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Agriculture

Preparing to Make the Jump

Alan Seiler

Ricky Seiler

Whoa, Nellie! 4 Must-Haves Before you Make Your Move

Father God, we are thankful to be alive today.

It's a lot of information, Lord, and we just ask that you can impress each 1 of us where we are right now, as far as what the decision is and where you're leading us, what direction you'd like to invite us to go to follow you.

And that may be a little different direction for each 1 of us here.

I just ask in a special way you'd be with us this morning during this first presentation in preparing to make the jump.

I hope it's encouraging, Lord, and most importantly, it lifts you up in the way that you deserve and the honor that you deserve as well, Lord, is our prayer, amen.

Okay, first of all, There's 6 classes that'll be taking place in this room, right, throughout the whole day.

If you like what you see and what's going on here, my son and I, Alan will be in here just a moment, we're doing 2 of the classes.

But you're not obligated to stay in any class, so if you don't like what you're hearing, we won't take it personal.

If you want to go somewhere else, you're welcome to head out.

But you can skip around, so don't feel like you're locked into 1 particular track if you'd like to move around.

First of all, we just want to welcome you.

I'm glad you're even thinking about making the jump.

I can tell you, it can be kind of spooky, okay?

Because most of us, we're going to share a little bit about our journey, okay?

Some of these things may be relative to you, some of them might not be, but at least you kind of get an idea of some of the things we thought through and we continue to think through as we're going through this process, because this is really a journey.

I don't know how that makes people feel, but a lot of us like very concrete.

I want to go here, I want to do this, I want it to work out like this.

Certainly with what we're asking and hoping the Lord is leading us.

But there's a really unique process here.

Today we're going to be talking about this, 4 signs to heed before you make the jump.

Now, Alan is going to be in here, he's helping get some people situated out there, and he'll be in just a few minutes.

But 1 of the things we were going to demonstrate is when you're thinking about preparing to make the jump, maybe a better title for this talk would have been preparing to make a series of small hops.

Instead of 1 big jump, Like I'm living in the city today and tomorrow I'm living in the country.

If you try to make that type of jump, it's probably going to be, well, you'll probably end up back in the city.

Think of it like, you take a hop, you take a hop, and you might actually take a hop backwards.

And then hopefully you take another hop, hop, hop, right?

Because here's the thing, guys, we're not educated to live in the country.

Most of us have been educated to not live in the country.

We don't have the skills to live in the country.

We don't know what it takes to live in the country.

We have not a clue of the first thing to do about growing anything.

You guys may be in a little different area in your life, but we'll just walk you through our little journey.

As you can see there, my wife is on the far right.

Vivian's folks actually don't live with us.

And then our daughter, Aubrey, and then our son, Alan.

I used to work for a hospital organization.

And then about 22 years ago, the Lord was convicting my wife and I.

Our kids were very small at the time they were like 1 and 2, 1 and 3 years old and I don't know we just kind of I can't tell you we had this moment in time where we just all of a sudden just like we need to move the country it really wasn't quite that crystal clear but the Lord was wooing us and we ended up making a transition We used to live in Texas in an urban setting, kind of like a typical housing area where the houses are all close together, and those types of things.

We had an opportunity to take another job that took us to a rural location in Oklahoma.

I never had any interest growing up as a Texan of ever living in Oklahoma.

But the thought is that we made this transition The kids were small, but here's the thing We lived in the country for 13 years before really we ever really put anything in the soil to actually consider growing anything.

I mean, I did kill a few tomato plants in a raised bed garden for a couple of years in a row, but that was about it.

Yeah, we're still good at killing tomatoes.

This is my son, Alan, by the way, he just slipped in.

So the reality was we physically had a home in the country, but we still live very much like somebody in the city.

So it wasn't until Alan was 14 years old that we were down visiting my mom's house, his grandmother's house, and she had in her garage a book, a Black and Decker backyard gardening book.

Basically, I was just in the garage and my grandma put stuff in the garage for us to find.

My parents didn't like us just giving us stuff, so she'd put things in the garage.

She'd say, if you find anything in there, you can take it home, you know, type of thing.

So I was doing my visit search in the garage, and I came upon the book and opened it and it just started introducing some principles like putting things back in the soil I mean it seems so mundane now, but like then it's like oh the soil just doesn't have everything in it You know that's amazing so you know the simplicity of things But yeah, that's that's how I how I got interested so so he got started and Kind of just kind of eventually it ran down the path where We started kind of paying attention to some of the counsel that we had been given as a church that we were totally oblivious to.

I mean I was raised in the Adventist faith.

I went through Adventist schools my entire life.

How could I think about it if I couldn't even think about it?

We're going to show you in here in just a few minutes kind of a little bit about our journey in our garden.

So you can kind of get a sense of what that looked like.

So just to get an idea, we're from Oklahoma, of course.

That's Good to know, since we're in Florida.

Lynn Hoag

Methods of Urban Gardening

All right, we're going to talk about urban gardening or getting started there.

So if you live in the suburbs, you have a little bit of quarter of an acre.

So what can we do with a small bit of ground that way?

Alright, we're told that if we will ask God, that He will teach us.

And we're given multiple promises like that in the Bible.

1 that I like a lot comes from Jeremiah 33.

God is talking to Jeremiah and He says, "...Thus saith the Lord who made it..." He's talking about making the earth.

"...the Lord who formed it to establish it.

Call to Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know." Another translation says, I will tell you things that you could not possibly know.

Since we have such a great promise, let's ask for it right now.

Father in heaven, you give us such great gifts.

The earth and the bounty that you produce.

Now you offered to teach us, and we need that and ask you for that right now in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, if you have a little bit of space where you can plant trees, you can get incredible growth.

These are trees that were planted, well it's a year and a half after I planted those, that was in Brazil, and we were doing the Ellen White planting method.

If you have the room to do that, you can get more produce per square foot per acre off of trees than almost anything else once the trees are mature up.

In a year and a half's time, I want to tell you, Here's a little cashew tree.

We had little tiny things, sticks, we were putting in the ground here.

And you can see that in a year and a half, there's my hand on the tree.

You can see what tremendous growth we had there.

We have treasures in the Seventh-day Adventist Church which have been given to this church, not for us to hang on to, but for us to teach the rest of the world.

There's 1 place where Ellen White says that the children of Israel were placed where they were because it's in the crossroads and so they were to teach the rest of the world how to grow produce, how to grow plants, without disease.

And then she goes on to say that that's our job today, is to teach the rest of the world how to grow plants, how to grow our food without disease.

And when we do that, the world will flock to us to learn that.

The way food is grown today, it is very, the way food is grown today, it is very, very deficient.

And when we track the use of glyphosate, which is Roundup, And disease, as glyphosate has gone up, the disease rate has gone up with that, just incredibly.

Okay, so let's get back to what we can do with a small area.

We were just, if you come to our table out there during the break, there's 1 thing we can do which is a vertical garden.

So when you don't have space or when you have a greenhouse and the space is precious, you can hang that vertical garden on the north wall so they get sunshine.

You can hang it on a patio there and each it's got 16 little pockets on it and each of those little pockets you can put soil in or you could put a pot in with a plant, and you could have 16 different plants there.

So you could have lots of different plants growing there.

Okay, I want to tell you that with the information that we have in the spirit of prophecy and in the Bible and then careful observation of nature, Those are 3 sources of divine wisdom.

We often say that nature is God's other book there.

So if we will look at those sources of information, We come up with growing methods that are different and that are so superior to anything that the world is doing today.

I think I will go into what I believe would be...

I feel like there's a tremendous need for us to develop a growing pod, or like a greenhouse, using the principles from the Bible and the spirit of prophecy.

And a few years back we developed what we call the Omega Greenhouse.

Now that was a greenhouse using principles from the spirit of prophecy.

And I gave the engineers and the young men working on this project, I just gave them free rein to do whatever they wanted with it.

And so they came up with a very good greenhouse, but it's expensive.

It's way too expensive for most people there.

So now we're working on a project where we are using what we call a water canopy.

Anybody heard of a water canopy greenhouse?

In Genesis 1, 6, and 7, God is creating the earth.

On the second day God said, let there be a firmament or let there be a sky in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters.

Thus God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the sky from the waters which were above the sky.

And God called the firmament heaven and the evening and the morning were the second day.

Now let's look at this just briefly here.

We don't have much time in these sessions.

If we look at the fossil record in the earth, we find that that anything just gigantic, just huge, much more vigorous than their descendants today.

Today we have some kind of mosses, club mosses, and sometimes they get this big.

In the fossil record we find the same moss, 50 feet, 50 feet.

Today they're 3, maybe 4 inches at the most.

In the fossil record, we have dragonflies that are 30 inches and even 36 inch wingspans.

We'll go to Genesis and we'll go to Ellen White's writings.

Ellen White says that Adam was more than twice the size of men today.

I'm about 6 feet tall, that would make Adam about 12 feet tall, and of course he'd have to be proportioned there.

That would make Adam, when we do the math on it, that would make Adam weigh over 2, 000 pounds.

Recently in Turkey they discovered at the base of Mount Ararat, they discovered a tomb.

They say that it's Noah's tomb because it's good for tourism.

Whether it's Noah or not in that tomb, we don't know.

What we do know is that the skeleton of the man in that tomb is of a 12-foot tall man.

Tells us that there were giants in the land.

Tells us that it did not rain on the earth before the flood.

Then of course all that water canopy that was above the earth collapsed.

So if we were to make a growing chamber with water above so that all of the sunlight has to shine through the water and through the glass or the plastic and then to the plants.

Jonathan Dysinger

Basic Farm Tools

The first important thing that I'm still trying to learn, everybody I know is still trying to learn, and that is put it back when you're done with it.

A place for everything and everything in its place.

Everybody's had that experience when you're trying to find something and you know you just had it but you can't find it.

And that is, there's a simple solution to that and that is when you're finished with it put it back.

But you can't maintain order like that unless you have a place designated for every tool.

So that's super important and something that you have to continually work on.

I know I find myself in situations where you're halfway through a project and it's, you know, end of the day, but you think, well, I'll just leave my tools here, I'll start up next day.

Well, then something inevitably happens and then you're trying to figure out where you left your tools.

It's always a good practice to put stuff away at the end of the day, clean it up, and that way it's ready to use.

We're going to go over a few different tools that are not gardening related tools.

We're going to touch on mechanic tools, which If you don't know what I mean by that, we'll get to it.

Cordless drills and drivers, that's something that's super important.

Everybody should have cordless set of tools.

Chainsaw, because that's going to be important Anytime you need to cut a tree or clear a fence or clear some branches that fell in your driveway, you need a chainsaw.

A wheelbarrow or a wagon, that's going to be something that's pretty important because You can only carry so much by hand, but if you have something to push or haul, that's something you definitely need.

We're not gonna go into detail about wheelbarrows because everybody knows what a wheelbarrow is and what it looks like.

The only thing I would say with wheelbarrows is get a wheelbarrow that has a flat free tire because that's just 1 less thing you have to worry about.

Although we do have 1 that that has a pretty stout plastic, but it's it's probably not going to last as long It'll it'll fatigue in the Sun over over a period of time.

So yes, definitely Definitely solid wheels that don't require you to you know patch flats or you know fill them up Another thing that can be really handy with wheelbarrows is 2 wheel on the front because then you don't have to worry about balance as much.

You can get more weight in it and focus all your energy on just lifting and pushing rather than trying to balance it.

So, couple things on wheelbarrows, but we're not gonna go any farther into that because it's pretty basic.

And then the last thing that I have on the list, and if anybody has something they have specific questions about, like I said, we're not gonna wait to the end, just raise your hand.

If we're gonna talk about it later, I'll tell you.

But weed eaters are something that is important.

But once again, lawn mowers, just buy a decent lawn mower.

I'd be happy to give recommendations on what I feel like is a good lawnmower.

But weed eaters are important because, especially gardening, you have to keep weeds down.

That's super important because If you have weeds that grow up and and seed You know the weeds can the weed seeds can blow a long distance into your garden, so we try to keep all around our fields mode and weed eating and So that's that's an important thing and There are definitely large differences in quality between 1 and the other different types.

I apologize, this is a really low quality picture I grabbed off of the internet.

Basically a mechanic's tools are your sockets, wrenches, Allen wrenches, screwdrivers, all that kind of stuff is mechanics tools, and there's a huge variety of You know different quality and price range and all I have buddies who invest a tremendous amount of money into like Snap-on tools that kind of the high-end a lot of really nice mechanic shops are going to use snap-on I have used them, but personally I can't justify spending $10, 000 on a set of tools.

The nice thing about them is they have lifetime warranty.

If anything ever breaks, you just take it back and can replace it.

But this picture is actually a basic set of cobalt tools from Lowe's and that's personally what I have.

They're good quality and The great thing about them is, at least for me, we have a Lowe's in the nearest town to us and they have a lifetime warranty as well.

If you break anything, all you got to do is walk in, take another 1 off the shelf, go to the customer service and they just swap it out.

That negates the snap-on thing where, well, it has lifetime warranty.

We got lifetime warranty with these and you can buy a complete set.

Normally like I think $280, but I got it for under $200.

And it's a complete set of sockets all the way from like inch and a quarter down to the smallest.

A complete set of wrenches, and it's just really a complete set of tools.

I mean the comparable like if you priced out the same tools that came in that set to snap on literally it would be thousands.

And so this is important because anything even around the home you need tools like this But especially on a farm You know you maybe you buy some some hand tools from from Johnny's and you got to put them together And there's stuff that has to be tightened Screws that have to be put in so so you definitely need a set of tools like this It's not something you might you maybe will be using all the time But if you have something and you you always have them organized, they're always there when you need them.

So definitely recommend a good set of mechanics tools and the Cobalt brand.

We manufacture and so I got a lot of different stuff.

But this 1, I just actually got these last week.

You can definitely get cheaper ones, but they just aren't gonna hold up as well.

They make them with Hammer drill features where it'll actually kind of hammer fords and backwards while you're drilling That's only needed if you're doing like concrete really and so and it adds a lot of extra weight to a drill So I personally do not own 1 and I would not recommend purchasing 1 unless you're doing concrete or rock or like something like that that you're trying to drill into.

So these are a new kind that Dewalt just came out where they're brushless motors.

If you have it in the budget, I would highly recommend paying the extra 50 bucks for a set of the the XR model D waltz These are 20 volt they come in 12 volt but not the brushless I think the brushless are only in the 20 volt So I thought I'd just show these off and any of you guys are more than welcome to come up and look at them after the class.

This can do almost really everything that this can do.

It's just that there's certain things that this impact driver can do better than this.

If you're building a bunch of greenhouses and you want to put in a bunch of tech screws, the impact driver is going to work way better.

If you were setting up a little 1 like we have out here, you can get the job done with this.

It's just a little bit more, it would take a little bit longer.

You can get impacts, especially like air ratchets, that you can set the torque setting on, but they're extremely expensive.

So these, no, you would just control that by the amount of like strength you put on the trigger and then there's no way to really tell that.

Next thing we're going to go into is chainsaws.

So like I said, everybody needs a chainsaw if you're living in the country.

You got to be able to clear, brush, and well, you know, chainsaw is not really brush, but I mean if it was small trees and stuff which you know you're gonna get or or cutting firewood actually we personally do not cut our own firewood we are in a really nice situation and I would encourage anybody to research.

We have a, like 30 minutes from us, a big pallet manufacturer and they have, they get logs basically already cut into rectangle sizes and then they have to cut the ends off to get them to the right length.

And so we end up with a bunch of wood that's like yay long all the way up to yay long, about that big around, just perfect firewood.

And we can get it so cheap that for the house, what did you guys spend, like maybe 100 bucks to heat for the whole winter, like 2 big loads of wood.

And so you just, you can't cut wood and split it yourself that cheap.

And so look around, I mean, there's pallet manufacturers all over, so you might have a sawmill.

We can also, from a local sawmill, get slabs for like 12 bucks for a big bundle but they're not as good for firewood because it's mostly bark or a large part of its bark.

Look around because cutting your own firewood is a lot of work and it's dangerous.

It's not really logging, but logging is the most dangerous occupation.

My dad would not let me run a chainsaw until I had read the manual front to back.

Series

Preparing to Make the Jump

Methods of Urban Gardening

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

How to Evangelize Using Agriculture

How to Evangelize Using Agriculture- Part 3

52m

Intensive: Gardening 101

3. Gardening 101: Steps to Productive Soil

1h 2m

Intensive: The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap

The Life of the Plants Is in the Sap- Part 2

58m

Session 3

Sharing the Simple Life: My Journey

1h 11m

Gardening Techniques

Sea Minerals & Trace Minerals

1h

Basic Gardening

Help! How do I Start My First Garden?

1h 7m

Special Interests

Irresistible Basil

1h 6m

Flowers

Starting Out with Flower Farming

1h

Starting a Market Garden

Growing Better, Not Bigger

1h 6m

Home Gardening

Beating the Botanical Besiegement

1h 14m

Advanced Track

Optimizing Your Greenhouse Production Part 2

59m

Breakout Session 3

Veganically Grown: Our Journey to Certified and Beyond

58m

Sound Doctrine