In this YouTube video, homesteader Justin Rhodes walks viewers through his ongoing 100‑day food‑growing project, highlighting what’s working well, what’s gone wrong, and what looks ugly on his farm. He opens by introducing his sustainable, low‑input approach to growing vegetables and raising livestock. He demonstrates a mineral feeder, explains a quick‑win feed‑soaking method that cuts feed consumption by about 25%, and shows successes such as trained chickens, an effective scarecrow, and easy‑to‑move fencing. He then discusses setbacks, including loss of grass, challenges with raising sheep, and the poor condition of animal housing—rusted wire, rotten wood, and broken nesting boxes. He shows the before‑and‑after of repairing these structures. Finally, he announces a three‑part video series (good, bad, ugly) that will premiere on YouTube on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8 PM Eastern, explaining how the Premiere feature lets the audience watch together and interact via live chat. He encourages viewers to subscribe and enable notifications to join the premieres.
Chapters
For those of you who don't know, I'm Justin Rhodes. I've taught thousands of people how to grow their own food in a more natural, sustainable, less input, more output kind of way. Squash, cucumbers, watermelon. The way I have taught is through reality. Should have done this like several days ago. Aragonite. Where's your kelp? Okay, thanks. Bring it over here with our minerals. Mineral feeder. You know what? Didn't account for water getting in that. Hmm, that probably needs to be moved. We wanted it there so we didn't have to take up a perch and it would be easy to pour stuff into, but this is disgusting. I'm just thinking there's got to be a better way to be able to clean out one of these things. Here we go, Jenna. Free choice of ragonite, free choice kelp. You follow along on my life as I build up a homestead this year. And you see the good. I'd say this is panning out very nicely. Chickens are trained to the fence. The scarecrow is working. It was super easy to move them. We all learn from that. I show you what I've done that's great, and you can implement it yourself. Probably the quickest win you can gain from this video is take dry feed, put it in a bucket, cover it with water about 4 inches, Let it soak at least 12 hours. 25% better. They're going to gain the same, same amount of weight on 25% of the less feed if you just soak it. The bad— you got any fight left, buddy? Bad things happen, y'all. Grass. It's weird to wake up with them both gone, especially since we spent so much time with them. But sometimes that can be our greatest teacher. So we're going to talk about what we learned from raising sheep, what went wrong, and what we did right. And finally, ugly. Ugly. There's plenty of ugly. This is the ugly. Held together with various wood scrap, PVC plastic falling off, manure all along, poultry wire rusted and busted, wood rotten. And this was just propped up and just looked ugly as can be. Rusted, broken tin, unnecessary and rotting nesting boxes, a hole in the back. Just covered up with a half-inch wire mesh. But we can always try and do better and improve. And this is what it looks like now. Much better. This next week, starting Monday— Monday, Wednesday, and Friday— I'm going to release a 3-part series, 1 video each day, on the good, bad, and ugly of our recent project, the 100 Days of Growing Food, just to showcase and see what we are capable of growing in just 100 days. The results are unbelievable. Also, YouTube has rolled out this new feature called Premiere. That means I can edit and make this movie and then put it up on YouTube, and then we can all watch it at the same time live. Like, the video is not live. I already edited it, but we can watch it together like a movie premiere, like if we were gonna go watch a movie all together live. There's a live chat there and everything. We're gonna do that every time. To make sure you get included in on that, just remember we're gonna air Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8 PM Eastern. So So just tune into our channel or become a subscriber and then make sure you hit notifications to be notified when we upload new videos. And when we premiere, you'll be notified, I think, 30 minutes before that goes out and then like 3 minutes before it goes out. So that would be a lot of fun. We've done a few of those in the past and they've been so cool being able to interact with you guys as the movie plays. Oh my! Perfect shade! So my plan is— All right, buddy, it's up to you. We've got a rosemark. I can't just let these sit here and drown. I'm gonna dig a diversion off of them. Here, you carry them gently. I guess I just want to be more connected to my food. I want to— I want to, like, if I'm gonna eat meat, I want to be a part of it. Pumpkinage coming in, supporting 2x4. Oh good, it's on. Cooking it up. You got your ground rod in? Yep, there you go. Perfect. Yeah, I don't know, 6 inches maybe. What's going on? Thank you. Just camera dry, uh, and look who's not stressed out one bit that the pigs are over here. Ready? Yeah. Water, minerals, happy cows. No kid can jump on and catch a ride now.
