Farming
The Butler Family
Our homesteading journey into self-sustainability has been so exciting! We won’t sugar coat it and say that it has been easy because that is not a word that we like to use. Farm life, homesteading, or whatever you choose to call it, is hard! If someone tells you otherwise, they are lying!

This article was first printed in our very first issue of The Beartaria Times Magazine, Origins, A Revealing of Legends
Hi! We are the Butlers party of seven. Our family is nestled on 80 acres in the hills of West Virginia. Our homesteading journey began in 2014 when we decided that we would build our current 750 sq ft cabin and sell our 2,500+ sq ft farmhouse. My husband Bobby’s job as a coal miner was undependable and made things difficult. It took us three years to finish but all the costs were out of pocket. Finally in 2017 it was complete and our farm house sold! We were mortgage free! The first night we stayed in the cabin was surreal! The thoughts of our five homeschooled children getting to make memories on the farm where Bobby grew up made all of the long, hard days of work well worth it! We would get to see our children not just live but thrive on the land.
Our first spring on the farm we purchased our flock of feathered friends. They were and still are a mixed breed of both brown and white egg laying hens with one handsome Red Leghorn Roo. We collect around a dozen eggs a day that go unwashed into egg cartons then into our refrigerator. Eggs contain a coating that is called bloom. The bloom keeps the pores on the eggs covered and reduces the risk of bacteria from entering the eggs. We don’t leave the eggs out on the counter since our eggs are fertilized. You can though! We’ve read that chickens are the gateway animal. That may have some truth behind it!
We had constantly talked of becoming more self-sufficient on the farm. We’ve always had a large garden and canned, but 2021 felt and ended up much different. We experienced some food shortages in our area but God always came through! We were never without! We knew we needed to make changes if we were serious about becoming more self-sufficient. Spring of 2021 we set our goal to jump full in! Meat, dairy, garden, all of it!
A reliable meat source for our family was important. We are a hunting family, so every fall our shelves and freezer are usually full of venison. That only lasts our family a time and hunting season on deer isn’t year-round. We wanted a meat that would quickly add to our food storage, be timely to manage and wouldn’t take from our pasture. Meat rabbits were our focus. Good friends of ours had already started the rabbit journey and supplied us with three New Zealand doe’s from their farm. To complete our warren of rabbits we purchased a Lilac Silver Fox Buck and a Blue Silver fox doe. Silver Fox rabbits are a dual-purpose breed, raised for their meat and fur. Their fur coloring trait is found in no other breed and resembles the pelts of the silver fox from the Arctic. They are also a heritage breed. We have had three successful litters so far. One of the litters we have already butchered for the freezer and sent their furs to a friend to tan for us. Be on the lookout for some fun fur items to come!
The next add on to our farm that spring was Honey Bees. I mean why not? Who doesn’t love raw honey?! We purchased a package of Italian honey bees from a local bee shop. A package of honey bees includes about 3 pounds of bees and one queen bee. Three pounds of honey bees is estimated to be 10,000 bees. They toss those three pounds of bees into a mesh box and add a boxed queen bee. She has to be left in her separate protective box for several days after placing the bees into their new hive. This gives the colony time to accept her as their new queen. If she was released into the hive without their acceptance the colony would kill her. Honey Bees are so cool! If you ever get the chance to be present during a hive inspection, do it! Those little creatures are so neat to watch!
The first year of beekeeping, honey usually isn’t collected. The goal is to get the colony strong enough to survive the winter with enough honey to feed them during the months when they can’t forage. A month later, after getting our package of bees set up, a friend called about a swarm of bees that had landed in a peach tree of theirs.

We were excited! What an awesome opportunity! We jumped on the chance to catch the swarm and bring them to the farm as our second hive. We closed up both of those hives for the winter a few weeks ago. If everything goes as it should they will be ready to produce honey for us in the spring.
In between getting our farm ready for our rabbits and bees we expanded our garden. It is roughly a quarter of an acre and was jam packed this growing season! Gardening is such a forgiving sustainable option, in my opinion. We not only use ours to grow our fruits and vegetables for the season but we also have several herb beds that we use for medicinal purposes. We started some from seed and purchased some from local nurseries. A small list of some that we have are: Comfrey, Feverfew, Jerusalem Artichoke, Motherwort, Elecampane, Marshmallow, Anise, Hyssop, Arnica, Lovage, Pearly Everlasting, Bee Balm, Catnip, Sweet Annie, Wild Licorice, Goldenseal, Solomon Seal, Wild Ginger and several different mint varieties. We dried a lot of herbs this year for teas. They are such an easy way to boost your immune system or add as treatment to a condition.
While we have plans of adding a few other creatures to our farm, we feel that our Jersey Cow, Momma, is the staple to our homesteading life. We did a lot of research and searching before finding her. We knew with the size of our pasture that we wanted a medium sized cow but also one that produced a lot of cream to increase the number of food products that we would be able to make from her milk. A Jersey was the perfect fit for our farm.
In preparation for her arrival all of the old fencing that enclosed her pasture had to be torn out and replaced with new. The old fence was in rough shape and would not keep in a cow. Along with the fencing provisions we didn’t have a barn to milk in. The same friend that gave us a jump start on our rabbits came to help square up and set the posts for our milking barn. We are so grateful for that help! The milking barn is currently under roof and about fifty percent covered with rough cut. That wood was cut from downed trees from our farm on our saw mill.
Momma requires to be milked & fed twice a day now that her calf, Guapo, is weaned. She is currently giving us about 2 gallons of milk a day. That adds up quickly! We spend lots of time in our kitchen! We make mozzarella cheese, butter, chocolate milk, ricotta, and yogurt several times a week. Just this month we made our first hard cheddar cheese! Hard cheeses have to age from three to twelve months unlike soft cheeses that can be eaten right away. There is something so special about the bond you form with your animals. We spend hours with Momma every day and she has made such great improvements since coming to us. She is expecting and it’s due to calf this coming June 2022!
Our homesteading journey into self-sustainability has been so exciting! We won’t sugar coat it and say that it has been easy because that is not a word that we like to use. Farm life, homesteading, or whatever you choose to call it, is hard! If someone tells you otherwise, they are lying! There are so many ups and downs but this way of life is so rewarding! We tell our kids that there is such satisfaction in a hard day’s work! To be able to sit back and look at your accomplishments, how far you’ve come and the amount of priceless knowledge that you gain cannot be matched!








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Farming
Micro Greens – Macro Benefits
Having good nutrition is important, sure, but that’s just scratching the surface of the benefits growing your own greens offers.

By: BalanceBear (aka @johnny.greenleaf)

This article was first printed in our very first issue of The Beartaria Times Magazine, Origins, A Revealing of Legends
Microgreens, as the name suggests, are small by nature, but the benefits they offer are quite the opposite of their size.
What are microgreens and what exactly do they have to offer? Microgreens are vegetable greens harvested just after the cotyledon leaves have developed (7-10 days after germination for most varieties). The benefits? Well, they are countless. We’ll get to many of them, but a few of the biggest advantages of growing microgreens over traditional vegetables are their space efficiency, time to harvest, & ease of getting started. Just because you don’t have a yard, doesn’t mean you can’t grow your own food. With as little as a shelf in an apartment, and a few supplies, you can start sewing seeds and reaping the benefits of these nutrient dense greens in no-time. I was introduced to the world of microgreens this past year by the legendary Urban Farmer, Curtis Stone, and in just a matter of 8 months they have already had a profoundly positive impact on my life, and my community.

Now how could something so small offer so much? It’s been theorized that the reason microgreens are so nutrient dense compared to the leaves of their mature vegetable counterparts is because they are harvested shortly after germination, when all of the nutrients they need to grow are there. Regardless if that theory holds true as to the why, nutrient tests have shown that microgreens contain 4-40 times more concentrated levels of various nutrients than leaves in the mature plants, depending on the variety & specific nutrient (i.e. red cabbage microgreens contain 40 times more vitamin E than mature red cabbage). Buying microgreens from a store can be significantly more expensive than normal mature vegetables, but growing them yourself, especially when you consider the time from planting to harvest, is much more affordable. Furthermore, when you buy anything from a grocery store, the vitality of the food has already been severely diminished due to the fact that it takes so much time for the product to be packaged and shipped off to the store. From the moment a fruit or vegetable is harvested, the nutrients begin to break down. This vitality can actually be measured. Realistically, the freshest produce you can get from a store is 4-7 days post harvest. The total time it takes to get from planting microgreen seeds to harvesting the greens is 10-14 days total (for most varieties), which is right up there with the nutrient density when it comes to the best benefits microgreens have to offer. When you compare that to typical times like 2-3 months for a mature plant to bear fruit, it’s quite astonishing that the microgreens pack such a dense nutrient punch, and when you grow them yourself, you can eat them living, which means you don’t lose out on any nutrients like you do when you get already deteriorated greens from a store.
Having good nutrition is important, sure, but that’s just scratching the surface of the benefits growing your own greens offers. One of the biggest benefits I have personally experienced since becoming an urban farmer, is the community connection that has come from it. I believe that food and community are two of the biggest sources of energy in this realm, and when you grow your own food, and further when you exchange it within your community, the energy boost is multiplied. Picture a closed-loop energy cycle; that’s what you get to experience when you buy, sell, or trade locally within your community. First, you get an energy boost from growing your own food, you then experience an additional energy boost when you exchange your food to someone in your community, because you see the joy it brings them, and you know that it will nourish them. They receive that same energy boost when you buy or trade for their food, and thus the communities’ overall energy goes up by a multiple factor, and the energy loop remains closed. When people in your community buy food from a corporation, especially one that’s not local, energy gets siphoned off into the ether, rather than being kept in your community where it can continue to cycle & recharge.
I’m speaking from experience here, as I have felt a tremendous difference since buying, selling, & trading with local bears at our Southern California Bartertaria Meetups, as well as exchanging my greens for fruit from my neighbors’ trees.
Even if you live in an apartment in a city like I currently do, microgreens can be a great starting point for you to tap into that energy cycle. Furthermore, if you’ve never grown food at all, consider these greens as a great micro-step to start the journey that is gardening/farming.
I won’t go too much into detail about the equipment you need to get started, as there are plenty of great resources online and on YouTube for that (seek and ye shall find), but I will tell you the basics of what you need to get started, and a few good online resources to look in to if you want more details. You will need some kind of tray or container to put the growing medium in (I use 10×20 trays from Bootstrap Farmer), seeds (I get mine from TrueLeaf Market), a growing medium (I use an organic potting soil from ProMix), and lights (I use 4’ Sunblaster Fluorescents) if you want to grow indoor, otherwise you can obviously use sunlight if you have space and want to grow them outside. That’s basically it. Anything else will just upgrade your operation. A few of the best online resources which helped me along my journey, from setup, to growing, all the way through harvesting are: Curtis Stone’s From The Field TV, Donny Greens on YouTube, and OnTheGrow who have great experiments on YouTube & an ebook.
So, whether you just want to add some nutrient dense greens to your smoothies, juices, salads, or dishes as a garnish, have some sunflowers to snack on, take a micro-step towards learning to grow food, or go big & contribute to the energy cycle of your local community, the macro benefits of microgreens are there for you.
“To a man’s heart it brings gladness to eat the figs from his own trees, and the grapes of his own vines”, and to your heart gladness can come from eating the microgreens of your own stem.
Farming
Using Hay to Import Fertility and Feed the Pastures
A recent study I read indicated that pastures responded better to feeding hay directly on the field verses hauling manure and compost from the barn.

By: Mohawk Farmer Bear
When we took over the farm in 2015, the fields were constantly being cropped and hayed. Modern agriculture focuses on production at the expense of soil health and fertility. While we have good soils here, it’s obvious that fertility is low, and the pastures are nowhere near as productive as they have the potential to be. This winter, rather than feeding the cows down by the barn as usual, I focused on rotating them around the pastures and feeding the hay directly on the pasture. By the time grazing starts in May, I will have fed 200 round bales of hay or 50 to 60 tons of hay onto the pastures. That’s a lot of manure, organic matter from wasted hay, and fertility to spread on 50 acres. A recent study I read indicated that pastures responded better to feeding hay directly on the field versus hauling manure and compost from the barn. More fertility is captured with winter bale feeding on pastures. So, this summer, I’ll get to see it. Either way, 50 tons of hay (5 tons to the acre) should have a huge impact on the pastures. More fertility means more grass, which means more beef.

Unrolled hay bale. It spreads the fertility around the pasture and gives all the cows access to the dinner table.

In early February, you can see where the cows have been without snow. I covered this part of the farm well.

The farthest and highest point on the farm. Typically the hardest to get manure spread on, but I fed a ton of hay up there this winter. It’s a pretty good hill, so even with heavy baleage, I start at the top and push the bale down the hill to get it unrolled.
Farming
Building a Beartarian Homestead
So, how does one get into homesteading if you don’t have any experience with it? The big thing is, to take it slow.

By: Mohawk Farmer Bear
This article was first printed in our very first issue of The Beartaria Times Magazine, Origins, A Revealing of Legends
There’s something romantic about homesteading. Thinking about building a chicken coop, or milking your own cow. Making butter, cream, and cheese with that milk. Raising a few sheep and pigs that you slaughter yourself and put in the freezer. It all gives you a wonderful homey feeling as you daydream about all the possibilities of building your own homestead and growing your own food while reading homesteading books by a warm cozy fire with snow gently falling outside.
But then comes the daunting task of making it happen. Pounding that fence post into the ground or putting up dusty, scratchy, hay in 90 degree weather… all of a sudden it doesn’t seem as romantic as that homesteading book made it feel. Truth be told, it’s not romantic at all. But it is good, and it’s extremely rewarding.

So, how does one get into homesteading if you don’t have any experience with it? The big thing is, to take it slow. Raising animals requires building infrastructure and dealing with living animals, weather, and predators. There’s a huge learning curve that usually takes years. So don’t try to do everything at once. Start slow and work into it. Get good at raising chickens before getting a pig. Likewise get proficient at keeping a few pigs or goats before adding a milk cow. As you learn how farm animals behave and what is required to manage them, you will become more confident with keeping larger animals.
If you try to do everything at once… chickens, pigs, beef cows, milk cows… you’re going to be overwhelmed. So take it slow, start with some chickens, and work up from there.

As you build your homestead there are a few things you should strive for.
Functionality
Remember, you are growing food to feed your family. While we do want to properly care for our animals, we also want to keep our costs down as much as possible. The goal is to grow the best food we can at a very affordable price. Don’t let money be your go to solution for everything. When faced with a project or a problem, challenge yourself to think of solutions that don’t require spending money.
Animal housing and infrastructure should be primarily about function, not looks. The chicken coop needs to keep the chickens comfortably out of the elements, give them a clean place to lay eggs, and keep the predators away. You can have an attractive chicken coop, just figure out how to do it without spending a boat load of money. If your homegrown eggs are costing you $50 per dozen, you probably overbuilt your chicken coop.

Efficiency
If you just got into homesteading, You’re probably still working a full time job. That means everything you do needs to be efficient. Daily chores should be under an hour per day. Right now I have 11 cows, 1 milk cow, 5 pigs, 70 chickens, and 3 sheep. My daily chores usually take 45 minutes. Mostly this boils down to just a few things.
Sturdy reliable fencing, You don’t want to be chasing animals that escaped. Good fencing is a must and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Accessible water. Hauling water is a pain and very time consuming. Black plastic pipe is cheap. Run some over the ground to where you need and pump the water instead of carrying it. During the winter, keep the animals close to a central watering point so you don’t have to carry buckets very far. Automatic feeders and waterers are a must. There’s tons of options out there but the main thing is to always have clean fresh water available to your critters.

For Chickens I like the Poultry Bell waterers. They can be gravity fed from a 5 gallon bucket with a float valve filling up the bucket. All you have to do is check daily to make sure the water is flowing into the waterer. For pigs I like the Brower 85gallon field drinker. The weight of a full tank keeps the pigs from tipping it over and a float valve keeps it full.

If all you have to do is collect eggs, add a little dry bedding here and there, do a walk by inspection to ensure feeders and waterers are working properly, then your daily chores won’t take hardly any time. Occasionally you’ll have to clean out the coop or load pigs to go to the butcher, but your daily chores will be minimal.
Forgiveness
Don’t get discouraged when stuff happens. Things will go wrong from time to time. You’re dealing with living animals, nature, weather, and seasons. A Pine Marten will massacre your chickens, your sheep will get out and eat your garden, drought will dry up your pastures. Whether your toddler steps on a chick, or your goat gives birth to stillborn kids, don’t let the emotions overwhelm you. Life and death is all part of homesteading. Take a moment to ponder what happened, learn from it, and move on. After all, the other critters on the farm still need tending to. Just pray that God would give you the wisdom to learn, prosper, and crush despite the challenges.
Homesteading is about continually building, refining, getting more efficient and more self-sufficient. It’s the journey that makes it so much fun. Enjoy the building process as you build your homestead.
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