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Failing & Succeeding at Homesteading w/ Devin Rose
345 Plays5 months ago
On this interview, Mathew met with Devin Rose, author of Farm Flop: A City Dweller's Guide to Failing on a Farm in Two Years Or Less. This is a hopeful and cautious interview and one which will hopefully be of great inspiration as you consider your current and future homesteading goals.
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For media inquiries, advertising, speaking requests, guest referrals, consulting and more - email us at hello@littlewayhomestead.comHow to Fail at Homesteading & Keep Going w/ Devin Rose
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Transcript
Introduction to The Little Way Farm and Homestead 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.
00:00:22
Speaker
On this
Interview with Devon Rose: Lessons from 'Farm Flop'
00:00:23
Speaker
episode, I had the privilege of interviewing Devon Rose, a Catholic, husband, and father who homesteads with his family in East Texas. Amongst other ventures, Devon is the author of Farm Flop, a city dweller's guide to failing on a farm in two years or less. This is one of my favorite interviews to date, as Devon provides insight into some circumstances which can upend your homestead journey. Now, to be clear, this is a hopeful conversation and also a necessary one. You can Homestead and we want to help you thrive in your experience. And we thank you for joining us on the Little Way Farm and Homestead podcast in person at Little Way Farm and Homestead or via any other of our online communications. We thank you for joining us and we hope this amongst any of the other work that we strive to do is inspiring and encouraging to you.
00:01:12
Speaker
With good planning, reasonable expectations, and a firm resolve to overcome adversity, you and your family can thrive on the Homestead. And we're excited to celebrate those wins with you. And with that, here is the episode.
00:01:37
Speaker
Devin, welcome to the Little Way Farm and Homestead podcast. Thank you, Matthew. Great to meet you. Likewise, I want to jump right in. You
Devon's Journey: From City Life to Homesteading
00:01:46
Speaker
have a really interesting story that is particularly intriguing to me, partially because I came across in a article that you had wrote on Catholic answers years ago, titled The Catholic Farm in My Dreams and in Reality. Later, I learned that you had wrote a book called The Farm Flop or Farm Flop. And so I thought that might be a really interesting place just to start because your story is one of adversity and humility and something that I think will be very sobering to a lot of people who are finding themselves in a position in the homesteading experience where things might becoming a little bit challenging. So maybe just start there. What is the farm flop and what happened? Yes, our farm flopped.
00:02:29
Speaker
My wife and I, when we got married, we both didn't know this, but realized that we both liked agriculture, horticulture. And it happened that we both wanted to get bees in a beehive. So we did. and We had a you know city lot, very small. But as we talked more, we both dreamed of having a homestead. And this is the era where Joel Salatin was the number one guy.
00:03:00
Speaker
And there were starting to be books that were coming out about you know eating more healthy and that type of thing. So we decided to pursue it. We at the time had a one year old and a three year old. So
Balancing Tech Job with Farm Life: Initial Struggles
00:03:15
Speaker
the children were small. We lived in Austin, Texas and moved east of town, maybe 30 minutes, 30 miles to outside of a small town there called Elgin. not the most fertile place in Central Texas and pretty dry. I was a computer programmer and our goal was to be able to to make a living from our homestead. But as you know, that was going to take time and we had to figure out how to do that. We had about 10 acres and I really was intrigued by the rotational grazing, management intensive grazing of cattle,
00:03:59
Speaker
falling behind with other animals, the whole nine yards. ah But I had to still keep my computer job, drive into the office a few times a week, work from home, we had small children, meanwhile try to get the farm enterprise going. um A lot happened, and I'll jump to the end, our farm flopped. And we can talk about as much detail as we want with why and how that happened. But we did learn humility because I was you know humiliated, which is a good way to learn humility. um And we made some key mistakes that I'm happy to share with you.
00:04:44
Speaker
Well, let's start here just a little bit behind the flop portion of it. What, what did it look like? So you are, presumably you were living in a city or a suburban lifestyle and then you moved to the country and what, what was the initial experience like? Was there a culture shock? Was it different? Was it exactly what you expected? What are your thoughts there? Yes, we lived in typical suburbia of a big city. We moved out to the country when it was in the country, and it was a shock, especially for my wife, who, she's extroverted, she's social. In town, she gets to have all her visits with friends. Out on the homestead, well, there's a lot to do, and we're isolated. We eventually met one Catholic family who lived about three miles away.
00:05:37
Speaker
similar dreams, goals, but that was pretty much it. And the rest of the people were much more rural, not Catholic, degrees of like hostility toward us, if you will. Some of which was justified because we really were green horns. But you know, we thought that we knew what we were doing because we had read a bunch of these books. And we were doing things in a way that in the country, they don't do them. So here's these people coming in. And so, you know, they might, some of them probably wanted to see us fall on our face a bit, which happened. But also, you know, the Catholic parish out there by this town was quite anemic. This was not the strong center of our Catholic faith that we would have wanted. And so we were, we didn't know, if we were we arere so naive. We didn't
00:06:33
Speaker
think about these things or we did somewhat, but we thought, you know what? I bet we'll be able to invite a monastery out and they'll set up a shop, you know, yeah around here. And we actually, we actually did try to do that. So being out there now, I had effectively two full-time jobs, my normal day job as a tech worker, but now the farm. And one of the bad things that happened early on was the farm had an agricultural tax exemption. And in Texas, it might be in other states, you need to keep that exemption and prove that you have the number of animals necessary to keep it. Otherwise, the county can come after you, not just for much higher taxes, thousands and thousands of dollars a year, but even five years of back taxes, they could say that you owed because you would let that ag exemption lapse and they want their money.
00:07:31
Speaker
The
Financial Strain and Tax Exemption Challenges
00:07:32
Speaker
need to keep that ag exemption was a fatal driver in our, uh, failure because right away we needed to get seven animal units. And I asked Bastrop County, what's an animal unit? A full size cow is an animal unit. I got a decent size calf is half an animal unit, five goats or five sheep are an animal unit. Therefore we needed seven full-size cattle. Uh, the land did not have a carrying capacity for that. The 10 acres of land real played out over grazed over, you know, everything weeds. So all of a sudden now I'm trying to do this management intensive grazing. The cattle are eating all the grass. It was a really bad drought across the South that year. This is like 2012. Um, even and ultimately there were terrible wildfires, even in Texas, which is very rare.
00:08:27
Speaker
So that right away was a huge overhanging problem for us. How are we going to keep these cattle fed? And when the ag guy comes out for the county, he needs to count seven cattle. Well, we're going to be on the hook for thousands and thousands of dollars.
00:08:46
Speaker
That's one of those things that I think it becomes particularly difficult for people to wrestle with in the very beginning. One, between ambition and knowledge versus the distinction of practicality. And it becomes very difficult very quickly to reconcile some of those things with people because the passion and the ambition is so high and the drive is is there and everything is new. So you don't mind maybe picking up a couple extra chores or working a little bit harder in the beginning, but then it starts to set in. Or you realize that things are not exactly as easy as what you might've thought reading a book or watching a YouTube video or seeing somebody on social media talk about what they do.
00:09:30
Speaker
And so one of the things that I think is particularly hopeful about this conversation that people will resonate with is that it is difficult in the beginning and there's only so much preparation that you can do in order ah to to prepare yourself until you're there. And then once you're there, it's going to be different and there's going to be lots of things that are challenging. I share one kind of anecdotal story. Now it's not necessarily related to the agriculture portion of this, but when we moved out to our farm, uh, one thing that was in need desperately was some house room models. And so I was used to just being able to run out to the big box hardware store, you know, five, 10 minutes down the road for something, bring it back home and, you know, work on it. And if you forgot something, no big deal. Just go back out to the big box hardware store.
00:10:18
Speaker
Now, we're a minimum of 45 minutes ish away to the big box hardware store. And the smaller mom and pop hardware stores don't have all the things that you probably need, which means I now have an hour and a half commute. And if I forget something, Now I'm in trouble, not to mention the fact that you're going to lose service along the way. And, you know, everything is just different and takes longer and can be more arduous as a result. I wonder if in addition to the ag exemptions, things like that popped up for you all where this move from the city to the country just brought about certain things that maybe you weren't prepared for in the beginning. In every, in every aspect of life you could imagine, we ran into
00:11:05
Speaker
a problem or a shock. We also wanted to renovate the farmhouse, which was dated in, you know, somewhat strange ways, and they'd been smokers and on and on. I also had dreamed, for example, of having a wood burning stove, like a modern wood burning stove, and yeah we're going to heat this house off of off of wood. Well, we we did those things. We're renovating those things, but My wife and I are very different in the sense of she really cares a lot about the aesthetic appearance of things. And I'm much more on the utilitarian functional side of that spectrum. So each thing that we would want to do, let's say with our innovation or even with something I'm putting out for the cows or a chicken coop.
00:11:57
Speaker
needs to not just be functional, but also look nice. And trying to make something look nice, that's more expensive. That takes more time. um But she did not want to see some big mess out there. so And actually, that's something that Joel Salatin brings up in his You Can Farm book. He says, here's the top 10 things that will sink your farm. and either It's either number one or number 10. It's a difference in vision between the white
00:12:27
Speaker
My wife had the view of, we're going to be gentlemen farmers. I had more the view of Joel Salatin, which was, we're going to live in a mobile home and bootstrap this enterprise up, raising broilers, chickens on the pasture. Those are very different. and you i Now we understand it better. We're on try two of the homestead, but back then I didn't quite get how important this difference was and how it would drive um certain things. For example, one of the cows we ended up getting was a Jersey milk cow. So, you know, full bread Jersey milk cow, because of course we dreamed of having milk. Well, this cow could give gallons and gallons of milk a day. I think it maxed out at like eight gallons a day.
00:13:21
Speaker
Every enterprise that you add, now you have a daily maintenance and work. Also the cow had some messed up teats that made it. We understand now have chronic mastitis. So then we're having to just milk out the cow and get nothing. All the effort, you know, none of the benefit. We tackled so much stuff. It was like, well, I had to build a milking stanchion like you said multiple trips back and forth to try to build a milking stanchon for a thousandpound jersey cow Well, my wife wanted rabbits, so we got rabbits, but I didn't build proper enclosure. So the rabbits are digging out and we're chasing, you know, flopsy and mopsie and cottontail all over the yard. We wanted to have a farm dog. Well, guess what? The farm dog, beautiful yellow lab. It got into the chewing stage and she's chewing up everything. And she's trying to go after the chickens. I mean, you know what I'm talking about here. so
00:14:18
Speaker
we We jumped in, we took on a bunch of stuff, way too much, way too fast. And from yeah the home renovation to getting all these animals, it was it was completely overwhelming. I don't know, we like we probably did every single thing you were should not do.
00:14:37
Speaker
One of the things that I think continues to happen, we're in a unique position where we get to hear some of these stories from people across the country, is the reasons for pursuing the homestead and then the reasons that it becomes difficult are pretty consistent. And I have to believe that in some ways we can learn from one another and support one another and not make some of these um make the experience more difficult than it needs to be. But I do wonder before we get to that, what do you what what what is it that you think continues to drive people to the homestead?
00:15:11
Speaker
Because it would seem right now that this is nearly an explosive topic. It's just, it continues to build and it seems like it's gaining more and more momentum and people are, you know, romanticizing or interested in the homestead and the farm lifestyle. And I really want to help create ah a space where people can experience that in a positive way that supports not only their temporal needs, but more importantly, eternal. What do you think is driving people so ambitiously to the homestead today? Yeah, what a great question. There are so many factors. One is our modern life, especially in the city. It's very contrived. It's very artificial. All the entertainments. There's not just vast green spaces that you can, that you can run and play and explore and that your children can too.
00:16:07
Speaker
but that's very rare. It's very manicured and which a lot of people like. It's, hey, we can go to this park. It has a play set. Okay, maybe there's a little creek, you know, in in and a green space that you can go to. So people definitely long for something that's more real No doubt too, there's a romanticization of the farm life and hey, it could be just like all the conveniences of city life, except we also get to do this homestead thing and you know you just throw some seeds in the ground and it pops hundreds of pounds of of of nutritious food. um But I do think for the most part, this there's this wholesome desire
00:16:59
Speaker
to be more connected with God's creation, nature, food, right? All of the stuff with the ah yeah the processed foods that we have. In our Catholic faith, obviously, for the most of human history, life was agrarian for most people. You know,
The Allure of Homesteading: Nature and Meaningful Work
00:17:20
Speaker
we had these in the traditional calendar, there was like these Rogation Days, which were tied to the you know in in their specific blessings in the the roman ritual books for everything you can think of you know it's like for the bees and for the wheat harvest and for that it won't rain and destroy everything um so even with our catholic faith there's there's that great ideal and we've got you know this beautiful picture of the the the angeles and the the husband wife out in the field you know bowing their head and and praying ah the angeles and all of those things i think are very good that's why
00:17:55
Speaker
We returned to 10 years later to a homestead. Now we're in Northeast Texas. we It never died that we wanted to have this way of life and have what we would say are better values that are more aligned. right the The country, the conservative, so-called, is more aligned with our you Catholic values. you The motto in Austin is, keep Austin weird, which I actually there's actually in several cities and the country whose motto is keep Austin weird. And they do a pretty good job of that, right? There's like a lot of like weirdness. And we're thinking, king we don't really want to be in weirdness, Phil. So we had a lot of reasons. Do you have more that you've thought of too?
00:18:42
Speaker
Well, I think in some ways, you know, the idea of romanticizing the homestead is possible and probable for many people, but I also think it's because frankly, it is romantic. It's difficult, there's passion, it's hard, there's productive labor. mean Everything that you do on the homestead nearly requires you to give something of yourself, whether it's time, resources, ah something is required of you in order to get any type of production back off it. Unless you just want, well, no, I was gonna say unless you want a hayfield, but that's not true because in order to get hay, you have to go do the work to gather the hay. So I think one of the things which is particularly intriguing for people is that they have this experience in modern life where they're concerned or they're feeling that their work doesn't mean anything.
00:19:33
Speaker
And then you come out to the rural life and everything you do has an impact. Even the things you do not do have an impact. You know, one of the things that we've been struggling with here this year, we've had what I believe is a very unseasonably rainy springtime going into the summertime. It's in, it's in fact been very, very difficult. And part of that is because while I had things that I did plant and seeds that I wanted to plant and things that I wanted to grow. All of the cycles of nature came together to produce an enormous amount of forage and weed pressure all over the place. And so my inability to get out there or my unwillingness to get out there at times and protect against that has resulted in a lot more work now to get the same harvest out that I probably could have got if I had put a little energy in up front.
00:20:20
Speaker
So I say that because I think for many people, even the response to that and the need or the feeling that you're you're responsible for something or stewarding something or that you are involved is so warming to people and fulfilling that they're willing to put up with enormous amount of financial pressure, time pressure to even sever relationships and friendships to get their family out to the farm or the homestead. Yeah. You know, Matthew, that's so true. And that reminded me as well, because, um, my, I wanted my son to be able to join me in my work. Well, my work was a computer programmer. Very abstract. You know, now he's at the age where he can start to understand algebra and, you know, the stuff needed for computer programming. Even so, it's not my dream that he becomes a computer programmer and sits in a cubicle for 20 years, like I did.
00:21:14
Speaker
if he could do something else that'd be great and We can't, us being out here on the homestead, we get to have shared work together. We have shared work with our neighbors where we actually do need them and depend upon them. As you've seen rounding up cattle you know that got out of your neighbor's vents. And that's something that in the in the city, you have to invent that, which is fine. And there's like, we're in troops of St. George, which is you know kind of like the Catholic scouting.
00:21:45
Speaker
and and that was in the city, but then we would go out and we're, you know, we're going to tie knots together. Well, not for any purpose other than just to learn how to tie knots. Valuable, you know, helpful, but out in the country, well, you need to tie that knot or it doesn't stay and now you have a problem. That is a great take. You know, I feel like someone else has mentioned that to me or it's come up at some point and I can't recall where or who, but it's the idea that Well, that there are real problems which require real solutions and you have the agency and the ability to be involved in that. And in fact, if you don't involve yourself in it, well, you're kind of giving up that point of stewardship for whatever that problem is. And that's an important distinction because on the homestead, man and family are needed in order to fulfill the production that you're seeking. And if you don't,
00:22:41
Speaker
Nature will move on without you. and It's very humbling, I think, in that way too. Yes. And depending on what, you know, your, your kind of root vault is, I probably have a few root vaults, but one of them is laziness and laziness is punished out here on the host. Like you said, you don't do something. You will pay for it later because. everything will grow rampant or you have an animal die because it got too hot, you did not replace the water fast enough or check it and it got tipped over or or you what have you. Or you didn't set up the facilities well enough where like on the homestead we had bought cows ah and it was a special breed called the Piney Woods which is a Gulf Coast variety Spanish land race went native to the Florida and Gulf Coast.
00:23:34
Speaker
when we got the cow it was really cold and the cow got sick and I couldn't get the cow into you know a barn and the next day or a day later the cow died and you know I wasn't set up I wasn't ready to do stuff and of we we paid the price for it so this it is it's a connection you put in the work you get you get the benefit but not always not always one for one things happen but if you don't put in the work, almost always you don't get the benefit. Right, right. It's so true. Well, you did write a book called the farm flop or is it farm flop? Yeah,
Learning from Failures: Insights from 'Farm Flop'
00:24:15
Speaker
farm flop, a city dwellers guide to failing on a farm in two years or less. Talk to us about the book. Who is it written for? What's the content of the book? Why should someone look into it? Yes, I wrote this book.
00:24:29
Speaker
right after we moved back to the suburbs after our farm failed And it's short. It's to the point. I had not read an account of people who failed miserably at the farm. All the things I had read were success cases. And so I wanted people to have a dose of reality and for it to be a cautionary tale. Not to say don't do it, but learn from our mistakes and don't do the same things that we did
00:25:02
Speaker
The worst thing that happened too, which I talk about in the book, was, you know, I'm a computer programmer. I work in the cubicle. Then I'm going out in the afternoons and evenings and weekends trying to do heavy labor on the farm. And I was not physically strong enough. I ruptured two discs in my back. All the fluid leaked out of the discs. bone on bone, severe pain. I physically couldn't even do the homestead work anymore. And it was jeopardizing even my ability to be a computer programmer and provide for my family. I had neglected the physical strength aspect of being a man and just thought, well, just being on the homestead will strengthen it. Well, yeah, that's true. But if you do stuff wrong, or you don't have a minimal amount of strength,
00:25:53
Speaker
you could hurt yourself And then it could jeopardize your ability as a husband and father to provide. So Farm Block chronicles us going out there, all the different things we tried, all the problems we ran into. um There's some humorous aspects, so it's not all doom and gloom. Our neighbor, for example, our neighbor was a woman who was a Lutheran chaplain at the hospital system in town who ran an animal sanctuary. Case in point, when there's no restrictions out in the land, you don't know who's gonna move next to you. Well, she had so many animals, flies everywhere, ticks all over the place. She would need my help sometimes. And it was it was animal pandemonium. I thought that I might be killed at one point by some of her large pigs. So there's funny stuff in the book, but it,
00:26:52
Speaker
It shares, yes, we were green horns. We also did some stuff right. It was a good experience, but ultimately we didn't succeed. And when you're going into this thing, you you need to be aware of of all that's involved if you want to be able to be successful.
00:27:13
Speaker
It's a great insight. What are some things that you think people do need to know before moving out to the homestead? They're just in that research stage, or maybe they have already closed on a property, but they're still living in their city or suburban environment, or they're just not there yet. What are some things you think they could know before they get there to make the experience better? Yeah. The number one, I would say is you and your wife better talk. about what are your goals for this homestead? And you need to align yourself with her on the vision for what it's gonna be. And including expectations of, is our goal ultimately to make a living from this homestead, solely from the homestead? Or is that not a goal? Because that's a big difference in direction in how you're gonna go.
00:28:13
Speaker
Is your wife on board with you having a budget? And it might be that certain things that, you know, entertainments and whatever that y'all used to do might have to be curtailed. Is she okay with what the homestead budget would be for, because you might be, you know, men and women or every husband and wife are different. And sometimes it's one way or sometimes it's the other way in this sense of, you know, the husband might be wanting to do everything on the homestead and everything else could be sacrificed to the homestead. Your wife might not be willing to sacrifice everything to the homestead. So that's really important for us too, realizing where do we go to church? Where will we go to church once we're out there? How far away are we moving? Who are our friends going to be? Are we going to keep the friends that we have? Do we have to make new friends? What if there's not many friends out there?
00:29:08
Speaker
What if you, wife, are alone on the homestead, isolated, homeschooling the children, but also having to do all the other, you know, I'm expecting you to make the yogurt and go fetch the eggs and, you know, do everything else. So it's like, you got your full mom, children duties, and you've got homestead duties. Do you want to do that? Are you happy doing that? So those are, those are like the, ah you know, the initial things that I would think, um, in terms of, do we even want to move out there? And if so, what is that going to look like? Well, and now it sounds like you are either moving back to a homestead or you're already there. What's the current situation? Yes, we
A Measured Return to Homesteading
00:29:56
Speaker
are out on a homestead, Northeast Texas.
00:30:02
Speaker
we've been here three to four years. So I've not yet written, farm flipped the successful return to the homestead because I want to wait maybe another two or three years to actually show success. We are, we left all our friends and family from Central Texas to move up to Northeast Texas. As people know, Texas is a big state and so it's many, many hours away. We get get to see them sometimes. We have a three and a half acre property within, across the street, about 17 acres, mostly wooded, including access to a small lake. On the return to the homestead, every time my wife said, I want to get these animals, I want to get animals, I pump the brakes.
00:30:57
Speaker
And so instead, slowly, we started with a garden in zone one, which means close to the house. Then we started in just the front yard area, front acre, call it zone two, and orchard. And it's a permaculture orchard, but for all intents and purposes, it's a fruit and nut orchard. And I wanted that plan since it takes time to, you know, for those trees to grow and you can't speed it up. We slowly have added some animals. So we have ducks and chickens now. So the thing we learned was let's go more slowly because as you know, if you get cows, and this is something people should be aware of. Once you get cows, once you get a thousand pound animal, you are now also in the heavy equipment business. You need a truck that can pull a big trailer
00:31:45
Speaker
you might need a squeeze shoot you need to be able to go get big round bales of hay and bring them in and massive amounts of feed. so And those animals, depending on like my children were were little and young. I was very afraid my children escape out there and you know they accidentally get stepped on or gored or whatever. So we've taken things a lot more slowly now, a lot more humble aspirations too, but so far it's been more successful. How do you measure success then?
00:32:20
Speaker
I measure success is that I'm not severely injured myself. My wife has not gone crazy. It's a low bar.
00:32:29
Speaker
we And I want to be clear, we do not make a full-time living from our homestead at this point. The homestead has been a now a contributor to our livelihood. but what we i consider a success is we've been able to make a living kind of cobbling together a lot of different endeavors and also tightening our belt. We have a rich life in a beautiful area. We do grow things. Our son gets to do all sorts of stuff. We homeschool in the morning and then he and I do homestead stuff.
00:33:12
Speaker
he's learned so much he's so much more advanced than i was his age or even he he would do something thingss better than i can he's fourteen And the community that that we have out here really matches our values as it is as Catholics. So that for us now has been success. If we can increase the dial on how much the homestead contributes to making a living, I would consider it you know a smashing success, but that's a longer term process for us. Sure. Where do you think people go wrong getting on the homestead right now?
00:33:48
Speaker
Where do they make the mistake early on, you think? There are so many ways to make a mistake because you can make a mistake with where you choose to live, both in terms of the people there or how far, how remote it is. You can make a mistake with how much land you buy and whether you decide to build you know a house or buy one that's there. And so that could be a financial mistake too. where now you're saddled with debt, with, you know, interest payments. What I see the most from people who've moved out here, and I tell them all, I'm like, by the way, I wrote this book, Farm Flop, but you don't buy it. The the TLDR is go slow and don't just jump in and go crazy. Well, in spite of telling people that, as you said, people are so excited. They jump in. Multiple friends ah might have done this.
00:34:44
Speaker
one of whom actually then closed up shop, left their homestead and went back to the city in effect. And he said, I know, he said, Devin, I know you told me, but you know, they got pigs and they did this and they did that. Meanwhile, they had lots of little children. So like it most of their life was just trying to keep their lots of little children, you know, fed and clothed and bathed and diaper changed and in all of that let alone
00:35:17
Speaker
all the enterprises they'd added you know to their homestead one of course got the the dream the two great Pyrenees you know the Anatoly Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dogs well but guess what they didn't have the land for that and those dogs will get out those dogs will dig those dogs will cause all kinds of problems afford you and they did and he ended up having to get rid of one of them meanwhile the they can't like go into the backyard because the backyard is also the go pin and the sheet pin and not the area that children can play in. So, you know, being really slow about how you ease into things, doing a lot of research ahead of time about what your
00:36:01
Speaker
getting into. And some people, you know, have actually moved so that they could have a strong Catholic center, a church, a chapel, a monastery, a religious order, right? They want to be close by that. That's great. But what happens if that order has to leave, or that monastery doesn't get built, or they, you know, you diverge from them? And and plus, keep in mind too, a lot of monasteries, they're not parish churches. Their charism is not to serve you
00:36:32
Speaker
and the sacraments for your family As much as you might want them to do that, they're Benedictines. That happened to multiple people as well. Yeah. There's a lot of great lessons here. And one of the things I'm very appreciative of in this conversation, having a chance to speak to you prior is that you're willing to share them. And I hope what people take away from this is a sense of hope and preparation. And that the homestead lifestyle is very possible and it can be very fulfilling and very helpful, not just in you know helping you to get good food, but really in things that are more important like the development of virtue and raising a family. And I hope as people hear this, they don't walk away thinking, oh, that's not for me. I can't do that. Or even, oh, we'll never get the big animals or we'll never you know build up to more than one enterprise or we'll never make any money off the farm or homestead if that's what you want.
00:37:29
Speaker
But that it needs to be thought out and there's a certain design to it that is supportive of your family. And if we recognize that and what the family needs and your state in life and your ability and means and what you have at your disposal to use, then you can have a great experience and not just a okay experience. Yeah. and And people should like, I'm a very hopeful guy. That's when we came back out here again. you'd be amazed what you can do on a quarter of an acre or half an acre. You could start now in your suburban lot, plant some stuff, grow some stuff, you know, and you might not need also 50 acres. 10 acres is a lot. Five acres is a lot depending, right? If you're going to intensively cultivate a half acre or an acre in a market garden, in an orchard, like that could take up all your time right there and that's a great way to to begin too is just to say in zone one or zone two
00:38:25
Speaker
we're going to do x we're going to do these more intensive operations if we have success with that, yeah, then we might expand out. So there's something for everyone and it's very doable if you just, you know, be proven in how you approach it. entirely. I have one final question for you here, Devin, about the idea of the zones, because you've brought that up a few times. And I have a suspicion that it's similar to something that I'm interested in, which is the way that the homestead is laid out or designed, or I've always referred to them as circles, ah circle one, circle two, circle three. And
Efficient Homestead Design: The Importance of Zoning
00:39:01
Speaker
for me, it has to do with how far I can walk and reasonably work on the farm. What are the zones and and why is that important?
00:39:09
Speaker
Yeah, the zones are circles. And so that's the exact same thing. It's effectively how far away from your home are the areas around your farm. And and they're not hard and fast rules. It's not like this amount of feet or yards or something like that. it But it the idea is that zone zeros your house as a computer programmer you don't see around. But zone one is that immediate area around your house. You can see it from your window. It's easy to go out your door and oh there's my herb garden that I have by the kitchen or my garden that I can go pick something and then bring it back in. I can keep my eye on it. I can maintain it and you know weed it if I need to. So that's the kind of thing then where you want to think about what you want
00:40:01
Speaker
each of these circles i want a little grassy area in the front yard so my kids can play that's not goingnna be you know a farm enterprise. It's just a green space. Okay, now I'll go out zone two. That's a bit further. What do you want there? Well, yeah, maybe you have some animals. Maybe you've got chickens there. You have some fruit trees and nut trees. Things that don't necessarily require an animals could be in zone one, two, or zone one as well. but um things don' require as
00:40:34
Speaker
you know minute ah regular attention multiple times per day And ah the the cool thing about this is, is the zones is, I probably use kind of like a permaculture concept or maybe they've they've branded it that way, but there's lots of these great farm books. I bet you have some of them. The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It. One's called An Old One's like Five Acres and Independence. yo'll act they'll show you diagrams in there. Hey, got a one acre homestead, got a five acre homestead. here Oh, here's the wheat field out in zone three. Zone five is the unmanaged kind of land you, you might go walking in if you don't really manage or cultivate it actively. They'll give you these different layouts and designs. And if you do that, it's going to help you because
00:41:26
Speaker
It's very ergonomic. You know, the things that are close, you need to be close by, are close by. The things that don't need your regular attention are a little bit further away. Right. I have found it to be, it's a developing idea for us here, but one that I find very comforting. We have done not the best job of taking any such advice about moving into the homestead or farm life slowly. And frankly, I'm still getting my bearings underneath me. And I think we're getting in the right direction. We're actually looking at really building out the right systems and structures to give a more controlled experience.
00:42:03
Speaker
There was a, you mentioned it earlier, a funny post I put online today about being out getting some cattle that had gotten out. That was a totally kind almost a freak accident kind of thing. The gate was not open. ah It was a broken piece of fencing. And for some reason, despite the ample forage in the field that the cattle were in, they thought it would be interesting to go walk down the road and check out the forage growing on the side of the road. And it is it's encouraging the zone idea because it gives me a foundation effectively to work from. I don't have to manage the whole farm. I don't have to manage the whole homestead today, this week, this month, this year. I just need to work on zone one right now. And then maybe next year I'll get into zone two. And maybe zone one and zone two will kind of, you know, we'll switch some things up between them.
00:42:54
Speaker
But I find that that's really helpful and maybe that's helpful for other people as well. Yeah, totally. And in one last thing about the cows that got out and and and where we won't end on a doom and gloom. and I'll give you the last word, Matthew, that way you end on a hopeful thing. We had cows that got out on our farm. The thing is we are on an extreme.
00:43:18
Speaker
county road that people zoomed out they got out and it was getting to be nighttime and they're there on the road and it's sort of hilly and you don't have a lot of visible distance. By God's grace, no one crashed into those cows. But when I saw that, I thought someone crashes into it. That cow goes into the windshield. The cow's dead. There might be a person who's severely injured as well. So there's these liability aspects and there is real danger on a homestead that you don't have to be a
00:43:55
Speaker
but you have to be ready and prepared to Mitigate. Entirely. Absolutely. Well, we'll leave it here. I find that these types of conversations are actually significantly more productive and hopeful than maybe the tone sometimes suggests. In your instance, it's incredibly encouraging. You're back on the homestead. And I think many people would think, well, he tried it once. It didn't work out. They left and they went back to the city or the suburbs or something else and they're done.
00:44:27
Speaker
But that's not your case. You and your family are back on the homestead with more knowledge, practical experience, and probably the same, if not in an appropriate way, tempered ambition to make it work for your family. And so I simply want to say thank you for being willing to share that because I agree. There's not a lot of stories about the farm flopping. It just doesn't happen very often. So thank you for being willing to share that. Thank you, Matthew. And our friends from Central Texas said, Devin, I'm going to be honest with you. We expected you all would fail in two years and be back. So it's been four years now and you haven't come back yet and we miss you. They said. That's great. Well, Devin, where can people who are interested in either the farm flop or learning more about you and any other work that you might be doing, where can they find you or where can they find that work?
00:45:18
Speaker
little bit all over the place these days, but um I post photos of my of our farm on Instagram and it's DevinSRose, D-E-V is in Victor I-N-S-R-O-S-E. And then um Farm Flop was ah is on Amazon. It's a paperback or it's a very cheap ebook. It's short. You might laugh at a few places. so that's that's worthwhile And then, um, uh, I have my, my main site is lionheartcatholic.com. And that's, um, sort of my hub so people can go there as well. And then you and I, of course, met through Twitter. I'm Devin S Rose on, on Twitter. And now we're Twitter friends and now we're buddies. It's wonderful. Well, Devin, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be here. I hope you have a wonderful day and the homestead continues to be a great experience for you. Thank you, Matthew.
00:46:11
Speaker
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.