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Beyond the Romanticism of the Homestead - Farm Updates, Accountability and More.
318 Plays2 months ago
On this episode of the Little Way Farm and Homestead Podcast, Mathew and Carissa have a genuine and honest conversation. Discussing farm updates, their developing experiences of rural living and the the evolving maturity that comes with pursuing a vocation of marriage. This conversation begins light hearted and becomes a bit more serious around the midway point. It's a conversation of hope and one that acknowledges the potential for disorder and fatigue, as well as fun in life. This episode, we hope, leaves you inspired to keep focused and pursuing a life that God calls you to.
For more information about Little Way Farm and Homestead including the farm, podcast, and upcoming events, check out https://www.littlewayhomestead.com/
For media inquiries, advertising, speaking requests, guest referrals, consulting and more - email us at hello@littlewayhomestead.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Family Update
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Little Way Farm and
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of the Little Way Farm and Homestead podcast. We are excited to have this conversation. This is, it's been a while, honestly. We have posted so many different interviews from people over the last year or so that we really haven't had these conversations, just Karissa and I that we had in the beginning when we first started this podcast.
00:00:42
Speaker
And over the last month or so, maybe a little bit longer, we really haven't posted any new episodes. It's frankly just been a really busy time. Do you want to share some of the fun updates that have impacted our family and some of the things that have been going on?
00:00:57
Speaker
Well, primarily we welcomed another little baby into the family two months ago, almost exactly. And we've been pretty busy with having four children, getting through the early postpartum days, starting homeschool back up and just figuring out what's next for our farm, our homestead, our family.
00:01:21
Speaker
I think that's kept us pretty busy. It's been extremely busy.
Farm Achievements and Community Support
00:01:25
Speaker
Let's talk about the farm first. So this was a year of a lot of firsts for us on our farm. I think farming is one of those businesses. It's ultimately an entrepreneurial venture for many people where you're taking on all of the early challenges and problems and successes and excitements.
00:01:44
Speaker
of ultimately running a business, whether that's marketing, reaching out to new customers, finding new retail avenues. And this was the first year where we recognized a few successes. One, we just shipped garlic across the whole country, minus a few states. That was a lot of fun.
00:02:03
Speaker
It was fun. It was very exciting and it kept us very busy for probably a whole week, two weeks maybe. Yeah, between harvesting garlic, which you know is done in the late June, early July period. Which then just so everyone has a full picture of what we were dealing with here. i was like five weeks out from having a baby yeah and we realized well we knew harvest would be we thought it actually would end up being closer but we had to pull earlier because of the dry yeah just weather wasn't yes yeah typically we would harvest garlic we aim for early to mid-july but
00:02:47
Speaker
We were harvesting fully by the end of june evident end of June and it probably could have been sooner. It was just so dry which is also That was also wild because that was also our processing month for chicken so we were really busy in my eight eighth month of pregnancy and we had some really great loving friends and family that came out to help support us and that month, which was wonderful. But yeah, garlic, we were busy harvesting garlic, then we have to get it all cured and set away so that it's properly usable for seed or storage to eat. And then it got time to ship out garlic. And it was our first experience with packaging and shipping any kind of product.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah. And I am, I'm so thankful to, there's so many people who have supported us and so many people who are kind of following along with this farm journey. You know, we don't share everything that we're doing with the farm. Some people know about us on a national level from garlic sales. Some people know us from social media work and what we post online about farm and home setting.
00:04:00
Speaker
But a lot of people only know us from our local meat sales, which is actually really interesting too.
Homesteading vs. Farming: A Philosophical Discussion
00:04:06
Speaker
And the garlic was unique in this instance because it was the first thing that we ever packed up and sold across state lines legally. Mind you, I contacted so many different agencies to figure out if we could do that legally. Well, not to insinuate that we've done any illegal sales either. I reach out to just about every agency that we need to to make sure we are very, very thorough in making sure we understand the guidelines for sales.
00:04:36
Speaker
But that was really neat because we got to ship garlic to so many different people across the United States who are going to use it to plant in their gardens or are going to use it in their kitchens or maybe make fermented garlic honey with this. It's the pictures that have come in from people sharing with us what it looked like when they received it and how excited they were has just been so humbling and so exciting.
00:05:00
Speaker
And it gives me a ah lot of encouragement that as we continue to grow that one enterprise garlic from our farm here, that eventually it'll be one of those things that helps contribute to our our family's financial viability and ultimately helps to create a good future for our children and potentially other employees in our community who can benefit from the garlic that we're growing and shipping across the country. And that's just so neat.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, something that I think has been really fun in the business side of this, the farming side, is that there's a long process sometimes from the beginning to the end of a product, whatever we're getting out to a consumer or a buyer.
00:05:47
Speaker
and Sometimes you lose sight. you It's hard to see the full picture when you're in the middle or the beginning of creating these products that people are buying. Obviously, we're we're growing them or raising them. We're stewarding a lot of nature so that people can eat food.
00:06:09
Speaker
but When we are able to get to that final piece where we're handing over what we've put our time and energy and effort into to somebody else to put it in their kitchen and then for it to become something useful to their family, I think that's when you and I have felt a lot of satisfaction and an assurance that we're happy with this direction that we've taken our life and what we're trying to do for our so our family and for other families around us.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah, I agree because one thing about home setting that I think a lot of people want to do is I think they want to and they'll investigate this and we even have a short article on our website about this doing like profitable home set enterprises. But the reality is is that home setting is one thing and farming is a completely other thing and they do not have to overlap at all and they you don't have to feel any pressure at all to make money off of your homestead. In fact, I would argue that if you're home setting,
00:07:10
Speaker
Really, it should be about focusing on the development of the homestead so that it fulfills the
Future Plans for the Farm and Homestead
00:07:16
Speaker
family's needs. And if you're farming, then you really need to go down profit and loss, business development, website marketing, you know, all of those different things in order to make that successful. Otherwise you kind of spin your wheels in both of them and not be as efficient as you could be.
00:07:31
Speaker
and you know Admittedly, one thing that I think I'm going to focus on over the coming year is really focusing on developing our homestead portion. yeah Because the farm, we've been really thankful. I've spent basically the last two years developing the farm business. The brand is out there. It has a certain reputation, which we're very honored and thankful for.
00:07:52
Speaker
And you know so long as God continues to will it, maybe in and hopefully he does will it, that the farm will continue to grow and be a source of income for our family, but also a place of change in our local community here, and a place of employment for folks who live in our community. And the homestead though is something completely different. yeah I think that I think that is a topic we've probably touched on it before and I think we could do like a full really in-depth conversation about it but I think that is something that is a super important topic of discussion for families that are discerning
00:08:28
Speaker
making the shift in their life towards homesteading is trying to understand what are our goals and do we want to homestead? Do we want to farm? Do we want to homestead and make a little bit of money off of it? Do we just want to do this for our family and it's not about supporting other families and their food needs? I think and that's also something that I don't even know if you can fully know what you want until you're doing it, but at least having the conversation all along the way so you can see where all parties are, where their minds are, how they're viewing it. But something that we've learned is that, like Matthew said, homesteading is not the same thing as farming and farming is not the same thing as homesteading. They have a lot in common, but farming is ultimately a business and a lot of the homesteading
00:09:25
Speaker
the the ways that you want to go about it, the things that might be best for the animals or the plants, whenever you're trying to scale in a farming sense and you're trying to support many, many, many more families,
00:09:42
Speaker
There's a lot of different routes you have to take and like two people running a homestead can't always meet the demands of a hundred people without adding in either extra hands or extra tools machinery having certain things that maybe you just like it's something we wouldn't do for just our family on the homestead but now we have to scale this a hundred times and so now you make different decisions.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, that has been a challenge for us and something that I think we've been, we've had a lot of difficulty in truthfully meeting demand because when we first came here, it was about two and a half years ago, we incorporated the farm officially on the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel. oh We really, and it was probably a lot of my motivation there to build a business away from, you know, full my you know other employment at the time.
00:10:41
Speaker
But the farm really took precedence over the homestead for us over the last few years. And it's, it's really grown. It's grown in a way that we couldn't really understand and is still a little bit confusing. And I'm very thankful for, but now we have to solve business challenges and we have to solve business questions.
Rural Living: Challenges and Adaptations
00:11:01
Speaker
And those solutions to business challenges and business questions don't necessarily solve homestead questions and homestead challenges.
00:11:12
Speaker
And so I suspect that this is a problem that many people ultimately come to. Um, and I suspect that many people turn away from farming over time and they turn back into the homestead or they abandoned the homestead and the rural life altogether because they find that they're in over their head or mentally or physically or emotionally or they spiritually or just can't handle it. A lot of times I think people are trying to live in both worlds at the same time, so to speak. Like one person in the family is still working a regular nine to five job, probably has added a commute because you've moved a little rurally in a lot of cases.
00:11:55
Speaker
And that's taking up a lot of time. And then you're also trying to live this rural agricultural lifestyle that you're not familiar with, you didn't grow up doing. And that adds its own strain and stress on the family life and
00:12:13
Speaker
Where were we going? Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. That's in, that's actually extremely interesting. When we first moved here, so for context, if if you're not familiar with us, we lived on the west side of Cincinnati for quite some time. And before that we moved around regularly over the course of the first seven or eight years of our marriage regularly being like every six months to two years. Right. Yep. Typically it was because we were moving closer to work opportunities for me. That way my commute time was less or sometimes we did a lot of strategy in our living circumstances, our housing in order to pay down debt and to get in a better financial position. We were not, we were not set on staying in one place just because of the comfort of it. We were willing to make sacrifices so that we could
00:13:07
Speaker
And he writes except for that one year where we moved into a really nice apartment complex because we were tired You know what but that helped a lot with stress And come to find out stress has a lot to do with that apartment complex had ponds at it It was beautiful. It had a gym. It was it was a nice reprieve of crazy living circumstances. Yes, we did that for a year. But so I, you know, some of the things I think are really interesting are things, you know, when you move from the city, the suburbs, urban environments, even that transition from country, you know, rural experience, um you know, to the city.
00:13:50
Speaker
and you move really deeply out into a rural environment where the scenery changes the smells change the way people make money changes you get into more like factory work only or you know cattle work so you start learning about different cattle businesses and things like that. Lots of side gigs. Lots of people selling firewood on the side or roadside stands yeah all that stuff there's some things like culture shock which really come into play that i still remember to this day there's different language elements which come into play there's certain societal mores and norms which come into play a lot of small businesses don't want you to use credit cards
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah. Well, actually, you know what? That's one of the first ones that I was, I was really, that, that was a culture shock to me. Um, when you grow up in, you know, city, urban, suburban environment, credit card just seems normal credit debit, you know, whatever it is, and basically a card. Yeah. Now people don't even use cards. They just Venmo and Zelle and the, all the things we haven't even touched. We still don't accept those things. You can't pay us with those things.
00:14:59
Speaker
We don't understand it and we're not interested. We'll stick to the. Simpler. You can pay us in cash or checks for farm goods at this point. Actually, actually that's not, we do, we do accept online payments now online payments, but we don't have, but I do so regretful regrettably. Like I don't like it. It's just, I, yeah you know, some people send us checks for things. Anyway, I digress. Cash was a culture shock for me. It was, it's still somewhat of, I haven't fully adjusted because we don't always have cash on hand and you almost always need or want to out here. Even right now we're like coming towards the end of summer. And so every time I'm out, there's yard sales happening and I can't stop all the time because I don't have cash on me. And it's like a long drive back to find this random yard sale if I find something good. Yeah that and I mean there's so many other things though that have I mean there's so many things which have just generated a certain culture shock and you do have to become used to them over time. One thing that I was a you know a close friend a family friend mentioned to me it was about the importance of time and the way that time is recognized in the country
00:16:12
Speaker
And I have have noticed this more and and not, and it's really humbling to me is that if you are, you're in front of someone, you're in front of someone and your phone and anyone calling you takes second place. Everything takes second place. And there usually are no like, quick, I'm going to run down to the neighbor to pick up this one thing that they're lending me. And I'll be right back in five minutes.
00:16:36
Speaker
Yeah, that doesn't really happen because, you know, that neighbor may need help with something or you're there and now they need a second hand or hey, maybe it's just a good opportunity to catch up with them and talk with them. Usually that one, I think catch up time. Catch up time. But you know what that is? Truthfully, it's community. that it That's exactly what it is. entity And it's something that you don't even realize we've lost in a lot of ways. Yeah, man. I was so humbled the other night.
00:17:07
Speaker
Man, I you know i had ah a quick, I thought a quick errand, a drop-in thing, and I ended up sitting on you know a good friend's porch with them, talking with a new neighbor I hadn't talked to, swinging on the you know the swing. and i just Man, I sat there and I had like this like realization at some point, just, I need more porch time. That's exactly why I'm trying to get you to build me a porch.
00:17:38
Speaker
I need more porch time. yep I need some porch time too. We need more time sipping bourbon, pipe cigar, tobacco, warm milk, hot chocolate, swinging on the front porch so that other neighbors that see us out on the porch can stop stop by and talk to us. exactly maybe a rosary, maybe ah a Bible in hand, you know, something, but you know, that, that a lot of people dream of that lifestyle and they see it online. You know, they see these like, it's funny. They see these, you know, social media, 10 second, 15 second, multiple angle shots of people supposedly living really slow.
00:18:25
Speaker
But then you get to the country and that slowness is actually jarring. And it's very difficult to settle into
Faith and Community in Rural Life
00:18:36
Speaker
it. You, you, it's almost like, you know, you want it and you know, you need it because it's, it promotes these good things. Like it promotes a slow and a present awareness of one another.
00:18:50
Speaker
It promotes a recognition of the faith. It promotes a recognition of those who are present to you and the things that you should have or could have done all day long to work. Well, you know, it's funny because there's a slowness, but there's also like a never ending to do list living out here, which is funny because it kind of seems like it counteracts the slowness. Like you have to choose the slowness in a lot of ways. In some ways you don't like, like with stopping a neighbor stops to talk. You're not necessarily choosing it, but like, because we live out here, this is what we do. These are our neighbors. We sit and we talk and we catch up and we support each other in the ways that we need to. You take a phone call and run and help
00:19:36
Speaker
the neighbor get his cow out of a ditch, whatever it is. um But then in a lot of other ways, we we do have to choose the slowness because our list, we can keep going and going and going and never reach the end of that list. And I think that's that's the other side that we've experienced this year. We've had that the clash of we have to slow down because we're in the country like even the fact that like you have to drive 45 minutes to get to the grocery store or Lowe's or something there are natural slownesses but then there's also this busyness that we always have something to do
00:20:22
Speaker
And are we taking enough time to sit and be present and watch the kids play in the yard or have a tea on the porch with my husband, you know?
00:20:34
Speaker
I think that the you know the caricatures of the busy person in the city and the cubicle and the busy farmer in the fields ultimately kind of come together in a unique angle just from different worldviews where they both question the meaningfulness of the work that they're doing.
00:20:56
Speaker
and here and I can't reconcile either position, you know, the, in the country, you are humbled by the natural order. It's just, it's just a reality. If, if you're engaged in agriculture and you're in the country, you know, things like the weather, rainfall, droughts, the seasons, animal temperaments, reproduction cycles of the animals, all of these things,
00:21:21
Speaker
They will humble you to nearly an nth degree because they don't care about your feelings or how you've yeah anything. They don't care about it. They don't care. They just, they continue on in the city. It's similar, but you have like, you know, the seemingly mundane ness of work, the cubicle, the office of fluorescent lights. You go in, you put your time in, you get your paycheck, that kind of cycle too. They're, you know, if you really think of it, they're, they're very similar in a way in their elements.
00:21:53
Speaker
In both instances, at the end of the day, the work is nearly meaningless, unless the faith is involved. Because the promise of eternal life is the only thing which makes the sacrifice of modern-day living worth it.
00:22:11
Speaker
at the time that you put in consistently, the lack of thanks, the lack of gratitude, the effort, the tiredness, the overcoming of objections and obstacles. It's all meaningless if if there's not a hope of eternal life, and that's what the church promises us.
00:22:29
Speaker
Now, I think we would argue at this point that while you don't have to homestead, you don't have to live a rural life, that but that the rural life is a really great way of you know raising a family and helping teach the faith to the children, and also provides just this phenomenal opportunity to be productive.
00:22:52
Speaker
You know, we talked about, um, you know, Rerum Novarum, the encyclical was just so powerful for me reading that. And the idea of the family society and productive labor and guilds and all of these different things where you're working with your hands and you're producing and you're cooperating or mastering nature. And you're, you're working really hard to produce things that are real. They're tangible. You can feel them. It's not just dollars in your bank account.
00:23:20
Speaker
or zeros in your bank account, but it's actually good things. You know, we plant garlic as an example in October. We don't get it to customers until almost a year later.
00:23:34
Speaker
Chicken is a quick turnaround. We produce a lot of chicken and it's kind of maybe a spoiler alert. We didn't think we were going to produce more and more chicken, but we're kind of becoming somewhat of a chicken farm in a way. And we get to watch them go from these little tiny, cute yellow or, you know, dark brown colored feather bear. Well, it's not even feathers like fluff, little fluff balls to just these like remarkably meaty animals over the course of a few weeks. And we get to see.
00:24:04
Speaker
how beneficial that is to families. Families gather around meals from chicken that we raised. That's really neat. That goes for so many trades though. It goes for so many things. Yeah, it does. I think that this is just unique to us because this is the first time that we've been involved in creating Something that is given to other families is sold to other families, but it's, it's for their use and the good of their family to promote like a strong family life, you know? Yeah.
00:24:50
Speaker
We haven't gotten to talk in a while in this way, and so it's just kind of exciting to reflect on this last year, and I guess that's what some of this is. For many people, when they start homesteading or even farming or moving to the rural life, there's just so much romanticism to it. There's so many things that are new and novel, and I think we're past all that.
00:25:14
Speaker
Well, I think we've definitely gotten to this stage where people are questioning, why did we do this? Do we want to keep going? And I think it's reasonable. I think it makes sense why a lot of people get to that place. But for some reason it's, it's reminded me a lot of marriage. I would agree. It,
00:25:44
Speaker
puts us in a position where we, you know, you get through your honeymoon phase, you know, the excitement, the novelness of it. And it's not that, you know, the goods wear off or that they go away, but it is that you start to settle into the responsibility and the accountability. Well, in the reality of it, I think like you were saying, I think marriage is a lot of times romanticized and people have,
00:26:10
Speaker
these grand ideas of what marriage might be like and what having a family might be like and they live for many years dreaming of it and and even in that like phase of courtship and engagement where you're building up to the wedding and being married i think that it it can be very
00:26:35
Speaker
romanticized. Yeah. It's exciting. And then like experiencing the reality of it, not at all to say that it's not a wonderful, beautiful experience, but you see the reality of what life is married and what life is having children. And it's not always easy. And I think If you look around our culture, a lot of people get into it and they get into those hard stages of it and they're like, why did we do this? Like, do we, is this worth it? Do we want to keep going? And it's very, I see the same thing happen with homesteading and the rural living.
00:27:16
Speaker
It's not I mean, it's not a complete it's not a perfect analogy because you don't have to you don't have to homestead especially The way that our world is set up right now. There are many ways to get food into your house, but It is a good thing for the family. and And I think that for me, getting to that place with homesteading and with living this way has reminded me a lot of the times that we've gotten to hard parts in our marriage where I've thought to myself,
00:27:54
Speaker
I see why other people get to this part of marriage and they're like, I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can keep going that I've never thought that because I think that you and I just had a ah a pretty good understanding of what marriage is and the covenant that it is and I just don't think I've never questioned. I would never like quit. But I understand how, where people get to that point. It doesn't justify quitting. That's not my point at all. I simply empathize that I understand how they get there.
00:28:39
Speaker
to which I would say, you know, when you're talking about your vocation marriage, you're going to have to pray more and you're going to have to push through that. And now you're going to have to make the decision to love your spouse. Well, and it's also, again, very similar to the homesteading thing. It's a time when you get to those hard parts to step back and reevaluate our things properly ordered here, because a lot of times things start to get hard.
00:29:07
Speaker
Not to say that you won't experience hardship if everything is properly ordered, but a lot of times when things, when you start to hit those hard parts, there is some disorder going on somewhere. yeah And that's what I think we've experienced what we have realized.
00:29:24
Speaker
in our hard days so far with homesteading and farming is that whenever we hit the hard part and we're like oh my gosh i'm so tired i don't know if i can keep going we're we start to look like okay where are things piling up what what is causing the exhaustion and the lack of balance for us and we start to see we start to root out where is that disorder and how can we address it so that we can move forward because what we know is that for our family this is what we believe is the best for our family right now and we believe that this is what God has
00:30:04
Speaker
led us to in this season of our life and in raising our children. And so for us, it's not a matter of we're giving up, we're quitting, we're moving back to the city. Neither of us can never really see that happening again. Of course, if God says it for some reason, we'll do what he says, but for us, it doesn't seem like an option. And so we just go back to, okay, where can we address things and how can we make this strong? How can we support each other better? How can we find better order and peace for our family?
Family Dynamics and Farm Life Humour
00:30:44
Speaker
You know, it's some disorder in our homestead and farmers.
00:30:48
Speaker
Go ahead and tell me. The goats.
00:30:54
Speaker
well The enterprise of the goats at Little Way Farm and Homestead is disordered. You know what's funny about the goats is that I think for a long time, you were like, hey, we should get some goats. And I was like, no, no goats. I don't want goats. Lots of people say they don't like goats. They're hard. They're a pest.
00:31:18
Speaker
I don't want goats. And you know what's funny now is that I am much more willing to put up with their craziness than you are. But that really comes down to I'm holding out for the milk and we just haven't hit that season yet. And if we get there and it's not worth it, then we can read. Okay. So the goats are fun. They're funny. They are quirky. They've got a certain like, yeah they're just, they bring some in, they bring some levity to the farm. They're a little more dog-like than we expected. I don't know when, you know, unfortunately my very loyal close dog passed away recently and that was really sad. It's still sad. I'm going to cry right now. I'm not going to cry. I'm going to move on really quickly. I miss my dog a lot. Yeah.
00:32:10
Speaker
but They are dog-like, except that my really awesome German Shepherd dog, who was with me all the time, also knew his place. And these goats just come around everywhere. I don't know. Maybe if you put some effort into training them, they would be... yeah They would sit when you do. Yeah. um But they do. Yeah, I don't know. We just haven't come up with a great system for them and they don't cause enough trouble that no, they're fine. They're just they're just very bold. I guess they should say because they mention it and it'll you know obviously come up on the upset. We did lose, you know, our our big our family guard dog. And so that was really sad, but.
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah, it adds to that conversation about death on the homestead and the farm and just how you process and cope with it. It happens a lot, but it's so interesting whenever you bring out an animal that you're not like bringing them out expecting the end.
00:33:16
Speaker
like with with chickens with meat birds you bring them out knowing they're only going to be here for a short period of time and then we process and they're in people's freezers and it's you have like the expectation but when you bring out something like a dog you're not you're not expecting you're not anticipating the end you're anticipating ah a long period of time that they'll be with you i think it'll be similar to like having a dairy cow Ours we've had a dairy cow, but she hasn't really given us much. She joined the beef herd yeah So so she's a little bit of an anomaly in this conversation but I mean even like we've been talking about what's the next step for her and There there's just a difference with certain animals that you bring out with different expectations of how long they'll be with your family and right how they'll Interact with your family even
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah, I really miss him though. It was a hard loss. It was...
00:34:16
Speaker
I didn't, I know we're digressing here a little bit, but it is interesting on the, you know, rural life and for many people in any other ways too, you really developed these routines. And one of the things that was the most challenging for me after he passed was I didn't realize how involved in my morning chore routine he was. And then all of a sudden I was alone and that was really hard. Now, the really neat thing about that is that.
00:34:47
Speaker
our oldest daughter has really made it a point to get up on her own and meet me outside for morning chores. So for anyone who doesn't, hasn't seen anything I post online about this, we have, you know, different chore time of the day. They're typically broken down into morning and afternoon chores. And right now, chores consist of feeding a variety of enterprises.
00:35:11
Speaker
It is, right now we're in the autumn of 2024. So we have meat chickens growing. We have pigs, feeder pigs. We have breeder pigs. We have breeding breeding sheep pairs, or sheep trio. um One ah ram and two ah female sheep. We have cattle. We have hens. And goats. And then we have the goats. So there's a lot of animals that need to be fed.
00:35:39
Speaker
Well, typically what I do is I go out and I offer feed and water to all the animals that need to be fed, whether it's a ruminant and they need to be fed up you a variety of feed or whether it's a, um, animal that's taking hay, you know, whatever it is. And in the morning time, my oldest daughter has started to get up and basically rushes out to be with me. Not, not necessarily the most helpful, but she accompanies me. Hey, kind of like the dog.
00:36:08
Speaker
Yeah, but in a way that obviously and ultimately really surpasses it because, you know, the dog senselessly runs to me and just wants to be with me all the time. My daughter makes a conscious decision to be outside with me, not probably because she likes chores, not because I don't I don't I don't honestly think she likes doing any of it with me, but because she wants to be with me.
00:36:36
Speaker
And one of the lessons of homesteading more than anything in the rural life is that, uh, the, the awareness and the presence of the humans around you surpasses nearly every task that you need to accomplish. Yeah. It's a big reminder. Yeah. Need more of that. Yeah. We need more of that. We need more prayer.
00:37:03
Speaker
I think people quit homesteading because they get wrapped up in the aesthetics. They get wrapped up in the work. They get wrapped up in the idea of self-sufficiency to the detriment of being present to their family. Yeah, and finding balance. i think I think it's really hard. A lot of it And in a lot of ways, I think you and I have done a lot of things that people recommend not doing when you start homesteading. We took on a lot at the beginning. And I, I think a lot of people are doing it that way because there seems to feel like an urgency in the world that we're living in to like, why didn't we do this five years ago or 10 years ago? it's It's like homesteading from the perspective of being scared because you think the world is about to end. but for and I'm sure there's many people who listen to this and this is how they feel. and I'll tell you, I sympathize with you. i This is why I did the way that I did here. However, I don't know if the world ending is going to really support me in milking a cow.
00:38:19
Speaker
There is a sense of, like well, if it's over, it's over, guys. What are we doing? like We're not gonna be here hiding away in our basements with all the food that we stored up by ourselves when the world is over. The solar panels will give it away.
00:38:35
Speaker
No, but there is there there are many things that could potentially happen that us being able to provide food for our family seems like it would be helpful. Yeah, no, I think that's, I just said it, but I think that's totally fine. im I'm totally open to that.
00:38:52
Speaker
But I do think that people semi connected to modern world and semi in this, we're being really honest, very connected because you're probably employed in the modern world and you're probably trying to make a first generation move for many people to the home setting in the rural lifestyle.
Homesteading vs. Modern Convenience Debate
00:39:10
Speaker
And the reality is you're not going to have a lot of support communally around you and you're not going to have a lot of support often from family or friends.
00:39:18
Speaker
and your life is going to become very difficult because you're making a very difficult decision to nearly radically alter what it is to live and
00:39:29
Speaker
I don't know I think ultimately
00:39:33
Speaker
I think if you feel and you believe that the family society ought to be supported and ought to be cared for, then it's okay to make a radical decision to solve for your family's temporal needs. But more importantly, to build a family society that prays, worships God, attends to the sacraments, and ultimately is a place of refuge.
00:40:05
Speaker
And I think that's a good thing right now. Yeah. I think so too. I know why it's hard for people to homestead.
00:40:18
Speaker
I think these comments should be completely separate from farming. I know why it's hard to homestead. I mean, it's hard to farm too. It's very hard to farm. Do not. It's really hard to farm. Do not mistake us. Yeah, don't worry. But I think homesteading is uniquely difficult because if you're just homesteading, then at some point you're going to have to reconcile Why do I work so hard to provide the conditions for eggs to end up on my kitchen counter when I could just go to the grocery store and have eggs on demand? And it's cheaper. And it's probably, yeah, it's probably definitely less expensive.
00:41:01
Speaker
All the conversations about like homesteading to save money, that's like so in 10 years. Maybe, if you do it the right way. That's like ah one of those like generational wealth conversations.
00:41:13
Speaker
Yeah, kind of, I mean, like agriculture builds on itself. So like over time you can, for instance, we have breeding animals on our farm so that eventually we can provide the animal needs that we have. But even that we have to grow from a farming standpoint to be able to support it at a larger scale. All that to say it's not necessarily cheaper.
00:41:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's like long-term costs versus short-term gains kind of thing. What do you think though? honest Honestly, do you think we'd ever move back to the city?
00:41:55
Speaker
Aside from, you know, a very clear sign from God saying, Hey, you need to move back to the city. I mean, I think.
00:42:04
Speaker
I think the only reason we would is to be near our kids one day if that's where our kids are and we're an old age and like we can't we can't do all this by ourselves. or like Honestly, wouldn't we rather be near our kids in our final days than out on the farm by ourselves?
00:42:25
Speaker
I don't know. I think i hope I know. I hope that they're still near us. But what's our real plan? So hold on. Let's we'll just say it now. So it's recording. and We'll be able to forever go back to it. oh my god Our real like kind of idea or plan here is basically we live in the Midwest, you know, throughout the duration of our children's lives, our the productive time of our life. We build a business to support employees and give you know phenomenal people an opportunity to support their family and then one day if we quote retire which is not like a Normal retirement, but like ah we still live off the land kind of retirement. We're probably going Northeast
00:43:11
Speaker
Not if we're staying near our kids. Well, I think maybe they'll move near us. Oh, yeah We're just like we built this life in the Midwest. Let's go to the Pacific Northwest. Oh That's funny Now we'll figure it out. Who knows we it in another life. Maybe we would have liked the Northeast Coast maybe I think we just see so much possibility for living and so much hope. And we, we say so often there was a realization in our marriage where we just realized at the end of the day, all of these cool things that people do from the ways they choose to live their lives, hopefully morally, but also like the way they choose to do it and where they choose to do it and how they choose to do it. It's just people deciding to do certain things and just persevere. Yeah. So that's a great point.
00:44:08
Speaker
Many people who are listening to this podcast, truthfully, if you haven't already, you'll probably resonate with this eventually. Home setting is really difficult. It's not just physically hard, but it is physically hard. Eventually you realize you're being humbled in ways that you didn't know you could be. It's kind of like when you start working out really hard and you're, and you say the phrase, this is like a common phrase. People say they're like,
00:44:35
Speaker
I'm sore in muscles that I didn't even know existed. Okay. Well, being humbled, like spiritually in ways that you didn't know you could be, I did not know how impactful the weather was to me.
00:44:50
Speaker
I know I mean we just we just went through you get so carried away in the to-do list and like the season of life okay we're starting school we're getting the garlic out and like thinking about prepping to plant it next month and why do the sheep keep getting out they keep getting out every day why do they keep getting out oh yeah It stopped raining. The grass stopped growing. They aren't getting fed anymore. You know, it's funny need to give them hay. I was pulling up pictures. I was looking on my phone of pictures from last year. Last year looks so beautiful. You know, at this time at this time. So it's yes. So in about one ah one and a half weeks from this time we had we were setting up I think for like a family farm event.
00:45:37
Speaker
pumpkins, watermelons, squash. The grass was green everywhere. It was beautiful. This year, drought, dead everywhere. it's already last I think I have a video that I posted on X last year about, you know, it's November and the cattle are still on the the grass and they're eating the forage and it's beautiful. And now my neighbor called me today and asked me about putting out hay. I know.
00:46:05
Speaker
It's not even October. That's one of those things we're like prepping. We're getting all of our wood for the winter and we're like, well, last year wasn't that cold, but we need to make sure we have enough this year because it might be colder this year and we might need more wood. But it's the same thing with hay last year. We might not have used 13 bales of hay. We might have less animals and need more hay than we had last year. It's wild. Oh no, we have a lot more that'll need hay. Yeah. Well, they're smaller.
00:46:35
Speaker
yeah but ultimately on it i mean honestly you might be at a point right now at's the end of the season you're probably really tired and wanting to take a break and then realizing that breaks don't really happen on the homestead and i just want to encourage you consider why you're doing it or even if you're in a position where you haven't chosen to homestead or maybe like maybe you're considering moving into the country to take a bigger leap into it and you're already doing what you can in your home in the city or the suburbs and hearing conversations like this it might sound like a deterrence but i don't think that it should because life is hard you're gonna have hard no matter which path you choose
00:47:26
Speaker
And so if you think that this is the right path for you, I would i would say don't be scared away because it's going to be hard. like Just like working out, working out is hard, but it makes you stronger and it makes you better. And when we're challenged in in our spiritual life and in our Real practical physical life. It makes us stronger and it makes us better so I think it I think it's worth it, but Being able to have the perspective like this is gonna be hard and not walking into it thinking like oh It's gonna be beautiful flowers and all the food that our hearts could desire Well, I hope you all know that
00:48:12
Speaker
It is beautiful. it It is hard. It is rewarding. And ultimately God loves you. Thank you all for your support. We really appreciate it. I hope to see you all soon. Thank you for joining us on another episode of the little way farm and homestead podcasts. Check out the show notes for more information about this episode and be sure to tune in next week.