Episode 129: What Homestead Skills Should You Learn to Save the Most Money?

Welcome!

Hi, and welcome back. I just want to remind you that you can get all my Homestead Science books on my website for a new way of teaching agriculture to today’s youth and aspiring homesteaders by focusing on small-scale farming and self-sufficiency. If you’re a school, co-op, or retailer and need invoicing, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

Homestead Trivia

So this week, big news: we got the new Kids Homestead Trivia in, and I shipped it out to everyone excitingly waiting to get it for Christmas. So now we have the set of original Homestead Trivia and Kids’ Homestead Trivia. You can get it through the end of the month for just $32 for the set.

Otherwise, they’re $20 a piece. If you’re listening to this on the day it comes, this podcast on the day it comes out, you might be able to still get it with expedited shipping before Christmas, if that’s something that you want. I do have the option for expedited shipping on the site just for the trivia.

I haven’t got that set up for some of my other things. So yeah, definitely something to go check out. You can find that on my website, thehomesteadeducation.com, or if you just want to go direct and check it out, it’s homesteadtrivia.com. So pretty easy there.

Raising Self-Sufficient Kids

This podcast episode is actually going to be a lot about homestead skills. And so I just want to talk for one second about my book, Raising Self-Sufficient Kids, An Honest Mom’s Guide to Intentional Parenting. And this book kind of sparked from the conversation that I was having with everybody on how to teach their kids skills on the homestead and to get them to do their chores on the homestead.

And while I was thinking about how to answer that question for so many people, I realized that there’s more to it than just teaching the skills. It’s about the relationship that you have with your kids and the relationship that they have with your life endeavors by the ownership that you give them. So I wrote this book.

Not only does it tell our story, it can be raw at times. We have neurodivergent kids. We’re a blended family. We raise our kids on a homestead.

I’ve read a lot of parenting books because we had quite a journey blending our families. And in reading those parenting books, I just didn’t see that there were a lot of books out there that understood what it’s like raising rural kids. So even though this book isn’t only for rural families, I think that as a rural family, you’re going to get more out of this book than you will a lot of other parenting books because when you raise kids in the country, it’s, it’s a little more raw. It’s a little more crass. Your kids are a little more feral. And I think that there’s things that you just have to take into consideration.

Like, I guarantee that there are not moms in the city who have to, change their kids out of four pairs of manure-covered pants before they can get to church in the morning. So, and that’s just one piece of it. But anyways, if you are just looking for some peace in your home,  ways to try to get your kids involved, ways to just raise self-sufficient adults because honestly, let’s face it; we’re not raising children. We’re raising adults. They just happened to be children at the time.

So, go ahead and check this book out. It’s Raising Self-Sufficient Kids. You can get a signed copy off my website, or you can head over to Amazon and grab a copy there, or it’s on Kindle and it will be on Audible in the spring, hopefully.

Homestead Update

So, just a little reminder there on those things, this week on the homestead, I kind of, I’m really enjoying checking in with you guys on what’s going on on the homestead. Because I think like a running theme with homesteaders is we don’t really have a friend to check in with. I talked last week about my best friend from California coming up to visit and, you know, even though we grew up in rural California, I grew up ranching, and she didn’t.

And so visiting Kody’s house was always an adventure. So that’s what that was for her, too. When she and her family came to visit, it was an adventure for them.

Whereas this is life for us. And I find that, just kind of on a regular basis, like I don’t have that girlfriend to pick up the phone and say,you won’t believe what we did on the farm today and have them be like, oh my gosh, we did the same thing. Do you have advice on this? Oh, I do have advice on that.

And I don’t know. I just kind of, I miss that, back and forth, which I’ll admit, even on a podcast, I’m not getting that back and forth, but I encourage all of you, if you listen to this and you’re like, I resonated with that, or I’m going through that too. Or do you have advice on this? Reach out to me because this is my way of connecting.

And if I could pick up the phone and call each of you and have this chat, I probably would, maybe not. I don’t know. That’s a lot of people to call, but that’s the feeling I have with it.

And so, even though it’s one-way listening, feel like it’s not one-way, a one-way conversation. I always want you to feel like you can reach out to me. Or just a shout-out: Hey, I loved the episode, hated the episode.

Because it just it gets that back and forth that I think, like I said, as homesteaders or as homeschool moms that we don’t feel like we have a lot. So, I always feel like this is a two-way conversation. 

Dairy Update

So this week on the homestead, like last week, we took our cow Bailey to the vet.

She needed her tuberculosis test and a brucellosis test in order for us to legally sell her milk in Idaho., Her tuberculosis came back fine. Her brucellosis hasn’t come back yet.

And I actually reminded my husband to call today and see if it was in, but he hasn’t yet. And I was hoping to be able to give you guys the results tonight, but you know, it’s what it is. I’m sure it’ll come back fine because we’ve had her tested before and there’s no reason to believe, I mean, just like a year ago, there’s no reason to believe that that would be any different.

And so once I have that, I can start selling her milk legally. And then we have another cow due soon or a heifer due soon with her first calf and we’ll be selling that milk too. So, that’s kind of just an exciting step.

Food Freedom

You know, raw milk is a big topic in America right now with a lot of our political changes, and a lot of those political changes have to do with food and food freedom, which is something that I really feel like I was passionate about. I had a joke like as a homesteader, food freedom person, like I was country before country was cool. And so I actually I talked about that on Instagram this week.

I did a carousel, just kind of sharing my story and my testimony on how I came to where I am now. And one of the big ones is that I actually quit my job in corporate agriculture to consult with small farms to help them be able to sell their food legally because the federal and state governments are designed to basically choke out the small farmer. I mean, they do have small herd exemptions and things like that, but they don’t advertise it.

Like it’s not. And if what they do have, I mean, you print out there, it’s called a white sheet, which is their explanation on how to do stuff. I have worked in food safety for years.

And I mean, reading those regulations, literally for a living, we’re working on trying to be able to do the 10,000 bird exemption in Idaho, which is, federal law is that all meat has to be butchered at a USDA plant to be sold. But there’s hardly any chicken butchering plants. So if you are raising under 10,000 or under a thousand there, it’s like under 10,000, you fall into a certain category under a thousand, you fall into another category, of any type of poultry, like chickens, turkeys, quail, that you can butcher them on your property.

Every state’s a little different. Some you can have open air, some you have to do in a certified kitchen, or not exactly a certified kitchen, but basically the same requirements as a certified kitchen, which is what we have to have in Idaho, which is super shocking. Idaho usually doesn’t care what you do.

But a certified kitchen is reasonably acceptable to put together, which is something we want to do anyway, for our milk processing and stuff. So the white sheet for Idaho is basically something that somebody typed up in Word, made a PDF, and put it out there for people to read. And it’s, I don’t want to say that it’s not forthcoming, but I kind of look at it, and I’m like, what does that mean for my situation? And because I’ve never actually worked in a commercial food safety setting in Idaho, I feel like I have a lot of questions.

And my husband’s like, I think you’re letting your previous experience hold you back. And I’m, he’s like, what would somebody who didn’t have your experience, they would just implement this stuff? And I’m like, yeah, but then they might be wrong. And down the road, you end up having issues.

So we’re actually we’re going to just make an appointment with our local health inspector. It’s a small department in a small community. It’s not a big deal.

In fact, there’s another certified kitchen right near us that he comes and checks regularly. So we can even have him by the house to see what we need to do in our current facility, which has a hot water heater, sink, drains on the floor, and all that stuff to make it appropriate to build a butcher for the chickens there. And if we even can butcher the chickens in there, when we’re also doing other things like our milk in there, or if we need to like add on to the building or something.

So yeah, that’s just what we’re doing with like getting our cow tested, we’re just making sure that we follow all those rules. But what I was kind of getting at is that, both federal and state don’t make it super clear on how to be a small-scale producer. So that’s been something that’s always been near and dear to my heart is helping farmers meet those regulations.

Being a Direct-to-Consumer Pork Operation

With that, we’ve been selling a lot of our pork lately, we’re trying to get our website up. And I think I’ve talked about it for the last few months, or maybe last few episodes, and that I have someone building my site. And a lot of the problem at this point is he’s waiting on me for things.

Because I need to enter all of our products while also running our other business. And some I needed weights on them and that type of thing to be able to put the proper weight in so that we could calculate the proper shipping cost. And I mean, the list just goes on.

And so this last weekend, my husband and I went out to the meat room. I had my computer out there and our scales, and we did weights on every single thing in our freezers so that we could get averages for each cut and then figure out the averages for our value box sizes and figure out what size boxes we even need to order. So now I’ll be able to get the website up and going a little quicker. With that, I still need a cash flow from my farm and we’re butchering three more pigs next month for retail.

I need my freezers kind of broke down a little, not broke down, like emptied out a little. So we’ve been selling a lot of pork, just locally. And, I advertise it on Facebook, word of mouth, that type of stuff.

And my husband and I were having a conversation about it the other day. And, I’m always like, if we just, push the farm and run it the way it’s supposed to be ran, we’re going to see a lot of income. We’re going to see the income that we’re wanting to see from our farm. And he’s like, I don’t know, we’ve been at this for a while, like we have a regular income, but can we really boost it to the numbers that you’re thinking we can do? 

And, this isn’t a look at how much money we made type of conversation.

This is more of a, because trust me, there is a lot of money going out to run this operation. But I sat down, and I added up what we made in a 30-day period from the day we had some pigs go to the butcher. And we sold some as a whole hog, some as half hogs, and then we’ve been selling retail cuts and value boxes.

And it came to $5,200 in 30 days just off of selling our pork. And I think it was just a really big eye-opener for both of us. I mean, yeah, like I said, we buy feed by the ton, we have vet visits, we have, a whole separate like power bill for the barn because we’re milking up there and running heat lamps and all that type of stuff.

So I mean, I’m not sitting here saying like, I’m sitting on $5,200, like goodness, I wish. But to be able to kind of step back and look at those numbers and say, when we are staying on top of this, when we are marketing properly, even just via Facebook, that we’re making a reasonable income off of our farm. And that’s something that I think anybody who’s looking at starting a homestead business. Tt’s not something that there’s a lot of products, businesses like if you build it, they will come.

And farm products are not really one of them. It seems obvious like it would be more like that, like everybody eats. So if you just have food, they’ll buy it.

And that’s not really the case when most people are programmed to buy from the grocery store. I am even programmed to buy from the grocery store. I mean, I’ll tell you right now, I do not go, oh, we’re out of pork, or we’re out of beef.

I’m going to run down to the local farm store, or I’m going to call my neighbors who raise beef and see if they have some burger. I just don’t think about it, even as a producer myself. And we’ll be in town. I’m like, hey, kids, you want tacos for dinner? And they’re like, yeah, but we’re out of burger. And I’ll grab burger at the store. Don’t even think about it.

I would much rather buy from the neighbors, because honestly, it tastes better. We bought some burger from Costco the other day. I mean, it was a good deal.

We wanted to have smash burger croissants. And we, of course, have to get the croissants from Costco. And like my daughter was trying to make the burger patties out of it.

And it was so slimy compared to our meat, whether it’s pork or beef that we that’s just more, I don’t know how else to word it, like chunks of meat, rather than chopped down sliminess. It was so bad she couldn’t even eat dinner. Like she was like, it’s gross. I made you guys your hamburger patties, but I can’t touch them. She was like gagging, trying to form these burgers. 

So when you’re trying to sell a farm product, you actually have to be in people’s faces regularly, you have to make it convenient for them, and you have to educate them on how to use the product. 

So, for example, we’re pushing our hams with it being Christmas time right now, I provide a recipe for a glaze, I let people know, I’m going to be sitting in the grocery store parking lot Thursday at noon if you want to put your order and put it in now, because you can just meet me there and pick up your ham. And it’s those types of things that they need to be reminded, they need it needs to be as convenient as grocery shopping to them.

We live 45 minutes from town. So it is not convenient for people to come to our house and buy, although they do. But that’s like our regular customers or someone who’s getting a whole hog or something, not someone who’s just buying a ham.

And you have to teach them how to use it. Because a lot of people don’t know what to do with, like whole hams that aren’t spiral cut and stuff like you need to give them a recipe. Tell them how to use it in different ways.

We even talk about, because our hams, they don’t come like as a round, they’re like, they look like a giant ham steak. They’re four or five inches thick. After you’re done eating it, you can put it on the meat slicer and have ham sandwiches.

And have to go through all those steps to teach people how to use your product from start to finish and make it really easy to get into their hands. This was not going to be a podcast about how to market your homestead business. So maybe I’ll just kind of move on to the next step of what I was talking about.

But if you want to chat about that more, that’s one of those great opportunities to shoot me a message and be like, that blew my mind. I want more of that. Because then, I will take the time to explain it to you and create content for others to get that information.

Day in the life of a homesteader

So I want to talk a little bit about my day-to-day. We joke that we have days that are more like homesteady than other days. Because there are days when we get up in the morning and we head off to our co-op in town.

I mean, we feed before we leave and stuff. We’re doing co-op, we’re getting lunch in town, we’re running errands. And we aren’t homesteady, I guess is the best way to put that.

And then there are days like today where we’ve had a couple  ofthings on our to-do list, but we’ve been pretty busy. Co-op’s done for the year. So, our Wednesdays are for the semester.

Or yeah, I don’t know. So our Wednesdays are open. We woke up this morning, and there were six inches of snow.

And we needed to get a bale of hay out to the cows. We do that with the tractor. We get the big like 1200-pound bales.

But we have this calf. Well, I say calf. She’s a year old now.

We have a year-old heifer that we needed to catch because she has been stealing our milk. Her mom is our milk cow. She was weaned.

I mean, mama dried up and everything. And now that she’s back in milk again, baby’s stealing her milk. And we just can’t have that because Bailey is already a low producer.

We’re calf-sharing. So she’s feeding her baby. And then she’s got last year’s baby trying to drink some.

We just can’t have that. So my husband needed to feed this morning. So we’re like, okay, if we need to feed, this is the best time to kind of lure all the cows in so we can catch this little heifer.

And our squeeze chute, or we don’t even have a squeeze chute. But our chute system right now, we’re using that as a feeder pen for pigs because we feed them in different age groups. And in the winter, it’s really hard to have pigs out on pasture.

So they’re just all in the corrals. So we can’t really use our chutes unless we absolutely have to. And so we all I get up this morning, I’m sitting in my chair having coffee, I kind of started to work, I had the kids get out their schoolwork and my husband’s like, I think we got to go deal with this calf.

So everybody switches gears, we go put on our work clothes and head out. And we ended up spending about two hours at the barn, working as a family, where we caught this little heifer and pended her between two panels and put one of those nose clips in her nose so that she can’t nurse off the cow because the cow. She can still eat and drink and everything. But if she tries to nurse, it’s got like little pokey things on it, and the cow will kick her off and not let her nurse.

And that went really smooth. And while my husband was putting the hay out into the pasture with the tractor, my daughter and I looked over, and there’s been this boar that was supposed to be a feeder pig. We were never able to catch him. He was born out in what we call general pop, which is where all of our sows live together while they’re gestating.

And we were never able to catch him to castrate him. And then, one day he got out. And so he’s been roaming the property and he’s a boar.

So, we can’t catch him to feed him out. He’s been tearing up our grass. We talked about, like, I mean, to not be rude, but like, maybe we should just catch him with the AR, shoot him at a distance and butcher him, but he’s a boar.

So he wouldn’t have tasted good to us. So we could feed him to the dogs, but he’s a beautiful boar with some amazing genetics, like show genetics. And he looked gorgeous, of course, because he’s roaming the property, eating whatever he wants.

And we’ve been trying to decide what we wanted to do. Like we didn’t want to, waste him. And so my daughter and I are standing at the barn, and he walks up and into some pens that we took down recently.

And we had all the panels still lying there. And with the tractor running, it drowned out all the other sounds. My daughter and I were able to quickly grab a panel and go block him in.

And we’re standing there with him blocked in, really hoping he doesn’t decide he wants out because he’s six months old. So he’s close to 200 pounds. And if he really wanted out, I mean, we could keep him in.

But we’re hoping my husband gets back quickly and realizes what we’re doing. And when he comes back, he’s still running the tractor. And I’m trying to holler for him to come over and give us a hand.

Finally, he figured out what was going on. And I mean, within 10 minutes, we had this boar and another pen, we had him fed and watered and made him a little nest in there with some straw. And I snapped some pictures, we got him online and had him sold by dinner time.

So very exciting there because we just don’t have a need for him as a boar on our property. We already run two herds. So we have two boars on the property.

And that’s nerve-wracking as it is because ,having two boars, they don’t get along. So we actually have our two herds on different sides of the property, just to make sure that we don’t have any cross issues. There are two very big boars.

And if they got into it, we would probably have to put one or both of them down. And that would not be good because they’re great boars. So we came back to the house, and I was thawing out some chicken.

Oh, we did all sorts of stuff while we were up there. The kids crawled under the porch and found like two dozen eggs under the barn porch. And so we brought them down to float them and see if they’re good.

Did some cleaning. We fixed a gate that the cows had broken this morning. I mean, just really like, I mean, we just kind of switched gears so fast and went up there.

And then we came back to the house. I hopped in the shower real quick. Our little boys hopped in the shower after me because they were all icky and just kind of needed a shower too.

I thawed out a couple of chickens that we raised last year, and we had to butcher them earlier than we wanted to. So they were like the size of Cornish crosses. They were like a couple of pound birds.

So I thawed out two of them, roasted them. After they were done roasting, I threw them in a pot to make broth and then went about my day. I worked for a while.

I homeschooled our seven-year-old while I worked. I just set up his little desk next to mine, and he gets through his work at the same time. My husband will kind of come in and out.

And if he has a few minutes, he’ll do some school with our four-year-old just to keep him engaged. The teenagers handled their own. I got some work done.

My daughter and I did some social media posts for the businesses. And then I’ve been fighting a little bit of a cold, and so has my four-year-old. And so we’ve been up all night the last few nights.

So after kind of a busy day, I decided to go lay down for a little while. I took about an hour-and-a-half-long nap. When I got up, the broth was already done.

My daughter had started a creamy chicken soup and made some biscuits. My husband had finished working on the tractor. No, he was working on his truck.

He got his truck fixed. Our farm truck’s been down for a couple of weeks. That was a bummer.

Then my teenage son cleaned our stanchion area because when the cows got out this morning, they all went to the bathroom in the stanchion area. That needed to be cleaned so that we could have milk tomorrow. And, now, my daughter’s out there straining the broth.

I’m doing a podcast. And when I get done, while I’m waiting for this to upload to my website, I will read the kids a little bit out of Little House on the Prairie that we’ve been reading that series on and off for the last year, year and a half in the evenings when we have time. And I don’t know, I just kind of wanted to talk about what a homestead day looks like, because I find that we have worked these things into such a rhythm for us that we don’t even think about it anymore.

But then I talk to other families that what our rhythm is seems like a dream to them. Like this is the life that they want and they don’t know how to make it happen. Whether it’s finding that rhythm, getting all the family members working together, or being able to learn the skills to have all these things just happen where it’s not a challenge, it’s just part of daily life.

Homestead Skills to Focus On

And that’s what I really want to talk about today is what skills do you really need as a homesteader, especially ones that are going to save you the most money? 

When we first started homesteading, now I was chatting with my husband and kids, making some notes for this episode. And I was like, hey guys, there’s a lot of skills that we have that we exhibit on a daily basis. Some of them we’ve learned, but some of them I feel like we take for granted because having grown up more rurally than a lot of the new homesteaders, that’s just part of life for us.

And we don’t see them as skills, they are just how we do things. And so we had a hard time coming up with a list, but we would throw ideas out and then debate whether or not they should land on this list. And what I see this list as is when you first start homesteading and that lifestyle, it feels really overwhelming.

You feel like you have to all the skills at once. And even though I grew up rurally, this was our life when we decided to go all natural after my husband’s diagnosis. So we actually tried to relearn everything all at once.

And it was exhausting and I felt like a failure all the time. And because we were actually literally trying to save my husband’s life. I mean, I have other episodes about this if you’re a first timer popping in and don’t know what I’m talking about.

So, I also felt like I was on a time frame. And I know that a lot of other people who are in this realm also feel like they’re on a timeline or a time cutoff because either you’re trying to get it to where you’re growing enough food at home where the mom doesn’t have to work anymore. Or because of agrarian cycles, it takes two years to be able to raise out your first steer.

And then a year for them to gestate, and you have to build a fence before you can buy your first cow. And it’s if you’re starting kind of from scratch with, say a bred heifer or something, you’re looking at potentially three years before you have your first steak. And so, if you don’t know how to build a fence, you better figure it out.

And if you don’t have the money to build the fence, you better figure it out. And it just kind of keeps going down that line. And so I wanted to really talk about which skills are the ones that are most important to really hone in on to make sure you know them. They’re worth the time, they’re worth the effort because they’re going to get you the most results and probably save you the most money, where either you can have things like mom staying at home, or you can afford the bigger purchases, or you can afford some of those like things that pop up that cost money, like a vehicle breaking down.

And that’s actually one of the conversations I’m going to have. But sometimes you have to talk about what a real skill is, and which ones are acceptable to be a convenience to pay for. So I mean, I think as homesteaders, our idea is, I am no longer going to pay for convenience because I’m going to do it all myself.

And gosh, I wish that was the case. It’s not, though. You just can’t. I mean, we’re not islands, meaning that we can’t be 100% self-sufficient, unless you’re really going to go without a lot of stuff. And I know, as homesteaders, we go without a lot more than we did maybe in a different period in life or something.

But it’s just it’s impossible to not have any sort of like outside inputs. So you have to look at what’s most important. And I think is the one of the biggest ones is food is I was reading a book the other day, I’m kind of bouncing around for a minute here.

What conveniences should you pay for?

I was reading a book the other day that it was talking about how the food and agriculture industry actually banks on the fact that, as a society, we will choose convenience over cooking our own food. And so they will actually focus more on their energy on foods that are going to the frozen food industry and things like that, rather than foods that are going to be bought fresh or as commodities or anything. So, that was a little surprising to me.

I thought it was, I don’t know, I’ve worked in ag for a long time. And I thought that they just grew what they needed to grow. I know, in this book, it was like talking about the different trends.

And it definitely said that farmers don’t follow every trend. I mean, it’s just, they’re like, I raised my animals. And if I tried to follow every trend, and I’m looking at two years before my steers are ready, if I tried to follow a trend, I might have something that nobody wants by the time we reach that endpoint.

And so I definitely don’t blame the farmer for following every trend, or for not following every trend. But the food industry is definitely following every trend. And that is where you like the money, the money follows.

And so if we’re really wanting to make some of these changes that we want to make, definitely pulling away from those convenient foods is I mean, that’s going to help change the industry. I mean, you can’t vote completely with your dollars; it’s just never going to be enough. But it does help.

And then, on the flip side, just for yourself, the amount of money that can be spent on food, especially as a convenience food, is insane. And I can say this from experience because traveling for business, it’s impossible. I mean, I’m not cooking in hotel rooms; it’s just not a thing.

So yeah, I am buying fast food, or I’m going to grocery stores and buying, deli items that I can heat up in the microwave or make sandwiches. And those types of things. I’m just, it’s just impossible.

And I added up like what my daughter and I, or my family and I spent on the road this last year, or two years ago, I think it was, and it was like $15,000 just on convenience foods. I mean, that is, that’s insane. That’s, I don’t know, 1100 a month or close to 1100 a month on convenience food.

That’s more than some people’s mortgage. I mean, maybe not anymore. Some people’s rent, let’s go with rent.

But for me, we have to look at that as a business expense versus other people, like our home food budget is nothing like that. I mean, most months, we only spend a few hundred dollars at the grocery store. And that’s just to get things that are out of season.

But we do spend a lot of money on raising our pigs. But then, our pigs and our milk and stuff like that are making us an income as well. So it really just kind of washes out.

Should you pay for information?

The next thing is, should you pay for information? So there’s a big discussion right now on, one of the biggest industries, especially growing industries right now, is online education. Whether you’re buying ebooks from somebody, I have them myself, or courses. Buying regular books, a lot of people, I mean, some of these courses are so intense that, you get certifications and can get jobs with them, similar to what if you got a certificate at a college.

So that’s a really big industry right now, is like that online education, the online ebooks, that type of thing. And personally, running a business, my skills lie in my education that I already have. My skills lie in what I can do on the homestead, what I can do in the kitchen, and what I can do with business.

But social media management is exhausting. And so I actually have a business coach. That’s a really standard thing for a lot of entrepreneurs to have a business coach.

And she teaches me how, or she teaches me the trends that she’s following, that she’s taking expensive courses with, that she spends her whole day studying social media management and marketing and those types of things. And then, during my time with her, the courses that she offers through my coaching, it breaks down the information in a way that I can absorb it in an hour or two a week and implement it without having to spend thousands of dollars on courses. And like hours of my time learning how to do something or how to implement something or how to test something that she can just hand to me.

I offer that in my own business coaching. I have years of homestead experience. I have years of depredation experience working with keeping predators off of your land.

Food safety, HACCP, food marketing, food laws, all that stuff. I have all of that experience. And for a fraction of the price and time that it would take, I can teach you how to do that.

I can create business plans for you. So all the research is taken out of it and stuff because that’s what I do all the time. That’s what I do as my hobby.

That’s my interest. I have bookshelves, binders, and boxes of tons of information that I can pull out in a heartbeat because I keep it all cataloged, and everything is because this is what I do. And this is where my passion is versus my passion is not social media marketing, but it is for my business coach.

And that’s what I pay her for. So I do think that information is something that is absolutely worth it to pay for, whether that comes in the form of a coach or a course, or just filling your bookshelves with valuable information. 

Paying for Skills

A lot of skill that a lot of us will pay for is we’ll pay vet bills. We pay a mechanic. We pay our accountant.

We’re paying for those skills. And in some cases, it’s worth it to do it ourselves. In other cases, it’s not.

I was a bookkeeper for years. Now, as a homesteader, it’s just easier to do my own books. But then I have a CPA check them out.

I have a tax preparer and that type of stuff because that’s the stuff that it would take me lots of extra hours to keep up with all of the current laws and industry and tax regulation when I can just basically I can do the bookkeeping myself and then have them handle that part. Absolutely worth it to me. 

As far as mechanics go, my husband’s a great mechanic.

I am not paying a mechanic. So you just have to look at those differences on what is worth it for your time to take the time to learn. If you know nothing about mechanics and you’re getting ready to go buy a new tractor, it is 100% worth it to pay for that extra warranty or that service plan.

Sometimes, with tractor companies, you can pay for an extra service plan that allows for where they come out to your house every year and do the preventative maintenance on your vehicle. And it allows for an allotment of repair hours or something. Those things are worth it if you know nothing about mechanics.

Whereas with my husband being a pretty good mechanic, we might pay for a warranty because that’s if there’s something wrong with the equipment. But we’re not going to pay for a service plan unless that voids the warranty. But that’s also another thing, we feel comfortable buying used equipment because my husband can fix it.

The Homestead Skills You Should Focus on For the Most Value

So it’s just where you want to balance that and where you want to focus your time. But what my family and I did before this podcast was we sat down and made a list of the things that are going to save you the most money if you put the time into learning them. And that they’re worth the time to learn as well.

So one of them is basic carpentry. We also listed basic irrigation, plumbing, and basic electrical. So, with those things, I actually have a book on my shelf.

I don’t know. I don’t see it. But I think it’s called Homestead Building Projects.

I know Joel Salatin has a book out, and it has like a lot of his plans for building chicken tractors and other things like that. Those types of books ike small engines for dummies. I don’t know.

Grab a few of those. Watch some YouTube videos. Maybe like see if you have a friend that knows some basic stuff.

Those are worth your time. And when I say basic carpentry, know how to run the basic tools. Invest in some basic tools.

You know, hand tools, a drill, a handsaw, those types of things. With irrigation and plumbing, know how to set up irrigation. Know what the difference between a male and female thing is, the different types of pipe.

Like it seems small, but as soon as you have something you have to fix and you get down to the hardware store and you don’t know what to tell the guy, and you end up back and forth between your house and the hardware store and trying to look stuff up online and like our hardware store, I don’t have any service there. So, I’m trying to look stuff up. I can’t figure it out.

It is absolutely worth your time to have all that information beforehand. So, like I said, whether it’s that you spent the time to look it up on YouTube or you spent the time to buy the book or, spent the money to buy the book and then spent the time to read the book, whatever those things might be, the carpentry, irrigation, plumbing, and electrical are all 100% worth it. Because not that I’m saying like you shouldn’t hire contractors and stuff.

They’re working just as hard to earn their income. But if you’re doing all the little jobs, you won’t need to hire them until you have a big job, and you’ll be able to afford to pay them for that big job because you haven’t had them out there 20 other times to do the small jobs. 

And do it right the first time.

That’s another one because I was even thinking in my head just now, and I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m imagining people fixing the side of their barn by, trying to staple a pallet to it. Please don’t staple a pallet to the side of your barn. And I’m talking like with a big staple and not like your little house stapler.

But learn how to do it and learn how to do it right. And it’s going to save you tons of money. 

Troubleshooting Abilities

And some of that just comes with experience and with life skills. But learning how to problem solve that might be just from spending some time with people, taking the time to look it up online. 

And another one is investing in diagnostic equipment.

Consider getting one of those testers. This isn’t even my realm. But my husband has one of those testers that he can hook up to the engines if the engine light comes on and see what’s actually wrong with our vehicle, rather than having to take it to a shop and having to pay for $100 diagnosis appointment or diagnostic appointment.

When for that same $100, you could buy that piece of equipment, and it works on all of your vehicles in the house. And instead, you can call and be like, this is what’s wrong. How much is that going to cost? Or you, changing a spark plug, I can change a spark plug.

And if I can’t remember exactly how to do it, I can YouTube it. So that’s going to save you a ton of money as well. 

Learn basic vet care

Another one is how to give shots to your animals, which is literally, probably the easiest thing to do.

It just freaks people out because there are shots involved. But it is easy, especially with the little ones. If you have a litter of piglets or something like that, that just needs to be wormed.

Yeah, do it yourself. I mean, watch a YouTube video and buy the equipment; you can get it at the feed store. They scream it’s not that big of a deal. Piglets scream anytime you touch them. 

And learn the difference between subcutaneous and intravenous or intermuscular. Learn what that means.

Learn how to do those actual shots. Like I said, there are videos, there are books, and there’s really focused on taking care of whatever animal you’re raising too. 

So I really like the Storey Guides.

You can get them on Amazon. There’s pretty much one for every type of livestock and a lot of household stuff. In fact, I think the homestead business or the homestead building guide is from Storey Publishing.

I have another one, and it’s like a homestead planner. I really like it. It’s a good skeleton guide for planning what you’re doing on your homestead.

And wintertime is a great time to buy those books, read them, make a plan, have a notebook, decide the changes you’re going to make, decide the skills you want to learn and just do it. It might sound a little weird. But if you’re nervous about giving a shot to animals on your property, you can practice by giving them a saline shot.

Pick your most chill animal and get them in the shute or wherever you need to get them. And give them a saline shot. Like just, intermuscular or something or not intermuscular, like subcutaneous right under the skin.

It’s not going to hurt them. I mean, in fact, a little dose of water might do them good. Just to have that practice so that you feel comfortable.

So when you’re having to do it kind of in a quicker situation, you’re good. And pretty much any basic first aid because I mean, every time you call the vet, you’re looking sometimes even a hundred dollar bill just to get them there. That doesn’t even include anything else that needs to happen.

And having a relationship with your vet, we’re considered more of a commercial farm. The relationship I have with my vet is he’s been to our farm. He knows our practices.

He knows my abilities. Having worked in the industry and majoring in agriculture and stuff where I can go to him, tell him what’s wrong. And he sells me a bottle of the medication and gives me instructions.

Not everyone’s going to have that option, but the better relationship you have with your vet, the more money it’s going to save you in the long run, and you’re going to have healthier animals. 

With that, make sure you know how to assist in labor of any animal that you’re raising. If you need to pull piglets or help a goat that’s turned sideways, any of those things are going to help. Make sure and not just know how to do it, know how to do it safely.

Like, make sure your nails are trimmed. Make sure you’ve sanitized your hands, and that you’re wearing gloves. And anytime you insert anything into an animal to help pull a baby alive or dead, that they’re going to need antibiotic shots.

So make sure that you have that relationship with your vet where you have antibiotics on hand and can do that for them. Castration: who wants to pay the vet to castrate a bunch of piglets or to band a calf or something? It’s just, it’s not worth the price tag. And if you really want to have a profitable homestead business, you need to cut out all those, as many of those small expenses as you can.

Because the margins in farming is small, whether it’s homesteading or farming. Many times with homesteading, we spend a lot of money to get the products we need because we’re not buying them in bulk. And then to be competitive, we can’t sell them for very much.

But on the flip side, there are some things like meat, it’s a commodity. So if you can buy your feed in bulk, and then turn around, or it’s a hot commodity. If you can buy your feed in bulk, and then turn around and sell it as a retail cut to consumers that are interested in sustainably raised meat and stuff, you get a pretty good profit margin.

Whereas commercial farmers can buy things on a small scale, or they can buy, goodness gracious, they can buy their supplies in bulk for a lower price, but they can’t sell for as much because they are selling in bulk the same thing, the same way in which they’re buying. So I mean, the key as a small farmer, a small homesteader is you find ways to buy wholesale, sell retail. And that’s how you make your money on that one.

How good of a mechanic do you need to be on your homestead?

I talked about mechanics a little bit already. But my husband and I were talking about this one before we came in. There was something wrong with his truck.

I don’t know. He said something about a turbo. I don’t know.

Obviously, like I said, mechanics aren’t my thing. I can do the basics. I can change oil. I can check oil. I can, put water in my radiator or, antifreeze or whatever I’m using. I can change a spark plug. I’ve changed hoses before. If I were on my own, I could keep my engine running. But the big stuff I can’t do.

So there was something wrong with his truck. And there’s this big part that if he went to a shop, it would have had to be completely replaced with just that part, which was $200 or $300. That doesn’t even include the diagnostics, the labor if they had to order the part in, all that type of stuff.

Where him knowing what was wrong with it for $8 off of, I think eBay, he was able to take that big part apart, fix whatever was inside, put it all back together, and fix the truck for $8 and a few hours of his time. Now, I have to say, personally, like I said, mechanics aren’t my thing. I’m okay with small engines.

I’m with trucks and stuff. I can survive. I can help my husband and know what he’s talking about.

But it’s not my thing. And for most people, it takes a lifetime to learn how to be like a true good mechanic. But understanding your equipment, understanding the basics, I mean, small engines are a really big one, you could spend a fortune having your small engines worked on, especially because a lot of people buy their small engines used.

So when I say small engines, I’m talking lawnmowers, rototillers, weed eaters, that type of stuff. Like I said, those, whether you buy them new or used, they’re breaking down all the time. They need special oil, you need to know how to clean the carburetor all the time.

I mean, my kids are learning how to do it because they’re out there running the weed eater, and it’s always, just getting clogged up. So I would say, if you’re going to take any time to really learn mechanics on anything, learn it on a small engine. And those are also really easy, because you can pick up a small engine at a yard sale and just like take it apart and mess with it.

In fact, my book, Introduction to Homestead Science Textbook has a whole thing on how to identify parts, how to troubleshoot, how to do your preventative maintenance on your small engines. I mean, I actually had a dad come to me one time, and he’s like, just the amount of money my family has saved on small engines from your book has paid for the book. But besides that, small engines are probably the easiest ones to master and save yourself money.

And it’s going to make you a better mechanic on the trucks, too. So that’s all the kind of like outdoor stuff that’s really important to learn as skills. But as homesteaders, we’re also we’re in the kitchen.

What Skills to Master in the Kitchen

And that’s another one when you’re also trying to learn how to be a mechanic and the chief cook and bottle washer. It’s a lot. So I’m going to talk about some skills that are going to be the most important to saving money in your kitchen and making it easier for you to learn more, and implement more as you go because you don’t want to learn how to be a homesteader in a year.

And honestly, I’ve really been doing this my whole life. I’ve been doing it full blown for the last eight years, and I don’t know everything yet. 

So first one, right off the bat, and I think everyone pursues this one, but I’m going to talk to you about why you need to pursue it.

And that is bread making. Whether it’s white bread in a bread machine or sourdough, whichever one, tickles your fancy the most, whichever one your family likes the most, whichever one you need for your own health, pick a recipe and master it. And whether you’re going to make sandwich bread, hopefully when you pick this recipe, it’s like a dough recipe that you’re really comfortable with.

Learn how to make your sandwich bread. Learn how to make your rolls. Learn how to make your biscuits. Learn how to make tortillas. I mean, of course, you pretty much only have the one recipe for bread and something different for tortillas, but get comfortable in making breads, having the supplies on hand for making breads. Really master that one, sandwich bread recipe, the one that you’re going to be making a couple times a week if you were to replace all of your bread needs with your bread making.

A loaf of bread in our house to make, if I buy things in bulk, which sometimes, that gets scary because you’re buying in bulk and it’s, we go back to trying to make a profitable homestead and you’re having to buy your grain in bulk and you’re having to buy your boxes in bulk and then you’re having to buy your, flour in bulk in the house. That comes up to some really big price tags. I’m not even going to deny it, but do what you can as you can and over the course of a year or two, next thing,  like every couple of months, I’m like, oh, I’m starting to run low on a couple of bulk things, and then I’ll go buy them.

I’ll go buy more stuff in bulk. I mean, not my feed. We’re buying a couple tons a month sometimes of feed, but as far as my kitchen stuff, if I’m buying 50-pound sacks, of the things that I need or bulk producing like lard and stuff like that, it’s, I mean, when we do lard, we do enough for the year, and we’re usually giving some away to friends.

So, catch those bulk things when you can, as you can, but I mean, even your first month, if you’re buying a 50-pound thing of flour, whether you’re doing, sourdough or you’re doing your own yeast or buying yeast, it’s cheap enough. I think a loaf of bread in our house, I mean, we’re even, we’re using our raw milk and our raw butter for it and put a little sugar in there. I just buy sugar.

I think I figured it out to 25 cents a loaf. Now, yeah, you can go to the grocery store and buy the cheap bread, but oh my gosh, even the cheap bread is $1.50, $2 now and I still buy some of that because I have a toddler who likes to feed entire loaves of bread to my dogs. So yeah, you guys have fun with the $2 loaves or my toddler makes seven PB and J sandwiches a day because we’re out farming and he says he has to pee and goes in the house and makes a sandwich.

So even though I want him to eat healthier, I can’t afford for him to eat seven good sandwiches a day, but because he’s not actually going to eat them, he’s going to take two bites and feed them to the dog. So if you go to the store and you buy a loaf of sourdough, you’re looking between five and $10. When you make it at home, you’re looking at 25 cents.

And I mean a gorgeous, what you could probably turn around and sell for $20 loaf of bread. I mean, at least with the beautiful sourdough stuff. My sandwich loaves, I would probably have to pay someone to take because they’re usually lopsided, but they eat the same.

So bread is 100%. I mean, just think about it. If your family eats a loaf of bread a day, and I didn’t like bring my phone or calculator or anything in here with me, but 25 cents a day, that’s $1.75 a week, let’s say $2 a week, that’s $8 a month in bread.

Versus if you buy, a $2 loaf, even the cheapest bread that you can get a $2 loaf, that’s $60 a month in bread. So that difference right there, first month buys you all of the bulk supplies that you need to be able to make bread for like the next three months, plus all your other household needs that require flour. So right there, 100% worth it.

I gave you the numbers, go do it. 

But what else it’s going to do? If you are able to make your breads, when you go to figure out what you need to make for dinner, and you’ve got your meats in the freezer because you’re starting to grow your own meats or buy them in bulk from a neighbor farm. And maybe you have your milk because either you have a milk cow or you’re buying it from a neighbor farm.

And you have all your spices in your cabinet, and you’re making your own bread. And you have veggies from your garden or canned veggies or whatever it is, you can make a meal with what you have on any given night. Even if you don’t have the breads that you need, you can make it, and you can make it quickly and efficiently and part of your routine.

So whether it is a bread loaf that needs to rise, you can get up in the morning, okay, I’m going to go pull out some steaks for dinner, and we want some French bread with it. I’m going to go ahead and start the bread at the same time. You start the loaf, walk away, and come back in two hours when you have to do whatever is next with it.

So you aren’t running to the grocery store because the second you walk into the grocery store, I don’t care if you need a $2 loafer bread, you’re looking at 20 to 100 bucks, because you’re going to get in there and think of something else you need. So that 50-pound sack of flour that costs, I don’t know, 10-20 bucks is going to end up saving you probably hundreds over the course of the lifespan of that 50-pound bag of flour. 

Next one is learning how to adjust a recipe.

I can’t tell you how many times we decide we want something or we find a recipe on Pinterest and we want to try it and we don’t have all the stuff. When we live 45 minutes from town, I’m not running to town to buy one spice or something like that. So when you can look at that recipe and make a small adjustment or find a similar recipe online and combine the two but follow, okay, they still need to both cook for an hour and a half.

One calls for two cups of tomato sauce. And the other one calls for one cup, but I only have one cup. So I’m going to add, like salsa or whatever to make the difference.

You just have to be able to line those up to make sure that the consistencies are the same and the cook times are the same. And that’s going to be your biggest change. I mean, even for example, we make our own cream of mushroom soup.

I try not to do canned soups at all. And even with that, a recipe calls for a 10-ounce can of soup, but then you have to add milk and stuff. But because my soup is already made and it’s got the milk in it already and all those things, I have to make those adjustments to make sure that I’m putting the same amount of liquid into a recipe as what the recipe calls for.

So, learning how to make those adjustments. And there’s going to be nights where you end up with really runny soup or really dry biscuits or something like that, because you’re learning and that’s okay. Make those, make those adjustments as you go.

It’s still a reasonable meal. And don’t feel bad about it. Don’t think your husband’s going to leave you. He’s probably eaten worse when he was single. 

You’re going to be able to over time, save yourself a ton of money and be able to make pretty much whatever your family wants at any given time, because you’re going to have all the stuff in the house or make those adjustments. 

Get over yourself, and butcher that chicken

And I know that seems really big. Like, how did you jump from me making my own bread to butchering a cow? I’m not even saying you have to know how to butcher a cow, learn how to butcher a chicken, like learn how to do it from start to finish, find a YouTube, ask a friend. And I’m not even talking about those days when or that you’re considering raising 50 meat birds, and you learn how to butcher all of them, and you need to buy the big equipment and all that stuff like no, no, no, no.

I’m talking like if it really came down to it, and you were broke, or there was a snowstorm, and there was three feet of snow on the ground, and you had no other meat that you could walk out there and grab a chicken and butcher it and cook it for dinner. Learn how to do that. But in the long run, that comfort level of taking it from chicken to soup is going to make it where you’re more apt to learn how to butcher sheep, butcher pigs, butcher a cow one day.

Our average butcher fee just for a pig is about $350. And when we invite a couple of friends up and have all of our seasonings and all of our seal packets and everything that we’re going to do, we can butcher, I mean, we butchered a 730 pound sow in three days with just like four adults and my teenagers. We butchered 100 chickens with just me and my husband and, our two teenagers, and one of their friends.

And I mean, that’s all the way from start to everything’s in the freezer and like done deal. It is so worth it. Go ahead and when you’re ready, invest in the little bit of equipment that you need, like a meat grinder, a couple hundred bucks for a good meat grinder.

I mean, that meat grinder is going to end up saving you thousands over the years. Get the vacuum sealer, get the vacuum sealer bags, get some good knives, some big tubs and just learn to butcher yourself. There’s books on it, there’s videos, there’s courses you can take.

A lot of farmers are offering on-farm butcher classes. Go ahead and take the time to do that because those are skills that are worth learning. And like I said, you don’t have to learn, don’t go take a class on how to butcher a cow before you decide to get a cow because by the time that cow or steer or whatever is ready to butcher, you’re going to have forgotten all those skills.

Go take a class on learning how to butcher a chicken and butcher chickens for three years while you’re raising your steer out, and go take a class on how to butcher a steer three to six months before you’re ready to butcher and then spend the time getting the supplies you need and then you’ll be ready, and it’ll be fresh in your mind. That’s when you do it. So don’t feel like you have to learn all this stuff on day one.

Make a plan on when you’re going to learn it. 

What to preserve?

The canning, fermenting, drying, proper freezing, freeze-drying. Do you have to learn them all, and which ones are worth it? So, for us, we don’t like the taste of fermented foods.

So I don’t know how to ferment. I have some fermenting equipment. I just I bought some small stuff.

I do want to try fermented tomatoes. I probiotics are amazing. So I’m not saying don’t do it, but it’s just not our thing.

I like homemade yogurts and other fermented foods. So I guess I do some of that, but I don’t do like the crock fermenting. I do, dairy fermenting.

I do a lot of home dairying. That’s worth it to me because we actually eat those products. Like don’t waste your time learning how to do something that you’re not going to use.

Canning? Yeah, great. Learn to can. Learn water bath canning first.

It’s easy. Doing small-batch canning is easy. 

I mean, during the summertime, our canner just sits on the stove all the time.

I come into the house. I have just enough stuff to process like one can of something, and I do it. And then I’m just filling the pantry all the time.

So that’s one to learn and feel so comfortable with that you barely even need to bust out a book unless you need the recipe. But as far as the actual process of canning, you’ve got it so down that it’s second nature. 

Proper freezing.

I mean, that’s just really making sure that you seal your bags right and label everything and stuff. 

Drying, I think, is a really important one. 

I have my dehydrator handy. It’s the kind with the pullout drawers. I’m always putting stuff in it.

It’s always running. Even as small as I cut up a bunch of tomatoes I have all the tops. I go through them on the dehydrator.

It dehydrates them. I pop them out. I put them all in a jar.

And then when the jar gets full, I grind them and make them like tomato powder. When you’re constantly doing that type of stuff, it adds up. So I only point that out because a lot of people feel like they have to learn to do it, and then they have to process it all at once.

And then that’s going to take a whole week of time. No, no, no. Maybe take a good weekend and learn how to do it where you really feel comfortable, and then work it into a routine that you’re doing it all the time.

Make a routine

And that’s the next skill that I think is really worth learning is teaching yourself a routine and gaining rhythms and having the supplies you need to do that. So invest in the equipment that you feel is worth it and keep it handy. Don’t put it away.

Like, stop putting your equipment away. Find a home for it in your kitchen or in a mudroom or something that is going to be part of your regular routine. Like my dehydrator, it’s in my mudroom, right? Like, I have freezers in a row, and my dehydrator is right next to it.

So I’m in and out there, in and out of the freezer all the time. Or to the freezers all the time. My garbage cans are out there, too.

So I mean, I can walk out and throw the trash away in one hand and throw a few things on my dehydrator shelves at the same time or drawers or whatever they are. And, we have our milking rack in the kitchen and all the milking equipment goes on that. And there’s also an egg basket or an egg bucket.

And what we do is all day long when we’re cooking, it’s also it’s right by the door that goes to the trash can. Any scraps that we aren’t going to keep, leftovers that can go to chickens or pigs or whatever, they all get thrown in that bucket. And then when my son goes up to the barn in the morning, he takes that bucket with him.

He feeds all the scraps to the animals. He rinses it out. He puts the eggs in it and brings it back down with all the milking equipment in the cart.

And we’re saving so much on like trash space, and our chickens are eating that, and they aren’t going through their other food as fast. And we’re still getting tons of eggs in the wintertime. In fact, we’re probably getting more because I’m feeding them all sorts of protein because they get leftover pork and stuff that I can’t feed back to my pigs.

And yes, they eat that just fine, and they love it. In fact, something killed one of my chickens up at the barn last night, probably the boar that was out that I was telling you about earlier. And all the chickens were fighting over the dead chicken.

So yeah, they’re gross. But I mean, you get tons of protein that way, and they’re laying beautiful eggs. 

So teach yourself that routine of doing that.

And like the rhythm that I was talking about, how my family and I, we just like flow together and we’re working at the barn. Like I didn’t even have to say anything to my daughter. I said, hey, I’m going to roast these chickens and make some broth for the week because I do that every week.

I make a pot of broth, and then we just use it. It goes into the fridge or we put it in jars and can it if we have extra. And so she’s like soup for dinner.

And I was like, yeah, some sort of soup. I don’t know what kind yet. She knew I wasn’t feeling well.

I went and took a nap. I woke up to chicken soup. I mean, and it’s just that rhythm that everybody can work together and know what we all need, what needs to be done.

And that it wasn’t any big deal for me to literally go from frozen chicken to homemade broth, dinner tonight, scraps for the other animals, all in this one swoop of our day. And it never, it was like no skin off my back at all. Nothing got missed today.

And I wasn’t overly tired. I mean, I was overly tired because I’m not from homesteading. And it was, it’s a routine that if I think back even just a few years ago, that would have felt like I would have had to think about each one of those steps.

And that’s what makes it more exhausting. That’s what makes it harder. 

Homestead Skills for Kids

So I just kind of want to wrap up today with which ones of these we should be teaching our kids.

And the answer is all of it. But the way I want to put it to you, and that’s what I teach in my book, Raising Self-Sufficient Kids, that’s where I came up a huge part with a lot of my projects and things like that in Introduction to Homestead Science, is that I didn’t want the kids to just learn how to do these or go through the motions of completing it. I wanted them to have ownership of it.

Because if they don’t have ownership, they don’t commit it to like knowledge. So that’s kind of, the same idea when I talk about how to adjust a recipe. Just following the recipe, you don’t have ownership of that recipe; you’re just following instructions.

Understanding how to manipulate that recipe to work for every part of your life, whether that be your bread recipe, where you learn a dough that you can use for loaves, and you use it for rolls, and all the different things that you want to do. That’s owning that recipe.

And if your kids don’t have ownership in these things, they’re just a chore, or they’re just you taught them how to do it, and they move on, they don’t understand why they don’t know how to integrate it into their life.

And maybe one day in adulthood, they’ll be like, Oh, yeah, I think, Yeah, mom showed me how to bake bread. I could probably figure it out. Or do you want it to be like, when your children move out of the home, that baking bread in their adult kitchens is just part of their routine, both your boys and your girls.

I have teenage sons now who bakes bread when they’re out. They have a bread machine, and they prefer to buy bread because they’re teenage boys. But the other day, one of them was like, Hey, mom, we ran out of bread the other night. And I remembered that you taught me how, and so I got out that bread machine and looked it up online, and we were able to make bread. It was super easy.

It’s like, he was able to problem solve through, we can’t afford bread. We don’t have it. He has a couple of roommates. 

We can’t afford bread. We’re hungry. We want bread.

Oh, wait, I have a solution for this. That was just how life was at home. And, he’s kind of going through that, I don’t want to call mom for everything.

But then when he’s able to accomplish it, like mom did, he’s really proud to tell us. So teaching them how to have that full ownership of these things is what’s really going to make the difference. And that’s a lot of times by teaching them a skill, like teaching them one time, observing them doing it the second time, and then walking away and expecting them to handle it on their own the third time.

And I think, what do they say? Like, see one, do one, teach one. It’s like the Socratic or another Socratic method is asking questions. But see one, do one, teach one.

It’s that same idea is you teach them, guide them, and let them do it themselves. And then another piece of it is, something as mundane as taking out the trash. Like, that’s not one of my kids’ chores.

That’s one of their jobs. And what I say with that is you don’t just take the trash out on Sundays. Every week, you need to make sure all the trash is out.

You need to make sure that the trash cans are clean. You need to make sure that everything’s cleaned out in front of the dumpster so that when the trash truck comes, they can get to it. I mean, it’s all these steps.

You need to let me know if I’m out of trash bags so that I can order them from Amazon. And that’s the expectation. And, at first, I wrote it down, and then from there, that’s what I expect now.

And I feel like as, my 16-year-old son being in charge of the trash, I should never have to think about trash except for paying the bill or ordering off of Amazon, the trash bags. Other than that, the trash is always out of the house. There’s always a bag in the can.

The cans are clean. And the trash man can come and get the trash. I don’t have to remind him to do that.

And that’s because he has ownership of that job. I don’t just expect him to do what I say. I’ve asked him to, and I’ve asked him to put it into place.

What works well for you? he even was the one who thought of putting a trash can, by our garage door so that when we get home from town, and we have trash from the car, we put it in that trash can so it’s easier for him to get to the dumpster. Because we’re on 40 acres. Our dumpster is 300 yards away from the house.

So, being able to put all of our trash in that trash can by the door, he just has to jump that rather than trying to clean up the car for us and stuff like that. 

I figure, how many of us in adulthood have struggled trying to relearn skills or learn skills in the first place that were never taught to us when we can just teach them to them as our kids or teach them to our kids while they’re still kids. So it’s just part of their life and part of their world.

Again, like I said, my book on Raising Self-Sufficient Kids really helps how to implement this and all of my Homestead Science books teach the individual skills. So those are really great ways to help your kids, even help yourself learn some of these skills. Even in the Raising Self-Sufficient Kids, it has a lot of reflection for yourself on how you’re running your life and modeling that for your kids.

So go ahead and grab those to do with your family. You don’t have to be homeschoolers to use these programs. I just put them in place for homeschoolers, but so many families have embraced them as after-school learning, weekend learning, family projects, all sorts of stuff.

So I hope that you take this list and decide what’s really important for you. Make a plan to implement it on your Homestead and that you keep growing. 

Thank you and I will talk to you guys next week about a Homestead Christmas.