I Spent a Day with Joel Salatin (on my farm)
In this YouTube interview, Victor Justin Rhodes spends a day on Joel Salatin’s farm, walking through a variety of regenerative agriculture practices and discussing how they translate into viable farm businesses. The conversation covers pasture‑based livestock management, portable poultry shelters, small‑scale dairy techniques, and the economics of broiler chicken production as a cash‑flow starter for new homesteaders. Salatin introduces the concept of a “carbonaceous diaper” – using a small herd of pigs to create high‑quality compost for garden fertility – and expands the idea to large‑scale animal‑driven composting that replaces expensive machinery. Detailed guidance is given on pastured pig social dynamics, fencing, and mixing groups, as well as controlled grazing with cattle, including S‑curve grass growth, cow‑days per acre, and stockpiling strategies. The discussion moves to resilient farm infrastructure, such as building water bars, low‑cost access roads, and ponds to prevent washouts. Throughout, Salatin promotes his “Farm Like a Lunatic” course bundle, explaining that purchasing now grants access to all future modules, positioning the education as an investment that can save money on equipment mistakes and generate income through marketing strategies. The tone remains conversational and instructional, with enthusiasm for practical, low‑tech solutions that empower homesteaders to build profitable, regenerative farms.
Chapters
I'm about to spend a day with my mentor. You guys have learned from me, now you get to see who I learned from. Joel Salatin, friend, an imaginary uncle. He's that food-growing uncle I never had and wish I had, which that is what I am for you all. So it's a multi-generational thing here. We're just gonna keep the camera rolling. You guys are gonna get a bunch of JJ content today. Joel and Justin. What are you looking forward to about this, Austin? Uh, just hearing all the wisdom from the two homestead kings themselves. Hey, there he is!
Hey, hey, hey!
You remember Gideon and Henry? Yes.
Boy, little Henry, I don't think he was walking the last time I saw him.
Maybe not.
Justin, yeah, good to see you.
And Austin?
Hi Austin, good to see you.
Him, we, we brought him last time we came to your house.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, all right, we had stew together.
You want me to help you with that?
I'm good, balance like two 5-gallon buckets. Yeah, you don't carry just one, right? No, you don't carry one, you throw your back out. Hopefully we're not going to get an inspector.
Oh, you're fine, you never know.
Hi Henry, it's early, isn't it?
He wanted to come with us, so here he is.
Good.
Where do you want me? Get my front passenger seat. Did you watch the NC State game? The boys, they haven't been in 40 years.
Yeah, no, they don't have a Caitlin Clark.
Yeah, that's what you're about. Why do you like her so much?
Well, she's just, she's just a great, she's just a great gal. I mean, seems to have a wonderful grasp of life, personality, and she shoots these bombs, you know, from 33 feet. Boom!
You know, really?
Yeah. And she's got every NCAA record in women's basketball there is— rebounds, points, 3-pointers, assists. I mean, she's just incredible. And so, you know, look, if it were just me I might not be quite as, but I started hearing about her and told Theresa about it, 'cause Theresa's life is bound up in a lot of other things. And so we together on the computer, we pulled up YouTube, Caitlin Clark, and Theresa got into it because it's like anything when you're, like you always appreciate skill when you've tried it. Like if you play the trumpet, you appreciate a good trumpet player. If you play guitar, you appreciate a good guitar more than a person who doesn't know anything about playing a guitar. I mean, I look at that and say, oh, that's pretty amazing. But I can't appreciate, you know, the level of skill because I've never tried to play the guitar. And so because Teresa is a great basketball player and knows what it takes, she has a level, a depth of appreciation for what Caitlin's doing that I don't. So anyway. It's just a fun thing.
Did she win?
No, they lost. They lost the championship game to University of South Carolina, and it's a bummer. But the game Friday night— yeah, Friday night was the semi, and that was a squeaker. And I watched that. That was over University of Connecticut, UConn.
Yeah.
And UConn's been there to this level like 13 times in Iowa. This is only their second ever. And so, you know, they're definitely the underdog and they won by 2 points. It was a clinker right to the— I mean, right to the end. It was, oh, heart, a heartbeat. But yeah, yeah. Anyway, so I watched that game and then, and, but yeah, I did some— just rested, rested.
Did you watch that one at home or did you get down here?
Friday night? No. I was here, I was here and I got back to the room, it came on at 9:30, and so I got back to the room for the special dinner right at 9:30, so I was able to watch it. So I was up a little later Friday night, a little past my bedtime. I'm usually in bed by 9:30, but I wanted to watch it.
What time is your bedtime?
Oh, you know, 9, 9:30, yeah.
What time's your wake-up time?
I wake up with daylight, so in the summer I might wake, you know, get up at 5:30, 6 in the, in the middle of the summer, and in the winter, you know, 7.
You don't set an alarm?
I never set an alarm. I mean, unless I got to go to the airport at 4 o'clock, then I, then I set it.
How was your Uruguay? Was it Uruguay? Uruguay, we were on a webinar and you were going—
that was fantastic. Yeah, Uruguay. I'll tell you what, I've never had steaks like Uruguay. Oh man. Oh, and I'm still trying to figure out why they're so They are better than any steak I've ever had anywhere in my life, and I had it twice. I had one dinner with the Uruguayan Secretary of Agriculture, and we had steak. And you know, Uruguay, the American per capita consumption of beef is about 52 pounds a year. That's American per capita consumption of beef.
America.
Uruguay is over 200 pounds. That means on average, The average adult Uruguayan is eating more than a pound of beef a day on average. And yeah, yeah. And so, you know, so they had me down. This was their first— they billed this as an ecological farming slash business conference. It was the first time that they had Uruguay has done a lot of conferences on whatever, beef management, beef production, but they've never linked something up with business. And so they asked me to come down and talk about business. And of course I did the whole controlled grazing. And they don't do controlled grazing much either. And so I'm driving through the countryside and it's terrible. But boy, you talk about a grass paradise. A grass paradise. Listen to this. This country, this country, it never gets over 85 degrees.
Wow.
It never gets below 30. They get 50 to 70 inches of rainfall a year, and there's no more than 1,000 feet of elevation difference in the entire country. Now, if that doesn't sound like, like, like grass paradise, I don't know what does. And, but, but, but they're just, you know, control— they just, uh, the cattle are out You know, and the pastures are short, grazed down to nothing, they're standing in the creeks. You know, it was— and the cattle to me didn't look specially different or better or anything than anything I've seen here. So I'm sitting there thinking after the second steak that I had, what is it? What is it? And here is my conclusion, and I have no idea if this is correct or not. I may be completely off the wall, but I want you to think about that that for literally hundreds of years, Uruguay as a culture is a beef culture, a beef-loving culture. So think about what the French have done, say, with wine, or Italy with Parmesan cheese, all right? Okay. Or pasta. Okay. And what you've got now is a multi-century legacy of beef selection. What tastes good? What cooks good? What's right? And so I think that they have literally— and of course, you know, most of this was quite genetically— I mean, you know, they would butcher one and then cook it. They didn't have refrigerators, I mean, until recently. And so, you know, they had these asado pits, you know, where they would actually butcher it and then they would cook it. My mentor, you know, Allen Nation, founder of Slot McGrath Farmer, one of my favorite stories from him, you know, he was a train— he loved trains, and so he rode trains all over the world, and especially steam trains. And I think by the time he died, he had ridden on every commercial steam engine train in the— I don't like to stop on railroad tracks— every single commercial steam engine train in the world. And he told me about one time he's going through— I'm not sure whether it was Uruguay or Paraguay, and of course Uruguay hates to be confused with Paraguay. When I asked him before I went, I emailed my host. I said, so what are the major faux pas? I don't want to be culturally— I don't want to make a fool of myself or embarrass myself. And the number one was confusing us with Paraguay. The number one. It's like Australia and New Zealand. Texas and Oklahoma. Yeah, Virginia, West Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, um, so anyway, he's on this steam train and, um, and there was something with the rail and it jumped a rail and derailed. Didn't crash or fall over, just jumped a rail. Well, you know, you can't just, you can't just set steam engine train back on the track. Oh, it hit a cow! That's why it derailed. It hit a cow on the track and derailed. So within 5 minutes, he said, people just emerged and they butchered the cow, set up an asado pit, cooked it, while other people came with, you know, levers and bars and blocks. And in about 4 hours, they had the train back on the track, which was about the time the meat was done, and they all sat and ate the cow the train killed, and then all got back on the train and went on. And what I'm getting at is when you're that close, when you're that close from eating to seeing the animal or knowing its genetics, you know, the grandmother and the grandfather, you can very quickly say, wow, this one's a good one, that one's not a good one, this is a good one. And so they've got centuries of genetic selection for, for, for palatability, you know, delectableness. And, and I think that they have just selected and selected and selected over time to where it's just— I mean, it was just— I mean, I would go back tomorrow to get that steak. I mean, that's how good it was.
So it's not a matter of preparation. I can't just— no, talk to Google and say, no, how do I cook like a—
like, like a Uruguayan? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can't do that. No, no, go there.
And I think, I think you kind I have to— okay, go there to— go there to get it.
I'm gonna have to put that country on my bucket list. Yeah, yeah, I eat that much meat. I eat that much beef easy.
Oh yeah, you're— you're almost a carnivore. Yeah. Well, the other evening they took me to Brasilia. Oh, the restaurant. Are you familiar?
Is that a Brazilian steakhouse?
Yeah, where they come with it— where they come with the— with this— with this. Oh my, if you like meat. I've never— I've never been— so I've been a lot of places. First time I'd ever been went into one, and my goodness me, boy, if you are a carnivore, man, that is the place.
Yeah, you think they've got—
they've got these two-forked, uh, spikes, and they've got— and I don't know how they cook. I assume they have great big cookers that they suspend these in, in the cooker. And, uh, it's everything from, you know, pork chops to lamb chops to, to, you know, filet mignon, uh, beef roast.
And that's called Brasilia.
Brasilia. Brasilia.
Mm-hmm.
And, and so there's no menu. You go, you sit down, and when you're ready— now there's a salad bar, so you can go get your lettuce and your rabbit food if you want to— but, but then, then when you're ready, you flip over your little coaster under your wine glass from red to green. And when it's green, then they start coming from the kitchen, and they just come to your table. And you know, they've got these, these things, and if you— yeah, I'll take that. Well, then they, you know, they scrape it off to your— or they cut it off and they give you a little tweezers and you, they cut the steak, you know, and you take the little pieces off and you eat it. And then when you're done, you flip over your coaster to red, tapped out, you know, I'm done. And it was—
they just keep bringing it.
They just keep bringing it as long as it— yeah, yeah, long as you can eat. And so what Megan instructed me with when we sat down was, don't go eat any potatoes and don't go eat the white rice. This is, you know, You know, if you want your meat, you can get that anywhere. And so that's exactly what I did. And oh my goodness, it was fabulous.
And they want you to eat those potatoes and white rice.
Absolutely, that's cheap compared to the meat.
Nashville's got some good places to eat.
We put it away. It was pretty impressive.
Austin, you'd get your money's worth over there. Austin could eat down some food. Carlo.
We go to it. Do you really? Yeah. Brasilia?
Uh, it's not Brasilia, but it's a Brazilian steakhouse. Uh-huh.
But it was the same idea, same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I wonder if the Brazilians got it figured out, or do they just have a method figured out? Sounds like maybe they have a way of cooking.
They probably just have a way of cooking and, and presentation. I mean, yeah, I mean, it was definitely not the best meat I've ever had, no question. It was not the best meat, but it was just, it was It was just a really cool, you know, whatever, a cool presentation. Yeah, way to do it.
Did they have the pineapple?
Yeah, yep, yep, yep.
They had it, they sprinkled it with cinnamon.
Oh yeah, that was actually pretty good. Yeah, boy, that was, that was good. And I'm a pineapple— I love pineapple.
You like the tropical fruit.
I do. Well, you know, I was in Venezuela for 4 years and had bananas and papayas and pineapples in the backyard.
Is it Venezuela that's banning Twitter? Somebody's coming down. Oh, somebody's doing something crazy.
Like, well, Venezuela is kind of banning— they're banning, uh, business.
I guess they're not getting any better, huh?
No, no, that's not a— that's not a place you want to be right now.
Sounds like Uruguay. Is a place you want to be right now.
Oh, yeah.
What's their government like? What's their—
uh, very, very stable. Very, very stable. They're one of the— they're one of the places where— well, you know, so who knows about Uruguay? You know, I mean, nobody knows. So nobody's interested in conquering Uruguay, you know. So it's an extremely stable, um, politically stable place.
People are happy there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's very, very high on the happiness index. Uruguayans, however you say that, Or were you getting people from all over the world at that conference?
Well, there were people from all over the world, but primarily, primarily South America. There were people from all over South America. I met a— and I'd been in Colombia. I'd done a seminar in Colombia a couple months before. And you're going to love this. Met a family, sat down with me. And they have a 500-cow milking herd.
Good Lord.
And they're all hand-milked. Hand-milked. Can you imagine a 500-cow dairy and they're all hand-milked in the field? In the field, no parlor. So they've got like, they've got like 25 milkers.
How many cows per person is that?
Um, it was about 10 or something.
All right, um, 10 or 20.
20.
But yeah, we're going home. Hey, you want to milk 500 cows?
He wants to go to Brasilia. Yeah, yeah, um, they, they, um, they don't give that much milk. Okay, he said, you know, they don't, they don't they don't milk like a— okay, like an American. No, no, no, no, no. He said, you know, they're given a gallon.
Yeah.
Okay. So, you know, you can milk pretty fast. You can get in there. But, um, yeah, that was— that was— I just, I just was trying to imagine. And they have, and they have a tractor, a truck that drives out to the field with a bulk tank, refrigerated, and they, they pour the— yeah, pour the milk into them.
They don't want a barn for 500 500 cows, they probably don't want to— can't afford that. No.
Well, and, and think about the cows don't have to walk to a parlor. I mean, think about how long, how long you'd have to walk, you know, if you had 500 cows trying to walk.
They don't move them in any way?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they rotate them.
Oh, they do?
Yeah, they rotate them. Yep, yep. Yeah, it sounded like they were doing some, some good stuff. Yeah, but I just The thought that, you know, that you can't get out of your mind is hand milking 500-cow dairy herd. I mean, I mean, an American wouldn't even think of milking 5 cows hardly. Yeah, you know, by hand.
My grandpa used to go and milk 20 every day.
Wow.
And walk to do it.
Yep.
Walk about 3 miles that way.
Wow.
We're almost home.
Wow.
And my granny would go with him. She didn't even get paid. She just went with him and she milked 10. And she was, her hand was strong at 101 years old when she died.
I'll bet. Well, we had several neighbors that milked 10 cows. That was pretty common.
I've milked too. It's rough. But you just— they just did it.
I met an interesting guy in Oklahoma 2 weeks ago at the Okie Homesteading Expo. Donkey dairy. Oh yeah, donkey. He said there's only 2 in the U.S. He's one of 2. He milks 35 donkeys and they give between a cup and 3 cups at a milking. Now they're raising their babies, so you know, he's getting the leftovers, but they have 2 teats And because the thing is, they're 3 feet high off the ground, so you basically kind of stand next to them and the teats go every which direction. He said nobody's been able to figure out a mechanical milker for a donkey. Of course, it's not like there's a huge market for it either. But anyway, he said, so you strip and you milk with one hand, you know, you hold your jar with one hand and you milk with the other two. And I mean, you know, you're only getting a cup to 3 cups of it.
Who's the market for donkey milk?
So it is therapeutic. He got into it because his infant daughter got some sort of terrible autoimmune disease thing. And in their sleuthing, sleuthing, sleuthing, they found out about it. It's kind of like camel milk and autism. And they found out about donkey milk for her, so they got one, they tried it, and she immediately responded and was fine. Almost like a miracle. I mean, he started weeping. Weeping when he was telling me this. It was very, very hard, very cool. Anyway, so one thing led to another, then other people started coming to him. So you don't drink it like milk. You take it like a cough syrup, you know, like a tablespoon at a time. And they have now all these customers who buy it for therapeutic purposes. As a medicine.
You see all kinds of things, Sir Evelyn, don't you?
I do, I do.
You still like and try them?
And I'm interested in all of them. I mean, I'm just fascinated. It doesn't— see, I'm real easy to please. I don't have a very high threshold.
Yeah, Jonah was like, "Let's pick him up in a limo." I was like, "Joe Rogan picks him up in a limo." Are we done? He's like, "Yeah, you can pick him up in a limo." That actually might be off-putting to Joe. Let's find the cruddiest car, oldest truck we got.
Yeah, there you go. Pick me up in a Beverly Hillbillies truck.
Then you'll be impressed.
Pick me up in a Beverly Hillbillies truck.
We're with Joe and we're gonna, uh, we figure, you know, you got a course that you're building. There's enough that people are already in it and consuming it and improving, but you've got a lot, you got big visions, and we're going to talk about more of that in a minute. In it, but I thought this would be good to maybe walk around a homestead and talk about the farming. And, uh, and if anywhere along the way, hey, there's more about this in the course, you know. I know this is a homestead, your course is more market farm, but you were the guy I first found. Do you know that? My mentor turned me on to you over— what was it, 20 years ago? And I didn't know how to farm in any certain way, except maybe how my dad did it, which was put them out in the field. And I just thought this was the way, 'cause that was the first book I got ahold of. And thankfully Rebecca found Elliot Coleman's book, and that's how you garden. It wasn't born out of any kind of conviction. It was, you were the first one I found.
Right, right, that's funny. And you know, if you have never grown up, I mean the whole idea, isn't it revolutionary, of just moving out animals. I mean, yeah, just that, that concept is revolutionary.
Yeah.
If you've grown up in a conventional setting where, well, the pigs are raised over here and the chicken house is here and the, you know, this idea of, of actually moving them routinely, uh, is just— yeah, it changes it. Because then you got to have shelter, you got to have control, you got to be able to get water every place.
Yeah.
You know, and, and so I tell people, they say, oh, you're so clever. You said, no, no, no, no. If you start moving animals, by necessity, you're starting to think about portable shelter, water, you know, around, control, you know, because you don't want to put them here today and here tomorrow. And so all the clever things that we've, and you have invented, are a natural inherent outgrowth of moving animals.
Yeah, I feel like I've tried to take what you did at Polyface and then scale it down. So instead of the Eggmobile that you pull behind a tractor, a Chickshaw that you pull like a rickshaw, right?
Right.
And, uh, but that took a long time to figure that out. And then, but finding you, you know, my dad thought I was crazy. I mean, he'd make fun of me. He called them all my crazy wires, all the little wires I had out. I mean, he was so happy when I figured out how to not have crazy wires everywhere. But, you know, I just hit the ground running with it. You know, at first I just put, you know, you train them to the fence, got them in there, just put up a single strand of electric on these cows, just got power to them, and just started moving them. At first I was— I didn't have the cow day figured out. I knew the concept. Yeah, I would drag a water hose out here, a trough, and just make it happen. And water from the well. We're just now getting to where we have gravity-fed water off the nothing. But, so thankfully I found you and then it made sense. I was reading you and you were talking about how it regenerates the land, it makes it better, it makes it more productive. And I wished that my dad would have took the time to read the book. I felt like if he would just read this book, he'd get this. Do you ever feel that? Like maybe if your neighbors or somebody— we're getting into the importance of the way you farm right here. That's the purpose of this talk right here. Do you ever feel that way?
Like if you just read the book, it'll make sense. Absolutely, read the book And I will tell you this, you're not alone. There are plenty of people who their neighbors just sloughed them off, or family members, ah, you know. And they bought the book, and the family member, the neighbor, read the book, said, oh, this is great, let's do this. No prophet's loved in his own country, right? And so it takes the expert from far away to come in, or if it's in a book, oh, that's credible, that's credible, it's in a book. Book. And, uh, and so I've had numerous people that have, that have been stuck with a family or a neighbor situation to get the book, um, or now they can watch a video, and, and, and, and then it makes sense. Yeah, when they see the, the guru, you know, explain it. And, uh, so yeah, yeah, that's great.
I was talking—
you've done, you've done well. I see, uh, I see Lily Lily has her accomplishment. I know. Her ultimate accomplishment.
She has got the bug.
Oh man, isn't that great? Yeah.
She's got the bug. And the boys got the bug for airsoft, so they have a little airsoft field in the field.
Okay, yep.
She got the bug for the horses. For the horses. We put her in lessons 3 miles down the road hoping to kill that bug.
Oh, uh-huh.
Backfired.
It didn't do.
He's cheering for you, Lily.
Hi, Lily!
You got your horse.
How are you doing?
Here, that's for you, Joel.
Oh, is this for me?
Is that for us? Yes. What is it? Coffee? Oh, you want coffee, Austin?
Uh, somebody else. You don't drink coffee?
You're so sweet.
You're so sweet. Austin told me to make a coffee.
Oh, well, he didn't know Joel was not an addict.
Yeah, I'm not— I'm not a—
Joel doesn't do drugs.
Okay, you're about the only one I know. That's me.
Don't drink coffee.
Does somebody else want—
you want the coffee? That was very nice of you. A friend of mine was like, his daughter was bugging him for a horse and he refused, and the wife was like, come on. And then she's like, if you get in the horse— get her the horse, she'll be interested in that and not boys. You know, hold that off for a little while.
That's true. That is true. Yeah, yeah.
So let's hold that off.
This is, this is our, our our male vaccine.
Yes. But it only lasts so long, but we'll— and there's no booster. So eventually it will get to her, but we'll prolong it as long as we can.
She rides this one?
Yeah, she shows it. She's an English rider, takes it once to go do the shows. She started her YouTube channel and it's doing really good.
Oh, wow.
So she knows I don't worry about her. She's entrepreneurial. She's— every morning she checks the YouTube, see how much money, you know. She's, she's like, okay, if I'm gonna get a ring, this is how much money I'm gonna need, how many videos, how many.
Oh wow.
So she's thinking about that.
Yeah.
Lessons and— wow. Well, anyway, Austin and I were talking about homesteading, how I feel like my approach has been I'm just going to do it this way, and I know people are going to find me and they're going to feel like it's normal. And I hope so. Like, this is just how you do it. You just move everybody, or you put them on deep bedding, and that's just how you do it.
That's right.
Just normal. And that's disarming. And it's worked so far, I think. And then people are building the chick shaws, and they don't know they're doing it this regenerative way. Always, they're just— just are.
Yeah.
Uh, so, but I feel like it's important to speak more about that, and I do so, how important that is. Oh, and he was saying, as I was explaining to him on the way over to the airport, he's like, it just makes sense. So just reading the book, it just makes sense. Just don't return to the grass until it's recovered so you don't destroy the grass.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, let it recuperate. Yeah, yeah. We all know if you talk to any lawn care outfit Don't mow your grass real short and let it grow back some. Don't just keep shaving it, 'cause first thing, a little drought comes, it's all gonna turn brown. But you let it be a little long and you let it rest longer, and it'll be way healthier.
That's a good segue into what Jonah was gonna ask you about.
Well, I'll tell you right now, it's a big deal coming now and seeing the lack of fences.
I know, right?
Man, man, does that look different, right? You can't imagine.
Accomplished it. Yeah, people didn't see his last consult with me. He came here and we had, we had fences around every pasture, as close to the road as you could get them.
I mean, right up. Well, because you want to—
yeah, right there. We wanted— and you're like, you got to get rid of these perimeter fence. And we're like, wait a minute, this took us like 4 years. So we didn't pull them out right away. Yeah, we pretended we didn't have them for a whole cycle, and we're like, yeah, okay, let's pull these fences.
Yeah.
And we've been milking in the field for—
oh my—
2 years now too. Isn't this grass amazing?
It is.
If you look, if you look at our grass and then look across the— yeah, beyond the pole barn, look how brown that grass is.
Yeah, yeah.
So if you just look to the neighbor And look at your clover.
Clover's in.
Yeah, now remember the clover came in so soon. Okay, so it was a swampy spot and we graded it to be more sloped. Okay.
So we planted new grass in the fall. That's why it's failing some. You know, you had to kind of restart. Yeah, restarted. You know, that's a concept that's so critical. We've got this notion among so many people in our movement, I'll say, in our land-loving movement, who don't want to touch the landscape. You know, oh man, you know, that tree is sacred, this little hilltop is sacred, this thing. And so they're afraid, they're afraid to manipulate it. It's like they've got this idea that God, nature, whatever, laid the land down in a perfect way, you know. And the fact is, a lot of times shaving a little corner, putting a little drainage in a wet area, taking a, cutting a little access path to level out, you know, so you can get there and not tip over.
Oh, dude.
You know, those kind of things can revolutionize a landscape. But you've gotta massage it. You gotta get in there and work with it. Exactly. And so I'm tickled that you— and I'm sure you've already seen improvement.
Drainage. Well, gosh.
It just—
Well, the deal is, I'm a nook and cranny farm, as you would call it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
100 acres that way, 350 acres that way. Nobody's selling, nobody's leasing.
Uh-huh.
That means this—
Yeah.
This 2 acres has to be more productive.
Has to be productive, yeah.
So—
You planted something here.
Here?
Did you plant some ryegrass in the new patch, or did you just put—
I got a mix. I got a mix from Nature's Seed. Okay, a Southeastern milk cow mix, and it had some clover. It has a little bit of alfalfa. I don't see any of that coming up. It's probably the rye coming up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's more hardy. Yeah, um, yeah. And so, yeah, I'll show you. Yeah, thankfully, soon after I found you, probably because of you, I found permaculture. And if there's any natural way of doing things, permaculture. And that's a big advocate of earthworks.
That's right. They're not afraid to touch the land. Swales and all sorts of wonderful things. We can change, you know, of course, you know, I'm a huge advocate of ponds and all sorts of things.
We are not stopping progress on the house. Our tile guys are coming today.
Oh, uh-huh.
That's been the big struggle. Is getting people to come.
Yeah.
There's more work than there are workers.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Is that the tile?
It is.
Oh, wow.
It's the tile guys. And they've been a couple weeks behind, so we're happy to see them. All right, Jonah. We had talked about drought, and you wanted to ask him something particularly about this yard. He's concerned. He feels like our grass isn't coming up quick enough.
You're really concentrating right here.
In other words, We can go step on it if you want.
Yeah, let's go right up to it.
It's swampy here at the bottom. We could talk to you about that too.
Well yeah, this is a drainage here.
Yeah, we had to just put this down just so we could access, you know, if our milk cows are here, we come out here with the side-by-side.
This moss is indicative of calcium deficiency.
Oh.
That's an indicator of calcium deficiency. Now what's interesting is you also have clover, which is indicative of calcium sufficiency.
Oh wow.
So you have, you have both of these at the same time. Now, um, so what— so I can't right now in a, in a one-day look, I can't tell you, okay, which direction you're transitioning I see.
You're saying we could be making a mistake here and going towards moss.
You could be transitioning toward moss.
But we could be going away from moss towards clover.
You could be going away from it as well. But if it's been better— so what I like to do when I see a spot like this is I like to pick a spot. If this whole area—
so that's been a manure pile.
That's a manure pile. That's a manure pile. So, when I look at a spot like this, we've certainly got them. I mean, this stuff here, these little weeds here are— see how—
And you can get in his frame, that's okay.
So, like here's one. I don't know what the name of this weed is, but you see how flat it is? See how flat it is? That is a plant that is a— that's a shield plant. In other words, that is telling you Something's going on here that we've gotta flatten on the ground and protect it because something's not good going on. Look at how flat these leaves are here. See how they're flattened out against the ground? Now here's strawberry. My sense is that this bank is going backwards in fertility. But when I have a situation like this, I always try to look and see, is there someplace that's expressing something different? This is different. Ah, this is different. And so in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, what would it take to make the whole bank look like this? Well, whatever made this look like this, if I do that here, it'll all look like this. And, and I mean, you can just see them, okay?
Yeah, and we see that's manure, so we're gonna come in here with the manure spreader.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you actually really concentrated here, now you do have some shade here. I mean, you got a walnut tree there, but walnuts are pretty, they're pretty open canopy.
Yeah, 'cause you're looking at, is shade causing this? Well, this is north-facing. Well, that's south, so this is the north.
This is north-facing.
This is north-facing.
Which means, you know, which means it's gonna tend to be damper. So, this is facing away from the sun. It's a north aspect. I wouldn't say— it doesn't seem to me like if the sun's coming from here, I don't think these trees here are causing trouble because the sun's not shining this direction. I think what you've got here is you've just— look, you've got a break point here. Look at the terrain. Alright, you've got this break point right here. And I mean, clearly right here is another— here's some Queen Anne's lace starting up.
There you go, good.
That's some good stuff. I mean, and look at this.
That's good stuff.
The orchard grass, yeah, it's good.
They like to eat Queen Anne's lace?
Yeah.
How did you learn the names of all these grasses, if they were good or not?
I don't know the names. I wish I could tell you the names. Well, now there's apps. Yeah, there's apps now. I don't know, but this little violet here, that's another calcium. So I'm seeing—
What's the dandelion? I'm seeing more dandelions.
Well, calcium's in dandelions, a calcium indicator as well.
Too much or too little?
Too little, but they bring up calcium. Dandelions have a taproot that brings up calcium.
So you're not saying go get you some calcium?
No, I'm not, I'm not. Here's the deal. Look, you got rocks here. Look at this rock.
That's also calcium?
Well, yeah, that's got all sorts of minerals in it. Rock's got all sorts of minerals.
He's like a kid at Christmas morning out here, aren't you?
So here's earthworm castings right here. See them?
Wow.
See all the earthworm castings right here? Okay, I mean, that's a whole—
That's what that is? Yeah.
Wow. Blob of earthworm castings.
And, um, so that's an old manure pile then?
Well, probably, probably something older than, older than, yeah, older than a year maybe. But we'll see. Here's castings. Look at those castings. Yeah, see those right there? But, but they're fairly anemic because I look around here and you notice there's no castings where there's moss. The earthworms are coming where there is organic material to feed them. Yeah, you know, manure something, compost. Okay, and so here's the thing on the whole mineral thing. I mean, there's obviously rocks there. This is a thin, you know, a thin bank here.
It doesn't have much soil.
I mean, I'm sure if you took a shovel and shoved it in here, you might not even be able to shovel— get the shovel in the whole direction. Okay, so If you throw carbon down here, you increase earthworms. Earthworms, they— here's the coolest thing about earthworms. They take in a pound of material in their front end, run it through their alimentary canal, and out the back end poop out the same pound of material. But what they poop out has 3 times the calcium, 7 times the phosphorus, and 11 times the potassium of what they brought in. And nobody knows how they do that. You know, if they were pooping out half of what they took in, you say, well, they're concentrating it. But they're not. It's the same amount of material out their back end that came in the front end. Nobody knows how they do that. The other thing is that this carbon, when carbon's in the soil from the manure, from wood chips, I mean, you could come in here and just lay 4 inches of wood chips on here.
Oh, really?
And then next year it'd be completely—
so the leaf guy, he can just drop it?
Absolutely. Leaf guy, yeah. We've actually spread, you know, fresh wood chips on stuff like this. And it— all right, because here's what happens when you have organic matter, right? I mean, this is a twig, but imagine this in a, you know, in a bunch of little wood chips, okay?
Yeah.
Um, when you have organic matter on the soil It starts to decompose, and as it decomposes in the soil, it exudes carbon dioxide. When things rot, they, they give off carbon dioxide. Well, as that carbon dioxide comes up through the soil, it encounters moisture, water, H2O. Well, CO2 plus H2O makes carbonic acid. Now, if I took a rock, okay, so, you know, Here's a, here's a rock, okay? Here's a rock here, and I think everybody would agree that that rock today, I don't see any holes in it, it has the same amount of molybdenum, boron, cobalt, calcium that it did 500 years ago, okay? If we wanted to find out how much molybdenum, boron, cobalt, calcium is in this rock, we could treat it with sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, you know, numerous acids. That's why all the chemical fertilizers are acidulated. Okay, you know what the most efficacious acid we could treat it with is? Carbonic acid. Carbonic acid, which is what's made when decomposing organic matter percolates up through the soil, encounters H2O, and makes carbonic acid. So what I'm pointing out is the calcium deficiency is not— you could go out and buy lime, you could, and put it on here, but the real problem is active decomposition, which includes worms, it includes organic matter decomposition. So the real, the real culprit here is decomposition.
Decomposition.
And so if you can stimulate decomposition, and of course, you know, worms like to be fed on top of their head. They don't like stuff tilled in and, you know, sliced them up as you're putting stuff in. They want fed on top of their head. So if you can get organic matter on here, obviously compost is the best, then you will not only excite the earthworms and develop earthworm activity, activity, you'll also start to break down the rocks and solve the mineral issue that, that these, um, that these calcium deficient indicators are, are showing.
Nice.
Okay, that's a little bit of a long— yeah, exposé. But, but it, but it, uh, do you think we— and the reason, the one of the reasons you're seeing it right off of this breakpoint, you've got a bit of a spine here. It might even be a rock ledge. Yeah, a bit. And so you've got accelerated, accelerated water movement, which is leaching minerals.
Okay.
So when you have accelerated water movement, it's much easier to leach out minerals than if the water is— Is that why it's so swampy down there? From the water going down? Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh-huh. Yeah, well, I mean, there's probably a drainage. I mean, you know, you get into these hills and, and that could be That could easily be some sort of like almost a wet weather spring or something, you know, coming out. I mean, you're in the bottom of a mountain here.
That's their old spring right there that they used to drink from for that house.
Uh-huh, yeah.
Did we overgraze this? I feel like because of the drought, I mean, how early were we gonna start feeding hay? I feel like we grazed it pretty low. Yeah. Yeah, it was the last run, it was, they were eating. But so I guess, well, did we overgraze it? I mean, looking at it in the spring, if you can tell.
Yeah, well, I mean, this is why when you do graze, you want to run your paddocks. So we've got fields and we got paddocks. Okay, fields and paddocks. So you want to run your paddocks on these terrain break points to honor, to honor the difference between this and this. And so, for example, let's say that you graze this, I don't know what, 5 times in a season, just for sake of discussion.
[Speaker:GRANT] Yeah, 4 or 5 times. [Speaker:GRANT] All right.
[Speaker:GRANT] Well, this one, this, from, from this ridge point down to the swamp, and I know this is a small area, so I mean, it becomes a, it becomes a pain to just have them in such a, tiny thing, but the concept is that maybe this you would only graze 3 times and you'd let it get a little longer.
I see. Okay.
Because it's a steeper terrain, it's away from the sun, and so this is why homogeneous— homogeneous, that's what I'm looking for. Paddocks allow you to— when that paddock is ready, you graze it. Because if you have too much terrain variation, those terrains, you know, south aspect, north aspect, east, west, they're all going to grow at different rates and actually have different species in them that are going to grow at different rates.
So for those listening, you wouldn't put— you, you wouldn't like put your fence down there so half your paddock is this and half your paddock is that. You'd put the fence here so all your paddock is this inconsistent north sloping.
Yes, and I wouldn't want to go across, across the wet. Yeah, because then that, that gets wet down in there.
You just avoid that wet.
Yeah, yeah, you just avoid it. And I realize we're, we're looking at a fairly— this is a very, very small— but when you're when you're just running 2 or 3 sheep, a cow, obviously, a paddock like this, and put some attention on it. You know, you got some beautiful compost down there, I see, and that could come up. I mean, you could literally take a shovel and a wheelbarrow and do this in a nice 2-hour project.
So the better, the more closer to compost, the better, but you can also put total Absolutely.
Not sawdust. Wood chips would be okay, leaves would be okay. The problem with sawdust is the particles are so small that the decomposition pulls nitrogen away faster than it can build up. But the bigger pieces like wood chips, those are big enough pieces that the microbes have— there aren't enough seats around the table, and so they actually they actually eat and die and eat and die and hold the nitrogen as fast as they're decomposing the wood chips.
So you— this would be okay to hay bomb then?
Yes, absolutely.
Maybe instead of skipping it, maybe we need to slow down because maybe we're moving too fast and we need to slow the cows down. And we need— you remember when you told me don't hit that for 2 more weeks? I don't know if you remember that, but there was an area that wasn't mature enough. You said you gotta slow down. I said, well, where do I put them? You said put them up the hill where you need nutrients. You need more productivity. So that could be another option for people. Maybe they couldn't get wood chips or compost, but they could get hay.
They could hay bob, yep.
Instead of skipping it, they actually go at it more intense, but they're laying down hay.
And that's where a drought becomes your best friend. Because this time of year, if you hay bomb this, they're gonna tear it up. I mean, everything's damp and loose and, you know, we're early spring. But in late July, when this gets hard and, you know, it's— then you hay bomb it and then it's a totally different effect than it is in the spring. You could actually pug it and actually damage soil structure. In the middle of the summer, if you hay bomb this when it's dry, you actually get all this wonderful material.
Yeah, I wonder then—
mulch it.
Well, then when do you hay bomb your forest clearings? So, uh, and I'm not making a mistake because we're hay bombing up there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And Jonah's like, ah, we're gonna tear it up. I'm like, well, I don't know. Um, uh, so is that the exception?
That would be the exception. And and you're probably not as steep there as this right here. Maybe you are. We can look at it. Yeah, well, we hay bomb where we're making conversions. We just did another, we just did two little 1-acre spots again this year, this spring, and we did it about 2 or 3 weeks ago, you know, So, but it was fairly dry. And you don't want to go in when everything's just wet, wet, wet. You want to go in when it's dry.
If somebody did lime, is that lasting or is that then just something you have to crutch on every—
Well, there's different kinds of lime. There's high mag lime and high calcium lime. And people who spread lime don't like to use calcitic lime because it spreads out. Pile up. The problem with high mag lime, which everybody likes to use, is that magnesium ties up calcium. Okay, chemically, in general, most of the people that are whatever of our, of our tribe, um, encourage actually, um, quarry tailings, which are completely unprocessed, and, uh, and they're cheaper. And so quarry tailings can be a big help, but there are other really good minerals. Obviously wood ashes are good. We— and that's where, you know, if anybody's interested in making some charcoal, you know, for lots of reasons, and you can get some wood ashes there. But also, you know, things like Planters 2 trace mineral, we actually use that. You get super sacks of of it, and we put a 5-gallon bucket of that in every— What's it called? Planters 2. It's from ancient ocean deposits out in, I don't know what, Utah or something like that. But they roll the mineral around a sugar beet, so it's little round balls, and that makes it more biologically active. Active as it goes in. So anyway, we put a 5-gallon bucket of that on every spreader full of compost that we put on. And, you know, if we're gonna go— we also put on a 5-gallon bucket of wood ashes because we have an outdoor wood furnace that heats the house, so we get barrels and barrels of wood ashes. And we sift them. We sift the charcoal out, and we can use the wood ashes on the compost, and the charcoal we can use to feed the pigs as a organic.
So yeah, and we have some brush piles we've been burning, so we could put some ashes on our spreader.
What have you done? Is this a swale?
That's what we wanted to bring you and show you this.
Yeah, this is new.
Remember, this is like a 35-degree slope.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh-huh. Uh, what we've done to be able to, you know, now that you've, you convinced us to do mobile milking. Yeah, you know, we're coming through here.
Uh-huh.
We pull the unit, which is also their shade, which can also be their stanchion, it's also their mineral, with our side-by-side. So to get out here, look what we've done. We put this on 2.5-degree— it's not a perfect, it's not a contour swell, it's 2.5% off.
Oh, okay, okay.
So we have a problem of a lot of rain. I mean, we can get 40 to 80 inches of rain.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can get a lot of rain.
So it's a pathway. It's a pathway that is a swale.
Man, what soil cover can do, isn't it?
Isn't it?
Man, you imagine if the whole farm looked just like this right now?
From Jonah, it's going to.
Yeah, that's what enthuses me when I look at a place, you know, at a thing, and I come and I pick the prettiest place and I say, that's the potential here. So imagine if the whole farm looked like this right here. Oh, I mean, you talk about volume. And so, so then, well, what did it take to do that? Well, how can we duplicate that? You know, that's the idea. And, uh, well, this is really cool. So, so you can get the side-by-side right up through here.
It's just a gradual— it gradually climbs, and then there's another one will hit it.
Okay.
It's just so much more.
So does this— so does this actually, in a, in a heavy rain, just actually flow with water?
I haven't seen a heavy enough rain for that to happen yet. It's tilted enough in, it must be absorbing it faster than it can do that.
Yeah, but it certainly slows down the slope runoff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which is why—
which is maybe why it's up here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Huh, that's really cool.
Now one reason it's doing better over here is because when they grade— we did a bulldozer So those are, you know, this topper soil is coming down. And that's why this side's just doing so terrible. And it's hard to get a manure spreader on that.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
We were able to get it on this. But so this then, we need to, after talking with you, we just need to gird up our loins and get some mulch out.
I wonder if you could borrow, do you have anybody around that has a, like a silage feeder? You know, you've seen these side unloading, like a side unloading silage feeder. Pallet feeder. Yeah, if you could put your— if you could borrow one and just, and just run it right along that top edge and just, and just lay a—
lay it—
yeah, just kind of, you know, it, it wouldn't cover the whole thing. Yeah, but you just kind of lay out a, a, another little berm of compost right along here. Yeah, it wouldn't take much. And, and, uh, and, and the rain would leach through it, you know, it would leach through it.
Yeah, and you're saying a berm of compost, don't spread it.
Yeah, yeah, don't spread it, just, just a berm of compost. Let Let the rain spread, let the rain leak through it.
Would you remove rocks? No.
From a pasture, you value the rocks? Not necessarily. Okay. I mean, yeah, that doesn't bother me. You're not mowing this for hay. So I mean, if that rock was out in the middle of a hay field, yeah, I'd probably pick it up.
Let's talk about hay for folks like me who doesn't make sense necessarily to do it on their own property.
Absolutely.
We have found a buddy 10 miles away away, or 10 minutes, is it 10 minutes? He's willing to not spray, but how to get nutrients over there, nobody's grazing on it or anything, so I mean the best thing I knew to do was get some organic poultry manure from New Country Organic and have it applied, and he wanted to apply lime, so I let him do that, but what can somebody do who can't put animals on a hay field if they're having to bring it in.
So it's a real problem.
And before that, for me to find unsprayed hay, I had to bring it in from Kansas. So it was crazy.
Oh no, that's, you just can't move carbon around that far.
I know, right?
It's too expensive. Have you done any experimenting? I haven't, but I'm keen to. There's a, you know, one of the kind of new vistas in this, in our movement, is the whole Elaine Ingham biological foliar. We don't have a sprayer, so it's hard for me to even experiment with this stuff. Neptune's Harvest even. The stories that I hear consistently make me interested in it, and I'm the first to admit I'm just negligent here, and partly just because A, A, I don't have anybody on my team right now that's keen to do it, and I'm, I'm so busy running around and writing stuff and doing things, I don't have time to, to ramrod, yeah, the experiments like I used to. So, you know, that's an excuse, I understand. But, um, Teresa and I are making garden beds this year. That's our big— we're making gardens.
That's your experiment this year?
That's our— we did the prototypes last year, and we're thrilled. We're taking basically Basically your ideas and we're using them. That's what I was saying, are you gonna get chickens next to them this year or is that next year? I've got my design in my mind. That's good. And I'm hoping to get that done this year as well.
And that's been on your heart for a while. It has.
So it's good you're getting it. Yeah, it has. It's been good.
Neptune's Harvest, that's what you got?
Yeah, that's one of them. So you're just saying a liquid. There's algae, there's a host of these.
And why is that better than fertilizer?
Well, what the idea is, you know, compost tea, manure tea, I mean, this is something you can brew here. You can brew this stuff here. Here and make your foliar amendments, and then he could spray it on there, and it might, it might get you over that hump. Because yeah, the truth is, if you're making hay and, and translocating all the biomass every year, you are, you are depleting things. There's just nothing else that you can, that you can say. And, and you're doing it, you're doing the same thing in the same field every year, and you know as well as I do We don't even wanna start grazing on the same spot every year. We wanna shift that. You know, you start at Paddock A this year, start at Paddock G next year. Why? Because we want different things to reach physiological expression at different times. And so anything where you're doing the same thing every year, like hayfield, we're mowing this every year, you know, sometime between May 20th and June 10th. Anytime you're doing the same thing to the same place every single year, that's anti-ecological. I mean, it just by definition it is.
Can you add enough ecological to make up for it or is it a hopeless case?
Well, no, you can't. I mean, if you could add enough, I mean, the ideal would be compost. If you could add enough compost, then you certainly could.
How much compost do you need per acre?
But that would take a lot of compost.
To recover a hay field.
Yeah, probably, you know, somewhere between 2 and 4 tons.
Okay.
I mean, how much—
that's only—
how much are you taking off?
That's only a dump truck load.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're— so it's only per acre, per acre.
Okay. Oh yeah, per acre.
So if you're— if let's say, let's say you're taking off 100, um, let's say you're taking off 4,000 pounds, okay, of hay per acre.
Okay.
If you're putting back on somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 pounds of compost, you're probably okay. So yeah, I'm just looking at the carbon.
This is good. How'd you learn all that?
I've talked to people smarter than me.
You name these numbers, man.
And I read. Well, you know, a good hayfield, a good hayfield, I mean down here, I'm sure, I'm sure if he's got any good hay at all, he's, he's, it's going to be 4,000 pounds an acre. I mean, that's 40, that's 100 little square bales. They weigh 40 pounds. That's 4,000 pounds. So if you can put on the same amount, but you know, anything you can find, I mean, when you start looking around, I mean, there are, I just talked to a guy in Vermont a client who has just started getting produce from his local, like, you know, Kroger supermarket. And he thought he might get, you know, a few 5-gallon buckets, you know, a week. And he's starting a little earthworm business. He's got a brand name and he's starting to sell castings. And in the first week— well, he's into this now about about 2 months, and he's— there are pallet loads and pallet loads of this junk of blemished produce coming out the back of this store to where he's calling all of his friends, hey, you got chickens? I mean, he can't even use it all. There's that much stuff. And so there again, you know, I've run into people that, you know, have these, these big worm pee, you know, where you make a box a worm box, and then you bleed off the— you have a little— they kind of make— well, they make— I call it worm pee, but they, you know, they have a waste, worms, and you have this drainage down here, and that is incredibly rich. And these are all things I'm interested in right now, but, you know, I'm almost ready to— I need a person. I need a person that's as interested in this, you know, as I am, and then we can run with it. But if you, you know, if one of the kids took an interest in this, the bug idea, I mean, I've been on vineyards in Spain, guy was running his whole thing on bioferts, and he had his little, you know, barrels that he was percolating, and he He had his compost tea bag stuff in there, and I mean, it was impressive. It was impressive. And this was commercial. I mean, he had 100 acres of vineyard. I mean, it was a big outfit. And boy, the changes in his neighbors, you know, and it was unbelievable, the differences. So, and so I was there to try to encourage and help him to figure out how to run chickens, add chickens under the grape. Pick up the dead fruit and eliminate that issue.
Did you help him with that?
I think, yeah, yeah.
He started running chickens under there?
Yeah, he's been here now last spring, and so yeah, he's making some real progress. So he's got some Eggmobiles and different things, and so, and he's not doing a clean, he's not doing an herbicide under the, you know, it's grass.
Yeah.
It's grass, so he needs to mow it.
Well, your water idea, or liquid, you're speaking that because it's gonna be more concentrated and easier to transport and travel and go a little further.
Now you're not involved in dump trucks and nurse riders. Yeah, there are brands now that are selling this, and when you ask them, well, what's the point of this? Well, the point of this is that you can take your 4,000 pounds of compost and concentrate it biologically to, you know, a 55-gallon barrel. And suddenly it's just more efficient to spread, more efficient to handle, blah, blah, blah. And I'm not ready to be a full believer because, I mean, 'cause we have tried, we've tried some algae, we've tried, I don't wanna mention brands, but we've tried numerous of 'em. Them, and we've never seen the things that they say that it'll do on any of them. And I'm not saying there isn't one, and I'm not saying if you do it yourself you can't get something. We haven't seen it. So I'm a— the one thing that has never let us down is compost. We know if we get compost on something, well, everything, everything—
Yeah, and your animals going through through it and then compost.
Yeah, yeah.
Now then, then we could do a full spray on this bank.
You sure could spray. Yeah, yeah, you sure could figure out the silo shooter, the compost itself. Right, right, right. So this is a water line that's buried.
This was that we've kind of abandoned.
I would ask you this: you abandoned the water line?
Do you— well, no, we're actually still using it. But I want to ask you this: I feel the water line needs to be on these pathways, I think.
Yeah. Uh-huh.
And so it's kind of like, is water line like electric fence? I shouldn't make a permanent water line until it's been there 3 years? A mobile one, you know what I mean? Because it's like, I've dug it, we dug this trench, then we did these pathways and I'm like, oh.
Well, okay, so you definitely want weatherproof water. That's a given.
Well, I'm gonna ask you that. Let's talk about that too.
What do you recommend in your course? This is not weatherproof.
No, no, it's not. Well, okay, that's it too.
So, so if you, if you, if you don't need weatherproof, right, then I wouldn't even bury it. I just, I just run it on, run it on the berm of that thing and, and, um, and just, just let it be.
Do you need weatherproof?
Yeah, we do.
We do. Do you bury it?
Yes, we do.
What do you do, run a trencher?
No, we have a subsoiler. It's a one-shoe subsoiler with a pipe welded on the back that hinges, and you just feed it in.
Oh wow.
You just feed it in, and you can put in a mile of pipe a day. As fast as you can walk, you can lay pipe.
And you use the 1-inch?
Most of our stuff we use inch and a quarter, because we're real, we're running running herds of 300, 400, 500 head of cattle.
The tool you just described, is that made for that or you rig it up for that?
So the subsoiler is made, you can go buy a subsoiler, but then the, now in Australia you can buy 'em 'cause they do a lot of this and they don't bury 'em. In Australia, I was asking that guy, I said, it doesn't freeze here, why do you bury your pipe? He said, because it'll get so hot it turns to steam and bursts the pipe because it gets— black pipe, it gets hot. And yeah, can you imagine?
I bury it because the burial— well, one reason I bury it— hey, I know, I realize that's not waterproof. We're putting them in before it becomes too much of a pain in the butt.
So what we do is each one of these joints, we simply, we you simply get like a 20-foot piece of like 18-inch plastic culvert.
Okay.
And just cut it in little segments.
Okay.
And just take a shovel, dig out a little hole, you know, cut two little notches to go over the pipe at the bottom, and lay it in there and just put a round piece of wood or something on top. And that's weatherproof. And ours Most people buy a $150 frost-free hydrant, but those are very expensive, and inevitably something will come up and rub on it and bust it over, and then you've got— So we just put a tee in.
Just a regular plastic tee with hose clamps on it. Hose clamps.
Yeah, with hose clamps.
That's working?
Yeah, yeah, it's wonderful. And you got to special order these tees. They make— so what it is, the tee is barbed, barbed on the two ends, you know, so your pipe can go on it. And then the tee coming out is a 3/4-inch female plumbing threads. Okay, okay. And, and you can get these for 3/4 inch, inch, inch and a quarter, inch and a half, uh, and, and then, and then we just put a little, uh, you know, the little, um, plumbing threads on one end and garden hose threads on the other, you know, the little, little whatever, you know, the little adapter.
Yeah.
Okay, screw that in there. Now you've got garden hose threads and you just put up, you just put a regular garden hose valve on the end and you're done.
So the T doesn't get you to the garden hose?
The T doesn't get you to the garden hose. You've got, you've got, you've got 3 fittings in all. You've got the T, you got the little converter, thread converter, and then you've got your, your little valve on the top. But it, but it can all be buried under this, under this wooden cap.
And then when you need to tap it for water, you open up the lid and you just Yeah, and we just screw it on. You don't use quick connects, I've noticed.
We don't, we don't. And the reason we don't use quick connects is because over time, the friction, you start getting leakage. You get a little grain of sand in there, a little anything, next thing you know you've got— you've got—
yeah, I've noticed they'll, they'll stop working too. They'll get dirt in there and you can't— it's kind of like just—
yeah, yeah. So, so, so we just, we just use the, you know, it doesn't take but a minute to screw it on. And, you know, if, if, if I, if I can't get my work done because I'm spending another 20 seconds screwing on a hose, I got other problems. It's not, it's not a, it's not a hose adapter. But, um, but that, that's what we use.
But, you know, if you're not actually, if you're not actually looking for, um, you know, for winter, uh, for weatherproofing, um, well, I was going to say the only other reason I cover it is because we are pulling our, our, our, our milk station, which is also their shade, on skids, and it's— you can catch this hose if it's not buried.
Yeah.
So I'm like the Australians, I have different reasons to bury it then.
So what's the bigger hose?
So this, this is actually— is this our old hose?
The electric?
We've gone up to 1 inch since This, that's, that's—
oh, that's an old— that's an old—
just an old—
pick that up.
Okay. And then—
and that's electric.
This is— I went along with it, and then there was every 100 feet there's going to be a T-post with a connection. I'm not married to it.
Are you burying this? Yeah, you are going to bury this eventually.
Yeah. Okay, once we figure out where we're going to repair this, uh, because I feel like it needs to go along the— yeah, the pathway.
Absolutely. There's no, no question that it should go along the pathway. And, uh, so that's your platform, Justin. You got your access is number one. If you can't get there— and this is kind of permaculture stuff— yeah, access is number one. If you can't get there, you can't do anything with it. And you've learned that, you know. You, you've paid for some excavation and some dozer work to get some stuff pushed in. Access number one. Number two is water. You can't do anything without water. Yeah. And number 3 is control, and that's your fencing. That's our platform. When we look at that design, we're looking at those 3 things in that order: access, water, control.
Yeah.
That's what we're looking at. And of course, the access, the access automatically, I mean, on a bigger farm, access automatically demands, like, if this were a big place, if this were an actual able, like a, an equipment road, you know, where you could run tractors and, and things down, hay equipment, whatever. And this were actually a, you know, a bigger, a bigger shelf. Yeah. Okay, then, then at 16 feet wide, then you put your electric fence and you put your water line down one side of it. Okay, so, so the access inherently creates the, yeah, the, the, the basic pattern for the rest the rest of the stuff.
Yeah. Which side would you put it on? Does it matter? So let's walk up here and get on this other access road just so you can see it. And then while we're walking there, let's ask you—
yeah, you've got a pile of tree plants. Yeah, this is really cool.
Our idea here is, well, we're, we're foresting our pastures like, like this guy I know.
So are these Are these all fruit trees?
These are fruit trees.
All fruit trees.
So right here we're above the frost pocket. This is about 50 feet vertical from the creek.
Yep, yep.
And we just planted a savanna silvopasture of apple trees.
These are all apples?
Well, no, they're different things. There's pears, there's plums, there's apples, peaches. Peaches do good here.
Really? Yeah. Oh man, I envy you. We've tried We're just too cold.
Are you too cold?
We're just too cold.
You're zone 6?
We're zone 7, or whatever. We're the same zone as South Dakota.
Oh, is that so?
Yeah, 'cause we're 1,800 feet, 2,000 feet. Well, I love your poor boy. This is really—
You like this? I was gonna ask if you had a better idea to protect these trees from sheep.
No, I love it. We've done it with, basically take this, this same approach. Yeah, a 2x2 on the sawmill.
Yeah, that's what—
and put, and put 4 of them in.
But you're just dealing with cows. You wouldn't need this with cows, or I guess you would.
You would with cows, and I'm hoping that this will hold with cows. We're not, we're not, we're not putting cows where we're doing this. If we put cows, we would use electric fence. All we need Sheep and deer. Yeah, that's right.
We have terrible deer pressure.
And so what we've done is made taller ones, you know, like 8 feet long, put them in the ground 2 feet, so you got 6, so this is, I'm almost 6 feet, so okay, so imagine this sticking up here. 4 of them, just the 2x2s, and then wrap them with nursery shade cloth.
Cloth.
And that has worked beautifully. We've been running sheep through there and the deer have not touched them.
Yeah, I'm not saying— I don't feel like I have this dialed in yet either.
Yeah, well, that's what we've done. And what we figure is that those are going to rot in about 3 years. But by that time, you know, they're going to be up, kind of getting up away from of everything.
Are you worried about these— this rotting and the screws falling into the ground and then the cows picking it out?
No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. I don't think that's going to happen. I just don't know. Yeah, I hope that—
that you're thinking it's— I noticed Greg. I might have to experiment with what he does. He's got a goat. He does a hard paneled goat. Oh, and he just does 3 sides, no T-posts.
Oh, like a triangle?
Yeah, like a triangle.
Well, we were thinking about a triangle, but then we thought, you know, we want a little more stability. So we just— I mean, they're cheap. I mean, we just mill them on it. They're just junk. And, um, and just drove them in with a two— you drive them in with a T-post pounder. Yeah. And then there's no T-posts, and, um, and, and they're just gonna rot, and the shade cloth will eventually just kind of whatever. Yeah, it'll give up the ghost too.
This could maybe be ported what, diagonally that way?
Yeah, yeah, it maybe could. We have a lot of problems even on rental farms with the cows. You know, we've got beef cows, so they're, you know, got some size to them where they, uh, they rub and stretch and, and on a telephone pole, um, like a, you know, where there's a guy wire down from, you know, a utility pole, and they'll actually loosen it, you know, over time and And so we have actually gotten along real well with just putting a couple fence posts in with a little board. I'm wondering if what you've done here, if you just made a wooden— you could do a triangle, that would make it less big, but make a triangle with just some, you know, 1x3, 1x6 boards, and being a triangle, it won't be wobbly because you get the triangular support. And just with, you know, with maybe, I don't know what, you know, 5 boards or something up, that would not even— I'm wondering if it would even have to be put in the ground. It could be something that you could actually put over the trees tree.
Now I see.
Okay, um, you know, you and Johnny can pick it up and, and stick it over the tree.
And, and, um, yeah, I just, uh, has to be to where it's far enough out where the— yeah, can't reach through it.
That's right, that's right, that's right.
That's right, to be a pretty pretty triangle.
But you want, you want it to be a kind of wide base. Yeah, uh, otherwise they'll tip it over. Yeah, so, so, you know, if you made something 4, 4, 4, 4.
Yeah.
Just with wood, no wire, just with wood, it would be real stable. I just don't know. That might be a good experiment. I don't think the sheep would bother it. I don't know what the cows would do.
Yeah, I don't think the sheep would. They don't scratch on this usually because they have the sled.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
The cows are scratching on the sled. And the cows don't scratch as much. As much as the bull, and we only got one bull.
I'm impressed with the progress. I don't come every single year, but you're definitely getting some.
I wish people could see what this pasture looked like.
Oh my, yeah. Yeah, I'm seeing some real progress here. That's, man, congratulations. That's really cool.
Some of these areas we're gonna have to get something down for sure, Some of these are seemingly going to make it.
You might be able to do just as well hay bombing.
Hay bombing.
Hay bombing. Just in other words, you did well, it just wasn't quite enough.
So we could maybe unroll a big round bale.
Did you feed on this or did you just—
No, I haven't feed on it. No, we cast and put hay.
I would say what I'm seeing here is if you had done about 3 times what you did head, I think this would be really different.
Okay.
I think it'd be really different.
Yeah, this got washed away. Yeah, 3 times.
It just, it just wasn't, it just wasn't quite enough, enough material.
You want to go on a walk now on our farm?
Absolutely, absolutely. It's fantastic.
Billy can ride her horse on this trail.
Yep, yep, yep.
And we're keeping this a— I call it a pathway, so we're not going to like gravel it or anything.
No, no, that's right.
This will actually be pasture. We'll graze.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
I was gonna ask you, does it matter where we put— I don't know where to put this water. I'm afraid to like dig a ditch already, 'cause what if I decide I don't want it there, maybe I want it on top of this.
Well, here's the advantage, here's the advantage, and it's a big one, for putting it up here instead of down here. If there's a leak, you'll see it. Down here you won't see a leak as well. You're right. Because you're not walking below it. Your traffic is downhill of the pipe, so if there's ever a leak, you'll see it. And so we always put our hoses on the uphill side of the road.
That's good to know.
So we can see a leak.
Not right here though.
No.
So, oh, there.
Yeah.
Okay, well now we know where to put it. I'm just gonna grab some of this while we go here. Yeah, yeah. Austin was here when when we covered this. Boy, about— it was a big— it was a big job spreading 30 round bales on this.
Yeah, come in here in the dry and just roll them out and feed and let the— yeah, that's how good the cows— let the cows tromp it in.
I mean, it's pretty dry right now.
Yeah, it is.
Do that with sheep too, can't we?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you could do it with sheep.
So we might just start doing that, Jonah. Just start taking a system of— hey, we've been— we hay baled this year.
This This is kind of new open now.
Yeah, this was last winter. Didn't do a really good job of getting rid of all the sticks. This, uh-huh, this was last year.
Uh-huh.
Not this winter, but last winter. And so this year we hay-bombed it.
And is that a new road you put in up there?
No, that's an old road.
That's the old road, the old original.
That's, that's an old logging road.
I've never seen that. I've never over. Yeah, because the last time I was here, this was still woods here. Yeah, wasn't it? So you've opened this up.
Yeah, this all used to be woods.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just had a peninsula of woods here.
Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah.
So we're trying to just hay bomb this, and we put our steers and our, our ram and our bull— we just kept them out here over the winter hay bombing.
Uh-huh.
Is it all right to hay bomb in the winter?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Anytime.
Anytime.
Well, except you weren't a big fan of hay bombing it on steep, uh, on steep when it's really wet.
Yeah, it's really, really wet. Yeah, yeah.
So here we just—
but I mean, this is so steep.
This is too steep for hay bombing?
No, no, this is plenty dry. I mean, this is—
so you're just looking for dry more?
Yeah, I'm looking.
And would you rather run sheep on this as opposed to cows?
Well, They're a little more gentle for sure. You've planted—
Yeah.
You've planted clover here.
That's clover, yeah.
Yeah.
We planted a mix.
Yeah.
And then— What do you do about sticks? So then what we just— Sticks?
Just leave them. They'll decompose.
So I guess my thought— Yeah, yeah, he's worried about the sticks.
Uh-huh. Well, I mean, if you want to do something with them, just flip them all tilt so they're on contour to catch water. All those sticks, like that one up, all those sticks that are sideways of the hill are helping to slow water down.
That's so good. So I'm gonna show him what you mean by that. So you take this stick, Jonah, and you just put it like this.
That's right, that's exactly right.
And maybe you put them, a pile of them here? We making a dam?
Well, not necessarily a pile, but you know, Here's— but you just lay them with intention, that's all. I mean, here's one completely vertical. Okay, so you bring it over and you just lay it in there. Wouldn't that look better? And you'd be surprised.
He's got an element of looks. He wants it to look nice too.
Yeah, yeah.
That one's already in position.
That one's in. This one here, look, it caught— wow, it caught all that. Look at that berm there. Wow. That— so that in, in just a season caught—
see that?
Built up.
And that's instead of this topsoil washing away.
Yeah, that's right.
And ended up down on the road.
Yeah, that's right. And I mean, you can look at it right here. This is a, this is a real clear, uh, dam where that end was over, and that water came right down here, pulled up, and it caught all that sediment all the way out to right here where my hand is, right there. It caught all that. That stick was on top of the ground, and now it's got all that.
How'd you learn that?
Remember when we came to the farm in 1961, it was rocks and gullies. I mean, we— now it wasn't all steep like this, but, but it was— it had been plowed for, you know, a long time, and, and we didn't have money. And so we went up— a lot of my, you know, when I was 7, 8, 9 years old, was going up on these hillsides, maybe not quite this steep but almost, that were just just— we had 16-foot deep gullies, just— and we would take branches, lay them in the bottom with the butt downhill and the branches uphill, and in no time at all, those built literally terraces in the bottom of gullies where that, that pot pile of branches down in the bottom would catch, you know, slow the water down. As soon as it starts slowing water down, it would drop its debris, and it started, started doing that. We, um, back in those days, in the early '60s, people didn't have corn combines yet, and so they would have a corn picker, pick the corn, take it down to the, to the feed mill, local feed mill. They would run it through a stationary, uh, you know, uh, sheller that would take And then they had all these cobs. And one of the first things, the first big piece of equipment Dad bought, I mean, when we bought the farm we had a little Ford 8N tractor, the little 20-horsepower, you know, red and gray tractor, and a hay mower, an old horse-drawn rake that had been converted to tractor, and an old Case hay bale. That didn't work very well. The first piece of equipment that Dad bought was a dump truck, and it was all to bring in carbon. So he'd go down, he'd go down to the feed store where farmers were bringing in, in the fall, bringing in these things. And of course, he was where he was, an accountant. He was working, you know, in town. But I can remember in the dark of the moon at night, 10, 11 o'clock, he's out there on these slopes and putting corncobs out to catch the water.
Isn't that something?
And those corncobs were just enough strength, and all those banks are now— we graze them.
Wow.
Yeah.
Is this too steep? This is probably 35.
This is about as steep as you want to go.
This is breaking permaculture rules, I know that.
100%. Yeah, it's pretty steep. It's pretty steep because, yeah, because this is almost, how do you, would you bring a manure spreader up here?
No, it's too dangerous.
Yeah, that's what I think.
So it's gonna have to be hay bombing is the only way to bring the nutrients here.
Or, you know, or by hand. Or, I mean, hey, no, this, This is where you run chickens.
Oh yeah?
Turkeys. I mean, you can run nets here, no problem. So poultry, this is where we run things like poultry.
Oh, because they don't pug as much?
Well, they don't pug, but they bring fertility. I mean, you're feeding them feed and they're pooping and they're bringing fertility.
Yeah, so park our chickens here. Chickens in here.
Yeah, I mean, so I mean, you with the ATV, you can bring feed up to them. Yeah. And so you put feed, I mean, basically, okay, so you know, you're buying hay from a neighbor while you buy feed. And this is where you get into this purist discussion. You know, people start to, you know, get wonked out and weird about purity. But the fact is, One of the most valuable, one of the most important things that animals do in nature is move fertility from low ground to high ground because they can move. Otherwise, all the fertility gradually comes off the hills and into the valleys. And so historically, predation is what moved the birds and the bison and the elk they'd graze in the valleys, move up to the high ground to chew their cud and lounge so they could watch for predators. While they were there, they peed and they pooped, and they moved that valley fertility up. So where we are, we're surrounded by people. You know, we're on it. We're on a kind of a headwaters farm, and people downhill in the valleys, in the, you know, deeper soils, you know, down there, that kind of place. That's where they grow corn and soybeans and wheat and rye and all this stuff. So we buy that from the valley and feed it to the animals on there. So, you know, in a lot of ways, we're duplicating very strategically that same pattern of, you know, the historic—
so The turkeys need to go up in here this year instead of down there.
Turkeys would love this up here. They would love this up here.
The egg-laying chickens. But you don't want to keep them in one area too long or they start scratching it down the hill.
Oh no, no, you're moving them every couple days. You're moving them right along. But boy, I'll tell you what, that will bring grass, man. And you don't have to worry about the sticks. They're gonna decompose. In 3 years, there won't be any sticks here.
Daniel agree with you on all this?
He better.
See, we're alike. What is one of Daniel's own ideas?
Oh, well, he's our hunter.
He hunts.
He's our hunter. So he now officially has deer chores.
Okay.
Deer chores. So he is He is creating soap. So for the first time this spring, we've picked a little holla kind of like this and about this same size between two of our pig— so we have a— you've been to our place. We have this one pig pasture that's kind of a kidney bean around this ravine. Okay, well, when we made the pig pasture I cut, I cut it all, but I fenced out the ravine so it would come back in woods. And you've got this pig pasture, you know, it's like a 2-acre pig pasture around this ravine. This ravine has now grown back, and it's been 20 years, and it's grown back and got some nice trees in it. Well, he's going up with the chainsaw and doing hinge cutting, hinge cutting all the junk trees, you know, the, the red maples the crooked and all this, leaving the good growing trees, basically creating a deer protective, you know, where they can— so when you hinge cut, you cut about this high, pretty high, and you don't cut the tree clear through. You just cut it till it falls over, and that cut then sprouts like, oh, what to the, uh, like, like, uh, like pollarding. Okay, like pollarding. And then the laid over creates cover, and the deer, you know, come in there on a— for protection. And, uh, so he's doing a whole— it's going to be, it's going to be an acre by the time he's done. He's about a third done with it.
Wow.
And we've never done anything like it, but that's his, you know. And for me, for me, I think it looks terrible. I mean, it looks like a mess. Mess, you know, but deer need some mess, yeah, you know, to be attracted. And, uh, so he's really working on the deer herd, getting some big bucks, and he won't let anybody shoot anything under 8 points. And getting some— we're getting some really nice big deer because we've got a big enough tract of land that we have deer that actually live. They don't go on neighbors, so we can actually— there are deer that we can kind of cultivate that aren't going to go get You know, on the—
Do you find that deer are more attracted to your land because of the way you farm?
Oh yeah, yeah, no question, no question. So the ponds we built way up in the mountain, you know, they're attractive because there aren't any ponds anywhere on the mountain anywhere. And of course the deer— the pig pastures have always attracted the deer. I mean, that— but then when you add cover next to— because the problem is the— these are pretty dense woods. Woods, but a lot of our woods are real open, you know, with those— we don't have, you know, beautiful azaleas like that. So, so our woods are a lot— pretty open. So what happens is deer comes out and they graze in the, in the pig pasture in the fall, but then if they get, if they get spooked, or if you— then they run way out of sight. But if you could, if you can get an acre strategically around a of COVID they quit running. And it just makes for an interesting hunt. So, I mean, he's actually— I mean, he's— I'm not doing it justice because, yeah, I mean, he reads this stuff. He's got a couple buddies that he hunts with on our property, and oh, they just brainstorm, you know. And see, they're coming down this ridge right here, and so if we put— so he's taking the— now that we have a skid steer. He's gone up in a place like this, for example, like this. He's excavated a little, a little pond. I mean, just the size of a swimming pool, built a little dam, a little pond there to give water for the deer. And then last, again, first time last year, he actually asked my help. He asked me to come up, and he had, he had cleared a little like a little half-acre spot and was wanting to do a planting of, you know, beans and maize and, you know, stuff to attract them. And, but there were still, there were some big trees that were going to shade it too much, so we dropped those trees and took the sawlogs out, and he took the, he took the the tops, pushed them below the little pond he'd built, and boy, I mean, in no time it looked like there were pigs in that pond. It was so used because he and his buddies had decided that that's where the deer go.
They figured it out.
And so now the deer, that's their way station. That's like their rest stop.
Okay.
And now they got a deer stand and— Nice. It's neat. Yep.
You worried about this bugging right here?
Well—
That needed more hay waste.
Yeah, probably. You know, it's not the best, but I love the twine. One of the best things you can do is leave the twine. Really? We actually collect all of our twine and use it for places like this.
Well, we gotta start doing that, 'cause that's dammed it up right there, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's dammed it up. Well, twine won't run. It won't run down the ground, you know, like hay will.
And it biodegrades.
And it degrades, yeah, it degrades. I think the quickest way to move this forward is with poultry.
Okay.
And just enjoy it, use it, and instead of hauling hay up, haul feed up.
I see. Okay, and that's your main reason for, hey, maybe not putting the big animals up here, it's harder to haul hay. It's just easier to hog feed.
Well, no, I would graze it. I would graze it with the herbivores for sure. But they're not going to make you fertility.
Yeah.
Okay. Look, this is another raging, raging discussion in our movement.
I see.
Another raging discussion in our movement as to is the best way to remediate something. So here's what I've finally come to. That the recipe for remediation depends on your starting point. So let's say we're going to run a race. We got 3 people ready, we're going to run a 100-yard dash. One guy's got a broken leg, one guy's got a broken arm, one guy's got a broken back, or maybe the other guy's 400 pounds, he's way overweight, okay? So the regimen to get ready for this race is gonna be different between a guy with a broken leg, broken arm, and 400 pounds, right? They don't, and that's the way it is with the land when, because everybody's starting from a different place. Like we started from a place of there was no soil. I mean, you know my story of dad pouring the concrete in car tires and putting half-inch pipe in in them, we didn't have enough soil to hold up electric fence stakes. Okay, and so, so we, we had to actually build soil. Okay, here you have soil. This has been rested a long time, been under woods. In a lot of ways, this is, this is almost like quasi-virgin land. It's been rested a long time. It's had trees on it, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so your recipe for moving forward— and of course, you know, terrain makes a difference, how steep it is, different things. And so all I'm saying is that the regimen, the, you know, the remediation checklist will be different depending on where you start. And so here I mean, all animals have four-wheel drive, or two-wheel drive in the case of poultry, and they can be on something steep, but it is more fragile. You just have to understand this is more fragile, and you might only graze that twice a year and let it get longer than you would down here where it's a little more forgiving. And then you do your other grazes with maybe some laying chickens and some turkeys. But goodness, you know, with what you've done here, I know that you've never aspired to be a commercial farmer. But I mean, I'm seeing some real potential here if one of the kids wants to raise, you know, 200 turkeys.
Yeah, turkeys are incredibly easy.
Yeah, make 200 turkeys at $50 apiece is, what's that, $10,000? Yeah. You know, that's not just pocket change. And that could absolutely be done here. And think of the fertility you'd be bringing in.
And you're talking about $50 profit?
No, no.
Or revenue?
Revenue.
New.
Yeah, well, probably more than that. More.
Yeah, I think so, because you can sell a turkey for over $100 here.
Well, you can. Yeah, well, here. Yeah, that's true. Everything's expensive here.
In Asheville, you can.
Ours are—
$125.
Ours average about $65 or $70.
Wow.
Wow.
Does anybody need a turkey? Pollyface Yum.
Yeah. Yeah.
Best deal on the East Coast.
Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, I mean, when you compare, we could— I'm always trying to think of how can I do this work and monetize it.
Yeah.
So I'm not just, okay, I'm not just carrying hay up here or whatever. I'm actually, I'm doing something that actually is paying for my redemptive, you know, for my remediation. That's—
so if you spend, if you revenue $50 per turkey, what do you make? Make? What's the profit on that?
Profit is about $20,000.
$20,000, so almost half. That's good. Yeah, that's good. So that's nothing to shake a stick at, $5,000 profit.
Yeah.
Okay. This a good hay bomb?
Yeah, yeah.
Because we were wondering, did we do enough hay? Did we do too much? No, you can't do too much, but did we do too little?
Well, you can do so much that you smother it and then it—
Oh, you can?
Yeah.
Okay.
But No, I think that looks really good.
So as Matt puts camera on this patch here, tell the people why that's good. Like how can you tell that's not too much hay, not too much—
Well, we talked about organic matter. Well, you don't want to put on so much hay that you actually mulch out the grass.
Okay.
But what you want to do is get enough cover on there that the water— that when the— look, when raindrops hit the ground at 120 miles an hour, they're like little bombs. And so when the raindrops hits bare soil like this, it actually— you can watch it, and this has been captured on camera over and over, where it actually hits and makes a little crater, and it knocks the little clay particles out. Out and hardens the bottom of the crater and then caps the other parts. The difference between a piece of sand— this is one of my favorite little word pictures— if a grain of sand were an NFL stadium, think about, um, yeah, we're an NFL stadium. A particle of clay is one person in that stadium.
Wow.
That's, that's how different it is. And so when, when a raindrop hits bare soil, it bounces all the people, all the clay particles out, and they cap the soil and stop oxygen from being able to get in there. So what you've done when you hay bomb something like this You have put mulch, you've put enough material on the ground so when that raindrop comes down and hits the ground, it's actually not hitting the soil, it's hitting a buffer, a blade of grass, a blade of straw, something, hay, and that means when it, by the time, and that splatters, it takes cuts that initial velocity off, splatters that raindrop, and it actually hits the soil as a mist, as a fog. And so you're holding your water, you're holding your soil, and all the organic matter is stimulating this whole biological decomposition cycle that we talked about before. So yeah, this is— I just can't imagine this being any better. This is just perfect.
This is gonna come up. It was poor, you know, like that. Yeah, yeah, we really need to hay bomb that one too.
Yeah, yeah.
Mhm. So the boy's been having to, you know, drive the machines up here to hay bomb, uh, this. And so we've compacted this pasture. What are your ideas to either not do that or help it recover?
Ah, in other words, you get hay to the hay bomb.
How do you not drive through the cornfield, so to speak?
Okay, so this is where access becomes a big deal. So you never want to drive up and down a hill.
Okay.
Never. You always want to drive on contour. So the ideal— I assume this path goes all the way out to the—
yeah. Okay.
So I would, I would go, I would go up the road and then come out this path. You never drive up and down a hill path. Okay. And so, so part of, part of designing the access That's why you want access when you're, when you're putting in access, you want access to split your property. So for example, now I know this road here was an old legacy road, right?
Way down there you're seeing along the wood line. Yeah, that's a logging road. Yeah, and that's along the perimeter of the property.
Yeah, okay, so I thought so. So I'm making the point that if you were starting from this patch and you bought this thing tomorrow.
Yeah.
If I came and said, and you said, Joel, tell me where to put the road, I would have put the road right smack up through the middle of this.
Yeah.
Because you want your access to touch as much of your acreage as possible so you can access as much of your acreage as possible. And what people do is they, well, I want the road out of sight. I'm gonna put it down here along the boundary. Well, then you've got all this between that you don't have any access to. So then, you know, you start doing this. So, obviously, you've got a good road there. We're not, you know, you're not gonna duplicate it up through here. But what you have done is you've made a nice access here. And so this is where, look, if this actually becomes a little bit, you know, overused for a period of time, it's not gonna hurt anything 'cause it's not gonna erode. It's not steep. You're not going up and down a hill.
That's what I tell the boys. It's not gonna run very fast off here washing the soil. It's not gonna wash much soil.
That's right. And if you do get any washing at all here, you can always put in a little water bar. If you get a little spot where, like from the top there to right here, I can imagine if you wore this down, you'd get a little bit of an erosion here. Okay, so you put a little water bar in there far here, knock it off, you're okay. But yeah, this right here is not good.
Yeah. And not much you can do about it, but just—
Well, yeah, but what you do is you drive extra. One of the things that we say is our fields, assume they're cornfields.
Yeah.
And if you wouldn't do it in a standing cornfield, don't do it on grass.
Don't drive in it.
Yeah. And so the whole idea of access is to put all of your traffic, all your traffic on that and not, and keep all your fields really nice and open. That makes sense. Well, I love your trees. I mean, you've done some great, so what's the difference between the ones that are wrapped and the ones that aren't wrapped? What's the difference?
Where are the ones that aren't wrapped?
Well, like this white, the polybond.
Oh, that, that's— Those are flowering, so we had to protect them from frost.
Oh, okay, okay.
Yeah, so we have the Agribon on them for the moment.
Yeah, isn't that wonderful material?
Oh, it's so good.
Agribon, that's such an amazing material.
Yeah, if you heard Joel Wright, you understand. To feed hay in this hay bale, we're going to go on that road above it. Yeah, and you just have to throw the hay down.
Throw down.
You're gonna have to walk down to get different places.
Yeah. You end up driving a little more, but then you never destroy the pasture.
And it would be better to just— I've been trying to protect this to let it come off, but really it would be better to just drive over it.
If you're gonna destroy something, destroy this.
Yeah, all right. He's been telling me this, he said. I know, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong. And you were right.
Say that again?
I was wrong. Yeah, you were right.
Yeah, you, you and Joe are where Daniel and I were about, uh, whatever, uh, 25 years ago. And, uh, it takes— yeah, it takes a little bit to get that— yeah, get that figured out.
Because if people didn't hear that, I was trying to let this grass come up and, and, and let it get established, and Joe was saying, oh, let's drive on it it. Yeah, I said, well, let's get established. But then that meant the boys were driving through the already established pasture up and down.
Yeah, yeah.
And you're saying it would have been better to mess up something on contour?
That's right.
Which makes total sense because it's not going to wash away. That's right, that's right.
Did you do this with a track loader or a bulldozer?
A bulldozer.
Bulldozer, just a blade. And he just—
yeah.
Oh, isn't it fun to watch them work?
A day.
Yeah, isn't that fat?
1,500 feet of road.
I always tell people, they're so scared of that kind of equipment. Oh man, no, those guys can do so much work in a day, you just, you just stand in awe.
All right.
And those good operators, they can about pick lint out of your belly button with those machines, man. Yeah, I mean, we, we just, we ever, every year we try to set aside, you know, a few thousand dollars for some excavation work, build a pond, to do, you know, do something. And, uh, man, it's the best money you ever—
it's like a chainsaw, you know?
Yeah, yeah, it is. It completely changes your, uh, your thing. And it's not— yeah, it does mess things up for a little bit, but it does. Then look, look what— look what you—
and you know, he's freaking out about how it's messed up, and— but I'm like, dude, your child will never know. Your child will come out here barefoot and enjoy this road.
This will be—
this will be the new Not even your child, in just a couple of years, you won't.
Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's amazing how fast the new look becomes normal.
Yeah.
I mean, all my life, we've done this stuff, you rip out the trees, you tear up things, oh my, and in 2 years, you can't even remember that there was that tree there or that hill there or that rock there or whatever it was.
That, you won't remember what it looks like. Once you go up here, you've—
Okay, so this— This tee, you can get a tee, you can get a tee where this one right here is 3/4-inch NIP, or whatever it is.
And then that's like, you're talking about threads?
Yeah, female threads. And then you get your little adapter, then you put your little garden.
Yeah, I know how to get those tees.
Thing on the end.
And then these didn't work out for whatever it's worth. They just don't hold and ends up leaking.
Really? Huh.
And then when you want to go to get it off, yeah, you got to break it. If you want to put it on and this is already on there, oh, you can't.
Oh yeah, like a pipe clamp.
You can actually open it up, open it up, put it on. Sometimes for whatever reason you need to open it up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Put it on.
Yeah.
So how—
well, that makes me feel good because I've had people tell me, yeah, you're just wasting money, whatever.
Yeah. So we just cleared this.
Wow. Yeah, this is their—
but we do have— we, we have a Mini X.
You have a Mini X that helped. Did you rent that or—
no, we bought it.
You bought it?
Yep, yep.
Oh man, I got— I got to get into this YouTubing business, man. Man, what a machine.
Oh yeah. Oh, it pays for itself very badly.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's the thing, you know, don't be scared of— but then are you going to keep it or do you think you'll ever sell it?
They're going to start it. They're thinking about starting a grading business.
Yes, absolutely. That was going to be my next thing. And if you're going to scale homestead and grading, you're going to do it, keep it, keep it.
Well, that was part of it is like, yeah, yeah.
Well, we bought the sawmill, you know, You know, for years and years I was the only one that ran it, and we only ran that thing, I don't know, 30 days a year maybe, if that. Now I've trained 4 people on the sawmill, and it runs not every day, but— and we're milling for neighbors, we're selling lumber, we're doing stuff, and it's long paid for itself. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing is, if you're going to have a machine, use it. Yeah, put hours on it. Yeah, Allen Nation used to They say nobody can justify owning a tractor unless you put 1,000 hours a year on it.
Yeah.
And a lot of it—
and yeah, you can't necessarily justify that on—
yeah, if you can get— if they want to start a little business, yeah, when they charge $150 an hour for, you know, that's what we're thinking. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, well, this has to be covered up here pretty quick.
I know, I'm on it.
What if you just— what if you just went and got a bunch of round bales?
And that's what I'm trying to do.
And just unroll them on here.
That's what I'm trying to do.
This is, this is pretty, pretty vulnerable. You've done, you've done really good getting stuff in the bottoms though to get all that protected.
It would have been better had I— I should have had the hay here because I'm having a hard time.
Oh, having a hard time finding it now? Yeah, this is the wrong time. I know everybody's fed them out.
Everybody's out.
Yeah, yeah.
So I need to have it on hand.
Uh-huh. Yep.
And then just get it down, just have some cover, and then run the cows through it. And if there's anything they want to eat—
yeah.
And you talk about putting them out on different spots every year, but right now our bottom is growing better than our top, you know, the lower pastures. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you— instead of repeating ourselves like we normally do, start them in the bottom where The grass is more lush.
Yeah, well, no, I think you probably would start them in the bottom every year. But just start one end one year and one end the other. You know, just flip your ends. Flip your ends.
So instead of start— we normally start way down there towards that white fence. Instead of starting down there, we need to come start up here.
Start up here at this end, go that direction, and then come back.
Why is that so important?
It's so important because the different forages and when I say forage, I'm being very comprehensive, you know, herbs, forbs, grasses, legumes. All the different forages have a different growth cycle. In other words, they don't come based on the calendar. Oh, it's, you know, it's April 5th, it's time to grow. Okay, they grow based on, you know, sometimes we have cold springs, warm springs, dry springs, dry springs, wet springs, and all plants respond differently to all those conditions. Okay? So what happens is, from year to year, the season will favor one thing or another. Just like you, you don't say arbitrarily, we're going to start grazing on March 30th. Kind of some years you can and some years you can't. Okay, I mean, last year, last spring at our place, we were grazing February 25th. February was incredibly warm, and we turned out one group of— not all of them, but a group of, I don't know what, um, 80 cows, uh, on February 25th. And, um, and that was the earliest we've ever started grazing.
Wow.
And now, now, we didn't have enough grass for all of them, but we had enough for those. Those were first calf heifers. We wanted to favor the first calf heifers, give them plenty. All right, um, and then, and then other years we haven't had enough grass to graze until April 1st.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so, so the plants are not growing based on a calendar. They're growing based on, on their, their perception of— so it— so if you, so if you start in the same paddock every year what's going to happen is you're going to move toward a monoculture because you're going to be hitting the same plants at their same physiological growth rate every single year. And so if you rotate it, then this year, well, these plants get to grow longer and make some seed before I get there. And so you're diversifying your grazing to stimulate the diversification and the expression of different kinds of plants from your— so you have this, this real, you know, rapid kind of daily rotation, but then you have this long annual rotation, you know, where one year you come up here on the high ground and circle back down there, and another year year you come up on the low ground, you circle on around.
What we could do— we're silvopasturing, so, you know, I've done it in the past too where I bring in the pigs first.
Yep, yep.
So they kind of help bring up some grass seed.
Yep.
And do a little underbrushing so we can actually get in there with a chainsaw.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Well, if we did smaller batches like that, then it's not this whole 2-acre slot swath.
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a pretty big—
and then we're kind of just—
that's a pretty big—
we're just kind of covering a little bit at a time.
Yeah, that's a pretty big swath.
That might be the way we—
but, uh, we, we've found that for us, 2 acres is our max. Yeah, in a winter. And we've got a lot of cows, but we've just found that we, we just can't— it's not worth opening up more than you can metabolize. I see. You just, you just Stay gentle on what you can throw down there.
I used to throw it in the trash, but there we go.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was picking them up. Yeah, so we've got like along the road where you've got a little washout or something, you know, or anywhere in the edge of a field or something.
Yeah.
We'll just take a barrel of twine and just dump it right in there, and then immediately you've got this wonderful silt terrace.
Yeah.
Right above it. And it's there for good.
Well, when you clear that—
When do these things blossom? I bet that's gorgeous.
They never do. They never do? These are rhododendrons. Well, no, they're not weeds. They're weeds of the forest. Oh, is that what Ian calls them? They're rhododendron. The mountain laurel, which looks a lot— thistle blossom.
Yeah, yeah. That's all we have is mountain laurel because we don't get enough rain for rhododendron. Right here. Yeah, right here. Let me tell you about this road. So what you're getting here is you're getting a, a worn-down path.
Yeah.
Uh, okay. And so this is where your water bar comes in.
Okay.
You can see the erosion. See how the water's running in this— in this gutter?
Yeah.
So what you do is, now that you've got that tool down there, you could easily—
yeah, we have no excuse now.
No excuse now. So what you do is you come in here and on a 45, here's a nice long thing I can lay down.
And don't pay attention to this one because this is your job.
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, listen, we've got our two big tractors we have now. I've never even started them.
I've never even driven them. I let him do it all.
Yeah, I like the little ones. I like the little ones. Those big ones scare me. So the water's coming from that crest right there down here. So what kills a road is volume and velocity. Volume and velocity. Either one alone won't kill a road. In other words, if you have velocity but there's no volume, it's no big deal. And if you have volume but no velocity, it's no big deal. That's where Darrin Daugherty and Regrarians, if you have a a 1% grade, you know, 1 foot in 100 feet, the water goes about as fast as you walk and it won't erode anything. When it goes faster than that, then it— and it doesn't take long for it to speed up. So right here, see, this is all— this is all— okay, what you do is at a 45-degree angle. So you see you've got a little hump right here. Okay, so right, right in here here, I'm gonna lay this about where you want it, on a 45-degree angle. And the reason for the 45 is so the water never stops. If you make the water bar perpendicular to the road— and a water bar is nothing more than a little berm. Yeah, it's like a speed bump.
And he digs it from here and just puts it here, right?
Yes, yes. Or, or I would go from the bank. Oh, I would go from the bank. I'd dig into the bank right there and get your fill. Yeah, you don't want to dig from behind because then you're going to have a— you're going to have this. Okay, so go into the bank a little bit, get a little bit of fill, and just make a, you know, a 12-inch speed bump looking thing. If you make it perpendicular, the water comes down, hits it, puddles up, and leaves a puddle. If you put it on an angle The water never stops, so all the leaves and twigs flush out, and your maintenance will drop by 90% by putting it on an angle.
And here he needs to kick this out so it has somewhere to go, right?
Yeah, that's right, that's right. And then we're going to just drop it into the field. Yeah, and so this is where— so you make a little trough here, okay, for it to run on the uphill side, then you bring up some of your bale twine and you throw it right in there.
Another reason for the water line being on the upper side.
Yeah, on the upper side. That's exactly right. Yep, that's exactly right.
Not only to see if it's leaking, but to— if you need to make a drain.
Yeah, I would put this water line on the upper side and then everything leaks out.
What about when the hose runs across?
What do you do and drive over it? Yeah, well, all you're going to be putting across it is just, you know, like for for feeding these paddocks here, you're going to just use a garden hose and you're going to have a buried, maybe under one of these water bars, over to get a tee on the other side on one of these centers that runs down to your next row. Okay.
Yeah.
All right. So, so you're— yeah. So all your hose can be on the upper side and when they're And when they're— wherever you're needing your water, you just run your hose across the road and you run over it. That's not a big deal. Garden hose, okay. So I'm looking— I would put one right there. And as it gets steeper here, so the beauty of that is now the water has to restart from there down. The steeper the road, the more the closer you have to put your water bars. So yeah, I would come down, probably about right here. Yeah, so let's look at the undulation of the road. So right past, right past Jonah, it kind of goes down a little bit. See, see how it kind of shelf right where Jonah's standing and then it goes down a little faster? So I would come right in, right in here, grab this shelf, uh-huh, grab this shelf right in here Okay, okay, another one right there, and then another one at the bottom, and then another one, another one at that next shelf.
Yep, okay, yep, yeah, you seeing it, Jonah?
Yeah, so that when you can do it, because this is, this is just continuing to wash, and this will just wash and wash until it's a, it's a, it's a creek. Another one right in here. Well, you, uh, and you sort of have a, you don't, you don't want to run it right at the tree. You want to leave yourself a place. So yeah, here, here, here. Now this is called a broad-based dip. Okay, yeah, so the two things are a water bar, okay, and a broad-based dip. So this is a broad-based dip, and all this needs, all this needs is to be opened on this side to give it a, to give it an out. So that just needs to be Yeah, nothing to give it an out.
Pond here, we've always had.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
We've always had a puddle up here.
Yep, yep. Yeah, you, man, water, water and roads are— yeah, you can't, you can't have water on a road. So this one, you've got it out over here.
Yeah.
So here, here, you just, just kind of scrape. Yeah, scrape this down a little bit. And, uh, can you get some of the—
can you grade this road more. He's wondering if you should make it lean like that.
All right, so, so that's another big discussion is inslope, outslope.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is where you fight with excavators. Yeah, you will not get any excavator in here that wants to do an outsloped road. They all learned in excavation school to do an inslope road. So, so here's the bank, so you inslope the road so the water runs on the uphill side side and then goes out of a culvert somewhere. Yeah, very expensive. The reason they do it in the highway department is because if you didn't inslope it and you were going around a turn at 55 miles an hour, you'd feel like you were flinging off the, off the edge of the road. Okay, so they inslope it like a racetrack to, to keep you from going crazy. Okay, we're not driving 55 miles an hour on this road.
Okay, maybe.
What we want to do is out-slope, which is what you see right up there. What that does is all— is drain the water off. And I want you to notice something right there. Notice there's no berm on the right side like here. So right there, the water is running off the road straight down the hill. Here, it's running down the road and gouging the eroded down over time and creating this berm on the other side. So in a perfect world, you would regrade this road.
Yeah.
To out-slope it all the way up. You'd pull that berm back in and use that fill to create a bit of a— it doesn't have to be much, you know, very little, but that helps. That out-slope gets the water off very, very quickly.
With all those trees there.
There, yeah, it would be. I mean, yeah, it's hard now, it's hard now, but if you went along and were able to pull that berm back, uh, just, just the, you know, that berm, because that berm's right now like a river edge. Yeah, yeah, it's keeping everything from going. So I've always wondered what we could do about that. Yeah, well, what you do about it is you, you out-slope it. And so, you know, there's fill here. You can gouge in here and get some fill. But obviously, once it's deteriorated, remediation— if it were put in right in the first place, you wouldn't have ever had this berm on the right. It would have been fine.
Which those logging guys, they aren't thinking about it.
No, no. They're just getting that timber out. They've all been to excavation school, and it's all in-slope, and they're thinking in-slope because that's what the best management practice, the BMP, at the forestry thing, that's what it all says, is BMP. But this is what you want.
Now on my pathways though, I did in-slope because I wanted the swale effect.
Yes, yes, but there, there you wanted swales. And so you're all your— and you're on contour. Here you're not on contour.
Right. Oh, you're right. Yes. Yes.
So that's what changed. That's what changes it.
Okay.
Yeah.
And it's a road proper.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Yeah. Yeah. But mainly here, you're not on contour.
Would you worry about graveling this one day or you're happy with dirt road?
You know, this kind of stuff here drives you crazy. Yeah. Bumpy. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, um, you can either— you can either gravel it one day, gravel it, or you can call in your bulldozer guy, your blade, and he'll gouge in here a little bit. And you'd be surprised what just, you know, 3 inches, yeah, of fresh dirt over here, okay, a little bit of fill can do. Um, up to you. It all depends on how much you run. We've certainly definitely put a small fortune in gravel. Yeah, there's nothing like gravel, you know, to stabilize and make it nice to go. Put a water bar right here, knock this off.
Yeah.
And, and that'll, that'll fundamentally change because right now that water is coming down this inside gutter, running right down here.
Basically, we have a canal.
We have a canal. Yeah, it's going all the way down and you can go all the way down.
Yeah, he can fix this in like 2 hours. He can probably do all Yeah, 2 hours.
Yeah, so, so the, the, so the, the mini, the mini is Jonah's machine. Oh yeah, is that right? Yeah, yeah, cool. That's great, that's great.
Well, we've been out putzing around on the farm looking around this place. How do you think you've come up with a course, you've partnered with Gabe, and, uh, I've seen some of it and you put together a really nice thing and you already have some in it, but just tell us what you might want to tell us about it. How about how it might benefit homesteaders, small-scale farmers?
Sure. So unlike you, um, I, I'm, I'm not a video guy. Yeah, I'm a book English major, you know, I'm all about the written word, verb, you know, all that. But I'm very cognizant 100% that we are becoming a video society. And you know, picture's worth a thousand words. Video can do things that others can't. And so when Gabe McCauley and Little Dragon came to us, you know, they have this crew and they do beautiful, beautiful video work, a lot of historical type stuff and different things. And they're all the guys on the crew are homesteaders, you know, they got their little little 4, 5, 6, 10-acre places. And they had become fans, and, and, um, and so they, they approached me about doing a, a video course. But I, I think one of the things that I bring to this movement is, um, is homesteading. And I, and I don't want to talk down to anybody, but homesteading as a stepping stone to a commercial farming. What I've found when I have a group of 300 or 400 or 500 homesteaders in a conference and I ask, how many of you, if you could actually figure out how to make a living on your acreage, would leave your town job? And half the hands go up. So I know there's this latent seed inside of a lot of people wanting to germinate. And there's a lot of homestead content out there. I mean, yours is as good as any of it comes, and obviously the response to, you know, to Abundance Plus has been indicative of the quality of your material. But I think that what I bring to this movement is, okay, I'm all about homesteading, but, but for those who want to take take this another step and actually start selling things, make a brand, you know, do this commercially full-time. That's kind of what we did. We were, our family was a glorified homestead for our first, whatever, 15 years. You know, it was not, it was not a business. It was not a going. Dad was an accountant. Mom was a schoolteacher. Those jobs paid for the farm. You know how that goes. And, but we, we had a big garden. We milked a couple cows. We made all our own cheese. And ice cream and butter. And, and, you know, I had, I had my flock of chickens, and, you know, we raised a couple pigs. And it was, it was basically a glorified homestead, was not a going concern. And when I came back to the farm full-time in September 24, 1982, for the— my grandfather wanted to farm, never did. Dad wanted to farm full-time. Time and didn't get it done. And so here we were 3 generations in and I'm wanting to do this full time. And fortunately I had, I stood on the shoulders of greatness and I had, you know, a lot of experience and experiments and things on behind me and we were able to pull it off. And so now The idea is what is all that now half a century of experience can I convey so that somebody else instead of taking, in our case, 2 generations to build a platform that we could germinate on, how can somebody do this down in 3 or 4 years, 5 years in actuality? Do this. And so, you know, my handle is The Lunatic Farmer, and so we decided to call this Farm Like a Lunatic, uh, to, you know, to stay with the brand. But it's Farm Like a Lunatic, not Homestead Like a Lunatic. And so I've been very strategic about the, the theme of the curriculum, that it is— this is for, this is for for the next step. You want to commercialize this, you want to monetize where you're going with this farm, with this homesteading farming thing. Let's do it. And so all that we do can be scaled down. I mean, that's one of the beauties of it. But it can also be scaled up to some serious, you know, serious stuff. And so, you know, our farm now, you know, we run 800 hogs a year, 4,000 laying hens, 20,000 broilers, 1,000 head of cattle. You know, this is not a backyard. And we, and we, and we have about whatever, you know, 22 people earning a full-time living from the farm. So, so this is— I have lived my life in both of these worlds and And so I can— I think I can speak appreciatively of the fears and the hurdles of somebody wanting to do it while also inspiring the potential.
Yeah.
You know, for that same person to say, no, you really can do it. And now that we've— now that we've been doing for 30 years almost now, our, our apprenticeship program, We have watched our young people. And so my wealth of experience on how do you start— you're a young person, no money, no land, and how do you start full-time farming? And now we have, you know, a handful of these young people who have— who are now full-time farming and didn't have any land, didn't have any money. And so, so we're, you know, We're bringing that level of experience to people.
Yeah.
So the, the, the course is now, uh, we've been filming now for, I don't know what, 3 years. Uh, we've got 26 hours of content. My goal is 100. I feel like we get to a— well, I don't know anything about this medium, but the guy said that if we get to 100 hours, we've basically got a university course. You know, we've got, we've got something than it can really go. And, uh, so we're at— we're a little over 26 hours. Uh, we're filming again next month. We're trying to do 1 or 2 courses a year. Uh, the courses run somewhere between 2 and 3 hours. They're divided into somewhere between 16 and 22 or 23, um, segments. Uh, so right now we've done 6— 6 courses 6 videos and about something over 120 segments. The segments are all anywhere between about 11 and 16 minutes. We're trying to keep all the segments 11 to 16 minutes. And so the 6 segments right now are— the first one was, was how do you start. And there's a lot in there about leasing, about getting access to land, collaborations, partnerships. How do you, how do you build a collaboration? Because as you know, land prices have just gone through the roof and, and it's really expensive to have land. So, you know, I'm all about having a hub. Yeah, you know, you can have a hub. And, and as I have formulated all this, I've realized, you know, even as at the scale where we are right now, we could actually We could actually do all the production, the farming that we're doing now on a hub, less than 10 acres. And we lease now, we lease some, you know, 1,200, 1,400 acres in the community. And so there's the whole, you know, how do you get into this? How do you start this? And it includes You know, what kind of housing, what kind of nest egg do you need? You know, I'm a big believer that if you want to do this, do it, but don't destroy your marriage or your family. You've got to be on the same page with your spouse, and especially if you come to it with teenage kids, you can't, you can't just destroy everything. There is a cycle of life. I think that you have a really high risk if you come to it after 50 because you simply start— you don't have the physical stamina that you did at 20. So I encourage people that are over 50 to find a young partner and leverage your life experience on youthful enthusiasm. And, you know, that's the way people built wealth, you know, for a long time. Time. But all those, all those elements are in that kind of that first course. Then we have a course on laying chickens. How do you make money with eggs? There's everything from what breeds to choose, marketing, pricing, you know, infrastructure, starting the chicks, you know, all those kinds of things. The whole idea of— and benchmarks to egg laying, like, you know, if you're, if you're having to wash more than 10% of your eggs, something's wrong with your management, with your nest boxes and all this. We deal with, you know, what do you do with an egg eater? How do you, how do you have clean eggs? How do you have hard shells? How do you, you know, all these kinds of things that are, that are issues in an egg-laying operation. Because at our peak right now, we get about 200 dozen eggs a day.
Day.
So, you know, and, and think about this, you know, 200 dozen eggs a day, if you're selling them for $6 a dozen, that's $1,200. Now that's not net, but $1,200 a day, that's, that's a serious, that's a serious deal, you know. That's not just back yarding stuff. Um, and then, and we, then we have a course on broiler chickens, which as you know is dear to my heart because because that was essentially our ticket in. That really paid the bills. Lots of reasons. Broiler chickens, A, you know, Muslims and Jews eat them so you don't have religious issues with chicken. America's eating chicken, you know, a lot of chicken. It's a fast turnaround, 8 weeks. You know, you buy the chick, 8 weeks you have a harvest. I mean, that's not quite as fast as a radish, but almost, you know, cash flow. A lot of— most businesses actually fail not because they don't have a good product or a good service, but because of cash flow. Bills are coming in faster than you can generate the income in time to pay those bills. And so, of course, we've got a whole segment there on butchering and processing. And you have all the tension too now between Cornish Cross and heritage breeds and all that sort of thing. So we discuss that.
Best guess.
Okay, these are all things that, that if you're coming to this without much experience, they can become paralyzing discussions.
Yeah.
Oh, what am I gonna do? And so, uh, you know, you can disagree with me, that's fine, but I'm just going to tell you, you know, where I am on these things and, and what we think and what we're, what we're doing.
Um, is the broiler still your favorite for somebody to start out?
Absolutely.
One thing.
No question. No question. It's child friendly.
Yeah.
Cash flow. Everybody easy to sell. And chicken is the worst thing in the store. I mean, if you, if you're looking, if you're looking for something to brand you as, oh, this is different chicken.
Yeah.
The difference between the broth, you know, the broth, the texture, the the feel of it, the taste. The chicken industry is, is the most industrialized of all the meats. And, and so it's, it's way out there. So, yeah, then you got the broilers. Then, then we've got, we've got one. I was just, I was just really keen to capture one whole course is on the carbonaceous diaper. And Justin, in my, in my discussions around with, you know, with people doing this, yeah, I have just found this to be an epiphany for so many people. And of course, our friends Sean and Beth Dougherty that do a wonderful thing. I learned something from them the last time I heard them. I was able to catch a little bit of their presentation. And it was, it was a thought I'd never had before, and that's why I want to share it, was that even a homestead— and of course they're very much a homestead, very much a homestead scale— they said every homestead needs a source of fertility, something for your garden and your little bit of pasture and whatever, you know, around some fruit trees. Homesteads are starving. And people ask me all the time, I got this homestead But where do I— where do I get compost? Where do I get this stuff? And they use their pigs. Now they only raise like 6 a year.
Yeah.
And, and of course they use their pigs to use whey from their cheesemaking and junk. The pigs are for them. The pigs are basically a salvage operation. But unlike us where we're raising hundreds of pigs, they don't let them run out in the field, in the woods. They have them in a pen. Yeah, but it's got a carbonaceous diaper. All right. Lots of carbon, wood chips, hay, straw, junk hay they can throw in there. And, and it, it doesn't smell. The pigs make a toilet area which they continue to bed every few days, you know, to keep that up. But the pigs, then they, they till and they root and they turn stuff around. And the point is that those 6 pigs literally generate the compost for their 2 acres of gardening and orchard and stuff. And because it gives you a concentrated, a, you know, a pile of compost that you can use from. And I had never thought of that. It was just one of these, you know, aha moments for me as they said that. This, because I know that even at the smallest scale, people are starved for compost. You never have enough. And, and so this idea of pinning the pigs. And so, so, so we have the— so the carbonaceous diaper becomes a real thing for your fertility program, for, for the animal because there are times in the year when you don't want the animals out in the field.
They—
it's too wet. Maybe there you've got to— I mean, obviously, if you're up north, it's not very comfortable. And there are absolutely, obviously, you know, chick brooding. That's hard to do out in a pasture. Okay. You need to have a protected place. And so the carbonaceous diaper, you know, where do you get carbon? How do you— how do you do it? To it. And then, of course, that's linked up with a little bit of forestry. I haven't done the forestry course yet, but there's a little bit of forestry in the Carbonaceous Diaper because we, we see the woods, you know, crooked trees, dead trees, junky trees, using your, your, your, the carbon in the woods as a as an inventory of carbon to then use with the animals, you know, with the, with the carbonaceous diaper. And of course, you know, we, we, we use now, we use, I don't know, I'm going to say probably something a little bit south of 30 tractor-trailer loads worth of cart with wood chips. Yeah. A year.
And you talk about that in your course, how to do this on a big scale. Scale too.
Yeah, I'll do it on a big scale, including the pigger rating at the end to inject the corn in it and use pigs as an aerator, as a turner. Because the reason farmers are intimidated of large-scale composting is a $25,000 compost turner, double handling. You know, we got to pull it out, then we got to make windrows. And I mean, when you think of conventional large-scale composting, you think all this equipment and big windrows. We don't do any of that. You know, we just let the animals do all that aerating and all that work. One handling, no equipment except a manure spreader and a front-end loader, and you're in business. And so that can be a game changer for a lot of people. And so I really wanted to get that out and get that done. So that's done. It's fantastic. I mean, when you see it, it's just— I mean, the light bulbs go off. So then another one we've done is the pastured pig. How do we pasture these pigs? So now you've got— the thing about pigs is that they're the smartest of all the farm animals. But they also have the— so they're the smartest, but they have the poorest eyesight. They don't see very well. I mean, if you had a nose that big, you might not need to see very well either. You know, sniff your way, you know, into, into life. And so, so the pigs actually are problematic because they're smart, which means they're thinking, but they don't see very well. So they are the hardest animal to build trust with. Because I don't know what you're trying to do. I can't see it very well. You know, cows, you open the electric fence column, they just come. They can see the wire. They trust you. They come through. Pig. I see him moving, but what's he doing? I'm not sure. And what you got in mind? And, and you have, you know, and so, so the pigs, the pastured pig becomes becomes, you know, a control. A lot of it is a control issue. You know, what kind of electric fence? How hot do you need it? How high do you need it? You know, a cow, a cow tends to jump, jump over an electric fence. A pig would rather go under an electric fence, all things being equal. Pigs don't jump. I mean, they, they go under stuff. And so So it's these nuances. I mean, just those kinds of things are game changers if you really want to do this at a commercial scale. Understanding how to mix pigs. So we've got a group of pigs and we're trying to put together a group of 50. We got 25 from this farmer, 10 from this farmer, and 15 from this farmer. How do you put those pigs together so they don't fight? Because pigs are very social, territorial, bully. And so there's a whole, a whole, you know, segment on, on mixing, on how do you put pigs together so they don't kill each other because they're omnivores. You know, the mafia has pig farms for a reason and, and all that. So moving them, controlling them, you know, obviously feed. Feed, breed, you know, all those kinds of discussions. And then the, the 6th course we've done is, uh, is controlled grazing with cattle. Yeah, I've got cows. How do I manage this pasture in a way that makes it functional? So we've got a whole discussion on, you know, the, the S-curve of grass growth, um, how to figure cow days, cow days per acre, monitoring all that, what kind of fencing. Again, all these questions about grazing management, stockpiling early spring drought, stockpiling winter forage, all those kinds of things are in the beef one.
I would like to probably say that somebody taking that course and understanding all the things you just said there's something very valuable about reading or consuming you in a way, because then they go out then with your mind and your thoughts, and they can get that in such a short amount of time that has taken you 50 years to accumulate. And then that's why you can go out into my pasture like you did earlier, and you're like, oh, you know, here's the COVID here's where you put the fence, but but folks can just consume that and do this themselves.
Yeah.
Think, think like you.
Yeah. We've got a whole course on, on, for example, how to build an access road, water bar, broad-based dips, how to, how to build a pond on the downside and let the dam be a road over rather than a culvert situation because access is such a, such a big deal. And so, you know, with the video camera, you can actually go out and show the water bar, the, you know, the debris field, that sort of thing. Because, you know, washed out roads are a big deal and they're expensive to fix. You know, once your road starts washing, it becomes really expensive to fix. And I've been on hundreds and hundreds of farms around the world. And boy, washed out farm roads are just everywhere. And I mean, we had them when we came to our our property in 1961, we had farm roads that had been put in in the, you know, in the early— I mean, our house was built in 1790, so those first log initial logging roads were probably put in in 1790, you know, as they first started going around. And I mean, they had washed down. We had roads that were washed down, you know, 5 feet from both edges, you know. It was a canal. And so when the rain came, it was a river And we ended up making water bars to remediate those. We ended up coming in there and having to build water bars that were, you know, 8 feet, 8 feet tall. I mean, very gentle, big. We had to move a lot of dirt to get that thing stabilized, to get those things stabilized. So, you know, these are all things that will make such a huge difference as you get started. And so, yeah, I really I really want— I really want people— there are a lot of people, homesteaders, that never aspire to make a living with the farm. You know, it's just, let's grow a big garden, let's maybe milk a cow or two, grow most of our own food, you know, and, and I'll continue my IT work or my, you know, whatever it is, uh, off-farm work. And, and because they like their work and whatever, okay, that's great. But for those who who would love to quit that town commute.
Yeah.
And make a living on their farm. This is for them.
I like it.
And that's, that's what it is. It's a farm, Farm Like a Lunatic. And, um, and, and I just appreciate your, your interest in it and your, uh, kind of collaboration with us.
Yeah, I back it to get that out. I'm gonna put the link down in the description and fully support it. And I've seen some of it. It's great. Uh, if somebody were to buy it now, this is probably the question everybody's hanging on to. If they were buy it now, do they get the future classes?
Yes. If you buy it now, I'm pretty sure I'm on fair ground that, that you buy it now and all future stuff comes to you.
And that's how I understand it.
It's a little bit pricey. In fact, when we first did it, I was almost embarrassed. I'm a frugal guy, you know, and I was, oh, guy, you know, Okay, you know, you talked me into doing this and now I'm almost embarrassed. But now I understand that if you buy it, then all the future stuff comes to you.
But then if they spend this money and learn how to do it, they're going to make that money back. It's— listen, this is different than just going on a fancy vacation. This is an investment.
Yeah, absolutely. And Justin, you know, and I know that on a, on a farm.
Yeah.
You can blow a lot of money really quick buying the wrong piece of equipment, building the wrong kind of building, barn thing. I mean, just, just the carbonaceous diaper thing. How many farm buildings can't accommodate deep bedding because, because the sill plate's too low and you can't— now you're up on the, on the sill plates and the, and the barn boards. And so you end up— so think about how that— so you've just built, you know, you've just spent $20,000 for a building that you now can't dovetail your fertility program in. That it's going to save— this is the, this is the best investment. Sorry. You know, now I'm totally convinced this is the best investment you can possibly make. It's going to— because you can make, you can make $1,000 mistakes just, just day after day on a farm.
Yeah, so you're not only going to learn how to save money, and, and you're going to save so much money knowing how to do this, then you're also going to learn how to bring in money. So the income aspect of it with the marketing program. Well, so thank you. It's time for our lunch. And, uh, yeah, I encourage folks to check it out, and we'll, we'll get— move on and get our podcast this afternoon.
Huh, boy, that's really cool.
Crazy if you look at it you look at it bare-eyed, you, you just see the sun. You would never— yeah, yeah, you didn't know about this, you would be like, why is it dark out here? No, no, you can see it. Look, he's freaking out. It's getting colder too. I know, I feel chilled.
Structure.
That's a 10 by 12. There's a pig in that. And on these two ends, it's just cattle panel and tin. So when he's done, after you filled it up with con— with your material, okay, you can remove those. And then those— that's on skids, and you can get it out of the way, and then you can get in there and properly turn your compost and make it fine for the garden.
That's great. So that'll be good too.
Yeah, that leads you off of it. You can put it on any side to cover wood chips or to cover—
oh, that's great.
You— I don't know, this is because of you. I don't know if I ever showed you.
Did you ever get to see this?
You remember coming here and we had 100 rats? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That you didn't need to make a— oh wow.
Yeah, that's a bulletproof case back there.
Yeah, that's great.
This is a UFC— Yeah, yep, that's bulletproof.
Half-inch wire mesh everywhere, tent, storm doors.
Yep, yep, yep. Two bays. Here we are.
Safe travels.
You too. Thank Victor Justin Rhodes.
Yes, sir.
Thank you, Austin. Yeah, good to see you.
Oh man, another pocketful of notes, another session of farm-changing, life-changing tips. Joel has done so much for the progress of our farm, from just getting us started in a regenerative way to keeping us going. It's absolutely incredible. And then he's expanded into like personal and the health and the family. What a good day. How important that is to spend a day with a mentor. That's just— this is pure gold to fire this whole year, if not, well, if not the next 100 years. So couldn't be more excited about today.
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