It happened to me, it’ll happen to you The Beautiful One and I had sort of been “tricked” into homesteading. Like most everyone else we started homesteading to save money, eat better food, spend time with the family etc… All those expectations have been fulfilled :) No trickery there. But, there was this one other expectation that failed to materialize. 

We thought this lifestyle would be romantic.  

Kinda like when you see the good guys in those food documentaries. Like in “Food Inc” when Joel Salatin is moving his cows to lush grass and eating a beautiful meal with his family outside on the farm. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s some romance. A new calf is born, a chick hatches or you harvest some veggies and cook them for dinner. BUT. And, that’s a BIG ol’ “But”. But, much of the time it can be terribly boring. For example… Letting those chickens out in the morning and putting them up at night can get old after 730 visits (just a years worth of visits). Actually, it can get real old after two weeks! Basically, it’s the same ol’ thing EVERYDAY. The Beautiful One (my wife) and I pushed through all this for 10 years, but developed a couple of serious problems that truly threatened our farming future. Coincidentally enough, I’ve come to find out that many others are suffering from these TWO major problems. However, no one is talking about it in their text books (I know, I’ve read em all). Major Problem #1: We felt significantly inept. We read all the right books (Salatin, Coleman, Mollison, Ussery etc…), yet we still had many questions. We thought if only we could see some other farms… we might gain some clarity. Things might be better. Major Problem #2: Virtually none of our friends were into growing food, and honestly, we felt a little bit cray. No. We felt a lot a bit crazy. So, many nights my wife and I would lie in bed dreaming about possible solutions to our our problem. One recurring thought was, “what if we chucked it all and traveled the country to visit other farms? That way we could learn and find community.” We’d get all excited about that possibility, stay up too late talking, and get up grumpy the next day to milk the cow. Worst yet, we’d talk ourselves out of the crazy adventure shortly after sunrise. There were plenty of reasons why traveling was a ridiculous way to solve our problems. But one day Rebekah asked herself, “what would you do if you weren’t afraid?” The answer was clear. (Very) long story short we sold (or gave away) our farm animals, found some house sitters, converted a school bus and traveled ALL 50 states of America in search of her GREATEST farms. Let me repeat.  

We traveled ALL 50 STATES OF AMERICA. Pick up the phone and call The Enquirer. Anyway(s) Immediately, our little world was opening up to the grandness of small stead farming. Everywhere we went we found like minded people making the world a better place by growing a little bit of their own food (and sometimes a lot of food to market or to give away).  

We found community with the farms we visited, but also at the meet ups we’d host along the way. Sometimes 100’s of our fans would show up. Funny thing is (or maybe it’s not so funny) that we soon discovered something interesting. From Alaska to Florida, we noticed other food growing people were lonely too :( Like us, folks needed a sense of a community. Now, thousands of people were connecting with other like minded people and finding invaluable encouragement. In addition… online, on our YouTube Channel, there were countless comments on our videos talking about how they were encouraged by seeing other ordinary folks (like them) doing extraordinary things. It turns out our videos ended up with an accumulation of more than 20 MILLION views! That’s 20,000,000 sets of eyeballs finding a sense of community. The viewers were feeling a little less “crazy” about growing their own food and finding the motivation to just plant. Ultimately, we realized that there’s a HUGE community that’s welcoming to ANYBODY and EVERYBODY. The result of our discovery?  

We don’t feel so crazy anymore (and neither do our viewers ;) 

Now, upwards and onwards to problem #2 - the feeling of being inept.  

I’m now (extremely) confident.  

But, in a surprising way.  

Absolutely, I learned a toooooooooooon, and so did our viewers.  

We all learned things like…  

• How and why to move cows/sheep everyday  
• How to use wood chips in the garden to illuminate work
• The various places we could keep bees
• Multiple rabbit growing systems  
• How to grow a plant in a pot  
• How wild Maine blueberries grow
•  The idea behind rocket mass heaters (10x as efficiefficient)  
• And, I could certainly go on and on…  

But the BIGGEST takeaway for boosting my confidence was this…