In this vlog‑podcast episode, host Victor Justin Rhodes visits the Winger homestead in Wyoming, joining husband‑wife team Christian and Jill Winger (joined by Rebecca Rhodes) for a three‑hour conversation that blends farm tour, homesteading techniques, climate challenges, and product promotion. The discussion opens with a light‑hearted look at the Wingers’ horse barn, highlighting safety differences between horses and cows and Jill’s childhood dream of a barn attached to the house. The tour moves to the integrated animal‑based mulching system: a hoop house layered with 4‑6 inches of wood chips, chickens, turkeys, and pigs that together break down organic matter and serve as mulch for tomatoes and cucumbers. They discuss the extreme Wyoming weather—winds up to 154 mph, heavy snow, and a very short 4‑5‑week growing season—requiring resilient structures and flexible planting. The Wingers run a massive cattle operation (≈600 head on 25,000 acres) and explain their grazing strategy that preserves soil nutrients and allows land to rest for years. The episode also showcases Genuine Beef Co., the Wingers’ beef brand that ships nationwide, with a cooking segment where Victor samples ribeye, bacon, and plans lamb chops, encouraging viewers to buy the products. Throughout, the conversation touches on lifestyle aspects beyond farming, referencing their long‑form Abundance Plus podcast, the value of smart‑person interactions, and the community vibe of the homesteading network. The content blends practical homesteading knowledge, regional contrasts between East and West farming, and promotional storytelling.
Chapters
Tell me if I'm doing it wrong.
You've been here 5 minutes and you already got the torch.
Ready to burn something down.
Christian Winger, all the way from Wyoming. Husband to Jill Winger. Many of you probably know her. If you don't, you're gonna get to know her and him in this vlog. So you're a firefighter?
Firefighter.
So does that also mean you know how to start fires? Oh yeah. Okay. We're just coming back from Home Centers of America. I think our farm center was loading it enough, namely because we weren't here and we had the heat turned down. So now we get here— I should have went down and loaded it last night. And we found Jill Wiener. What's in your coffee this morning? Um, I assume that's coffee.
It is coffee. It's a dirty—
it's got a lot of milk and sugar in it.
I didn't bring my maple syrup. Shoot, I should have known. I should have asked last night and got you some real coffee. Okay, you're a horse person.
I am. I'm coveting your barn.
I know, and you're—
it's kind of a mess right now, but You said you're coveting it because, look, I don't know, I don't know if everybody that watches this knows, but this is our basement. This is full of horse stalls. Yeah, the outer stalls too.
Like, when I was little, I always dreamed of having my barn attached to the house. Yeah, like, first off of that, like, these are like kind of classic horse stalls, which we don't have our horses in stalls like these, but it's just like, it's every little girl's dream to have the breezeway and the little stalls with the sliding doors.
So yeah, very nice horse barn. Nice, good. Okay, we passed the horse barn test. Yeah, my dad and brother set out to do a horse barn here and board horses. Yeah, but it just never happened. No. So you're actually using horses?
Not for every single thing, but yeah, we do use it on your ranch. Yeah. Wow.
Yeah, cool.
But I mean, there is a different— I feel like for homesteaders there's a different safety aspect. Yeah, like you can get really hurt if you don't know what you're doing with a horse versus a milk cow might just kind of push you over. A horse is a little bit more higher.
The horse can be how tall?
I mean, they couldn't— their back can go to there. So yeah, that's, that's something.
Yeah.
So you have all these wood chips here right now.
When you're ready to plant, this spring, do you pull them back and plant in the ground, or how are you?
Yes, exactly. I'm doing like a— you know, Joel might do a big thick layer of wood chips, but he would have his ratio in here would be like 300 chickens. Well, I don't need 300 chickens, so these guys are gonna break it down slower, so we do less. Yeah, there's only about 4 or 6 inches of wood chips there. Yeah, and then we would have started our tomatoes or cucumbers. We would probably make a furrow. We'd get our shovel and make a furrow. You gotta plant down into the ground. Yeah, I know you know this, but for those that don't, then we've created this furrow along the whole thing. So then we plant down into the dirt, and this then serves as our mulch. Yeah, so it's less weedy. For those that don't know, this greenhouse is perfect for these, these chickens. They don't like rain and snow, so they come out here. They're out if it rains or snows. They can still get out. Uh, the pigs are in here too, nearby, so we can knock all our chores out at once. We could move our— Christian, we could move our— this is actually our turkey shawl. It's what we keep our turkeys in. This guy? Yeah, yeah. But in the winter, we move this around and spread the chicken's love. This turkey shawl they can perch in at night, and we move a really intense drop layer of droppings.
I wish we had one of these right here.
The, uh, the hoop house. I already know why. I imagine wind, right? You can't have that in windy. He asked me, how much wind is this rated for? I don't think we had to even think about it.
So what's the—
we might get 60 miles an hour, and that's a big storm. That's like, oh my gosh, that's like a hurricane.
We had 154 mile an hour wind recorded last month.
I haven't daily vlogged in like a month. We're gonna be— it's gonna be about Jill and Christian today, but tomorrow for the next video, let's do a, uh, we'll do an update because a lot of exciting stuff has happened on the farm since we've been daily vlogging. Do chickens get out in Wyoming?
Oh, all the time. We have the dogs to chase them, so this is actually—
the chickens are the same in Wyoming, huh? She's a chicken whisperer. This snow has been here for a few weeks. That's pretty rare that snow would stick around. Do you have snow sticking around right now? We do.
Yeah, we're covered in snow.
Are you? Kind of. How much?
Well, I don't know. We had about 18 inches here a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, I mean, we were calling the Inquirer when we got 18 inches. Yeah, is that a big storm for y'all?
But we will have warm snaps. Like, sometimes people are surprised in my pictures, it'll be December and it'll be bare ground.
Yeah, so we will—
it'll go away for a while. It's not like it's constant.
We didn't have any snow at Christmas.
Yeah, of course.
So it was warm there too. I mean, it was like warm here. 15 degrees. Okay, all right, we have our heifers in the stall. I'll tell you more about that in the next vlog. There we go. Welcome, Rebecca! You ready for the, uh, Alaskan winter?
Last night I checked the weather and it said it was going to be 22 degrees. It is not 22 degrees. It doesn't look like that, so I'm a little overdressed.
This is what happens in, in the mountains of North Carolina when it gets cold. And this is Wyoming when he comes to the North Carolina mountains.
He's like making sure everybody knows how little dressed he is.
He's about to prove it. He's about to take it. I'm ready to take it off. This is the ramp pasture. This will— it grows so fast we can't cover the whole field, maybe half of it, because the other half, before we even hit it, is like this tall in 4 or 5 weeks. Doesn't grow that fast.
Our whole growing season might be 4 or 5 weeks sometimes, really, depending on the year, depending on the drought conditions and that kind of thing.
Yeah. So, so how is it there's so How many head of cattle do you have?
200.
So how do you— so then that must take a lot of acreage.
Takes a lot of acreage.
So here that would maybe be 400, 500 acres. How many acres is it?
So we have 200 cows that we run with another guy who has 400 cows, so we got about 600 altogether.
Yeah.
And we run them on 25,000 acres.
I thought he's gonna say 2,500. No, 25,000.
Yeah, so that's the trick. Where there would have been a million buffalo that came through and grazed intensively, they wouldn't have come back for a year.
No.
Or maybe—
and gone multiple years, depending on what Joel was saying. You guys posed this question to Joel, and he said something interesting. What you have over us is you don't lose the nutrients in your grasses like we do, right? So they could leave for 2 or 3 years and come back. But if you left this 2 or 3 years, actually you would be starting to get a forest. Yeah, like that over there. That would be kind of different in Wyoming. We're talking about kids playing outside. Our kids are outside playing right now because it's like 30 or 40 degrees outside. It's not— so is that a little tricky in Wyoming, being able to let the kids just go out and play with the cold?
They kind of self-regulate, so I, I— we don't worry. Like, if they're cold, they'll come in.
Yeah.
And so they know how to get dressed. I mean, now that they're older, it's easier. When they were little and we were suits them up, unsuits them, and that gets old. But, um, they usually—
they're pretty tough. Yeah. Potatoes from the farm, bacon from the farm, sausage from the farm. You ready for this, Jill? I am ready. Look at here. All right, this is— this is food from your farm.
This is the Genuine Beef Co. What's the name?
Okay, I was gonna get that. Genuine Beef Co. It's a website on there. I guess if people just Google Genuine Beef Co., they can order. So you guys are shipping nationwide?
We are.
Yeah, sweet.
They got a ranch in Wyoming if you guys haven't picked up on that yet.
Can't go to Canada, so, but I'm going anywhere in the US. Okay, nice.
Yeah, they're gonna feed us some of their— so what are we gonna eat tonight?
We're gonna have some steak.
This is a gift? This is a gift. They're giving us this?
This is for you guys.
Oh my word.
You don't have to eat it with us if you want to save it.
We didn't bring it so that you could cook it.
Yeah, now let's have some Wyoming beef tonight. Look at this bacon. I love it about Brandon's cut. It's such an English style, I imagine. It's got the tenderloin in it. Look how wide— not just thick, but wide— these bacons are. It's all Justin Rhodes farm food. The eggs, the potatoes, the bacon, the sausage. I made the stupid, stupid, stupid mistake— probably the second most dumbest question I've ever asked in my life. I said to Jill and Christian, do you ever have— do you have— have you ever had a homegrown pork belly? And then I realized we used their recipe for the— for our bacon. You guys had a lot of grace for me there. Thanks. That was a good lunch. We just spent almost 3 hours interviewing Jill and Christian. Rebecca and I sit right there. This is our new video podcast setup for Abundance Plus inside the old farmhouse. Look, here's, uh, here's Grandpa, Great Grandpa Pinkney. Looks like even American Milking Dev in there. But hey, in the days of horse-drawn carriages. But anyway, had a great conversation with Jill Winger Old Fashioned On Purpose and her husband Christian. That's going to drop on Abundance Plus as soon as Dan can get it edited. He usually does that in about a couple of weeks, but then it'll go public. It'll be several months from now as we drip those out once a month to the public. But if you want it right away, you want to do Abundance Plus. But that was a good show, long form too. Matt came. I don't know if they remember you, Matt. I don't know if I introduced you. I'm vlogging. I didn't realize you had the camera. You were the, uh, for those that don't know, it's okay, you get on the vlog. Oh, of course. Are you hiding? Am I hiding? No, I am. As long as you're not hiding from anybody. I am. No. Hi. So you did my audiobook. That's how I found you. So how'd the podcast go? It was awesome. It was very informative. You guys are fans of David Goggins, and I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. Um, yeah, uh, I'm glad you brought that up because we talk— I mean, we interviewed Jill Winger, and her content has traditionally been homesteading, but we talked in the podcast about how We're so much more than homesteaders. Well, and we just— it was basically a lifestyle talk for nearly 3 hours. Yeah, interesting. How do you think the podcast went, Rebecca?
Oh, it went really good. It was really long. It was the longest one we've ever done. It was fun.
That was the goal. Any eye-openers for you?
Um, well, I liked the whole anxiety equals go.
Ah yeah, that was far out, wasn't it? What's the big takeaway for you?
We're awesome.
3-hour podcast with you guys.
I know, right?
I feel like we could keep going.
Yeah.
What's your takeaway?
That I like hanging out with smart people like you guys.
That's what Christian said.
He said— we rehearsed it. We rehearsed it.
We rehearsed it. On today's episode of Burn It Up Cooking Show, Wyoming beef, huge ribeyes. And so they can taste some of ours, we're gonna do lamb chops. First we're gonna sear. We've got some, uh, tallow going. That's what we want, the sizzle, right guys? A little bit of redness. Let's test it out. I pulled the steak over. Looking good. We got it done searing. Looking good. I'll put it in the oven. How'd it turn out, Jill?
Just right.
Tasted the lamb yet? Not yet.
I'm excited to try the lamb though.
Try it. Cut into this tomahawk steak. Yeah, it's good. Look at that. Is that yummy? Rebecca, you've eaten their steak yet? It's delicious. You've eaten our lamb yet?
I haven't got your lamb.
Let's go for your steak here. Lamb is super flavorful.
Yeah, it has really good flavor.
Good. Okay, so I need to get people to go and eat your steak. This is absolutely delicious. So I encourage you guys to go check it out. What's the name of it again? The website? Genuine Beef. GenuineBeefCo.com. And can they get this tomahawk steak? Oh yeah, so good. What else can they get?
Roast, hamburger.
I got some prime ribs and all kinds of steaks. Yep. So we got bundles and coupons and all the fun stuff.
All right, and I think when we have our beef shortages in between harvests, Beck, we know where to go because you ship to every single state.
Yes.
Hawaii and Alaska too?
We have.
All right, all right, all the 48.
Yeah, okay, we haven't shipped anything.
Absolutely delicious. Go check it out. I'll also leave the link for it down in the description.
