Purpose Driven Homestead

That's the kind of livestock guardian dog you want. The layers are free roaming all around her and she keeps the hawks, eagles, foxes, and coyotes away. We had our mobile coop in a different pasture away from our LGDs a few weeks ago... and foxes often try to catch a opportunistic meal from an open door. These chickens are always safer being protected by our LGD.

Well... I took today off from my 8-5 "day job" to process another round of chickens for our farm business. Often we're able to start early enough that I can be done before heading to work. Today however, we're doing a big batch that will take a good portion of the morning. I still have to set up the tent... but this is how chicken processing should be... open fresh air, sanitizing sunlight, and green grass as far as you can see. That's a far cry from the dark commercial processing sites that are more like CIA black sites. Our chickens stay on pasture until the moment we process. They aren't trucked across states to sit in a disgusting USDA facility and float in chillers with fecal sludge measured in feet at the bottom. If you're in Eastern NC and want fresh wholesome chicken with no vaxxines, no antibiotics (ever) and are raised on fresh pasture... then check us out at www.raisedrightfarmstead.com Buy local. Buy fresh.

A friend of ours has an apple tree that produces prolific amounts of apples and this year has been great. He gave us several 5 gallon buckets of apples that we can use to make applesauce for the kids. Im amazed at the different growing seasons in the US. Where we lived last in the Midwest, September and October were apple harvesting times but here in Eastern NC, its July!

For most of the year, we were facing drought conditions. All last summer and fall we were in a drought too. Currently to date for July (which isnt over yet) we've had a little over 17 inches of rain. The pastures have exploded with life... albeit soggy life. We are grateful to God for allowing the storehouse of rain to open. This is where AMP grazing continues to shine. Even with 5 inch rains like the one we received recently, the cattle don't stay in one place and destroy the pasture, they move every day to new space instead of creating a muddy pit. As they step, they push in exposed seeds and plant for next year.

Them: How dedicated are you to regenerative agriculture? Me: So much that I was out there this morning chopping dog fennel with a machete in pastures, and pulling it up by the root so I don't use any herbicides where our cattle graze. Thats what regenerative farmers do to keep from using chemicals on their farm and keep your food safe. You want to know why their food is more expensive than the trash in the store? This is one of the thousand reasons why. The first picture is the "before" in that paddock and the last picture is "after". One paddock down and 33 more to go. Lol.

🎥 New YouTube video is now live! ✅Repost to help us! 👉👉 Watch here: https://youtu.be/vKXX0L77_MA 👈👈 Why would a small regenerative farm drive 2 hours just to buy animal feed? In this video, we're taking you along on one of our regular feed runs as we haul nearly 8,000 pounds of non-GMO livestock feed back to the farm using our dump trailer. For us, this trip is about much more than buying feed. It's about supporting a local family-owned feed mill, investing in our rural community, and making choices that align with our regenerative farming values here in Eastern North Carolina. This is only for our dairy cows and pigs, as all of our beef cattle are strictly grass fed and finished. If you've ever been curious about what really goes into feeding livestock on a small farm—or just enjoy seeing the behind-the-scenes work that keeps a farm running—we think you'll enjoy this one. After you watch, let us know your thoughts. If you raise livestock, how do you source your feed? We'd love to hear what works for your farm or homestead. As always, thank you for supporting our journey. Every view, comment, and share helps us reach more people who care about regenerative agriculture, local food systems, and the future of small family farms. 🌱🚜

This is how you get gas when you have a small farm operation. We dont have gas trucks show up and fill up large tanks that are on the farm, we take a whole bunch of gas cans every few weeks and fill them up. Scale matters and small farms and ranches don't do things like big farms do because they can't.

If you ever see these strange tiny dirt mounds in your pastures around cattle manure, this is a good thing. These are signs of dung beetles which are incredibly good for pastures. By tunneling and burying waste underground, dung beetles naturally enrich the soil with nitrogen and other nutrients. They also naturally aerate the soil, which helps plants grow deeper roots and increases the soil's ability to absorb water. The first year we saw none of these, then the second year a few now on this third year we're seeing a lot of them. They also provide protein rich meals for our chickens as they forage. Just one more way regenerative grazing and not spraying our fields allows God's creation to work as designed.

Good Morning! Tell me you havent had a day like this recently? You're just trying to eat and the world just poops on your head. Lol. I hope everyone has a better day than this little guy. The good news? Its supposed to rain today... so he will get a shower. 😆 🤣

Some people only post the "idyllic farm life" on social media, but we think its important to call out the harder days on a homestead or farm business. We put our chicks out on pasture almost a week ago. They were so large that they were flying out of the brooders... so it was time. Yesterday while I was at my "day job" that keeps the lights on for the farm, we had a big thunderstorm roll through that dropped 3 inches of rain in about 30 min. In less than one hour before I could get out there... we lost over half our chicks to hypothermia. Even with pallets for them to get out of the water, and roofs for them to get under, these Cornish cross chickens have no material survival instinct. The majority didnt jump on the pallets (which they are always on when its not raining) and they were under the one small area where there was no roof instead of large section that has a roof. We were able to save some with hair dryers and heat lamps... but many didn't make it. Sometimes it doesn't matter how hard you work...

Sometimes regenerative agriculture and AMP (Adaptive Multi-Paddock) grazing is viewed best from the air. This is a bird's eye view of two pastures with six paddocks each. The cattle make a large loop with a day or so in each paddock. You can see they are currently on day 7 paddock. Its been grazed the most and they are ready to move. Paddock #8 is green and tall and ready to be grazed. However the beauty of the system is to look back at paddock #1 that has a lot of clover. Its already starting to green up and with rain and heat like we've had in July... it will be ready to graze again soon. You see, if left unchecked, the cattle would eat that clover down to the roots and kill it all. Rotating daily keeps them from regrazing their favorite forage at the expense of long term pasture management. It also keeps them from grazing where they have dropped their manure for at least a month to prevent parasite loads. Most parasites can't live more than a few days in the sun without a same species host.

Got more work done on a new taller turkey tractor for this year. Weve been using one of our chicken tractors for the past couple of years but they are a little too short. This is also a bigger tractor since we're raising a few more birds this year for customers. Hard to believe that it's time for the turkeys to hit pasture to be ready for customers in time for Thanksgiving.

A lot of people don't understand a lot of what goes into grass-fed and grass-finished beef or pastured pork. They dont know what it means to a farmer or rancher to not use herbicides on their farm. Yesterday before working my 8-5 "day job", it meant getting up at 5am to work on weedeating the miles of fence line to ensure the electric fence works for cattle and pigs. Traditional farmers would just spray the outside woth round-up (glyphosate) and thats it for most of the growing season. However, regenerative agriculture means no herbicides to drift into grass eaten by our animals. It means weedeating miles of fence every month or so during the growing season. The vows will eat up ti the fence line on the inside but the grass and vines on the outside ground out the lines and then animals get out. You want to know why regenerative farmers charge more for their products? This is one of a thousand ways they make your food safer and better for you but requires dramatically more labor than commercial farming.

About a year ago, I planted some alfalfa as well as some clover and cover crops in a few fields to help diversity the forage types. The clover was expensive... but the alfalfa was downright criminal. I believe each 40lb bag was $180 for alfalfa seed, which is a lot for us. You can see the video of how I planted the alfalfa and other seeds with a borrowed seed drill here 👇 https://youtu.be/GCdSeY00Z38 Well after a dry year, July has shaped up to be an anomaly in a good way... with several material rains that didnt involve tropical summer systems. As a result, the alfalfa from a year ago has started germinating in a few areas. I had given up but I guess the dry fall, winter, and spring didnt have the right moisture conditions. The cattle absolutely love it.

The amount of glyphosate sprayed on the food we eat is insane. The first two are tobacco fields... fine... not food, but still. The last is a "round-up ready" soybean field. These are genetically modified soybeans that can be sprayed with glyphosate and not die like normal plants. Then we consume those soy products or our animals do. You are what your FOOD eats.

Some days on a farm/homestead are celebration and some days are mourning... and some days are a bit of both, often within hours of each other. Yesterday we had a beautiful calf born and it was an easy calving by all accounts early in the morning when it was still relatively cool. This picture was while he was napping within the first hour after birth. The cow is a good mother and was very attentive staying close to the calf but it was never able to stand up and passed within a couple of hours of being born. We believe there was likely a congenital heart problem because it seemed to be breathing fine. Just goes to show that not everything is picturesque on a homestead. Like a farmer once told me years ago.. if you're going to have livestock... youre going to have dead stock unfortunately.

We just received another 200 meat birds for customers. One brooder wasnt enough, so we split the chicks across two. I really like these ceramic heaters vs using heat lamps. They pull a lot less current and dont pose fire dangers. We should be processing another batch soon thats reached maturity. Let me know if you want to know what kind of brooder heaters we use.

We cut some more lumber up recently by having a guy with a mobile saw mill come and help. Scroll to the bottom to see the video. We paid him for his time and the saw mill and we did the labor of loading the logs and stacking the rough cut lumber. So far, we have tens of thousands of dollars of rough cut pine and Cyprus lumber stacked up for future building projects and about $800 in total cost to have this person cut it up for us. This time around, we onky cut Cyprus and you can see we have a lot left still. If you missed our video on this last time, you can see how it all worked here👇 https://youtu.be/TiglC8O1xpg

Just a reminder for everyone. Telegram spoofers are everywhere. They can copy your profile name and your profile picture. First time I've seen someone try to join our chat channel as us though... thats a first seeing someone impersonate us on our own chat channel. You can see how they had to zoom into their faked copy of our profile picture to crop it without edges. I've been deleting tons of spammers recently from our channel, but some still get through. REMEMBER WE WILL NEVER REACH OUT TO OUR FOLLOWERS VIA AN UNPROMPTED DIRECT MESSAGE. We instead connect via our comments channel first in a public forum. WE WILL NOT ASK YOU "ARE YOU READY FOR THE UPCOMING XYZ" OR TELL YOU ABOUT CRYPTO, MEDICINE, OR "INVESTMENT" OPPORTUNITIES. Report and delete those people immediately. They are scammers/spammers.