Homesteading on a BUDGET vs. BREAKING THE BANK: Which Tools Win? 💸

In this video, we've got 10 cents farm tools that you use every day for all kinds of things, and we go all the way up to $100,000 plus. And I guarantee you there's many tools along the way that you didn't think of, and I'll share with you all the uses of these 40+ tools. 5 cents zip ties. You can get a lot of farming done with zip ties. Cattle panels and tin and a multi-tool, and you're pretty much there. Feels like all kinds of stuff with zip ties, free really, but say 10 cents. These cost 10 cents on the hay bale. I was literally rolling up this fence yesterday and said I need to wrap it, and I looked around, and you know, sometimes I carry them in my apron, and just tied this fence up. It's what cost the farm who sold me this hay. 10 cents. 10 cents for this hay string. We tie up posts, we tie up cords, we store our net in this thing. So much you could do with a hay string. The $1 item— big lighter. Starting the fire in the morning, in the evening, in our insert wood stove. Also for lighting the candles at night in the winter when we're having supper at 5, it starts getting dark Sometimes we're eating at 5:30. A lot of you are eating at 6 or later. Light some candles, get those eyes down. It's got a romantic, cozy, relaxing feel to get you ready for bed. $10. You know what I'm gonna pull out of this drawer, don't you? Duct tape, right up there with zip ties, and just an all-around handy tool. Let's say, I don't know, $12 to $20. Books. Oh my gosh, books are the most undervalued homestead life tool there is. My book, The Rooted Life. I say it because if I had a whole shelf of farming books, which is probably what I have, I've summed up my experience in farming books all into one little 4-hour read. It says retail for $28. I just looked it up on Amazon, it's $12 right now on Amazon. From gardening to chickens to permaculture design, to winter gardening, everything but cows and pigs. Everything you need to know. Just get the one book and just go. It's enough to do 75% of your own food. Let's go. $15. Crap, you gotta have gloves. You gotta have gloves. And I, you know, you can get the cheap leather ones, but they tend to be bulky, and I like these form-fitting gloves. They're not that expensive. These have lasted me forever. I store them in my apron. It's not cloth. Just nice form-fitting grippy handles, just come in clutch. Extension cords, I must have at least 12, and long ones too, starting at $20 probably. Look at this, I have hanging them up over above the road. We're running trough heaters in our waters to keep the waters unfrozen, and they run on, uh, 15 amps, so you can't put 2 on one outlet. So we have extension cords till we get 1, 2, 3 4, 5. We've got 5 going right now. $15 to $40, Premier One Energizer tester. I like this one because you can also test the batteries. You can put this on the negative side, this on the positive side, and see how charged up the batteries are. But we test our fence. This is the key to keeping your cows in. Yeah, it's working. 5.8, 5.9. That'll really keep them in. That's hitting really hard. 4 is great. 3 is okay. 5, 6 is fantastic. I can sleep good tonight for $20. Ah, it didn't work. Umbrella. Yeah, it's cruddy. Have you ever found an umbrella not to get cruddy? I haven't. Not with kids. And we learned this in 2018 when it rained every day straight for 9 days. We got 18 inches. Umbrella was clutch on the farm. It made it so much less measurable. You do have to hold it with one hand, especially for filming. It's great because your cameras cannot get wet. That's broke. That's broke. It still works. And you might be able to find these cheaper, $5, $20. I've spent $150 on an umbrella and still you get problems. So forget it, just get the cheapest umbrella you can get. Kids are going to run off with it, break it. The wind's going to break it. Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. $20 to $50 range, I'll speak to some notable tools that aren't obvious, like a spade shovel. We don't need to get into that. The number one weeding tool is the— I get this from Johnny Seeds. It's a stirrup hoe. I believe this is the 5-inch, which you can get them all kinds of sizes. The stirrup hoe is my absolute favorite. You can hoe going in, you can hoe going out. Absolutely amazing. Hands down my favorite hoe for sure. Pitchfork. Notable, especially with Woodchips Farm, with the regenerative homestead, farmstead, where you're going to have permaculture doing, you're going to have animals on deep bedding, you're going to move a lot of material around, you're going to maybe turn compost. That's a manure fork, a hay fork. These are all good things to have on a regenerative homestead. $30 headlamp. I mean, may seem obvious. I got a little tip and trick for this here in a second, but you know, you can, you can go outside load the wood stove, milk— you get up early, milk the cow outside. They're very handy. But I just recently discovered, and I've been geeking out on this lately, it has a red light version. Our eyes go down with the sun, so you can put this on and read books to your kids, go load the stove, whatever, and you're relaxed. This is if you're camping, but you're at home, you just get so relaxed and just go to sleep easily. Most of the time I'm using this red light. It It's not that bright, but for the most part it gets most of the work. If I need something more, it comes with a brighter version, not that much money. I don't know what this is, but I have no brand preference. For $20 or $50, you can get this auger tool. We use it— you just hook it up to a drill and you can go out in the garden and drill down for planting potatoes, anything like that, maybe sweet potato slips. This is a really cool tool for quick planting in the garden. $70+ splitting maul. You want to have this for redundancy. What if your log splitter goes out? What if you just want to cut some kindling? It's good to have a chainsaw, but it'd also be good to have a manual saw just in case of disaster. It's good to have a log splitter, but it's also good to have a splitting maul, especially since it increases your testosterone every time you split wood. It just feels great. For $70, you don't have to play this game with the T-post, and you can pull it up with this T-post puller. You're supposed to make it look easier. There you go, good job. Next up, about $80, a Craftsman blower. Why get a broom when you love the grid and you can have an electric leaf blower? Not a battery one, it's just more batteries for kids to lose. A 50-foot Cobalt extension cord. Retraction. Watch. I can retract. I'll show that in a minute. But you can retract this and it winds up itself. It doesn't have to be like that cord and just stay unwound. Look, there's cat food on here. You get your hair cut and then just— now you just pull this cord and it pulls itself back in. How do you like that? Woo! Austin just pointed out, what about your watch? Oh my gosh. Probably less than $100. Probably the most taken-for-granted tool on my body. And probably because this thing has just taken a beating. It's a— I don't even know what it is anymore. It's a Casio. I like the big font so I can read it. And it's got the light. This thing has probably gone at least 5 years, and I am rough on it. and I like to keep the time, so it's absolutely critical. $100 plus, I got 100-foot half-inch Garden Right hose. I don't just get the hose at Lowe's. One, those kink. This is kink-free. I mean, you can still kink, but you got to work really hard at it. This is lead-free, so there's none of the lead in this hose. And three, stay— you know what, this crazy stainless steel people stainless steel fittings at the end. From time to time we run over one with a mower and we get a little repair kit at Ace Hardware and we're good to go. This is in here because we're freezing and we want to be able to fill up the waters if the water lines don't thaw out in the afternoon. If it doesn't get above freezing, we can come in here and use the— take this out and go water the cows. If I could only have one tool on the homestead, only one, Here it is. This is the Leatherman Wave. We make this a special thing in our family. I'm not sponsored or anything, just I've had this for 20 years. They, they have a lifetime warranty and it works. You send in a broken one, they either fix it or replace it. It's first got pliers on there. They only, you know, from time to time I lose one. Why do I like it so much? Well, has a knife. I keep the smooth knife for cutting edibles And I keep the serrated knife for cutting gross stuff on the farm, cuz I wouldn't want to eat off that blade. Those 3 things are the most used things. Next up are the scissors. From time to time I use those. They have these little tiny— this Phillips and little tiny for fixing glasses or something. That comes in handy from time to time. This is cool. You can switch it from a Why do I not know the name of that? Flathead? There you go. Flathead to Phillips head. Austin behind the camera keeping me straight. Can opener. Rarely use that. Probably wouldn't have that if I designed my own. Just don't use it enough. I do use this from time to time. File. The saw. So especially if you can only have one tool, you'd probably want all this, even the can opener. And it's got a little safety button. You can't shut on itself unless you push this. Really handy tool. About $120. This is from a fellow homesteader who used to work at Polyface Designs. They make these leather pouches with magnet. So you could be upside down, which happens sometimes. You're reaching over a fence or whatever. $200, you got the Log Ox. This can roll over big logs. One person could be down there, you could be here. You could pick up a big log. Let's demo it a little bit. And it just picks that log up. Isn't that crazy? That's kind of neat, right? And it has an extension so that you could, uh, you could roll it up here. Let's see if I can— as an extension to where you can actually— here, maybe I can do it. I don't know, something like that with its extension, and you get it up off the ground and you can saw it. We have a Mini-X for that, but this is a heck of a lot cheaper, isn't it? Oh my gosh, one of my favorite tools, my apron. Number one, it keeps my clothes nice so I don't have to buy as many clothes, so it's cheaper that way. This is a waxed canvas apron, $200 from Sturdy Brothers. It's American-made down in Georgia. We went to see them on the Great American Farm Tour. The other thing I like about this is the pockets. Let's just see what we have in our pockets. I'm not saying I don't waste it sometimes. Yeah, in case I need a metal strap. Looks like I need to put that back. Zip ties are not bad to keep in here. I could keep a fence tester in here, measuring tape. A pen here. This, this another pocket you can keep pens. Just unlatches right here. I keep that loose enough so I can just get it over my head. I'll add the European scythe in here. It's probably $200-300. You can go in and manually cut down briars with this thing, or even mow with the grass blade on this thing. Wee! For $300, you got the new wheelbarrow. See, This is a gorilla cart. The problem with the wheelbarrow is you have to hold it with two hands. You have to balance it. Have you ever been going with a wheelbarrow and it just fall over? And it can be real heavy. Ah, you guys, you can get in this, you can put your soil in this, and then— or whatever in this. I've carried anything from chidlers to soil in this thing. And if you do want to dump, you can lift up on this handle and it releases, and you've got a dump trailer. The only place I found that the wheelbarrow beats the garden cart is when you've got to take soil down a 1-foot-wide garden path, which we do sometimes. A 1-foot-wide garden path, taking the wheelbarrow down and dumping a little bit of soil on there. If you're moving soil with this onto a garden path, you kind of have to ride on your garden path to dump it, or your garden bed, to dump it into place. Used very heavily on the farm. Way more than a wheelbarrow. $300, the Meadow Creatures Broad Fork. Only broad fork I would use from here on out. It is so sturdy. I've worn out other broad forks. You do like this, you drive yourself into the ground. I mean, if you were on compact ground like this, with this Meadow Creatures Broad Fork, you could literally get a sledgehammer and drive it in. It's that tough. But normally you can just step on this thing, wind it in, push it down. This is a way to aerate, hydrate your soil without tilling. So it does— it will help your soil without the harmful contributions that are tilling. The broadfork will help get more bang for your buck out of your garden. About $350 for this whole kit. The Never Sink Gritter— what in the world is that, Justin? This is a metal wheel, bars across it. I believe this is a, I don't know, 7-inch This marks your spacing on the garden. I don't know if it'll do it on this compact soil, but you sit this down, the handle is crooked like this so you can walk in your pathway, and you roll this over your garden bed and it marks where you're going to plant. That's why they call it the griddler. It creates a grid and you know right where to plant. And you want to plant in straight rows so that you can go and hoe in between those rows easily. If you don't plant evenly, it's hard to get in a rhythm to hoe it, so this can make a big difference. Here we got a Jang seeder, $500. It's worth it if you're gonna have 8,000 square feet of garden like us. If you're going to grow a significant amount of your produce, it's a really fine seeder. Put the seeds in the compartment here and roll it along. You can get Earthway, you know, cheaper ones, and we started that way. But if you're going to get real serious about garden— your gardening, you're going to eventually want to invest in one of these because it just makes it so much more smoother and accurate. Last thing you want is to roll out a seeder and it not have put down seeds. And for about $500 $500 guns. If I could only have one gun on the homestead, it would be the.22 Magnum. Why? Well, it's strong enough to kill a cow, it's strong enough to kill a pig, it's super accurate. Just a good all-around gun. More powerful than the.22 Long Rifle. Don't get it confused with that. Get the.22 Magnum if you don't want to have a lot of guns. If I could have two guns, and I think it's all you need for guns on the homestead, also about $500. This is a Mossberg. What was this? This was a Savage. I just got them at my local gun shop. We know the owners, they're friends of ours. This is a.410 shotgun, my choice for shooting pigs and cows. You can shoot them with a.22 Magnum, but this is even more powerful. You use the slug ammo. It's one bullet about that big, so it's really hard to mess up. It's important to me that we knock out the, the pig, knock out the cow and they never knew it coming. And this has a huge— the hugest margin of error. The only problem is, if you want to eat the brains, forget it, because this is just going to explode the brains. Why this stands out from the.22 Magnum: one, it's a little more powerful, but two, you can also put a birdshot in it, which is probably the most common. And that's a bullet that starts out solid like this and then spreads out the further you get away. It's good for turkey hunting, you know, hitting that little head, the ammo starts spreading out in little pellets. Home defense, because you're going to be nervous. All these things for the 410 shotgun because it can— it has versatility and ammo. Those would be the only two guns. There's— that's the only two guns I need. For $800, stay in communication with the world. We learned how important that was when we had Hurricane Helene and we were without communication for 5 days. It was bad. Starlink. You just have power, which we do. We love the grid. We aren't going to be without power. We have the generator. We stay in power. We stay connected with the internet. We're ready for the snowstorm coming up. Power can go out for 3 days, no problem for us. We'll have power, we'll have warmth from wood, we'll have, uh, all that we need. I'd say probably in about $1,000 worth of product, you can build my classic Chick Shawl. Got to get the book Homestead Builds. This will hold up to 60 chickens, really. I say it's a tool because they're inside, their manure is dropping through the ground. You can move this to a different place every day and you're fertilizing the pasture, making it better. Or you can use it as a chicken tractor in a sense. You could put a, a mobile electric net around it where you want a garden and just leave it there for a while, perhaps during the winter, put some deep bedding down, then just let them till it up. You've got a removable hitch here so you can move it around with a machine, or you could take this off And why do I call it a Chickshaw? Well, it moves like a rickshaw, okay, but for chicks. For $1,000, $1,200, the number one tool— I said, I said the Leatherman— it'd probably have to be this. This, this beats it all for fish, for entertainment, for information, for communicating. I used Grok to figure out prices of all this stuff here. Let me show you some of my apps. Timer going off. I set timers all the time. I use the calendar. I just saw Beefcake and Poundcake mating yesterday, so I put that in. The camera, of course, documenting, sharing your life, sharing your journey, communicating with others, getting help. Social media platforms, just staying in community, sharing your joy with others, like on Instagram or YouTube. Apple's weather app. Super easy to use, but the beautiful one hates it. So I got the Weather Channel down here. It says it's a little more accurate. Audible. You're out there working. You want something to listen to. Just listen to a book. Get something done. Podcasts on YouTube Music. D-Minder. When, when, when can you get benefits from the sun outside? AllTrails. Get off the farm and go for a hike. Have some fun. And another chatbot, ChatGPT. CapCut for editing really quick. How could I forget? It's saved on my home page, the Abundance Plus app. See what the community is doing. They're having fun in the snow. Somebody's asking a chicken question, they got 10 answers. Somebody's discouraged, they got 11 encouragements. Somebody's wondering if we're going to do okay in the storm. You can go in there to the community, or you can go to browse and see how to plant garlic. You can see the vlog— the vlogs or our podcasts ad-free. You can see shows like Divergence last one with Ruth Ann Zimmerman. Rooted, our docu-series. Lots of stuff with Joel. Joel has a whole section. If I could have two tools on the homestead, and you know, it'd be the Leatherman and the chainsaw, because I could clear land with this chainsaw and get more acreage. You know, you start out with what you get. You get something at Lowe's, but then you realize, wait a minute, I'm clearing 2 acres of winter Yeah, let's get the serious boy. Let's ask the Asplund tree service crew what they're using. This is a professional quality Husqvarna 572 XP. This is what the professionals who chainsaw clearing the roads and whatnot use every day. It's not cheap, but it is— it's sort of like books. Pound for pound, the power you get out of this— Joel Salatin says if I only have If there's only 1 gallon of gasoline left in the world and I've got it, I'm going to run it through a chainsaw. So what you get out of that gallon of fuel from a chainsaw is more than from any other thing. You want a money-saving machine? Get a wood splitter. We've got the 37-ton from Northern Tool. It's got the Honda engine. This machine has been, you know, what do you call a machine that's good versus a lemon? This is the opposite of the lemon. It starts up every time. And it has a 4-way splitter. And the splitting can be your bottleneck, especially when you have a Mini-X and you can hold up the logs, saw the, saw the logs, and then we're just waiting on the splitter to go. But the 4-way splitter helps. And with this splitter, the chainsaw, and the, the big machines, we can split 5 cords of firewood in a day. And these start out at about $1,600. At Northern Tool, but you can get them at all over the place. I don't know, $2,000 or so plus, depends on if you get used or new. A manure spreader. We take our deep bedding from housing all the animals all winter, put it in this thing in the spring, and go put it on the pastures where it needs it the most. You can spend $2,000 on a manure spreader, or you can buy more land. Which one do you want to do? Increase productivity over many acres with $2,000 or buy more land. For us, our neighbors aren't for sale. That's not an option. So we've got to make the land we have better, and it tends to be much cheaper that way anyway. $4,500, an all-around farm trailer, 2-inch ball hitch. We've added some extension because we're using it currently to haul our own trash. It's a whole lot cheaper than having a dumpster. You could put a side-by-side, a four-wheeler. You don't need all this right away. We first started homesteading with a Premier 1 electric net and a wheelbarrow and just build out from there. This has taken 20 years to accumulate this stuff. Don't beat yourself up or think that you have to get all this stuff right away. Start with a zip tie and a Leatherman and get going, and a phone with timers reminding you to Check the trees. Camera rig. I told you I'd tell you about tools that maybe you're not be thinking of. Great for documenting the farm. It's our living right here. This is what we're doing. We're not out milking the cow, we're out here making a movie about milking the cow. This is a probably $5,000, $6,000 rig. Now it's not what I would start out with. It's not what I would tell you to start out with. You can start out with a smartphone in your pocket plus a mic. Do a mic hookup and you're going. And go from there. See if you like filmmaking. Satchler, very expensive tripod. Look at this quick collapse. Put it in the side-by-side and go. Also quick setup. Where have you seen a tripod do that? And it's not that heavy. Feels like plastic. It's not. I put this on the fence to try to get over it one day. Got shocked. This is carbon, carbon fiber, which I guess is metal. We've got the Canon EOS R, full-frame camera, probably $2,000-$3,000. We've got the Canon— this is the cheaper of my wide-angle lenses, 14-35. It's $1,000. I have a lens that is $3,000. The Rode mic, you plug this in and the cool thing about it is it turns on when you turn on the camera. Back in the old school days, you didn't have that feature and you had to remember to turn it on, and I'm not like that. So there was oftentimes I'd be filming a whole bit and say, oops, didn't turn on the mic. I like the Joby ball head for on top of this thing because you can, uh, just unscrew that and you can twist this thing around. You can tilt it, you could go vertical and shoot a short. I put this quick release on here. This is —this is my custom setup and has been for years—a quick release. It pops out of there, and then you've got a selfie cam, and then it pops back in rather easily. This was one of my very first big machine purchases because in 2017 I went on the Great American Farm Tour, saw one of the greatest farms down in Florida, Full Circle Farm. It does everything naturally. He said one of the most inexpensive natural fertilizers you can get is a mower and going behind the cows. For us, whatever the cows and the sheep didn't eat in the rotational grazing, we then come behind them with the mower. We mow on the highest setting. You don't want to mow it real low. We get a commercial mower. These start at $6,000. You get a commercial one. This is a Skag mower. Big fan. My dad liked these. I like these. Zero turn. They're a lot of fun to drive. They're fast. It is a fertilizer. Behind the cows and the sheep. It cuts what they don't eat, chops it up, that breaks down into organic matter a lot quicker, and the edibles tend to grow back faster than the non-edibles. So this can help really increase the productivity of your land, just a mower. Start with what you have now and maybe dream of a commercial zero-turn, especially if you're on a big scale like this, 10, 15 acres. We're on about mowing about 15 acres. And for $9,000, a side-by-side. I like the Kawasaki Mule. We have a, we have a one-bencher, and this is a two-bencher. It collapses, you can make the bed bigger. I didn't think I was going to like this. We were getting this for the beautiful one so she could putz around on the farm. I said, it's yours, you pick it out. We got it home, I've been using it every day since. I got the side-by-side 15. I gained 15 lbs after we got this thing. It, it enabled us to haul hay, to the cows way out in the field, go put pigs in a pig glen out in the forest. It just enables for so much more. A snowplow— we've got that winch-ran snowplow. Don't want to wear out the shocks on this thing, so you put that down. Oh gosh, you can see by the— by the— it's been beat up. We use this thing every single day. It 2x'd our productivity. On the farm. I grew up on a farm with a four-wheeler, and four-wheelers are great. And if it's all you can afford, do a four-wheeler. You can haul a couple of hay bales on it. This thing can probably haul 6, 7, 8 hay bales. It can also haul the family. I'm all about family-friendly homesteading, and we all can go in this. And I've also noticed it's terribly hard to film on a four-wheeler. I have a tripod that I carry with me. It's so much more easier to just put it in this and film. It stays dry if it's raining out here. Much more hay, better for filming, better for bringing the whole family. I mean, we've put up to 13 people in here, and we call it the Rhodes Farm Safari. When we have our family plus others, we can take guests around. This just, just makes it really pleasant. Let's say $30,000. We're gonna see if this starts. We named her Lucky because this tractor is over 30 years old, and it's lucky if she starts. We got a 50-50 chance. The benefit of a tractor over a track loader or a Mini X is they have the PTO, so they have a spinning device back here that can run a hay machine or something like that. The tires like this are much less damaging on the pasture, so we keep this around as backup one day doing hay equipment. And plus, it was Dad's and he gave it to my son Jonah, so this is a nostalgic piece. Let's see if she starts. It's very cold out here. It's probably not even above freezing. You might not even have a 50/50 chance. Nope, nope, not gonna do it. Alternator doesn't work, so you only have so many charges on the battery before you need to charge the battery. That probably— that needs to happen. And we're in the 50, 60 plus thousand division with our truck we use for hauling picking up animals. Now listen, you don't have to have that. Our just— our children are coming of age, they need a license. We farmed in a minivan for the longest time, and it was the one we had. Well, you can haul calves in those, you can haul sheep in those, and chickens. Some minivans got trailers. This is handy for hauling big animals a long way, but before we had that, we just rented a truck. It's a little difficult to rent a truck for hauling hauling, but you can do it, and it's probably worth it if you're only doing it once, twice a year. Unless of course you want a big vehicle for your kid who's going to be 16, you want him to be as safe as possible on the road. The Suburban, that's the farmer's minivan because you can take up to 8 people in it, so all the kids can get in it. Plus, and then we use the Suburban for the longest time until we finally got a truck. With Suburban plus a trailer, and you've got your farm setup. Finally, the big machines. $80,000+ for the 25G John Deere. This is a track loader. A lot of people call it a skid steer. If you can only have one big machine, it would probably be this. You have forklifts on this so that we can unload feed. We get our feed in 1,000 to 2,000 pounds. This will handle it, no problem. You can easily switch it out from inside the cab. To the bucket to use all— use it for all kinds of things. Bringing the animals in from the harvest after we've harvested, killed them out in the field, bring them in. Any kind of use for a bucket, all kinds of use. We have the grapple attachment because here's another thing about this thing, you know, we got in the 5-year payment plan for these things. I was nervous. It's a big expense. It was one of the most nerve-wracking expenses I ever did, and I wondered if it was worth it. But here's the thing, these things can clear between it and the Mini X and clear it more safely. You don't have to fell down a tree with a chainsaw. Pasture. And we're working on clearing some of our forests for pastures. And right now in this premium place area that we live in, pasture land can be $30,000 to $50,000 an acre. But I can clear an acre probably in a good week if it came down to it, you know, working all day. The other thing, the hurricane came, absolutely destroyed our farm, and if we were going to have to be like our neighbors, we would spend $50,000 to $100,000 on repair. It took the hurricane for me to finally say, okay, one of these machines paid for themselves just by us being able to repair ourselves after the hurricane. Lastly, these machines have become handy because it's taught my boys a trade. They are thinking about having a business one day in this. But also, Jonah now has a really good paying job as a machine operator for a local man here, and he's doing really well with this. As expensive as they are, they've— they're going to more than pay for themselves. And we only got 2 more years left and then we're debt-free on these things. The Mini X. Some would say this would be the only thing you get. This can root up a tree, it can push down a tree, and you're not— one of the most dangerous things you can do is fell a tree with a chainsaw. This takes out that danger. Between these two machines, we're certainly using these machines 2, 3 times a week. La la la la la, let me be free.