Purpose Driven Homestead

My best friend inherited a mobile home and needed to do some floor repair on it due to water damage. He had never done anything like that before, so we tackled it together. He and I did the first piece together and some other repair work in other places. Then he was able to do the rest right by himself. I was so proud of the work he did. It was going to cost thousands of dollars in labor plus materials... and he did it with a weekend and a few nights after work. I was really impressed.

My wonderful wife recently went out of town for a week to attend a Christian Women's Conference in TN. That left all four of our kids with me manning the farm, milking cows, etc. So I did my "day job" then at 5pm we started the farm work. Wouldn't you know it, we get one "rain" event and it happened to be at night after I got off work and was milking by lamplight. Our daughter is a champ and jumped right out in the rain and helped me get it done as fast as possible. I really dislike shorter days because it always puts me doing chores at night by a headlamp, but I'm very grateful to God for our children who help us so much and make the journey fun every day. Even in the rain. 😆 🤣

We got some hay last year that unfortunately had some cocklebur seeds in it. Mainstream farmers would spray their pastures with herbicides but not us. I walk paddock by paddock pulling up these plants by hand. Then I make a pile that can be burned so we don't have a cycle formed. In regenerative agriculture, everything is all about stopping the seed cycle without chemicals.

I absolutely love it when the grass is so tall that the cows make a path as they walk into a new paddock. It's a beautiful sight. We aren't getting any rain these days, so the pastures have been struggling even though its still warm. It won't be long before I have to start supplementing hay, especially for our dairy cattle. But for now, we're still reaping some of the benefits from the July rains. Because we've added so much carbon with our regenerative agriculture practices, the grass has grown substantially from the water locked into the ground since July. This is the way.

I think... the my mower blades just might have needed replacing. 😆 🤣 I finally got around to replacing my mower blades way too late, and of course its at the END of mowing season. You can see them compared to a new blade and the difference its HUGE. I changed ove to a mulching blade and we'll see how it performs.

Had quite a few loads of horse manure delivered this week to compost over the winter for our regenerative agriculture modrl on our farm, and its been so dry here that the composting manure actually caught fire spontaneously in several places. Its crazy to think that composting materials can get that hot, but they do. If you want to see how we apply the compost to our farm, check it out here👇👇 https://youtu.be/3xlGsGE8214

Fox doesn't get it right much anymore... but this one is worth a read. They say "ultra processed" but its really any processed food at all. https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/just-one-small-serving-ultra-processed-food-day-linked-higher-disease-risk-major-study-finds

Tell me you have big dogs on your farm... without telling me you have big dogs... Yes... thats a standard 2 foot high cattle trough. I kept wondering why her water bowl wasnt going down. Lol... now I know.

Weather is a fickle thing. After having a wet July, August turned dry and September has been super dry also. That combined with the heat we've had in September... has made it like a late summer oven for the pastures. The rain guage in the picture hasnt been emptied since mid August, so we've had about a half inch in a little over a month now. On Sunday you can see that it hit 100°F, and thats not sitting on some asphalt road or parking lot, that was driving in the yard. Its been so incredibly hot and dry that it will likely cut the pasture growing season short. One benefit is that the manure and carbon that we've been adding to the pastures have allowed us to hold on to the July rain much longer than before and more than neighboring farms. Our soil is primarily a clay (called gumbo or marine clay) with a thin layer of topsoil on top that we've been developing with our regenerative practices. Its reached the point that I need to use a hammer to get the "step in" posts moved for paddocks.

After we did customer drops offs on Saturday, the rest of the day (all the way til dark) was spent hauling hay. In all, I picked up 38 bales of hay and drove nearly 400 miles back and forth to get it. We dont have any hay sellers in the nearby area because there isnt a big cattle presence here. So we have to drive a decent way to get it. The three pictures below were from each of the runs we did. The farmer we buy from is kind enough to let us borrow her large trailer to haul with. I wish I had a large 30ft trailer to haul with, but thats not reality. So we work with the kindness of others. I still have another 60 or so bales to haul for the winter. They have called for a "harsh" winter of wet and cold for the southeast where we are due to the strong El Nino. We like to be prepared with more hay than we need rather than less. Last year we went through about a little less than 100 bales during the winter. You want to know where regenerative farmers spend money on cattle? Its in hay for winter. $$$

Today is drop offs for our customers. We shared the other day that we run our whole delivery trailer set of freezers and fridge off of our solar generator. It works great because we can keep all of our products frozen and it runs quietly so we can talk with all of our customers. I usually throw out our solar panels, and with good sun, we can run all day before it runs out of power. Thought you guys might like to see all the stuff its running in the back of the trailer.

I'm regularly in awe of how well regenerative agriculture can improve and heal land that was previously used for traditional farming. This farm that we lease was used as a crop/tobacco farm for over 200 years that the owner can trace back. That's only a generation from the declaration of independence. It was in bad shape when we started 3 years ago. Dead and depleted soil with no microbial life, worm activity, or insects like dung beetles. I took these pictures last night as I moved the cattle. The grass is tall and healthy, the soil retains water so much better, there are tons of earthworms, dung beetles have returned as nature's killers. Its amazing to see God's design in motion. The cows crushed the prior paddock filled with native grasses. Thats leaves manure that will be spread by the chickens and nourish the soil. Its still growing season for grass here, so I will get 1 or even 2 more grazings before the pastures die for the year. Thats two more months before feeding hay potentially. Praise God!

We have a tiny little fig tree that has struggled for a couple of years, but now all of a sudden it thinks this is the time of the year to produce figs! Lol. Now I have to get it relocated to a spot where it can have space to grow.

Systems make all the difference in the world. The family is back from vacation safe and sound, and this morning before work was spent banding bulls from the spring. I prefer banding bulls on the day they are born, but sometimes both... boy parts... aren't available that day so I have to push out til they are about 6 months. If you go back and watch the comical video here of how we did our first banding, you'll laugh.👇 https://youtu.be/GvFt6mjMxW0 This year I built a bud box and the corraling and banding process went from 4 hours of working them to 30 minutes that included retagging 4 cows that had lost their tags. This is the video of the Bud Box we built, and im telling you... leveraging the natural tendencies of cattle in this design makes taking them through squeeze gates so fast and simple. If you want to see the RIGHT way to work cattle, here's a link to our bud box build video. 👇 https://youtu.be/UaxdnnT4-o8

Yesterday's afternoon sun was pretty awesome. You can almost feel fall in the color of the sun rays hitting the tall grass in the pasture before I moved the cattle. The sheer volume of doom and gloom political posts on different feeds is hard to fathom some days. Feels like its gotten worse over the last few years, but especially on platforms like Rumble, it seems inundated with accounts constantly posting about how one action or another is going to end life as we know it. Its good to unplug from the 24/7 news and alt-news cycle and revel in God's creation and know that he is in control.

Getting a few more things "knocked off the list" before my family gets home from vacation. One item was to replace a hanging light with a ceiling fan in our "office/homescool" room that used to be a dining room. Lol. Given that this 100 year old farmhouse has no insulation in any of the existing external walls, having some ceiling fans helps circulate the air a bit and improves the look. I'd like to tell you that those wires hadn't been sticking out like that for months waiting for me to get this done... but I'd be lying. 😆 🤣 I had the ends wire nutted and taped so they were safe,but this project took too long to do. Farm life... eh? Never enough time.

Its not just farm work I have been trying to get done while the family is out of town. I asked my best friend to help me get some drywall work done on the milk shed while my family is out of town to start finishing it out. I bought a drywall crane/lift for the 12 foot ceilings for the gambrel roof and it worked so amazingly good. For that first picture, that was what my wife and son were able to hold up with me on three ladders. The other pictures show the lift in action and it would have been possible to do most of this by myself with the lift, but it went so much faster with my friend's help. I'm not a professional drywaller by any means, but it turned out great. He and i were able to get the rest of the 40 foot ceiling done with cutouts for all the ceiling fans and recessed lights. Once again, just like the spray foam, im saving a ton of money doing this myself. If you want to see how I did the spray foam insulation myself, you can check out the video here:👇 https://youtu.be/qLYuDK8FjR0

Well... life continues on the farm without my amazing wife and kids while they are on vacation with family. After a surprise calf birth, I have been supplementing with some colostrum. Since its a new cow, neither of them (cow or calf) knew what to do, so I had to step in. Since the cow would only let the calf nurse for a few seconds before stepping away and only when I was holding her by her halter, I made two bottles of colostrum yesterday. The first one the calf drank 90% of it. The second she didnt want. Thats a sign that even though ive not seen it, the calf is nursing somehow... otherwise she'd be hungry. I made this bottle 🍼 this morning and once again she didnt seem hungry. Making a warm bottle for a calf requires a dramatically bigger pot of water than for a baby... lol. Since I work a non-farm day job all day, I can't observe the cows all day. I have to make inferences based on other data. Here, the calf is mobile and not hungry... thats a good sign even if I dont physically observe her nursing.

Well.. I shared earlier this week that I volunteered to hold down the fort for a week while my family went on a well deserved vacation to see my mother-in-law in Florida. Of course we had to have at least one surprise while they were gone. One of our dairy heifers decided to go into labor early and I had to quickly pull a calf. Now she's officially a first time cow. I video called my wife and the kids named her Peaches. You never know what you're going to get into on a farm from day to day. This cow wasnt due for another few weeks, but she wanted to throw me a curveball while I was by myself. Lol.