Our Newest Chicken Invention Changes Everything

Getting our blood tested this morning. Checking vitamin D levels, checking inflammation levels. If you're not testing, you're guessing. What were you testing?

Thyroid.

Testing thyroid. I don't know why I'm singing. Maybe it's this weird headache I get every once in a while. Like painful to the touch up here and an earache and like my beard hurts when it rubs. Like the beard rubs the other side of the skin. Maybe that's because it's getting gnarly, but I think it's just because the whole left side of my head is And a Relight hydration. That's an electrolyte from Redmond's. That's in a quart jar. You're giving them Gut and Digestion too? Yes, beef organs and bone and liver inside of a chocolate smoothie. You just keep taking it to the next level. That's by Heart and Soil. We got 10% off for you guys for Redmond's. All capital letters, SALT15. We should try to get that for Heart and Soil. We use it so much.

I've been taking them for 6 to 8 weeks. I don't know exactly when I started taking them. I have to say, I feel really great. These are just freeze-dried organs. Jessica at Three Rivers Homestead got a freeze dryer. Maybe we should get one. Well, this is really why I want one. You can make marshmallows and then freeze dry the marshmallows, and they're like—

truth comes out. Amazing. Truth comes out. I'll tell you the truth.

I mean, there's other things that you can freeze, and I confessed.

To them something? Yes. This is probably a sin. We've saved our own livers and hearts and, um, things like that. Like the big— superfood. Superfood. I know this. I'm trying to get myself around to eat it. Can you excuse me for a second? I even set some individuals out yesterday, and I'm looking in here. It's the pig scrap bucket because that's where it ended up.

What we'd like to do is to grind it into our ground beef. Yeah, because, well, when we get it and it's not like—

what I would like to do is to fry it with some onions and some bacon grease and just gird up my loins and eat it. But I just can't get it. I'm just— I shouldn't say can't, I'm just not coming around to it for whatever reason.

I, I can't. I have it.

So maybe it's the freeze-dried. It's, it's trying to come to truths with that because really that's what I should do. That's who I want to be. I want to be a straight up liver eater. It's just not there. So at some point I need to be real with myself and find another way or it's not going to happen. Well, I guess I'm taking those supplements right now. And maybe— and that's okay. You gotta give yourself grace. I gotta give myself grace. It's okay. Picking the battles. Looky here. Set to 72. We are heating our entire house 100% with wood. We got our wood boiler problem figured out.

These are for the pigs. And, um— they always put the sticker on. It's like— they couldn't put the sticker on the outside?

So you're getting a cigarette? We're going outside, you'll be fine. How empty was it?

It was about right here.

Oh really? So not too bad. No, of course it's not that cold today. 175. Really, I'm going to show you guys what we did, but really it's like a video journal to me in case this happens again. Uh, we hooked up a water line here and reversed the flow with a hose. Put a hose on it and that one we would turned it that way, and we would have turned this one— that we would turn this one horizontal, and we would shut that off. Yeah, that one I'm gonna shut off, but this one would stay open so the water can go through. It flows in there, pumps off when we do that. Then they replace the pump for a bigger pump in here. What finally broke the camel's back was we switched these lines, which reversed the flow on this— is this a radiator coil? Coil and switch the line. If there's any air or sediment in there, um, it got moving out and that did it. This is the fan. This is the fan you hear running. So we got it figured out. Felt so good. We've had, uh, more pipes on top of that. They have fallen off in the wind. We have ordered more. What? They've blown off in the wind and we are gonna hire Randolph to secure them better to the—

I can pick them up today, the roof.

Can you? I don't know, it's not Asheville, it's Canton, I think. No more wood chips in our grit, hopefully today. Hopefully we're gonna finish the mineral feeder today. We cleaned up the shop yesterday. What do you think, Rebecca, we finished it today?

Uh, maybe.

You guys know by now, if you follow us for a long time, she's hard to milk. When Brianna stayed in the log cabin for a few months, she would come help me milk. She used to say, the early bird gets the milk, Flossie. Okay, okay, we don't want Polly over here. Hey, so what we've always done— Polly's over there, and I guess if she's— as long as she's over there, Stud's in the other paddock. Uh, what we've always done is milked and then brought the calf on because she also holds it back.

This one isn't nursing.

Well, yesterday I was like Hmm, what if we get the calf on first? Will she let down better? It was, it was better. It's one of those things where it's like, I wish I would have figured this out 3 years ago because it makes milking so much more enjoyable. Clean it up a little bit. I mean, they clean the udders a little bit for us. We'll still go and clean it, but Jona, is it easier? Yeah, it was a lot easier when I did it yesterday. Now it's just running out. You weren't even squeezing it right then. Is it easier though, man? Yeah. What we're learning here is not to be afraid of trying new things. Just because we've been doing that for 3 years doesn't mean it's the best way, you know. And there's kind of a little bit of an investment there, but we've got to just take the sunk cost and say, what's the best thing to do moving forward? It looks like this might work. Here's another trick I learned when I'm out here milking with Henry. If I just squat, squeezes in the ergo. So when I sit down, I just loosen up the straps. You know, I guess at this point we're just making perfections at this point, at this time. That's a fun place to be in on your farm. Every day in every way, we're getting better. Got the rope holder on Joey.

Yeah, do you want to try controlling?

Uh-huh. All right, go for it. Unhook his leash.

I better help you, Joey.

He looks strong. Okay, go. Come on, go. If you control his head, you can control him, so just don't let go of the rope. There you go, there you go. That's— hey, better late than never to start training him. That's awesome. Good job, boys. Now I'm finishing off Phyllis, and what she's done in the past is held back and will bring the calf in after the first milking and it'll draw it out. But I think because we did the calf in the beginning, she's just let it all loose. And it's good to get it out of the way in the beginning instead of interrupting right in the middle of your milking process. Just more efficient. Henry's asleep, so guess what? We're gonna have the beautiful one cam. You're gonna be the GoPro. The mineral feeder build from Rebecca's perspective. Don't turn it on yet.

Okay.

Poor Dan. We try to be selective in the files we send Dan, our editor. So I heard once somebody say, amazing footage. Yeah. Yep. I heard a filmmaker say once We're not garbage collectors, we're filmmakers. So we try to just get the shots. Oh wait, I'm not recording that we want and know that we're going to use. You are recording. Apologize to Dan.

Dan, I'm sorry.

Thank you.

I deleted it.

Okay, good. Okay, he made— she made it up to you, Dan. The people don't want to see 10 minutes of you sweeping, so what about like that? Okay, we cleaned up yesterday. These, these are our parts. We got some cutting to do, we got some screwing to do. I'm gonna go get this measuring tape. Rebecca's cleaning. A friend of the family, Kathy, came by and she's very organized and very proud of it. She came through the hallway and she's like, they're so organized, you know. Look at— I mean, look, we've got tools hanging nicely on our hallway. And then I was like Oh, because I knew she was going to come in here and see this and that and that. Rebecca, I have an idea. Since every day in every way we're getting better, my idea is to pull everything— I mean, the heating guy had to climb over the— he had to ask me if he could climb over the cardboard. That's embarrassing.

The guy last night?

Yes.

Oh, that's embarrassing.

It's embarrassing. So I, I vote that we put— now they— I'll say they wanted to collect cardboard for what? You guys were going to jump in it or something? Okay, so it's not total irresponsibility. They did have a vision for it, but I say we pull everything out of these stalls, pile it in here. We get a dumpster. Yeah, just start hauling to the dumpster.

I love it.

Pile everything where you think we're going to keep in here and then distribute, then organize, build shelves or whatever.

Yes.

And it's going to be a big pain in the butt, and that's not as fun as I have ideas building a new thing, but you have organizational ideas?

Okay, I have ideas especially for like the fencing stall. And are you going to sweep? Just— I was taking over.

This is our mission to make this the organic— look like the organic farm that it is.

Is that what you were doing?

I guess we're getting it on record, so we're gonna have to do it now.

I want to not be embarrassed of our farm. Yeah, I don't want to be embarrassed when someone comes down here and is like We should be proud, and it should be pleasant to us.

Like, when you come down here and look in there, does that really make your heart sing?

No, that's what I'm saying.

Like, that wood stall, it's terrible.

On Fridays, our project needs to be—

yeah, when we don't film. Yes, because it's not that fun. It's not that fun to watch us clean, is it, guys? One thing that really gets me is to watch an influencer in a space, say the health space— and I realize I'm an influencer in the homesteading space— I don't want to— I don't want you ever to think I'm perfect. I think it's actually discouraging if you thought I had a textbook life and never made mistakes, never had flaws. So that's why I'm vulnerable and share these things with you, because when I see influencers being perfect and it's annoying, not cheating even on Thanksgiving, it's incredibly annoying. It's incredible. It's actually very defeating, and it makes what they're doing totally unachievable and unreasonable. Yeah, and it makes me want to give up. It actually has the opposite effect.

I know everyone's so cringing.

If you— we want you to cringe because if you see us doing everything perfect and having all the nice things and not making any mistakes, then that's absolutely crushing. We don't ever want to crush. I need to do another set of these. To put up here. Battery died there, baby woke up, mom's got to take him to a well baby visit anyway, so she's out. Solo me. Like, so where we're— ours here is we have all the, all the units up. Now we just need to do the upper frame and we'll start to work on the roof. It's exciting. I think we'll get this. I like one screw in there. See where I'm going with that? But we still got to do the inside ones. I've run out of screws. These screws might work for this. But they won't work for that. Got those pieces on so y'all can see the vision. There it is. They can, uh, they can stick their head in there, but they cannot get their bodies in there. Now we want to do a bigger roof so that we can protect this from rain. It's all weird. The kelp and the aragonite gets all weird if it gets wet. This grit feeder from Premier One is excellent. It's just a grit feeder. I'd hoped, I'd hoped because it has 3— 3-way divider that we could have done grit, kelp, aragonite, but this is not quite enough. One of these compartments is not enough grit for our chickens. Let's, uh, do try this. This might even be the right size. I mean, it just fits right there. I think— do I want a little more gap though? Do I want a little more hangover. Like, how much? I do, I do. I like that. I like that hangover. It's hanging over here, not hanging out enough there, so this board won't do it. But you get the idea. I won't have to find a big enough one. It doesn't have to be a solid one because we're gonna put a plastic over it. It could be two of these. We need to get something just this size. Okay, yeah, two of those, two of those would do it. Be okay for a little hangover. I made a mistake. I put the roof on, I screwed this into that. I knew I was, I was having a feeling. I want this to be able to hinge and lock so that we can get— because how are we gonna get— can't get in there to get our minerals, let alone clean it out. Uh, back it all out. And I think we'll put brace boards on the bottom to hold these two boards together. Now I've put those boards on to hold this together, and we can put it like that and mount the roof. Let's do the hinges first. We had this brooder wall in our old milking area. With hinges. This is another one of those sunk cost things, you know. We could have been married to this. Oh, we built this just 2 years ago. Let's not improve the brooder, you know what I mean? Now we just moved on. Test drive it.

Yay!

All right, Johnny, you got your grinder ready? We gotta— yeah, we gotta get these screws ground down. We'll see y'all.

Bye!

Feel like one thing to try this thing out— I flipped it upside down. Let's put a little— let's put some, uh, skids on it to keep it off the ground. Not necessarily movable with the Chickshaw. I guess you could put it in there. They aren't skids in the sense of dragging it. I don't think it's necessary. It's so light. Although that might help the kids.

But then you could hook it to the back of the— what you call it?

The chickshaw. Yeah, there you go. Golden. Okay, well then we need to cut those at 45. So we've cut these 2x4 like that, and then it skids right here. There's decking that we put on this, plastic, really tough plastic decking that makes sliding easier. I want to run out there and do it. Try it. First, let's clean up in here. This was for our car getting pulled behind this safety.

It was the safety.

Let's get up to the O-hook on the Chickshaw. This thing just got super cool. O-ring, carabiner, metal strap with a hook. This is the Chickshaw Mini Me. I'll leave the link for the plans down in the descriptions for free. This is good for 24 birds, 30, 30 birds. This thing is plenty easy for me to pick up, but we are a family-friendly farm, so we want the kids to be able to do it. Okay, so drag it, see if this works. They could drag it, drag it by hand. On the skids. Put the plastic on the bottom of it soon. Or they're wanting to move the whole chickens, we do this. Boom! Oh, oh, oh my word, this changes everything! Look, that was a little wobbly, wasn't it? Because the skids need to be longer. So what if What if this was a thing? What if this was also a mineral or water? What if this also had the water? And then, because it's also hard to move the water behind the— you know, you got to put the water in with them, and sometimes they get out. So what if this was a thing that, that had the mineral feeder and the water on it, and it got pulled behind the Chickshaw? And it stabilized this as a sled. It came more of a sled instead of a square. Holy moly. Probably going to be rebuilding, or we could just do longer skids and then have a mount for water. Oh, I like it. Can you tell I'm really excited? Okay, let's get this in and let's get the minerals in it. Let's get it to our chickens. So we got aragonite in one Poultry NutriBalancer. There are actually 3 minerals we're giving them: kelp, aragonite, NutriBalancer, and then, uh, grit. So there's your Thorvin kelp, put it in one of those, and then we'll do grit in one. So there are 4. There it is. All right, what do you think, ladies? You'll thank me later.