Building a Homestead in 100 Days - Day 97

You're coming out later, okay? Not now. It's dark and cold. These boys got up at 5:30 this morning. I couldn't sleep either. Why'd you guys get up?

Because the track loader is here.

Is it because the track loader is here or because the Mini X is coming today?

Both. I'm putting wood chips down here so that doesn't get super ookie and smelly.

Alcohol ready? Can you get that ready for us? We are going to do chores early. I don't know why. Why? We can't drive the machine. When the locksmith comes, we'll be ready. So we'll do chores early. I'll get my office work done. When we do get this machine unlocked, we can go at it. Or when the machines come, I can go at it.

Oh, the scoop's missing. It wasn't in it when he opened it.

All right, we're gonna take this bucket up as soon as we can. Jenna, what you doing sitting there?

Oh, just waiting on you.

Can you go make sure we have that scoop? I can hear the kids, namely Gideon, from downstairs. Why is he not with me? Gideon!

Yeah?

You've got to go with me. I'm coming. Nothing's different about today. We're looking for something. It's a new day. Make good choices. Do not bother the people.

Okay. Oh, why do you have to fill it up right now?

What's wrong? Oh, wait, what's wrong?

What?

She's got to get on. She will get bored if we're off topic, especially since she's got it in the hay. Is something wrong?

Hard to move my leg around when I'm sitting, right?

But oh, I thought something was wrong with the cow.

She was, she was moving around like crazy.

Okay, nothing's wrong. We're all good.

Yes.

Okay, they say they're done. All right, off to the side.

This piece looks pretty empty.

You just got to make sure. Pretty close. I would say it's probably done. Good job, good job. What about App— what about Honey? Why do I want to call you Apple sometimes? Apple. All right, get me a bucket. This one's got a bit more. Good job, guys. Do you know— can you go process this milk?

I'm coming up.

Yeah, can y'all process it? Yeah, can y'all pick it up and process it? Yeah, pretty close to getting a phone call in.

We'll just come up with you.

Okay, it's almost 8, so I'm gonna call them. Y'all gonna have to be quiet because I cannot find the cordless phone. I got 1 minute. American Eagle. Hey, uh, I've locked myself out of a track loader, which is a piece of construction equipment.

Well, not Avery.

I mean, he's out of town for the day. Oh, he's gone today. Okay, thank We're gonna have to hope the dealer who's coming today with the other piece of equipment has a key. I've already called these people. They're— one guy stood me up. Am I really gonna call him again? No, I'm not. I'm not. The other guy gave me some other dude's number that didn't work out. Um, it's just been out in Hooper's Creek with that locked, uh, track loader. I tried to call Albert, but there was no answer last night. Tell me about getting into your track loader. That's right. When you're locked out of Yeah, machine. Trying to get a good picture of what you have. Do you have a door? Yeah. And where are the keys right now? Inside the machine. As best you can, describe what that key looks like. Is this your cell phone? I could send you a picture. It wouldn't be a picture of the key though, it would be a picture of the lock. I can't, um, key would be hard to— How long do you think it would take even to get out here?

It's red.

Let me see what I got going. Hold on, let's hold off. Uh, I do— I may just contact the dealer. That's probably maybe what I'll do. I'm just gonna swallow my pride, contact the dealer. He said he would bring a key. He's wondering how we do that. Okay, now swallow our pride a little bit more.

Loose so you can stick a wire through. And I've—

oh no, what's there? No, that's not gonna do it. He's coming. He'll be here, uh, after lunch.

What time?

I know, it's okay, it's okay. It's all happened for a reason. Did you try the sunroof?

You can look at it. We already tried turning a bolt and it—

No, don't do that. Don't do that. Let's not tear this thing up.

Shoot. Oh no, it's next right here. It's next under the cell. Oh shoot, it's right here.

It curls around. Okay, pull it out please.

It's broken.

Oh, I can tell. What happened? It got in the trough and then Stun Muffin pushed him into that.

Show me. I think you can tell if neck's broken.

Go get my knife quick.

Are we gonna eat it?

Well, we're not gonna let it go to waste. Jonah had a good question. Who has blood on their horn?

From the bottom side.

Oh, there it is, there it is. Dudd did it. Jonah, while I harvest this lamb, will you please get the steers out? This hasn't happened in a year and a half management in the winter like this, and it was just a freak accident. He didn't do it out of cruelty, he's just moving out of the way and just freak chance got wedged and got pinned and got horned. No key. We have to move the mower because our gambrel is there. We're going to hang the sheep up. There's no key. Said the key is in the train.

What the heck you trying to do?

Well, just— I'm looking for the keys to the mower. So I can harvest this. It runs the train?

All right, harvest what?

The lamb. We have a lamb. We have time. Hey, we're kind of running out of time. Get me my smog umbrella. Where could we put everybody so that the sheep don't get out? Herd the sheep onto the concrete, then herd the steers out into sacrifice paddock, then close the sacrifice paddock. And then the worst case scenario is you— the steers aren't going to go right to the stall like you'd hoped.

Okay. I'm gonna put all these sheep in here, and then I'm gonna shut this gate, and then I'm gonna get the calves out and over there to that pen.

Josiah's come. It's not going as planned. The steers are out. He's gonna need us. All right, come on. I'm not hurrying because this is a panic situation for the cows. It's just I don't want the carcass of the lamb being out too long. Okay, this is open. That's ready. Let's shut this gate. It's off. We got this area. If we can just herd them into here, we can funnel them into the barn. Good. Put your arms out wide. Put your arms out wide. There you go. Good boy. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! Without spooking them, could you somehow go around? Here they go. Okay, where we want them. Hey, hey, everybody, let's get in there! Hey, hey, hey, let's get in there!

Let's get in there! We need to get all that metal to the metal yard so we can shut the gate.

Good job, everybody! Can you, uh, get the hay racks installed?

Yeah.

Okay, and what else? They've got water, that's good. There's a hay rack right there, and then there's another one up by the road where we like to keep them. Okay. In summary, it's about as ideal as it can be. We didn't come across it dead. We knew exactly what killed it. We saw the pierce. It was not long after. The body was most definitely warm. Even while I was still harvesting, it was warm. Uh, so it's pretty much the most ideal If this is going to happen, that was the most ideal situation. Now it is right before a vacation, and I've not ever broke down a, a lamb by myself, meaning breaking into parts. We're just going to hang this for a day or two. We'll see if my butcher is available to come and break it down. It's not worth it to take it to the butcher. We have an on-farm, uh, killer who can also break down. It's definitely not worth it to like take it to the butcher butcher for just one. One little 45-pound lamb. I think we have hanging hooks next to the cool room that we can hang these up in the cool room with. Do you like this? We'll have them ready. Do the other one. Okay, now hold that up. All right, now pull the gambrel out. Oh, okay. Ah, pigs are gonna have a heyday. Here you go, Lenny. What else do you like? I'm looking for the heart. I guess there it is. Cut in half. She'll love that. Mama is inside doing her fourth in her health series. And I think she's talking about— what is she talking about today? She's talking about supplements and minerals. That health aspect. I'm excited. Gonna ride in the full weather. So CB usually has this in a couple of weeks. Guys, you're seeing this— wow, we're like live right now, I think, when this post in Abundance Plus. And didn't you miss that? What we're gonna do, the replay is gonna be available, and we're throwing up Abundance Plus free trial right now. You get 7 days for free, so you could totally come in and get the Homestead Design Course replay. Will help you build your homestead from scratch or know what to do next. You could get in on that and then cancel before the 7 days up and you never get charged. Chances are you're gonna like it and keep it, but there it is for you at bonusplus.com. Let's go get rid of these guts. We're gonna check in with Matt. It's so weird, like, you're seeing this 2 days later. The time this is getting posted, this show is live. So if you're seeing this early on, get into Bonus Plus and come join us. We're on till 6 PM Eastern Sunday, January 22nd. We decided to go to the old house because it's gonna rain and be cold. Hey Matt, aren't your arms tired? Look at this all the time. Look at this, look at this switchboard. Heck yeah, this is for real, dude.

I can also— another thing, when you're giving your PowerPoint, I can give picture-in-picture you here with the PowerPoint on the screen or vice versa.

Are you ready to test this thing?

That's what I was just texting you about, is the only thing is that the internet connection here is vastly different than the one at the farm.

What is it?

So I did a couple of things to try to like go by it because I went, I just, I went straight into the wall. Best I've gotten this morning is 5 down, 5, a little over 5 up.

That's because that's connected to my house. This is not on—

this is a different service. So I'm gonna go up the speed because I was thinking about a, you know, 160-foot Ethernet cable if we had to.

We could. Does that exist?

I mean, we'd have to go buy it.

I'm gonna ask them.

The easiest solution would be to just turn up the power.

Yeah.

You know, with the call-ins, you know, we're gonna have to have you like in a— with some kind of like headphone or maybe an in-ear little bud, earbud. If you had a speaker in the room, if it was live in the room, it would feed back.

And Rebecca will join us for the Q&A and stuff too, so is that okay with setup you have there.

She'll have a speaking role, I would imagine.

Mhm.

I just set her another mic up.

Okay, set up another mic. I'll go see if we can't get some internet speed. Where, where'd Henry go? And did he leave? Forgot something. There we go. You stay with me. You're as bad as, uh, Gideon. Deal with these guts. Call and get us some faster internet. Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick! All right, they're all being really quiet, sleeping.

I thought they were gone.

Trying to get the keys out. Jonah, you can pull that red thing. Jonah, you can pull the red thing right there, will open the window. If it wouldn't start catching on the— who would catch? Jonah! You could open, you could do that red thing, what opens the window. Catching in that mesh. Almost got him. Ah, I'm a mess. I can't get it out now. Just the, just in general. Should I yell over here and I'm not allowed to talk?

Put it to review and then Matt can get us 10 up. He thought we would only need 3.

I'm like, if we have 5, I can't do nothing.

Literally, you need like They recommend— Wirecast and Blackmagic recommend double whatever the bandwidth is. Depends on the codec or the way that the—

Can you make that as low as possible?

Basically the resolution. Yeah, these can be arranged with another piece.

So what's your estimate on that?

I think you need— honestly, you need 20 up.

Okay, then you gotta get a cable. Yeah. They can't get us 20 up no matter what. They can't do a cable. Okay.

All right, how many?

We can test it.

By the way, I'm live on YouTube right here on my— I just did a private test. You go the lowest resolution and, you know, hope for the best with the internet.

You're a mess. Gonna measure before we go ordering hundreds of feet of cable. We do not. Can we order 200 feet? What happens if we need 250 feet? And we're talking like Amazon overnight at this point, so We got to get it right. I think that's 200 feet. 200 feet. Look, look at that. It's going to need more than 200 feet.

I'm going to put all these sheep in here, and then I'm going to shut this gate, and then I'm going to get the calves out and over there to that pen.

Gonna start up the new John Deere skid steer here. We gotta unlock the door and pull it down so everybody can have access to it. Where are the keys? How did you lock it? I'm just curious.

I took the key out, I guess, and I put them back and then shut it, and it must have been locked when I took the key out.

We were both wondering because I did not know that you could lock it from the outside or without actually inserting the keys. Mark Ramer, uh, Kel Cleland, he is the guy once again that covers the territory. Yeah, and we'll, we'll sort of do a joint walk around with you here. The door, you can tell it's a little harder to close.

Okay.

Yeah, it's because it's a pressurized cab. That's the reason. So you just make sure it closes real good. It's going to try and keep the elements outside. This is a power quick attach. It's not hydraulic. It does look like a hydraulic line here, but it is all, uh, it's an electric solenoid.

If you're in a lot of those wood chips You may get some to accumulate in there. So if it ever doesn't work as well, you can just pull that cover off and clean it out.

Right here?

Yep.

That's the COVID You see your red arms in under here. That's what that actuator's working. It's opening and closing those or engaging those pins or disengaging those pins.

How much do I need to grease everything?

How often? We'll go into all that. Greasing the machine is the livelihood of the machine. Very, very important. We're going to go over the operator manual, which is behind the seat, guys. I would read that, know it front to back.

So for your undercarriage, uh, something unique to the Deere, something that's going to be great for being out here in the mud, is all of our hydraulic hoses for our final drives are covered in this, um, guarding right here, so nothing's exposed. So your final drives right here, I think it's either at 50 hours or 250 hours, we'll get that out of the manual. You will want to change your final drive oil. That'll be just an initial service. After that, you hit 500 hours is your routine. So that'll probably take you, I don't know how many.

So 50 and then 100 and then 500?

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Yep.

So he didn't say much about it.

Okay, so each of your fluids in here are basically color-coded. Is your diesel fuel fill. So you can lock out your hood. So I don't think you'll have any problems with, uh, theft out here. This pin right here, this is a Boom lock, unique to the Deere. Huge safety feature. I really think it should be a standard for everybody, but when you have your boom all the way up in the air, if you have to get out of the cab, industry-wide mostly, you have to put a guard over the cylinder so the boom can't come down. And a lot of guys don't do that. They'll just get out quickly and hope that the boom doesn't fall. The boom's not going to fall, but if there was a hydraulic rupture or something like that, it, it is dangerous and it could happen. So from inside the cab you can turn this lock and it'll lock your boom up. Now that we've got the boom up, it locks.

Oh, that's good. So we can physically— so we can like—

it will not come down.

That's great, because when we do like butchering and stuff, like scraping a pig, you don't— like, we do it under the bucket and we know, like, we kind of stay away from it because we don't want to get underneath it. But this is much better.

The whole cab will flip up Um, it's on a gas strut with a lock. It'll sit completely open to where you can access your hydraulic pump, and all your hose routing is all underneath the machine that you can completely clean out completely.

That's where I'm gonna— I'm gonna be working there.

Hopefully nobody's gonna be working there.

I was joking with the kids. I told them everyone's gonna have to get in line behind me.

I'm driving it.

The air conditioning is really, really cold. Oh yeah, it'll run you out of there.

Um, you buying to get in there, babe?

So, so the footwell clean out, these two covers right there. So even though, you know, you got a floor mat in there and you'll be in and out with the dirt and dust, and you can basically get the dirt out of the foot— yeah, you can basically like sweep it out whenever you pull that footwell out. Um, so you can really get everything out of inside of the machine. If you're at full throttle and you start moving forward, you know, all the way with your joystick, you're going to start moving, you know, max speed in rabbit or turtle. But you— let's just say you want like half speed You want full RPM, you want half speed, you know, you're going slow, you got thick brush, something like that, and you got some bumps, you know, your hand's not going to be completely stiff on that. You're going to be going— it's going to be kind of jerky. So what you can do is you can go all the way forward and then you can ratchet back. This will take you from 100% of full propel speed to 90 to 80 to 70 to 60 to 50. So you can just hold your joystick all the way forward and then you just slow down your speed. Don't touch these. It's a good thing. Um, so that's your emergency exit for the cab. Uh, if for some reason, if your boom was stuck halfway down and you're in the cabin, you can't open the door, that's your emergency exit right there. But to actually put that back together, it'll take you almost all day to do yourself.

It's just a pain.

Yeah, so typically guys will call our service technicians out and they have the patience and, and the experience to put it back together. But Just don't grab onto it to close the door, even.

You're going to forget a lot of this. Remember, you got the cheat sheets and the reminders all around the cab, but most, most often just run it a week. We'll follow up. Write down any questions that you may have, and because the more you run it, that's when you're going to figure out maybe what questions you may have about certain functionalities or what features. All kinds of aftermarket accessories. Guys that you will see online that you may have interest in going down the road once you use it a little bit and you see, you know, what application it will be in mainly. You can always add counterweight, you can add protective coverings. So just, you can always keep that in mind. And if you see that you're going to have any interest in that, just let us know and we'll—

Good, good deal.

Many excavators should be out here this afternoon.

All right, thank you. Look what's here! It's here, my boys! We're gonna be pulling up some stumps now. Two buckets, big ones attached. We're gonna get some serious permaculture design done with this thing. Serious earthworks coming right up. First impression, it's really big. First impression?

It's pretty big, I guess. We're gonna get so much done with these two new machines.

You got to use the key for the ignition on this. All right. So then after you turn it and turn it on, you're gonna have to pull this down to do anything. It will run in idle. But at— what's it called— nothing will move until you pull this down. We're gonna try this thing, very first time. Looked pretty simple. The John Deere guy said it's easier. Uh, maybe let me try it first and then ride it with me.

I'm pretty sure that this goes back. You see this?

Okay, sure, I'll mess with it. Here, you hold this. Y'all back away in case I do something stupid on accident.

Yeah, back away. Swing that thing.

Jonah's turn. Josiah's going at it. Gideon, you and I are We're gonna move some of these rocks.

Can I start working over there?

How are you gonna work?

I don't know, do something.

No, no. No, you guys just get it over there and wait.

Now there's two tractors, Henry. There's two! So Papa can drive you in one while moving some more.

You wanna ride the tractor? He won't need that, we'll put on the heat. We can bring it though.

I want to move these logs from there to there, and then we can continue today.

That's our path.

Yeah. And then start to work on our path.

That's a lot of logs for us inexperienced people.

Oh, just one at a time.

Hey, can you move that hose out of the way? Yeah, just one at a time. Do you hear him? That's right. Couldn't we just move this out of the way and go that way to it?

No, you got to move your— you got to move your bucket. Your thumb's fully extended.

There it is, there it is.

Thumb is fully extended.

It won't go all the way. It. You move your bucket. We need to do this. Yeah, yes, thank you. Your belt is fully extended. Yes, you got it. Can I go? Me and Sarah both about to have heart attacks. I'm doing it, guys. Yes, down. Yes, keep going down, down, down. Papa, down. Yes, now hook it all up.

This might be a waste of time. Look how many logs there is.

Watch me. Papa, no, it's my turn. Papa, please, it's my turn.

Keep going right here and then we can maybe cut through this way.

We have to pick up—

You're heckling me.

Jonah, I need to go in first. Back up so I can get in. Why?

I— that's—

it's so hard to park this thing. Well, I can't fit in that.

Good job, guys.