yes. Right.  Okay, so um I usually keep these to half an hour, but I really want to hear about the other part of your business. So do you have 15 more minutes? Oh yeah, I got time. Okay, so you have your farm, but you also have a business. So tell me about the business part.
26:45Yeah, so I've been in some version of online business in that realm for closer to 15 years now, but I say over 10. So I've always had my own website, my own blog, done all of that kind of backend thing. And the past two years now, especially, I really got into teaching other people how to do that. Because what I see a lot now, it's like my clients and my coaching group members,
27:14They have these audiences on Facebook or on Instagram or what are on Tik Tok or wherever, but they have no website. They have no email lists. They have no way to contact people if like Tik Tok shuts down every other day. I don't even do Tik Tok, but I know, you know, it's  gone every other day. Um, Facebook limits your reach so bad. So, and even if these people have already been monetized on these platforms, like they've got a heap, like huge audiences, some, some in the hundreds of thousands  and
27:42they'll still get shadow banned. Like they'll have one video do really well and go viral, you know, and then they get paid a bunch from Facebook for the ads on it. And then the whole next week, Facebook doesn't show their content to anybody.  And that's frustrating for a lot of people because they're spending a lot of time creating this content and then it's gone in 24 hours. It just disappears. So what I teach people, have, do this one-on-one for clients directly where I'm doing the work and setting up the foundation for you. And then I also have my coaching group is content seeds collective.
28:11where I teach you how to do all this.  And this month, especially in February, we're doing a business roots challenge where every week we're going through these setup phases. So the first week we already did business foundations. Like, do you need an LLC to be legit? Do you need an EIN? Do you need a PO box?  This is the funniest thing that stops so many people because when you go to send emails for anti-spam laws, you have to have an address posted at the bottom of your email footer.
28:41And a lot of people, they have a farm or farm stand, they want people to know their address, right? It's another just marketing piece. But a lot of people  are just running this from their home and they don't want people to know their home address. So you need to go have a PO box. When I tell you that these people have had to go back to the post office three or four times because they don't have the right amount of IDs or they need their name on something and everything's in their husband's name on the farm, like all of these things. So this is what we set up the first week of Business Foundation Week because
29:11People run into this and they didn't even know it was a thing. Well, I've been there, done that. So I can help steer you and get you past those roadblocks before they even stop you up. So that was week one. Week two, then we got into websites. You have to have a home on the internet. If you're writing these big, long captions for Instagram, that probably should be a blog post. So now you can drive traffic to your website. You can monetize the site with ads there that are more consistent.
29:40And then you have somewhere that you can actually drive Pinterest traffic to that you own and you can track that traffic. Then you can make a social post that ties back to the blog post, take a piece of that post out for your caption and drive them back there instead of everything living on ground that you don't own. You're just posting everything on rendered ground on socials. So then  this week now, third week, we're into email.
30:05And I use flow desk in particular, but I can set you up on, you know, whichever different email platform, but the concept is the same. need to get people off of wherever they're coming from, whether it's Google SEO, and they're landing on your website from a search, they're coming from Pinterest, or they're coming from your socials.  I want you to have their email. So you own that line of communication to them. So that's what we're setting up this week. And then next week, we bring it all together with Pinterest. So this is where.
30:34everything starts to really get to be automated. Especially coming into spring, everybody's gonna be outside being busy with the garden and know, baby goats if you've got them bred, all the things in spring. And you don't wanna be stuck to your computer. You don't wanna be with your face and your phone making another reel for Instagram.  You wanna be out enjoying that. So you can have content going out on Pinterest, schedule a month or two months out even if you're using a different scheduling app, because Pinterest only goes out 30 days on the
31:03native scheduler, you can schedule a month's worth of content so that you can go then be outside the whole rest of the month. You can take that two hours that you would have spent making one day's worth of content for socials and instead put that into an entire month and schedule it to go out automatically so that that whole system is working in the background for you around the clock without your input, setting up all of these kinds of things. But it all comes down to is your business set up correctly with that foundation?
31:32Do you have a website and a home for them to actually go and to drive this traffic to? Can you capture their email so that you can talk to them? And then do you have a way to market that doesn't rely on you constantly being on your phone? So that's what I do one-on-one for clients. And I work with all kinds of people. I've got a couple right now with literally hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook and they had no website, no email, anything. And so now we're getting them up to speed to have all of these things.
31:58to add those extra income streams. Cause now they'll have ads on their websites. Now they've just launched digital products too. So their own product that people are buying and it's just releasing that constant reliance on social media and being on your phone all the time. And then I teach people how to do it themselves in the Content Seeds Collective. We have a coaching call every Thursday at one o'clock Eastern time and everybody gets in there. We can screen share and I can walk everybody through it.
32:26The group's still really small right now. So a lot of the time it's like a one-on-one session. Like last week, one of my members got basically a one-on-one session for the whole call because she shows up every single week since she's joined the group. And so we were working through a couple of changes on her website, how to optimize the WordPress theme so that it's faster and the pictures load better and it lays out the information better for her people that land on her website to actually go do what she needs them to do on the site, which would be
32:55subscribe to the email list and buy her products. So she got like a one-on-one  with that coaching goal. And then all of my resources are in the Root Seller Resource Library where I've got my Canva templates for pins. I've got all of these checklists to go literally step-by-step. The exact same thing that I do myself for clients. This is how I set everything up and in what order. Random things too, like you need a Gravatar for your author bio on a WordPress website. What is a Gravatar?
33:25So stuff like that that I help  set up so that you're not wasting any time trying to learn how to do this stuff. I just tell you the exact steps to do it in the exact right order.  Wow. That is a lot of stuff. um So do you assume that somebody who comes to you  knows nothing and you talk them through it from scratch or do you assume that they know a little and then you just go from where they're at?
33:54It can be for both. So the way that I have Content Seeds  Collective set up  is if you are completely beginner, you can go through it step by step  and build out your business the right way  from the first time  and set everything up in the right order. Or if you're somebody that has a couple pieces in place, you've got a following on socials, you've maybe got even a website, maybe even have a Pinterest and email list, you're maybe just not even using it.
34:24you can go through these same steps and treat it like a checklist to find any gaps  and then, you know, fix those pieces so that we're building that foundation correctly. So it works both ways for if you're a complete beginner or if you've already got some stuff in place.  Okay, cool. Cause when I started the first podcast, this podcast, I'm sorry,  get confused between the two.  When I started at Honey Homestead podcast,  I had no idea what I was doing.
34:53at all, like huge learning curve. And I was talking to my mom about all the stuff I'm learning. And you need to understand my mom was 78 at the time.  And she's like, what's that? How does that work? I've never heard of that. And I said, well, no, of course you haven't heard of it because you don't do this.  And she was like, I can't believe you're learning this at 54. And I was like, I'm not dead.  You can learn something new anytime.
35:23I said, 54 is not as old as it used to be. Right. And she said, you're just so smart. And I love it when my mom tells me that I'm smart because my mom has spent her life thinking that she's not smart and she is, she's brilliant. She has no idea how smart she is, but she's really smart. And I said, I get it from you. And she's like, now you get it from your dad.
35:49I just, every time I try to talk to my mom about how much I appreciate how brilliant she is, she always deflects. And so as I've been talking with her and my dad about this project and friends,  when people are like, you're so smart, I'm like, thank you. I don't deflect because I saw my mom do it my whole life. Yeah, own it.  Yep. So it's really, really fun.
36:18learning all of the marketing. if you want to do a podcast listener, you should do it because you will gain a whole lot of knowledge and understanding about how people react to marketing, how they understand how they're being marketed to how they're being sold to. uh blogs are really good too, because people who don't want to have earbuds in blogs are great because you can sit down and read them.
36:48Yeah. And you can transcribe the podcast episode into a blog post  and then you can pin both of those on Pinterest. Yeah. And for people who don't know Pinterest is not a social network. It is a search engine. Yeah. It is a search engine. So you can comment and interact and stuff on post. There's a little bit of a social aspect to it, but it is a search engine.
37:14So you're going on Pinterest. It's almost always a completely cold audience of people who've never seen you before. They're not searching like for you in particular, they're searching for, like I have a lot of uh recipe bloggers that I work with. do canning recipes and  baking and all that. So they're going to Pinterest and typing in beef canning recipes or how to pressure can potatoes, you know, like that's what they're searching for. And then the goal there is for them to find your pin.
37:44and click over to your website. Pinterest is also the only platform that's designed to take people off of it.  All the other social platforms, they don't want you to get to leave that platform. They knock your views. If you post a link in stories,  if you post a link in the caption or the comments, they don't show that post to anybody because they want to keep you there and keep you scrolling. But Pinterest is literally designed to take people off of Pinterest and to land them to where you're trying to take them, which should be to your own website. Yep.
38:14Absolutely. All right, Jen, I would love to talk to you for like three hours about all this because I'm so entertained, but I try to give you half an hour and we're already at 38 minutes. So where can people find you? can find me on all socials and all Pinterest and my website, SteelSpoonFarm.com or at SteelSpoonFarm and then all of my business content is at Jen Kibler online. Okay. And what's the name of the
38:44the program that you mentioned? Content Seeds Collective, because we're planting our content seeds. Okay. That's on your website. Yeah. Everything's linked on my website. Okay, great. And can we say how much it costs for that? Yeah. Content Seeds Collective is $37 a month. You can cancel anytime. I do have an affiliate program for it also. So you can get in and get an affiliate link and then you get paid before I get paid actually.
39:14When you join that  so you can it gets paid on every month to that people join using your link Fantastic, that's great  All right.  Um, was really really fun Jen. Thank you so much for your time  Thanks for having me  as always you can find me at a tiny homestead podcast calm  Have a great day
 

Silo Springs Farm

Today I'm talking with Tricia at Silo Springs Farm.
https://www.homesteadliving.com/subscribe/ref/41/
https://homesteadliving.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-planner/ref/41/
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
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
00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis.
00:11Today I'm talking with Trisha at Silo Springs Farm in Tennessee. Good morning Trisha, how are you? Good morning, I'm good. How are you?  I'm good. I'm just going to be honest. The first part, we tried recording this and it didn't work. So we're starting over from scratch. So I'm going to ask the same questions over again. um How is the weather in Tennessee? It is beautiful today.  Sun is shining and the ground is drying up. We had a really wet rainy day yesterday and today is looking really pretty.
00:41I'm actually really glad to hear that you guys got rain because I have a friend that I co-host another podcast with. She lives in Nebraska  and they've been under fire danger for oh most of the winter time so far. And she's always lamenting the fact that they really haven't gotten any snow or any rain. And I'm like, oh, if I could just send you some from Minnesota, I would do it.
01:05It is a gorgeous, sparkly, sunny, warm day in Minnesota today. And it was so cold three weeks ago that I have nothing to complain about. Exactly. It's so pretty. I'm like Mother Nature, stop teasing me because I know we have snow in the forecast later this week. Oh, really? Just a little bit, yeah. Whether we actually get snow or not remains to be seen. I suspect it might be rain because I don't think it's going to get cold enough to snow, but we'll see what happens.
01:34Yeah.  All right. So tell me a little bit about yourself and how you ended up raising Highland cows and High Park cows. um Well, it kind of started, it's kind of funny how it got started. My husband  was offered a job in Nashville, Tennessee, and we're  from the city. We're actually from Alabama and have lived in subdivisions all our lives. And when he uh
02:03said that he had to move if he accepted this position. I was like, okay, well, we're going to get land and we're going to get us some mini cows.  And so that's what we did. We  moved to a little uh old farmhouse that had 12 acres and remodeled the farmhouse and got us some cows and  just kind of going from there. nice.  Your husband is a canine police officer. Is that what you're saying? Yes. uh Okay. have a quick
02:33offside's question. When you're a canine police officer, does the canine come home with the officer that it works with or how does that work? Yes. He's actually had two dogs  and uh one  got sick and had to be retired. And so we adopted him and still have him, but  his other one  comes home with him every day. it's em not really
03:00good for farm life. He's a  GSP and he  doesn't get along well with the chickens. He wants to point them and eat them. ah I imagine. So  the reason I'm asking is because I know with service dogs that you're not supposed to go up and pet a service dog at the mall.  And I'm assuming it's the same thing with a canine officer. You don't just walk up to a canine dog and, you know, an officer dog and pet it.
03:27Yeah. Well,  it's always better to ask, but like  his dogs are explosive dogs.  Um, and so like they're not on duty. They know when they're sniffing an area that that's when they're working.  Um, his old dog, anybody could just walk up and pet him, but this dog, he just gets too ramped up and gets kind of hard to hold onto when people start giving him attention.  But yeah, yeah. He lets people pet his.  Nice. Okay. I was just curious because I've never known anybody who had, who had that
03:57job and never never known a  canine that was working with police. So I thought I would ask while I had the opportunity.  Okay, so your cows you raise them so that you can have babies so you can sell the babies. Is that right? That is right. Yes. Okay. So when is when is calving season for you? Is it coming right up? Well, we usually um have in the spring and then some will have in the fall, we try our best to avoid
04:26summer calving  just because of the flies and the bacteria that's rampant in the summer.  So we just actually delivered um our last 2025 calve yesterday and  really hoping that we start having some babies in March or April this year. Okay. Wow. The last one for that you that you were expecting in 2025 was just born. Yeah. Well, no, it was we sold it yesterday. Oh, okay. It was born in October, but it went to its
04:56home in Alabama  yesterday. oh I misunderstood. Sorry.  All right. So when you,  like I said, I don't know anything about how this all works. When you sell the babies,  do you know what those babies are going to be used for? Whether they're going to be used for breeding stock or meat or milk or do you have any idea? Well, with the, um, with the Holland breed.
05:24They're really popular right now for just pets or yard ornaments,  people wanting to breed their own.  They're so expensive. I  really doubt anybody would be eating them. uh I don't know anything about them and I know they're not, they don't get as big as say, you know, an Angus. Right. I wasn't sure whether people actually use them for food or not. And I don't know about their milk. Is their milk worth?
05:53using or is it just for the babies?  I haven't ever actually milked these, but I have read that they're really good beef  and uh milk cows.  And I do know people that like have huge massive farms of highlands  and you know, lot of their bulls they'll steer and eat those, but  we're so small. don't, we can't do that. Yeah. Yep. We have a three and a half, sorry, 3.1 acre property here ourselves and
06:23Somebody asked me if we were going to get a mini cow and I just laughed. was like, number one, cows are herd animals. That one critter would be so lonely it would die. Yeah. Yeah. They need a friend. Yeah. And number two, we don't have enough room or any place for them to graze. That's an expensive, expensive hobby. Oh yeah. So the answer was no, but I just laughed before I said anything. I was like, no, we are not getting cows.
06:51Nope, chickens. Chickens in a big garden is about the extent that we're going to commit to farming here.  Yeah, I love our chickens. That was one of the first things we got was chickens. They're great. Do you have one specific breed or did you go crazy and get all kinds of different breeds? Well, I went crazy and got all  different breeds according to like the pretty ones and the colorful eggs.
07:15which was probably a mistake because they're not real good layers. So we go a good portion of the year without eggs, but they're getting started back now. But we do have a lot of pretty eggs when we get them. You have the different colored ones? We do, yeah. Rainbow eggs. That's what my daughter would call it when she was little. She'd see the blue and the, I don't know what they're called, the Marin eggs that are dark. Yes, yes.
07:42We'd be somewhere and somebody would have all different colored eggs and she'd be like, Oh mom, they have the rainbow eggs. And I'm like,  uh-huh. They sure do.  She was very disappointed when she found out that the blue ones didn't taste like blue raspberry. Yeah.  They all taste the same. That's cute. Yep. An egg is an egg is an egg. Just like a rose is a rose is a rose. That's correct.  Okay. Um, do you have lots of chickens? We have 18 so.
08:12I don't think that we have lots of chickens, but I tell people we have 18 and they're like, oh, that's a lot of birds. Yeah, that's probably about how many we have. um I have two coops, the ones that lay and then I have some silkies um and another coop. And so probably all together  20, 25, something like that.  I was just talking with somebody that raises silkies and she was like, they are so pretty, but they're the dumbest birds ever known to man.
08:40They really are. I have to go and collect some of them at night because they just can't seem to make it back to the coop. that's what she was saying too. She was like, I don't know what it is, but they just will not go in the coop on their own. like, they're dumb. She's like, they're dumber than dumb.
09:00They do struggle. Dumb as a stump as my dad would say.  Okay, so do you  incubate any of the eggs from your chickens and sell the babies or not? I did at one point. I  have,  well actually the last two years I sold  silkies,  but I'm probably not going to this year.
09:27But they're really good mamas. They're not real bright, but they're excellent mamas.  They're not so bright.  No one but a lady from the South can say they're not very bright in the nicest, lightest way ever.
09:43God bless their hearts. They're not very bright. That's right. Love it. Okay. Um, are you guys parents or you just have your animals? Um, we have children. Um, I have a daughter, uh, that she, uh, just will be 19 this year. And then my husband has two sons and, um, they're grown. Okay. So you're, you're pretty much empty nesters at this point.
10:11Very, very close. uh Yep. I understand. just, I'm going through it now and I raised four kids and I'm like, wow, the house got really, really quiet. I know.  So hard. Yup. um did,  did your daughter,  I don't know, was she younger when you guys moved to the farm?  No, she wasn't. And I wish she had been. When she was growing up, she was a little tomboy.
10:39But when we moved here, she was like middle school age. And so she was um more into  doing video games and  she just, she would have been more into it if we could have uh moved here when she was a lot younger. she didn't, she didn't embrace the farm life. What like you would have hoped that she would have. No, she didn't. She was at the point where she was like, Oh, that's so gross. Ooh, they smell.
11:09Oh, fine. Yeah. Huh. Did she love the babies though? Oh, yeah. She likes the babies.  Yeah. See, I'm a sucker for a baby. It doesn't matter what it is. I always say even baby alligators are cute.  She says that her, the goats are probably her favorite of all the animals. They're mine too. Other than a baby kitten. Baby kittens are my favorite, but baby goats are my next favorite.
11:36They're totally different things. A kitten is going to be a pet. A goat, probably not a pet. Love it like a pet, but probably not a pet.  Yes, baby goats are the most adorable farm animal ever, ever created. I've had a thing for them since I was young. I've talked about it a lot on the podcast because my friend's parents used to raise goats and every spring  she would call me and say,  can your mom bring you over those baby goats? were born last night.
12:04Every year she would call me and be like come now while they're brand new.  Oh, they're so funny. They're the funniest animal I loved them when they were anywhere from  18 hours to 36 hours old because they weren't quite Crazy bouncy yet and they would let you hold them. Yeah  Yeah
12:28Once they got past that 36 hour mark, she's like, nah, don't even bother because they're already running around and climbing on stuff. I'm like, okay. Yes, they are love wars. Yeah. But oh, when they're brand new, they're so sweet and they're so soft. Yes. I love them so much. I do. It's ridiculous. My husband thinks that I have some kind of affliction or illness when it comes to baby goats.
12:53Boring, they don't do anything. I'm like, that's the whole point They don't do anything they let you hold them and they'll get you like they love you whether they do or not  Ours are really um clingy like they'll just if you let them out of the gate They just follow you around the whole day Uh-huh. em I get the impression that sheep are kind of like that too We have friends and we went over to pick up we went to get chickens from them  and her son was
13:24walking up the path from the barn and behind him was a probably four or five day old lamb. And it was a good 20 feet behind him following him and just doing that meh noise at him. And I said, you got a puppy back there? And he's like, that's not a puppy, that's a sheep. And I was like, I know it's a sheep. I said, does it follow you around like a puppy?
13:54And  he said, yeah, said the only thing missing is it doesn't bark. And I was just like, kid, I can't figure out if you are being rude or if you're just playing my game. I don't know.  Have you ever seen the Valleys sheep?  I have. Yes, they're beautiful. They are. I'm begging my husband for some of those, but so far no luck.  Huh. Okay. Well,  um,  Christmas maybe? Asking for Christmas.
14:23Well, the lady that I have been talking to, actually, said, do you want me to message your husband about Valentine's day? And I was like, yes, please.  But it still didn't work. Why doesn't he want them? They're so expensive. um They're like more than the Holland cows. They're, they're really up there.  Well, I know just enough to be dangerous on some of this stuff, but um I think the reason they're so expensive is because they're not common in the United States. Right.
14:53Right. Yup. Anything that isn't common is going to cost much more than something you can get anywhere. Always.  Yep.  Which sucks because I would love for you to have a relationship because they're really, really cute. They are adorable. So I'm trying to figure out how to ask this without sounding rude because I don't want to be rude on my podcast.
15:19Why are you  raising the cows? Why do you have chickens? Is it because you love them? Is it an income? Is it both? Well, it's not an income yet.  That's our goal is to have it as an income, but um it's just different. um it's something that me and my husband are doing together that neither one of us has ever done. And so we're trying to build like this business. um
15:48together and it's just so much fun working together. Not that we always get along, but  there are days that we butt heads, but  at the end of the day, it's like, look what all we accomplished today. Look what we've done. Yeah. And you would butt heads no matter what you're doing, because that's what husbands and wives do.  Exactly.  Okay. um God, I don't know what is wrong with me today. No questions are coming to mind.
16:16Uh, are you,  are there people around you who are doing things like you're doing so that you have a community?  Um,  we have a lot  of, uh, old time farmers around us, uh, that,  and by that, just mean like they've been doing this generational,  um, they, know, they're on their daddy's land, um, still raising  cattle, mostly Angus.  but
16:44There's not really a whole lot of hollown.  I can think of maybe one or two that might be fairly close to us. um
16:54We have some people that are on the hill right behind us and they're raising their cows um just to eat, but not doing kind of what we're doing as far as just raising them to  sell. And although we do, I mean, we have goals that we would like to be able to be self-sufficient and  do our meat. And  I've bought a milker.  I have one Jersey that I plan on milking, but working a full-time job and then doing farm life is kind of...
17:22A little difficult at times. So the farm is like a very expensive side gig sometimes.  Yes, exactly it is.  But if you're like a lot of the people that I talk to, it pays for itself in joy and satisfaction. It is. It's really odd that you can get out there and work yourself to death  and you've enjoyed it, you know. Yes,  I do know.
17:48I'm going to say this again. say this all the time. I am not the grunt worker at our place. My husband is. He  loves being outside. He loves gardening. He loves all the manual hard work.  I am, I'm kind of over it. I really worked hard raising my kids like in the trenches, playing with them, shuttling them, feeding them the whole bit.  And in my mid fifties, I'm kind of like, you know, I really don't want to be Holland wood.
18:19And I'm not in the shape I used to be in. And he's like, that's okay. You don't have to, you do what you do best, which is cook and do the podcast. said, cause you love the podcast. You're good at it. I'm like, okay, cool. So yesterday he was outside cutting up a tree that he took down last weekend, cause it's a huge ash tree. And he came in after two hours, just his T-shirt was just wet with sweat. Cause it was so warm here yesterday.
18:47I said, were you out there with no jacket? He's like, honey. He said, I've been out there without a jacket for the last two hours. He said, I am dying.  I need water. I was like, oh, let me get you some water.  And he loves it. He loves being outside. That's my husband too. He jokingly says he's the hired hand. I'm the one that comes up with the ideas and he's the one that brings them to fruition. um But it's funny that you mentioned cutting wood because he, um
19:17installed  a Cast-orange stove and that's what he's been doing this winter is chopping wood to burn in the stove  Uh-huh best form of heat ever I grew up in a house where my parents had a wood stove in the house and we used it all the time in the wintertime loved how it smelled and Now we have a wood burning boiler system so the wood stove itself is outside and then there's a tube that brings water to the furnace and then
19:46the furnace somehow takes the heat from the hot water and blows it into the house. And I really miss having a wood stove in the house because of the way that it smelled. Yeah. It's so pretty at night too. Yeah. And we just don't have a good place to put one in because otherwise there'd probably be one by now. That's how much I love that. So is right now through, I don't know, June, your favorite time of year because you're going to be calving and
20:16The chickens are starting to lay and the light is changing and everything just feels full of promise. Yes.  Especially the day's getting longer. just, I hated the daylight savings time, but  yes, I love spring.  March 8th, we turned the clocks ahead just so you know.  I looked the other day. was like, Hey, it's staying later. Later, later. When do we change the clocks ahead?
20:42And my husband was like, I don't know, they keep changing it. And I was like, okay. So I went and looked and I said, March 8th, we get an extra hour in late in the evening. He's like, yes. Yes. Cause then he can be outside longer when he gets home from work. So that'll make him really, really happy. yeah. He's so excited right now anyway, cause it's getting to be the time when we plant seeds. So I figure this weekend he's going to bring in the seedling trays and be like, we're going to plant. And be like, okay, I'll lose my kitchen table for two months.
21:11but that's fine.  It'll pay for it later. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's really ugly the first week  and then as those little babies start popping out  three weeks from this weekend, I'll be like, Oh, look at all the green babies. It's so pretty.
21:28We have tried and tried to get an uh orchard going, but everything we plant dies.  We have to regroup every year and try something different. ah What's your soil like there? Well, the soil looks really good. It's a little bit rocky,  but aside from that,  the dirt's good. It's not red clay or anything like that. What have you tried to plant? We've done blueberry bushes. um
21:56My daughter loves pomegranates and so we tried to plant a pomegranate tree. em We've done lavender,  but  it may be just us.  We're having to learn all of this stuff. em Well, uh blueberries, is that what you said? Yes.  Blueberries really need sandy soil and they really need acidic soil.
22:24Well, that may be the problem because we definitely do not have sandy soil up here. We'll have to work on that. Yeah, I grew up in Maine and that's where wild blueberries grow and the best wild blueberries grow right by the edge of the driveway or where it's sandy.  Yeah, and they really like being near or underneath pine trees because of the acid in the pine needles.
22:47Well that's good to know. Yep, so that's probably why your blueberry plants aren't doing very well. And also you need to have two different varieties to pollinate each other.
22:58Well, that could be part of it we've only been planting like we'll plant one,  it'll die. Yeah. And we'll plant another and it'll die. Yeah. They don't have the right growing. They don't have the right soil conditions and you have to have two different varieties. That's part of what's going on there.  And the only reason I know this is we tried to grow them at the house that we lived at before this one in Minnesota and it wasn't sandy soil and they just didn't do well.  They had blueberries for a couple of years in a row.
23:26but there just wasn't enough acid in the soil and they didn't do well.
23:31So that might help you.  And if you can find pine trees, or if somebody has pine trees, you can literally go and get pine needles in the fall that have fallen off the tree  and work them into your soil and add some sand. And then you might be able to get them to go.  We'll try that. Yep.  And  like I said, I know just enough to be dangerous and your mileage may vary, but you could try that.  And if you have good black dirt, good soil,
24:01Try apple trees. Oh, we do actually have an apple tree. It was here when we moved and we've gotten some good apples off of it. Yeah, get some more apple trees if you want an orchard because we have 20 apple trees here that we've put in and this past fall was the first time we've gotten over a hundred apples from two trees. So it takes a while. We've been here five years. So were you baking lots of apple?
24:31desserts and  jellies. We made apple crisp, but these are the  honey gold apples. They're like a golden delicious apple.  And they weren't very good in apple crisp. And I was like, you can sell them at the farmer's market. I don't love these apples at all.  So they got sold and people ate them and loved them. I like the really nice Regents and Harrelsons and um Cortland apples. Those are my favorites.
25:01And those are really great for baking. So hopefully our Regent and our  Harrelson and our Honeycrisp trees will produce this year, hopefully. Oh, yeah.  And just so you know, if you have, I think it's eight apple trees, you have a small orchard. Oh, really? Yep. I had to look it up.  Yep. And um
25:28I don't know if plum trees would grow where you are, but we have plum trees. have peached. have a couple of peach trees.  We've got some wild  plum trees, but I think our goats have just about  eaten them down.  I bet they have because I bet goats really love plum trees because they tend to be a shorter bushier tree. So I bet they can reach it. Yup. uh
25:54Don't give up on trying to have an orchard because I'm sure there's stuff that will grow for you. You just got to figure out what it is. And in Tennessee, do you guys have, what are the little orange fruits? Not oranges. uh Persimmons? Oh yeah. Yeah?  There's some wild persimmons growing around here too. Yeah, we don't have those here. It doesn't stay warm enough, long enough for them to grow.
26:22they would never produce. They might grow, but they wouldn't produce any fruit.  Okay. Well, I don't know. I would suggest trying out amending your soil for blueberries and putting in some more apple trees if the apple tree does well. Yeah. I'm to have to tell my husband about that.  Yup.
26:43Again, the only reason I know about blueberries is because I grew up in the land of blueberries. I can't even look at a blueberry pie anymore without my stomach flipping over because I ate so many blueberries as a kid.  I can't eat blueberry anything anymore. My grandparents had  blueberry bushes on their land in Alabama and oh my goodness, those are the best blueberries ever. Yeah, it's really funny when I talk to people about the things that they grew up eating.
27:12My mom grew up eating black raspberries because she lived in Illinois when she was a kid. And black raspberries don't grow wild in Maine anywhere. And she really misses black raspberries. And she was like, it must be like that for you with blueberries. And I'm like, no, I can't stand blueberries. And she's like, why? I said, because we picked so many blueberries when I was growing up. And we had blueberry muffins and blueberry pie and blueberry cake.
27:41you know, during blueberry season.  I said, I can't even stand the thought of eating anything blueberry flavored at this point in my life.  She's like, you're weird. said, yep, I, what was your first clue? But yes, I am. can't do it.  She's like, what about blackberries? Cause we picked a lot of blackberries too. I said, I love blackberry jam. Other than that, I don't really do blackberries either. We did have some blackberry,  wild blackberry bushes,  but.
28:11Our goats ate those as well. Those darn goats.  I know it. How many goats do you have? I have, um, four, five does  and  a weather and then about four bucks. I need to get rid of some bucks, but you kind of get attached to them.  Yeah. Do you, um, do you have babies with the goats and then sell the baby goats too? Yes, we do.
28:38Do people just lose their minds when they get their baby goats? Are they like, yes, I finally have goats.  They do. um They're fairly easy to sell because they're so cute. uh How old are they when you actually sell them?  I believe they're  eight weeks old when I can either have to look this up.
29:02Every year. think it's either six or eight weeks old when I can wean them. And then, um, once they're eating really good, um, then they can go to their new homes. Yeah. Um, fun fact about goats, goats don't have top teeth. They just have bottom teeth. Right.  Do they have top molars though, in the back?  I've not seen any, but I,  uh, have not really looked either. So.
29:30I for the life of me cannot figure out how in the heck they chew hay without top front teeth.
29:38I don't know, but they chew on it forever. maybe  it's  a combination. There's. Yeah. I don't know. I read this a couple of months ago about goats and I was like, how do they eat? How do they crunch anything?
29:55You know, how do they masticate it, I guess is the word I'm looking for. But they definitely do enjoy eating. They eat everything.  Yes,  I've heard  two different sides of the fence on this.  One lady said that her goats were the best behaved goats ever. They weren't mischievous and they did not eat tin cans and paper. And then another lady was like, oh my God, my goats are terrible. They're everywhere that they're not supposed to be. They eat everything.
30:24Including me if they're not supposed to eat so it make them sick  and I was like hmm sounds like kids to me Yeah, mine has not ever uh
30:36Eating things like things that they're not supposed to, but like they'll get into the calf feed or some other animals feed and  go to town on it. But as far as like eating paper or things like that, I've never had that issue. And mine are the Nigerian dwarf.  Um, so they're not jumping fences or anything like that. As long as I have the wire at the bottom of the fence, they're, really no problem to keep in. Nice.  Yeah. My husband and I keep  sort of.
31:05revisiting the idea of getting a couple of goats, know, youngins. And every time we talk about it, I said, I think I'm more in love with the idea than I am the reality.  And he's like, yeah, me too. He said, every time this comes up, we're like, we should get goats. And then we both come to the conclusion that we're not ready for goats.  hardest part to me about goats is that they're wormy,  the worms  and
31:34Part of that's probably my fault because I don't have enough space to rotate their fields.  Yep. So  that does make it a little bit more challenging. Yeah. Well, we're lucky enough to have friends that have goats. So if I really, really, really need a baby goat fix in April, May, June, whenever they're due,  can hike my cute little hiney over there and visit a baby goat.  So I'm good.
32:00I really, I think the garden and the chickens and the barn cats and the dogs are probably more than enough for us at this point in our lives. I've never given up that dog. The only way that dog is going away is if she dies. I am so in love with Maggie. It's ridiculous. And I've been remiss. I haven't been talking about Maggie as much as I did when I started the podcast two and a half years ago. So what kind of dog is Maggie? She is a mini Australian shepherd. Oh,
32:29And she is the loviest, leasiest mini Australian shepherd you will ever meet. She,  you know how they talk about,  um, cattle dogs being very high energy and,  crazy.  She's like a lab. Oh, wow. She's very, very calm and  she's very athletic. If we take her outside and run her with the frisbee, she hauls  ass and she's jumping in the air to catch it. And she's just all go, go, go.
32:58But when she's in the house, she's just a loaf.
33:03We have a golden doodle  and talk about being wired up and crazy.  is, he actually, um, last week got bit on the head by a Brown recluse. Oh no.  Yeah. So,  um, he's  been getting a little TLC here, but he's all better now.  Good. Good. I hate it when dogs are sad or hurt.
33:30I was never a dog person, Trisha, until we got Maggie. And now I'm a sucker for all of them. I see stories about dogs and if they're sad, I cry. And if they're funny, I laugh myself stupid. It's so dumb. To the point that I will see dogs that are being walked when my husband and I are out running around doing errands and I'm like, oh, who's a good doggo? And my husband's like, you are a sick woman. He said, you never used to be like this.
33:59I said, but look at the pupper. And he's like, don't push it. Cause he thinks it's really weird that I am so a dog person now. Cause I used to be a cat person, way before I was a So she has, she has assimilated and ruined me for my love of cats. I'm now a dog person. Oh, cats are so funny too though. We made my husband was crack up at the little cat videos of them doing different things.
34:26Yeah, my husband really likes the YouTube videos where the cats or they knock things off on purpose of  the surface they're on  or they get startled and fall over.  thinks that's pretty funny too.  Yeah.  But anyway, we could talk about things that aren't necessarily  farming or homesteading related all day, but that's not what this podcast is about.  So oh you would like to get Valet sheep. Right.  And is there anything else that you would like to add to your farm?
34:57We have  a couple of donkeys. would like to get,  we have a mini Jack and I'd like to get a uh don't, uh, Jenny. Uh-huh.  Um, but other than that, just  the Valleys sheep and, and another donkey would be awesome. So then you could have baby donkeys too.  Yes. But they take like a year, I think. Yep.
35:24Yep. It's a very long gestation period for equines and donkeys fall under equines.  So yeah, it's a long wait  and, it's,  oh, I don't want to burst your bubble. do not want to this out loud because I want to discourage anybody, but  I will  never have a horse or a donkey, mostly because I would want to have that horse or donkey have a baby.  And  it's really nerve wracking.
35:52when they have their babies because you don't know whether that baby is going to come out good  or if it's going to come out not alive.  And I don't do so well with the second option there. m We had a calf this year that was stillborn. It was  very sad. oh Again, I don't want to discourage anybody from this lifestyle.  Farming, homesteading, ranching is  an amazing choice to make for your life.
36:22But you've got to get comfortable with things not being alive when you expect them to be. Oh no, it's so hard.
36:33I heard somebody say one time, if you've got livestock, you will eventually have dead stock.  Uh huh. Yeah. And you will. Whether it's a barn cat or a chicken or a foal,  it's going to happen  and it will break your heart.  yeah. So, you know,  I think that the joy that comes with farming, ranching and homesteading far outweighs the sad.
37:01But boy, that saddle kick you in the teeth when it happens.  Oh, it really will. There is more good, there's more exciting things  that does happen, but not nearly as often.  So,  all right, Trisha, I try to keep this to half an hour. Where can people find you? Oh, we are on Facebook and Instagram at Silo Springs  Farm. Okay. And you have a blog, right?
37:30Well, I do, but it has  not been updated in a couple of years. Life got kind of busy and I  quit  writing, but. Okay. Nevermind.  All right. I really appreciate your time so much. People can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com. I hope you have a great day, Trisha. Thank you. You too. Thank you.
 

New Beginnings with Leah at Clear Creek Ranch Mom

Today I'm talking with Leah at Clear Creek Ranch Mom.
https://www.homesteadliving.com/subscribe/ref/41/
https://homesteadliving.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-planner/ref/41/
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
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
In this episode of A Tiny Homestead, Mary welcomes back returning guest Leah from Clear Creek Ranch Mom in Nebraska. Leah has previously appeared on the podcast four times since March 2024, and today’s conversation brings exciting updates.
They begin with a little seasonal appreciation, talking about frosty mornings, baby pink sunrises, and the beauty of unobstructed rural views. From there, the conversation turns to what is new.
Introducing a New Podcast
Mary and Leah recently launched a brand new podcast together:
Grit and Grace in the Heartland: Women in Agriculture
After thoughtful consideration, Leah said yes to co hosting, and the two have been recording weekly conversations that highlight the voices and stories of women in agriculture.
They talk about:
Why so many podcasts stop around episode seven and why they are determined to keep going
The joy of unscripted, authentic conversation
Creating space for women to be heard
The power of storytelling in building connection and courage
The importance of real human connection in a world increasingly shaped by technology
Leah shares how her background in communications and her love of asking questions have shaped her passion for elevating other people’s stories.
Why Women’s Voices Matter
Grit and Grace in the Heartland focuses on women in agriculture and the many roles they hold. The podcast explores:
Identity and authenticity
Wearing multiple hats in rural life
Leadership, business, ranching, and family
Financial literacy and independence for women
The deep and often unseen emotional labor of rural women
Mary and Leah discuss how meaningful it is to go beyond surface level conversations and create a space where women can share their real stories, including the hard parts.
They also reflect on the courage it takes to put yourself out there publicly and the importance of community support, especially in small towns.
The Power of Asking and Listening
Leah shares stories about the impact of simply noticing people and saying thank you. From fast food employees to store clerks, she talks about how powerful it can be to acknowledge hard work and offer genuine appreciation.
The takeaway is simple:
If you see something, say something.And not just when it is negative.
Kind words and curiosity can change someone’s day, and sometimes even more than that.
Stories That Shape Us
Mary and Leah also reflect on the women who shaped them, especially their grandmothers. They talk about unconventional women, loneliness, resilience, and the importance of preserving family stories.
Every woman has a story worth telling.Every family holds stories that matter.
That belief sits at the heart of both podcasts.
A Nebraska Favorite
The episode wraps up with a lighthearted discussion about Runza, the beloved Nebraska sandwich filled with beef, cabbage, and onions baked inside bread dough. They even share tips for making them at home.
Where to Find Leah and the New Podcast
You can find Leah at Clear Creek Ranch Mom on Facebook.
Listen to Grit and Grace in the Heartland: Women in Agriculture at:gritandgraceintheheartland.com
Find Mary and A Tiny Homestead at:atinyhomesteadpodcast.com
Thank you for listening to A Tiny Homestead. If you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend and leave a review. Your support helps more people discover these meaningful rural stories.
 
 

Grounded In Maine Podcast

Today I'm talking with Amy at Grounded In Maine Podcast.
https://www.homesteadliving.com/subscribe/ref/41/
https://homesteadliving.com/the-old-fashioned-on-purpose-planner/ref/41/
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
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
00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters.  I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Amy Bolduc at Grounded in Maine in Virginia. I know that's weird, but that's how it falls.  Good morning, Amy. How are you?  I am doing fine. Thanks. I know it's such a funny thing. People are like, where are you? Like I'm in Virginia,  but why is your podcast Grounded in Maine? Well, because you'll always be.
00:29Your heart will always be grounded in Maine. That's why. mean, 49 years, not like that's nothing. That's not nothing. Yeah, exactly.  Well, what's the weather doing in Virginia this morning? Oh, geez.  It's so cold this morning. Like, I'm sure it's not Minnesota cold, but it's still cold. mean, it was 15 degrees when we were walking this morning. um And yesterday,  yesterday, it was so yesterday we had 45 mile per hour winds. um And  it was not much warmer.
00:59So but then two weeks ago, I mean, if you're asking about weather, the weather here is so weird. I mean, all of like November, December, it was beautiful, like 40s, probably. And I know I, you know, everyone was like, oh, my gosh, it's so cold. It's snowing, snowing, snowing. And I'm like, well, you know, don't want to say anything because I'm in the south, blah, blah, blah. But then two weeks ago, the weather forecast was looking like we were.
01:27My weather app was telling me we were going to get up to 21 inches of snow.  And I was like, what  is this about? ah And then when it actually came, it was like a dusting of snow, but then an inch and a half of freezing rain, ah which I would so I would prefer 21 inches of snow a million times over freezing rain and ice. ah Anyone who's dealt with freezing rain would agree a thousand percent freezing rain is so dangerous.
01:57Yeah. it's, you know, it just is like, but since then, so last weekend,  I, my, my trusty weather app that I've been using for years lied to me and said, you know, maybe, maybe one between one to three inches of snow. I'm like, okay, you know, that's no big deal. But then we got 10 ish inches of snow  and it was fluffy snow, which was cool. But then like, when I moved here, I did not get a snow shovel because I was
02:26You know, last winter we had four inches total, like  all winter long, two, two inch storms.  And I was like, that is no big deal. And then this year,  you know, and then the ice, I was like, I'm not I'm not even shoveling. I literally can't shovel that. But so I have a travel trunk shovel, which  it's in two pieces and it's rickety and plastic. I've had it for probably 20 years uh and.
02:54I ever used it, only when I was working and I got stuck in a snowstorm.  But so that's what I've been using. I actually went out yesterday to try to get a real shovel and they were out. Of course.  Of course.  Because we just got 10 inches of snow.  yeah, I mean, the weather is great. And then, know, Tuesday is supposed to be like 60. I  like,  there's no,  I don't think there's like Virginia weather. I think it's just whatever.
03:23happens, like what it just feels like.
03:28Yeah, Mother Nature has become extremely bipolar over the last two years. That's a great way to say it. Maybe she's going through menopause too. I don't want to make you jealous, but it's seven, it's, what is it right now? I'm looking at my weather app. It's 27 degrees here in Minnesota in Lesor right now. And it's supposed to be 38 for the high. Tomorrow 45 for the high, Tuesday 38, Wednesday 38.
03:57Thursday 40, Friday 40. Well, that's like making up for the last two weeks when it was below zero. That's exactly what I was going to say. We had, we had 14 or 15 days in a row where we never got close to freezing to 32 degrees.  And it was the longest stretch I've seen in years and it sucked. No question.  So anyway,  um, that's the weather update. I would do weather update.  Um, start with a weather update folks.
04:26Oh, always do. In case you need to know. Every podcast opens with how's the weather because we're all doing stuff that weather impacts and I figure it's a good way to do it.  We're all experiencing weather. We sure are. And when we're trying to grow stuff or, um you know,  if we have chickens. Raise animals. Yeah. Yeah.  It's  kind of important to know what we're walking out into.  So that leads me to my first question. I saw that your  chickens are starting to lay again, beautiful eggs.
04:55How are the chickens doing and how many do you have? The chickens are good. I have five. I've actually, so I've had one. Miss Lacey never stopped laying. Like every so often she'll skip a day, but then the next day she's like, before I even get there, she's already laid her egg.  She has not taken a break.  Jason, however, has not laid an egg for at least two months. uh Jason is a hen.  She came to me with that name. don't,  Jason Kelsey. I don't know.
05:24I think that's football. Yes. I don't know. It's football. That's the name that she came with. That's so funny. And she's very nice and she's very pretty, but she had a really, really rough molt and she was really funny looking. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Jason. I know you can't hear this, but she was funny looking. But it's always the worst timing when they molt. Do you have chickens, Mary? I have 18. You have 18. Okay.
05:52How many kittens do you have now? um Well, technically we have three kittens, but they're about five months old now. Oh, well, they're still kittens. um Okay. So  I have, yeah, five still. I have not lost a single chicken in a year. Good job. They barely see the light of day, but  I feel like that's a good trade off. mean, they do. They get out. um
06:17like an hour at the end of the day, because that's when I am not working and I can actually be out there with them. And even if I'm not out there with them, like usually when I get out of work, so now because the time, because with the time change and the light, longer darkness, whatever. So I get out of work at 4.30, my dog and I walk at 4.30 and I let the chickens out at 4.30 because 5.30 it's going to be dark.
06:44So I let them out at 430 and I leave my phone while we're walking  with music playing so that the critters don't feel like the predators don't feel like they're alone.  I just looked at my farmer's almanac wall calendar and daylight savings time is March 8th.  So we only have a few more weeks until literally a month, literally a month from today.  Yep. So
07:10Yeah, I know me too. I was like, yay, more light in the evening. It's so sad that we have to wait until March. like really winter is just, I know winter is a season of rest, but some of us don't get to do that. And then it's just miserable. Absolutely. I just had a thought and it went bye bye. Cause that's what happens. Um, I'm very excited to know that, uh,
07:39daylight savings time switch is only a month away because that means that good,  spring weather is only two months away.  Yeah. It's just, you know, it's like  there are no holidays. So we're like March 8th, come on, come on, come on, March 8th.  You know, never push the  time to move as quickly as this last month for sure. Yes. And I figure
08:04In Minnesota, we have March Madness, which is the hockey tournaments, I think. oh is it? It's not  baseball? Baseball? I can't remember. It's hockey or basketball.  It might be both. Who knows? I'm not a girl. Don't take sports information from us, peeps. Yeah, I am not a sports fanatic at all.
08:25What I do know is that March, because of the tournaments that are going on, is always terrible for weather because of course it would be because people are traveling in for the tournament. Well, it's like that in between, right?  You're waiting for spring and you're so anxious for spring, but winter's like, eh, I'm just going to hang out a little bit longer. Just going to throw a little crap your way. Yeah, yeah. And it's always March. It's always the worst month. February's okay. I can deal with February, but March is the worst.
08:55Cause everybody's so excited about this tournament thing.  And I'm like, yeah, good luck driving in that three feet of snow we're probably going to get.
09:05Oh,  it's so  yeah, it's like going out with a bang. The last hurrah.  Yes, it is. then I'm like, okay, it's going to be peonies season soon. So I'm all for it.  let's get back to the whole grounded in Maine and you live in Virginia now.  When I first interviewed you two years ago, I think it was you were in Maine. I was in Maine. And then you got divorced and then you moved to Virginia.  Yeah.
09:36It's for the people who don't know it is kind of a pain in the butt  to change the name of a podcast. Yeah.  So  I don't blame you for not changing it. Plus I  know when we last talked, you had mentioned that you were trying to get back to New England. So how is that? Is that anywhere on the horizon?  Um,  well, I mean, I would love it to be on the horizon. I really don't want to do another summer here in Virginia. Yeah.  Um,
10:04So my goal is to get back there in some form by like May. I don't have any big things happening though. My house has been on the, on the real estate market since July and no one, no one has even like looked at it, which is sad. But, um, you know, my realtor says it's just really expensive, but at the, at the same time, like I put $25,000 in solar panels on this house. And so.
10:34the electric bill,  except for this month because we got 10 inches of snow, uh has been literally $10. Like 11 months of the year, it's $10. Okay, I forget the nearest big city to you in Virginia.  So I am about an hour from Greensboro, North Carolina. I'm about an hour from Danville, Virginia, and I'm about an hour from Roanoke, Virginia.
11:03Okay. What's the next biggest town from you though?  I mean,  like how far?  Uh, Martinsville is right next door. It's just like 10 minutes, but it's not, it's not like bustling by any means.  Everything is about an hour. Let's use the, the, American definition of how far away you are from stuff. How far is the nearest Walmart from you or Home Depot? Oh,  uh, Home Depot. don't, I think.
11:32is like an hour. Walmart is like 10 minutes. So if somebody wants to move to Virginia, Amy's house is on the market. You should go check it out. Cute little house. Very simple, but you $10 electric bill, man. And it's on an acre, a little bit over an acre.
11:52Well, maybe somebody will hear the podcast. you can have chickens.  Yeah. Maybe somebody will hear the podcast episode and be like, I would like to check out Amy's house. Maybe it's somewhere I would like to live. I would not be mad at that. Yeah, exactly. And then you can go find your house where you want to be.  I did though. mean, just yesterday I got, so Saturdays I get an email from the New England Farm Finder website,  which is really fun. I don't know if you subscribe to that, Mary, but it's really fun if you're dreaming.
12:21Well, I'm not dreaming and putting that in front of me would probably be a bad plan. So  I would get nothing done.  But so a new one came out yesterday and I actually sent a letter of interest to two different properties.  Good.  And they were not selling. They were like leasing  per se.  I actually I got an email back just like an hour ago from one of them.
12:49So that's like, that feels like progress, even though  it might not become anything, it's progress. uh I also,  have my actually next week's podcast  episode, the guest hooked me up with this guy who's also a podcaster and Mary, you might be interested in speaking with him.  His name is Ting, Tim Ang.  I have already talked to him. did? Okay. His wife actually. Okay. Sophia. Yes. Super, super nice. Fabulous. Yes.
13:19They both are very, very nice. And so I got hooked up with Tim and he's a homesteader realtor banker. And so I paid him to help market my house to homesteaders. And he's put it on a list of off market homes, properties, which I've never heard of, I'm like, I'll take whatever.
13:48Anything to get the word out at this point.  And so we took new pictures. We changed the wording and the listing. I changed the wording in the listing because it was too  sterile and it did not highlight the solar panels quite enough and the great things that are around here.  Well, fingers are still crossed. Love and light to get your house moved because I know how much you want to get back to New England. I totally understand.
14:17I don't want to go back to New England. I am really, really happy with where we ended up.  I feel like a traitor saying that, but I am assimilated. Minnesota is pretty similar to Maine. It is.  is. It's just But that's where your people are. Yeah. It's just missing the ocean half an hour away and mountains the other half an hour away, but I can live without those things. It's okay. Yeah. I mean, a funny little...
14:43I mean, it's not really a complication, just like literally yesterday,  my sister,  so my sister's been in Greensboro, North Carolina. She took a job transfer a month ago. She started in December. then uh just yesterday, she and her spouse  and their dogs drove from Cincinnati where they've been living for the last like eight years  to North Carolina. So now they're living an hour away from me.
15:12God, I can't imagine  moving  again.  I know. I can't either, but I also can't imagine staying. Yeah. If I didn't love where we are so much, it would be a different story. But my God, trying to move a 20 years worth of stuff out of a small house into a bigger house, you would have thought that we  would have had lots of room.  And  after five years,  we're starting to...
15:39starting to be like, okay, it's time to really deep clean the house and get stuff out of here again. Right. Well, I think you and I are similar in that we don't, we're thoughtful about what we let go of.  Um, my sister was like, I don't want to move this. I don't want to move this. And so they had a dumpster  and she was showing me,  she showed me the pictures of her new place, which has this beautiful deck. And  she was like, I'm not sure if I'm going to bring  the grill or not. And I'm like, but you have that deck. And she was like, well, but you know,
16:08It doesn't work that great. guess,  you know, they  also move a lot. mean, eight years is a long time for them to be in the same place.  I think they don't have... um
16:26What's the word that I need? um Like nostalgia for stuff. uh Stuff doesn't hold their emotions  like it does me.  doesn't hold their hearts, Travel does. So  here they are again.  Yeah, I hate travel. I hate it.  I have done so many road trips between New England and the Midwest in my life because my grandparents lived in Illinois when I was a kid.
16:56um That I'm just I'm kind of over it being stuck in a car or an airplane or train just does not do it for me anymore  Yeah, I would rather have people come visit me at this point then then go you know  For sure uh So I we're gonna totally jump tracks here  I saw that your your cats maybe one of them got sprayed by a skunk. Is that right? Yeah a couple months ago uh Maybe a month ago
17:26And you mentioned that you had a trick to get rid of the stinkiness. So what's the trick? Right. Well, I mean, I just Googled it because I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this actually happened. I never thought that it would actually happen. Google said,  what was it? A quart  of hydrogen peroxide. um I forget how much baking soda,  but I can get that to you. Yeah. So
17:55Hydro and peroxide, baking soda and dish soap. Was it specifically Dawn dish soap or is it any dish soap? Well, I don't have Dawn dish soap, em it might've said Dawn.  Okay. Well, Dawn's just really good at  really, really good. I mean, I'm not sponsored by Dawn dish soap,  don't take it that way, but Dawn dish soap is really good at cutting oils. But Dawn, if you're interested, uh Mary's looking for sponsors.
18:25Well, I always am, but I'm not sure Dawn would be the one, but we'll see what happens.  But it's really, really good at cutting oils.  It's fantastic. They  use it after oil spills.  Yeah, exactly. And so I'm assuming that  the skunk spray probably has natural oils from the skunk in it. And maybe, maybe that would help.  don't know. Well, I mean, what I did worked great. mean,  I, was, I was very, very happy and I was like,
18:55Oh my gosh, I can't let her inside. Because I don't want that in my house. But then it was cold enough that I was like, we're just going to take this into the entryway. I gave her the little bath in the entryway and then it was, you know, better. My parents dog when I was a teenager got sprayed by a skunk and he was a Samoyed. So much hair. Holy moly.
19:24My dad tried using tomato sauce. Well, that's what we grew up learning, right? Tomato juice cuts it. But then it stains a white dog. Well, that was fine, but he was still stinky for months.  And the worst part was that he took a full-on hit  of skunk. of course, my dad let him in the house to try to clean him up, and my clothes smelled like skunk for months.
19:54And I was in high school. Can you imagine how that went over?  mean, somebody told me that cats and skunks usually get along pretty well. And I was like, what? But then  as I was thinking about that, somebody said, really, is that true? And then it clicked with me that  Pepe Le Pew from Looney Tunes  was in love with a cat. uh
20:20So, mean, I think they don't necessarily not get along, but I think that my male cat was hissing and probably freaked it out. and skunks are finicky. There are times where you think they're going to spray and then it's like, no, I'm good. And then there's times where you think they're fine and nope, they're going to spray. But so this skunk came around. So it was like, it was 715 in the morning. I felt so bad because I was like, get away, you know, screaming.
20:47and slamming, like I have a galvanized uh bucket that I keep my bird food in and I was just slamming it on anything just to scare it away and it wasn't moving. And I was like, Oh my gosh, like,  I wonder if it's rabid. And someone eventually said that  it's mating season for skunks.  Oh gosh.  But it was like, it was around all day and I haven't seen it since.  But that day,  like it was, it was circling my house.
21:16And it creeped me out so much. Uh huh. Yeah. The joys of living in  an area where there's wildlife that can just come visit anytime they want. Yeah. But I've seen, this is probably the fifth time that I've encountered this skunk. I assume it's the same one because this is the, I'm guessing that this is the same one that I caught last year in a trap thinking that I was getting a possum. Oh no. So I put the trap, the have a heart trap in my
21:46chicken pen, which is where one of my chickens was killed.  And I saw the possum. So I'm like, I'm going to catch that bugger.  I caught a skunk. Yeah. And I got sprayed when I tried to move it, of course.  And  then I found out that it's illegal to um to move it  from where it was living. So it's not like you can just  move it seven miles away or something like that. They said it's illegal. So
22:16The options are kill it, which there's no reason to kill it. It's doing it's skunk thing. Yeah. Or release it.  Oh my God. I had a trapper come and he released it back into the woods and.  No, and it keeps coming back. I mean, I've seen it in my chicken coop a couple of times and I've just like, the chickens now are barricaded so that no one can get into their coop. They have a safe space and then usually  all the critters are gone.
22:44when the light turns on at 430  and the light starts to come in. uh You know, most of them are  nocturnal. So they, they bail and I just leave the chickens in until it's light.  Your chickens have a safe room. I know it's so, I can't believe that this is, it's taken me this long,  but I mean safe as in like they are barricaded by with  cinder blocks.  I've got them all around the outside of their.
23:12the inside and the outside of their coop and um their door, which was, it used to be just like a pillowcase,  a pretty pillowcase with a tree heart uh that they could just push in and out. Now it's blocked.  Not only do your chickens have a safe room, they have a fortress. That is true.  That is true. sure this is the love that you have for your chickens.
23:41for not wanting a skunk to get in there. Heck yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's, think that that's,  it's actually  part of homesteading ish, isn't it, Mary? Like  you, you learn as you go  how much,  know, if you're, if what you're doing is not safe enough, you need to  add to, right? Or like be innovative and  figure out how to make everyone safe and get everything done right.
24:10absolutely is part of being homesteadish. had I, did I tell you about the raccoons that showed up this past spring here?  Yeah, mama. have a raccoon story. Yeah. A raccoon showed up, a big raccoon showed up  and my husband tried to dispatch it and missed.  And then about a week and a half. No, I'm sorry.  Couldn't have been that shortly. Couldn't have been that short of amount of time. Like a month later.
24:39I got up in the morning and was going out on the porch, drink my coffee, and I opened the door to the porch  and I heard all these little scritchy noises and it was a mama raccoon.  had  like four or five babies and they had all come up on  the cement pad that's outside the porch. It was their little feet scritching to run away.  That would have been fine except that they proceeded to find the weak
25:08heart in the fence for the chicken run  and they killed like four or five of our chickens. my husband and my son went out and  and fortified uh the fence. And it was really weird because I never saw the raccoon or the babies again.
25:30And I know that my husband shot  the shotgun off a couple of times after they fixed the fence.  He didn't shoot it at anything. He just discharged the rifle or shotgun.  And I think maybe the gun  going off a couple of times scared them and left. Maybe. But uh raccoons will rip, literally rip chickens apart just for the fun of it.  Yeah. They don't even eat.
25:55And what a waste. I mean, I wasn't I wasn't crying upset, but I was just like, you know, those freaking chickens cost us twenty three dollars apiece. Oh. Five of them. Are they fancy chickens? No, it's just that laying hens that that are old enough to lay or just getting to be old enough to lay were expensive last year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you call them? Pullets. Thank you. Yeah. So we lost like.
26:23almost $125 in one go. And I was just like, this is not okay. And my husband said, this is homesteading. I went, mm-hmm, sure is honey. Speaking of homesteading, have you seen the Homestead Living magazine yet? I haven't. Oh my goodness. If you have an extra $30 burning a hole in your pocket for a subscription for the year.
26:51you might want to subscribe to it because it's really beautiful. started over two years ago  and it used to be monthly. Now it's bimonthly. So  one um issue, not episode, one issue every two months now.  And it's gorgeous. And I get it because I was one of the founding people that subscribed  and I am not willing to give up my subscription yet. But I...
27:18had an article that was supposed to be published in the, I don't know, December issue. And it might, my article got bumped because of the gift guide and I was very sad. my editor said, how about we put the article on the blog? And I was like, yes, please. em So it was published on the blog on like December 17th, I think. And  it was just really cool to see it. Cause I spent time writing that thing. It was nice to see it get out in the world.
27:48Absolutely, but it's it's a gorgeous magazine and their blog has all kinds of information for people who want to look into getting into homesteading or who are homesteaders and want new ideas.  I need I need outlets where people are supportive. That's good. That's good to know. Yeah, it's very very fun. um I really want to interview Melissa Canora. She's the lady that started the magazine.
28:17But she's  really busy. This woman has her hands in everything.  I just, can't, I can't get her attention. I'm like, Melissa, please come talk to me. That I just can't, I can't get her.  So, um, we have a few minutes left. wanna, I wanna tell you, I'm very impressed with your podcast. You have had some fantastic guests lately.  I feel the same way.
28:47Yeah. And your podcast is really about sustainability, right? Yes.  Although I take some poetic license with that. Everybody does with podcasts. There are no rules. That's right.
29:04sustainability and then some.  Yeah, I just, I love it. I see,  I see your little snippets or whatever they're called  on your Instagram account.  And I'm like, Ooh, that's going to be a good one.  Yeah.  I've got a really interesting one coming up in a few weeks. mean, I've got, I've, so I don't, I don't know if you're on pod match.  I am. Okay. You are.
29:34Why am I not seeing you? Maybe I'm not. I'll have to look. I'm on a whole bunch of pod things, but that may be not be one of them. don't remember.  So a lot of the guests recently have come from there, but also some of them  I've just found on Instagram and some of them are just chance. Like I think um if you  happen to listen to the one with Tia's prom  closet.  I did.  She just, and there are people that
30:03that just follow people because my podcast is grounded in Maine and she's in Maine. So I think that she was just following me because of that. And then I saw what she was about and I was like, oh, heck yeah. Getting prom dresses and formal dresses back into circulation is so, so cool instead of being wasted. But then the story behind it was just like...
30:30you make makes you cry to listen to but you know, in the most inspiring and  and happy way, right?  Yeah, it's always the stories behind it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love to be able to bring those out. And then I just think that, you know, she was totally chance like  I was looking at her profile and I was like, Oh, I want to hear more about that.  And then as I you know, when she filled out her guest form, she was talking about pain and to purpose and I'm like, Whoa,
31:00This is going to be so good because it's so much, you know, I don't know what happened, but I'm, I'm here for the, you know, the, the stories I'm here for the stories. And I, I love when they have a good story. It's a stories are a hook. and  I, I personally hate the word hook cause  it's like tricking somebody, but, but in this case, it's not a trick. It's a gift. Yeah.  Well, yeah. I mean, it definitely was for me.
31:30But then it also,  it just makes them, it makes it relatable because people,  know, everyone's lost a friend. Well, not everyone, but you can imagine what it would be like to lose a friend and  to be able to make, create something so powerful from that friend's  memory.  And to honor that friend. Yep.  Yeah. And I just thought, you know, she's got,
31:58the girl that I interviewed, think she said she has three kids, three young kids. her youngest is just months old  and she's also running this place. I was like, you know, that just says so much about their friendship. Yeah. And about her, about, about the girl that, you  interviewed. Yep. Yeah. I just, mean, there, there are some really cool people there, you know, and I just,  I find them, I find them everywhere. I mean, I,  I do a lot of, I scour
32:27Instagram, not, not like in a creepy way, but just, you know, there are so many cool people out there and I'm,  I'm out there to find them. It's a lot of work, but it is always worth it when I get a really good conversation. Yeah. It's a ton of work. mean, I used to do,  I used to release an episode every day, Monday through Friday in the morning. And now I'm down to  at least one a week because right now I'm having trouble finding people to talk with me because people are really busy.
32:57Yeah. So anybody listening who knows somebody  they want to, if they want to chat with me, you can get ahold of me through  the, through the podcast information in the show notes. ah Amy, did you know that I started another podcast? know the, the last time we talked to you were, oh well you had interviewed me for this potential podcast. Did you start a podcast about podcasting?  I did not. Oh, okay. Then what is the second podcast?  It is called.
33:26What is it called? oh I do this every time. Like I read it every day in front of my eyeballs. But every time I go to say it, I completely forget  grit and grease in the heartland women in agriculture.  And I have a cohost. Her name is Leah. She's clear Creek ranch mom on Facebook and on Instagram.  And I had interviewed her a whole bunch of times for a tiny homestead. She's a cattle rancher in Nebraska  and
33:56I just off the cuff was like, do you want to do a podcast together with me? And she's actually, is 2026 is Leah's year.  She, she just got invited to do her first paid speaking gig,  um, at the end of 2025. Like she was invited then and she just did it, did it yesterday, day before yesterday. don't remember this past week, Friday, it was Friday.  And, um, she said,
34:25She said, can I have a week to think about it? And I was like, absolutely. And so I,  I messaged her a week to the day and said, did you have time to think about it? And she came back with, I absolutely want to do a podcast with you. ah And so basically I didn't know,  but 2026 is the international year of the woman farmer. I didn't know that when I asked her and I found out about it afterwards. So.
34:53Our whole mission for this year is to find women  who are doing big things in agriculture or little things in agriculture or women who have had to leave agriculture and have turned that into promoting  or advocating for agriculture.  I think we have eight episodes out now since the very end of December. Tell me the name of it again, Grace.  In the Heartland. In the Heartland. Women in agriculture, colon, women in agriculture.
35:23But the podcast is actually called Great Grace in the Heartland.
35:28Okay. So yeah, you might want to. Gotcha.  I have some people that I can recommend.  Awesome. Fantastic. We,  we just interviewed Carol from the old farmers' Almanac.  we. Oh, Carol Conair.  Yes. And I had interviewed her for the tiny homestead for this one.  And I messaged her marketing person.
35:51I was like, a friend of mine started a new one, this is what it is. Could Carol come back and talk with us? And she was like, absolutely. And Carol has the most gorgeous laugh. And when she's talking and she's happy and she's animated, her voice completely changes into this other register of sound. And I love it when she's tickled. It just, makes me giggle.
36:18Right. Well, I think it's also part of something that excites you, if you're talking about homesteading as opposed to, not that the almanac is not exciting, but it's something that you're doing, something that you are very involved in, something that just makes you really happy. hear that a lot.
36:46I mean, I think I do that too sometimes, but it's, uh
36:53Yeah.  It was, it was just, it was so fun to have her on. of course,  with Leo being a cattle rancher, she is a D a devotee  of the old farmer's almanac. And  there was a rumor going around that the old farmer's almanac was going out of print. was not, was the farmer's almanac. The farmer's almanac was going out of print. So we had to talk about that. It was just really, really fun. Yeah. It's very confusing. I didn't, I never knew that they were two.  I did.
37:21And I always knew the difference was that it was the old  Farmer's Almanac that my dad used to buy. So I would just get that one.  But anyway, so where can people find you, Amy? Are you just on Instagram?  I am  just on Instagram. I've deleted everything else except for LinkedIn.  So Instagram is grounded in Maine podcast. Okay, cool.
37:47And you guys should go listen to Amy's podcast if you want to learn about new ways to be sustainable and all the amazing things that people are doing, like the woman she talked to who is recycling prom dresses, because that is amazing.  All right. As always, you can find me at AtinyHolmsteadPodcast.com. If you want to support the show, can find that at AtinyHolmstead.com  slash support, because I'm original like that.
38:16And please go listen to the other podcast again. is written grace in the heartland Yes, exactly. Thank you because I was gonna call it again women in agriculture Yes,  yes It needed a tagline because grit and grace in the heartland apparently could mean anything and I was like, okay Well women in agriculture pretty much says it all.  Yeah So  Amy, thank you for coming back and chatting with me. I appreciate it. It's always fun Mary
38:43It's a joy. love you so much and I wish you all the luck in the world with your home search.  Thank you.  All right. We'll talk again soon. Okie dokie.  Bye. Bye.
 

Open Road Ranch

Today I'm talking with Julie at Open Road Ranch. You can also follow on Facebook.
The Old Farmer's Almanac
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
Muck Boots 
Calendars.Com
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
00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Julie at Open Road Ranch in Wisconsin. Good morning, Julie. How are you? Good morning, Mary. I'm wonderful. Thank you. How are you? I'm good. How's the weather there?  Sunny and beautiful. It's so nice to see the sun.  Oh, we had that  yesterday and the day before. Right now it is inco...
00:28incredibly overcast in Minnesota, but it's warm. Yes. It's nice, isn't it?  Oh my God. This last two weeks of  like living in the Arctic tundra.  Yeah. I had forgotten how terrible a more than a couple days stint of those temperatures is. Yes. I woke up on like the 13th day and thought to myself, if this doesn't break soon, I don't know what I'm going to do.
00:56Yes, we just need like a day of sun to remind us or just a windless day or something just to hang on. Yeah, I grew up on the East Coast and I remember the song, the  song Oklahoma, where the wind comes rolling off the prairie. Yeah. And I had no concept of that because my house was surrounded by trees. The wind didn't roll across the prairie because there was no prairie. I moved to Minnesota and I learned real quick about wind rolling off the prairie.
01:25Oh yeah, I just saw the other day  someone said the quote, it wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the wind, said every farmer ever.  Yeah, absolutely.  It's just crazy. And I open every podcast with How's the Weather? Because I just feel like we're all in ag and it's important to talk about the weather. Oh yeah. I used to work office jobs and I worked in a basement office with no windows and weather was just, I'd never even thought about it. It could be light out, could be
01:54night, could be raining. It just didn't really have any effect on my life whatsoever. Now it's everything. Yeah, absolutely. It literally is everything. okay, I don't do a lot of the outside work. My husband is the outside guy. I do a lot of the cooking and the cleaning inside. And even I pay really close attention to the weather because I'm like, I saw it's going to snow tomorrow. Are you set to plow the driveway?
02:22Or I saw it's going to be minus 40 windchill three nights from now. Are the chickens going to survive in their coop?  And he's like, you never really paid attention to this before we moved to Homestead. I said, no, I didn't because I had no reason to pay attention to it. Yeah, you're so into your lives, you know, your animals.  It totally changes your perspective and the way that you live your life. And I kind of love it.  Yes.
02:50All right, so tell me all about yourself and what you do. um I  am a first generation farmer. I'm a very new farmer. This is our second year in farming. um So all very new, um very new small business owner. um Just learning as I go.  We have a small farm in Greenbush, Wisconsin, um is five rented acres of family land. So Tony's folks live up the road and
03:19our crop farmers corn, soybeans and wheat  and they very generously um are renting us five acres to start our farm here and they're very helpful with their farming knowledge and experience just up the road and so it's because of them that we're able to farm and so we have five acres here  and looking at right out the window in our backyard we have pasture raised hogs, uh have uh pasture raised sheep and we have some chickens that aren't  doing much of anything right now it's mostly for us m
03:48but I did get three eggs the other day, so that's exciting.  we sell our pasture-raised um pork and lamb.  And  I also make lard products with lard from our pasture-raised hogs  because one of my missions when I first began was uh education and also to use as much of the animal as possible. So I dabbled in  trying to  tan sheepskin hides that didn't go very far,  make dog treats out of the organ meats, just different creative ways  because these animals give us such a gift.
04:17you know I hate to see you go in the trash when especially our ancestors you know  would be you know grateful for the whole gift and use as much of it as possible and they needed to use as much of it as possible  but I hope to still  tap into a little bit of that so ah we use the lard from our pasture raised hogs to create um bombs, dish soap, shampoo bars,  things like that because lard is just incredible for us and  so I also feel strongly about educating people about  the wonder of  those
04:46what are often considered waste products that are so wonderful for us and such a gift. Awesome. Tell me about lard dish soap, because I have not heard those words in the same sentence before. Yeah,  me neither until recently. And I had been making lard bombs for about a year and I thought, well, what else can I do  with this lard?  Because the bombs were going really well and I thought there must be some other things um that our ancestors used lard for that we can use it for. Because it's just full of vitamins and minerals and such healing properties.
05:16uh You would not think that lard would clean dishes. You're often trying get lard off of your dishes, so I didn't really believe it either. ah We mix the  lard with lye and  some lemon. That's your degreaser. It's really pure and simple. ah It's just a uh dish soap bar, so it takes some getting used to, but you just use a sponge or a scrub.
05:41You just get it wet and then you use it like you'd use  dish soap and it works wonderfully and it's clean and pure. It's not full of... um One of the reasons I started this is because laundry soap and  lotions and  shampoo bars and all those things, they're just full of so many chemicals. And I know people, myself included, are looking for clean things to put on their body and use in their homes.  And so it's just pure and simple, non-toxic.  So that's another reason I started making them.
06:10Nice. Okay.  The reason I was so confused is because I always think of liquid dish soap. I didn't think of a soap bar dish soap. So  I didn't know you could use lard for dish soap. I am going to have to look up a recipe and maybe try that. Because we make, we make cold process lye soap here for  baths and showers and  love it.  Like all of our kids grew up using these bars of soap since we started making  them 15 years ago.  And, uh,
06:39My youngest asked me the other day, said, can I have like four bars of that soap? I said, yes, you can.  Well, they last so long and they're so versatile.  And yeah, they're just wonderful. Yeah.  I have a daughter and three sons. The daughter is the oldest.  The oldest of the boys lives in Nebraska. And he also had asked for some soaps to take home with them a couple of years ago when he visited.
07:05And he and his wife are now making their own cold processed Lysol. That's wonderful. It's such a good feeling to be able to do that. It's such a skill. So excited that the things that we tried to teach them really did sink in and sunk in enough that they want to do it too. Yeah. It does work. It does work. If you model good things for your kids and you make it fun, they'll probably want to do it too.
07:32Yes, it's quite different than just telling someone to do something when they see you doing it and enjoying it and what can come from it. Then it's quite different than just telling someone very much so. Yeah. And I always say this when I bring up the soaps. The reason we started making cold process lye soap is because store bought soap makes my skin itch like crazy.  And I had bought a beautiful um honey oat bar soap.
08:00from a lady that has been making them for years. And I just loved it so much, the way it smelled, that I was like, oh, I can't wait to take a shower with this. And I used that entire bar, went back to store, bought soap, and my skin was itchy, but the whole time I used the bar I from her, my skin was really nice. And I said to my husband, I said, can we please try making cold processed lye soap? Because I can't afford to spend $7 a bar.
08:29uh It's a stretch for the budget back then.  And he said, let's look up how to make it. And we did, and he made a batch and it was unscented and we loved it. And we gave a couple bars to people to try to see what they thought. And they were like, can you make a lemon scented one?  Can you make a lavender scented one?  And then we got into the essential oils and it was just, it was so fun.
08:53to learn all the things and all the properties and why lavender is so good,  why lemon is so good.  And we still do it now. So I just, always rave about the cold process Lysol because yes, it has some things to be careful of,  but  once you've made a couple of batches and you know your process, it's one of the simplest ways  to improve your life. Yes. You get so many out of a batch.
09:22You get like eight or 10 bars and so much more cost effective. And um yeah, you have to be careful with the lie, but like anything, it's a skill that you learn. then, you you use safety and you get the hang of it. And then, you know, you get this cost effective product that, you know, saves you money. You can share with family and friends. It's really wonderful. And it's  satisfying, you know, you.
09:46You make that soap, you use that soap, and I don't know about you, but I just get this bubble of happiness in my chest that we can do this, that we did this, that we use it, that it's good for us. Yeah, my first bar of soap, I couldn't believe it. There was no soap there, and then I made soap. It's something that you think you can only get in stores, and I made it. It's such a neat thing to know that you can do those kinds of things. There's such a sense of...
10:13Accomplishment and pride when you create something with your own hands and it has like a different feel to it  Because you had a hand in it and you created it and it's just yeah Really nice. Humans are really skilled really special creatures. We are very good once we set our minds to things. Yes. Yeah  Okay, so uh I'm gonna bring up the fact that your place is called open road ranch not open road farm. Oh,
10:40I have been told by a few people that typically a ranch is a property to the west of the Mississippi and a farm uh is a place to the east of the Mississippi.  So is there a reason that you named it ranch?  We like alliteration. Okay. So it just sounded nice. And actually we looked up ranch versus farm just to make sure we were being technically accurate because I didn't quite know the difference either. And I actually had not heard that.
11:09ah But  my understanding was that  a ranch was primarily  livestock based uh and a farm could be produce or uh livestock. So  a farm could be a ranch, but a ranch couldn't be a farm kind of  thing. And I don't know if that's right. This is probably just on Google. uh But we are  livestock only and it  sounded nice.
11:36Yes, we went with ranch, but I often call us a farm too. feel like  in a lot of ways they're interchangeable and in a lot of ways I'm sure they're quite different. Oh yeah, absolutely. And I don't have an opinion on this at all,  but my thought before a couple of people told me about the West versus East of the Mississippi thing, my thought has always been if it's a farm, it's more produce. If it's a ranch, it's more livestock. So I'm in the same boat as you. Yeah.  Interesting.
12:05So do you have lots of pigs?  I wish I had more. um Well, it's always changing as  some go to the butcher and then we get new piglets. last  couple of weeks ago, we took five of our big pigs in and so now we have five um left. So usually I do batches of about 10 at a time. um And then once the  littles start getting big, then we'll get some more littles in so we can kind of.
12:32face it out so we're  quite a small farm um and so we're still growing our avenues for selling and we're still getting freezers and things like that so that felt like a really manageable uh amount to be able to have enough to sell um without gaps and to be able to manage here from our little farm and our little farm store um but we do hope to grow  and I've just absolutely fallen in love with pigs so I love  tons of pigs and um
13:02The sheep we rotationally graze  as well, so that takes  some thought with  how many acres we have and how many can  rotationally graze on the pasture and have enough to eat and  have that be beneficial for the land and the soil um to not stretch that. uh And so it's just kind of working out um between the sheep and the pigs  what's best for the animals and the land and how much we can feed and how we can grow.
13:29So right now we have five um red wattle Berkshire crosses  for hogs and we have  seven  sheep. Some are south down and some are heritage breed called Jacobs.  I'm 19 Langhans. I just kind of hang out.  Are the sheep the hair sheep or are they the wool sheep?  They are wool sheep. Okay.  I don't know the names of the breeds well enough to go, oh yeah, that's a hair sheep or oh yeah, that's a wool sheep. I'm  not up to date on my.
13:59My shape breeds.  We have 18 or 19 chickens. Last I was told we have 19, but there may have been one that decided to on alive itself. I'm not sure. Oh no. Are you getting eggs? Are they layers or? Yeah. They're the  ISA brown breed. Yep. And we have a light in their coop. So they  lay during the winter. Oh good. There's nothing like a farm fresh egg.
14:26So I missed them during their sabbatical. Yeah, we're actually swimming in eggs right now because the weather's been so cold. People haven't been making the journey out to our place to pick up eggs from the farm stand.  And I'm glad we're talking about this because after I'm done talking with you, I need to post on Facebook and be like, there's eggs and it's warming up outside. Please come buy eggs. Please. Yeah.  We need you to take our eggs. Yeah, exactly.
14:53um My husband brought in, think,  eight dozen from the farm stand a week or so ago  because  they  were getting to the point where we need to get them eaten up.  And I was so excited because as anyone who raises chickens for laying eggs knows,  you can't really, well, you can hard boil a fresh egg, but it doesn't peel very easily. You lose about a quarter of the egg white.
15:19And he brought in all these eggs and I was like, yes, I can make egg salad again. Yeah. Oh yum, that sounds good. We made that in a while. Yeah. So I've had, I've had egg salad like three times in last two weeks. I'm probably going to do it again today because I really like egg salad. And I hadn't had an egg salad sandwich in a year because people were just buying the eggs before there was any time for them to be over two weeks old. Yeah. Yep. Eggs are like gold.
15:47Yep. I love having chickens mostly because I feel like we're helping our community. sell our eggs for $5 a dozen. I don't know what eggs cost at the store now because I haven't bought eggs at the store in almost a year, but there for a while eggs were really freaking expensive and we were still selling our eggs at $5 a dozen. So we were trying to help and I'm a big believer in help where you can. Uh, yeah.
16:17Yeah, yeah. That little touch point, that little access to food,  even if it's just a dozen eggs,  well, you know, connect someone to the farm and the farmer and kind of open doors, I hope. Yes. And the other thing that's  interesting, and I don't mean to make the interview about me, but we're talking about stuff I actually know about. Usually I'm talking to people and they're like, we're raising horses. And I'm like, I don't know anything about horses. Let me ask you a ton of questions. In the spring and summer and fall,
16:46when people come by to get eggs and they've never been here before.  I watch them get out of their vehicle  and they're kind of tight in the shoulders when they step out of the vehicle.  And then they kind of stop and look around and I watch their shoulders just relax.  And I'm like, oh my God, our property, just being on the property helps people. And it just makes me so happy. Yeah. A lot of people don't have access to, of course, like
17:13you know, being around pigs or sheep or chickens or anything like that.  I just, or just even out, you know, in the quiet and the fresh air and green grass and all that stuff. So it's just, it's a really nice, I absolutely know what you mean. Yeah. It's really fun when you get to observe people quietly, like they don't know what you're noticing.  Because if I said to them, did you have a rough day?  They would look at me like I was crazy. Yeah.
17:42But you can see on someone that they've had a very stressful day and you can just watch it kind of melt from their shoulders down to their fingertips when they are  able to take that long deep breath of fresh air. Yes. I try not to take that for granted. because I grew up in the city and I've only been living out in the country and on the farm for a little bit.  I mean, when I see the sunrise or sunset or, you know, the pigs are running around as God intended and...
18:07all of that, like I just try to pause and think like what a gift it is to be able to see pigs out our window and you know, sheep and  these sunrises and sunsets and you know, this fresh air and all these things that like some people might not  be able to have every day and how much that, how good that might feel and yeah. So what,  what pushed you to do this because you said you're, you're not, this is two years in.
18:35So  what made you decide to do this?  I read a lot of Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin  and was just really moved by their works. I think it was just  a curiosity about where my food came from, which can, you know, uh results in all sorts of things like either just, you know, buying  organic or going to a farmer's market. And for me, it manifested in  becoming a farmer. ah
19:05I just, yeah, I started to really think about and care about where my food came from. I was a vegetarian for 20 years and a vegan for three years. And now I raise animals and take them to the butcher. And so it's quite the leap, but I feel like there's a lot of fear of propaganda when it comes to veganisms and a lot of food choices. And I think it's because we are so disconnected from our food.
19:34today that when you hear things or see these videos or see these things on social media, um if you don't have experience with it yourself, it's easy  to believe those things or to not understand.  so I think it just sometimes it takes, it's maybe over simplistic, but it's a simple act of like knowing your farmer or coming onto the farm and seeing how their animals are raised um to make that connection back. um
20:01And with vegetarianism and veganism a lot, uh it's  fear-based. um And  I had gone the route of, I don't want anything to do with this.  And so I just cut it out of my diet and out of my life.  But then it was a little bit later on in life when I started reading  Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin.
20:21that I started to see that there's a different way. Like you can have meat and it can be ethical and responsible and actually good for you and good for the earth.  And I feel like a lot of times that wasn't always portrayed, at least in what I was seeing uh with that sort of diet and lifestyle choice. so,  yeah,  I feel like  if people only  knew that or were able to have access to their farm or to their food, they could see that there's a different way um
20:50to eat meat and ethically  and good for the land and good for the animals and good for us. And so part of why I love to do this is the education around that. I invite people come to our farm, see how we raise our animals, see the good lives that they live. And that makes me feel good about eating our meat is because I know how it was raised. know the life it had.  And I feel very proud of being a part of that. And I hope to educate people about that and share that with people. I love it. I love it, Julie. oh
21:20Are you a reader of the Old Farmer's Almanac? Oh, I have one. found it in the thrift store and I have not read it. Okay, well, it's not an it. It's a publication and they come out every year. Yes. And there was a rumor going around that the Old Farmer's Almanac was going out of print. It is not the Farmer's Almanac. There are two different Almanacs. The Farmer's Almanac went out of print with this year's
21:50last one.  The old farmer's almanac is still alive and kicking and doing really well. And  if you want to,  you will learn a whole lot of things about farming and ranching and growing produce and growing animals. It's only like  $10 to buy a copy and it's for the entire year.  Like it's one  little publication for the entire year. And the thing that I love about it is that
22:21It has like days for everything like this is a good day to wean calves or this is a good day to plant seedlings and  It will take you all year to get through it. It's over 100 pages
22:36But anyway, I was just curious if you were a devotee, because a lot of the people I talk to, they're like, oh yeah, I read the farmer's almanac every spring and I mark down what the days are for the things I'm going to be doing, blah, blah, blah. OK, it sounds like I would love it. I am going to open it up. Yeah, it's very fun. I can't remember the name of the website. I think it's just farmer's almanac, but I would have to look it up. It'll be in the show notes.
23:05Hi, what else can I ask you?  You said that your pigs are red wattle and what?  Berkshire crosses. So those are both  heritage breeds.  A red wattle is a lard breed,  which I'm still learning about. um But  I believe it just has that really good  fatty marbling and really good taste.  Yeah, and they're like furry, right?
23:34Oh yes, so our hogs have actually been sleeping outside. If it's above 10 degrees, I would say, and you know, windless night, I'll come out in the morning and we have a big brown hay bale out there for them to grab hay from and they can stuff their huts or they can hang out there. And they'll just be laying outside under the, you know, under the moonlight  in  their hay pile all night. They're very tough  because they you know, raised outside and they have thick fur. So  yeah.
24:04Yeah, people think that pigs don't have fur, but a lot of them do. Yes. And it's interesting to depend on the breed we've had, like durochs and yorks and, all different kinds. And the Berkshire breeds will have, yeah, quite a lot of hair and  it does help them, you know, be pasture animals. Yeah. I know just a little bit about the red waddles because I knew people who had them and they're, aren't they kind of friendly? Aren't they pretty nicely demeanored as it were?
24:34Yes, they are. mean, and I think that's too,  most of the pigs we've had have been really friendly demeanor just because we have so much contact with them. You know, we're out there  two, three times a day.  Um, you know, they have that one-on-one interaction and, and I sit and talk to them and, know, I'm friendly with them. So I think you get out of them, what you put into them. And so I think like the more contact you have with them,  um, they'll, they'll be friendly, but all the breeds we've had, we've had durochs and Yorks and a hundred percent Berkshires. We've had a ham.
25:02Hampshire and they've all been, you know, so friendly. em Yeah, I think pigs are just very quite social and curious and friendly creatures um in general. yeah. And the sheep, are they, I don't know anything about sheep. Are sheep friendly or they just kind of aloof? uh Not compared to the pigs. They're quite aloof.  So they're just more skittish around. And again, it's what you put into them. So, um you know, we've had sheep
25:29where, you know, we're out there, they do need less, um I would say, day-to-day care than  the pigs, especially in the summer. ah You know, you're not feeding them like you are twice a day with the hogs, and they're just rotating on the pastures, and you just need to make sure they have water.  So there's a little bit less contact there,  but we have had sheep.
25:50where we're around them often and they get to know us. But even still, even when they know us quite well and we spend a lot of time with them, they're just generally tend to be a little bit more skittish. And the pigs, they're just so curious. They'll run out to the road when people walk by or a tractor goes by. They're just very, very curious and social animals. So I'm very smart. Okay, cool. So what would you say if you made a new friend at
26:19the feed mill or the library or some place where people actually talk to each other. And that new friend said, I really would like to buy a couple acres. How should I start my homestead or my little tiny farm? What would you say to them? Oh boy, that's a million dollar question. It sure is. It almost reminds me of that joke. If you're a farmer, how do you get a million dollars start with 2 million? Yes. It's because I
26:49I uh there can be oftentimes this romantic idea, which absolutely, this is like incredibly romantic  way of living, but there's also hard realities too, especially, I feel like there's not a lot of conversations around  maybe finance all the times and how much it costs uh to start a farm, to run a farm. um And uh there's those realities. uh
27:12And I would say  too that you don't need to own land to  start a farm  because I was looking to buy land for quite a while  before I had this opportunity to rent land here. And so I know a lot of successful farms that start small and you can just rent land and kind of get your feet wet.  I would also say that  farmers are by far the friendliest, most um sharing folks with their knowledge and with their time.
27:39So before I began farming, I spent a couple of years just emailing and reaching out to farmers coming out to their farm and they would stop their busy days and take time to walk me around and answer my questions.  And I would happily do that for anyone now. So  if you're curious about farming, reach out to someone who is uh already doing it  and ask them questions. And  I'm sure there'll be an open book and farmers wanna help other farmers and...
28:06Um, because they know how important it is for farms to keep going and how important it is for people to have access to real fresh food. Um, so I would say talk to a farmer for sure. Yeah, me too. I, I would, I really kind of wished before we moved here in 2020 that I had had someone who knew more than I did about what we were doing. I love what we're doing. are a 3.1 acre property.
28:36And we have our big old garden and we have our chickens and we have our barn cats and we have our dog. That is, that is it.  But I didn't, I don't know why I didn't think of it, but I didn't realize we were going to have to buy a small tractor because our driveway is long.  at the least we needed to be able to plow our driveway.  Didn't, didn't think about that. That a new tractor is not inexpensive.
29:03And it took us three and a half years to pay it off.  So  we didn't know that we would need that. And we didn't realize that we had, I mean, we realized we were buying a place with a humongous pole barn,  but  we didn't think about the fact that there might be something wrong with something in the pole barn. there is, there is one support  beam, but it's not on in the ceiling. It's along the wall that is starting to buckle.
29:32And we're going to have to have somebody come in and help us fix that because if that barn goes down, that takes out all of our vehicles, our tractor.  My husband's  as we call it workshop, but really it's a  bench with a bunch of tools on it. We can't have the pole barn buckle because of the pole barn buckles, we lose a lot of important things.  So there are,  there are all kinds of small things, but they're humongous things if they go wrong. Yeah.
30:02that you don't  know  to ask about or think about because you don't know. Yes, exactly. There's so many things in a day that you are responsible for, like that you can't possibly, you know,  imagine like an animal gets sick or something happens with your fencing or, you know,  your trailer pops a tire, things like that, you know, that you're all  responsible for and that all adds up and it's all.
30:29needs to be working for the farm to work. And so you have to be role with those things. And  yeah,  is an everyday education for at least the first five years. Oh, yeah. That's one of my favorite things about farming is I always say like, feel like I learned something new or multiple things. Like every single day. I'm just  and I love learning. And so I just  there and I feel like it will be endless my whole life.  I feel like I will be learning something new every day. Well,
30:57The dumbest thing I've learned so far in the last 15 years because we were actually growing food on the city lot we lived on before we moved here  is Brussels sprout plants are very finicky. If you throw them, if you throw the seeds somewhere and basically forget about them, you might actually get really good Brussels sprouts. But if you throw Brussels sprout seeds  in a spot and baby them and tend to them and nurture them,  you don't get any Brussels sprouts.
31:26I have been trying to grow Brussels sprouts for oh,  15, 20 years now. And the one year that we just kind of threw a couple of seeds down and forgot where we put them, we had the most beautiful, huge Brussels sprouts  for eating. Since then cannot grow Brussels sprouts to save my life.  So the dumbest things can be the most impactful on you because I really like roasted Brussels sprouts, but I only like the ones I grew.  So that has been.
31:54That has been terribly frustrating for me. And my husband asked me the other day, he do you want me to throw in some Brussels sprouts plants? And I was like, no.  No, I do not because I don't want to be disappointed in August when there's no Brussels sprouts to eat, but there's some really pretty leaves on it.  Yes. You have to have a lot of grace with yourself.  You know, it's easy to focus on the things that you messed up or you did wrong. um Cause it's also important, but then it's,  it's nice to remember the things that just.
32:22worked out that you didn't think would or the things that you did right and the things you are learning.  Yeah. Like I said, dumbest thing ever. Cause it's no skin off my nose that we can't seem to grow a good Brussels sprout here. I don't know why I have looked up all the things and I'm like, I don't know what we're doing wrong, but I give up.  no  big deal. As long as the chickens survive the winter and we have eggs, am  all good.  right, Julie, this was so much fun. And I feel like I talked a lot, but
32:51It was really fun to actually talk about this place too. I don't do it very often.  Where can people find you? uh They can find us at  our website  is um www.openroadranch.com. And I'm actually working um on a little revamp right now of our website. So that'll change one day. And then um also  we have Facebook and Instagram, but this is relationship I really struggle with and, and, uh
33:19but I'm trying to  be present on social media and see it for the good. uh So we're at Open Road Ranch um on  Facebook and Instagram.  And then, yeah, we're in Greenbush, so if anyone is local,  they are welcome to stop by our farm store  or just call or email if they wanna come get anything from us, and  we're here. Fabulous.  As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.
33:48And if you like this podcast, you should go listen to grit and grace and the heartland women in agriculture.  Cause that's my second podcast. started a little over a month ago  with a cohost Leah. She's clear Creek ranch mom on Facebook. And we are having such a good time  with the fact that 2026 is the year, the international year of the  woman farmer.  thank you again, Julie. I appreciate your time so much.
34:18Thank you, I really enjoyed talking to you and I appreciate your time as well. Have a great day. You too, thank you.
 

Ranch Wife Marketing

Today I'm talking with Alisha at Ranch Wife Marketing. You can also follow on Facebook.
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
Muck Boots 
Calendars.Com
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
00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Alicia at Ranch Wife Marketing in North Dakota. Good afternoon.  How are you? I'm doing good. How are you doing?  I'm good. How's the weather in South Dakota this afternoon?
00:22North Dakota, um but it is getting better. We did have a negative 50 wind chills just a day or two ago, but now we're at least above zero. So for us, we can finally go back out in a sweatshirt. Nice. Did I say South Dakota? I swear my brain is not working today. You did. It's okay.  Oh, North Dakota, the one above South Dakota. Jeez. uh In Minnesota today, it is really cold.
00:50I am looking out my bedroom window at uh the tin roof of the bedroom next to me  and the snow is all sparkly in the sunshine. It's really beautiful, but it's too cold.  Oh yes, I get it. We don't get a ton of snow, not as much as Minnesota.  I was born and raised there, so I know how much snow falls there. We're a little drier,  so we don't have em as much snow, but we do have a little dusting currently.
01:17Just out of curiosity, where are you in North Dakota? I'm actually on the  North Dakota-South Dakota border. I live about 20 miles from South Dakota. um We live on the Standing Rock  Sioux Reservation um in a small, tiny town called Selfridge. Okay, cool.  Well, for the people who are following along on the podcast about my barn cats, um
01:46We had a stray barn cat show up here a month ago maybe, and she has been kind of hiding out. She'll come and eat every other day.  And we have three kittens that we got a couple months ago. They're about five months old.  And  today is the first day that I have seen her, seen the stray hanging out with the other kittens in the dog house in the sunshine on the hay bales. And I think she's probably around the same age as the three kittens.  So,
02:14That was the banner moment of my day was seeing this beautiful tortoiseshell stray cat hanging out with the kittens.  Oh, that's amazing. We have plenty of cats around here, um both indoor and outdoor. I love seeing all the kittens as they grow up in the summer. Yeah, it's really fun. And this cat showed up out of nowhere. I was like, why is there another cat? We don't have six cats.  We have five.
02:42and my husband happened to get a photo of her and I was like, Oh, I hope she sticks around because she's beautiful. And from my local listeners, we have tons of chicken eggs in our farm stand. Farm stand is heated so the eggs don't freeze and we have lots of eggs in the farm stand for sale every day. So if anybody needs eggs, come on by. And that's it for my updates for my house, my homestead. Alicia, you are
03:11farmer, but you're also a marketer. So can we talk about both? Yeah. So if my husband listens in, he's going to cringe because we're actually ranchers. worries. Some people call it cattle farming. Some people call it ranching. It's all about where you are in the world. But yeah, so we have a cow-calf ranch. We run about 500 mama cows.
03:37about 200 heifers. We breed some bulls and sell some bulls as well. And we also have a quarter horse operation. So we have about a hundred horses. We run about a 65 to 75 mare brood band and have about six stallions. So that's kind of our ranch side. Wow. That's a lot.
04:02Yes. Yeah, it is a larger  ranch. as much as I'd love to do the homesteading thing and like have the garden and all the other little animals,  we have plenty going on that my husband's always like, no,  you don't need to add more to our plate.  Yeah, I wish that my husband understood that concept. He's always like, I want to try this. I want to try that. And I'm like,  I think we need to get good at the first couple of things before we add more in.
04:30I know. I really want chickens because I love fresh chicken eggs. And he's just like, just go across to our cousins. They have chickens. Honestly, it's easier if you just get them from somebody else. It really is. um We have 18 chickens  and  keeping chickens is not hard. I'm not saying don't get chickens. I'm not telling anyone to not ever get chickens because it's not that hard, but you have to make sure that you have bedding in the wintertime. If you live in a winter state, a Northern tier state,
05:00And you have to clean out their coop at least once a month, if not twice a month in the warmer months because it gets stinky and that's not a fun environment for them to live in. So if you don't want to deal with chicken poop, don't get chickens.  Yeah, that's definitely a thing. I have had to babysit the chickens across the  way a few times and they are a little bit of work. I think they'd be so fun and my sons, they love the chickens.
05:30Yeah,  I love watching the chickens. I just don't love going in the coop in August when it's been a really hot day and the coop needs to be cleaned.  And I have to hold my breath for the whole time and they're getting eggs, you know, it's very stinky.  But they are they are gorgeous. Even the most, I don't know, plain Jane chicken like we have, we have the ISA Browns. They're just a reddish brown chicken.  They're really pretty, too. So  I don't know. Chickens are great, but
06:00I think that you probably have a very nice setup with your cousins across the way to get eggs from. Yeah. Yeah, it definitely does work.  And there's other people in our community that do eggs as well. m I hear one of your kitties in the background.  Yeah. Yeah. Whenever I'm at my desk, she has to be right here with me and she is a old girl. So she likes to complain. Does she help you type?
06:26She would love to sit right on the laptop the entire time if I let her. Something about the warmth of it. Yeah, we don't have any indoor cats anymore, but we have a dog and she barks in the background. Probably  one out of every three recordings I do.  And sometimes I edit her out and other times just leave her in because we live on a homestead. There's going to be animal noises. Oh no. Yeah, exactly. I have my dogs right beside me too. And if she heard a noise that sounded like a knock,
06:54She would be extremely loud.  huh. Yeah. Maggie's like that too. The trash truck pulls in the driveway and she loses her mind for the entire time.  I'm like, you know, even if you caught the truck, there was, there's not anything you could do about it. So just stop  and she won't until it pulls out of the driveway. She will not stop barking. And as it's pulling out of the driveway, she does this raw, raw, raw, like, yeah, get out of here. Exactly. sounds. m
07:24It's very, very funny.  So, um tell me how you got into this marketing thing, because I looked at your website and I know the story, but the listener doesn't know the story. Okay. So, um I originally got into it by doing it for  the ranch. So, my husband is a fourth generation rancher and  we have the Quarter Horse Program, which is where it mainly started and
07:51They always sold locally and by word of mouth, they got it out and kind of were selling their horses for the last,  they started in like  the mid 1900s. So it's been a long  family operation. And in, you know, 2012, 2014 ish when  Facebook came out,  we started using Facebook to market the horses. And that's kind of when the program blew up.
08:20We don't do any  modern day bloodlines. We don't show our quarter horses. They're just ranch bred horses.  And when we were able to show them off online using social media and the internet and a website and all the things, um we started selling them all across the U S and now we have even started selling them overseas.
08:45And when I was working for the farm service agency, before I had my, well, up until right after I had my son, I was always talking with the farmers, the ranchers, the stay at home ranch wives that had smaller businesses or the little businesses in town. And they always struggled to market their stuff.
09:11like further than just going to the local elevator or the local sale barn or just farmers markets and things like that, especially in such a small rural community where we live. And it was hard to, for them to make side hustles or side businesses really work in such a small community. And they just, you know, always were at awe. Like, how do you guys sell your horses? You know, so
09:39to so many states and now you've even shipped them overseas or how are you getting your cattle to be hitting the top of the sale barns every time you guys bring them to the  sale barn and most of the time we sell right off the ranch private treaty  because we're able to market and get a good deal where we don't need to take them to a sale barn and give up that commission.  so  kind of, yeah, questions kept coming up and people asking advice and that kind of
10:09made me want to help people do it  the way that we're doing it. So  I built the business, quit my full-time corporate job with the Farm  Service Agency and started doing this full-time alongside moming and ranching. Yeah, and that moming job is the most important one of the three. Yes. Now we have two boys and it's been uh such a blessing to  not worry about going back to work with my second.
10:39Yeah,  I imagine it probably has been. I did not ever have a job when my babies were babies, like from the minute they were born until they were at least two and a half.  having the privilege to be a full-time focused mother  is one of the joys of my life. raised three that I birthed and one bonus child. have a stepson.  And that first couple of months home with those babies are my favorite memories.
11:10Oh yeah, I know. I was so burnt out and just drowning. I went back to work part time at six weeks because I got 12 weeks of maternity leave, but I knew that if I spent three whole months at home that I was not wanting to go back. And we didn't really want to give up the health benefits and all the things yet. So I was like, all right, I'm just going to do this slowly and went back part time at six weeks. And I ended up
11:39quitting when he was 13 months old because I was just like, no,  I'm going to find something else and do something else. during that time from about, I probably started,  I started Ranch Wife Marketing  when I was eight months pregnant with him officially. And then I really,  you know, got into it and got it to where I felt comfortable leaving my job by that time that he was a year old. um
12:09And so it's just kind of worked out to just leave and come home full time. And I, it was the best thing I've ever done.  Awesome. I'm so glad you found something  that you love and that works for you and your family.  So do you consider yourself a coach or how does, how does farm wife marketing work? So it started as coaching as a one person team. I didn't have, you know,  the, um,
12:38capacity to run enough social media accounts while still ranching and being a mom  to bring in the kind of income I wanted to. So I started as a coach and more of a do it with you. um That way I could kind of have a  more,  at that time I could do  more with my time. I could set up, you know, three hours a day where I did client calls.
13:05That way I could have multiple clients throughout the week and then um able to just assist them. We would just sit down in that hour and we'd go through what their marketing plan was  that week, um what goals they wanted to hit and kind of just work on their marketing strategy and get them all set up um for whatever the retainer was, whether that was three months, six months. um But it had then...
13:32Um, this summer I had expanded it into a marketing agency and we're starting with social media. So we're doing social medias for businesses that just don't want to do it themselves. I also created courses and guides and books. So I have all kinds of little, um, low ticket or, um, medium ticket. can have like things that you can, uh, buy and do it yourself and.
14:01kind of have your own education without having the coaching side or me do it for you. Okay, that makes sense. So I don't want your secret sauce because your secret sauce is the reason that you have a business and you're making money at it. But what would you tell someone who knows nothing about marketing their homestead or their little farm or their small ranch? I don't know there's such a thing as a small ranch, but we're going to call it that.
14:29What is the first thing that you would tell them to do as their first step in marketing? The first thing is just visibility. You just need to be able to get yourself out there. um it's probably the biggest thing that, biggest hurdle that people have to get, especially in rural communities over is like  putting themselves out there for people to see them. um And
14:56Showing up on social media, even if you don't have a plan, telling the world what you have, what you offer, that is  by far the first step. If you can get  started doing that, the rest will fall so much more naturally when you can start implementing strategies and plans.  Yeah, that's what I would say too. And I am not a marketer, but I worked for a PR and marketing company for about five years and started out just helping my friend who owned it.
15:25do filing because she had a brand new baby boy at home and she needed some help. I learned so many things working for her  as an office assistant in the five, six years that I worked for her. And  it has helped me  so much with what we do here because we have a farm to market garden and we have the eggs.  And I'm always in the summertime when my husband's taking stuff to the farmer's market. Every morning he sets up the booth and he sends me a photo.
15:53And I write a little blurb and put it on Facebook.  Kyle's at the farmer's market. Here's what we have for today. Stop by and say hi. He would like to, he'd like to say hello to you or whatever I say. And he always comes home and says, somebody stopped by and said, they saw that I was at the farmer's market because you posted on Facebook. So it does work.  Oh, definitely. It is such an asset. If you can just post on social media. um
16:19A lot of people, especially probably my older clientele are so against it. But once I show them that it can be simple and easy and um you don't have to spend all day on it, just literally get a post out there  and it will even a little bit, even a couple of times  whenever you got something going on is going to help so much. Yeah. And once I feel like once people get past the, don't know what to say  thing.
16:48They find out that it's fun. Yes. Oh yeah, it's  so much fun interacting with people  on social media. I've met so many people through social media that I would have never met if I hadn't started this business or  hadn't marketed our horses in the conversations that we've had with people over the years just from finding us online on social media.
17:13Whichever business it was that I was working for, um it's just incredible the relationships we've built. Yes, and it is all about community and relationships and it needs to be right now.  I don't want to get into it, but it's been rough living in Minnesota for the last couple of weeks and we need more people talking with each other instead of at each other.  Exactly. Yeah, we don't need to get in it, but I do have an immigrant stepmother  who's living in
17:43suburb of Minneapolis. So I do understand the struggle. Yeah, it has been a very, very  long  January and we're not even,  what is today? The 27th? We have a few more days of January and I don't see February being any, any faster. It's been a very rough start to the year here in Minnesota. uh So  I need to pick your brain for a second on email lists because I keep hearing and I keep reading.
18:11that it's important to have an email list because that keeps you in contact with your customers.  Even if Facebook or Instagram or whatever social media platform you use goes down.  Do you think that an email list is really important?  Absolutely. It is one of the things I get people set up with  right away uh is how they're going to collect emails and how they're going to nurture that  email sequence because
18:39I'm actually a great example.  So when I first started Ranch Wife Marketing, I had an Instagram page where I focused on helping burnt out moms  in the rural community, the ones that were like me working 40 hours a week, trying to start a business, trying to be a mom, trying to help their husband on the ranch,  um, find a way to  make that side income a full-time thing. And I had over 10,000 followers and my Instagram was hacked.
19:09and taken away. I lost all my leads,  all my customers, all my potential from that um Instagram. And now the one I have now, which I know I'm not sad about,  followers don't mean sales,  but having a nice large follower amount. Some people are like, oh, she knows what she's doing. And now my current one is only around 1300.  But you have an email list now.
19:38but I have an email list  and I was able to email all of my  email lists and tell them, know,  you can find me at this  Instagram now instead,  or I was able just to keep in communication with them.  own, once someone gives you their email, you own it. Like that is your information, that is your data. They have consented you to contact them through email  and it doesn't,  it's like,
20:07on an Excel file or wherever you keep it, you have it to reach out to them.  Where social media,  you can lose that lead easily, they can easily change their username and you can't find them. ah You could get your account taken down. ah They could easily block you by accident even sometimes. ah So there's just a lot of things with social media that a email list helps  navigate if you can
20:37collect those emails from your following. Okay, so here's where I get stuck because I just built a new website for the other podcasts I'm doing now. It's called Grit and Grease and the Heartland  Women in Agriculture and I  just set up the email list thing and I haven't sent out the first email because I'm going to do it in February because then I have all of January to draw from.  So
21:03My thing about email lists is that I never know what to say in an email if I'm not actually selling something. I'm just promoting the podcast. So my plan  is to email people  a synopsis of  what the things are that we talked about in January  and do a little teaser at the end of the guests that we're having in February. Is that  a
21:30good thing to do for an email list? Yeah, that sounds great. I honestly believe in one of like my foundation  beliefs in my business is that you shouldn't be selling every single time you post something, send something, whatever it is. It should be 80 % nurture and value and education driven  and 20 % selling because if we're not giving ourselves to our customers, why should they
22:00open their pocketbooks to us. Right. Yeah, exactly. So  if someone is  selling their produce in the summertime and they have an email list, should their email they send out  once a month or every two weeks or however they're timing it,  should the first like 60 % of the email be about what they've been growing, what they've been seeing?
22:29the cute garden spider that they found in the middle of the garden and it scared them to death. And then what they're going to be selling and where they're going to be selling. Oh, yes. And even if like, especially in that niche, if you can throw in gardening tips or certain varieties you came across or new things to try, throwing in any kind of little bit of knowledge or entertainment.
22:55it before you actually lead to the sale is going to up your conversion rates so much.  That's what I figured. We have a beautiful photo that my husband took uh of an orb weaver garden spider. And it is orange and sorry, it's yellow and black and it's a beautiful spider, but lots of people are really scared of spiders.  he said, he said, I took this for you. He said, cause you're not scared of spiders. He said, but do you think that it'll get
23:24attention on Facebook or an email and I was like probably because people are  arachnophobia is a real thing eh
23:35Yes.  No, and uh I actually,  I'll even  use my husband as an example. So he's scared of snakes, but you know, he'll sit there and watch  a  TikTok or any real video about snakes and just be like  grossed out the whole time, but just interested because  I don't know what it is about it. But um yeah, they just are drawn to watching them even if they're scared of them.
24:03It's like Gawker's in a bad car accident. I swear that's how the brain works. um So I have one more question about a marketing tactic and then we can, I actually have questions about your quarter horses too. Art, do you think that podcasts are a good way to market? Yes, if you can market, well,  so podcasts.
24:27You have to be able to also mark the podcast, but then the podcast itself is a great way to nurture your audience. It's a great way for them to learn, know, and trust you and lead them to your offers by providing value, entertainment, and things like that. I have considered even myself starting a podcast. The only thing holding me back from starting a podcast is my time. I have
24:56two under two and like I said a lot of livestock to take care of but I think once my boys get a little older it's something I even want to do so that I can teach on my podcast and then market my services through it. So definitely it is a great place to do that. And I want to tell the listener it is really easy. It will probably cost you anywhere from 25 to 100 dollars a month to do it.
25:25because it does cost money to have a host  for the files. you have to have a way to record if you're doing guests. there there are expenses around having a podcast, but it's not  exorbitant. It's not a ton of money. And you can pick up a headset like I wear and the sound is fine. You don't have to have a fancy boom mic and the big fat earphones that don't stay on my head. Well, that's why I don't use them.
25:54don't love them.  It's fairly easy. is  not hard to do. it  is my podcast, this one,  and the one I just started, it's a joy of my life right now because I get to talk to people  who are helping me educate people in the world about agriculture and about food and about cooking and about animals. And it just tickles me to no end when I get up in the morning and I know I'm going to do an interview with someone. It just makes my heart.
26:25first, you know? Yeah, they are. I love listening to them too. And I've been on a few and they're always just a pleasure to be a part of and also listen to. And I always get little  golden nuggets from every single podcast I ever listened to.  Yes. And the best part about podcasts is that you can put your earbuds in and you can do dishes or you can cook dinner or you can muck stalls or you can brush a horse.
26:54You know, it's something that you can learn from without having to focus completely on the thing that you're learning. can be doing something else in the process. Oh, definitely. I love them. I think they're great. And I would say that because I have to. And Alicia, your voice is beautiful. You would be great at a podcast. Oh, thank you. It's actually one of the things I'm insecure about. I feel like it's high and whiny. Oh, no, you would be great. You would sound
27:23perfectly fine for a podcast.  the other podcast that I do is with a cattle rancher and she's in Nebraska. And so we talk a lot about her livestock, but we don't talk about quarter horses because they don't have quarter horses.  tell me about quarter horses. What are quarter horses for?  What's their purpose?
27:47Quarter horses were bred to be very versatile. um So  there's not really a true purpose to them. They are so versatile, they're used almost in every uh equitation out there.  Originally, they were kind of  raised to...
28:10have a little more strength than a thoroughbred  and um some endurance and be able to kind of go all day on a ranch chasing cattle and things like that  instead of breaking down like thoroughbreds  and then having a little more strength than Arabians  to be able to rope and pull cattle.  They're kind of  built through
28:36those breeds and even crossed with some draft to bring in that strength. um So that's kind of what they were built for just to be your all around do anything and everything horse. They're  going to excel in those Western cattle  areas, but they're definitely,  they can be quick. They're used for racing and endurance. can climb mountains  and yeah, that's just kind of where they came from was.
29:03a breed that could withstand that rugged American terrain that we have. they a smaller horse? Are they like 14, 15 hands or are they a bigger horse? So because they come from so many other breeds originally, they are anywhere from pony size. Like some of them even fall under 14. I think one of our mares is right at 14 hands.
29:31And then they can be, I mean, we have 16, 16, two hand horses as well. I've seen quarter horses get as tall as 17 hands. Wow. Okay. All right. So they're, I'm going to use a bad word. My, the best dog that my parents ever had was a mutt. He was, he was not a purebred anything. And they only had him for about a year because he got hit by a car and he was the loviest, most healthy.
30:01most uh athletic dog and his name was Lucky, which was  unfortunate because he was not lucky.  And we love that dog.  definitely were a mutt in the beginning. that is a great ex- now to the now they're just so old that it's now a purebred themselves. But yeah, that's where it came from was just that hybrid vigor of  combining a bunch of different things together. Yeah, I was a rare uh
30:29I was afraid if I said the word mutt, you're going to be offended.  think a lot of quarter horse people probably would be,  but I completely understand where it comes from. um So  though we, all of ours are purebred, they're American quarter horse registered.  But yeah, if you trace any quarter horse back far enough,  you're not going to find a quarter horse at the end of the trail.  Exactly. I think that's what I was trying to get at.
30:57I don't know enough about horses to talk to it  smartly  and that wasn't really smart either, but you know what I'm saying. I don't know enough about horses because I've never had any. um So I guess my last question, because I try to keep these to half an hour,  is are  some horses still used for work, like for hauling a cart  or for pulling a plow or any of the things that horses were used for 150 years ago? Yeah.
31:25Yeah, there's a lot of people that still use horses for work. um Amish is a great example. um There's a lot of Amish communities still um in the United States. We have a lot of Amish customers  that uh use their horses still to  pull  carts and plow and work on them. So  yeah, it's definitely still a thing.
31:54Okay, because a lot of the horse Facebook pages that I follow, I follow a couple,  they're more for racing or for showing. oh Or just for having because they're great. Horses are amazing animals. And I was thinking about the other day, and I knew that the Amish still use horses for actual farm work. But the average person who owns a horse, they don't typically use them for farm work. They race them or they show them.
32:23Yeah, I would say we use ours for work, but not for farm work. have tractors and plows and all that stuff, but  we use ours to  herd our cattle. We to rope the cows and treat them out in pasture to round them up just because,  you know, a four wheeler or a dirt bike or whatever. lot of people use, especially where we live in North Dakota, we have a lot of rugged country. Can't get to where the cows can get, but a horse can. Yep.
32:52Yep, that makes all the sense in the world.  All right, Alicia,  I appreciate your time so much as I do everybody who talks with me on the podcast.  Where can people find you?  You can find me by Googling Ranch Wife Marketing. That will bring you to my website. You can find me on Facebook, oh Instagram, TikTok, all with Ranch Wife Marketing.
33:16Um, the actual at is ranchwife underscore marketing on both Tik TOK and Facebook. Um, and I love chatting and I'm always just a DM away or an email away if anyone wants to learn anything about marketing, your rural businesses. Or if they want to buy a quarter horse. Yeah. We, yeah. you want that's Freilich legacy quarter horses. If you want to look into our quarter horse program. Okay. Awesome.
33:46You can find me as always at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can go to atinyhomestead.com slash support.  And if you like this podcast, check out  Grit and Grace in the Heartland, Women in Agriculture. That's my other podcast.  Alicia, thank you again for your time. I appreciate it. Yes. I had a great time talking with you, Mary.  Have a great day. You too.
 

Santa's Crew LLC

Today I'm talking with Sara at Santa's Crew LLC. Sara and her dad raise reindeer!
 
www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead
Muck Boots 
Calendars.Com
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
00:00You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters.  I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Sarah at Santa's Crew LLC in Wisconsin. Good morning, Sarah. How are you? Good and good morning.  How's the weather in Wisconsin this morning? Because it's damn cold in Minnesota.  It's very cold here as well.  Getting through it.  Yeah. um
00:29I know we shouldn't complain because we had a very long, extended, beautiful fall, but spring can't come soon enough, honestly. Yeah, I don't mind cold weather, but when it's like way, way in the negatives and it causes things to break or have issues, then it's like, okay, now it's maybe a little too cold. Yeah, I am prone to migraines. It runs in my family, and when the temperature drops like this and the air gets dry,
00:56My head tries to hurt every morning when I get up and I'm like, spring's only a couple months away. I will survive it. Yeah. I would definitely be looking forward to it as well if I were you. Yeah. It's no fun getting up in the morning and you get that little twinge and you're like, okay, so am I going to be down for three days or is this just a few seconds of dry air bothering my nose causing sinus headache?
01:22It's very frustrating, minor. There are worse things in the world. I'm not worried about it. I just don't enjoy it.  So um Sarah talked with me a week or so ago about their dairy farm  and she let it slip that she and her dad have a reindeer raising endeavor as well. And I was like,  oh, will you come back and talk to me about the reindeer? And she's back. So  how in the heck did you guys get involved in raising reindeer?
01:51Right? It's not something you're, you know, not very common. uh But our neighbor used to have them.  And  I did go to one of these events one time and, know, it was a lot of fun. I did grow up on a dairy farm. So I grew up around animals and training animals  at, you know, going to the fair. So I was familiar with that.  And
02:12we found out he was selling and my dad and I kind of talked. It was kind of spontaneous. It wasn't something like we planned. It was just kind of like the opportunity was there  and we're like, let's do it. So we kind of went in partnership. I was 17 at the time.  Um,  and  we started with  two baby calves  and kind of expand from there was a male and female. So they were calves. We showed them that first year.
02:40And the following year they would be a breeding pair. So then we had to get another female, um, because during the holiday season is when the males are in rut. So you don't want to bring them out because they're very aggressive. So usually people will bring like females or steers. So then we kind of started with three animals within our first two years. And then, um, the third degree added another one. So then we had three females and kinda, oh um,
03:07went with that and then we had three breeding females. But yeah,  we slowly built it. was, uh yeah, it's very fun. m Reindeer are different than  cattle in some ways. They have their similarities but their differences.  And growing up with dairy cattle, when I got the reindeer, I'm like, oh, reindeer are much quicker and  more nimble than  cows. But yeah, it's been a lot of fun.
03:34And now we've been doing it since 2016, which is crazy to think that time's flying by that fast. do you have a big herd now? We're at eight right now,  which is a good size. I don't think we'll get  bigger than that um at all. We're pretty with the amount of space we have for them. It seems to work well.  It's enough  animals for like the holiday season. And then we do have some breeding females.
04:04So we can kind of get calves. We'll keep a few every once in a while and sometimes we'll sell some to people who don't breed or want, you know, new genetics kind of thing. So other people who have reindeer or want to get into it. we had, let's see, last year we had two, but we were expecting four. We're hoping to have four. We had four breeding females. This year we have five that were in breeding.
04:34with breeding bulls.  And we think the youngest one isn't bred because during the holiday season, we think she was in heat because the steer was kind of trying to jump on her. like,  oh, I think she's having a heat. I don't think that one's pregnant. So maybe we'll have four calves. Like, we'll see. um We'll just have to wait and see. How long is gestation for the babies?  Oh, two.
05:02Why am I blanking on the exact? uh Let's see, October is typically when hours are bred and then they calve in springtime around April or May. Why? I'm blanking on the number of days right now though.  So like eight, nine months.  Yeah, yes. Yep. Around that. Okay. Awesome. And is it set in stone? They only have babies in the spring? Yes. Yep. Because rut.
05:32For the males, always, usually the end of August is when it kind of starts.  So it kind of starts around there.  And then they drop their antlers in December or January, which means rut season is done. But we pull the females out of the breeding pen in October because if they get bred any later than that, then they're calving.
05:55into like late spring and summer and it's really, you know, warm for the baby calves. They usually don't do as well  when it's that warm.  Once they get older, they're really good with like the warmer weather, but it's just the baby calves seem to take it harder, you know, in their first few weeks. So we just don't want to have any late late calves. So we just pull them in October. oh Okay.  I have so many questions for you because I out and did some reading on reindeer this morning and
06:24Reindeer and caribou are not the same animal. They are cousins. Yes. And reindeer come from Siberia area, right? Yes. Yep. Across seas. They're native over there where caribou are native to North America. Okay. So how did reindeer get to the United States? Do you know? Yes. So, I guess I'll kind of go back and kind of tell people that
06:53I go to so many events and people say that they're the same thing and they will argue with me and that they think that I'm just  lying, I guess, at like Chris said, that I'm like, am not. are completely like, they're separate animals, but they are close cousins.  They are the same species, but different subspecies. um Because even like national geographic or prominent zoos in the US will wrongly classify these animals, which is kind of why I think.
07:20people get confused because you can research it and get different things. But they have done research  on the migration patterns of the two of them. they are close cousins, but they are different animals. And reindeer domesticated  have been domesticated where caribou aren't. So  some people will kind of make the comparison.
07:44to kind of make it a little easier to kind of understand it as like wolves and dogs, like they're close related, one's domesticated. I guess it's kind of a way to put it in perspective in that way. yeah, so reindeer first arrived in Alaska in 1892 by a boat, obviously, because they weren't.
08:10Unlike Caribou, they were already here because Caribou basically used the land bridge to kind of come over here and then you know, that's how that worked and they were shipped from Siberia. So you're right there. And they ended up having their peak population here for 640,000 of them around the 1930s, but they say there's only roughly 20,000 of them that are in Alaska today.
08:38I'm not sure we're in Canada. I know there's some hers in Canada, but I don't know exactly what the numbers are over there. Okay.  And  I'm going to be bouncing all over the place because stuff's going to pop in from what I read this morning.  You and your dad raise reindeer to  take them to Christmas things or have people come see them at Christmas, right? Yeah. We travel with them  to all different places. We're in Wisconsin, so we...
09:06basically stay in Wisconsin because there's enough events to fill the mid November through Christmas. It's a very short window to kind of get to all these places and jam pack it all in. So we do a lot of traveling with them and we do two teams. We started with one trailer and we travel with two at a time because they're herd animals.  they like to be with another one, seem to do better that way. And so we travel with two of them. We bring a whole display pen. We set it all up.
09:34get, you know,  I'm in there with the, with the reindeer on a, uh, with a lead rope and, know, I'm able to kind of, you know, talk to people, educate them, and they can kind of take photos with the reindeer as well.  Um, and then we just, we added a second team a few years ago because there was just so many  people wanting the same dates.  And so now we travel with two teams on some of the days. So, um
10:00four animals out at once and my dad will take one team and I'll take the other if we happen to have like double bookings that way. Um, but we will not add a third team. That would be really chaotic and a lot. we're, we're going to kind of two teams is good enough. Okay. And have you guys trained the reindeer to pull a sleigh yet? Not yet, but we have one that we are  hoping  to or working with. Um, it's a steer.
10:27So he doesn't have the testosterone like an intact bowl, so he won't go into rut or anything like that. And he's like a big puppy.  Your steer is kind of like, you know, even in cattle, your steers are very, very calm, nonchalant.  And he's  bigger than two in size.  And I think he'll be, you know, a really good sleigh puller where the females are usually they should be pregnant during the holiday season. We don't want to have them, you know, being a sleigh puller during that or anything. But we're working with him. He's young.
10:58He's going to be two this spring and we're working on that. So we'll see how that goes. But that is a goal to have a sleep holder. Fun. So much fun. So I don't want to, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but do people raise reindeer for meat as well or not? Not around here. There's not really a market for that around here, but like in Alaska or like, uh, Norway, Siberia, Siberia over there, it's you.
11:26They can, or there's a market for it, but down in the lower 48, it's mainly to just kind of have them for either just to have them or to go to events or some people will have um their own farm where people come to them. Kind of like tree farms, some tree farms have them or they just want to have an experience  on their own property with them. Okay. I was really curious because we have.
11:53We eat venison here. I don't love venison. My husband and my kids do.  And so we've had venison in the house off and on for years.  And I didn't, I really didn't think that reindeer were for that because  it's an expensive animal to raise, would assume.  Yeah.  So it's like where they're more like in Alaska where they have like more herds or
12:19You know, they raise them more for meat up there.  I haven't had any,  so I can't speak on how it tastes. Yeah.  Haven't had any personal experience tasting it. oh But yeah, we, there's really no market down here for it. Otherwise you probably see it more on menus or in stores.  Yeah. Yeah. That's what I figured. Okay.  And are they,  I don't know how to ask this.  Are the reindeer friendly?
12:49Yes. Well, the bulls when they're in rut, they're not, they're  all full  of testosterone, but when they lose their antlers, then they're back to like, testosterone's low, they're kind of back to their normal self, they're not as crazy. But yes, they're friendly. Okay.  And when the mamas have their babies, are the mamas super protective? Are they good with you being around the babies, but nobody else?
13:16They're actually usually pretty good with us. We have one female that is a little more  iffy on it with us, a little more protective, but for the most part, they are all pretty good. I need to find somebody who's closer than Wisconsin who was raising reindeer. Cause I really want to hold a baby reindeer before I die.  They are so cute. They are. They're so tiny.  Yeah. 12 pounds on average.
13:43Yeah, yeah, like 12 to 15 depending. Yeah, yeah, they're, not that big and they're like all legs. It's so funny. And, they  start walking pretty soon after they're, they don't like lay, like, you know, some animals you would think like they, they aren't mobile, but they're up and around really soon after and doing zoomies and yeah, they're, it's pretty impressive.  So much fun.
14:09It's amazing to me that they are 12 to 15 pounds at birth because my dog weighs like 36 pounds. So they're about half of what she is right now. Yup. Yeah. When you put it that way.  Crazy. Crazy. She would love to have a baby reindeer friend. Maggie would just be the best mama to a baby reindeer for five minutes. It would be amazing.  Okay. The other things that I read are the female reindeer keep their
14:37antlers longer than the males do because they use them to  make sure they can get food so they can feed their babies. Yes, yeah, they keep theirs on longer.  So when the males lose their antlers, the females are the ruler of the roosts. They have the advantage of, you know, being able to kind of pick on them if they need to and defend their babies. Fabulous.  That mama bear energy. It's mama reindeer energy. We do have a few that will
15:05not often, but there will sometimes be females that'll lose one  before they calve.  I think we've had one lose both of them before she calved, but usually they keep them on. um Sometimes right after they have the baby, soon after they'll lose them, it just really depends from reindeer to reindeer.  But yeah, they do keep them on till spring. um Some males, I know there's like a thing out there where all males lose their antlers in December, and that's not the case. We actually have a bull.
15:33that still has his antlers on. He is younger and it seems to be when they're younger, they sometimes keep them on maybe a little longer. And our steer still has his antlers on, so it's not always the case. But  a lot of males will lose theirs in December, but some of them will keep them till January. Do you do anything with the sheds at all? Right now, we've been just kind of stockpiling them.  I tried to do some macrame designs on some.
16:02Um, but it's just, it takes a lot of time. I enjoy doing it. It's just getting the spare time to do it.  Um, and then there are some people who are interested in just having, you know, the sheds, like they're all like, they just like, if we sold them, they just want, you know, a reindeer shed. But we  have a big stockpile of them. I think now we're going to try to part with them since we've got a bigger herd now and they grow them every year. So we just keep getting more and more.
16:31Yeah, I was reading that even the babies within four or five months start growing antlers. Oh, yeah, right away. So they're born with, you know, nothing. And then  all of a sudden you'll start seeing little tiny nubs forming and then they just keep getting longer and longer. And  some of them will just be little tiny ice picks. Some of them will have a few points, but they're on the smaller side. And then the following year, they just like triple in size. It's crazy how much how big they can get.
17:00in such a young age from year to year. the racks  on caribou and reindeer are just gargantuan. Once they get to be about what, three or four years old, they're just huge. Yeah, yeah, they are big. And the males especially, obviously the males, their antlers are much thicker and larger in size. It's pretty impressive on how big they can get. And we bring  some sheds to events.
17:27um And that's one thing we have to remind people. They look at them and they're like,  oh, they assume it's from a dead reindeer that we killed the reindeer or something. I'm like, no, they shed them every year. So those sheds, you know, they fell off. So it's kind of like a, you know, educational point as well for people. Cause some people just don't know that, you know,  deer,  you know, the species, that's just something that happens.
17:53ah But yeah, the males, theirs get large real fast. It's very impressive in how fast and sometimes daily when they get really big, you'll just notice a difference daily on how much bigger they're getting. Well, I was reading that they can grow an inch or two a day. I was like, oh my God, that's got to hurt. Yeah.  I don't know if the growing process technically hurts on them, but they are very sensitive when they're growing because they're covered in this fuzzy velvet.
18:21And it's just a bunch of blood flow that's just basically going through them to keep growing. And so like they're very sensitive. They don't use them. They don't want to touch anything with them. And if they even nick it just the littlest, it just bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. It eventually clots, but it's just if you nick it just a little bit, almost like if you cut yourself with like a razor, just doesn't want to stop. And it's just like the smallest little thing. So they're very sensitive and they're just full of blood.
18:51through that process. then end of August is usually when they harden. Sometimes some of them will be a little later like September. had a steer this year was really late on wanting them to harden and then they just rub all that velvet off. They don't have that feeling and sensation once they harden. I mean, when they're rubbing that velvet off, there's some of that blood left between the velvet and the hard antler.
19:20And so people think it looks painful when really  it's not. It's just a little bit that was just left on top of that hard antler. So it looks like a  bloody mess sometimes because they'll just rub their antlers in trees because it's like an itchy feeling for them. They want it  off.  And it just looks funny because it's just like their antlers will just look kind of bloody at first when they're doing that.  And it's just a natural process. It doesn't hurt them.
19:49Yeah, I was talking with my  son like a year or so ago and I made the mistake of calling  deer antlers, deer horns.  And he said, you know better than that. And I was like, better than what? And he said, antlers are not the same thing as horns. He said, antlers are a living part of the animal up until they start to harden off. He said, horns are not alive. And I said, um
20:18actually I didn't know that. He said, you're kidding. I said, no, I didn't know that. He said, yeah. He said the horns on a cow or steer, you know, bovine. He said, those aren't the same as antlers. And I was like, oh, I learned something new today. I was schooled on the difference between antlers and horns. Yeah. Yeah. There is a difference.  Um, cause obviously with reindeer, they fall off  and they grow a new set where horns, just, you know, they, and they grow from the base  of like,
20:48the head  of cattle where  the antlers, growing from the tips. The tips keep growing because of all that blood flow. So they're not actually growing from the base. yeah, you don't think of that when you're just looking at  them, but yeah, they do grow differently and they are different. and getting schooled by my kid is my fault because I'm huge on semantics. And he was like, for a lady who's big on semantics.
21:15I can't believe you didn't realize that there was a difference between antlers and horns. And I'm like,  you can stop now.  I have been schooled, now I know you can stop harassing me. And he's just laughing.  So it's great when you raise your kids to be smart because then they outsmart you.  It's a challenge then  for them probably. Yes, exactly.  The other interesting thing that I read is that reindeer on their hooves, they have a dewclaw.
21:44like a dog has a dewclaw or a cat has a dewclaw. And I was like, what is that for?  And then I continued to read  and it's so they can walk on the snow and ice easier. Yep.  And, uh, and it kind of, cause the cows even have dewclaws, I kind of, cause they're hoofed animals, I kind of compare them. Their hooves are different than cows or even horses, but they have that dewclaw and it looks funny cause it looks like they need a hoof trimming, but they don't.
22:14And  we do have trim them. So obviously they can get longer than what they should. But yeah, they are for that traction on snow and ice and their hooves are really big because it accesses no shoes  and shovels in the snow even. And if you looked at the bottom side of the hoof, it kind of indents a little bit. So they are really good shovels for the snow and they can dig as deep as three feet. Wow. OK.
22:43um I was looking at a photo of a reindeer hoof  and it reminded me of the chunky  platform heels that were in fashion a while ago. was  like, oh, they have fancy feet. And they're softer  and they say like,  not saying super soft, but they kind of are like a little softer in like summer, more spongier.
23:09And then in winter, they harden up a little like more firmer, you know, for that ice and snow.  in summer, so it's easier to do their hoof trimming in summer versus winter because they're very, very hard  in winter.  Yeah. Do the babies have the same  like angel feather thingies on their feet when they're born the  eponychium or whatever that's called for cows and horses?
23:38Angel feather? I'm trying to think of what you're referring to. So that the hooves don't cut the mom when they're coming through the birth canal. Oh, yes. Yeah, their hooves are tiny. They're not like really big when they're first born. But are they soft? Are the bottom of their feet soft? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah, they're more rounded, smoother. Okay, because with horses and cows, they look almost like little flaps.
24:07on their hooves when they're born and it's so that they don't slice mom on the inside of her body. It's so cool. is amazing how she takes care of things. because with our dairy, because I grew up on a dairy farm, yeah, their hooves are softer and then they're hearted and they're just different. it's weird how they're made that way. It's always interesting how things change too so fast in the calves.
24:35Yeah, they go from being completely defenseless to able to take care of themselves really fast.  Yeah, yes. yeah, the  reindeer babies. So it's interesting because they are a little different  than like cattle. You you feed calves twice a day, bigger amounts, and they get that curd in their stomach and it kind of slowly releases throughout the day. But then you have reindeer babies, they drink
25:03very often in small amounts. milk is really, really high in fat and protein content  as well. So that's also probably why they don't need like a ton at once, but yeah, they drink very often.  And  reindeer do have four teats, um not like goats where they have two. So  they have four and they're really, really tiny. Oh, okay.
25:29And they usually only have one baby. are occasionally twins, but it's usually one baby per mama, right? Correct. Yes.  And  we actually had a set of twins.  What was that? Not this last year, the year before that.  So yeah, twins are very rare. They usually just have a single calf.  And when we had the twins, we were kind of calling around a bunch of other reindeer owners who've been in it for
25:57a while, like did you ever have twins? Did you have to pull them both? So you had to feed them, like did you have to bottle feed them or did they do fine on the mom?  And the mom who had it, she's our oldest in our first range. She's always been amazing with all of her calves.  And at first we thought she was like pushing one away, the smaller one. The female was more runtier, she was smaller. And then we realized she was making them take turns. So like at night she was trying to let one drink.
26:27And then she would let the, you know, she was trying to kind of give them turns. So she was, it was very interesting because at first we thought, oh, she's just pushing one away and that wasn't the case. So, and then you have to think, is she going to produce enough for both? You know, you want to make sure they're both getting enough nutrients or is that bigger one going to drink more? And then, you know, when the other one wants to drink, is there going to not just be enough? So we ended up having, we left them on the mom and we would kind of every like,
26:57So if you ever bottle feed reindeer, we keep ours on the mom because we've just had good luck with that. And our moms have always been really great. You have to feed them like every three hours, almost like a baby human because they drink that often. And so we had to go out there. I had my cousins help me a lot. They were great. I actually just had my newborn son at the time. So I was already feeding my baby every like three hours.
27:26So they would go over there and help and feed them,  the baby twins, and try to make sure, like see if they would drink off the mom. Then they had a little like, you know, syringe, like just to kind of do little, slowly put a little bit in their cheek at a time and  kind of see how much they would take  and record that  every day or every feeding. And then we'd weigh them.
27:55Yeah, it was it was a very interesting with reindeer every year you learn something new there is And that was something that year I'm like and they live we showed them at shows there that first year with the mom They took turns we always bring the calves to events with the mom  They always do you know really well that way and then this last year we brought the twins out together So that was really fun that they were able to kind of go to all these events together awesome
28:24So yeah, the babies, it's crazy that, oh, and I found what I've been looking for. Cause I'm like, I don't know the percentage of fat and I'm like, I'm just trying to find it  in their milk. So  this reads here, is it?  Reindeer milk is very high in fat compared to milk from other domestic species. Like a Jersey cow is known for its high butter fat content,  which is
28:49which only has about 4 % milk fat, reindeer milk registers at 24 % milk fat. They rank first in fat content among milk consumed, or they rank, yeah, first in fat content among milk consumed by humans. People do not consume reindeer milk in certain parts of the world. some do, like, know, where reindeer are native, there are people, you know, in Norway, like you were saying.
29:19And Siberia where they rely on these animals and herd them and this is like their food source and,  know, they, you know, have to drink their milk too. So, and they use, you know, they butcher them too. And it's crazy how  much the fat content in these animals are so high, but they are also native to those really harsh, cold climates too.  don't know if that's also why. Probably.
29:48And what you're telling me is reindeer milk would make excellent ice cream.  Yeah, that would be interesting to try.  Yeah, it would be the smoothest ice cream ever known to man. Yeah. Oh, and then it does go on to say polar bear milk is 31 % fat. So yeah, it's interesting how  like they did this research on all these other animals and the fat content in their mouth and how it really, really varies.
30:16I mean, even a dairy cows like jerseys just have more just naturally than Holsteins. You know, it's just interesting how that's just how nature works. Did you know that the milk from cats has a very high fat content too? Oh, cats. Okay. I don't know too much about cats. I mean, we have tons of bark cats, Yeah. I was reading about all this stuff this morning and I read the same kind of comparison that you just read. And it said that.
30:43is that cats have a very high fat content in their milk. And I was like, I am not milking a cat.  That would be very hard.  I would just frustrate the cat and  I'd probably get sliced up pretty good. So no, we're not milking barn cats around here. That seems like a bad plan.  Okay. Well, Sarah,  I  would love to talk to you for days about this because I  love it that you're raising reindeer. think that's so fabulous.
31:09There is just so much to them. It's endless amount of information I could give.  Yeah, I have one more question and then we'll wrap it up. When little kids come to the event and they see the reindeer,  do they get to actually pet the reindeer or do they just get to ask you a bunch of questions and stare at the reindeer? So for us,  we don't allow the petting of reindeer just for biosecurity reasons. For us, um
31:36and liability, not that our reindeer are aggressive or anything. It's just,  it just puts a peace of mind. feel like for us, cause I'm not, we have two  teams and if I'm not at the other one, there's other, you know, I have helpers and if something happens, whether there's a person who doesn't understand what they're doing or a PETA person who wants to make a scene, I don't want them to have that on their shoulders. So it's not, I don't.
32:04I allow it for that reason and just mainly biosecurity too, because you don't know  what those people, if they have animals either. There is something that sheep and goats can carry. It's called MCF and they can carry it. doesn't affect them. But if reindeer end up getting it, it's deadly to them. So if I ever have any helpers of mine and they have,  there's some who have sheep and goats at home and like you cannot wear any of the clothes or boots that you have that you go out.
32:33by your sheep and goats because I just don't, it's a big risk. know, it's something that if reindeer get it, it's not a good situation. ah But yeah, the reindeer are very, very friendly. So we let people take photos with them and  I do bring antler sheds so people can hold those  and touch those. And then yeah, we get lots and lots of questions  about them. Nice.  Awesome.  All right. Where can people find you Sarah for your reindeer business?
33:03So we do have an Instagram and Facebook. It's called SantasCrew  LLC  and we also have a website as well. um And there's a page if you just want to learn more just about reindeer in general, there's a ton of information on reindeerowners.com.  An abundance amount of information there. um So yeah, it's  interesting. um Some states don't allow people to own reindeer, which is really interesting too.
33:31um So if you are listening and you're looking into wanting them, just, you know, first of all, check with your state's rules and regulations.  That's what I would say first before going on and trying to find some reindeer to purchase. Cause that would, you know,  you want to make sure you can get them to begin with  and then making sure you knowing the  facility you need. Some states require double fencing, some don't, you know, all those things, every state's a little different.
33:59How expensive is it to acquire a reindeer calf? It varies. um It's quite a wide range.  It could be 12,000 and I see up to 20,000. It really depends.  Bottle raise seems to go for a little  higher for some reason.  And some people prefer that, which  is totally fine. It's just preference. We don't bottle raise. We do work with our animals though, too. um
34:28So it's just really, really depends on that. And can you even get them from certain farms? So it depends on certain states. um I can't sell to certain states because of their regulations,  but I can sell to some others.  like, for example, I can sell to the of Texas. Their regulations currently is you can't have a CWD case  within a certain mile radius. Yep, chronic wasting disease.
34:58Yes. Yep. And  I meet that requirement. But if someone else in Wisconsin has a case that was just within that radius, even within a mile, they cannot sell a reindeer to that state, which is, which is so crazy. Um, so I can, it can make it hard. There is a state I could sell to and they just change the regulations and now I can't.  Um, so it's,  it's a really, really interesting market that way, how it's constantly changing and it makes it harder.
35:26to acquire them or sell them. So yeah, it's very interesting and constantly changing. Well, you're never bored. So that's good.  No, no, never. And like I said, we learn something new every year with these animals. So we'll see what happens this year. I mean, if we ever get twins again, we've been through that.  So  I think it's fascinating. And I'm so, I don't know, I'll use the word impressed. Probably not the right word.
35:54So impressed that you do this with your dad. think it's great. um As always, people can find me at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com. And if you'd like to support the podcast, you can go to atinyhomestead.com slash support.  Sarah, thank you for coming back and talking with me. Oh, of course. Thank you for inviting me back.  I loved this conversation and I have not talked with anyone about raising reindeer before. So this was really interesting. Thank you so much. Yeah, you definitely, you're welcome.
36:23All right, have a great day. You too.