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Recorded March 15th, 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.]

Josiah Young 0:00
So if I can do it, anybody can do it. Again, just pick that one or two things, things that are important to you things that you think you’re gonna like. Because again, like I didn’t, I didn’t visit any place that honestly the closest I’ve been to a goat. I mean, goats were a petting zoo. Like, at the Missouri State Fair. Like I didn’t I didn’t have any extreme goats. I didn’t have zero animal husbandry experience. I helped I helped with sheep. When I was a kid, we would we would round them up and hold them for a sheep share. So I mean, a little bit of exposure but nothing I mean, I didn’t grow up around it I those regime

Matt Derosier 0:38
at the State Fair and be like, yeah, for huge balls.

This is the FarmHopLife podcast, I’m Matt Derosier. Today my guest is Josiah Young of Over the Moon near Kansas City, Missouri. Let’s find out what got him into growing his own food. How are you doing today?

Josiah Young 0:51
Good. How are you?

Matt Derosier 0:51
doing good, Thank you very much. So I saw a little quote on your Twitter. And I thought that that was interesting. You said, I’m not an expert in much, but learning by doing. What did you? What did you mean by that? I think we can all take a guess. But I’d like to hear a little bit more about that.

Josiah Young 1:23
So much like a lot of people that kind of get into living in the country and doing things I did not really grow up. I grew up on a little bit of land. But I didn’t really grow up doing any of these things. And it’s kind of hard to find people that do. And so a lot of times I just had to go out there and do stuff. In order to learn how to do it. I’m really good at failing forward. I do that, actually. And I do that personally. So it’s just learning. It’s just and being completely unwilling to pay anybody. or do any of those things. You know, have anybody else do it. I just I just do it myself. I kind of got that from my dad in the 22 years that I lived at home. I never saw him pay anybody to do anything. He just learned. He learned everything. Did it all himself built his own house. That works. So

Matt Derosier 2:21
still standing, I hope.

Josiah Young 2:23
Yeah, yeah, he’s actually that’s, uh, he built a geodesic dome back in the early 80s. So any of my eccentric sees? Probably come from my father. He’s a he’s an odd duck. But But yeah, so that he built he built his own dome. He and my mom did all by themselves. They had some friend’s house, but otherwise he did it all. So I kind of get all that from him. So

Matt Derosier 2:50
that’s cool. The out of the box type a type of stuff like that. That’s I like alternative building methods. I think they’re pretty neat. like Adobe cob. hempcrete rammed earth like all that stuff. earthbag like, I don’t know. It’s different.

Josiah Young 3:08
Well, the unfortunate thing is is that if my since my dad did that, I have to do something crazy to I can’t let my dad

Matt Derosier 3:14
Got to one up him.

Josiah Young 3:16
Yeah I’ve got, got a I’ve got to do something out of the box. I’m not

Matt Derosier 3:20
gotta go underground

Josiah Young 3:24
I actually we had some friends when I was a kid that had a fully underground house. And it was it was pretty cool. So

Matt Derosier 3:31
that is pretty cool. So how did you get started homesteading? You don’t call yourself a homesteader you just make food for yourself, I guess

Josiah Young 3:41
is what Yeah, I just, I think I think slapping a label on it. It, it makes it sound like it’s not normal. And for me, this is this is just me, this is just what I wanted to do. It used to be normal. So why why slap a label on something that was was normal 100 years ago, 150 years ago, whatever. You know, people raise their own food. And that’s just, I just want I want to do and you know, if I can if I can make money off of it, or you know, if I can, you know, turn it a side hustle or whatever that looks like. That’s what we’ll do. But I don’t like the label in general. It’s just, it’s just what just I wanted to do, basically, but really, it kind of stems from growing up. I grew up on a little bit of land, my parents, you know, they tried to split between live in a city life. To some degree guests are made out of a Normie life normal life and living on land and doing stuff with it. I mean, I grew up in a dome. I mean, that’s pretty odd. But that’s kind of where it started is you know, that idea that I could you know, we had a garden we had chickens. We didn’t do anything crazy. We lived aside from living in a dome and we lived a pretty average average life. But I knew I wanted property. And so it took a while. We lived in an apartment for five years and then lived in a house in Kansas City for two years. And the market went nuts. And we got out of there, sold out and moved on to our current property recently. Well, it’s been it’s been five years, it’ll will, it’ll be five years in August. So, anyways, why why that changed, I guess, early on, I would probably have just been happy to have a little garden and that’d be that somebody gave me a Joel Salatin book, I don’t remember who it was. And I guess subverted, me converted me, however you want to hear we’re gonna look at that, right? But they gave me a Joel Salatin book, and I was intrigued, I had never really thought about it. I didn’t really care much about I still don’t I drink Mountain Dew. I’m not particularly. I mean, I’m a pretty normal when it comes to some diet. I mean, you can see the pantry behind me. You know, but it got me intrigued by all that. And so I started looking into what I wanted to do while we were still living in that housing in, in the city. And when we moved up here, I jumped in with both feet. Probably too much. To be to be truthful. It was it was a little too much. We did everything all at once that first year too. So. So yeah, that’s pretty much the origin story.

Matt Derosier 6:32
So let’s, I’m gonna I’m gonna go out of order here a little bit. So what did you so your first year? What did you What did you try to do in that first year, that was a little too much first year to

Josiah Young 6:46
dig a garden. We took what my parents had done, and I said, I can do it better than my parents. And I think it was probably three times the size of my parents. On top of that, my wife was, well, we had two, two of our kids. I think she was pregnant with the third. The first growing year we had, so that so we moved in the fall. So I had a little bit of time to kind of get acquainted acquainted with everything. But we did a huge garden. We bought chickens. We did pigs. And we got our first goats all in that first Wow, 365 days. And it was it was a bit nuts. I bit off more than I could chew. It was it was and I was still commuting at the time. So I we live about an hour north of Kansas City. So I was still driving two hours a day round trip. And it was it was too much. And my wife was actually working a little bit at the time too. So we would go in together, we would be down in the town for 1214 hours with kids. It was it was miserable. It was absolutely miserable. Way too much. But again, learn by doing. I didn’t know, I didn’t know that that was forward. Yeah. And I mean, I did I did well, we learned what we what we could accomplish with all that we learned how to be more efficient with time. I mean, that’s what I do with my day job is work on efficiencies. And so that was something I had to learn is like, you know, I have to be better, I have to be more efficient about it. But

Matt Derosier 8:22
you have any, like automation setup on your homestead, then to like kind of improve efficiencies.

Josiah Young 8:33
That’s something that’s actually coming kind of this year. Previously, we had really lousy internet. And I didn’t really want to go down the whole networking my stuff or do any of that stuff, if I wasn’t going to be able to monitor when I was gone. And we didn’t really have the bandwidth to do it. I’m talking like two or three megabytes down, one up kind of a, it was bad. I actually worked from home for about a year and a half that way, it was pretty miserable. But that’s something we’re looking into this year. We’re talking about putting some cameras up in the goat barn that we’re gonna be working on building this year. And doing a little bit of that kind of stuff, monitoring, checking temperatures, more that kind of stuff. As far as other other automation. We do have, I have a bunch of alarms for freezers for the root cellar, chicken houses, that kind of thing just to kind of keep an eye on things. I don’t necessarily automate any of those things. But I get an alert if the temperatures past a certain point or whatever. Thus far we really haven’t I mean other than that, I don’t know that there’d be a lot of stuff I go out there and I check on the animals in the morning so I mean, ain’t shutting it’s not a huge deal and I work from home I if if I was still driving in I probably would have to automate some more to make like my life and my wife It’s life a little easier. But yeah, apparently, I was

Matt Derosier 10:03
just I was just curious because it’s it’s been something I’ve been thinking about here like, okay, like if I set up like an Arduino or something like that, or one of the other 100 options, I’m sure there are now like, I talked to a couple that have like one of those sunup to sundown, like, automatic chicken coop doors, but they’re like 175 bucks apiece, and I’m like, Man, that’s kinda just go open a door. I feel like I could just go do that manually. But hey, whatever, whatever they want to do. Right? So

Josiah Young 10:37
yeah, I mean that some of my concerns with those things is, you know, with animals, weird stuff happens. And that’s one of the things I mean, I posted it was, it was probably a month ago, like an average time that it takes for me to take care of the goats. And that doesn’t really take into consideration the time that goat like ramps through the door and disappears on you. Or when a possum gets into your chicken house, and your chickens are already sitting outside. You know, because they’re terrified. And the possums just said they’re eaten eggs. Like, if the door closes, I don’t I you know, so I’m gonna go check anyway. So I don’t know how much that automation would help me. You know, we freerange our birds. So some of that. I just don’t I mean, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t necessarily trust it. I just know, like, we’ve had enough things go wrong. Right? I don’t know that I would ever trust it. And I’m the kind of guy that I’ll wake up at two in the morning and wonder if I close the chicken house. So you know, my mileage may be a little different than someone else’s.

Matt Derosier 11:45
No, I get it. I mean, the automation sounds nice. But you’re like, do I really want to run the risk of it failing on me? And then it was like, okay, then was it all worth it? You know, if you have a poor connection to start with, you’re kinda like, and then you know, okay, for some reason, this stopped working. And I thought it was still working now. Something as simple as, like, the GFI tripped on the outside of my house. And the water froze up for the chickens, or whatever. I went out there and like, oh, my gosh, like the waters just froze up solid. And so I had, like, I had somewhere to be that morning, scrambling to, to get the bucket thought out and come up with like, Plan B, while that’s falling out. And like, man, is it gonna get above freezing today? I mean, if I put in warm water, it should be good all day. Like, you know, and then? Well, because the GFI tripped. You know, that’s pretty, a pretty basic thing. And you’re not trying to have it connected to the internet and back and all this, all this stuff. So

Josiah Young 13:03
and I work I work it I mean, not it’s not technically a traditional IT job. But I, I see, even stupid simple things fail, for the reasons. And so I think it’s funny. I mean, several of my it, coworkers, we talk about how, despite the fact that we’re probably the most capable of getting these things working. We’re also the least likely to do it. Like a lot of the people that I work with, they have a lot of smart things in their house. I don’t know that anybody in the my IT department has a smart house or anything like that, because we do I just know. And it’s it’s not that it’s necessarily a bad thing to do just just leery because I see stupid things go wrong. So though I agree other reasons.

Matt Derosier 13:50
Yeah. I mean, I’m an electrician. And sometimes we run cat six cable, well, if it’s twisted slightly, because cat six is very picky. It the it fails the test. And so I mean, something as simple as that. And personally, like, I just have like a couple switches that turn lights on and off. And it doesn’t always work or like the, like a nest doorbell camera because my wife likes to see who’s who’s at the front door before she goes to the door. And those things, again, doesn’t always work. So just as you add complexity, it’s just gonna go haywire and go wrong. So I thought I didn’t ask directly, but I had a feeling that you were in it based on some of your responses when we were when we were messaging each other. So that was, I guess I was right. Yep. So what motivates you to grow your own food?

Josiah Young 14:54
You know, I guess I guess there’s a couple things. A lot. But it’s for the kids, I think. You know, it’s kind of the cache about, like, I want them to know where the food comes from. I also really want them to have responsibilities that are important. So that was a big thing. Like I said earlier, I’m not necessarily i, we don’t we don’t spray anything. We don’t. We don’t. I mean, we’re fairly organic, I guess you could say, when it comes to what we grow. But it’s not for any kind of product. I mean, I’m pretty pragmatic about it. Realistically, I guess. The most important goal is to put food on the table. And then after that, you know, I can start with with being dogmatic about how I do it, with the realization that I’m using less chemicals, or I’m, you know, treating the animal better along the way, but ultimately, you know, aside from all those things at the end of the day, it’s it’s food security. Right, as it’s kind of the big one of late you know, I I was concerned especially geopolitically so I work in import export, for an import export company. And so I see how tenuous some of those connections are, how complicated some of those things are. And so even prior to Corona, knowing just how, what a delicate dance it is to make sure that we have food on our shelves, and when Corona happened, and it made it abundantly clear that there wasn’t much difference between full shelves and empty shelves. That was kind of a big moment for me and kind of kicking it, I guess, a little in overdrive in terms of, you know, being able to produce and maybe even saying, you know, turn it into a real you could side hustle or real farm, however you want to phrase that we we had been given a bunch of chickens. So when we when Corona really first hit. We were selling 20 some dozen eggs a week because people couldn’t get eggs. So we would just make a week once a week trip into Kansas City and

Matt Derosier 17:28
only doesn’t Wow.

Josiah Young 17:32
So yeah, we have so now at the time, I think we had about 50 hands we have about 40 now but it’s so we were selling eggs and that was kind of I mean, we were more than paying for chicken feet at the time it was before feed costs went up. And I realized I don’t want I can make a kind of a side hustle not have to, there’s clearly a need for me to be able to do some of this we live pretty far away from a grocery store. You know, being being self sufficient when it came to eggs and when it came to dairy. It was a big deal. You know, there wasn’t a lot of milk on the shelves at the time so it kind of changed things for us in terms of urgency I think we kicked it up a notch in terms of weather you know how how quickly we could sell for Lion isn’t isn’t really an accurate word the way the way I see it is most people look at homesteading as like a horizontal monopoly. You want to you want to like take care of everything across the whole you know all your all your veggies, all your meat all your data, all that stuff. And I think it’s it’s probably a lot more accurate historically as well as realistically to look at it and vertical monopolies I want. Like the goats. We still import import we still buy hay, but if I can make it so that I run the whole Goat Chain we have a buck or two bucks you know we do all the breeding. We cut all the hay here. If I can run that whole operation then I am completely resilient in that way. Yeah, and that means I can barter those things for anything else that I need because nobody you know No Man’s an island and so for me that the food security ultimately was what it came down to I’m kind of rambling there off the question there but food security was what it’s all about. So at the end of the day

Matt Derosier 19:28
are your goats for meat or for milk

Josiah Young 19:33
they’re they’re mostly for milk. We had it was it was another one of my my homesteading mistakes. I guess you could call it the first year we were here. We had a friend of mine he had a bunch of bow or Kiko goats. He brought out a breed before it’s a it’s a cross there blower slash Kiko.

Matt Derosier 19:59
Oh Okay,

Josiah Young 20:00
they’re big old before. Okay. That’s to my recollection, they were their big old meat goats. It wasn’t something we were particularly interested in. But he brought them in. And random and our pasture pasture was hideously overgrown. The previous owner, maybe even previous owners had never, never taken care of it. So he ran those goats. Well, he had two extra bucks that he didn’t want anymore. And so he just gave them to us. So we slaughtered them, about a month after we had them, and put them in the freezer. And my wife, it turns out, she’s not a fan of the taste of Bucky goat, I guess, basically, is what you could what you could call it, they were not whether they were real bucks. I didn’t think it was so different from a buck deer I’ve shot. I didn’t notice. I mean, it was a little game here. It wasn’t my favorite. But it was it was protein. My wife’s not a fan. So we haven’t had goats since. Basically, she tells me that if push came to shove, we can eat the goats. But we’ve also been able to sell all the little ducklings every time so I thought I mean, it’s not a huge income stream, but it’s a little bit of money. And that’s far she’s, that’s her impetus for selling them. She gets on Craigslist right away. And listen, because if we keep them I’m going to eat them. So she has a reason to list them. But that’s their milk goats. We have all of them but one or Nigerian dwarf goats. Okay. So they’re not very big. They’re kind of perfect. I I know lots of people have different different feelings on the matter. But for me, they’re cheap. At least locally. You can get a dough for 150 bucks. I’m not talking about every common. Yeah. But they’re 150 bucks here, you can get a book for 75 bucks. And you can throw them in the back of a van. And at the same time, the math, it sounds horrible. But the math is if I lose a goat, it’s not a huge deal. I mean, it’s it’s awful. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t nobody likes losing animals. But if something goes wrong, I have 14 Other goats out there. Sure. I can’t we don’t have the land, we have 21 acres and about half of it we use for the homestead per se. So I don’t have enough land to really run a fully contained cow herd. But goats Let us run a lot of animals, potentially run a couple bucks and keep the genetics you know, clean. But they’re small, easy to handle. Like I said you throw them in a minivan. And having a bunch of them means the milk supply is a lot more resilient than just the one dairy cow, or two hearing cows or however many I could realistically handle here, which is why we did it that way. So it works for us. Good.

Matt Derosier 23:12
How much does a goat buckling? I guess go for? Okay,

Josiah Young 23:18
we’ve been selling cars for about $75 apiece. So it’s not it’s not bad. We’ve we’ve never sold a dwelling. We’re still kind of growing. We’re still trying to figure out like I was talking about with with a vertical monopoly. We’re still trying to figure out how many dos we’d need in milk to provide butter yogurt. The fresh milk ice cream every now and again, that kind of thing. We’re not quite there yet. But most of our nose. I think we’re milking three right now. And I think we’re about I think we have two more. That will wean off here in a little bit. And then we’ll have we have four more that are bred so potentially we could find out this summer exactly how many goats a family of seven would need to keep us fully in dairy.

Matt Derosier 24:08
So we’ll find out how many how many gallons are you getting a day,

Josiah Young 24:13
we get a coat a quart per goat per day on average, okay. Right now it’s probably a terrible time to kind of spot that number off simply because they’re on hay. It’s good. Hey, I mean we feed them alfalfa but usually that first flush of grass, they really start producing and obviously it ebbs and flows based on how long it’s been since they’ve been freshened. But that’s the average for the little goats. We have one that’s she’s happy to be in and she produces a lot she produces more than a quart a day, but it’s pretty much it. So they’re pretty economical overall.

Matt Derosier 24:58
Did you say that you have pay eggs too.

Josiah Young 25:01
We had pigs had eggs, okay, I

Matt Derosier 25:03
still had them that first

Josiah Young 25:05
year we had them. I didn’t want I don’t, I didn’t make a whole lot of financial sense. We process them ourselves.

Matt Derosier 25:16
That sounds like a lot of work.

Josiah Young 25:17
It was we had, we had to my wife’s cousin lives pretty close to us. And so he basically paid for me to care for one of the pigs. It was a lot of work. And then we didn’t, we didn’t really, we hadn’t really been connected in the community very well. There’s some opportunities now to I posted about it on Twitter, but we picked up a bunch of down corn. And I think if you can make some of those things work for you, then maybe you could make it make sense. But it didn’t really make all I didn’t it didn’t know, the math didn’t work out very well for us. I’d probably try it again, with maybe a bigger pen. And maybe with some of the connections I have now and some abilities to kind of scavenge food. But at the time, the math didn’t make sense. And one of them got pretty aggressive towards the end. So I have little kids, I basically said, You know what, I’m not gonna worry about pigs and tell. Either I can get a better setup. The kids are bigger, et cetera, et cetera. I love bacon. I love sausage. So someday, we’ll probably end up doing it. But it has to be a different setup. So,

Matt Derosier 26:37
gotcha. So you said that you’ve got a that you were gifted a Joel Salatin book, do you remember which one I was?

Josiah Young 26:49
For? You’re probably look, it’s one of them was everything I want to do as illegal, I think. Cuz it’s funny that if the guy that gave it to me, I don’t think he was particularly food. I think he was more just a libertarian bent. Like he just hated the government intervention. So that’s the reason he gave it to me. But I got curious. And I think I picked up a couple more of his books I forget, there’s there’s two others that I really liked by him. But yeah, I think it was everything I want to do is illegal, or whatever that one’s called. So

Matt Derosier 27:23
what’s funny about that book is like I will when it goes when, sometimes it like makes its way across like the internet or whatever, every now and then. And like, I always see it just the book title, but never the author, and I’m like, Will you at least give credit where credit’s due? Like, come on? That’s kind of a dick move. Yeah. So so the reason I asked about the books is I was just curious what methods or techniques or practices that you’ve got on your farm, like rotational grazing or paddock shifting or something.

Josiah Young 28:00
So we have I forget how many how many links of Premier one electric netting that we use for the goats. I think it’s 300 Total feet. But we run that in the yard a lot. Basically, we move it I hate mowing. It was one of the things when when I moved to the country, I told my wife that I wasn’t gonna mow. I didn’t want I didn’t want to be one of those guys that you know, bought five acres and mowed and that’s all he did. Like that just seems silly.

Matt Derosier 28:33
Same, it’s stupid.

Josiah Young 28:35
So I’m glad that that’s good to hear. So I have a lot more than that. I didn’t want to mow 20 acres either. But I so I did not want to mow. So that was one of the reasons we got the electric fencing. And so we rotate them through the yard. And then we have two paddocks that we put up with basically scavenge chain link, we had a guy, he let let me tear down all of his chain link that we put up, that equaled about a half an acre, which worked pretty well until the goat herd basically doubled last year and so we’ve been putting in basically acre paddocks and then hopefully, as we grow with that, and as we put some more in, we’ll end up dividing them a little more. I can’t really right now because they’re not cleared enough, it would be a nightmare to get them a little more subdivided. I’d love to get them into half acre, even quarter acre within those hardwired, you know, permanent fences and kind of rotate them through. But basically the setup is gonna be pretty rotational. We’ll have a barn as basically the spoke of the wheel and then we’ll just have paddocks coming off of each, you know, in each direction. I think

Matt Derosier 29:59
that’s pretty good. Sweet, that sounds cool. It basically the

Josiah Young 30:02
goal, the goal, and it goes back to the efficiency thing I don’t I love the idea of intensively rotating. But you could call it efficiency really, it’s lazy, I don’t, I don’t want to have to go out there and be moving and juggling things all the time. They when the kids are older, that can be a chore for them. But for now, I don’t want to have to mess with it. So the goal is basically so we’re gonna build a barn in the center of the pastures. And we’ll just open a door, you know, open each gate, depending on which which pasture they need to be in, and kind of go from there. So that’s, that’s really it there. I don’t like I said, I love the ideas. I’d like to put some of them in practice. It’s more just, we, there’s there was no infrastructure here, when we bought the place, so it’s all been spelled in it. So the electric fence has come in handy for that. But

Matt Derosier 31:02
do you have your chickens follow your goats? Or do you not need to do that on your property?

Josiah Young 31:09
We basically so when we first is backing out, when when I grew up raising chickens, we had a very conventional setup dinky little run 1015 layers. That was when we first moved up here, that’s exactly how I did it. And I didn’t like it was a just a standard. I mean, it was a little cheap little Lowe’s shed that the guy had bought prior to us moving up here. So I use that we had tried a chicken tractor. While we were living in Kansas City, we were trying at my parents house still. We tried meat, birds and a chicken tractor. And it went horribly wrong. We had a raccoon sneak underneath the tractors and kill half the birds. And then, two nights later, after blocking all those holes up and turn it into the Alcatraz. He got in again. And we went from 50 Meat birds state team. So ultimately all that to be said, I think a lot of times these are called fancy ideas. They’re not really I’m leery of those fancy ideas. Because of that experience. I wanted to try something new. I wanted to get the chickens out on grass, I wanted to I wanted to Joel Salatin it up man, and it failed horribly. And I’m not saying that’s a bad idea. I’ve seen it work. It’s never worked for us. So I hated putting the chickens back in the house. It wasn’t fun. But the first year we were here, me and my dog between the two of us. We killed 27 raccoons out of the yard. And they weren’t getting to the chickens or anything. There was just that many raccoons here. Wow. And that’s just the yard like I didn’t go out of the way to do it. That was just me and the dog would go out there to check on animals right before bed. And there would be raccoons in the yard. So all that to be said, the first year or two I thought I had to I thought that was just how I had to set it up. But basically we just started free ranging last last year. Basically what feeds started going up, it kind of goes back to the whole, you know, the goat value. If I’m spending $10 $12 A day dumping a bunch of food at these chickens. Is it is it really worth the math versus the potential of losing a chicken or two because I free range. And so I started free ranging I just let them all out. We had a really nice pen set up for him it was pretty big. And I said I can’t afford the chicken feed. So we’re just gonna free range. So we free range. I don’t run them. They still have a stationary coop. I don’t run them after any of the goats or anything. They go wherever the heck they want to. It’s been huge feed consumption is way way down. I mean just absolutely insane. We used to probably go through 2020 25 pounds of feed a day something like that maybe we have a few chickens died of old age we haven’t had a single production issue and the year that we’ve been doing this so we have fewer chickens but we use way less food. I mean, down to just a couple pounds a day really. And they seem healthier. I realized that’s kind of subjective thing to say but they do seem healthier. They run around a little you know a lot more they seem it’s fun to watch them on top of that. I don’t really like chickens, but it’s fun to watch them free range. So it is yeah. But so that’s it that’s really it when it comes to the animals in terms Have so we free range them. Honestly, towards the end of last year, we were kind of free range and the goats. We fenced off the orchard and the berries. And then let them just go to town and figure things out. They didn’t wander too far. Again, we never had a predation issue despite the fact we get neighbor’s dogs. And we ended up not having to feed hay into December, despite the fact that we didn’t I didn’t do anything special. I didn’t have any winter pasture. I didn’t pull a Greg, Judy and like leave a bunch of paddocks. You know, I just we just let it let it go. And they scavenged. So we’ve had some, I mean, a lot of learning, again, learning by doing when it comes to that stuff. You know, initially we did things really conventionally. And kind of learning how to get away with doing something in a different way, something that works for us. So that you know that that kind of worked out when it came to the animals.

Matt Derosier 36:03
Really nice. So in your Do you use any of your chickens or like goat manure in like, building up a compost in your garden or anything or?

Josiah Young 36:16
Yep, so we we do basically the I want a deep bedding or whatever for the chicken house. We don’t we don’t heat it or anything like that. We just throw a bunch of bedding in through the winter. What zone are you in? Five B, north northwest Missouri. It’s okay, it’s five, five B. Okay. So we get we get pretty cold. We usually have this winter was really mild, but the chickens have been just fine down to negative 25 for a couple nights with nothing. So it worked out pretty well. It does keep it a little warmer. I don’t know how much warmer I’m sure they’d be happier with a heat lamp, but they survived. So So anyways, we every spring, I clean that out and then we keep it pretty, pretty shallow in there. And then they go manure, we muck the barn out. Because prior to this year, they spent most winters in the barn. Just in a small little lot, the hay was in there, so it was a little more convenient. This year, we put them on one of the little paddocks, most of them with the exception of one or had babies. So that manure is not going to be quite as easy to use what hopefully because goat manure is not as hot. So the plan is to take that paddock that’s basically grazed or beaten to bare dirt. We’re going to tell it up till and all that poop till and all the nutrients we got from the hay and we’re going to try some grains it’s about a quarter of an acre. So we’re going to put in corn and that and try and watch you know just kind of an experiment. It’s a pretty cheap experiment corn is cheap. So we’re going to plant corn and see what happens see if it’s worth basically hard you know winter paddock have them beat it down, have them doing a bunch of the work have all those important nutrients from the hay and see if that’s enough to get a decent corn crop. You know enough the corn that we got when we went and picked up corn. It defrayed feed fairly well. I mean, so for us that’s kind of it is I’m trying to work I’m I’m basically relearning what everybody already knew, which was you know, graze it, then you can plant in it, and then let it go fallow. Like we don’t have to do that again. We can let it get back, I can put a better seed a better pasture seed in there, let it bounce back. And then give it a break and not let it be a winter. You know, paddock for a year or two? Which again, I think some of that is just it is relearning it is it is learning what works for us. And again, I mean some of those things like he read about him in books and some of that really does mean it does work so

Matt Derosier 39:20
nice about your free ranging your chickens is would you say that that’s one of the things that you’ve tried and worked well. Was there anything else that

Josiah Young 39:31
oh, gosh, yeah. Free ranging chickens absolutely worked really, really well. That was a it was a huge one. The the goats and the electric fencing was one moving moving them regularly.

Matt Derosier 39:49
How often do you have to move them? Did you say

Josiah Young 39:52
it does. The mortgage obviously the more goats we threw in there, the more often we had to move it. It’s not a particular With a huge I mean 300 feet when you turn it into a square, it’s it’s not particularly big. And a lot dependent on seasons. That was something we ended up learning, I think the hard way. It was great because

Matt Derosier 40:12
the grass.

Josiah Young 40:15
Yeah, we were watching the grass, but learning and learning that like in again, this, this is gonna sound really silly to some people. But when you got that spring rain and your grass is just growing non stop, it’s like we kept the goats in basically an acre yard and we just moved them all the time. And then we hit late July and August, and the grass stopped. And so of course, like it sounds silly to even say that now but summer late summer hit, we stopped having a bunch of rain, and the grass stopped growing as well. And we had I mean, we got rain, but it wasn’t growing as well. And so I’m sure experienced grazers out there would laugh at that admission, but it just hit me like out of nowhere, like, oh crap, I don’t have anywhere else to graze. So that’s when we actually started building the first paddock. But that rotation and learning all that was really big. The downside, I think with goats and using a fence like that, is that where I really want to put them is really brushy. And moving those fences through brushy areas is the worst thing in the world. I bet yeah, you want to test the strength of your marriage. You and your wife go out there you and your spouse go out there and try and dragging electric fence netting through brushy areas trying to get it set up. Who will man especially trying to do it before work like you know trying to sneak out there right before I was supposed to be at work. Lots of tester it was it was pretty fun at times so

Matt Derosier 41:47
so what would you stay didn’t work then other than trying to fit electric netting through brush.

Josiah Young 41:56
The chicken tractor is one I did talk about. I had a terrible experience with that I don’t think we tried chicken tractor again. I’d be much more likely to free range, even meat birds. What else we’ve had all sorts of failures. Well, I strongly suggest strongly suggest that people get their hay taken care of before December. That’s another big failure this year. It was kind of we just had all of our previous high sources fell through the cracks and I just didn’t make it a very urgent thing. That’s the reason why the goats prearranged. It wasn’t because we wanted to it’s because I was an idiot and didn’t didn’t think I was a big deal. Fencing been really, really serious about the fencing. I, our our dogs were kind of escape artists. And so I thought if you could make you know, I could make a pretty good fence because I kept the dogs in. And we have one goat she will break out anywhere. And so the the amount of frustration involved in keeping a goat that doesn’t want to be in there. If you just make the fence right the first time, that’s kind of a big deal. That’s a frustrating thing. Oh, I mean, really think about how many failures. We have lots I fully admit we had many failures. Sure,

Matt Derosier 43:30
yeah.

Josiah Young 43:32
Water, I think some of some of the things that were probably most most frustrating, we set up the animals in a place far. We had existing infrastructure, we have a it’s I think 100 year old barn that used to have electricity run to it. And it doesn’t anymore. But that’s where we decided to set up our animal operation and so having to deal with carrying water out there and having to manually break up ice. Those are like, you don’t think about that. And again, it’s my laziness. Yeah, but man it’s frustrating. It’s I mean I so I think for as far as things that I learned it’s Intel you know 100% That that the solution you’re doing is going to work for you being very willing to scrap whatever it was whatever grand idea and saying you know, that didn’t work let’s try something different. We we moved the chicken house three times before I built a permanent one. You know the goats we tried them in different spots. And then we finally ended up settling on electric fence. I think those have been some of them were the bigger ones is realizing especially when you watch some of those YouTube videos and this is this is a soapbox I get on for a lot of people. You watch those YouTube videos and they have this very cool They have their way and it works really well for them, and I’m sure it does. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me. And so really understanding that not being set in a certain way. Because I wouldn’t say that they’re like, tremendous mistakes, but they were things that didn’t go well at all. And the cost of them, you know, not being able to keep, like not being able to keep a buck in his pen. It ended up I mean, it was just like a knock on effects. He ended up breeding goats, we didn’t want bread, which meant that we had dos dropping kids in the middle of winter. So we ended up losing some kids. You know, and then I mean, so just on and on and on, like, that made it more difficult. And I had to run, you know, I had to go out in the middle of night and check on these pregnant does, I mean, just these little things like that they ended up just really exponentially increasing difficulty. I think, especially for someone like me, who doesn’t have a lot of experience with it. Like those things, making it making an already difficult experience and already difficult learning curve even harder because of one little thing at the start and like trying to find those to make life easier.

Matt Derosier 46:18
Yeah. No, that’s, that’s good to know. Good to share, like those those failures, like, this is where I’ve, this is where I failed, and had to learn hard from this, or these mistakes. So

Josiah Young 46:34
I mean, I really probably could, my wife would probably be a perfect a perfect person to mention. She tends to remember either the successes and the failures a lot more, but it both, she’s just better at remembering successes and failures a little better than me. I tend to try and at least, you know, just, Today’s a new day kind of a thing, both good and bad. But I’m sure she can remind me of a few more ridiculous failures that we’ve had, as far as I guess, I guess one of them. It’s not necessarily animal related. But we we got up here it’s it’s 100 year old farmhouse. And there’s no no wood burning stove or anything like that. Well, we moved in. And we just kind of assumed that the previous guy really liked money, and didn’t want to just burn his money in this furnace that he had. I was not the case. We had a ridiculous heating bill the first winter we were up here.

Matt Derosier 47:31
Oh, no.

Josiah Young 47:34
I mean, and we couldn’t even keep the house warm. So it was ridiculous heating bill, and we couldn’t keep the house warm anyways. And so yeah, I mean, little stuff like that, where you just again, assumptions, I mean, just these assumptions about how something was going to work. So then what do you do? We ended up so basically, we just suffered, we suffered through I will tell you right now we had the summer before, even with an air conditioner. We were at about $100 a month. And then in February, the first winter, we were up here, we had a $440 electric bill. So four times. And it was cold. Still, it was miserably cold. That furnace could not keep up. And it was like burning. I mean, it would I would have been cheaper setting dollar bills on fire. So we ended up going with a wood burning stove. I put it in. And it’s working much much better. We took out the furnace, actually. So we’re sold solely wood, wood heat in the house now sounds pretty sweet. It’s worked out really well. So

Matt Derosier 48:32
we have anything No, so go ahead.

Josiah Young 48:35
Oh, I you just we have a bunch of the properties, 13 acres of timber and about eight acres of pasture or brush. So not I mean, we’ve gotten given a bunch of wood. So I’ll sometimes go to other people’s houses and get wood. But I mean, we could do it all here. So that’s worked out really well. So it’s I mean, aside from a chainsaw, you know, it’s free. It’ll pay for itself. So yeah.

Matt Derosier 49:04
So you do you have anything unique, that you’re you’re running on your property or that you’re trying to grow or anything like that.

Josiah Young 49:15
I’ve done tobacco three years now. It’s unique. It’s pretty easy. Really. I’m kind of surprised more people don’t do it. Especially Missouri has really, really low tobacco tax, but obviously not every state does. So I’m kind of surprised more people don’t do it. I would say it’s probably about I mean, it’s about as easy as grown tomatoes. Obviously preparing the tobacco. But it’s really Yeah, I mean, it really is it really is about that easy. Obviously it takes some work. And I’ve been told I’m not a I’m not a smoker. It was really just for kicks and giggles. I

Matt Derosier 49:53
was I was gonna ask like Do you smoke it in a pipe or like personal consumption? I don’t know what

Josiah Young 49:59
I had of smoke I’ve smoked in in a pipe. But I wasn’t it was more just out of curiosity was something I had read about. And I like a cigar every now and again. So I thought, You know what, I’ll just I’ll just try this. How hard can it be? And it’s really not that hard. I’m told. It’s not great tobacco. So maybe I need to try a different variety. This was from cigarette smokers. So I liked the pipe smoke that I did. Like, I liked that. But that’s something we’ve tried. It also keeps away paths growing the tobacco the internet don’t like it. So it was kind of a kind of a double whammy, I guess you could say. Other than that, I am not. I mean, that’s one of the reasons I try and shy away from the label of upset or whatever. Anyways. I’m not a particularly unique. I mean, we don’t I don’t think we really do anything particularly crazy. Partially by design. You know, I, I think especially, I mean, we so we homeschool our kids.

Matt Derosier 51:10
How many kids do you have?

Josiah Young 51:12
So we have five? Wow. So we homeschool and I work a day job. So I if I can learn from somebody else I learned from somebody else, which means uniqueness isn’t necessarily something that I strive for. I’d rather someone else learn the lesson for me, despite my philosophy of learning by doing, you know, watch YouTube videos and whatnot to learn, but yeah, I don’t I mean, I don’t think we really have tried anything. Anything crazy, really. Other than the tobacco. I think my daughter wants to grow some peanuts this year. I don’t know very many people that grow peanuts, like small scale.

Matt Derosier 51:52
No. So just just SpongeBob I think grow grow peanuts.

Josiah Young 51:59
So we’ll see how that goes. But other than that, like I said, I It’s pretty normal stuff. As far as unique stuff. We’re probably going to try I am so I bought a sawmill back in the summer it’s finally here. I’m building it. I’m actually short some parts. So it’s been a little

Matt Derosier 52:17
Of course of course the short parts another six months before you get them

Josiah Young 52:21
well they actually it we were lucky they’re little plastic injection molded pieces that the the engine raises and lowers on they shipped me the wrong size but it so I you know, I wait eight weeks for it. And then I actually we had we were sick the week I got it. So it’s pretty miserable. And so when I finally get out there, I go through the first and I get the whole bed made. And then I discovered that we’re short pieces. So it was a little frustrating. But we’re going to try building building our own house here. So that’s I guess, I guess you could say that’s unique. So we’re gonna I’m gonna do all the work on that.

Matt Derosier 53:06
You take lumber from your

Josiah Young 53:09
hopefully from the property. I don’t know what I don’t know what in terms of lumber and how it works in other states. But here in Missouri, the big cash crop is walnut, black walnut, and cottonwood right now people make pallets out of And surprisingly, despite lumber being ridiculously expensive right now. Nobody else really uses a lot of other wood. So my hope is to use some of what we have on our property. And then other people do have so we have a lot of oak. It’s an oak and hickory, northwest Missouri is used to be pretty nice. So I have some options. But right now, white oak usually is cash lumber, but nobody’s really buying it right now from what I understand. At least here locally. And there’s other options. Most people don’t use their hickory but hickory something I can make cabinets and hardwood floors out of honey locust is actually really comparable to Oak. In terms of strength. It splits a little bit but the plan is to is to timber frame I told you earlier that I couldn’t let my father one up me with the dome So my plan is a timber frame house

Matt Derosier 54:26
do so love timber frame houses that I’m kind of taken with them. So yeah, it’s gorgeous. The joinery like it’s just those those guys that like really, really do it. Just like masters in their craft like it’s just I don’t know, just like

Josiah Young 54:47
a North Bend you know that YouTube channel at all?

Matt Derosier 54:51
I don’t think so.

Josiah Young 54:54
I think they’re in Latvia. I want to say they’re they’re an Eastern European it’s it’s a guild of People that basically just do things traditionally. And I think the guy that runs it, he’s, he’s a carpenter, I think it’s the guy that runs it. I don’t, I don’t necessarily know all the backstory, and it doesn’t help that it’s in another, another country. But he has like a 20 minute video of him making this cabin primarily by hand. Logging with a two man crosscut saw, and hauling the wood out behind the horse, and the doing all the joinery. And I was really, really taken by that my wife would probably have preferred that I’d never seen that video, but I was really taken by that

Matt Derosier 55:36
building, your house will take 10 times longer, but man, yes, it’ll be so amazing.

Josiah Young 55:41
Yes, and I mean, we, you know, I guess it’s me being cheap, too. But we, like the goal is to try and stay out of debt for that build. So the point of it would be, you know, we get the mill, and then at least the majority of the things we can we can source very locally, you know, keeping consumption down that way. And cheaply. So, so that’s the plan there. I hope so. I hope so. It’s kind of a it’s kind of a bit of a gamble. You know, learning learning how to timber frame, I mean, the goat barn that I was talking about, that’s going to be kind of the first project. Oh, so kind

Matt Derosier 56:21
of get your feet wet in it. Okay, this is how I this like this type of joint or whatever.

Josiah Young 56:27
Yeah, or just, I can do this. And, you know, with the goats, if the barn falls down, it’s, you know, at least it wasn’t me and my, my kids kind of a thing. And the beauty of it. I mean, ultimately, if it turns out to not be something that I like, or it turns out that I don’t have nearly as many uses for the mill, you know, it’s an asset that can be sold. So it’s not a right. It’s, I mean, I’m not, it’s different than if I just spent, you know, that money on on part of the house build, you know, this way, it’s, it’s a good that I can sell later. So we’ll find out, I’m sure, sure. I’ll post about successes and failures about that. But that’s, that’s probably, yeah, it’ll be it’ll be fun. It’ll be it’ll be interesting. So

Matt Derosier 57:11
speaking of plans, what’s your plan with the goat herd, you kind of touched on it earlier, trying to build it up a little bit, and then sell sell more, I’m assuming

Josiah Young 57:21
that hope, basically, we’re gonna kind of dip our feet into that and see, I’ve touched upon it on on some posts, but it’s about $4 a quart for goat milk at Sprouts, and locally, and that’s pasteurized goat milk. And so my thought is to just try and find some people.

Matt Derosier 57:43
Do you pasteurize or do you just leave? We do

Josiah Young 57:45
not we do not. So I would assume. I mean, it’s legal here in Missouri to sell farmer direct raw milk. So I don’t have to I won’t be worried about any any kind of legal hurdles. We thought about doing a herd share. Basically, we’re just going to try and dip our feet in it and see if it’s worth it. I don’t necessarily I guess that’s my wife has her own little side. hustles. And obviously, I have a job and so I want to make sure is at the end of the day. That’s not entirely the focus. Like I’d love to make money. And if maybe we can time it so some of the kids all our kids are really young. They’re all I think, I don’t think I know the oldest turning six. So

Matt Derosier 58:32
Oh, wow. Just pumping them out. bang them. Mmm.

Josiah Young 58:34
Well, we have we have a we did we did have a surprise. But then we also were in the middle of adopting one of them. So there Oh, all the way down there. So yes, it’s it does look a little crazy, but we didn’t they’re not all biological. My poor wife was not pregnant quite that much. But you know, that my my dream with some of those businesses is to be something that kids can run pretty much by themselves as they get older, you know, so I have one that’s responsible for the dairy you know, one that’s responsible for the eggs, you know, have one that’s helping me with the mill or whatever. I’m not sure the time is gonna work quite quite right for all that, but we’ll see. But if I can make money on it, I’m absolutely game. One of the downsides with dairy, that’s different obviously, with eggs. The bulk doesn’t keep as long. So with gas prices going up, I don’t drive to the city. I only go to the city twice a month. So delivering it to people that that would actually be interested in it will be a little difficult. So we’re still trying to work all that out. You know, if I’m selling a quart for $4 and gas is $4. You know, it takes a lot of milk to be worth going I mean, I guess it could pay for my trip to the city but so we’ll have to see See how that all works. But the goal would be to keep growing it get to a point where we can start trying to sell milk, if that doesn’t work, then we’ll just take a step back, start selling some of the dolines. And not not expand the herd past that point. But I guess like anything with any of those small businesses, you know, there’s, there’s a high likelihood that it’ll fail. And we’ve tried both my wife and I, we’ve done some entrepreneurial type things, and failed at most of them with the exception of her current endeavor. So we’re kind of used to it trying to make sure that you know, we don’t get our all our eggs in one basket, and we’re willing to, you know, we have the ability to fail and, and, you know, not be too stuck into a business idea. So we’ll have to see what happens with

Matt Derosier 1:00:54
a little flexible and see what is looking promising. Sure.

Josiah Young 1:01:00
I gotcha. We’ll see you there.

Matt Derosier 1:01:03
What, what has been the biggest challenge in homesteading or in your case, just providing your own food that you face was the biggest challenge.

Josiah Young 1:01:18
Honestly, it’s probably trying to live the balance, I think, on it. I mean, it was a it was a topic of conversation on on Twitter, this this last week amongst among some of our some of our mutual acquaintances that, you know, that home setting, it’s, it’s, it’s fake. And I don’t necessarily agree with trying to balance the normal, normal, such a weird word to use it, but trying trying to make sure like, I work 40 hours, at least a week, making sure that we’re making progress on the things that are important to us. In the homestead, or, you know, all the other things that accompany that I talked to I do almost all the work around basically everything here. So if a car breaks or whatever, so I mean, I have to juggle all those things on top of the Homestead. And so basically, it goes back to just being overwhelmed. When we first got here, it’s it’s really trying to take manageable bites at all of these projects. When you’re, you’re living a double life, you know, people used to grow their food, and that was a full time job. And we have the benefits of mechanization, and all these other things that we can do. But at the end of the day, it’s still used to be a full time job. And so being reasonable with yourself. And just saying, you know, what, this is, this is, this is good enough, or this is what we’re going to accomplish this year. And it seems silly, and it doesn’t seem like it’s very much but this is reasonable. Because that’s truly was the hardest part was trying to find that happy balance. You know, between those two lives, kind of a thing. I mean, I work it and then I go out and I, you know, I’m holding up a garden patch, like, that dichotomy can be really hard to balance. And especially with friends and family that, you know, they were used to Josiah the city, you know, I played video games and board games with friends. And you know, that’s pretty an average, average urban, you know, suburban dweller. So trying to balance all those things, is hard. So that’s probably the hardest thing about about the law, about how we choose to live is trying to make those balances and making all that work for the family. Right.

Matt Derosier 1:03:48
There’s a there’s a thing going around social media right now. It’s like people feeling burnt out on doing this, that the other thing and whatever the audio overlay is, it’s like just do more things that matter is what the key is, like, don’t try to do everything just do more things that matter. So and I like that. I mean,

Josiah Young 1:04:13
I think I mean, to some degree, that’s where that whole the whole vertical monopoly versus the horizontal. It’s like, I could do pigs, I could do cows, I could do all these things. But like, despite the fact that goats are really frustrating at times, you know, picking I like goats, so we’re just gonna do goats. Does it solve every one of my problems? No, because we still buy bacon, we still buy sausage. Does it? Does it solve problems and and make me happy and is it fulfilling? And do I feel burnt out? No, that’s, you know, it’s a good thing and it gives me some flexibility, you know, and so very much like what you were saying is You we it, picking and choosing the things that really are going to matter to you or the things that are really important and But being willing to be flexible about the rest and not get burnt out? Because we did We absolutely did that first year. It was hard. And learning a lot of people

Matt Derosier 1:05:10
went after stuff like that. There’s Yeah, absolutely. I’m out. Yeah.

Josiah Young 1:05:16
And it’s and it’s hard. And I mean, that’s one of the things when it when I see anybody posts on social media, you know, I have, my wife’s had a couple of friends that have kind of started down this road. And I’m like, listen, pick one thing. Just pick one thing, one thing a year, yeah, do it learn, you know, if you’re really feeling good, you can pick two. But don’t do three, like threes, too many, like just pick to get it to it. And just get really good at those two things. And then move on to the next thing and add one or two things again. Because otherwise, you’ll get overwhelmed and did you’ll get to you’ll get to a point where you say, You know what, this is a good number. This is a good amount for us. This is this is a happy place. You know, this is enough work. This is enough. Commitment. I’m good at this. I like these things we’re going to stop here. And I think that’s a lot more reasonable, especially if you have to live those two lives, you know, if you have to work a day job and do this on the side, right? It’s reasonable.

Matt Derosier 1:06:15
Yeah. So then, what would you tell people that wanted to get started in farming or homesteading? Or just providing their own food?

Josiah Young 1:06:25
You could do it if I mean, if I could do it, anybody can do it, I think is the big thing. I don’t, there’s been a lot of people, especially friends of my wife, that she’s pure city girl wasn’t particularly interested in this stuff until we really got started. Now she’s an absolute Pro. So I don’t want if your spouse is really into it, or really, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s an important thing. But that that being aside, they they all just automatically assume that this is how I grew up. And it’s absolutely not, I all of these things are things I’ve had to learn. So if I can do it, anybody can do it. Again, just pick that one or two things, things that are important to you things that you think you’re going to like. Because again, like I didn’t, I didn’t visit any place. That honestly the closest I’d been to a goat. I mean, goats were a petting zoo. Like, at the Missouri State Fair. Like I didn’t I didn’t have any extreme goats. I didn’t have zero animal husbandry experience. I helped I helped with sheep. When I was a kid, we would we would round them up and hold them for a sheep share. So I mean, a little bit of exposure, but nothing. I mean, I didn’t grow up around it I those regime

Matt Derosier 1:07:37
at the State Fair and be like, Yeah, huge balls.

Josiah Young 1:07:42
You know, it was it was nothing. I mean, those were those were unique enough experiences that I have. I remember because they were odd. It wasn’t a normal thing. So yeah, I didn’t have anything and I didn’t even I don’t I still don’t really know anybody around here that that has goats. I mean, I know. I’ve seen them. But, you know, learning, it’s, it’s hard because of the time commitment. But animals know what to do. And so it’s not particularly hard keeping animals you can keep a dog, you can keep a goat. Milking goats is a little bit of a different story. But if you can keep a dog and keep a goat. So none of it’s particularly hard. It’s not it’s not intellectually challenging or anything like that. So I just I just tell people do it. It’s not. There’s no big hurdle. If you’re willing to do it, if you’re willing to put in the work, you can figure things out. And especially, I mean, I wasn’t I wasn’t on Twitter at the time, when we first got into it. I was not on any internet sites, really. There’s a lot of opportunities for people to learn on Twitter, on Instagram, on YouTube, and how to do these things. So you can leverage that you can leverage that you can learn from somebody in a completely different state. You know, that has that can handle your your unique setup. And that’s, that’s really cool. And it’s something I didn’t really leverage until very recently. But you can and it’s not. It’s not rocket science. It’s really not. I think anybody could do it.

Matt Derosier 1:09:22
Yeah, what I like about the homesteaders and farmers and whoever they’re so willing to help. Even just even just this talking, almost everyone said yes, this is like yeah, I’ll talk to you. What do you want to talk about? Just like well, just farming, homesteading, growing food like stuff. And so they’re just like they’re so willing to share. It’s really amazing. It’s such a great great community. Yeah, just it’s very cool. People are people are cool.

Josiah Young 1:10:00
One of the one of the things that truthfully, I mean, a lot depends on where you end up landing. But the community here has been really, really good. Obviously, it’s a lot more conventional AG, but especially when you get to talk to some of these old people, they, they know how things were done 100 years ago, and that that’s, in my opinion, that’s kind of the first target point is you don’t have to do anything crazy, like try things pretty conventionally just just make it conventionally 100 years ago, not conventional now. But like, one of the guys, when we shelled that corn, or when we got that corn he, I was talking to him about it. And he was like, Yeah, we used to feed I used to raise pigs just on corn, I would pick up out of fields. I was like, Well, how do you shell it because we’ve just been like, twisting it with gloves on. And he described it, and then he ended up wandering back into his barn later that day. And he he found a shelter that we ended up using. So I would I would say again, like, you know, sometimes you might assume that that person doesn’t really have a whole lot of experience with it. But they have tools. Yeah. Or they might have tools that, you know, I bought that mill and one of the one of the deacons from our church. He was like, Well, I have a mill, it’s, you need, like 150 horsepower Cummins, because it’s a 32 inch, you know, circular saw blade thing. But so I mean, he grew up doing that, though. So like he milled he milled the old way. Like he, I mean, he, that’s what he grew up doing. And so these things were like, I wouldn’t have assumed that I wouldn’t have known that. He’s a he’s a conventional ag farmer. He’s a great guy. And if I wanted to know about conventional ag at all, that would be a great source. But in addition to all that, he had a bunch of information that I would have not assumed he had. And he was willing to talk about it all. You know, so you those things. I mean, it is kind of universal thing people like I think people don’t don’t really understand just how much people like helping other people. I mean, what it boils down to, so I I mean, the internet’s proof that there’s random strangers, offering advice about all sorts of things that, you know, a lot of it’s good. So,

Matt Derosier 1:12:19
yeah, and most of it’s also well, intention to, yeah, even if it’s wrong.

Josiah Young 1:12:27
I’ve seen some wrong stuff. So but yes, most of the time there. You know, and it goes, it does go back to some it to some degree to some of those things were like their experience that may have really worked for him. I mean, it’s it, it could still be wrong, horribly wrong, but it also worked. So how wrong could it be, especially for them? Right, but that’s true. But by and large, I mean, there are some people that you’re like, Well, you probably should give advice, you probably shouldn’t give advice about that. But then there’s some people where you, you know, you realize they’re like a, you know, a guru of their topic and running into those people, especially on the internet, or even locally. I mean, there’s, there’s that guy with the pigs, like I was talking about that he raised pigs, you know, knowing, you know, he was talking about all the different little things about raising pigs and all that stuff. And I was like, This is better than watching a YouTube video. I’ve got this guy that lived it, he raised it. You know, this is awesome. I mean, he I think he’s got to be one at something. So he you know, doing it as a kid in the 50s. I mean, he the wealth of information, because that’s that’s pretty much that time period, like I was talking about that conventional AG. You know, those are, it’s it’s a decent starting goal is that time period, so learning from those folks, especially while they’re still here. Big deal. So

Matt Derosier 1:13:50
yeah, absolutely. Well, that that does it for all my questions. Do you want to tell people where they can follow you? What you’ve got going on? Because you did you say that you’re going to start a website or

Josiah Young 1:14:07
the so my wife has an Instagram and all that I posted it on Twitter. Right now. She originally was for kind of all for side hustles altogether. And so this this show lined up spinning up one just just for farm related stuff, so on that post than that, but that’d be a good way to see the more artsy side of things. You’re more likely to find something of some practical things from me then then you or anything fun. But So Twitter. It’s out of the 215 is my handle, but you can find me by just a young as well.

Matt Derosier 1:14:47
I’ll have links to that as well. Yeah.

Josiah Young 1:14:49
Okay. But yeah, so will it it will will have an Instagram and website up probably within the year. I realized that’s kind of a long timeframe, but we don’t really have anything to sell right now. So that So that’s pretty much more just getting getting the word out. But yeah, I just I kind of post a stream of consciousness stuff, but you’re gonna see the attempted to go barn. Again, just watching some YouTube YouTube videos and a book and I’m gonna go out there and tremble, the goat barn timber frame, and you’ll see some more goat stuff. And I’m pretty big on the math side of things. So I’ve had a couple of posts like that. And there’s some more coming down the pike as far as what’s the value? How, you know, is this worth it from a financial aspect? Is this worth it from a from a time aspect. Kind of things I again, I don’t necessarily say a whole lot of unique things. But really, it’s just more like any anybody can do it. So I don’t have a lot of plug in to do. Like I said, I don’t even sell anything. So I can’t do it. I can’t do a whole lot of plugin, but

Matt Derosier 1:16:00
that’s the right you’re selling knowledge, which is doing right now.

Josiah Young 1:16:04
I’m off. I’m giving it giving it free of charge. So there you go. With your knowledge.

Matt Derosier 1:16:10
So, hey, we ought to start somewhere and sometimes behind me, so. But hey, I appreciate your time tonight. And a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, me too. And so yeah, every for everyone else. You can follow FarmHop life almost anywhere. I’ll have a link in the description. So see you later.