The Coop Ep. #01: From Neglect to Abundance (Transforming Your Land and Your Life)

Introduction

We believe food looks and tastes better when it comes from a mason jar, and that every home should have a well used cast iron skillet.

We believe in starting where you are, in being a good steward, and that homesteading is a mindset first.

We believe that our great grandmothers were right about almost everything and that the best conversations happen around The Coop.

 

Anna Sakawsky

Alright, so good morning everyone, or good afternoon I guess depending on where you are joining us from. I am actually on Vancouver Island, so it is 11:00 AM here and we’ve got guests coming in from Ohio today, and I know that we have actually thousands of you who have already signed up from all over the country and actually all over the world. We were just discussing behind the scenes all of the different places that we are seeing people come in from. So welcome to everybody. So excited to have you here today for the inaugural episode of The Coop. So this is something new that we are doing here at Homestead Living. It’s sort of like a bonus/behind the scenes chance to connect with some of the amazing contributors and people that we feature every month in Homestead Living Magazine. So if we haven’t met before, you don’t know who I am.

 

My name is Anna Sakawsky, and I am the editor in chief of Homestead Living Magazine. I am honored to have the privilege of curating some of the best homestead content out there and expert advice for our readers each month and showcasing some incredible homesteaders and people from all over the content who are experts in their field and who are really at the forefront of the modern setting movement. So today I am excited to introduce our first ever guests on the coop, Shawn and Beth Dougherty, authors of the Independent Farmstead and the One Cow Revolution blog. But before we get into our live interview and Q&A session, everybody will have a chance to submit some questions for them as well. Before we get into that, I just want to take a moment to thank our sponsor today. So the Coop is brought to you by Homestead Documentary.

This is your ticket to modern homestead inspiration. With 20 episodes across two incredible seasons, you’ll meet 50 real life homesteaders who are turning their dreams into reality from growing your own food to raising livestock and starting profitable homestead businesses. This series covers it all. You can instantly binge seasons one and two right now for just $59 and take the next step on your homesteading journey today. You can head over to homesteaddocumentary.com to sign up. Again, that is homesteaddocumentary.com.

Alright, so let’s get into it. So for anyone who is just joining in, again, today’s guests are Shawn and Beth Dougherty, authors of Independent Farmstead and the One Cow Revolution blog. So Shawn and Beth have been home setting and farming together since the 1980s and have been on their current property in eastern Ohio for the past 20 years. Their small family farm consists of 24 acres of land that was once designated by the state as unsuitable for agriculture. But despite the seemingly insurmountable challenge, Shawn and Bath have managed to turn their land into a thriving homestead where they successfully raised dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm fed hogs, and a variety of poultry as well as their garden where they produce food year round with minimal outside inputs, which is really interesting. So today we’re going to be chatting all about how they managed to, they’ve managed to thrive on this neglected piece of blend and how you can do the same. So welcome Shawn and Beth.

 

Shawn Dougherty

Thank you, Anne. It’s good to be here. Fun to be here.

 

Anna Sakawsky

Perfect. Alright, so we’re going to get into it. We’ll start with kind of a live interview format and we’ll take some questions from the audience as they come in. Yeah. So we’ll get right into it. So can you just start off by giving us a bit of a 50,000 foot view of what your journey has looked like as homesteaders? I know it sounds like a loaded question, right? But just bird’s eye view of what your journey has looked like, how you came to be homesteaders in the first place, and how you came to be on the property that you’re on today.

 

Shawn Dougherty 

Well, we both grew up around farms and knew that we wanted to do that. And when we were in college, we met and we were the two people who really wanted to homestead.

 

Beth Dougherty 

I had to marry him. It was the only guy who would buy me a farm.

 

Shawn Dougherty 

So we ended up that way and we ended up in Steubenville because I ended up with a job teaching theater at Franciscan University and we looked for land and we thought we’d found the perfect place and it fell through. And so then somebody said, well, there’s this piece of land, 17 acres for $11,000. And we thought, that’s not where we’re going

 

Beth Dougherty 

With the house. We knew what it looked like. We were like, okay, it’s a dump with a cardboard box in the middle. That’s the house

 

Shawn Dougherty 

In. And the house was in bad shape. It

 

Beth Dougherty 

Was terrible,

 

Shawn Dougherty 

But it had more or less a good foundation. It had electricity. So we thought, okay, let’s do it. And we knew that we were just aiming at getting this, flipping it and then turning and then getting a real farm. And we’re so fortunate that we ended up in a place that was this bad because it taught us starting with that. All of a sudden we now know that you can farm on anything. It’s been a really great educational experience for us and we highly recommend not trying to chase the perfect farm, but finding a piece of land that needs you.

Beth Dougherty 

It’s where you want to be

Shawn Dougherty 

And

Beth Dougherty 

That you can beg, steal, or borrow, right? You don’t need a place that looks like a farm, especially because it’s a little bit like buying a house that’s just been remodeled. You may be buying a whole lot of remodeling you’re going to want to get rid of. If you just start with the piece of land you can get your hooks on. However, it’ll become a farm. Almost any piece of land can be turned into a farm.

Shawn Dougherty 

And we had a lot to learn. We did not know what we were doing when we started off and we have eight children, and the top four would testify to the fact that we didn’t know by the bottom four we had a much better sense. And the key is that if you get on a piece of land, what you start with is the grass, the pasture you’ve got that it’s going to come in, God’s given it to you, don’t ignore it. And the best thing that you can do, or I don’t know how Bethel if I’ll hit the button for Beth to start in, but what the grass does, we can’t eat it, but a ruminant can. And that’s what you’re going to start with. You’re going to bring a ruminant onto this property.

Beth Dougherty 

So when you come onto any piece of land, if it wasn’t just bulldozed and it isn’t a parking lot, you’re looking at an ecosystem that is a community of living things that by their growing and living and dying and reproducing are making a community that’s pretty stable. And it starts with plants, photosynthesizing, because all guy energy is solar energy. And we can only get at it if a plant photosynthesizes and all the living things that are downstream of those plants live, die cycle energy, create soil that will hold water. That’s an ecosystem. It’s successful, it’s working. And the way you can tell is if you drive by the same vacant lot every day for five years, it’s not going to change very much in that five years, it’s successfully sort of settled into a groove that changes only slowly. Well, those ecosystem services, sunlight capture, rainfall capture, and then the cycling of nutrients are what you want working for you when you make your homestead.

 

So when you come to a piece of land and you say, well, I know what I want to happen here, I’m going to erase what’s here and make it happen. You just got rid of all your ecosystem services without even thinking about it. But if you come to a piece of land and acknowledge that it’s already doing a good job, it just doesn’t happen to be producing food for you. And then you say, how can I propose to this working ecosystem that’s providing 10 million services, I can’t even identify, how can I propose to it that it produced people food the fastest, the most direct and the most sustainable ongoing suggesting you can make to that land is to bring in the ruminant that is an animal that can digest cellulose, that will eat what’s already growing there. And the advantage to one of the problems that people have when they come to a piece of land and they want it to produce food for them is that most plants produce people food seasonally.

 

Tomatoes are only around in the heat of the summer. Apples happen in the late summer, early fall. Strawberries are usually spring, summer. These are all foods that one are sort of narrow band nutritionally and two are only there some of the time. Grass is there all the time. It’s even there when it’s dormant. It’s harvestable by a grazing animal so that when it’s dead but still standing, it’s usable. That means we have access to its energy 12 months of the year, so long as we bring in the animal that can digest it. And the funny thing about cellulose plant material, 90% of most plants, roughly speaking is going to be cellulose. And it’s a complex hydrocarbon like a carbohydrate you eat only, you can’t digest it. And in fact, almost nothing can digest cellulose except bacteria. So when you cut your grass and the clippings fall on the ground, they break down partly because of the bacteria in the soil.

 

When a cow digests grass, it’s because she’s hosting those bacteria in her first stomach, her rumen, cows, sheep, goats, all the rumen, split toed, four tamed stomach animals that eat leaves and twigs, they can break down cellulose. That means they can give us access to that 90% of plant material, which is where all our energy has to come from. Plant ruminants can give us access to that, not just in the form of meat if we eat the animal, but in the form of milk, which we can do daily and keep the animal go guide to keep doing it for us. And in the form of manure, which, and here’s to me, this is like the icing on the cake. The magic of the thing is that ruminants either behaving according to natural patterns in a very wild setting or managed by human beings to imitate that setting. Ruminants actually build more energy into the soil than they take out of it. If you go grow a tomato, harvest the tomato and eat it, you’ll get some energy, but the soil will be depleted by your tomato harvest unless you do some special things to put it back. But if you manage ruminants on grass in natural patterns, the grazing itself, the passage of the animal over the grass, harvesting it, trampling it, et cetera, actually builds more energy into the soil than the animal took out.

Shawn Dougherty 

And what Beth has been talking about is matching the animal to your pasture. And that’s a really simple thing. I mean, if it’s woody, you bring in a goat and if it’s forages, if it’s grass and you bring in cow sheep and you let them, and now it’s very important that you’re rotating these animals, we’re imitating. What nature does is that animals come in. If you were looking at what was happening across the plains of the United States before that the animals would move across, they would be held together by predators in a tight bunch, and then they would eat everything that was there and then every day they would be moving, they have to move and they’ve eaten everything there. We have to do the same thing with our animals on a small plot of land if we’re wanting to improve it. What we started with, the things that we didn’t know where we just turned the animal loose, just like what happens with most conventional

Beth Dougherty 

Reasoning. Actually in the very beginning we were just

Shawn Dougherty 

Lucky. Oh, that’s true, that’s true.

Beth Dougherty 

We came to a really wasted piece of ground and it was mostly briers. And so following some good reasoning, it was just incomplete. We brought in goats and we tethered them, they ate our briers, we milked them. So we were doing a really effective job of land transformation without ever having really thought the steps through well.

Shawn Dougherty 

And then we got a cow, and then we just turned the cow loose and we watched our pastures degrade because the cow was eating the things that they liked best, leaving the stuff that was junk. And that stuff started to take over the pasture as soon as we started to rotate the animal. And again, rotationally grazing is a very simple thing. Think of Laura and Mary and Little House on the Prairie. They would have a steak and a rope and they would move that cow every day. So they were managing what she was getting. And instead of with a child saying, you can have all the ice cream that you want until all the ice cream’s gone, gone, and then you have to move to something else, we say, here’s your plate. You eat everything that’s on that plate. And that’s what we’re doing with our cow is we’re making sure that it eats everything on that and all the rest of that grass that’s not being eaten that day is growing. So it becomes really important

Beth Dougherty 

And it’s really a little bit more nuanced than that.

Shawn Dougherty 

Yes.

Beth Dougherty 

The reason we have to put grazing in really simple terms is that we want anybody who wants to homestead to get that. They can start out with just that much knowledge. Small paddock, frequent move, don’t come back until it recovers. If you graze an animal in that pattern, it’ll work. The animal will thrive, your grass will improve, your pastures will become more biodiverse, more dense, longer season. And over time, all the other details that might be of help to the homesteader, knowing plant species and knowing the seasons of those plant species, being able to identify, say toxic forages and knowing why they’re not dangerous to their animal, all those things will come with time. But for the purposes of a conversation like this, we’re going to just super simplify. And it’s not dangerous to oversimplify like that because those rules will get anybody started. And then anybody who sticks to it who’s interested enough in homesteading and in good land management and sticks to it is going to learn the rest because they cared enough to stay there. They’re also going to care enough to notice the

Shawn Dougherty 

Details. What are the most important? And I want Anna to get a chance to ask.

Anna Sakawsky 

No, it’s your show, you go for it. But I’m like, okay, check. You’ve answered that question. But I

Shawn Dougherty 

Do have lots, lots of follow up. One of the things that- one of the most important things that people need to start off with is the faith that God created a world and we are an important part of that. We bring management to it. God put us in a garden and said, gather your food, make your food, make this world better. And unfortunately, in the last 150 years, we’ve begun a process of degrading. We turned our food over to somebody else and we said, you make food for us. And what they have done is started that process of degrading the soil, the soil blowing away or making poisonous food literally. And we have to take this back, but we need to take it back. And one of the keys is on the human scale, if you want to farm well, you farm on the human scale, not on the commercial industrial scale. It does not

Anna Sakawsky 

Work. So funny that you say that, that God put us in a garden. It reminds me of how we featured Paul Gauci in our October issue and he mentioned the same thing for anybody who doesn’t know, Paul Gauci is the creator of the Back to Eden gardening method. And he had mentioned that we were given everything we need to successfully feed ourselves on a human scale as you’re saying, but we have over complicated things over the years. We have tilled the land and we have made things more difficult on ourselves and just by kind of reverting to following nature’s course, we can actually be really successful and get back to the way God intended essentially. Right. And it sounds like that’s what you guys have done with your land when you first arrived on it. I know you mentioned there was kind of a dilapidated house and some of the infrastructure maybe wasn’t there and the land wasn’t productive as far as feeding humans. What were some of the other specific challenges you faced on your land and how did you actually establish that pasture? You mentioned that you got a goat and then you got a cow, but did you actually have to, so grass seed, what were the steps that you took?

Shawn Dougherty 

Our land was very steep, and in fact it was shale going up underneath the trees and as you tried to go up, you would find yourself slipping back down and we didn’t want to, one of the things that I think is a real advantage to us both on our home property and then as we moved up to the convent is we are very frugal. We did not want to spend a lot of,

Beth Dougherty 

We didn’t have opportunity,

Shawn Dougherty 

We didn’t have a lot of money and we didn’t want to spend a lot of money throwing it away. So when it came to every time I would see money going off the farm to pay for something, I would say, could the farm have provided that? And so we have not done a lot of seeding. We haven’t

Beth Dougherty 

Done any seeding.

Shawn Dougherty 

Well, we threw out a few seeds every once in a while, clover or something like that. But every time we did, we’d say that was not worth doing. There is a 50 year seed bank underneath the soil just waiting for good management. That’s what the farm needs. It needs management, it needs time, it needs, and we have to be patient with that and it needs people doing things. So we started running animals, we ran the goats there, and one of the things that we saw was the goats were wiping out the briers and grass was coming in behind ’em.

Beth Dougherty 

Yeah, we started with you learn by mistakes and we had the advantage of making many mistakes. The first was buying the wrong piece of land, which of course turned out to be the right piece of land, but we bought a holler. There was no flat ground, bigger than maybe the space in front of the house, which is about the size of a swimming pool, no flat ground. Almost none of it was cleared. So the first obstacle that we had to get over were the briers that were everywhere, and we did that with goats and grass came in. But the next obstacle we had to get over was we didn’t have enough room.

 

Fortunately, we had neighbors who were only intermittently hostile to ask them what we were doing, and they had maybe five acres of north facing steep slope. It was damaged in all the ways you can think of, but there were no trees on it and it was growing some kind of briars and we began grazing it. I would say that almost all of the forward movement that we’ve ever made has happened because we showed up and started doing the minimal things that you do when you try and take care of a piece of property. Most of the success that happens in a homestead is actually biological success. It’s the success of the living things there. And this takes us back to Paul Gauci in that question of what is our role on the planet? You will more often than not these days, counter the steadfast conviction that human beings have a negative effect on the planet that that’s inherent.

 

Well, we certainly have had a lot of negative effects in the last 200 years or so, but it’s not inherent. And in fact, all you have to do is dial back to someplace where people have been for a long time, China, France, anywhere in Europe, parts of Africa, and you’ll see that people stayed there and were able to grow their food and make their giving there for thousands of years, which would imply that any degradation that was supposed to have been happening either wasn’t there or was recognized in time and accounted for fixed. And that’s what I think we need to recognize that we as homesteaders can do on a piece of land, if we come in and facilitate the things that are living there. And Shawn talks about the difference between bulldozing and nudging. When you come onto a piece of land and you say, I know that what I want is a barn right here and a water system that goes like this and fences here, and I’m going to run Dutch belted cattle because I think they’re cute.

 

We don’t leave room for the land to respond to that very much. But when we come to a piece of land and we make gentle suggestions like I’m only going to use temporary fence and temporary water systems right now, and I’m going to look at what’s growing and suggest that goat to the correct animals, so I’ll bring on goats, I won’t bring on too many. I’ll manage them in the right footprint and see what happens. Then we get a chance to do what human beings are here to do, which is to put our hand naturally to the pulse of non-human life and slow down in nature. Populations tend to go on a boom and bust cycle. When we were kids, arctic snowshoe hairs and arctic foxes were the example right where the more grass there is, the more hairs there are, the more foxes eating the hairs until at some point you have too many bunnies for the grass and they eat themselves out of a diet, they eat it, all the bunnies die, the foxes die.

 

You have a crash population which gives the grass time to recover. And that works as ecology when people aren’t there but is very uncomfortable if the people are there and want to eat some part of that, what people can do is use their minds and their creativity to put out a hand and slow down the boom and bust cycle. In fact, we can really eliminate an awful lot of it. This past fall would be a great example for us because our part of Ohio is just completed like year four of what is now a historic drought, the worst drought in the history of Ohio in the recorded history of Ohio. And so we came to the end of the summer having gotten very little rain and what we got wasn’t all effective. Even if you’re doing a good job managing your grass, if you get six inches of rain in a very short period of time, a lot of it is going to run off, especially in the hills.

 

And so we knew that we didn’t have as much grass as we would normally have going into the winter. And what did we do? Well, we could have kept all our cows and then say March, we ran out of grass and we’re in big trouble. If you can’t feed them, they’re going to die. But instead what we did was harvested four and put ’em in various freezers. Ours, our kids, our rental farm as a convent. So the sisters got a steer and that reduced the pressure on our grass. And that’s an image, it’s a model for what a lot of homesteading is, which is to make observations about available energy, available nutrients and reduce or increase parts of the system. So the whole thing stays harmonious.

Shawn Dougherty 

One of the things that when we talk to homesteaders, they have an image in their mind as best said of this is how I want to homestead. And the way that they do that is, okay, well then I could just go to the feed store. I want a whole bunch of chickens. I go to the feed store and I’ll do that. But what if you said, how much food can my farm produce? And I said, I’m going to live within that circle or

Beth Dougherty 

That. Yeah, people are used to going to the grocery store and getting things from far away and things out of season. I think they are a little shocked to realize what homesteaders’ absolutely delicious and nutrient, nutrient dense diet looks like because we really do eat seasonally. So if I want tomatoes in December, they’ve got to be canned because we don’t have any fresh tomatoes.

Shawn Dougherty 

But it’s a wonderful thing. We eat better than anybody else that I know. We eat really well, we have fabulous food, but we eat from the farm. And occasionally we’ll buy some oranges for Christmas or something like that once we go Christmas dock, but generally not. I mean, we really say what is it that the farm’s providing and how can we live with that? Not in any kind of a,

Beth Dougherty 

It’s not aesthetic. It’s not not being frugal to the point of, but

Shawn Dougherty 

Partly it’s because, and I think this is something that parents need to take seriously. The food system, the commercial agricultural system is poisoning your children. You

Beth Dougherty 

Have, there’s no way to put that that’s true and not that rough. And

Shawn Dougherty 

I want to be able to say to my children at 30 as I do now, that I cared enough about you, your health, your food supply to work hard to make that happen for you. I don’t want my children at 30 to say, didn’t you,

Beth Dougherty 

What were you feeding me Cheerios for? Were full of glyphosate

Shawn Dougherty 

And I think that we as parents should be doing that. We should not be turning this challenge, not a challenge, but this thing that God told us to do. Feed yourself, provide for your food. And we’ve said, well, he didn’t say provide for your food until McDonald’s comes along or until something comes along and is going to provide it for you. That was what our

Beth Dougherty 

Genesis chapter one, tell the Earth and subdue it or however you want to translate that. And I do think it’s interesting to note for all the Christians listening that there’s not a point later in the Bible where he changes that, where he says, oh, by the way, you only really were responsible for the earth until you could turn-

Anna Sakawsky 

Until the industrial revolution came- Right? 

Beth Dougherty 

Exactly,

Anna Sakawsky 

That’s

Beth Dougherty 

Right. And that’s a really challenging and counter-cultural position to take because every one of us inherited through, no, before we were old enough to think about it, a whole lot of cultural ways where we do buy everything we need. We do focus on how do I make money so that then I can go buy what I need? And one of the driving forces behind the homesteading movement today is the realization like a spiritual awakening across the country or even around the world, having to do with our actual responsibility for meeting our own needs, for taking care of the land in our keeping so that three generations down the line, they can still be doing it.

Shawn Dougherty 

That’s

Beth Dougherty 

Right. I used to read stuff like that and I’d think, I don’t know who they’re blaming, but this is totally not my fault. I was into this, don’t blame it on me. And I think that’s a good attitude to fend off unnecessary guilt, but it’s not a good attitude to justify going on doing it. Shawn says, responsibility, we we’re too far down this road. The food is too toxic. Our kids are too sick, the soil is too worn out for me or people like me to justify anymore going on, taking part in a degrading system when we know there’s an option.

Shawn Dougherty 

But it is so exciting to watch for us that we’ve been on the convent farm for 20 years. We’ve been on our own property for 30 years, 28, to watch how much that property has recovered, a nutrient dense food that we get. We’re watching our animals improve, and the things like toxic forages and stuff like that. What we have learned is that those are medicinal, those are not toxics. Animals are so smart, they will not poison themselves. God is except us, right?

Beth Dougherty 

Yes. Right. Isn’t that fascinating that animals have instincts that lead them as a species, as a group of species to healthier habits? And somehow or other, we’ve managed to lead ourselves into unhealthier habits. But I think you’re right that the industrial revolution has a lot to do with that. That is as we mastered the power of the lever, the power of the internal combustion engine, we’ve temporarily sort of forgotten what the real important things are.

Anna Sakawsky 

I think it’s interesting. I think that we’ve almost been convinced by smart marketing that this is the way forward, but really I think a lot of us innately know that that’s not the healthy thing. That’s why I think, anyway, so many people are coming back to this now. So many people are feeling dissatisfied or feeling anxious or feeling like there’s got to be something more. Our health is suffering more than it ever has. We know this deep down just like other animals do, that we are not being led to what’s best for us. But it’s kind of all these fancy, really brainwashing techniques that have convinced us that this is the right way to live. But I think deep down we know it. And I do think that this is what, like I say, has brought so many people into the modern homesteading movement in recent years and why we’re seeing such a surge in people that are interested in this thing.

Shawn Dougherty 

I think people are hoping that somehow there’s going to be a tweak of the agricultural system that’s going to, somehow it’s going to get better. Robert Kennedy is going to get in there and somehow he’s going to solve these things. I’m very excited about what’s happening with the Trump cabinet, but they are not going to solve the problem. Joel Salatin just went on this wonderful rant in his little lunatic farmer thing where he said, don’t send me all these ideas about how the government is going to solve the problem. The government is not going to solve the problem. Corporations are not going to solve the problem. None of those things. It is going to be on the individual level. If you want to feed your people well,

Intro 

You

Shawn Dougherty 

Have to do it yourself. And the thing that we love and that we are not seeing, I think there are other people that are beginning to say this and see this, but we really feel like we were kind of on the forefront of this, that you can do this. And it starts with the ruminant, with the dairy cow, and everything else falls into place. We really believe that God has a pattern for farming that we can all pick up. And when people say to us, oh, you’re lucky because you’re so rich that you can afford to do this. This is not expensive. We eat for practically free because at

Beth Dougherty 

Least anybody thinks it was a money thing. Okay, so a college professor in a little Catholic school with eight kids is not loaded

Intro 

Ever.

Beth Dougherty 

So this was all done under circumstances. It would’ve qualified us for some kind of

Anna Sakawsky 

Assistance program.

Beth Dougherty 

We never got the assistant program, but this was all done on a shoestring. I think Anna was really putting her finger on,

Shawn Dougherty 

This is our daughter, Anna?

Beth Dougherty 

No, no, this, oh,

Shawn Dougherty 

This Anna,

Beth Dougherty 

Sorry. A minute ago when you were talking about this internal sense that things aren’t right and that we should do things differently and that we’re called back to the land. And that comes back to what you’ve both said about small scale and about being led by this strong sense. We can do this. This is up to us. We can be driven from the inside.

Shawn Dougherty 

Our mission, what we want, our mission is to help you farm the way that we farm. We believe so strongly in it. We think everybody should do it. We think it is wonderful for families to grow up this way, but what we hope for our country is a million, million, million little farms just like ours. It would transform our country if we had something like that because we would not be looking to the government for solutions. We would not be looking at the educational system for solutions. We would be looking to each other and to our community and we would care about our communities and we would care about each other if we all lived on these small farms that provided for ourselves. So we desperately want this for us, for our country, and whatever we can do to help you, to encourage you, that’s what we want to have happen.

Beth Dougherty 

One of the things that happen a lot that’s interesting is as this internal urge to get back to the land, infects more and more people, there’s so many creative ways people are getting their hands on a piece of land

 

Just within five miles of our homestead. There are people on borrowed land, people on squatters, right land. It is land that belongs to I think the local, it’s not even the local one to a big electric company. And they just have a lot of acres that they own without doing anything with them. And these people, it’s right next to their land. There’s no fence. They graze their animals across it. They’re only doing good. Nobody objects. So the impulse to move back to the end is being also brought to fruition by people’s creativity, their determination that they should be able to do it, their willingness to step out of the box, to do some pretty original, maybe even radical things to get their hands on some land. And then it really is as simple as saying the established plant communities are already good at living here.

 

They’ve proved that by being here. They’re volunteer, they’re diverse, they’re perennial. There are plant species here that like hot, cold, wet, dry, long season, short season, they’ll thrive no matter what. And then they just bring in an animal that will begin to embrace that. It’s the beginning of our becoming. Each of us, wherever we are, people of this place, people with local knowledge, local ties, even if you want to get this specific local soil running through our veins, we become instead of eating foreign made food, imported food, we’re eating local food. What does that really do to our present in a place when our bodies themselves are made up of local sunlight, local minerals, local water? And that’s the beginning of this homesteading movement.

Anna Sakawsky 

And I think that that’s good advice for people who maybe don’t even have their own land yet–or feel like, “well, I can’t do this because I don’t have the 17 or the 24 acres”–starting where you’re at. Maybe that’s just sourcing food locally. There’s so many things that we can do, and I want to get into that in just a sec. There’s so much to talk about and you’ve answered a lot of my questions, but you brought up more. But we also do have some questions coming in from our audience. So I do want to pop over there. Just before we do that, I just want to remind everybody that there will be a live recording of this, so if you’ve missed anything or you want to go back and review anything, you can do so after, we will be sending out the live recording after the show.

 

And also that Shawn and Beth are featured in the February issue of Homestead Living Magazine. So they’re going to be on the cover next month. And if you have not yet subscribed, there should be a link below the video right here that you can go ahead and subscribe. And if you do so today, as long as it’s before, I think January 9th is the cutoff for next month’s issue, then you’ll get next month’s issue in your mailbox. So on that note, let’s go to a question from the audience. I’m sure that there are many, let’s see. Let’s see. So, okay. Oh, here’s one that’s come up. Okay, thanks. So it says, Ramona asked, does the seed bank differ on a steep slope made by the Department of Transportation, I’m assuming moving granite to build the interstate back in the day, and that granite being covered by soil from who knows where. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. What do you guys know about that?

Beth Dougherty 

So the answer is yes and no. Typically the highway department is going to come when it’s made a cutting or anywhere it’s disturbed soil. It’s going to come in and hydro mulch or unroll like a mult cloth, I mean, sorry, a seed cloth there. They’re going to plant some stuff. Two typical examples would be a rye, a grass plant, and rye

Shawn Dougherty 

Vetch.

Beth Dougherty 

So those are seeds that have been introduced that wouldn’t necessarily have been there, probably wouldn’t have been there otherwise. But as she’s talking specifically about granite being moved, so if we’re looking at a rock substrate really for that to turn into pasture first soil has to migrate onto it. It doesn’t really have to be formed there. It’ll just migrate with wind water onto that hillside. We see a lot of that here because we’re in Appalachia in the mountains. And when a cutting is made, often what’s next to the road is a pretty steep rock face, and it’s astonishingly how fast that turns into a tree scape very, very quickly

Shawn Dougherty 

Of natural. And this is not what’s been planted by the Ohio Del Park.

Beth Dougherty 

That’s right. That’s right. This is

Shawn Dougherty 

The natural things are coming in. It is blown in it’s dropped by birds.

Beth Dougherty 

But given that that’s what Ramona has specifically referenced here, let’s look at less steep, more soil banks like that. They are largely going to consist of, very quickly consist of soil with a local seed bank in it as soil moves. So are seeds moving Now, here’s the catch that’s disturbed soil and its bare soil and nature rushes to cover that with usually annual weeds. And then behind those come perennial weeds. A weed is sometimes people say weed is a plant where you didn’t want it to grow. Anything can be a weed if you didn’t want it there. But more specifically, weeds are fast growing plants that thrive in disturbed soil, which is a perfect description of the side of the road. And so what turns a weed bank, just a weedy spot into a pasture, is grazing. If you think about it, a pasture is a pasture because animals graze it and grazing animals exist because there are grasslands for them to graze.

 

That may seem a little esoteric until try and focus on this, the plants that a species of animal like habitually to eat have to be plants that thrive under being eaten or they wouldn’t still be there over the millennia. The plants that grow wild, that like to be grazed by animals are the ones that are going to be there as the animals graze, migrate away, come back when it’s regrown and graze again. So to create a pasture, you have to create the conditions for a pasture. If you leave, say a bank that the DOT has laid bare alone, it’ll grow in weeds. But if it starts to grow in weeds and you graze animals across it in orderly rotations, that’s small paddock, short duration, visible impact, long rests and recovery. In other words, it gets grazed and then it gets to recover. What will thrive, what will fill in, what will like those conditions and stay there are pasture plants.

Shawn Dougherty 

We highly recommend that everyone watch Alan Savory’s Ted Talk where he discusses what he did in Africa in regenerating, taking deserted land and regenerating it. It is fascinating. It’s very exciting to see it. It’s unfortunate that people get in the way of what Alan Savory is trying to do because it is really important work. It’s a Ted talk.

Beth Dougherty 

Just a little warning for your readers, if the words climate change bother you just like hit mute for the first minute or so in your mind, translate to environmental degradation. We can argue forever about yes or no, climate change semantics. Yeah, environmental degradation is obvious and we’re making it happen right now.

Anna Sakawsky 

That’s fantastic. I just want to make sure that, I know we’re already almost getting close to the hour mark here, so I want to make sure that we–we’ve got so much ground to cover still.

 

So I do want to go back. Okay, great. I was just going to say I wanted to go to another question and they just put the exact question that I wanted to go to a little bit selfishly, because I actually homestead on a small scale. We have a quarter acre and we are doing an incredible amount on that quarter acre. But when we’re talking about grazing and pastures and everything, it seems like, well, that’s completely out of reach for this scale. So Julie had this same question. She says, for a much smaller scale, so half an acre or less, or I’d even say an acre or less, would you recommend rabbits and chickens for livestock options? You’re always saying start with ruminants. How small can we go here? One

Shawn Dougherty 

Of the things that Beth and I talk about is if we were stuck in a city, we would get a cow and we would hide it in the garage and we would feed it hay all the time. And literally there are places in Europe where they do this. They do not have land, so they are constantly buying in hay. What you would discover is you would get all of the wonderful benefits of having an animal, a lactating ruminant that would be feeding you. The great thing about the cow is it feeds you. It feeds the pigs, it feeds the chickens, it feeds everything on the farm. And you would also have the best garden in the world because of all the waste that that cow would have

Beth Dougherty 

Provided for you. So river applies like on your quarter acre, your half acre is the statement that it has long been traditional for city dwellers, not in our country in the last hundred 20 years, but in our country a hundred years ago, it was not uncommon to see a city kept cow and it was kept on a very small space and its manure was managed and its feed was brought in cheap, low quality nutrients in the form of grass or hay turned into high quality nutrient dense food and manure to make your gardens grow. Well, now to go back to the rabbits and chickens, they are a great option for a backyard farm. They’re going to do something different. What a cow or a ruminant does, she actually turns cellulose into proteins, fats, and sugars, and she’s going to do it on a daily basis.

 

If she’s a dairy cow, I mean if she’s a dairy animal, she’s going to turn in a protein of fat in her meat and you can eat her. But if you want a daily source of proteins, fats, and sugars, you’re going to milk this ruminant. What chickens and rabbits can do really well isn’t primarily going to be the conversion of cellulose rabbits better than chickens, but they’re going to be great assists toward the utilization of your low quality nutrients that is your cellulose into soil fertility. You’ll get some protein too, for sure. Chickens are going to have to be supplemented. Rabbits are almost always going to have to be supplemented. They’re not just going to live on your grass on your yard, but they’re also very good converters of low quality nutrients into protein in the form of meat or eggs and into fertility for the soil. So they’re a good place to start. But we would encourage people to check out our book. We have another book coming out in November from Chelsea Green Publishing that’s going to be specifically on the cow, and we will be looking at some of the very small scale settings

Anna Sakawsky 

For the cow. So I was going to say, that’s a great thought to have a cow in your backyard, even on a small plot of land. But of course it’s not feasible for a lot of people. Simply if nothing else, one of the things we, the laws around that too, right?

Shawn Dougherty 

Yeah. One of the things we do say is there is probably five acres very close to you or a few acres close to you that are not being used at all. That’s certainly what we did with the convent. They were not using their property well, they were having it mowed once a year or twice a year, and then we approached them. And what needs to happen is all of those abandoned pieces of property, we contact that owner and we say, would you mind if I started running a cow on it or something? That’s a really, we need to be thinking out of the box and not just saying, I only have a quarter of an acre. That’s all I can do.

Beth Dougherty 

And it’s a great community builder too.

Shawn Dougherty 

Absolutely.

Beth Dougherty 

Keep a count on your neighbor’s field.

Anna Sakawsky 

Yeah, no kidding. And what about, oh, well, here you go. Here’s another question. What about predators? How do you deal with predators? So Stephanie says, we have bears, coyotes, and hawks. More specifically, what’s the timing course?

Beth Dougherty 

Stephanie is

Anna Sakawsky 

Livestock guardian dogs. Do you guys have livestock guardian dogs?

Beth Dougherty 

Not specifically. We have a great farm dog and he is in fact our lgd two.

 

So can we address this? Let’s start with the LGDs little white puppies that turn into big white dogs are darling. And so it’s really easy for a beginning homesteader to go, I want chickens. Let’s go out and buy a puppy. Let’s leave the puppy. Let’s not buy it yet. If you don’t have the livestock, then that puppy’s going to turn into a pet, not into an LGD. You have to have the livestock first to train the puppy. Two, you probably don’t need it. We’re talking a small scale people right now, small scale is usually close to the house, which is usually more or less predator, not proof, but predator safe. It is so easy to jump straight to the cute part of homesteading and get in at the wrong end. A livestock guardian dog is always going to be a dog food eater because their job isn’t to hunt for their own food as our farm dog does. He keeps our rodent population down and he feeds himself and we don’t buy food for him. But in LGD, its job is to be with the animals. It’s protecting, and you’re always going to be buying dog food. So timing for introducing LGDs. One, you want to have the animals. Two, you want to know that your scale, both the amount of land you’re covering and the number of animals you have actually requires that dog. They are wonderful animals when they really have work to do, but they should be somewhere down the dine in most operations,

 

Predators, bears, coyotes and hawks,

Shawn Dougherty 

All of which are roundups. Let’s Minnesota,

Beth Dougherty 

Let’s put her in northern Minnesota.

Shawn Dougherty 

We’ve got them all. We’ve got bears, coyotes, and hawks all around us. And the coyotes do almost never come close to us. Now, it could be partly because the cows help keep them away,

Beth Dougherty 

But it’s largely scale.

 

If your homestead is small enough, is not too extended, too long and skinny with parts of it way far away, and you have a farm dog who’s leaving his scent around and you have a mix of livestock. So you have poultry, but you also have cows that are near that and maybe a pony that’s in the area. And people who are providing the kind of care for that homestead, the real homesteading requires, which means I’m there every day. I’m probably there twice a day. I’m walking past those spaces all the time. You’re leaving scent marks everywhere you go. And unless everything around you is very built up, in which case you probably don’t have bears, coyotes on your property.

 

If your place is well patrolled by people and the farm dog, coyotes and bears are going to tend to go somewhere else. People, I think, stress about predators long before they see one. We have bears around us, we have lots of coyotes and we have hawks. And in 28 years of homesteading in our piece of Appalachia, now we have had, let’s see, three serious hawk problems. That’s in 28 years, so that’s not a bad record. We’ve had one bad fox problem, one bad coyote problem. These are all encapsulated in a week or two of dealing with the issue. And although we’ve seen bears, they’ve never bothered our livestock or our bees.

Anna Sakawsky 

Right. Yeah. And what sort of infrastructure then do you guys have? I know that there was a question that came in about fencing, like sloped land, and how do you deal with that? And is that something that you establish first or did you just get animals on the land and let them free range and get that pasture going first and then build the infrastructure or what did that?

Shawn Dougherty 

One of the things that we have to be careful of is that if you start talking to experts about fencing and stuff like that, they’re going to tell you, oh, you have to have six strands of high tensile wire. And in some sense, that might not be bad. We’ve never been able to afford that, so we’ve never had that. We do have a mostly closed perimeter fence.

Beth Dougherty 

Yeah. Read one or two strands of hotware. That’s our perimeter right now.

Shawn Dougherty 

And it is not closed because the sisters have to be able to drive in and out on a driveway. So at any time our animals can walk straight off of our farm convent

Beth Dougherty 

If they get out of their paddock fence.

Shawn Dougherty 

That’s right. They have an internal fence, internal fences that are temporary.

Beth Dougherty 

So we are taking for granted that anybody keeping in the way of four legged ruminants grazing animals is going to practice holistic grazing. That means small paddock, short duration, long rest, and recovery, which means temporary fence in almost any circumstance.

 

Temporary fence is relatively cheap. It lasts a long time. You’re going to be moving it all the time, and that’s the fence that’s actually keeping your animal in 95% of the time. So if you have a single strand of white poly twine holding your cow in, that’s the only fence she ever sees. 95% of the time, the other 5%, she gets loose or you’re driving her across the farm to get milked or whatever, and she may encounter your perimeter fence, but because she’s only going to see it that seldom, she’s very seldom going to have any reason to challenge that fence. So it doesn’t have to be that durable. I love the idea of having Fort Knox around my homestead like impenetrable fences, but if I really had them one when I needed a gate net fence, it probably wouldn’t be in the right place.

 

Two, when a tree fell on it, I’d have a really big fence to fix instead of one or two strands of galvanized wire that I can cut and sice. So your perimeter fence, the thing I want people to understand most of all is that because in a holistic grazing system, your 4G livestock are very seldom actually going to be in contact with that perimeter fence. They’re almost always inside a portable electric fence. That fence need not have the durability and the impenetrability that it would need to have if that’s what your livestock were touching all the time. If they could get at it at any time, check it out for holes, lean on the posts and rub them down. It’d have to be durable then, but because they’re not actually in contact with it, it is mostly a visual suggestion to the animal like, Hey, wouldn’t you rather go somewhere else? Because there’s a fence right here.

Shawn Dougherty 

They’re also on grass that they like being moved to new grass every day. So there isn’t, if they were on the same place and degrading their conventional, they would be constantly looking at better grass somewhere else, but they are on good grass given to them every day, new good grass. They are not discontent animals.

Beth Dougherty 

We could go into the fence question for a long time.

Anna Sakawsky 

Yeah, I’m sure we could. And again, I know we’re getting kind of close to the hour, so I do want to wrap up soon. I just wanted to touch a little bit, just go back to this, I know we’ve talked a lot about this, but about your tying in, first of all, the idea of frugality. Because I think that there is a misconception among a lot of people nowadays that home setting has to cost a lot of money, at least to get started. But traditionally home setting was a way of life for people because they couldn’t afford to purchase food, purchase what they needed at all times, so they produced it at home. On that same note, the way that you have approached home setting is really from a closed loop system mindset. So you talked about this kind of conversion of grass into energy through running ruminants on your land, having them convert the cellulose into protein and then into manure and all the other sources they provide. I guess just give me an overview of what that closed loop system looks like beyond that, because you guys have other animals as well. How are you feeding your chickens and your hogs and all of the other things that you’re doing on your homestead as closed loop as possible? So for anybody who doesn’t know what that means, kind of meaning that we’re not needing to bring in external inputs, so going and purchasing fertilizer can start going and purchasing grain and feed. How does that all work together in the bigger picture for you

Shawn Dougherty 

Guys? Well, it’s the grass and putting the ruminant on grass. And you can either have a, your ruminant can be a one-time harvest, so I’m going to butcher my animal, or I can have a twice daily harvest of the best food that there is and that’s milk. And so we started with goats. We didn’t particularly care so much for goat milk and they didn’t give so much. Then we moved to the dairy cow and that has been what we call the jet fuel for the whole farm. So the amount of milk that a good dairy cow doesn’t have to be an exceptional dairy cow. And we’re talking about the smaller breeds, jerseys

Beth Dougherty 

And all grass fed

Shawn Dougherty 

Dexter and all grass fed. And I think that that’s one of the really important things to start off with is that we have a cow that does not need anything but grass. We don’t buy in grain for it.

Beth Dougherty 

That’s how God made them. He didn’t provide grain for them. Cow’s genius or ruminants geniuses that they can convert cellulose into proteins and fats. They don’t require concentrated carbohydrates and proteins in the form of grain.

Shawn Dougherty 

And we often look back to the monastic world, the medieval world, they were a dairy-based system

Beth Dougherty 

Where

Shawn Dougherty 

The people ate cheese, they ate, drank milk, that was primarily a great source for their food. And then they would raise certain things in the garden. And that’s the other thing that is a very important part of it, is that we are gardening with the thought that we are trying to provide food for all year round. So we will literally grow a ton and a half of potatoes, not that hard to do. We use a couple of two tenths of two tenths

Beth Dougherty 

Of an acre,

Shawn Dougherty 

Of an acre to grow that many potatoes. We grow in the winter, we’re eating vegetables, we’re eating greens all

Beth Dougherty 

Winter. So one principle in inputs free homesteading is that I’m not going to bring an animal to this farm until this farm has food for it. Thomas Shaw, who wrote back in the 18 hundreds, he wrote a book called Feeding Farm Animals, and he says somewhere in there, no man would be such a fool as to by pigs without having the means of feeding them. Now he is writing prior to most industrialization to Purina. There are no sacked feeds available. So he is making an obvious statement. We bring an animal onto the homestead when the homestead is producing food for it. But we do want to, we have certain species we like. Most people like to keep chickens and eggs. Many people like bacon. So your standard homestead triad, cow pig chicken is a good place to start. If you look at the homestead is already producing ruminant food.

 

It’s already producing plants that cow, sheep or goat could eat, and you bring on that cow, sheep or goat and you begin milking her. What the milk does is it’s perfectly available proteins and fats that are appropriate for calves, obviously, or kids or thems, but also for humans, for dogs and cats, for pigs, for chickens. Now, when we grow food for, say you’ve got chickens, you say, well, I’m going to grow food for my chickens. I’d like to see that happen. And you plant some corn and some millet and some sorghum and some sunflowers and you harvest them. You start putting them in front of your chicken and you’re not sure whether you’re feeding her right and you’re not sure if she’s getting everything she needs. The primary plant foods are good at carbohydrates. What they’re not great at is protein and fat. So if you fed, say a chicken, just corn, it would come up short in the protein department.

 

How do you fix that? Well, it turns out in a world that bases its food on grass and therefore on dairy there’s always surplus dairy. Think about the world prior to refrigeration, which means prior to about 1910 or a little bit later on an American farm, right? Quite a bit later on American farm, there’s no refrigeration and everybody has grass. So everybody has dairy animals and they’re converting their grass into proteins, fats, and sugars. There’s going to be much of the year, there’s going to be far more than the human beings are going to consume. And the whole point, let’s go to pigs for a second. The whole point of pigs is they eat what we eat, that they eat the lower grade calories that we don’t want to eat. The parts and conditions we don’t want to eat like seed, RINs, peels, cores over ripe, under ripe, moldy, and they’ll eat almost without limit.

 

So when you want to produce food for your family and you say, as Shawn said, we want a ton and a half of potatoes, so we aim to produce a little bit more than that. We don’t know if we’re going to get a good harvest or not. When you grow food for your family, always try to grow more than you need just in case it doesn’t do well. But what do you do with the more that you’re mostly going to get? Because most years you are going to get a harvest bigger than you need. That’s where pigs came in, is that they could convert those spare nutrients into proteins and fats. And if you have milk to give them, the pig has a balanced diet. If it’s getting several gallons of milk a week, it’ll probably do okay without them. But that’s how you know it’ll convert your surplus nutrients into walking, reproducing protein and fat that is actually your spare food stored for the future. We could go on for like 30 minutes just on, but as a beginning for seeing how does the cycle of sunlight turned into plant material turned into nutrients, work on the farm, if you picture most of the farm is grass that’s harvested by ruminants who turn it into milk, which is protein, fats, and sugars that’s consumed by the people. And then all the surplus and waste is consumed by dogs, cats, pigs and chickens

Intro 

Who

Beth Dougherty 

Either the dogs and cats are predator and pest control. And the pigs and chickens are surplus nutrient conversion and storage.

Shawn Dougherty 

And when people say, well, I want to have my chickens and I want to be inputs free, usually their biggest problem is you have too many chickens. You’ve got to look at your farm, look at what the cows or whatever your ruminates doing and saying how much chicken food does my farm produce? And not decide on the numbers of chickens that you want, but how much food is provided by my farm.

Beth Dougherty 

There’s always that temptation to go through the catalog and say, I’ll take two of those cute birds and two of those cute birds and pretty soon you’ve got more birds than your farm will feed, which is fine if you want to consider them pets, but if you’re trying to make a food producing homestead,

Anna Sakawsky 

You have to

Beth Dougherty 

Match your animals to your food availability.

Anna Sakawsky 

So really what I mean, I think the message that we’ve all got loud and clear, what it all comes back to is the ruminant animals. And before that, even the pastor and before that even, it starts with the sun, right? The sun,

Shawn Dougherty 

Absolutely. That’s right.

Anna Sakawsky 

The plants photosynthesizing, the ruminant animals, converting that into that energy, into proteins and fats, and then us using that and also feeding that back to our other animals. And of course having that diversity of species, of plants, animals and so forth on our farms and on our homesteads helps to kind of close those loops from all angles, right? Bringing in the pigs and they can convert the excess and provide us with bacon, of course, which is amazing. And they can also do other things for our homestead. So yeah, I mean this is fantastic. So we could get so deep into this. I have so many more questions and I know that our audience does too. We keep having more come in, but we are just over the hour mark now. So I will say to anybody who would like to learn more and read more about Shawn and Beth’s story, I just want to reiterate that they are featured in the February issue of Homestead Living Magazine, which of course will be coming out just in a few short weeks.

 

If you have not subscribed yet, it is not too late to do so and to still get the February issue delivered to your mailbox. So you can click the link below the video and sign up now and get that in your mailbox next month. But I think that we are at time, as far as I know right now. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of this amazing wisdom with us. And just to wrap up, is there anything else that you would like to finish off with or any words of wisdom or advice you’d like to leave

Shawn Dougherty 

Me? We’ll be speaking all over the country and one of the places we’ll be speaking at is your conference, the Modern Living Conference. And we really love to share what we’re doing. And one of the things that we do and we go to a conference is we camp out at a table and we’re selling our book, but we are answering questions and we have long lines of people coming to us and saying, help us with our farm. And that’s what our mission is. That’s what we want to do.

Beth Dougherty 

And I would end with this is real work and this is real adventure. So it includes things like blood, sweat, and tears. And I want to encourage everybody when you hit as you will hit those moments of insecurity, I didn’t grow up doing this, can I really do this? Believe that the universe is orderly, believe that it makes sense, believe that it loves us and wants us to be here, that God made us for this place. And so you need to believe in that even more strongly than you believe in the dead animal at your feet when you’re looking at a dead chicken or a dead cow, right? You’re standing over it and you’re thinking, I’m a total failure. No, death is part of life. Death is part of nature. So we’re bad crops, so we’re good crops, so are a lot of things. But believe that if we follow that model of sunlight to animals that convert cellulose to the food and nutrients and fertility that come out of those animals, that our attention, just paying attention will unlock for us the beauty and the plenty and the health that God intended us to have from the world in the beginning.

Shawn Dougherty 

God wants us to do this

Beth Dougherty 

And he wants us to

Anna Sakawsky 

Thrive.

Shawn Dougherty 

Yeah,

Anna Sakawsky 

I love that. That is such a beautiful way to leave off. Well, thank you again so much for joining us, Shawn and Beth, and to everybody who tuned in from all over the world. Like I say, I know we had people coming in from all over the US, Canada, and other countries as well. So thank you so much and we will be back with another episode of The Coop next month.

Just one more time, if you’re not subscribed to Homestead Living Magazine yet, click that link below the video and get subscribed before January 9th, and you’ll get the February issue with Shawn and Beth on the cover delivered to your mailbox in a few short weeks. So thank you so much to everybody today. And yeah, sign off and let you get back to your busy lives as homesteaders. Thank you all.

Shawn Dougherty 

Yeah, it was very fun. God

Beth Dougherty 

Bless y’all. Alright.