AdAgrA 2022: Sharing the Blessings

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Homesteading Track

Chad Kreuzer

Making the Country Move Painfully or with Pleasure?

I want to get started Just so and I'm gonna try to leave hopefully leave some room for questions at the end so hold them off unless I really don't make sense hold off till the end just for the Recording sake and then we'll try to do the questions and answers at the end.

Just to let you know, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Chad Kruiser.

I have a YouTube channel called Health and Homestead.

You can check that out on YouTube, and we have over close to 150 videos on there.

We're putting out new ones all the time on research on studies from the peer-reviewed literature on health and natural remedies compared to head-to-head with drug medication often found to be just as good or better.

We also talk about country living in general, homesteading, preserving food, growing food, gardening, and so forth.

But before we begin, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we're so thankful for the opportunity to study about country living.

I pray that Jesus would be in our midst, that your spirit would dwell not only in this meeting right here, but all those taking place over the course of the conference here with Ad Agra.

Lord, we pray for your blessing and give us sharp minds.

And I also pray that you give people wisdom to implement what needs to take place in their own lives.

So we're going to look at 15 points, and there's actually multiple points that we're going to look at this morning on making the move to the country painfully or with pleasure.

You can make massive mistakes, or you can hopefully do it—there's always going to be some pain.

But you can make major mistakes and make the wrong decision, or you can make the right decision and still have difficulties.

And so, but number 1 is gonna take place, we're gonna find it in Proverbs 3, verse 5.

You probably know the first part of this, But the last part is in the context of country living.

You know the first part, trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lead not unto thine own understanding.

In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

If you're seeking to know where God is leading you, you need to acknowledge Jesus in all your ways.

Repent of your sins and allow Him to day by day lead you in the small decisions of life, not in just the big decisions of buying a house or getting married, but in even the little things of life, let him direct your ways and he will do it.

And then it says, be not wise in your own eyes.

It shall be health to your navel and marrow to your bones when you let God lead you.

Interestingly enough, evolution has not given us the longest living culture on earth.

Do you realize creation has given us the longest living culture, the longest living culture, Seventh-day Adventist, and they get their ideas from Genesis, creation.

If evolution is so powerful, what good has it done for anybody?

Name 1 good thing it's done for humanity.

Right, But at least creation has given us the longest living group of people by following these principles.

But nevertheless, it shall be health to your navel and merit to your bones.

Honor the Lord with your substance and with the firstfruits of all your increase.

You know, we might today call that something like tithe.

And I was amazed when I found out that the majority of people often don't even pay tithe in God's Church.

Young people, you may not even have a job yet, but when when I gave my life to God, tithe wasn't like an option.

It was like, am I gonna follow God or am I not gonna follow God, right?

It's not like, will I give God what is his this week or not?

Even if you're in debt, should God get the money that we are to give to him?

Yes, in all our ways we're to acknowledge him, right?

And so put God first, even in your finances, of all your increase, so shall thy, what's gonna be the result?

Your barns will be filled with plenty and your presses shall burst with new wine.

So notice this trust the Lord with all your heart is in the context of God blessing your agricultural labor.

And friends, we want to put him first in all the things that we do if we want to be blessed in our lives.

So the very first point out of our 15 points on making the move with pleasure is number 1, seeking God's counsel.

That's spending time in the Word of God, but I want to also challenge you, I asked the last group, but We have a lot of new people in this.

How many of you, how many of you have read the book Country Living, how many of you?

Okay, a number of us, maybe slightly less than half in this group.

And the great thing is, and I said it's the last group, it is a tiny, tiny, tiny book, it is only 32 pages.

I would challenge even you young people who hate to read.

I used to hate to read too, but now I love to read.

And so, but read that book, Country Living.

There's gonna be things in there that I don't have time to cover here, and it is unbelievably balanced.

She doesn't just say go go go move to the country hurry up and do it get it over with no no no she gives us wisdom that listen you need to be led by God don't go ahead of him and you need to seek his counsel.

So number 2 I've 1 of the most important things before you move to the country, now first of all is giving your life to Jesus.

Seeking Jesus, knowing him, knowing his will, knowing what he says, yielding your life, being faithful with your finances, yielding everything you have to him, that's most important.

But when you're actually going to make the move, you're yielded in Jesus, you're walking with him, he's your savior, he directs your paths, but you have to ask the question, before you move to the country, can I make a living?

Or can I have an income if I move to the country?

You may be following Jesus with your whole heart, but you're not listening for a moment, so now your heart isn't maybe 100% there, but you heard you should move to the country, and so you just rush off into the country, and you get there and you find out you don't know how to make a living.

You're going to say, I wish I'd never listened to that guy Chad Cruiser, right?

Well, no, I'm not pushing you into doing something you shouldn't before the time.

Because 1 of the difficulties of living in the country is it is harder to get a job often.

There's less humans and where there's less humans, there's less work.

That doesn't mean there's not a ton of jobs in the country.

I have a video on my YouTube channel of like, I don't remember what it was, 15 jobs that you could do in the country, so you could check that out on Hamilton Homestead, but 1 of them, this isn't like a main 1, I'm just, I was here in California, I was making a documentary at Weimar, and we were recording a bunch of people there, and I lived in a motorhome at the time, we lived full-time traveling in a motorhome, and this guy came by, There's a bunch of motorhomes there that sit there like year round and ours we would travel, but we got there and when a motorhome sits, it gets kind of dirty on the outside and you'll get like, I don't know, moss lichen or something growing on the outside.

And so this guy would go around with a van and he would have just rags and things, and people would pay him to just, he didn't have any water or anything, he'd just clean down these motorhomes.

You know how much he would get per motorhome?

So the guy could make upwards of $800 to $1, 200 a day wiping motorhomes.

Is there work that you could do somewhere and make a living, yes or no?

Does that sound like a good living, yes or no?

I mean, think of what the dude could make in a week, you know?

And I'm not, this is not all about making a living or making great money.

The point is there's so many jobs out there.

There's so many jobs out there that if you're willing to find, I just met a kid last week or the week before.

And we live out in the country, but we're in Kansas City.

He was moving a clothes washer and dryer.

The Prophetic Call of Country Living

We've been traveling around for 20 years now.

We do seminars on several different subjects, ranging from health subjects like the gut-brain connection, diabetes, overcoming type 2 diabetes.

We do seminars on heart disease, and we do Bible prophecy seminars, and we also do seminars, and we teach on country living.

We have a YouTube channel called Health and Homestead, where we teach people about research on natural remedies, health principles, and also just homesteading.

And so you can check us out on there if you wanna learn more.

But before we begin this morning, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to study the prophetic call of country living.

Lord, it seems every day that goes by, it seems clearer and clearer.

The importance of, well, just number 1, the amazing and unusual times that we're living in, and also the greater need of moving to the country.

And we also see greater difficulty rising up in the way to being able to do that.

But we're also, we have a great promise that you've given to us, that for those who are willing, you will open the door.

So I pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us and give us wisdom now in Jesus name, amen.

So we have a website called anchorpointfilms.com.

That's our website, Anchor Point Films, but our YouTube channel, so you can just Google it or go on YouTube and type in health and homestead.

And we have, I don't know, I think almost 150 videos on there, and we try to put 1 out every single week we Sometimes miss a week, but very seldom very seldom So we don't have the slides so it's okay you'll be able to understand the principles.

Maybe for the next 1 we'll have that set up.

But you may have seen that during the pandemic, Although as if we're out of it, we're not out of it.

We're actually, you know, at the highest rates right now, not the highest rates of death.

Praise the Lord, but as far as people being infected.

But during, especially earlier on during the pandemic, we had a convergence of 2 different things.

We had a pandemic and then we had riots and looting and dangerous situations in the city and people as a result of this we're seeing in major news sources.

Right here is an article called coronavirus may prompt migration out of American cities.

And this says that nearly 1 third of Americans are considering moving to a less densely populated area because of the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to a Harris Poll survey.

And so nearly a third of people considering moving to a less densely populated region.

That's a massive amount of people considering how many Americans are there.

I mean, there's over 300 million Americans.

That means potentially upwards of over 100 million people are considering moving to a less densely populated area.

Now that doesn't mean everybody's looking to move to the mountains per se, it means people in New York City maybe wanna move to the suburbs, It's just to a less densely populated area.

But each level might be looking for a less densely populated area.

The people in the suburbs might be looking toward the country, and the people who just live outside of the cities in kind of a country region might be wanting to get further, right?

Now notice this does not say a survey of Seventh-day Adventists found that a third of them want to move to the country.

This just regular old Joe Blow and Jane Blow American thinking of moving to the country, a third of them.

Jesus told us in Luke 21, verse 26, men's hearts in the end of time, men's hearts failing them for fear and looking after those things which are coming on the earth for the powers of heaven shall be shaken." That in the last days men's hearts will be shaken because of fear.

They see that something is coming upon the earth, whether it is riots, whether it is a pandemic, people are noticing things, they're fearful, and they sense that there's maybe freedom and safety, at least to some capacity, in country regions.

And you can't see it, but when you look around during the pandemic, some of the major epicenters of the pandemic, especially toward the beginning of it.

Do you remember toward the beginning, where did we see some of the greatest, you know, catastrophic events taking place because of the coronavirus?

New York City, you had Detroit, Michigan, and you basically had large centers of population, which are the driving force between pandemics.

Because when you get a bunch of cattle together, and I'm not calling humans cattle, but when you drive through the valley here in California, you drive down interstate, you drive down 99, and you go through a putrefying stench.

Have you ever driven down 99 or even up interstate 5?

When you get a bunch, when you get tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of animals, you shove them together, they're dropping feces on each other and right on the ground, it stinks, right?

And it's a breeder of disease, So you have to give them all kinds of drugs to keep them not healthy, to keep them alive, right?

And when you crush humans together, something similar happens.

Sure, we have, you know, toilets and stuff, so it's not quite as bad, but it spreads disease.

When you crush people together it breeds an unhealthy state, right?

And so we saw that, we've seen that during the pandemic.

And just looking at some of the, you know, pop pop news and so forth, this is a, This is not this year, obviously, but do you remember, obviously, we all remember the toilet paper shortage, right?

Where it looked like the world was coming to an end and people thought, but will I have toilet paper, right?

Such an important thing, but here's an article that is, the title of this article is Vegetable Seeds Are the New Toilet Paper.

Vegetable seeds, now 5 years ago I've said if you read a title like that you'd wonder what on earth they're talking about you know vegetable seeds are the new toilet paper but today we know exactly what they're trying to say and now right now it's not as bad as it was when the article was written but but these are just kind of harbingers of what could be in the future that it became more difficult to get seeds.

I mean sure you could maybe find some seeds but many varieties were taken, they were gone, they were all purchased, and why was it?

It's because so many Americans started to what?

It's interesting that in the context of difficult times, people begin to think, how could I become a bit more self-sufficient?

So people began to think, can I guard it?

Now, what if all the seats were taken and you wouldn't have been able to buy any.

Or if you lived in Michigan where the governor made it illegal for a time, illegal is probably not the right word, but she made a mandate.

Mandates aren't actually necessarily always legally binding, but they made a mandate in Michigan that you couldn't buy seeds at the store during the pandemic for a while.

You could go there, they could be there, you could buy other things, but you couldn't buy those because they were in the garden section and that section was cut off.

Now okay, things have opened up again, but the point is this.

Strange mandates could be made at the whim of a human being and they could decide that this is non-essential.

Growing food is non-essential and you can't buy and sell seeds.

Now there were other ways to get around it, I get it.

But as we get toward the end of time, these things are just pictures, depictions of what could happen at the end of time if God's people are not preparing.

I don't say this just simply to scare people.

We were told this prophetically beforehand that we should begin to prepare for the times.

And the good news is we don't have to let it scare us.

As you prepare for a test, an upcoming test, those who are the most afraid are the ones who did not what?

You go into a test you didn't prepare for, you're the most nervous.

But those who studied and studied and studied, sure, there's still a tension, you know, there's still a little bit of nervousness, but at least you know you know something, right?

And the more we prepare, the better we are for those times, not only for ourselves, but we can be a greater asset and benefit to our community, right?

So that we don't have to just be selfish, right?

But we can actually selflessly help other people at the same time.

This says seed companies can't keep up with as more Americans turn to growing their own food.

Now this was, I mean this was actually way back in 2020, so this is not today.

And I think God allows us to go through these things to kind of shake up his people so that we begin to recognize, wow, I better prepare.

And some people say, well, things might start getting better I can go back to my old life but those who are wise will begin to seek to prepare for the times that we're living in.

This article here is taken from The Economist and the title of this article is called Some Hard talk about towns or living in cities.

It said it is not just an urban myth, life in a city really is getting more dangerous.

And the sources of peril are not just human ones like muggers and reckless motorists.

A report by the UN Habitat, an agency responsible for human settlements, says that the number of natural disasters affecting urban populations has risen four-fold since 1975.

Interestingly enough, natural disasters have risen four-fold in cities specifically since 1975, and we were told that this was going to happen specifically in the cities.

Ryan Booth

Solar Panel by the Numbers

Okay, if you're here for a solar power this is the right class.

And if you're here for pruning that's across the lake over there.

It was here this morning but it's over there now.

So, okay and you're all going to want to sit probably like right here because this is the biggest screen we got.

Normally I'd have handouts, but we ran out of them yesterday, so It's all the numbers are up here as well.

We'll go with that Okay to get started, let's see my name is Ryan Booth I'm a general contractor in California as well as having some licenses in heating air conditioning and electrical.

I'm also a real estate agent in California.

Let's go ahead and start with a quick word of prayer.

Father in heaven, thank you for opportunity to come together and learn and experience what you'd have for us in the world for knowledge and help us to have the wisdom to apply that in our lives in Jesus name, amen.

Okay, welcome to solar power by the numbers.

This class is all about the dollars and numbers involved with solar systems, whether grid tie or off-grid, and what makes sense from an economic standpoint.

If your time worth is probably worth more than $150 an hour, then head out the door, go hire a contractor, do whatever you want.

Because you're probably going to lose money trying to do your own project.

That being said, if you enjoy doing work, do your own thing, stick around, let's run through the parts cost, and I encourage people to tackle their own projects if possible.

50 states, 3, 143 counties, 19, 000 incorporated cities, 29, 000 fire departments, 200 major utilities.

Every 1 of these has rules that affect solar, whether it's regulatory, fee, or other factors, all of these can affect everything going on with installing a system, code-wise, etc.

1 note on local rules, about 90% of them across the board are the same across the country.

However, there's a lot of variance so you have to find that last 10% how is it different, how is it going to affect your system.

We're going to talk mostly, almost always about watts.

So We're going to talk almost always about watts.

And the reason we do that is because it's universal, whether it's volts, amps, or any of those things.

Amps, you have a battery bank of measure of volts and amps.

And at the bottom right here, you can see 30 amps times 50 volts is 1, 500 watts, 1.5 kilowatts.

And then 220 volts times 6.25 amps is 1.5 kilowatts.

So the wattage translates depending if your voltage or amperage is different.

So if you're working with batteries, and then the end use of higher voltage, you turn everything into watts.

That way you don't get confused crossing over.

We're going to do a lot of talking about kilowatt hours.

That's a main unit measure we'll be talking about today.

That's amount of power used in a given time period.

It's just something to give us a reference point when we're talking about how much power is used on a daily or minute basis, et cetera.

It's basically solar panels that take energy from the Sun, they go through an inverter, and it dumps back into the power used by the house and the grid simultaneously.

Its main purpose is to offset the power you use in your house or other applications down to 0 so you're not actually paying for power from the grid, if possible.

It requires to do a success requires a net metering agreement with an electrical company because net metering requires that during the daylight you produce more power than you use and at nighttime you're buying power back from the grid, and then it zeroes out at the end of the month, year, et cetera, when they true everything up at the end of the billing cycle.

However, if you do not have a net median agreement, then guess what?

Nighttime you're still buying power and they don't care about how much extra power you made during the day.

So again, to be successful economic and grid-tied system comes down to your local utility and what agreement you can make with them.

I'll take quick questions during the presentation, but if you have more keep a track of them and we'll do a Q&A to end.

We'll get to economics at a minute with the off-grid system.

In a sense, you have solar panels that go through, in this case, charge controllers to a battery bank, back out through an inverter, and you feed the house.

Series

Homesteading Track

Solar Panel by the Numbers

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Starting a Market Garden

A Bird’s-Eye View of Market Gardening

1h 3m

Level 2 Home & Market Gardeners

Cultivating Sweet Potatoes for Storage or Market

49m

Breakout Session #1

The Science of the Mind of Christ

1h 19m

Homesteading Track

Cultivating Country Cash: Crafting a Thriving Rural Livelihood

59m

Preparing to Make the Jump

Basic Farm Tools

58m

Basic Gardening

Your First Soil Test

1h 13m

Community Health

False Prophets of Health Ministry

21m

Market Gardening Track

A Balancing Act

59m

Special Interests

Pastured Egg Production

1h 3m

The Entrepreneur's Toolbox

Entrepreneurial Core Competencies

53m

Market Gardening

The New Big is Small: Value-added Product Integration on Your Farm

1h 4m

Sound Doctrine