AdAgrA Conference 2024: Growing Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Homesteading Track

Lucia Tiffany

Cultivating Country Cash: Crafting a Thriving Rural Livelihood

I'm going to start just for those of you that don't know me.

I currently live in California where I'm doing elder care for my parents.

I'm going on the 14th year of elder care.

So if any of you are doing elder care, I can relate and we can talk.

I began my journey as an entrepreneur when I was about 6 years old.

My parents did not believe in allowance, but if I wanted something and I wanted some pocket money, My mother made an arrangement that if I provided the labor for making granola, that she would pay me a dollar for a 14-cup batch of granola.

And so I would start figuring out how many batches of granola I needed for something special I wanted to get, and that's how it started.

By the time I was 8 or 9, I graduated to making bread.

And then it was a batch of bread for a dollar or 2.

Now, when I got to high school age, I was on my own.

I moved out of my home when I was about 17 because my parents moved and I was in school.

And so they moved away and where I was I had no real income.

And I didn't even actually have income like for clothes.

So a friend of mine and myself got together and we found out it was right at the beginning of kind of this health food craze.

And there was a health food store in Chattanooga, which wasn't too far from where we were, and they were willing to buy alfalfa sprouts from us.

And that was before it got really regulated and all of that.

And so we used to do 25 half gallon jars of alfalfa sprouts every week.

And we would wash them in this big laundry sink in the basement.

I mean, I kind of cringe when I think about it now.

But that is how we made extra money so that we could buy clothes and some of those necessities.

Then, leap forward, because I went into, I took nursing, I'm a nurse, that's my background.

And when I had children, they were small, and I was homeschooling, and then we started elder care with my mother-in-law in our home.

And so that's very demanding time-wise, and it made it so it wasn't really, didn't work for me to go work nursing shifts or things like that and I needed something flexible and I heard about microgreens at a summer camp meeting that we went to and so my husband and I took time to have lunch with the people that had talked about.

It was like an agriculture track of some kind that they had at our camp meeting.

So we were like, come to lunch with us, we want to hear more.

So they got us inspired, and I started growing microgreens in our garage.

And, well, actually we started in a greenhouse, and then we learned that controlled conditions worked better for microgreens.

And we grew organic certified microgreens for 6 years in northern Michigan year round.

And so that was 1 of the things that we did that we really enjoyed.

We ended up closing that down just before, it ended up the Lord worked it all out.

They live in California and we ended up having to move to California.

And so what I currently do living out in the boonies of Northern California is I do diabetes reversal coaching virtually.

So that kind of taps into my experience working at lifestyle centers, health education.

So that's 1 of the ways that I repurpose that and am doing that for income on the side at this point.

So let's take a look at what are the essentials for success.

Now I don't know how many of you came here hoping for like a list of things that you can sell and make a lot of money, because that's not where we're starting today.

In fact, there is some other things that are actually more essential, because I want you to take this away if you take nothing else away today at this session.

And that is that revenue generation, that's another word for making money, revenue generation is the result of value you create for others.

And I want you to always think about it that way.

It's really important that if you're looking to make some additional income, that you're not doing it from a place of, I need to do something to make money.

Making money does not work long term as a motivation.

And it doesn't work well when you go into the selling or the marketing of your product.

You need to be thinking about how you create value for others.

So, it needs to come from a place of service.

This is something that's really well recognized in the entrepreneurial field, but a lot of times we don't think about.

And in fact, I really feel very strongly, and this is like something I've learned over the years, was not something I really understood when my kids were young and at home.

But for those of you that are young and have kids at home, I really want you to put down this resource.

It's called The Value Creation Kid by Scott Donnell.

He's probably 35 years old right now and he's probably on his fifth or sixth business.

But he has a real burden for teaching values around how to handle money.

And this book is kind of the summary of his philosophy and approaches to teaching children how to think about creating value wherever they go and using that as a basis for success in life.

It's about what we do with our time, our energy, our resources, the relationships we build.

So creating value is really a fundamental principle of revenue generation long term.

So, I really want to encourage you to look into that.

If you have grandkids, It's like I'm not an affiliate of his or anything, okay?

But I met him a few months ago, and he actually has like 1 of the most amazing programs for teaching your children the value of work and how to make money, save money, invest money, give money away.

And it's called Gravy Stack, and it actually has developed a banking app that can be used for children from 8 to 18.

So that's something you might want to look into if you want to teach your children some of the things we're going to talk about next.

Because what is going to be most important for your success in revenue generation is your character.

It's not how good of a public speaker you are.

It doesn't matter how good your product is.

What will make you successful are character qualities.

And I want us to take a little time to look at that.

So some of these characteristics that are important for success.

I like this quote from In Heavenly Places.

It says, what a man is has greater influence than what he says.

If goodness, purity, meekness, lowliness, and integrity dwell in the heart, they will shine forth in the character.

That means power for influence, power for impact.

How many of you believe God put us in this world to have an impact on other people?

The reason that Christ spoke as no other man spoke was that he lived as no other man lived.

If he had not lived as he did, he could not have spoken as he did.

So I want you to think about that and what that means for you.

Because for me, this really means we have to pay attention to the kind of person that we are being.

So research has shown that there's a number of characteristics that are important for success.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be successful in generating revenue for yourself.

So I'm going to just review some of those.

Dylan Wagoner

Amanda Wagoner

Beginning with Animals on the Homestead

We live in Tennessee on our farm there with our 3 and almost 4 kids.

So yeah, we're going to talk today about animal husbandry, but really it's kind of more like a case for having animals on the homestead or the farm.

Sometimes there's questions, maybe if, you know, somebody's vegetarian or an Adventist, like do I really need animals on the homestead?

We think that there is a good case for it.

So we'll talk about that and hopefully we'll have a good time together.

At the end of it, we'll have a moment for questions, maybe 10 minutes or something like that.

So, this talk is really for beginner homesteaders or those that are thinking about starting with animals, wondering if maybe animals have a place on their farm or their homestead.

Our passion really is for beginner homesteaders.

We know a lot of people who live in the city and have a passion and a desire and a dream to move to the country and start a farm.

And so that's really been our thing for years, just trying to encourage people, help give them the tools that they need to make that step.

A lot of times people, when they leave the city, completely city people, like don't know where a carrot comes from, you know, which is through no fault of their own, they live in the city, right?

But going to the country, it can be such a shock that sometimes they'll actually go back to the city.

We've seen that happen on numerous occasions.

So We actually started a Facebook group, it's called the Beginners Homesteading Group.

It's got over 2, 000 people in it, it's growing.

And yeah, we've got a lot of other resources that we'll show you at our table, but that's kind of our passion.

So That's kind of why we talk about beginner homesteaders or those that want to get started.

So yeah, we're just gonna talk about animals on the homestead and let's move on.

Okay, so ask your neighbor, what was the best animal you ever owned?

They want, Aragra told us to ask the question to you guys.

So ask your neighbor, what is the best animal you ever owned?

If you had asked me when I was a kid I probably would have said a salamander or something but I had a lot of weird pets as a kid.

All right so say what Oh salamander oh I haven't had a gecko no some lizards though not a gecko.

All right so yeah be sure to write down your questions at the end.

We'll try to address those as best we can.

Animals can be a lot, can bring a lot of joy to your life.

They can also bring a lot of stress But I think they're a net positive especially if you go into it with your eyes wide open and you've you've got I Don't know the expectation that there's going to be issues.

It's gonna be problems They will get out.

They will go to the neighbors and chew their things up.

You are really making a great case for this.

But you need to go into it with your eyes wide open because animals, You know, God originally created animals wild, and so we domesticated them.

But they never quite get the wild out of them.

All you got to do is take a dog that's lived in a house its whole life, you take it for a walk in the park, it sees a squirrel.

So that's why even though I think it would be awesome to have a pet tiger, don't think You can breed the wild out of a tiger.

The family experience, it definitely has been such a joy to have animals with kids.

You know, we have, like you said, there's ups and downs, ups and downs all the time through this journey with animals.

But when you see a baby goat being born and the kids are so excited, you know, to hold that little baby goat and, you know, just those moments that, you know, through their childhood, they're gonna remember that through the years to come.

I was 12 when my parents moved to a farm, and those were the best memories that I have, just the best memories I've had.

And just the enjoyment of just being with the animals as a kid.

Just really is awesome and I know that they're going to have great memories as they get older.

Yes, you grew up on kind of an animal farm.

I grew up on kind of a corn and beans, Midwestern kind of farm situation.

And really wasn't until well into my adult life that I started getting into animals in a farm sense.

So you've got to definitely head start on that.

There was, I think on the next slide we have this question, was there manure before Adam and Eve sinned?

You might think about it like 1 in the morning, as you're driving to Ad Agra.

Maybe just you, because I don't know if I've ever thought of that.

I have a lot of weird questions that pop my head at those wee hours of the morning.

And we're not going to have this big theological debate about it.

But you just kind of look at the way we're designed.

I think that Adam and Eve and the animals all eliminated their waste.

And I know there's this big, I know, why would I be talking about this?

Well, there's a movement, this veganic movement, where people are using only, there's Korean natural farming, you know, where you can use fermented greens and stuff like that to fertilize your crops, and it does work.

But in the end, it's bacteria still doing the work, even with veganic farming or with manure.

We have found that aged manure, especially our own animal manure, we know where it comes from.

It's really helped to build the soil in a great way.

Sometimes you get manure from another farm and it could be contaminated with all kinds of things that could really harm your crops.

You could almost render your garden sterile with some types of chemicals that might come with the manure from somewhere else.

So if you've got animals, you know where it came from, you know what you've been feeding them, you know the grass they've been eating, and all that stuff, so very, very helpful.

We were able to take some pretty poor soil, which I did not realize, I was born and raised in Ohio, we live in Tennessee now.

I did not realize how lucky I had it in the beautiful bottom valley lands of Ohio, like 2 feet of topsoil, inky black, black as your boot, organic, fluffy, incredible soil.

Moved to Tennessee and it's absolutely terrible.

Now there's parts of Tennessee that have nice soil.

But the manure has really helped with that.

Franklin Cobos

Heating with Wood from Start to Finish

Our topic is heating with wood, which I would have thought years ago just wasn't worth the time to talk about.

I mean, you strike a match, the stuff burns, it gets hot and you sit there in front of it.

After having done it for a decade or so, there's a lot of nuances that can be really important, especially if you're by yourself and you need to save time, money, and energy, and you want to avoid the steepest part of your learning curve, it'd be nice if you could learn and listen to what other people have done before you.

So, I'm incorporating a lot of that into what I'm going to cover.

I want to remind you of our conference-wide rule of the rule of 2 feet.

If you feel like in the first 5 minutes or so that this beginners introduction, beginners to intermediate introduction on things to consider, If you desire to heat your living space solely with wood, feel free to spend your time at another lecture and maybe listen to me on AudioVerse if at all.

But please do so within the first 5 minutes and do it discreetly so that those who choose to stay are not disturbed unnecessarily, okay?

Please, If you find that as I'm covering some material, perhaps I don't cover it the way you need to answer a question or it leaves you confused in some way, or maybe I mispronounce or stumble through a sentence and you're confused by it and you have a question, at the end we're going to set aside a bit of time to field those questions.

But we'll do it at the very end all at once and I will need time to repeat your question so that the recording can contain your question as well as my answer, which is miked.

Let me give you a brief overview of the kind of the, about the roughly 3 areas that I will cover as we review things I find in retrospect were most important as I've come through the process of heating my little homestead, no, heating my air, my place.

Since some of you are laughing because some of you know how much space I have to heat.

Doing it now with wood compared to what I used to use like standard stuff, electricity, natural gas.

So I want you to understand what your choices are, the challenges, the pros and cons of sourcing your wood and actually hauling it or getting it to the location where you live before you can burn it.

I mean it'd be nice if you could burn at your neighbors where they're giving you wood, but it can't heat you from over there.

So you actually have to bring it physically.

And if you've never done that, you might be surprised at the challenges that presents, even though you may be being given as much wood as you could possibly want to burn.

People are giving me more wood than I can burn.

But, if you do it wrong, you'll heat yourself not just twice, brother, but it'll heat you 5, 6 times.

You might not have time for that, or energy.

So we want to talk about whether or not you're going to source that wood on your property or somebody else's, or if it's coming from somewhere else.

Now once you actually have it in your possession, there's a new set of things you're gonna have to deal with.

I have a chainsaw class we did this morning.

We'll have another chainsaw class tomorrow.

So we're talking about cutting it, splitting it, drying, stacking, and storing that prior to actually burning it.

You can't just go chop down a tree and throw it in your stove and expect things to go really well.

You can chop down a tree and throw it in there to burn.

And then in that discussion, we'll talk about the pros and cons that I've experienced with using a stove that is inside the living space or outside, an outside furnace or stove, and then the catalytic versus non-catalytic options.

Let me ask this question also by showing of hands.

How many of you are currently finding that you are Most all of your, maybe not all, but most all of your heat right now in the winter, you are providing by the burning of wood.

Most of your heating this winter is coming from wood.

So everybody who didn't have your hand, this is the class for you because you've not you're not doing it or maybe you've never done it And these are things I wish I had thought about or someone had told me a decade ago Before I made all my mistakes So I try to make life better for you If you are not currently by the way those who are not currently heating with wood mostly, is that what you wanna do?

You can just turn the little switch on the wall.

It's got numbers and like a Fahrenheit sign next to it.

If you just click the on button and then the up and down arrow, you can go back to bed and you don't have to do anything that I'm talking about.

You just set the thermostat and the central heat comes on and you're fine.

I can do that for part of my place, for about, I guess about 4, 000 square feet of where I own and work and live and such, but there's another 5, 000 square feet that I can't do that easily.

And so I've kind of been forced into this learning curve.

All right, let's talk about sourcing and hauling, you know, getting it to your place.

Now, if it's on your property, that's really not as much of an issue.

It is said that if you have 10 acres of wooded property, that's pretty sustainable for a family.

That you could continually burn and grow more trees and replace that timber that you fell, split, dried, burned, and you're not gonna run out.

I've gotten a little bit into the math and we will get into a little bit of math together.

But that is the rule of thumb I was given by Dave Westbrook and I find that it seems to be pretty true to me.

I bought the next lot to my south, 5 and a quarter.

I bought that because it was nothing but woods.

And my 5 and a quarter had been cleared a bit for the house and garden area which took up about 2 of the acres that I initially owned.

So I was eager to buy a bit more, particularly since there had been a horrible ice storm and a lot of big oak trees had come down.

They're just on the ground waiting for me to just saw them up and bring them across my new little property line and use them as my own.

So if you're looking to buy property or you have it, and some of it's wooded, some of it isn't, 10 acres is kind of a ballpark of what would make you independent as far as a heat source, sourcing your own fuel for burning.

Now let's say it's not on your property, but it's local, maybe a church member recently offered me some free wood.

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