Turning My Chickens Into 10 Gallons of Broth

First we killed our fat old lady hens, then I cooked them a long time, and today we're getting ready to get that meat off of them, see how much we get, and we're going to process all of that into nutrient-dense broth. Let's see how much we get. That and a family photo shoot, and I make headway with my dislocated shoulder. Had to let the fat old lady hens simmer overnight. They did finally soften. Boys, you there? Heck yes! Oh, let's go, let's go! It's 46 degrees. It's gonna have to be okay. I cannot find my coat. It's gonna have to be okay. Sorry, not sorry for the lights. We are waking our bodies— our bodies are waking with the sun, so we don't want that blue light in our eyes until we get that from the sun. Extra early today. We got a family photo shoot on farm for our Christmas cards this year. It's almost been 24 days since my fast, my water fast. Hey, you want to put the cloths in these? Come on, get up, get up, let's go. Let's start getting the alfalfa while it warms up. Hey, don't turn on those bright lights, dude. Your body's saying, oh my God, it's noon. Yes, that's what I want to feel like, Papa. The sun comes up Slowly. Come on, you don't even need that. Yes, I do. No, you don't. I train in here in this light every morning. I can't be doing my Simple and Sinister program, although that is the goal, the kettlebells. I gotta heal this shoulder. Let's see what we got. I was a lot, a lot worse off. 8 o'clock photo shoot. 7:30 change. That means we got to get going, and I haven't been able to train Harriet in a couple of days. Hey, put that on red light. Why is that Energizer already blinking red? Everybody's here. Who's that? I think this electrician's— they start at 7. I've done apple cider vinegar. Over here, over here. We won't do it with Harriet this morning. What we need to do is start milking her down there with the other two, or training her down there with the other two cows. Nobody's paying me any mind. Yeah, they should do it before they get the new grass because now they're distracted with the new grass. Yeah, here she comes. So what I'll do is we'll start training her. Come down and milk near the, uh, ladies. I'm excited about having 3 family milk cows. I thought 2 was a lot. What about that 3? I'll need to come milk with the boys. Minty will be 20 months next month, so we're gonna go get her a bull. We thought, should we do AI? Well, that's artificial insemination. Vanilla has probably come into heat and we haven't even noticed it. So you kind of got to be organized and aware. You think Vanilla's come back in heat? She should have. Well, that's the thing about the bull— sort of bulletproof. What? You can move the water. Okay. Fourth stage of child training: they tell me what to do. 20 minutes till photo shoot, so I gotta go help Mom with the little kids. You guys come get yourself changed. We've yet to, uh, we still gotta filter this milk. Look at these leaves. What a good time for a photo shoot. We're about primo lighting right now. All right, y'all do yogurt, okay? Here's your starter. Just do a ladle scoop, a heaping ladle scoop. Mix the yogurt in first though, okay? I'm gonna find his shoes. Apparently he's lost his dress shoes that he's not supposed to be wearing on the farm. Get your dress shoes, Gideon. I got them right here. Go get changed. I found his dress shoes. How are we doing in here? Let's get you changed. How do I look? And hey, Jonah, why aren't you changed? We never Do screens in the morning. Josiah, are you changed? Go change. Okay, y'all change. I didn't know I'd be chasing y'all. Come on. Where's your shirt? I'm gonna go get it. Okay, don't give Mom any problems. Told them to put this in there. We do have sour cream going. But I'll just put a timer on. Do a 24-hour Timer. These timers are clutch. I set out to do something, I think I'm gonna remember it, I don't. Especially when the beautiful one requests something. Either put it on the calendar right then. I either— one of three things, and I'm working on it. I'm not saying I'm perfect at it. I, one, do it right away. Do it right away, you won't remember. Two, Set a timer. Or 3, put it in the calendar. I gotta remember to check the calendar every morning. Like zombies, it's so weird. Everybody come on. Everybody looks so nice. Lily, you look so nice. Josiah, you look so nice. Henry, you look so nice. Gideon, you look so nice. Does Papa look nice? Yeah. I gotta start doing the Garden of Peace on her. Start treating you like a woman. Not a kid anymore. So that you know what to expect of a man. Look at this little Eskimo. I guess with Austin, it's everyday bring your kid to work day. Here we are, read 'em the riot act. I'll start, start making y'all go to church on Sunday. Have to get dressed up every week, you hillbillies. Look at this bunch. Do it, do it. Smile. Don't smile. She's a good assistant for Austin. Those are probably the money shots. We think that probably we got another spot down the road and then one on top of the property. It does feel good to have trained— well, stretched this morning, eaten, done chores all by 8 o'clock. It's not as colorful, but hey, maybe it's more Christmasy because it's green. I know, he sleeps through everything. Poor kid. Waylon, you're the warmest of us all, buddy. I feel like we've had half a day already and it's only 9 o'clock. 8:40. Yeah, um, it's okay. One more, one more place. Got a bonus on that one. We got Winnie in there. What do you think? One day we'll be all there. Resting in peace today. This moment, at least. It's not that moment. With that view. Like, all right, Austin, show them your best work. And by the way, Austin's for hire if you're near Asheville, North Carolina, for photos, video, YouTube coaching. Austin, put your stuff in the description. Hey, y'all kids did really good. You guys did really good. How was it? It wasn't bad. I felt like this was the best year yet. Yeah, Henry behaved. Yeah, everyone's getting older. Really knocked It out. It's just a rock. Oh, it's freaking out. Everyone lean forward. Photo shoots behind us. We pulled our chicken this morning. That's 5 birds. Not a whole lot of meat on those. Adam's gonna help me a little bit on this. We're putting beef broth in a bag, 4 cubes, 4 chicken broths, and then let me know, we'll start Well, let's start putting it in there right now. And I want to get this 10 by 10, so I'm recruiting Adam. Thank God I have Adam here today. He's going to keep going through that broth, that chicken. We need to get the chickens— for the chicken freezing so we can free up the Super Cubes for this tomorrow. I like to cool the broth for two reasons. One, we don't want to put warm broth in the super cubes. I don't want to have any leaching going on. And two, you can see the fat layer on top. Oh gosh, it's probably gonna be about that big. We don't necessarily want fat if we're gonna just drink broth, so I'm gonna skim the fat off of it and save it for when I'm putting in soups. We'll skim it off, freeze it, save it for soups. Put a chunk of this— that's it, that's what it'll come to. I put a chunk of that in my soup this this morning. Phone call with the Teddy— is it Teddy Roosevelt Library? Yeah, they're sponsoring an event in North Dakota that we have been invited to. We're gonna get them some attention when we go out to this event. That'd be exciting. Is this the furthest west we've gone on an event besides the Great American Farm Tour? Well, I mean, for a conference. Yeah, that'll be fun. A few moments later. That's gonna be a nice event. Tickets for sale November, December. Yeah, so stay tuned. Yeah, and we're gonna go see the Teddy Roosevelt Library. Oh, they call it the Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt. Me and Teddy, we're tight. We're tight. I get to call him Teddy. Okay, well, we got all 3 of these. There's a lot of— and there's a lot more fat on these too. Like, look at— once we cool this down, we didn't get all the chicken out of this one. Cut up all this chicken, making chicken sausage tomorrow. Broth cooling. We got the chicken in the freezer. I thought I was gonna do this and chicken sausage all in one day. This is taking two days. I like those gloves. You got working gloves on? Clean out your garden bed, huh? Y'all are cleaning up and doing, huh? I bet if you— if you two and Adam and I went over there, we could get everything cleared out around the bass shed. You just got a few more minutes here. We'll help you here, and then we'll all go over there. Josiah, this looks so much better. Thank you. You, y'all are like, y'all are getting ready for this party. I am the singing at the party. You pull up in right here and just see junk. Shall we hide it? Let's hide it. Let's hide it. I think we're done except hauling that stuff off. He needed more sweet potatoes, and so we made that happen. This is fun eating with everybody. I put a little Gaps twist on it— sour cream, sauerkraut, raw egg yolks. Look, I'm going to show you all the secret to success in the spring: work in the fall. They pulled all that up and weeded that. It looks great. As much as I want to go do office hours, I've noticed the cabin. I guess that's adult and do the right thing. This looks like a fine place to start. Randolph's installing some hog wire. If you have 2 feet or more, you got to have a railing. We're getting close, aren't we? Yeah, I can see the light. What are you going to do after this? I gotta go put that bathtub in for Stan and Marsha. How long you been putting that off? Probably 5 years. That's about how long you've been working for us, isn't it? Yeah, see, it's kind of— it's just a mess. We got it starting. We got a plan. So what I've just been doing, you can come in here and see. Yeah, swept. It is a rough sweep. Okay, this is good. This is what I'm talking about. You don't want to adult in the moment, but once you get it over with, you feel pretty good about it. We did the right thing. Ain't nobody gonna do that for us. See you later. Gideon strikes again. Oh, he gave you a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Oh, y'all been on a— y'all been having a party. Bye-bye. All right, they're dropping me off at PT. I love you. Okay, we're gonna see how well my shoulder's doing after the PT session, okay? Did you guys see that? Did you see it? That, but with my other arm. That's the Turkish, that would be the Turkish getup. Rebecca? I still get tricked by this pantry. Let's go knock out evening chores so we can relax. Last night was wonderful. I feel refreshed today because of it. That's one thing I like about entrepreneurship. And homesteading is you can just shift things around. I can say, well, let's see if doing this at 4 is better than at 6. I definitely will be in the winter. Is it going to be colder? I think, uh, Pound Cake must be coming back into heat. Oh, ready to try our new feed mix? Look at Jonah putting stuff away. For the winter. Proud of that kid. The good thing is this loses zero nutrients because it's a whole grain. I think I'm most excited about that. If you get ground grain within 3 months, so little nutrients left. Wait, no, I have a scoop so I know how much I'm doing. We're gonna mix some water, a little bit of milk. I'm afraid their feet, their egg production is going to go down, at least initially. I mean, it could increase. We're going to be counting on farm protein. We need to get these two minerals in, get in as quickly as possible. This is the right arm. Wow, you can almost do kettlebells. Don't focus on— you're doing so much better. Okay, now do the other one. Sun is going down. We're going down. Thank you for joining us. Happy day.