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If you spend any time on YouTube in the garden/homestead niche, you’ll have come accross Justin Rhodes. He’s one of the most prolific YouTubers I’ve ever come accross, with almost daily short vlogs from his family farm in N Carolina. I’ve watched most of his episodes since 2020, when the pandemic left us stuck at home, with only my garden to save me from staring at 4 walls.
I gardened, I watched, I gardened more, and a couple of years later, we bought our own farm. 5 acres, nothing as big as the Rhodes family’s property, but more than enough to contend with. It’s a lot of work.
I think I’ve learned some things from Justin Rhodes, but mostly I’ve seen his ways, used them for entertainment, and not adopted them.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the guy, he seems nice, but his ways are not for us. Here are a few things we do differently on our self-sufficient, permaculture, chicken-tending farm. No cloth caps or aprons in sight!
We’ Don’t Do These Things Like Justin Rhodes
A lot of these things are actually things we do differently to Joel Salatin (AKA The Lunatic Farmer, or The World’s Most Famous Farmer). I respect him, he’s very wise, and he’s the source of many of Justin’s practices, but they wouldn’t work on our farm, nor for our family.
A lot of things we so the same. We like to eat clean, but not obsessively. You won’t find us packing our own food when we travel. We travel for fun, and we travel internationally a lot. We eat what the locals eat.
We exercise, a lot, but we always have. We do have a small home gym, my husband is a former junior champ in power lifting, so we know what we’re doing.
We run, bike and hike, we’re pretty fit. We appreciate that sauna, ice plunges and Vitamin D from the sun can be beneficial, but as I’m diagnosed Vitamin D deficient in the QLD sunshine – I know the sun isn’t enough.
I don’t think we need saunas in Queensland Australia, we sweat plenty! My husband likes a cold shower but it’s not for me. Maybe we will in future.
Like the Rhodes family, we homeschooled, going way back to around 2010. We worldschooled, mostly, Joel Salatin “farmschooled”. He doesn’t know it, but we both contributed to a book on alternative education for the University of Maine. I wrote the worldschooling chapter, he wrote farmschooling. I haven’t read it, I should!
- We don’t buy chicks from hatcheries, and more differences with our chickens & other poultry (There are a lot! This section is long.)
- We don’t use portable electric fences, and why.
- We don’t do YouTube
- We don’t can, we eat seasonally, and why.
- We butcher our own lamb.
- We could not an will not, harvest our cattle ourselves
- We don’t milk
- We don’t grow huge amounts of tomatoes.
- We don’t dehydrate herbs and spices and make powders, we use them fresh, mostly, and why.
- Our livestock guardian dog lives in the house. Because we’re soft.
Our Chicken Methods vs Justin Rhodes’ Chicken Methods
Our chickens do not live in chicken tractors, they’re not confined to a coop, and they’re not next to our vegetable garden. They do not make us chicken coop compost (the geese and guineas do) and we do not buy huge batches of chicks in the post (which is fairly abhorrent). We do not keep C- monsters – Cornish Cross giant mutant chickens, with eggs injected with growth hormone. We prefer natural birds.
If we want to eat chicken, or guinea fowl, or goose, or even turkey, we’ll harvest one. There’s no need to fill the freezer with a year’s supply.
We hatch our own chicks for meat and eggs, we’re constantly hatching. Maybe for a large family like the Rhodes, a huge bird is essential, we are 4 adults, 2 roosters makes a good meal plus soup the next day. A small cheap incubator does the job for us, plus the occasional broody hen.
Our chickens free range and get minimal grain because we need them to eat a natural diet of bugs and plants. That way, they should be higher in Omega 3s, lower in Omega 6s, and contain more Vitamin D. We hope! All of those things are better for them, and us.
Free range birds also help your soil and keep the bugs down. Having a wide variety of animals on your land is really good for soil regeneration. Our chickens and guineas help with ticks, leeches, flies, and some say they keep snakes away. We’re a big fan of free range.
Of course free free-ranging has drawbacks. My vegetables and garden beds have to be thoroughly chicken-proofed, and it’s annoying. But it means we don’t need to catch 50 birds to clip wings.
Ornamental beds and mulch also get fairly trashed by chickens. You learn to garden around problems like this. There is poop on our path daily. 4pm every day, I hose it off, it feeds the ground on either side.
Justin has pointed out these issues with free ranging, yes, he’s correct, but we think the positives outweigh the negatives.
Chicken tractors or the Rhodes variety are not snake proof. We need that here. Pythons take our birds despite our very best efforts. As our chickens free-range we don’t need to keep moving them.
Their night coops are for sleeping only and have deep wood chip as a base. That breaks down to compost eventually while the free-range poop directly feeds the grass and fruit trees. We have a lot of fruit trees in production, way more than JR – but thats an advantage of tropical living!
I object strongly to the “guard goose” concept. Geese are flock birds and not meant to be kept with chickens, solo.
We have 5 geese, they also free range and swim on the lake, it’s beautiful to see.
Geese keep the grass down, although we still mow. I like neat lawns, I’m constantly mowing. They give us eggs, which we can hatch to make more geese. It’s a great system! It’s self-sustaining, no goslings in the post for us!
Turkeys are a particular favourite of mine, they’re better meat birds than chickens, and I can turn turkeys into mince, it’s very useful.
Again, no portable electric fences and turkey tractors open to the elements. The turkeys free range, have a roof to keep the rain off at night, and are self-sustaining. We can hatch as many as we want for next year. If we were to buy baby turkeys as JR does, and harvest in bulk for freezing, can you imagine how much freezer space we’d need?
Electricity to power freezers is expensive, despite the solar, freezers are expensive and take up space. For us, it’s better to harvest a turkey or two when we need one, store them in the paddocks, rather than in the freezer.
The turks have a coop at night, so a cyclone or hurricane likely won’t blow, or wash, ,them away, as happened to JR. We sympathised, enormously with his hurricane damage, it was immense,but those turkeys didn’t deserve to die through lack of proper housing. We’ve also been through a cyclone. 8 days of no power or wifi, but way less damage.
The Portable Electric Fences Thing
Have you seen how expensive those portable electric net fences are? Plus the solar chargers? They are insanely expensive and most things solar don’t last long. While moving any animal to fresh grass, without poop or parasite buildup, is a great idea, we can’t do it, and can’t afford those fences!
We have fixed fencing and a fixed electric fence system that runs off the mains. It keeps the cows and goats from escaping.
None of us wants the daily chore of moving fencing.
This means we have to worm. We also have to treat the cow for ticks, there is absolutely no way around that. Ticks can blow in here in the tick zone of Australia, she needs treating as do the dog, cats, goats and sheep. We’ve never wormed a bird and have never needed to.
The free-range birds and wide variety of animals rotating (somewhat) around the paddocks probably help with parasite buildup.
We also have to vaccinate some animals, because otherwise they would die. We use Pestene powder (not DE, diatomacious earth) in nesting boxes occasionally, because we don’t want chicken lice or mites, thanks very much.
I’m not a fan of DE, it stays in the environment forever and will kill anything with an exoskeleton, plus can cause respiratory problems. Ash, sand, and soil are always available for anyone to take a dust bath. We have no issues with external parasites on birds.
We don’t use concoctions of garlic and apple cider vinegar. We have fermented chicken feed occasionally, but it’s too much work, it’s not for us.
That section got a bit off track! Onto the next.
We Don’t Do YouTube
I do not want the exposure YouTube brings for me, and certainly not for my kids. I’ve been a professional content creator since 2012, in the travel niche. I’ve never wanted to expose my kids to that, I get enough hate from just being a blogger!
I also don’t have the imagination, commitment, or dedication of JR to his chosen platform. Hats off, he works hard and is good at what he does. I would suck at it. My skill set is different, I make websites for a living.
We Don’t Can, and Why
We don’t have a large pantry, we like to eat fresh, seasonal food, and there’s always something in the garden.
We have an advantage being in the tropics, no long cold winter or frosts, so a lot of things do grow year-round. If it’s not available fresh, we eat something else. This means we eat bananas when a bunch is ripe and when they’re not, we don’t buy them.
I make jam, marmalade and lemon curd occasionally as a treat for the kids, and I do like a refrigerator pickle, but heating food kills vitamins. I’d do it if I had to, but we don’t need to. Lucky us!
Like the Rhodes family, everything I cook at home is “from scratch”. But I never use US-style seasoning mixes and powders for health reasons, more on that shortly!
We Butcher Lamb
I’m not certain on this, but I believe JR harvests lambs and then packs them off to a butcher for processing. We do it ourselves. A sheep is manageable to butcher at home. My husband (the Chef, with butchery skills) does the initial breaking down. I do the mincing, bagging up, and freezing. A lamb (which is a full-grown sheep, near enough) does fit in the freezer in our kitchen.
We have a walk-in fridge for hanging lamb, I don’t know if the Rhodes family has this, but it’s very useful.
There is no way I could kill a sheep, my husband can. I don’t even want to watch. I certainly wouldn’t make the kids watch if they preferred not to. My elder son is OK with it. He helps his Dad on harvest days. As Justin said, there’s something in female nature that’s about nurturing, and for a lot of us, we just can’t.
Another Justin phrase “These animals have just 1 bad day in their lives.” That’s very true, and that’s what I want for the meat we consume and the animals we love as pets and future dinner.
That said, I could if I had to. I’ve had to put a chicken out of its misery, a favourite chicken. I felt I owed it to her to help her move on when she was suffering.
A Cow Is Too Big For Us To Manage
If the point comes when we want to put a cow in the freezer, we’ll get a mobile butcher to do the deed. At the moment, Tilda is too much of a pet. I can’t see her becoming dinner. Maybe in future we’ll toughen up, but right now she’s a paddock pupper and very happy cow. There’s nothing wrong with owning animals just to give them happy lives.
We Don’t Milk
We buy maybe 1 bottle of Jersey milk from a local dairy per week. We couldn’t come close to using the amount of milk a cow would give.
I’d love to make cheese and our own butter, but it’s a lot of work and a lot of equipment. We can buy grass-fed milk and some (very little in Australia) unpasteurised cheese. That’s fine for now.
Nobody here wants the chore of milking every morning, so for now, dairy isn’t happening.
Right now, I could go out and milk a sheep or a goat. We do have that option with lambs and kids being born fairly often.
The Tomato Abundance
I suck at growing tomatoes! I’d love to have rows and rows of different varieties as you see on the YouTube channels, but I struggle, they don’t grow well for me, just yet.
Maybe one day if we ever build in-ground beds or get given a high tunnel (because we certainly can’t afford one!)
But then I’d have to can, and I don’t want to.
We’ll see what happens tomato-wise in future. Right now, I have a few eating tomatoes to throw in my husband’s lunch box, plus a few Roma tomatoes for cooking. It’s enough, but I do buy the odd can of tinned organic tomatoes. I’d rather use fresh from the garden, and we’ll get there one day.
Herb and Spice Powders in Cooking
Powders and smoothies share the same problem, the fibre in the plant is destroyed, and that’s not good for your gut microbiome.
So the mountains of herbs, turmeric and other spices stay whole, chopped, fresh or dehydrated. I don’t make turmeric powder or chilli powder.
We very rarely use garlic or onion powder in cooking, we use the whole bulb. I make dehydrated chilli flakes (on the chunky side) and a rough cut fermented chilli sauce, but most chillies we use fresh.
I grow chillies like the YouTubers grow tomatoes, I love them! And the turmeric harvest is insane. You can roughly chop and freeze turmeric for any use, or I make an easy fresh chutney with just lemon juice, turmeric and salt, no cooking.
The “Livestock Guardian”
We were peer-pressured into getting a “Livestock Guardian” dog. Justing Rhodes, Roots & Refuge, The Kraemer Life, they all have livestock guardian dogs of some sort. We have a small potential risk of dingoes and maybe large raptors or goannas taking livestock, but it’s never happened.
The dog that was supposed to be out guarding his wards very quickly went from paddock dog, to deck dog, to house hippo. I always swore I’d never have a dog in the house, but he likes it. He guards us and loves us, that’s enough.
