Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
- Introduction:
- Hosts: Brandon and Joe
- Discussion about the new podcast studio
- Guest Introduction:
- Guests: Gabriel and Tia from Half a Barn Farm
- Overview: Living on a 1.7-acre micro farm and promoting self-sufficiency.
- About Half a Barn Farm:
- Location: 4313 Mitchell Mill Road, Wake Forest, North Carolina
- Services:
- Teaching people how to grow and raise their food.
- Offering farm tours and classes.
- Addressing the lack of micro-farms in the area, especially in Raleigh.
- Microfarming Discussion:
- Comparison of microbreweries and micro-farms.
- Challenges of farming on just 1.7 acres versus traditional farming on 50+ acres.
- Overview of classes and education, building, and actual farming.
- Services Highlight:
- Providing prefab raised beds.
- Assistance with raising chickens and bunnies.
- Not just for buying products but to learn and be inspired to self-sustain.
- Benefits of Raised Garden Beds:
- The solution to soil problems and promoting sustainable gardening.
- Differences between permaculture and raised bed gardening.
- Raised beds offer micro-climates ideal for specific growth, prevent erosion, and are cost-effective.
- Advantages over traditional tilling and avoiding soil degradation.
- No fabric barrier between the bed and natural soil to promote natural environment growth.
- The Gardening Journey:
- Discussing the challenges and investment of starting a garden.
- Gabriel and Tia's background: Started in Maine on a 0.28-acre property, faced challenges, and learned over time.
- Importance of guidance in gardening, similar to starting a training or nutrition program.
- Closing Thoughts:
- Trial and error in gardening, the importance of experience and guidance.
- Helping others to avoid costly mistakes like spending too much on unsuccessful gardening attempts.
Find out more at halfabarnfarm.com
Creators & Guests
What is Fire Within Nutrition and Fitness?
If you want to transform your life with nutrition and fitness, there are no shortcuts. You need a sustainable plan: the right mindset, and the knowledge and inspiration to stoke the fire within. Just like the Phoenix, you can burn your old habits, never turn back, and emerge anew.
[00:00:00] Track2-Mic 2: Welcome Fire Within Community. This is the Fire Within Podcast where we talk about all things health, fitness, and nutrition related. I'm your host, Brandon with my co host Joe.
[00:00:24] Track1-Mic 1: Hello. Welcome to the new studio. I
[00:00:26] Track2-Mic 2: welcome to the new studio. It's awesome.
[00:00:27] It's swanky.
[00:00:28] Track1-Mic 1: out.
[00:00:29] Track2-Mic 2: Am I going to have to pay more for
[00:00:30] Track4-Mic 4: Where We have
[00:00:31] Track2-Mic 2: Okay, cool. We're really excited about our guest today. We have Gabriel and Tia. Tell us a little bit about what you do. Why you got into it. And all kinds of stuff. And this thing's going to take all kinds of left turns. I can't wait.
[00:00:42] Track3-Mic 3: So we live on a little 1. 7 acre micro farm, and we own a little non profit called Half a Barn Farm. We teach people how to grow and raise their own food right where they live. So we offer classes at the farm and do farm tours.
[00:00:56] 4313 Mitchell Mill Road, Wake Forest, North Carolina,
[00:00:59] Track4-Mic 4: Are there a lot of micro farms in the area?
[00:01:01] Track3-Mic 3: There are not there aren't a lot of micro farms period we're trying to fix that
[00:01:06] Track2-Mic 2: There are
[00:01:06] Track4-Mic 4: There aren't a lot of micro farms, period.
[00:01:06] Track1-Mic 1: There are a few in Raleigh, but there's... they're not well known. Yeah.
[00:01:10] Track4-Mic 4: Is the concept similar to like microbrewery? Like it's like here's a hyperlocal special treat?
[00:01:15] Track3-Mic 3: It's
[00:01:16] Track1-Mic 1: Most people farm on 50 plus acres. We're doing it on 1. 7 acres. So we're raising animals and food and feeding ourselves on much less than most people will farm
[00:01:28] Track2-Mic 2: on.
[00:01:28] Track4-Mic 4: Gotcha. So it's so is it like one part like a class like how to be self sustaining and one part like farming?
[00:01:34] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah
[00:01:35] Track1-Mic 1: like four parts. It's like classes education, building, and farming.
[00:01:40] Track4-Mic 4: Cool.
[00:01:40] Track2-Mic 2: because they, you guys also offer services where you can prefab raise beds.
[00:01:45] You can get them started with raising chickens, raising bunnies and all that kind of stuff.
[00:01:50] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:51] Track2-Mic 2: So it's not like they're going to your farm to buy tobacco. They're going to your farm to learn about these things, see how you're doing it, experience a little bit of that firsthand and then hopefully get excited about doing it
[00:02:03] Track3-Mic 3: of that first hand and then hopefully get excited about doing it themselves.
[00:02:22] Is that correct? It's an entirely different ball of wax, but you can do it for yourself and it's perfectly legal and it's cost effective and Way better than anything that you can buy at the grocery store. So
[00:02:38] Track4-Mic 4: yeah.
[00:02:39] Track2-Mic 2: feel special. I got a private tour with my one year old Luke and I got to see all the animals. You have a dog that doesn't bark, a really cool cat that put up with us. It was a good time and an exciting male person. So
[00:02:50] Track1-Mic 1: she's delightful.
[00:02:52] Track2-Mic 2: inside joke. So tell us a little bit about the different facets of what you offer.
[00:02:57] Maybe let's start with the raised garden beds. I'm seeing a lot more of that now. People are excited about it. I think it's really cool. My wife's interested. So tell us about that part. Yeah.
[00:03:06] Track3-Mic 3: So raised garden beds solves an awful lot of problems, right? A lot of people When they think about subsistence living and gardening and stuff, they think of the word buzzword permaculture that gets thrown around, and permaculture is awesome, but it takes a really long time to establish, because what you're trying to do is basically chaos garden stuff together until it works together in this maintenance free sort of way.
[00:03:32] It's very difficult to do,
[00:03:33] Track4-Mic 4: I've never heard chaos garden before, but I have to imagine that's what I do.
[00:03:36] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah, you need,
[00:03:38] Track2-Mic 2: We just kill
[00:03:39] Track4-Mic 4: Do you mean no plan?
[00:03:40] Track3-Mic 3: in order to get it right. And it takes five years to really establish and start producing anything. A raised bed garden, however, gives you this little micro, climate that's perfect for growing what it is that you want to grow.
[00:03:53] It's real easy to continuously amend the soil with natural compost and it prevents erosion. So here in North Carolina, of course, we get these crazy rains like we just did and everything is washed out and Durham is all underwater, right? So doing a traditional type garden where you just till the soil that that kills all the Bacteria and chops up all the worms and really makes this arid mess And then when it rains it all washes away When you build a garden box and you put all the dirt in there You can just set that right on top of the really awful clay soil that we have here and It will stay put and then you can just plant right in it So it's really cost effective and it helps you keep pests out of your stuff.
[00:04:36] It's just really It's the best thing going. If you're, if you want to eat soon, do it that
[00:04:42] Track1-Mic 1: Yeah, it's a really fast way into getting into gardening.
[00:04:45] So some people hear gardening and they're like I'd love to get into a fall garden, but they don't have time to sit and start amending their soil preparing the ground. And so raised garden beds gets you growing as soon as you have compost down. The other great thing about it too, is you a lot of people have the misconception that putting the bed on top of the soil is going to somehow.
[00:05:06] Not promote the same kind of environment as if you till, but what you do is you don't put barrier between it, you have the benefit of getting the good worms and everything coming up and getting into your soil, and you start actually, the good soil you're putting on top has the effect of improving the soil around it.
[00:05:23] Track2-Mic 2: Okay, so there's no fabric barrier between the bottom of your bed and the natural soil that was already
[00:05:28] Track3-Mic 3: Nope, not the way that we do it.
[00:05:30] Track2-Mic 2: That's cool.
[00:05:31] Track3-Mic 3: So there's some people like we'll put down cardboard and stuff like that to smother out whatever grass or weeds. But if you're putting 12 inches of compost on top of that, it's going to smother anything anyway.
[00:05:43] So that stuff will just break down and it becomes more, food for your food.
[00:05:48] Track4-Mic 4: Yeah. Is that about the right It's
[00:05:50] Track3-Mic 3: an unnecessary step.
[00:05:51] Track4-Mic 4: Is 12 inches about the right amount of soil is what you want to put in a raised bed?
[00:05:55] Track3-Mic 3: it's a entry
[00:05:55] Track1-Mic 1: point because You get into more dollars with build and soil. And so 12 inches will give you the ability to still grow carrots.
[00:06:01] It's up off the ground. It's easier to reach, but you go 18 inches, 24 inches. You're just, that's, it's doubling. It's doubling and
[00:06:09] Track4-Mic 4: I saw a really, I saw a really funny TikTok the other day. It was a woman dancing in her garden because she was really excited because she had a pepper. Like she finally grew a yellow pepper. And she, then you know how they do little text things on the TikTok. And she was like, this is my 850 pepper.
[00:06:23] Track3-Mic 3: I saw that
[00:06:23] Track1-Mic 1: that.
[00:06:24] Track4-Mic 4: All the info, all the money she dropped into trying to get the garden working. And I think that's a lot of people's perception, right? Cause I know every time I buy something from the plant store, I kill it immediately because I don't do the things you should do. I don't put in, I just dig a hole in the ground.
[00:06:37] I'm like, I'm gonna stick that there and that's going to grow. And then it just dies in three
[00:06:40] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah.
[00:06:41] Track3-Mic 3: reason we started our business is because there's so many people that really would love to grow and raise their own food, right? But,
[00:06:47] Track1-Mic 1: but
[00:06:48] Track3-Mic 3: It isn't free to do right like there is you do have to invest in some infrastructure, right?
[00:06:53] And if you fail
[00:06:55] You know, you could have spent that money on groceries,
[00:06:58] Track4-Mic 4: That's like a year worth of
[00:06:59] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah, so what our aim is to take folks and make it so that way it immediately You're successful, right? So they get to live vicariously through all of our defeats. So we're originally from Maine So we've been subsistence gardening for almost 15 years But we started in Maine completely different climate and we actually started on just a little over a quarter acre.
[00:07:21] We had 0. 28 acres
[00:07:24] And our house was there too, so we had chickens and a garden and In a neighborhood where we weren't really supposed to do either and did it anyway When we moved here six years ago it was time to figure out what grew, how and why. And we just immediately put up some of the ugliest garden beds you'd ever seen in your life that were secondhand just to get some dirt in them and some stuff growing.
[00:07:48] And we had failure after failure. And now we can grow stuff, right? It's
[00:07:53] Track4-Mic 4: You figured it out.
[00:07:54] Track3-Mic 3: yep. It was literally just a a trial and error and take good notes. And now.
[00:08:01] Track2-Mic 2: So that's analogous for somebody starting, a training program with me or something or a nutrition program. There's so much crap out there and there's so many different ways to do it. I could help somebody figure out here's what works. Cause I did it wrong first, a hundred ways. And then got certified and worked with thousands of people and got it honed.
[00:08:17] So you guys did the same thing with garden beds. So they don't have to spend 850 to yield one pepper. That's pretty cool.
[00:08:25] Track4-Mic 4: I didn't know this. I just recently learned that the majority of this stuff, like the pre grown plants that you buy from Lowe's or whatever, aren't grown in our climate. So you plant them here and you're like two strikes against you already because that thing started out in like Arizona or something.
[00:08:39] Track2-Mic 2: at least in that greenhouse
[00:08:40] Track1-Mic 1: And they're often grown hydroponically. And so when you take them from one environment that they're started in and put them in another environment, they don't do very
[00:08:47] Track2-Mic 2: They're often grown hydroponically, mean?
[00:08:50] Track1-Mic 1: Rather than being planted in soil, they're grown in water and
[00:08:53] Track4-Mic 4: those towers, I thought that had something to do with weed,
[00:08:56] Track1-Mic 1: but usually it's a much larger circulation system and quite large facilities.
[00:09:01] Track2-Mic 2: Okay. That makes sense. Now what I'm excited about with the Reese garden bed we've had a lot of shows on picky eaters issues with childhood obesity and things like that. So what is the effect of growing your own food and how that changes the psyche of the kids?
[00:09:15] You guys have. Two thriving, daughters, I believe. And and so they've probably seen all this process and the foods they're interested in and what their blood work looks like and their development is probably a lot different than somebody who grew up on Kraft macaroni and cheese.
[00:09:29] And it's okay to still eat those things occasionally but they've seen all that. So how has that impacted them and how does this change how people view food?
[00:09:36] Track1-Mic 1: Both of our daughters are very active on the farm anyway. So they're not just helping to grow food. They're also feeding and watering their animals every day. They help to collect the food and, harvest from the garden, collect eggs.
[00:09:51] They participate in chicken processing day. So they're fully active in all the things. And so they see where their food comes from. They get really excited about it and they want to eat it. Now
[00:10:01] Track2-Mic 2: so now that we've brought up the animal side let's talk about the chickens for a bit. And then the bunnies for a bit, the processing and all that kind of stuff, what all goes into that. And also how do those meats and products differ from what you buy at the grocery store?
[00:10:13] Track3-Mic 3: It's really night and day. Let's start with chicken, and then we'll get into rabbits
[00:10:16] the chickens that you buy at the store All of them were were typically raised by really well intended farmers that don't have a choice in how the animals are raised. And if they could do it differently, they would.
[00:10:32] Track4-Mic 4: Is that primarily because the people who purchase the chickens set the rules and guidelines for the farmers?
[00:10:38] If you're Tyson, you're like, this is how you grow a Tyson chicken kind of
[00:10:41] Track3-Mic 3: 100%, right? What happens is that these farmers are heavily leveraged in their equipment and processes by the same company that's going to be purchasing it from them, right? They get their chicks, they have to raise the chicks out a certain way to be chickens. They have to use the type of facilities that they're told to
[00:10:58] Track4-Mic 4: Like a franchise, like this is how it works with us.
[00:11:02] Track3-Mic 3: And if you try to differ in that in any way, they'll pull your contract. So now you have these giant chicken houses that were purpose built for one thing that...
[00:11:13] Track4-Mic 4: And I'm sure they have in their guidelines that you can't sell them to the competitor.
[00:11:17] Track3-Mic 3: It's just that
[00:11:18] Track1-Mic 1: it's just that
[00:11:18] Track3-Mic 3: you're now bankrupt.
[00:11:20] Track4-Mic 4: If anything, Americans trust it's big business to do things right.
[00:11:23] Track1-Mic 1: Right.
[00:11:24] Track3-Mic 3: The, so the meat producing industry in this country is actually closed door. It's completely OPEG. It's against the law to take photos or videos inside any of these facilities. All of the videos that we have been bootlegged and smuggled out, and these people have been prosecuted and their lives ruined for doing so, right?
[00:11:39] Track2-Mic 2: Because you'd never eat again if you saw what was happening.
[00:11:42] Track3-Mic 3: The average American, if they actually realized how badly these animals are being treated and what the conditions are that they're being raised in and how gross it really is. Not just in the growing and raising side, but then the processing side also, they are modern engineering marvels, but they're disgusting.
[00:12:00] Like it's, it was really gross. Like I don't want my food sprayed with chlorine or ammonia. Like I don't. personally, right? But that's the approved method of doing it. So that's what grocery, like if you go to any chain store and go get yourself your boneless, skinless chicken breasts, right? That stuff was broken down in a facility that was just like that.
[00:12:22] And it came from one of those giant, chicken grow operations now if you go to a farmer's market you'll get a bird very similar if not exactly like the type that we're growing for ourselves, right? Now you'll have to get to know your farmer a little bit, but the birds that we raise on our farm are what's known as pasture raised, right?
[00:12:41] Which means that they're in a enclosure that's fully, so they're fully protected, but that enclosure gets moved around our property so they get fresh forage every single day. So fresh grass, fresh bugs and they get supplemented with grain and they're given water and they get to do all the things that chickens want to do for a handful of weeks, and then when they're, raised up to weight they get brought up closer to the barn where they're purged for one day, they're given no food and only water for one day, and then they get processed out and sat in a light salt brine for a couple of days and then put in the freezer.
[00:13:14] The taste difference is absolutely night and day. You go from something that's practically flavorless to something that actually tastes like food. And it's not
[00:13:23] Track4-Mic 4: absolutely night and let me know if I think I'm on the right track here. I did a lot of traveling to Haiti in a previous position and you would buy like the chicken off the street. Like the woman would just be selling the chicken she just prepared and oh my gosh, that chicken was so much better than any chicken you've had in the U.
[00:13:38] S. Cause it was like... You killed that day and then you had it for dinner and it was like, Oh, this is what chicken's supposed to taste like.
[00:13:45] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah.
[00:13:46] Track4-Mic 4: , I think we've done some episodes on different documentaries that we've done and interviewed some different people, even some people that made it.
[00:13:52] And it's pretty gross. Like to what you're saying, they just kinda, they just stick them in a cage and they just stick stuff down their throat. And then they're like, Hey, there's your chicken. And and so you're basically eating whatever they fed it. It's not like it was, It's not so much a chicken anymore, it seems
[00:14:07] Track2-Mic 2: plus chloride in a moon, yes.
[00:14:09] Track1-Mic 1: Yeah. Part of it too is chickens are an animal. We can all love animals and still eat them, but it's also more honoring for allowing the animal while it lives on the earth to enjoy their life.
[00:14:18] So our goal on the farm is only one bad day ever. Yeah.
[00:14:22] Track2-Mic 2: I love it.
[00:14:23] Track1-Mic 1: One bad
[00:14:23] Track4-Mic 4: and ammonia. We'll let your pardons
[00:14:24] Track2-Mic 2: and they were all running around. They had names and and what was cool is you would take whatever you weed out of the raised garden beds and you throw that to the chickens and that helps that self subsistence idea. That was
[00:14:35] Track1-Mic 1: And we were talking about permaculture a little while ago.
[00:14:37] Permaculture is more of a how you set it up to, and not just, the long term goals. But, our chicken coop lives inside of our garden, even though the run is outside of it. And The garden scraps go into the chicken run is, basically they make compost in the chicken run, we rake that out and move that out to the compost bins that go back into the garden.
[00:14:57] So all three of those things work together very cohesively and they live within 25 feet of each other.
[00:15:03] Track3-Mic 3: are naturally omnivores, right? So they don't want to eat a diet of genetically engineered corn every day of their life. That's been ground up and that's not how it's supposed to be. They want
[00:15:16] Track4-Mic 4: Like brand name corn like Moussana corn or whatever, like the genetically engineered Monsanto or whatever.
[00:15:22] Track3-Mic 3: it's,
[00:15:22] Track4-Mic 4: trust that big business. They do it right.
[00:15:24] Track3-Mic 3: many chickens have you seen? That are tall enough to eat corn off the stock, right? That's not
[00:15:29] Track2-Mic 2: Oh, the North Carolinian giraffe chicken.
[00:15:31] Track3-Mic 3: It's not a thing, right? So what chickens do in the. Wild. If you just let a chicken be a chicken, they scratch the ground.
[00:15:38] 'cause they're looking for bugs and worms and grubs. And they'll also eat the grass right from the top down. They'll just chew on whatever's green and
[00:15:46] Track1-Mic 1: they will also chase down the stray mouse and fight over it
[00:15:50] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah. They'll, they're absolutely pest control like chickens will get after a mouse
[00:15:54] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah, that'd be a fun way to do a pest control company. You just have a herd of chickens and
[00:15:58] Track4-Mic 4: away in
[00:15:59] Track2-Mic 2: you let them run around your house with an offense for a week and then you move on to the next house.
[00:16:03] The goats that you hire. Yes. Grass. Yes.
[00:16:05] Track1-Mic 1: you
[00:16:05] Track2-Mic 2: poisoning. But now what about chickens raised for eggs? How many eggs can one chicken produce? How often, how long do they live? All that kind of
[00:16:13] Track1-Mic 1: A chicken can live
[00:16:14] Track3-Mic 3: We should talk about goat yoghurt on another time. but they're only really productive for about three years depending on the breed. There are some variables there, right? You could have a pet chicken for a decade, but it's gonna be, it's gonna start being a problematic bird in year four, because...
[00:16:29] Track2-Mic 2: Just like I heard an employee.
[00:16:32] Track3-Mic 3: Chickens lay on a 27 hour cycle, 27, 28 hours, and you get one egg every 27 or 28 hours, depending on the
[00:16:39] Track4-Mic 4: Oh, that's way more than I thought.
[00:16:41] Track3-Mic 3: right?
[00:16:41] Track1-Mic 1: also based off of daylight, so you don't get eggs year round when the winter hits and the reduced light hours, you don't typically get eggs from your more mature chickens.
[00:16:50] Track4-Mic 4: I did not know chickens were solar powered. That's interesting. They all
[00:16:53] Track2-Mic 2: think we all are! I think we're all solar
[00:16:56] Track3-Mic 3: through the winter. So you get, when you think about it. But yeah.
[00:17:00] Track2-Mic 2: Plug? Oh, anyway.
[00:17:01] Track3-Mic 3: if you wanted to have a backyard chickens you, you don't need more than, Six, right? Four to six for a typical family if you want to eat eggs three or four times a week, it would keep your family and eggs.
[00:17:14] Now, if you wanted to
[00:17:15] Track2-Mic 2: three dozen eggs a week.
[00:17:16] Track3-Mic 3: yeah, there's a interesting statistic. If one out of every three families had backyard chickens, there would be no need for the egg industry whatsoever. So those giant buildings that are filled with slanted floors and covered in chickens, right?
[00:17:32] That stink to high hell, and all the neighbors totally hate it and it ruins the groundwater and all that sort of fun stuff. That stuff could all just go away.
[00:17:40] Track1-Mic 1: It doesn't take that much room, so your coop needs to be four square foot per chicken, so four chickens is only sixteen square feet. That's pretty small. And then their run needs to be...
[00:17:51] Track2-Mic 2: than I thought it was.
[00:17:53] Track1-Mic 1: chickens are five minutes a day. You'll probably spend longer because you'll find them interesting.
[00:17:58] They have their own hierarchy. A lot of our idioms come from chicken life. Getting your hackles raised, pecking order, that's all chicken stuff. And they actually make about 27 different unique noises to communicate with each
[00:18:11] Track2-Mic 2: Oh, wow.
[00:18:11] Track3-Mic 3: other. Oh, they're like elephants.
[00:18:13] Track1-Mic 1: they're like dolphins.
[00:18:14] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah, There's some stuff that you need to know to make sure that your flock stays healthy. And it's mostly prep work and infrastructure to make sure that your coop goes in the right place, they have the right type of environment, that sort of thing.
[00:18:25] But once you have that stuff established and you understand how to care for them chickens are easier than any dog, right? Like they, they just are. The amount of time commitment
[00:18:34] Track4-Mic 4: So what goes into that five minutes a day? What's an average five minutes to
[00:18:38] Track3-Mic 3: You collect the eggs you top off the water and make sure that the water is working properly and then you top off feed and that's it.
[00:18:46] It's really that simple. Once a month you're going to clean the coop out, right? And then once every three months you're going to do a deep clean, right? You want to make sure that there's fresh, shavings and stuff in nesting boxes,
[00:19:00] Track4-Mic 4: Are there any companies that go clean coops? Like people that you can hire to pick up your dog poop?
[00:19:05] Track1-Mic 1: Not that I know of.
[00:19:06] Track4-Mic 4: Instead of Pooper Scoopers, it's Cooper
[00:19:07] Track3-Mic 3: we've helped people
[00:19:08] Track4-Mic 4: clip chickens wings,
[00:19:08] Track3-Mic 3: Clip their chickens wings, right? Like we've we've come out to where their flock was because they didn't know how to do it and they needed it done. And we weren't for hire to go out there and do it every single time.
[00:19:20] It's like, all right, we're going to come out here. We're going to rescue you. I'm going to, I'm going to clip a couple of their wings and then you're going to clip the rest of them. And that way you now know how to do it.
[00:19:28] Track2-Mic 2: Do you know the Zac Brown's band song, Sickum on a Chicken?
[00:19:32] Track3-Mic 3: No.
[00:19:32] Track2-Mic 2: Oh, man. What are the copyright laws to play a clip of that on the show? Can we?
[00:19:37] Okay,
[00:19:37] Track4-Mic 4: But you can sing it in its entirety.
[00:19:40] Track2-Mic 2: Oh, you don't want to hear that. It's a good time. Check it out. It's ridiculous. It's absurd. That's probably why I
[00:19:45] Track4-Mic 4: Oh, you have to clip a chicken's wings? Does it fly away if you don't? If
[00:19:48] Track1-Mic 1: the... If you don't have an enclosed run, yeah, they'll fly.
[00:19:51] We have five foot tall fences and our chickens will get out.
[00:19:54] Track4-Mic 4: They can fly enough. You don't see them migrating south for the winter, but they can get out of a fence is what you're saying.
[00:20:00] Track1-Mic 1: migrating south for the winter, but they can get out of the fence, if you
[00:20:16] Track2-Mic 2: Is that the one you're chasing when I got there? Yes. Greasy. She
[00:20:21] Track3-Mic 3: She is not going to be on the farm after next weekend that's when I actually have some time to go. She's gonna get processed. She's gonna be stock and turn into Popeye That's gonna be it for that old bird. We've had her we've had
[00:20:35] Track1-Mic 1: done a great job bringing up many clutches of chicks. So she's hatched out a bunch of chicks for
[00:20:41] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah
[00:20:42] Track4-Mic 4: when you guys, you let some of the eggs become chicks, I assume, and then those chicks become chickens, how do you choose which ones stay and which ones
[00:20:49] Track1-Mic 1: chicks become chickens. How do you choose which ones stay and which ones... The rooster is basically just doing his job all the time, making sure that all the hens are tended to and fertilized. So all of the eggs you can pretty much crack open any time and they're going to be fertilized. A few times a year different hens will go what's called broody.
[00:21:13] And that's where they decide, hey, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to sit on some eggs and hatch them out. You can't force a chicken to sit on eggs. You can pull eggs at any time and incubate. We've done the incubation route. The success rate is not nearly as great as moms that raise out their babies.
[00:21:28] So we move mom with a clutch of eggs into our separate brood coop And she sits in there for 21 days on her eggs and hatches them out And then she teaches them how to be little chicks So how to get water how to scratch they're under her full protection and there's nothing quite like a mother hen protecting her chicks
[00:21:47] Track2-Mic 2: I bet. Now how many, what's the time it takes for an egg to turn into an eatable chicken?
[00:21:54] Is eatable a word?
[00:21:55] Track4-Mic 4: Edible?
[00:21:55] Track2-Mic 2: Edible?
[00:21:56] Track1-Mic 1: Time it depends on the variety. If you have just a backyard flock of hens, and you can get a lot of dual purpose, they're more heritage breeds that put on more weight, and are a bigger bird, and they're not just bred strictly for...
[00:22:10] Track3-Mic 3: Orpingtons. Yeah,
[00:22:11] Track1-Mic 1: They're not just bred strictly for producing as many eggs as possible.
[00:22:14] Those are breeds that have been really bred down to smaller body types and high production. If you go with something that's dual purpose, you have 21 days from sitting to hatching. You typically have 20 weeks until a chicken is considered mature for a hen to be able to lay. So you could basically grow out birds.
[00:22:36] to 16 20 weeks. And you could put those, instead of having laying hens, or if you wanted to keep all your roosters, you can do that, process the roosters, and that's your chicken. Now, if you're doing a Cornish cross, they're meat birds, they're actually considered sterile, because they've been cross bred so many times to get this certain body type for the chicken, that's from hatch to process is 8 10 weeks, depending on how they're raised.
[00:23:02] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah.
[00:23:02] Track4-Mic 4: Wow. Wow. Yeah.
[00:23:04] Track3-Mic 3: So they've been bred to have really light colored feathers sparse feathers because to eat the chicken, you're going to pluck it anyway, right? So they don't ever really fully feather out and they get real big real fast.
[00:23:15] Now,
[00:24:15] Track2-Mic 2: rabbit meat.
[00:24:16] How about with the chickens in a year's time?
[00:24:18] Track3-Mic 3: Chickens, the economics are way worse, which is one of the reasons why like it's the cost effective. The most cost effective way to raise protein on a, in a small space is definitely rabbits. Those numbers that I gave you was a trio of a medium breed rabbit. So if you have one buck and two does, their first full year of sexual maturity, provided everything goes well and you don't lose anybody you'll end up with about 250 pounds of meat.
[00:24:44] The second year you'll end up closer to 300 pounds. And the dollar per pound conversion to do that and because it's self replicating, is way less expensive than raising out chickens. Raising chickens, you need the infrastructure for, if you're going to pasture raise them like us, you need a chicken tractor which is a mobile coop, with rabbits the rabbit enclosure doesn't move so they're, they stay in cages so you can control the breeding and take care of the babies and stuff, and check their weights and make sure everybody's gaining weight like they should.
[00:25:14] Track2-Mic 2: 80
[00:25:16] Track1-Mic 1: why aren't, why isn't rabbit meat more mainstream? It was before the grocery store. Yeah. So before The grocery store, which is only about 70, 80 years old people were raising rabbits in their backyard. So it went out of fashion. So once the World Wars I and II were over, you were no longer required as part of your patriotic duty to keep a victory garden and to raise your own backyard flock people started going to the grocery store and it fell out of fashion.
[00:25:41] If you go overseas though, you can go to Europe and buy rabbit in the grocery store. Is you could spend 30 bucks to try some
[00:25:51] Track2-Mic 2: rabbits for free.
[00:25:51] Track3-Mic 3: rabbit
[00:25:51] Track1-Mic 1: some suck. Aash. It's actually delicious.
[00:25:53] Track3-Mic 3: grocery store. Yeah, you can spend 30
[00:25:55] Track1-Mic 1: as a aristocrat
[00:25:57] Track3-Mic 3: bucks to try You had to be part of royalty or the gentry in order to legally have rabbit, right? Wow. They raised them. And then Rabbits do what rabbits do, right? They,
[00:26:08] Track2-Mic 2: hump a lot.
[00:26:08] Track1-Mic 1: Yeah, they,
[00:26:09] Track3-Mic 3: yeah, they, yeah they're really prolific, right? And they also dig.
[00:26:12] They would be able to escape and just get out. And then next thing you knew, everybody had them. And because everybody had them, and they realized they couldn't really control it, the gentry decided rabbit meat is stupid now. If everybody can have it, then it's stupid. Then, it's not cool anymore, right?
[00:26:28] So then everybody had it. After, the Second World War and the advent of the grocery store and, the whole TV dinner thing and that sort of stuff you basically got told that if you grow and raise your own food in your backyard, you're a loser. You're not really providing for your family, right?
[00:26:45] If you can't afford to just go to the grocery store and get these, the newest whiz bang 9, 000 and bring it home. Yeah, everybody was just sold a a bill of goods that just isn't good for you.
[00:26:56] Track4-Mic 4: I don't know that I've ever really had rabbit.
[00:26:58] Track2-Mic 2: That's good. Yeah. I like it.
[00:27:00] Track3-Mic 3: it's so rabbit tastes like a more chickeny chicken.
[00:27:04] Track4-Mic 4: Or chickeny
[00:27:05] Track3-Mic 3: It does, right? So whenever anybody says, Oh, everything tastes like chicken, not everything tastes like chicken, but a rabbit is almost entirely dark meat, right? It tastes like dark meat chicken, except for the tenderloins up, up underneath the ribs by the spine.
[00:27:22] Those are white meat and they're just like the chicken tenderloins that you would take from underneath the breast meat, right? You know how the chicken tenders, the... It's identical in flavor and texture. Provided that it's, prepared well, and they are amazing. The only difference when it comes to preparing rabbit versus preparing chicken is that there's no skin on the rabbit when you're done processing it.
[00:27:46] And rabbits don't have any subcutaneous fat, right? So there's no fat under the skin like chickens. If you take a skin on chicken and throw it in the oven and roast it, it will baste in its own fat, and it won't dry out because it's got the skin layer on it. If you just take a whole rabbit and throw it in the oven and try to roast it like you would roast a chicken it's gonna end up kinda dry and kinda stringy.
[00:28:07] It's not gonna be good like you want, so you can either cook it quickly and brown it off bone in, bone out, doesn't really matter, but Fast and then done and eat it or you can brown it off and then braise it and serve it with some sort of sauce and it's fantastic. One of my favorite ways to eat it is enchiladas.
[00:28:25] Rabbit enchiladas are completely insane.
[00:28:28] Track2-Mic 2: So the best
[00:28:29] Track1-Mic 1: the best pot pie we ever had was the rabbit pot pie.
[00:28:32] Track3-Mic 3: It was great.
[00:28:33] Track1-Mic 1: Yeah, it had fresh carrots and green onions from our garden and just the rabbit, and that was it, and it was so
[00:28:38] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah, it was really good.
[00:28:39] Track2-Mic 2: and just a rabbit, and it was so good. Really good. What does process name look like?
[00:28:42] Track4-Mic 4: it was so
[00:28:43] Track1-Mic 1: For
[00:28:43] Track2-Mic 2: chickens or rabbits? Rabbits. Either. Both. Let's start with chickens and then finish with rabbits.
[00:28:48] Track3-Mic 3: chickens is a lot dirtier.
[00:28:50] Track1-Mic 1: Yeah, and
[00:28:50] Track2-Mic 2: longer.
[00:28:51] Track3-Mic 3: yeah, and a lot longer. So with chickens chickens need to be bled out, right? So they go into a,
[00:28:58] Track2-Mic 2: deer?
[00:28:59] Track3-Mic 3: yeah, so they go into a kill cone, right? So the live bird goes upside down into a steel cone and
[00:29:07] You slice its throat and break its neck all in one motion and all the blood drains out into a bucket to get dealt with later.
[00:29:13] And once they've hung for a couple of minutes, you put them in a scald pot at 150 for about 15 20 seconds until the outer scales will slough off their feet. And then we are blessed to own a chicken plucker. Plucking chickens by hand is awful and I don't recommend it.
[00:29:30] Track1-Mic 1: Ever.
[00:29:31] Track3-Mic 3: They are miserable. You can rent chicken pluckers from people that own them to rent them out.
[00:29:35] But anyway, we bought one after plucking seven by hand one day, and we're like, we're never doing this again. So you throw it into the chicken plucker, two at a time, it knocks all the feathers off of them, or most of them anyway. They then go into a cold ice bath. From there, you take the feet, head, and glands off, the tail gland, the oil gland.
[00:29:57] You then loosen the crop.
[00:30:01] Track2-Mic 2: Crop
[00:30:01] Track3-Mic 3: the crop is part of the digestive system. It's where the food goes before it hits the gizzard, if I remember correctly.
[00:30:09] Track2-Mic 2: gizzard.
[00:30:10] Track1-Mic 1: Yeah.
[00:30:11] Track3-Mic 3: And then so you have to loosen that and then make sure you get everything out of there and rinse them all off and put them into the ice bath with with some salt, and it sits there for a couple of days.
[00:30:22] That way it can go through the whole rigor mortis process, because if you eat a fresh chicken, one that was just killed, it's gonna be tough. It'll taste good, but it'll be tough. If you give it a couple of days to relax, it ends up being tender and fantastic. So you end up with all kinds of feathers, all kinds of guts, all kinds of blood.
[00:30:38] And you need to have water running all the time, and it takes a long time to go from the foot to the freezer, right?
[00:30:45] Track1-Mic 1: Earlier
[00:30:46] Track4-Mic 4: you said it. You did seven in a day. Does that mean it took you all day to do
[00:30:50] Track3-Mic 3: You said
[00:30:50] Track1-Mic 1: no. That was a batch of
[00:30:52] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah, we just had seven to process, and it was awful.
[00:30:55] Track1-Mic 1: We just did 26 about a month ago and it took us three and a half hours.
[00:30:59] Track2-Mic 2: just did 26
[00:30:59] Track3-Mic 3: Cause of the plucker. Yeah. And there's ways for us to be more efficient next time anyway. And we figured out a couple of bottlenecks. So the next time we process birds, we're going to be processing 60 and I expect to do 60 in about six hours.
[00:31:12] Track2-Mic 2: Okay.
[00:31:13] Track3-Mic 3: Like total, like the whole thing.
[00:31:15] Track1-Mic 1: We basically assembly line it.
[00:31:16] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah. So rabbits rabbits are much, much easier. So you bring the rabbit over to the breaking table. And there's a couple of different ways to dispatch the rabbits. I like thumping them. There are some people that that stretch them.
[00:31:32] So that's a fork shaped apparatus that
[00:31:35] Track1-Mic 1: They call it a hopper popper.
[00:31:36] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah, you put their head goes above it, their body goes below it, and you give them a yank and it separates their spinal cord. I don't like that way because there's there's more of a chance of you getting clawed so you have to do it wearing welding gloves and stuff, and I just would rather not.
[00:31:51] If you bring them over to the table and set them so they're Their front paws are still on the table, but their chin is off of it. You hit them behind the ears and the right of the brainstem with a with a thumper with a, with a little mini bat and it severs their spinal column just like the other thing does, right?
[00:32:08] And it causes massive hemorrhaging in their brain. So everything is off right now. You then, Hold them on the table while the nervous system stuff finishes twitching And because they're there and you can control them like that You don't have to worry about getting scratched or anything like that and they can't you know flop around So I prefer that way
[00:32:27] You make a little nick with a knife
[00:32:30] Their shoulder blades after you've rinsed them off real good and got the fur real wet and then you just Stick your fingers in and pull each direction and the the skin, the fur all comes off like a sock just that's being pulled two different ways remove the feet, remove the head small little incision at the bottom of the sternum reach up in through the diaphragm, trachea, lungs, heart, everything comes out crack open the pelvis to Take the anus out of it and rinse it.
[00:32:59] It's way fast. It's a lot faster. It's a lot cleaner. The
[00:33:04] any digestive juices or fecal matter from processing chickens is really dangerous and super unsanitary. With rabbits, there's none of it. You don't have to purge rabbits. It doesn't matter. Yeah,
[00:33:16] Track2-Mic 2: What do with the
[00:33:17] Track4-Mic 4: what do you guys do with the fur?
[00:33:18] Track3-Mic 3: It becomes compost. So
[00:33:20] Track1-Mic 1: Some people tan them. We have what's considered, again, a dual purpose rabbit, so you could keep the... The pelt and do something with it. People used to, make clothes out of rabbit fur rabbit skin.
[00:33:31] I'm not big into wearing rabbit underwear anymore, but people used to anymore people used to, I've never worn it, but
[00:33:38] Track2-Mic 2: kidding. Now, for people listening and they've never been exposed to this like 80 years ago if you were gonna eat, you were doing this.
[00:33:44] And I think that's important to consider.
[00:33:47] Track4-Mic 4: If you're eating today, it's being done. It's just not
[00:33:49] Track1-Mic 1: Yeah, even if you weren't necessarily doing it 80 years ago, you knew your farmer who was
[00:33:54] Track2-Mic 2: who was doing it, right?
[00:33:55] Track3-Mic 3: I know it sounds like I'm a monster talking about like pulling the guts out of, rabbits and
[00:34:00] Track2-Mic 2: just
[00:34:00] Track3-Mic 3: it's, yeah,
[00:34:01] Track1-Mic 1: that happens to every single animal you're eating.
[00:34:03] Yeah.
[00:34:04] Track2-Mic 2: Every single one.
[00:34:05] Track3-Mic 3: And it's I'm not going to lie and say that it's my, my favorite thing to do on the farm.
[00:34:09] It's messy and it's it's weird when you do it the first time. But I, as a kid, I grew up eating game meat. So that's, Definitely doesn't come from a grocery store. You've hunted the thing you now have to process it and that's just part of it
[00:34:22] Track2-Mic 2: So
[00:34:23] Track3-Mic 3: but all things considered if I was if I'm gonna eat something
[00:34:26] I'd like to know how it was cared for.
[00:34:28] I'd like to know that it was treated well and You know all of the animals that I process personally It's a fraction of a second And it's over with, right? There's, they don't even, they don't even know what happened, right? Chickens, rabbits, either it's over before it began.
[00:34:44] It's a fraction of a second, they have no idea.
[00:34:46] Track4-Mic 4: Yeah.
[00:34:47] Yeah, I know that's tough for people and I think the words that people like to use like meat is murder for example or like you would need a human corpse. It's that's the only thing that's a corpse an animal is a carcass It's the terms aren't the same
[00:34:59] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah.
[00:35:00] Track4-Mic 4: It's not really
[00:35:02] Track2-Mic 2: And
[00:35:02] Track4-Mic 4: But we want to I think when people that don't understand they want to apply those Terms to it, but the terms actually don't fit meat is murder.
[00:35:10] Track3-Mic 3: The uncomfortable truth about life is that in order for anything to live, something else has to die. And it doesn't matter what kind of, moral superiority podium you want to try to stand on or put yourself on.
[00:35:24] There's no way to X to escape that cycle in order for you.
[00:35:29] Track1-Mic 1: to survive,
[00:35:30] Track3-Mic 3: something else has to die. So we actually got our first hater the other day and she was a meat is murder person and hates our guts because we raise rabbits to then eat them. And that, and according to her, they have souls and we're going to, karma is going to get us.
[00:35:46] And
[00:35:46] Track4-Mic 4: have a soul to this woman?
[00:35:48] Track3-Mic 3: it was quite the
[00:35:48] Track4-Mic 4: pull it out of the ground, you're murdering the
[00:35:50] Track3-Mic 3: right. If you want to if you want to never eat meat, and you want to be a vegan, that's fine, I don't have any problem with that, but It's it's intellectually dishonest to think that type of lifestyle and choice actually saves more animals by eating that way because it doesn't.
[00:36:06] In order for your soybeans to be grown, to make your tofu chicken patty, right? They just ran machinery across a hundred acres of land and they killed every mouse, they killed every newt, frog, worm. Everything.
[00:36:24] Track1-Mic 1: familiar with Vinnie Tortorich?
[00:36:25] Track2-Mic 2: Are you guys familiar with Vinnie Tortorich? He created some Netflix documentaries on the vegan industry. We had him on the show. And,
[00:36:32] Track4-Mic 4: Are you guys
[00:36:34] Track2-Mic 2: And then there's the vegan meat one. What was it?
[00:36:36] Track4-Mic 4: I don't remember what it was.
[00:36:37] Track2-Mic 2: What it was, but he's fantastic.
[00:36:38] He's hilarious. But he mentioned about the till tilling, the soil and just the amount, the thousands and thousands of animals
[00:36:44] Track1-Mic 1: Also, everyone's very concerned about their carbon footprint this day, these days, and so what a lot of people don't understand is regenerative farming, when you're growing pastures and you have animals on those pastures, the grass is actually keeping the carbon in the soil. So all of the, it
[00:37:01] Track3-Mic 3: carbon. It sequesters
[00:37:02] Track1-Mic 1: carbon.
[00:37:02] So all of the cow farts that we're super worried about are actually being the methane and the carbon in it is being actually sequestered into the soil where it's safe and protected. As soon as you start tilling land, you throw all of that carbon back into the atmosphere. So monocropping is actually doing a lot more to destroy the earth and add carbon into the atmosphere than
[00:37:24] Track3-Mic 3: Yes. That's funny
[00:37:25] Track1-Mic 1: that you guys had your first hater. You would think that people would be able to understand
[00:37:28] Track4-Mic 4: the difference between a big corporation that's harvesting an insane amount of chickens and cutting corners and things like that versus A micro farm on 1. 7 acres that their kids are playing with the chickens and that's a different life for a chicken.
[00:37:45] Track2-Mic 2: than
[00:37:46] Track1-Mic 1: Yes. My, my daughter's asked if cuddling the meat chickens would make them taste better.
[00:37:52] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah.
[00:37:52] Track1-Mic 1: tenders.
[00:37:52] Track4-Mic 4: Yes, my, my daughter's They're just massaging the chickens
[00:37:54] Track2-Mic 2: Like Wagyu
[00:37:55] Track4-Mic 4: you're
[00:37:55] Track1-Mic 1: they're holding the baby chicks. I have pictures of 'em. So yummy. Yeah.
[00:37:59] Track2-Mic 2: That's a little
[00:38:00] Track3-Mic 3: so much. Yeah. It's our kids have known where their food has come from forever.
[00:38:06] And again, I grew up eating game and so my children get exposed to game. And I remember this funny little story. We were living in this neighborhood, right? Where we were having chickens. We weren't supposed to have back in Maine. And we had some giant gray squirrels in the backyard.
[00:38:22] And I said to my oldest daughter when she was very young I was like, man, that's a delicious looking squirrel out there. And she goes, dad, squirrels aren't food. And I said, oh, they most definitely are. Really? Yeah, squirrels are definitely food. And she goes, huh, squirrels are food. And her paradigm on squirrels completely shifted.
[00:38:45] Later that fall... When when it was open season on squirrels I went out to an area that was this big pine forest where there was a ton of them and I brought a bag of squirrels home and and she came outside with me and I processed them in the backyard so she could see me do it.
[00:39:00] I could have field dressed them there. I could have taken care of it and, brought them home in a bucket, all done, no fur and been like, here it is. But, I brought home the squirrels and she got to, play with their tails and feel their fur and stuff. And then she was out there with me while I broke them all down.
[00:39:15] And and then we ate them. And my girls love eating gray squirrel.
[00:39:20] Track1-Mic 1: So part of the funny part is we made squirrel and broccoli Alfredo and that set a precedent for her that all animals, all game that you kill should be made into whatever that is. And broccoli Alfredo. So fast forward five, six years, we're down here in North Carolina and there's a Fox skulking around our chicken coop.
[00:39:41] And so Gabe has to kill it. And she asks us, Are we going to eat Fox and broccoli Alfredo for dinner? And Gabe goes, no, we're not that hungry, honey
[00:39:52] Track2-Mic 2: honey. That's pretty wild.
[00:39:53] Track4-Mic 4: I wonder if that's something that's taught because I don't think most kids are necessarily opposed to eating animals.
[00:39:58] I remember a very similar story. My daughter, she was young and I went to my uncle Terry's house and out in his pole bar and he's a deer hunter and my daughter, she was like four or five and she's looking up at all uncle Terry's deer head and she's what are all those deer doing up there? Where's the back of it?
[00:40:12] And I'm like, no, those are just the heads, honey. Uncle Terry hunts them and then he eats them. And I thought she was going to be sad. And she was just like. People gotta eat. Then she went on and started playing.
[00:40:21] Track2-Mic 2: was it.
[00:40:22] Track1-Mic 1: gotta eat. That's
[00:40:23] Track4-Mic 4: Ha,
[00:40:23] Track1-Mic 1: started
[00:40:23] Track2-Mic 2: Now, to wrap this thing up to summarize the benefits of what you guys offer.
[00:40:27] They're growing their own foods, which means they're not getting glyphosate round up in their food. They know what it's fertilized with. They're creating a self sustaining item. And if you guys are helping them with them, they're not doing it wrong for. 1, 000 to get one pepper. If you got kids, they're watching you grow and raise your food.
[00:40:45] So they're not used to all processed stuff. They're actually involved in raising their own food, have a different appreciation and outlook on food, which is awesome. You're able to if you add the chicken and rabbit component, you're getting fresh eggs, you're helping carbon footprint. You're giving them a better life than what you'd be buying from the store.
[00:41:01] And you're not feeding those larger corporations money to continuously do this. So there's. So many pros I, not a whole lot of cons, maybe some additional set up at the beginning. Is there anything you would add to the pro side?
[00:41:14] Track3-Mic 3: It's
[00:41:15] Track1-Mic 1: really good for your soul. There's actual studies that say that 10 minutes in the garden, digging in the dirt will actually lower your blood pressure. That's a reason why they put gardens in jails and people build therapy gardens. It actually helps calm people down and adjust your. Your attitude. It helps with depression and anxiety. Getting actual bare fingers into the dirt and getting dirt under your nails builds your immune system.
[00:41:40] Track2-Mic 2: Absolutely. Yeah. And we've done episodes on grounding too with Dr.
[00:41:45] Clint O'Bear's research too. And so there's actually they've done studies where your blood platelets line up better. And that's part of what lowers blood pressure is when they're all in a line versus in clusters, they can flow through the capillaries and things better.
[00:41:58] Track3-Mic 3: It's not, yeah it's not,
[00:42:00] Track2-Mic 2: It's not hocus
[00:42:00] Track3-Mic 3: No, it's not pseudoscience. Like having your hands in the dirt is just good for you. There was a there was a reason that when man was created in a garden.
[00:42:08] Track4-Mic 4: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:42:09] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:42:10] Track4-Mic 4: I got a question.
[00:42:11] If you guys, on 1. 7 acres,
[00:42:15] Track3-Mic 3: throwing
[00:42:16] Track4-Mic 4: out if you want to go out to eat, because that sounds good. Could you just eat the food you guys produce? Or do you have to supplement? And how much do you need to supplement if you do have to supplement?
[00:42:26] Track3-Mic 3: If we wanted to only eat stuff that we produced, we would have to change some of the things that we were growing to do that more, right? And we would have to allocate some more of our land to doing that, right?
[00:42:39] So we would have to raise a very heavy starch crop. And then we would have to go, yeah, and we would have to go without certain things, right? I don't have enough land to grow enough wheat to ever eat bread or pasta again, right? That would I wouldn't be able to do that.
[00:42:56] Track2-Mic 2: olive trees for olive
[00:42:57] Track3-Mic 3: yeah, right? Like that wouldn't be a thing. But If we wanted to struggle meal it up, right? Like for ever. Yeah, you totally could, right? But I really like bread and my wife makes really amazing sourdough. So we buy flour, right? And I like rice. We're gonna have stir fry tonight, right?
[00:43:16] I also don't have a
[00:43:17] Track4-Mic 4: don't view that as some kind of failure. It's just, you're supplementing like anybody else would.
[00:43:21] Track1-Mic 1: But if everything broke and we had to eat off the land, we'd be fine.
[00:43:25] Track3-Mic 3: Yeah. It just would look different. It would be very protein heavy and very roughage heavy. There's lots of, there's lots of stuff that you can grow that grows all the time year round and you can eat it that you don't even have to farm.
[00:43:39] It just grows. Yeah. It just isn't particularly yummy,
[00:43:43] Track1-Mic 1: we don't also grow any sugar beets or sugar cane. Like we're not growing any kind of massive amounts of sugar. However, these will be arriving on the farm. Yeah.
[00:43:53] Track2-Mic 2: So we'll have honey.
[00:43:54] Track1-Mic 1: So we
[00:43:55] Track3-Mic 3: will soon.
[00:43:56] Track1-Mic 1: So one thing we do miss about Maine is we can't tap any maple trees here.
[00:44:00] So maple syrup, we're, that's part of our genetic makeup.
[00:44:03] Track2-Mic 2: So this isn't about becoming completely subsistent and not doing that means failure. This is about doing better for yourself, better for the environment which perfectly fits what we preach on this show.
[00:44:12] I'm in all transparency, I'm drinking bourbon while on the show. Do I recommend made from real rabbits?
[00:44:18] Track3-Mic 3: real rabbits. And
[00:44:20] Track1-Mic 1: Fed
[00:44:21] Track2-Mic 2: Is that part of a healthy diet? Absolutely not. But, we preach 80 20 what is sustainable for the rest of your life. I have people do better. I never tell a client, unless they're an alcoholic, to never have alcohol again.
[00:44:32] But, if they're drinking three glasses a night, that's probably not great for their liver. Let's pare that down to maybe four or five drinks a week and see how that goes. And if you can supplement most of your meals with what you're doing subsistence wise, you know where it's coming from, it's better ingredients, you're taking a part in it, you're lowering the carbon footprint, you're doing all these things, and that's an awesome project to, to, that's worthwhile.
[00:44:55] Track1-Mic 1: just because we're not producing it doesn't mean that you can't make conscientious decisions about how you go about getting your flour and your rice and anything else that you're supplementing with. You can choose to buy better. You can choose to buy local. You can choose the the healthier option.
[00:45:12] Track3-Mic 3: And the things that we don't raise currently on our farm, we, we've decided to make the personal decision to support someone else that is raising it.
[00:45:23] So we're part of a herd share. When you came to my farm, you didn't see my cow. I don't have room for a cow, right? But I can own a part of a cow, right? It's somebody else that has 50 acres where they have several cows, and I get we get fresh milk every single week, and we make our own butter, and we make our own coffee creamer, and
[00:45:44] Track2-Mic 2: For people who don't know what HerdShare is, can you give us the five second, or five, what's the nickel tour? What is HerdShare?
[00:45:49] Track3-Mic 3: Her chair is is just that, like you, you buy in to someone else's cows and you pledge to support in return you get a share of the milk, right? So if the share is zero that week, because they're not in calf and they haven't been refreshed, you still pay if they're overproducing, right? And they're producing a ton of milk and your.
[00:46:12] Share entitles you to two gallons you get three or four sometimes, right? So that's how a herd share works
[00:46:21] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah. And we could probably do a whole show on raw milk too. But is that part of the herd share program do you
[00:46:26] Track1-Mic 1: Yes. So
[00:46:27] Track2-Mic 2: Cool.
[00:46:28] Track1-Mic 1: Illegal in North Carolina, unless you be, become part of a herd share, and then magically it's legal.
[00:46:34] Track2-Mic 2: So raw milk is technically illegal
[00:46:35] Track1-Mic 1: Same milk.
[00:46:36] Track2-Mic 2: and then magically it's the benefits of raw milk?
[00:46:37] Track1-Mic 1: So raw milk it's not pasteurized.
[00:46:39] So all of the things that people have a hard time processing and pasteurized milk. The beneficial enzymes and bacteria and all that stuff is existing in the raw milk product. So people who are lactose intolerant typically just don't have enough lactase naturally in their own body in order to break down the lactose.
[00:46:58] While raw milk has the enzyme lactase in it so that you have the abundance of lactase in order to break down the
[00:47:05] Track3-Mic 3: Once you pasteurize it, the heat destroys it, it breaks it down and you've lost all of
[00:47:10] Track1-Mic 1: There's actual studies too of kids with asthma drinking raw milk, having fewer asthma problems. People with, that have a raw milk as part of their diet typically have better dental health.
[00:47:20] It, it does a lot for your body and it's one of the most nutrient dense foods you can just have. Now,
[00:47:26] Track2-Mic 2: it does a sensitivity to the A1. It's
[00:47:31] Track1-Mic 1: that only problematic
[00:47:33] Track2-Mic 2: just
[00:47:33] Track1-Mic 1: pasteurization? Not necessarily. Some people just have a sensitivity to the A1. It's just a little more potent.
[00:47:39] We specifically make sure that our milk is A2, which is why we buy from this family and this farm.
[00:47:46] Track2-Mic 2: We specifically make sure that our milk is A2 now, if somebody was looking to make a change what are the top three things you would have them do to get to a healthier lifestyle? Based on your experience and what you guys do.
[00:47:59] Track3-Mic 3: The very first thing that I would have them do is grow something anything get your hands in the dirt. It's
[00:48:07] Track1-Mic 1: even if it's just herbs on your window, sill something,
[00:48:10] Track3-Mic 3: right get outside get in the Sun get your hands dirty right start there You're gonna be astounded as
[00:48:18] Track1-Mic 1: As.
[00:48:19] Track3-Mic 3: How good do you feel just doing that? Just being out in the sunshine for the, the 10 minutes a day that you're out in your garden, pulling weeds and and getting your hands in the soil.
[00:48:28] It's just really good for you.
[00:48:30] Track1-Mic 1: The added
[00:48:30] Track3-Mic 3: benefit of gardening is that you also get to eat the food and
[00:48:35] Track1-Mic 1: it's
[00:48:35] Track3-Mic 3: unreal. The difference between a tomato that you walked 25 feet out your back door and picked and a tomato that was picked green.
[00:48:46] Track1-Mic 1: You radiate it
[00:48:47] Track3-Mic 3: and then put on a truck to, it radiated to make it red, right?
[00:48:51] And then trucked to the store. It's not even, it's not even remotely the same, right? One tastes like crunchy water and one tastes like a tomato, right?
[00:49:00] Track1-Mic 1: The other thing is, I would say, go back into your kitchen. Start making food again. Yeah, cook. So even if you're not necessarily pulling all of your food out of your backyard, Get some good food and start cooking for yourself again.
[00:49:13] Start mastering the art of how to put a good, cohesive meal on the table. Protein healthy fat, carb, like you need to eat well. And that's gonna fuel you to, in order to grow stuff and be outside and to do the things. But you're just gonna feel better.
[00:49:27] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:49:28] Anything else to add to that?
[00:49:31] Track3-Mic 3: Anybody that wants to start growing and raising their own food. It's literally what we do for a living and it's it's how we pay our mortgage. So they can go to halfabarnfarm. com. They can find all of our class offerings. We have a backyard chickens basics class coming up in September.
[00:49:47] Again, the open farm tour is this Saturday, 3 to 5. And, yeah, we're available to hire. We offer free one hour consultations locally, so we can come out to your backyard, take a look at what you have going on, talk to you about your goals, and put together a proposal for you and get you growing.
[00:50:03] Track2-Mic 2: And you guys will prefabricate the beds too, right? And bring 'em and build them on site.
[00:50:07] Track3-Mic 3: build them and install them and the whole thing we have. Two more installs going in this month, and yeah, we're, so we're booking into September now but there's still plenty of time to get your fall garden in, and yeah,
[00:50:20] Track1-Mic 1: so something too people need to know is that we offer the ability for you to get education in your backyard.
[00:50:25] Maybe you come and take a fall gardening class at the farm, but it's really not. All of the things that you're growing. So you can hire us to come and give you a specialized education in your backyard. I will dig in the dirt with you and teach you how to grow and work in your space specifically. And so the goal is not to have me keep coming out.
[00:50:43] The goal is to set you off and get those training wheels off and have you off and running.
[00:50:47] Track2-Mic 2: you off and running. Yeah. And the investment to have it taught right the first time is going to save you weeks and months and thousands of dollars
[00:50:55] Track1-Mic 1: save you that thousand dollars on that pepper. Yeah.
[00:50:57] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:50:58] Track1-Mic 1: so a lot too, what we're trying to help people to understand is the only barrier to you growing something or to you having this sort of lifestyle is your mindset.
[00:51:07] It's not your space. It's not your experience level. It's just your mindset. Yeah. And that's what we're helping to change for people. Yeah. Anything
[00:51:16] Track2-Mic 2: add, Joe?
[00:51:16] Track4-Mic 4: Two things. One, I wanna hear, I wanna get some information on this herd sharing thing. 'cause I always wanna dress like Kevin Costa on Yellowstone, but I don't have a cow, but I feel like if I herd shared then I could start wearing a cowboy hat. And two I saw in this documentary once and it just smelled like bss.
[00:51:32] But anyways, you guys would probably know. I was watching a farm to table documentary where they grew the stuff and then just brought it into the table and the restaurant was on the thing And it looked delicious. Everything was great. And they said they had certain chickens that they only fed Ghost red peppers to and then the eggs came out red and they tasted spicy.
[00:51:50] Does that sound like it's plausible?
[00:51:52] Track1-Mic 1: Yes. Yeah,
[00:51:53] Track3-Mic 3: it's plausible if that's all that you're feeding to them, right?
[00:51:56] Track1-Mic 1: Bones points to them for getting chickens to eat ghost peppers, though.
[00:51:59] Track4-Mic 4: They
[00:51:59] They don't
[00:52:00] Track3-Mic 3: don't have,
[00:52:01] Track1-Mic 1: ghost peppers? No,
[00:52:01] Track3-Mic 3: they don't. So they don't have taste buds, that would tell the difference. So
[00:52:05] Track2-Mic 2: would they have? Firehole like humans.
[00:52:07] Track3-Mic 3: no. So chickens can't they don't taste capsaicin.
[00:52:10] It doesn't have any effect on them. Something that's really common to try to make the yolks of eggs. artificially orange is to put a bunch of crushed red pepper flake in their feed
[00:52:22] Track1-Mic 1: Or marigolds.
[00:52:23] Track3-Mic 3: and they'll, yeah,
[00:52:24] Track2-Mic 2: We're marigolds.
[00:52:25] Track1-Mic 1: That's actually what they're doing in large production facilities, is they're feeding them marigolds to give them that bright yellow
[00:52:32] Track4-Mic 4: their feed. it would change the flavor if you did feed peppers? Yes. It would be like a
[00:52:36] Track3-Mic 3: that, if it was all, yeah, if it was all they ate, I'm sure that some of that would end up carrying over eventually, just the old adage of you,
[00:52:43] Track1-Mic 1: It's the same reason why people are hesitant to feed too much onions and garlic to your chickens.
[00:52:48] Track3-Mic 3: Because it can,
[00:52:49] Track1-Mic 1: But if it's part of a balanced, diet and it's just part of your scraps going
[00:52:53] Track4-Mic 4: love onions and garlic. I wouldn't care if a chicken tasted like I'm going to go,
[00:52:57] Track3-Mic 3: But
[00:52:58] Track1-Mic 1: you might, if you're a fried egg in the morning, did
[00:53:00] Track4-Mic 4: yeah, it's
[00:53:00] Track3-Mic 3: Really orange yolk isn't necessarily indicative of this the egg being, super fantastic or healthy. What's indicative of a really healthy egg actually is having good membrane separation of the three layers of the egg, right? So when you crack an egg into a frying pan, you should have three layers, right?
[00:53:17] The yolk should be on top and it should be sitting proud. There should be a thick layer of albumin, right? Which is white. And then there should be a thin layer of of the white that's... It should look like a three layer cake. If it doesn't do that, and most of the ones that you get from the store won't, right?
[00:53:31] You crack it open, the white is one layer, and the yolk is sitting on top of
[00:53:35] Track4-Mic 4: That makes a lot of sense. I never heard it explained like that before, but we recently stopped buying like the $3 eggs and started buying like the $12 eggs that are like the different kind that come in the fancy container.
[00:53:46] And you open it and it's got like the
[00:53:47] Track2-Mic 2: of the month. Yeah, that's
[00:53:49] Track4-Mic 4: it does. It has this eggs was made by Lucy or whatever, and they do cook completely different. Like the cook times
[00:53:56] Track2-Mic 2: Vital
[00:53:56] Track4-Mic 4: Vital Farms. That's it. That's what it is. And they're so much better. They're honestly, so much better.
[00:54:01] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah, there's no,
[00:54:02] Track3-Mic 3: nothing like it, right? A real fresh egg, right? From a chicken that got fed what chickens are supposed to be fed, right? It's life changing. If you thought you liked eggs before, right? Try a real one.
[00:54:15] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah. So one more time, hit us with your contact information so people can find you.
[00:54:20] Website, phone number, email, whatever.
[00:54:21] Track4-Mic 4: Www.halfabarnfarm.com.
[00:54:26] Track1-Mic 1: We're also on Facebook and Instagram. You can email us at growathalfabarnfarm. com
[00:54:33] Track2-Mic 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You guys are a wealth of knowledge. We could probably do three more episodes with you guys. That was cool to learn about the albumin and the different layers of the eggs too.
[00:54:42] I didn't
[00:54:42] Track4-Mic 4: We like weirded out by that stuff, but we should probably put a disclaimer at the beginning.
[00:54:47] Track2-Mic 2: out by Yeah, maybe now now the very first episode we ever did, like 80 something episodes ago just to be funny I ended with each shit and die and then I'd said, all
[00:54:56] Track4-Mic 4: have to cut it every
[00:54:57] Track2-Mic 2: and he has
[00:54:58] Track4-Mic 4: actually put it in.
[00:54:59] Track2-Mic 2: You know what? Let's leave that in. That's going to be the new tagline.
[00:55:01] Cause literally if you eat shit maybe you won't die, but you're going to have probably less quality of life.
[00:55:06] Track3-Mic 3: Tagline. Everyone's gonna die eventually right? But, you more than likely will have some sort of thing that you can link back to the fact that you have you know nine pounds of undigested pop tarts in your colon
[00:55:18] Track4-Mic 4: We'll give you Eat Shit and Die Faster. How's that?