We Survived a Hurricane + 3 Months Recover

Late September, our family's way of life got sideswiped by Hurricane Helene. Everything that we worked so hard for is floating away.

Look at that!

There goes the container.

Look at that, it's gone.

Our whole pond is overflowed. There went the bees.

We need to go just in case of them.

There goes the power pole. It's washed away concrete. We don't even have a driveway anymore.

How do you come back from this?

How many years is this flood going to reset us?

I'm so afraid it's going to break, but the water is already to the eyes level.

Hey, watch your back too. Watch your back. Okay, just leave the chickens that won't come. The pole barn is going to flood. We've got to get the chickens out. This is the 100-year flood. Whoa, be careful, it's deep. I want to be careful here. It could be deep. Wow. We're gonna get them in here. I don't know if there are any chickens are left. Oh yeah, there's a bunch in there. Come back right here. It's too deep right there. It's pretty deep right there, okay? Absolutely insane. Our bridge to Grandma's is covered. Our container has floated away. Let's see how close this is to flooding the pole barn. Chickens, they'll be able to save themselves. We're not far from a house flood.

I've never seen it like this. Like, it's insane. Like, it's what you see on the news, not in your backyard. Hi bud, you just playing in? Our front yard is completely underwater. Then we've got river, river. Right here is a pile of rubble, and that's where water is going I mean, it is just the most water I've ever seen in my life.

The high tunnel is flooded. You think Beefcake's gonna get aggressive? Oh yeah. Is he? We're gonna put Beefcake and Poundcake in the stall. Come on. Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Here, there you go. He doesn't want to go in there because it's dark. Wait, there you go. Oh, should we go find our animals? Jump it! Oh my gosh, it's just wild. This is dangerous. I guess these power lines are off. Did that just happen? The pond We could grab that whole stand and just walk it up here. Not worth it. Oh, look at that! Okay, that's a good thing we did not go. This is very dangerous. Now we have another dam. This water is rising very fast. What are we going to do about Harriet? No idea. The cows are all in their paddock, but that means we need to find the calves so they can get milked out.

Oh my gosh, look at it!

Just be mindful, just be looking around.

So I'm headed down stairs to look to see how close the water actually is to the house. We have to make a decision if we're gonna evacuate up to the cabin because it's on the highest ground.

Oh Lord, look at that tree just went. Oh, there goes the container! There it goes! There goes our memories. Keep floating over here, guys. Please keep floating over here. All right, hopefully it'll stay right there. Should we try to get in the container? I don't know how to tell you how long it'll be to be up here. We're down— it was down to the—

get something to put there. What could we put to block it?

We could put hay bales. Careful, be careful here.

I'll throw them to y'all. I don't know if it's apparent what we're doing, but we're gonna stack hay bales up to hopefully prevent water from coming up here.

I think these will work because they got so heavy. Jonah and I saw one of those huge trees just fall over. We're gonna do them too thick. Oh, we got Austin now. Put them too thick. Coal barn's already flooded. High tunnel's flooded. Going after our sweet potatoes next. It's good that the trees are getting washed out from there. They're going into here. A goose is having a good time. Hopefully that little funnel will hold.

I'm laughing at thinking of all the things we did to prepare.

Oh yeah, baby, that ain't touching. I don't think we could have ever prepared for this. Ever. This floats up during a rain event. It doesn't drain good. Right here.

I don't think we could have done anything. So Justin informed me that all of our turkeys are gone. Like, they can't find them.

We just got a flash flood warning on our phone. It's supposed to be in at 8:15. It's in now, so hopefully this backs it up. The last we heard, it was going to be in the afternoon.

Is down here. We brought her food, water. The cats are somewhere down here. Baby Waylon and Ashley, Austin's family, are here. I bet our root cellar is probably flooded.

This is good. It's not getting up to the house. It's coming down through here. Makes me feel a little better. Why is this little lamb sitting in the deep? Because it can get a little shelter. Oh.

You okay?

I'm scared running in here.

You're scared in here? Why?

Because I can't see what's happening. Oh. I hope that dam can hold that water. Hey, we need to keep everybody together just in case we have to jet. Oh, we're about to lose the high tunnel. This is sad. We're gonna lose the high tunnel. Maybe the 3 pigs, it's so dangerous to get out there.

Well, okay, now this is gone. Justin is wading through the water. The Energizer is on. He's made it across to a cage.

Oh my, our whole pond is overflowed.

This back here is our biggest concern, honestly. Sure, like the greenhouse being gone, the container, like lots of stuff is hard and sad. But like, we want to make sure we don't lose a life. That's our main concern. It seems as though our animals are doing okay. Justin, do you see the goose? The goose is loving it right here.

That just looks like a freaking raging river. Wildly raging river. State 45, and it's 4 feet away from the pig port. So we can calculate how high it's rising.

To get to the cabin, we would just come down here and walk.

Right now, right now we're doing that. In a little bit, we'll probably have to do that.

Going downstairs to check the hay bales that we put down. Honestly, this is like the most insane thing ever.

Oh gosh!

It's not. Oh, but there's my greenhouse. The greenhouse! Oops, the greenhouse is kind of mushed away, so it's no longer really comfortable in here.

I think we just caught a little lull there. Less wind, a little bit of rain. We need it to stop right now. Who is it?

Um, Lauren. Lauren K. Hey, prayer, y'all staying dry in Jeepy luxury farmhouse. Clear Creek is past our fruit tree line, which we planted on the 1,000-year flood line.

There went the bees.

Can we please go to the cabin now, please?

What if it does bring And we all die. Well, I think it'll be like the pond and just overflow. So we'll have time.

No, but we need to go just in case, Papa. Please.

Yeah, this is the thousand-year flood. It was right up to there, so it's actually receding, or just dug out the earth more. Yeah, it might be carving away. There goes that tree. There it goes. There goes the power pole. I'll be busy grading for the neighbors. It is. She's saying we're going to lose the pole barn. How many years is this flood going to reset us? Oh, shit, we are going to lose it. My gosh, that's what's happening. The good news is it's not going to flood our house. The bad news is it's digging stuff out. Like, this is going to move property lines, y'all. It's washing away concrete. And how are we going to get Grandma and Grandpa out of there? How's Grandma's going to get her nurses? Shoot, tree just fell. Says it's going to rain till 1. Chickens are going to make it now. Yeah, that's why the water— the water didn't get less, it just receded because it got deeper. It's washed away concrete. Okay, what happened is it went deep. It dug deep.

I know, but that's what I'm saying. But how do we clean this up? How do you clean this up? How do you come back from this?

I don't know.

I am so distraught. I feel so distraught right now.

Be careful, babe. It has taken concrete. That's what I'm saying. Don't, don't get too close to the edge. We don't have any control of any of it, but now our house is not gonna flood. I was seriously worried about our house.

I know, I was too, but like, this costs so much money.

I think we have farm insurance on this.

We do, but I don't know if it covers flooding.

The pole barn is a lot cheaper than this home. I think the rain is starting to drizzle. It's supposed to stop in 3 hours.

Little hay bales.

Our little hay bales weren't needed.

Well, the container's about to take another swim.

Should we put a chain on it and pull it? I don't think we can get on that driveway though. We don't even have a driveway anymore. If we'd have to walk to it and put a chain on it and then drag it up.

Well, could we put a chain on it and chain it to the tree?

These poor chickens, saved by compost pile. Our soccer field is a creek. You have to be kidding me. We got the container tied up. Maybe we'll save it. The wind has died down. It actually looks like it's receding. Oh, it's taking the power pole. The lines are about to go down. Goodbye power pole.

The chicken! Came out, so I felt like— Jess and I were just saying we felt like it had calmed this storm. Um, obviously it's still raging.

11 o'clock, a little over an hour since I checked in. I was gonna say the wind has died down, but it has kicked back up. Fortunately, just the other day we had the electrician hook up the generator. It's not hooked up completely to where it powers everything we wanted it to power, but it's powering enough. We've got the fridges on. Dishwashers don't work, but we're using them as drying racks. Two freezers downstairs are on. Youngest to oldest, voice your comments, questions, derogatory remarks. Ellie, I know there's something on your mind. Uh, what about the ring? Oh, okay. All the things are— so the horse ring. Yeah, we're gonna have a lot. Wow, that one's eyes bulging out. Cows and sheep and horse all sought higher ground. Gravity-fed water though has been blown off somewhere. Yeah, it's not here. We could run it on the well, but we need less pressure. On the generator. The news was saying before the storm it was gonna be— we could be out of power for weeks. Hey Blaze, bless you. You're not too worried, are you? We are above the animals. Do we have water here? Shoot. I'm thinking as high as this water got, our water catchment has probably been destroyed up there. I'm gonna herd the cows back down. Well, he's flighty. Think about how many generations back that cow has seen a storm like this. They do not want to come off the mountain. I've never seen cows so hesitant. It's their natural instinct to go high, way up here. Wow, very far from place. I'm thinking they got blown away. Okay, well water on. Hopefully it's intact all the way out to the cows. Crazy how this morning it's all here, right? Seriously. Hey, it's a Viber. Current one. You couldn't have prepared for that.

No.

We're gonna go get the electricity on. The fence working, this will be a Festivus miracle. Nope. Is our well water filling this tank? Hot dog. It is getting the sheep and the calves cut out of the main herd. Uh, watermelon. Yeah, it tastes good. Yeah, but this one has chicken poop on it.

I was coming to send a text to have to do it on the porch. And look at that, that's all a lot less, which is amazing. Um, this is not— I mean, that's obviously still pretty bad, but it's a lot less than it was. It's not flowing as heavily. Thank goodness. This has chilled considerably. We didn't have to let the Three Little Pigs go. Water still coming down pretty steadily. This I haven't seen the sun in days, so I'm very, very, very excited.

This is insane. Huge trees down right there, just 100 feet off our property line. We're gonna clear our main road so we can get out, others can get in. Who knows how bad it is? We can't see past that first tree. It could be wild. Wildly bad. We have full tanks, gas, 300 gallons of diesel. We're in good shape that way.

They're gonna go down our road and just see what they can do to help people because, um, I mean, it's still early, but if it can help somebody get out that needs to get out, or somebody to get in that needs to get in. I don't know, it's sad. It is sad, isn't it?

Let's check our surroundings. We got some leaning trees. I have no idea if they were leaning that bad before. We need to look out for each other. 3 sets of trees we just cleared out of the way. One more. It's absolutely destroyed our neighbors. His dam broke on his little lake. I doubt his bridge is there anymore either. Y'all all right? Clear now. If you need anything, we got a generator, so we got power. This is the road I was worried about. It wanted covered. This water got so high it got up over this road. It's like 10, 10, 12 feet. Look at this road warp. Water's come up so high it's almost took away the road.

This is always our driveway. This is quite the drop now. Obviously we're gonna have to fix it. It's just been, you know, demolished. And then you can see down there the big river.

We're thinking this is our best way to go check on Grandma, but let's see how deep it is because look, there's just as much water right there as right here, so that could be really deep. Where's our metal pole? Here in the middle. You're gonna go right here?

Yeah, in the middle.

Okay, you don't think it's gonna get deep over there? It might, and fast. Whoa, look, already just— I made it. All right, we drove out down the road, we saw it's, it's not gonna be possible to get all the way around and back up. And threw the neighbors down to Grandma's. We thought about paddling across the lake and getting there, but then Josiah said, I think I can walk the creek. And sure enough, he's over there, and Jonah's too. Oh dude, look at that fell over there. Let's go this way, Jonah. When do you think they'll have power back? 2 weeks. 2 weeks? Yeah, you can't get out of here, Grandpa. Chimney Rock and Lake Lure suffered some of the most severe damage from Helene. Rutherford County continues to take missing persons reports after evacuating more than 100 residents. This is an unprecedented storm and it's causing us to have an unprecedented response. This is the city of Asheville in the western mountains of North Carolina, 2,000 feet above sea level. In Hurricane Helene's wake, devastation and destruction stretching as far as the eye can see. We were not prepared for this.

The powerful Category 4 storm causing damage in at least 10 states.

Hardest hit, North Carolina, where every single county has been impacted. No one could have been prepared for that kind of wind, 20 inches of rain in just 2 days. So after the storm, you know, we rushed and cleared the public roads, and then it was like, what's the next most important thing? And it was getting ourselves out of our driveway and getting to Grandma and Grandpa. Hurricane Helene absolutely destroyed our lower farm. Our driveway was absolutely obliterated. We've got to get our vehicles out if we're going to go anywhere. We're going to get some fill dirt and fill in this— these massive holes. Then we'll you know, bring in some gravel that washed away and grade this road smooth, and hopefully we'll be getting out of here. We've got to get a path up to where we have some fill dirt from, from an old mountain board course. While Jonah works on filling in that side of the road, we're going to try to find this grate. There's a grate that takes water from this side of the road over, down through there. It's finding it. First with hand tools so we don't accidentally crush it. So the edge of the road is right here. We gave up. It's so deep. We're gonna get the mini excavator and dig at it. I think that'd be safe if you can put the machine over there and its little arms can just kind of barely scratch. Found it! It looks undestroyed. He's so good at that.

That was like a foot buried.

Yeah, this is taking so much dirt. Hit that hand and then hit the other hand.

Go flush every toilet.

Be very careful not to spill because we don't really have a way to pick it up. Flush the toilet. I'm flushing it. Check the freezer temp. 4. We really want that— I mean, that's 4 degrees. That'll keep them frozen. They like to be at zero, so let's see if that happens within 2 hours. We would lose untold amounts of homegrown meat if we lost these freezers. Easily $1,500 worth of meat in each freezer. 3, 6, $6,000 worth of meat. We are going to do a cooler with ice pack to cool down our milk before putting it in the fridge. What do you think, one more? What? I think it's good. I just washed the milk pails. That's on the list to do when we're power home. I'm not kidding you, these drop down to zero that that fast. That means if we have to, we could start getting power— I mean, maybe just an hour at meal times. Let's see how much fuel we burn. We're eating a lot of ground beef because we can't use our ovens, and we have a lot of ground beef, so that's good. 9:30, taking so much dirt. Our goal is to get out By brunch. So he's got 30 more minutes. I think we're gonna do it. I doubt it. I know, right? I think we got to where we can get out of here with our cars. Gravel— where are we going to get gravel? Right there in the soccer field. I want to first start getting it from there. Finish filling in the potholes. 10 minutes. And he's getting rocks from the creek. He was successfully able to get down there. This is going to take a pretty minute. We got the telephone wire rigged up, zip tied it to the pole right there, and then zip tied it to the ladder. Wow! Just in time, dude. Let's eat.

I'm hungry.

Are you low on diesel? That's okay. I think we have a lot of diesel, man. My assistant Heather, we just got word leaving town— like, she lives near the airport and there's no power. 1.2 million people are out of power. Everybody's going to be leaving. I know. Nobody can survive. They're gonna have to. They're not this equipped, honestly. Yeah, 25 gallons of gas. Okay. Yeah, well, let me tell you about this. Driveway. We got to do it because we got to be able to get Grandma and Grandpa out of there if we have to. So that comes at all costs. That's like our emergency. We got a little bit of connection to the world right here. Ashley, y'all are gonna head to Charlotte?

Yeah, we're gonna try.

And we have the weather radio. Kids are worried about our food supply. We've got plenty of meat and plenty of salt, and that's really all we need in a pinch. But right now we're gonna live it up with some water from some fruit, and we're gonna have plenty of eggs, plenty of potatoes. Plenty of green beans. Being a homesteader is coming in clutch right now, isn't it? I know, we are really not in a bad situation.

Oh yeah, we're gonna—

yep, we're gonna— we're gonna get Grandma and Grandpa out, and then we're gonna start clearing power lines.

And we're gonna— like, neighbors are bringing stuff to put in our freezers.

We'll get them. Bring it on, bring it on. The plan is you're gonna lead them out of here because there's gonna be all kinds of crazy closed roads. We have heard heard from neighbors there is a way out of here, but buddy, it's roundabout. We don't have a shortage of milk. Well, there it goes. So say we got it all scraped and we can't even get the truck out of the garage. How much fuel we got? That's about the middle, just a little bit. Yes, Austin, we have a driveway! Looks good. Oh boy, he's stuck. It's a little soft. We're not stranded anymore. Freedom! There goes Mom taking Austin and Ashley to Charlotte. They can go and edit and upload the videos. That's how you were able to see last week's videos. Hope they make it back all right.

Oh my God, I was going to say, do you think we could drive over this? I mean, I feel like like it's going to— yeah, it's not like it's going to fall in.

People have been driving over it. This is insane. That wasn't too bad.

That is a local nursery plant farm destroyed. There's so many power lines down, it's insane. Oh, I'm taking a bet that this is the right way to go. I don't know. I feel like there's no telling which way is the right way.

Everything's so clear.

No, like the road— the woods aren't dense like they used to be.

Whoa, grocery store is open.

It looks like there's no power, but the line is going out the door to the end of the parking lot and wrapping around. So I was thinking if something was open, I might run in and see what they had, but because Gideon's birthday is in a couple of days, we're to the to the interstate. We're just gonna wave them goodbye. I told them I'll go straight. Bye! Be safe!

Rebecca and Josiah got them out of this area to 26. They're going east. It just so happens that's the only way in and out of Asheville. Then 26 east, we send them on their way. Now that we've got the top of our driveway clear, we've got to get Grandma and Big Daddy to where folks can come, the nurse can come. Gotta come third Thursday to help Grandma with her ALS. I'm getting word that this, this storm is severe and brought widespread, and that's just from neighbors. We have no way, real way, of getting information. We get texts every once in a while. Jonah's gathering rocks from the bottom. That's where our soccer field was. Never in a million years. Hey, what y'all doing? All right, you got your Little tri rack. You are little Birdell. My late grandmother Birdell would have washed her and everybody else's clothes in this creek. I am unbelievably, incredibly, inexpressibly thankful for those machines right now. We got to put the oxygen mask on ourself and then we're going to get out in the community and help. I think our emergencies are getting this road open, getting this stuff out of the container, shoring up the pole barn, and then I think we can go out into the community. Oh boy, that culvert is full of rocks. No need digging that out with a shovel. We're gonna need to dig that out with mini-ax. He's trying to help. I have an idea. Tell me what you think. Take rocks like this and this, build a dam on that side with rocks, and it'll make this shallower. What needs to happen is the water needs to flow across it evenly. Yeah, and that would be better, and that's what I'm gonna do. Hey, over there! We're coming for you. Let's get across. Big Daddy seems to have some ideas. Okay, you got an idea? No, I was trying to figure out where your property was. It's kind of deep in your— you mean the bridge was? Yeah. Okay, so Jonah's gonna come from this side. He's gonna take these rocks and put them in the deep area. Step 1 to getting across— get across to Grandpa, Grandma. Get these branches out of the way. We weren't able to push that far enough without Jonah falling off the edge here, so we think the Mini X is the tool for the job, right? Yeah, and we're gonna need it over here anyway to get the wood out of their driveway. If he goes across the four-wheeler, we're gonna be able to get across with the truck. Yeah, buddy! Making progress. Jonah and I are getting exhausted. How do we wrap this up? Let's just get these trees out of their driveway. Laying on the power lines. Of course they're not on, so I'm not worried about it at all, but you know, how it's gonna fall and that kind of stuff I'm kind of worried about. Stop! Really don't know what to do. Hold on. I can't reach over there to cut those ends off. Could cut it here, then it might all fall on the line. That's gonna be too much for it. Chain fell off, but I think, I think I did it. I think he can get through with the Mini X now. It's quite the tree. So excited. You know what one of the coolest things about this is? We've met like half a dozen of our neighbors. We got some other special neighbors come visit us from over the mountain. All right, and Bree, we're gonna try this creek for Big Daddy. He's wanting to get out. He's got a two-wheeler. I don't know if I'd ford it with a two-wheeler, but he wants to see the— our truck do it first. No problem, our truck. There comes back. Yeah, good thing he's thinking about it. That's handy having that big old truck, isn't it? Yeah, Grandpa's worried I'm gonna have to pull him. Well, what's the rush? What do you need? He just wants to get across.

Where are you going? Oh, you just want to have the truck across it?

Can Big Daddy get out? Two-wheeler. Hey! We got Big Daddy across! One week later, the road is coming in clutch. Fuel truck arrives just in time to refill their generator before they're empty. Yeah! It's Sunday. And that man looked at the creek, he said, I'm going for it. He's working on a Sunday, he's risking his life. And then the roads are sketchy there, they're scared to go through on a car, you know, they're— they've fallen out and stuff like that. But that's, that's what's going on. The community helping the community. I'm proud of us.

I'm gonna start the StreetTripper.

I'm proud of us.

I'm gonna stop by Randolph's house. We drive past him and I want to just make sure. I've texted him and I have not received word from him. There's several people I've checked on that have not responded. Randolph is one of those people, so I just want to make sure that he's doing okay. Good to visit with Randolph and to see him. They're doing good. They just don't have any cell service, which is most of everybody.

It's good to be home.

This story can continue on Austin's channel. He and Ashley documented their journey all the way to Charlotte. I'll leave the link for that wherever link goes. The next important thing, we got to work saving our pole barn from collapse. We happen to have a lot of gasoline, but we're banding together with Art and Bree, who aren't too far from us. Unite as community, I reckon, and help each other out. We're gonna top your car off. We're topping everything off. Four-wheeler, the minivan, Salma, and then the Suburban, and then the ladies will take the truck, the big gas run, and do a big gas run to Greenville. Greenville normally takes 45 minutes to an hour. It sounds like once we just get out of our area, things are going to be pretty open. I think we got enough gas cans.

Maybe have your phone— check your phone more often.

You're the only notification I need, baby.

You're right here. But I'm gonna leave.

We're letting the boys run for you. Boy, they're gonna have a time. Such a cool thing about this hurricane and being out of power is it's bringing the community together. Which, that neighbor just informed me that there's power now in Fletcher, in Hendersonville, in Asheville. So the girls might not even have to go all the way to Greenville. I needed to run that a little extra long. Somebody left the drawer freezer open and we lost some of our liver. It just became mush.

What are we gonna do today, Paul?

We are going to fix this pole barn. Hurricane swept through, the creek got absolutely ridiculous. It even still looks like a river. It's not supposed to. This is not normal. That creek as is is like 3 times as big as it normally is. This creek was 10 20, 30 times the size it was. Took out telephone— like, that's a power pole, y'all. Our storage container was right there. There it goes. Our pole barn, this is what we're working on today. It totally washed out the soil underneath the concrete. The concrete has collapsed. Our pole has collapsed in the corner. I think it's only being held on by hay. If we're going to save the pole barn and have a place for our— it's very important, it's a place for our cows sheep this winter, and we had just enough hay to get everybody through the winter. So we can't really— we cannot lose any more. I'm not sure if our insurance covers this because I don't know if it included flood insurance. We wouldn't have thought of that because this is just absolutely catastrophic. We haven't had this kind of flood since 17— I forget what decade— and since the 1700s. Brianna said Arthur's been thinking about it all night. I feel like the easy part is supporting that post. I think if we can get the— yeah, the loader up here. Okay. Or excavator and chain the bucket to that and tilt it out and lift it. That's the easy part to me. To me, the challenge is this slab because my concern is that that slab is unstable. I kind of think we should try to drop that. I would hate to have Truss builds something and then like this comes down and knocks it out. If you look at the truss there, the middle of it looks like it needs to come up like this much to get to its previous location. Yeah, you can see the old fade. This end is probably going to have to come up twice that, so this hasn't slid down. What's the tool for the job? The Mini X. Mini X, yeah. The goal today then is just to get this shored up temporary so nothing— so it doesn't fall anymore. Don't hit the pole. You want to get that other piece of concrete? Wow, that's too heavy. You got to put your blade down. That would help. There you go. Trying to break this next one in half. There, he did it! Yeah, buddy! Few more, you might be able to break this one. Hit it. Try breaking this one, it's more, uh, water is so destructive. More destructive than a 9,000-pound machine. You're starting to break it. That's good. There it is. There it is.

Make it—

make us another one. We're gonna need two. Two. You got one right there and one over there. Okay, we might need three. Help, let me help you. I'm good. It's not that bad. Okay. All right, we're gonna need another one too. I for this. It's got to go up. Josiah says this needs to be in the middle, so it needs to go 4 inches. This is where the concrete was? That's what they think. You think the concrete was there? I think it was. Oh wow, this was in concrete. Look up top, looks like. So this post is not doing anything structurally. Oh, okay, shoot. We need to support it. Is this supported now? It's supported but we haven't lifted it. I'm concerned if we lift it now with this one really low that we're going to flex that even more than it's flexed. Okay, where it's connected to the truss. All right, and this is supported, it's not going to fall any further. We obviously got to get all this stuff out of here. You were talking about getting this out first. We potentially could try to move this to make a spot to support the post. I think when we move that, everything's gonna come down. I don't think the barn will come down. Here's why. It's already not supported. If it brings this hay down, that's fine, but if it starts pulling that hay, we're screwed. And what's going to happen when this concrete slides on this pole? It's sitting on this hay, this pile of hay. Can we clear some of this debris and put some rocks under that? Yes, let's do that. And then do what you're saying. Then just— all I'm saying is, why is that going to help, Papa? That's just going to break this, this— if when we— if we lose hay or whatever, this won't fall anymore. He's gonna lift up the barn and see if we can't put that post on a piece of the concrete that's laying right there. That post is not held up by anything right now. This corner's pole is currently sitting in the air right there. The idea is to lift it up, put it on that piece of concrete right there, and then hope for the best. I'm niggling that back piece of concrete out. Just— I had an idea that that maybe you could weigh in on it. Should we go all the way up and secure this back to that post? The truss isn't designed to be supported like that and then cantilever. It's possible you'll bend your truss. Oh, okay. If this ends up dropping, okay, and you have it screwed in there. We're just getting to where we can get that back out so that eventually we can build a we can build a foundation. That corner temporary held up for right now. Hundreds of dollars of hay right there. We can't just leave this. It's too compromised. We need to get it out, then we're going to shore this pole up. We think it's being held up by this. We're going to hope. That this piece of concrete falls down, not out. It fell down! It fell down and we didn't even lose hay. All the hay fell to the drive. We can get everybody to haul some hay up to the drive. Such good hay. Whoa, this piece is connected. Connected to our rock base. Yeah, I don't think you'll break that either. That's just like— yeah, that's gonna pull it right out. Is it too big for the machine? I think the best way to figure out the height that we want is that— is to have— is to have someone climb to that far corner. Okay. And eyeball down and just raise until we get all those trusses in a line. Art is fascinated by the history here. This was our old garden. This was field dirt to level for the pole barn. Arthur's guessing overplowing, grandpa's overplowing, which is very, very probable. And this is probably the original soil. That could have been another flood that ran sediment down, or who knows. Yeah, that's what we're finding under all this soil is just this, these rocks. Look at this layer of grass. Let's see what happens here. We might have to cut this one. Wow, tricky, tricky situation. Wow, it missed. It missed. Barely missed. Can you get that one further out and then pull that way? There, there's our supervisor. We're back like his dad, ex-GC, general contractor. Trying to break up the foundation. That does it. Time out from the pole barn work because Lily and Joy For Joneson to do something. They could work on this container, but we need to get it pulled up and balanced for them first. We need all the clothes off and, and, and because we're going to use that chain Lily, I'm so proud of you. Did they dry? That— I'm so proud of you for doing that. Pulling the trash out of the way. Nice use of the road. Might take both the machines. Yep. Ain't no way. Okay, get the other machine and push it. There you go. Art has the idea to spin it. Get over there and just pull it this way. Yep. Okay, get away. Chain can break. Keep going. Oh, now we're in the creek. Maybe put that particle board down or something. They have a bridge. Two machines. What we're thinking, Jonah's gonna pick up the shed just side That is going to hold up— it's going to hold that up at the track loader, and Jonah can clean out from underneath it, and we can put solid concrete chunks under it. Now to fill in under this. Posts. Jonah's holding this up. We're going to grab this big one to start off the bottom. 2, 3, that's it! Good job! All right, I think it's it. Look at that! All we lack is the middle pole. I feel really good about This is shored up. This is shored up. We've saved thousands of dollars worth of hay, $10,000 in the barn. Thank you, Arthur. Absolutely. You knew exactly what to do. Billy, what'd you make us? Thank you. This is peaches and blueberry and milk. This is good. For some— from preserved peaches locally. You know, it'd be a good last hurrah for you guys in the vlog is if we get poor old Beefcake and Poundcake out of the dark stall and back over to the pole barn where it's airy and bright. Don't be too excited, Josiah. Look at our lights. Kind of like it, actually. Kind of cool. Yeah, this is gonna get gross. Oh, make him chase you out. So he's only gonna run so fast. Now I feel like something is restored. And look who's home! 5:20. They've been gone all day. Hey, how'd y'all fare?

We fared.

We're home.

We did it.

How'd the toddlers fare?

They— it was a hard day, but they did it. They made it through.

Not one of them passed out. Let's get these fuels. Look at this.

Okay, so this is—

how many of those were you able to get?

I got a bunch. So the man pulled up behind me and I had just gotten all of the diesel things off of them.

Yeah.

And I was trying to figure out how I was gonna figure out how it was full.

Yeah, it's hard.

And so the gentleman came up and he was getting out of his car and I said, can I ask you a question? And he goes, are you filling all these? And I said, yeah. And he goes, I'll help you. He did it all.

Wow.

He did ask me where my husband was. He's like, he's not in the store, is he? I was like, no, I'm home.

But even in disaster, life goes on. We had a birthday. So, we balanced, you know, survival recovery with a celebration of life the best we could. Hey, happy birthday, Big Ten. I like your sock choices. Uh-oh. I thought y'all already did that. They're mating on your birthday, buddy. That gives us piglets. In January. As you can see, as you probably know, our farm is— our lower farm is a disaster, much like everything right now in western North Carolina.

A lot of people are running out of bottled water. Gas is also an issue in this region.

Again, Life goes on despite our troubles, despite the world's troubles. Little boy's turned 10. You excited? Mm-hmm.

Whee!

He's gonna be on best behavior today. Of course, we couldn't get Amazon. We couldn't get his gifts. That's partly why Mama snuck off to, you know, went off to Greenville yesterday to get Gideon some birthday gifts. Look at that disaster. It's like that everywhere. Bridge is gone, roads is destroyed. The struggle today would be finding joy in the midst of disaster. Open your letter from Grandma. Oh, cash money!

And he got some cash.

Gideon, you're gonna stay here and play? Yes. All right, Gideon's up there happily playing at Grandma's house. Joy and disaster. I've got an idea for this greenhouse. Thankfully our greenhouse made it, albeit our high tunnel did not. I think it's because, well, the greenhouse house is so close to the house. Wind was coming from that direction. I think that's how my chickshaws made it too, is the pole barn full of hay, and that blocked a lot of wind. The electrician came yesterday and we got our hot water, our washing machine on the generator. Mmm, we're good for a while. Of course we can't run the dryer, so I'm thinking. This is our solar-powered, uh, dryer. So let's clear everything off the table, let's get things off the floor, let's get it cleaned up in here and ready for some clean clothes. We were thinking we were going to do a regular clothesline, and then we had the thought Why not the greenhouse? It'll get warmer in here during the day, and if we don't take our clothes out at night or they're not finished by night, we can just leave them out and the dew won't get on them. Look who's come to help me. Okay, Gideon, what should we do? Do we hammer little U-nails in and hope they hold, like right here? Or should we screw screws up through here?

Or from there, and then we can do another all the way to there.

Couple screws on either end. Clothespins coming soon. 1, 2, 3, and 4 right in the middle. We'll see if that's enough. Now we need some ventilation in there. Time for the morning generator run. For lunch. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh.

Our generator isn't starting. I'm hoping the battery's dead on it. Let's try again. Generator starting, preheat. Shoot. Initializing. We are up the creek without the paddle if that does not start. Oh boy, Gideon's party's ruined. Our meat's gonna be ruined. Is it battery? Oh, they're back. Okay, that's helpful. Nothing. Card got full, but jumping that generator worked, so we might be going to town this afternoon to find that extra battery. Just in case. In the meantime, these boys want to open gifts. We got to give him one so he leaves you alone all day. That's big box underwear. Go ahead, open up your socks. Get it, Henry. Oh, Legos! And you got a steamroller.

Oh, I remember looking at this and I wanted it. Oh good, I'm glad. You know what, I got it. You know what I was looking for?

What?

Do you know who I was looking for? Do you know which character?

Nope.

Who's that character? That's Boba Fett, because you always talk about him.

How's it having your dishwasher back, or laundry back, babe?

Fabulous.

Jonah, let's try our solar dryer. Looky here, since the storm, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, It was crazy. You got to go 20 minutes before there's power, but not that— not so crazy. We were able to get generators. Boy, they were flying out the door at Ace. We got a generator for Big Daddy. It's a gas generator. Yeah, let's take it out, put it together. This is propane. We're afraid it's gonna run out of propane and the trucks are not going to be able to get here to fill it. Just needs to power Grandma's chair to get her up up from sitting. At least 3 more days without power. I kind of— they're saying Friday, but well, yeah, I don't know. It's looking pretty rough out there. What is this? That's cake dance.

The cake dance. I'm gonna bring some back to Grandma.

Okay, yeah, you have to use her oven.

I said, you want dinner too? And she said, no, I just want cake.

Uh-huh. She's gonna go straight to the cake. Right across straight ahead behind those— behind the bushes. There's a bear. Sweet. Oh, there's more. Wow, how pretty. Next up in the Justin Rhodes Show, apparently Jonah found something very special down the creek. That's almost back to normal. We're standing on it. Wow, that's our bridge! Our bridge is still intact. We're gonna rescue it. We are. Let's get it back over. I missed this bridge. Mark came and got his generator started right up. Being brand new, it's what you call paper locks. They're caught up in the line. Hey, your birthday meal of choice: bratwurst, rice, and— hey, where's the fried onions, peppers? You're not a fan? You don't have to eat them on your birthday. Look who else likes it. What's this? Is it your birthday? Yeah, it is.

Thank you, Mama.

Matchbox, Matchbox cars, a gift certificate to Underwearz R Us. This is from Lily. I will give you 2 free riding lessons. Oh, she wants you to be on an equestrian. I will bake you whatever you want. That's a big one.

Oh wow, I didn't know that.

Gideon, we have a candle shortage, so one for one decade. Okay, buddy.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Gideon, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you.

You did it! Hey, Henry, birthday blessings.

Can you say something nice about Gideon?

One nice thing.

Say, I like to play in the dirt with Gideon. I like to play in the dirt with Gideon. Is Gideon your best friend?

Yes.

Do you love him? Gideon's a good little brother and he likes to play in the dirt. Play in the dirt and play with trucks and Legos, and he's a good little brother.

Gideon's fun to play with and he's a good little brother. Gideon's a good little brother. He likes to play in the dirt. It's fun. A lot of fun things. He's a good little brother to have around.

Gideon is actually very smart, and I think some of his rambunctiousness is that he's bored. Because he's so smart.

Yeah.

And what time is it?

Oh, it might be almost his birthday. Birthday?

Not even born yet. So I think we just put all this away and start tomorrow.

He was born in the bathtub at 9 o'clock.

Born in the bathtub. You were our only surprise baby. We found out all the other children what we were gonna have. But with you, we didn't do that.

Oh, we didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl.

You mean that's what I meant? I was shocked that you were a boy, but you're a great addition to our family. Henry loves you a lot.

Gideon, I'm gonna steal Joel Salatin's blessing on you, which was, yeah, you're gonna be it. You're the entrepreneur. You're an entrepreneur. Joel looked at your mom and I and he said, he's your entrepreneur. And he said, what, what do you mean? And Joel said, because he's got his own ideas. Yep, you do have your own ideas. And you use most, most of your ideas you use for the good. It'll be interesting to see where you go in this 10th year.

Happy day.

Given our abundant homesteading lifestyle Well, we found out that we were very prepared except for one thing: communication. So we're going to a neighbor, we're going to change that. It's been 5 days since Hurricane Helene and we've been out without power, which means we've been without internet. Oh, she went right into the poison ivy. Let's go this way. Our neighbor, they are not there, but they do Starlink!

Starlink uses the world's most advanced satellite technology to deliver high-speed, low-latency internet all over the world.

That's our priority! This is the old driveway. That's like a 10-foot drop! Option 1 for getting in here. They do not have power of course. But if we can get our mobile generator on Salma and get get salmon in here. I think we'll be all right. The original road. Hey, there's my chicken waterer! Look for our bee stand. That's gonna be the chicken dance. Hey, there's our lid to our tank. We found our tank yesterday, our 225-gallon tank, a mile down the creek. I've got our way to do it. We're gonna go down their little access road. We're gonna open their fence. Hopefully it's okay. Yep. All right, it looks okay. Heck yes! So this is not a regular Ethernet, so let's see what kind of wire and we might be able to patch it. Okay, we've got the gear out. We've been completely cut off communication from the outside world for 5 days. Only news we get is from just people coming by that have been out. When Rebecca went went to town the radio the other day, she could get some news. Oh, we got the radio! But we really need to get back in touch. There's another option for getting in. House way up there, there's a place to cross, come through and up, and we're home free. There's one of our peppers half a mile down the creek. Still good? No. No. Option number 3: open up this fence, come through this access road. If we come this way, we can take apart two bands.

We should do that way, and if that doesn't work, then we do this.

We're back at the house regrouping, getting the supplies we need. Jonah wants to get busy, so there he goes. We totally found our bridge, and it's totally intact. He's going to work on getting it out of there. I'll be— this is probably not a long-term solution. Again, it'll certainly be a nice short-term. And looky there, that looks like a power company. Happy to see you. Yeah, we're just getting the road kicked back. Yeah. Hey, how's our solar-powered dryer working?

It's working. You can see all that I've dried.

These are ready. These are dry. I'm on a mission. Get us connected to the world. By lupper. By the way, I've ordered Starlink. Our weakest link in this whole thing, it's shown us, it's communication. We have the power, we have the generator, We have the, uh, those important resources: food, water, communication. I don't know about this. It's a little more difficult to take apart the fence without damaging it. Let's try one— let's try a way Mom's thought, although I'm worried it's a little wet. I was like, no, we can't go that way because somebody else's property and it's wet, so we might damage it. It's one thing to go through somebody's property and not damage it. If we go Jonah's way, we need a chainsaw. This is Jonah's proposed way. Oh my gosh, slow down. Okay, I'm down for getting this tree up because because it's on the power line. It gets us through the internet and it gets— helps the power company. That's deep, probably. Can we get across over there to the house somewhere? Went back to get chainsaw stuff, check on Jonah. What's wrong? Are you sure? Yeah. Why? What plan here is to cut it getting reasonable enough pieces that he can move it with the bucket. We didn't get the grapples on because he can grade us a way into this creek a little bit better with his buckets. You want to go right here if you bevel it? Sure. We're thinking he can get us a path through there. We made it across! Woo! 10 bucks says we flooded this thing. It's probably not going to start right up. You'll never— you're never going to— I set everything else up and then come back to it. Ethernet worked into the satellite. You go into the router? Yeah. All right, all we got to do is get power. Let's see your best internet dance. Here you go, Dar. You don't believe it yet, do you? Are you surfing?

Yeah.

You texting? Yeah. Let's see your dance. You're a hand dancer. Our neighbor, he's not here, but we gotta hold him. He said we we could take the Starlink, but will it work? It's half a mile down the— might be a security thing. Uh, none of these outlets out here work. I found one right inside my office that works. Make sure it's not going to register stolen or something. Hey, I think it works!

Send a text to someone.

Papa, send a text. Okay, come. We got internet at our house! Now we did really well living without electricity. We had to work out some, you know, you can't just live like you did. We had to work out some systems and we show those off. It's been a week. This is how we're surviving, you might even say thriving, without electricity. Wait for it. We get up with the roof rooster. That's trick number 1. I know you can't see in here, but I can. Propane stovetops, no power needed. I got these 5-gallon water jugs. When the power's on, physical mechanical pump on. Gotta make sure to wear the apron, keep these clothes tidy because I've worn them for like 3 days in a row. What do you Smell something? Do I smell something?

What am I hardest smelling?

Of course I smell something. We going, boys? We awake? Sure. Come on, let's go. It minimizes the amount of wash we will have to do. Thankfully, we were well stashed on fuel. Also feed. The homestead preparedness lives. I mean, this, this lifestyle looms lends itself to preparedness. A good habit is to always be in fuel, always be in grain, because you never know when anything like this is going to happen. We didn't. Happy day! You making a video?

Yeah.

Sweet. We knew hurricane rains were coming. We thought it was going to be our typical crazy hurricane rainstorm, but nothing like the monsoon that happened. I haven't even found out how much rain we had. Rebecca said somebody was saying 40 inches. Oh, oh shoot! Hey, hey, that would be bad. There, thank you. Out here in the field, we want to minimize our power use. We're actually using a solar energizer. We can't turn it off. The only way to turn it off is just unhook it. And it's not because that solar energizer sucks, it's actually quite the contrary. That solar energizer was for our bees. It actually got washed down the creek a half a mile. Sam and John found it and rescued it. It still works, albeit all the time. You can't turn it off. Happy day! We just used one cleaning cloth. Normally we have one for each cow. Let's do drying cloths, but we're just letting them air dry. That way we don't dirty as many cloths. Hang it up too to be reused as a wash the window shield cloth. Milk tap doesn't need any electricity. Kaden, you come help push. All hands on deck. It's gonna be a tricky move today with the milk sled. It's going uphill and it's dewy. Even though I was pushing, we slid out. I had him turn a little bit down the hill and that was all it needed. Wow, getting something through, man. You knew it, you knew it. What do you think? The generator's turned off. I know, but maybe Jonah's got the gray— what turned off on the Yeah, that's not gonna cut it. We can go off of the well, but we're only running well during power hours. More about that in a second. It'd be better to make sure our gravity-fed water system is working. What's the word? You got water. Why isn't it crazy? The tank isn't full. Why not? The thing got knocked off. Oh, it did? You fixed it? What thing? The thing where the water comes in, where it goes across the half barrel. Thanks for doing that. Were you able to drive up there? No, not all the way. We have a new trail up there, but it's probably littered with trees, huh? Oh yeah. This water line goes all the way up to the mountain where we have a little small creek, and we fill up a 225-gallon tank. But if it's empty, which it is now— something went wrong up there, Jonah fixed it— it's only going to come down as as fast as we're filling that up. That's why we have the tank up there, because when the tank's full, it blasts. Whoa, are you serious? This Cummins generator has been clutch diesel. I get excited every time it starts. I am We emphasize diesel because you can actually get diesel fuel right now easier than anything else. If we were dependent on propane, we'd be dependent on the propane tank to fill it up. It just started. Morning power hours. We're conserving. We're not running that all the time because it does do 2 gallons an hour. Freezer check. Okay, reset. 17. Okay, that's a little higher than I would like. 24, much higher than I would like. That is a year, 2 years worth of meat and veggies in our freezer. It would be absolutely— it would absolutely disaster if we lost that. I think it's froze-ish. Hey babe. Breakfast? Yeah, you're good with— you're good to make breakfast. We kind of freeze-ish these ice packs. The reason I'm doing that, this is another trick, is it's taking some pressure off of the fridge. So we're going into this cooler before we go into the fridge. We've been just going straight into the fridge, but that fridge is probably not as warm as it— well, I know it's not as warm— cold as it should be. Now we put these back. We should probably put them in separate freezers. Washing dishes by hand during power hour. Also skim from the cream separating we just did. That's a lot of food for the pigs, and I don't know how soon we're gonna be able to get grain. Hey, what's your job during power loss? What's your job? Play nice and quiet. Yeah. And what's your job during power outage? Watching the baby. Yeah, buddy. Freezer's down to 4 already. Oh, this one's at 22. I know. And It's not going down as fast, but it's very frozen. Look at that. Whoa, that looks so good, guys. Look at this, Lily, you've cleaned up in here. What's your role during power outage?

Uh, cooking and cleaning.

Heck yes, she's heavy on the domestics during this. The boys can be out running them. And what? And laundry. Yeah, the boys can be out doing the machine work, so stuff that she can't do. We had no power to run our little 100-degree yogurt oven here. It's not really a yogurt oven, it's a dehydrator. Uh, so we're just— we just got it started and we're just letting it sit at room temp. It's sour enough after 2 days. Heck yes! Notice how bright in here it is. There are no lights on. Well, keep the power off. It burns less electricity. That'd be another trick. Use minimal electricity when the generator is on. Uses less fuel. 4 skylights. We don't need any lights in here. Again, no, there are no lights on. There are no lights on upstairs. Getting batteries going. Dang power hour. That GoPro, that drone is done. We just spent the afternoon bailing out Lily's horse trainer. She's making a video for her channel about the hurricane, and your horse trainer has been hauling water to 20 horses. So we went, hauled some water for her, and going to— we got Mark, we hired Mark to get a generator hooked up to her well.

Lisa doesn't have much water, so we're gonna get someone to come and fix her generator. So she can get a pump hitched up so she can have water for horses, but she's gonna have enough to last till then.

One of the big tricks, if we didn't already mention it, is cooking just twice a day. I don't know if I mentioned it on the vlog. Put this over here on low, Lily. Put a little more water in it. And it's leftovers. I mean, we always do that, but really cook breakfast, every brunch, and then a nice supper, and cook double so you have it for leftovers the next day. What is your role Without power.

I'm trying to just get all the stuff done.

It's the afternoon power hour. Yes, and we're doing laundry. How many days in a row have you worn that outfit?

Oh, this is a new outfit today. I've worn my previous one several— 3, 2, 3 days.

I think I'm on 3 for the shirt and I'm like on 14 for the pants.

I took a shower today.

Afternoon power hour for doing dishes. The good news is I haven't actually had to touch these. Jonah and Mom are doing a good job at this. We did end up getting hot water hooked up to our generator. Thankfully our electrician is right up the road. Oh, for drying. We stay on top of it because the dishwashers are not on the generator. After this, once it settles, we'll get one of those on. What is your role during this power outage? Working outside. I got no shaving this. I found some paper plates. In the Suburban. We ran out. We are going to use paper plates while we have power outage. Kids are on a weekly rotation to help Mama in the kitchen. Is everything okay in there? Yeah, just staying informed, catching up on the internet.

I'm looking at the outage paths.

They're saying Friday at like 11 PM. It's not happening, they would already be here. Can you tell me how much rain we got? We haven't even had the wherewithal to figure that out. I feel like today was our first day It's been 6 days. It feels like it's our first day in non-emergency mode. We got 22 inches of rain. Like, we normally get 40 inches of rain a year. This weather radio has been key. We can also get local radio stations, which has been our— which was our source of community, you know, word from the outside world besides neighbor just coming and updating us. Our weakest link during this, communication. We've been strong on power. Very strong. It's keeping our freezers going. We're surviving, if not thriving. This is clutch. We went to the neighbors who are not here, and they're— they were very kind to offer us their Starlink. Thank you, Elon Musk. I hope you make another billion. I'm happy to send money that way. I've ordered one of these. I get one in 2 weeks. So next time the power goes off here, We're trucking. We're still internetting. We're still internetting, which is very important these days. That's how we communicate. Super fast, super affordable, more affordable than what I was having to use, which shoots up to the mountain and then shoots out. So it's just super vulnerable. Even when we get our power out, if the guy up the hill does not have his power, we're still screwed. How are you getting these edits? Well, Austin was here, my editor. He was— he's able to get here from Charlotte. He, uh, took all the footage and is uploading. Oh, he's coming tomorrow, and he's coming tomorrow to grab some more footage apparently. How do you like our fancy solar-powered clothes dryer?

It's wonderful. The nice thing about it is if it rains, I don't have to run out here and take everything down.

And you don't have to sweat getting it out at night. Yeah, because it doesn't get dew. And so for our final trick for thriving unwantedly off-grid: going to bed with the sun. Once we had our own home and farm secure and communication with the world, we realized there was much need around us. So, we went out in the community and helped where we could. In this video, the boys and I are going into some of the worst-hit areas of Hurricane Helene. My friend Whitney has been doing emergency work since the beginning, like ground zero, like body bags, y'all. Happy day. But as you can imagine, after 10 days, Whitney is absolutely exhausted. Once I gave people tasks, they were all over the place, so I've just been telling, even if I see the National Guard, Fire and Rescue, if they're not doing something and they need something, I'm like, hey, if you guys can help us out. Massive lack of leadership. Yeah, she's passing the baton to a crisis relief organization. Why are you handing it over to CRR?

Because I can't carry it anymore and I trust them, and that was the purpose, was me just setting up.

You're checking out, you're tag-teaming. During that meeting, they're talking about like needing four-wheelers. Reverend's farm gave us a four-wheeler to use during this crisis. We're shadowing Daniel from CRR. We can help them get into these places to assess biggest needs so that they can do the greatest good. Some mold, there's some mold. Sinai and Jonah are going to go with Daniel and try to get into Gerton.

Saying 6 months to a year for them to get power. So some are saying and some are not, but they just want—

factor is between 4 tomatoes, this place has power and that place is 6 months to a year out. Oh hi! Hey, sorry.

Um, I was wondering if you guys had maps.

We're kind of drawing out charts for the team. Yeah, we got a big map you can look at on the left here. They was hit pretty bad, but I know they're doing their own thing, from what I understand. I mean, you're more than welcome to check with them. All right, you got to get out of here.

I feel weird leaving, but yeah, it's okay.

It's okay to feel— I'll hug you. You did a good work. I've heard some things that FEMA might take this supplies. How do you feel about that? Um, What's your protocol there? That's a— you know, I don't really have a protocol for that. Cross that bridge when we get there. Okay. All right, uh, have a good conversation with some folks. Okay. Treat people like they're humans, and it usually works out pretty good. We did toss water, gas, water, gas. Do you want to toss anything else in before we roll? Yeah, toilet paper. Uh, let's see, we may over at the church basement. Having also gone through this, I'm thinking what I would have wanted and needed right after the crisis. Fuel, water, food. That's a good one. Toilet paper. We got new shirts. That comes in handy when you don't have a washing machine. Yes, I have a new shirt. I got a new shirt. Yeah, well, scratch that. We do have— we did get our washing machine going on the generator, but we still don't have a— well, we have a solar-powered dryer, but it's a little more work on there. We're happy for a new shirt. Plan is to go and assess a local area about 10 minutes from here. They don't have a bridge, road's gone. The only way in is with ATVs, and then we're gonna go over the mountain near us to where it's been hit real hard over in Gerton. A place once popular with tourists is now dirt and debris. Only a few places are still there. There's a pole. That's what we like to see. I think we're gonna get to the end of the drivable road right here. That's what we're looking for— inaccessible places. Still here. Stay over on the left. This is a house. What do you want to do, Daniel? Try to get over there and park? Yeah, let's get over to that and try to go down this road. Yeah, don't stop unless he stops us. You got it. So we bring it everywhere we're doing anything. So it's got all of our just, uh, higher level care medical stuff, just in case somebody falls off the machine, gets hit by a tree. Any of that. Nice. Um, tourniquets, uh, blood stop, stop the bleed, all that fun stuff is in here. Other than that, we can load these things to the gills with water and gas. These are drop-off points for these people. Awesome. Hello. Nobody is home, but it's clean and dry in there. So what do you do now? You mark this down as a tree service job? Mark it down as no one was home, trees down, uh, safe, and, uh, that's it. We'll, we'll try to, uh, come back at another time. That's the road we came in on. Looks like where— that's where the river was, up through there. It's jumped dumped and came this way, destroyed the road. Did not destroy the bridge, just destroyed the road. This doesn't even look like the original spot. Yeah, I think the original spot was there in that hole. This was a homestead. Look at their gardens. Oh, breaks my heart in a special way to see a homestead destroyed. This was their home. Now it's there. And like a good homesteader, they ain't leaving. They've got a 10x10 living area set up here. Nobody's here. We don't see any water around. We're going to drop a load of water. Huge truck. That's a tow truck. That's a flatbed. It looks like the chickens are gone, so the water must have gotten too terribly high up here. But oh, the poultry net. That's a lunatic homesteader like us. Somebody on this road has goats because somebody dropped feed off— yeah, what was their driveway. Freezer way up in the— look how high that is, guys. That's 20, 25 feet. They have power. How? Well, are Ring cameras battery or powered? Well, I mean, they do have a fan going, so they have power. What happens when you lose land? Like, you don't— you don't get insured for land. Look at beachfront property right now, right where they're a little— they had a little Garden of Eden out here. Going to their beautiful oasis here. Raised beds, strawberries. Lemon balm, more onions or garlic, cherry tomatoes. Yeah, you can't kill them. Beautiful greenhouse gone. Guys like you have just been helping us from day one. Yeah, and we've, we've got everybody got gas they need. Yep, uh, everybody's got water.

We got tons of water, so give it to people who actually need it.

Um, you running a generator? I did. Oh, you got power now? Oh yeah, came in yesterday. Oh my gosh, perfect. Oh man, this used to be a house. We're standing where a house was. The gentleman told me this was a beautiful, well-built rock house, had a little pavilion for the community. But just about the ATVs, we have to run back and forth. Yeah, take it for your ATV. Yeah, yeah. Crisis relief, relief and recovery. Thank you, guys. They're looking for jobs. They're going to have a lot of volunteers coming through. Do y'all know of anybody needing tree work or— I know someone. There's someone— I'm a pastor of a church, and we have someone in Hendersonville that had a big mudslide that it's really hard to have access with a tractor. Awesome. Big team in there that wanted to come and just do shovel this dirty, dirty— Daniel, you hearing this? Yeah, I need to get your contact information. I'm Daniel, by the way. I don't know what he does. He saved your life. He saved their lives. This road for you. He, he, he, he didn't grade this road. He built this road. Wow. This road was gone. We spent a day building a walkboard, and a church saw it on the news, and they said, that's something we can do. And they drove down from Ohio and in 4 hours had that bridge built. Wow. If there's any way to give Paris Farms any praise, they, they, they're the ones who got big hungry power. Wow. We got a tank coming in. The power truck is on tracks. That's their way out. Walking across that bridge. I guess they're nervous about driving on that new road. This is their way out right now. They're gonna need gravel over there. We'll see what we can do about that. They're concerned the propane truck isn't going to come through there. Problem is what we're going to do when it rains. These people need a miracle. Because this is a private road. That's the old bridge. If you know any miracle workers, feel led to help some people get over their river. I'm gonna leave my assistant's email down in the description. Hey, I'm just, I'm just throwing it out there. I believe in miracles. Y'all believe in miracles? Road closed. That's what we're looking for. We're trying to get into these hard-to-reach places. Wow, we got a little homestead. Big Hungry Homestead. Little honesty stand. Duck eggs. How did those ducks make it with that stream right there? See you later, bud. See you, man. Good work you're doing. Thank you for what you're doing. We are going to leave them with that donated four-wheeler from Reverend's Farm. Arms and our trailer. Home sweet home! I'm excited! We were able to get CRR some great contacts in the area. Good start! The next day, we are on a mission to find Barbara, a local feed distributor. That's how they're gonna get power into us. The neighbors, it's gonna be gnarly getting in there. Today we are on We're on a mission to find a lady in a feed co-op. There's this lady named Kelly who organizes a new country organic co-op, and it's trying to be delivered there. That's the hub, and nobody can get through to her. No place to unload our ramps, road closed. We're walking. You don't know who Barbara Myers is, do you? Yeah, she's my wife. Is she okay? Uh-huh, she's fine. Okay, so there's a food co-op with her, uh-huh, and they're trying to get a hold of her and can't. They're scared. We don't have any cell service. Okay, they're just worried to death, and I'm just over the mountain. I said I'll come check. So is this your truck? Yes, we had a— we had a 20, I guess 26-foot, um, portable building with one sale and some animal health stuff in it. Okay. And then there was a 38-foot straw trailer, still have a few hundred bags. All that right there. Yeah, stormwater washed it all away. This building, this was a heartache. We had just finished this building. Oh, I see. Do you have insurance on this? Flood insurance? Nobody does here. They said 2/10 of 1% flood here. Came in here, you can see the water line went up about 9 feet. Whoa, that's the flood line. You see it's up through the halfway up that cow picture. If I was standing here, I would have been drying down. This is not a floodplain, y'all. This is not a floodplain. This was a little creek. Blew this door in, the overhead door, and it filled up. And then when the water rushed out, it blew that whole back wall out. Wow. And that whole end wall at the bottom blew out. All this feed— we had about 60 tons sitting in here. It all flushed out or hung up. Did you have that feed insured? No, nothing's insured. It's No flood insurance. So how'd you front that to get all this feed back? Just strap it up, man. We've got accounts, we can bring in feed. A little bit of it was donated, this Nutrena. We're not a Nutrena dealer. This is the composting feed in these piles here. Anything in bags, paper bags, went there. Wow. All the plastic bags we tried to cut open and compost, but we hauled about 40 tons of feed that we couldn't do anything with. We had about 40, 40 or 50 tons of bag feed went out of here in roll-offs. What's the name of your feed business? We'll give it a shout out. Feed— what is it? Fairview Feed. Fairview Feed, North Carolina. There's another one in Alabama, livestock feed and hay. Bobby?

Yes.

Also known as Barbara. Justin Rhodes, Across the Mountain and Hooper's Creek. Oh yeah, there's a— there's Folks in the New Country Organic Co-op are getting feed from you. They're worried about you, can't get a hold of you.

I tried to—

I'm just putting eyes on you and saying you're okay. And I can get a hold of New Country for you and say they can get through. I talked to your husband, he said trucks can come through.

'Cause I was trying to get my delivery from Florida Hardware and they also use RNL. And they said there's, he told me there's zip codes on there that they are not delivering to and this is one of them.

Shoot.

So that's probably—

well, we're gonna help you out somehow. We'll figure out if we have to meet them or something.

That's our bank on that side. We just live right up there.

Yeah. And I told him, I was like, can you maybe just like help us drag your stuff back over?

And they were like, that's a lot of cleanup. And I said, yeah.

That was extremely productive. Found Barbara. We found that trucks can go through, so the feed delivery could come through. The feed is trying to deliver, but I did just hear that R&L is not delivering to certain zip codes, so we might have to go and get this for them. Oh my gosh, Barbara is safe! And aren't she and John so resilient? Like, totally destroyed, but you would never know it going in there. They just girded up their loins and are just taking care of business themselves. How'd you front that to get all this feedback? Just go strap it up, man. Those are the kind of people you really want to help. So I gave their contact, handing them over to CRR. But also, in the meantime, Kelly, the head of that co-op, uh, has been in contact, and she's delivering hay to people in need and people who have donated and things like that. So I'm sorting this hay, getting the moldy stuff out of here, stacking this nice, and we're getting some hay replacement. We lost a lot of hay, and hay is good— hay is not cheap. So America, you are so good. I don't care what anybody says. The people of America, doesn't matter if they have a— in this crisis, didn't matter if they had a Harris sign in the yard or Trump side, people were rallying together and helping each other, and they still are. I don't care what you're hearing, people are banding together. I learned from my time volunteering with CRR, which was basically assessing hurricane damage and seeing what's the most important thing to tackle, that that would be very important to do on my own homestead. So I took a farm assessment tour. I think we see a power company. Just had a visit with Grandma and we come back down and there's a service worker on the house, on the cabin. How can we help you? Oh, I'm fine. I just— some lemonade, some water? No, I'm good. Two very able-bodied men, they're volunteers through Reverence Farm. Reverence Farm organized some aid to this area. We hosted them for a couple of days. They finished early and y'all wanted to get sweaty. That's right. Yep. What compels you to come here and get sweaty for other people for nothing? We just wanted to help out. We thought, uh, we know people in the West are hurting and we wanted to get out here and use a chainsaw. High up on the priority list, rebuilding the high tunnel area, hopefully in time for winter. The company and friends of mine, Farmers Friends, has already reached out to us and said we're going to replace that high tunnel. Thank you. Thank you, Farmer's Friends. You are a friend. That's the name of their company. You are a farmer's friend. I thought it would— this would have been over for the— this winter, but maybe not. So that we can be free without worrying about getting— I don't think I'm authorized to cut the power line. Joan and I are going to work on this tree that's all entangled in the cables. You guys go to the the further one. It goes all the way there to the pig port, and you guys start working up that tree. I will tell you, this is man heaven. It's a little warm. Chainsaw. It's gonna use a Mini X. There's other men here to help. The adrenaline's running. I can't get out there fast enough. It is all tangled up in this power line. We're gonna have to be very, very careful. I had my electrical friend and look at it. Good. Can you tell how big this is? That's how big this is. Probably 5 feet tall, 12 feet by 15 Huge hole. We got the tree cleared of the line. That was a pain, and I was not looking forward to that job. Glad it's done. Wow. You ready for phase 2? The ladies are back from Reverence Farms. They're wanting to be put to work too. Big shout out to you guys. Thanks for what you're doing.

Thank you. Thank you for hosting us. Yeah, yeah, thanks for having us.

And if folks want to help and help farms, they go to Reverence Farms. Where do they go?

Knowing Love Ministries.

Knowing Love Ministries.

Okay, it's a family friends nonprofit. Normally they feed hungry children in Honduras.

Okay, okay.

Um, but right now we're organizing efforts to help help over here in Western North Carolina, but we're going to be shifting gears and start to help homesteaders and farmers who got impacted.

I should come give you a hug. We appreciate it. This place worked you to death this weekend. Oh, it has. And he's getting people to work. You know, it's coming out here and just looking around, and it's kind of like, where do you begin? Another amazing worker. They don't even have an office right now. They got slammed, but they're out delivering diesel fuel. They couldn't even give me the bill. They gave me the gallons and said you got to call them and pay. Oh man, the community right now. You guys already worked through that? Will, how long did it take? You know, 5-10 minutes. That's it? This was a huge tree. System down. Hopefully we'll get up there to document this before they finish. This was not an active stream. It became one though. Came roaring down that mountain. Never in my life have I seen water in these crevices. This is important work here, getting a trail access to our our water reservoir at the top of the mountain so we can see what's wrong with it, keep it more consistent. We might get really lucky and this be our last blockage. Approaching work during a crisis is just like approaching work during growth and abundance on your homestead. You're just— you got always got way more to do then you have time, money, and energy. So you prioritize. We got to get the garden uncovered. Winter's coming, a high tunnel's coming. So we cleared the trees there. We need to get the gravity-fed water working so we take pressure off of our pump. We don't know when electricity is coming back on. With the lady volunteers down there, I went into the mode of zoning. If you don't know where to start, start right outside the door. So I thought, okay, zone 0. They could be picking up around the house, zone 1. So I had them pick up zone 1-ish, you know, front yard, and work out from there. Small blockage. Thankfully it's the top of this tree over that trail, not this part. What? Huge tree! How big? Why'd nature choose this one? Pretty big step. I'm gonna go get my saw back at Selma. Somewhat close. Hopefully there's not any more big ones. No more trees. I thought there was so much more. I thought it was another hill over. I don't think so. Let's check the tank while we're up here. Good work. Well done, man. How did this not get blown away? Water was up to there. You can see the line. This was covered with 2 feet of water. All right, it's coming in. Where's our tank? It's buried in debris. I think the tank's somewhere in there. My bet is our tank is compromised. Okay, there it is. Goodness, why isn't it filling up? It's only to right here. Why isn't that full? We have a blockage right here. Jonah, how are we gonna dig this tank out? It's just clogged. This should just be blasting. It's gonna be hard to get in there and get any sediment out. Probably gonna be easier to disengage it right here and try to just let this blast out right there and maybe clean it out with a stick. That tank should be filling up. It's going flowy in there, so I'm thinking there's some breaches along this line. Can y'all follow this line and go tell me if there's a leak? Another reason we've been building that access road. Is to run this water line up an access road and not through a crazy jungle. It's on this. Okay, that's on that, probably pinching it. That log is pinching the line, and there's probably going to be several others. It's telling me it's not worth the patch job since we're just going to reroute this water line. It's a rehaul. That our insurance company might actually cover because it was wind damage. Look at this. Yeah, waking up this morning, I had no idea we were gonna clear my garden and a path to this water.

There's 3 fallen trees on the line and like 4 leaks, but they're like— the leaks are tiny, they're like little scratches with water flowing out of them.

Yep, that line's totaled. Got a green light. That means it's charged this battery. Whoo! Meanwhile, America helping America, and look at all the gear they brought to give out to people 4 hours from them. We're feeding our friends fresh food from the land. Butter, beef. Beef. It's what's for dinner. We've literally had beef for dinner the last 10, 10 days in a row. Fried potatoes too, lunch and dinner. Beef and taters. That's what's for dinner. Emergencies abated. It's actually time for a fall farm tour, but this is going to be a hurricane assessment tour. First of all, this whole front yard was flooded. Fence, this was all flooded. Water was coming through here. It actually was so large of a hole under here, chickens were getting out. We had to mend that right away. Right next to the chickens, always a good idea to have garden. Permanent chickens blew out the side of the raised bed. I think I tried to blow that one out. I mean, that is an advantage of raised beds. It's why we did it here, actually. We've had rain here before. I mean, not this far over— over there. We didn't lose our crops because we had raised beds. On the other side of the chickens, oh my word, I think wind actually might have gotten this first, but This is coming out of the ground. This is not long. This is gonna have to be fixed first. You know, permaculture teaches us start right outside your door. This is going to have to be high on the priority. Our chickens were going to move to the high tunnel. We don't have a high tunnel anymore. You'll see that in a second. Out of our front yard, down to our driveway. Our driveway, which became a river. It missed our greenhouse, guys. It just you could see water just coming right there. This little culvert here totally got filled with, with gravel and will have to be pulled up and replaced. It's just full of gravel. Gosh, it doesn't take long to get to some of the more serious damage. I'm thankful these chickens are still here. The geese were loving the storm.

The goose is loving it. Right here.

The chickens were not— some of them even weren't in the coop, they were perched up on the compost. Around the side we've got this fence, probably destroyed, maybe not. Certainly gonna have to be cut shorter. Premier One fence. The pole barn is still standing. There were times that we didn't think it would be. Digging stuff out like this is going to move property lines, y'all. It's washed away concrete right now. Next to it. The creek was way over there. This looks like a river here still, guys, but it's not. Some of the most devastating destruction, because either we bring in a ton of field dirt or we just embrace what it is and just bevel it. Oh my, look, it went underneath the concrete right here. It's probably 8 feet down. Damage is intense. Intense. It's washed away our metal platform. Some of our gutter drains are just out. It's washed away our concrete platforms. That's probably gonna have to be broken off right there. We're probably just gonna do without. Although nice, wasn't absolutely critical, not with the cost of concrete these days, probably double what it was. And see the history in the earth, the lines there. We have had to shore up these two poles. They got completely washed out. We're thinking, while we can, huge concrete footers. Oh my God, I'm sort of freaking out. This is not cheap. And of course, we don't have flood insurance. Nobody has flood insurance. It doesn't flood here until it does, I guess. Hasn't rained like this since 1791. We lost a good corner of hay to the storm. I lost probably 100 bales right there, but from the crazy blowing wind, you know, for the blowing rain, normally we're just ready for some of the outer— it's just some of the outer hay bales to even just parts of them to be ruined. It's fine. But it was like a fireman came here with his hydrant and just hosed it down. I've been pulling off ruined bales. This isn't just wet right here, this is like soaked right here. And here it was flooded. It wasn't just wet here, but this whole hay bale got flooded. Thankfully, I think there is someone stepping up to the plate and delivering good hay to the area and is going to help us out there. From the hay to the garden, you can see the water line all the up here. I mean, water was going down our stairs over there and over here. It just so happens that our house is just on this little knoll. We were completely surrounded by water, but it stayed dry. The high tunnel did not stay dry. But here, it not only took our high tunnel, which can be replaced, it took soil that we spent years building. Not only did it take our topsoil, like, it's getting in the subsoil here. Like, we're 2 feet— we're 2 feet in the ground. Ground here. You can sort of see maybe where there was, you know, the little rows. The sweet potatoes, albeit covered, are fine. We're going to be able to have a wonderful sweet potato harvest. And we'll remember— always remember Boots, my late dad. I'm glad those survived, although our curing place for those is right now being used as a solar-powered clothes dryer. We'll have to go show you that in a second. Oh, oh, we thought that was a deep crevice. I'm standing where the garden part— big part of the garden was. There's this huge sinkhole, comes up to about right here, so maybe 5 feet. I did see some fill dirt for sale up the road, a lot of fill dirt. The boys want to fill this in back all the way back to where the creek was. Creek was way over there, guys. It was over there. Really all it entails is just putting those rocks back over over here. Thankfully we have some machines. That's going to take an ungodly amount of fill dirt. I'm wondering, what is nature telling us? What does fate want us to do? How do we roll with these punches? Because we don't want to afford 10,000 loads of, of dirt. Logs we already worked up, more trees to work up. We're fixing to go to a sad spot. Rocks washed up. Yeah, we'll take all the rocks that have washed up and things like that, and that can help build up the banks right here. The bees— oh, there's something left of the bees. Some of the concrete platforms, we couldn't save them. There went the bees. These trees were swaying like crazy when we realized the water might hit the bees, and it was just too daring. One of you guys actually assured me they probably swarmed. You know, they have sense, like the cows and the sheep did. The cows and the sheep keep— went to the top of the mountain. I missed the bees. I missed seeing them out here on the various whatnots. We have stacked our brush directionally. Reverend's Farm, who has really stepped it up to do some relief work in this area, is telling us they're gonna get us a wood chipper. Talking about building back soil, it's all this carbon. We've been blessed with all this carbon with these down trees. We're gonna have more than we're gonna know what to do with, so that will help us build back soil. I can replace a high tunnel. Our compost was on high ground. The animals are continually making it. I can build back a garden bed on top of the, you know, the ground there. But what do you do when it— you got a whole plot gone? What do you do when you have untold tons of land gone? Like, percentage of an acre, that's hard to rebuild. We came real close to letting you guys out. See the leaves? Water got up to there. I think it would have gotten to them and probably our house had not the water just started eating away at the banks. Pumpkins, not too heartbroken there. Garden beds certainly need to be rebuilt. The poor pumpkin trellis, nothing left of it. Oh my word, has this come in clutch. We fixed that Wednesday. The storm was Friday. We hooked it up to our house. Reverend's farm donated some diesel. We weren't sure if we were gonna be able to get diesel delivered. As of filming this, tomorrow will be 2 weeks without power. We got us a backup. Redundancy is key. I would recommend, folks, get a whole house generator. Work towards that. But in the meantime, this— I would recommend folks getting it to where they could plug in their well pump to a generator like that. And that was, that was $1,000 new. But if you can't afford that, you could do Craigslist. You cannot— you cannot not afford something, you know. Go to Craigslist or something. This needs to be high on the priority. I feel like because we have that, we have a lot of meat, we're able to keep it frozen. I feel like, you know, kept saying, well, there's nothing we could have done to prepare for this. But when you actually corrected me and said, no, you're very prepared, and I thought, oh wow, we are, and we live prepared. My drone pilot today, thank you for all the cool drone shots between, uh, spots. Get one of me going to the— from the house to Harriet. We're trying to give you perspective with the drone shot. All right, let's go see the other pasture. Harriet had washed up to the— got blown up to the road. So Harriet, we've just having to run her a little higher up. We're losing pasture here, guys, because this would be on the rotation. And with losing hay and losing pasture, you know, talking with the neighbor, seeing if we can't lease something, you know, everybody's kind of chipping in, you know, people are bringing us hay. So I do think we're going to be okay. Let's go down and see the soccer field, what it did to our pasture, Lily's horse ring, the bridge. Oh my gosh, I don't even want to I've been thinking about how I can help people achieve that abundance, which in turn prepares people. You live in preparedness. You're not like afraid storing up cans of food and things like that. No, you're living in a continual flow of eggs, milk on tap, meat constantly and continually in your freezer, so you're ready for anything. Here we had the blizzard of '93. You Northerners are gonna laugh at us. It was like 2 feet of snow. But for us, that doesn't happen. And so our infrastructure isn't there. We don't have the trucks to plow the roads. And we were up without power for 2 weeks. You couldn't drive on the road because of the snow and stuff like that. You just never know what's going to happen. And then with COVID and supply chain issues and things like that, this has kind of been a wake-up call to me. Let me tell you more about the wake-up call in a second. This was the soccer field. I thought we lost it, but once Josiah started digging things out, I realized it's still there. The soil is still there, the grass is still there. Look at this massive pile of just sand, so we can use that to rebuild some of our banks. We are going to leave the creek here. It was 75 feet over, it had a little turn, had a 90-degree turn, but we know nature is not going to allow that in the end. We kind of like— well, some of us like how wide the creek has become, therefore how shallow it is. And easy to cross. This side we're thinking is, you know, we'll be able to graze it now. We couldn't graze the pretty place, it wasn't worth it before, wasn't enough. But we could graze this. Lily could have our horse ring. Let's go see what's left of Lily's horse ring. Oh my gosh, so glad we did not invest in like a proper ring with like proper material. We just did it on the pasture. We've got panels that are mobile and hopefully mostly not destroyed. In some ways, some things are going to be better in the end. But we got a lot of trees down on it, and one of my Abundance Plus members is saying, hey, I'm a disaster relief worker, I'm going to come down and help you, I've got a wheel loader. Look at all this material. Okay, but how do we get it up there where it came from? A dump truck would help us. We're putting out fillers there, we're putting out fillers for people who can build bridges, or more or less people who can design bridges. When I've gone out out into the community and I see what we have here, a lot of it's so big. A lot of this, you know, littler stuff that folks can help with, although, you know, we can always use a good sawyer and a good support person for them to, you know, work up some of this stuff. I don't know if I can go this way. All right, let's try. A lot of material, probably another 10-foot pile there, 30-foot of that, which stayed on our property. This is the old creek. Holy moly, I've not been here yet. See how far it's jumped? It used to come right there and come down through here. One thing I think I'm gonna do for folks, for you all, I'm gonna create a Living in Preparedness series. We were already going to do winter preparedness. I had that class all ready to go. That was going to be October We're gonna have to delay that one. Look at this tree though. Let me show you why I call this the pretty place. I mean, it's still pretty, right? It's still pretty. Winter preparedness, disaster preparedness, and that would be going over stuff like helping you guys set up with a generator, making sure you guys are getting appropriate chainsaws, and just some best practices that we've done right through this crisis, but also that we've learned through this crisis. So that would be another class. I'm where the bridge was. Yeah, thankfully we have the machines. One of our strong points, preparedness in other ways, you know, besides the event, is we've got eggs in continual flow and we keep eggs going even in the winter. And some people struggle to keep— a lot of people struggle to keep eggs going in the winter. We've got that. Let me— guys, I'm going to show you one more thing. We also We also have meat in abundance, and so when this storm came, when we were going to get cut off from civilization, out of communication for 5 days, we were okay. We had plenty of meat, we had power through our generator, we had salt. I noticed right away that at first it was just neighbor helping neighbor, and then people were coming from an hour or two away in this— from the state. And then people from whole other states were coming to help this area, and we got lumped in on that and had a group of volunteers come one day. When people say, how long you been here? I say, I've been here 92 years because Grandpa bought the little old house in 1932 for— it's a 75-acre property. Anybody want to guess how much he paid for that in 1932? It's now worth $3.5 million. He paid $500. You're the lowest bid ever. Thankfully, we've got a group here, looks like, of eager people to help us rebuild what was destroyed. My vision of this thing is that you have so much destruction and damage that the only way forward in this is for people to help other people. Like, this is not— this is the kind of damage not only not only on this farm but just across the— this end of the state. It's like if people don't help other people, you're gonna have people homeless indefinitely. We used to have a big greenhouse right over there on that. You can see where we've kind of flattened it out there. You see we have a big gap hole there. Um, the water came all the way up to that structure there. We had a storage container, it's right there behind y'all. It was right here. There goes the container. There it goes. Let's make piles over there because we kind of need to make room for the hay to come off and then back on. So we got 4 or 5, raise your hand. If I can get some over here to do a, um, do the hay. It got flooded down here and the hay bales are crushing. That's even wet though. Like, how high do we— that's just weathered though. Yeah, this whole side. I was thinking maybe We send a bunch of people for trash. Okay. Is there a way to get a truck down there to— oh, that's low. That's a good idea. Like on the neighbor's property if there's a bunch of stuff down there? No, but we can get up to it. Okay. Are you here today? What makes you want to? It's my wife's birthday.

She's like, I want to go help for my birthday. That way she was able to corral everybody.

So what makes you come and help out today? Uh, well, my mom wanted to come up here and help people rebuild stuff, and this was her birthday present, all of us to spend our weekend up here. So, okay. And I kind of wanted to help rebuild things. So moving on to the next thing, we're gonna leave Arthur with some folks. We need some good stout people who aren't allergic to hay. About 6 feet on that side. Yeah, hanging over. Yeah, and we're gonna need to get out. I'm surprised it hadn't cracked yet.

I guess there's rebar in there.

There's a crew in here. We need a little bit of rain. I want to laugh at that, you know, but actually seriously, when it doesn't rain for 3 weeks in North Carolina, it's usually pretty bad. But I think we're all gonna have PTSD. Just did when it rains again. You can see down in there all kinds of debris just across the property line. The tree line is the property line. Our bridge washed away, okay, and we're gonna need to build another bridge. So let's see what we could salvage. Okay, there's a bunch of 2x10s, all right, that I think we can salvage. Let's get those first.

Okay.

Yep, just haul these 2x10s I'm happy to see most of these are still intact. We wouldn't have found this, it would just be one more thing we would have had to buy. We had to buy the lumber for the bridge. That's what's really breaking my heart, is like, this was not in the budget. And I'm trying to not, if I don't have to, because it feels like every time we have to buy something to replace it, it's like we're getting set back. These folks helping us get get our— what is left of our bridge saved. That was our bridge. It used to live 1,000 feet up that way. We're taking spoiled, spoiled hay and just piling it up here. We'll compost it. Black gold. Get it out there with a machine. Turn that problem into a solution. We could almost take these and put them in the cows' paddocks right now and sheep. Yeah, and just park the cows and the sheep there for a few days because that area needs it. Are they in the same spot? Yeah, let's hay bomb. Let's hay bomb where they're at. We can do that if you want. So what brings you out here to help? We got a message from him on LinkedIn. This past Wednesday saying they need bodies, even if it's for a day. So I asked my fiancée if she minded I go out here, and she said no, and I'll go with you. We're gonna turn a problem into a solution by taking these half-spent hays and spread them out in this pasture that is lackluster. And this hay with the cow's waste will go to the soil, and all the manure that comes with the cows coming near this hay will feed the soil. So it's really not a complete disaster that we're, we're losing hay. Lunch. You know what I like to say? Let's aim for the impossible and extraordinary things will happen. We're gonna get the trash up, wash downstream, and harvest all the sweet potatoes. Weird, because in the past I've been being the one on the helping end, not the helpy end. It's a little trippy. It's like we're licking our wounds after an epic battle. A lost epic battle. Mind blown. Super encouraged. This is just something that wouldn't have got done with just me and the boys. This is like a big group job, so I'm so It's done. They've, they've pulled off all the hay from the edge. We can now break off this and rebuild it, restack it, you know, stack it. Definitely lifts my spirits, breaks my heart, but we will turn it into compost, so it'll be a better material in the end than it was. We just, uh, picked up all the trash we could by hand. The machines are cleaning it up now. We're gonna get these sweet potatoes up before it starts cooling off too much. We need to cure them for a couple of weeks. There's one here. Yep, there's one there. It's on deck. I'm loading the sweet potatoes, and then we'll come back. And what you guys enjoyed for eating that as some piece of steak. Yeah, you know what nature's greatest miracle is? Turning veggies into pork. Y'all get to take part of that, okay? That's a bunch of sweet potatoes. They're beautiful too. And on a day like today, they're gonna cure nicely in the greenhouse. This is like licking a wound after an epic defeat, but you guys came and just picked this up a little bit. So we thank you for that. We really appreciate it. It's the encouragement we need. Weeks after Hurricane Helene, it felt like the world had moved on. We were waking up every day to a nightmare. We were still hurting, and we were still hard at work. Thanks to those volunteers yesterday, this lifts my heart. Volunteers from CRR, we got the hay off the edge so that can be repaired. Junk hay piled up and smoking, already composting. I figured we'd probably lost 300 bales of hay. Even though it's organizing destruction, it's nice to have some order. Chickens are hair cramped, especially if we want to get that compost out of there that they've helped us make. It's ready to go. It was too net to put them in like a compost corner type of situation with the pigs. Pigs were stressing them out. Taking another net, setting it up around them, and then removing the internet. Would you hold that steady? We gained a little bit on every side. Maybe it's just enough. Keep going. You got to go to the foot. Go to the foot. That was nice. So I can just come in here with the Mini-X and turn the compost pile. That's some good-looking compost. Don't get too excited, it's done. We're getting it out of here. Wow, he's gotten it looking good. I'm thinking we'll hay bomb this all winter. We're gonna to get all this out of his way. Hey, we need that to move compost. Chickens can make compost if the situation is right, and we're gonna make it right. Like that. Again, in between loads, going over the edit. Today's office. This is the— this is a fun office, isn't it? It's a stand-up desk. Yeah. Let's get a picture of her holding her hand to you. How's he gonna get that without— oh, why did he knock it on? Getting so close to the edge. Okay, all right. You want to get that spit hay with the bucket or the grapples? The bucket. All right, let's do that now. I didn't want to give up on the animals. Of course, would have been easier if the pigs and chickens could have just worked together here, but it was too tight of a confinement, I think. Can you run the hose on this while you spot him? They were just compacting the hay. We put it in our tried and true compost run. We've made this bigger, so now the chickens have more room. We're gonna wet this hay down, and the machine will turn this every other day. This will be black gold before it gets too cold. Black gold is compost. It's black soil, not dirt. Chickens will help us do the rest. Chickens will not help us move the— their coops though. The turkey shawl under shelter for season. Dusty and dirty out here. Dustin and Dirtin' is what I was gonna call my boys if I was a pro mountain biker. Can't think of a better combo than a Mini-X and a chainsaw. We're still hurting. Every morning when I wake up and look out the window, it's still there. You can't see that, that's foggy. And of course I don't sleep in my clothes. We're thankfully past that stage in the dramatic event. It's just a reenactment. I didn't want to get back in my underwear. And look out, there it still is, improving. What's up? Supposed to be in with that? No. How did he get in there? I have no clue. Hey, we have organized some stuff. The remnants of the high tunnel. It took so long to build. It took so long to make it chicken ready. They stack nice. I walk a little further, no bridge. Trees, rocks, tons and tons and tons and hundreds of tons of rock need to be moved back up here. This is our chance to make it so we can actually put a post in the ground without it hitting a rock. Where are we gonna get the soil? I'll show you a spot in the 2 acres where we hay bomb. That will be a nice place place to hay bale this winter. Close to the house, water's easy to get water there. Happy day! It's gonna be your job this morning, Gideon. Play with Henry. Beefcake! A rare all-you-can-eat buffet for him. I guess that's gotta wait. I see Jonah out there with Harriet, and it looks like she's gotten out of the wrestling ring. It was the strangest thing. Like 5 days after the hurricane, we were in the dark, so to speak. We got our neighbor— we got our news from neighbors coming by and checking on us. But I remember when we got our Starlink going and I got online, it was way too normal.

The US presidential election is just over a week away.

You started me off, but I'm gonna teach you how to box, Mike. Life had gone on without us, just like this stream just keeps going. There's no stopping it, just keeps on going forever. Cut this walnut tree the other day. 2 feet wide. And I'm like, wait a minute. There was not a walnut tree in this pasture. Not even close. That walnut tree was 200 feet upstream. How can you go back to a normal life when you're picking up a walnut tree that has moved 200 feet? What happened? I was moving it and the door got knocked open. Come on. Come on, come on. That's good to have a tame one in here for this reason. I'll let her have it. Now we have to run the creek to the middle of our property, right? The creek was not right there. Creek was 75, 70 feet over. So as the world goes on, we're still here scratching our head trying to figure out what to do. What's the most important thing to do? And what and how to do it. I don't know how to bridge, how to build a bridge. I'm gonna build a bridge. I don't know how to rebuild a creek bank. I'm gonna rebuild a creek bank. I've never done a concrete footing. I'm gonna do that, maybe today. The homestead store. Turns out we are gonna be able to work on those footers today. I'm still living day to day. Like, I just figured out— I decided last night this needs to be done today. You see, we have to do this before we start bringing material back up. I got all the lumber. We'll see how Rebecca's doing on her task list. This is getting heavy. Oh, there you are. How you faring?

I'm doing good. I've been Is this the right hammer?

There we go.

Is that better?

I think so. That is something that has taken me 3 weeks to get the gumption to do. Yeah, $1,500.

That's good.

That's a setback. That's the setback, isn't it? I feel like we're rebuilding something as opposed to building something new. That's what we were talking about. We're both— Rebecca and I, you and I both kept reiterating this. How long has this set us back? Daddy. Yeah, military helicopter right there. Thankfully we're hearing those less and less these days. It's like we were in a war zone at first. Nothing but helicopters flying over. No airplanes, just helicopters.

Going to Lowe's was just very normal. I normal activity. You know, we have our list, we're getting what we need. It feels very normal, but then we come out and we're loading and here comes a military helicopter and it kind of just reminds us of all of the— the turmoil and the disaster and the—

the—

like, you know, we're— we're okay, but there's lots of people who aren't and it's just a reminder of that, that like our area is not okay.

Day.

Like, we might be doing a normal activity, but it's really still not normal.

Here they come to save the day. I don't know about all that. How you doing? Yay, I'm above the ground! Since Big Daddy's not here, Ben's the new Big Daddy. Are you wanting to form it up higher to recapture this? Yeah. So yeah, we'll have to move all that. I was thinking so. That's a lot concrete then. Yeah, I'm going to do it. Goodness, who's this? Oh, it's Big Daddy. Hey, hey, you coming down? Yeah, I'm coming down. You better hurry, Ben's starting. It's looking sloppy. Why can't we just put— what do we, what do we got? We got, I don't know, 2x. I don't know how much weight here, but we could bring something something out on either side and try to pull this out. If we can stabilize this so it can't move, we could put another brace over here each way too. The, uh, the Mini X like you did, build something to support it. You know, we only have to come up that much. Build something to support it, get all the concrete out. Once it's supported, the, uh, the Mini X can leave if you need to. And then we can, we can dig, put a footer in. And it'll be supported while we're waiting for concrete. We got goals. We got an hour and 45 minutes. Yeah, impossible goal. Let's brace this and the next one and get these rocks out of there. You want to just put a piece there and put some legs on it? Yeah, that's what I was thinking. We're almost to— he's got an hour, actually might be spot on. I bet we'll build the second one even faster. I think Ben's Bruce's kind of guy because I've never seen anybody reinforce something more than Bruce would. And one thing I didn't account for is the time it's going to take us to, you know, lift it up, get all the rocks out. Come this way, come this way. Austin says hold my camera. Camera. Austin, you can't get it. Come on now, come on. Hopefully it's not full of rebar. There it is. Thank you, man. Hey, no problem. Yep, we did it. When you guys are ready for mud, okay, give me a call. Yeah, that mixer, I'll call it and see how soon it can get here. Well, it's still holding. By the way, I did not know how to build one of these until now. I don't even know what's that— what that's called. It's a proper way to hold up a post so that then we can build a concrete footer and stand to hold up our pole that has been washed away. And I don't know how to make a footer. That's the plan today. What'd you just learn, Dana? How to use a square. How to use a big square. The little one has a little lip. How were you using it? He was lining it up on top. I said it goes against there. Oh, good enough. Like that. We want to level underneath this thing to prepare for the forms. Tamped it, flattened it out. Somehow we have some dirt-type material, don't we? Really fine sand. Yeah, seemed to pack okay. Oh my gosh, that might actually be right. Somehow that is perfectly level right now. Do you see what's going to happen? Fill that with concrete, then we're going to make a 16-inch by 16-inch column to come up and support that. Hey, you'll never believe it! What? It's level! No! We have a survivor! Can you guys see it? You bitchin'? No, it's a honeybee. What's the goal for today? To have all the concrete poured, everything, for both of them. Yeah. Okay, let's go. He thinks it'd be better to pour it all at once. The column too. You need to make an E-form, a couple of E-forms. What was your thought behind not doing the column now? Well, you can brace it off of the, the form that's there, probably to keep her from expanding. I mean, it's just a little box basically. Those. Yeah. Did you want to form it up and build it separately? Because we can do that too. That'd be a little bit easier, but it's 2 days of work rather than 1. Oh yeah, we need to do it with 1 day while we have Ben. Now I'm gonna get this thing leveled up. Now we got stakes in, and once it's level, then we can go from there. What makes you think this was an impossible build? Well, because I guess it could be from ignorance. But also it seems like it's a lot to make two forms. Also pull all those rocks out from underneath that other one. Yeah, undo that support, redo that support. I mean, it took us just to do that support the other day with Ben. It took us 3 hours, didn't it? Maybe to speed some things up, we will build another brace. Let them be working on this. We'll have another brace. It's going to take a minute for the concrete to cure too. To be able to move that. So yeah, we need to do this. Go down there and do— make that what? Two side by side going that way, two going the other way. What are y'all waiting on?

We have seven of the four-footers.

They don't know what they're doing. Yeah, it's not that easy. About right there. This one was way longer. What, longer than 6 feet? We just put the center up. It's leaking hydraulic oil. It's leaking hydraulic oil like crazy. Leaking hydraulic oil like it's going out of style. Threads are broken or something. Right there, it looks like it blew out. This thing eats like 80 gallons of hydraulic Don't tighten it a lot. I know you can break the threads. It's just how I had— making bad noises and it's because there's a hydraulic leak. I'll put some hydraulic fluid in. This Mini X is everything for that second pole. We can't lift it up, we can't get the rocks off, we can't build a form under there. So this is everything for the success of today. Okay, now we got We tightened up the nut and now we put some more hydraulic on it and it's good for now. Almost got the first one ready to go. Then we just got to build another one. 2-hour check-in. We've built a brace for supporting the barn. Big Daddy and Ben have, have built a form. They're building the other one. So I'm thinking let's get that done by lunch, ready, and then after lunch concrete. And it just might be doable. So we're getting started with the concrete. Um, we are having to haul this all down by hand from a pallet. We're just mixing it down here with creek water. We're adding some gravel and some Portland to it. I think we'll knock this out pretty quick because the opening on this thing is so small. We have found using this, you know, any other time it's easier to split the bag in half, tear it, and dump half at a time We can mix 2 80-pound bags in this, surprisingly, and it'll mix it just fine. But we are doing something different. We're adding, you know, rock and some Portland to this. So we're just gonna play around and figure out what kind of mix we like. I just ate lunch. Everybody's full. We're raring to go. They've got the concrete mixer going. That's it. So barring any crazy difficulties, I think we got this. Rich, it's a perfect slump. Not too wet, not too dry. He's gonna mix up one more bag. We're gonna see where we're at. Let's see where it is. Huh? Why? There's a slab, concrete slab. You can move it. It needs to go that way, and it's on an angle. Oh, thank goodness it's the same as that one. We're gonna have to lift up on this slab and go over the concrete because this concrete is laying— it's a huge piece. Hopefully we have enough leeway to actually lift it up a little bit. We are gonna have to move it a bunch, like 3 inches. I'm just gonna notch the form rather than try to get this whole chunk of concrete that it's sitting on. We'll just notch the form and work around it. All of this is going to be filled up with dirt and rock later. We just need to get this post supported, and that's the easiest, quickest thing. So I'm I'm gonna grab the chainsaw and I'm just gonna notch the corner of this form so we can get it level. Otherwise I have to remake this entire stem that's coming up, uh, and I don't want to do that. This pole barn is so much for our health journey because it's our total winter housing situation for the pigs in the summer and then the cows in the sheep in the winter, and that's our lamb, that's our beef, that's our dairy. Because we do deep bedding method, they're mixing their manure with those wood chips. It's our soil fertility program, so we, you know, we capture all those nutrients in the winter when otherwise it'd be lost if they were out in the pasture. It's going to be close as far as if we're going to have enough concrete. We've already used half our concrete. For less than an hour, 5 hours, you know, that's pretty good for all this work.

We made it, we're done.

Everything went off without a hitch. The first part took a lot more concrete than we thought, but that was fine. We had brought some extra concrete that we had had leftover, so we had enough concrete. Um, it went great. Couldn't have done that without everybody pitching in. And the boys, I was just so proud of them. I couldn't think of a better education for them, learning how to build the foundations of the most important structures of our lives. Uh, proud of everybody. This one goes down as a really good memory. What a cool— what What I mean, at least this storm has done is brought us together. People weren't the only ones affected by this hurricane. What about the animals? What about the hay that was lost? I mean, we lost so much hay we wouldn't have been able to make it through the winter. But good folks across America, in this case the East, banded together and got many people, many hundreds of people. Hey, including us. Hurricane Kelly, I know what to do.

He just drops those forks, like picks up the next ones. How are you? Good, how are you?

Hurricane Kelly, you're running your own farm. Yes, big farm too.

Yes.

And then yet you're doing all this hurricane relief work. What's up? What? Why?

Well, hands and feet.

We do this for Jesus. Oh, we do this to give hope because he is our hope, and that's what you do. You love thy neighbor. Yeah, well, thank you. What a gift. Unsprayed hay. And I would say we lost 300 hay bales, and that's about what it is. Oh, that's nice of you to think of Gideon. What do you think about all this hay?

It's good.

Super blessing, super blessed. You will not believe what else Hurricane Kelly has collected for us. Bee boxes.

That's amazing.

Where did you score the bee boxes?

So this came from Two Peas in a Pod Farm.

Okay, Two Peas in a Pod, um, they had— they've given us so much to bring to the families between heaters and beehives and she picked us up with organic food. Thanks for all the wonderful people, all the Americans. Aren't we proud? Aren't we proud to be an American? Aren't we helping each other in this time? Lily's horseshoe ring would have been included in that. It got totally destroyed as well. The goal down here today, try to recover Lily's these horse panels and see if we can't get them out of the way though so we could keep clearing. Every time I get a panel up, that's $150. He can unbury it more. If not, I'm going to break out the old shovel. What, you couldn't get me the regular shovel?

Well, I thought this one's better.

All right, let's see. First of all, if I need it, he's dug it off as much as he can with the machine. Oh, two more! You went and got me a real one. Yeah, thank you. Put all Look at all this material. Feet of rocks. I'm going to take some of these rocks upstream to build back the bank. Hard to know what to do here. There's no textbook on that. We saved 4, 5, 6, 7. As we began to get things under control, we started to get back to more normal farm projects, but found great obstacles, found things from the hurricane we hadn't seen before because we were expanding further out. We lost our lower pasture to Hurricane Helene. It's where we were grazing Harriet, our heifer cow we don't want to get bred yet. We're restoring it, and I think it'll be better than ever. Eventually Eventually, eventually. Another perspective. There's the blown out pasture. So here's Harriet. Problem is we need this grass for our main herd. So we have this 2 acres that we cleared the winter before last, and it's pretty well stockpiled. It's ready to be grazed. Already a blockade. We've got one tree, we've got one tree, I think three trees on this path. We need this path to get to the— is the water working? I mean, maybe the water's not— is working, and maybe we don't have to. That'd be a fat chance. It's disconnected here and there's no water coming down. I reckon the first thing to do is assess the damage and see if it's worth it. 'Cause pretty soon water is gonna be freezing this water line, and so is it worth it to get them over here? Oh my gosh, a huge tree down in the path. 3 gigantic trees down. Oh my gosh, I don't want to see through here. We could get Jonah with the machine and I get my chainsaw. Wow, maybe I can get through on this side. Okay, gosh though, this is worse than our trail up the other side, which was much longer. Okay, little respite here. Still, these trees have to be cleared. I'm kind of afraid to go see what might have happened to our water catchment. Hey, the tank is in place. There's the water catchment. It's still here. It's gotten ripped out of the rock. These screws were screwed into this rock. Pretty amazing those go through the rock. Got a rock back on it. Got some water on it. It's coming in a little weird. It's filling up. It comes down. Through this pipe. Happy day! Look at that, it's coming down through the line right there, and you can hear it filling up the tank. As it fills up, the overflow will come out right here and where it belongs on the spring. This water line is intact. We may not have to clear our trail up to here before we move the animals. Line goes through and underneath this Is there any way it's not damaged or even has to be replaced? Open that nozzle and see if we have a Festivus miracle. Oh my, that just built up. All right, turn it off. Honestly, this all just too— feel— just feels too overwhelming. I also only have about an hour and we're killing pigs tomorrow. And also on my list is clean up around the pole barn, which is where they are. And that would make sense since we're gonna harvest them tomorrow. It'd be a little less stressful. It's not as sexy, but it's the right thing to do. It gets even worse with Hurricane Helene. Massive wind damage on this side. Not so much water damage, but massive wind damage. I think we start chipping away They're clearing this road and getting this water line back. Impossible goals. We don't have the track loader right now. The boys are busy. Can we get these limbs and can we get that up? We got about an hour to get us to the entrance of our trail. Oh my God, this is overwhelming. Forks. Need to cut it there. Need to get this branch down first. Keep this one here, you can stand on it. This is wild. This is fun. Here with these maniacs getting this out of my way as I go. But I think after right through there, we're through the thick of it to get it off our hose and to get us up to our water line. Wow. Out of fuel. What we've learned why this side is so bad is this slope this way is south-facing. That's where the, the storm and the wind came from. So that's why this, this, these trail, this trail on this side of the property is so much more jacked up, even though it's like a fifth of a length. We have more trees down on it. The water line has been pinched, barely getting anything out of here, and it won't take long before that's totally drained. At the utmost edge of our property, we collect water out of this little creek into this weir, and it runs down this line all the way to this collection tank, 225 gallons. And then it comes down the water line down to the pasture, but there's not much getting down there because of all the damage to this line. If we're gonna get this done in due time, we're going to incorporate that machine. Impossible goals, here we come. 9:30-ish, let's stop by 11:30. We got to work up this whole tree, face it directionally so we can feed a wood chipper easy. We're also going to rent a wood chipper too. 3 right here in one flop. So much. Waterline right here. All kinds of trees above this waterline. It's really just the beginning. This is a lot, um, it's just the beginning. You want me to climb up on that? I hope that's held up good. Ran out of fuel. We have one more big cut. How do I get down? I cut my way out. Think I can stand on that? Yeah, what's holding it up? I kind of cut myself, uh, I cut away my exit. It's not gonna fall that way, is it? Does that jump? All right, we ran out of fuel. What time is it? This is a beast. Yeah, 10:30. Whoa, we got 1 hour to finish getting through this and the rest of the trees. I've cut most of them up there though. Forest break, probably good. Oh wow, this is dangerous. This is the most dangerous work you can do on the homestead. Hey, I think we're through the hardest part. I've already sawn most of those trees. 11 o'clock, 30 minutes. Show them how we can do it. Let's go. We are at the absolute cutoff time. We didn't, we didn't quite make it. We've got about 100 more feet. We got through the big gnarly stuff though. In an effort to keep the spotlight on Hurricane Helene victims not necessarily us, but the others in the area, those who have lost homes. We— my boys decided to live in a hurricane relief tent for 100 hours to raise awareness for those in need. For the next 100 hours, we're going to be surviving in this hurricane tent to bring awareness to victims of Hurricane Helene.

Thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed by Helene.

That impacted an estimated 200,000 people right here in the mountains. Or what would you call these things, Shawn? These are like lodge tents. They're called hot tents. Our area here in western North Carolina was destroyed by Hurricane Helene. What's the difference between this and just a regular old tent? Uh, it holds heat and you can stand up in it. You just tie like a slipknot and these just lock naturally. So you can always— starts getting loose as you set it up. Nice. A little more tightness on it. You guys might recognize Sean from the 100-day circle. Yep, 100 days in the circle challenge from MrBeast. Oh my God, it has officially been 100 days! 7 days on an island, 7 days in a cave, 7 days in New York City. The cave was the worst one by far. The next 7 days will by far be the hardest of our entire lives. It was like like living in a refrigerator for 7 days with wet clothes. Sean's main job is to keep MrBeast and his crew alive. Would you say that's fair, Sean? Alive and safe. What is your biggest concern about sleeping in this tent for 7 days? I don't know if I have a concern. No concern? No, it's safe. What are you most excited about? It's fun. It's going to be fun to camp out. What should they be most concerned about? Um, they should be concerned about Imagine a fire inside of a tent. First impressions, take shoes off. This is for home for the next year. Hey, Rob, what's this, Sean? This is what makes it all work. It's a wood-burning stove that you can cook on the top of, heat water, and just the quality of life is way different when you have warmth and a way to boil water. Is that all your camping stuff? Okay, you got me a bag? Yep. Okay, and what if it's not warm enough? You're gonna get in there with me? No. What's going on? My sleeping bag is broken. Welcome to the club. So it won't zip up?

Yeah.

Okay, do you want to get that other broken one and use that as a bottom and the other one as a top? I guess. Here, can you just add that to your protection? Can you imagine it being put into this suddenly? It wasn't— it wasn't even like you could plan for it. Y'all ready to go to sleep? Yep. All right, day 1 in the hurricane tent. It is so cold. Are you boys cold? I just sleep fine. I woke up so much. One time shivering. I didn't wake up once. You didn't? Got to get the wood stove going. You didn't wake up one time? It's 7:15. We slept like 11 hours. You the only warm one? Mm-mm. As my dad would say, you boys are burning daylight. What's the goal for camp today? To get the, uh, fireplace put in so we can stay warm. Yeah, I would say that's our big biggest need, huh? Yep. I heard Annie asked you how it was last night. What'd you say? Cold. I think he said it was awful. Go get us warm. You ever use this before? This stove? The wood stove? Yeah, in our old house. How does this work? Some are bigger than others. That's going to need to seal way more than that. You got to figure out what ones for what. Oh, that does. Yeah, I thought that was just like a nice storage. I think that's pretty good size. You know what this is for? I bet that goes across the, the top of the pipe. Yeah, it probably does. You're too short. Thanks. Can't reach it. I hope that's actually what it's for, because if not, that looks kind of silly. It does That looks awful. Or we can even here, maybe. It is, it is for that. Yeah, looky there. That's next level. How do you keep rain out? This probably can't lay on it. We're getting some wood split for our fire tonight so that we stay warm because last night we were very cold. I think so. At least I hope so. Let's try that tile now, boys. Shawn told us that the number one thing we should be worried about is fire, so we definitely have to have some fireproof floor right here. Shawn also said it's very important to make use of what you have, and so here's a box. We're not gonna throw anything away. Here's a box from the stove Well, this is kindling. What I don't want to be doing is out here trying to start this in the dark and the cold. This is a tiny stove. It ain't gonna take much either. We're probably gonna be having the windows open. We're gonna stay warm tonight, aren't we, boys? Uh-huh. All right, so it's bringing smoke in. Let's, uh, shut it. They should be concerned about managing a fire inside of a tent. Do some good research on what it looks like to properly set up the stove and how to manage an open flame in a closed environment. This is probably fire retardant, surely. All right, the stove seems safe. Let's locate my knife in case we have to escape for carbon monoxide. Jonah's got his window open, there's a window open up there, the vents are open. We're gonna be Hey, we've improved, guys. Now if you wake up, stoke the fire. Has anybody looked at the fire lately to put more on it? I'll load it.

Jeez.

Well, you guys want to survive with me because I do all the work. Here are Sean. His mom and I say to each other every night, good luck. Good morning, sleepies. Did you sleep last night, Josiah? Warmed it up in here, buddy. The stove worked and we didn't burn down the place. Man, Jonah, you know what my dad used to say? What? They're burning daylight. It's already daylight. Today's mission is to get a fire pit outside so there's a hangout and cook a meal on this. We're going to be cooking us some breakfast this morning so that we can be ready for the day. How was last night? It was good. Yeah? Yeah. Did we get too hot? No. Well, let's not put all of the Stuff on here. Yeah, you're gonna eat 3 eggs? No. Okay, toast, eggs, and bacon. Nope. That's so lame. I like expected it to sizzle for real. There you go. How much of this thing are we doing? The whole thing, man. 100 hours. Are you gonna make it? Yeah, you're 60. Well, maybe a little more. It's good. A little soggy though. Oh, they're really good. I'm gonna get some rocks so we can, so we can have a fire tonight. That was quick. Fire pit, a place to hang out. Sam, what have you signed up for? Um, I'm not sure yet. A log for the campfire. I'm gonna make it into a seat. You're serious? What's this? A seat. All right, seats from the rubble. They're kind of low, but that's good. It's good enough. We're gonna be cooking some chicken and some rice. It's a really cool concept though, how this works. I mean, I guess it'd be sustainable. Everybody wants to sweat while they— before they eat dinner. Wanna hear a paper joke? Yeah, I can't. It's terrible. Terrible. What the heck?

What the heck?

I want a sizzle. I actually don't think this thing is made to cook. The thing is, is This thing, I feel like I've got it going so hot. It's going pretty well. I don't know why it's going so slow, but like, I've got this fire just roaring. A lot of fire is going at the top. Oh well. Oh my gosh, that's where all of our power is going! Just put the pan up there. Yes, keep the— yeah, keep the Okay, that's where all of our power was going. Oh no, that isn't good. What? The hot plate— the hot plate is on the bottom. The what? Dude, that is awesome. That is because they're made to deflect heat. Quick, grab the poker. Oh, it's melted on. Yeah. Oh, oh, that's bad. Oh no, we're done. Get out. You leave it on? It's so hot in here. That was a pretty noob mistake. Yeah, I mean, at this point the heat's going through it. It's like a fucking cake. Austin, this is yours. This is a lot of chicken though. How is it? It's good. Good. It's got this nice smoke smoky, quirky flavor. The chicken's perfect, cooked all the way through. Hey, rise and shine! There's no daylight, so we're not burning. You left the window open and soaked my bag. Yeah. How was night 3, boys? It was good. Getting used to it? Yeah. Why'd you leave the window open in the rain? We didn't mean to. You left the rice out pot with the lid off and chicken in the pot. You bachelors. And the boys are going to do what many hurricane victims do, and to dry out that— dry out the sleeping bag, find stuff on site that can be repurposed for something else. Can you guys think of something good that would be to try? Some of those logs that we had. What about the cat— the panels, horse panels. Lean a couple of those on each other and then set these on them. So Papa's sleeping bag got wet last night from all the rain, so I'm gonna go get one of those horse panels and lay it out and get it drying. Where did my sleeping bag go? We've had 40-mile-an-hour winds. Nothing right now. I think we're through the height of it. Yeah, I guess I'm not sleeping out here tonight. Soaked. If this were real, that would just be such a blow, but also reality. Have you spent a night out here by yourself yet? No. Well, it's tonight. So you've upgraded your camp. You have seats and a fire pit, and now s'mores, and you have a guest. Hey, guess that like has a house like right there. He came for the s'mores. Yeah, hence the reason I'm not spending the night. What are you gonna do if it snows? Um, playing it. When life gives you lemons, let's make lemonade. I saw this meme yesterday. I don't know if it's true. Lemons were aren't a natural fruit, and so life didn't actually give us lemons. Wait, where's the tongs, bro? Yeah, you can use straw. I guess you don't always have tongs when you got lost your— Yeah, this is a good— He's got a fork, and Austin's got a straw. Jerry, tell me about these s'mores, boys. Is it taking the edge off? Yeah. Austin, your experience of this— more lunch. Oh yeah, it's great. I get to enjoy the exciting parts and then go back and put down more bells. You did it! 100 hours in a tent. Nice. How do you feel? You made it, Jesse. How does it feel to be a hero? You guys got to start breaking down tent. It's about— it might be freezing. Let's break down this hurricane relief tent. You're gonna miss your home in 4 days? Nope. Shawn and I left the farm and we were able to find a victim in Swannanoa for a tent. I followed Shawn in the giving away of an RV to a family in need. Shawn connected someone who had an RV eager to donate, and he connected them with a family in need. It was really cool. Did you find this person who's in need? This is again just through Twitter. People message out to me and say— they say, hey, I got a family in need. I'm like, give me a phone number, location. Would you like to see it?

Come on, there's a bed here.

And if you're having guests, that makes a bed and that makes a bed.

This is gonna be my hangout area.

That's what I was thinking too. I encourage you guys to do follow Shawn for a grassroots adventure helping those in need. He's a great guy and he's out on the ground helping people, vetting people himself, and he could always use all the attention and support that he can get. I'm going to leave links for all his socials down in the description. Please do check that out. But generally, it— his handle is @TheSeanHendricks. Then our biggest windfall yet. Farmers Friends saw what happened to our high tunnel decided to not only donate a high tunnel but to come and install it with us. We lost our high tunnel, which is critical for us growing our own food. We lost it to Hurricane Helene. There goes— there goes the power pole. There's a little bit of what's left of our high tunnel, our old high tunnel.

Not driving the post. Our thing's frozen up or something.

Wow, the machine.

Hopefully we can get that resolved. Is it not going in anymore?

Not really.

I don't know if it's just, uh, really cold and it's kind of frozen or what's going on, but it's not wanting to drive the post.

18 degrees out here right now.

We'll go ahead and try to get the other end in and just, just got to roll with the punches.

Today we're replacing an almost double in size. It's going to be 21 feet by 96-foot high tunnel.

This tunnel that we're building is our Guardian. It's a new model, brand new.

We're actually just launching it publicly this coming Monday, so I'm gonna have one right before.

Yeah, so it'll be—

but it'll be out by the time— perfect time.

First thing we got to do is just get the ground posts in. Um, we're starting with the corners, so 4 corners of the tunnel to get it all squared up and make sure we have our layout just how you want it. Um, and then after that we'll run some strings and finish driving all the rest of the ground posts down the length on both sides, and then we'll put bows on. So it'll look like a greenhouse by the end of the day.

We've leveled a pad as good as we could with our machines. 96 feet— well, we went a little longer than 96 feet and a little wider than 20. It's 21-foot tunnel. That little machine they have isn't working, isn't going to work. It's too cold. Josiah, what? We need a skilled operator. Car. We need somebody that can drive posts in. What is this? Hot chocolate with foam on top. Ooh, marshmallow. Here's your morning trucks. Thank you. He's a little concerned he might bend bend the poles?

Well, we have a few extra, so if we bend one, we'll, we'll stop.

Does the heater work good in this one? All right.

We started doing installations, um, earlier this year, and that's handy. Yeah, so if people—

we're gardeners and farmers, we're not necessarily builders. How many of these have you put together? Um, I don't really keep track, honestly. It's that many? Quite a few. How long did it take you to put together the first tunnel you ever did? Um, that's a good question. I mean, so we have a farm, and so we do a lot of installs ourselves. Yep. So first tunnel, I don't even know what I would consider because we grew up building tunnels, but You know, you definitely get faster over time. Get to learn a new grading skill today.

If the ground is just too hard to get them in, that's probably what's the—

it's gonna bend them.

Um, I'd be surprised if it bent it, but they're 14-gauge, uh, inch and 5/8, so.

See how the bucket curves as he goes down? That's the trick. Lift up on it. Ah, so he's pushing down. It gets unlevel and he'll lift it up on it. He can adjust it. There, that's perfect. Looking pretty level. That's not too bad, huh?

So far it's looking pretty good.

Just as fast as that other machine, probably maybe faster. Bending, that's bending. Just don't do that. It has enough flex, it looks like it's really bending, but Oh, it does. Okay. The Mini-X turned out to be too sketchy. Is that the word you used? And now this might be a real fast heat-up. They drove one by hand and they were like, yeah, let's go see if that machine has more power.

I think this is where the cylinder is.

Yeah. So that's— All right, you want to try it?

It's warmed up for sure.

They could really get moving if they get these poles in the ground. There's a lot of poles, 50 of them. 50, that'd be tough by hand. There it goes. Wow, that's more like it. Yeah, it is. You got one whole wall up. We do. Is this about as far as you think you'd be? We should have been farther along, but yeah, it's That's all right, it's because the machine—

we get— we had a little grief with that.

What's Joshua doing, Jacob?

Jonathan, he is installing the truss assemblies and all of the inner bows. So this is just for wind support, snow load, um, also trellising. Like if you're trellising tomatoes or cucumbers inside the tunnel, you can hang a lot of your trellising infrastructure off of the trusses.

It's gonna be handy. We had to add this to our— in our last one. What's the goal for putting these up?

Um, before lunch.

What time is it?

10:50? No, 11:15? 11:30?

What time's lunch?

1 o'clock, probably.

Working on the second wall poles. Are we just trying to get it to this green line?

Yeah, so basically the top of this green line is going to be where your baseboard is.

Okay. Jonathan saw what happened to us after her— or during the hurricane and reached out. How'd you know that we lost our high tunnel?

Well, you know, we— I guess we've been working together just a little bit back and forth on affiliate stuff with Abundance Plus, and yeah, so I've— I try to watch one of your videos every once in a while.

Yeah.

I knew the hurricane came through here, so I started watching your hurricane series. And, uh, so yeah, just—

did you see that? Did you see the high tunnel go down? I did.

Yeah, that was, that was sad.

Um, right.

So then I think I just shot you a text and said, hey, we'd love to help you out with a new tunnel.

Yeah, see, that was the best kind of help after the disaster. People just said, what do you need? Well, I don't know. I don't know what I need, and I don't know what you're willing to do. I would have never dared ask for a high tunnel. Yeah. So So man, Caleb's ready to go.

All right, let's go send it.

Let's hope this works because the pounding ain't doing it. Going right down. What you think?

I can't believe it.

And they installing it.

I know, it's so—

right, icing on the top.

I don't think this means so much. It's so wonderful. Can I get you guys some herbal tea?

I will take some.

Okay, hot, hot, obviously.

Nice to meet you.

Hey, Caleb and Jonathan.

Jonathan.

All right, we hit something very solid.

How important does it— is it to be exactly on 4 feet?

Um, at this point, not super critical. The first 3 sections we have wind bracing and we can wiggle it a little bit, but if you start getting too far off, that wind bracing is going to be at a steeper angle.

Okay.

Which a couple inches is probably not going to hurt anything at this point. We can move it 6 inches if we have to. It just might look a little bit weird, but going.

Why'd you put the arch on the end?

Just to feel like we're making progress. So we like to try to get them 3 feet in the ground, um, especially if you're on soft, you know, if it's soft soil, but it doesn't need to be 3 feet in the ground, especially if it's really hard. So we went through like—

and every single pole, yeah, 3 feet. We went through like 2 layers of rock on that one, so it's not coming out. Anytime. Well, you're taking care of us.

All the ground posts are in, so that's a huge hurdle. Honestly, that's where most of the like hiccups can come from. Yeah, like hitting solid rock. Or bending a post, or not too many hiccups in assembling the arches. Oh, this, this went pretty smoothly, honestly.

So when you noticed our high tunnel getting washed away, what compelled you to— I'm gonna get you guys a high tunnel.

Well, you know, we've always tried to take care of people in catastrophes. Like, one of the things that we've, we've offered since the very beginning with our high tunnels is a 50%, uh, 50% discount, or essentially a 50% warranty on any like storm damages. So, you know, we always try to help people out. We don't want to make profit off of people in their, in their time of trouble. And, um, yeah, as a company we try to systematically actually set aside some, some money for helping people out.

One good thing about this, Rebecca, is you have your trellises. I know, it's, it's trellis ready.

It's trellis ready, baby.

The other one was not. I had to put all those poles in later. How can you tell? It's tall. Could you go measure? It's making me nervous. It will fit. It's like 6 feet. This would be bad if our track loader won't get in here. Is this how we're gonna get material in and out? Well, we could use a little tractor. We could use, uh, Randolph's tractor in a pinch. Okay, you got 93 inches, and Grock says that—

I don't know what it's talking about.

So we got 10 inches clearance. Yeah, I know, a foot.

It's fine. Are you the owner of Farmer's Friend?

Okay, you are the only owner. You're the owner.

I should have kept that a secret. I didn't realize you guys didn't know that.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, I started.

So you're the boss man.

I grew up farming. My parents started farming when I was—

I'm impressed—

4 or 5 years old, but I was like really more mechanical. Taught myself to weld when I was like 12.

This is Jenna in the future. Yeah, I know what company he'll own.

I was always like, you know, building different pieces of equipment to make work easier.

How long did it take you to get profitable with this company?

It's, it's kind of gone up and down, you know? Like, yeah, sometimes it's profitable, sometimes it's like you're reinvesting a bunch and you're trying to figure things out. And then so it's—

so, so, so you had the craze of 2020.

That was good. We sold a lot, but we also almost went bankrupt because—

why?

Well, because we sold a lot, but we also, we backordered way more than we should have. So when ended up with like, you know, $2 million in back orders. You're coming to me like, I gotta have a tunnel.

Yeah, people are waiting.

It's gonna be like probably a 6 or 8 week lead time, and they're like, that's fine. So we took the money, we took the orders, everything, and then our suppliers are like, well, we don't know when we're gonna get material. And by the time we got around to getting material, it was twice as expensive as what we had budgeted for. So we lost money on a ton of orders.

So every time— so for every sale, you were actually losing money.

We were losing money. Our sales have been coming down every year. This year we've turned it back around and we're up.

How did you turn that around?

Marketing and just more strategic plan.

How do you market?

Uh, we do a lot of social media.

We're doing good because you can actually count how many you have left. I think we could do that from the beginning. How they doing, Joshua? They're doing pretty pretty good.

Just double-checking to see if your skid steer is going to fit through the door.

Ah, that's right.

If not, we'll have to talk about some other options. Yeah, I think it's going to be tall enough.

And what's the other end? Are both ends same thing?

Yeah, we're gonna do that, but we don't have to put these on. We can figure something else out. The zipper is 80 inches.

Whoa, 82 inches, isn't it? At the top. Well, can't we— I bet we can mess with the zipper if we modify it. Maybe we can look about raising it.

There's really no reason why we couldn't put taller zippers on this tunnel.

Yeah, I think most people would, would bring in material with a little tractor, wouldn't they?

Yeah, a lot of people would.

Yeah, not necessarily a skid steer.

When we build the frame, we'll go ahead and go taller on the top header. So if we can get some taller ones, we'll— okay, we'll send them to you.

Where do you get these manufactured?

In Kentucky.

Oh, do you? America?

Oh yeah, most of our stuff is— is, uh, we— most of our stuff we either manufactured ourselves or we get it from some, uh, Mennonite Amish companies up in Kentucky.

Jonah came up to me and he said, you are not gonna By that, you had to mean your mother filled us with tomatoes. Is she the crazy tomato lady? Yeah, she was. Okay, she told me she only needs 2 beds.

Only 2?

So there's 6 beds in here, so 4 other beds for cucumbers and beans and squash. She would just all go carnivore. Yes, let it be grass. Oh, y'all don't put it up? When we try to, it's kind of sketchy with us. Okay, okay, Jonathan, what's the impossible goal for this afternoon?

Oh boy, what time is sundown here?

Uh, it'll probably get dark about 5:30, 5:45.

We'll get the rest of the bows up, we'll get the wind bracing done, and, uh, we'll get the center purlin in.

Okay. Um, that's, that's not an impossible though. No, that's not impossible.

So I'm thinking—

yeah, keep going.

Um, we could definitely get the baseboard on. Um, so we have metal baseboard that goes all the way down both sides of the tunnel.

He— the help's still shaking his head, nodding his head, so we gotta, we gotta keep going. What else?

We'll probably start framing the end walls, uh, framing up the lumber.

There's still none.

Maybe he's just as—

and then we're gonna install the water line.

Comes with every tunnel, really. So you can, uh, put your screws and nuts and bolts and stuff in there.

Heck yeah.

And then pretty handy around the farm.

Heck yeah. Two more to go. This one and two more. Heck yeah. I guess we're having supper. Oh, what? Pizza. What, for real? Yeah. What's this step, Jonathan?

So we're framing up for our end walls, and we want to do this before we, um, put the channel, the aluminum channel on the end bows, because we have our brackets here that just get a lot harder to put on after you've put the channel for your plastic.

And this wood does not come in the kit, or the wood— the wood does not, um, but it's in your instructions. Yep. Every day is bring your kid to work day on the farm. That's right. Is it this cold in Nashville?

It was pretty cold. Okay, Josie, can you hand me the screw?

All right, there we go. What are y'all working on, Joshua?

Just putting up these bows. Close to the framing done. The next would be the baseboard over there and then the double wigwam channel.

All right, just a 3-man job? Yeah. Or can you pull it off with 2?

I mean, 2 tall enough people.

You got to be a little— just a little bit taller. Oh, you're putting the big long pole up there. It's pushing this 96-foot-long long metal pole. It's going down. It's like that level was made for this. Slightly modified, but kind of— Oh, you modified that for that? Now we're just putting up the center purlin, and so we have these two clamps to go around the top, and then a nut and bolt goes through the bottom to hold it in place. If you're anywhere near Nashville and you get one of these Farmer Friends tunnels. Also, get— even a day's drive away, get these guys to come. You don't need to be up there doing that, right? They know what they're doing. They're seriously going to put this up in 2 days. It would take you 4 full— you working full time. But let's be real, you're a homesteader, you got a lot of things going on. All right, cleaning up this This afternoon, evening. All right, what's the plan for the evening?

It was a successful day.

Yeah, it was.

Go home and, uh, drink some tea. Yeah, rest.

I was gonna say get some rest, but how you gonna rest with a 3, 2, and a 1-year-old?

It might be interesting. Hopefully they sleep better tonight.

You might be so tired you'll just pass out. What's the plan Sunday?

Get started early. We got ground, uh, or the baseboard board. Um, we got the channel for securing the plastic. We got to put that on along the sides and around the ends and, um, just a few of the last features. And yeah, we'll get the plastic on, get your roll-up sides working.

And all right, yeah, let's do it. Good, good people at Farmer's Friends. Good, good product. I've been using their product for years now, the silage tarp. Let me show you a product we just implemented this year from them. Weed fabric already custom holes. We put our strawberries in there. We just covered this up with straw to keep it frost protected. We will not have to weed those two beds this coming season. Oh my gosh, what a game changer! So excited they've gotten into the big high tunnel space. They also have small ones if you guys are interested in that. I'm gonna leave the link down for that down in the description, and go check them out. Wonderful people doing wonderful things with wonderful product. I couldn't think of a better place to get a high tunnel, a silage tarp, a weed fabric, and other tools. In the coming— high tunnel gonna be finished today, that's the goal. Joshua, you okay? Last night. Worked till what, 9:30?

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, what'd you get done last night?

Baseboard here on the other side, and we got one of the sides, uh, the double wiggle wire channel.

Nice.

And then we're gonna do this side, frame these corners out, and hopefully get the plastic on.

Hey, what's the impossible goal this morning? Uh, to accomplish and time to be out of here by noon. All right, so what do you need from us?

There's definitely things that, that we could get help on. Okay, right now I'm getting ready to start working on the quarter panels, which is, um, each 4 corners there's a piece of plastic that goes there to kind of act as a double barrier at the corner of your roll-up sides.

Okay, how many is too many?

I think we could use 2 more.

You could keep 2 people busy.

Probably start to maybe—

yeah, I might have an idea. 2 boys on that and take Lily and do the chores. You guys want a break from chores to work on the greenhouse? Well, we want to make sure these guys can finish by noon, and then we can move all the rocks we want after they're gone. Help? I'm even letting you get off chores. Did they say they needed help? Yeah, they need help. Is that what they said? Yeah, 2 people. They could use 2 people. So just get Annie. Annie was maybe wanting to come help. Uh, no, I'll do it. Ellie, will you help me do the chores? All of them. Getting your job is to keep him occupied, and then you guys come out in an hour or so. What's the problem this morning, Jonathan?

Well, we got to figure out if the skid steer can get through the doors.

We figured out It's a little too tall.

It's a little bit too tall, but I think it might be a little too wide as well.

Most growers don't need to get a skid steer in there though.

Yeah, it's not something we've—

what do you— what do they— what was the biggest— do they get machines in there?

Like, yeah, sure, maybe just like a small tractor.

Yeah, walked— a walking tractor behind.

Yeah, like a BCS or something like that. But hey, If you've got it, use it.

I know, right?

77.

What's your door?

It was 80, almost 80 inches, so that's not much.

74.

Oh, you know, your operator is in there trying to look backwards and to, to get it 3 inches, you know, with a 2 inch and a half of margin on either side. It's not realistic. Done up ripping it up.

You'd have to go real slow to get through it too, and I could I just realized we don't want a man door on the side because it needs to be able to roll up and down. Just today it's going to be 60. Over the weekend it was 30. Well, that's the difference between opening it all up and closing it all up, so it needs to all happen. Oh yeah, he's got— we got room.

What we're just gonna have to do, Justin, is just frame out your end walls to where you can have a 10-foot by—

um, I'll be honest with you, we don't need to get the machine through the other end.

Okay.

We never have had—

okay, somebody will leave the other end as it is.

And the other high tunnel had a smaller entrance on the other side too, and we never used it. You got to follow it through.

And then we'll do a 10-foot opening here. And what we're going to have to do today is we're just going to have to put this in there, and because we don't have anything else. Yeah, unless— are you going gonna need to get the machine in here like before spring, or is that more of a like in the spring once you go to muck it out type thing?

We need to get some steps in there. Okay, for the chickens to be on.

We could leave this one off and you guys could just put it on yourself after you get everything kind of ready to go in there. We can either get a custom one done like this, or you guys could look at maybe if you wanted to look into options like fabricating like a sliding door. I mean, none of this is like, you know, even like your handyman guy could just come in here and just, you know, get a track door set up from Lowe's or Home Depot and just do like a hanging kind of like you have on your barn or something like that.

Let's call the smiley one. She offered yesterday. Seemed like she wanted to come. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic— Call her and text her. Smiley one incoming. I cannot be in two places at once, as much as I want to be here. I'm gonna leave you guys. We're gonna leave the town. That's the best I got. Check-in, 3 hours to go. How you doing?

We're probably 30 minutes away from getting ready to— from starting to put plastic on.

So you're ahead of time.

I think we're doing good.

Nice. Jonah, what's your duty? What is your duty right now? What are you doing? Seems crazy. Explain what you're doing. I don't know. You don't know? Joshua, what's he doing?

He's just making the corner panel frame. Okay, the wiggle wire goes through there. We have the corner panels, and that just protects when you have your roll-up side. That protects from the wind. Okay, uh, coming in, and, uh It's a nice look.

All right, yeah, so the plastic will get pinned down into this slot with what you call wiggle wire. What's your duty? I have no idea what this is. Caleb, it's 9:15. You're on pace for the 12 o'clock goal? Um, I believe so, honestly. Nice. Yeah. They're getting some plastic up. I got you the smiley one. Oh sweet. Annie, okay, that she'll fill in while the boys are eating brunch.

The first 4 feet on the corners, you have this overlapping section. Okay, so this, this is a fixed piece, and then the roll-up side rolls up, and then your lock wire is going in right there.

Correct. What y'all doing?

We're on the home stretch. Just got to put both ends on. Yeah, that has the door panels for your access, your entry. And then I think we're pulling plastic over and then we're getting them on the road.

Wow. How long of a drive y'all got today?

Uh, 6 and a half hours.

This is a gigantic piece of plastic. How long is it? How long is it for a 96-foot tunnel? How long is the Plastic.

This one's probably 103.

Now wait, how did you know to cut right there?

Um, well, we just need like, oh, 2 or 3 feet of extra on either end.

You're at 1 hour and 10 minutes. You got this.

I think it's gonna look a whole lot different in an hour and 10 minutes at least.

Okay, so he's gonna crawl over, is that right?

Yeah.

Now this isn't how we would normally recommend people doing it, but how do you recommend it?

Well, we would take some ropes and throw them over and then take like a tennis ball or something, bunch it around the plastic, and try to pull it over.

Whoa, he's climbing! There used to be a thin, healthy guy, young guy. Greenhouse plastic is going up. Look at that! It's going up. Dang, dang. Oh, come on now, come on, you got this, come on. Oh, there it is. Nice. Comes in handy being Tarzan. There it is.

You saw how much how hard it was for experts.

Yeah, well, he's got a technique. Yeah, he does, for people.

Oh, does he?

Yeah, you, you, you toss the rope over. That's how you're supposed to do it, folks. Get a ladder, climb up it. Bring back memories of your old job, Annie.

Yeah, I want to tell them about these guys.

What do you got Gideon doing?

He's just gonna spread this out because Next step is to anchor it down on the double wiggle wire channel.

All right, now do one next to it and do it all the way across. Okay, there you go. You're doing the lower level, I'm doing that. No, the lower level is done. All right, I like it. Put me to work, Jonathan. You look forward to the day when your kids put you to work? Yeah, yeah, take over. Oh yeah, you ever let your little brother Boss around? Every once in a while. Oh, Jonathan, we got 5 minutes.

We are close.

That's indicative of an impossible goal. Good job, bud. You're still gonna make extraordinary things happen. Annie, what are they doing on this?

Uh, So the wiggle wire, I did this side and you can see that part that's sticking up right there. I lost my thumb strength.

Uh-oh.

Because that, that last bit of tension is really strong.

Look, Josh is like shaking.

Yeah.

Yeah. Fingers.

He's had more practice than I have.

It's just, you just build up bigger Strength, because like, yeah.

How'd you get up there in the first place? Ladder. Okay.

Yeah, I had to stand on it like that.

Oh wow, Employee of the Month right there.

Oh, hear that, Austin?

Austin, hey, it's not hard to beat him this month. He's been gone 3 of the week. Yeah, they are fixing to get done. I know we're gonna go and get some shots in. We really want it to look like that. We're about to put that on our bed.

I hate that we're leaving you with an unfinished—

well, here we're gonna have to do a custom.

Yeah, because of the skid steer situation, which was an unknown variable coming into this. My thought is if you just need to get mulch in there like right away to get the chickens, you could just do that and then you could put this door panel on. It'll still fit just like the other end, but when you go to get— when you need to get the skid steer back in, um, you'll just have to cut out the, the middle part. And then that's when we'll have to figure out whether you want to do like a sliding door or I'll look into seeing if it's reasonable for us to get a custom wider, taller one.

Sounds good.

As far as the roll sides, it's, it's real simple, um, just a geared hand crank. Um, surprisingly, this actually ended up pretty straight because we were fighting the wind, and, and if you don't get it attached perfectly straight without a lot of wrinkles, then it starts to get real— when you roll it up, it'll, it'll get kind So demo this. So it looks pretty straight, all things considered.

What, it's that easy? Yeah, Rebecca could come out here and do this.

Oh yeah. And, uh, the other thing I'll mention, I put it in the center, but if you need a little bit more, uh, torque, you can put it to this outer position. Um, for, for a 96-footer, you may want to put it in the, in the outer position, but you can just get a feel for it.

We'll have to send you some salsa at the end of this season.

Some, some what?

Salsa.

Salsa, yeah, that'd be awesome.

Looks good, Josiah. Hey, you're just in time for the celebration. Yeah, iced tea. Jonathan has shown us this really cool way to get the sides up and down. We're gonna see what else is cool about this thing that we might not notice right away. Come get you some herbal tea, Joshua. Jonah can only hold out so long. Is that for me? Yes, sir. Thank you. Good stuff. Well, that's nice.

So this is our brand new Guardian high tunnel, and this is the first time I've built a 96-foot long one, so it's, it's a, it's a large tunnel It's beautiful. This is, uh, the strongest structure that we've manufactured so far. All of the bow material is 1 5/8 diameter, 14 gauge, so it's super durable. And then also with all of the truss systems on every bow, this thing can withstand a lot of wind and, and snow load. So it's a good strong structure. Also one of the nice features about it is the, the straight sidewalls, so So, you know, you have a lot of clearance, head clearance all the way right up against the wall. So you don't have bows kind of arching in on you here. And then also you got, you have a lot of cross ventilation capabilities because when you roll the sides all the way up to the top, you have, you know, 6 feet of clearance across for ventilation. So, metal baseboard around the perimeter so you So you don't have to worry about that rotting out and having to replace it. And, um, it's just a good solid structure. These are literally launching on our website tomorrow. So by the time the video comes out, they will be available for purchase. And our kits include everything, um, for the structure. The end walls, we have a couple of different options, so they kind of come separate. Um, and we do free shipping anywhere in the US. US.

That is Farmer Friends. You can check out that website. I'm going to leave the link for it down in the description. Goodbye.

Thank you.

Be dangerous. Yeah, well, bye Caleb. Thanks. Thank you. Your hard work last night. Yeah. Best of luck with the business.

Thank you.

I'm reading.

May you multiply. We're here to be the friend farmers and homesteaders. Yeah. Zig Ziglar said, uh, if you want friends, you got to be be a friend.

That's right.

So you're going to be a friend. You're going to get many friends.

Yeah, we have, you know, we have sold over 12,000 high tunnels in the last, um, since 2016 when we started. So we've—

how many?

Over 12,000.

Heck yeah! After the high tunnel and after we worked up all the fallen trees, lined up the branches we, we bit the bullet and we rented a wood chipper, a wood chipper to chip up these branches into wood chips so that we could use it for deep bedding. The cows add their manure and urine and that turns into compost. We can put it back out on the field. We'll spread some of these wood chips out where, where we've lost soil, where, where we've lost topsoil, where sand has washed up on the soil. We'll put those wood chips down and then the cows will come. We'll hay bomb that and rebuild that. Hey, there's electric Mini X. It's a little tiny Mini X. There it is, Josiah, your new best friend. Vermeer, good brand. He said this is a $40,000 model. That's what's interesting about it. I think we can get a ball hitch like that for the track loader. Yeah, just turn the key. All right, try your best not to hit this. This is like an e-stop. If you hit it, it will shut the machine off. It's like a safety switch. Hey, we got us a wood chipper! The guy said go get them, we're gonna go get them. Does that machine feel heavy on there? Yeah, it's not as big of a machine as I thought. That's good and bad. Good because maybe it won't kill us as quickly. Bad is it may not get the work done as quickly as we were thinking. Home sweet home. All right, drop yourself off here. You get the Mini X warming up, get the bucket switched out. That's how we're gonna stay safe. I have no idea how long this is going to take. Hopefully not long. We want to chip it all in a day if we can. Got to lift up the stand. I just put up the stands. Okay, one reason I got insurance on this thing— tree accidentally falls on it or it gets crushed, max liability is $500. Oh boy, I didn't ask how to get open. How do I open this? Are you serious? All right, you better stick around and Help me then. This is a safety shut off, so if some reason you were to get dragged in there, we need an emergency shut off. What kind of branches you reckon this is? Small, medium, or large? You kind of have to save the largest. Save the largest, set them aside or something, and we'll have to set them on a different setting. Okay, okay, it's on medium. Where are we gonna have the wood chips go? It's not moving. Shouldn't that thing be spinning? It's stuck in there. It's going now. We got wood chips. I'm going to need some gear. Looks like you could use an assistant. We made our own wood chips. I know, turned a problem into a solution. Watching this, I'm like, is that a honeybee? Are any bears? They're leaving somewhere out on this warm day. These are great wood chips too. They are, they're fine. We're learning the nuances of this thing. Thing. And the order of work— it's not going to do naughty things. Well, we didn't even try that big one. It's not going to do that. It's a walnut. The plants that these wood chips will end up in that aren't going to really like the walnuts anyway. This brumbly stuff, it's better just to— so hard to get it to go in. Danger of tangling.

I'm so scared.

We're just gonna— let's just burn pile and then we'll have ashes.

Yeah.

Which is also good for the soil. We can spread it.

Yeah, we also need to get the chickens down here, Justin.

Yeah, let me think about that because I'm also thinking about putting them in a high tunnel slash getting them ready for a garden. Well, you know, it might be that we can have a little run. Yeah, get them to the high tunnel.

I was thinking that.

And they go in the high tunnel at night. We put their feed and water out in the run. You have all that And then we probably have 4 times that over there, and then we have some up there. Should probably stop talking and start doing work.

How many hours did this take? Well, you are—

that's a good point. It's 11:30.

Well, maybe—

what time did I start? 10:30. 1 hour. If I work till dark—

he's like, come on!

That's like he's rushing us. That's like, I got 5 and a half hours, babe. Okay, happy hour remembered the hitch this time. Pile number 2, it's all this stuff we worked up just recently. Yeah, see all that tangly stuff's fine in the burn pile. The stumpy stuff is not going to go through like that one. I feel like we picked up speed on that one. A lot of that Josiah was just able to load. Uh, that was sort of the end of us chainsawing, and we were, you know, this was the last stuff we worked up, and I think we had figured it out by then how to get it ready for the machine. Where we're about to go is the most brush ever, and that's where we first started, so I doubt it's that ready for the machine. But we get in this groove where I de-limb things, not efficient to run the big, big, big stuff, and that's the hardwoods right there. So we just save it for firewood. We don't have to split that. Super efficient for firewood production. We get the poplars and run them through though if they're big, but that one was a little bit too big because poplar is not that great of a firewood. I am not going that way. I don't want to risk it. As much as I hate to drive through my pasture, we're going to make up for it with all these wood chips. So I'm just gonna drive over and out. Remember how I said we're about to go to where we first started working things out? Yeah, this is not organized. It's not ready for a wood chipper. That stuff doesn't go in. We could have had that separated. There's a lot of knot— there's a lot of straggly stuff that could have just been put in a burn pile. This could be our— oh, he's gonna have to sort this. This stuff is not sorted. Did you know that? Okay, you're gonna start right here? Yeah, most of this ain't even wood chippable. I got it pulled up. You can sift through that pretty quickly though, I think. One more pile down. This is taking longer, but we are getting with it. It's 1:45. It's dark around 5:30. Let's just say 5:45. Let's say it's 4 hours. We can get this done today. We've got one more pile in what we call the 2 acres where the group— youth group is. I think it's quite possible to get in one day. If not, it's double the cost. We go from $500 to another $500. Let's get it done. Okay, $240. I moved supper back to 6. For maybe a quarter of it. Although the pile does get smaller, I think, as we go. We got to reposition. Almost— almost 6-foot pile of mulch. That's probably a $200-$300 pile of mulch if we were to have to buy it. Paid $500 to rent this machine. Maybe we'll get Penadys, did we just get $3,000 worth of mulch for $500? 3:15. Sun is up too far from the mountain. It feels good on me though right now. It's actually hot. Can you even hear me? It's so loud. It's not quite as much as I thought we were going to have to copious amounts. A lot of this we're gonna have to save for winter bedding, which is fine because then that just gets broke down into compost and then spread out ready to go, as opposed to just putting it with chips straight up. There's a whole set of logs right there that we're just gonna go around. That's good news and bad news. Bad news is not material we can grind, but good news is the less we have to do. And we're looking from just here to here, and there's a lot of logs right right there. We don't have a dump truck, we do have a track loader. So one day at a time, just start hauling rocks. It stopped spitting stuff out. I straightened the chute, I pulled stuff out of the chute, we put it in reverse. We've got a lot of the wood chips out. Hopefully it's not clogged. Clogged, guys. Can't penetrate that. I mean, I don't know, it looks like it's on there so hard the metal is indented. Whoa, are we moving it or did we break something? We moved it! We're getting in there now. That may not be the trap to getting in there, and it may— it may be a big old mess. We can't handle. All right, well, Jonah is going to take the truck. He's got a shindig tonight. They said to get the jack off, so you have to have it on the truck. Oh, we could— we could hold it up with the tractor just to get the jack. Let's do that since the tractor's right there. We slick the jack in here and then put it in here and jack it up like crazy. What we did there was not not necessary. All right, come see if you can't help me figure out what he's talking about. See anything in there? Let's see if our YouTube guy gets her chute. Because the wheel turns this way rather than this way. Okay, I'm working on getting this chute off. One more bolt. Gotten it off and cleared. We just don't know how to get it back on. You figuring something out? What was that, an hour and a half just that? 2 hours? We did it! We're mechanical! We worked till absolutely dark. We couldn't see anything anymore. It's supper time. Jonah finished the cart. I don't know if that happened today though, the training, but the cart's finished. Would have gotten to our goal, I believe, had we not had that— it was probably an hour and a half fixing that thing. I wonder if they'll give me an hour and a half extension on the rental. First light, we'll have to get up and start working this at first light. Happy day. It's dark and early. It sure isn't bright and early. I'm hoping Jonah had the walkie-talkie in the Car. We've rented a wood chipper. It's $500 for a day. That means we need to get it in by 10 o'clock. It's 6:30. That's 3 hours of work. That's really pushing it. Uh-huh, practically a full moon. We could almost work by the light of the moon. See if that walkie-talkie's in the truck. We need the truck anyway. They cleaned out the truck nicely anyway. I don't know where this is. I set it down because it was dead. It's only good for a couple of hours. Hey, you know where the walkie-talkie is? Should be down there. You for sure saw it when you cleaned it up? Because I did not see it. Yes, I saw it. We had the problem last night where the chute got clogged up. And that delayed us probably an hour and a half. I feel like we'd be having a leisure morning this morning if that had not happened. How's that? Welcome to my office. You like that sound? Rushing creek. It's a beautiful office. I'm fortunate to have this kind of office. Job site's lit. Shoot, if I'd have known, we could have lit it that that well. We might have started a little earlier, which I don't know how well we can see in here. Y'all can't see it, but I can see it. Camera doesn't see as good as I do. If I had to estimate, we probably have 3 and a half hours of work. We're aiming for the impossible, right? Let's do that. Many extras warming up, wood chipper is warming up. Let's start this fall. And we have a pile taller than myself. Tony's figuring out how to load the brambly stuff too. Just shove it in and then pick up another pile and shove that in. That's, uh, working-ish. I feel like it's the 20% though. You know the 80/20 rule where you get 80% of your results from 20% of the effort? It's flip-flop that. We do this, it's hard on the machines, hard on that machine, it's not as fast, and I have to sit here and hold the go button. Kind of hoping you were renting like an industrial. Is this not the industrial? This is what you probably saw the other day. Yeah, you just load the stuff right into it, like in this hole. That's all the top, so you're probably talking about a tub grinder. Let's hook it up. We've got a really nice pile over in the 2 acres, stacked perfect. I gotta leave in 15 minutes. Hopefully I'm not making a mistake. And I think we could work up this other pile in an hour. That was a pretty big pile, right? I went fast though. That's how we have to stack it. It only gave us this little pile. Small. That's maybe half a winter for a pig port. What do you think? If we leave now, we'll, we'll get back on their time. There's that brush, but based on that performance, that's going to be so little brush. That's gonna be so little wood chips, and it's just not worth it because if we're late, it might as well rent it for a whole— yeah, they could charge us for a whole nother day. We aim for the impossible, and impossible things are happening. We're like not even gonna be late. Fast forward to today, early January 2025. I'm walking our new high tunnel. It's so much warmer than the outside. It's twice as long as the old one, and we've got chickens set up on it. They're happy as can be. They're dry, they're warmer, their water is less likely to freeze. You can hear them, they're laying eggs even in the winter. They're happy about it. The high tunnel used to be right here. It was half the length. We have graded it. This is— this is— this was a cliff, but that's— that's this is what our future looks like. All down through there, it's probably 6, 7, 8-foot cliff. You can see the markings of the property line where the creek was, but the creek has to stay where it is. So it stays, and we work with nature, and we'll just bevel down to it to salvage some pasture over here. This is a nook and cranny farm. We value our pasture, and we need as much as we can get. Let's cut down through the pole barn. We have concrete footers on this pole barn now. We still have overhanging concrete. We're gonna cut that or chisel it. We have like a, an electric chisel, or we'll rent a concrete saw and we'll, we'll break that down. But there's going to be an order to things. We're going to need to finish this retaining wall. We've done a lot hot. Look at all these rocks we've gathered from the farm. See this retaining wall going up? That's so that we can bring some of that— a lot of that loose material. We'll show you in a minute and bring it and pile it in here and build this back up on a slight slope. And I think all we lack is just more rocks here. The boys just keep gradually, slowly bringing rocks off the mountain. I'm telling them I think we can break up this concrete and make that part of the wall too, the concrete that dropped in. The Great Wall of Burrow Holler. And we're just doing with what we can. You know, graders have offered $150, $200 for cement blocks. Hurricane recovery was not in the budget. Recovering from our house build was in the budget. We're doing this as frugally as possible. And with what we have. We're missing a bridge, but in order to get the bridge— I think the bridge would stand in the way of getting material back in here. And then once that's done, which is a lot of material, once that material is in— and guys, we could use a dump truck. We don't have a dump truck. Could we rent one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we may. That may make sense. We rented a wood chipper. There was no way around that. We've smoothed this out. We We didn't lose land here, which was good. Just rocks, as you can see, have raised up on this shore. And this is where we're going to use those wood chips to spread them out on top of the sand and then hay bomb— feed hay on this over this winter with the youth group. It'll be good because it's close to the house, it's close to the water. It'll be a nice winter rest to hay bomb problem right here. Is that a deep end? That looks kind of deep. We're gonna have a cold plunge right there. You see all this material we've piled up? It's huge. It's massive. We've got a track loader. We're gonna do one bucket at a time. Have the boys work in the morning. They'd rather do that than do a project with me. How long would it take to move a pile like that? I mean, if it's crazy, we'll go rent a dump truck, but if it's not too bad, just slow and steady wins the race. Found a couple our buckets. Did get $3,500 from FEMA. That'll be most of— if we get a culvert bridge, two 48-inch pipes set next to each other, stone in between them, and then we grade on either side. I like the culvert idea because, you know, it's not this crazy structural bridge, concrete, metal poles. If it gets washed out again, it's something we can fix with our machines. If we were to do something fancier and it got washed away, it's going to be more difficult. So next time we would be able to repair this a lot quicker. That's coming 2025. I'm very confident that's going to be picked up. We're gonna have Lily's horse ring over there. The creek's in a new spot now. It goes down through here instead of over and out, so it's gonna provide a good separation. You know, Lily's kind of operation can be over there with her horse. We're gonna have start— oh look, we've kind of started. There's some some wood chips spread here. I just turn into soil over time, especially if you add to it and, um, hay. That'll break down incredibly well. This is our soccer field. Oh, that's it. Goal: end of 2025, being playing, playing soccer on this field. Fall, that means some grass would be growing. That's tight, and we're counting on nature, but hey, what do I say? Aim for the impossible and extraordinary things will happen. We're not just gonna rebuild, we're rebuilding better. Can't wait for you all to see it. Thanks for joining this journey. Let's do it together.