Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Picture yourself in 1932 in the heart of the Great Depression, and maybe you're living in a city, maybe you're out in the country, but the country has collapsed. And what are you going to eat?
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Welcome to the Duster Mud Podcast. My name is Rich and I'm Shelley. On the Duster Mud Podcast, we like to talk about food freedom and farming, and today we're going to focus that on food and probably farming.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah. So, dude, my grandparents grew up in the Great Depression. How about yours?
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, my, my great grandparents are the ones that I remember having the, the most stories. Yeah, my, my mom's grandparents.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Yeah, my, My grandparents would tell plenty of stories because they were younger and saw the impact that it was having. You know, they were from the south and they, as were yours, from the south, mostly sharecroppers. And they were so poor, they often said they didn't know, you know, that the stock market crashed.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Because they were so. They didn't have a lot of money, but they would watch their parents have to, you know, do go to fairly extreme measures in order to keep 13 kids fed.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Right.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: And how did they, how did our grandparents during the Great Depression feed their families?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: And what can we learn from the measures that they took back then to create more resilience in a modern lifestyle?
[00:01:29] Speaker B: I think it does matter. I think we can learn from history, and I think that right now, as food prices continue to go up, I think it's a good time to maybe take a moment to look backwards and look at how a few generations ago, how they did make it and how they were able to pull through.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: So you have about 1929, October of 1929 to the mid-1930s, the country was in absolute turmoil. The stock market crashed, food became scarce, especially in the cities. It got to the point where 25% of the working force didn't have a job, and especially the ones that were in the cities relying on standing in line to, at soup kitchens and government bread lines and government handouts, and. Because when you're living in a concrete jungle, it wasn't as much concrete then, but they were so, so compactly tight living spaces that they didn't have the space to grow much food and to be able to, to fend for themselves. So they were kind of at the mercy of the government and whatever could be brought in.
[00:02:44] Speaker B: Yeah, but even if you look at the urban or, sorry, the rural areas, you were running into issues where the decade prior there were like, record harvests, so prices fell. And so you include the the fact that prices are falling, there really isn't any money. There's not a whole lot of jobs. So even. Even the people that had farms, it ended up losing those farms. A lot of them. Yeah.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: It was absolute perfect storm of situation where, like you said, the. They had over overgrown, over harvested, over farmed, I guess, in the 1920s. So the farmers were losing their. I mean, they were losing their farms before closure because they couldn't sell their stuff. I mean, it was. It was. They were getting any money for what they had.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: You mentioned over farming and storms. That. That is basically the dust bowl. That's the definition. Yeah, the.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: You know, that hit in the 30s as well, where you had soil across the Great Plains, where they had. Had cleared all of the prairie grass off to grow all of those crops in the 20s. Well, a drought hit. And when the drought hit in the 30s, then there's nothing holding the soil down. So the wind start as the wind blew, it just kicked up dust. And you ended up with, you know, dust from the plains and cities on the East Coast.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: And like it really was a perfect storm where you had an economic downturn. Huge. You had a quarter of the population that didn't have jobs. Farmers were losing their farms. And if. Even if they were able to plant crops, they were just dying. Like the livestock was dying due to the dust. Crops were. Even if you got them in the ground when they're covered in dust, the crops are failing. Like it was. It was a bad situation.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: Yeah, it was bad. And that was less than 100 years ago right here in what became arguably the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen. And they were in a bad way. And while we pray like this is not some doomsday conversation, we just pray that we don't have to revisit that.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: And the picture we're trying to paint is that things were bad and yet they. They survived.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: They survived. And how. Well, they started growing some of their.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Own food everywhere they could.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Right?
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: If they had something, a place that would hold dirt, they would plant something there.
Your mom talks about sometimes up in Alabama, some of your dad's side of the family. You had an uncle, I think his name was Uncle Louie.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: That was Uncle Louie. That was my grandma's brother.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Okay, so your grandma on your dad's side, and he. She talks about. And they tell stories. Your dad tells stories about him. He would grow anything everywhere. He would even occupy the ditches on the side of the road.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: And grow peas.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: He loved to plant Field peas.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: And so he would plant his however much acres he had. We've got some really exciting news we wanted to share with you.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: We have officially launched a Patreon to give us the opportunity to connect more with you behind the scenes.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: We've been trying to figure out how we can share more of our life without having to battle the YouTube algorithm that would punish us for putting out things that aren't high quality. So we've decided that Patreon is a great way of doing that. We'll be able to share behind the scenes looks at things that are going on around the farm, recipes we've even got planned in some live Q&As. Lots of different things that we will be able to share with you that we just can't quite do with YouTube.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: Another thing that we're looking forward to sharing with you, our raw life a little more often and giving you the opportunity. We have so many listeners and viewers that are coming on that wish maybe that they could support us in some other way. And this gives you the opportunity to support the farm and be a part of what we're doing here in the movement that we have going on.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: So if this is interesting at all to you, click the link in the description below and it'll take you over to our Patreon where you can join the air to Ground Farms community.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: We look forward to meeting you and seeing you guys over there in that area and actually getting to know you a little bit better.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: When I was really young, he had lots of acres and he planted all of it. And then as I got older and he got older, he had less acres and he planted all of it. But he would also include things like the ditches, the roadsides. Like, he was right. He planted everywhere because he lived in that time. He did.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: And he was probably a farmer at.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Heart, and he grew anything and everything. And it always grew well.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Yeah, well, times changed. You know, the, the, the dust bowl ended, the Great Depression era kind of waned. Things took, they started kind of turning, you know, and people have changed over time. But like you were saying, if we can look back just for a minute and see how they, what were some of the skills that they, that they had, that they. Or learned, you know, and can we, can we mimic that? You know?
[00:08:22] Speaker B: Well, we're coming up. I mean, it's end of February coming up on the end of February. So we're all of us who grow gardens are in garden planning season, right. If we haven't started plants yet, which we haven't but we're certainly talking about the garden that we're going to grow this year. And, and like, now's the time. Plan. Plan.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Yeah. It's winter. This is February. And so, you know, as we're sitting around kind of in the cold, it was frigid here the last couple of weeks. Sitting around. What are you talking about? Hey, Planning for our annual food growth. What. What do you want to. What do you want to have on hand to be able to cook with next year to provide for your family?
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: And we've gotten so far away from even thinking about what we're going to cook for dinner, much less to consider what we're going to eat in September.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. The planning right now is for what you're eating in December and January of next year.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: What kind of things are you going to grow? What are we growing this year? We've been discussing.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: We've decided that we're going to grow less tomatoes than last year because we still have quite a bit in the pantry.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: We're going to continue to grow peppers because I love them and that's just an enjoyable thing for me. We're going to increase things. Our squashes, like yellow summer squash and zucchini. We're going to have another full row of okra because that did really well last year and we're enjoying that. Being in the freezer.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: Some cucumbers, for sure.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Some spices, some herbs. You got to have herbs out there.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: Spices. Some. Some green beans. Like we're. We've got staples. Yeah.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: We grow everything pretty much above the ground. We don't do anything too very much. I think they may try some onions in pots this year.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: And we have the space to grow a big garden. But there have been times where we didn't and many of our listeners know that We've. We've done extreme measures in places. And at one point we had baby swimming pools with dirt with herbs in them. We went to the store and got five gallon buckets and raised squash and tomatoes and peppers and a myriad of things in buckets from Lowe's.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: And when at our Florida house, we had buck those same buckets growing plants in amongst our. Our landscape.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Oh, right. We grew peas and tomatoes in the landscaping. Yeah. In where the, where the shrubs were.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: But so you can grow your food anywhere. Get resourceful. If you have a backyard, most people do with that. You have to mow. If you've got space in your backyard that you have to mow, you can.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Grow food for sure.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: That Is a. That could be a food oasis back there.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: Very good friends of ours, they had a. They had an urban homestead. They had animals and grew vegetables and grew a whole lot of food in a backyard. So we can. We could get back to that. And really focusing right now, we're kind of in the middle of a.
Well, you know, inflation has really affected food prices.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: Everyone. Everyone feels that, you know, I don't care what political whatever you, you know, subscribe to, everyone eats.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: And we have to buy the food.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: We have one of the. One of our subscribers. It grows his own food in Canada, and he's done a couple of different years. He's put together the actual numbers, and I believe last year, his numbers were he saved $450 by growing his own garden, and in previous years, it's been as high as $2,000.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: That's great.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: He's saved by having his own. Even when you count in all of.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: The things people talk about, hobby gardens and this $400 tomato and all that.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: I think that's a bit exaggerative because it feels like you're spending a lot, but you actually spend a whole lot on groc.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: Yes.
Let's just say food.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: You know, because a lot of times it doesn't come from the grocery store. So many times it's coming from an outlet that has prepared the food for you, which is so incredibly expensive on our wallets. And. But it's a mindset. It's such a mindset shift, you know, in what we're eating and where it's coming from. We were talking about a paradigm shift, and maybe that's happening right now. Maybe there is a shift. Maybe a wave is coming of people wanting to eat more quality food and knowing where it comes from.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: I hope so.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: I do, too.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Another thing they did really, is made meals last. Like, they stretched the meal. And I mean, even us, when we were first married, like, we didn't have hardly any money at all.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: We was whole.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: And I mean, if. If we got a chicken that lasted a long time for us.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: We. We learned very young how to cut up a chicken, how to cook the different parts of the chicken.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: And there was not YouTube. There was no one to teach you how except your parents. Were you.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: Your grandparents.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: Your grandparents, you garnered information from them and watched them do things and then just try and mess it up.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: And then try again.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: Well, then after we do that, then you boil the bones.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: For sure. We could get fat with, you know, us and a couple of kids, we could get four or five meals out of one small chicken.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that that is a lesson that we learned from our grandparents, from our great grandparents, from the. The people who lived through a time of extreme shortage.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: There was no waste. Food waste then?
[00:14:09] Speaker B: No, not.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: There was not any food waste. There wasn't a whole lot of food waste when we were growing up. I don't know about your house, but Thursday nights at my house when I was growing up, again, that was left overnight. We're going to pull it all out, and whatever was left, we're going to clean it up before we start cooking again next week. And I mean, that was our way in the 80s and 90s of not wasting things, because we do have refrigeration and we were able to save it on the short term and eat it later.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Another thing that I think they were able to do was you. The things that you're good at, you barter that thing. The things that you grow, you can barter with people that are doing or growing other things because.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: Have you ever had too many cucumbers?
[00:14:52] Speaker B: I have, yeah.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: We've had a good thing to barter. Right.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: We've had too many eggs. We've had too many tomatoes. Like, even the. The short time that we've been here farming, there are times when you have an abundance of things that you like. You're just overwhelmed. And the ability to take that then and trade somebody that might be overwhelmed with something else but not what you're overwhelmed with is a. I don't know.
I don't know that it's a skill, but it's definitely something that you need to consider. Like, you need to be thinking about it. And for us, one of the things that's important to us is building that community. Now, like, people know that we have eggs.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: You know, we. We have friends that make knives.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Isn't that cool?
[00:15:45] Speaker B: And.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: But a real skill.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: A real skill that makes tools. Right.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: But, like, amazing.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: They don't grow pigs and they don't.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Have a milk cow.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: And they don't have a milk cow. So, like, right when it come, if. If the.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: If push started coming to shove, you.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Start bartering again, you know, And. And you start trading things that are worth something to each of you. I think that that's an important thing. Like, in today's society, the only thing you trade is your time for money, and then money does everything.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
You know, we have traded some things, though, you know, since we've been here. That's been nice.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: I like it. I Enjoy doing.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: Yeah, hey, I'll trade you, you know, even sometimes this set of animals for that set of animals.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: Like, hey, we've got too many you lambs, you lambs.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: And you're looking to get rid of your, you know, ready to butcher pork, right?
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Let's swap for sure.
[00:16:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: If you dollar, if you can figure out your dollar for dollar on that, it's great.
So yeah, bartering, bartering is huge in an economic crisis. If you've got something.
But back to the food, the eggs. You know, eggs are the hot trending topic and problem right now. They're very expensive in the stores. There seems to be a shortage. We've got this bird flu thing going on.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: We've killed over 100 million birds in the past couple years.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: That's a lot of birds. That's a lot of egg laying birds. You know that that creates a real problem.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: And unlike just chicken, like the chicken that you eat, it takes layer hens a long time before they start laying.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Like when you say a long time, if someone doesn't know, four to six.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Months depending on the breed.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: But Right.
[00:17:36] Speaker B: Like from the time that these birds are killed, you're looking at a minimum of six months before there are birds back in that operation laying again. Minimum.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: Minimum. Yeah.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: So like every time you kill one of these birds, you're setting back at least a half a year.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Right. But you know, when I, there's been a couple of times we were living in suburbia, we had our own chickens.
[00:17:58] Speaker B: We did.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: And during the, or in the early 1900s, it was in some places it was basically mandatory that you have chickens in your backyard because you're going to have to help provide some of the food for this nation. Meaning you're gonna have to participate in your, in your own, in your own food. You grow your food and you have to have chickens. And I can, it makes so much sense. First of all, they're super easy keepers.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: They're easy to take care of and they give nearly every day.
They will eat your kitchen scraps, your waste. So they are going to take care of your food garbage, beating you back. It's a wonderful loop.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: And an egg, by the way, is one of the most nutritious whole foods. It's the, it's the actual, you know, nose to tail type food. Yeah.
And it, you were looking it up, it goes pretty toe to toe with ground beef.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: It does, Yeah. A pound of ground is. And it's about 16 eggs. Caloric comparison, they're about the same. So Pound of ground beef is almost a dozen and a half eggs.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: So most people don't eat a pound of ground beef. I mean, I do sometimes, but most people don't. So I mean, if you said, hey, I need a quarter pounder, that's a sufficient amount of protein for me, then so is four eggs.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: And if you have four to six chickens, I know in, in Maryland and when we were living in La Plata, we could have six hens. And we did in the city limits of a town just outside of Washington D.C. and we did, we had six hens. And the amount of eggs, especially in the height of production, that you can.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Get as you're getting nearly three dozen a week at that rate, you know, so it, that's for a small family, that small family. That's a lot.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: That's a lot of food. Yeah, yeah.
And not only are you going to eat them, I mean, you can cook with them and make your, you know, your cakes and, and all that. You ever had a brownie without an egg?
[00:20:06] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: They're not good.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: They're not good.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: They're not good. Don't do it. But they had to do it in the Great Depression because they didn't have any.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: And any kind of protein source was really, really expensive, really hard to find. And so oftentimes they would make food without the proteins, without the eggs, without the milk. I mean, they had like a depression era cake was like flour and what, water and sugar, not very many ingredients and just kind of make a cake, a dough.
[00:20:40] Speaker B: One of the other things that they were really good at was preserving food. You had to know how to save it. So if you grow it and you harvest it in the, you know, late summer, early fall, what are you doing with it then to make it last? And it's, it's not as easy as just put it in a jar, you know. No, there's a lot, there's, there are a lot of techniques and you know, you look at the, the Ball Mason, you know, Handbook for Canning or whatever, you know, the Canning Bible, like.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a big book. Yes, it is a big book.
[00:21:14] Speaker B: And there's different rules on what you have to do with different things. You know, is it acidic? Is it not acidic? Do you water bath? Do you have to cook it? Like there's, do you have to pressure can it?
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Like there's a learning curve to it, you know, and those types of skills. Now we have, you know, harvest right. Freeze dryers in the world that can rather quickly preserve your foods up to like 25 years.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: There are some really cool ways of preserving them now.
[00:21:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: And you put it in there, let it go, it tells you when it's done.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: I mentioned my great grandparents on my. So my mom's grandparents, they always had deep freezes, and the deep freezers were always full of food, like it didn't matter. When I went to their house, the freezers were always full. Like, they never let the freezers go. Less than full. And there were always coffee cans, the metal coffee cans. They drink coffee and never threw away a coffee can. And there were always coffee cans all in their garage. And the coffee cans had food.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: And they even, they. By the time I knew them, they lived in the city and always had a garden in their flower beds. So it was. He was always growing tomatoes and beans.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: And that was your great grandparents.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: So they were in there. I, I mean, I knew them and they were well into their 90s. They. Well, they were well into their 80s.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: And. Yeah. Still growing their own food.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: To some degree.
Even though they had money, they didn't have to, but they. It's. It's food security. And that's one of the things that's really become.
Well, in 2020, it became evident that our food supply supply chain, it's very centralized and centralization of food becomes a problem.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's where I was going to go. You said they have money, but what we saw in 2020 was it didn't matter.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: You can't eat it. You cannot eat money.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: It didn't matter. If you had money, the food wasn't there.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: Like the supply chain issues. The trucks weren't driving.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: And like, if you could get to the grocery store, then oftentimes, especially the meat aisle.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: Right there just. There's wasn't any.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: There just wasn't any.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:33] Speaker B: And so the having the money wasn't the issue.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: Right. Like, they, they had seen that. Their generation had seen that, you know, even if you did have the money, you may not have the food.
[00:23:47] Speaker A: Well, and they saw and felt in real short order, things can go sideways with an economy real fast. And that's the case that we live in now. And we don't know things are great today, but we don't know what we're going to wake up to tomorrow. And the best thing that we can do for ourselves is have some skills, grow some of our own food, be a little bit prepared. But the skills are something you're going to have to just pony up and get. And a lot of people were doing that in 2020. People were making sourdough bread and they were planting their gardens, and they were freaking out a little bit, which was totally warranted.
But now it's 2025, and people have kind of eked away from that. We've kind of become a little bit semi complacent again in where our food is going to come from tomorrow. And I think that just a reminder, you know, that's kind of maybe what this podcast is. Hey, this is a reminder. First of all, it's winter. If you're going to grow a garden, get planted.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: So that you can get planting, you know, and the reminder that, hey, if you don't grow a garden, or you didn't last year, but you know, how maybe this is the year to go ahead and plant something again and get it in the ground.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Something to think about is it doesn't, you know, not all plants grow in all soil. Like, we live in the Ozarks. Our soil is very rocky.
We can't just go out with a hoe and, you know, move some grass and grow food like that. That doesn't work here.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: It, you know, we brought in a truckload, literally, of compost, and in that first year, we didn't grow. Well, no. Right. Like, it takes time to prepare a garden, prepare the soil so that it can grow in certain places. Some places, like where I grew up in south Florida, man, everything grew. Right. But. But, like, that's not always the case, and you would hate to be complacent until the point that, okay, I need to grow something now.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: And.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: And I can't.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: And I can't because I don't have.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: The medium to do it in.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:04] Speaker A: Even if, hey, I know I'm not going to be able to grow anything in my particular yard because maybe I live in Boise, Idaho, and I'm zero scaped.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Okay, well, you can go get some containers and buy some dirt now, because in the event that everyone kind of needs to start doing something, the dirt's probably going to disappear from the store pretty quickly. So just the forethought. That's all we're saying.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Is forethought on where's your food going to come from.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: This year.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Plan your garden. Plant a garden.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: And, you know, we really do, actually, I do encourage people. Get some chickens. Yeah, get some chicken.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Chickens really are easy.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: But you also have to learn.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Basic.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: How to take care of them.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: How to take care of them. But, guys, there's YouTube videos on all of this. How to take care of a chicken. Check out Living Traditions Homestead. Of course they have done. Of course they have done a video on how to do almost everything with growing your own food, you know, and they. An absolute wealth of information library on their channel on how to do anything. Almost.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Another thing we would encourage you to do is cook.
Like, real food.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: Oh.
Huh?
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Like really cook. Oh, like actually not heat up.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Not open the package, but actually cook.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Cook.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Learn how to cook.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Yep. Because Rebecca tells a story. She was out in Washington when Washington state.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Rebecca's our oldest.
[00:27:42] Speaker A: Our oldest daughter was in Washington state. And, you know, Covid hits and she goes to the grocery store and the only. She stood there and cried. The only thing that was on the shelves was like dried beans and grits.
And thank goodness she knew what to do with both of those things. I don't know what in the world grits were doing in Washington. It's kind of funny. But she did know how to cook it because the fact is, the convenience foods are going to go away really, really quickly.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: And then what's going to be left on the shelf are ingredients.
[00:28:18] Speaker B: If there's anything left.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: If there's anything left, there's going to be ingredients that you can cook. There's going to be food that's going to have to be prepared. Learn how to cook. We put out some videos at Air Ground Farms on our other YouTube channel. Make sure to check that out. Sometimes we do cooking videos if it's cold outside to show you. Hey, here's a simple meal of real ingredients that we can put together in 20 to 25 minutes that are also good for you. Yeah. So get cooking. That's really great.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: Another thing is your local food network, like, who grows food around you? Who do you know that grows what? When you need tallow, when you need lard, who has that?
Who. Who has vegetables? Who has honey? Right. Like they're. Find your. Find a local food network. And, well, we encourage you to join it. Like, grow something. But figure out who around you grows what and does what. I think that's really important. Go to a farmer's market, meet people.
[00:29:19] Speaker A: Talk to people, ask them how they're growing their food. Ask them any kind of questions. Hey, we. We've had people come up. Would you be willing to trade, you know, some. These plants for a little bit of meat?
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: You know.
[00:29:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Yes. And did we need to do those things? Not necessarily, but it's good to practice to make the relationships with the Other people in the community.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
And then encourage. Also learn how to preserve.
Learn. Learn what to do with what of the different foods.
[00:29:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: How do you, how do you dehydrate meat? How do you make jerky? How do you salt pork? Like, there are, there are things that we can do, all of us, to learn, to learn how before it's absolutely necessary.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Again, praying doesn't become necessary again, but in the event that it does, we want to be prepared.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So learning. Yeah. But they would, they, those, our great grandparents knew how to do all that stuff.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: I wasn't nothing to them.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: You know, we're. We're going to grow the food, we're going to preserve the food, and we're going to know how to cook the food and eat it. Because that was their life.
Getting food on the table was someone's primary job Right. Within the family.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: My, my dad's mom, my grandma, we grew up, like, way out of town, right next door to my grandparents. And I guess at the looking back on it, we had a homestead. At the time, it was just home.
But like, she understood that a, a great way to preserve meat was to keep it alive.
Like, yeah, we, we had rabbits and when she wanted to eat a rabbit, she would go get one and butcher it and then we would have rabbit that night.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: Right. There was no big harvest time and preservation time because if you harvest a bunch of it, you had to preserve it and you had to find somewhere to put it. I mean, we always lost space, deep.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Freezes with, I mean, like, because we grew acres and acres of garden, but, but, and so we had freezers and we had, you know, we normally had a dairy steer or two, and, you know, when those would get harvested, they would go in the freezer. But she also understood that things like, you know, the, the rooster that was running around this morning might be in the pan this evening, like.
[00:31:47] Speaker A: Right.
Well, my mom talks about her parents had a milk cow and in the same town you grew up in, but they lived in town and like a block from where the one school was in town, they had a milk cow and chickens. And because you grew, you grew your food.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: You know, because if you went and bought it and paid someone else to process and deal with it, it was expensive, but they didn't have that kind of luxury. So they had a milk cow in town.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:19] Speaker A: And she would do the same thing. If they had chickens, she'd go out and, you know, bring a neck and cook chicken.
[00:32:27] Speaker B: My grandma was really good, man. She could Pick that chicken up and, like, that was it.
[00:32:32] Speaker A: That was it.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Yeah, man. Like, yeah.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: But we make all this big deal about it, and they just could, like, get, you know, fix it up lickety split.
[00:32:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:41] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. So back to our grandparents. They did an amazing job at. At being resilient and being able to take care of ourselves, themselves. And I think we can all get to that space again in a modern way. Modern resilience can be a thing. And we have technologies like this video right here to. To talk to one another, to teach one another the skills that we have and to pass it on to our kids.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And a word we've been using a lot lately is that they didn't just survive, they thrived.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: Yes, they did. They did.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: They were healthy.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: Yeah. They were a lot healthier than we are. But that's a whole nother podcast.
[00:33:21] Speaker B: Okay, let's do it.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Okay. Hey, what are you going to be growing this year in your garden? I know you're planning, and if you're not, do you want to, you know, what are the things or skills that you could learn this coming year that would add a. A. A bit of a.
Tools in your toolbox.
Yeah. Tools in your toolbox.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you, guys, for watching, and until next time. Bye, y'all.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: Bye, y'all.
