How to Leave the City & Make Money Homesteading

when we bought this Farm back in 2016 we had no inkling that this was going to be what it is now even close to it I had no thought about leaving my career that I'd been at for 25 years almost and the pandemic had something to do with that you know I was one of those people who I was stressed at work I was you know running 60 hours a week and and you know working to the Bone for somebody else and I was always happy with that because it was just the way I'd always done it so thank you guys so much for letting me tour your farm there's so many little details in here that I think will just apply to so many people and I know that one of the biggest questions that people have about homesteading or wanting to get into farming in this whole kind of lifestyle is you know going from no knowledge to then learning how to garden and raise all these animals how do you transition financially to do it is it just growing food for your family is it trying to go full time and be a full-time farm and have all the income provided like there's so many ways that you can do this so there's not one right way it kind of depends on your family and what you're trying to accomplish and so I just thought it would be beneficial to other people to share your kind of Journey over the last six years and how how you did all this with a with a family of eight how you did that I think the pandemic working from home for a year a year and a half yeah working from home for a year and a half but also just the the realness of what it exposed about the world's food system societies shortages here yeah yeah yeah mostly toilet paper toilet paper apocalypse 2020. we had everything else because we already had by the time 2020 came around we already had our pantry set up we already had like extra flour and Grains and like all of the things like we didn't have to worry about anything immediately yeah yeah except for toilet paper but we can handle that when you saw bad things on the news people were running out to you know McDonald's to make sure they got a couple extra value meals and I was buying you know 50 extra pounds of rice just so you know we would have it immediately and I think a lot of people didn't see that but that caused me and well it caused us to really have a lot of conversation about what's important um to make things better and we started making a plan at that point of okay maybe a five-year plan of you know doing this more full-time so I didn't have to be living that life anymore and we'd already planned the flower warrant Farm before the pandemic we were going to start you pick flowers as a way to supplement and like help to be able to have all these animals because just selling the babies and baby goats doesn't pay for the goats so that we can have the milk we can't just sell their babies and and make enough to cover their care so we were like well we can sell from flowers it'd make enough to cover our garden expenses that was the original kind of like try to offset it just enough to make it so that homesteading the homesteading part of it wasn't so expensive yeah the first year we did the plant start CSA the idea was maybe we can make enough money selling plant starts that it will pay for our seeds or pay because I buy a lot of different things to grow I don't and you have to buy the whole packet every time that is that and we did it one year and found out wow if we tweak this and if we tweak that this can actually make some good money so with not a lot of Labor increase right three years into it we're it's actually a decent part of our income um yeah that's clear I like how you approached it thinking of is you know we want milk for our family we're going to start there yeah or have a garden now how what are some ways we can bring in more revenue from something to pay for that and then before you yes you're already paying for that before you add on your next thing and then you add on your next thing okay what can we do to supplement that more and then that's how you kind of figured out some of these different business ideas and you know I'm not discounting the fact that we were I don't know what word you use lucky blessed whatever it is that I mean I did have a good job I made good money and we were able to we came into this with a nest egg we came into it with money to invest in the farm so we didn't go into debt to do any of this um and I think that's really important especially in this day and age you don't don't want to be I want to own what we're putting in right um and I know not everybody has that luxury of coming from a situation where you have that but my advice to people would be as much as you can start out small start with how can I do this to cover my cost and then once you do it you're going to say I could be more efficient at that I could I could increase production here I could cut costs there and turn this into a profit Center lots of the stuff that we do like with the plants we figured out okay this is how much I can grow with our current greenhouses we figured all that out and then sold that much this year so we we knew what we were going to because we had to cap our our pre-orders on our plants but now I can look at it and say I know I need this much space to grow this much so how much money do we want to make like and how much how much can we handle growing so it's like we'll take so I need this much to cover winter so back into it how many plants is that how much do I need to charge for them like what investments do we need to make in order to grow that much we're going to have to add a greenhouse yeah and what will but it's like we've already got you know we've had no problem selling what we what we needed to in the past with the plants and and we had to turn people down but we've also done that with the farm tour type things we we come in okay how much income do we need to meet the gap between the plant starts between summer flowers and the animals were going to sell well that left X as a dollar figure how do I back into that number okay well I've got to do this many tours a week for the window that we want to do them in the spring when the babies are little and fun and everybody wants to play with them so and then we figure out how how much work we need to put into it based on and how much you charge too because like that's so this is something that you know every business should be doing but a lot of us don't do we don't put a some sort of business plan together a lot a lot of farmers you know even myself like you start doing it yeah and I'll figure it out later and but having these systems in place and thinking about profit and loss and all these you know the more these business ideas in the beginning and seeing what you know what is my goal yeah start with a goal and figure out how you're going to get there like what's our goal with flowers or what's our goal with plants because if I tried to say what was our goal with all of this this never would have happened It's gotta had to be smaller because I wouldn't have been accounting perspective um I think it's important to track what you're spending especially if you have multiple lines of business you know we we break things up into the plant starts uh in garden plants uh the flowers we also have a line for dried flowers so things that we dry process make wreaths flower crowns uh bridal bouquets kind of value-added flowers the animals are a big big line item so we track all of our costs per line item or per line of business and as well as the revenue on it to figure out are we actually making money in all these things because it's really easy to mask you know if you're doing really well let's say on the flowers and you may be losing money on the animals and not know it because that money if you just you know put it all in the system or in your bank account without having a system to track your Revenue versus your the incoming versus the outgoing so having kind of a basic chart of accounts that that tracks all that and it can help you make better decisions next year right you know we may focus more on one thing and less on another next year we're already having conversations about that because one thing may not be as profitable as we thought it was or it was too much work planting and keeping alive all of these flowers when it was so hot very smart and yeah so that you can um Curtis Stone is a farmer that I learned a lot from about Market gardening and one of his things is the 80 20 rule figure out you know there's 20 of your business is making 80 of your money yeah figure out what that is and then double down on that and then next year do that same analysis again and do it again until you're you know that you're not spending time on things that are making you ten dollars an hour five dollars an hour exactly one thing that we've we've tried to stay away from by necessity is thinking of the by the hour type of cost structure you have to value your time you have to because nobody else will but when you're doing things um as we are we're we're opening our farm to the public for the tours for the you pick flowers you know we have to take into into account things that aren't necessarily as practical you know there's curb appeal there is um you know this white picket fence it's nothing we ever would have done I put it in last year we've got a decent amount of money in that in labor we never would have done it otherwise so we we have to consider that and the labor that goes into it you know I mow and chimos we push mowed that whole flower field to make it look nice for people because we can't run a riding mower through it and throw grass clippings on the flowers because it looks bad and you can't not mow it because it's you know people say oh these flowers are beautiful but God is nasty so you know you if you're going to open your farm to people bear that in mind you know you're going to have to do things that you wouldn't necessarily do if it was just you that's a great Point part of the way we do irrigation is different because we're open to the public we can't have hoses and things out all the time so everything is under the rose and we just have to plug the hoses in and then take all of that out again so it's like each row has its own set of soaker hoses the flat style not the drip tape like most people use because then we can take it all up and store it and it's all it doesn't make a big I don't know it just works better for our and our Rose our rows go different directions too so we couldn't we would have had to have so many systems the transition phase because you're now you're not working full-time in I.T right you have now you're doing some part-time things locally here um yeah can you tell me how you like stage things down um and how that kind of looked or we started out with a spreadsheet is that how you're tracking your um expensive reviews yeah he's the master of spreadsheets so it really helped yeah I have an Excel spreadsheet and for for income we use uh square and we we set up categories but I do transfer all that to a kind of a p l spreadsheet so I've got profit tabs and I've got cost tabs and then they on a on a master uh page like the first tab it's basically a summary that pulls from all those yes so you've got basically you can look at you know profit or income cost profit nice um and then you can you know run percentages and things off of that a lot of things you got to consider though I mean like I said it's something maybe a low profit High work but maybe it's something you have in an off season so the value of that money is greater like the the plant stars for example I mean they are profitable and it's good I'm not saying it's not but right but it is a lot of work but it's a ton of work but it's value to our family is higher because it's income in February um and it's bringing in customers early in the season that may buy other products from you exactly almost everybody that comes to pick up plants buy something else too yeah yeah so it's a not a lost leader but something that can bring people on the property and yeah it's marketing yeah you know even though it's more hours it's like in March I want to be in the greenhouse I don't I don't care what's going on I think I'm happy that I'm no longer in the house or out in the snow somewhere it's not it's better but then the little like the herb salts and stuff that we sell you know we track each of those separately so we know is it worth by the time you grow the herbs you you have to buy salt you buy the jars the processing time the electricity to run the dehydrator all these different things so thumbs up how profitable is it really you know numbers tell tell a real story because you can this is one thing I learned at my last in my career is you know emotion we'll tell you one thing numbers tell you something different in merging those together is is key there's a lot of emotion involved with goats yes yeah that is a huge thing in farming we get really attached to whatever it may be on our farm but whatever it is as a business person you need to be pretty ruthless right which is why our wool sheep went to live at another Farm we loved them but yeah they were just they they weren't friendly with people they weren't making babies they were making wool but we have enough wool we have and we don't do anything we don't have time to mess with the wall we don't have time to learn that skill they need to go somewhere where they're going to be loved so they went to another Farm where they are focusing on fiber and we have meat sheep now or hair sheep which we've never actually eaten but whatever we're still raising that's a great point of um every Farm every Homestead is going to do this where they're gonna get involved in something that's not going to pan out not going to work with their system it's not going to be profitable or right we don't do guineas anymore we don't do meat turkeys anymore we just some things just didn't work no don't yeah don't let yourself get caught up and like oh but I spent 500 on these animals no no they're taking all this time from you which is taking money from you and your mind and stress on you move them out yeah and be ruthless yeah you've got to be ruthless about it if you the way the way I would look at it is if you're going to keep those things then you need to basically call them a pet right because they're not making income they're not making income like we have a nice little pet goat right here but she actually does make some income because she's so friendly with people the little white one like she she visits with the visitors and is good but she probably won't ever be able to breed she was a triplet she was really small and she's and we have another one that had a C-section and we're never going to breed her again but the nice thing about small goats is they don't eat much so one thing I might add on to the the whole business side of this for for people that are watching I think it's important for people to think oh you pick flowers and you know maybe opening your farm to do things that is a state by state in a community by Community thing as whether or not that is applicable to you I would highly encourage people to get with their states agriculture or tourism departments there are agritourism laws in the state of Missouri where we are that enable us to do this without uh as without nearly as much risk yeah it's people come onto our farm for agritourism they are assuming the risk of something that might happen and it protects us from frivolous lawsuits you're not going to have that in every state so definitely do your research before you get emotionally invested in the idea of I want to start a U-Pick flower farm and and then look into Insurance to the type of insurance that you might need for that because of impossible frivolous lawsuits it's unfortunately it's huge you need to think about it but some states doing something like this is a non-starter wow especially with animal s yeah it's not just Insurance it is state law got it and how did you get the courage to say we're ready we're going to make the leap of faith and do it there's a there's a couple things with that one would be it was the end of pandemic and they were saying he had to go back to work and the whole into the office go back to the office yes not back back to going there every day yes back to leaving the farm to drive 40 minutes in traffic and all of that like that that was all coming back and that was not the nightmare was coming back yeah yeah it was not it was not something that he looked forward to and then there was all of the other things that were going on around that time with mandates and forcing people to put things in their body that they may not want to which nobody should have to do that it's a free Society right hypothetically yeah there was all that and then and like really that was you know early 2021 and so we made the decision to like okay we're gonna do this he found a the part-time position that he has now so it was going to kind of cover the the big expenses with the insurance and all that and then like I was talking about where we would take the number you need and back into what we have to do to get it and then we just hoped people would show up yeah because that was the big thing we were depending on the public to support us um it wasn't just like we're going to grow vegetables and people have to eat like that was we're going to do something fun and hopefully people want to have fun because that's pretty much how it worked you know that brings up something that is really important um you know my my career I mean I was there 27 years again made good money and all these things a lot of times people get attached to a number this is what I make I cannot make less I think our society has conditioned us to think that if you are going to bring in less dollars your value is less yeah and as a man too that our ego is all tied up in that there's some of that stay at home apparent like the whole last 20 whatever however many years 16 years since since our oldest daughter was born I have not had like this is this doing this is been your job this is my job but like before that I technically didn't have a job so I don't I was seeing creating things as making money even though there's no dollars attached to that that was already in my mind and that helped him like by creating food for our family by growing it like that makes up that difference in that number both financially and emotionally because going from making you know X to making y as a lesser number yes it's not it's not only just emotional it's like the old adage that when you move into a bigger house you're going to fill up all the closets you're never going to have extra space you're never going to have extra money I mean take whatever you're making add a zero to the end of it I would almost guarantee you within a couple of years you'll have found a way that you'll be complaining about money again that's part of what we do it's human nature was we took that spreadsheet of what we absolutely needed and the difference like he made more than what we absolutely needed so we tried to take that extra and put it toward debt and not and put it towards savings and we we did that for a few years before before this so we knew we could get by on Less on less than what you've already made we kind of tested that first and then just said this better work when I ended up leaving the job it was I got a lot of disbelieving like are you serious are you crazy but that's because the mentality is but you're going to be making less money yeah well but yeah spend like how much more time with my family right and and it's and we're so conditioned to think that more money is more success it's more better and well yeah it's not well and and there's nothing to say that within a couple of years of building this up I won't be making more money but that's not that's not the point you know figure out what that figure out what that number is that you have to have and build from that not the what you have now and work backwards from it it's it's a trap yeah absolutely and you can you can make that number lower you just have to cut cut Corners figure out how to like so we have to eat all this gluten-free food like that's really expensive but we buy gluten-free grains in bulk make our own flour that cuts costs in that area like a ton yeah we invested in like a 400 Grain Mill that's really nice and it was expensive but it was 10 years ago so it's paid for itself many times over by buying grain instead of gluten-free flour and it tastes better better nutrition yeah yeah it's not oxidizing by sitting right exactly and yeah and which is extra important in gluten-free stuff because it gets nasty in a hurry yeah that's why most people think gluten-free food tastes bad it's because they're doing it wrong yeah they're just because it's gross and pre-packaged gluten-free foods are all made with rice flour and I usually use a seed oils or some other bad stuff oh yeah that's not good so I know but you but to carry that across to anything with your meat um you know we spend a good chunk of money on chickens and chicken feed but we have our own eggs and we have uh our own meat from that and we raise the chickens in the summer when we're bringing in money from the farm and we have them in the winter when the income is not it's great so it's a nice day I mean it's the same either way but it feels better makes you feel more secure knowing going into winter that you already I've got 50 chickens in the freezer I can I can make a chicken a week I can make two chickens a week whatever that number is and then you supplement that with your beef with your pork with your lamb and we buy the beef from a local Farm because we don't have our own beef yet and by the whole yeah yet and I would say to people too don't feel like you have to raise everything around your farm you don't need to like I don't I'm not you know I have cheap pigs chickens like that's fantastic I buy my milk and I buy my beef and I have some good sources for that and that's okay and yeah some people feel like I gotta do everything but you don't you shouldn't I don't think I do everything so you can also do something like you could raise a pigs one year and chickens the next year and go back and forth and put them in the freezer and especially in the beginning I was a caveat that as you get more advanced and more experience you know what you're doing and you add on more animals and more and more then you can handle it but some people will make a big mistake I've seen so many homesteads they'll get all the animals in the first or second year and they just you know we pretty much did that if you haven't had the experience yeah but did you have a bunch of disasters and or you know we really didn't have disasters we didn't have disasters but we weren't really like getting much out of it yeah like everybody was alive and cared for and we enjoyed them and we were we were getting all this fertilizer and really helping our land but we weren't getting a lot back from them it took like three years to really get to where we were like this is actually our first year we're getting the amount of milk that I wanted to get we had to get the right does and and figure out how to feed them that was the other thing because we weren't them enough and then they would lose too much weight and then they would have to wean or dry them off and be but you know trying things too one of the most inexpensive sources of meat that you can raise and we are set up for it is rabbit however I butchered a bunch of rabbits one first meet we started with man it's a pain I do not like butchering rabbits it's just harder it I hate the smell there's not enough meat to make it worthwhile we really don't like to taste that well if like we tried to just hide the taste and soups and things but we always were finding bones and we had little kids and part of that maybe just experience but we decided early on after doing that twice that okay this isn't for us I'm going to devote that energy towards chickens yeah and we can butcher a chicken and get everything out of it and and it's better than anything we can buy at the store so we keep the rabbits I we use them for fertilizer they still have multiple uses on our farm but we're not actively eating them that's I guess that's a cautionary tale is when you start doing something like this if you get passionate about it prepare yourself for the fact that you're going to lose that passion elsewhere and you got to be okay with it I mean it was a struggle for me I mean I spent well over half of my life with one company and I was emotionally vested in it and financially and to have to admit to myself that I wanted to leave Corporate America that I wanted to leave you know a management level position where I was well paid and highly sought thought of to to want to do that to admit that I wanted to do that I had to come to terms with that myself because and to know that you were disappointing those people that you'd worked with like yeah yeah that way to wait on you a little bit it did weigh on me a lot if you if you align your your identity with a corporate job and you want to change that don't lose sight of the fact and this happened with me and it was it was hard to watch it but I knew it was going to happen that any job you're at you will be replaced the next day it's a job right don't forget that yeah um it it was almost ego busting for me to see well they moved it right along yeah I left on Friday and on Monday they were back at it cool and that's great but you know don't let your ego get the best of you and think they need me and I it's not it's not necessarily the case you got to live your life for you not for somebody else for a paycheck yeah that's such a great point I think it's really important for young people to hear that too that um it's not about that and yeah there's there's so much more to life than your career or money so much more and and not to say there's anything wrong with it if that is your life then that's your choice it's cool but just you know be objective about it if you put your identity into your job right that's fine but you just have to recognize that that is what your identity is and to change that is hard and you also have to let yourself like be the the new thing like yeah it took us like several years to be like okay so we're Farmers now like this is what we do like I'm really doing this especially as modern people like you know people living in the 2020s it feels yeah yeah almost a little weird like we're going back in time or something imposter syndrome that's the other thing it's like serious imposter syndrome like I'm not really good at this I'm not really doing this but what I am it's here I mean I believe we're supposed to be doing this if yeah I mean growing even just if it's just a plant in your apartment there's just something about the connection to Nate and any level of that like is real if you're doing it you're doing it like like let yourself feel good about it if people would like to find out more about gooseberry Bridge Farm and more about your work and learn more from you guys you shared so many great tips Instagram Facebook and YouTube we've got a presence on all three and we're we're constantly putting out new content and our goal is to be informative about what we're doing here but also to educate people about uh you know people that are interested in doing what we're doing or just want to follow along and live vicariously cool and I'll put all those links down in the description for their Instagram and YouTube so you guys can go check that out and maybe you want to learn more about freeze drying or how they set up their flower beds or gardening how they have that on their YouTube channel so thank you guys so much for having me it was really nice spending getting to know you a little bit and and seeing your farm and I learned a lot as well getting to be here

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 17,442

Keywords: how to make money homesteading, how to make a living homesteading, making money homesteading, homesteading, make money homesteading, how to leave the city and move to the country, how to start a farming business, how to start a homestead with no money, how to start a homestead business, gooseberry bridge farm, nature's always right, how to homestead for beginners, how to homestead with no money, homestead making money, homesteading money making ideas

Id: ygbnzBLbCYk

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023