Interview #3 – Geoffrey Long of Long Story Farms

Recorded on January 30th, 2022

[The following transcript was auto-generated using Otter.ai. If there’s a discrepancy between the audio and text, please reach out to me and I will correct it. Thank you.]

Matt Derosier 0:09
Welcome to the FarmHopLife Podcast. I’m Matt. today. My guest is Geoffrey Long of Long Story Farms in South Carolina. How’s it going, Geoffrey?

Geoffrey Long 0:17
Very well, Matt. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Matt Derosier 0:19
I appreciate you being here. So I wanted to start off with your pinned tweet. You’re very, very active on Twitter. And I thought this was a perfect segue into getting started, you wrote, when I started this journey to becoming a farmer, I was only doing what five year old me always knew I would do. I love that. I. That’s great. So how did you start?

Geoffrey Long 0:47
Well, it’s kind of a long, long story, which is part of the reason why this farm? Yeah, well, I mean, that’s really the reason we named this farm that way. My last name is long. So there’s, there’s a long tradition of farming, you know, basically, Southern dirt farmers are my ancestors, you know. And, you know, my dad is the first generation that wasn’t a farmer. And forever. And so, you know, I grew up going to my grandparents farms, I always loved the John Deere tractors just completely envision myself one day, you know, at the head of this, you know, whatever, 36 Row planter, just, you know, cruising across the fields or whatever. And, you know, I got a bunch of John Deere, you know, the, like, the cast, the metal cast tractors for Christmas one year, and just, you know, just my imagination just took me there. And, you know, as you get older, you know, you’re in high school and whatnot. And people are like, Oh, you’re gonna go to college, and you should stick around here as rural towns just just just too much opportunity for you, you know, whatever. And you start, like, letting go of those dreams that you had as a kid. And so that’s kind of what happened with me, you know, I was, you know, it was college prep, or gifted or whatever kind of stuff. And there’s a lot of encouragement to, you know, leave the rural area behind. And we were living in an area, it wasn’t too rural, it was kind of a rural becoming a becoming a bedroom community. But still a lot of encouragement to kind of move on. So I did, you know, I kind of, you know, changed my dreams up. And I was thinking, you know, I wanted to be a politician maybe, and just, you know, started thinking about different things. And what happened was, you know, when I was like, let’s see, I guess I was, shouldn’t date myself too much. But, you know, as middle age, let’s say, my mom got cancer, she passed away. Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Yeah, my dad got cancer. He passed away. When my dad died, man, he’d always been always had his prolific garden. Man that just something just switched to me. And I’m like, I gotta grow some food. Man, I cannot continue this life without growing some food. So we lived in a courtyard home, started growing food as much as I could, I probably had about 60 Different plants growing and raised a little courtyard. You know, I had six laying hens. Eventually the HOA found out about that. They weren’t too pleased. So, you know, had to move on that point, I was really, you know, driven to Find Replace. So that’s we started looking for land. And we got really lucky we found a great place. And, you know, it kind of all fell into place. And it worked out. And the thing is, right, right. When we signed the contract. My my job took me to South America. So I moved to South America for work and really couldn’t do anything with the land. So sure, yeah. Yeah. You know, one more thing I just mentioned about that. When I was when I was a kid, I was about 13. My grandfather had retired. He was the principal of the high school, local high school here. He had retired and he was he was just doing a little, you know, garden. It was like five acres and he had won. You know, he won prizes. He won. Best sweet potato at the county fair. So he had 21 pounds sweet potato. And he could go to those. Yeah, he could grow tomatoes like nobody have ever. Yeah, I’ve never seen anyone grow tomatoes, but he grew tomatoes. I mean, just incredibly, just huge. Just really nice. You know, some of the simple pleasures I remember as a kid were, you know, Miracle Whip on white bread with tomatoes. You know, it’s like a big tomato sandwich salt and pepper gets kind of stuck. So, you know, I worked with him one summer with that truck farm kind of thing that he was doing and loved it man just really loved. I was 13 and, you know, listen to my grandfather. tell stories about all kinds of stuff. You know, everything from being an educator during the Civil Rights Movement, you know, all the way up to, you know, watching the things like the pick program, you know, big USDA program was paying farmers to leave fields fallow and things like that just been incredible experience, listen to him talk about it. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was a rural American mail carrier, and had about a 40 acre farm that grew peaches and watermelons and things like that. So every year, we were canning peaches and, and all that and just feels like coming home, you know? So

Matt Derosier 5:38
that’s very cool. Um, side note about your your grandpa’s tomatoes, did you save any of that seed? Or is that? Is that gone?

Geoffrey Long 5:47
No, I mean, he grew, you know, pretty standard, like hybrid,

Matt Derosier 5:51
I don’t know if he like made his own or kept this, like this one always does the best or whatever.

Geoffrey Long 5:56
Not that I remember, I think he ordered from a catalog. I remember, you know, I want to say Better Boy, or something like that. I can, if I looked him up, I could figure out what they were. But I did meet a guy here locally, in the farmers market last year actually put this on Twitter. He’s he’s got seeds that were handed down from his family for 200 years.

Matt Derosier 6:20
Whoa

Geoffrey Long 6:22
Yeah, I had been remiss and not getting with him sooner, but gotta go touch, you know, touch base with him, he’s offered to give us some seeds. So that’s about that.

Matt Derosier 6:33
Those kinds of connections, they always start so small like that, and then it just like blooms into like, something like you wouldn’t even imagine.

Geoffrey Long 6:41
I mean, you know, it’s amazing. Just locally, we’re trying to, we really want to be part of this community, my family’s from here. You know, we we just want to be part of the community and whatever that takes me if we just ended up being homesteaders that go to the farmers market, and it never does more than that, that’s going to be you know, we’re going to be part of the community one way or the other. I aspire to more, but you know, who knows? But man, we’ve met so many people that are into this, you know, that want good food that want community. So you great local downtown community, kind of, you know, guys thinking about how are we going to grow our community and be, you know, more self sufficient as a community trade with each other? Help each other? So it’s really cool, great vibe. Really?

Matt Derosier 7:26
Yeah. So then, after South America, how long until like, so when you got back from South America? Yeah. How long has it been in that, like from then until now? So you got,

Geoffrey Long 7:41
yeah, we got back right at the end of 2016. And when I say at the end, I mean, we literally landed I think December 22, or something like that. It was right for Christmas. I think we were in a residence in for Christmas, just kind of getting getting acclimated back into the states. And so we had the land and we were living, we moved into an apartment, downtown and just, you know, we would come out here and you know, try to plant some trees and do a little gardening and stuff, stuff like that. And you know, we didn’t really get serious about living out here till about two years ago. So we had chickens little before we moved out here. So we were doing some American active you know, we planted the first thing we did was planted a about a two and a half three acre, kind of permaculture food forest forest garden kind of concept. Orchard spacing about 40 or so different species.

Matt Derosier 8:36
Did you design it?

Geoffrey Long 8:38
No friend of mine, his name is Matt Kip. That’s cool. Yeah, he designed it he’s now he designed it and then we were delayed in planting and so a lot of the he had laid everything out with flags everything by the time we went back we finally got things figured out again you know just just you know, fits and starts with me having a pretty demanding corporate job and everything. By the time we got back to it I think we we kind of had to improvise a little bit but we stayed pretty true to you know, the basic principles we have a kind of a canopy level along one edge because there’s there’s a little road there like an old logging road that we use now as in the part of the farm. On the other side of that it’s a bunch of sweet gums and and oaks and stuff like that deciduous hardwoods, you know, generally. And so we kept this canopy layer along the edge there. And then as it goes towards the south, it goes layers go down. So the stories, you know, on the on the south edge was a windrow. And right to the north side of that is where a lot of the berry plants are things like that. So we had an idea of maybe putting a house over there that didn’t really work out. So it’s kind of we didn’t really follow, you know, basic zone zero type. That didn’t work out because we didn’t put the house there, but we do follow that from a point of view of like, where our main center of our farm is, is kind of our zone. I guess you call it zone one maybe. But yeah, right just kind of goes out from there. And the farm is the farm is a little ways from where we actually live now on. It’s all on sale, you know on the property. It’s just sits there. Two minute walk.

Matt Derosier 10:21
I was gonna ask was there a house on the property when you bought it?

Geoffrey Long 10:26
No, no, it was pretty much raw land. Yeah, from its raw land. So it was about about half deciduous hardwoods, half plantation pines, and we made a deal with this with the seller to she would clear cut some of the pines that would help her out on the money side. Leave some space to work. So cool. Yeah.

Matt Derosier 10:49
So what, what kind of livestock do you have on your farm right now? And why did you pick it?

Geoffrey Long 10:56
Yeah, well, we so basically, you know, just for some context, I’ve, I still have a pretty demanding corporate job. Yeah, I was habitually Well, what was going on before the pandemic, as I was flying every week, somewhere, you know, and most of the time, that was pretty far away. So I was not able to, I would come home on a Friday evening or something like that. And basically, I would just work on the farm, you know, Saturday, Sunday, and then fly out again. And so we were keeping it pretty small. We were just trying to, you know, keep the fruit trees and that trees go on and do a little gardening has some chickens and we wanted to get, you know, we want to do more, but we just had it, we’re just taking our time because I just didn’t have time to dedicate to it. When the pandemic started, I didn’t travel as much, even though there are still I mean, from a work perspective, my days are pretty busy. I don’t have a lot of time to do anything during the week. So I’m pretty much still a weekend farmer but it’s a little easier logistically with me not traveling. So definitely yeah. So we stepped up a little bit and we fenced in an area and so we right now we have some cows, we have a few goats we have some pigs. And we have two donkeys donkeys were rescues. That’s cool. I literally got a call from a guy he’s like Hey, man. There’s a guy guy I know that does guy buy some hay from he runs a few Red Angus, the Red Angus herd and I buy hay from him and he has another friend I guess a mutual friend known to but he does he does some cattle which he sells I’m not sure exactly through whom but he does sell into like the whole foods distribution network somehow. So you know, again, those connections with people that care about the quality of the food and all that it’s not hard to find here which is really cool. But anyway, he he so he runs his day job is running a tree service. And one of the guys that comes out to service some of the equipment said hey, I got these donkeys and it’s not working with my goats and so that kind of that that message came through the the the bat phone or whatever and I got a call and it’s like hey can if you can you know if you don’t come pick up I don’t want to talk bad about the guy think the guy would the donkeys were causing trouble with the goats? Probably just not enough space. And I don’t know whatever. But the way it was framed to me was if you don’t come pick them up. I’m gonna shoot him. So I don’t know. I don’t think I’d take that literally but yeah, he was he was like they gotta get out of here so never know. Yeah, I don’t know. I went over there and and we loaded them up and I brought him over here and man they they have flourished and they’re probably honestly they’re probably stay probably saved some of our goats from the coyotes you know, they’re their minds understanding is the coyotes will come within you know, they stay they take wide berth around those guys so

Matt Derosier 14:02
yeah, they don’t want to get the crap stomped out of them or anything like that. Yeah, so

Geoffrey Long 14:07
yeah, so between we saw the donkeys that we weren’t we started with the dairy with the cows was dairy my wife wanted to Jersey. I love the idea from a homestead perspective having having milk we’re not doing Yeah, we’re not doing dairy from a farming perspective is pretty rigorous state inspection. We don’t have the infrastructure really for that right now. I mean, I guess that could happen the future but it’s not something we’re planning for. So we got we started with one one jersey, she was bred we brought along a steer calf with her so she wouldn’t be by herself. She had a calf she’s super productive. So we got a bottle calf to go with her. Which she adopted which was I mean, we’ve been pretty lucky on some of that stuff. Because you know, blog people say that’s really hard and it worked out for us. But yeah, so So that’s that’s our little, little cow herd and we added Another Jersey this just a few months ago and she just had a calf so he’s about Awesome.

Matt Derosier 15:06
That’s good that that the heifer right that took to that calf I, I once worked on a on a ranch in Montana many years ago. And this, this milk cows calf had died. And this other one’s mom had died. I don’t know, it was weird. So. So this was before I got here, like just before, what they did is that they skinned the dead calf wrapped the hide of world of the dead one in the the calf that lost its mom or the mom rejected or whatever the deal was. And so it kind of smelled like the other calf. And it worked. And I was like when she told me that story I like lost my mind. I’m like, Yeah, sounds so crazy.

Geoffrey Long 16:00
That’s hard. That’s hard to take. Yeah. I don’t know if I can do that. What you know, what they told us was put some of the mother’s milk on the bottle calf. And we what we would do is we would we would pull her into the milking stanchion, which is basically it’s a head gate, we have a little chute with a head gate that we set up. And so we use that as our milking stance. And so we would put her in the milking stance and get her started getting her ready to milk and we would let the calf come in. And she would kick him ferociously the first few times, but he, he was, uh, you know, he had a little fight in him and he kept going back and she finally was like, okay, you know, you can be my kid now. And, and he’s now we’ve left him intact. So he’s a, he’s a jersey bowl. He’s living up to the reputation of Jersey bulls. I’ll just say that. I’ve mentioned that on Twitter once but he’s he’s the ornery little cuss. So turn your back on that guy. And when you’re in the pasture, you’ve got to be like, head on a swivel, guys. He’s, yeah, he’s tough.

Matt Derosier 17:08
Yeah, that same place. I was. I was feeding them one day and like that, that jersey or whatever, she was the most productive but man, she had an attitude and like, I don’t know if she like, since something like I was off one day or whatever she like, blocked her head and her horns were tipped or whatever. And it caught me right below the eye and like broke the skin. I’m glad I didn’t break my cheekbone. I mean, it was hard.

Geoffrey Long 17:36
Well, yeah. I think that, you know, the challenge we have is that with him being a bobble calf, he’s really affectionate with us. And he doesn’t know that he’s, you know, he’s pushing probably 700 pounds now, I’m guessing, but I don’t know six or seven probably. And he you know, if he comes up to the kind of nozzle you like he would do when he was a, you know, baby calf. Like, knock you on your butt. You know, you gotta

Matt Derosier 18:01
Oh, yeah, swinging that head around. And yeah. So you said you mentioned goats? Are they for meat or dairy?

Geoffrey Long 18:09
Well, so they’re American pygmy. So it really you know, there’s a lot of things we’ve done this is you know, I mentioned to some of the things you have to figure out what we’re doing that’s a farm and what’s the homestead and the goats is one of those things that you know, I think with the dairy cows, you know, we’re getting some beef cows out of it, we’ve got the milk the milk is a closed loop on our farm we we eat or we consume whatever dairy products we need. We don’t we don’t have to milk every day because of the bottle calf and stuff like that the the you know, once we wean off the older calves which just you know, we’re doing to do that we should probably well should have I mean nature will take its course but once we weaned them, we would have a lot of milk and we’re giving that to the pigs and the chickens and whatever whenever we have extra we’re feeding it to the other animals so it was a closed loop they’re a pretty clear relationship to what we’re doing from a farming perspective because we are selling chickens, chicken ducks, eggs and pork. The goats not as clear cut pygmy, you know that breed? I mean we can do a little bit of meat and milk is a good homestead breed a smaller it’s easy to manage relatively speaking I mean are goats that can get out of whatever they want to get out of. But I think it really came down to we saw a lady that her husband was this is kind of where we’re not great business people maybe with this farm but lady was like down on her luck and her husband couldn’t take care of him anymore and she wanted to her to stay together so we we stepped in and bought him from her and I think you know we brought we’ve we’ve been lucky and we’ve got some we’ve had several now I guess the second kidding since we got him. We sold some of those more of just like almost like breeding just like just selling them to other homesteaders But I think what we really were thinking was we could use them to help clear some of the land, we have an area with a bunch of old stand pecan trees. And I’m guessing these are seven year old trees probably like that. And they’re still, they’re still producing. But underneath them, there’s a bunch of scrub and privet and you know, sweet gums and small oaks and stuff like that. So like, my idea is to pin them up under those pecan trees, let them take, take as much of that out as they can, and go in there with the chainsaw and see if I can’t harvest a few pecans and the you know, next fall. So that’s kind of what we’re thinking right now. So I think we thought, you know, the goats helps clear land, and they’ve done a great job on the pasture of getting rid of some of the stuff that was causing us some, some concern. A lot of the wild Blackberry, you know, just briars, basically, but they’re wild blackberries. And you know, in April, May, June, there Breyers rested here. I mean, they’re, they’re, you know, they’re pretty thorny, so sure, and we’re worried about that, you know, heard some stories about was it called Black leg black leg disease, I’m getting the right black, something disease, but I’m not familiar. It’s a bacterial infection and cows can get, and apparently the blackberries, the thorns and stuff can kind of create that, that condition or not, creates a condition that’s more more advantageous for the bacteria. So we were kind of I was kind of worried about that. Maybe I overheard about it. I just heard Joel Salatin talking about it one time where he said he had two Bush saw some, some blackberries, because the cows got in there a couple of got blackleg disease and, and so maybe I was more worried than I should have been on that. I mean, you know, I just heard him tell the story. And, and I’ve, you know, I know that they inoculate against it around here. So anyway, the sweet gums and the blackberries, the goats really keep those completely down, which is awesome. And they do a good job with the pivot too. So some of those species that really, really don’t care about having on the pasture. They’ve been, they’ve been really good about kind of cleaning it up. So some of the wins the old Windrose that were pushed up after the land was cleared. You can see through them now, it used to be that they were just big thickets, and now you can see, see through them and the goats and the cows, you know, walk through them and use them for shade or whatever. That’s kind of cool, but I think we’ll work on them to get them, you know, take more advantage of their ability to take out some vegetation.

Matt Derosier 22:26
What herbs are you growing? And why do you grow those ones? Well,

Geoffrey Long 22:31
you know, I, part of my journey as I worked as a chef, I guess, I mean, I wasn’t really a trained chef gonna, I worked with a really talented chef and and his sous chef after he took over the restaurant for a little while and I love food and ran that kitchen for about a year. So my food journey kind of started with with that with cooking, I love cooking. I still love cooking. And so I really started growing herbs more to keep them around because I use them a lot you know, use them in stock and you know, bone broth, that kind of stuff. So right now we we have we have lavender, which you got for another homesteader. It’s a species. I don’t know what the variety is, but it does a lot better here than anything I bought from any other. And the other thing any other lavender. I’ve tried this is a lot a lot more hearty for this area. But we have lavender, rosemary, oregano, we have three or four varieties and Mets. We have a bait Bay Laurel, which is cool having that around. Let’s see what else we have some time. And we have we have the bay Laurel. And then we have kind of a guild of herbs around the bay Laurel out in the food for us, which is kind of a cool thing. And then we we’ve been growing dill and cilantro, that that we’re we’ve been selling, which is it’s been a pretty good seller, relatively speaking, I want to do more with herbs, I got a bunch of seeds for this year and try to do more with that. I think the problem around here is they do grow pretty well. And so there’s not a lot of demand for that because people can now they can grow them on their kitchen counter. You know what I mean? unless someone’s really using a lot of them. Oh, we have basil as well. I might have missed a couple but we I just have a bunch of box. Like there’s a buddy of mine who works at a manufacturing plant nearby. And they they get these big ingots of metal. And they come these wooden boxes and they’re great little little garden boxes. So I just have Yeah, they’re all planted out in those boxes. So that’s kind of neat, you know, keeps them contained and helps to keep the weeds out of them and stuff like that. So they get a little dry in the summer. That’s really hard to keep them wet in the summers because so hot here but other than that it’s a great, it’s working great. I think I’m going to try to expand it and to move them out of the boxes. But that’s a project that I might not get to for a while we’ll see we’ll see what happens here.

Matt Derosier 25:00
Yeah. So farmers market how well do you guys do at the farmers market?

Geoffrey Long 25:06
Yeah. So, I mean, 2021 was our first year going into the market. We did sell a little bit in 2020. Just right around Thanksgiving, Christmas. Yeah, some turkeys we’d raised and a few chickens and eggs that we were also. And we weren’t, you know, you know, full disclosure, we weren’t really fully signed up with the state on all that stuff. So we got that stuff for anybody. Yeah. But hey, for that to get out. We got that worked out by by the end of June. So we went to the farmers market. You know, in July, actually, of 2021. And we did great. Our first our first day, it was it’s a Saturday market, they do it pretty much every Saturday during the summer, and then one Saturday, a month in the fall through December. And, you know, I would say we averaged, you know, dollar figure wise, but it’s not, it’s when I say great for us for our first summer out, it felt great. We did about $300 a day, on average. Amazing.

Matt Derosier 26:05
So I mean, the year before you were making zero, so $300 is pretty dang good.

Geoffrey Long 26:10
Yeah. And a lot a lot of local farmers, we’ve spoken to they’ve they’ve indicated that. Well, first of all that market where we go, it’s a little tiny market. I mean, it’s, I mean, Tiny. Most of the farmers that go through there, they they end up building up a clientele list, and they don’t go back to the market. And I think, you know, we may we may be on that type of journey if we continue to grow our business, but you know, the markets, it’s a cool place to meet people and to be part of the community. So it’s working well for us in that regard as well. Yeah, so that’s what I’ve done. So far. We’re doing a little bit of marketing on Facebook, not any paid advertising. Just, we just have a foreign page. And we you know, we try to let people know what’s going on there. But again, I mean, I have I have a pretty tough job. You know, I don’t, I don’t have a lot of time for that. I’m trying to do better, but just setting aside time every weekend to do something. That’s about the extent of our marketing. And you know, we did pretty well, I think closing out the year we did pretty well. Good. Yeah. So

Matt Derosier 27:13
yes, you’re really more using the farmers market as like a networking tool. And this the cash is nice, but it’s really like, Hey, can I get your contact info and like I know about this or that if you’re interested?

Geoffrey Long 27:27
Yeah, exactly. That’s that’s our thought process is just use it as a way to get to know people in the community. Hopefully, we can pick up a couple of restaurant accounts for some of the people downtown that are that are, you know, wanting to do some local things, I think we’ve got a chance to do something with the pork and the duck eggs in particular. You know, some of those, uh, you know, some of the some of the restaurants are doing their own pastries and things and so that baking would be really great with some duck eggs and duck eggs are fantastic for for cakes and custards and stuff like that. So definitely gonna make inroads there.

Matt Derosier 28:01
I was gonna ask what breed of pig? Ah,

Geoffrey Long 28:05
yeah, so we met a farmer and we love these guys. It’s called woodland Valley Farms. And so it’s Chase and Alyssa and they’re younger than me by by more than a decade, I think. But they’ve also been farming a lot longer than me by more than a decade. So it’s really interesting to have someone who’s really been a bit of a mentor, we’ve actually, you know, I’ve actually worked with with Chase on like a consulting arrangement. And they’re both CICS just very knowledgeable. They recently got married and we just really love them they’re they’re just great people and they they have a breeding program for for pigs and they they have Berkshire ossabaw Cross and so the ASA ball, you know, kind of my understanding at least ossabaw island off of Georgia, some some people brought some of the black haired Spanish pigs over and kind of kind of became a breed and we love them, they do a great job for foraging and routing, and we’re using them definitely using them to clear clear out some of those brambles and things and, and the meats delicious. We were doing really well people really, really enjoy the pork I’ve I don’t think I’ve had a single complaint. So it’s just been it’s been great. It’s got a nice kind of red color to the meat. It’s pretty flavorful. Ours are eating a lot of blackberry, wild BlackBerry roots and leaves and stuff and you know, we we have a non GMO feed source that we’re we’re using it’s as obviously grain based everything we’d like to do, you know, get them on a better rotation. There. They’ve been harder to manage them than I think we expected from a sure keeping them in and everything. But we’re we’re trying to get better at that and get bigger I’d like to right now, I think, you know, we’re on pace to do about about 2524 25 Pigs a year. And that’s including us eating probably a couple of those. But nice. I’d like to get up to about I think we could sell, you know, I think, you know, maybe a reasonable goal for 2022 would be maybe maybe 40 or 50 Pigs, I think so we’re gonna go for something like that.

Matt Derosier 30:24
That’s very nice. What do they finish out at?

Geoffrey Long 30:27
I’m trying to to get them up to around 300 pounds. It just depends what what I did last the last batch. I got six, six piglets. And I took three early so they were on 161 80 on the hoof, and then the other three I’m going to take this week, and they’re going to be 300 ish. On the hoof. Wow. And that that’s a that’s a nice pork chop, man. It’s really

Matt Derosier 30:58
Yeah. So what do you what do you charge per pound for pork?

Geoffrey Long 31:05
Yeah, so we’re probably a little under priced right now. I’m trying to figure out the market I’m not worried I shouldn’t say my word. I’m not pricing cost plus or cost basis really, I’m looking at the market what I think I can get for them and I’m trying to figure out you know, figure that part out so I I’m a little below what I probably should be charging I’ll just say that upfront charging we’re charging around you know 10 or $12 a pound for the the main products that we’re selling so the bacon, smoked bacon sausage, pork chops, those are you know $12 on the high end $10 On the low end and then we have some of the other cuts we’re doing like $8 750 Something like that and we’ll sell the the hawks and the other stuff a little cheaper than that. So we offer all of it and we you know, we have sold you know, shanks and leaf fat and different things not as much demand for those things that I was hoping but we are we are selling some of that at the market

Matt Derosier 32:10
are your customers able to buy those individual cuts from you directly?

Geoffrey Long 32:16
Yeah, we so the way I don’t know how it works everywhere else but in in South Carolina, we have to have a meet at see it’s a meet hand handlers license or a permit or some like that came okay. So you get that from the state. And as long as you’re using a, you know, an inspected processor, that’s fine and you can do whatever you want with the cuts. So the processor we can’t butcher anything of course, but we take our So USDA processor. And so we you know we come we got sausage, we usually care about six or seven different flavors of sausage. We have smoked bacon, non uncured smoked bacon, and everything else in cuts and we’ll do some loin roast some ham roast, some half hams, whole hams, fresh slice bellies, salted and fresh fat back, you know. So that’s how we sliced up.

Matt Derosier 33:11
That’s cool, how it how it works here, I’m in Montana, I don’t know if you knew that. I have. So like I bought lamb last year from a guy, I paid him for the lamb plus a transport fee to the processor and then the processor had the kill fee and then you know obviously all the costs it was like price per pound and then if you’re over a certain weight, it’s a little bit less or whatever. So then I get it from the processor, not necessarily a farmer now I could probably get it from the farmer. If he had his like more stuff, I guess like you know, hey, I’m USDA certified blah blah, whatever blah blah blah but it’s just less work for him doing it this way. And so it’s like I don’t mind it’s just it’s just different.

Geoffrey Long 34:03
Yeah, well we you know, I don’t know it’s a bit of a catch 22 We’re pretty private people in terms of we don’t we don’t put like I don’t I don’t put my real name on Twitter I don’t talk about it you know it’s not I’m not like hiding it you know, but we’re not we’re not we haven’t been out there I was really not struggling to do this interview to be honest with you because I just we’ve just got the Loki Fair enough. The The challenge though if you want to be if you really want if you’re serious about you know just be idealistic from it if you’re serious about changing the world and how people eat their food and and how your community supports itself and all that you have to put your you have to put yourself out there and even though I kind of hate given all this information to the government and all that stuff, that’s the only way to really make these products accessible to people. You know that that I think need it you know, I I look at the world right now and see a lot of things happening that I think are a result of just not not eating right. I mean, big motivation for me is my, my, my little sister, I didn’t get to this part mother’s sister also died of cancer. And you know what, man? Yeah. So when you see that happen to your family and I came to the conclusion that food was part part of the problem, I knew the ton of other things going on in the world, obviously, I’m worried about everything from electromagnetic pollution, I’ll call it to chemical pollution and other things. And certainly they, we don’t really understand the epigenetics behind some of these things, we don’t know what’s going to happen to our offspring and their offspring, as a result of some of the things we’re doing to ourselves. So sure, I became really concerned about food as a, you know, for our, for our family. And then obviously, I if I, if I’m serious, I care about other people have the same access the same quality of food. So you got to do that you have to do stuff out there. And so that’s that’s kind of where we are putting ourselves out there a little more now, and, and saying, Hey, we want to be part of the solution.

Matt Derosier 36:06
I did notice that you are very selective on what you post on Twitter. Like, I have no idea what you look like. And I’m like you had posted a thing about playing with Legos. Like you’re recreating, like, Star Wars scene in the snow with your kids. And you I’m assuming it was intentional. You didn’t have your kids in the photo that you? Yeah,

Geoffrey Long 36:28
I’m not cool with that. Okay. Yeah, I’m not good with putting the kids on social media. You know, there’s some there on there some, you know, some other stuff. But yeah, we’re, we’re pretty careful about that. I mean, let them make some of those decisions when they’re older. They want to do it or not?

Matt Derosier 36:47
Sure. Sure. So, we, we just touched on it a little bit about, you know, the unfortunate cancer with your family. But what motive so like that kind of motivates you to grow your own food? Is there more to what motivates you to grow your own food?

Geoffrey Long 37:08
Yeah. So yeah, I really just, you know, I think the world isn’t heading in a, in a great direction. So I’d like to have that, you know, an element of self sufficiency, you know, for our family, but also, like I said, for the community, I really, you know, what I would love to see is a situation where our food supply chains are much shorter than they are. And, and, again, I’d like to be part of solutions. So I think the big motivations for me are, you know, first and foremost is health. Another big motivation is, you know, the lands healing the land as much as we can. And then, the the third thing, or I’m not saying priority, I don’t even know, but, you know, is that that idea of the community? And just, you know, why can’t we provide for our own, you know, our own needs locally? Why can’t we, you know, let’s just, let’s try, and maybe, maybe I can, you know, I can get hay from my guy, my guy and I can get him some pork and I can get, you know, maybe feed for another guy and I can I can get grain from our cousin who does row cropping on contour. Not too far from here, and I get wheat straw from him. And you know, I was talking, I was talking about, you know, maybe, again, I mentioned this on Twitter the other day, but I was talking about what if I source grain from my cousin, maybe got a hammer mill made my own feed for the pigs. There was a guy a guy on there who suggested using barley sprouted, you know, I guess, like almost like a micro green kind of sprouting system to make Potter. So I would love to figure out a way to source all that stuff. You know, here, I have to drive about an hour and a half to get non GMO feed right now. I can only get it, I can only get it in bags. And I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I mean, there’s certainly advantages but you know, and that’s, that’s a lot, you know, 50 pound bags, I’m not getting any younger, you know, I don’t know I can’t see myself have done those 50 pound bags for another 10 or 15 years, which is what I would need to do to see this thing actually all the way through, you know.

Matt Derosier 39:20
Um, one thing that we have in our area for it’s, it’s Montana poultry growers Co Op, and they partnered with a non GMO organic seed company in like Central Montana somewhere I forget exactly. And so we buy it, like collectively as like, at a discounted rate. Like you go to the store down the street from me or whatever. It’s like 30 or $35 for 40 pound bag, whereas if I get it through here, it’s about $20 for a 50 pound bag and And so I don’t know if that’s something that’s available to you in your area or? Or maybe it needs to get started. Yeah, no, you’re not doing enough now. So you should be just,

Geoffrey Long 40:12
well, yeah, I did run across some, some people on Facebook on a Facebook group for, like, local farmers. And there are some people saying, Hey, we should do like a co op. And I’m like, yeah, we’d love to do that. I would love to, like, you know, ring up a farmer and say, Hey, drop off to tractor trailer loads of, you know, organic peas, and, you know, whatever, let’s come up with a formula. And but again, I can’t take that on right now. I mean, it’s all I can do. You know, we, you know, the thing is that I’m, I consider myself an honorable guy, I’m not going to, I’m not going to shortchange my employer, you know, my employer, you know, we have a deal, not going to not going to back back down from that. I’m committed to the job to getting the job done and doing it right. And all that. And the, you know, the position I had requires a pretty hefty time commitment. And that that is what it is, I made that deal. And so I have to honor that. So I have to fit the stuff in around around that in a way, you know, that sometimes that means getting up at five in the morning and making a feed run or whatever. Or maybe that means even taking a day off, you know, taking a vacation day and going and being a farmer for a day. Like a nice vacation. Yeah. So, you know, we had to fit it in around that. That’s, that’s a big challenge. And that limits our growth. I mean, I think, you know, I think that if, if, if I ever got to a point where I felt like I wanted to commit 100% to the farm, you know, I’m pretty sure we could grow up pretty quickly.

Matt Derosier 41:47
There. I mean, yeah, really. I mean, you’d be running on all cylinders, right? I mean, there’s really, like, if you’re looking at what you can get done, like, look at what you’ve accomplished for mostly just the weekends, if you could do that seven days a week. I mean, just boom.

Geoffrey Long 42:06
Yeah, I mean, part of the part of the thing, you know, we talked about my wife and I agreed that we would start off as a homestead. And we would figure out what we liked and what we were good at. And if and whatever we like, and we’re good at, we would head in that direction, and see if we can make a business out of it. And we’re really at the point where we figured out that ducks and pigs and garlic are pretty easy for us to grow here. And we like them, you know, we there enjoy. I mean, ducks are a mess. You know, pigs are a mess, but they’re, they’re a good mess. You know, it’s, and I think like garlic are really not that stuff with pest pressure, the way that you know, some of the other stuff can be this a great a great area to grow food, a lot of people will go to the farmers market we don’t bother with, we’re not going to go sell tomatoes at a farmers market. Everybody has tomatoes. Everybody has squash and zucchini and sweet corn and peppers. Everybody has all that stuff. Green beans, you know that stuff. Any any gardener here can grow that without too much trouble. I’m not even I’m not even thinking about competing for that. There was a guy that we’re really good friends with in town who’s doing a little microgreens farmer call, he calls it Renegade, renegade acre. I think it’s called Great, great guy. He’s doing micro greens. You know, I don’t, you know, I don’t want to go compete with him. I want to I want to go figure out hey, what can I do that builds our community. So looking for ways we can do that. I think we will push more into produce market garden type stuff over the next couple of years, but we need to get some ground prepared for that. And right now, right now, we’re just more focused on the animals. We do. We do. And one thing I wanted to mention, you know, brought up talking about selling the the pork by the cut and everything off Carolina has the for the Federal exemption. Saqqara has a again, under the same meat and meat and poultry hammer license, you can you know, you can qualify for that federal exemption. So, we qualified for the 1000 bird exemption we do on foreign processing of the poultry. And, you know, we’ve done we’ve done turkeys and chickens and ducks. And, you know, we’re getting pretty good at it. We’re not great at it, but you know, we’re my son and I, we can we can knock them out pretty quickly. You know, by the time by the time we’re, we’re done with 20 or 25 or we’re sick of it and we’ll do something else but yeah, you can handle that so sure to do that too.

Matt Derosier 44:37
So you’ve got your permaculture food forest, you’ve got your your goats and your pigs and your cows all keeping down the wild blackberries and and other things. So what other methods practices or like Are you do you have going on

Geoffrey Long 45:00
Well, I think the main thing that I really want to get a lot better at is, I need to I need to get my, I need to get more balanced. So I would say, in terms of time commitments, and, you know, I need to, I need to figure out what I’m doing for a business and what I’m doing for a homestead. You know, so I’ll address her directly to address your question. But, you know, one of the challenges is, you know, I love I love growing stuff. And after my dad passed away, I started growing that stuff in my backyard at that little courtyard house and my grandfather had a green thumb, my dad had a green thumb, like, my dad could grow anything. And it looks like it’s hereditary. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I can make stuff grows, you know, my wife, we have to put her on weed patrol, because whatever she touches, you know, it dies. So we’re like, Hey, honey, just to take care of the weeds over there. Let us plant the stuff, you know. And anyway, I really enjoy just, I just love walking around, you know, figuring out how to make stuff grow. And you know, we’ve had some pretty good success with certain crops at a garden, you know, homestead or you know, personal scale. At think we could do more there. But I think the the things I’m really, I really want to work on is getting a better balance and working on that rotational grazing, especially with the pigs, I want to get them in the right get the paddocks setup better, get them moving at a more appropriate interval. We left them a little longer where they’ve been on purpose, but I want to, you know, we’re getting as we push across where they are right now, we’ll get to some, some old standards as deciduous hardwoods. And I would love to have them in an area for you know, a week and a half, two weeks and then move and I think it’d be just incredible for that area for that forest. I’d like to, we’re planning some trees working on like a silvopasture kind of system. And the other thing I’d like to get more into is because starting plants from cuttings and stuff like that, so those are things I’m kind of interested in and working on. I think I’d love to do like a have like a permaculture nursery kind of thing where I could help other other people who are interested in getting started with a homestead or doing some permaculture, I could say, Hey, here’s something that’s worked well for us and, and be able to pass on a few plants to him. That’d be cool. I think where we need to go from a business perspective, I mentioned earlier market gardening, we need to figure out how we’re going to do that. And I don’t really have a good, I don’t have a good vision of how we’re going to accomplish that I don’t have the experience or the knowledge right now to really make that happen. Then reading Eliot Coleman’s book, I need I need to learn more about it. Chase mentioned Chase earlier from Woodland Valley Farms. He’s Yeah, he’s, you know, he, he’s, he’s a little bit of a critic, I guess. And which is what I asked for, you know, but yeah, we definitely need improve there. If we’re gonna make a business out of this.

Matt Derosier 48:05
I’m sorry, I thought you’re gonna go.

Geoffrey Long 48:10
I don’t know what else. Yeah.

Matt Derosier 48:12
No, that’s all right. So. So it seems you got like a good good flow going. You know, there’s a lot that you want to improve on and whatnot. So what would you say that’s working? Well.

Geoffrey Long 48:25
I mean, the, you know, the, the pigs are working well, there. I just would like to move more, but they’re working well, sure. You know, the, the things that we’ve done really well, we have the other thing we have I didn’t mention we have a 20 by 60 hoop house. And, yeah, and so that’s another area where I got to figure out if I’m a homesteader or a farmer, right? Because that’s a huge asset from a farming perspective, in terms of like dreams, production and stuff like that. And the homesteader in me and the, you know, the aspiring horticulturist in me, has filled it up with tropical citrus plants and bananas and stuff like that. So that’s the kind of thing that, you know, if we’re, again, if we’re going to be if we decided to get more serious about being farmers and really making a business out of it, we would need to, to either scale that back or or relocate it to an area, that property that’s more of a homestead and part of it and, and really focus on getting that going for a you know, from a productive capacity kind of point of view.

Matt Derosier 49:27
Sure, I have heard that you might be able to get a grant for a high tunnel. Yeah, I didn’t know if that was common knowledge,

Geoffrey Long 49:36
or there was a, there was a timeframe where I think up until like, November 19, they were taking applications and I wasn’t able to get anything in for that. But I yeah, I’m aware of that program. I need to look into that. See if there’s another another deadline coming up.

Matt Derosier 49:52
Sure. So then, what didn’t work so well.

Geoffrey Long 49:58
The biggest issue we’re having Biggest predation, especially with the chickens. We were trying to do I built a built these really cool mobile coops. And just really enjoyed that as cool watching the chickens come out every morning and everything. And then we’ve got pretty good populations of permission, every predator you can imagine here. And especially the pullets, when they were, you know, say when they were seven, eight weeks old, they would just disappear. This get carried off by osprey, or hawks or something like that. Raccoons foxes. Haven’t seen the coyotes kill a chicken yet, but I’m pretty sure we’ve lost at least at least a few animals to the coyotes as well. Essentially, we we moved here if you didn’t hear him very, very much you’d hear on but they sent a really, really distant now you hear him and they’re on top of us. I mean, yeah. And now, my neighbor said that they kind of had in his experience, they’ve rotated so they’ll, they’ll come through here, and then they’ll kind of migrate. So right now, we’re, we’re watching out for them. We lost a couple of goats a few weeks ago, we think that’s what happened. So predation is probably the one thing that we have got to figure out how to manage, we’re gonna need to have livestock guardians, which we don’t have, except for the donkeys. And we’re gonna have to do more in terms of shelter and fencing. And we we’ve, we’ve just all the chickens into tractors, we’re no longer using the mobile coops with the electric netting isn’t successful. And so that’s been the biggest challenge and the biggest frustration, and, you know, it hurts my soul to see these animals get gets, right. It’s part of the cycle, you know, the circle of life, but it’s still I feel I feel like a failure as a farmer when I don’t protect the animals adequately.

Matt Derosier 51:56
Sure, I can totally understand that. Did you follow a specific style or plan when doing the mobile coop?

Geoffrey Long 52:05
Nah, man, I kind of made it up as I went along. I just did a single pitch, you know, it looks like a little single pitch shed, you know. And I used one of that stuff called T 111. Or something like that stuff. And the first one I built it’s, it’s solid man, I think if he could roll that thing down a hill, and it would just, you know, flop back up on its wheels and off you go but little bit heavy, but it was just easy for the kids to move, you know, was the thing that can hold about 15 or 20 Birds pretty comfortably. And sweet spot was right around 16 or 17 would be comfortable in there. And so we could move the netting and just roll the coop over to the next spot and underneath their coop what we did the first season we did this, every time we moved them we would plant a little garden plot under where the coop had been. And we had beautiful like butternut squash and pumpkins, we put the really heavy feeders like the qubits there, and they would just go crazy. It was pretty cool watching that process, but just not we just cannot protect them well enough right now. So we’re gonna have to figure out how to fix that.

Matt Derosier 53:17
So you’re you’re saying that the predator problem is your biggest challenge by far?

Geoffrey Long 53:23
Yeah, easily.

Matt Derosier 53:25
Yep. Gotcha. So then what? What are your like, goals for the farm? Are you still in that stuck in like that? Like lay awake at night? Am I a homesteader? Am I a farmer kind of like, mentality? Were you trying to take it?

Geoffrey Long 53:41
Well, you know, like a, like, as mentioned before, I’ve got to gotta maintain the right balance. I mean, I have to maintain my sanity, first of all right, I, I have a tendency to kind of put a lot on myself. And I can, I can really make it hard for me to like, so I’ll sit here, work all day with my my day job. And then I’ll feel like I have to go do something for the farm. And I’ll go, you know, whatever. Do whatever I can. It’s really hard when the days are shorter with in terms of daylight. Because, you know, during the summer I can I can squeeze in an hour, hour and a half at night. Not too much trouble. I don’t like I don’t watch TV. So that’s no big deal. I mean, it’s relaxing for me, it actually energizes me to go do something like that outside and with the animals or with plants, whatever, that really energizes me. So it’s a lot, you know, a lot of people I used to get out when I when we lived in South America, people, you know, I would leave the office on Friday. And, you know, some of my colleagues would say, Hey, man, you’ve you’ve had a really long weekend. You get some rest, man, I hope you get some rest over the weekend. And then I come back on Monday and they’d be like, Hey, did you get some rest? And I’m like, man, we went and we hiked like, you know, 20 kilometers and Saturday was awesome. They’re like, what’s wrong with you? You know, like, I just, you know, I’m a restless soul. I don’t like to sit down and and, you know, watch TV. see that what relaxes me is to go do something, I gotta go do stuff with my hands or something. So it’s a good rest for me but I, I asked keep that balance and not put too much on myself I can get my vision and my dreams can get a little ahead of my reality when it comes to the time that I have. So I’m trying to be careful about that. But I mean, my ultimate goal is to retire and be a farmer. I don’t know what the timing for that is right now. But I would love to have the opportunity to you know, make a go with this before I’m too old to really work it. So that’s that’s where I’d like to see it go. But I am in a bit of I think the not so much stuck between being a homesteader and a farmer, I’m more stuck between, you know, am I going to commit to this as a read a source of revenue and profit? Or am I going to continue to do this as a homesteader who has a little bit cash on like a, you know, a side hustle and a little bit of money on the side? You know, that’s really the conundrum right now is solving that problem. But you know, what level of commitment we’re gonna make to that.

Matt Derosier 56:02
So then how do you define homestead versus a farm?

Geoffrey Long 56:06
Yeah, um, so, you know, this is this is the conversation I was having with, with Chase. And I’ve also had a similar conversation with Joel Salatin. I’ve been fortunate enough to tour his farm three times. And three times, yeah, he’s not too far. I can drive up there in you know, six or seven hours. So. But um, that’s actually one of the things that switched my mind into doing this actually is the first time I went up there. I was like, I’m listening. I’m watching. Like, I can totally do this. I can do this. It was right after my dad passed away. And I just started growing up stuff, my backyard, and I went and saw Joel Salatin as farming, I thought, dude, I could do this, like, you know, not that it’s easy. But I mean, I could do this, I would, I’d be willing to work hard to do this, you know, anyway, no tour, touring his farm and everything. You know, he talks about the whole lawns and the different enterprises on the farm and how you stack them. There’s a thriving farmer podcast, listen to Michael a little bit, he talks a little bit about how you stack the enterprises. I think that’s something that we have to think through better. But, you know, when you start, we talk about homesteading, I think, you know, like this, my little citrus thing, that’s kind of a hobby, it’s not gonna make me a lot of money, unless I decide to start, you know, a citrus nursery, but I’m in zone eight, I’m, I mean, I could do it, I would be really, really stretching the limits of, of nature and energy usage to make that really work. You know what I mean? So I probably, I probably need to figure out how to relegate those things to an area of the farm, that’s, that’s something that’s easy to take care of that I’m not stressed about it. And then, you know, really leverage the productive capacity of the infrastructure like the hoop house and stuff like that. So I think that’s what I’m trying to talk about. When I say homestead and farm. The farm is the enterprise that’s going to actually generate, you know, revenue, it’s going to pay for the homestead lifestyle. And I have to figure out which ones or which ones are which, and, and put them in there, right, you know, priority. So, you know, if I’ve got to make a decision between citrus trees, getting an extra cup of fertilizer or feeding pigs, I have to feed pigs because pigs make us money. You know, that’s really what I’m kind of talking about, I guess.

Matt Derosier 58:29
Sure. Yeah, that’s fair enough. So with all that being said, what would you tell people that want to get started in homesteading or farming? I guess.

Geoffrey Long 58:42
Yeah. I mean, I think the most important thing is, is start. I think, the biggest challenge for me, we did I’ll just tell you a quick story. I did. We did a solar we’d run the farm based on solar. We can’t grow much beyond where we are right now on on that solar system. But we’ve run the farm successfully since 2017. We are weeding install the solar the first time we’ve run our irrigation or our all our water for the livestock. We’re running our freezers all abouts on solar. Wow, that’s amazing. When I started doing the solar install, I joke I jokingly say I didn’t know what a vault was right. I didn’t know I didn’t know anything about electricity. But I just decided I was gonna be afraid I was just gonna get figured out and I you know, I got some people to tell me a few things here and there and you know, watched a bunch of videos on YouTube and you know, just just researched it and and I was super careful. I would test it every time double check everything and you know, we’ve learned a lot of lessons we didn’t get it right the first time we didn’t have just a few little things that people that do solver probably would know but I didn’t know and Sure. But that’s the thing is like just Start, you know, do something on your balcony, if you’re in an apartment somewhere just on your balcony if you’re, you know, if you’re in the suburbs, and if you’re in a, if you’re in a courtyard like I was, you’re in a courtyard home, hey, you know, throw up a raised bed and hide it from the HOA for a couple years, you know, just start do something. Or maybe go, you know, at least be a customer, man, be a customer of a guy like me who’s just trying to trying to figure it out. You know, go, go, go say, hey, local farmer guy that dream big. And, you know, he’s trying to hold down your corporate job and do this at the same time. I’d love to Boston, your pork chops. I think that’d be super appreciated. So I think just starting anywhere. I guess the biggest pitfalls that I think I’ve fallen into is going out there and getting the, it’s part of the same thing that makes me I guess, impulsive enough to go try to build a solar system, but getting the animals before I had the shelter or the fencing ready, you know, like doing some stuff like that, where you’re like, hey, let’s get some, and you’re not ready. So I’d say there’s a balance there between just start and, and maybe, you know, get some things prepared before you jump. But I would say in general start and then, you know, try to be mindful not to, not to get too far out, you know, ahead of yourself, but

Matt Derosier 1:01:26
sure, I got a friend like that. It seems like every weekend, he’s got like a new like, animal or like, whatever. And he’s like, yeah, so um, you know, I’m building infrastructure to do this because I picked up ducks on, you know, Wednesday, or like, oh, by the way, I’m also digging a pond for the ducks. And by the way, I’m picking up geese. And my brother dropped off three cows like all of this stuff, just like dude. What are you doing, man? Like? Yeah, but it’s he’s making it work. Dude, he hustles like crazy, like someone I don’t want I’ve ever met. So

Geoffrey Long 1:02:01
the only way man, but I’ll just tell you another quick story. Don’t mind. Yeah, we got we got the cows that we know the cow. We bought her. She was bred the first year as we got and as a dairy was shutting down and and you know what? No, they aren’t registered or anything that, you know, but he said they were Jersey looked like jerseys. And, you know, she seemed like a pretty decent looking cow and all that. As well, as we knew, you know. We brought her home. We had the fence all set up. We had water all that, you know, we had some hay, she was good to go. Well, called the vet and I said, Hey, could you come do a pregnancy check? And the people at the vet’s office were like, well, you know, do you have like a shoot or anything? I’m like, Nah, don’t she goes? Well, he’s got one he can bring him like, Okay, I have no idea. You know, so the vet shows up. He’s like, what’s, what is this? You don’t have anywhere to catch the cow. I can’t just like run across a pasture trying to catch your cow to give her a pregnancy check. What? What is this, you know? And so, you know, we I spent a couple of weeks, you know, researching a red temple, Brandon’s book on how to handle livestock, or I came in what’s called but and then we designed a little thing, we threw it up and the next time the vet came, I’m like, yeah, here she is. She’s in the she’s in the chute. She’s in the head gate ready to be ready to be examined. You know, he’s like, looking at me going, you know, what’s, again, kind of like, what’s wrong with you? But yeah, I didn’t know I didn’t know any better, right? I don’t know any better. I got educated. We had some unfortunate situations with the first try it bottle calves. And, you know, it’s expensive lesson, but I figured that that bill was basically tuition. You know, we learned we learned how to take care of a bottle calf. That’s, that’s struggling. And, you know, there’s the hard knocks, you know, I think that the one thing I’ll say I’ve been very fortunate because of because of my job when he says I protect my job and try to be you know, put that first to a certain degree is it does afford us the resources to make some mistakes along the way.

Matt Derosier 1:04:05
Sure. You got a little bit of a financial buffer. Yeah. Never hurts to have never

Geoffrey Long 1:04:11
know this. It can be expensive. It can definitely be expensive.

Matt Derosier 1:04:16
Yeah, so Well, awesome. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention? Did we forget anything? Or?

Geoffrey Long 1:04:24
No, I don’t think so. You know, like I said, this is a big leap of faith for me to put myself out there like this. So I think that’s probably pretty good. For now.

Matt Derosier 1:04:31
I appreciate you being here. Honestly, this is this has been great. So yeah. Do you want to plug anything specific? Just just Twitter or get anything?

Geoffrey Long 1:04:42
Yeah, I mean, you know, I hope I hope in a couple of weeks, couple of weeks or a month or so we’ll have some sort of website going but right now I do mostly it’s it’s Facebook and Twitter. We have a foreign page on both. We have an Instagram my wife does, and she puts very tastefully done photographs there because she’s, she’s got a great eye for that stuff. But I talked on Twitter I kind of talked about, I think, you know, the, the ethos behind all of this, you know, the, the idea of, of, you know, being just really rooted in your community and eating sustainably and taking care of the land and the animals. You know, I think people find it a paradox that, you know, you can love and care for an animal and then take it to the slaughterhouse. And, you know, I’m making a point, you know, yeah, make it a point of saying thank you to the animals and we say a prayer before we slaughter the chickens. And we just feel like there’s a spiritual connection with the animals there. And you know, that’s, that’s what I love. I love I love that feeling of connectedness to the physical and, and yeah, it’s beautiful.

Matt Derosier 1:05:53
That’s well said. Thanks. Very good. So yeah, follow spello Jeffery on Twitter at Long story farms, I think is where he’s most active. And you can follow FarmHop life everywhere. And I appreciate you being with me today. Thank you.

Geoffrey Long 1:06:10
Yeah, thanks a lot. Matt. Enjoyed it.

Matt Derosier 1:06:13
Um, so I can cut it there and whatever. You got a you gotta go or?

Geoffrey Long 1:06:19
No, I don’t have I mean, no, I don’t have it’s not urges me to go.

Matt Derosier 1:06:24
See a couple. Yeah, that’d be awesome. You mentioned that you almost didn’t do the interview? What was the what was the thoughts going through your through your mind?

Geoffrey Long 1:06:39
Just private? I just private? I mean, I guess there’s some reticence about just, you know, my, I don’t want my employer to have the impression that I and I don’t know who will see this right. I don’t want my employer to have the impression that this is this is consuming my life to the point where I’m not doing my job. Because, sure. The fact is that that’s that’s not the case, I put my job first. And, you know, I do what I have to do for my job, because that’s the that’s the agreement that I made, you know, I’m gonna honor that. So I was a little bit worried about that. I guess, I think the other thing is just, we’re just pretty private. I mean, you know, we have some close friends. And, you know, I’m an open book with people that I’m familiar with. And I think but it’s, it’s not always easiest to talk to someone about, you know, the scourge that cancer has been in my family. It’s not something that’s comfortable to talk about, you know, sure.

Matt Derosier 1:07:33
I appreciate you sharing that with me, by the way. That’s, yeah, it’s not easy. Like, Hey, by the way, I have three family members that have passed away from cancer like that. Yeah, it doesn’t really come naturally to a lot of people just like, mentioned that. So

Geoffrey Long 1:07:49
I it’s just such an integral part of the journey. I mean, literally, when my dad passed away, man, that was the switch. I went from, I went from, like this comfortable, like, I’m right, um, you know, I’m climbing the corporate ladder. I want to be a CFO, I want to be the C suite guy and all this stuff. My dad passed away, and I kind of, I didn’t really take time off, but I was working from from home, taking care of my dad and and the flip, just flip the switch on me, man, I was like, I, you know, is this is this what I want? You know, like, is this Do I want to chase this stuff at the expense of my health and, you know, all these other things. And, you know, I, when I started taking care of my dad, now, I still travel to stuff. I mean, it wasn’t it wasn’t full time caregiver, but I was there as much as I could. But when I got got back, I was in Mexico, working in Mexico, I got back from Mexico, weighed more than I’ve ever weighed in my life. Now, I’m not a I mean, I carry weight pretty well, but I was heavy and wasn’t feeling good. And watching my dad go through everything he was going through, and I started kind of just thinking about what I was eating a little more. I mean, Mexico, and the tortillas. Good cane sugar, Coca Cola, and, you know, tacos. Yeah. I love that stuff. Great. But it wasn’t doing me any favors. So I dropped about 30 pounds over those two or three months. And obviously, there’s probably some element of grief in there and whatever. I don’t know what the word play but yeah, and I tried to be a little more thoughtful about that. From that point on, and then you know, then I just felt like I had to that was he passed away in March. And we tried to do a little bit of a garden that year. We didn’t you know, we had I’d always consider my dad’s garden, kind of like my garden like a you know, if I need a garden. I got a garden kind of kind of an idea. That changed you know, He wasn’t there. He wasn’t there to do that garden anymore. And so we started trying to grow some food that year, we we had a really aborted attempt to grow some tomatoes. I don’t know what we did wrong, exactly. Put a bunch of cow manure down. And I think it was combination of a heat effect from the brick courtyard wall. And the salts. Kind of, I think it needed some amendments, better amendments and a little more protection. But anyway, when I thought about that, I don’t know. It’s just an idea. I have no idea I might, I might be completely wrong. But yeah, then in the next year, by the next year, I mean, I grew some carrots that were, you know, footlong and an inch and a half around, and we’re growing just everything. And I was like, you know, I was thinking I was collecting rainwater is doing compost all in this tiny little courtyard home and then we added the six chickens. And that was too much really, surely should have expected that was going to create a problem with the Oh, I

Matt Derosier 1:11:03
see what you mean. Yeah. Okay.

Geoffrey Long 1:11:05
Yeah, I could have I could have stayed low key with the plants. I added the chickens. Yeah, that didn’t. That didn’t go over too. Well. They actually tried to make an example of me They. They sent me a letter on Friday afternoon that said that if I didn’t have everything cleared out by Tuesday, they were gonna find me $500 a day. And, you know, I literally called a buddy of mine. I’m like, Hey, can you come over with the trailer? He’s like, Yeah, so I’m gonna give you my hands. And we just loaded everything on his trailer because it was all it was all we were moving them around in the backyard, like doing little chicken tractor. And you couldn’t smell anything was It was great. You know? They’re well managed within that space are well managed. But someone saw him or heard him. I don’t know what happened. Hold on us. So

Matt Derosier 1:11:49
how big was your lot size? Then in your courtyard area? I guess like

Geoffrey Long 1:11:57
the courtyard area? No, no, it was tiny. See, I’m guessing it was. And I don’t know it was maybe 1000 square feet. I don’t know. Maybe 1200. If I’m stretching it like it was an L shaped area that they had. And we grew, if you will, on the shorter side of the L was where we were growing the plants. They had the long side of the hill. It wasn’t a lot of space. I’m not really sure I had my mind. Yeah, I don’t remember. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Derosier 1:12:31
Yeah. You, man, what was my question? Oh, I saw your your tweet about declining health of young mental health of young people. Yeah. Or your Do you homeschool your kids? Yep. Oh, that’s cool.

Geoffrey Long 1:12:52
Yeah. Yeah, we’ve homeschooled I think that was that question came from just I do some work with youth group, my church, and just hearing a lot of it from the kids. And I’m like, man, what’s going on? You know, what’s, what’s changed? What’s different? It seems like it’s different. I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, I’m, like, I’m, I’m Gen X. I’m not, you know, my kids are 14 to 21. So you know, they’re in that age group. degeneration, you know, parents that, you know, I don’t know, I don’t my kids, you know, in general, pretty, pretty healthy, pretty happy. I don’t see a lot of among my kids, I think we’ve had one or two, they’ve struggled with one or two things, but they’re, they’re really good. And I just wonder what’s going on? You know, I think a lot of it, I really do. A lot has to do with nutrition. I think screentime is a big one. Oh, definitely. But I don’t know. I don’t know. It seems like there’s something in the water, if you will.

Matt Derosier 1:13:54
It’s probably probably a lot of things. Have you seen the documentary? social dilemma? I think it’s called a Netflix. You said on TV. But

Geoffrey Long 1:14:04
yeah, I think my wife showed me part of that. Is that the one they talked about? How how they are using kind of psychology to keep you on the page. That kind of stuff? Yep. I watched every part of it. I didn’t see the whole thing.

Matt Derosier 1:14:15
So like, towards the end, I think it was the like, you got like CEOs and presidents of like Pinterest and Google VPs and whatever. They’re like, I don’t let my kids have a phone. Because I know what it can do to people and you’re like, if this is what like these high ups are saying like they don’t even let their own kids have phones. Like why are we doing it to ourselves like for our kids even worse, like you think like think as like adults, like we know better but then we still like think it’s okay kind of I don’t know.

Geoffrey Long 1:14:58
Yeah, let me ask you a question like I don’t know, like, I find it really interesting. The, you know, my my Twitter accounts gotten a lot more attention than I ever expected it would. I’m find it just mind boggling. It’s got 1200 followers, but you know, whatever. Yeah. But one thing I try, I try to avoid politics and, and arguments, and I try to be positive as much as I can. And I’m just finding that to be a good formula. You know, I don’t know if that comes across that I’m trying to make those types of decisions. But I’m, I’m constantly trying to avoid arguments. I’m trying to avoid politics, and I’m trying to be positive, I, you know, express the positive side of something as opposed to the negative side of things. And I found the interactions on Twitter can be really positive if, if you approach it that way. I don’t know.

Matt Derosier 1:15:52
Yeah. I mean, it’s genuine. So what I got from your Twitter is that you ask very or mentioned, it’s not always a question. You’re very interesting. No, no, it’s like a catch all phrase. It’s kind of like a BS, like answer kind of, easy out. But you’re very interesting. Like thoughts? Like, just, they’re just kind of like, what about this? Or, hey, this thing happened? Or, you know, like, I don’t know, there, I just find it. Like, just interesting, because you’re, I don’t know, just the way you phrase it, because it’s not the same old crap that everyone else is talking about, like, Hey, did you hear about blah, but the like, you’re like politics? Like you’re talking about? Like, I don’t care. I don’t watch the news on purpose in here. Is someone telling me their opinion, and why I should have their opinion and like, I don’t care. But yeah, so to give you that give you an example, like, so today? Your I mean, these are all your tweets, obviously, you know, what you said? About your, you’re not having water today, I thought that was an interesting thread. And like the talking about the systems that we take for granted, you know, keeping a little bit of this little bit of that in case you have issues. Like that’s, I mean, that’s just being prepared. Because you said, you’re, you’re off grid?

Geoffrey Long 1:17:20
Well, so I did I this is one of those things where I don’t get into the details. It’s really funny, because there’s so many people coming back onto that thread, like with advice from me, right, which I thought was really interesting, right? Because I was just taught, I was trying to do a thought experiment, because there’s a couple of things like if, if I’m, if I don’t have water in my house, do you not can pack everybody up? We’ll go to the hotel for a couple of weeks. While it gets fixed a couple of days what I mean, I’m not going to die, right? On the other hand, if the well that, that water is the animals dries up, or, or quits working, I’ve got a major problem of a major problem about that, right? And so it’s more of a thought experiment, like what how would I react, you know, and especially with the way the supply chain has been lately, you know, if, like, I went to the store today, because one of the problems with it turns out one of the problems of the well was that the pressure switch, the little stem, the water in that STEM is freezing, and so it doesn’t get the signal to turn on and off. And it actually over pressurized, and then basically destroyed the gauge the pressure gauge, and there’s something stuck probably in the seat of the of the check valve. So it’s not a major thing. Like it’s not disabled, I can still get water out of it. But, you know, people were like, Oh, you could do a hand pump, or solar, you know, and I’m like, I have all of that. I, I didn’t want to say like, No, thank you. But I was a thought experiments like, hey, like, if you if like, there are people in the world that assume that their car is gonna start every time they turn the key. I don’t assume that I assume that the battery and one of these cars that we have outside is failing anytime now. Right? And so it kind of prepared for that that’s going to eventually there’s going to be a problem. It’s not going to starve them out to go do something about it. But I don’t really think that about my Well, I think my well is going to work every time and that’s what that’s really that was the whole point I was trying to make. You don’t think about it because you expect to work you know you flip the switch light comes on and you don’t think about it and but um you know we have so we have a hand pump over on the farm side of the of the property we have solar a grim FOSS solar pump on the other side of the property. We can go get we can go get water from that side of the property and bring it over here if we have to. Just a thought experiment and I thought was odd to me advice because I wasn’t really I was just trying to say hey, have you thought about this and people are like, I can solve your problem.

Matt Derosier 1:19:59
Thank you Before I bring up another tweet that I that I liked I did like the handpump tweet, cuz I was like, Hey, I could use one of those. Like, that’s a good idea. So it’s, it’s not always just for you. It’s sometimes it’s for

Geoffrey Long 1:20:18
people. I was trying to be humble, but it was hard.

Matt Derosier 1:20:22
It was fine. You did you did just fine. It was not like, yeah, yeah.

Geoffrey Long 1:20:26
And the simple simple pump is one of the ones we looked at, we looked at simple pump, and we looked at the bison and the bison went out on aesthetics. My wife just thought it was beautiful. And it is a beautiful thing. I don’t know if you looked at him. Look this up. Yeah, we got a stainless steel, it’s stainless steel. It’s just almost like art. It’s really brilliant. Really pretty. So one of the things my wife told me, I could say that I didn’t say in the interview, but Oh, very nice. Yeah, so one of the things, you know, like I mentioned, we’d agreed we was do a homestead, we can see where it went, right. And, like one of the things one of the reasons that we’re not, you know, like one of these, I don’t quit my job and just go full bore into you know, just push all the chips to the table. Is my wife’s not ready for that, you know, like our family, our family have, you know, we got four kids, their their high school and college age. My wife’s not ready for the training wheels to come off. You know, I mean, she’s like, right, let’s be a little more careful. And, again, I have to respect that and all of that. So

Matt Derosier 1:21:31
there’s only a certain level of risk she’s willing to take that makes that makes sense. I mean, yeah, my wife’s the same way. I like to jump in to things that I thought of yesterday with like two feet. Like, this is the greatest deal I do I’ve ever had. She’s like, whoa, like, remember the last time said that?

Geoffrey Long 1:21:51
Yeah. I get rid of some of my mistakes every now and then. Yeah.

Matt Derosier 1:21:56
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the thanks for that. Thanks for keeping me in check. You brought up so you brought up the well pump thing? And you said you designed your own solar array, I’m assuming in system and everything. Yeah. So how many panels like the kilowatts like do you have for that and like, using for batteries and everything?

Geoffrey Long 1:22:20
Yeah, so So I’ve only got three kilowatts, I’m gonna I think I might add another kilowatt to it. Maybe, maybe right away. I switched to lithium ion batteries this year, I was using golf cart batteries. Okay. And, you know, the biggest problem with the lead acid batteries is they just can’t handle the depth of discharge. I mean, if we had if one of the kids forgot to turn off the sprinklers, or forgot something, and, or there was a leak, or whatever, the well pump runs all night, it almost discharged them to zero, and they just don’t recover. So we had a couple of situations like that, where we had just just just discharged them too deeply. And we would we were frying a set about once every year and a half. Oh, there’s only about $1,000, you know, to replace them. The problem is that, you know, I really, what I would have had to do is go and spend $2,000, and maybe maybe three to really have enough capacity to discharge as deeply as I need to. And that would have forced me to, you know, up the wattage on the array and all that and I thought it would be ultimately a better idea to go and go lithium ion phosphate. So we did that. As it turns out, that was fine when we had three freezers, but now that we have five freezers need to add add a little bit more to it. So I think it’ll add another 100 another 100 amp hours of battery storage and another kilowatt of array to the system. And I can do that within the parameters of the system I have. So as this is a pretty small system, it’s the 60 amp, AC it’s five kilowatt, basically inverter charger thing so nice. Yeah.

Matt Derosier 1:24:16
Did you go solar out of necessity or want?

Geoffrey Long 1:24:20
I’d probably have to say want in theory, we we could probably get power back there. But if what I had been told it was going to cost several $1,000 Now I can browse for that on solar. I never really checked because I wanted solar anyway, you know. So we did the solar but you know, I’m glad we did the solar. I mean, I learned a lot doing it. You know, we made a couple of mistakes. One of the big mistakes she made was we didn’t we didn’t have the right differential in voltage between the panels and the batteries. Fix that. Now. mistake we made was with the, you know, the, the lead acid batteries, just discharging them too deeply. And we did that twice, we did that twice. And we just were not like we just did not have the right parameters, we would like I said, we don’t have to have a much bigger lead acid bank to handle what we were doing. So, anyway, I mean, you know, a good learning experience. I feel really comfortable now with electricity. All that, you know, one of the things we didn’t really talk about, I meant to mention, when you’re asking what works, one of the things that works really well is that we’re getting our skills are just improving by leaps and bounds. Hoop House, hoop house construction feel like we really almost mastered that solar, we’re getting we’re getting pretty good at I can do basic plumbing and electrical work. Our construction is getting really, you know, I do it with my boys mostly. And, you know, instead of awesome, yeah, we throw up a running shelter in a day and a half is 12 by eight on on four by four skids. I can it’s sturdy enough to drag around the pasture with the tractor, and you know, just stuff like that. It’s, you know, it’s hard to hard to put a price on that even though from a business perspective. Well, from Pittsburgh, it was actually not a bad deal. But what I mean is, like, regardless of whether it worked out from a business perspective, the education that kids are getting is just, it’s just phenomenal. It’s well, I

Matt Derosier 1:26:28
have to say. So what I was trying to lead into was that, if you’re looking at it financially, you don’t like learning how to do it yourself, you’re going to be in the red at first. But if something goes wrong, you’re comfortable with that system specific, like I was specifically thinking about the solar array. Okay, why is this not working? Oh, we discharged the batteries to date. How do I know that because I’ve checked all these other things, I’ve built the thing I understand that up until this point, it all works. This is my problem. So like, I mean, that’s you’re just comfortable with it, like I I added Sorry, I’m pointing over here because it’s on the side of this wall. Like a water filter setup for my house, I have very, very high iron content. And so I wanted to get comfortable with plumbing. I’m like, whatever people do this all the time. And so like, I bought the tools, and I learned how to do it and like didn’t have any leaks. And I was like sweet so I went like a step further and added blah, blah blah, blah doing this doing that. So like so like, I was learning plumbing and I’m already an electrician by trade and so like what else can I What else can I learn what tools and like knowledge can I keep? Like in my back pocket at all time? So yeah, that’s awesome that you’re teaching your kids that I hope to take my son there as well. Yeah. Very cool. Um, do you have time for one more question? Yeah, sure. Okay. The tweet that I thought was interesting was you said I tell my children options are get a degree as inspect in expensively as possible avoiding debt, starting a business learn a trade which will pay white color salary, welding plumbing cetera, I will invest in your future, but show me a business case for your choice. I love that so much. Thank you. So your your oldest, if are you comfortable telling me like where he’s at? Like, What’s he trying to do?

Geoffrey Long 1:28:33
I’ll give you an idea where the kids are doing that. The oldest is the girl She’s, she’s writing as she does. She does comics. And she she’s right. She writes. And she just got back from a year and a half in Vancouver, Canada. She’s bilingual Spanish English. She’s, she hasn’t decided pursue a degree. So she’s just writing. She’s writing a book right now. She’s short, a little novel that she self published a couple of years ago when she was like 18. And she has been publishing a comic on webtoons and she’s starting to she’s taking some commissions for some artwork, that kind of stuff. Yeah, she helps out on the farm doing chores, basically doesn’t do a lot more than that. She’ll help me out with you know, planting stuff or whatever. But she’s, you know, she’s really more of a writer and artist. In that sense. The next one down is finishing his degree in Computer Engineering. Really, really bright kid like super bright super driven just a rare combination of bright and driven together. And he’s he’s gonna graduate at at the age of 19 which is

Matt Derosier 1:29:48
pretty cool. That’s amazing.

Geoffrey Long 1:29:50
Yeah. Really, really good kid with a bright, the younger two or you know high school, homeschool want the the the the Want, he really likes gaming and that kind of stuff. And he, he’s very task interesting kid, he’s very task oriented. So he, he, like loves to go chop wood, he’ll love He loves that. But on the other hand, if you give him some open ended thing, it’s like, you know, it’s like, they don’t have like a defined like, this is what you have to do. He does, he doesn’t enjoy that he likes, you know, he likes to go off figure something out by himself or likes to just go do something that’s like a defined beginning and that you know, and just really interesting that all four of them are super interesting to me, but, and then the youngest is he wants, he’s, he built a computer, he was 13 built a gaming computer, did all the research everything. He’s once been entrepreneur,

Matt Derosier 1:30:47
good for him. That’s awesome. I mean, good for all your kids. I mean, there’s each teacher choosing their own path and figuring it out. So

Geoffrey Long 1:30:54
the youngest is pretty severely dyslexic. And he’s really done a great job overcoming all that big, big challenge homeschooling kid with that kind of disability. My wife is a saint, my wife is just phenomenal. Very, very good home educator. Don’t think I’ve met anyone that’s more, as you know, more researched and more prepared to help with the kids from figuring out what the right curriculum is. And what I mean by that is like, our kids and all respond equally, and people go out, they’re like, Well, I got this curriculum, you know, they’re like, whatever, Calvert, or whatever it is. My wife would be more like, you know what, you seem to learn better this way. Let’s try this math book and this science book. And it wasn’t it wasn’t always like a, you know, a curriculum that was like, well, this particular math thing, and this particular science thing that works better for that kid, and that’s the way she approached all of our kids. So the the oldest show of mythology show of writing from a very early age, I love the Percy Jackson stuff, you know, so she, you know, her her curricula are tailored towards, you know, mythology and literature and that sort of thing. And the other was pure stem, he did catch us he literally did the calculus AP exam. When he was 13 got a five on the BC calculus AP exam.

Matt Derosier 1:32:20
There. Dude,

Geoffrey Long 1:32:21
he’s smoking smart. Really, really? Right.

Matt Derosier 1:32:27
Yeah. You said bright and driven. I mean, watch out for that kid. I mean, he’s gonna really go somewhere.

Geoffrey Long 1:32:34
Yeah. So I mean, you know, I’ve wanted to be a dad. So I was 12. So, you know, I love it. I love being a dad love being a husband. Just, you know, just enjoying it. Enjoying life, I have a great life. I mean, I really do. I can’t complain. I, you know, the jobs demanding, that’s hard. Some days, I don’t enjoy it. But in general, doing something where I feel like it can add, you know, add value and, and it provides the resources for us to do what we want to do here. And so just kind of keep working to make that future, you know, with where I can do this full time a reality.

Matt Derosier 1:33:13
Does your wife work as well? No, she stays home. My wife does as well. And I always tell her like, you have the harder job. I have to go to work every day. But you have the infinitely harder job. I just make sure we’re not broke. You do literally everything else. So yeah, it’s thank God for wives.

Geoffrey Long 1:33:40
Yeah, yeah, it’s incredible. I mean, you know if you can find the right partner partnership is a huge blessing. And it’s great. Yeah. Are you guys you have a traveling homestead family on your your tagline or whatever? Is that something you guys have just been bouncing around? The different farming gigs or whatever? What’s What’s the story there? You don’t mind me asking? No, that’s

Matt Derosier 1:34:04
totally fine. So we just last week, we did our first like episode and my wife and I are sitting down explaining what FarmHop Life. So the goal is next summer so 2023 We’re going to hit the road and go visit people’s farms. So like, are you familiar with woofing at all? Yep. So it’s like that, but not necessarily through woof if people if people reach out to us like Hey, I I’m like fallen behind here. I can’t I feel like I don’t like I can’t get my head above water. You know, like, can you give me some help? Like yeah, you know, we’ll show up for a week or a month or whatever it is you want and you know, help them out on stuff, just whatever they need it like that and just record it, record it along the way. I like maybe they, they teach us stuff. I hope so anyways, I love learning new stuff. And then we can like, help them with whatever it is they need, like, Hey, I’ve seen it done this way or I talked to the guy that blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever. So I don’t know, just just an extra pair of hands sometimes it’s all you need. So yeah, that’s, that’s the goal.

Geoffrey Long 1:35:22
Cool. Kind of like Justin Rhodes, but actually doing more work when you’re when you’re touring.

Matt Derosier 1:35:29
Yeah, so I explained it to one person like it’s kind of like Justin Rhodes American farm tour, and homestead rescue, but like, you kind of need to get both those references for it to work and she only got the American thing and so like, I don’t know, Google it like so it like what did I say? I was like American rep does. homestead rescue without the drama is what? What I what I said so.

Geoffrey Long 1:36:03
Yeah, man. Well, if you’re in the southeast, give us a call, man. Maybe

Matt Derosier 1:36:06
I’d love to love to swing by and check it out. Meet people in the real so but yeah, yeah. So we got a we got a baby on the way due in June. So that’s why we’re pushing to next summer. So things will probably easier when they’re one or maybe they won’t. I don’t know.

Geoffrey Long 1:36:25
Yeah, that’ll be interesting. Yeah. Newborns.

Matt Derosier 1:36:29
Well, yeah. Thank you, again, for giving me your time. And we’ve and all this extra extra stuff. Is there anything by the way that we covered that you’re like, hey, I kind of don’t want that.

Geoffrey Long 1:36:40
I mean, I mean, some of the stuff since the since the cut, if you will. I probably wouldn’t want to talk about my my day where I was saying about the employer, but why why not do it? Sure. You can put in all the positive things about my wife, I probably wouldn’t want the kids the kids stuff. Too much.

Matt Derosier 1:36:59
Okay. How about anything that I anything after the cut? All send you like a private link? Like, that’d be great up? Thumbs down.

Geoffrey Long 1:37:10
So that’d be great.

Matt Derosier 1:37:11
Yeah, no, that’s totally cool. Yeah, it’s I honestly, it’s the least I can do. Because obviously, it’s your face and everything that you’re disclosing so. No, that’s, that’s cool. I’ve appreciated this. This little chat between us.

Geoffrey Long 1:37:24
So Oh, thank you. That’s essentially, you know, it’s hard to imagine yourself interesting enough for people to want to want to see this, but we’ll see what happens. You know, so,

Matt Derosier 1:37:34
yeah, I mean, yeah, everyone has a different story to tell. And so like, like, I’m talking to this lady. Right now. We’re trying to schedule a thing. And she raised his goats for her severely autistic son, and like, he’s like making like, these, like, connections with animals. And I’m like, That is so crazy. That that Yeah, so just things like that. Things like your story. So I don’t know. It’s all people are interesting. Just give him like a space to talk and they’ll just be like, what, really?

Geoffrey Long 1:38:11
Yeah, awesome. Well, I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Matt Derosier 1:38:13
Yes. Thank you. Take care. Yep. Bye

bye.