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Low-Input Farming, Beginning Homesteading and the Catholic Faith: Shawn and Beth Dougherty
373 Plays1 year ago
Shawn and Beth Dougherty discuss low-input farming, starting points with animals on the homestead and the Catholic Faith.
Biography for Shawn and Beth Dougherty:
Shawn and Beth Dougherty have been farming together since the 1980’s
Using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy, the Doughertys raise dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm-fed hogs, and a variety of poultry, producing most of the food, and feed, on the farm. Their ongoing project is to identify and test the potential for operating a farm and homestead with minimal off-farm inputs.
They are the authors of The Independent Farmstead, actively contribute to Plain Value magazine, have written for Mother Earth News, Hobby Farms and more. They have been featured in various interviews, podcasts, and conferences
Shawn and Beth promote an outline of farming and homesteading that is inspiring to us as we consider the ways we engage in a stewardship model which considers homesteading, farming and the Catholic Faith.
We are excited to bring you this interview as a production of Little Way Farm and Homestead. If you are interested in helping this podcast grow and reach a larger audience, please consider leaving a review wherever you are listening to the episode, and share with someone you know!
Helpful Links:
The Independent Farmstead by Shawn and Beth Dougherty
The One Cow Revolution Website
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. Little Way Farm and Homestead is a regenerative and educational farm in southeastern Indiana. Motivated by the Catholic faith, we strive to inspire, encourage, and support the development of homesteads and small-scale farms in faith and virtue. I'm Matthew. And I'm Carissa. We're excited for you to join us on the podcast.
Season 2 Special Guests
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to season two of the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast. We're excited to bring you not only continued conversations between Carissa and I, but we're excited to introduce many more conversations with special guests and interviewees of the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast, beginning with the Doherty's.
Sustainable Farming Methods
00:00:40
Speaker
Sean and Beth Doherty have been farming together since the 1980s.
00:00:44
Speaker
Using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy, the Doherty's raise dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm fed hogs, and a variety of poultry producing most of the food and feed on the farm. Their ongoing project is to identify and test the potential for operating a farm and homestead with minimal off-farm inputs.
00:01:04
Speaker
They are the authors of the independent farmstead, actively contribute to Plain Value magazine, have written for Mother Earth news, hobby farms, and more. They have been featured in various interviews, podcasts, and conferences. Sean and Beth promote an outline of farming and homesteading that is inspiring to us as we consider the ways we engage in a stewardship model which considers homesteading, farming, and the Catholic faith.
00:01:27
Speaker
We're excited to bring you this interview as a production of Little Way Farm and Homestead. If you are interested in helping this podcast grow and reach a larger audience, please consider leaving a review wherever you are listening to this episode and share with someone you know. Thank you for joining us and let's get into the interview.
Journey to Low Input Farming
00:01:56
Speaker
So we want to say thank you firstly for joining the podcast. We know that there's a lot of people that are familiar with y'all's name and folks that reach out to us and they're very excited to hear from you in this particular conversation. And so in order just to get started, for those who may be somewhat familiar with you or those who aren't as familiar with you all and the work that you do, would you begin by maybe just giving a little bit of introduction overall, what you do, who you are, and we'll go from there.
00:02:22
Speaker
So we're Sean and Beth Doherty. We live in Toronto, Ohio. We have 24 acres of our own, which is deemed by the state of Ohio not suitable for agriculture. And then we also farm a convent, Franciscan convent, about a mile and a half up the road. There's about 30 acres up there. We run sheep, cows.
00:02:51
Speaker
Cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and ducks are our primary dive stuff. Right. And what our main thrust is to be low input. So we believe that the farm should be able to feed the farm and provide fertility for the farm so that we don't have to buy in fertilizers and we don't have to buy in feeds and all that stuff.
00:03:14
Speaker
We started out with a desire to live in the country, started out 40 years ago, a young couple, well, not quite that long ago, a young couple with small children, and we wanted to live in the country, raise our kids close to nature and knowing where food came from. We wanted to raise our own food. That process led us to the discovery that sunlight and grass are the foundation of
00:03:40
Speaker
the global food system on the land. They just are, and especially to feed human beings.
Role of Ruminants in Farming
00:03:47
Speaker
We knew that our grandfathers had not been dependent on inputs for their farms, and they had raised families on small dry farms in the Southwest. And as we moved toward that and began to make discoveries about energy flow, we started a blog and we began speaking for Mother Earth news fairs across the country.
00:04:09
Speaker
And in 2016, Chelsea Green published our book, The Independent Farmstead. Since that time, our speaking expanded slowly, since we're not telling people how do you get rich as a chic young farmer near a city, and instead are saying, how do you live modestly within
00:04:29
Speaker
within the patterns and the limits that God built into nature. We never envisioned ourselves as having a big future as speakers. We just wanted to share what we knew. And over the last five years, particularly, the demand for what we're seeing has grown. And we're really grateful that the Catholic world is beginning to sit up and take notice for a long time.
00:04:57
Speaker
I think Catholics have felt themselves, faithful Catholics have felt themselves besieged. And the message that we usually got from the Catholic world was, yes, yes, that's all very lovely, but don't you think food's a rather secondary thing to worry about? We're busy getting our kids to Daily Mass and getting them, say, the family rosary and homeschooling them, all of which we've done and we appreciate the work involved. But we're glad to see maybe a little latent Janssenism
00:05:26
Speaker
being shed as Catholics come to grips with the idea that the physical world and its care is a vocation. Genesis chapter one, it's our vocation. And we can't enact our vocations as married people with children very well if feeding them is not a part of our concern. And people are getting more and more concerned about the availability of food
00:05:52
Speaker
and its quality. And I think we're being drawn. I think we're seeing the Holy Spirit move through not just the Catholic world, but
00:06:01
Speaker
move through the country, drawing people toward engaging directly with our vocation to take care of one another. But one of the things that Beth mentioned is that we are not about making a living on the farm, although we do now make a living. We are about making a livelihood from the farm so that one can live from the farm, can provide from the farm, and
00:06:27
Speaker
With that in mind, we raise about 90 to 95% of what we eat and what our animals eat. It's not that hard to bring in feed all the time and provide for your farm. But if you can get the farm to also provide what your animals eat, then you're off that farm.
00:06:47
Speaker
The thing that breaks it for homesteaders so often is that you can't afford to continue to farm this way. And we would agree, you can't afford to farm that way. You've got to be able to provide for yourself. Yeah, that's one of the things that we come across often with folks who are beginning homesteading or they're looking at trying to purchase land in order to homestead.
00:07:06
Speaker
or simply just how to carry out a homestead itself is the financial burden that they find themselves in. Whether it's because they have an extensive mortgage that's burdensome to them or they simply have grown at a pace that basically outpaces their financial
Starting Low Input Farming
00:07:20
Speaker
resources or you know there's that kind of that final point there is that
00:07:24
Speaker
There, the way that they enter into home setting is often guided by a understanding that they're going to have to continue to bring in resources and continue to feed the farm effectively or the homestead, as opposed to, as you mentioned, reducing effectively the dependency on bringing inputs in.
00:07:41
Speaker
So, maybe we could start there. There's a lot of great points in the conversation already, but maybe we could start there. And what does that look like to actually go about and build out a low input or an input free farm or move the farm, the homestead towards an environment where it doesn't rely so heavily on bringing in animal feed or resources versus things that it can produce itself? Well, one of the ways that we think all homesteaders should start, which is kind of the inverse of how
00:08:10
Speaker
Most homesteaders start, most of them start with chickens and things like that and then they're bringing in feed all the time. We suggest that people start with food that the farm is already providing for animals and then you would obviously go to grass.
00:08:25
Speaker
grass is going to come in or forage, whatever you want to call it, the forage is going to come in, the pasture is going to come in no matter what. You can hardly stop that from coming in. And so what is the animal that will eat that? Well, we go to the lactating animal, to the ruminant animal. So we're either the cow, the sheep or the goat. And then we strongly recommend
00:08:49
Speaker
instead of the one-time harvest of butchering your animal, you go to a twice daily harvest of getting milk from that lactating animal. So we always suggest that people match their ruminant to their forage. So if you've got woody forage, if you've got briars, you bring in a goat. But if you've got forages, if you've got grasses, you would either go to the cow or the sheep and then
00:09:18
Speaker
Milk that animal and the thing that has transformed our farm is discovering that That milk that's coming in that raw milk is the best food for every animal on the farm Super it's it's super food
00:09:37
Speaker
and every animal on the farm can thrive from it. So that's one of the big ways that we recommend. The principle behind this is the idea that God made a planet and it is fueled by our nearby star, the sun. It is solar energy. Actually, it makes wind, makes rain. So we can thank the sun for the fact that the wind blows and water runs downhill.
00:10:06
Speaker
or at least moves uphill before it runs downhill. That's the power that runs this planet. Old life energy is solar energy in some form. Farms throughout the last at least 12,000 years and probably a lot longer farm, any kind of agriculture has been enacted as
00:10:28
Speaker
simply a form of collecting solar energy via leaves and converting it into other things. Any homesteader who's starting out is already growing a crop. If you didn't buy a Walmart parking lot to make your homestead on, if you have dirt, you're already growing a crop
00:10:46
Speaker
The problem is it's not edible to humans. No problem there because if it's not a tree, we're going to put trees in another class and that's for a different conversation. If it's a low-growing ground cover, either a woody, a stemmed perennial shrub or a non-woody herbaceous perennial or annual
00:11:10
Speaker
ground-covered grass, weeds, that sort of thing. Then there's a ruminant that eats that. Ruminants are animals with multi-chambered stomachs who are capable of turning not only the starches in plants, but the cellulose in plants into proteins, fats, and sugars and manure.
00:11:33
Speaker
you're gonna partner with one of those and it's going to take the landscape as it stands right now and start feeding you 12 hours after you bring it on the place with your local sunlight and rainfall.
00:11:47
Speaker
This isn't just a great dodge for people who were cheap. This is God's pattern. It's how He made the world. And it is, in fact, how humanity has fed itself since the fall. Go back before Abraham, go back as far back as you like to go, and you'll find that we are tenders of flocks and herds. And those flocks and herds convert the naturally available forage into people food. When you add to that,
00:12:17
Speaker
a picture of global health as a whole. And you realize that soil is made by broken down plants, and that the plants that break down to make that soil, that protect that soil, that capture solar energy before it can heat that soil up and dry it out, are those herbaceous ground covers we're harvesting with our animals.
00:12:40
Speaker
And those plants, not only are there to build soil, protect soil, hold water in the soil, keep the soil cool, those plants require the grazing you're going to give them, right? Herbaceous plants.
00:12:54
Speaker
require some form of pruning in almost every environment. They require some form of pruning to make them break down. We do it with our mower on our lawns all the time, and we don't really think about the various functions that mowing is serving. But with a grazing animal, you realize this animal's mouth is going to prune this forage
00:13:15
Speaker
That will result in root dieback so that the lower, the subterranean part of the plant is, it reflects the available leaf solar capture that's going on above. That dead tissue is going to build organic matter into the soil. It's going to feed soil microorganisms for soil health.
00:13:37
Speaker
and it will also make it possible for water to percolate down through the holes left by the dead roots. New roots can go down further. This plant growth, both above ground and below ground, followed by pruning, followed by regrowth, is how soil is made and is how the plants go on being able to do this act. What happens if we don't prune
00:14:01
Speaker
herbaceous ground covers. They smother themselves in top growth, which doesn't break down. And after a while, the plant has so much dead plant material on top that the new growth points, the shoots at the bottom, can't get enough solar energy to grow. And you end up with dead plants. And over time, you end up with
00:14:23
Speaker
desertification, which we're seeing all over the world, which can be caused just as much by overrest, that is, no animal pressure, as it can be caused by too much or unguided animal pressure. We're here to guide it.
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah, one of the things that we have discovered is that pastures must be managed. They must be taken care of. So it's not a matter of simply turning as we have done in the United States. We put a fence around our farm and then we just turn the animal loose. That's not the best way of building soil. And building soil needs to be the key
00:15:05
Speaker
needs to be the fundamental decision making choice that we make as homesteaders. What's best for the family is the primary decision maker, but the second one is soil. What's best for the soil?
00:15:23
Speaker
Taking care of your soil is a little bit like looking out for your spiritual life, right? You know that you need to say prayers before you lay yourself down to bed. You know that when you get up in the morning, you need to devote your day to the service of the Lord. You have this ongoing need to maintain
00:15:44
Speaker
your conversation and your relationship with God. Taking care of your soil is that fundamental in farming. Nothing else happens if you're not taking care of it. If this is tree hugging, all power to tree hugging. This is our original vocation. Go back and read Genesis chapter one. It's an interesting thing when you read Genesis chapter one as a person of faith,
00:16:12
Speaker
to ask yourself, so when did he revoke that? When did the Lord revoke Genesis chapter one and say, oh, don't bother anymore. You've got the industrial revolution and big business to cover for you. If it didn't happen, then maybe that's still our mandate. We assume it is. Oh, I wanted to make a point too, when it comes to the inputs free question and the 90 to 95% question.
Balancing Inputs and Community Resources
00:16:41
Speaker
What you are attempting to build as a homesteader, I believe that the dream behind most homesteaders, there are a few who are thinking, boy, wouldn't it be cool to be a hotshot new young farmer who makes a ton of money selling microgreens in New York City. But most of us are, I think, responding to
00:17:01
Speaker
the urge in our soul, the place in our soul that, you know, we have like, our heart is restless until we rest in need. And a piece of that is that he made us creatures in this creaturely place, and our heart is restless until we occupy the place he designed for us. So most of us are looking for some really primal meaning to homesteading. The inputs free piece, Eric Brandy, who wrote,
00:17:29
Speaker
Better Off had dinner with us a while back and he opened, we handed him a bottle of beer and he said something that meant basically, I thought you guys were inputs free. And we said.
00:17:43
Speaker
Yes, right. In potential, we could drop all our inputs and we know what the natural patterns are for farming. This farm could run with no inputs. But that isn't really the goal at the moment, right? It's like your seatbelt. You don't put it on thinking, I hope the car hit something so that I can use this thing. You put it on hoping you'll never use it.
00:18:09
Speaker
We can run this farm with no inputs. We want to know and enact and keep strong all those patterns. But we also want to buy beer from the local brewery and drink beer and enjoy it, not make our own beer. And we like electricity.
00:18:25
Speaker
Well, as long as the electricity is there, we know how to use it, but all our systems are set up so that we can shut it off. Off-grid is such a funny term because it's like, it's as though people imagine that their survival really has to do with that plug in the wall. And so if they can figure out a way not to use it, they're safe. A lot of off-grid people buy their food, which makes me scratch my head a little bit.
00:18:50
Speaker
It is interesting to see some of the variations and interpretation of certain terms and maybe the vision of an idyllic lifestyle that maybe sometimes we consider as historical, but might really just be a figment of our imaginations. I think what we want to do is recognize that ecosystems
00:19:08
Speaker
don't export. If your farm is an ecosystem, that means it's a community of living things beginning with green leaves that can capture sunlight, that trade around energy and water,
00:19:22
Speaker
endlessly, and if it's managed well by humans, it should also grow in resilience and fertility and biodiversity all the time. If you understand that system, then the importation of a bottle of beer is not a weakness in that system, but it's part of you being part of a bigger community, a bunch of connected micro-ecosystems that are your neighborhood.
00:19:47
Speaker
that can share stuff across borders all the time. There are no real borders.
00:19:52
Speaker
But it comes back to the knowledge that it's all dependent on sunlight. So the acreage for which you have responsibility is the acreage where you're trying to hang on to the sunlight and rainfall and direct them into meaningful paths that don't vote any living things off the island, but make sure that those meaningful paths, one, feed the human beings and their companion animals, and two, build fertility over time.
00:20:19
Speaker
So you guys mentioned starting with the ruminant animals to get the homestead going. How would you transition into adding in the other animals once you feel like you've established your ruminant animal and getting the milk from them? Right. Well, so what we would do is we would not add those other animals until we have the food.
00:20:39
Speaker
And after you've been milking a cow for three days, now you have to have a pig because you've got that much milk coming in. So now I can easily add the pig.
00:20:51
Speaker
All the animals, too, are worker animals. We say that for chickens, there's no reason that people can't start with chickens as long as they're starting with about two chickens per person in the household. Because you probably have that many scraps coming off your table.
00:21:14
Speaker
that would feed chickens. Or from food preparation. That's right. So chickens could come earlier. We actually subsidize our chickens a little bit because they're our primary fertility system in the garden. We run chickens with cover crops and we are daily running them in like pasture on parts of the garden that are
00:21:42
Speaker
that we're not growing crops in as a fertility. And then all winter long, we run chickens through the garden. So we're also getting the manure from the pigs, but chickens are a primary part. So we are willing to have more chickens than we may have to buy in feed, which we do. We buy in, but we are only buying in wheat. We're buying in wheat and then mixing that with milk as their primary
00:22:12
Speaker
So basically we build our farm in appropriately sized parts so that the whole thing can function as an ecosystem. Those additional chickens are part of a program on the rental farm, the convent farm, where we keep most of an acre in tillage and about a third of that, between a third and a half of that is in cover crops all the time.
00:22:39
Speaker
Those cover crops, if we run chicken tractors over them, are converting solid clay subsoil into topsoil, like a tilthy fertile garden soil with the help of chickens. So those chickens get this. We subsidize them so that this transformation can happen.
00:23:07
Speaker
All homesteaders, virtually every homesteader, unless you're fabulously rich, in which case you're probably not a homesteader. But most homesteaders are going to find themselves in the situation. I think it might have been Ben Hewitt who said, the goal is to not require
00:23:27
Speaker
importation, especially of things like petroleum, that you really are importing that is totally beyond your ability to provide for yourself. The goal is to make them unnecessary, but it's important for the homesteader to remember in the beginning
00:23:42
Speaker
that you can move yourself light years ahead with a little judicious petrochemical energy to run your chainsaw to clear the space you're going to put your house on or to move a little dirt to make a pond. And I think that's a really valuable thing for us to remember.
00:24:00
Speaker
Catholics, we are great at hair splitting and at pursuing, you know, because we know that this thing that has been entrusted to us is infinitely valuable. You know, if you think about the Eucharist, it's infinitely valuable and our faith is like that. So we tend to get ideological, you know, and sort of back each other in a corner and keep correcting, offering a kind of fraternal correction that is a roadblock sometimes.
00:24:30
Speaker
One of the ways we do that is when we say, I can only engage in this project if all the parts of this project meet the qualifications of my ideology at the moment, which is a little bit like saying, rather than use three deck chairs and four life
00:24:51
Speaker
life rings to build yourself a life raft as you jump off the Titanic, you insist that since the Titanic is defunct, no part of it can be used for your life raft, right? We are stuck with the system that's broken. We're all going to be buying animals that are coming out of petrochemical-based hormone-induced
00:25:13
Speaker
grain head system. We're all going to be starting from a piece of an economic system maybe that we find objectionable. And it's important to recognize that you're allowed to build your lifeboat out of parts of the ship that's going down.
00:25:28
Speaker
Well, I think that's a great reminder to a lot of people who would be maybe a bit reserved to even begin the project or begin homesteading or begin farming because it's not as ideologically sound as they think it is in the very beginning. So as I maybe hear what you're saying, just to clarify, there are starting points and then there's this continued growth over time that can be had where you can move more and more and more closer to input low or input free farming and homesteading.
00:25:56
Speaker
so that it doesn't discourage people from basically beginning the process simply because they can't have it all in the very start. Right. Right. So for example, if you have a homesteader you're trying to help and they say, well, look, I'm really comfortable with chickens. I want to start with chickens. The answer there may be absolutely. If what you want to do is get 30 chickens and put them out there in a tractor and tractor them around,
00:26:22
Speaker
and cover a certain amount of ground tractor and go right ahead and buy the feed for those animals. But recognize one, that the failure of those chickens to feed themselves from your land is not a failure of farming. It's a fact about chickens, right? And we can go into that later if you want. But chickens are going to be your least. In big numbers, they're going to be your least efficient, least farm supported livestock.
00:26:51
Speaker
And the other piece is if you recognize where chickens can fit into an integrated low or no inputs farm, by all means buy fuel for them for a little while and tractor them over the place where you're going to put your garden and use them to rip out the grass, invite worms to the site, drop fertility there. You know, chickens are often people's first step.
00:27:14
Speaker
And then they become their last step because three years in you think, well, those were the best $15 a dozen eggs we ever ate, but nobody wants to do the chores. Nobody wants to clean the chicken house out. And I'm tired of buying feed for them, right? We want people to recognize what the steps are for starting a homestead so that when they use chickens in that way, they do it knowing that it won't be the most efficient operation on the homestead, but they can use it as a tool to move the homestead forward.
00:27:44
Speaker
One thing it makes me think of is a lot of people, ourselves included, at some point we had to begin and we had to look around at the land that we had and we have grand visions for what it's going to look like and what we're going to be able to do. But I do suspect that a lot of people find themselves looking at land that is maybe not as idyllic or as exemplary of an example as what they think they are.
00:28:09
Speaker
completely flat pasture, perfect balance between woods that are cleaned out with no brambles or invasive species, that kind of environment. A lot of what you're talking about seems to suggest that or at least support this idea that you're going to start somewhere and it's not going to be as perfect as you may think or your imagination is going to support, but over time with the right management style or stewardship that it can improve and ultimately can be maybe not self-sufficient but invite that idea of low or reduced input.
00:28:38
Speaker
So I do wonder, Shawn, you had mentioned that some of the land that you own has been deemed by the government as not fit for agriculture.
Accessing Land Creatively
00:28:47
Speaker
And there's a lot of people who are right now looking at land that probably even if it doesn't have that designation is probably going to fit somewhat into that category, maybe excessive hills, steep environments, rockiness, difficult soils, often people will reach out to us and they're
00:29:02
Speaker
Very concerned about the clay in their soil and we seem to not we don't find that to be as Alarming as other people seem to be but maybe you could just talk about that if you're looking for land today, what do you look for? And if you find yourself looking at an environment that just doesn't meet the expectations you think it should where do you start? And how do you proceed from there? Well, we think that people should One one thing that we think is that owning land is way overrated For example, the majority of our farm is a Franciscan convent
00:29:32
Speaker
area. And that's where most of our farming, most of our livestock are. And it's been a great relationship that we have with the sisters. We've been there for 13 years. Yeah. And it's really fabulous. So that's one thing is that we always say within five miles of where you are, there is almost certainly land that is being underused, that's being abused, that, you know,
00:29:59
Speaker
approach that owner and say I would like to Consider using your land. We have somebody that approached us at a at a conference and said I reached out through a hunters app So that he was discovering land that was out there for hunters and within the circle that he had drawn he found ten different pieces of hunting leases and he approached
00:30:27
Speaker
and wrote to all of them and said, I would like to moo your land, which meant I would like to put a cow on your land. To do the mowing. Five of them responded and said, absolutely, come do this. So we really encourage people that do not have the money to do it. And land is very expensive now to find a way to work with other people.
00:30:52
Speaker
But we also say, and I think Joel Salatin says this as well, we've got to use the edges and the pieces. Nobody can afford to buy the farm. You can't compete with the commercial farmers. So you've got to take just the edges, and that's certainly what we have. We have about as bad a land as anybody
00:31:14
Speaker
can imagine. People come here for workshops and they say, you said it was steep. I had no idea it was this steep. So we have, with rotational grazing, a number of different ways that we have found ways to use that land. But a lot of it is letting the land leave you.
00:31:39
Speaker
So instead of coming to the farm and saying, I know how I want to farm, you go to the land and let the farm teach you how to farm, what it's able to do, and then your farming is going to follow that. And that's certainly what we've done. We've found lots of different small climates that
00:32:03
Speaker
that allow us to do bees in one area and fruit trees in another area. So when we're trying to help somebody, we'll give them a short list of things to considerations as you're looking at a piece of land. And the number one is
00:32:22
Speaker
It can't tie you to a paid job somewhere else that's going to require so many hours that you're not going to have time to deal with this land or you won't want to. So affordability is number one. And if that means that you rent a little house right next to an abandoned field, right, and crouch upon the abandoned field, sometimes that's easy to do. For instance, close friends of ours,
00:32:47
Speaker
own a 10-acre farm, it backs onto a whole lot of acres owned by the utility company, unfenced land the utility company doesn't care about, and they graze that land. The utility company knows they're there and sort of turns a blind eye because they don't want liability for their presence there, but they effectively manage about a 40-acre farm while owning only 10 of it and not having a lease for the rest.
00:33:13
Speaker
If you were hungry, you'd figure out how to use the van next to you and you wouldn't say, well, let me trot down to the title office and make sure I have title first. I'm not suggesting that people trespass. What I'm suggesting is that people think creatively. So number one, it needs to fit your budget and your budget needs to be a budget about livelihood.
00:33:36
Speaker
not living. The difference being your livelihood is those things you need to live. Your living is the money you earn so you can buy those things you need to live.
00:33:48
Speaker
If you can grow, produce, forage much of your livelihood, your living gets a lot smaller. You can get along with a lot less. I was able to go from a full-time professor job to working maintenance for the Franciscans at part-time and then less part-time. And then we stumbled upon another piece of
00:34:11
Speaker
property that we purchased next two hours. Again, we only buy property when it is so bad that the rats have left it. That makes it affordable for us. There was a house that we turned into an Airbnb, and we discovered that agro-tourism pays
00:34:32
Speaker
pretty well uh so that huge income but it it takes care of our needs it has taken care of our needs but it's because our needs are so low um that beth has learned uh has kind of led all of us in farming and in food um using the food using the farm so that our needs for cash have gone way way down number one would be like
00:35:03
Speaker
Access the land you can afford to access. Number one is to go back into your brain and figure out what is that image you have in your mind of what a farm is and erase it. Get rid of it. It's probably your Fisher Price farm set that you set up in the middle of the living room for when you were a kid.
00:35:24
Speaker
And you know, it's flat, green, square, fenced all the way around, barn in the middle. Get rid of that picture and say to yourself, the Lord made all this land. It is all worthy. And very much of it, if it's accessible and you can get water on it, it can be farmed. And it deserves that kind of care. So number one is budget. Number two is access. If you can't get to it, it's not doing you any good. Number three is water.
00:35:53
Speaker
If you can't get water on it, you are going to have serious difficulties moving forward in any other way. But if you have those three things, if you're going to afford it and still have time to deal with it, you can get to it and you can get water on it. Then you begin asking a series of questions that show up sort of informally in our big book, The Independent Farmstead. They're asked more directly in our field guides to independent farming.
00:36:22
Speaker
And then when we do consults, we help people walk through them. What's growing here and who eats that, right? What form of ruminant, what species of ruminant eats that?
00:36:33
Speaker
you can begin feeding yourself from your own land while building it in fertility within 12 hours of coming on to it. And that's the definition of farming. When you can manage land so that while it is feeding you, it is also feeding itself, you've begun farming. So we've got to park our John Deers, stop mowing, and turn that grass into food.
00:36:58
Speaker
If we were 21 and starting now, we would buy the cheapest junk trailer camp or whatever we could find, park it on our land with some solar panels on top and start day one, bringing that ruminant on who could eat what's there. If there was no fence on the land, we would use a tether.
00:37:22
Speaker
we would water it with a bucket. We'd have already made sure, one, that we could afford to do what we were doing. Just by making it so cheap, not by raising our income. That we had access or we couldn't get that camper in there, right? And that we had water. From that point, we can begin farming. And every day that we manage our grass holistically or whatever our forage is. By moving the animals on that pasture.
00:37:48
Speaker
And maybe holistic grazing is something that needs a little time to itself so that your listeners understand what kind of grazing we're talking about. This is biomimetic grazing. It imitates the natural patterns by which God makes soil and animals and plants all interact beneficially together on the planet.
00:38:14
Speaker
You guys have given so many really great points about getting started, starting with the ruminant animals and working your way towards feeding the family, feeding the land, feeding the other animals, and then some really important topics about how to find the land.
Faith's Influence on Farming
00:38:30
Speaker
So before we just wrap up this conversation today, can you just touch on the way that you feel like the Catholic faith has fueled the way that you guys have approached
00:38:42
Speaker
homesteading in general, but especially the approach that you guys have taken to it. And just how has it fed your lives, having the Catholic faith a part of all of that? Well, the thing that I think has been very exciting is for us to be able to watch our belief in God be manifested through our farm and be manifested through creation so that
00:39:10
Speaker
by watching the farm, by using the pattern that God gave us, we are fed abundantly, and the grass and the ground improves. So all of a sudden, you are aware, not all of a sudden, but you are aware that God really does love us, that he created a world that works, that works with humans, that... Yeah.
00:39:39
Speaker
And if we will follow that, if we will live inside of that, you really have a sense of how God...
00:39:48
Speaker
God is revealing Himself through this work so that in our world, many times we can get discouraged and feel like, where is God? Why do all these awful things happen? Why isn't God preventing it? But then you focus on this and you see that God is there every moment.
00:40:10
Speaker
providing us with water, providing us with—if we'll live with that pattern. I mean, so much of the Old Testament and even the Mass is a ritual. It's a way of doing it. And God is pointing at doing it the right way through, you know, all those laws and all those things seem archaic or
00:40:36
Speaker
arbitrary. But then you begin to see that no, there really is a right way to do things. And I think that that's what we have learned so much is that if we do things right on the farm, we have this incredible abundance and we have the soil improving.
00:40:55
Speaker
and it really encourages you then to say there's a right way to do liturgy, there's a right way to to be Catholic, there's a right way to be a parent, there's a right way to not that there's not that there's only one way because every farm is unique but but but we need to look for
00:41:15
Speaker
But we can respond. We can respond to God as He reveals ourselves. Each of us in our own individual ways respond to that by becoming more and more the person He wants us to be. Now, Shawn is a cradle Catholic, so he brought depth of faith to our relationship before it was a relationship.
00:41:42
Speaker
I'm a convert. And so for me, I received the faith largely. We went to the University of Dallas. Sean was a liberal arts professor. You get an idea that maybe there was a lot of things go on in our heads, right? And I received the faith as promise, as hope, as tenet, as the word of God, as the sacraments.
Intertwining Faith and Farming Practices
00:42:06
Speaker
But the material of
00:42:09
Speaker
My first 20 years of life, the years of my formation, did not include material that supported the claims of the faith. It was an act of faith, to be of the faith. And I find that working with soil and plants and animals, according to God's patterns for how that works, has taught me
00:42:40
Speaker
to see on levels that reach at least as far down as the knees. I may not be infused to the soles of my feet. Maybe you cradle Catholics have it on us converts.
00:42:55
Speaker
There's a depth of understanding of God's goodness that can be received very directly from the process of holistic management of an ecosystem because what you see is God made the universe to be beautiful and abundant and fructive and a blessing on every level.
00:43:20
Speaker
When I walk out to move pastor for my cows in May, I'm walking across the most marvelous oriental carpet of wildflower as I do it, so that on every level I'm fed by this beautiful world he's made. So I think we all receive from the modern world the idea that mankind's
00:43:50
Speaker
destiny, our unfolding of our meaning has reached new heights in the Industrial Revolution because we have machines that can do heretofore un-thought of, unimaginable things.
00:44:07
Speaker
And we don't question that those inventions have been interposed between us in ways that create temporary abundance, but interposed between us and the natural world. We say food comes from the grocery store and that's just fine. That's an assumption that we make without even knowing we make it. And I think it's one that we Catholics are going to have to begin
00:44:37
Speaker
to examine, if it isn't because we feel within us the call to Earth care on some level, and I don't mind using the term Earth care, brand new tree hugger, if you will, if it isn't that we feel that it could be that finding ourselves as Catholics more and more in a hostile environment, we need at least to ask ourselves, at what point will I have to balance
00:45:08
Speaker
make choices between my children's desire to be fed three times a day and the culture's insistence that if I'm to have children and feed them, I have to comply with a set of invented norms that are increasingly hostile every day to what we believe and hold sacred. And I think also that on the flip side, the spiritual is
00:45:37
Speaker
I mean, every sacrament is both spirit and it is earthly. All the sacraments have an earthly element. And to simply focus on the spiritual and not be recognizing the real importance of that part of the earthly part of the sacraments. God loves the material world. That's right. And He would love for each of us to take our little
00:46:06
Speaker
ground, our little piece of ground, whether that's a backyard or if that's and turn that into a garden of Eden. I think that that would be beautiful if every Catholic turned their little piece of property, whether it's a few acres or something, but it's an acre in the city and it is impossible, not impossible. It is incredibly difficult to do this when you start farming in a scale that's bigger than the human scale, which is where most
00:46:36
Speaker
Yes, farming is happening now on these incredible thousands and thousands of acres. This is not farming. This is they don't even call it farming. They call it producing or growing. That's not
00:46:51
Speaker
what farming is. And if each one of us took our small, if all the Catholics, if all the Christians said, I'm going to take my little piece of land, I'm going to make it provide for me what it can. I'm the treated as God told me to. You want to talk about transforming this world. You want to talk about ending climate change, whatever that is.
00:47:12
Speaker
All of those things, the world would be a completely different place if everyone took their piece of land and said, I'm going to make this my Garden of Eden.
00:47:24
Speaker
I think you all have such a way with words. It's incredibly inspiring. We have a laundry list of questions to follow up with you all. And I think one of the neatest things about a conversation such as this is that with the experience that you all have, it provides a beautiful degree of practicality and prudence.
00:47:45
Speaker
in an environment where so many people are just yearning so much to get back to what they perceive to be a simpler way of life or a more sustainable way of life, maybe one that is less dependent on systems that we may find objectionable.
00:48:00
Speaker
And as I hear you all speak, it seems to at least challenge me, I presume Chris as well, even as we look at what we do and where we can not just get better at it, improve our processes, decrease our dependence on inputs, but really better understand it from a perspective of stewardship and what God has asked us to do in life and how we ultimately return love to Him. Right. That's right.
00:48:27
Speaker
Yeah, I fully agree. It's so easy to listen to you guys and it just feels like there's so much wisdom and knowledge that you've gained on your journey that I could listen all day.
00:48:40
Speaker
Well, one of the things that's hard for us is to hear someone who has started on the homesteading journey and then run into the roadblocks that are necessary. Suffering is a part of what, to me, suffering is the only thing that Jesus has promised us. He said, you will suffer if you follow me. He didn't promise that we would make it to heaven. He didn't promise us anything, but he said, you will suffer. And I think that the movement toward
00:49:09
Speaker
that thing of suffering and then going through that, pushing through that.
Persistence in Homesteading
00:49:17
Speaker
What we desperately want to do is help people not give up. We've had so many
00:49:27
Speaker
hit so many roadblocks and made our way through them or around them that we've got an abundance of workarounds and we really want to offer to people the opportunity or the
00:49:42
Speaker
our knowledge to help them not give up on this journey. And so we do a lot with email. We certainly recommend people to email us. We are still able to answer all the emails that are sent to us with farm questions.
00:49:59
Speaker
So our goal, our evangelization is to keep people going, to not give up. So as people run into roadblocks, contact us, email us, let us help you pass that next hurdle so that you're on it. So you stay on this journey. It is so hard for us to hear of the family who was going along and then they
00:50:23
Speaker
And they lost it. They lost it because it was too expensive. They didn't understand the pattern. That's right. And they were discouraged by their experiences. That's right. When if somebody helps you see the pattern, if you're willing to do, to be faithful, it's not that the work is huge. Sometimes it's huge and sometimes it's tiny. It's not that it's horribly messy and full of problems. Sometimes it looks that way and most of the time it doesn't.
00:50:51
Speaker
But if you're willing to be faithful to it and you have that pattern, it's going to work. You know what the proof of that is? Here's humanity still here after every many thousand years because it works. God's promise is for always and for everywhere and for everyone. And it's true. And when we can when we can feel that truth, not just in our sacramental lives, but in our sacramental lives,
00:51:18
Speaker
everyday life as people who take Genesis chapter one as a mandate, then I think we will be a much stronger church. And God only knows, like, this is a time when we need it.
00:51:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's wonderful. So you definitely encourage people to reach out to you for their own struggles. Yes, that's great. We can include your contact information, your email in our show notes so that listeners can reach out for any specific questions they have. We're glad to have an organ to the Catholics.
00:51:56
Speaker
Yes, we have specifically found that there is a growing desire and interest, but also somewhat of a lack of direction for a lot of Catholics right now that are wanting to make this change in their lives and for their families.
00:52:14
Speaker
Our heart is really to just connect people with resources and encouragement to specifically Catholics, people of the Christian faith, so that they can, like you said, have the encouragement to keep going and to not give up whenever it gets hard and when they face the challenges because there certainly are many of them right now. That's great. Well, thank you for what you're doing.
00:52:37
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing all of your wisdom and everything that you've learned along the way. We have really appreciated this conversation with you guys. Thank you. Have a blessed day. Yes, you too. Thank you for joining us on another episode of the little way farm and homestead podcast. Check out the show notes for more information about this episode and be sure to tune in next week.