Did This Just Happen? Mother Earth News Fair, TX 2020

Rebecca, I guess we're those people.

Yes.

We brought cultured cream, sauerkraut, bought some eggs from Yonder Way. I'm nervous. I gotta speak today.

I always get a little nervous.

I gotta remember that I'm just here to wash the dishes, so to speak. I'm just here to serve. Servant doesn't need to be nervous. Our cooler held up well over the trip. In fact, our cultured cream— it held up so well, our cultured cream froze. But all our goods made it. That Yeti served us well.

Here it is.

It's already slammed. Look at all these people, Rebecca. Excited about homesteading.

All right, Justin.

Yeah, how are you feeling about it?

It's a little better once you get here. Almost like the gun has went off and the race has started. You start feeling a little bit better. Not in the stage. We met a lot of people already, so thanks to everyone for coming up.

Let's go down here.

All right, we are done. Well, we come back to the meetup at 2:30.

We're done for that portion.

You're freezing.

I'm really cold. My hands got like purple.

So now we're gonna go to the hotel because we have an hour. It's so close. Let's go eat something.

—And then come back. Yeah, and I need to like warm my toes up. Continue straight.

Well, look how they made the bed, Rebecca. I got all the pillows. You get one pillow that you brought from home. What's up with that? So what's gonna make us for lunch?

Um, well, I'm gonna cut up some cheese and eat that, and then I'm gonna cut up an apple and eat it with peanut butter and some sauerkraut and broth.

How'd I do? The speak? Hope better than that. How was the talk? It was great. You rescued me once. I didn't complete a thought. You got me back on track. I wouldn't be where I was without you. What would you say the key takeaway is for these folks?

Grow your plants, grow where your plants are, water the grass where you're at.

Oh, water the grass where you at. You know the saying, the grass is greener on the other side? The grass is greener where you water it. So make it happen where you're at. That's the takeaway from the Great American Farm Tour. You are the greatest farm in America. Isn't that cool? Big old expo. We are back. We're excited. We're freshened up. Got us something to eat. You feel good, Freddie? She feels good. She doesn't like it though. We're a little late. I don't like it either. We're not the late kind of people, but we will stand in line for as long as it takes to meet all you guys. Speaking is great, but it's really good to also meet you guys and see who I'm talking to in this big old camera of mine. Thank you guys for setting this up. This looks great.

You know it.

Thank you. Thank you. Keep it going, buddy. No, that was great. That was cool. Yeah, good.

We'll get intro'd here as a part of the podcast as well. Uh, yep. Nancy, is your radio off?

Oh, good check.

Uh, Carla is gonna do some sound checks just to make sure recording levels and microphone positions are good, and she'll let us know. We were planning on initially recording with Gary this evening, and he had, uh, conflict, uh, in the schedule. And I think that jumping off point would have been off-grid. So to re— maybe focus that though, uh, I want to find the overlap, uh, so we can kind of play in that space and then start to explore the differences in each other. So, um, we'll maybe talk to Marty about his homesteading experience up in Alaska, which I, I have kind of painted in my head as, you know, this somewhat like gritty, cold, hard, you know, super rough version of it. Justin has toured America and seen a lot of farms and homesteads. They have theirs in North Carolina. Okay, in North Carolina. And, um, you know, the route that you guys took to your homestead is quite a bit different.

And we love the grit. And you love the grit. Okay, so yeah, and those are lifestyle decisions, right?

Yeah.

And so I think there's some of that to explore. I really appreciate Justin and Rebecca's story and honesty because they had a piece of land and they weren't really there under the banner of wanting to be homesteaders. It evolved for, sounds like, obvious reasons. The food they were buying at the store is killing us. I lived many years on-grid. Wanting to return to the homestead life I had 45 years ago when I landed in Alaska in the early '70s. What were you missing? That's a really interesting question. I was missing everything that's real about life. I was missing everything that's real to me about being an Alaskan. I was missing all the things I went to Alaska for, all the reasons. And those reasons were adventure, living closer to the land, with the land, trying to live self-sufficiently, getting away from the trap and finding a way to live outside of it and within our own means.

And so Justin and Rebecca, you know, we talked about the food angle was really big for you guys, and that you had that land before you decided to start growing your own food. And so I'm— I know health was part of it, but then where does it take that tipping point, I guess, that you get that maybe you had an aha moment and realized we need to go at this at a, you know, more aggressively?

It was the precipice. A lot of times it takes people You have to go over the edge. So finally in me, my Lyme disease surfaced. I didn't know I had Lyme disease. Just, it started, I just started with this sudden muscle pain in my leg and then we began to look at that and research that and try to figure out what in the world that was. And all of a sudden, people who were living happily on $15,000 a year growing some food, selling some food, dumpster diving, whatever it took. We were living happily on that. All of a sudden, we're spending way more money trying to figure out what this is and having a lot less physical input into it. So then it's like going down this road, like, what happened? You know, and we— that's when we got really hardcore about our diet. And that's when we got really into— at that time it was paleo. We found that, hey, we need to eat more meats, we need to eat more fats, we need the vegetables and fruits and less sugar. But in America, that's what's very, very expensive. You go to the outer edge of the grocery store to the Whole Foods and that's what gets you.

When we were going to the grocery store and everything that was on our plate we could grow.

Well, yeah, it was like, wait a minute though, this is the very stuff, stuff that's so very expensive is what you can grow on your farm. Yeah, chickens and vegetables. It's hard to grow spaghetti noodles, okay, and mac and cheese, but you can go in— but you can— it's not so hard to grow kale. It's very easy to grow squash. Ask anybody that's grown squash. Yeah, it's prolific. So day 2. We are those people. We brought our food from home. That's our sausage for breakfast. That's our broth. Cultured cream. How do you like it this morning, Beck? Great. We somehow came up with an agreement somewhere in our marriage. I make the breakfast, you make the supper. Yep. All right, supplement time. The whole— everything on the table, top table, is mine. This is like liver. This is, uh, bone and tissue, building up my jaw. All right, I gotta show this. What? Beauty. We're talking about the weather this morning. Well, it's sunny and we're going over and I'm thinking, you know, it's a sweater afternoon. No, it's a sweater morning. She said no, it's a sweater afternoon. You know what the temperature is going to be this afternoon? 76. Okay, hold on, in my defense Yesterday! Look at this coat! It's almost 50 degrees out here. It is, it's 53. Listen!

It was supposed to be warm yesterday. No, it wasn't. It was not, so I just don't trust these people anymore. I'm just bringing what I need in case, and I was cold yesterday.

She's still warming up, I guess. It's almost 60 degrees, come and cut it off. I'm about to take the sweater off.

I was like, I can't believe you're not bringing your jacket.

Jacket.

He's like, I'm not bringing my jacket. At the expo, it is definitely short sleeves weather. What do you think, Beauty? I even took my jacket off. You ready, Becky? Yes. Check out the vendors. Bad news, you can't buy anything.

Actually, I can. I realized that, um, we don't have any room on the airplane.

No, we're maxed out on weight. We're not.

Oh no, because the cooler— we ate all the food.

All right, huge bookstore. All right, it's a dream. One day, walking tractor. This would be a really neat way to work in cover crop. A flail mower chops it up really fine and would break that cover crop down to be able to plant right after the COVID crop. What's this? I've got no idea.

So there's a bed shaper. Oh my, by BCS. After we just worked so hard to shape our beds. Now you had a bed shaper. I know, I didn't I know you had a bench.

That might be our new favorite attachment, especially after having chickens.

Our beds by hand. Let's go to that Wise Woman Botanical.

Okay. I love you all so much. I'm so excited. I'm so excited.

We're actually coming to get some CBD oil because— you're right.

No, I said that's wonderful. I'm a nurse and I do some travel nursing, so I'm in the car a lot. And this sounds really weird, but I watch you all when I'm driving down the road. I listen to it. Okay. We have a mini farm.

Yeah.

And so we watch it and it's nice and it's calming. I work a lot of hospice and so it's a lot of just bad energy.

Yeah, I love it. So help us out with my inflammation, standing, walking all day.

I will give you whatever you need.

What do we need?

You need CBD and then I want to put some— I want to put some EO for pain on you. Okay. Yes, we want to put 3 to 4 drops twice a day. Okay. Okay. And then before sleep, what it does is the CBD will actually extend the amount of time that you're in your REM cycle. Well, we need that. And so that's the reason that you go to sleep, otherwise we would just stay up so that your body can repair itself. You want to be in that REM cycle. And then let's get some EO for pain.

For like a topical? Yes. So it involves a massage. You have to massage this in.

And it's my feet that hurt the most.

He wants a small window of time. They're going to be like, what, what are they selling over there?

This will take the inflammation out and this will do your topical analgesic. Okay, so you want to take both together, you know what I mean? So what you'll notice is once you get your inflammation out, you won't need this as much. I'll see, that's good. And it's not like when you take a pharmaceutical that they say increase your dose, increase your dose. You'll actually use less of this over time because you're pulling your inflammation out and your endocannabinoid receptors.

Yes, I'm looking for one of my favorite companies. Can you guys guess who it is? Who am I looking for? Can anybody guess? Some of you are getting it, some of you are not. I don't know where this is. You pulled away. Do we know where we're going? She liked to talk, especially about health. Get her talking about health, get me talking about business, you're in trouble. Do we know where Joe is? I cannot find Joe. That's a hint. The guy's name is Joe. Oh, we should run by the animals real quick. What do you think? Everybody say aww.

I think we should have pigs to farrow so we can have piglets. Maybe I'll feel differently once the— look at this one, it's so cute!

You're so cute, I want it to grow up!

Oh, there it is, poultry right there. There it is.

Oh, you gave it away. And it is Joe. I could not do what I do without this guy. We're moving our sheep, we move our pigs, we move our chickens. Oh my goodness, this is our everyday. Oh my word, they'll even keep in devil eyes. What's that?

It's a banding.

Oh, why are you pointing that at me?

I mean, who wants to get that? Poor, poor lambs.

Look, why do they have this on display? This is what they chose to display.

It is what they chose to display.

Out of all the things, out of all the things, was going to be an ear tag. They're going to display the bander. No, good for them, covering all, all spectrums. All right, Joe, we're gonna get you on the video here, buddy. Okay. You've kept bears out, kept bear out, raccoon out, fox, coyote, fuzzy on armadillos. But will it keep out a Sasquatch? I can't prove it. You ain't got no pictures of that? Oh, and we're probably gonna have to order a, uh, can we order just this piece? This is a gate. Grandma needs a gate. My grandma—

my mom needs a gate. She's doing chickens.

We just kind of hop over it. Your grandma needs a gate. Just this piece. I think so.

My mom, she's now doing chickens, and she's got— she got her Premier Net, an Energizer, and she's happy as can be. She does. She loves those chickens.

She's turning into the crazy chicken lady. There's not enough of those around. No. All right, well, thank you for what you do. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, guys. I see you on TV. High five. Hey, how's it going?

There we go. High five.

All right, there we go. High five. Thank you for watching.

I'm gonna mail this to you. Aw. But this is, uh, this is your tree. I didn't— Yeah, I was thinking about it. I didn't, um, I was like, I wonder if they're flying. And then when we were coming down, I saw the Instagram. I'm like, oh, they're flying. Yeah. So, uh, I'll take it back. But thank you. Thank you. That's very thoughtful. Yeah, this is an RDB, so this is good in your zone. It's prolific, it's delicious. High five!

All right, how's it going? Good. How's it going? How are you? How's it going? How are you guys ready for this? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, how's it going? Hey, my number one fan! Hey, let's hear the screaming!

I'm the number one fan!

Yeah, that's it, Justin Rhodes! All right, so here I was updating my live video, I was putting up a description, and somebody calls Chicken Ninja. Yes. Okay. And we already buy Frontier, don't we?

We do. I buy a lot of Frontier.

Yeah, we already buy that.

Yes, this is what we buy at home. We love the cinnamon, like seriously.

And the artwork, I mean, it's just a pleasure just to like pick that up and be like, this is a piece of art. We've been moving a lot of like even our bulk advertising and headers and stuff like for our displays are going to that style and design as well.

Yeah, I really like it, and I think you guys stand out in the store, you know, with it.

So tell me, Rebecca, is it Is it sweater weather?

It is not sweater weather. Okay, I might need to take my sweater off. It is 84 degrees. Sweater weather. I even took my sweater off.

We are back at the hotel. Those are lamb chops. We are those crazy people. Those— that's actually our homegrown butter and our chicken. And what are you making, Rebecca? I'm just making some kale. Case in point, you can go buy organic kale in very many restaurants. Oh, this— I mean, not restaurant, grocery stores. No, this is not our kale. Okay, okay. No, here's why. $2.50 a bunch, organic. Okay, okay. This is 100% grass-fed lamb. Can you buy that anywhere? No. Anywhere? No. And if you could, how much would it cost? I can't even talk about it. This is Beau and Kelly from Better Together Life, though, for those that don't know. They're coming to hang out, famous for turning a shed into a home. That's them. That's that. Hi! And they're happy about it. They're still happy about it a year later. We love it. It's fun.

We want to do it again. It's great. I hate to throw this.

You guys want to take this?

I know you've got pigs.

Yeah, we will.

That's awesome. Let me put it in a bag.