In this video, Justin Rhodes shares three practical, low‑cost strategies he used to fund his homestead without spending cash. First, he sources free food waste from small co‑ops and health‑food stores, especially produce departments, and uses it to feed chickens and pigs, providing detailed daily feed amounts and calculations. Second, he doubles his production—raising twice the number of chickens, eggs, vegetables, or grass‑fed beef—and sells the surplus, illustrating the approach with role‑played phone calls to potential buyers. Third, he rents out a spare bedroom on Airbnb, describing the experience and how the income can cover rent or mortgage. Throughout, he offers anecdotes, feeding estimates, and promotional information about an upcoming Netflix‑style homestead docu‑series premiere in the Abundant Permaculture member area, encouraging viewers to watch the free sample and join live Q&A.
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In this video, I'm going to show you 3 brilliant one-odd ways to pay for a homestead without any money. Idea number 1: get free food waste from the grocery store. Forget about Publix, Whole Foods, Piggly Wiggly. Forget about the big brand stores because they usually have trash compactors. It's hard to jump in there to get that food out. And if you ask the various departments, they don't want to give it to you for fancy liability reasons and things like that. So think more instead of small co-ops, health food stores. All you got to do is go in there to each department. I especially like the produce department because they get a lot of food and that tends to be the best stuff for your animals. Say, hey, I've got a farm, I'm looking to feed my animals, Hey, could I just come by and get your food waste, things that you're gonna throw away? And we have been able to arrange various arrangements there. We would pick up once or twice a week regular, and they would even save their trash. Other stores might say, sure, come by, we'll give you what we have when you come by. You can feed about one chicken, I'd say, 2/3-ish pounds of food a day. This is our food scrap. Let's pretend we got it from the grocery store. I'm gonna say this is about 25 pounds of feed. At 2/3 pounds of chicken, that's about, I don't know, 25— that will feed about 26 birds. There's eggshells in there, there's bananas. They will generally miss the banana stickers. There's a meat carcass. You probably won't get that at the place. We got very little meat. Lemon, they'll get the inside of that. There's plenty of feed for them. For pigs, I would say give them 2 pounds a day for however many months they are old, till about that 8-ish months mark, and then kind of level out there at about the 16-pound-a-day mark. At that weight, this is almost enough to feed these, uh, say they're 7 months, they need 14 pounds, 28 pounds each. So I'm gonna have to come up with, uh, 2 pounds of commercial grain to feed these pigs. Idea number 2: raise enough for you, times it by 2, raise that as well. Because listen, if you need 12 chickens, say, for eggs, it's not that much harder to raise 24 and then sell the extras and pay for the entire operation. We've done that, works totally nice. Well, I literally went into my phone and called people from there selling. I did this with grass-fed beef, I did this with vegetables, I did this with eggs. Call them. Hey, is this Mr. Mullet? Yes, it is. Okay, good. Hey, Mr. Mullet, this is Justin Rhodes. How are you? I'm doing good. How are you? I'm doing good. Okay. All right, well, listen, you know I have a farm. Yeah, we're growing a lot of our own food. We got, uh, okay, starting to grow more chicken eggs than we need, and, and we're thinking about selling them. We've got They're organic, and we source a lot of our food from the co-op. Hey, would you be interested in buying some of those eggs? Well, that sounds good, but I'll tell you what, Justin. Would you let me think about that and get back to you? Oh, okay. Well, just let me know. Okay. All right, I'll let you know. Have a good day. Uh, thanks for calling. Okay, bye. Don't count on those ones. Just keep moving. You're probably not going to hear from them again. So let's keep going. Miss Birdie? Hello? Oh hey, this is Justin Rhodes. Hey listen, I got extra eggs. Yeah, from our farm. We're selling them. Would you like to buy, say, We're doing this program where you pay once a month, $20, and you get a dozen eggs a week. Yeah? Okay, and we're doing farm pickup, so any day of the week that works for you, just come by. Okay, I'll be right there. Okay, bye-bye. Hey, Miss Birdell. Hey. Got your eggs. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Bye. Bye. We generally found that we could not only cover our complete costs of operation but also make a little bit of money. Thirdly, this one's maybe a little bit odd and out there. Rent out a spare bedroom on Airbnb. We did this and except for that, those one visitors that one, parked in our grass. Two, their son kind of inspected our kitchen knives. But other than that, we had visitors from all over the world and it was really wonderful to get to know these people. And that not only paid our rent, I mean that that could have been your mortgage. That on average paid our rent and many times more than rent. We got to put a little money in our pocket. These are 3 of many things that helped us when we were hard up financially. Hopefully maybe those are some relatively— well, those are some ideas for you. I don't know if I'd say easy, but they are some ideas. That is just scratching the surface on some of the things we had to do in this video, hopefully. More educational and lighthearted. But guys, we have hired a production crew. We are— I am producing a legitimate Netflix meets homestead style docu-series. I'm excited about that. That airs this coming weekend. We're publishing it. We're going to put it in our Abundant Permaculture member area. But for this weekend, I'm gonna get you guys— we're gonna premiere it. I'm so excited about it. I want everybody to have a sample. Let's premiere it for a couple days starting Valentine's Day and get in there. No cost to So if you're strapped like I was, get in there and take advantage of that. And if you're seeing this past that premiere date, check it out. I'm going to work on getting you guys a free sample or some kind of goodie down there, but I would love to see you guys at the live premiere. We're going to show the first debut show, and then Rebecca and I will be online answering questions live. So it should be pretty neat. Hope to see you there.
