The Best Homestead Films of 2023

Happy rainy day! You get 2 bonus videos this week. Normally we just post vlogs Sunday through Thursday, and those are vlogs. Yesterday you got a podcast. How are you guys liking these podcasts? I mean, they're not performing as well as vlogs, but they are completely different, so it's maybe not what you're used to. I want to get a good wide shot. I don't want to be too out. Maybe we can. It's not raining too much. I want to show you guys what my morning looks like. And no, I'm not scrolling my phone. And yes, you've got to see this view. I mean, that's my morning view. This is my office. Not bad. What am I doing on that phone? Well, I'm reviewing all 16 films that are in the Abundance Plus Film Festival. Free to you guys. It's coming up this next weekend. I'm going to give you guys 1-minute clips. I asked Dan, the Abundance Plus editor, "Hey, get us 1-minute clips of all these amazing films and I'll share them with the audience." A nice tease. How's that? Just us hanging out on the porch. Let's go. First film.

So with learning all these new skills, we knew that not everything was going to work and we certainly had our failures along the way. And, you know, being more self-reliant and relying on ourselves and each other for food, you can't sort of dwell on those things. Pretty much picked a new skill to try and learn every week just to add more and more variety to our diet and expand what we were doing.

After a couple of weeks in, we had harvested our first chicken. That was an incredible experience in and of itself.

Taking a life for the first time was definitely one of the hardest things I've done. Having to take the life of an animal really put things into perspective.

We learned so much, and just having that appreciation for life was, was really important throughout our journey.

You know, with our own YouTube channel, people really kind of attached to it because we didn't— we weren't experts, we were amateurs that were learning, and we'd watch a YouTube video where you know, some 25-year farmer would go and butcher a chicken and have it done in 5 minutes and looking perfect. And we go do it for the first time and it did not go like that at all. So, uh, it was interesting for us to, A, learn from YouTube, but then also to give a realistic, uh, interpretation of what that's like for, you know, people who are just learning and starting and what it's going to actually be like to butcher a chicken for the first time.

That was an epic story on a couple just getting started out and going hardcore Like, we're only going to eat what we provide for ourselves off the land. Very good story from a friend of mine, Curtis Stone, part producer of that, and from the company Freedom Farmers. Next up, an out-of-the-box film, Against the Grain. And that's the theme of this whole film fest, isn't it? We're all going against the strain. We're all opting out. These are stories of do I want to say indifference? Is that the right word? These are defiance of norms, and he is making grand connections with nature and building wooden spoons from nature and finding connection there. Beautiful film.

What I like about spoon carving is I get to go out in nature, I get to connect with the elements, I get to breathe, I get to have silence, I get to hear the birds, I get to see water, wind, clouds. It gives me all those things. Somehow, when I'm carving a spoon, as soon as I take the axe or sharpen my knife, engaging in this process, I get quiet. Suddenly I smell things. I smell the wood. I hear the splitting of the wood. I see the colors. I see the direction of the grain. It gives me so much knowledge just by doing it. The wood tells me how it wants to be worked or how it doesn't want to be worked. So it teaches me a lot, and I can relate those teachings to myself.

Homesteading doesn't always go right. Bad things happen, right? And that's what Morgan Gould from Gold Shaw Farms' film is about with his blind duck.

So, but yes, this is the duck right here that I think is actually blind. Now some of you OG Gold Shaw Farm viewers might actually recognize this duck because because she has a little bit of a history. Does she look familiar to any of you? Can you guys recognize her? And no, she's not Ron Swanson. Ron Swanson's probably the most famous duck we have in our flock these days. You see, because Ron Swanson is the duck who thinks that she's a goose. And this duck though does have a weird relationship with a goose. You see, because this duck is Bean the duck. Do you guys remember Bean from about 2 years ago? So a couple of years back, I had a mama goose who hatched a bunch of goslings. But the only problem was this mama goose was a terrible mother. Like, I mean, She hatched these babies out, but it seemed like she had no interest in mothering. If my memory serves me correct, I think she lost like 2 of them. And she had this 3rd gosling that I was really worried about, and I did not think she was going to be able to raise to adulthood. And so I decided to take that gosling in and raise it myself. The only problem is all of my other goslings had already matured to the point that I didn't want to mix this like 2-day-old gosling in with a bunch of older goslings because I was worried it would get hurt.

Next up, a superb film inspired by our TV show Rooted, so it's really high cinematic, but they did all the filming themselves and they're homesteaders just like you. It's a top-notch film, totally original. Nobody's ever seen it before. Check it out.

There is this one moment that comes back to me absolutely every year around the time when we moved, which is mid-February. It really helped me to realize that this was— that this is such a blessing and I could not discount it. The morning after we moved in, so the day after Valentine's Day, we slept until the sun came up, which I don't know when that is in February, but probably like 8 o'clock. And the first thing that happened is I propped myself up in bed and looked out this huge picture window over this completely brand new, fairly uninspiring but empty landscape. Like we were not in the city anymore and saw the sunrise behind the trees just past the river. And it was like balm to my soul. I just felt like, okay, we can do this. It was an unforgettable experience, an unforgettable moment.

And how about a reminder of why we homestead? To get those who are of us who are just getting, you know, on the verge— hey, maybe we— this is why we want to start. And then for those who, like us, have been 20 years, been doing this for 20 years, a reminder. This is a nice film from More Than Farmers.

We were away for the evening and we were driving in the lane. I showed my headlights out in the field. We're pretty sure we saw a baby calf out there. That's like 5 days early, but that's exciting. It was cold earlier this week, but it warmed up a little bit. Hey there, little girl. It's starting to sprinkle just a little bit, but this is like really, really nice weather to have a baby calf. I'm super happy for that. I'm closing them up in the corral up here for the night. I didn't want the calf to be able to accidentally get it outside of the fence and Maddie not be able to get up to her.

Here she comes.

Started sprinkling out there a little bit, so they've got shelter. Maddie's Hey, hey, she got it!

She got it!

My absolute favorite thing to have on our homestead is a new baby calf. I just, I love the new life. I love watching them run around in the pasture. I love seeing the mama cow and the calf together.

Just the storyline of this next one, gardening with Dad. I'm just a sucker for dad and son stories.

I didn't know a lot about my dad's long history as a gardener? I never thought to ask until I started reflecting on my own experience.

They're loaded. And that's another raised bed that I made, and it's, uh, sweet potatoes. And there's a dill. A lot of the seeds didn't come up, but this one, it doesn't get a lot a lot of sun. It just gets the morning sun, then the house blocks it.

When my wife Michelle and I moved from Washington, D.C. to Kentucky, I brought with me big plans to start a garden like the garden I grew up growing each summer with my dad.

Redwood Creek Farm, brand new budding YouTubers. Blew me away with this film on not just moving to the country to grow their own food, but moving to the country for the sake of children and, and being the best idea for raising their children. And these guys are not your typical, like, we're in our 20s, we're going to start a homestead. No, but they're doing it and it's absolutely beautiful. I read that if you want to raise good kids You gotta move to the country. Well, I want to raise good kids, so we should probably move to the country.

We were already intent on raising good kids. In fact, that's foremost on our heart. Good marriage, good family, and parenting well. Country living is actually a great environment for this to happen. We had a little house in the suburbs. We saw that other houses had pretty plants out in their front yards and thought, "Hey, we need to do that.

Be pretty.

Be nice." We looked at each other. "What do we do?" She said, "I have a friend." I said, "Call your friend." So her nice friend, she came over and rolled up her sleeves Dug a hole, put the plant in, dug another hole, put the plant in, and we just stared in awe. We were shocked, like, that's it? You just plant the thing in the hole?

I'd like to think this next one is kind of like a— yeah, definitely represents what I want this film fest to be about. It's called Gardening in a War Zone, okay? And it's about a lady growing flowers in the Ukraine, of all places, with where there's disaster all around her, and she just has this conviction to just not be overwhelmed but to do the most important things. If we can't be inspired by her, we're not going to be inspired. Incredible. And that one's going to be a 33-minute-long film, and it's going to be absolutely amazing.

I was actually paralyzed in the first months of the war because I had a very difficult situation. The husband who didn't walk and used oxygen concentrator, he had around 90% of lung injury and some heart damage. Also a very old granny who was 88 years old and with serious heart disease. Also, my mother-in-law, she is not too young. They were unable to work. I understood that I do not have means to continue the treatment of husband, of granny. I do not have means actually to buy food. I do not have means to leave the war zone with all my family.

This next one is so fun. It's a time-lapse of this young couple's first 6 months on the homestead. What you'll see here is a clip of them coming into the farm, you know, living in an RV, fixing up this old terrible house. And they do it with such— they're so relatable. They have such a talent for fun storytelling. This is a good one from Calico Cow Acres, budding YouTubers.

We knew it was going to take a long time to rehab this property since we're both working full-time too, so we promptly moved our camper to our new front yard the very next day and got right to work. The first thing I did? Ripped down those curtains. Did I mention this house has been abandoned for a year? The plastic container of buggy brown mush, which used to be blueberry muffins, in the sink and the unplugged freezer full of rotten food made us very aware of that fact. Not to mention the spiders. So many spiders. On Day 1, we found out that our bedrooms have original hardwoods. Cool! We also found a whole lot of mold and more mold and lots more mold. I spent days ripping out flooring, good old paneling from the 1970s, and all the trim while Taylor worked on ripping up the upper layer of subfloor. Everything was waterlogged and moldy, which wasn't surprising since it was raining inside the house on the day of our inspection. The house wasn't the only project we needed to focus our attention on though, so we bought ourselves a shovel, had 10 yards of compost delivered, and got to work on some garden beds to plant our garlic that I had purchased before we even found a house. That's how determined I was. This feels like a metaphor in my life at this point.

If Calico Cow Acres were our budding YouTubers, this next one from White House on the Hill, a veteran, been YouTubing for several years. He has submitted— it's probably his most, his most popular video at over 20 million views. I said, Jake, why is this so popular? And he's like, well, because people like to see someone inexperienced try bees. And so, uh, this is, this is a clip from his movie I Killed the Queen.

Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! There she is! There she is!

Oh, you did find her!

Oh my gosh, there she is! Okay, she's right there, moving really fast. Long abdomen. I get her! I got her! I got her! The queen is right here. There she is! There's our queen. No doubt about it with that, that abdomen, the short wings, and then everybody's attention to her once we grabbed her. All right, well, we've got our queen here. I haven't been really careful holding her. If you needed to keep a queen alive, you're definitely supposed to be more gentle holding their abdomen. But we've got a new queen to take her place and hopefully make this hive a little bit more calm. So for the sake of saving the hive, we are removing this queen from the hive, and by doing that, we've got to squish it.

This next one, lighthearted. We definitely select funny videos, and we end each day's session of the Film Fest with a funny one. This one, I would like to say, maybe a spoof on how I make my vlogs. Like, you may or may not know what it all is entailed in making a farm vlog, and this is a fun look and glimpse inside of that. And it just keeps these films, you know, just out of the box and different. And Austin, my editor, he came up with this one and did a great job with it. Let's go see your job y'all did this morning.

Nice transition with the audio and drone shots.

This is so steep. Slide steep. Yeah, this This is steep.

All right, so if you notice, the camera's set up at a distance and he doesn't have a cameraman. So he goes and sets up his camera, walks, does his shot, goes back, get his camera, and then continues on with the story. I mean, that's dedication.

If I don't have lupus, what's wrong with me?

So he continues on with his health journey, the theme of the vlog. We're already 4 minutes in, but I mean, we break up the story so well throughout that he just kind of continues to live his life throughout while also telling the story. Just flows so well. Well done. Sometimes I find these little bits where the kids just make silly faces or whatever.

Funny. I'm about to pull you like a rickshaw. This next one was an early submission, and I knew we were on to something and on the right track. It's cinematic. It's a great story. It's actually international. It's in a different language, but we do have subtitles. Absolutely incredible, you know, people doing amazing things to— and going to great lengths to protect their beloved fruit trees.

Ça devrait venir vers 4h, donc on commence à chauffer à 4h, 4h30 pour qu'on ait le temps de chauffe au moment où il fera le plus froid. Les petites boules avec les petites queues, tout ça, ce sont des fruits. Et s'il y avait pas eu la lutte antigel avec 9 nuits de gel sur ces abricotiers, il y aurait plus rien du tout. C'est des cultures pérennes et c'est du vivant. On essaye de les aider, mais après on est quand même à un moment donné confronté aux limites du climat.

Les flammes commencent à venir derrière là.

Another spectacular film just dug up, just a treasure discovered. Memory of Kabisa, I believe it's set in Asia, and they, they have just a different mindset over there, and it just takes us away and opens up our minds in new ways, and they find how we're connected. In this case, in this clip, you'll see how they might feel connected to to bees and themselves.

Bees are very, very important in what we do. Bees and man, we are stuck together. Between the two species, there is a very, very important connection, and the bees are disappearing. Minyan once came with this young man, and he came into the land, and he brought us some of his hives, and it just happened. He brought the bees back. Xiao Jiang gradually became part of our Kabissa. [SPEAKING CHINESE] You have a kind of intimate and immediate relationship with this piece. This is amazing, really amazing.

Back to America. Back to—

about—

how about a pig's life? And how about a story from the pig's perspective? This is such a creative, such well-told story. An amazing film from The Pastured Homestead.

We wanted to raise our own meat source, but we didn't like the idea of having to buy feeders every single time we wanted to raise a hog. So we decided to get some Idaho pasture pigs that we could breed, and from those litters we would keep 1 or 2 for our our pork production. The rest would be sold, which essentially paid for our pork. I'm not sure I fully understood at this time that this piglet would be born on our farm, would be grown on our farm, and would be butchered on this farm. At no point in this pig's life did it deal with the stress of being ripped away from his mother too early, or placed on a trailer and shipped 1,000 miles, or packed into a cage without direct sunlight and fresh air. The only thing this pig knew was our farm, and that makes me happy. The life of a feeder pig is anywhere between 6 and 10 months, and it's amazing how quickly that time goes by. One moment he's a cute little piglet, and the next he's a big 200-pound beast ready to eat everything in sight.

Here's a clip from a whole series we've been able to acquire inside Abundance Plus from our friends at Farmer friends who supply high tunnels and our silage tarps and things like that. These are actually available inside Abundance Plus. And one of the viewers said, I just love these because it's such an international perspective. And yes, this, this one's in Sweden, there was one in France, and that's true. And these are stories of market farmers, so a little different than, than the homestead normalcy stuff, but the, but the, but the homesteaders are loving it. And I think you'll love this one. Here's a clip, and it's none other than Richard Perkins himself. You gotta love it.

Well, I went to agriculture school when I was 18 to study organic horticulture and crop production in the UK at an agriculture school there, and I left there with a lot more questions than answers. So I embarked on a longer global trip looking for people that had different solutions. It took quite some years to find really working examples, and I found it very hard to find people willing to share data, like numbers and facts and figures. And so that's become a key part of this farm, is creating a place that shares the sort of data that I wish I had had access to when I was learning. Starting a farming business is perhaps the hardest thing you could do. A lot of young people coming into this kind of business, they're growing up in a world that missed a bunch from a few generations ago. We really wanted to create a space that was open to people to come and get engaged, so we've tended towards running really long-term farmer training. And quite hardcore, you know, more like farm boot camp.

This next one, you're gonna want to take a break from eating your popcorn during the film fest. Uh, because it's about— I love it though. It's international, it's Guatemala. Basically, this, this family, I think they're experiencing drought, and to survive and even, I guess, thrive, they're feeding worms. She's, she's prepping worms and they're eating them. But talk about like, let's get out of our normal mindset, our normal situation and just be exposed to some realities in the world.

Gusanos.

Cuando lo probaron, sí les gustó la galleta, pero saber que íbamos a tener que tener una granja, no, fue un poquito difícil, pero después lo aceptaron sin ningún inconveniente. Incluso hasta ellas lo limpian, lo mantienen, le quitan la piel muerta. Le ponen comida, que lo hacemos usualmente cada 2 días. Entonces ahora ya es normal comer gusanos.

And just to make sure we keep this completely different and maybe inspire ideas, how about a tiny farmhouse tour from YouTuber Levi Kelly? My idea with this farmhouse tour is just that, but it's this really unique small area, and hopefully it could inspire people to, one, live small, or if not, two, maybe there's some ideas in this house. And this is a video where, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be your cookie-cutter growing food type story. I want these films to be sort of all over the place. We have the behind the scenes of a Justin Rhodes vlog, a gardening in a war zone, but it's its flowers, and then this tour of this house. Just enjoy a little glimpse of this from Levi Kelly.

We're going to be taking a tour of this tiny house right here behind me. It has everything you need inside. King bed, washer-dryer, full bathroom, and it's all under 500 square feet of living space. It's charming.

Let's go check it out.

We are in Kingston, Tennessee, about 30 minutes outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, at the Tennessee Farmhouse. This is a brand new tiny house located on 37 acres of land, and it is just beautiful here. You'll drive down the driveway, it's a really long path that leads to your tiny house, which is set far back, open fields in the front with the tree line all around you. It's a beautiful setting. The tiny house is beautiful as well!

Last but not least, I always enjoy a film from David the Good. It's always this quirky humor that educates. And this one on stealing compost does not fail to meet that criteria! So what we're going to do today is go rob Mother Nature! I almost forgot. Don't want to leave fingerprints. Mother Nature won't even know what hit her. You can watch all those films in their entirety this weekend, March 22nd through 21st at the Abundance Plus Film Festival. Sign up, it's free, link down in the description. There are 70+ hosts that maybe you can go and find a local party. And if you cannot find a local party, maybe there's not one near you, you can watch online. I'll be available in an online chat at every single one of these. We're going to be all watching all this all together, all at the same time, '90s style. You know, we used to watch all the shows at the same time. Together. You know that we're gonna enjoy this. I'll definitely also leave links to all these wonderful people and film contributors. I consider them some of the best films of 2023, and I'll leave links to their Instagrams or YouTube channels down below. I cannot wait to see you there. First annual Abundance Plus Film Festival. Let's do this!