Welcome to the grazing grass podcast episode 143.
Don't get ahead of your learning curve. We always talk about getting ahead of our market. We always talk ahead about all, but don't get ahead of your learning curves
You're listening to the grazing grass, podcast, sharing information and stories of grass-based livestock production utilizing regenerative practices. I'm your host, Cal Hardage. You're growing more than grass. You're growing a healthier ecosystem to help your cattle thrive in their environment. You're growing your livelihood by increasing your carrying capacity and reducing your operating costs. You're growing stronger communities and a legacy to last generations.
The grazing management decisions you make today. impact everything from the soil beneath your feet to the community all around you. That's why the Noble Research Institute created their Essentials of Regenerative Grazing course to teach ranchers like you easy to follow techniques to quickly assess your forage production and infrastructure capacity. In order to begin grazing more efficiently. Together, they can help you grow not only a healthier operation, but a legacy that lasts.
Learn more on their website at noble. org slash grazing. It's n o b l e dot org forward slash grazing.
On today's show. We have Cedric Shannon of Weathertop Farm. Him and his wife, Sarah, have a farm in Virginia, which they raise. A few different species on, they have sheep, cattle, hogs, chickens, and turkeys. Everything rotationally grazed, he makes extensive use of electric netting. And he also has a podcast. Can your beans do that? It's a wonderful episode. We're going to talk about his beginnings, but we're gonna talk a lot about getting started when you don't have much money.
That's our overgrazing topic for today. And then we run out a little bit of time. So to get the cattle and sheep in that's over on our bonus segment for our grazing grass insiders. For 10 seconds about the farm, my cool season perennials are growing. They got some. Some much needed rain and, um, the weather's not been too bad. Not too warm. Not too cool. For 10 seconds about podcasts. On our show notes, we have a link to a listeners' feedback form.
We'd love to get your feedback about the podcast and how we can improve. So if you've got some time, click on that link and fill out a form for us, we'd appreciate it.
Cedric, we want to welcome you to the Grazing Grass podcast. We're excited you're here today.
Thanks, Cal. It's great to be here.
To get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your operation?
Yeah, so, we moved here in 2003. It was some land that was getting all divided, you know, subdivided. It was going to just turn into housing and we bought it as a whole. It was about 54 acres. My wife and I, we had five tiny little kids. There was like nothing here. We, it was crazy. It was like the, you know, midlife crisis type of crazy. Everyone's was like, you should not be doing this. So we really started from scratch. There was a few buildings, but they were like a hundred years old.
There was some pastures left because people had just thrown some cows on here, but so we really started with very little. We had thrown all our capital. to the land. And so we started slow and we just started with this little infrastructure. You know, we, we were, we'd read some Joel Salatin. We'd have visited his farm a little bit. So we built some chicken tractors. You know, we started like with a hundred broilers, 25 hens, a couple hogs, you know, and I had rabbits too.
So I had brought my stock. Yeah. We started very slowly and the market was there. We were in a great place here. We're in Floyd, Virginia.
So we're in the rolling hills, but there was already a community here that was doing, they were calling it sustainable agriculture at the time, found someone who was actually doing like pasture poultry, rotational grazing, and talked to this old codger, and he was just really nice, and I asked him if, you know, Would he kind of be there as a resource when he said, yes, I told my wife, we can do this. We can do this. So they really, it was a couple and they really helped us out through the years.
I mean, we, we started, we were like, we didn't have any processing equipment. So we were taking our birds over to their place and processing and we traded traded work for that. And so we're really well supported. But started very, very slow. The market was there. So we might've started with 200 broilers the first year or a hundred. I can't even remember, but you know, next year was like 500, you know, and then like 700 and then a thousand. Right. So, and then we added other things.
We did ducks for a while. I had rabbits for a long time, but they're, So those have fallen away and in the place we've put in sheep. We've put in cattle. We have now access to the farm right across the road. So in total, we manage about 200 acres. Some of that is woods. We've got a fair amount of pasture, but with multiple species. So we've got just to give you a sense of scale, we do Well, we order 6, 000 broilers. You know how that goes. It's 5, 000 in sum by the end.
We have flocks of laying hens, 600 at a time. We'll keep two through the winter, but then we kind of, as one is phasing out, we'll get another flock. So anywhere from 1, 200 to You know, 1800 birds laying. Then we do turkeys. We have like about 600 turkeys for Thanksgiving. So that's our, our poultry there. And then we do hogs, and we rotationally graze them as well. I have listened to a few of your podcasts. People were dissing on hogs, and I'll, I'll have a different opinion on that.
They're awesome. Yeah.
just a couple weeks ago. Yeah, what if so it was pretty harsh on hogs They were not fans of them. We do have a few that's that's hog base. So that's that's interesting. We'll have to get into that Yeah
So we do hogs, we farrow, we have about 10 sows, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when they're each farrowing twice a year, averaging, you know, like 9 or 10 hogs, you know, that can be anywhere from, you know, 160 to 200. And it's all direct sale. So, So we, you know, finish out quite a few hogs. Then we have a, a Katahdin flock of about 60 maybe, sometimes a little bit higher use. And then I'm just, right now at this point, I'm just bringing in steers.
So I might bring in like 25 steers a year. And then keep them for about a year and a half and then, and then sell them. So, and we run our sheep and our, and our beef together. So we have what they call flerds, right? A
Oh
a herd of flerds. That gives you a sense of scale.
Yeah. And, and so we have so much to cover as I, I took notes as you were saying, all that so much we want to get through. But first I wanna go back till you moved down there and ask you about your rabbits.
Okay.
you, you moved rabbits with you when you moved them down here. Were you doing any kind of, were you trying to raise them on pasture or were they more in the cage and raising them like a more conventional system for the rabbits?
So I had the breeding stock in cages, you know, raised up with the wire and all the poop is falling through. I had ideas. I was gonna do worms under him, which never worked very well. And then we were, and then we were putting them like, you know, the, after we weaned them, we would keep them out in the field and these sort of rabbit tractors.
Oh, yes.
We went through so many iterations of that. You know, put wire on the corners, put, you know, some extra bars and, you know, I know, that Salatin at some point was doing it where he had lots and lots of slats. By the time I saw that, it was like, there's no grass coming through. So what's the point?
yeah. Yeah, you're not you're not getting any grass forage consumption there
Yeah, so then, you know, and they were still getting out like every now and then and I had a great dog. She'd help me catch him and she wouldn't kill him. She would help me catch him. We'd round him up, but I was wasting so much time. And in the end, right, I might have like. 20 rabbits in a tractor, right? When you can do like 75 broilers in a tractor, right? So
True. Yeah,
economically, I mean, just time. I mean, at the beginning I had a lot of time and I loved rabbits. I've grown up with rabbits always, and I love rabbit meat and I had great stock. Never found stock as good as I did when I, the stuff I brought here.
And eventually it was just a you know, we had to cut something out because it was just taking so much time because we were like scything grass for them and like, you know, and, and you take care of one rabbit, you know, and she might have 8, 10 babies as well, but you taking one cage,
Oh, yeah.
In each cage at a time, whereas I go out and I can take care of 600 layers all at once.
Yeah
So you just never, you can never get the price point to make that actually economic item.
Did you find there was a fair market for rabbit meat?
There was plenty of a
Oh, yeah.
It was either, Like an older generation, because, oh, I love rabbit, I grew up with rabbit, or through the depression, my grandma made me rabbit, or a lot of ethnic, so we're close to a couple bigger towns, we have well, Roanoke, and then also Blacksburg is a town that we go to a lot, that's where Virginia Tech is, and there's a lot of international people there, and so they, a lot, you know, most, most places love rabbit, it's a little different here, this generation
Oh, right.
People used to eat rabbit all the time here as well,
Yeah, I grew up eating rabbit. We went through some phases as I was growing up, different times when rabbit was the main protein we had. Now I say that we always had beef, so always had beef. But rabbit replaced chicken for a number of times because we, we started raising some rabbits and rabbits multiply like rabbits. And we, we had way too many. They're one of my favorite animals. I have them off and on. And I just really struggle with it.
Right now, I don't have any I told my wife the other day I want to get a few more And she's like, well, are you sure? And you know, i'm always them when I want to but but I know the the issues I would love to do them in a, in a rabbit tractor or something, but I just look at it and I'm like, that is that much more work I'm creating for myself when I don't need to create more work. So it's that love, hate relationship with it. Not so much the rabbits, but just trying to figure out that system.
yeah. One of the best things about rabbits, though, actually, we started, we put some, a bunch of our, our rabbit hutches in a, we have sort of a poor man's hoop house, right? So, we have like a PVC, 20 foot PVC, and we just put them, you know, and so it's like 12 feet wide, 96 long, and it's about 7 feet high. And then we had our, our rabbit hutches in there and we have shade cloth over. And over the winter, we, we hook up our hen houses to it so our hens can get into those hoop houses.
So we don't do lights and they still, they get all that heat from the hoop houses and they just lay all through the
Oh yes.
But when we had the rabbits under there, it was like even extra like mobonus for them.
Oh yeah.
They just loved it. They would go through all the manure and the bugs
Oh yeah.
they were happy as could be. So there's a lot of pluses to rabbits, you know, and if I was doing more of a homestead and not a business, I would get rabbits in the blink of an eye.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I I do have a couple disadvantages for Rabbit here. I can't convince my wife to eat it, and,
She hasn't had it made by my wife.
and, and she ref, she refuses to, well, actually, if, if I fix it for her, she's much closer eating it. She doesn't wanna be in the processing portion of it at all. And, and to say she has came a long way. She grew up basically in town. in Hawaii. So this is all pretty foreign to her. So she, she's came a long ways, you know, not having the meat come to her on a, on a styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic was a, a shock for her. So yeah, of course it's been over 20 years.
So another 20 years, I may have her convinced. We'll see. Yeah. Right. So I always think, I know we had an episode where a lady She started with rabbits and then it's expanded way beyond that, but I love rabbits as a, a potential protein source for people with limited land or just getting started. It's, it's great there. And a lot of times.
We don't want to talk about rabbit because it kind of, it's, it's, I hate to say the stepchild because I think that's just the wrong connotation for stepchildren. But, but sometimes it's not looked upon all, all that greatly. So,
well, I grew up, I grew up overseas in Africa and, and places like that where agriculture, you know, is, is less business and much more, you know, subsistence rabbits can be like, Just essential, right? I mean, in all kinds of climates, right? But like, they, they so synergistic with garden and other animals and, you know, so like, it's hands down one of the best animals, just not for business.
So, so with the business in mind, you all, once you moved, you took some rabbits down there, but you quickly found some other species that worked a little bit better. So let's, so first you got chickens, I believe. Tell us a little bit about your beginning process with chickens and how that went.
so, I basically built two pens, you know, I sort of took a Salaton's model and sort of tweaked it, you know, I'm a carpenter, so I tweaked it in ways that made sense for me and we did around, right? And already the couple that I mentioned before, the brights, they, they were doing broilers and they had, you know, I don't know how many they were up to, maybe a thousand at that point. It was just, just the two of them.
And they said, well, just come do your broilers and we'll see if we can sell it. And we just sold everything. So then I bought a hundred more and we were able to get two in that season just because of that, right? So it was just very minimal infrastructure and just like, you know, chicken tractor, especially back then. Costed very little. I could just buy the wood, and I could, I even bought aluminum back there, back then, so that they would be lighter, and it was, like, affordable.
Then we, I built a little chicken coop for the hens, and it's, like, this one that my, my, my dad had, like, backyard poultry stuff, and found one there, and I, I literally, like, I didn't have a tractor, I didn't have a truck. We moved here in a Grand Caravan, Dodge Caravan. And I pulled this chicken that could house a hundred birds, and I pulled this little chicken thing on skids with my Dodge Caravan around the pasture.
And, and since we're telling kind of embarrassing stories about the beginning, we would move our hogs around. And this is hilarious, just thinking about how far we've come, right? I got two hogs, but I wanted to move them, right? The whole thing is I wanted to move them. So there was this shed that had fallen down. And so it was this triangle of the roof. So I just cut that and we put it out on the pasture and they'd be under that.
And then when we wanted to move it, I literally said, Hey, I'd get my brother or somebody around here and we'd go under it and we'd put it on our shoulders. And we would lift it up
Yeah,
and we would walk it like a hundred feet. So, so yeah, I mean, we started with nothing and so, I mean, it's, it's pretty funny to think about it, but you know, you do what you got to do.
my grandpa his favorite saying was always poor people have poor ways and and I Well, I hauled some goats off in my my little homemade Goat towed on the back of my pickup just the other day. I, I actually have a really nice one, but my dad and nephew decide they needed to borrow it. I'm like, I gotta sell some goats. So I, I made one out of a panel and stuff, wired. I was telling the people at the, at the place where I, I actually bought some goats and I said, yeah, poor people's got poor ways.
It'll work
Yeah,
So you expanded into all those species chickens, layers, hogs. You started out really small scale. Did you just grow as the consumer as you found the market, or did you just grow as you had money, or how was the growth process?
it was all together. Right. So the great thing about broilers is you, You get your investment back within two months,
Oh, yeah.
And we absolutely had to have that. We did work off farm. My wife and I took turns working off farm for the first like five years. So it wasn't until after that, that we cinched our belt and said, we're going to try to do this full time. But yeah, no, I mean, you know, I, I think actually the one thing you didn't mention is, is that also the learning curve,
Oh, yes.
right. So like, yeah, we didn't have the money, but we also needed to do our market. We also needed to grow our skills, how good we were doing this without like, Oh, I'm going to buy 50 hogs and do it. And then just completely, you know, we didn't have sort of the cushion to to do that. So, the market always seemed to be there. And sometimes we'd have to work to find it or to get the people there.
But always in the end, we ended up always selling everything, you know, and it helped, you know, and then, you know, we've always been really high quality, even though we may be poor and have poor ways, we've always been really high quality. Just the taste, right? People are just like, Oh, this tastes, I don't, I can't believe, is this really chicken? Like, I haven't, I guess I haven't eaten chicken all my life. And that spoke for itself, you know, so it's all been kind of word of mouth.
We've never like, we don't do anything like shipping, whatever. But like, now we have hundreds of families that we, for a lot of them, we are their only meat source.
Oh, yeah.
And yeah, no, it just has grown. And then in 2012, we also branched out to the human species, had our first intern. And that was one of the things we were hearing. We were going to conferences and stuff was, you know, one of the biggest needs is a lot of people want to get into regenerative agriculture, but they don't have an entry level. Sort of way to start. People are looking for managers, which I too, I get that.
I'm looking for a manager to help me, you know, with the load, but we kept hearing this need of like people want to get into it, but they don't know, especially with animal husbandry. So we started an intern program. And so right now we do have a manager and we do about three or four interns on top of
Oh, yes, so you have quite the crew because you mentioned earlier I think you had five little kids when you moved,
we have five kids too, but they've
and they've had, oh, have they all left home? Because I'm thinking they're, that turned into quite the workforce.
They were, I mean, I mean, they were also very active, you know, but they all know how to do everything on the
Right, right.
Unfortunately I, I, the, the sustainability aspect of getting your kids to take over. I haven't learned that one yet. They all want to go off and do their own thing.
Oh, yes.
Totally understandable. And so, yeah, actually, now I'm into the stage of being a grandpa.
Oh, yes.
and they're coming back to the farm for that. So they're here right now for a few months and we get to hang out with our grandkid
that
And I have another one on the way. So, yeah. Yes, they've always been a big part of it, but no one's taken over anything like
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I complained to my dad. My wife and I have, we have five kids and we'll be out there doing stuff. And I'm like, dad, I'm the young one here providing labor. There should be another generation out here doing the hard stuff. Now we do have, I do have a nephew that is helping us quite often, which has been really nice because that means. I don't have to run and do everything. I'm like, Hey Michael, go do that.
Yeah, it is the Amish say you invest in your kids for the first seven years and then you get your investment back the next seven
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, my siblings ran from the farm as quickly as they could. So I was, I was the one that stuck around here for, for my generation, but the next generation, yeah, we'll have to see. So when you started processing, you started with chickens, did you, have you always used Cornish cross or have you tried anything else? Wow,
we started with Cornish Cross. They just, yeah, sure they have a bad mortality rate, but that turned around. We tried every now and then, some Freedom Rangers, or just, and, They just can't compete. You just can't get as many rounds in. They just don't grow as much. And we put it to a taste test. We, we were giving all our customers like sort of blind taste tests. We would do these like samples and they, people couldn't tell the difference.
And they, it wasn't like, Oh my goodness, the Cornish cross isn't as good. They were getting enough grass and bugs and sunshine that it was doing what it needed to do nutritionally to make it taste so good. So we've just Every time we've tried a little something like that, we're going back just because economically, again, if I was homesteading, very different story,
Oh, right. But you've got to, you've got to manage this as a business. And I
still are probably our biggest cash crop, so to speak.
yeah, I do. I, I would say summarizing everyone I've talked to, majority of the people go with the Cornish cross. It's just hard to compete with that. And in fact, when we get off here today, I'm running to a post office. I've got some Cornish cross chicks to pick up.
I've been, I. I pastured, I raised some, I don't know, like 10 years ago, and, and my wife didn't like them as much as she thought she would, so we didn't do it anymore but I took them somewhere to get processed In the processing, etc. So I just bought a small batch to try it again. I'm going to do it all in house and we'll see how it
well, you know, even if you don't make money on them, they are unbelievable. You know, cyclers of nutrients. So to jumpstart a pasture, like we got access to this pasture right across from the road four years ago from us, and there's nothing like broilers to just kind of jumpstart things, wake things up,
completely agree. I agree. Yeah. We had broiler houses. Years ago, we put in broiler houses and grew for a company. So we had 80, 90, 000 broilers, four houses, you know, that complete conventional system, which worked great for money flow. And the other thing it worked great for was we spread that litter on our pastures and it'll make rocks grow grass. And you can do the same thing with a chicken tractor and raising some pastured poultry. So you use Cornish cross for your, your broilers.
What are you using for your hens?
It's the red sex link,
Oh, okay.
which I think, you know, it's some F5, 000. I don't know what it is, but you know, originally it was like a roast Rhode Island red rooster with a,
I know what you mean. Yeah. yeah, But
they're fantastic birds. They're unbelievable, you know, really bad mothers, but they
that's not what they're bred for.
Forage, and they will lay you beautiful eggs. And they're, I mean, they're great birds. So, yeah.
They're a brown egg layer, correct? So you're just, you're selling all brown eggs.
Yeah, we get this thing by the time they've been laying over a year. They get whiter and whiter. So we do sell some white eggs that were
you have a nice variety in there
There's a variety, yes.
Do you get any feedback from consumers that they'd like some a different color egg or anything in there?
At Easter.
Oh, okay. Yeah.
But otherwise, no.
Well, I grew up. We, we raised, we always had Rhode Island Reds. So we always had brown eggs. My wife doesn't understand why I'm fascinated with brown eggs because she's like, just white eggs, just white eggs, but it's a brown eggs. But I know pot, it seems pretty popular in the homestead community right now for the green or blue eggs. So I was just wondering if you got any.
and yeah, yeah. No, I mean I have in my life, but that's not for, not for the
Yeah, right, right.
Yeah.
then you started turkeys at the time, or you started turkeys pretty early in your
Yeah. very early.
You're growing one
Broad breasted white.
So,
They're, they're wonderful foragers. They're like, I mean, they get a hard rap. One time you know, Barbara Kingsolver came through and she was, you know, promoting her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and she was harp, harping on the turkeys. I went up and talked to her afterwards. I said, you can't do that. Come to my farm. I'll show you. They're great foragers. They're so happy. They, they're much funner than the broilers. And they're just much more active and they forage.
I mean they, they graze, right? That's the thing people don't realize, like hogs and poultry and all. They're like grazing. It's not just like a pick here and pick there. It's like you can, there's a line from when the fence was to the next day. Right? So, Anyways, she kind of backed off a little bit on her being quite so harsh on the turkeys after that. And I even read her book and she had taken some of that out.
So that was kind of cool, but they're great, you know, and we've done some we've done some heritage breeds before, but again, you'd have to like quadruple your price. To make it worth it. And that's just doesn't make sense. So let the, let the other people worry about for us, we just worry about the heritage breeds, you know, more power to them. But as a business is nothing compared to the broad breasted whites.
Yes. That, that's good to know because I, I've thrown around the idea of raising a few turkeys. I don't think I really want to do it as a business, but I wouldn't mind raising a few because my wife gets tired of me talking about how I want my meat to be cleaner, my food made from scratch. So she gets over, she, she gets tired of my little speech on that. Are you growing one set of turkeys a year and are you shooting for processing October?
So we. We do this, so we have 600 out there, and we start processing, actually end of October, that's like next week, we start processing, we'll do like 100. So those will be the birds that are like 10 12 pounds.
Oh, yeah.
And then like a week or 10 days later, we'll do another group and those will be 12, 15, kind of, right? So, and then, and then we'll do three days, like right at around Thanksgiving. And those are the 20, 20 plus birds. So we get the different sizes that way. You just have to freeze it if you want.
Oh, yeah.
you know, so that, so it's all one flock.
Oh, okay. Yeah. And you all have, you have a processing facility set up so you all can do it right
We've grown up a little bit, built my own processing, bought my equipment. It was an investment, you know, and but you know, it was, we, We processed at the Bright's, I think, probably seven or eight years.
Oh,
Before we were like, okay, we have a little bit of extra capital here. We can, you know, build a shed with cronky pad by the equipment, which is not cheap at all. So we have a, we have a scalder and we have a plucker
Oh, yeah.
rest is just done by hand. So,
Is there in Virginia? Are you, you have some limits to how many you can process on farm?
yeah, we get exemption, but it's very, very reasonable. It's wonderful, right? So we if you do under 1000, they don't care what you do. You just can't sell it, resell, or you can't go across state lines, but you can even sell it to family, friends, whoever you want. As soon as you get over like a thousand, it's like a thousand to twenty thousand units, right? Which, like a turkey is three units, a chicken is one, whatever, but we've never even gotten close to the twenty thousand units.
But at that point, We can't go across state lines, we can't do wholesale, but we can do everything else. So what we do is we'll, Thursday we'll kill about 300. We do rounds of 300. So we'll kill, it's usually not 300 because some of them have died, Right, So, so, we'll do that and then that afternoon we might sell like 150 of them. People will come pick them up that afternoon. Then we'll put about a hundred in the, in the walk in cooler for the next day to cut up
Oh,
and we'll cut up into pieces and that's all under the exemption. It's perfectly fine. So we get your breast, you get your legs, you get, you know, we'll cut up about a hundred of those and then we might have like 40 we save fresh and then I take fresh on Saturday to market. So during broiler season, almost every Saturday, I've got fresh whole birds and fresh cuts and people are spoiled rotten. So yeah, so that's how we, we do that.
Now, you mentioned 300. Is that how many fit in each tractor?
Well, it's, it's half a brooder,
Okay.
and it's two tractors no, four tractors, four chicken tractors, right, about 75 each, or I, I have developed my own houses, and so it's two of these other houses that I actually pull by the tractor, because as I get older, I don't like to pull them.
Right, right. I, I understand.
get a lot of interns to pull them, but I always, I like the tractors, everything's built on skids, everything's moved all the time to fresh pasture. And then 300's a good amount for us to process, cause we gotta get all the chores done, then we kill, then we gotta clean up, cause we sell from the processing shed where we just killed. So we gotta clean up, we try to be done by like noon or noon thirty. And then everyone, we eat lunch together and volunteers will come and do this and they love it.
They like work hard and then we give them this great lunch
Oh, yeah.
and then by two o'clock, two to four, people are showing up to pick up their
Oh, yeah. So do you is that
is just a good
is that like they have pre ordered them or they just you're saying two or four show up? We will have fresh
No, no we set our dates at the beginning of the year. Like in March, we send out a newsletter, say here's all our processing dates. So all our poultry dates, all our broiler and our turkey dates and people just sign up and then we close it out when it gets too full and then people. I'm crying.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's a good problem for you to
It's a good problem,
Yeah. Well, let's let's move off of poultry and talk some about your hogs.
Yeah.
You said you have 10 sows, and I know a lot of times when I talk to people, they're not doing the farrowing and finishing. A few people I've talked to are doing both. But you've got 10 sows, and you go farrow to finish. First question, I'm gonna ask right off so it's out of the way. What breeds are you working with?
So we started out with Tamworth, right? My mentor Larry Bright was working with Tamworth. Great. And I, and I started off just getting feeder pigs from him.
Oh, yeah.
them off. For years and years. It wasn't until we had grown quite a bit that he's like, I think it's time. You have your own sales, you know,
Oh, yes.
can share more and, you know, you know, he's kind of like my second father and stuff. So it's great. And he was pretty solid Tamworth for a long time, but I think the breed really has. It's getting harder and harder to find because he just brings a boar in. We're not saving our own boars. And so a few years ago, we started bringing in other blood. So Berkshire or just, you know, rock or whatever, you know, you get this sort of cross, whatever you can kind of get your hands on.
But again, now, like I'm all into the epigenetics. Right, so that's part of having the sow there. We, we rotationally graze, they get a fresh strip of grass every day.
So you, so you're
Our hogs graze, and they get a ton of, right, so if, if mama's doing it, and her biome's got it all, and the piglets, you
Right. They're going to learn from her.
they learn from her, and they got the biome going, and so, we have pig, and we've sold some, you know, some pigs before, you know, some little shoats, and people are like, Right. I thought I didn't, I, they didn't realize they opened their fence thinking, Oh, I they'll do their thing. I'll go feed them. They'll be interested in the feed. And then I'll open the fence and I'll do some work over here.
Well, as soon as they opened the fence, they left their feet and started coming to the grass and they were like, Oh this is a different breed. So, right. So, yeah, and I'll, I'll put a plug into, I think another player, yeah. Right. I'm all into the soil as well. I'm well sold on the soil being there as super important and all that diversity of species and all the moving hogs are amazing. I'm going to tell a little story that I've, I tell a lot, but I think it's really important.
I think it's really telling. We had sent the hogs down. We, we, I mean, we layer, our pastures, just we get oodles of different species going, right? We might get the sheep, the sheep and the And the steers might go through there three times, but I'm also getting the hogs maybe going twice and the chickens going twice. Right? So you just layer and layer. You can use your land so much more.
So we'd had the this area where the hogs had been through, through half of where the sheep were going and it had just been a month or so ago. And to me, to my eyes, the grass looked gorgeous. The whole thing looked exactly the same. 100 percent of the sheep and cows were where the hogs had been a month ago.
yes.
Ate all that grass first, and then went over to the other stuff. So clearly they're cycling something. The BRX level's gotta be up higher. There's more nutrients, whatever. I don't know the science, and I don't, I don't even need to know the science. But for me, the science is watching those, those sheep go, Okay, this stuff's much better. And it was like a hundred percent. My wife and I were just looking like, This isn't just like, oh, they're favoring it. It is like a hundred percent on this
yes. Yeah.
Just chowing down and when they're done with that, they're like, okay, we'll go over and eat this other beautiful lush grass that you couldn't tell the difference at all. You know, it's just at the perfect stage, but where the hogs had been, that's where they wanted to eat. So something's going on there.
You know, your story reminds me and I really hadn't thought about this in a long time. When we'd spread those, that chicken litter from those boiler houses, Where it was always a darker green and you could tell where we spread it and a lot of times we would spread We had to keep track of where we spread it and we know where it was or we might leave a gap Accidentally between a couple loads, but those cattle wanted to graze Where we had fertilized where we'd put that broiler lead
If you, if you give it enough time. Yeah it can't be right away.
Yeah. Yeah right away. I don't want to be there.
yeah, I had, I had hadn't done this as much with hogs. I'd done this with the poultry, but what I, I guess what I would say is that it's even better with the hogs.
Oh Yes.
prefer where the hogs have been over where the chickens have
Oh Interesting.
tell you why, but there's some sort of synergy going on there. So yeah.
how are you managing shelter for your hogs with moving them every day? And how are you managing water? You
So again, we're small, right? So, our biggest group of hogs is going to be like 40.
Oh yeah.
Right, which is a lot of meat when you think about it you know, I mean, I hear a lot of your people on your podcast, they have 5, 000 acres, they have 5, 000 this, whatever, but it's still a lot to do. You have 40 hogs in a group, right? So you had it's all done with electric netting,
Oh yes.
And then our houses. Everything's on skids,
Oh
and then I just have these hex bolts, these half inch hex bolts, and I just throw a chain around it, and I put my tractor, and this is a one person job if you need to. I've done, I've done everything on my farm one person. I mean, you can do two people, it's sometimes nicer to have quite a few people,
Oh yeah.
and then I just drag it with a tractor. Right. And then I have the waters on skids and then we have a chain on them. I go back with the tractor and I throw that chain on the hitch and I just pull the water. And we've been we did get sort of be when working on putting the I can't talk the the underground water where you have the plugins.
And so the more of that we can get in, in our pastures, you know, so you're only going to have to need two or three hoses at the most, and you can put the water anywhere. And it was great because we were at just recently. We had this wonderful opportunity. Alan Williams came to Virginia Tech
yes,
and so I took our whole crew, my wife and I, and four, four, four employees here and great, wonderful, Alan Williams is the best, but one of the things he stressed was, you know, to keep changing that water
oh
he shows his water, like he had, like, I don't know, a thousand cattle or something and he's got one trough. On wheels. And he's like, you know, it's actually important for them not to learn, not to mob the trough and to learn to, you know, and he's like, and he was just stressing how important it was to just keep that water moving. And one of the things as we've been putting these lines and we've gotten some help from like NRCS and
oh yeah.
and they're like, Oh, you got to put in these permanent water things. And my wife and I have been resisting these, resisting these because we just like our waters in a different place Every time. they come through. And we just felt kind of vindicated.
Oh yes! Yeah!
And we were like, Oh, yeah, well, Alan Williams is on our page. And yeah, so it's just on skids, and we move it, we fill it with, you know, and for the steers, we do have like a float valve. And so that, but still, it's not that much. It's just like 100 gallon tub. Or we might have two of them out there and one on so yeah, or the sheep, it's a 50 gallon because it's a little
Oh, yeah.
And sheep don't even drink as much, so anyways, yeah, so it's, I mean, I guess it's a lot of manual, so you're using hoses and you're plugging them in, but like, for us, that flexibility and the moving, that's keyed
Oh, yeah.
And so, yeah,
With your, your moving, you, you've mentioned this a little bit earlier, I believe, that, you know, your cattle and sheep may go over an area three times, your hogs may go over a couple times, and you've got turkeys, you've got your layers, you've got broilers. How are you keeping track of where you're grazing everything, and how are you moving them through your, your pasture?
good question. When we're on top of things, we do have a grazing chart. We always get behind,
Oh, yes.
you know, but we through, you know, through everybody and everyone's got phones. We sometimes we've even gone back and looked at pictures. When did you take that picture? Oh,
I, I love pictures for that.
It's dated. Okay. It's okay. Because, because we wait. Especially for the sheep. We wait 60 days.
Oh, yes.
We have developed, so we know we have, I haven't wormed a sheep in probably four or five years.
Oh, very nice.
And we might lose one, you know, or two, maybe a year from, from parasites very, you know, much, much higher than anyone who's using Wormers, much, much better mortality rate, I should say, so lower and so, that 60 days is important. So it's not just the grass, what stage it's at. It's also the cycles of, you know, the barbacole worm and
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, no, I'm we, so the, we do pay attention to that when we're at our best, we're using a grazing chart, we got it all color coordinated and we got it all marked out and we do have all our land sort of parceled out in areas. So we know where, you know, generally where they were at what time.
Oh, yeah. One thing we haven't talked about your sheep or cattle yet, but I'm thinking we may save that for the bonus segment and we can talk about those more. Because we've, we spent this whole time talking about kind of getting started and starting from scratch with little capital, little infrastructure, but that's our overgrazing topic for today, an overgrazing topic sponsored by Redmond.
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And we're going to take a little bit deeper dive. So I wanted to get that in there because I felt like we kind of spent the whole episode on that topic, but let's hone in just a little bit more on that. Because I feel like so many people's in that position, just getting started. How do you get started when you have no capital or very little capital to, to go? First off, just getting the farm. How were you able to get the farm? Did you all have money saved up or how did that work?
That was a community effort. We went in with my wife's brother and his wife which he's he was actually I knew him before I knew her. He's one of my best friends, right? And another couple helped us with like down payment. And then so, and then we eventually, we bought them out, but so we've remained you know, we've remained partners, I guess, with her brother and, and wife. And my dad has always sort of been there financially, you know, backing me up if we need.
So I've had a lot of support, family, and that was how we bought the land. And then the rest we just had to generate ourselves.
Oh, yeah.
So one thing I wanted to just throw out there was that we never put permanent fencing up.
Oh, yes.
So because we're using this electric netting and poly wire and whatnot, I just have a. Just temporary posts with one high tensile wire that goes around the perimeter, and that's just feeding electricity.
Oh, yes.
And then when I need to, like, I can either get the fence on the other side of it and get the, you know, the animals to graze it, or I can just lift them all up and I can brush hog it, like, once a year. So, you know, you don't like come. I just one of the things we never sprayed anything right so spraying like poison ivy or whatever on the post was just it was just non negotiable for us. We've never sprayed fertilizer or a pesticide you know, any kind of poisons or anything, right?
So, but that also turns out to be, I mean, putting in perimeter fences extraordinarily.
Oh, it is. It is. Yes.
And people are like, well, you're you know, aren't your netting expensive? I'm picking it up and moving it, right? So yes, okay, it's expensive, but I'm just using it all the time. And I, the flexibility is really important. So, we didn't have to have that infrastructure and like, like, Like, if we go into the sheep or the, the steers, I don't have a sorting area for them. I have this thing where if I need to work the sheep, it takes me, well, with another person, it takes me about an hour.
I set up some cattle panels. I set up a couple, like a guillotine and a sorting thing and maybe something to weigh. And then we use the netting and shoe them into this thing. And it's built right onto, like, against, near, like, one of the walls is the actual house that I pull.
Oh, yeah.
So it takes like an hour or two to set up and an hour to take down. And then we'll work all the sheep. No, it doesn't take an hour to take down. It takes like 20 minutes to take down,
Oh, yeah It's always easier going that way.
Right? So, but that's like, so I don't have to, I don't have a big, you know, you can spend. Tens and tens of thousands on an area to work your, your animals and I have never, you know, I have cattle panel and some, some gates,
Oh, yeah.
right? So that's just, and when I want to get my steers, I mean, our steers are so used to being worked because we, we move them twice a day, right? So they, I'll just set up some cattle gates. And I'll just slowly work them and I'll use the netting and I'll just put my trailer there and I'll walk them into the trailer, right?
so just as examples of not having to have as much infrastructure as you might think you need to and Learning more the animal husbandry part the more, you know, and the more you can read animals and work with animals Actually, I think the less Infrastructure you actually need so like Every Every building I have is no bigger. Like my biggest buildings are like 20 by 12. Because I buy these, I buy a 6x6 skid, 20 foot long, and it might be like 12 foot wide, and those are my houses.
And so if I need two or three of them for my, for my steers and for my flirds, then I put three of them on, right? But they're all very easily dragged with a tractor and all.
So, so none of the, the shade or shelter that you're giving your animals are permanent. They're all on these movable shelters with skids that you're able to connect to and move.
Yeah, I mean the only exception would be like the brooders right? Then the hoop houses in the winter for three months, the hens will hook up to them, but their houses hook up to them, and they have access to inside the warm hoop house, and they have access outside. And if it's not windy, it can be 20 degrees out there, and they're going to go outside, because they love to be outside. But yeah. otherwise Nothing is permanent. Everything is, you know, movable and everything is temporary. Yeah,
Now, one thing you mentioned there, you move them with your tractor. Were you, were your first structures all where you can move them? By hand until you were able to get a tractor.
I did mention that, that big that it was a big one for us because I couldn't move it by hand. I could push it a little
Oh, yeah.
I moved it by my grand caravan,
Oh, yeah. Yeah, you you'd mentioned that earlier. Yes.
And I still have that building. It's held up and I still use it. But I, I move it by tractor, but yeah, so at first it was just all by hand. For the first few years except for that one. And then yeah, I mean, we got a tractor like about a year in, we got a tractor and so then I could start building things for that stuff. So,
and you mentioned a tractor. Do you use a four wheeler or UTV?
I don't this has been a big discussion. It's extraordinarily expensive.
are I I've looked at them I would love to get one and I'm just like I can't justify the cost.
So, our ATVs are Subaru Foresters.
Oh, yeah.
They have great traction, they have plenty of space to put, you can actually carry people, you're protected from the rain, and they're like, a fourth the price.
yes.
So, I just, I've looked into, I just couldn't, I just couldn't believe the prices, I couldn't believe, and you're not, and, and my Subaru can pull some of those houses.
yeah
These, like, so it's like, what's the point? Right. And you can buy one for a few grand versus like 20 grand. If you wanted to pull anything, you know, if you want to have anything with power. So yeah, ours are Subaru Foresters.
I, I do. I've wondered about that. I've looked at some older Jeeps and some other things. I mean, I have my, my pickup, but really, to be honest, it's a little. Overqualified for that and too much money I spent on that. I think if I had something a little bit smaller, just barely do some stuff, it'd be nice, but I look at those prices and especially for you TVs, I'm like, Oh man.
Yeah, well, my parents have one and I use it occasionally, but I hate to use it every day and put all those hours on it. On, you, you mentioned about water and you're getting pipes in ground where you're able to connect into them. How did you handle water before you had the pipes underground?
So we just, I had when we originally were, I mean, we built our house and while we were like setting up infrastructure, I mean, I guess it was way before we built our house. We just, we got in like four hydrants. Yeah.
Oh yeah.
spread out. And then, like, literally, we would have ten hoses that we
Oh yeah. Yeah.
because that movie was so important to us, so we would, we would work with ten hoses to get to the edge of the fields. I mean, we were working with less acreage at the time and it would just, off those hydrants and hoses. Yeah, it was so important to
Oh, yes.
that we do that. So we'd have, like, one close to each field.
Yeah. So, so you spend a little bit of money and got some hydrants close that you all could work with and then you utilize a fair number of garden hoses to get it the last mile.
Four ways.
Yeah, but it works. It works. If you want to do it, you can make it happen.
Absolutely. Yeah.
As you think about someone, since we're kind of on this topic of starting without too much and building up, what, what would you tell someone who's sitting there thinking, I want to get started? I know we're going to have the famous four questions going to be kind of like this, but it's going to be a little different. That's thinking, I don't have money to do anything. How do they get started?
Yeah. I mean, it's not easy, right? So I, I would say find an internship, right? First, get some experience because you need experience. And it's not just right. It's not just experience of having some techniques or knowing how much to feed away. Right? One of the things. I'm actually think that what we do as much as anything else has changed the way people think. They might not realize it, right?
But like, how do you, if you're not used to working outdoors, if you're not used to working with animals, and if you're not used to working with multiple variables all the time, and diplomatic sort of tussling, and you know, how do you strategize, how do you make judgments, how do you, all these things, like, You really don't know.
Oh,
not even know how to work hard, right? So like,
yes. I, I see that way too often is that work hard is a little bit tougher than I thought it would be.
yeah, I mean people just haven't done a lot of manual labor and the learning skills of the hands is like learning to get into that flow. It's something that people, you just have to do it, right? So like we're changing the way you think as much as anything else. And I think that's worth going onto a farm and learning how they do it. But also I don't care how structured a farm is. You're going to have those days where.
You got to make some judgment calls and something's gone wrong and you got to figure out, you know, and you also have to figure out what's important, what follows what, you know, you know, and so that's crazy important. Now, it is a huge barrier. Land is a huge barrier. So I know there's a lot of people who are talking about, you know, using leased land. If you have that experience, then you can look. I know how to, I know how to rotationally graze. Animals. I can make your fields better, right?
There are people who are able to, to sell that. So land access is huge, obviously, but the experience is also more than I think people realize. And we change the way people think, right? I'm I write a lot. I do a little bit of podcasting. I've written a manuscript and everything. And one of the things I try to get across is that we start, we think of things as nouns. In a, in a way that it's not really right, right? Like I was a philosophy major. So we kind of believe that we describe things.
Well, chairs got four legs and a seat in the back and, you know, you sit on it, right? And you can't look at soil that way. So it's not really a thing, right? It's a thing, maybe in the way that economy is.
oh,
Right. Like exactly define my, like, can you tell me how many legs does an economy have? Right. I mean, you can make up stuff, but it's all going to be metaphors. It's just thing in action. Right. And so it's like these verbs. And so like looking at systems, looking at soil, looking at all these different things, it's all, it's the interactions are actually much more important. Right. And the more interaction and suddenly diversity then makes sense. Right.
Because if you have more players in the game, you have more interactions, it becomes exponential. Right? Right? And if, if it's the interactions that's creating soil, if it's the interaction between the rycol, ryzol, fungi, and the, and the roots, it's the interactions between the manure and the urine and the soil, the interactions between the grasping, all these different actions, they compound. That's a word that Alan uses.
I've used synergy and I've used different words like that, but he uses compounding effects, which I like. It's a great word. Suddenly it's not really a noun. Right. What's going on is, is an economy is, it's much more verby.
Oh, yes.
So you're, you, that's, and that's an art. Right. So I guess my whole point I'm getting to is you teach people. It's like teaching people like Kung Fu or something, right? You can't just, Oh, I learned my techniques on YouTube
Oh,
and I did this and I know exactly how to do it because you're gonna go out there and Nature and life is just gonna throw you a left hook, right?
And so you just you got to do it a thousand times And as you do it, you gotta learn, and you, and you, it's an art form, and so it's much more, it's knowledge of the body, it's knowledge of intuition, it's knowledge as much as it is head knowledge, and that can only be learned hands on, that can only be learned by doing it, by working with someone who's got experience, you know, like, I'm starting to be that guy who's got more experience, but for me, it was working with, you know, this older
couple,
yeah.
particularly Larry, who was my mentor, just, you know, just watched and learned, and, you know, A lot of osmosis, you know, and you know, now and then I pick his brain just working side by side for him, you know, just that's that's super valuable. So that's kind of what our internship is trying to do. And it can frustrate a lot of people. I just want to know how many buckets to feed.
yeah.
Well, today was colder. Yesterday was this, or you know, or they, what, and you read the animals.
right. Yeah.
do you read animals?
But as you think about you You don't know the questions to ask until you're in the middle of it. Sure, you know some questions to ask, but do you know the real questions to ask? And until you, you've got into it, you may not know those questions. I
Oh, you absolutely
I, I like to think I'm fairly intelligent, and at times I think I'm fairly dumb. So either way, but we got a hair sheep. It's been a number of years ago and I thought I, I took a course on sheep. I've been around all kinds of animals my whole life. I thought this is just another species. It won't be any problem. There was, I hate to admit how steep that learning curve was.
It's, yeah, I've still, I'm still learning about sheep. I'm still,
still learning on everything and
yeah, absolutely.
there.
Well, it's like, it's like kung fu, right? You, you always can get better
Oh, the more you know, the more you don't know.
Exactly. Exactly. And I think people who can get into that state of, you know, well, one thing we do is that we do lunch with our interns Monday through Friday. We provide lunch. We sit down and I'm like, look, I'm available here for a whole hour. Get rid of your cell phones.
Oh, yeah, right first.
I'm right here. And sometimes people take advantage of that. And sometimes that's some of the best learning goes on there because you know, I, I can be an academic and I love a lot of that, but when it's not in the context of, you know, here's an environment, you go out and you work with your hands and you do stuff, and then you have a question it's in this context of actually doing the whole thing, then you can learn the art. Right?
And they can get, at first they get really frustrated in my answers because it's always, I've always got a caveat and a prelude and this and it depends and all this, right? But they slowly learn and they start, okay, here are some of the, here's the things that were important, here's the principles, whatever. And so I really think that a lot of what you do, and I think this is what agriculture, we need to get in touch, it changes the way your synapses work, changes the way you think.
And. And you start thinking things less like individual nouns that have, you know, properties of red and, you know, and weighs this much, but what's it doing? How is it interacting? Right? So, Oh, well, we just had this over here. So now would it be good to have this here? You know, like the verbiness of it, you know, what, what they're doing, how they're interacting, that becomes actually more important than, you know, All their physical traits, so to speak,
Oh, yeah.
really affecting the way they think. And then if you can take that mentality, that's actually going to be a powerful tool when you start.
Yourself and I don't think people I think they underestimate that because I know plenty of people who I I went to Salton You know and I learned all this stuff and now I start and they don't last, you know And they they're not making good judgment calls and and sometimes that's just is it's a hard thing to succeed at Sometimes it just life hits you and you can't necessarily blame the person But sometimes it's just they haven't made good judgment calls because they've jumped in too quick thought
they knew everything they thought they were black belt already, you know, and
yeah. right. I my wife says I jump in the deep end too often, so I completely understand. It's time for us to transition to the famous four questions sponsored by Kencove Farm Fence.
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They're the same four questions we ask of all of our guests. Our first question, what's your favorite grazing grass related book or resource?
Yeah I thought about like, you know, oh, here are books, but actually I've read some books and they've been great. You know, I read Jim Gerrish, I read Joel Stalton, I've read some others, and I haven't gone back to them.
Oh yeah.
Right? I mean, they were great, but right now there's so many like YouTubes, and there's Stockman Grass Farmer, and there's YouTube. Podcasts and like, I'm getting more out of all that and in keeping up and then like going to this like event with Alan Williams, that was probably one of the most valuable time I've spent the whole day and we were all at different levels of Kung Fu, so to speak, my wife and I are interns that have been some have been there a couple of years.
Some of them in there like, you know, a month and some have been all got stuff out of it.
Oh, Yeah,
People like that. And we were, we did the first couple hours like a lecture and then this after lunch, we went out for three hours in the pasture and that, that I
Oh, perfect.
is the most valuable.
Yeah, well, you go, go out in the pasture with him and I've not done this, but I've been out in the pasture with Jim Gerrish and just the amount of, of knowledge they drop on you is amazing.
Yes, I've been with Jim Gerrish out on a sheep one. Yeah,
Yeah. Yeah. So very good advice or very good resources there. Our second question, what is your favorite tool for the farm? Yeah.
I'm going to go with the old electric netting. Because we use it for everything. It gives me the flexibility, and I know some people absolutely hate it.
I'm not a fan. I'll tell you
I love
just a second. I'm not a fan because I have too many thorn trees, and they just reach out and grab it. Now, if I'm not around the thorn trees, it works great, but those thorn trees just give me fits when I'm trying to move it or
You need some, you need some hogs.
Yeah, well, you know, My wife tells me I've got enough irons in the fire. I, I really would like to get some hogs and, and mess with them some. Just something on the electric netting and moving your hogs each day. How many sections of electric netting are you using to, to make a pen for your hogs for that day?
So, if we have a group, I tell people to have seven fences for it. Because everything we do is we do corridors, right? So we have like a corridor and they're going down. And you might use four fences for that.
Oh,
And then you have a back fence, a front fence. And then you have the next days,
Oh, very
next move. And so, seven is the bare minimum. And then you can just, you pick up one fence, and you set up the next days.
Yeah.
And then, twice a week, we're moving the back fence, and the houses and everything. And so you just, you open it up, you pull them up, they're all eating grass, and then you pick, you know, you can put your back fence, and then so, I, you know, I say seven, you could do it with, you know, With five, but I think with the corridors you kind of need I put, you know, two on one side, two on the other side. That way, you know, you can have a little overlap. And so yeah, it can be very, very simple.
And I really like the way you're describing that. You can go back to early episode like three or four with Edgefield Farm, and he talks about putting up corridors for his sheep and grazing them. And this is where I talk about with the podcast. We want people to take that next step, whatever that next step is. And they may have to hear something a hundred times before it clicks for them. I've heard about corridors and I just have never done it with my, my goats.
I have four four nets and I set them up, but then it's a hassle because then I have to make a smaller pen. I make it and then I move them all. But you know, yeah, yeah. I don't know why. It just took me longer on that. And like I said, a very early episode and it's been covered other times, but this time it spoke to me differently. Yeah. My wife will be so happy. You're going to buy what now? I just need a few more, but I really do. So thank
And I learned the hard way. Man, I was moving hens by the stupidest ways, right? Oh, let's make an area for them. Let's try to herd hens. And then we would take a fence and we would all hold with all the kids and we would like drag the fence along. And man, like now I can do it one person. It's just some of those things. Yeah, those are all. All good things, but you would learn that at a farm if you went there or
yeah. Our, our third question, we kind of answered it somewhat. We took a little different take on it earlier in the overgrazing section, but what would you tell someone just getting started
Yeah, well, first, it is super hard. Like, no, you are, you have a mountain to climb, especially if you don't have family land or whatnot. But my thing has always been, it doesn't take the capital that you might think it does. You really can do things and, you know, part of it is my upbringing too. We, we, we made silk purses out of sow's ears all the time. So, there's amazing amount that you can do without all the toys and the fancy stuff. So that's probably be my biggest advice.
and just say to add on to that? It's so easy. And, and I really fall into this trap when I'm wanting to do something new. I think, well, I've got to have all this to do it. You don't have to have all that. Quit, quit looking at other people where they are on their journey and everything they have. You can get by with less. Just get what you barely need to get started. Get enough to get started. But, but get started and learn what works for you in your context. And
Start slow,
Start slow, Yeah. That's the
Don't get ahead of your learning curve. We always talk about getting ahead of our market. We always talk ahead about all, but don't get ahead of your learning curves.
oh yeah. Good advice.
Get a mentor.
Yes. And lastly, where can others find out more about you?
Well, we are Weathertop Farm. It's just info at weathertopfarm. com. There is a tab on there. It's called Farmer Sledge. It's got Links to my writings. I do a podcast, but I say that with a lot of caveat. I, I'm very conceptual guy. I'm not like a how to guy. So when I do like the podcast, I'm, I don't do a whole lot of these, but like, the last one I did, I did three podcasts about scale. Right? So it's like, we always talk about, oh, can regenerative agriculture scale?
And I'm oftentimes talking about how we think about things wrong. So I do, you know, and people are into conceptual stuff, they like it. Other people are just looking, you know, for some techniques. Absolutely hate it, because it's just me talking. It's not, it's not fancy at all. So then I also have writings that you can, on that farmer's sledge. And I've written a manuscript. I'm trying to get it published. I was talking with Chelsea Green for a bit.
They stopped communicating with me, but Alan Williams was interested. So, he's taking a look at it. We'll see. But it's very much about like, how we think and everything. So maybe eventually, if you ask me that question. In a few months, I might be able to say, you could read my
Oh yes. Yeah. We'll be looking forward to that. And we will put links in our show notes for that.
Oh, I do have an Instagram account,
Oh, okay.
farmer sledge, which I've really have not done much. I've been really focusing on writing, but maybe I'll get back into that as well. So
Well, we appreciate you coming on and sharing with us today. Really enjoyed the conversation.
was fun. It's fun. Thanks, man.
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