Today I'm talking with Cindy and Bill at Harmony Mountain Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Cindy and Bill at Harmony Mountain Farm. Good morning, guys. How are you? Good morning. Doing well. So tell me all about yourselves and your story because I was looking at your website and it's a beautiful story. Well thank you. 00:29 Well, our story goes way back because Sydney and I together go way back. Um, so I don't know how far back you want to go, but we met in the eighth grade. So we go back pretty far. Originally from, um, a suburb in, in Connecticut outside of Hartford and we lived a pretty traditional life. So Bill and I, suburban, sorry, suburban life, but Bill and I, um, we met when we were 19, we started dating, we started raising a family. 00:58 um, built, you know, built a business and I was in education and we've done a lot of different things. And, um, when our resource allowed, we started skiing up here in Northern New Hampshire. And at the same time, um, my kids had grown and kind of left the house and, and we were just starting to, I think, examine where we wanted the next part of our life to go. 01:26 And I was having some health problems and we were getting tired of the hustle and bustle of living in the area that we lived in. And we started talking about how food was impacting on our health and we just went down the rabbit hole. I was reading a bunch of books on leaving the suburbs or leaving the city to become a farmer and we started researching farmers. 01:54 Joe Saladin and- Yeah, and largely for entertainment at the time because we're living vicariously through those folks, I think, and their stories. Yeah, and then, so this is a, we call it our midlife crisis farm. So we're city suburban people who did not grow up doing this, but we were attracted to the lifestyle for the health benefits and- 02:23 And the more we learned, the more we educated ourselves, Cindy more formally in reading books. I'm a YouTube university guy, so I try, I can, you know, I spend a lot of time watching other people's stories and farms and things. I think we also need to mention we connected with a lot of other farmers, one of them being my cousin out in Missouri, who is, you know, had a generational cattle farm. So we would talk to people and, and 02:53 how you think about what we wanted to do for the health of the animal, our environment, and for ourselves. We think that raising animals or doing what we do, it has many, I guess you've helped me with this. Yeah, well, it adds more meaning to life. Our lives were feeling meaningless in the traditional suburban American model 03:23 you know, our free time was spent, you know, just trying to fill it with shopping or going to different events. And then it didn't seem to be a lot of meaning in that. So when we started down the road with animals, um, which then brought us into our diet and, uh, it just gave more meaning to our life. It was, we felt as though we were doing things that had a greater impact than, you know, Hey, what do you want to do? Let's go shopping or, you know, 03:50 let's go see a movie or a show or yeah and it just seems so incredibly interesting for both of us. It wasn't like we can't, you know, we kind of were doing it at the same time kind of parallel doing research and then it just all kind of evolved on our long drives back and forth from New Hampshire to Connecticut how we wanted to proceed and that just continued to grow. 04:19 And the beautiful thing about farming and living off our land and living sustainably is that we're never bored. I mean, and the work is never done. So there's always something to be done and to be learned. I think I am absolutely motivated to learn new things. I think that's big for me. I think for Bill, it's probably the same. 04:49 Um, it's, it's definitely evolving. We've gone through different animals and, um, you know, trying to find that the right mix of animals for us. Right now we, we work beef cattle. We have a couple of our family dairy cows for ourselves. Um, we do pork and we do poultry, both layers and meat birds. It's pretty much the mainstay of what we're doing is the beef, the poultry and the pork. 05:17 And then we have other animals just for enjoyment. We have three goats that are family pets, we have guarding dogs that are extremely valuable and dear to us. And I think that the main thing for us is like some of the things that I took away from some of the farmers that I had read about or he had watched on YouTube is that everybody has a job here. ...
