Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

Welcome back to another episode of the Homegrown Liberty Podcast, this is episode 32, part 2 of our conversation with Carolyn Jill Sloane on tree fodder and tree hay.

Before I introduce to you what we have for the show today, I wanted to take a moment to remind you that I’m headed all over the place soon and you will have opportunities to get me out to your property for consulting at sometimes almost 50% off my normal rates just in saving on most of the cost of mileage! I’m going to Baton Rouge Louisiana on the 21st of this month, then a week or so later I’ll be headed up through Arkansas to St Louis Missouri for Garlic Fest on the 4th of September, then possibly headed through Tennessee around the Nashville area on my roundabout way home to Louisiana. So if you’re interested, email me and I’ll see if we can get you on the consulting tour! I often get called to someone’s property to help them fix a problem that could have been avoided with good foundational thinking from the start. So don’t let yourself be that person and have to call me after the fact. It’s so much easier and cheaper to avoid a problem than fix one!

Alright, in this episode we get into a lot more of the details of how and what to do with tree fodder. We talk about some unique opportunities and resources that present themselves when you start using fodder for animal food. I always like to try to make the work I do, reduce my workload in other ways and meet as many needs with as little effort as possible. One of my big priorities is trying to find as many ways to stack opportunities together, design into my daily life, systems that work together to meet our needs. Think about having your animals get to express their innate natural desires to scratch, root, dig, browse, and set up your animal and human interaction areas so they get to do what makes them happy and healthy, and at the same time they’re doing a job, or part of a job that would have required you do all the work. If they reduce your job by ten percent, or even fifty percent, that’s free labor! So think about that when we get into this episode. Think about designing into your homestead or small farm, a way to do multiple things with one moment of effort. We specifically talk about providing animals with food, while providing ourselves with fuel wood, and reducing our need to split firewood. If you don’t find lots of those little opportunities, you will have to work harder, or find outside employment to do so. And I want you to be able to meet as many of your own needs with your property as is humanly possible. So without further ado, let’s get into the interview!

[INTERVIEW WITH NICK & CAROLYN]

So there we go! I think that was a great introduction to the idea of using tree crops for animal food. I like to open up different ways of thinking about using resources on your land. So don’t forget to look up when you’re thinking about where to find your animal’s food. I’ll tell ya what, we’re starting thousands of trees from seed to get the stock we need to grow our own animal feed. This is a long term goal of mine and not a quick fix for sure. We’re working on transforming the land here from pine regrowth into productive glades of pasture separated by belts of trees that will be producing fodder for animals as well as fruit and nuts for both us and the livestock. In several years I’d like to see multi-species grazing going on with a leader follower system to help disrupt pest cycles. We want to be utilizing sheep, a couple dairy cattle, a couple pigs, chickens, and ducks. All pushing through the pasture and tree areas to harvest the plant matter and deposit in the form of manure up at the barn built on a high point of the property. That’s the long term goal. But for the short term, we are working on developing the area right around the house with a new kitchen garden and berry patch. We’re moving the chickens close to the house for now and hopefully that will reduce the predator issues we experienced this past summer.

We’ll be filming all this and have a plan to make all of our projects documented and available to the audience. This is a big undertaking and I hope you all will be as excited as I am when we can make this a reality. I want to share our experiences, our successes and failures, so when you take on these same types of projects, you’ll be able to learn from us and hopefully avoid problems and take a shortcut to success so to speak. Be looking for the announcement! I’ll make the first offer to everyone on the email list that you can sign up for on the website, it’s at the bottom of the page on the homegrownliberty.com main page so make sure you have your name and email address in there if you want to get the first shot at this thing! I’ll tell you all more about it as we get closer to launch but I’m trying to hold in as much as possible until we’re ready to launch.

AHHH I just wanna tell you all about it!! But I can’t!

If you’re interested in a free e-book by J. Russel Smith on fodder and tree crops, you should click this link and get a free copy! It’s hundreds of pages of great information and I highly recommend you get this book if for no other reason than to have it if you ever need it. A paperback copy on amazon right now is over $50!! But it’s free here in digital form. http://www.homegrownliberty.com/treecrops

Ok, one more thing, that I forgot to mention, I’ll be in the Dallas/Fort Worth area the last week of October, so if you’re in east or central Texas, or anywhere between there and Saline, Louisiana where I live, you’ll have a chance to get some discounted consulting since I’ll already be in the area! I’m doing a lot of traveling, I honestly don’t know how I’ll be able to  fit everything into my life for the next 4 months but I’m gonna do my best and it’ll be a wild ride!

To submit a question for the show, just send an email to nick@homegrownliberty.com
With “Question for the Show” in the subject line and I might be able to answer your question on the air!

Until next week

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”