173. The Independent Farmstead | Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient-Dense Food | Shaun and Beth Dougherty
I’m so excited because your book is published by Chelsea Green Publishing, from White River Junction, Vermont. I learned a little bit about intensive pasture management and nutrient dense food from Mandy Gerth and Jay Cummings when I went to their farm. And because I teach on the east side of the mountains I’m always shocked at how expensive dairy food is on that side and I think they should start a dairy over their to reduce the price of food like cheese and milk.
Authors of the book, The Independent Farmstead: Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient-Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management
To win a copy of the book enter a comment below with your biggest takeaway from this episode! Winner will be picked on April 29th 2017!
Tell us a little about yourself.
Shaun and I are both, farming in Ohio now, native Texans grew up in Texas and Oklahoma
gardening and raising beef cattle, when we had a young family,
spent the first 4-5 years,
my gosh it rains here and it wasn’t raining in Texas or Ok, and Appalachia have a culture in the same way Texans have an identity, but the same sort of steadfast stick in the mud here
How many kids do you have in your family?
We have 8 children!
6 boys and 2 girls between 30-9 pretty evenly spread out
5 at home
2 in college
15 and 12
Youngest is 9
On a farm there’s an advantage to having kids. In the city you might look at racking up kids as expensive, but on the farm kids are just part.
My husband kind of grew up like that with 4 boys and he talks about having to have the cookie jar full to give the boys energy to get out to work!
Feel like our life revolves around food bringing in food and eating the food!
Tell me about your first gardening experience?
Beth: My folks spent the first 7-8 years of my life moving around, my dad was in school
before we move to the farm
when we moved out to the ranch, my dad raised cattle, he was a doctor, but he raised cattle on several hundred acres in south Texas. We put in a big garden out on the farm. I remember I was a very picky eater until we moved to the farm.
I remember crookneck squash for the first time and realized that food was a delightful experience. It was transformative, I was an extremely picky child until I encountered fresh garden vegetables
Shawn: Garden
I remember coming back from the garden one time and remember the Pickup is full of potatoes
impressive and very neat and something for us
Did you both come from big families?
Shaun: I was one of 6 boys,
Beth: there were only 3 kids in my family.
How did you learn how to garden organically?
It’s really interesting even though we both kind of grew up on farms and we spent our early summer when we were first married we spend time on family farm in summers
We were
- growing vegetables
- composting
we didn’t have knowlege of how a farm works and we’d been told
“you just can’t farm any more”
we had a little garden
desperately wanted to get out to the city
price of land was so high, didn’t know how it was gonna happen
found a piece of property we thought was gonna be it!
50 acres
beautiful 3000 square foot pre-civil war stagecoach inn
before we thought we were going to buy it, someone else bought it, we didn’t even know osemone else was looking at it and the realtor said, sorry it sold.
we couldn’t believe it!
Then a good friend of ours who said they saw something in the local paper
16 acres and a house for $11,000.
we didn’t even go look
We figured the house was made of cardboard….
But he said “At least go look at it”
We called the guy up and he said “if the door hanging open can you close it on your way out?” and this was in January.
It was in bad shape!
people who had lived in it had thrown trash over the side of the hill
mostly hillside
no flat piece of property bigger then a swimming pool
but it was getting us out of the city. We thought this will be our staging ground we can learn some things! Then we’ll find our real farm.
As we started working on it, brought in some goats to take care of the briars. Started to discover what was here.
- The house had a solid foundation
- electrical was ok
- added on
become our farm…that we absolutely love.
Well let’s go from there. That’s what your books aobut right?
The land that we’re sitting on, the land we are farming,
plat map on the state of Ohio,
not sutiable for agriculture.
They never said a truer word.
We live in an east west draw which is called a holler.
- moisture all summer and winter
- overgrown with the weed trees
- alynthias and shoomack
- covered in briars
None of it on the level couldn’t go over with an implement
As we started to intend to fix it up for 2 years, sell it to someone who wanted a cute little place in the country and then go buy something with fences and a barn. But in the course of bringing in any organic supplements we could get for free
- cow manure
- rotting sawdust
- building raised beds
- chicken house
- goats and tethering to eat briars and milk
redefine what we meant by farm
it was a long process because initially we went out and bought books on farming…
- story-guide to raising chickens
- followed the directions
- raised chickens but always with our parents in charge who had full time jobs off the place
Started to methods
Found we were getting more food off the place
to what ever extent we were dropping our grocery bills we were raising our feed bills… basically operating import/export business
bring in the feed
guet food if we sold any off that was the export
Something told us that wasn’t all there was to farming
poor dry farmers in arkansas, knew they didn’t have big feed stores
Both had a hard time, it was world war ii, dustbowl, knew it wasn’t easy but also knew there was an economy that didn’t include importing most of your nutrients.
shawn’s dad grew up in the dustbowl
jumpstarted the gardens with raw sawdust and cow manure
Foodprint Farm
what is the economy of the footprint farm
that doesn’t go outside of itself to make it work.
what makes it work
inputs are either meteorological – rain, snow sleet… or it’s sunlight
2 things you have to work with
we started looking for ways to do that
first thing we discovered
SUNLIGHT CAPTURE
if you have a dairy cow all of sudden you have a method of turning your principal sunlight capture that’s grass into all kinds of nutrients that are available all over the farm
Most people think milk cow, and they think cow, and jugs of milk…
I only go through 2-3 gallons a week so how much is that?
We try to encourage people to think the energy source is the sun, capture is in energy growing that needs to be converted into forms not just human beings but everything on the farm can use!
Little Known Facts
you can raise a hog, from weaning- slaughter
protein supplement (most expensive
1 gallon of milk a day
that’s because as it gets bigger the percent of it’s diet the need for high quality protein goes. You think a cow gives out milk and think what the heck am I gonna do with that
all of a sudden you have a hog growing on roughage and milk…
everybody who has a dairy cow their best friend after their cow is their pig
our next great insight
everybody gives their cows grain. Everybody gives grain. But cows used to live on grass.
We bumped into the intensive rotational grazing after we bumped into the soil conversation people
intensive
only on grass
living paddock
little bit at a time
you hold your cow in a small area an area as big as your bedroom moving it every 12-24 hours and not coming back to the grass for 30 days or 60 days and that’s the key to intensive grazing you let the animal eat that down and then don’t let the animal back on the grass for 30 days… and you let the grass to come back…
It gives them fresh grass all the time too…
now we can’t believe how our pastures have improved
areas that were rock shale that you couldn’t walk on
we have had goats and sheep on them and all those areas are coming in
the only thing that has institution of intensive rotational grazing
grazed it and watched the grass grow in
transformation is mind boggling!
On our very steep home pasture we have thick tight beautiful legume grass mixes
shale and weeds
just from moving the costs over it, feeding out hay
feed them out on the pasture keep them moving we are putting down a certain amount of grass seed and organic matter
exciting thing for us is we are really extending the grass season! Now in February we stockpiled some area to we didn’t put the animals on it, now as we go into the winter, we feed them off that grass we do some supplementing of hay, we give them grass. instead of giving them hay.
So how many?
Cheating a little bit
one of the things we say to farmers
young farmers
it’s all too expensive
find some trashy land and turn it into a farm
find the land that is close to you that noone is using and start to use it
So up the road there’s a monestary. The sisters bought that about the same time we bought ours…
somebody come in brushhog…. bring in a big tractor…
You know what they do here, they burn it… as soon as the sun comes out and it gets nice in the spring….
mowing this big piece of property
what if we ran some cows up here
sisters were urban girls, so they were a little bit nervous about it…
They had 50 acres that we put into pasture… their place had been a pig farm where 20 years before they bought it they would load up a truck with restaurant trash, partly food scraps let the pigs go all over it … eventually they got hog cholera
burn them, bulldoze them
grown into briars and weeds
getting
21 minutes
ag regeneration taking land that is bad and turing it into good farmland starting primarily with rotational grazing and milk cows.
feeding yourselves
Milk share where we were feeding other families
feed the sisters up there from the dairy
pastures are improving rather then taking away all the time… we’re making the farm better and feeding ourselves
Intensive grazing is the way you take something away and end up with more
when you graze intensively the source of the food ultimately goes back to a living soil
So the soil gets deeper and better quality
If you are practicing good intensive rotational grazing you are creating fertility what could be more magical then that
By moving this ruminant across the ground
- pretty darn bad ground
- feeding farm animals
- milk going to pig pen,
milk whey is a first class soil treatment and compost feeder
ways a nature
nutrient
through a dairy ruminant while I am doing that I am actually growing soil by measurable amounts with intensive rotational grazing
litter and manure
growing soil underneath the surface
grazing creates root die back
intensive razing
soil horizon massive plant above that and about an equal mass amount in roots. When the top half is grazed down the bottom half corresponding to the top
organic man
microbes living around the roots need
break it down
more nutrients in the soil
passages for air and water to get back into the soil and new roots to grow through
rest cycle with intensive
pulsing carbon into soil
perpetual
making room for more water
air
invent one that got more enragedtiv
getting back to original question We raise 2-3 dairy cows on our little property. We can pasture about 7 acres with cows we could pasture about 4 acres
We moved up to sisters have about 20-25 cows up at sisters
here we changed over to sheep
- better on the hillside
- softer impact
sisters have much more flatland
Keep Sheep and Cattle on the home-farm…weenland calves
Less likely to steeper here…
little animals less likely
here we run in summer time
6-7 ewes and a ram, their babes
6-8 weenlyning calves at at time
6-7 acres of sloped pasture
55 acres of grass at the monestary… another 20 animals of various sizes and ages…
You must have to go up there and move them.
We milk up there… the thing that is surprising is how little time it takes to rotational graze. I taught as a professor for 25 years and recently as our farm took on more of lives and we loved it and thinking how can we be more at home?
I now work for sisters as maintenance man, farmer, gardener
He’s the honey-do for 30 nuns… Im on that farm most of the day, beth is at our little farm here
She comes up and she’s the one that manages the grass to move the fences
1/2 hour to an hour a day… if I have a long move … this time of year, making bigger paddocks. takes a little longer because I’m moving more fence
not a time intensive operations
You know the best fertilizer is the shadow of a gardener
shadow of the animals
walking that land
that little bit every day
were better farmers because of it
We’re not running a tractor to mow those fields they are being mowed by the cows
even as we talk they are up there mowing…
That’s been a going theme of 2017, talking about really, all along it all comes down to your soil. But Jon Moore in Austrailia was the first one I talked to who mentioned no til soil….
Grass fed that’s all anyone talks aobut if you are gonna eat beef you should eat grass fed beef.
for a long time
we thought that cows need to have grain
dairy cows we were giving them a little bit to pull into the stand
don’t give them any gain
only give them hay so they are completely grass-fed
move toward how can our farm feed our animals we are not at
no cost feeding
- don’t fertilize fields
- don’t mow fields
- providing little babies
these animals are going and providing little babies
almost completely free animals
do buy a few bales of hay in the winter. Eventually it occurred to us we were spending about the same amount on equipment repairs as we were getting in hay value
retired the equipment and buy just a little bit of hay from when we have to stop to get from feb-march till being of april…
Questions going through my head… you have to milk the cows every day… would you start with a cow?
Goats, are a good place for people who are nervous about a cow, although american are used to drinking more cows milk then goat. but once you realize how well the conversation works from soil to milk
You can start out milking a cow
- under a grape arbor
- portable canvas garage
- shed scrap lumber and recycled tin
- used a solar powered little light
- string of leds with that shed
upgraded because as our children were getting bigger one way to improve was to build a better barn
A lot of people assume that it requires a milking machine but hands work better then milking machines for the health of the animal
for the health and happiness of the animal
- 2 hands and a stainless steel bucket
- 5¢ a day for a strainer
- tie their cow up to a post
- hold it
- head gate
that we manufactured out of 2x4s
I was just online looking at what people were looking at micro dairy, unfortunately people think 25 cows
- 2-3 cows
- up to 8
- nothing more then our family can milk by hand by ourselves
medieval
important to remind ourselves
industrial farming is less then a century old, the average dairy before WWII was 17 dairy cows and a family with 3 children helping out can milk 17 cows
- one of the chores
- it wasn’t a form of torture…
- not terribly
- morning milking is one of the most peaceful things you do on a farm all day long
People could lay here another half hour. What gets them out of bed…
Im gonna get up and go milk my cow
her clock is as tight in some sense their clocks are better then ours…
ready to go at a certain amount of time there’s some flex.
not tied down to
I love the order that it gives
2 times of the day I know where Im gonna be
once those start to become bookends for the work day then other things become more regular and fall into place
the family rhythm by the milking times
Shawn is a morning person
I’m not a morning person when I made that commitment I realized that I am a farm person I realized that
from the beauty that I could see coming out of that bed at 5am to go milk cows.
really was powered by the sunlight
harvest and the greens that will
will by golly get out of bed
the reward has been far beyond the effort
cows make very little demand on you
get up at 5
shove our legs in your dirty blue jeans
and shove your feet into your boots, by the time you’re therethe morning air and the screech owls down in the valley
- no one’s talking to you
- no ones telling you didn’t do something right….
- you walk up slow behind the cow and they put their head in the stanchen
When I talked to Jean Martin Fortier I was watching his videos etc I thought that is so much work, IDK if I could do that… it’s very similar with the animals, it’s a nice life. I think people are trying to get more back to that… maybe I tend to hangout with people who are more connected to their food. I meet people every day who are still like what’s compost?
when you start reflecting on it,
people in this country don’t seem as a group
seem concerned
despite the sources
worried about a centralized chemical based food system is that it’s a complete black box
don’t know where our food comes from and what’s inside
where our food comes from
no idea where to address that problem
exciting that so many young people popping up in their teens and early twenties and older people but that group of people seems to be turing out a lot of people that the cubicle life they have been educated to daycare through college and sit in a chair and respond to bells monad tap on a keyboard
despite not having a background in farming they are looking to soil and nature to give them a sense of meaning they haven’t had before
sepecially interested in the process wev’e been privileged to find on our own farm. It’s an intro a foot in the door for a lot of young people staring out with school debt and lack of experience
2 obstacles
what’s preventing young people from getting into farming.
- lack of capital
- no expereince
don’t have experience faming
onece you buy a farm another huge obstacle is operating costs
Intensive grazing answers all three of those problems
don’t have to find good land
benefit
what I’m about
better effect if I find land that needs to be regenerated
It’s easier to buy or beg steal land that no one else is biding on
no one had written a book that told us how to do regenerative farming.
like our grandfathers to live
we decided to write the book, so we did, we are now going to conferences and help people see there is another way to farm!
rather then the commercial way whcih is destorying the land
sucking the life out of the land
regenerating
i don’t like sustainable means we’re just trying to maintain I want to talk about regenerative because then we’re making it better
this method that we’re exploring we’re more excited about
bilborad for shelter pets
find a shelter farm
adopt
a shelter farm find a piece of land that needs you…
instead of imposing your visionof what a farm ought to be
1/4 acre ot generate $20k
I’m not denegrating that model…instead of that model that requires quite a bit of cash input… go make friends with that land. Then give it what it needs.
case of grasslands
overrun with weeds
home place had been
- mined
- logged
- overgrazed
- top soil stripped off and sold
So about as bad as it gets. Give it animals graze but won’t over grass
other too obstacles
operating money
very little operating money in an operation that relies on grazing.
you can do it on 2 acres or less if you animals are small
Make nature your teacher
- always there one on one 24 hours a day
- never changes the rules on you
- disciplien you if you get out of line
perfect situation
as you listen what altho animals
- instead of paying for your schooling
- harvesting your food
- as others see what is happening on that land
- they see this land coming back and how beautiful it is
They come to you and say can you do the same on my property
helng them get their property
link up other people with the inclination to farm to other pieces
We’re not gonna grow our operation.
If I had 20 lives maybe so.
For any topography there is sort of a natural limit to what can be well farmed by one family
natural limit to how many cows you can graze in one area
dairy means animals walking back and forth and the barn. A cow just wants to walk so far between the dairy parlor and her dinner.
middle as far as the cow is willing to walk because she’s loosing interest inclination to walk that’s about the natural size for a dairy.
A farm is like that. Every inch of it deserves to be husbanded well, there’s only so many inches you can look at before the day is over.
I think this is great when our planet is in a bit of peril. Our big problem is soil, having access to quality soil. I like the way in your book you talk about buidling soil. I love the way you talk about the millennials I love them I call my audience green future growers. Talking about growing energy in the book. So many people put them down and complain about htem and the ones I interview are awesome.
Born Heroes
I think they are born heroes, and they were born itno this age with the purpose
big
consierable
sense of hope. If you can’t see where the cahnge is gonna come from it’s hard to know where to find the hope
where all the energy you use on this planet is solar energy when you discover whatever is growing where the sun falls
how are we gonna use that
drinking yesterday’s sun in that milk… because the cows have just grazed it and the cows turned it into milk so we’re drinking liquid sun
when we picture the sun
the possibilitys of what
the system shutting down
- economic system
- transportation
shutting down for a period of time
we’d have to adjust a few things
dairy cows
migrant families walking down the road every day camping in a new spot with 2-3 cows and we’d be fine, wed’ be ok
now it’s a lot nicer to live on a nice farm and harvest your grass in that spot and improve that soil and know the future is gonna find a better place in this little corner of Ohio because we stayed here and took care of it. Liek that original command to Adam and Eve there’s something to make this piece of ground. I don’t want to leave my children not a million dollars but fertile land that is better then when I got it and ready to be made even better.
I don’t thnk there’s a limit to how you can improve a farm. It just keeps getting better.
I just talked to Danny Swan who works for Grow Ohio Valley, he’s in the city I think doing the same thing, regenerating the soil in a pretty urban area. Using whatever he could get to mulch and build up the soil after they broke a few rototillers etc.
those possibilities
most exciting
watching these millennials start to change city ordinances to allow to farm livestock. The amount of food that could be generated and the beauty and fertility by a goat and a dozen chickens and a good gardener. There’s source for hope.
I think that’s why you are so inpsriational. I am so lucky to talk to people who are making postiive change and digging into the soil.
reminding people at regular intervals this is great place and we’re doing great things… Don’t judge the planet by the news judge it by the people you meet
incredible people out there doing wonderful things
When we go to conferences and meet the people who are doing it and meet the young people who want to know. Who are convinced there is a way to do this.
What we like to talk about
Turning it into $20k a year. But turning it into the nutritional food I am gonna eat, my neighbors are gonna eat and share with our sisters
that’s what farming is about
feedin the farm first
feeding us this really good food
if there’s some excess then
make some money off of it
let farm’s be what they were a source for food.
regenerative farming
the problem that we forsee
in some of the models that are popular out htere. Any time we start
that are temporarily
- farming venture that has to make money from the get go
- and generate a cash income
- not reduce the inputs to the farm
purchased inputs instead of reducing what’s needed tries to make enough cash to
that’s how we got where we are in the first place was growing farms by buying bug equipment
- specialized materials
- condfineing animals so they are not hustling
- then you have to make payments have to get bigger
- more payments
- sickness
- downward spiral
nature works
all energies coming through the sun through plants recognizing that and make our farms to capitalize
take advantae of that feed the farm before all else…
farms that do generate
can export
most famring….
organic farms belong to the model of farm called
imports and exports
hightly successful market gardener
- not using any animals importing compost you’re
- bringing in fertility
- converting it into
- import and export
stuck in an economic model that may or not support you all the way through where as natures… never gonna drop…
Do you want to at the end… I know you talked about business advice you talked about finding some land that needed to be regenerated.
The people who are on the fence who are not sure just jump in and farm with reckless abandon
- buy a piece
- start doing it in the alley way behind your property
- plant some seeds
we know folks who have to have it perfect before they start. We run into a goat on craigslist we say start with that and learn as we go.
look at this
instead of buying expensive classes in farming buy the animal and let the animal start to teach you
add to that trust nature believe in nature
we’re breaking the conventional model there’s a 1000 voices that says the guy down the road who can raise out a steer to 950 lbs because he’s doing it right and you don’t know what youre doing because it takes another 6 months to finish out
Youve got to have an anwer
- vet, feed store
- grocery store
- extension office
your doing it wrong
more then you believe in low producing steer
dead animal sitting in front of you
- cows eat grass
- chickens scratch
- pigs like to waste into pig
true for 1000s of years
didn’t change when we went industrial
working with soil that has been depleted
animals that have genetics
in the end this is gonna work…
It totally does… it’s interesting to me and we’ve been married 23 years… now we have lush green grass… it used to be rocky clay soil… we couldn’t have animals because we didn’t have water and then we dug a deep well slowly 2 years ago… we have transformed this land slowly… we’ve had chickens we had 4-10 foot beds.. with just chicken wire… then built a fence slowly expanded the fence, when we put the well in , I say he put the mini farm… the year we put the well in we put an orchard in, but I have been amazed in all the apples we put in. I always tell people the chickens are here for the manure the eggs are just the cherry on top…
Two things that I made notes about…
Jacqueline freeman who wrote a book about bees. She;s in Washington state her views on animals and nature are very similar. She wrote a book. She goes out and comnunes with the bees… one day she was like we need to get a cow… so they got a cow… do you want to talk about conferences… are there some conferences coming up?
Next conferences
- Mother Earth in Vermont early June
- North Carolina in May
- Pennsylvania in Sept
really exciting events
lots of presenters and vendors
alternative ag
see that hope for future generation. Just came back from Pennsylvania ag conference in State College
we’re hoping to do the Ohio food and farm association
our farm
love to have people come out and look at our farm.
see what we do
show people around the farm
We love to go visit! If someone wants us to come to their farm and help out.
One of the greatest hopes for farming and hope for humanity, we see so much in the news and people don’t understand and don’t communicate. The people what we meet at conferences. We all speak one language when we start talking about soil. Because nature’s the same everywhere I mean savannah doesn’t look like tundra boil forest
nature how she operates
our own place in it
stewards
live that we’ll
we come to have a deep understanding of one another
We’re catholics with 8 kids, that’s not necessarily the demographic you would look at NE Farming association. The ones we just got back from NY and Mass
lot of different demographics
really loving and being together
because wheat w’ere talking about is so beautiful it transcends our differences in religion or idiology or whatever difference you want to come up with.
Final question-
if there was one change you would like to see to create a greener world what would it be? For example is there a charity or organization your passionate about or a project you would like to see put into action. What do you feel is the most crucial issue facing our planet in regards to the environment either in your local area or on a national or global scale?
Shawn: I would really love to see the huge 2000-10,000-20,000 acre farms divided up, IDK how you would do that. I’m not about stealing land away from farmers. But I’d love to see them broken back up into 5-10acre maybe even -160 acre. I would love to see that happening and families moving back into farming and taking care of that land.
somewhere was talking bout china still has some of this small far
It has an intact agricultural tradition that is beautiful based on the small farm
farms keep getting gobbled up
we’re finding … if there are things like global warming when you start taking care of your grass and start doing what we’re doing it’s gobbling up and sequestiering it back down… so it’s really taking care of some of those problems so that would be my dream farms that are run by families.
Beth:
If there was one change I would see, even though we’re country farmers
excited about possibilities of urban farming, I wold love to see ordinances shift to permit
cities in this country with large areas abandoned empty degreatede fthat young people and older people, not knocking us older folks in our fifties… the trasnformative things
not valued for the food
but for the change they create in communities
city chickens and city goats and ordinance that could define how big the place needed to be how the animals…what sense they had to be contained
how quiet they need to be but enabling young people to create urban farms that are just growing plants
Albert Howard said
nature never attempts to farm without livestock
Even the most determied vegan wants wiggler worms in her compost bing and the bigger livestock….
How do we connect with you?
If you go on line to One Cow Revolution operates as a website
where we are speaking
how to get a hold of us
classes in cheesemaking
contact us as a way to get a hold with questions or a request to come on a farm visit
we’re liable to hand you a shovel and put you to work while your here but we love to have visitors!
looking for the book the most direct way.
- chapters on grass and grazing
- captured low pressure water system
- gardening
- butchering
- dairying
learned oer 20 years
being determined there is a way to farm with nature.
jumpstart people over 5 years of mistakes….
I just have to ask is how did you get a contract with Chelsea Green?
We knew of all the books we read… the books coming back to were from Chelsea Green? That’s the place that we were like to be.
Beth had done a lot of blogging
how to communicate it
We were at a mother earth news conference and someone said where’s the book?
The Independent Farmstead: Growing Soil, Biodiversity, and Nutrient-Dense Food with Grassfed Animals and Intensive Pasture Management So we ought to try and do it. We went to the website and looked at their submission guidelines.
created a document
expecting to get
within 24 hours
this sounds like…
what we were proposing
what they want in a proposal
included sending a description of the book
a tentative table of contents
a couple or 3 chapters
had written a more narrative book
anybody was going to publish a book telling you how to do
how do you do all that work
tell stories about mistakes and things we’ve learned but it will be full of hints
The got back to us right away and said we want you to write a how to book
chapters and proposals
honestly it was a blessing of god
right place at the right time
they had already published some books on intentional rotations and grazing…
book
the
accident and sincere of grassing
1 1/2 after we started writing
family scale – homestead scale
presented not just the grazing but all the permutations down the line
- pigs
- chickens
- garden
- pasture
- soil
- and the kitchen and how that all works
- background again
we were incredibly blessed to be in the right place at the right time…
we have not idea how you sell a book because our first shot they picked it up … and said.. we like this.
How long did it take then?
about 6 months our first contact was in April… busy busy busy for next 6months
publishing
projecting 2 years in the future
several months of coming up with a proposal for this different book and generating things and they would say change it this way, then it was probably November that we would. We had one year… from signing the contract to turning in the finished book.They would probably have given us extensions but we look at a deadline is a deadline. It’s a lot of hours of work. A lot of work we had done a head of time
things we had done at conferences
sit up for hours in the evening, when the kids were not disturb us
work on an outline for a chapter. Then we’d shanghi the kids at that point and they helped with the morning milkings.
5-6:30 I would write
shawn and I were doing lots of driving
back and forth to Iowa and ok. car times were wonderful. I’d plug computer into the car and hammer out outlines and write, write, write.
I always laugh when I’m driving and editing my podcast I can’t type the shownotes like I want to… but if it has to get done it has to get done.
The Organic Gardener Podcast is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com
If you like what you heard on the Organic Gardener Podcast we’d love it if you’d give us review and hopefully a 5 star rating on iTunes so other gardeners can find us and listen to. Just click on the link here.
So much great information! Love your podcast. Thank you
Thanks For Listening Vicki!I love it too. Such an honor to be the host!
I think their focus on rebuilding land is so important. This works well for smaller and/or more urban environments but still has similarities to the re-foresting and re-wilding movements that are having positive impacts on larger swaths of land.
Thanks Jim for listening! I agree the rebuilding our land is crucial and since I’m struggling just to feed my class gunniea pig I think a lot of what they say will change the way people look at food. It’s interesting there was a commercial on tv the other day that said if you eat, you participate in agriculture! Thanks for commenting to!