Thrifty Homesteader

Today I'm talking with Deborah Niemann at the Thrifty Homesteader. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00

You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Debra Neimann at the Thrifty Homesteader in Illinois. Good mor- well, it's noon.  Good day, Debra. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for having me. Ah, thank you for being here.  Um, what's the weather like in Illinois today? Insanely hot.

00:26

Um, we actually have this really horrendous thing  called evapotranspiration.  Um, Illinois is actually more humid this time of year than the Gulf coast because of corn sweat.  Um,  all of these billions of acres of corn and soybean are drying out in the fields, releasing their moisture into the air. So, um, we have a heat advisory today, even though it's only like, um, only supposed to be 90 degrees.

00:55

But the heat index gets dangerously high because of the high humidity.  Yeah, we're here in Minnesota, where we live, around my house. It's all corn fields and  there's a soybean field across the road from us.  And  I can remember my dad and my mom mentioning corn sweat when I was a kid and being like, that's gross. I don't want to know about that. That sounds terrible.

01:22

Yeah, I swear to you it is hotter on our property than it is in town, which is four and a half miles away when it's like this because of that trans evaporation or whatever it's called. Yeah. Evapotranspiration. Yep. Crazy. Yep. But it's summer in the Midwest. So there you go. Yep. It's pretty brutal.  Yeah. Somebody told me that

01:49

When I moved to Minnesota, they were like, oh, you live in the Midwest now. And I thought, you know, I don't think Minnesota is Midwest. And I had to look it up and it's upper Midwest.  So I learned something because somebody was like, oh, you're a Midwestern or now you're a flatlander. I was like, um,  okay. Cause I grew up in Maine.  Oh yeah. And my dad called people in,  in the Midwest flatlanders.

02:17

and goat ropers. And I was like, you know, that seems really mean. I  don't think that you should call people names who live in other states  just because you're so in love with yours. And my mom would laugh and say,  he's right. It is pretty flat in Illinois. I'm like, oh, okay.  All right. Well, the weather here is  not as miserable as it was yesterday, but not as lovely as it's going to be tomorrow.

02:44

Nice. Hopefully you're sending in the nicer weather our way. Supposedly it's going to cool down toward the end of the week, but I'm not sure I trust it just yet. Yeah. Cause you know, weather, who knows what it's going to do. Exactly. All right. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. Well, uh, we moved to the country in 2002 to grow our own food organically because

03:14

I  wanted my family to eat healthier  and  get natural exercise. When I was growing up, I ate lots of fast food and convenience food and I was sick all the time. And when I got pregnant the first time was when I learned about the connection between your diet and your health. And that was such a  wildly revolutionary idea to me. Like, oh my gosh, so like, if my kids have a healthier diet, maybe they won't be sick all the time like I was.

03:43

And so  that was where it started, you know, and we were originally shopping at health food stores all the time, spending a lot of food on money  because I had started reading labels.  And  finally,  in the early  2000s, we started looking for a place in the country because I realized the only way I was going to be able to get the kind of food I really wanted to feed my family was for us to grow it ourselves. And so we did.

04:09

Um, we ultimately found 32 acres on a Creek in the middle of nowhere, about a hundred miles Southwest of Chicago.  Um, I always say we're an hour from everything.  Um, but anyway, we started, we were so clueless. I had this crazy idea that people have been growing their foods since the dawn of agriculture. So how hard could it be? Right.  Um, cause everybody would ask me like, Oh, did you grow up on a farm? And I say, no.

04:38

And they're like, well, how do you know what to do? And I was like, oh, it's not that hard. Like, I seriously thought you just plant some seeds in the ground, come back a few months later and harvest dinner and that any  mammal, every mammal lactates and they're all just gonna let you stand there and take their milk.  it was  so  unbelievably naive when we got started.

05:04

Okay, so  I don't want people to think that it's extremely hard to do this though, because it's not.  But  you do need to do a little bit of learning and research and hopefully make a friend with a farmer who can tell you the secrets. Yeah, and read books and stuff. I was very adamant. I knew just enough to be dangerous, honestly. I  was very adamant that our chickens were going to be free-range.

05:34

which is a great goal. But if your chickens are free range, then you need a fence around your garden.  And I didn't realize the first year, I couldn't understand why we weren't getting any tomatoes because all I ever saw were green tomatoes. And I'm like, why aren't the tomatoes ripening? They're always green.  We had had a garden in town and we did get some red tomatoes. So I thought I knew how to grow tomatoes.

06:01

And it actually wasn't until the second year that I saw chickens eating the tomatoes. And that's when I realized like, oh my goodness, we should put a fence around our garden so that the chickens can't eat the tomatoes and so that the geese don't eat all of the lettuce and  all that kind of stuff. there was,  was,  it was interesting. If I had done more research before I got started, it would have been a lot easier.

06:30

Well, I think that can be true of almost everything.  And  for the listener who doesn't know, chickens are very drawn to anything  red. And  once they get a taste for tomatoes, they will destroy your tomato crop.  Oh, yeah.  Chickens are great. I love them. We have 21 of them right now and they give us  wonderful eggs, but they are in a run. They do not rearrange because they would eat our garden because our garden does not have a fence around it.

07:00

Yeah. Yeah. So you need to have a fence somewhere between the chickens in the garden.  Yep.  Absolutely. You do, or you will not have a garden. They also really love lettuce. Yeah. Just, just a heads up to anybody who thinks about doing that. Cause they do. They love lettuce almost as much as I do. Yeah. Okay. So the reason I was so excited to have you come talk to me is because you've written like three books about homesteading.  Um, six. Six. Okay.

07:30

But tell me about that. Well, I got started. My first book was called Homegrown and Handmade and it was a little bit about everything. I called it a, I would tell people, oh, it's kind of a DIY book on steroids. Like I don't just tell you, I don't just give you a recipe for pizza.  I tell you how to grow the tomatoes,  make the pizza sauce, can the pizza sauce, how to raise the goats and milk the goats and make the mozzarella and how to.

08:00

raise the pigs to  make the sausage for your pizza and then how to grow all the other stuff in the garden to put on your pizza.  Like basically how to really make pizza from scratch, you know,  from the very beginning  or anything else that you want to do. You know, I'm always, I always want to be really clear that you do not have to do everything.  And I thought I did. And so that's why in the beginning,

08:26

Um, we did try to do everything and that is exhausting and we never could have done it if there had not been five of us. So once our kids left home,  we started cutting back on a lot of what we did because we realized that we not only could we not do it all with only two people, but we didn't need to do it all. And so we cut way back on that.  Um, I it's funny, I say I accidentally became a goat expert because my goats were dying and nobody could tell me why.

08:55

And this was back in the early  2000s. And weirdly enough, back then,  even veterinarians thought that goats and sheep were pretty much the same, that they had the same nutritional needs, that their drug dosages were the same,  that they handled parasites the same.  And so there really had not been much research done on goats because the number of sheep in this country had been a lot more. Like the number of sheep in this country started to go down.

09:24

50 years ago, but prior to that, we had millions of sheep in this country and we've never really had very many goats.  And the reason for that is because if you try to raise goats like sheep, they're going to die.  Um, and what I learned in the early  2000s, because what I ultimately wound up having to do after going to a lot of different vets, including a university vet school and everybody going, I don't know why your goats aren't, are dying. I don't know why they're not getting pregnant.

09:52

Um, I eventually figured out by  diving into the research that was like just being done at that time that, um, goats actually had a really high need for copper. And back then none of the goat minerals had enough copper in them.  The goat feeds didn't have enough copper in them. And on top of that, we had sulfur in our well water  and it smelled so bad. Um, we had an apprentice about 10 years ago who called it fart water. Uh huh.

10:20

like really bad sulfur and sulfur is a copper antagonist. So our goats had both primary and secondary copper deficiency. Primary copper deficiency means they weren't consuming enough because the minerals in the goat feeds back then didn't have enough. And the secondary copper deficiency means that you've got an antagonist that is making it impossible for the goats to absorb enough. they were double whammy for them.

10:49

So we started supplementing them with copper. They stopped dying. They started getting pregnant, having lots of babies.  And  by the time I figured out what I needed to know to keep my goats alive, I had enough information to write a book over 300 pages on how to raise goats. Wow. So  you wrote one. Yeah. So I did.  Nice. So OK. So what are the other four books?

11:17

Homegrown and Handmade was  expanded and revised about six years after the original one. So in the second one, I expanded it to include pigs, which I felt I did not feel I was qualified to include pigs in the first version because I still found pigs really challenging, even though we'd had them, you know, like for the whole time almost.  We still struggled with them a lot. And so I didn't feel qualified in the first book. By the time I did that one again,

11:47

we did, we were being very successful with the pigs. So in addition to updating everything in the first book, I also added chapters on pigs and maple syrup and lard and homegrown businesses because we'd also started our own goat milk soap business and egg business. sell eggs at a grocery store now. So we added all of that or I added all of that. I've written them all by myself.

12:17

And then Raising Goats Naturally was published in,  originally published in 2013.  And there is  always so much research being done about goats.  And so within five years, I told my publisher, I really want to update this because there is so much more stuff that needs to be included.  And there are recommendations that have been changed in the last five years because of new research.

12:45

So this is why when people contact me and they're like, your website says this, but this website says this. I look at the website that they're referencing and I page down and I look at the bottom and I'm like, yes, this website is from 2003. And that's what everybody believed in 2003, but we now know that is incorrect because unfortunately nothing online ever dies. you think like,

13:10

You find something at Purdue University's website and you're like, oh, this is, this has got to be good. It's from a university website. Well, look at the references. Like every university is going to have references.  And if you look at the references, sometimes there's still stuff up there that has ref the references are from the nineties.  Um,  and so that's not up to date. There's a lot of dangerously outdated information on the web. And if, if you don't know that and you're not checking the publication date.

13:40

then  you could be using the same kind of information I was back in 2002 when I got started.  So  that was why I wanted to update the second book and then,  or the goat book. And then I also wrote a book called the Eco Thrifty, which was basically my attempt to help people like, okay, so you don't have 32 acres on a Creek in the middle of nowhere. Here is how you can live a greener lifestyle. Even if you're in a

14:08

condo, like it doesn't matter where you are.  it's all about a third of that book is actually about food, about how you can eat a more natural diet  simply, you know, by cooking from scratch more and avoiding processed foods and stuff. And then a lot of it is just on replacing common chemical  products, you know, like  one of the

14:35

favorite things I used to talk about when I did like the morning shows promoting that book was, did you know that baking soda makes a fantastic facial scrub? Like is 100 % natural. It costs you next to nothing  and it leaves your face feeling  like as soft as baby skin, you know? And it doesn't smell yucky. Yeah. So I love that book. That book is out of print now. It was published in 2012.

15:02

I just love that book so much because it was like super simple things that anybody could do regardless of where they lived.  And even like how to have like a salsa garden  in a very small space, you know, like in a four by eight raised bed. then my last book is called Goats Giving Birth.  And I actually started out as a blogger.  Remember back in the early  2000s when everybody was like living their life online on blogs.

15:30

I was. Yeah.  I did that for 10 years from 2006 to 2016. I  kept a farm blog where I wrote about almost every single birth that we had on our farm. So there are hundreds of birth stories on there. And obviously  after,  you know, 10, 20 years, you look back at some of those stories and go, Oh man, I wish I wouldn't have done that. Um, or wow.

15:59

that was rough,  was nothing I could have done to  get a better outcome there. And so what I did in Goats Giving Birth was  I went through and I read all those birth stories and I pulled out the ones that I thought would help people  get the most secondhand experience about goat birthing.  so I talk about,  so they've got the original blog post completely unedited.

16:26

Even though I had to argue on that one, my editor's like, we gotta change that. like, no, it isn't. I want these original blog posts to be completely unedited so that people know exactly what I said when it happened. And then after every one, then you've got my reflections from the time I wrote it now. Here I am now, 10, 15 years later, looking at this and saying, okay, this is why this happened.

16:53

Um, this is what I should have done differently. These are the things that wouldn't have made a difference and all that kind of stuff. And it's got tons of photos, color photos in it. So it's very graphic.  So people can really see things  because a lot of times people get really worried about they, like they see a bubble. looks like two bubbles and they get really worried. Like I've seen three or four bubbles coming out at the same time. Like I think the, the goat amnion is the most.

17:21

fascinating thing. It's just got layers and layers in there  and pockets of fluid get pushed out in various bubbles. Yes, it is possible to have two kids trying.  It is possible for two kids trying to be born at the same time. However, that's really rare. We're up to like around 775 births now.  It's probably only happened two or three times.

17:48

So usually when you see multiple bubbles, doesn't mean anything worrisome. It's just a little extra piece of the amnion that's coming out with some fluid. So. Yeah. It's just a little bit of extra. That's all. Yeah. That's all. Yeah. And honestly, biology is so incredibly fascinating. It doesn't matter whether it's humans or animals.

18:16

thought about being a doctor when I was a kid. And my dad actually worked on the machines that keep people alive at hospitals. That was his job. Oh, cool. was was a biomed tech and he would come home and tell us stories of things that he had heard and seen at work. And he never said names because, you know,  HIPAA wasn't a thing then, but it certainly was his take that people's privacy was very important. And he would tell us stories about people.

18:45

dying, know, doctor had done everything they could and the person died. And after those stories, I was just like, I can't be a doctor. I will feel so terrible every time a patient dies that I will not be able to continue.  So I'm fascinated by it, but I would not have made a good doctor.  Yeah. Yeah. That is one of the hardest things for people to deal with is death  anywhere on the homestead and at any time really.  most of us in our modern world are very insulated from death.

19:15

We, most of us have never seen a human die.  Most of us have never,  maybe we've seen, you know, a pet dog or a pet cat die.  Um,  by the time we started our homestead, um, we had had  one cat and one dog that,  um, we had asked the vet to put down because they had cancer  and there was no hope. You know, they were very, very sick and suffering.  Um, and that was it, you know, like.

19:44

In my whole life, I was 39 years old when we moved to the country. And in that whole 39 years, I had only ever seen two living creatures lives and in front of my eyes.  Um,  and when you, when you're not familiar with something, it gets really, it's just really scary.  Um,  and  so there was a lot of stuff that, that you don't understand and you, and a lot of times people think it's going to happen when it's not.

20:13

Like that's one of the biggest things is a lot of people think that, you know, oh my gosh, it's going to die. And it's not like, no, what you're seeing is completely normal. Like  it's fine. It's all fine.  yeah, I think the hardest part about death  is the people that are left behind alive.  The person or the creature that dies, that's it. They don't, they don't have any future in this realm.

20:43

to look forward to. I really feel like the experience we have as humans with death is the  end of the potential of the life that was supposed to go on.  And so  it's hard for us humans because we spend our lives planning for the future. When there's no future left, it's like, what? Yeah. So, but yeah.

21:10

another philosophical statement from Mary on a, on a Monday morning. Yeah.  Well, it's interesting. You wind up confronting a lot of things on the farm that you did not experience when you lived in a cozy little suburb or, you know, condo in the city or whatever.  Um,  and you've, and also with farm animals, it's very different than it is with pets and especially with goats because they just,

21:40

don't, it's getting there, we're getting there. It is so much better now than it was 23 years ago.  But there was so little research on goats, you know? Like I shed so many tears  and I had so many goats die because in addition to the copper deficiency, we also had a problem with complete dewormer resistance because this was back in the day before they knew about dewormer resistance and it was like, oh, give your goats a dewormer on a schedule and

22:10

The first thing, the first time people started talking about pasture rotation, they said, deworm everybody and move them to a clean pasture. Well, now we know that is really terrible advice because now you're taking a hundred percent of the worms you are taking to that new pasture are resistant to the drug you just used. So you're going to accelerate dewormer resistance if you do that.  But that was the information I had. That's the information everybody had when I got started.

22:39

And thank goodness we are doing more research now, but it's so hard to get that information out there. Um, and that's one of the things that, that sets me apart is one of the things that makes me different from a lot of people who talk about goats online. Cause a lot of people are just talking about like, Oh, this is what I'm doing with my goats. Kind of like what I used to do with my old blog from, you know, 2006 to 2016. Um, and what saved my goats was.

23:08

digging into the science and going,  oh, this is why this happened.  And  that's why that happened.  And we need to understand the why behind what's happening because otherwise then you get somebody out in Arizona in the middle of the desert who says,  oh my God, I have never lost a goat to parasites. I give them a dewormer every month.  This is how you keep them alive.

23:37

And it's like, well, no, actually, if you're in the desert, you're wasting your money on the warmers because you don't have you don't have grass  to get. where the worms get where the goats get infected with the worm larvae.

23:57

So it's,  sorry.  No, that's okay.  I was going to say it's interesting because back in medieval times, humans used to be bled as a form of medical treatment. You know,  we'll just bleed them and they'll be better. And we now know that that's a terrible thing to do.  So why would animal science be any different? It changes. Right. Yeah.

24:25

Exactly. more we know, the more we know, the more we learn, the more we know, the more we do differently. Yeah, exactly. I know. I always tell people, would you like to go to a doctor who graduated in 2000 and never did any continuing education on the human body? No. Because that's, unfortunately, that's where some vets are. They just, they graduated from vet school back then and yeah, they have to get continuing education. But if, know, 75 % of their practice is dogs and cats,

24:54

That's where they're going to get most of their continuing education. then another 15 % is cows. Now that's going to have priority too. You know, if they only see a dozen goats a year, they're probably, they're like, Oh, it's the same thing as cows. You know, it's the same thing as sheep. I don't, I don't need to update my information on goats. Uh-huh. Wrong. Wrong answer. Exactly. Well, the other thing is, is that people are funny about things because

25:24

We have barn cats here and there are people who think that it's terrible that we have cats that don't come in the house.  These cats get fed, they get loved on, they're friendly, they come up, they visit, they purr.  And this morning my husband came in with his cell phone and said that one of the cats did his job last night and showed me a picture. it was my  husband's foot on the grass  and a

25:52

creature that looked suspiciously like a mouse, was way too big to be a mouse,  dead next to his sneaker.  And I said, that's not a mouse. He said, no, that is a rat.  I didn't, we have not actually, I have not actually seen any rats on our property ever since we moved here almost five years ago. I've seen lots of field mice  and  I said, why did they not eat the rat? Cause they will usually eat anything that they kill. And he said,

26:21

I don't know, maybe it was just  too much of a snack. You know, they eat the mice because the mice are little and I was like, yeah, true.  But the point of the story is that the cats have a job. They keep the mice and the rats and the snakes and the frogs down. So they're not in, in,  um, where I want it. Can't think of it right now.  They're not eating the chicken food or the scratch grains or the cat food that we need to feed our critters. Right. Yeah.

26:51

Yeah. So livestock is very different than pets. You're right.  Yeah. And that's an interesting adjustment that people have to make in their minds.  You know, a lot of times, and I was the same way. I went out and I bought the first three goats that I found because like I said, I thought if  it was a mammal, it could make milk and it would let me have its milk.  You know?  And so I went out and bought the first three goats that I found. knew nothing.

27:19

about what makes a good milk goat or anything. And of those first three goats, I ultimately sold two of them. In fact, I keep saying one of these days I'm gonna sit down and see if I can count up the number of goats that we bought in the first three years. Because from 2002 to 2005 is when we were building our herd. And I'm sure I sold at least half of the does that I bought. I wound up selling them because either they were not good milkers, they were drying up by the time they were six months post-kidding.

27:49

or  because they were impossible to milk. Like they just didn't have the personality and we were not very experienced and we were, you know,  fighting with them. And so we ultimately gave up  and  we only kept the goats that had, you know, so we wound up keeping the goats that had good milk production that would stand quietly on the milk stand and let us milk them.  also to mother nature called our herd. So we wound up with goats also that were

28:17

very naturally parasite resistant because the dewormers quit working. But a lot of people think, because with dogs and cats, we always talk about the forever home because they're becoming a part of our family. But on a homestead, they're your employees. They're not your family. You may love them. You may have an employee that you really, really love. But they're not.

28:44

going to be part of your family just because you bought them. so sometimes, you know, so if you're not buying goats that have like a great lactation history behind them, there you don't know what their mother produced or their grandmother produced or their sire's mother produced.  They may not be a great candidate for  a milk goat  because they may not give you a lot of milk. They may not be agreeable. They're

29:10

Teats and udder may be difficult to get the milk out of.  There's so many variables. I could just go on and on about that. But the bottom line is that if you had an employee that wasn't doing their job, you would not keep them.  And if you've got a goat that can't do their job or any other animal, know, cows or whatever, then you may not want to keep them either. you may  sell them to some, they may, you may send them to another home.

29:40

I'm always super honest with people because,  know,  I, you know, if I had a goat that we couldn't milk, I would tell people like, okay, well, we're selling her because we can't milk her.  Um, and we would either sell her to someone who had a lot more confidence and experience that we did, or somebody who was just like raising goats for pets and wasn't planning to milk the goat.  Um,  you know, cause I always feel like every animal has their ideal home out there somewhere.

30:08

And we need to be really honest and tell people why we're selling them  so that they go to  the right home.  Absolutely.  All right, Deborah, we've been talking for 30 minutes. That was really fast.  I have  one last question and it's probably a big one. When  you  bought your 34 or 36, 34 acres,  you had basically no experience and you said that you were really naive.

30:38

Do you  love what you're doing now with your homestead? Oh my goodness, yes. I have loved it from day one, even through all of the challenges and tragedies and everything. Like our friends in the suburbs thought we had lost our minds when we told them what we were doing. And I think they all expected us  to be turning around and coming back to the suburbs within two or three years. And  over and over again, through the years, the early years, we would hear people saying, man, I can't believe you're still there.

31:07

That's amazing. Like you're, you're doing this stuff and you're having these challenges and you're not giving up.  Um, and the bottom line is it all goes back to the fact that we absolutely love the lifestyle. We love living in the country. We love living as lightly on the earth as possible because we really care about the earth and we don't want having, we don't want a bunch of chemicals dumped on the earth to feed us.

31:34

We don't want to have animals living in abusive situations to feed us. And  so  if I'm not  growing it myself, I'm buying it from a farmer that I know,  who I know like, yeah, they're not dumping tons of chemicals on the earth. They're not mistreating their animals  so that I can feel good about  what we are consuming from other sources.  But you know what?

32:01

It all goes back to loving it, know, like just loving all of it, loving the natural exercise and loving the animals and  loving how it all comes together.

32:13

I figured that was probably going to be your answer, but I wanted  to hear your answer.  Where can people find you online, Debra? You can find me all over the place at thriftyhomesteader, thriftyhomesteader.com, Facebook, thriftyhomesteader,  Pinterest, thriftyhomesteader, Instagram, thriftyhomesteader. And then I also have a podcast and YouTube channel called For the Love of Goats, which is all about the goat stuff. I interview vet professors and researchers so we can stay.

32:42

stay on the cutting edge of this and like go right to the people who are actually doing the research. And then I also talk to successful goat business owners because most of us get to the point if we really love our goats, we're gonna wanna buy more and more. And then we're like, hmm, you guys are gonna have to start helping to pay for the feed bill. How can I do that?  So for the love of goats and thrifty homesteader.

33:05

Fantastic.  Deborah, this was a joy.  I love talking with people like you because you started from zero  and you have surpassed a hundred. I can hear it in your voice.  And it's so great to talk to someone who started out from very beginning, is living it and continues to live it and love it. So thank you so much. You're welcome. It's always fun talking about this. It was great talking with you today, Mary.  Well, thank you.

33:34

always people can find me at at atinyhomesteadpodcast.com.  Have a great day Deborah, thank you. Thank you. Bye.