How I Saved My Struggling Homestead

So, for an update on our raised beds: I know some of you are wondering why in the world we’re planting our gardens so late in the year. Well, for starters, we’re in zone 6B and our final frost date was only a week or so ago. If you’re not familiar with the USDA Hardiness zones, check in the show notes for my post on when to plant your seeds. The other reason we’re planting so late is the weather has been so crazy up here in north Idaho, that I’ve been concerned about planting any sooner. And the final reason we haven’t planted yet is that we’ve been waiting for the cedar that a friend of ours is going to supply us with. He works for a mill and gets a discount on imperfect lumber.

So we are anxiously awaiting the arrival of our bent and dent cedar. This week, we will be getting weed control handled. We’re doing this by putting down basically a landscape fabric, except we’re getting it as a by-product from a local truss company. Trusses are the large triangle pieces that support the roof of a building. I’m laughing, because I’m trying to show you triangles with my hands and you can’t see me. The local company gets their supplies wrapped in a cloth type fabric. That will be perfect for laying down first in my garden. This is one of the most fun parts about homesteading for me, finding and repurposing products and byproducts through networking. We will be potentially saving ourselves a thousand dollars or more just by using some ingenuity. Other options for weed control would be plastic, which honestly doesn’t set that well with me. It reminds me of when I was a kid and everybody had the plastic with the red rock over it and the plastic would be falling apart.

It just grosses me out. Some people also use cardboard or newspapers, and I’m actually not against that as an option because it’ll leave a lot of carbon in the soil as it breaks down. However, it breaks down incredibly fast, and the area that we live in has a ton of natural grasses and wind so my garden can easily be taken over without a longer term solution. I have tried straw and mulch in the past, which allowed me to get my garden to harvest time, but it was a battle from day one. We have this weed called the common purslane that I have talked about. I have it on my Instagram. Anyway, it grows in our garden and it’ll actually lift two wet flakes of hay completely off the ground.

On top of that, there’s this tall weed that grows over waist high on me and I’m pushing six feet tall. This particular weed will shoot up almost overnight and has these thorns or stickers that turns out I’m allergic to. And they’ll even pierce through my gloves. I’ll end up with hives all over my body and sometimes require the use of steroids to calm it down. So that last part actually makes me laugh because most people, including us, start or extend their homestead efforts in order to heal their bodies. My efforts to extend our homestead has actually been harming my health every summer. Like what are the chances? I’ve seen an allergist and I’ve focused on my gut health, all to no avail. This is why we decided to beef up our weed control and take the next step for raised beds. And that conversation is a great segue to my main topic of today’s episode, how I saved our new homestead.

Many people started homesteading during the pandemic. Not everyone, of course, but there was definitely a huge influx while all the shutdowns were happening. People were really worried about where their food was going to come from when we had empty shelves everywhere. But my family and I, we have a bit of a homestead history. I’ve talked about it before on the podcast, but I actually grew up on a ranch. We always had gardens. When I got into college, I always had a flower pot garden. At one point after college, I even lived on enough acreage that I had some chickens on my property. I continued to increase those efforts, and then when I met my husband, we moved to Oregon. We had five acres there. We had pigs, chickens, goats, squirrley pony and a small garden, but turns out Oregon, or the high desert of Oregon is actually just a giant sandbox and you can’t grow anything there.

So after my husband was diagnosed with, what we thought at the time, was end-stage cirrhosis, we’ve actually found out now that it wasn’t quite as extreme as we thought, but he does still have some liver problems. A lot of people hear that word and they think it’s from drinking. We don’t know what caused his; We think it might be from when he was in Iraq, from medications after the war. We’re not really sure, but the only cure that they suggest is a completely natural lifestyle. This brought us to buying our dream homestead in 2019, just before the pandemic started. We had previously reduced our food budget from 1500 a month to 300 a month just by changing everything completely to home cooking, stocking up, canning, and butchering our own meat. I have an ebook on how to do that and it is currently a free download with a popup on my website. However, it’s not going to be free forever. So if you have a chance, go get that now. There’ll be a link in the show notes.

So when we bought our homestead, we decided that we could focus a big part of that previously $1,500 budget on increasing our homestead. Then, during the 12-hour drive while pregnant to move to our new homestead, I actually got blood clots in my lungs. That’s a pulmonary embolism and I was pretty much on bedrest the entire rest of my pregnancy. Mind you, I was seven weeks pregnant when we moved. So that was a miserable pregnancy for me. I couldn’t do anything to help on our homestead. I lost all of my muscle mass. I’ve always been such a hard worker, but I mean, I would get winded just walking from our bedroom to the kitchen. However, we did continue to advance our efforts on the homestead and, thank God, because we needed it with all the COVID food shortages. But I couldn’t do the home cooking that I had previously done and our food budget began creeping back up. Then to top it off, baby came seven weeks early.

I had to live three hours away from my five older kids to be near him in the NICU. Our community really came together and took care of our kids while we were gone. But we had to take out a loan to afford living expenses while we were at the children’s hospital, even with living in the Ronald McDonald House. Once I began to recover, we had to come up with a plan quickly. We had a garden plan in place. We have a lot of fenced garden space on our property but I needed a way to recoup some funds. So I started asking around our community as to what was a niche that needed to be filled here. Almost everybody had the same answer- pigs. There were not enough people raising 4-H pigs, feeder pigs and not enough local pork producers.

This was a good thing because I was already familiar with pigs. We had raised them before. I majored in animal science in college where I worked in the swine barn. I’d always done 4-H; pigs were already my jam. In fact, we already had pigs on our property and our property was completely set up for pigs because the previous owners had been pig farmers as well. So I got out my trusty planner and I wrote a to-do list: “Find money to become a pig farmer.” We did not have the money to become pig farmers. The pigs that we had were just feeder pigs and the male was castrated. We were not going to be producing more pigs anytime soon. I had to figure out something else.

Luckily for us, not necessarily for other farmers, but during the lockdown, a lot of farmers in the Midwest were having to euthanize pigs because slaughter plants were locked down. Therefore, feedlots weren’t buying any pigs and pigs that were being born, had nowhere to be fed out. We heard of a deal that there was a trailer load of piglets coming to our area for 50 bucks a piece. It was just a farmer trying to recoup costs and not have to euthanize. We knew that this was our opportunity. We knew that they were just feeder pigs. We weren’t planning on breeding them. We had a plan, but we didn’t have even the 50 bucks for one pig let alone what we were hoping we’d be able to do. So to kind of back up a little bit… I had previously always had a black thumb when we made our garden plans.

I over planted, I mean I probably had 3000 starts in our mudroom. I know that sounds insane, but I am not even joking. I’ll have to post some pictures of it or something. So I posted my plans for a sale online for $2 each and in the first weekend I sold enough of those little plants to afford to get two pigs, the gas that I needed to meet the trailer, and a ton of feed. That works out to about a thousand dollars each to feed them out. So with these two pigs, our original plan was to raise one to eat for ourselves and sell one at full butcher weight for the money to buy a breeding pair of feeder pigs to be able to born a sow, to be able to breed and start having piglets on the property.

We started to tell people about this great plan that we had and we started getting asked if we could haul for other people. The first group of people that asked us to haul said that they’d actually pay us $75 a pig rather than the 50 to cover our costs for gas and for driving over there. My brain just clicked. We started actually advertising this online and we ended up sourcing over a hundred pigs and two truckloads to our community, which was great because nobody had pigs that year and people were freaking out. We actually made enough to start a small feeder operation on our property. A feeder operation is just where you take piglets, feed them out and sell them at an auction or sell them at full weight for butchering. For someone that’s not a breeder, we made enough with all of this to cover all the feed for about 20 pigs to butcher weight and all the additional supplies and all of our pigs were covered.

So this was super exciting for us, but it was still going to take six months to feed these pigs out. Our gardens weren’t producing yet and things were still a little tight, so I needed to come up with something to help us get through until this next step. This was early summer when this was happening. So with a little bit of the extra plant money, I bought quail chicks and an incubator. Quail start laying in six weeks and I can incubate their eggs in 18 days. By the end of summer, we had purchased a second incubator and we were selling 50 to a hundred day old chicks every two weeks. That was up to a thousand dollars a month. I mean, that was like if I would’ve gone out and gotten a part-time job. It was mind blowing. It was so amazing that I was able to make this work.

In fact, we were making so much with that, that we were able to start our pig herd a little early. That extra money helped us, not only with some life expenses, and then the gardens started to get ready. We had more food and we were able to invest in our herd way earlier than planned. Because of that, we had six litters of 4-H pigs the following spring. That’s pigs for local 4-H kids to show and an additional four litters of feeders to be able to sell to people who wanted to raise out their own pigs. The money that we have made from pigs on our homestead has made our whole homestead almost sustainable between the income and the food budget replacement.

When I say sustainable, that means it’s also paying for feed for our milk cow. It’s paying for feed for our chickens. It’s paying for all the supplies I need to increase our gardens. It’s helped pay for a dehydrator, a smoker, upfront cost to now start selling retail cuts of pork. It has really, really worked well for us. As another backup, I had gotten my real estate license while I was pregnant. So while I was in the process of saving our homestead and finding these additional income sources, it allowed me to build my client base. Once money started evening out, we were even able to start using our regular pork production to donate meat to struggling families and our communities from the lockdown.

This was when I really felt like we were able to come full circle for our community. Anyways, our homestead plans moving forward, now that I’ve saved it, we definitely have a direction that we want to go at this point. One thing is that we want to change our swine breeding stock to Hereford, which is an American heritage breed that we just absolutely love. They look like Hereford cattle, red with the white faces. They are great meat pigs. We currently have two milk cows and a heifer. We will be bringing those cows to a beef bowl soon, which will give us milk from our cows and a good steer or heifer to feed out and butcher in the next couple of years. Our heifer, however, is a pure brown Swiss. Our son shows her. She was actually reserve grand champion last year at our fair.

We plan on breeding her to sexed Brown Swiss semen using an AI technique that will actually select for female sperm. In this case, we would be able to have milk from her and then raise her heifer to sell as a family milk cow. That amount that we’d be able to make off of her would really cover our entire dairy endeavor. We’re really busy, though. We’ve had our cows open and dry for quite a while over the last year. We decided we were just wasting money with that because if nothing else, we could use the beef. So we started talking to a local gal who has some young kids and she wants raw milk, but can’t afford the cost of raw milk. She lives nearby us.

So we’re looking at doing a calf sharing program where we share the calf. One time a day she’ll come over and milk and we will split the milk with her at that point, with us pretty much covering all the costs of the cows. So we’re pretty excited about that process, because it’s going to save us a lot of money, a lot of time and put food in the fridge. Our next exciting change is that, last fall, due to the hay shortage, we caught a deal on two purebred, Angus heifers. We are super excited about those two girls. We call them Thelma and Louise because they’re kind of troublesome, like most heifers. We’ll get plenty of beef personally from our dairy cows, so when we breed these two girls, we’re going to be able to sell their calves either as grass fed beef or for 4-Hers as show calves. We also have an additional 16 acres of grassy hillside that has hot wire. Once we tighten that up, we can just feed the girls there and not really have to put a lot of extra hay into them. So that’s gonna be really great. We also have a few fields locally that we help hay a couple times a year and get to split that product as well.

Our laying chickens have done really well for us for a few years, so we don’t need to make any changes there right now. We’ve had really bad luck with meat chickens though, but can usually still fill a couple of shelves in the freezer. Definitely want to work on what’s been going on there and aim for less casualties. Something I’ve really wanted to do is try red bourbon turkeys. They’re a heritage breed turkey and they’re more sustainable than the standard white, and they’ll sit on their eggs if you have a breeding pair and hatch themselves. So if you haven’t seen them, they’re really beautiful. I would consider looking them up. I just realized they kind of look like the Hereford pigs that we’re planning on raising. Maybe we should get some Hereford cows and then everybody will match. But in the meantime, we’re gonna stick with our Angus girls. This will require me building a new pen. So that’s probably going to be done or probably going to be put off until I’m done writing this next curriculum. That is taking up every ounce of time that I have. And then we don’t really feel like we need to increase anything else at this time. We want to improve everywhere that we can. One thing we’ve learned though, is that healthier, cleaner, livestock and conditions will actually produce more than just increasing our stock. So that’s what I think we’re really focusing on at this point.

I personally want to focus some more energy on building the Homestead Science business. If you don’t already know, that is the homeschool curriculum that I created. There’s going to be a couple of subscription or membership type programs in the future. So please follow me and watch for those. I’m very excited about them. I really just want to focus on my content creation, because I believe that everyone can really benefit from the goals of Homestead Science and the message of this podcast. Did you listen to this episode because you’re thinking to yourself that you need to figure out a way to save your homestead? First, you need to decide that you’re going to do it and actually want to. I have consulted with people that really just want to feel sorry for themselves and that doesn’t work when you need to be able to implement a plan. So next I suggest asking around and finding a hole in the market or a local niche that needs to be filled.

I know it can be super exciting to make goat, milk soap and crochet baby hats. And you know what they sell great, especially in the holidays, but these items often flood the market. And I don’t know that you’re going to have the cash flow from them that you’re needing, for the time that it takes to make up. Find something that has a cheap startup and a fast turnover. I know some people grow microgreens and get large orders from restaurants and markets. I had a local restaurant owner say that he has a hard time getting fresh herbs in our rural area. Is there something on your land that you can already use? When I was selling plant starts, I also dug up and replanted raspberry canes. They spread and have to be cut back anyway. I was able to sell them for anywhere from 5 to 20 a piece, depending on their size. I’ve also heard people complain about the price of meal worms for their chickens. They’re super easy with a cheap startup and can be sold as chicken feed.

Are you thinking to yourself?”But none of those things are what I want to be when I grow up?” That’s okay. Get that cash flowing. With that cash, you can start working on paying your bills or investing in some higher yielding investments. Start your plan right away. There is never a right time. Like they say, if you wait to have kids until you’re ready, you’ll never have kids. The money won’t start coming in until that effort is put out and make sure you advertise your products in as many places as possible. You know, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about, “Well, I started selling eggs off my homestead and I put a sign out at the end of the road and I haven’t sold any eggs.” Well, a lot of people who have chickens live in rural areas and maybe no one’s seeing that sign. Advertise on Facebook. Advertise on Craigslist.

Don’t discredit putting up a flyer at your local hardware store. People still read those. Can you sell at a farmer’s market? When I first started selling my curriculum, I would take it to holiday craft shows and always sold some. But if nothing else, I was getting my name out there. Don’t just wait for someone to find your ad. Go to the restaurant and ask if they need herbs or go to the restaurant in advance. See what herbs they need before you even start growing them. Then make a plan with what you want to do with that extra money. If you’re doing this for extra pocket money, great. Sell it, have your extra pocket money and get a soda on the way to work or something. If not, decide what all of it goes toward. If you decide it’s all going to go towards credit card debt, do that.

If it’s to save up, put it in a place that’s not easily accessible, or if you’re wanting to invest in a business or property, make sure you’re putting that money in a bank account so that it’s trackable. So if you are looking for ways to make some extra money, go ahead and look in the show notes and download my free guide on low or free startup cost, homestead money makers. And there’s going to be links there to everything I just talked about, marketing ideas and hopefully you’ll be able to get yourself back up and going. 

Thank you for joining me today at the Homestead Education. I hope that I have given you something to think about this week. To help others find me, please comment and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram at Homemade Revelation. Do you have questions that you’d like answered or just want to say hi? Please email me@helloatthehomesteadeducation.com until next time, keep growing.