Purpose Driven Homestead

As the USDA says over and over... clearly highly regulated commercial/industrial food is dramatically safer than knowing your local farmer and buying directly from someone you can trust. Chickens at those factories providing your eggs... instead of allowing their chickens to graze and scratch in an open pasture, those factory egg chickens live their entire lives in a space the size of a 8"x12" piece of notebook paper. How is anyone surprised by this level of incompetence. Buy local. Buy safe. Pay your farmer or pay your pharmacist. https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/fda-upgrades-egg-recall-highest-risk-level-salmonella-sickens-dozens-across-several-states

Pay your Farmer... or Pay your pharmacist. Next time you're eating that soy milk in your latte, eating soybean oil in food, or anything else that that has it. Remember that these weeds dying amongst the soybeans, aren't dying of natural causes. These are "round-up ready" GMO soybeans. They have been genetically modified to tolerate application after application of glyphosate without dying. That goes into all that food you eat. I took this picture on a bike ride right down the road the from where we live. Yet we wonder why cancer rates are through the roof in rural areas and digestive system cancers (especially colon) have dramatically increased over the beast few years even more so for young adults under 40. You are what you and your food eats.... Look for local farmers thats don't use this stuff.

Ever wonder what goes into running a small regenerative farm that feeds your local community while still working a day job? That means leaving to go get feed at 5:30 after work yesterday and making a 4 hour round trip (getting home at 10pm) because its the only local non-GMO feed provider. It then means getting up before going to work today to get the feed unloaded and put up before some potential rain moves in. Smaller pickup this time with only 4,000 lbs. It makes for a long day from 5am to midnight working two jobs, but we love serving our community. If you want to see the full picture of what that entails, check out the video below of a typical feed run for us.👇 https://youtu.be/vKXX0L77_MA

Moved the cattle to a new paddock yesterday (like every day) and it just amazes me at how much the regenerative approach changes things. The first picture is from a video I made a couple years ago on how to connect hard fencing. Look at the ground and the grass in the back ground. Thats the same pasture (just viewed from outside the fence vs inside) as the second picture. No fertilizer. No herbicides. Just regenerative agriculture practices with animals on it for only 2 years. Wow!

People don't realize what goes into raw milk production. For example... we break down ever single piece of equipment and sanitize it every day to keep milk safe. You think commercial dairies do that? https://youtube.com/shorts/xJAp3D3_UW4?feature=share

What a difference a year makes. The last two years have been droughts. We started feeding hay in June both prior summers all the way until spring. Hundreds of bales just for our little herd. This year... we have actual rain! The spring was dry and then starting at the end of June... the rains started. We received more rain this summer in NC than in the prior two... combined... times 3. Lol. The pastures exploded and all of the regenerative work we've been doing paid off! The land held on to more water (less runoff), it soaked in dramatically quicker, and it was available for the grass for longer due to the improved organics in the soil. We haven't fed one bale of hay yet this summer and if things continue... we wont feed until winter. We're talking about thousands of dollars saved compared to prior years and better fresh forage! Praise God!

Dog days of summer have returned and the chickens benefit from some watermelon from the fridge. It's a nice way to cool down the chickens. You can see the before and after... lol

When you think you're eating healthy avocado 🥑 oil... and they are really replacing it with soybean oil... https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avocado-oil-rancid-or-mixed-other-oils

Finally bought a cream separator for our jersey milk. Still need to work with it and make tweaks but it works pretty well. One day it may allow us to make sales of butter, cream, etc.

The sauerkraut is in the works fermenting on the counter in the kitchen. Love it when my wife makes this stuff. I never liked sauerkraut before she made it, but I think thats because it always had all the additives and preservatives in it from commercial production. To me, the homemade version from your own garden tastes completely different. Its also great for your gut health.

We're grateful for the rain. Because of it, we had to harvest onions early as they were going to rot in the soil otherwise. Some were already headed there and we had to cut some sections out that were soft. However, we still have bags and bags that are now frozen and ready to use.