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How We Homestead - FF S2 E10
23 Plays8 days ago
In this episode our fatherhood panel is small, but mighty! We discuss our homesteading and farming ideas and the best practices we have developed. We discuss bees, milk cows, pigs, compost, and more. We hope this discussion will give you some ideas and spur your prosperity as you take dominion in the Earth!
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Transcript
Introduction to Fatherhood Friday
00:00:11
Speaker
Well, there, everybody. You made it to Fatherhood Friday, brought to you by the Preacher Dad Podcast. My name is Jared, and while I do a bit of preaching, i also do some farming on the side. And today, we're going to talk a little bit about what we do and how we do it.
00:00:29
Speaker
And I hope that you'll stick around and listen. Maybe you get some tips for your homestead, get some ideas, and I hope we give you some good things to think about.
Cornerstone Fellowship Promotion
00:00:38
Speaker
I'd like to remind y'all, okay, pardon me. I'd like to remind you that this podcast is brought to you by Cornerstone Fellowship. Cornerstone Fellowship is a small little country church just north of Tombsboro, Georgia, and we love Jesus very much, and we would love to show you how we love Christ. We would love to love Him with you, point you to Jesus. We are all about Jesus at Cornerstone Fellowship. So why don't you come down and check us out? You can find us online at cornerstonefellowship.com.
00:01:14
Speaker
dash ga.org. That's Cornerstone Fellowship dash ga.org. We would love to see you. You can find a map. You can hear some sermons. You can find a statement of faith, all that stuff on the website. So please come and check us out.
Fatherhood Panel Topic Overview
00:01:31
Speaker
And without any further delay, let's start Fatherhood Friday.
00:01:42
Speaker
Well, hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us again today for Fatherhood Friday. And tonight we have a treat for you. ah You only have me and Matt. That's it. Tonight, the Fatherhood panel is smaller again, a little more focused and concentrated.
00:01:58
Speaker
And tonight we're going to discuss homesteading and, ah I don't know, hobby farming. It's it's the not the big guys, but the little guys and what we do and how we do it.
00:02:12
Speaker
and really why we do it as well.
Matt's Homesteading Journey
00:02:14
Speaker
And my brother, Matt, has had a good bit of experience in this area, along with myself and and my our wives, of course, have helped a lot. But Matt, share with us a little bit about your journey into homesteading and and farming.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah, so... Growing up, um because that's where that's where I kind of got a little bit of interest in it, we had Jersey milk cows. Do you have a Jersey? or what Yeah, we do. You have a do you have Jersey? Yeah, full-blooded. A2A2. Does she have the horns that kind of come towards the... No, she's dehorned.
00:02:54
Speaker
Oh, okay. But they're such pretty cows and sweet. Oh, I loved them. We had Daisy and Holly and Eve and we name them. We had them. And... um I'm sure like you get, ah she we could get a couple of gallons a day. I think it was just, it was great. And we had um we had a pump, like a machine that we used. Oh, really? I know you don't, I know you do it by hand, but. We hand milk.
00:03:17
Speaker
What now? We hand, we hand milk her. And she is very docile. Like you were saying, she's a very great disposition. Sweet, sweet cow. Yeah. Um, I love that milk.
00:03:29
Speaker
So good. I haven't had an any in that probably 15 years. but Oh, really? Oh, man, you got to come and see me. Fresh milk. Oh, goodness.
00:03:40
Speaker
And so so we did that, obviously, for for a while. And we had... probably 10 acres in pasture in the front of our house growing up that we were able to, five acres on each side of the driveway. So we moved them back and forth.
00:03:55
Speaker
And then we had bees. I didn't do much with the bees. Bees when you were younger, you did? Yeah. you My dad had some hives, but I never really, he he was, and we'll get into it probably, but he was one of the bee farmers where he would spend, he would look at them about two days a year.
00:04:14
Speaker
He would check on them at one point, and then he would open open it up the next time get the honey. So he didn't do much at all with them. Wow. but um But he had them, and they stung me several times. um but And besides that, we had some had a few chickens too. Yeah.
00:04:30
Speaker
but Growing up though. how How many chickens did you, did you grow up with? Not many, not many. Since, since, since I left home, he's, he's had 20 or 30, but we had a few.
00:04:42
Speaker
um I know we had some roosters at one point they were awful. i had a, I was on crutches at one point, had a cast on my leg and they'd come up to me and i'd hit them on my crutches and kick them on my cast, you know, about casted leg. And anyway, they were awful roosters, but, but anyway, so.
Starting with Gardens and Chickens
00:04:59
Speaker
Like a lot of people probably, and like probably like yourself, you know at some point I'm like, what should I get started with? ah really you know really want to do animals. I don't have, at the time, my yard was probably ah half an acre and I had two acres in the woods.
00:05:15
Speaker
That's about all I had. my What could I do here? So I had a little garden. like a 10 by 20, 30 foot garden, not that big. And then I just got some chickens. I had six chickens, built a little homemade coop, um whatever I could find her around the house, an old door. And it looked it looked ugly, but it worked.
00:05:34
Speaker
oh So started with the chickens, a good gateway animal, right? That's right. You start with chickens. The next thing you know, you're a full-time farmer who just starts with chickens.
00:05:48
Speaker
Well, a lot of my plans that I have in life, I have them, but I don't really do anything with them. all right don't I don't get past you know step one, but I did have a plan to start with chickens and then move to bees.
00:06:02
Speaker
And I did that. I was really blessed. Why did you pick bees next? Just because you're more familiar with that or was there a strategy involved with that?
00:06:11
Speaker
Well... Um, I guess I who was probably like, Hey, Hey dad, what's the next easiest one to do? Yeah. Yeah. I told you he spends two days a year working on them. So they were super easy for him.
00:06:25
Speaker
But, um, no, the main, well, there was a strategy, um, like, like y'all do, we make our own bread. And so, and then my oldest daughter, she sells, she sells bread. She'll sell, i mean, she bakes 10, 10 loaves or 12 loaves a week.
00:06:40
Speaker
And so, um, We maybe eat two. So she sells the rest.
Beekeeping Adventures
00:06:45
Speaker
wow And so we're going through a lot of honey. And um as you know, and as everyone knows, honey is very expensive.
00:06:52
Speaker
So I started thinking about it a year or two ago. And the Lord just put me in, put me in contact with the right person. And he's He's an older man in his late 60s.
00:07:06
Speaker
And he was, you know, he had been doing it for a long time and wanted to get out of the business. And and so he he basic he sold me four beehives or colonies or whatever you want to call them. ah Oh, he sold you the whole colony with bees and everything?
00:07:22
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, great. oh So he sold me, basically he charged me, he charged me $400 and and i got four four groups of bees and enough boxes for probably you know seven seven different hives, three or four boxes high. So I've got 20 something boxes, tons of frames. So all that for $400. That's a good deal.
00:07:51
Speaker
gave me a Oh yeah. He was just- Oh, you got an extractor with the deal too? Yeah, an extractor. Oh, Matt, what a steal. I know. I was so thankful. That's incredible.
00:08:02
Speaker
I got them last year in March. And I ended up, um we had, um many gallons? 14 gallons of honey last year.
00:08:15
Speaker
Something like that, maybe 12 gallons of honey. And so it was two overwintered beehives, I guess, and what what you call them. And then two nucs is what they were, which are like the newer ones that were from a split. Anyway, so I ended up catching three swarms last year.
00:08:34
Speaker
Um, so I had seven going into the winter and um, um I'm like, shit i didn you know, I know you can you could do nothing. And hopefully they hopefully they live. You can put a lot of work into them and treating them for mites and winterizing them and all that kind of stuff, feeding them sugar all winter long. You can do all of that and you they still might die.
00:08:54
Speaker
Well, I chose to do it all. And every one of them lived. And we had some cold, cold weather. I kept the sugar in there all winter. And so I have seven out there right now. And and so this year.
00:09:08
Speaker
if they make like I think they'll make, we'll be able to sell some honey and we should be able to make $200. I would think. So go ahead.
00:09:19
Speaker
go ahead my My daughter's done a good bit of learning about bees. She's got, um, two solid colonies and we're trying to, um, she caught a third, a third one this spring.
00:09:32
Speaker
We're trying to get them into a hive and we had a, A weird thing happened with another swarm where we tried to get the queen into a swarm trap. Like they gathered on a tree. We tried to pick them up and put them. Somebody did put them in the swarm trap.
00:09:46
Speaker
They wouldn't stay in the swarm trap, Matt. They went out and they got on the ground and they just started kind of crawling all over each other in a little clump like this on the ground.
00:09:58
Speaker
And that was just so odd. And we we still don't know completely why, but um we just about given up on them ever becoming one of our our colonies. But she has done so much work and learned so much. And, you know, she's on the side of kind of the less is more.
00:10:17
Speaker
You know, don't do too much with them because you might weaken them and you got a stronger, more hearty breed of bees. If you don't spend too much time messing with them, you don't feed them too much.
00:10:31
Speaker
um And so she's, she's a not really gotten into them that much. um But we're, we're going to harvest some honey this year.
00:10:41
Speaker
That's going to be really fun. How did she learn about it? She learned about it through an organization, i was to mention them later, called the School of Traditional Skills.
00:10:52
Speaker
um There's a teacher there named Adam Martin, and he teaches um beekeeping for them, does some classes, and he's written a book about it. And I can't remember the name of the book, but um he does what's called lay-ins style. your Your hives are called langstroths.
00:11:11
Speaker
They go vertically and he has, just has, um, he uses what's called a lay in style and the colony builds horizontally instead of vertically.
00:11:24
Speaker
Um, So that's that's what we've been practicing and that's who we learned it from, the School of Traditional Skills. They have classes on tons of stuff, gardening, cultivating, livestock of all types, bread making, freeze drying, all kinds of things that we've learned from them.
00:11:43
Speaker
Um, so we've really benefited from that membership and a number of our friends have also. So I, I really recommend them to, to everybody cause they've been such a blessing to us, but that's where she learned about it.
00:11:57
Speaker
And then she also, you know, the beekeeping community, you've probably figured this out. It's pretty welcoming, you know, in the sense that, Hey, I'll show you how I do what I do. So there's a late lady nearby here that, uh, had Lily come over and showed her a bunch of a bunch of her things, her extractor and different things that she does with them. So yeah that's been very helpful too.
00:12:18
Speaker
But you know. Having a mentor is is key for beekeeping. Yeah, I agree. I texted Mr. Mike. It seemed like that last spring and summer, nearly every other day, I think I was texting a question.
Challenges in Homesteading
00:12:32
Speaker
But um the bees have been fun. I actually... It's probably a little bit harder to get into it because you have to you have to know what you're doing and you have to buy the supplies.
00:12:42
Speaker
Right. um you You can go into, you can go into, you do chickens, you know. For almost nothing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, people give us chickens. They say, hey, we got a few chickens. Do you want them? Because they know we do chickens too.
00:12:56
Speaker
I mean, like, it's not hard. to get To get chickens, they're not expensive. um They get expensive you feed them enough. but Yeah. Well, in the i will say, though, I think that I spend less time in a year with my bees than I do my chickens. mag I mean, I check my chickens every single day. Right.
00:13:16
Speaker
I will say if anybody's listening and wondering about like – the chickens and and we maybe we can move on from them, but um I've had them in a in a, you know, built a coop and would have like chicken wire fenced in area for them. I've had that and they' and it's and it's permanent. And course I know you free range yours.
00:13:34
Speaker
um Not everybody can do that because living in a, with a bunch of neighbors or or wild animals or whatever, it's a little bit harder to do that for some people. But um I have mine in an electric fence. I have an electric netting.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, I can move and I can move on my my my coop is on an old trailer, a Harbor Freight trailer that I built. I've converted into a coop and I can pull it around with four wheeler. So that's nice. But the only problem is the kids can't step over the fence to go check to get the eggs and feed them and water them for me.
00:14:06
Speaker
They're not tall enough to do that. And so um one one downside to the electric fence. But but anyway, there's a bunch of different ways to do it. i fully alternativeative Have you ever heard of Joel Salatin?
00:14:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, he's out here Virginia. i've been to his um I've been to his farm out in Stanton. Oh, cool. Outside of Stanton. Yeah. Well, we use a lot of his techniques for raising chickens, including building chicken tractors, moving them every day. So the chickens are still protected.
00:14:38
Speaker
um we don't Well, we used to let them out. um just to roam around. And we still do that to some degree, but we also move the chicken tractors every day. So they're on fresh grass all the time.
00:14:51
Speaker
okay And so we wouldn't have to let them out if we didn't want to. And so somebody that has a limited amount of space or, you know, neighbor's dogs or whatever, you can keep them in the chicken tractor and just still move them around your yard.
00:15:05
Speaker
ah If you do it every day, that's still very doable.
Raising Meat Birds and Pigs
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah. oh we I don't have them yet, but me and a buddy purchased, I mean, we purchased 60 meat birds, Cornish Rock birds. Cornish Cross.
00:15:25
Speaker
cornish Cornish Cross. That's the most common breed of meat bird. Maybe the big white ones. But yes they're, I think, three weeks old. He still got them. But I'm going to get them probably next weekend.
00:15:37
Speaker
and And I've got a little trick and chicken tractor. It's simple. It's made out of PVC pipe and some chicken wire. And it'll it'll take two of us, but me and a kid, we'll just get on each side and scoot it over. There you go. To a new new section of grass every day. and yeah And so, but those birds, you only, I'm excited about them. We only have them two for nine weeks, but they're only not they're nine weeks old when we kill them.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah. And they're so big, they'll barely fit a crock pot. So that's think chickens, a lot of people, I think, get started in homesteading with chickens. And I mean, you know, we make jokes about it being a gateway drug and stuff.
00:16:13
Speaker
ah You said yes to chickens. So now you got pigs and cows and horses and everything, you know, your full-time farmer because you said yes to chickens once. ah That's a funny joke, but it really is, you know, one of the easier ones to dive into if somebody out there is thinking about what should I do first? or you know, it's not hard to raise chickens and they can really benefit your life a lot. I mean,
00:16:37
Speaker
We have eggs all the time and you know, it saves you so much money because eggs are so expensive, but it's, it's just a really good one to get started with. And that's how really we got started. and My wife, Anna, she was doing chickens before we were even married.
00:16:55
Speaker
Um, that was one of my, one of my, uh, uh, What's the word? Part of my dowry, I guess you might say, part of the bride price was that I came and I i did, helped butcher chickens one day.
00:17:10
Speaker
And her dad, when we were courting and he saw that I was willing to come and help process the birds, he's like, this guy is quality. where he's He's got my approval. So yeah that was that ah part of our part of our courtship was through chickens.
00:17:28
Speaker
That's funny. That's really good. yeah One thing I was going to say too, as as we were talking about chickens, it made me think, and rabbits are very similar to chickens in the sense of like, you can, yeah, you can put them on a little chicken tractor.
00:17:41
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah. huge I've never done rabbits before. i think most people and Nate Eisner, if he, if he were on here with us, he could talk about this, but I've helped him process some and they're so easy to process easiest animal.
00:17:55
Speaker
I mean, really from killing it to having it in a Ziploc bag, um, five minutes, maybe they're so fast. Um, but you, you can have your cage where you have your males and your females. And, but once they have the babies,
00:18:11
Speaker
oh put them in a little chicken tractor, a little small one. It doesn't have to be very big at all, few feet long. And you just move them around on the grass and you kill them when they're pretty, pretty young. And anyway, it's it's pretty simple. I think it's very low cost to get into rabbits, but not everybody wants to eat, eat little bunnies. You know, I know my family.
00:18:30
Speaker
You gotta be a real man to eat a bunny. My family won't touch them. um They'll eat everything else, but not, not rabbits. um I will say too,
00:18:43
Speaker
Bees are fun, but I think maybe my favorite animal that I've done um as an adult on my own, and that was oh in November of 24, I got two pigs, ah as little pigs, and then butchered them the last weekend of March.
00:19:08
Speaker
So i only had them what, five, uh, five or six months, something like that. One of them was over 300 pounds. One was like 275 or something. They were both, they could have gone a little bit longer, but I didn't want it to get too hot.
00:19:23
Speaker
Like I was trying to still pick a cool weekend to process them. Um, and I rotated them. I started them in the the same chicken, uh, the same electric fence and my chickens are in the little, the, um,
00:19:36
Speaker
three foot tall fence. Um, and then I ended up just using straight, like one strand towards the end cause they were used to the electric fence. They wouldn't touch it, but I had an, I had an easy experience with them.
00:19:50
Speaker
I mean, I would, had to, it was a big investment buying all that electric fencing and different stuff I needed for for them. But, um, But yeah, just moving them from one location to the next, they went right over like they were supposed to. Some people, it could take them ah a half a day to get the pigs to move out of the electric fence area to the new one. For me, it was like you open the gate, boom, they go. um What breed of pig did you have?
00:20:14
Speaker
What now? What breed did you get? you remember? ah feel like they were half it was half like Berkshire.
00:20:26
Speaker
big Big black or something. I can't remember. i don't remember. It was it was a mix. It's interesting the different breeds of pigs that are out there. We heard about ah ah there's a breed of pig that will eat grass.
00:20:40
Speaker
And I had no idea pigs would eat grass. I think pigs eat anything. Yeah. Well, that's going to i mean, i had um and I had them in parts of my yard and in some grass and they ate every bit of it. I had them in the woods and they would eat, they would just root and eat everything, but mostly I had them in the woods.
00:21:03
Speaker
And so oh I just moved them all around my property and I love those things. they were so so they were They were sweet pigs at the end and I had such such a good experience with them and ended up with, you know, it From a money saving standpoint, not really.
00:21:24
Speaker
ah If you if you factor out if you yeah factor out the electric fence, because I'm planning on using that for other things. But if it's just like, the I spent $1,100 on feed for those things.
00:21:36
Speaker
The last two or three weeks of their lives, they were eating 25 pounds a day each. Oh my gracious. yeah that was more I was pouring in my bag, a 50 pound bag of feed out there. Like for the last, was like maybe, maybe the last two weeks they would eat so much.
00:21:54
Speaker
That is incredible. A 50 pound bag. Yeah. It might have taken them a day and a half to eat it, but yeah, they were, they were eating the feed. And so, so I spent like 1100 and ended up with,
00:22:10
Speaker
200 something pounds of meat. So five, I spent like $5 a pound, $5.50 a pound or something. And, you know, so I probably didn't save a whole lot of money, but they were, you know,
00:22:26
Speaker
But they're probably better for you. Oh, yeah. Natural, organic, whatever. Like they had nothing bad at all. I mean, think about it. Ben, if you're at the grocery store and you see fully organic, completely natural, very, very healthy, ah relatively speaking. I'm not sure you could say bacon is healthy. But, you know, relatively speaking, this meat is – is ah is all natural for the same price as a highly processed, full of chemicals, you know, ah much worse for you piece of meat for the same price. That's not a hard decision. I'm buying the healthier stuff every time for the same price.
00:23:06
Speaker
Come on. That's a good deal. You know, I'll say this too, cause I haven't said it yet. Um, I do, you chickens, they don't need much land at all.
00:23:17
Speaker
You can do that on a half an acre or less than that. Rabbits, you don't need any needle very little land. Bees, whatever. i mean, you can do them in a little neighborhood. Just don't tell your just don't tell your neighbors. well But pigs, you have to have a little bit more land.
00:23:34
Speaker
But I probably, um mate i rotated them on probably two acres. of woods for five months. So it wasn't, ah it wasn't a lot. And I could have started back over, you know, could have done four paddocks and then started back over. you know, they don't, they don't care whatever they're just gonna, you know, so, but that was fun. Um, and you have to know how to process if you're going process them yourself, that's it. Yeah. You got to, if you want to save money, you got to process them yourself and you need a lot of equipment and,
00:24:08
Speaker
um strength. and Right. i but you You had a lot of that already because you've done deer and other yeah hunting. Yeah. So, oh but those were fun. I want to do that again.
00:24:22
Speaker
um they take time. You have to check on them every day. They always knock the bucket of water over. um So I finally figured out how to ah put some of those T-posts, metal T-posts in the ground next to the bucket and I bungee or I so ratchet strapped the bucket to the T-posts and they wouldn't knock that over.
00:24:42
Speaker
And I had the little, the little nozzles on the bottom for them to suck, you know? Um, But it took me while to figure that out. I tried to make them a little house out of pallets so they could get out of the weather because I had them over over the winter, November through March. And so they it would snow and and they're laying on their hay in their little little house I made them. But every you know when they were older, I was moving them like every every week or every every yeah probably every two weeks towards the end.
00:25:10
Speaker
And so it was a lot of work to to do that. But... I enjoyed it. So good that's my experience with raising animals. I'd like to get into some milk goats one day. Okay.
00:25:24
Speaker
But um I've milked goats. I've milked goats. Yeah. i've never had I've never had their fresh goat milk, but I'm sure it's good. I'm sure I would like it. Well, I think it depends on the breed ah that you get.
Dairy Discussions
00:25:37
Speaker
Some breeds have better milk than others. I have heard that some goats...
00:25:43
Speaker
Give milk – I mean if you feed them right and take care of him well, that you can't tell the difference between that and cow's milk. They taste the same. It's just the same. and That is not my experience. The goat milk that I've had has a little bit of ah a strange aftertaste sometimes.
00:26:00
Speaker
ah But really, if you if you cook with it or – you know, if you're if you put chocolate chocolate syrup in it or something, or you use it on your ah your cereal or different things people might use milk for, if you're not drinking it straight, you really can't tell.
00:26:17
Speaker
um So, you know, i would I would encourage people to do ah milk goats, but I can say that probably the animal that has benefited my family the most is
00:26:32
Speaker
I don't know, it'd be kind of a toss up probably between chickens and and our milk cow, but our Jersey milk cow has been an incredible blessing to our family. And I've told you before that um we save that that milk cow pays for herself every week.
00:26:49
Speaker
ah Last time we did the math, it was like $40 in the black that that she saves us because we use – not only do we drink her milk, but we also – we have cream to put in the coffee so we don't buy coffee creamer anymore. We can make our own sour cream. We can make um yogurt, our own yogurt.
00:27:11
Speaker
We make our own butter. So all of those things that we used to spend money for in the grocery store, we are now doing ourselves. Now, there's ah there's a lot of money up front that Cal cost us.
00:27:25
Speaker
Um, like, well, we had somebody invest with us, so it's kind of, ah take a share of her, but the price was around $2,200 and she was, she was going to have a calf. So that made her a little more valuable. And she's also a two, a two, uh, genetics. So that makes her more valuable. So, but you know, that's a lot to put out up front and then you got to feed her every week and you know, you got to have room if you're going to get a milk cow, family milk cow, you got to have room to have her have pasture.
00:27:54
Speaker
right the um it depends on your grass it depends on a lot of things but you can graze ah a cow one cow can graze on two acres pretty easily so um two to three acres is all you really need for grazing a milk cow but you know, all of those things we used to spend money on in the grocery store, we don't spend money anymore.
00:28:20
Speaker
So yeah she's actually saving us money. Now, eventually she's going to have saved us the entire purchase price of getting her in the first place.
00:28:33
Speaker
um And then we're going to, you know, she had a She had a bull calf, which we made a steer. And so we're going to, he's going to be in the freezer this year. Yeah. And that's, that's going to be really good meat. Now it's going to be cheaper than buying ground beef at the store, but it's going to be better for us. Like you were saying.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah. And it'll probably be about the same price, but that has been a huge blessing to our family and a lot more than I thought it would be. it's It's a lot of work, you know, milking twice a day. We're right now getting about four gallons a day or close to it, three at least.
00:29:08
Speaker
And so, you know, some of it we give to friends or, you know, we we eat we drink milk at every meal. And we make as much butter as we can. And we have just honestly so much dairy.
00:29:23
Speaker
it's it's it's ah It's just a ton. But it saves. I don't spend any time in the dairy section anymore, Matt. The only thing I buy dairy at the store is sliced cheese.
00:29:34
Speaker
we don't We're not making cheddar cheese yet. But we can make you know some mozzarella and some other. Anna even made some that she fried in oil. And and we all had cheese sticks.
00:29:44
Speaker
not too long ago. So, ah you know, there's different types of cheese. We're able to, we've started with some softer cheeses, but man, it's just been incredible. Honestly, and a lot more than i ever anticipated. i never would have thought ah that I would have had a milk cow and that I'd be milking twice a day and that I'd be preparing to, I'm not, I'm not, I'm going to pay someone to butcher the calf. I'm not going to butcher it myself.
00:30:09
Speaker
yeah But I never would have seen myself getting to that point. But hey, I said yes to chickens all those years ago. So now I got it all yeah for pigs. We haven't done pigs.
00:30:21
Speaker
i am I think when I think about you know getting the pigs and getting these meat birds, part of it is, yes, it benefits the family.
Benefits of Homesteading for Children
00:30:34
Speaker
from a like a health standpoint, we're eating healthier food. That's it. I want, and then another reason why I get it is the, I want the kids to experience it Even if it's just one time we get them and we if it was a bad experience, okay, well, at least the kids saw it.
00:30:49
Speaker
um And I want them to help me some. It's a little bit harder to get them to help me than than I would like. but um but ah But anyway, but then some of it too is just I just enjoy it.
00:30:59
Speaker
I really do. That may be the main reason I do some of this. It's just because I have fun with it. I think that's good for you. it's yeah it's i mean, you know they call it a hobby farm for a reason, but that i mean there's so many other hobbies that are not as beneficial as getting out in nature and learning how to work with some of God's creations and benefit from the world God has made. And really, you're taking dominion, you're holding dominion in the earth when you manage your property, manage your livestock. That's just really...
00:31:34
Speaker
it's good for It's good for a family and it's good for a man to do that type of work. It really, I think it feeds your soul. Yeah. And the way that we're we're raising these animals, me and you both, I think is probably the way that God intended it to be. I mean, he wants it to be. We're caring for the animals.
00:31:54
Speaker
I mean, these pigs... We were gathering up white oak acorns by some trees in the backyard and taking it out there and giving it to them in the front. You know, like they were eating just natural stuff and they were careful. They had a place to sleep.
00:32:08
Speaker
They never ran out of food and water. They were happy. Like, I just feel like that was the right thing to do. Now, I could have had them in one little pen. Some people may have to just keep them in a pen and they're laying in there in mud and junk the whole time. Like that may be all they can do.
00:32:23
Speaker
Yeah. But in our situation, we felt good about it that we were able to do it that way. Absolutely. So I think that our family, you know, my desire is that we be as independent as we can be. I don't want to be dependent on a supply chain that can break down because we're holding, you know, we're holding shipping tankers off the coast and not allowing them to offload. And now suddenly,
00:32:45
Speaker
I can't buy the food and and supplies that I need for my family. I don't want to be dependent on the grocery store. I want to be able to provide, to produce and not just consume the things that we need.
00:32:58
Speaker
And so that's part of my motivation behind trying to develop slowly. And I think that's another thing I would say to someone who's just thinking about getting into this, just go one step at a time. Don't try to dive off into everything at once.
00:33:12
Speaker
you know Take your time and and just start with one thing and add things slowly. that's been That's been a really good thing for us that we learned from some of the people that have taught us is, hey, just take it one step at a time.
Self-Sufficiency Projects
00:33:25
Speaker
Try to develop little by little. the uh the infrastructure that you need you know our next big project is to install gutters all the way around our house and to establish a rain collection system i'm telling you matt ezekiel my so my oldest son did the math it is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of gallons a year that we would capture off the roof that then we wouldn't have to tax our well we would have all of the water we would need for the garden we would need for the animals
00:33:57
Speaker
way more than we would ever need and or even be able to store where our storage systems would be overflowing before before they would run dry so yeah i thought about that i would love to have something like that where you just open the a switch on the barrel or whatever the nozzle and it runs in the pvc pipe in the garden and waters everything for you Yeah. That's what, so you're planting, like you plant something right next to the PVC pipe, you poke a hole in the PVC pipe and it just, and it waters it. And I guess you would have to almost be going downhill a little bit.
00:34:35
Speaker
But anyway, I would love to do do something like that one day. That would be so easy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, you know, our garden is pretty big. It's 50 by plot of ah of garden yeah that's good And, ah you know, we've been developing that a little bit at a time, but important part of it is developing the soil.
00:34:57
Speaker
And, ah you know, I was telling you about how we, I wasn't really telling you about how we do it, but just that we do a lot with compost and we try to get the compost pile to work.
00:35:08
Speaker
And we've learned how to do it from a man named Noah Shepard.
00:35:16
Speaker
Oh, i know no i so I know so many Noahs and one of them is my son. I can't think of his last name.
00:35:23
Speaker
Maybe Noah Sanders. um He does redeemingthedirt.com is his website. And he's he spent a lot of time researching and learning from really wise people about how to how to create a great compost pile. And it's basically a combination of, of, uh, vegetation and then brown vegetation. So green would be the stuff that's, um, like your grass clippings where you cut it when it's alive.
00:35:58
Speaker
And then Brown would be things like, uh, leaves that fall to the ground. They died before they hit the ground. So they're kind of more Brown material. And then you got your, um your feces or your your organic ah your organic, it's all organic material, but you got your you know your manure that you use to help in in improve the bacteria and the to help the the organic material break down within your compost pile. So you kind of do a ah mixture of these things.
00:36:35
Speaker
And I wish I could tell you exactly the mixture
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:37:22
Speaker
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00:37:28
Speaker
I can't remember exactly the order that all those things go in. Anna would know better than me. um But it's basically you put a layer of green, a layer of brown, a layer manure. And then you get it really wet. And then you green, brown, and manure, get it really wet. You do that about two or three times. You get a stack of compost about, I don't know what we have, probably four feet tall.
00:37:52
Speaker
And you let it sit. And it sits for about two weeks. And you keep a metal pole in the middle so you can see how warm it gets. once it gets hot enough, because that's what you're trying to do, you're trying to get get it to be hot, but you don't want to get too hot so you don't leave it there forever. You you let your your post, your ah metal pole sit in there.
00:38:15
Speaker
And maybe it's only three or four days that it that it that does this. I can't remember. But once the the the, like a little wire hanger or something in the middle, once you can't really touch it because it's too hot, you can't like grab it and hold but it's, uh, you have to let go.
00:38:33
Speaker
Then that's when you want to turn it. So you did, then you flip it over, you turn it into just next door, like right, right right next to it. just mix it up and then you stick your pole down in it and you wait two or three days more or a week more.
00:38:48
Speaker
And when it's too hot to touch again, you flip it again. And then you might add another layer or two, but, um, uh,
00:39:00
Speaker
Noah Sanders talks a lot more about that and has a lot more detail at redeemingthedirt.com. Maybe we'll get them to be a sponsor too yeah of our of our podcast. but and and So I don't think anybody will be thinking this, Jared. I don't think.
00:39:15
Speaker
But just just to state it, you're not the one going out there and pooping in your compost pile, right? No. No, you don't use human Human manure. No, you you scoop up the poop that that the cow drops. and And if you can gather chicken droppings, that's good too. but either Either one. cows or Either one.
00:39:35
Speaker
and look probablyly you Rabbits are good? ah did get rabbit for Yeah, rabbits, good fertilizer. yeah yeah um They say that fish um fish droppings are a great fertilizer.
00:39:49
Speaker
who So if you clean your fish bowl out, you know, the water in there, not all the water, but the stuff at the bottom that you're sucking out is really good fertilizer.
00:40:01
Speaker
Anyway, the point is that that's a really good way to make really solid compost that's very, very good for our garden. And so I'd encourage people to go to redeemingthedirt.com and he's really really christ-centered and has a real ministry mindset about his his gardening and how people can use their gardening to reach people's lives and their hearts and i think that's pretty noble and admirable yeah anyway matt why don't we uh why don't we close up our uh close up our episode tonight what final closing thoughts do you have to share with us tonight about this
Innovative Farming Techniques
00:40:42
Speaker
few things. um I wish I had fish, wish I had a pond. that we we I really miss eating fish. I used to eat we would go catch them all the time growing up in the river and in pines.
00:40:53
Speaker
Well, you know, as some people do. They just create a farm and they just get ah ah a pool. You know, those inflatable pools you can buy. And they just they just fill it up with water. They balance it the way it would be being in a pond and they throw some fish in there they stock it up.
00:41:08
Speaker
I'm not kidding. I had a neighbor in Virginia when we lived in Fredericksburg and he, across the street, he had, i don't know how big it was. It was probably like 15 by 15 or something. And he just, it was like a kiddie pool and he just put some carp in there or or some some sort of fish that he that he stocked.
00:41:29
Speaker
So you could still do it. Kind of sounds redneck, but hey, that's what I that's what i do So, um Oh, May's going to hate that you gave me that idea. She's going to love it when you feed her though.
00:41:43
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So one quick point, if you're, if whoever's listening, if you're interested in getting a meat grinder, I would recommend I had for years, years, for it.
00:41:58
Speaker
and i'd probably say
00:42:02
Speaker
2000 on meat 3000 probably between pork and deer. And I do about 150 pounds of deer meat a year and it just makes that hamburger meat. I mean, it's great. I would recommend that. the Another reason why I do the animals I was I was just thought about it a minute ago is when I'm killing that when I'm processing the deer, when I'm processing pigs, we'll be doing me and two buddies will be doing 90 chickens in May.
00:42:28
Speaker
All of that. you're with friends. You can't do it by yourself. Yeah. Friends and family. But it's just some um some of my favorite days of the year is when when two or three buddies come over and we just, we start early in the morning, we just help each other. And everybody's so selfless. Like,
00:42:46
Speaker
you know, they want to help or they'll bring a little bit of meat and I'll grind it up for them. They help me for hours and I supply the bags for them and the grinder and we just all work together and just have a blast.
00:42:57
Speaker
Yeah. we're almost we And we count up how much money we've saved at the end of the day and it's it's just a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. So oh I'm just thankful that My kids get to experience it like like I did. There's some things that they don't get to experience. that Like I played on the river a lot growing up and different things in South Alabama, but they get at least they do get to experience the animal piece of it.
00:43:21
Speaker
And that's fun. So I love it. And I would encourage um any listener who's interested in it, if they have any questions to reach out to us. I'm sure we would be happy to to help mentor them or whatever they need.
00:43:38
Speaker
We could both talk about bees and both talk about chickens, more milk cows. So that's for sure. Yeah. We can at least point you in the right direction, even if we don't know the answer. So, right.
00:43:49
Speaker
A hundred percent. Well, I, I really appreciate, uh, all of your thoughts and, uh, I've, I've had a good time, uh, fellowshipping with you around the meat grinder, uh, before a couple times. And that's been good. That's been good for our relationship. I think so.
00:44:03
Speaker
Um, Yeah, I would just encourage people to get into this world and take as much of it as you want. um Don't try to bite off too much right ah right away. But, you know, all of the bites that I've taken have been good for me, good for my family, good for my children's experiences.
00:44:22
Speaker
So I would encourage you dads out there that are listening in anybody else.
Homesteading Resources and Community
00:44:27
Speaker
that's tuned in, ah ah I'd encourage you to look into this further, go to Redeeming the Dirt, go to School of Traditional Skills, um any of these different places. the Find yourself a a good ah bee community, some beekeepers nearby, get yourself a meat grinder and find out what God has for you in this part of the world.
00:44:51
Speaker
It really has been great for us and we've enjoyed it. And so I encourage you all to do it. Someday we'll have to have Tony and Nate come on here. Nate will talk about raising rabbits and Tony will talk about ah eat making incredibly delicious looking food. ah He's so good at making his own meals that look amazingly good.
00:45:14
Speaker
yeah Well, folks, thanks so much for tuning in. And we hope that you'll either like and subscribe on this video, or maybe you'll make a comment. whatever it may be. We appreciate the interaction. You can email us dads at preacherdad.com. That's D-A-D-S at preacherdad.com. And we would love to hear from you and interact with you if you'd like to.
00:45:40
Speaker
And you can also check out preacherdad.com if you'd like to donate to this cause. We would appreciate that as well. Or visit the sponsors you've heard about on this podcast. Well, God bless you. we sure surely are grateful for all 10 of you that tuned in tonight.
00:45:56
Speaker
And we look forward to seeing you next time on Fatherhood Friday, brought to you by the Preacher Dad Podcast. Have a great night.