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Episode 009.
Are you an expert in your field? Do you speak publicly? Do you write articles and books? Do you teach your skills and knowledge?
Deborah Niemann of Thrifty Homesteader is an author, speaker and successful homesteader. She’s written several books including Homegrown and Handmade, Ecothrifty, and Raising Goats Naturally.
Though she didn’t grow up on a farm, she has become a leading homesteading expert. She can tell you about raising chickens, dairy, pork, goats, and so many more topics. Her thirst for practical knowledge is evident after just a few minutes of conversation with our host Brian J. Pombo.
What does it take to be an world-renowned expert? Deborah’s journey through life, and her ability to take advantage of opportunities around her is motivating and instructional. Listen now!
Find out more about Deborah Niemann: https://thriftyhomesteader.com/
Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company:
http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/
Full Transcript
Deorah: Raising goats naturally basically means you are letting the moms raise the babies. To me, that’s the cornerstone of everything.
You know, I saw something the other day online that said 10 things you must have in your goat medicine cabinet. And I’m thinking, Oh my gosh, if you think you have to have 10 things in your medicine cabinet, you’re doing something wrong.
Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.
If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.
You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.
We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your Maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.
From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure life off the grid.
Brian: Deborah Nieman is a homesteader, writer and self sufficiency expert. In 2002 she moved her family from Chicago suburbs to a 32 acre parcel on a creek in the middle of nowhere. Together they started raising goats, sheep, cattle, pigs and poultry to provide 100% of their meat and eggs.
They have a garden and fruit trees for fresh produce, and they make their own sweeteners with a little help from these and maple trees.
She’s authored several books including,Homegrown & Handmade, Eco Thrifty and Raising Goats Naturally. She’s currently at work on her sixth book.
If all that wasn’t enough, Deborah puts on workshops across the United States and Canada. She’s presented at the Mother Earth News Fairs in North Carolina and Maryland. And you’ll be able to see her at the upcoming fairs in Oregon, Pennsylvania and Kansas.
Deborah Nieman, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.
Deborah: Thank you very much. It’s great to be here today.
Brian: It’s great to have you. Besides what we heard about in your bio, tell us a little more about who you are and what you do?
Deborah: Well Usually the first question people ask when they meet me is did you grow up on a farm?
And the answer is no, I did not.
Just because you didn’t grow up on a farm doesn’t mean you can’t do this. And I think that, really that’s the main reason most people ask that because for some reason, you know, I used to be a reporter and nobody ever asked me, were your parents reporters?
Like they get it, like you can go to school and learn to be a reporter or a doctor or a lawyer or whatever.
But for some reason, when it comes to just living on a homestead people think you have to grow up like this. Otherwise, you can’t learn it and you totally can.
We made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but you know, I read books, I found mentors online.
The people around here pretty much all thought we were crazy. But you find your people online, which, that’s the awesome thing about having the internet and even in 2002 you know, back then it was Yahoo groups. Today, it’s Facebook groups.
So we can we can find people who can help us and find books and that’s why I started writing the books because when I got started all the books had been written by people who did grow up on a farm.
They did have chickens their whole life or goats or whatever. The books were missing a lot of really basic information that we could have used, you know, it could have prevented a lot of problems.
One of the things was you shouldn’t have….well most of the books just said, for poultry like, Oh, you only need one rooster for every 10 or 12 hens.
They didn’t say that you shouldn’t have more than one rooster for every 10 or 12 hens. But it only took us a couple of years to figure out the whole background. They’re like, yeah, you don’t want more than one rooster for every 10 or 12 hands or you’re gonna have a world problems.
Brian: Absolutely. Well, that’s great stuff.
You mentioned your books. Can you tell us a little bit about them?
Deborah: Well, the first one, Homegrown and Handmade, was pretty general.
It has a section on gardens and orchards, which I think orders are the coolest thing ever. It’s like there isn’t a stock on Wall Street that can can give you the return that a fruit tree can you know, it’s like you buy a fruit tree for 20 bucks, you plant it permanent if you have time every year to maybe even every three years, and then it gives you 50, 100 pounds of fruit year after year.
I mean, it’s incredible.
So I’m a big fan of fruit trees.
And then there’s another chapter in Homegrown and Handmade, on a whole section on backyard poultry, backyard dairy and homegrown fiber. And then in the second edition, which I published six years after the first one, I added a section on raising pigs so that you can have your own homegrown fat because lard is just awesome stuff important, great too.
Then a section on homegrown sweeteners because we do our own honey and maple syrup, as well as a section on homegrown businesses because so many people they start doing this and they think wow, this is fun.
I would rather do this seven days a week.
Then go to my job five days a week so how can I make money at it?
And they don’t realize that like there’s so much stuff you have to think about and not just in terms of like laws like do you need you know, like you have to be licensed to become a dairy but also in liability.
We could process chickens on our farm and sell them because we’re not going to sell that many but I don’t want that liability you know if somebody goes home and get sick after eating chickens I don’t want them to sue me and you know take my farm away.
Brian: Absolutely. No those are all really great points and that was the second edition of Homegrown and Handmade?
Deborah: Yes.
Brian: Awesome, and then tell us a little bit about your other ones.
Deborah: Eco Thrifty was, well the subtitle for Eco Thrifty says it all, cheaper, greener choices for a happier healthier life.
And that was basically the idea.
Homegrown and Handmade was kind of like writing you know, homesteading 201, first and then Eco Thrifty was kind of like self sufficiency 101, because so many people said to me, oh, I would love to live like you do, but it’s too expensive.
And it’s like, no, it’s not too expensive. This is totally like you save money doing this, you know, because we’re not talking about buying like the Amy’s organic dinners at the grocery store.
We’re talking about making it from scratch, Eco Thrifty was all about like, they’re really super simple things you can do that will save you money like using baking soda for facial scrub.
I mean, it doesn’t get any cheaper than.
The third and fifth book is, Raising Goats Naturally. The original was published in 2013.
And the title you know, pretty self explanatory said about raising goats and naturally. I wasn’t too happy with my publisher. I wanted to call it homestead goats, and publisher was like, Oh, you’re raising them naturally.
And I’m like, people are gonna think this is an herb book and it’s not. It’s a book about doing things as naturally as possible.
Kind of like I try to live as naturally as possible, you know, I want to eat natural food.
I want to do everything I can to avoid medication but you know if something happens and I need penicillin, I’m gonna take penicillin.
It doesn’t mean that I don’t, like I use ginger for, you know, I always keep ginger in my purse when I’m flying, because it’s just awesome for air sickness.
The raising goats naturally basically means like, you’re you are letting the moms raise the babies, which is like, to me, that’s the cornerstone of everything. If the moms raised the babies, and the babies are getting all of the natural antibodies, then they are going to be healthy.
And that right there is just going to avoid so many of the medications that people think they need.
You know, I saw something the other day online that said 10 things you must have in your medicine cabinet. And I’m thinking oh my gosh, if you think you have to have 10 things in your medicine cabinet, you are doing a lot of things wrong.
That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about when I say raising goats naturally like you shouldn’t be giving, you know, you shouldn’t have to give your goats all these drugs to keep them alive.
You if you get the nutrition right, that’s really the most important thing.
If you get the nutrients right for them. They are incredibly hardy, healthy animals. And the biggest challenge for most of us in North America is that goats are desert and mountain animals.
They are in nature. They live in places where they have evergreens available 12 months a year, their browsers and most of us are trying to turn them into grazers, which I tell people like if you stick them in a little pasture and you don’t let them leave, you’re basically forcing them to eat out of their toilet.
How healthy would you be if you were eating out of your toilet?
Probably not very healthy, like you would have some problems.
So part of raising goats naturally is rotating them, you know, you’re mimicking nature, you’re moving them from one pasture to another, rather than in nature.
They’re going to be naturally moving. They’re going to be ranging across thousands of acres.
So that’s really what raising goats naturally is all about.
And then I really I love research.
The frustrating thing for most people about goats is that they go online and they find they’ve got a question and they find 10 different answers. And then they send me an email and say, which one is right?
It’s like, oh, well, that that answer right there is what everybody thought back in, you know, the 1990s.
In the early 2000s, this is what they thought, but nothing ever dies online.
So this is what the current research says. And so that’s why you know, like, after six years or five years, I updated raising goats naturally after five years.
Because there was so much more research that had come out in five years and I wanted people to have that, because we had a really rough time raising goats.
Initially, we had goats dying. We never had a buck that live past the age of three for the first five years we had goats.
Then we finally found out it was because they were copper deficient because our well water is very high in sulfur and iron, which binds with a copper making it unavailable.
So they needed a lot more copper than your average goat. And then we had problems with parasites because back in the early 2000s, nobody knew about the importance of rotating pastures to keep goats from eating out of their toilet and things like that.
Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of people who are passing around that information that you need to give your goats and dewormer every month or two months or whatever their magic number is. And you don’t need to do that.
Like, you know, this year I have given one dose of dewormer to one goat and I have over 20 adults.
That’s really it. Like you shouldn’t need to do that.
If they say if you’re deworming more than 10% of your herd every year. You’ve got some problems like there’s some things you could be doing in terms of management that could make your whole experience much better and your goats experience much better.
Commercial Break: Okay, we’re going to pause the conversation right there. What you’re listening to right now is a special edition podcast. These episodes all have to do with the Mother Earth News fair in Albany, Oregon of 2019 at the time I’m recording this, we have learned so much about how to take advantage of events and I want you to be able to use this information in your own business. Go to BrianJPombo.com/secrets.
We are going to be putting out helpful materials on how you can use events to grow your business.
When you go to this page, you will either see our latest programs or if you make it there early enough, you will see an email address, capture page, put in your email address and we will be sure and update you. As soon as we get these out there, you’re not going to want to miss this.
If you get in early enough, you can get a special deal. These are principles that never go away.
These programs will be based on the experience of people who have written books, spoken at the events or exhibited.
They’re talking about how to use events, books, and speaking all to build your business.
That’s BrianJPombo.com/secrets.
BrianJPombo.com/secrets and now back to the conversation.
Brian: Now you had mentioned you first started writing these books because it was information that you couldn’t find anywhere else. And obviously, you’ve got the journalism background. Was it really simple to jump right into your first book?
What was the was the impetus to really go out and try it?
Deborah: The whole thing actually started really organically when we moved out here and from the suburbs. People talk to people and people they would contact me and say, Hey, I heard that you’re making your own soap or cheese, can you teach me?
So I started teaching people how to make cheese, at my house in my kitchen, one at a time. And then finally I realized, Hold it!
This is really getting time consuming.
So I started having official classes. And then people would say, Hey, could you come here to teach this class?
So I said, Sure.
I started going places to teach classes. Then I wind up speaking at the very first Mother Earth News Fair in seven springs, Pennsylvania and 2010. And the rest, as they say, is history.
You know, that was where my publisher discovered me and said, Hey, you ever thought about writing a book?
And I was like, Oh, yeah, I’d love to write a book. And so, you know, I wrote the first book, The goat book.
I did so much research to dig us out of a hole, which is kind of a horrible metaphor. You think of how many holes we had to dig to bury goats that died.
Like we just had such a horrible time with goats. It was like, either we give up and just sell them all, or we figure it out and I did a ton of research to figure it out.
And by the time I was done doing all the research and saving my goats and my goats were doing great. I was like, holy cow, I have enough information here to fill up a whole book.
Brian: Wow.
Deborah: So and that’s where it came from.
The first one was really close to 300 pages. The second one is close to 350 pages. So the first one was 90,000 words, the second one is 20,000 words more, so it’s 110,000. It’s a lot, but that’s how it goes.
Brian: That’s great. Do you enjoy the process of writing and the whole process of putting the book together?
Deborah: I do. I love writing.
You know, I say that whenever you get lost in whatever you’re doing, you lose track of time, that means you’re doing the right thing.
So, that’s definitely it. It’s funny though because sometimes when people hear me talking about my aches and pains are like, Oh, you’re gonna have to give up the farm and I’m like, No, no, it’s not the farm.
No, my first book, I gave myself carpal tunnel. My second book I gave myself tennis elbow.
And my fourth book I gave myself a frozen shoulder.
So working at a computer for 12 to 14 hours a day is very hard on the body.
Brian: Wow.
And we saw that you’re slated to present at the next handful of Mother Earth News Fairs, you have a whole bunch of different workshops.
So why don’t you tell us a little bit about those?
Deborah: Yeah, coming up, I’m going to be talking, I’m gonna be doing my raising goats naturally talk in Oregon. Which is all about, the importance of all those little decisions you make that people think, oh, you just stick the goats out there and they’ll be fine.
You know, it’s like, No, no, we’re gonna talk about, housing and fencing and the importance of making sure that kids nurse and get enough milk when they’re little, you know, like, you don’t want to start separating them from mom too quick and taking the milk that they should have. They need it to stay healthy.
We may like it because it tastes good, but like, you know, that’s your health insurance for the next generation, it’s there for the babies.
So there, they should get first dibs. And then you can take whatever’s left over after they’ve had their fill.
I’m also going to be doing one on spindling. Basically how to spin yarn with a hands on spindle.
I’m doing a full day of fiber workshop on Friday, I’m going to be talking about marketing your fiber products, and relationship marketing and value added products, how you can sell more than just raw will have your shapes.
And I’m also going to be doing on Sunday, I’m going to be doing a soap making talk. Tell everybody how to make soap.
Brian: That’s great. Such a variety, have you always been attracted to multiple things? Or are you always bouncing from one thing to the next learning something new because you’re an expert on so many of these things?
Deborah: Yeah, pretty much.
I’m one of those people like ever since I was a little girl like, you know, most people just take things for granted. Like they go to the store and they buy a food and just like hey, it’s a food they eat it.
And I remember even as a little girl like asking my mom, how do they make peanut butter?
You know, and how do you make cheese and like I just always wanted to know that stuff. From the time I was really young.
Brian: Very cool. If someone’s thinking about going, if they never been to a Mother Earth News Fair before, what would you tell them that would encourage them to go?
Deborah: Oh my goodness, okay, if you’re into homesteading and all that, you just have to go okay?
Like I keep going because it’s just so much fun.
You get to meet so many incredibly cool people, you get to learn so much interesting stuff like you know there’s there’s stuff I still learn, I go to one and you see something like, oh I don’t know anything about that and you know I go sit in on a session and learn more stuff.
My knowledge and bees is pretty rudimentary and so I’m just so amazed by some of the really in depth beekeeping sessions and like how these people know so much about these tiny little insects.
Somebody said it’s like Disney World for homesteaders you know, you can just go and spend all day and they usually have really good food there. So like they get food trucks from locals, that are using meat and produce from local farms. And it’s just so much fun.
Brian: Great. Who are you hoping to reach personally? Who’s the ideal person that you’d either like to connect with through your presentation or in person there?
Deborah: Oh, I always love to talk to goat people.
So because girls are definitely my favorite animals, and it’s really where my passion is. And it’s where I just kind of keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper.
Like, I have 450 articles on my blog.
120 of them are about goats. And you may think that like there isn’t anything more that could be written.
But I assure you there is, I get emails and messages every single day from people asking me questions about goats, and an awful lot of them I can just say, yeah, you know, just send them a link to an article on my blog.
But I still get questions that I haven’t written an article about.
And so like, that’s actually where a lot of my new blog post ideas come from is is from the emails I get.
Then after I’ve answered a question two or three times, I know like, Okay, this is I got to read an article about this.
Brian: Very cool. That’s a great look into the process.
We have a lot of business owners, executives that listen to the show, do you think it’d be worthwhile for them to plug into it an event like this?
Do you think it’d be useful networking or what have you?
Deborah: Well, considering the focus of your show, as we give business owners are listening to your show, then yeah, they would probably be a really good fit for the Mother Earth News Fair.
You know, if nothing else, like they could check it out this year and see if it looks like it might be a good place for them to be a vendor next year. Because I know it’s got to be a good thing for vendors because I see the same people there year after year.
Brian: That’s a great point. That’s something I haven’t heard till now.
How did you become a speaker at that very first one, did they reach out to you?
Did you reach out to them?
How did that happen?
Deborah: I was just surfing online one day and I just happened to stumble across a call for speaker proposals on their website.
Brian: Wow!
Deborah: Yeah. So I filled it out and sent it in.
And at that point, I already had a lot of other speaking that I had done in the area, like in Chicago and stuff. So I was definitely, you know, I was experienced and everything and I had so many topics, which that was what they really liked is that I had so many different topics that I was willing to talk about, I sent them a quite a few proposals like so making him bread making and, you know, all these different things.
And that was one of things that they really liked was the fact that I could just fill in in so many places, and I think it’s one of the things that they still like is that I can fill in in a lot of places.
I probably have 30 different PowerPoints for different talks that I do, you know, so like if somebody just called me up and said, Hey, could you do a talk for us on seasonal eating in an hour, I’m sure.
Brian: Very cool. You have any tips for people that they end up becoming vendors if they end up becoming speakers, you’ve done a lot of traveling for these things.
You have any logistical tips on things to watch out for or to keep in mind?
Deborah: Wear shoes that are good for walking, definitely dress for comfort, because nobody’s there dressing up fancy or anything. You know, I know in the beginning I felt like oh, I’m a speaker. I need to dress up you know, and I don’t do that.
Like I wear blue jeans. I wear blue jeans are really comfortable walking shoes now.
Brian: Those are really great points.
Oh, what could listeners do who are interested?
They want to find out more about you maybe get one of your books, where could they go?
Deborah: My website is ThriftyHomesteader.com.
And I also have online classes at ThriftyHomesteader.Teachable.com, and I’m on Facebook so facebook.com/ThriftyHomesteader.
I’m on Instagram, Thrifty Homesteader. Kinda see a theme there.
So I’m trying to keep it simple. Unfortunately, I don’t have thrifty homesteader on Pinterest yet. It’s just under my name, but there’s a link to my Pinterest page for my website.
Brian: Awesome. Awesome. Hey, Deborah, thanks so much for being on the show. Appreciate your time.
Deborah: Oh, I appreciate you asking me it was lot of fun chatting.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: If you can’t tell Deborah is an absolute delight to interview.
There’s a lot that she brings to the table.
One is expertise. Another is passion.
Another is a whole lot of practice that she’s put into it. She’s been a speaker for a while she’s been a writer for a while. All this equals confidence.
That’s a really great formula to look at expertise plus passion plus practice equals confidence.
With that you trust her, you trust what she’s saying. It makes sense.
She’s confident she’s easygoing about her delivery. Something to really keep in mind if you’re looking to be an expert out there in your field.
I love her outlining the organic path that she’s taken into the information realm.
She started out showing people one on one what she did, she started holding classes for groups of people. And then she started traveling to do classes. And then she started speaking.
And then she wrote books. And it all kind of happened at a natural rate, but it was something that she was interested in.
So she was looking for it when the speaking opportunity showed itself, she jumped on it.
Tthat automatically led to her being a book writer and the rest is history.
You can do the same thing, not necessarily in that order. But you can take the same steps that she took and do it purposefully.
Even though a lot of this stuff happened by serendipity for her. It’s what I call the organic life formula, which is learn, do, teach. It’s a big cycle.
You learn something, you do it, and then you teach it to somebody else.
Teaching, if you haven’t done much teaching, it’s a huge piece of the learning method!
You will learn more about what you’re doing by teaching, whatever you already know how to do.
For one thing, you will train yourself more, you will come up with questions that you would not have come up with before because the people you’re teaching, come up with those questions.
It’s a great process and something that anybody should do anyways, even if you aren’t in business, even if you aren’t promoting anything out there, whatever you’re learning how to do go out there and do it and then teach others how to do it.
And you can do that process all at the same time. It’s all part of the learning cycle.
I mentioned on the previous episode, what she said here because it stands out so strong Disney World for homesteaders when she’s talking about the Mother Earth News Fair.
This is an attitude I have gotten from most of the people that I’ve spoken with that have presented at other fairs. And what’s that mean?
Disney World for homesteaders.
Well Disney World or Disneyland is really the gold standard for acting experience based entertainment.
It sounds like an advertisement for Mother Earth News Fairs. I’m not meaning to I haven’t even been yet. But it’s amazing how they’ve created something that is so experiential for the end user that they compare it to Disney World or a carnival, as you’re going to hear Frank Hyman and the next episode.
And once again, you hear her talk about creating articles based on the questions that previous people had.
Content begets content begets content.
If you’re talking about any form of content marketing, once you get it out there once you start getting feedback on it, that helps you to create more content and be able to speak more to what people are interested in.
I can’t wait to meet Deborah, and all these great people that we’re meeting through these podcasts in real life over at the Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, Oregon.
Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.
That’s BrianJPombo.com.
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Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas.
I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.