You Can’t Buy This | Day 7 Surviving off the Land

Shabbat shalom! Happy Sabbath. Happy day. Happy seventh day living off the land. This is different. The sun is barely up, they're already up playing ping pong. Hey, why are you up playing ping pong so early?

It's literally 7:30.

John, are they your hot foot? Your buddies have been out of town and are back. Came super early this morning. By the way, a hot foot is a wooden match lit in between the teenager's toe in the morning when they won't get up. You get about, what, 3 seconds to get up once that's lit. Saturday is our zero day. I normally do not vlog, but I am doing this 10 Days Living Off the Land Challenge, and then we're going to take a break for vacation, so I don't mind vlogging every day. Oops, shouldn't have set it up there on the counter. I'm pretty sure I saw Austin doing the chores this morning. I forgot they like to do chores on, on Saturday. Gives us a break and gives them some farm food. So, Trey, we let them have the farm food of the day. Here they come.

Hey, good morning!

Hey, good morning! Every day is bring your kid to work day on the homestead. You even got a little hay in there for him.

Well, we use that for the chickens, but there's extra.

Oh, okay.

That should keep him warm though.

I thought you were bundled up in hay. I thought you were bundled up in hay. Are you a homesteader? He looked to you, Mom.

Oh yeah, he's like, I don't know, am I?

I realized I gave you guys no information on the winter setup, so I'm gonna come make sure you get all the information. You getting the milk supplies?

Yeah, you— Chores are much slower with a baby though.

Oh yeah. What chores are the baby?

Yeah.

The baby's the chore. Just activities for the baby.

That's true. That's a good point.

You gotta look at it that way. Chores are the baby. Let's store it here. Let's store our batteries in here. Let's see if this is working. Should be blinking green. We connect these things. Hot dog! All it needed was a battery charge. And that is how you store an Energizer for the winter. Charge the batteries. Let's put it somewhere dark. That'll do. So I never told Austin and Ashley the nuances of winter chores. I think they're figuring it out. He is our editor. So I think he's seen some of these videos where we're doing the winter chores. Hey, I realized I didn't tell you anything about the winter nuances. How many hay bales do you feed the sheep? One. That's good. And then 3 to the cows. That's good. Cows got water. Your heater didn't work because it's not plugged in. It's broke up enough that they can drink it. I knew that the videographer and editor also wants to homestead. Jack of all trades. Yeah. On this 7th day, let's talk about the 7th reason you might grow your own food, and that would be uniqueness. Grow things that you couldn't otherwise buy. Gosh, that's one of our major reasons, because we're in it for health. There's a lot of things you can't buy. Basically, you can't buy a grass-fed lamb, certainly that hadn't been dewormed or vaccinated or antibiotics. So we grow it ourselves. We have a ram, we— and these are all our ewes. These are mama sheep and People will come here, they'll be tender souls. They'll say, are you gonna eat these? And you know, they don't want us to eat these. They're so cute, right? They're so lovable, these little lambs. Something special about them. I put them at ease. I say, no, we're not gonna eat these. We're gonna eat their babies. So they're gonna start having babies actually pretty soon. We'll probably come home from vacation with several, and then we'll eat those babies in the fall. 100% grass-fed, no ridiculous injected into them. You can't buy it. And if you could, we bought a grass-fed leg once, it was like $125. We eat 2, can't do $125 dinner. $125 dinner, so we drive like— staying warm up there?

I'm trying.

It's a cold one this morning. So I don't know how long the vlog's gonna be today. It is our off day and we are gonna take it easy. It's not gonna be exciting stuff, it's gonna be boring. I'm here helping them largely to get y'all some content. They are very capable of figuring things out. You wouldn't know where the apple cider vinegar is. I didn't tell him, so that's my fault. He put apple cider vinegar to the cows as a help. Like, okay, where are you gonna buy that unless you're lucky enough to live next to Full Circle Farm in Florida? Do you live near there? Within a half hour, maybe even an hour? Don't get a dairy cow, just go to Full Circle Farm. They're not going to shoot them up, they're going to be grass-fed. I think they might even be A2A2. They feed them apple cider vinegar. Did you already give her RC Gold? Yeah, okay. Early on in our homestead journey, I followed my own advice I give people now. You want to start homesteading, you can start now by just getting whole foods that you could have grown. So Rebecca and I were getting raw milk. Remember when we were buying raw milk? How much was it? $14 a gallon. That was 10 years ago, right? Why are you laughing? We bought, we bought a half gallon for $10. Yeah, so it'd be $20, $25 now. Some of you are laughing because you think that's expensive. He was laughing because that was cheap, and it is. I mean, $25 a gallon wouldn't be unreasonable. I know, because the amount of work that goes into it— it is A2-A2 genetics, same beta casein that's in like human milk, goat milk, so it's easier to digest. 100% grass-fed. In the winter when there is no grass, well, they get organic alfalfa as they get milked. They get 100% unsprayed hay, rotationally grazed, mineralized, and not just some janky mineralized. I've seen grass-fed programs give those— give the cows that mineral block that you can buy. It's got all kinds of junk in it, and they may be looking for one kind of mineral and overeat on the other minerals trying to get the one. So it's bad news. And of course, no antibiotics, no vaccines, no dewormers. You can't buy that. You just can't. I told them they can't buy this unless of course they live next to Full Circle Farm. I don't know, unless it's next door, it's too far for us.

I like to stay home.

Yeah, we like to stay home.

I want to be home. I don't want to— yeah, be driving everywhere. And I mean, I enjoy being home.

And I mean, $25 a gallon, and we really do need 3 gallons, or a gallon, uh, we probably need a good 2 gallons a day. Oh no, it's empty. I called them yesterday. We might have an issue with our thermocoupler. I need to troubleshoot more. Not today, not today. Today is a zero day. That means chores and nothing else. Now let's look at chickens and pigs and talk about what's difficult to source about them. Why does this happen? That's frozen because power strip got turned off. I'm about to come tape this down. Austin's gonna get them a, a waterer. The thing about these chickens— well, what's happening right now, the bird flu— we're having crazy egg shortages, and that seems to be more and more common these days. And so there's egg shortages, and then when they are available, they're expensive. We've got no egg shortages here, even in the winter. Order some chicks now, McMurray Hatchery. Rhode Island Red, some breed like that, egg-laying breed. Have them delivered in the spring. Order them now for spring delivery. Get a dozen. Go ahead and start build— get Homestead Builds at homesteadbuilds.com. Build the Chickshaw Mini Me. It'll hold up to 24 chickens, just fine for 12. Get a big tote. Oh, we always have instructions for this in Homestead Builds. Get a big tote, put down wood shavings, a little feeder, a little water. A little water, you can get that stuff at Tractor Supply. A Premier One Hoverer brooder. Don't use a heat lamp, that could cause a fire, especially if we're going to put these chickens in your house, which we're going to recommend next. Um, get you some new, new Country Organic starter feed. You're ready for your chicks. And once your chicks get here in the spring, you have 3 weeks that they're inside to build the Chickshaw Mini-Me, or, you know, whatever. Get your Premier One electric net. With Energizer. I was going to show you the Energizer, but it's way outside the— okay, get the book The Rooted Life. I'm not partial to it or anything since I wrote it. I mean, so The Rooted Life Homestead Builds, you're set for all the details. Don't overcomplicate things. Go right now, McMurray Hatchery, order the Rhode Island Reds or the Black Australorp or the, uh, I really like the Red Stars. They're a hybrid breed. Black Stars. They'll produce a lot of eggs. So get you some Red Stars or Black Stars if you don't plan on breeding. One of the best stories I ever heard was Paul Grieve over at Primal Pastures. They were all sitting around watching football, normal people in California, and they said, you know what, we ought to start growing our— we, yeah, we gotta grow some of our own chickens. And they were just kind of thinking about it, you know, just throwing it out there, just being crazy. Well, commercial break came And I don't forget if it was Paul or his brother went off, he ordered some chicks. He came back in, he said, well, the chicks will be here in 3 weeks. They said, what? We don't know what we're doing. They knew nothing. Well, they had 3 weeks to figure it out. Oh, that's the best. That's the best way. That's the best way. Do something, even if it's wrong. Order the chicks. You'll figure it out. You'll have to. What am I doing? Gosh, I love you guys. I love you guys out here on my rest day. I have people doing my chores for us today. Yeah, that's frozen too because it's not plugged in. Interesting story about pork. We go to Whole Foods, we get some of our supplemental groceries there. We get organic bacon. I mean, there's only so much bacon on a pig. See, bacon comes from the stomach, okay? It's only maybe, maybe 10% of all the pig. But you notice you can only get organic bacon. There's not any organic sausage, let alone a Boston butt or pork Where is that stuff going? I had to make a movie about that. Where's all the other organic porks going? Pork going to get the bacon. But anyway, you can't get an organic Boston butt or ham or whatever, certainly not shot up with all kinds of ridiculousness. Dagum, don't lean that T-post against them. Ah, so here you are. I mean, lard, pork rinds, pork rinds. Maybe I should start a company because there's no organic pork rinds. I don't even think there's non-GMO pork rinds. I was convinced for the longest time that, hey, we could just buy our produce. Even at Whole Foods, you can get organic produce. You can't get organic pork, grass-fed lamb, raw milk. Uh, so let's focus on those things. But the more that we look into it, especially with this thing called appeal, they're putting like this wax even on organics. To preserve the fruits and vegetables longer. We just learned that because they don't vine ripen tomatoes, you lose like 85% of its nutrients by the time it gets to your plate. So even in a way, you can't grow— you can't buy these vegetables. So we're on a health journey, so we need superior health foods. We got to grow it ourselves. All right, let's get inside. It's very cold. I went inside and told beautiful one about this She thinks that power strip might be tripping. Trips again. We can't run them both, and it's only gonna get to like 35 today, so we got to get those going or we're gonna be hauling water to the pigs. We can put a waterer in the chickens, that's not a big deal. Thinking we might not be able to put 2 heaters on one outlet. Is it the power strip going, and I could just do a different power strip? Or should I plug it into a whole nother outlet? Testing the outdoor outlet there. We got it working. Let's try this first before we go running another drop cord, because we have to run a drop cord from here all the way out there. I'm gonna see if I've got this other power strip. This yellow power strip was buried in the brooder. I'm kind of wondering, is there maybe some debris in the outlets and it's tripping. It's on a power strip and we've been turning them on at the same time. The trough heaters are on the same cycle. I think they cycle. I don't think it's continuous heat. So I'm going to leave that one plugged in for a second and then plug in the next one, and maybe they'll be on a different cycle. So far so good. No matter what day it is, if your animals are out of water You gotta take care of it. See, it's got a bunch of crud in there. I mean, maybe that's a— where are y'all going on this cold day? The lake. What? To the lake. Geez. I like it when their friends come over, it gets them up in the morning. This morning, some eggs from the land. I suddenly like eggs under easy. So I'm just gonna barely cook those. All right, this egg's still clucking.

Oh yeah, it's not good to have the whites raw.

Really?

Yes, the yolk you want raw.

I'll have to sit over here. You'd think the apron-wearing permaculture chicken ninja master would know how to cook an over-under easy egg, but like I said, I just started liking them.

Well, one, it's not even on the burner.

Oh yeah. What is that, half a tablespoon? Not everybody's got the instinct, honey. Oh, you'll get it. Supposed to let— not crush the yolk because then all the white around it and underneath it gets cooked.

So then you just kind of do that and let the other white cook.

The jiggly whites from my first attempt. Yeah, that's pretty gross.

That's so gross.

Sorry, no tripod today. Too much work. We're just carrying the camera. We're gonna get some resemblance of a rest day today. Before we can fully just relax and rest and read a book, this has got to be working. Let's check it. Okay, it went off. Alrighty, so it had nothing to do with dirt in this one, and we're just— we're just We're just screwed. The breaker is just— it's just too much. Austin did get the chickens a water, but we got to get these pigs to water. I don't think it's long enough to get us all the way there. It's not. All right, running a farm is a 7-day-a-week work ethic. I think we're as good as anybody for taking it easy on day a week, you know, setting up as much as we can. There's two, two cords here. I only need one. Oh, okay. Set up as much as we can on Friday. We just do the chores on Saturday. And now even we've worked out an arrangement. It's cool to have community. Like, Austin and Ashley can do the chores on Saturday, we get a rest. They get some of the farm— they get the farm produce that day. Everybody loves it. The literal 8, 19 years before we had that, and even now, you know, if something goes down like the waters are freezing, I gotta get up and deal with it. I think where I got that 7-day work ethic was from my time Well, two things. From my time in Honduras working at an orphanage, 400 kids, only 14 workers, and the kids needed to eat every day. Okay, and I worked on the farm there, um, one of my first legit farm experiences. It was 7 days, it really was. And there, because it's kids and they're so understaffed Sometimes it was more work on their rest day. They, they would do Sunday. Hopefully this outlet is not on the same breaker or we're gonna have the exact same problem. So worked real hard there for 3 months. We did the whole 90-day visa type of thing in Honduras. The other place was when we were just hard up, man. I mean, it was, it was it was tough when we first got it started. You know, right before we discovered YouTube, we were— to survive, we were dumpster diving. We were getting the throw-out food from the co-op and eating what we could of it, building meals around that, growing our food, building meals around that. The food from the co-op, what we couldn't eat, we'd feed to the animals. Then when we started vlogging, there was Casey Neistat. Daily vlogging was a thing. We're like, let's do it. Well, we just never stopped. Now, we did stop the 7-day vlogging. I think in the end that's not going to be sustainable. You got to take a rest. Should be working. I wish there were a light on this or something, but this is solid and that nipple is not going to work unless this water heats up. Let's give that— they'll be okay, I don't know, for a couple more hours. And if that doesn't melt it and it doesn't work, we're getting water to the pigs. But that early-on entrepreneur work ethic, and we got traction, and just being so thankful and happy in that, and, you know, letting that fire— because often, as I'm— as the man, I was worried about where our next meal was going to come from. I mean, we were even racking up credit card debt, and it was like, I'm not getting any more credit cards. We're gonna have to sell a portion of farm if something doesn't fly. So we went all in on this business. We got some traction with our Permaculture Chickens Kickstarter, and it was— we discovered vlogging, and it was off to the races. Probably worked every day for 2 years. Took me a while to settle. Well, what does Zig Ziglar say? He gives you the 4 S's: surviving, stability. Once you start getting to that stability, then you move into success. But it's hard once you get into stability to realize, okay, I'm not surviving anymore, I can rest. And today, the most productive thing I can do is rest. I got a good book, found it at the library for 25 cents. Hey, what else would prepare you for a 7-day work lifestyle? Have some kids. You're gonna have some Little kids, might as well get a farm because you're working anyway. We gotta get water to these pigs if their heater's just not working and thawing it out. Okay, here's, here's one way we can know. Well, let's see if it's got the tripod. Okay, all right, that stalled out. All right, that power's still on. That line hasn't tripped. I would assume they would both be tripped if they were both on one circuit, right? That one's on. It goes to say that this one is on. Pigs have done a fantastic job tilling in here, bud. Installed nipple working.

Yeah, yes, yes!

I'm not hauling water to pigs. Shabbat shalom!

Drinking it!

Papa gets the rest. Note to self, put a lid on that tomorrow and that will Help keep that water warm. That's not help. Light lunch on this Saturday. Hey, I'm not exerting a lot of calories. I don't need a lot of calories. I'm happy with a little leftover thigh and a little leftover lamb chop. Maybe you want to add a little bit of acorn squash butter on top of everything. Evening meal, kids are having some bratwurst. Mama and bratwurst and rice. We do have onions and peppers for This is day 7 living off the land. I made some glorious burgers. I'm not gonna eat the bratwurst. Hello, those fried peppers and onions. That is a happy day. See you tomorrow, day 8, eating off the land.