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The Making of our Homestead

Apple blossoms
Picture of Kody Hanner
Kody Hanner

Welcome to Cedar Ridge Ranch (Our Homestead)

When my husband and I bought our ranch, we weren’t completely sure what our homestead goals were exactly. Our overall plan was to start growing our own food, reduce our food budget and to find a niche market for ourselves in this new region to supplement farm costs. I feel as though we have successfully met those goal and are constantly looking for ways to exceed them.

Growing our own food

Meat

Our homestead now provides us with probably 95% of our meat and proteins. This includes chickens, quail, eggs from both, raw milk, pork, beef, and even wild game. We get our cream, butter, yogurt, and cheeses from our cows milk. These products are also used to make many other items that we would normally purchase from the store. Making our lunch meats, jerky, and canned chicken has really reduced our processed foods. We have reached a point that we primarily only need to buy items like salami and occasionally hot dogs.

Chicken Breast on a George Foreman grill
Jerky on a tray
hamburger in a freezer

Fruits and Vegetables

For our fruits and vegetables, I am making forward strides every year in eliminating our off-farm needs. During harvest season I am pretty much able to only need to buy bananas and blueberries. I have still not been able to grow blueberries. In fact I think I killed more plants this year. We preserve many foods to use throughout the year. My favorites to can are our jams, jellies, and spreads with three varieties of grapes, raspberries, huckleberries, apples, pears, cherries, and apricots.

This year I canned enough tomato sauce and salsa to get us through early spring and then I did a freezer clean out of frozen tomatoes and now have enough sauce to last until pretty close to this year’s harvest. We used the last of our frozen zucchini, cauliflower, and broccoli in about April of this year. Our root vegetables did well in storage and those potatoes that we didn’t eat are now happily growing in the garden. Last year we planted a lot of corn and the pigs got out and ate all the starts! So this year I found some better fencing at an online yard sale and the corn and potatoes both will be much safer.

I am expanding my herb growing this year as well and hopefully have some exciting things in store!

Celery in a crate

Foraging On And Off The Homestead

As mentioned before we use huckleberries in jelly, but we also have a large number elderberry bushes. We freeze our elderberries while still on the stem bundles and make a nutrient packed syrup as we need it throughout the year. My good friend at Loki’s Barn taught me that one. When harvest gets closer this year, any elderberries that we have not used will be dehydrated for sell and dry storage.

Grains

Grains are something that we are not set up to grow ourselves. That is why we are so happy that we found a home in the location that we did. Many of our neighbors are grain farmers and allow us to purchase grains for our animals and flour for cooking. Going this route has considerably reduced prices from the costs in town. Having a community like we have is one of that reasons that we feel sustainable where we are, because what we cannot provide for ourselves, we can source in our local community.

 
Homemade Cost Cutting ebook on an iphone

Reducing our food budget

This step comes naturally with growing our own food. We have successfully reduced our family of eight’s monthly food budget from $1500 to about $300. I have outlined how I accomplished a large portion of these savings in my free e-book, Homemade Cost Cutting.

I’m not saying that a large portion of our homestead budget hasn’t gone to feed for our animals but finding our niche market has provided the additional cash flow to balance out our farm costs.

 

Finding our niche market

We decided that rather than wait and find out what farm product was going to be most in demand in our area, we would dabble in a little bit of everything until something took off. That way we weren’t losing time. I don’t know that this is the best route for everyone, but we were in a financial place at that time where we could make that choice. We purchased all quality animals so that if they did not work out for us there was a resale value and if they did work for us, we didn’t have to reinvest in the project. To outline what has been unsuccessful and what hasn’t, I will start with goats.

Goats

We already had a herd of papered Boer meat goats for the kids’ 4-H projects. So next we purchased a herd of dairy goats. My goal was to use them strictly to nurse meat goat kids if the does weren’t the best mothers. Well turns out none of my Boer goats were bred and ALL of my dairy goats were! So why not make the best out of an unfortunate situation. A small herd exemption from the Idaho Department of Agriculture is required to be able to sell raw goats milk from our farm. We worked very hard at getting this set up and I’m sad to say, that this was not the venture for us. We have since sold our dairy goats and are looking at also selling our meat goats.

boer goat kids

piglets

Poultry

Chickens! Who doesn’t love chickens? We have a great flock of laying hens that keep us in eggs most of the year. I am looking at playing with incubating more chicken eggs to be able to raise dual purpose chickens for eggs and our meat birds. Until then, be raise several dozen Cornish cross chickens in batches every year to always have chicken in the freezer.

chicken eggs in a basket

Something that I could not wait to try was raising quail. When everything is going well, we incubate a couple hundred eggs a month and this has become one of our regular money makers, especially once Covid lockdowns began. Quail make for a wonderful back yard meat and egg source. It has also been rumored that those with chicken egg sensitivities have less issues with quail eggs (this is for you to research yourself). Selling quail chicks has make the difference for us financially on many occasions.

cutornix quail chicks

Cattle

I never wanted a dairy cow and I dug my heels in hard. Now I absolutely love the cows that we have and we are expanding in the fall. We started with a Dexter/Jersey cross, Bailey, that had a 3-month-old half low-line angus heifer calf nursing. That calf has now been fed out and butchered providing us with a year’s worth of beef. Turns out when we bought her, she was already bred to the same low-line angus bull and had a bull calf about 9 months later, who was a totally surprise to us!

This year we purchased 6-year-old Brown Swiss cow that was bred to an A2A2 Brown Swiss bull. A2A2 is a milk protein casein that makes cow’s milk more easily digestible to those with allergies and lactose intolerance. Our cow, Cherry, is not A2A2 however, the little heifer that she recently had has a 50/50 chance of carrying the more desirable gene. We are looking forward to having her genetically tested.

We currently do calf sharing for milk and milk with a Simple Pulse automatic milker. This still provides us with about two gallons of milk a day.

We are planning to expand with beef cows this fall to have an additional beef and income source for the farm.

dexter dairy cow

Pigs

We started with one bred sow who ended up only having 3 piglets. From there, we had an amazing opportunity to expand our operation by 10! Turns out, the niche that was needed in our area was pigs. We now sell our stock in many different capacities and are actually making a reasonable profit at this point. Keep an eye our for my next post on raising pigs for a more detailed insight into raising and marketing hogs.

We have not only been able to supplement our family’s income and support our farm with pigs, we have also been able to be there for our community on a few occasions through donations.

Plants and produce

Any excess plant starts or vegetables have been items for me to sell to at a minimum cover our costs to have fresh vegetables. That is huge in itself. In the coming year, we have plans to expand some of these operations to save money and complement many of our current projects.

heirloom vegetable seedlings

Side hustles

I am always looking for way to help our family financially, with their health and to use my time to the best of my ability. This has led me to selling doTERRA Essential Oils to provide my family with the least toxic health care options.

doterra essential oils

I also use my business and marketing skills for graphic design, website design, social media marketing, and farm/homestead consulting and food safety.

What can you do with your farm?

There is a lot of information in this post and I feel that many of you can benefit from knowing the trials, errors, and goals of fellow homesteaders. I plan to post about each of these homestead projects individually to give a much more in-depth guide for you to consider each of these endeavors yourself.

Please comment here or over on my Facebook or Instagram as to which homestead project you want help tackling!
Check out our farm here on our YouTube Channel!

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