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