They Escaped the City & Make Money Homesteading

everybody welcome back to another nature Zoe's Right video today I am in Rogersville Missouri doing a farm tour with Stacy and Jeremy Hill at Gooseberry Bridge Farm this is a homestead that brings in quite a bit of income and this is one of the reasons I really wanted to feature them besides all the great growing techniques they're using the great animal raising techniques that they're using and they're also going to share their journey of how they went from Jeremy working full time making really good money in the it field how they scaled that back and built up their Homestead to fill in the gap of that income and just kind of how that whole process went for them I know there's so many people out there that are interested in homesteading maybe making a little bit of income from a homes that are maybe full-time income from their farm and this will be a great video to watch and learn from here when did you arrive at this Homestead and how did you kind of come to the conclusion that you and your family need to to live off the land in two thousand fifteen maybe 2016. we made a five-year plan that we wanted to get out of town we wanted to raise our kids on some land we wanted to have animals we wanted them to have chores grow with responsibility um so we so we basically said in five years in 2020 we wanted to be moved and that was around 2015-15 yeah um and then in 2016 we decided to go ahead and start looking at property and we put an offer in on on Labor Day of 2016 and about the place and have a look at that yeah it was kind of the first things that you started with when you got to your homestead what were your first big goals we wanted to have a garden but we had to find it first I mean it's this is an Old Homestead so our house was built in 1880. so there was a place where there was a garden already and it we pretty much Used winter to yeah learn and let everything die back because it was completely overgrown this was not a well-maintained property it was basically the house and there was a driveway and there were some fences but there was seven foot tall weeds in the fences and it was just like when we came to look at the place they brush hogged right up to the house the first things that we did were things that we knew would take along to uh reap a harvest off of so we did plant an orchard um in hindsight I might have put it somewhere else yeah it was just kind of like well here we are you know we tried with the best of what we knew we just put put in uh probably about 20 fruit trees knowing that it would take five years to get anything out of them and true to form this year is the first year we've really gotten any fruit we've gotten a decent Harvest of uh pears this year did you have any Garden experience or any farming experience we had how did you learn I guess once you got here we had gardening experience from in town we had done a community garden plot for a few years and then we had raised bed garden at our house in town but it was very small compared to this and we'd done canning and we would buy stuff from the farmer's market in bulk to supplement our little garden we took a little I took a class when we lived in town from a guy who did a race raised bed gardening class um you know one of the biggest things that we did was we took tidbits from him we took tidbits that we learned on the internet trial and error yeah we didn't we don't subscribe to any single methodology any person's you know teachings per se it's more of a yeah you know well this worked for us and this worked for us let's mush those together so just yeah trial and error and figuring out what works for your context and your climate and all of that yeah and your goals um you know a lot of people tell you you need to plant this you need to plant this many of this per person you know it comes down to what you like you know I was noticing the other day you know we're we're canning Tomatoes right now we don't can whole tomatoes everybody says yes I can't hold in diced tomatoes and this many of this uh salt yeah we pretty much just do salsa we've been doing tomato sauce this year it's like yeah because it's what we eat to me you should always start with what are your goals yeah what what does your family eat what what come March you know when you really have no food left in the pantry that you grew do you wish you had more of um not you know what's going to look pretty or what's gonna you know tick a box but what does your family actually eat yeah and then back that up into growing this past year so I'm growing I'm trying to grow tons more green beans but it's been the worst green beanier I've ever yeah we're big green beans and squash are our two big ones yeah so you know overdo those nice that's a great tip yeah everybody thought oh don't plant too much zucchini I'm like oh let me tell you there's no such thing so right now we are in your no-till you pick flower garden so tell me how this idea came about and why did you choose flowers and why did you choose no-till too what made you yeah so as far as why we did flowers we we really sat down and thought what can we how can we capitalize on this and and use it to generate some Revenue because yeah part of it is you know having a homestead is expensive you know to get started yeah um building shelters for the animals we were looking at ways to to pay for it to try to pay for the farm right um it wasn't really a let's use this to make a living initially yeah um and then it kind of turned into that the first year we opened was 2020 so when when the shutdown started to happen in March of 2020 we were just gearing up for our first season that we planned the year before we thought oh no this is going to be awful we we are going to have wasted all of this time and energy and effort and we hope that he's going to be able to come didn't do any succession planting that year yeah because we were like I'm not starting more seeds like what if no one shows up because we weren't going to open until the end of June and we would have had to have been planting every two or three weeks all through that but what happened since you know all the shutdowns happened uh Farms were listed as essential and outdoor activities were deemed safe um we ended up getting a lot of people coming out because people were stuck in their houses in town they had nowhere to go they had nothing to do they can't go to the mall they can't go to the movies they can't yeah and flowers make people happy can't go to the swimming pool so they came out here and put flowers you can socially distance so we had an awesome year our first year and 2021 was comparable so we could only open two days a week because we didn't have we didn't have enough flowers yeah we didn't have enough flowers we had to open Tuesdays and Saturdays and that was it for 2020. so it was a huge success very popular the local community supported it yeah and now you're been doing that for two years yeah this is the third year but the no-till thing came from the fact that tilling is nearly impossible here it's just like we have a tractor we have a big tiller it doesn't touch the soil it's rock and we basically follow the tiller picking up rocks and it's not worth it and it doesn't actually help anything I mean it's just even tilling in the garden the first time that because it had been done but for because somebody had pulled out the rocks it it set a good stage for us to get started with the no-tail stuff but that doing that out here we knew that wasn't going to work all these beds are basically the shovelings from our goat and sheep houses okay so we'd go get the hay that's been pooped on and peed on and we laid it out covered it for the winter we did that in the fall and then we planned into that and this is the first the first year we lay out the beds with with string so we can tell exactly where we need to put it and we measure it like eight to ten inches deep with the just goat rabbit whatever okay yeah ready to go compost basically yeah basically ready yeah and you have to bring it in by the trailer load and unload all of the houses and put it out here and then every um every year after these flowers are all done because 99 of this is annuals so we pull everything out we have a couple different compost piles most of the the zinnias because of the diseases they carry they go to our chicken yard and we don't use that compost for anything else they just fill grow bugs and the chickens make it disappear when the flower season's over we'll come through and we will cut out all the dead plants because I mean you cut them off leave the roots yeah leave the roots we'll pull off the weed fabric and then amend that soil with all of the hay poop pee stuff that we shovel out of the animal houses and then we leave it for the winter leave it let it yeah wrap all the fabric up and put it in storage for the winter it helps extend its life we reuse all the landscape staples and we actually even we have this plastic support netting on here which is designed to be disposable but since we have to get it off of the plants in order to compost the plants I roll it all up and use it again our biggest things that we try to do and we almost make a fun game out of it is we try to reuse everything we try to use things that are already on the farm since this was an old 140 year old Homestead the barn had a whole lot of old like scrap Lumber we've pretty much recycled all of that for you how can we use reuse things and use and use things that are not for their intended purpose to try to you know use it for something use it for something else like these hoops are just you know one inch one inch PVC we also use these hoops to use Frost cloth in the winter if there's something planted that we need to cover we'll plant tulips all in this area and sometimes we need to cover them yeah we'll have 5000 tulips in this area in the spring how much do you charge to do you pick how do you operate that so for the summer flowers that are all like cut and come again they just keep producing we do a container it's about this big it holds between 50 and 80 stems and it's 25 to fill it and they we give them the container and the scissors and do a little tutorial yeah we have a little where to cut the flowers um how to you know shake to make sure they're ready to go ready these are not no not right and just yeah set them loose the only thing we've been limiting this summer is sunflowers the single stem sunflowers that just make one flower and they're done we just it depends on how many we have and how busy we are we just try to make sure everybody gets them sunflowers are really popular so talking earlier this is um the flower business is um what percentage you would say of your homestead income is this yeah I'd say close to half okay yeah close to half Isn't that cool and then the other half the other big portion of your homestead income is coming from farm tours and teaching people about animals and all of that so I'd love to go over there and tell us more about that because um I haven't seen that too often where people are doing that another little percentage we have yes regular um yearly farming income is Garden starts so so since we have the high tunnels and we're starting all the seeds for these flowers and we also start all the seeds from our garden we do vegetable garden csas as a pre-order so they order all their plants and then because they're pre-solds we get the income in February and then they pick up their plants in May yeah if you're doing Market gardening if you're doing any kind of you know income off of your farm you know it's generally hard to come up with income in the winter months so being able to sell those and collect all that money in January and February and then you deliver in May and you're already doing the work for yourself anyway smart I like everything at the same time yeah it's very nice you're going to be growing 50 tomato plants for yourself why not grow 500 and sell to it turns out it's not that much of your friends right yeah because you're just efficiency because you're already doing all these tasks so why not until you're picking aphids off of every single seedling it's a little bit harder but yeah ladybugs and uh praying mantises are Employee of the Month how are you pre-selling what are you what are you using software and it has like and I also have a like a website that lists all the varieties of seeds that I have so I I don't offer things that I don't already grow or have or like know that I can do pretty much so it's we they have the list they can go to the list and they can pick it's like a like a package like a large garden and they get 18 plants or a um backyard backyard garden is nine plants so it's like different sizes and then they pick what those plants are and put it in the Google form but lots of people just say I want three tomatoes and three peppers and I want sweet peppers or spices they'll be very vague and then I just fill it in for them so I grow all these fun heirloom varieties and like get people exposed to that by you know just like they they trust my judgments so I'm like yes you will have an awesome Garden here I've never had a tomato that wasn't yeah that wasn't a plain red better boy or whatever right right so you know and we do get requests for those and I'm like I'm not growing that stuff you're gonna have to try this Cherokee purple like you'll like it you'll never go back then yeah nobody's complained so yeah and then it's fun introducing your customers to the new things and blowing their mind about how different it tastes yeah text from them with pictures like this is awesome because I mean around here at least your your best option to buy that stuff or most people's option is they're going to The Big Box store and buying it from the Nursery Center which is coming from a factory somewhere Factory and the plants are smaller and they cost more and they're all hybrid probably not organic yeah and we also do flowers as an add-on to that so people can get cut flowers they can get some they can get a flower garden as an add-on I like the varieties that I have extra of and and make sure they get I also do an herb garden add-on so they can be a little four packs of cilantro and basil and Dill things like that yeah I like that you're kind of um you're giving them options but you're kind of guiding them because so many people are new gardeners what do I exactly want I like how you are organized that it's smart for Animals we try to have multiple purposes for them the goats and the rabbits are are great because they're the milk the goats are milk goats the rabbits are all either fiber animals the the French Angora rabbits or the uh or their meat rabbits the Dual Purpose for most of them would be the fertilizer we really rely on the hay and the the poop from all those animals to fertilize both the flower field and our garden since we don't use any store-bought or synthetic fertilizers fantastic the other thing that we do with the uh the goats and the rabbits specifically is we do do farm tours where we allow people to come out and do that right to do this yeah but learn about animals you know most people you they may have gone to uh you know an attraction or something where okay you can get down where they where they have seen a goat or they've uh you know maybe maybe seen a bunny or something like that but they've never gotten to interact with one or be around a farm animal to know that you know or interact with them in there normal environment yes so you know our goal is to educate people it's you know it helps us from a revenue standpoint but it also it helps educate the public about you know what these animals can be used for and those people don't know that and that you know they're different breeds of goats they're a goats that are bred for meat they're a goats that are bred for uh Dairy yes we have we have fainting goats while they're fun and everybody's seen the YouTube videos they're some of our fainting goats are actually some of our best milk producers so they're actually really good milk Goods if you get the right lines and then we've got um Jasmine over here so la Mancha and she jumping out like a gallon we're getting about a gallon of milk a day just off of her nice from a from a baby that she had in April so and she fed a bottle lamb for us yeah and she adopted a lamb the other thing we've used the goats for in the past well and it's just not as necessary now because this is all nice and clear but that's not what this looked like when we got here this was all rose bushes that the multi-floor rose the really invasive stuff and poison hemlock and like just you couldn't even like see through this area we do three rotations so we've got three larger pastures here yeah I'd say larger they're they're goat sides they're not big pastures but we rotate those girls uh three weeks on six weeks off so I like does it is this kind of the building and the where they um yeah they're protected that's in the center and then you have Paddock surroundings yeah that Barn that's over there is brand new we just built that so it's not even connected to the pastures yet we're just using it for babies right now our first houses are those ones in the we found in the barn so these are meat rabbits um they can be used for meat we use them both with our farm tours honestly we use them more for fertilizer than than we do for meat we have literally been eaten them we've also used them to supplement dog food yeah because we do have four going on five livestock Guardian dogs so you know the feed Bill gets pretty big so it does help with that on a supplementation standpoint nice but we're not raising them in hutches to collect the poop we're we've got them in tractors like this these are six foot by two foot tractors made out of just PVC and um a little bit of uh 10 10 cut into two foot sections so they've got an enclosed area on one side a little lid on top and wire around the outside and the idea is they're light enough that my kids can lift them yeah yeah it's welded wire if you drag them they can get their feet stuck in it so one bite one by two wires one inch by two inch why is this better um it doesn't let the babies out the baby's gonna let other things in and it's it's just revealed I built several of these and they they they hold up generally pretty well but they uh I mean they do wear out over time we've used a little bit of scrap Lumber to attach the doors um the hardest part about them is just with material prices going up so much this year four 10 foot pieces of PVC yeah you cut off two feet and two feet to get it six feet long and then you use those for the corners but we also use these for that way the quail are more spaced so they're six feet long our aisles on our flower field are about six feet wide and then the flower roads are about four feet wide okay four foot uh weed barrier so we'll take these and put half of the tractor sideways over the aisle half over the flower bed and move them every day the the rabbits will eat the grass out of the aisles and then they generally will poop where there's not grass so they poop in the flower beds adding fertilizer so they're basically just recycling grass so what I just pulled from that is yeah they I didn't because I have narrator not raised rabbits they poop on a place with no grass like pick a spot interesting sometimes it's the place with no grass that helps a lot but usually they'll pick one end or the other of their cage so this is their house end yeah so they usually don't go in there they go shopping in this corner which is why you can litter box train rabbits pick the spot and when you move the cage the spot is the same right every time especially so you figure out what their spot is yeah just flip the tractor around yeah exactly so that's I love those that's like one of those patterns in nature like that you can recognize and then say well okay now apply it to something and we made a whole YouTube video okay cool rabbit s they're mixed drink and good mothering skills but most importantly to thrive on growth on faster and they don't like if rabbit pellets but if you don't need that meat and you really just want them to not eat a lot of food and just manure yeah if you want it for fertilizer and for cute rabbits then you don't have to feed them the pellets they can just do grass as long as we have grass right so in the winter in Winter we give them hay and we also supplement like each rabbit gets a half a cup of pellets okay so we measure it out so they're not but in our flower Fields I mean as long as there's not snow actively on the ground there is grass there's enough grass here because it's really can they dig through snow like a sheep can do that they don't do that they don't really don't yeah okay maybe could if they've got desperate most of them just kind of sit in the corner okay when it's they don't mind cold they just wanna out away from the west but we don't have too many snow days here I mean we we get we usually get two or three good snows throughout the winter season so they're they're more of the anomaly than the regular that's another thing I have a YouTube video is how we prepped our rabbits and all the animals for when it's not snow so on the angora rabbits and also um the wool sheep when we have a wool that's not usable yes uh we'll ferment it and use it as much mulch oh cool so with just in water do you add any microbes to it or the thing that the old you know Shepherds and whatnot told me to do with the sheep wool which I thought they were messing with me because like it was so gross but they said to put like the belly wool and the stuff that has poop in it yeah a tote and leave it out in the rain yeah in the spring and let it rain on it and then when it really smells bad it's done yep and I'm like okay and so we haven't added anything to it as long as we just let it rain in it and then you wear gloves and don't touch that stuff it'll stain you forever especially the Sheep because it has lanolin in there too yeah it is wonderful the difference it's made on our plants like this year I put it on one of our grape plants and not the other one and we got like two bunches of grapes on one plant and like all the grapes on the other one wow that's awesome and we'd never actually gotten anything off that plant before wow and I did it with my strawberries the first year we planted strawberries I had enough to cover half of them to mulch around each little strawberry plant yeah and it made a huge difference wow and for the most part it's the wool that most people throw away yeah the belly wool yeah just so we bag it separately we just keep a bag of junk wool and keep it off the side and that's our our mulch there's a technique called jadam organic farming it's a Korean or organic farming method but that's that's one of the main fertilizer methods is doing this in anaerobically fermenting it in water and uh but it's so cool because I've never heard that the wool technique before I've heard of you can do it to animals and that animal and stuff too but um yeah very cool we have something else we do with our dead animals yeah I just compost them usually yeah so we have like a rabbit it or a chicken or something that dies we have a bucket honestly and also whenever we butcher our chickens yes the parts that we don't yeah go ahead so we put it in a bucket in the chicken yard it hangs and it has holes drilled in it oh maggots take it to the maggot bucket yeah and you'll just have maggots pouring out of it and the chickens are go crazy living their best life yeah it works really well my bucket gets a little funky it needs to be warm enough for flies Okay but we've actually put things in them in the winter and it kind of stays cold and Frozen and when it thaws every now and again yeah oh neat and we keep it way far in the back of the chicken that's one thing I'm really proud of is when we when we do our meat chickens um you know we butcher enough just for our family right now I hope to do enough that we can maybe have some to sell later but just to do ours we we butcher about 25 a day pretty comfortably we can do those in the afternoon um compost of feathers the heads and the entrails go into the maggot bucket the feet we dehydrate for chew toys for the dogs uh the we generally will just freeze the chicken's whole shrink wrap them and put them in the freezer and then when we prepare them we keep all the bones and Skin Out make broth first round of broth we eat it's really good second round of broth sometimes if it's good enough we'll eat it as well and then we'll run either a second or third round and just cook it down for about two days until the Bone's just mush in your hands and that's good dog yeah any other animal food so effectively you can do chickens with no waste remember we used to we sit around and sometimes it gets a little contentious but we uh you know we'll figure okay we need to put new fence around this how can we do this with what we have right or we need to accomplish this how do we do it without buying anything yeah it reminds me of like you know our grandparents or something living through the Great Depression hearing some of those stories of we saved the tin foil and we did to this and yeah I get he always like it tells me I must have had yes she did it was everything I know you really can though I mean it's awesome our culture our society has been conditioned to throw it away and buy a new one um so you know if you make a game out of it almost it can be fun and it also saves you a ton of money and you're growing healthier animals healthier food for your family and teaching on kids teaching a lesson yeah I mean it's just and improving amazing soil and that's why we do it right that's why we do it of using what you have this uh 16 foot by four foot cattle panel when we moved here people had cows here at some point and this was all overgrown but when we started just bushwhacking our way through the place we found about 50 of these score like gold mine generally I use eight foot t-post 16 foot cattle panels and put them up with zip ties and then I'll put one Plumbing hose clamp on each one just to hold it the whole time zip tie yeah now the way we've had the weight of the tomatoes pulled the clothing off oh yeah they're 16 foot panels I usually come in about two two squares yeah each side and put one in the middle and one in the middle I usually and then I'll overlap the two right here so I've got the foot section here and they're raised up off the ground that's the other thing we do yes lots of people don't do it's they're at least two feet off the ground yeah because the tomato plants are clearly going to get higher than four feet Yes but we also in the spring you can see it on the next row a little better I trim off all the lower leaves to prevent them from getting wet in the splashback and all that but normally I keep all of this from laying on the ground that I gave up this year you know it might be worth the investment because this will last you decades yeah so absolutely yeah versus using wood or something that you know is Gonna Last Five Years right yeah and that's the kettle panels are what our greenhouses are held up there too which makes them really wind resistant and there's a lot of wind in Missouri we grew winter squash on this we grew snap peas and shelling peas first and then added the winter squash while the peas were still going and then there's tomatoes and cucumbers on that one and I'm planning next year to redo our whole tomato area and we're gonna do the weed fabric so that there's like a slit down the middle so they just the same team and I'm going to plant peas through the whole thing and like put some sort of strings there to reach them to the top so then we'll add the tomatoes and when it's time because peas grow and are like blooming and producing when you put the tomatoes in and then they are done once the tomatoes need the trellis great that's a great succession tip I like that a lot and I need more room because I put peas on all of this and it was great but they were like 25 plants and I'm like that's not enough for us so you'll put the peas in the ground into or beating a spring or I planted them as early as like mid-march here and our last frost is technically like April 25th it's about the same time we plant potatoes and onions here got it yeah I love that yeah do the peas they die out and then by the time they do out those tomatoes are coming those will be there great tip so Leaf is a new uh vegetable that I'm growing in my garden this year so I can get my sponges but you can also eat these and I they're delicious I have not tried mine yet but so tell us when do you pick them so if you pick them when they're up to size and still they're firm but they're still have some give to them you cut them up and eat them just like you would like a crooked squash or something zucchini um they're indistinguishable when you eat them yeah they're really good that's fantastic yeah so so the beginning of the Season let your fruit set so that you can get the like that with these it's not quite dry yet but almost it's drying yeah so your first fruits will set you'll get your sponges but then into season something that's this big won't grow big enough to to become a sponge so you're better off just eating it like a zucchini and this time of year typically the zucchinis are dead so perfect timing for the loofah our livestock Guardian dogs we have an Anatolian shepherd and a Great Pyrenees and they have had babies together so we've got two half and half across nice um we are slowly working our way back to all Anatolia like Rosie here yes and uh the main reason is the anatolians will usually bond to and guard animals whereas what we found at least with the Pyrenees and in our research is that the Pyrenees want to guard the land and territory their territory and by Nature they want their territory to be a lot more than we have so keeping them off the roads off your neighbor's Farm interesting so we're trying to go back to this anatolians because they'll if the animals move pasture to pasture she just goes with them yeah interesting so you found in your case that they've been more adapted to the animals and she also um and please eat less which is really nice really so much less and I didn't knees and then I was like what is wrong with him he eats so much and then I looked it up and it's actually a breed characteristic for the antonians and one of their daughters doesn't eat very much and the other one needs like a Pyrenees interesting I mean like she'll she can live off of like air and go poop and we feed her obviously but she does not eat like for her size she doesn't eat that much interesting we love the personality of the Great Pyrenees yeah because they're just I do too super sweet yeah great family dog you have to worry about them with your kids or anything and Rosie is Awesome with the kids oh good yeah I heard Dana twins could be a little bit more aggressive with people but they as long as they know you then and it's totally fine she's used to us having farm visitors and we're out there telling her it's okay these are people we know yeah new people every day but right yeah she barked at you we told her it's okay cool I'm gonna go hide then yeah and she went and laid down behind the house she's not even watching us now she's like oh you guys got this okay sometimes she doesn't trust us as much if she hears a gunshot then suddenly she's in her yard are you guys okay did you kill something for me that's awesome she's got a whole thing but but otherwise she stays in her fence she's our only dog that doesn't require an electric fan wow to keep her where we want her I think she's really smart like she like if we tell her something about an animal like it's like she knows what we're saying hmm like there was one time when she tried to attack a guinea that had gotten into her pen that was ours and we told her like no that's ours yeah and like yelled at her from across the pastor again she never touched one again like interesting oh cool that's yours I'm leaving it alone like yeah and I have no issue if we got a new animal put it through quarantine yeah we threw a new goat in here didn't read about it at all she knows I when we first got our pigs she was a little more concerned about them but she had just had puppies and they made weird noises so they were piglets making strange noises and she was like it took a little bit more to convince her that they were safe and that they weren't going to hurt her or her babies but otherwise like that's the only time we've had to really do anything extra with her did she kind of help train the other dogs a little bit like they kind of observe her at all and yeah yeah and she said that she sets off the alarm they listen where it's one of the like one of the house dogs that's off the alarm nobody listens so that's funny they know the difference yeah yeah wow and the most of them will listen to Rocky now to our Great Pyrenees but because he's by the driveway so if he barks first then she barks then the other ones they have somebody's coming down the drive the Cooney Cooney's um are really just known for not rooting as much as long as they are I mean lots of people say all pigs root and they can root but if you look at like this Ginger Pig here her nose is kind of really short and upturned that makes it a lot harder for them to root like this whole area we dug this up for them with a shovel when it was uh when it was when it was 100 degrees we dug this out and filled it with water which they've kind of it's kind of filled back in now but we had to make them a wallow and all that because they can't do it themselves interesting um especially not when the ground is really dry so but this is the only area in the whole pasture that's got any damage or rooting at all because they uh they just don't they don't do that they go out in the grass and just graze just like the goats do it's very cool and they've got a they've got a a redder meat yeah the other white meat their meat is more of a red meat um they're a lard pigs so they do have a lot of a lot of fat a lot of fat which we use that which we use we get under the lard and use it in cooking and everything else so part of that is diet too they I mean when they're mostly eating grass they're a little bit leaner or I'm just hoping they're really pregnant because otherwise they are overweight yeah but given the fact that we had them with a boar and we tried to breed them probably bread yeah like otherwise they're gaining weight on summer pasture and their minimum their minimal grain ration so so how much do you feed them these three feed them they each get one cup in the morning of grain like a big scoop a pig like an actual like a measuring cup yes like they get bigger totally but they're also getting oatmeal and no that's the piglets are getting them we had some sorry but they do these get all of our kitchen scraps too in the kitchen so these ones get the minimal amount of grain but they get yeah all the kitchen scraps which is mostly vegetables at this point um yeah because if I was gonna feed my you know I'm feeding my two these are like two these like 300 pound pigs now I mean I gotta feed them almost to five like a half a five gallon bucket every day yeah and so our grow outs are eating they're eating a grain ration but I don't think it's that much I don't know if the kids feed them but they get um we've got some oatmeal from a what where would we get that from it's a uh it was kind of like a back to school program or it's one of those School breakfast programs and they ended up with a bunch of extra that passed this expiration date so we have all these bags we've got cases how'd you how'd you find that or how would somebody find something like that in their town uh we kind of we kind of lucked on to it a friend of ours told us about it okay um so we we've kind of gotten in with them so when they have food that goes bad we get a call yeah and they come they know we have pigs so right and you know like um donation shelters or some places that yeah that they'll give you food yeah and some people they can't give it to people we have a we have a friend who has a name with with a natural grocery store in in town and when they get produce going bad they get a phone call that's what she gets is usually like bags and bags of lettuce yeah or something that's that's going to go bad it's hard to feed all that at once and you can't really freeze lettuce right so I really like having stuff like the oats to supplement yeah this has been really good I mean it's a little sugary it's not what we would necessarily choose yeah but for a girl it's nothing bad it's just and we do cook it too we pour it pour boiling water in it and let it be like regular oatmeal so they don't have to work extra to digest all that yeah neat and we also feed that to our chickens and nice and warm stuff but very cool we have boxes and boxes I'd say if you've got a local either a food shelter or yeah the one that we have uh struck up a friendship with is it's actually a faith-based group and they provide before and after school meals to a rural a very rural school district and when it's just when they have food they can't get mad yeah or they can't feed it to kids because it's past their generation they can't give it to people right I mean or it's been in the refrigerator too long and yeah and they need to clear out the space because they get regular shipments so they can't it's either it's going in the trash into a landfill basically so right it always comes to our pigs and chicken beautiful I mean I'd say just ask around the worse somebody can do is say no exactly yep and uh Brewer Brewers who I'd make beer the spinach Brewers grain that's that's another example whenever we have a tree go down or a branch fall off or any kind of extra larger piece of wood rather than throwing it in a brush pile to burn or just letting it rot away out there we'll throw it in this particular yard and then every couple months you'll go flip it over where it's making ground contact and then the worms the bugs The Beetles that are trying to decompose that uh log you flip those over the chickens get at it and it's just good free high protein yeah chicken food that's fantastic anything you can do to supplement uh you know people pay good money for meal worms it's basically the same thing right there are actual yeah so often do you have to um flip them to get in you don't have to ever do it but if you if you want them to if you wanted to get all the worms off of it I'd say every month or two depending on the weather if it's wetter more often if it's dry they're just gonna sit there yeah yeah when it's when it's wet I tell the kids to flip one or two every time they feed the chickens so they they do they don't have to do a lot of work and it's just a couple logs especially when it's the smaller stuff yeah you can move it really easier when it's rainy and we throw like cover crop seeds in there like radishes and turnips and stuff that they can eat the greens and we close off this fence and then they don't eat all the seeds oh cool I like that then we'll have a crop of that and then in the fall all of our and stuff will be piled in here in a giant but don't go crazy so they'll eat the seeds off of it and then as those start to decompose more in the winter and spring it's more bugs and that's chicken food and we still go in there sometimes and take a shovel to it and just our Pitchfork and flip a little bit over and that gets them really interested because they get bored with it and they're like that's our Mountain what are you talking about 50 laying hens it I mean it really stretches your feed cheap gates cheap gate so cattle panel and then you gotta just cover it with zip ties and a two by four welded wire fence and just a carabiner or something yeah just whatever and then it usually just like staple them in there sometimes they'll staple them in sometimes I'll take the last uh the last piece that you cut off that's sticking out and bring them down oh yep and then you can stick them down like inside yeah these or inside of like a staple or something yeah it can almost be like a little hinge actually and the other thing you can do um on a lot of these is they'll take a a good sized Bolt and attach it to the gate and then use a hose clamp to attach the bolt to a t-post in the little tee here yes and then it swings on that bolt it uses the bolt as a hint how do you attach the bolt um with hose clamps just clamping on them yeah I've got another one up here I can show you okay cool that's a great idea my father-in-law came up with that that's a great little idea we found a farm um that's about an hour from here that had that raises primarily A2 A2 jerseys and they have a few other cows but they're all they have an A2 herd and they uh they raise their cows to be um like really gentle temperaments they have like kids that your kids play with them they um they breed for that characteristic and for the ability to hand milk this jersey is um she was they didn't genetically test them for the A2 Gene so they have they can either have A1 A2 they have two of two of them so a1a1 a1a2 or a2a2 those are the options for milk cows and she is in a2a2 and that is supposed to be um easier to digest and better for humans the idea is that that's more of like the original Gene that was in cows before before they were modified to produce gallons and gallons of milk yes the number I heard something if I'm wrong but um prior to the 50s your average dairy cow produced uh two to three gallons of milk or like like oh really like three to five and now it's up to like 15 to 20 like a day a day dairy cows that have been like that are in the dairy industry are producing like massive quantities of milk and that's not not what they were supposed to do no they're not designed long term like it's not where they were at a guarantee there's less nutrition yeah way less because it's probably watered down essentially and it's genetically different right and there's no no question why people have trouble digesting it yeah it's a completely different product than what you would get from a cow that's raised pasture and she's only 11 months old and she's already definitely bigger than a midsize Jersey and so she'll probably make a her second freshening like five or six gallons a day wow that's awesome what's your plan with all the milk and the cream because jerseys are a higher fat content cow too right yes our plan isn't a lot of butter because you can't really make butter with goat milk without having a cream separator because it just doesn't separate the way cow milk does so with cow milk you just put in the fridge and let it separate skim off a cream and you can make all those cream products but so we're going to have those that sounds you know it's a long game but we're very excited another year so how old is the how old does the cow need to be before you can breed it and she starts producing 14 months you're supposed to wait two 14 months to breed and then and then another 10 months for the baby so she was born in October 2021 and she will hopefully have her first calf October 2023 and then we're also going to be feeding them all to the pigs that's not yes fantastic left over melt waiting is awesome Pig supplements but hopefully we will have enough and it will get good enough at this that weekend on a small scale make some cheeses and butters to be able to sell to also supplement our farm income yeah filling milk by the gallon is not really very profitable but adding that value add to it is where it's at and you know one of the things that we've done a lot of is like doing things with herbs herb salts and and things like that so herb cheeses um or Butters and things it adds a value layer to it that people will pay extra for and it's it's worth it yes yes yeah it makes a lot more use of your time when you can charge like 10 times the price essentially or whatever yeah but it works out to be yeah yeah I can never understand how people who hand milk sell their milk for six or seven dollars a gallon I let people ask us for goat milk all the time and I'm like it's not worth my time to afford it yeah you can't afford it it's going to our animals before we sell it for that Gene no it's too much labor and everything else do you plan on doing artificial insemination are you gonna get a bowl we're planning to to do the artificial method because a bowl I did consider buying like a a young Jersey bowl like that would grow up to be like right at breeding age when because they need to be about nine months from what I what I read to be so if he was like a few months younger than her but we didn't end up finding one and it's an extra mile to feed and it was a drought and so we're just we've we can ask around we asked our our vet our livestock vet and she said she knows people and we can find somebody my main concern is I want to find somebody who will come when we say she's in heat now because we can tell she has a she's an attitude she is vocal she is vocal and she is right Clockwork has her Cycles every three weeks we know exactly when to expect it and we have to move her out of this pasture and way back into with our goats because there's a bull across the road and we don't want him breaking through to get to her yeah or her breaking due to get to him so we we also want to keep her away from the goats because she also tries to mount the goats yeah so she gets her own little pasture aggressive she is a violent girl looking for love yeah she goes after people well not all of them do my friend has a jersey and she um they can't even tell when she's in heat yeah unless they have another cow like lots of people too have have two cows and you know they can tell because they'll Mount each other and otherwise they can't tell but she is now she's talking to the cows across the road we also got honey we've got herbs and we've got everything in here the eggs over the top there's duck eggs and chicken eggs Raw it's freeze-dried so with those we just crack them into a giant Bowl scramble them up and and pour it into the freeze dryer and then it comes out like a crystally looking powder it's sparkly like glitter but when you add water to it like the whole texture of the scrambled egg comes back well you can't freeze dry whole eggs because the egg white kind of basically just floats away into it becomes so like interesting it's not like dense enough yeah it doesn't it doesn't work you have to mix it together to make it work right and then The Scrambled ones it's better if you undercook them a little and then freeze dry them and then they they come out better than if they are really cooked how do you know how much water to add um I Google it there's a there's a ratio there's a ratio I think we wrote it on the top of the jars because we looked it up when we first did it and it's it's like a like it tells you how to how much to put like a tablespoon of powder and so much water makes an egg so and when we did these we wrote down how many eggs approximately were in each jar on the freeze drying there's a little bit more math involved for um yes but like four onions yeah it's um like so if we were wanted if we wanted to use this whole jar of onions which we probably wouldn't hey don't do that buddy um we take the lid off take the there's a little oxygen absorber in there too so we'll take that off the top and then we pour boiling water into the jar and let it sit and Let Them Sit probably 15 minutes and then then we strain it out and you cook the food and that works so these are sweet potatoes broccoli onions is in there they're they're true to size so yeah they're basically about the same two tops maybe that's probably two or three two or three yeah okay it depends on how big your onions yeah but the nice thing about onions is that like this is a partial jar and I didn't have to reseal that or anything I just put the lid back on and they don't go bad like because it's freeze-dried well because it's freeze-dried but also because it's onions now something like tomatoes like if I open this jar of tomato slices those are freeze-dried um yeah from last year and if I open that jar and expose them to the the moisture that's in the air right they will get Squishy and gummy pretty quickly but they they'll you know you can eat them for a meal and but you couldn't just put the lid back on and call it good same thing with the eggs you have to reseal those so you freeze dry it and put it in that jar with an oxygen absorber there's nothing else there's one here and that oxygen absorber pulls out any remaining oxygen or moisture and then that's it and the other thing we do with some of them in our what are you doing dude um we have a vacuum sealer attachment to our FoodSaver so like you put this there's a hose that comes out FoodSaver and you plug it into this and it pulls the air yeah and it sucks all the air out so if you do that and an oxygen absorber it's a lot better for long term goddess storage but if we're just doing like we're gonna eat this over the winter I'm gonna do one or the other got it but if you want long term like 10 years with well if you really want long term yeah you don't put them in glass because you're exposing them to light so the uh the really long term are in the mylar bags got it with the oxygen absorber okay and that's supposed to be better for a paper sealed five gallon bucket like a bucket like that maybe would work too yeah lots of people they make mylar bags that fit into those buckets too so you can seal it and then put it in and it's extra fancy yeah we've got that's all honey honey yes there's a big section of honey in here taking up my tomatoes this is The Dark One yeah and that's more cloverish Clover versus flowers early spring okay sometimes we get if you get a sale on something like we came across a whole bunch of organic lemons hmm snatched them up and she freeze dried we got them for free and limes this is lime juice so you Juiced them well this is I didn't freeze dry them sorry yeah we juice the limes and lemons and Candy zest right I did it is freeze-dried lemon zest whoa it's magical wow it was a lot of organic lemons to make that and then we also have one of lime zest that's free interesting so a freeze dryer is a pretty I mean and freezer it's a great modern technology and wonderful and like lots of people really worry about open freeze-dried stuff and that isn't as a concern with like the tomatoes like we talked about and the Squash and a few other things but like our Peppers things that are herbs that you'd usually use more like that are drier anyway onions the peppers the celery and the herbs yeah these are freeze-dried um parsley basil Dill all that which tastes like fresh they're amazing but you can open the jar use what you need close the jar as long as you seal it back up it keeps the same way a regular dry dirt wow when I make a bunch of chicken broth we'll put it on the stove I'll get a little bit of the freeze-dried basil and oregano and just drop just the tiniest bit into the broth to make soup and it is like you're fighting pressure yeah wow and so what's the difference between the like a dried herb and then the freeze dried there's there's a you notice a difference in the quality you find just the the shell of the food with no moisture around it left on your trays where you put it in the chamber of the freeze dryer is covered in ice and it's basically pure water so when that ice melts and you drain it out sometimes it'll have a little bit of a smell of the food it came out from but for the most part it is completely yeah smell this is removing the water right when you when you dehydrate you're actually losing some of these oils yeah you're losing the things that the actual flavor yeah and nutrients you're losing nutrients yeah because like see how can you see how green that is that is this is freeze-dried parsley but like if you dry parsley yeah the same colors when you have parmesaned it yeah I have some in here I'm sure that it's not it's actually correct yes you know ounce rounds it's way more flavorful yeah grab a jar of strawberries these when we did vacuum seal these so if you hear it oh well try one oh my gosh oh oh all the flavor the dehydrated when you're going to lose a lot of that flavor and it's going to be harder too and like I mean that is so I mean who needs to buy candy when you got this I think so for people who are trying to decide because free dryers aren't cheap they're a couple Grand aren't they at least at least like a few rounds and we've got it's probably closer to 3 500. yeah so it's a big investment it's a big investment but I mean man it is completely changed the way we do things in here the water pressure can okay green beans same varieties of beans freeze-dried oh my gosh they they look because this is this like washed out color is this purple and white and I mean those are pre-cooked and ready to go but what we do with these is we pour the boiling water in the jar let it um let it sit sometimes we have to dump it and try and add more if it cools off too fast and then drain it out and we fry them like stir fry hook cook them you can steam them you can do whatever but they taste like fresh yeah what happens it's just if you get them right the right amount the texture is just like the fresh if you don't quite get them hydrated enough it tastes more like a thawed frozen meat like with those kind of like a little bit tougher whereas these detector's never going to be texture is Never Gonna it's always better basically yeah and I don't like those you grew up on them and likes them I'm like they're gross then they just it takes away all the flavor you know these they even when the texture is not quite right because you can't get the moisture right second favorite here which this we just discovered last year this is zucchini and the yellow summer squash and if you freeze these and try to cook them right I do complete mush right they don't work and we don't have to blanch these either or the beans because if you freeze beans you have to blanch them right I don't want to do that you don't have to but these like wait the same thing as long as long as hot water and drain it and then we stir fry them with the beans and stuff and like the texture is just a little different but it's the flavor of Summer and the nutritional value is still there that's that's what I'm noticing because color and flavor is an indication of nutrition and freeze-dried food keeps more nutritional value than any other shelf stable preservation method so this one this is um be froth oh freeze ride freeze-dried beef broth so another thing you would have to pressure can that you'd have to brush your can if you have a freeze dryer and you just take out what you need and you can make it as strong as you want or butter it down and that's probably and it's got all the the gelatin and we didn't skim off any fat on this because when you're pressure canning broth you have to skim off the fat so you lose all that oh my gosh when you're freeze drying it you just have to make sure it's really well Incorporated because if the fat is separated it kind of causes some craziness in the freezer I have some of them probably at least and it's so you can make it like super concentrated make like um what's called a bouillon or the um that you know things you can buy turkey broth yeah chicken and all sorts of stuff yeah Venison and then this one is goat milk oh dehydrated milk is Diet powdered milk powdered milk which does not taste very good like that that's what it tastes like lots of people say freezing goat milk does the same thing so I assume it's something to do with that doesn't taste like it is fresh but it's still nice to have like it's good we're not gonna drink it and you can't really make cheese out of it we tried that it didn't it did not taste good either but we saved it this year we were saving that because we were afraid we were gonna have bottle babies or puppies or something like that that we might need to supplement that's a good use it for that that's smart you can use it in baking and don't notice the goaty flavor but we just have a little bit because we don't have that much extra but we will be trying that with cow milk and try to see if fix the flavor issues whenever we really need to be preserving it because lots of people do it but yeah since freeze drying is just removing all the liquid not the liquid the water yeah it didn't remove the liquid it removes the water just H2O so when you go to rehydrate your food depending on what it is you don't have to rehydrate it with water so imagine um rehydrating that zucchini with chicken broth yeah uh or something else yeah you can you can do it freeze-dried meat you can freeze dry meat so you take a marinade solution yeah Worcestershire sauce [Music] whatever very interesting it opens up a lot of doors that we have so my only maybe the only so besides the initial cost how much power does that thing pull it uses a decent amount of power so we have pretty cheap electric here yeah um but I can tell you on ours we've estimated that the average batch gots between two and six dollars depending on how long of a batch it is a piece of peaches was from one load one thing and then there was more this isn't all of it like we ate some of them yeah and we put some of them in mylar bags because the peaches don't shrink but you know what I would challenge I challenge people when they say it's so expensive to run okay well if you're water bathing you're boiling water on your stove or on a propane so you're using electricity you're using natural gas or using propane um the other thing you can do when you're using jars these are all flats that have already been used these are not new Flats the lids the lids so you don't have to use new ones every time those things aren't expensive or aren't cheap excuse me so once you pop one that you've used on maybe your green beans or your tomato sauce we save them you technically aren't supposed to reuse those in Canning but you can reuse them on your freeze-dried food so if we keep the rims on all the freeze-dried food to make sure that that stays yes because when you're on the canned item there's no rims on them because you don't want that falseal yes yeah so people do that so that they know it's chili sealed but with these like even when we vacuum seal them sometimes they fail and it's not worth losing your food because it doesn't matter if this isn't sealed it matters that the lid is on because it's a freeze-dried product so it's not it's shelf stable whether it's open or closed and if they if they come you know the lid popped off completely it would be ruined the only other thing I would mention about this room is that we're clearly not in a basement lots of people think they can't do this unless they have a basement or a Cellar and like we've been using this room for this purpose for what five years okay and the food doesn't go bad it's a little warm for it in the summer it's I've got a thermometer right here it says it's 76 so it's about as hot as it gets in here and in the winter it gets like cold enough that sometimes we have to run a space heater because we don't want anything to freeze and if it's like below zero outside right we'll have things on the floor that will freeze so we don't we have to keep the food above floor you have to have a basement anybody can start preserving food darkness is more important by far or for canned foods if now you're one they would do a lot better in 50 degrees and like or or fresh potatoes potatoes this room runs a little bit warmer than the rest of our house which is why our potatoes and onions are in our dining room that's right by the thermostat it stays cooler and yeah in a Suburban home or anything and there's a little garden if you think you can't preserve food because you don't have a place to store it if you want to try to preserve it for you know a decade well maybe but if you're preserving it to have fresh food healthy food to eat over the winter it's good for it yeah yeah guys don't let that be an excuse yeah people look at this a lot of times are how long is this going to last you and I'm like hopefully about 10 months like we don't want it to last longer than that I mean that's the food we put in the jar is we want to eat it all in the year and then put it back new food in the next year and then sometimes like we won't have as good of a harvest to something and it's nice to have like we always have a little extra tomato sauce because I don't want to run out of that we and we'll use that first even after we start putting up new tomato sauce in meal prep in the winter it'll come in I'm gonna do sweet potatoes some onions some squash and some green beans take all four of these hydrate them strain them and put a little put a little lard or olive oil or whatever in the uh Skillet and easy it's yeah but to get through spring when we're so busy planting and you need something fast we need it we come in we're exhausted and you want a healthy meal you know you don't have to spend all that time chopping yeah appealing smarter I like that and when you're making soup the other thing when you're making like soup you take the zucchini or green beans whatever you're putting in your soup you don't even have to rehydrate it you just dump it in and it's because it's already right in the broth we made early season salsa this year with some our first tomatoes and we didn't have Peppers yet so these are like these are pre-chopped sweet peppers already from last last September and I just dump them in there peppers and onions I don't rehydrate them I'll mix them into the meat one or the raw meat and it's going to rehydrate with the juices that are in the um that is cool yeah people who like we freeze-dried chili and like other pre-cooked so we have some like chicken curry that I made yeah like you can just put the whole super pre-made whatever we have some Veggie beef stew that we freeze dried and then you take it out and you put it in your bowl and you pour your hot water in let it you have to let it hydrate be in steak a while so the chili can take longer to rehydrate I really think we need to start doing it like overnight or something yeah because they take a long time to soak you gotta pre-soak them for a while but it's like in it's worth it yeah have the food yeah we make big meals with a big family and right we get too much as long as I've got a tree full a freeze dryer tray which is this is the size of the tray yeah as long as I've got enough to fill this tray then leftovers can just go in the freeze dryer and so even a liquid like a broth yeah it's like a bunch of liquid on there yeah and you scrape it off and then yeah okay liquid this holds just over it's actually a little broth okay so you're getting ready for your U-Pick operation so at 5 PM your customers come and how did you acquire these customers and then how do you you scheduled in the comment at a certain time or how does it work we open for you pick hours we set the hours weekly yeah and it's the set hours it's open hours anybody can come when we're open for you pick we only have the appointments for the animals just to space people out so that we're not overwhelming anymore we post our hours on Sunday and then they're Pro they're you know every night we open we only open in the evenings whenever it's hot because the flowers don't do well being picked In the Heat of the day so tonight we open at five and you know we hope to have just a steady stream of people coming to pick flowers very nice so then you've got you know a few other things that you're you're selling so um just you know trying to get offer as many things as possible when they come and you've got your salt that you've created with the different herbs that you grow and some merch [Music] in the basket and I'm sure it's an ever-growing line of different things that you want to make locally made ice cream and oh smart and are locally grown pumpkin selection nice because it's September so um sorry so some of the yeah so you're also incorporating some other local farms Goods as well I love it I love our store setup which we eventually want to set up in this building we want to carry all local in Missouri neat that's great and then you got your so you're using for point of sale you're using the square system and that's worked out really well for you and that's it's the only downside is that we're outside and it has to be plugged in and it has to be plugged in so are you so you're purchasing these winter squash and then you're adding some of your dried flowers yeah to make it and then upselling cutesy product cool so this is nice I love the squash in bulk yeah farm so it brings down the cost for us so it's a nice fall decoration flowers and plants that we grew yeah and then dried I love that I think that's such a great thing to do it's something that I did for um in my Market Garden I had to focus on the most profitable things so I stopped growing carrots but everyone loves carrots on a table so I ended up buying them from a friend who grows using the same methods and then yeah so I think that's such a good way to team up with other local farmers you're helping other businesses you're just everything no and you're helping each other you're promoting each other's business and people told us two years they just kept asking why we didn't have pumpkins yeah I guess we'll get pumpkins yeah they just we really don't have the we just don't have the space right the energy and all that to grow this many especially this many varieties like there's so many little different colors and everything we can buy that bundle from a local grower and right everybody wins yeah you so yeah listen to your customers and give them what they want you know they're expecting a farm has pumpkins in the fall apparently right everyone thinks so I'm really excited yeah we're not you can't do it on me yeah but we'll bring out some hay bales and stack pumpkins on them and make our little photo you know photo op thing perfect and I'm really excited to do uh piglets and pumpkins in October yes I love it I'm making it a thing I don't know that anybody else does that but we'll put the pumpkins and the piglets all together and the cute pictures and all right I love it I don't know who Associates piglets with all but it's gonna happen lots of great ideas that is like a lot of a lot of them now it's a thing so it can be a thing if you tell if you say it yeah that's right and if somebody's trying to do this I would recommend you get yourself a Facebook presence but also join local groups Community groups and make your posts not only on your page but in those Community groups so that people who are frequenting those groups to find out what's going in their town in your town all the towns around you will see your content because I mean the more you're out there the better yeah the other thing with that is collect email addresses yes because you know you can't depend on on Facebook even though email isn't always work better at least you have something yeah if your customers leave Facebook you you can still reach them

Channel: Nature's Always Right

Views: 202,495

Keywords: how to make money homesteading, how to make a living homesteading, making money 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, homestead tour, farm tour, gooseberry bridge farm, nature's always right, how to homestead for beginners, homesteading, homestead money making, homesteading money making ideas, saving money homesteading

Id: 3HQPGr2MFbI

Length: 66min 42sec (4002 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023