More Than Farmers

A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Codi and Michelle at More Than Farmers.
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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead. The podcast comprises entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Codi and Michelle at Not Just, or More Than Farmers is the name of your place, sorry. How are you guys? We're good, how are you? I'm good, I thought it was Not Just Farmers, but it's actually More Than Farmers. So, tell me about yourselves and what you do.

00:29
You want to go ahead, Michelle? Oh, you can start. Yeah, so we homestead on about 5 and 1 1 half acres. For the past, it's been about 10 years now. And we have our own milk, eggs, beef, chicken. We raise our own vegetables, berries, working on fruit trees. I mentioned milk. This is about the first time anybody's hearing about this. But we're working on the process of switching

00:59
a cow to possibly getting sheep in the future. So that's all in the process right now. But that's kind of what we do here. We've got four children and just trying to live the homestead dream. Yeah. We also have a YouTube channel called More Than Farmers and we have an Instagram account and we create content full-time teaching other people how to do what we're doing. So awesome. You are doing great things. So

01:24
Is all this all the food that you grow or produce is that for you guys or do you use it to help support the homestead? It is just for us at this point. So when we had first started we had dreams of building More of a farm business where we would actually be like selling products and stuff um We got to we got through the realization that It was going to kind of either be One or the other as far as either we were going to have to go all in

01:53
on growing food to sell or we're going to have to back off because that in-between stage of trying to grow some food to sell and still trying to hold down a full-time job and stuff like that, that's a really tough stage to be in. So we ended up backing off on the food production, just growing food for ourselves. And then that's when we started our YouTube channel. Yeah, we did Farmers Market for quite a long time. We had an egg business where we sold eggs to...

02:20
a restaurant, we sold eggs to a kind of like a butcher shop near us. We really enjoyed those things to some extent, but also for the small scale that we were at, that we were on, it just didn't, it wasn't quite worth it. Codi had a full-time job the whole time, so I was the one who was at home trying to do all the gardening and washing hundreds of eggs every week.

02:50
pretty much tanked after my third baby. And so we really just had to back off. We realized that the food production wasn't the kind of work that I was going to thrive on. And then plus we also wanted to homeschool our kids. And that adding that to the workload of the gardens and everything was just too much. So we really took a step back and just started focusing on growing our own food. And then yeah, eventually

03:19
Codi was able to come home from his job and we did the content creation, but we've never made a full-time income just from selling stuff on our farm. Okay. So, you said you started this 10 years ago and both of you sound really young, so how old were you when you started? So I would have been 24, Michelle would have been 23. Okay, so you were babies. You're babies. Yeah. So what?

03:47
Why did you want to do this in the first place? So Michelle grew up with some kind of farm-ish background. We both grew up in the Mennonite culture, but she was in more kind of a conservative group where like canning and things like that were just part of the culture. I didn't grow up quite so much in that. I was actually a skater punk when I was younger.

04:14
I did grow up in the country though I had a horse. I did and do enjoy the country life. But I had no intentions or dreams or anything of becoming a farmer. But I had some really bad teeth problems after a while. I just ate lots of junk food, did not care about how healthy I was eating and stuff. I had a lot of teeth problems. Somebody gave me a book. It was called Cure Tooth Decay. In there, it talked a lot about like...

04:44
the way you eat affects how healthy your teeth are. And it kind of was like a kick in the pants. And that kind of started it, just the desire for the healthy food. So we actually started like buying some bulk foods. We were living in a basement apartment at the time, but we were buying some bulk foods. We did a little bit of canning. We garden at a friend's house and at Michelle's parents' house. Started doing a little bit of that stuff here and there.

05:11
And then somewhere in that time, our first son was born. And I guess I just kind of realized, you know, at that time we were living in a basement apartment that I wanted more than that for my children. And I had grown up in the country, loved riding four wheelers and stuff like that. And I wanted that kind of life for my children. So it was within, I don't know. Uh, let's see. It was only about a, uh, a year after our first son was born that we bought our piece of property.

05:41
It's funny how having children who depend on you change your perspective. Yeah, totally. Yeah. It was funny because so my upbringing was much different than Codi's in that like, yeah, he had horses so he knew a little bit about animals. He lived in the country, that type of thing. But for me, I was a gardener all of my life. My mom was a big time gardener and we didn't go as all out with food preservation and stuff as me and Codi do now.

06:09
But I definitely had a really good solid basis for knowing how to do that lifestyle. And so we moved into this basement apartment and I just wanted a garden so bad. And so we ended up like while we were still in the basement apartment, Cody put in a couple raised beds for me and I grew like some herbs and peppers and green beans. And we also got some Bantie chickens. They're the tiny ones that lay the tiny little eggs. But it you know, that was where we got started. And then eventually.

06:39
we did find some land and went from there. So it was a slow build, which is great. As I've said on the podcast a few times and as people have said to me on the podcast a few times, diving in to the pool without knowing there's water at the bottom in home setting is not a great plan. Yeah, definitely. You got to start where you're at and you've got to take the time and figure out.

07:06
how to do things and what you really want to do and how to get there. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because, dude, there's no way to just jump in. I mean, you will kill yourself if you try to jump into a full-time homesteading lifestyle without having any idea what's involved. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, even with a basis, I mean, I'll let Michelle talk about it a little bit, but even with a basis, that can still happen. Yeah.

07:34
So basically, we just kind of dove in headfirst after we bought our property. We had to build a house on our land. I mean, that's no small feat for a young married couple with – we had a one-year-old and then another baby on the way. We were living in a camper and so building a house on top of all that was huge. But then we also – we're just so excited about this homestead life. We tried to have a garden in the midst of that.

08:03
before our house was even completely finished, we got a milk cow, which, you know, it was just so much. We actually burned out to the point that we almost quit completely. We would have these conversations of like, is this even what we want? It wasn't until we got to a much healthier place in our marriage, in our health, that we finally were like, we need to make this efficient. We have to cut back on so many things. That's kind of where

08:32
our YouTube channel was born out of actually was just, we wanted people, there was this massive, after COVID there was just this huge, or I don't know, movement. Yeah. And people were like, you know, they wanna know where their food is from and they wanna start this homesteading lifestyle. And I would see some of these people diving in headfirst and I'm just sitting here like, you're not gonna make it.

08:58
I mean, you're growing this massive garden, your soil isn't good, and it takes a long time to figure out this stuff. It's hard, but once you have things streamlined on your farm and your property and have your foundations in place, like good soil and all those things, it can be very manageable and very doable, but it's something that needs to be built up really, really slowly. And our biggest advice for people is just to, before you add another thing to your homestead,

09:26
Like master what you're doing. That just helps so much with the overwhelm piece. I agree completely. And I'm going to say if you are a gardener, you can master every skill there is in gardening and it still might not work. Oh yeah. So yes, learn how to do the thing that you're in the middle of to the best of your ability and then consider what's next.

09:55
We do not have livestock on our three acre place because it's a lot of money to feed livestock and we don't have any place for them to graze. I've talked about this ad nauseam too on the podcast. But we do have a huge garden and gardens don't take as much money to feed. As long as you have water and sunlight and air and good soil, you're probably good. I feel like there's

10:25
payoff in gardening than there is in livestock. And I could be wrong, but it's my experience. So. Yeah, I think that like I've heard that both ways. I think you're right in that it doesn't take a lot of inputs with a garden. Probably if you're really trying to go on natural anyways, probably your biggest input is gonna be compost if you don't have a way to make it yourself. Cause like we just published a video earlier this week about like the different sprays and stuff.

10:54
that we use in our garden and it's all natural stuff. We don't use any like harsh chemicals and stuff, but we do some spraying, but it's very, very minimal. So yeah, those costs are low. For us, I find, I think our milk cow, I feel like is probably has the biggest return. It also takes probably the most work, getting up every day and milking that cow or whatever. But that's gonna depend, I think,

11:23
Like what you're saying, it's going to depend so much on how much land you have because I mean, you're right. If you had to feed hay year round, then that would be really hard to justify. But the milk cow can provide, they can have calves that you can either sell or you can raise it for beef. You can get the milk, which you can make cheese, butter, yogurt. You can use it for fresh drinking and all that stuff. So there's a lot of return there with the milk cow.

11:49
Um, not quite as much with raising a beef steer or something, but the thing, the cool thing I think with a beef steer is they're so, so easy. If you have the land, you need probably at least an acre to two acres, depending on where you live for one beef steer. But I mean, you literally just put them out in the pasture and set up, you know, and simple rotational grazing thing. Um, put them out in the pasture and give them water every day. And that's basically all that they need. They're so simple, but you do have to have the land to make it happen.

12:19
Speaking of steers, I know that cows, the female bovines, need friends. They're a herd animal. They want friends. They want a group to be with. Do the steers need a group to be with or are they okay on their own? So I think that's a fairly applicable question at the moment because right now we had our milk cow and our beef steer that we had living together.

12:48
We had either just the milk cow or possibly the milk cow and a calf or milk cow, calf and steer. And we've got about two and a half acres of pasture. So it was never more than those three at a time. But we just, our milk cow just left and we're down to just the steer. So I guess I'm about to find out. I actually called my dad afterwards and just asked him what he thought. And he said, I mean, he thinks he'll be okay.

13:18
We'll just have to keep an eye on him and see how it goes. It's getting close to the age of processing. So if it is gonna be here alone, it won't be for very long. And if I just see that it's not doing well, noticing anything different or odd about it or whatever, I can take it over to my dad's and let it run around on the pasture there with his cows. But I'm gonna make sure that I go out there every day just to say hi to it, at least let it know that there's another living being on the property and stuff.

13:45
But we have actually had our milk cow by itself for several months at a time. It would be in kind of those in between stages of the calf was weaned and we sold the calf and then we hadn't gotten another beef steer yet or something like that. And she always did really well, but she was also being handled every single day, being milked or whatever. So I feel like that does make a difference too.

14:09
Yeah, I've always been told that cows need friends and goats need friends and sheep need friends. So that's why I asked. It's more important for sheep and goats than it is for cows. I have heard. Yeah, that's what we've heard. But I mean, even if it works to have them by yourself, I mean, it's just good. They are going to be better off with company. Yeah. Yep. They need buddies.

14:32
I it's really funny my my grandpa had friends that had a dairy farm talked about this in the podcast lately actually and He had many many dairy cows and many many babies and I said to him one time I said so why do you have so many cows and I was probably seven, you know I was little and he said well cuz I love them and I said well gasped, but why do you have so many cows?

14:58
And he said, you're one of those. You want a real answer. I said, I do. He said, I have so many cows because if I have more cows, I have more milk. I sell more milk and make more money. And if I have as many cows, I have babies coming every year. And he said, I have more cows. He said, and it just keeps going from there. And I said, okay. And he said, plus the girls need friends. And it stuck with me from a whole life. Cows need friends. So that's why I asked in the first place.

15:28
Okay, so you guys have a YouTube channel and it's about what you do and I see that it's fairly popular so yay team, that's good. Viewers and listeners are important. Do you get feedback from your listeners? Do they, I don't know, email you or comment and say thank you for sharing this particular thing because I didn't know about that and I wanted to learn about it? Oh yeah, absolutely.

15:57
You know, you always hear about all the crazy people online, crazy things they do and say. And while we do have some of those, like I would say, like the large majority of people, especially on YouTube, are so kind, very, very supportive. We get very little negativity, I would say, on YouTube. Maybe three out of a couple hundred comments on a video will be negative. Like there's not much negativity on there.

16:27
we see our channel at like we take it very seriously and we see ourselves as teachers like that's kind of what our passion is teaching and people are so kind. Definitely they reach out to us and tell us oh we started this herb garden or we started a garden this year because of you guys so it's very very fulfilling for us and we do get a ton of positive feedback. Yeah.

16:56
Yeah, Instagram is a little different. For the first, like when Michelle handles pretty much all the Instagram stuff, for the first, like, what day, half a day, it's more like her core audience. And those comments are nice and kind of stuff. But as soon as, like if a reel starts getting up into the hundreds of thousands or up into the millions of views, it's just, it's a dumpster fire in the comments. I don't know, where are these people, what rock they crawl out from under? But...

17:25
They can just get really nasty on Instagram. Yeah, and I think it's possibly, I mean, partially because it's such a short clip, you don't get nearly as much context around a reel as you would on a long form YouTube video. And also, like your videos, your reels are getting shown to people that don't necessarily want to see it. You know how when you're scrolling Instagram, sometimes you just flip right on past if it's something you're not interested in. And so this stuff is being put in front of people that might not actually be interested.

17:53
And so I think it's just a completely different crowd, a completely different community. So we definitely prefer YouTube above Instagram. Yes. I was raised by parents that told me if you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all. And it'd be really nice if people would do that. That would be great. I've had exactly one comment left on my podcast in almost the year that I've been doing it. Okay.

18:21
It was really, really lovely. And I don't know why people don't comment on the podcast because everybody I do talk to is like, I love the podcast. I keep doing it, but no one ever actually leaves a comment online. And I'm like, okay, what do I do to get people to talk to me? Well, it's so funny though, because on, when I, on Apple podcasts, it's like really hard, you have, don't you have to go somewhere else to leave a review on Apple? I think you. I mean, basically you just said you can leave a review, but

18:51
I mean, probably if you'd post your podcast on YouTube, people might comment more often. I'm guessing you'd have a lot more comments on YouTube than you would. Do you do it on Apple Podcasts? Is that your main platform? I do it on, I post it on like 12 different platforms. Apple Podcasts is one of them. Apple Music is one of them. Odyssey, I think, is one of them. Okay. YouTube for sure.

19:15
My podcasts are on YouTube. Oh, that's so interesting. But they're not, but there's no video to them. So I don't know if that's why people don't say anything. It's not a big deal. I mean, people are coming back to listen and that's what I want. So that's the most important thing for me. But it can also be nice to have some feedback, right? Yeah, and it's so funny because I was talking with someone yesterday for an interview and we got done recording and she said,

19:45
She said, I need to tell you. She said, I've been listening to your podcast. She said, I went back and started from the beginning. Oh. And I said, that was like over 100 episodes ago. She's like, yeah, she said, but I have learned so much from the people you talk to. She said, thank you for doing this. I felt so good for like an hour afterwards. I was just like, yay, it's doing what I want it to do. I want people to enjoy it and I want them to learn from it. So.

20:13
So I get how important this is to you guys because I'm trying to do the same thing just in a not video format. And it's a lot of work. And for me, it's not probably as much work as it is for you guys because you guys are doing video. So what kind of equipment do you guys have to do to do video? It's surprisingly simple, I guess.

20:40
When we first started I did have to buy a new computer or something that was powerful enough to run an editing program I think I spent about eleven hundred dollars on a computer, which I mean that's a chunk of money But it was at you know, and everybody or at least us lower income people were getting Yes, and so that's what we spent that money on getting a camera and a computer I got

21:08
fairly simple Canon camera. And for a long time, that's basically all we had. We've got my, I use a gimbal with my camera now, which just helps get a steadier shot. Wireless microphones for some of our parts of our videos and stuff, we'll even just use our phones to video. But yeah, it's pretty much still just the computer and the camera. It's all it is. And a gimbal. Yeah.

21:35
Okay, because I know there's lots of people who do YouTube videos and they have a whole studio set up. Right. And I've watched videos of people showing their setup for them making videos, which sounds really dumb, but that's what I watched. And it's like a professional studio setup. Right. All I have, I have a desk in my big old bedroom. Thank you, Jesus, I have a big bedroom for the first time in my life. I have a desk. I have a

22:05
desktop computer, I have headphones that plug into the desktop computer, I have a monitor that isn't very big, and I have a decent keyboard and a decent mouse. That is how I do this. And I just, I can't believe that this is all I had to do to do this. If I had known this years ago, I would have done it years ago. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much me. I do have two monitors for my setup that helps a lot with the video editing stuff. And I'm actually...

22:33
in our bedroom right now too. I had been in our closet for like the last three years, but I just couldn't take it anymore. So I needed some windows. So I'm out in our bedroom now but I am in the process of building a small office detached from the house. I spend hours and hours editing videos and I just feel like I need to get out of the house. Needs to get away from the screaming children. Yeah. It can make it a little rough.

23:01
It's coming and it works and you just you get you do what you got to do to make it happen Yes, and if I if I'd known it would be this easy. I would have done it 20 years ago however, the technology probably wouldn't have been as usable 20 years ago as it is now so I also bought a a really nice microphone you know one of the ones that has the arm that swings and has the the spit

23:28
thing in the front so that you're not getting all the S's and the P's popping. I can't use it because it picks up every single noise. And we live on a country road where big old semis go by all the time. It picks up the rumble of the semis from a half a mile down the road. So I bought this microphone and can't even really use it. And my husband was like, could you sell it? I said, I doubt it. I don't think anybody would buy it.

23:56
And I said, maybe five years from now, we can make a studio outside on the property somewhere and soundproof it. And then maybe I'll be able to do my recording out there. And he said, so for a hundred dollar microphone, you're going to spend $5,000 to make an audio. I was like, well, if the podcast does well, maybe we can afford to spend the money to build a studio, but we'll see what happens. So I guess my point in that.

24:25
whole story is that if you are so inclined and motivated and inspired to want to do videos or podcasting or something like what I'm doing and what Cody and Michelle are doing, it is possible to do it on a very low budget and not have it sound terrible. Yeah for sure. Yeah I think honestly and if you listen to any you know gurus or whatever out there that are talking about how to start a YouTube channel and stuff they will also say it that the

24:55
Quality of your content a high quality content has a lot more to do with The actual content you're putting out and not on you know The video not for sure not being fuzzy or something like I mean you want good good looking videos and good sounding videos But it's a lot more important How you're making the videos like you and your personality and the content that you're giving people if it's entertaining if it's helpful And stuff like that. I mean, that's the biggest thing

25:23
Yep, and it helps to have a really good voice. I keep hearing this all the time. People I interview, I get done, and they're like, you have a really nice voice. And for me, I hear my voice through my own bones in my own head. So I don't hear what everybody else hears. Even when I listen to it back, I don't hear it the way other people hear it. But I know a good voice when I hear one. You guys have really nice voices.

25:53
A lady that I talked to the other day, Nita, she is, Winfield Farms LLC is her episode. I think it came out yesterday. She has, she sounds like Angela Bassett. She has the most beautiful voice. And so for me, because I am so attuned to people's voices, this podcast is a joy for me because I get to hear different accents, different tones, different timbers every day.

26:24
Right. Yeah. And I love music. So when people talk, it's like music to me. Yeah. Right. So I do this for completely selfish reasons. It makes me so happy on so many levels and everybody's like, thank you for doing this. I learned so much. And I'm like, no problem. I'm just going to do it because I love it. But the thing that I have learned in the last year, because I'm coming up on a year at the end of August of doing this.

26:53
is that most people who have homesteads, and not all of them, but many, many of them, they have some kind of side hustle that relates to the homestead, whether it's agritourism, whether it's content creation, whether it's having people come and pick from their produce, whether it's a farm stand on the property.

27:20
there's some other piece that isn't necessarily just growing food, whether it's meat or veggies, and selling it. And I think that part of being a homesteader is that you are creative. I think everyone I've talked to is creative in some way. Yeah, I mean, it takes grit and it takes, yeah, that creativity and everybody's creativity is gonna be different too. Yes, and that's what makes it so much fun.

27:50
fun. And it also makes it hard sometimes because sometimes people are like, I'm going to do this thing and it's going to break my body, but I want to do it. Right. So, but so you said you have four kids? Yes. So we have an 11 year old, a nine year old and an eight year old at this point, and then also a three year old. So we had three.

28:16
very close together and then we realized how hard it was and then we waited five more years to have another one. So, yep. Okay. And are they all in on helping out? Oh yeah. Yep. We definitely have them doing lots of things around here. The oldest three are doing chores. I mean, they honestly, now that we don't have our cow, do they do all the chores? Pretty much. Pretty much. I still have to do some like with the steer still here, I would do the rotating

28:45
for him in the pasture, moving the chickens when they need to be moved but that's not every day. So like just your daily animal chores, they feed the chickens, give them water, feed the dog and cat. Gather the eggs. Gather the eggs, that kind of thing. Yeah, I can see that it's been – I mean they complain about it sometimes but – Just like all kids, yeah. But they – I can see it's really good for them and they also make – I make sure they make a little money doing it too. So it's, you know, teaching them responsibility in that way and stuff. Yeah.

29:15
we homeschool them and we just consider that as part of their homeschooling. Yeah. Okay. And so do either one of you have an outside job, like besides the home side? No. I mean, the YouTube content is the job. I think a lot of people don't realize how much work actually goes into that. We spend one day a week planning a video, getting ready for a video, I would say maybe half a day.

29:45
Um, and then the next day is usually solid filming all day long. And then I spend sometimes three full days, even more, sometimes four days editing a video. Um, I'm probably overly picky with my video editing, but I put a lot into it to try to make the story as cohesive and streamlined and smooth as possible.

30:13
and I think people appreciate that, so I really work hard on that. But yeah, it is, and it's both of us working on it too. It's not just one of us, it's taking both of us working nearly full time to make it happen. Yeah. So. Do you put out one video a week, or how do you schedule it? Yep, one video a week. Michelle also does a few Instagram posts and stories, and like two reels a week or something on Instagram. But on YouTube, it's one.

30:43
full length of video and every once in a while we'll either skip a video and do a live video because that doesn't take as much work afterwards and stuff. It's just the recording part. Or we'll even tack that on in between somewhere too if we want to. I think some people have this image in their heads of homesteading YouTubers. I'm sure this is true for some people but not for us. They have this idea that we just carry a camera around with us wherever we go.

31:12
And it just isn't true. Like having a camera out, especially with four kids, can be pretty hectic. And so we're really, really, excuse me, we're very intentional about making sure that everything is ready to go, everything is streamlined. We have a plan for what we're going to do. That makes the editing easier for Cody as well, because he doesn't have to try to like piece everything together. And it also just makes so that it's so much more doable with trying to...

31:41
shoot the video with our kids around. So we squash all of the filming into one day. Sometimes it goes over a couple of days depending on what we're doing. Yeah, depending on the subject. Yeah, but for the most part we have everything streamlined. Okay, wow, that's a lot. I mean, I know, I do know what it takes to do this kind of stuff. We tried. We tried doing videos of canning and making soap and stuff.

32:10
My husband and I hated every freaking second of it. I think we made three and I tried to edit them and I was just like, honey, I know, no. You gotta love it. I mean, you may have to want to do it or it's not gonna work. And he said, why no? And I said, look at this. And I showed him the clips that we'd taken of the canning and the stuff we were doing. I said,

32:37
It is going to take me two weeks to learn how to get this to work. I said editing software is no joke. Yeah. I said, we can't use the background conversation because we all swear like pirates. I said, so basically all the background noise, I got to get rid of it. And then we're going to have to talk over the video. Yeah. I said, do you really want to do that? He was like, no. I said, no.

33:04
This is not us. This is not for us. And we did the whole thing. We got the ring camera, not the ring camera, the ring light. We got the thingies to hold cell phones in the right position. We did all of it. And now I'm sorry, we did that, but we did, because we wanted to make it right. And the video was fine. The video itself, the images were fine. But the editing in stuff,

33:33
for sound, I give anyone who does that for a living props because watch a bean in the ass. It's funny because so many people, like you can tell they think we just have this cushy life where we make our money for making videos and stuff. But I think a lot of behind the scenes things that people don't think about is, I mean, number one, all of the editing. Like what is it, an hour per minute of video? It's about what it takes usually. Yeah. So if we have a 25 minute video.

34:03
that's gonna take Cody about 25 hours to edit. And then also on top of that, it's just everything that you do while you're filming, if you're taking all the different angles and making sure that your image is changing every few seconds, everything you do, every task, every job that you do is gonna take double the time. And so it truly, truly is a job. It is not just, it's not just staying at home and playing.

34:33
We've gotten the question a lot, like, how can I start homesteading while I have a full-time job? And we've done at least one, if not more, videos kind of about answering that question or whatever. And now that I don't have a job off the homestead, I've gotten the vibe from some people that, you know, it must be much easier now to homestead. You know, if you're just at home all the time, it'd be easy to homestead. It's pretty much the same.

35:00
as it was. It's definitely better in some ways. Overall, we love what we're doing. We love that I'm able to be at home, that we're all home together, working together, things like that. But as far as actually getting more homesteading work done, it's pretty much about the same. Because like Michelle said, everything takes twice as long. We have to think through everything a lot more as how it's going to show up on camera and stuff like that. And it's

35:29
all the hours of working. And so I basically, I tell people now I still have a full-time job and I'm still homesteading with a full-time job basically. And I like to tell people that because I want them to know that it's possible because up until just a year ago, I did have a full-time job off the homestead and we were at one point raising food to sell to other people.

35:56
I mean, through the whole thing, we've been raising food for ourselves that we eat all winter long and stuff. And I love for people to know that that is possible. Yes, it is. And again, if we had more acres, we would be doing the same thing. But we don't because we could not. We bought our place in 2020. And I'm in Minnesota. You guys are in Ohio, right?

36:24
Um, we got our place just before the housing market went crazy. Yeah. And it was one of the only places with acreage we could find that wasn't 25 miles outside of a town. Yeah. Right. And it's perfect. It's perfect for us, but having critters is not really part of the plan. I mean, I would love to have a goat. I would love, I would love to get two baby goats and a mama goat. And I would love to raise those babies.

36:54
sell one at the end of the season and keep one and then have the mama bread again and just basically have a couple goats every year. Right. Yeah. But again, you have to be able to have them grazed. We don't have any of them to graze. So it's a thing. And instead of us growing our own meat, we try to buy from local farmers who do have steers and goat and lambs and whatever. Because if you can't...

37:23
grow it yourself, buy it from a local grower. Yes, yes, amen. I think so many people miss that idea. It's kind of this idea, and I think I had the idea to begin with also, it's kind of like it's all or nothing. Like if you buy the land, or if you wanna go after the homesteading thing, you gotta do it all yourself. And that's just not true. I feel like we get a lot of people that leave comments that.

37:49
tell us that they're living in apartments in the city and so they just can't do any of these things. Well, I mean, you've got an oven in your apartment. You can go to the farmer's market. You can ask farmers there, you can either just buy their produce there or even ask them if they've got seconds back at the farm that they didn't wanna bring to sell at the farmer's market if they'd sell at a discount in bulk or whatever. I mean, I would have loved if people would have bought our seconds at farmer's market. We had so many vegetables that we had to deal with.

38:17
that weren't nice enough to sell the farmers market. But anyways, you could buy that stuff and you could start canning. You can bake your own bread. I hear people raising chickens in some crazy situations. I have a friend that was living in downtown in a city and he had this building that, it was on a, they were starting a mission and it was the building that was eventually gonna be their church house. And he had a section of it.

38:45
penned off and he was raising broiler chickens inside that building. There's people that do rabbits and different things like that. You can get back to that creativity thing. You can get so creative. I just feel like you can start wherever you're at and it might not be in all the ways that you want to, but you can get started. Then, like you said, support your local farmers and people who are growing food the right way and stuff. We need the supporters.

39:14
as much as we need people growing their own food. Because I mean, truth of it is, I mean, I haven't done the calculations, but there's not enough usable land on this earth for each and every person to have 20 acres or whatever. I don't know, but I'm guessing. And so, you know, there are just the way our world works. There is going to be cities and things like that. But if people in the cities would start supporting more of our local food and food

39:43
farmers who are using regenerative agriculture practices and stuff. We'd have the Walmarts and all those places selling crappy food. They wouldn't last very long. Yep, absolutely. You were talking about small apartments and actually using the stove in your small apartment kitchen. One of the things that always makes me giggle is people have their kitchens remodeled. I'm not saying people have apartments. People have homes.

40:12
They have their kitchens remodeled, these beautiful show place kitchens, and they never actually cook in their kitchens. My father-in-law and his second wife had their kitchen remodeled, like years ago. And it was beautiful. It was gorgeous. And I said to his wife at the time, I said, I would love.

40:41
to cook in your kitchen. If you would like me to come over and make dinner for you guys some night, I would love to cook a meal in your kitchen." And she was like, oh, that's sweet, but you don't have to. And I said, okay, that's fine. And then like a few months later they came to visit our house and they'd had my cooking before. And she said, you know how you said you wanted to try cooking in my kitchen? And I said, yes. She said, would you like to make Christmas dinner for the family? I about sobbed.

41:11
I was so happy. I said, are you serious? And she said, yeah. She said, you cook wonderfully and I know you can do a killer turkey and I know you make some homemade cranberry sauce. She said, I know Kyle makes, my husband's name is Kyle, I know Kyle makes wonderful breads. She said, do you guys want to make Christmas dinner this year at my house? I was practically dancing. I was like, yes, of course. And then she was kind enough to fund the shopping trip.

41:41
Oh nice. For the groceries. I said you don't have to do that. She's like no, no, you're gonna be you're gonna be earning it. Please take this. And I did. And we we went all out. It was so much fun. And come to find out that kitchen wasn't quite as user-friendly as I. So it was it was a challenge. And it was really fun to to cook in a new place and realize that I

42:11
But kitchens are for cooking. They're not for having company over and sitting around and chatting with a pop. They're for cooking. Right. So it just, it makes me laugh and it frustrates me when people go to all this trouble to make a beautiful kitchen that is set up for people to visit while you cook and then no one ever actually cooks. Right. Yeah, ours is kind of the opposite of that. We built our own house and we actually built it on top of...

42:41
a pre-existing basement and it's a very small footprint. It's two stories, but one floor is only 660 square feet. In our downstairs, we have living room, laundry room, dining room, kitchen, and bathroom all on that one small floor. The kitchen is pretty small. Michelle, also, she's a little different than you. She actually doesn't really like to cook.

43:10
ourselves and our children good food. She does a lot of cooking but you know, she's got definitely some hurdles with her kitchen size and stuff. But if it's something that you want to do, you'll find a way to do it for sure. Yeah. Oh Yes, the kitchen that I used to cook in was a galley style kitchen Oh, wow. And the kitchen that I cook in now is like five times that size I am I'm so thrilled having a big kitchen finally in my life and

43:39
I'm not going to lie, cooking in the galley kitchen was easier because everything was within arm's reach. However, the kitchen I have now has a huge island which means that when my husband and I and my son all want to cook together, there is room to cook together and it's wonderful. It is so much fun. Yeah, that would be nice. So on that note.

44:03
Uh, we've been talking for almost 45 minutes. I try to keep these to half an hour, so I'm going to let you go. But thank you so much for your time, guys. I appreciate it. Yeah, no problem. It was fun. All right. Have a great afternoon. All right. You too.