AdAgrA 2018: Something Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Intensive: Living Naturally

Jerry Wernick

1. Living Naturally: Overview

I want to give just a little talk to begin with.

I hope I'm preaching to the choir here, but maybe some new ideas that might be helpful.

We call our little presentation Living Naturally, And Linda and I have found living as we have for over 35 years now out in the country with our own place and our own food and our own water and being able to be together, our family all the time.

I was fortunate we had a family business, as I'll describe later, where I didn't have to leave home, hardly at all.

And a few times we did, I could take our daughter with us.

And you know, for nearly all of human history, almost everybody lived in the country.

We live in a very unusual time in world history when most people don't.

Now, it wasn't always by choice, of course.

They lived in the country, they didn't really want to be there, and they were working for somebody else, but there were other people that had nice country homes.

In fact, when I went there, it's where I got some of the ideas for our greenhouse that I'll show you.

Think of Jefferson and Monticello and what he had.

Wherever she went, she had a country home.

Sunnyside and Elm's Haven were both about 70 miles from the nearest large city.

In fact, at Sunnyside, there wasn't even a road to it when they first got it.

They had to float down the river to get to it.

At Elmshaven, she bought 70 acres, but she ended up, I think it was 30 or 35.

She sold the other 2 to a son and some to the hospital and whatnot.

She had hundreds of fruit trees on her land there.

In those days, you didn't go out and get a piece of country property and not have water.

So we need to keep some of those things in mind.

There's others like Enoch, David, Elijah, Even Adam and Eve themselves.

But most people really lived a hardscrabble life.

And a lot of people today still think, move to the country, it's going to be primitive, it's going to be hard, it's going to be terrible.

Well, the fact is, some of it is hard and that's what's good for us.

We need outdoor manual work, but it should be pleasant as much as possible.

There's 2 periods in history when most people lived in cities.

And it's interesting if you have your little handout we gave you the first 2 pages are statements from the Spirit of Prophecy but the other 1 is statements from scripture.

And if you look on the scripture 1, number 9 there, it starts out, and they said, I have them here instead of looking them up in the Bible.

I want to read that 1, a little bit of it.

And they said, come let us build ourselves a city.

We usually think of it as just the Tower of Babel.

Whose top is in the heavens, let us make a name for us lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.

The Lord did not want people to be concentrated in small areas.

And the reason is, is because people just were people and if you see the neighbors doing something and what not, especially with the advent of carnal nature and sin and so on.

It just, people breed on each other with sin and it just turns into a mess.

It's a lot better if people are scattered out and have to work on the land.

They tend to be healthier and they tend to be more moral.

So the Lord didn't like that and you know what happened.

But until that happened, everybody was living in 1 valley there virtually because it's just down from where the ark landed.

After that happened with the confusion of languages, people were Scattered all over the earth, the vast majority of people lived in the country for almost 4, 000 years, until our day.

You've probably read in news magazines or whatever that it was about 2 years ago, the world passed the threshold where now over 50% of people worldwide live in cities, many of them in huge metro areas with millions and millions of people.

That just happened recently and it's expanding tremendously now with people flocking to the city, especially in the third world country now.

They think it's going to be a better life.

You can't blame them because many of them, their country life is pretty tough when you think if you've done any mission work like we have all over the world.

So, why do so many people love urban life?

Originally, God gave us a garden home, We know that.

And if you've heard people talk, they usually say there's 2 great institutions that came out of Eden.

And it's an interesting fact, it's kind of a sad fact, that those 3 are all under attack in our world.

I mean is marriage under attack would you say?

Unfortunately, even among Adventist people, marriage is in decline.

It's hard for people to be loyal and faithful their whole life.

The Sabbath worldwide is hardly even known.

It's been jettisoned by almost every religion on earth.

And even among Adventists, faithful Sabbath observance is kind of declining.

Would you say that the vast majority of Adventist people you know live in the country?

Yeah, well, they kind of misunderstand it in a way.

But there was an article, I think it was a year or 2 ago, it was a whole review on cities versus country.

In there it mentioned that in North America, 90% of all people live in cities.

But it's slightly more than 90% of Adventists live in cities.

In spite of 100 years of counsel the Lord has given us.

You said the general population, it's 90%?

And Avenus is about the same, if anything slightly more.

And the reason is because Avenus, this is my opinion now, Avenus tend to be a little more educated than perhaps the general population.

And unfortunately, educated people head to where you can make more money and that's where they keep the money in the cities kind of is the reason.

So There have been many articles at the same time in the last 5 or 10 years in many of our papers on what's happening to our youth.

We are losing many of our young people in the Adventist Church, walking out the back door, even the front door.

But the real reason or the major reason, again in my opinion, is never mentioned.

And that's that these kids have all been raised in fast-paced urban environments.

And the world is such an allure, they're just sucked into it.

And they're not much interested in anything really spiritual.

The answer to that is to get back to our roots.

And I think it's very important, especially for those of you who have children or who are grandparents and have grandchildren, that you want to help and you want to help them with their spiritual life.

2. Living Naturally: A Country Home

We're going to have to move a little faster, but we have all day so we'll go back over some of this.

Anyway, this is the stairs going downstairs.

Another feature of a good country home that's wood heated, in our opinion, you gotta have a basement.

I asked, as I was coming through Texas here, I stopped and talked to a real estate agent just for fun to find out anybody live in the country around here, how much land cost and what do you do for water and all that.

1 thing he said is that in 11 years of doing real estate, he had sold 1 house with a basement in Texas.

Now you folks that are all Texans, maybe you can explain that to me later, I don't know, but if you're going to heat a house, the cold air, there will be cold air.

Those great big windows in our front, we pay for that because that's cold.

When it's 20, 30 below 0, those windows are double-paned, they're insulated, but still it's really cold right next to them.

That cold air is going to come down, it's going to puddle at the lowest place.

And that's my living room floor, unless you do something else.

If you have a full basement, it's, you're heating a whole other house.

So the cool air that collects in the house from wherever, we have several places, but 1 of the main ones, it flows down these steps and it's heading for the heater.

That way it doesn't puddle on your main floor.

I was just gonna say in Texas, you may not need it so much for heat, but it is a wonderful cool area also.

I realize your ground temperature is much warmer here, but it is a cool area, and then it does have a lot of uses that you can use.

But I don't know, maybe Texas has other reasons they don't have.

I mean, we'll show you here in a minute, but we have a beautiful root cellar down here.

And that's another reason you need a basement.

But at the bottom of the steps, if you turn left, you can't see the door.

Separated, the door to the right is a recreation room downstairs.

And it looks kind of like that and Linda laid all that rock too.

No, I've learned this you teach your children to do things and then they turn around and teach you how to do even better And that's how it's worked with Rochelle.

I'm not the mason, but I'm the hod carrier.

But this wall, and I'll talk a lot more about this in building your own home, this wall's a foot thick.

Because most rocks don't come in nature just nice and flat and straight and perfect.

And they make diamond saws, you can cut everything, and they make fake rock that's all 2 inches thick and all that sort of stuff.

If you just want to use native rock, and it's beautiful rock, has a lot of color and so on, they vary from 2 or 3 inches up to 8 inches.

So the back, all the nicest looking sides and the flattest sides are here.

I'm exaggerating, but it's all like that.

So you build a wall behind that, a form, with reinforcing rod, and then when the rock wall's up a ways, you pour concrete behind that, and the rocks are then poured into a wall.

And outside of that wall is foam, and I have a piece of it in the back for those who aren't familiar.

It insulates it away from the ground and the outside cold.

And that wall again helps heat that rec room because it gets warm and just stays there.

The question was, why do we need to insulate our basement?

Our ground is 40 degrees year-round there.

That's how we know what the ground temperature is.

Now in this country, maybe somebody can tell me, what's the temperature down 10 feet in the ground around here, year round?

Well, you're like 15 degrees warmer than we are.

We're trying to heat this to room temperature, and so 40 degrees is better than 30 below, which is outside, but it's still 40, and it would just suck all the heat out of that wall instantly because the ground's everywhere.

It's like about 15, 12 to 15 R value and then it stays nice and warm and it's not losing much heat because you are working against 40 and it works and there's no windows in it either.

Our kids used to call it the dungeon, but I thought it looked all right.

Now this is just in the other door, and this is a little fuzzy picture, and there's a lot going on here.

We're gonna talk about this in depth in the utility section.

That's our wood heater right in the foreground on the left.

It's 2 feet by 2 feet by 2 and a half feet.

It's made out of solid quarter inch plate steel.

It's reinforced on the inside so it won't buckle and whatever.

All you do is you buy a barrel kit, if you know what that is, down at your hardware store.

It's a kit that's designed to go on an old barrel to make a quickie stove.

We just throw the legs and stuff in the shop, don't use them, but The door is cast iron, so it won't warp.

I'll show you in the other pictures later.

That's what's on the front, so that's your door.

That heats our whole house with a little aid from Linda's kitchen stove and the fireplace and so on.

Above it, in that insulated box, is another quarter inch steel hot water heater that we designed ourself.

And the flue from this is 8 inch well casing, which is really thick steel, it is welded right through that water tank.

So when you heat, you get hot water instantly, automatically.

In fact, in the winter we have so much, I'll tell you later, we circulate it, we have a little stone hot tub in our bedroom.

I mean, you got hot water coming out your ears.

The stove at the top, it comes out and goes straight into that walkway at the top.

We have an automatic washer, and it runs off our little hydro plant.

You can see the end of the chute there coming down from outside, so that's where you drop the wood.

It comes in, often that whole side is stacked with wood.

3. Living Naturally: How to Find Good Land

It's a temptation today, just get on the internet, because you can, you know, Zillow is it or something, I mean you can find land all over the place.

I've talked to real estate agents that I know well in our area, and he's done that.

He said typically what is on the internet is way overpriced, hoping to attract somebody from California or Texas or somewhere to come and buy it at that price.

But if you go there locally and inquire, it's not that price.

The only way it's good is to see, well, there are some properties out there.

The best way to find land is go there in person.

What we did years ago, we started in California.

But when we had just a little, we had another couple that we had known.

And they didn't have any money because he was in school.

But we both wanted to live in the country.

And we went for about a month or 5 weeks.

And we Both wanted to live in the West if we could.

So we started in Southern California and we went all the way to Canada and out through Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming and made a circle back.

And we looked for every little forgotten valley that there was.

We stayed away from the major cities and all of that, but within reach of them or a tourist center like Glacier Park turned out to be for us.

On that 1 trip in about a month, we found 5 or 6 valleys like ours.

They were either on the wrong side of the mountain, they were too far from town, the soil was too Rocky in the case here.

Our valley had been homesteaded, 1 of the last places in the United States to be homesteaded.

They were still homesteading into the 30s there.

And the homes, at 1 time, in the 30s, there were 400 people living in this valley, pioneers.

There were 2 public schools, little log schools.

But they found out, they were all gonna be, 1 of them told us there were a few of the original homesteaders still left when we first moved there in the 70s.

And they told us, they all thought they were gonna be wealthy ranchers.

But they found out that this valley is surrounded by high mountains all the way around.

There's just kind of 1 canyon that goes out.

And because of that, it has a bathtub effect, which means that the only air coming in basically comes at night.

The air starts to cool, and the air on the mountaintops gets cold, so it's heavy.

And it goes to the bottom, just like in a bathtub, and sits there.

So the nights are cold and they can even frost in the summer.

And voila, they finally can grow hardly anything there and so eventually they all left, almost all of them.

Our property, if you can believe this, it just breaks my heart.

We only have about a fourth of a homestead because you could homestead 160 acres.

So ours is part of the original McIntosh homestead.

In the 40s, an older lady who we came to know quite well, she's passed away now, she bought that property for back taxes for 300 and some dollars.

The poor old homesteader, they'd have 5 children, and 1 of those children came back 1 day.

And she showed up at our door, knocked on the door, and she said, I forget her first name, but I'm so-and-so McIntosh.

I just wanted to see what had happened to the place and We sat her down and we grilled her for 3 or 4 hours on what life was like there What happened and all the rest of it?

But that's what happened the homesteaders left it was a tough Valley it's too cold it was too far from town Thin soil and like 1 of the guys said that lived there many years, you can't eat the scenery.

It's a beautiful valley, beautiful, But to live there was a little more of a problem.

There's a wonderful resource book called Strategic Relocation by Joel Skousen, and he did what he has done throughout the US, which you did on your loop.

Maybe we'll have you record that so everybody can hear that, but you need to do that.

But I'll tell you another thing that's important about getting country land.

The best land with the water and the springs and this and That often is not on the market.

Because if anybody wants to sell it, they just tell Fred or Joe, whatever the neighbor is like, hey, oh yeah, I want that.

Our property that we got was not on the market.

We have some other Avenis friends who just bought property in our valley, much below market value.

We know another guy who bought a property, this is 10 or 15 years, 20 years ago.

The property had been on the market, but nobody, it was so remote, nobody, and the guy got discouraged and he lived in Oregon and he just took it off the market and that's the way it was.

When this guy, he went around and found the property he wanted rather than looking for what was for sale, found out the history of it.

He drove all the way to Oregon from Montana, knocked on this guy's door.

I wanted to, that property's beautiful for what I want.

If you don't really need it, why not sell it to me?

You've got to, like Ellen White said, you've got to help, work hard to help open up the way.

The best thing is go to a place, start asking questions.

Some people wouldn't do this, but I go up to a ranch house and knock on the door.

You've got a beautiful piece of property here.

Oh, I'd grow this, and I got an apple tree, and Fred over here.