

Stop Throwing Away Bones After Making Broth!
Meat can be a controversial subject. Some people claim that humans were never meant to eat meat and that they are healthier now that they only eat a plant based diet, others swear by the carnivore diet. Most homesteaders raise some kind of meat animal but there are some vegan homesteaders. I can respect whatever food decisions you make! We choose to eat meat, but we do eat it in moderation. We prefer to eat meat that we know where it comes from and had a good, fulfilling life. Lastly, we try to use as much of the animal as we can. That can be difficult! One part of the animal that I grew up throwing away is the bone. However, bone broth has made a come back, and for good reason! Bone broth is one of those super foods that not only gives you a ton of nutrients, but also ads good flavor to foods. We like soup, especially in the winter so it’s nice to have a lot of bone broth on hand. In fact, chicken isn’t my favorite type of meat, but we plan to raise meat chickens mostly so we can have their bones for broth! We have struggled a bit with making bone broth in the past and have only made it when we have enough bones to make a good batch. However, we’ve developed a good system that works well for us and I want to share how we get multiple uses out of those bones instead of just tossing them!

How to Slaughter an Animal When it’s Difficult
For me, one of the most difficult parts of homesteading has been slaughtering and butchering our own animals. I was certainly not raised as a vegan, or vegetarian. In fact I grew up eating meat quite often. However, I was taught to value life. Hunting was very common and normal in the culture I grew up in. My grandparents and some of my aunts/uncles hunted for deer and elk and used venison for a large portion of their food source. However, I didn’t ever have that experience growing up. With the exception of fish, I had never killed an animal until I was an adult. At this point in my life I have I have both hunted, and slaughtered many animals for food. Now we are veggie lovers in my family and don’t eat a ton of meat, but we do value good quality meat. Also, I can’t forget bone broth! We LOVE having bone broth on hand! Meat can be a very valuable food source and we don’t ignore that.
Now that I have I have slaughtered and butchered my own animals for several years, I would like to share some thoughts and experience to hopefully help

The Goat Milk Rodeo!
In the last post, I wrote about a great system for keeping the goats from stepping in, or spilling their milk when I’m milking them. You can read it here. This system has worked well for me since I adopted it. In fact, it hasn’t failed once. However, I HAVE failed! It’s happened a few times now and while it doesn’t usually result in spilled milk, it has resulted in stress on animals and myself. Although, it has made for a very entertaining story! Ladies and gentlemen, this is the goat milk event at the Growing Freedom Homestead Rodeo!

Efficient Homestead: Goat Stand Tiedown Stystem
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been working on getting my milking routine more efficient. I’ve decided to just do a series of posts to show the changes instead of trying to cram it all in one post. The unique system I want to share today is something I came up with a few years ago. I see pictures of cows, and even some goats who will just stand still while they are milked. In all the years I’ve been doing this, I haven’t had a single goat that will do that! We put their head in a stanchion, give them treats, sing lullabies, etc., but no matter how well behaved they may be most of the time, it only takes one stamp of the foot to put their poopy, dirty hooves in the milk bucket! It usually happens close to the end of the milking session too so it ruins even more of the milk! Because of this, I’ve just decided

The Real Dangers of Raw Milk!
My family has been using raw goat milk for over eleven years now. I’ve heard of the “dangers” of raw milk, especially back before it was more popular. If you go to your favorite search engine and type in “dangers of raw milk” you’ll see all kinds of scary germs and diseases associated with raw milk. In all the time we’ve been milking goats, we’ve never had any kind of adverse health problem or disease from using it. That being said, in my experience, there are some real dangers of raw milk that we have noticed.

Efficient Homestead: A More Efficient Milking Routine
Today I want to talk about efficiency. Efficiency is something that I can geek out over! It is something that is becoming a bigger part of our homestead and will be a common topic on this blog. While I was working on making my shoe business more efficient in order to compete with much larger companies, I had to really focus in on getting my process as efficient as possible. I found that the areas that you can really save time and energy are the things that you do every day, over and over. If you decide to get dairy animals of any kind, you will find that it is a daily commitment.

Into the Fire
One of the things we’re learning the hard way is that if you heat your home with wood, it is very important to get it cut and drying long before cold weather hits. This is not new information for us, but unfortunately, we didn’t really have that opportunity because we moved in the late fall/early winter. The weather was nice here but it had been cool and the house needed heating. There was a little bit of wood available but we needed to obtain more wood. We’re farm sitting for the winter and this property is mostly pasture. There isn’t a lot of dead wood available. Luckily there is public land close by and I’ve been able to get a permit to cut dead wood there.

Property Update
I’ve learned since moving to Missouri that I need to be a little bit more proactive about checking the weather forecast. We got rain so infrequently in Utah and I learned to see the signs of rain coming. In Missouri, rain comes more often and I haven’t yet learned to see the signs so sometimes it surprises me and my plans for the day get washed away. I decided to check the weather last week and was surprised to see one day with a high of 72 degrees! I thought maybe that would be a good day for us to visit our property again. I checked the forecast for that location and it was showing a high of 74. I couldn’t ask for better conditions! We had to make some decisions regarding infrastructure and building plans but we needed some information first. So we made plans and headed out for the day.

The Problem with Homestead Advice
She asked me a few questions about our homestead situation and I told her a little bit. She was pretty eager to give me homestead advice. I like it. I like to hear what other people are doing and why. I know I have a lot to learn. However, sometimes usually you’ll get conflicting advice from people on homesteading. That was the case here.