The video follows a day on a family farm as they tackle a series of practical chores and challenges. The day begins with curing and smoking bacon, then shifts to handling a newly acquired cow named Honey. The family attempts a first hand‑milking, dealing with the cow’s calf, learning how to control the animal, and planning to separate the calf for future milking. Throughout the day they also manage sheep—herding them, feeding alfalfa, and moving them to new paddocks—while dealing with picky eaters and a mischievous cat. The crew discusses and attempts various farm maintenance tasks: fixing a leaking basement, applying waterproofing, and brainstorming a root cellar with contractor Seth, including considerations of cinder‑block construction, retaining walls, and floor types. Equipment improvisations appear repeatedly, from moving a smoker and auger to coping with a broken string trimmer and using loppers. Family interactions add a light‑hearted layer, with kids (Gideon) requesting birthday items like a bouncy house and dinosaur eggs, and the adults sharing jokes while cooking a slow‑cooked bacon lunch. The narrative ends with a preview of future milk production from Honey and an invitation to stay tuned for more farm updates.
Chapters
Gonna smoke our bacon this morning. It's done curing.
Our new cow is out there.
We're gonna manage her today for the first time. I don't think the calf got over either. The wall washers were here yesterday. Hopefully today they're coming to do the waterproofing. Our basement wasn't waterproofed correctly or had worn out and was leaking, hence the total utter destruction of our front yard.
Really?
Looks like my smoker's a bit buried.
What you doing?
Papa Henry, he was looking for you.
Okay, let me get the Ergo and him some pants. Hey dude, you're supposed to be on the counter. No, get off the counter, bro. It's cold out, you're gonna want a sweater. I don't know if it's sweater weather, but she's extra sensitive to that stuff. Girl is there. The nearest outlet is in there. Might be easier to one run across the street to the barn. Should I just bring my smoker over here? The grill's over here. All right, fate, if it works, these two cords get over there, we'll just leave it where it is. If not, we're bringing it here.
Why is this off?
I don't know. This is not right.
It wasn't tight enough.
Gideon, come step on this so we don't pull it. No, step on that end. No, there you go. I don't know. That's all we got from here to there. Think it'll do it? I think there's no way we're gonna make it. I think we're already there.
Uh-huh.
Well, you know what I said, I didn't want to move this. Because I don't want it to be far away, and it's terribly heavy.
Working.
What will do for bacon, y'all. I'm happy we're smoking bacon. Let's go milk some cows.
I know what I want for you, Mama.
What?
On my birthday, a bouncy house.
What about dinosaur eggs? You've been bothering me for dinosaur eggs. You still want dinosaur eggs? I know, but I'm saving this for later, but this is for my birthday. Okay, we've looked into it. $16. You gotta stay with me for 3 days during chores.
I know, this is one of those.
It's gonna be one of those days. Okay, at the end I'm gonna say yes he did or no he didn't. No.
Can I do that?
I could buy something for Sammy, please.
Yeah, I wonder what it would be that you would want to buy.
Not really anything. Maybe gas?
Yeah, nothing. Oh, okay. Yeah, that'd be $16 for 4 gallons. These youngins, these little ewes are gonna go. We got a couple more little ewes over there. We gotta get them later today up on the hill because Nacho's coming down.
It's breeding season.
They didn't eat a single alfalfa, but they did poop in it. The other sheep saw that. It's a shame alfalfa is an acquired taste, like coffee, I guess. But once they get used to it, they get addicted. Oh, that's— those are hilarious. You like those shoes? Keep your little feet warm. Oh, he's trying to kick them off. First thing we gotta do is management. I'm thinking we herd everybody over. The tricky part is the little calf.
We should probably get—
and then herd Flossie and the cat and Flossie's calf. Back over and just get the calf off of her as soon as we can. We're gonna lose some milk.
Pig boards?
Mm, the staff will be all right if we— Okay.
New cows and new situations are tricky. This is how I handled it. One, I didn't want to make too much change, so we left the calf on her. She just moved to us, she just traveled, she's in a whole nother herd, whole another place. I'm not gonna then take away the calf also, so everybody stays together. One little change at a time. The second thing you want to do is get folks separated. So we got the milking of Flossie out of the way, and then we isolated our new cow Honey. Third, it's like coffee to them— alfalfa.
If we can get her eating alfalfa out of this pan, we might be able to lead her down here. She got She don't know that call either.
Can we get her all the way to the stanchion?
This is too easy.
I know. She's a great cow.
Way too easy.
Yes, we got her to the stanchion. Can we get her through it?
There it is, there it is. We did it, we did it! All right, control.
If we control the cow's head, we control her, and she can be in there. We can stand at ease. Everything's going to be okay. Now we want to approach her. Here's the approach. I go in from behind. They're very unlikely to kick you from behind like maybe a horse would. So I'm going behind, I'm going close. It's scary going close, but it makes sense. It's more like a rub, a push like this, as opposed to a punch.
These are gonna be nice teeth.
Are we gonna put our calf up tonight?
Little protest.
Protest.
These are nice teats.
If they get kicky, if they get antsy, if they're nervous, just make sure we milk them all the way out. Because if they were to kick or move and you stop milking, what is that telling the cow? It's telling, if I kick or move, they're going to stop milking and annoying me, and then they're going to move on.
Unbelievable first day. Milked her, got the rest of it out, just got her used to it a little bit. Good job, honey, you did good. That's actually her name, Honey. That's very fitting. Together, come on, come on, honey, come on, let's go. Yeah, boy, you did good. You're a good one. Nice teats. First time hand milk, didn't kick me too much. Jonah Dunn left us to take the machines and there's no water in the cows. You've stayed with me so far, my man. Good job. There's no extra trough here.
Yeah, that's—
but the calves will need it when we separate them tonight, so let's go get an extra one. Okay, all right, all right, all right, all right, good. I'll agree with that. More interesting for y'all. He wants us to get started on the luchadors. He'll do the water. Get in! Are you keeping up? Here he comes. But he'll do it for some dinosaur eggs. There you go, good boy! Love it. Well, you guys destroyed this. Okay, it's off. Some say kudzu is a problem. On a permaculture farm, kudzu is not a problem. The only problem is how to get lambs to reach higher than that, because look, look at what they've done. It's as high as they could reach. Absolutely destroyed that, turned that kudzu into nutrient-dense Lamb. Let's mow the next paddock. We're bringing the young ladies up here and we're gonna get them two down. If I want this to last them a week, we gotta go a bit bigger than we did that time. I think we could probably get through right there. That's probably a good spot. Hit a snag. Too big for the string trimmer. Does Grandma have any loppers? She does. Ran out of string. I'll get what I can with the loppers. Probably have to go back for string. All right, I think I cleared this enough without the string trimmer. Let's get the net up. And then we got training. Nook and Cranny farming at its best right here, babe. Super frustrating. Look how far we are. It's 15 feet short. Are you serious? Yeah, so we're gonna have to handle this after physical training. Well, it's not even running. Oh, it's filled up with pellets. This has been the most finicky pellets to smoke her. Start again, I guess. What was the problem? It was smoking this morning and the fire went out. Couldn't keep up.
We got it once again.
Auger's running, but it's not running all the time. That's probably good. Seth, our contractor, is here and we're going to talk to him about a possible root cellar since we already have this all dug out. Have you ever built a root cellar, Seth?
No, but I've seen several.
Okay, we have to get you that book maybe too, Beck. Yeah, yeah, we're thinking block. I think it is a—
just off the top of my head, it's like block.
It's just like a cinder block room under the ground. You want it to be covered with dirt on the top.
Yeah, so we would come in at it from right here.
Okay, so the access would be— that's one question.
And you'll probably have to do a retaining wall right here since you're gonna have to displace some of that dirt this way.
Yeah, and to put the dirt over top of it, yeah, you would need a probably a suspended slab, okay, concrete going over it, um, just to box it in, make your 4 boxes. And probably would you want it to be a concrete floor or would you want it to be like a gravel floor?
I think that's what we need to find out right now. She's gonna get that book because I don't know. Root cellaring, you got to have a cold area in the bottom and warm air out at the top. Are you guys seeing your problem? We only had stucco, we didn't have waterproofing.
No, there was no waterproofing on this side.
Wow, we did pretty good for nothing.
We did do pretty good for as long as we did.
Did you guys know, according to Jacob, that weight training is the single best thing you can do for longevity? Look at you, new horse riding boots. Yeah, horse riding lessons today. Yeah, enjoy. They're putting on the waterproofing. If you got this, I'll go move the Energizer over here.
We're just walking in. I didn't expect that.
I was hoping to get everybody in the trailer so we could just leave Nacho in here, leave the fence down. It's gonna be a little trickier, but not that much trickier. All right, let's go leave Nacho down. All right, let's see if they follow you. So now do you guys see why we want to train these sheep to hop out? He just walked them wherever the heck they, they want— he wanted them to go. How do they like it?
I think they just want more alfalfa.
Okay, love it. There you go, skittish.
Okay, we'll pull this up, we'll shut this, and then we'll herd them all into the new area. Okay, do not spook them into the fence. Attraction is the old paddock. Come on, buddy.
He thinks there's other stuff in the other—
come on. Come on. This is the problem with the tame sheep. Let's get their fence up and on before these little guys test.
They're already testing it.
4-ish hours, but it's ready. I'm calling it 153. Close enough. 154. Come on, one more, one more.
155 is textbook.
There, it made it. 155. I think we're gonna have this for lunch. Now we're gonna put this in the oven, 325, slow cook that thick bacon. How was the horses?
Good.
Did you do your boots? Yeah, they worked out. They were so cute. The teacher loved the boots. Yeah, okay, okay. They help you?
I guess so.
Her other ones were eaten by the dog, so this is definitely—
and these are English style boots. Look at how the bacon turned out.
You can't, you can't buy this bacon. Made some cheeseburgers, toppings.
Condiments.
Lunch was delicious.
That was fun, guys.
I couldn't imagine it going any better.
But you definitely want to stay tuned.
We're going to see if Honey will keep on going, go back in there. We're definitely going to start separating her calf and see how much milk she'll give us. I think we're going to be swimming in milk very soon. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Thanks for watching.
