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Bevin Cohen: Small House Farm | The Artisan Herbalist

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Bevin Cohen of Small House Farm
Bevin Cohen of Small House Farm

 

The Artisan Herbalist, by Bevin Cohen
The Artisan Herbalist, by Bevin Cohen

Bevin Cohen is an author, herbalist, seed saver and owner of Small House Farm in Michigan.

Join us as we discuss topics like –

* why homesteading is a life long obsession

* The joy Bevin gets from sharing his knowledge with others

*Bevin’s latest book The Artisan Herbalist

Grab a copy of his latest book & other fine products today – SmallHouseFarm.com

 

  • 1:53 Small House Farm: We Believe in a Simple, Small, Intentional Life
  • 2:48 What Brought Me Into Homesteading: A Life Long Obsession
  • 4:03 From Music Festivals to the Beginning of Small House Farm
  • 5:49 Educational Products to Help You Grow
  • 7:09 Bevin’s Latest Book: The Artisan Herbalist
  • 8:11 From Our Seeds & Their Keepers
  • 9:11 Story Telling & Becoming an Author
  • 12:28 How Book Writing & Speaking Opens Doors for You & Help Others at the Same Time
  • 15:18 Teaching at Events like Mother Earth News Fair
  • 17:43 Gardening & The Power of Curiosity
  • 19:26 Small House Farms Top Sellers
        • Herbal Wellness – Witch Hazel
        • Seeds – Pineapple Ground Cherry’s
        • Books – The Artisan Herbalist
        • Workshop Classes – Seed Saving
  • 21:29 The Joy of Meeting New People at Classes and Workshop Events
  • 23:34 New Book Coming Out in February 2021 with New Society Publishers
            • The Complete Guide to Seed & Nut Oils
  • 25:45 The Secret to Success: Have Fun!
  • 27:15 Where to Contact Bevin and pickup his latest book, The Artisan Herbalist

Transcription

Bevin: I think that with everything in life as business owners or wherever we’re at when we put ourselves out there, challenge ourselves to try something new.

And it’s just that little bit of success can boost that confidence enough to be like, Okay, let’s try that again. Let’s push forward on this, let’s see where we can take this thing. Even if it doesn’t turn out we’ve tried something new, right and we’ve grown as a person because of that.

But nine times out of 10 it is gonna work out and that’s the beauty of pushing your limits, is we can find that we’re capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit.

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: Bevan Cohen is an author, herbalist, seed saver, and owner of Small House Farm in Michigan. He offers workshops and lectures nationwide on the benefits of living closer to the land through seeds, herbs, and locally grown food.

Bevin is a freelance writer and videographer whose work has appeared in numerous publications including Mother Earth News, Hobby Farms, Grit magazine, and the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company catalog.

He’s the author of, Saving Our Seeds, and The Artisan Herbalist.

You can learn more about Bevin’s work at www.SmallHouseFarm.com

Bevin Cohen, welcome to The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Bevin: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian: Great having you here.

Can you give us a little bit more about what it is that you do and how you got to this point in your life?

Bevin: Sure.

So my wife and I own a small homestead business we call Small House Farm, which is more based on the philosophy of living as opposed to the size of our building really, you know, a small house, we believe in simple, small, intentional life.

We grow a majority of our own food here we grow seed crops that we offer commercially. We’ve grown forage a number of herbs that we then craft into a full line of beauty, wellness, and cosmetic products that we also offer via our website.

In my spare time, I guess, I split wood to keep the house warm in the winter, and I do a lot of writing. We’ve published four books in the past four years, and we’ve got another one coming down the pipe and a little bit as well.

So I just like to stay busy. I don’t do well, just sitting around. We’ve always got something exciting going on here at Small House Farm.

Brian: What brought you into this lifestyle of homesteading and then beyond that, actually building a business out of it and teaching people and everything else?

Bevin: Well, you know, how does anybody get anywhere really, I found that the best thing I could do with my life is just getting out of my own way. I’ve been fascinated with plants ever since I was a little boy. I lived with my grandmother in an apartment on the edge of town and we were lucky enough to be right up against what was at the time, hundreds of acres of woods.

Now it’s been developed into housing and that sort of thing. But back then it was endless woods where young guys, we could just run out there and just play all day long.

So I started with this early age, spending so much time out in the woods, learning about the plants around me. And it became a lifelong obsession, that’s really kind of snowballed out of control, very organically, small houses came to me, what we offer commercially is just simply the way that we live.

We decided to share that with the people around us and people really responded well to it. We started offering some educational programs, the co-op in town, health and wellness store not far from here.

People really took to what we were offering and it just kind of took on a life of its own.

Somehow, here we are and the rest is history, I suppose.

Brian: Yeah.

Had you ever owned any other type of business before or is this something that you jumped into naturally?

Bevin: Well, that’s kind of funny. What I could consider a lifetime ago, I used to organize a small Music Festival, very different than what I do now. But there were a lot of overlapping similarities.

We did what we could to give back to the community. All the funds that we would generate through this event, we always donated to a different charity, big brothers and big sisters was one of our big charities that we donated to.

We got to work with artists, creative types, we got to see people that live a slightly different lifestyle than that nine to five job, you know, artists and musicians and those types of folks, we’re kind of coming at the world from a different angle.

That was always inspirational to see that there’s so much more than this world has to offer that we may not realize if we’re just focused on that daily grind, whatever.

The world has everything that we need right at our fingertips, but we’re usually moving so fast that we don’t even have the opportunity to notice it.

Working at the festival with these artists, I came to realize that if I did slow down and look around me, everything I had was already waiting for me there. And that was in a way the impetus for Small House Farm, where we decided, we’d move out to the country, we bought this property. And we thought, let’s try to do something a little more intentional, a little more focused on ourselves and our family.

We have two children now, but at the time, you know, Elijah, my oldest, was just a little baby. And we thought, wouldn’t this just be nice to think about life in a much smaller scale than we had before?

And well, small house, I guess, here we are.

Brian: It’s fabulous.

How long has that journey been, when did you first move out there?

Bevin: I want to say that we’ve been on this property for we’re going on our eighth year.

Brian: Awesome. Wow, that’s great.

You started out as almost like an educational service you had started putting out there. How did that grow into the other pieces to where you have your product?

You have books or everything else, how did that come along?

Bevin: Well, the books were a natural step from the educational process.

The books that we offer, help people learn to do some of the things that we’re doing here out at the fire, you know, the artists an herbalist is going to teach folks how to grow and forage all these different herbs, and then craft them into this full line of love his products very similar to what you can buy from us, certainly.

But at the end of the day, I like to put myself out of business, I would like other folks to be learning how to do all these things on their own. That’s very important to me.

My other book, Saving Our Seeds is a guide to teach you how to grow and gather and collect seeds from 43 different species of crops.

While I do sell seeds from my farm, I think the world would be in a better place if folks just learn how to do these things on their own. So the writing was a natural segue from the teaching, offering the products, it’s just kind of a thing that we just do.

Because people love the things that we offer, we didn’t really mean to get into the business of selling herbal wellness products, that was never really my goal. It just became a thing where so many folks kept asking for it.

So we started going to the farmers market to offer it and there was such a demand for what we offered, we thought well until I can get everybody making their own, I suppose we could provide them with some quality products in the meantime.

Brian: It’s such a cool dichotomy there and how that all fits together.

I was looking through your latest book, Artisan Herbalist and how you lay it all out there you show exactly how a person couldn’t go about doing this themselves. And it’s really great that you can have the final product, or here’s a way for you to do it yourself, which is what you’re all about. It’s what you’re promoting with the homesteading lifestyle. So that’s fabulous.

Bevin: It is all about doing it yourself. There are so many challenges that we face when we decide to start taking these steps in this different lifestyle. And one of them that I find with people, it’s a very common challenge that people seem to have is a lack of time where everybody’s very, very busy.

So as we find the time to maybe alter our lifestyles, even just small baby steps here, they’re where we work to free up that time to learn to do these things on our own.

In the meantime, we still want to have these high-quality, natural products. And you know, Small House Farm kind of fills in that gap.

Brian: Fabulous.

Saving Our Seeds. That was your first book.

Bevin: No, that was my second book.

Brian: Okay, what was your first book?

Bevin: My first book is called, From Our Seeds and Their Keepers: A Collection of Stories. It was out of all the books, it’s actually my favorite just because it was so much fun to write.

It’s as the title says, it’s a collection of stories.

As I’ve traveled about the country, I’ve met gardeners and seed savers, homesteaders, and preppers all these amazing different people. And they all have these fascinating stories to share and these wonderful seeds that they’ve also shared with me.

All of these seeds have a story in them as well.

So I realized along the way, that while it’s fun to sit around and tell these stories, right snapping beans or having a beverage and sharing stories with each other is wonderful stuff. But there’s going to come a time where maybe these stories are forgotten.

Maybe we’re not going to be there to tell the story anymore and too heavy responsibility.

But I kind of picked that up and I said I need to start writing these things down. These stories need to be documented in some way. So we collected these seed stories, as well as the stories of the people that keep the seeds.

They tried to get them all into one place and that is what ended up becoming my first book.

Brian: Now was that on your own impetus that you stepped out to write a book or did someone push you into it or how’d that occur?

Bevin: Well, the story starts with a lady by the name of Sylvia, an older lady that I met down in Kentucky.

Sylvia had this corn story that she was telling me about how her family had grown this corn. The grandfather had grown this corn had been passed down through the generations and we’re trying to trace this history back and fires because I sitting there and talking on the phone and one of the conversations Sylvie says to me, Bevin, I’m so thankful that you’re interested in hearing the stories that I have to tell because my children have already heard them.

They don’t want to hear about it, other people aren’t as interested in corn as you are. I don’t have other people to tell this story to.

These stories that Sylvia was telling me, it was more than just the corn. She would talk about how her father would come home at night and work in the gardens or how they would take their harvest to the mill to have it turned into cornmeal. She started telling me stories about when she was a young girl, when she would get sick, how her mother would go out into the woods, to gather plants to make the medicine from this little corn seed.

So many things came out of this story.

And I realized that if I didn’t write down everything that Sylvia was saying, there was going to be a day that Sophia wasn’t going to be there to tell the story anymore.

That’s all I needed, I realized the significance of the moment that I was in and we started writing the book. It just really, like everything else kind of took on a life of its own. And it manifested itself into, I think it’s just a wonderful collection of tales, is still probably to this day my most popular book.

I just had a gentleman call me yesterday, a guy in San Diego, who had bought the book was fascinated with the stories and wanted to call me and talked about some squash, you know, so the story continues to move, we tell the story.

But then the story has continued to have more chapters added to it.

Brian: That’s beautiful because there are so many people that have those stories that they’re wanting to tell, they have something that they want to get out there.

We’ve got business owners that are listening that want to get down write their first book. Where did you go from there, did you self-publish it, did you find a publisher, how did that happen?

Bevin: The first book was self-published, we did that ourselves, we independently published it here at Small House Farm. And it was really, boy what a learning curve.

That was a whole other thing.

It’s one thing to write a book, it’s another thing to publish and market a book. Right?

That’s a whole different skill set. But you know, it was fun.

At the same time that it was challenging. It was really a process that I enjoyed participating in, I would recommend it to anybody, if you’ve got a story that you think is worth telling, write it down, because you believe in that story. Other people are gonna believe in it, too.

We self-published it, and we put it out there. And just because of the nature of what I do for work, I do a lot of traveling to teach about gardening all over the place, I was able to bring the book with me.

It worked out very well having that book by my side, as I travel, people were very interested.

But publishers kind of picked up that idea to so now the books that we’re putting together, like The Artisan Herbalist, New Society Publishers contacted us, and they wanted us to write this book.

You got to start small and everything grows, just like with any small business. That’s how it is, as long as you believe in what you’re doing and you continue to do that, good things will come from it.

Brian: How would you describe the benefits that you’ve gotten?

You’ve put out three books, obviously, there are benefits tied to it, how would you quantify that?

Bevin: Oh, in so many ways, it is just it opens the doors to new conversations with people. I’ve gotten to meet so many interesting folks that when I go somewhere to teach, I inevitably always learn every time I’m on the road, you know, so it’s really enriched every aspect of what I do.

Being able to take my ideas and find a way to put them into words that other people can appreciate, it’s helped me fine-tune my own thought processes.

What we do here at the farm, it’s really helped me to tweak our operation by understanding it a little bit more, knowing that I’m doing something that is helping other people improve what they’ve already got going on in their life.

That’s awesome. It’s empowering to know that I’m having an impact on other people, just like I mentioned, the gentleman that just called, he was so excited to talk to me, he was so inspired by the book, even just reading a couple of chapters of it, he got a hold of me says you’ve changed the way that I’m looking at things, you’ve changed my perspective on what we’re doing.

And that’s powerful stuff to know, the impact that we can have every time we interact with a customer or client, or anybody in the public. We’re planting seeds, if you will. And those seeds are going to grow into beautiful things.

Brian: That’s really great.

Commercial Break: Okay, let’s take a break from that conversation.

I wanted to bring up a question for you, during these crazy times, do you feel like your business is indestructible? Most people don’t?

And if not, the real question is why? And what can you do to make it as indestructible as possible?

Well, that’s the basis of my new book, nine ways to Amazon proof your business. Let me talk about what we discuss in the first chapter, determine focus. So one of the main ways that you can Amazon proof your business is by determining the focus of your business. And the real problem isn’t that you’re not doing enough, the real problem is, is that you may be doing too many things in too many places.

So one of the things I suggest is decide whether your focus is going to be acquisition, ascension, or monetization. And I go into the details of what that means in this chapter. It’s really the only three ways that you can grow your business. And if you just do that one step of determining focus, you can have a huge change in your entire business. But I also have eight other ways to Amazon proof your business, basically the idea of making it competition proof to even someone as big as amazon.com.

So if you’d like to get your hands on a free copy of my book, go to AmazonProofBook.com sign up and you will get a free copy and get the chance to purchase a physical copy of it for a special price. And now let’s get back to our show.

Brian: And you’ve connected with all these great organizations and magazines, publishers out there, Mother Earth News and so forth.

I saw that you’ve put classes on for them, and courses. That’s kind of how you were explaining how you started out doing that?

Was that a natural fit for you, have you always kind of consider yourself a teacher? Or was it just being in the music festival industry that you’re kind of outgoing and used to kind of showing people the way?

Bevin: Well, I think that’s what it is, at the music festival, I would go out and I’d like to introduce the bands and stuff. And you know, you go out on a stage and there are 5,000 people out there, you can’t have any stage fright, you get used to public speaking very quickly when you’re in that type of a situation.

I think it made me very comfortable getting in front of groups of people to talk right, I was able to overcome that very quickly. As far as the teaching goes, it just kind of fell into my lap, the first couple of opportunities that I had to go and teach something.

There’s a local community college not far from here. They had a small-scale urban farm program that they were offering. And they were hiring local farmers to come and teach small classes, they’d asked me to come and talk.

So I went to this thing, and I prepped for it, you know, I really prepared for this thing, I felt like I was a little in over my head on what I was doing going to this college to talk to these folks. So I really put a lot of effort into preparing this, you know, get this presentation ready.

I went there, and it was a smashing success. Everybody seemed to really respond well to and I had a lady come up to me. And she asked, Did you go to school to learn about teaching? Or you know, do you have a teaching background?

No, absolutely not. I’m a gardener, and I’m farming over here.

She says, well, the way that you presented the information, it was very well-spoken, very impressive, you’re a natural, you may have found your color.

And I thought oh, you know, that’s laying it out heavy lady, but I appreciate it.

But I thought, you know, it kind of gave me that boost of confidence that I needed to try it again. Let’s go out there and do this one more time. And I think that with everything in life, as business owners, or wherever we’re at when we put ourselves out there challenge ourselves to try something new. And it’s just that little bit of success can boost that confidence enough to be like, Okay, let’s try that, again. Let’s push forward on this, let’s see where we can take this thing.

Even if it doesn’t turn out, we’ve tried something new, right?

And we’ve grown as a person because of that.

But nine times out of 10 it is gonna work out. And that’s the beauty of pushing your limits is we can find that we’re capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for.

Brian: Awesome.

Yeah, that’s really great.

Have you noticed characteristics or a certain mindset of people that get the most out of your books and courses and then people that become customers?

Are they newbies to the homesteading lifestyle, or have they people that have been around for a while?

Is there anything common within the people that you’ve met?

Bevin: I think you know, the commonality would be curiosity, people that are interested in trying something new. Some folks that I meet, certainly a great number of the people that I’ve met have been new gardeners, new seed savers, new to working with herbs, whatever it may be, and they’re excited about trying something new.

But I’ve worked with a lot of like, very experienced homesteaders very experienced folks in the industry that have come back and said, You’re coming at this with a different perspective, you’re approaching this subject from a different angle than what I’m used to. And I appreciate that because it helps us.

It’s so easy to fall into a bubble in our thinking. If we stay in the same group of people, and we keep doing the same things, it’s very easy to fall into a set pattern of doing stuff.

But when somebody can interject with this different perspective, this different point of view, helps us see what we’ve been doing in a different way.

So I’ve certainly had some old-school homesteaders that appreciate the angle that we approach them from. I would say that, since the pandemic has happened, that has blown the doors, on trying to choose the demographic for the folks that are in the home setting.

I mean, it seems to be anybody and everybody from all walks of life in some way or another even if their apartment, wants to grow something on their balcony. If they live in a city and they want to forage at the park, whatever it might be.

People from all walks of life are suddenly realizing that there’s a potential to this simpler lifestyle to come back to mother nature, that there’s something special in this moment that we’re in. It’s challenging is that maybe, certainly, it’s full of opportunities.

Brian: What would you say is the most popular service or course or product that you guys provide at Small House Farm, is there one that sticks out that people go bananas over the most?

Bevin: What we do is so diverse, we offer so many different things that it’s kind of hard to pick one so we’re going to break this answer down into subcategories and give us the best sellers in each category, right?

As far as say, the herbal wellness products that we offer via our website number one, hands down is the Witch Hazel that we make. We make a witch hazel, topical astringent from which has like a native shrub that grows out in the woods here that we gather and process from the bark.

And it is hands down the most popular product that we make. It’s unbelievable how people respond to that.

If we’re going to talk about the seeds that we sell this year, the number one selling seeds, for some reason are pineapple brown cherries.

And I can’t put my finger on why that is. It’s pretty common.

You can buy pineapple brown cherry’s from a number of seed sources. It’s not really unique that we offer it, but for some reason, and I mean, by a long shot, it’s the most popular scene that we’ve been selling this year.

It’s easy to grow. It’s very delicious.

I guess we have a nice photo of it on our website. I’m not sure what the appeal is, but boy, it’s really taken off. That one’s been really popular.

As far as books go, of course, The Artisan Herbalist is the number one seller it’s been moving like hotcakes. We’ve just been thrilled with how well-received is been.

We were Amazon’s number one bestseller for a while. But that’s selling new release when it came out. People have really been enjoying the book for sure.

As far as workshops that we offer. Seed saving has been a big one, you know, we do a number of seed saving workshops, people have really been coming back to if they’ve gardened in the past, they want to learn how to save seeds.

But even if they’re new to gardening, they realize the significance of learning how to save their own garden seeds. And that’s a class that I teach almost year-round, it seems like.

Brian: Overall, what would you say you like most about your business and your industry as a whole?

Bevin: I like meeting people, I like spending time with folks. I like to sit down and chat and everybody comes to conversation with them such a different place, different backgrounds, different histories, different religions, different politics, all these different things.

But when we come together, we’re not thinking about any of that we’re thinking about what we have in common, you know, and that’s pretty powerful stuff and I really do enjoy that.

And of everything that we do, that’s always the highlight is just all these wonderful people that I get to meet.

But also sometimes I’ll be out in the woods gathering plants. And I realized that, man, that’s my day at work right here is sitting out in the woods with my kids. And that’s pretty groovy too.

Brian: That’s awesome. On the other hand, if you can change one thing about your business or industry, what would it be?

Bevin: Yeah, that’s such a good question. And I don’t know if I have a good answer for you really, you know, I’ve tried to think about that.

One thing that I have the challenges us here at Small House Farm, is the seasons.

In the wintertime, it’s very difficult for us to do much of anything, because we’re not growing without harvesting. Sometimes travel can even be limited. But now, there’s something positive to be said about the natural cycle of the seasons. Even from a gardening standpoint, that cold, cold winter is really going to help keep the bug populations down the insect populations.

There are pluses to that as well, so I couldn’t choose that.

So I thought, well, what about the wacky weather that we have? That can be very challenging out here on the farm, when I’ve got all my ducks in a row here counting on the seed harvest to get me through and the gardens flooded?

That’s certainly a challenge too.

But at the same time, that’s kind of part of the fun of it all, are these unexpected challenges that we have to learn to overcome.

So if I could change one thing about my business, there’s nothing I would change. I have no answer for you Brian, I love it all.

Brian: That’s a great answer.

If we were to talk again, a year from now if we had you back on the show, what would you say would have had to have happened over the last 12 months for you to feel happy with your progress both professionally and personally?

Bevin: Well, I’ve got a new book coming out next year. This is, you’re gonna hear it here first folks, this is the worldwide announcement, I suppose.

I’ve got a new book coming out from New Society Publishers, February of 22.

The Complete Guide to Seed & Nut Oils.

It’s all about growing and forging seeds and nuts specifically for oil extraction. That’s another thing that we do at Small House Farm, we extract seed into oil, we use it as ingredients and our wellness products, as well as offer, you know, just the oil for culinary purposes as well.

And so for me to be super satisfied, 12 months from now, I want that book to come out as a smashing success. I want people to get their hands on it and really, really enjoy and make use of it. That’s the thing. It’s fun to read a book and enjoy it. But I want people to use these books to take this knowledge and make the world a better place.

Brian: What would you say are the obstacles standing in your way of getting there?

Bevin: Right now the greatest obstacle that I have is that most places have had to close down. And we don’t know if they’re going to be able to stay open. That’s kind of where I’m at, right?

So this is kind of a tricky place to even have an opinion in this world right now, what we want to say about how that works, but regardless, we all have different approaches to what we think the solution may be and we may not agree with each others solutions.

But we all have the same end goal. We all want the world to get back to where it once was, so we can all spend time together in person again, right?

But you asked me what my favorite thing about the business was, and my favorite thing is spending time with people. And for all of 2020, I wasn’t even allowed to, you know, we did a lot of virtual stuff and I guess that’s very nice.

We should be blessed that we have this opportunity to meet this virtual wonderland, certainly. But is that the stage during a meal with somebody and shake hands with people.

So for me, the greatest challenge that I have is the challenge that the whole world is facing, it’s possibly the greatest challenge that we’re all facing, as people, as business owners over we want to look at things. That is our greatest challenge, isn’t it?

Brian: Yeah, absolutely.

You’ve been on this journey for eight years on this particular half of it, this Small House Farm journey.

What advice would you have blanket advice out there for other business owners that want to take their passion and turn it into something that can make a difference, but it’s also sustainable?

Bevin: Yeah, to make sure you’re having fun, you know, and that might seem cliche, I suppose. But that’s what it is.

Obviously, you got to think about the bottom line and you got to think about marketing and you got to think about all these different things. And that certainly comes into play.

But none of that matters if you aren’t enjoying what you’re doing.

It’s all about pleasure, right?

We’re lucky if we get to hang out on this planet, 60, 70 years, that’s all you get, right? And then you’re done.

You want to enjoy it. You want to enjoy what you’re doing, if you believe in what you’re doing as a small business owner if you truly enjoy that, and maybe it’s not even considered work, even it is more challenging times.

That passion, that pleasure that you have, your customers will pick up on that. They’ll feed from that.

You’ll be able to bring that pleasure and translate into something that they’re going to want to exchange for Federal Reserve Notes, I suppose.

But at the end of the day, all that matters is that you enjoy what you’re doing and everyone else enjoys what they’re doing. We can find a way to kind of overlap that pleasure.

Brian: Fabulous. Yeah, that’s, that’s great. Thanks, Bevin.

I think you have a positive perspective but you also keep things nice and light. I really appreciate that. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you’d like to answer?

Bevin: Where can people get a copy of my new book The Artisan Herbalist? h

Brian: There we go.

Bevin: And if anybody’s interested in that they can get copies via my website, SmallHouseFarm.com. It’s also available on Bookshop, Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Brian: Awesome. Also, where could listeners who are interested in everything else that you talked about, where can they find out more about you and Small House Farm?

Bevin: So the website definitely the central hub for all things Small House Farm, which is again, SmallHouseFarm.com.

But folks can also connect with us via our Instagram, or Facebook page, which is also Small House Farm on our YouTube channel. For folks that are visual learners, we have a YouTube channel, you can find also under Small House Farm, where you can spend time with us out in the gardens or foraging making maple syrup.

Any of the adventures that happen here at the homestead are going to find their way to YouTube. And that’s a great community for us to connect to that as well.

Brian: This has been a great talk I can’t wait to see more from you. I can’t wait to see this new book coming out and be able to look over your other stuff coming out.

Thanks so much for being on The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Bevin: Thank you so much for having me, what fun.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Bevin was a lot of fun to chat with. He has a lot of great ideas, and just his whole energy about him was just fun to be around and inspiring.

I think I’d say that the most about this conversation was very inspiring in terms of if you know you’re doing things right, if you can’t come up with a single thing that you’d like to change about your business, and the industry that you’re working in, it’s a good thing.

It just seems like he’s in a really great place and moving in a really great direction.

I want to point out something that you might be able to use in your business, two major things.

First thing, the teaching factor that Bevin has built into his business from the very beginning. It started out as a process of teaching and most of us don’t start businesses that way.

Most of us start businesses from a different direction and then we grow into a teaching factor. We eventually may write a book or we eventually may put on a course or speak at an event regarding what it is that we do and train other people how to do it.

But he went the other way around where he began teaching. And then that grew into a product source and a website and all these other things.

I think it’s a huge factor in how happy he’s been in building his business.

That comes to the second point.

What he mentioned at the very end about having a good time is so imperative to your business, because if you aren’t having a good time, nothing else seems to matter.

It’s not that it’s the most important thing, it is a factor that is necessary for doing the most important things in your business. If you want to get a message out there, if you want to get a product out, there is a service out there.

You have to be having fun in order to sustain that business growth had to handle the ups and the downs, the goods and the bads that come along with running a business.

Those factors, I think really make a big difference and it’s something we can all learn from.

Also looking at how he structured his books, and how he structures his courses and workshops that you could find online.

Be sure and check that out because I think everybody can learn a lot from Bevin Cohen.

I really appreciate having him on the show.

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.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact.

Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

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.

Uncle Mud – Natural Building Chieftain

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Uncle Mud

Episode 22.

Who is your tribe? Is there a “community” of people already out there that would love what you do? Could you create one by scratch?

Chris Mcclellan (better known as “Uncle Mud”) has a special skill in finding and bringing together easy-going, like-minded individuals to create spectacular structures out of mud and junk lying around. Though he started out a business owner of a computer company, a life threatening situation made him rethink what his priorities were. Now, he travels the world, and has the world travel to visit him to learn his techniques in natural building.

What would it be like to design your life around an ideal lifestyle versus around an income number? Listen Now!

Find more about Uncle Mud: http://www.unclemud.com/
Support him here: https://www.patreon.com/unclemud
Like and Follow him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unclemud/

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcript

Uncle Mud: One of the things about having a midlife crisis and I would say a heart attack is a midlife crisis. If you survive it is that we were able to like reassess what we wanted to do, and start planning for a better outcome for our

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: Uncle Mud aka Chris McLellan raises free range organic children in the wilds of suburbia, in Ohio, building houses and pizza ovens and wood stoves with mud and junk is his way of sharing the can do spirit he writes teaches workshops and hosts a mud pit and DIY building demonstrations at fairs across the US.

The rocket mass heaters and his double wide dropped his heating bill from nearly $1,000 per month for propane to less than $75 per year.

Your results may vary but this guy is happy. Follow him on patreon.com/UncleMud or facebook.com/UncleMud.

Uncle Mud, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Uncle Mud: Thank you very much.

Brian: Well then besides just what we heard in your bio, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Uncle Mud: I like to play in the mud. Found a great job where I get to be a kid and go like to summer camp. And do an artist residency program were we get kids like as young as seven, an impact driver and have them help us build a tree house or have them help us.

Make a pizza oven that they have a pizza party for their parents. And later, they come to visit, we get all muddy and then go jump in the lake and then do it again, it’s great fun.

But it also kind of illustrates the divide between what a person can do and what we feel like we’re encouraged to do, we’re kind of encouraged to leave things to the experts and go buy something rather than make it and that just doesn’t sit well with a lot of the kids that I work with.

And doesn’t sit well with me. So we just have on build our sense of ourselves.

Brian: Sure. That’s great. How did you get to here?

What’s your life story up to this point?

Uncle Mud: So when I was kid in high school and broke my leg. And I like to build forts in the woods and, and electric little electric cars and things like that. And my dad bought me a copy of Lloyd Kahn’s book Shelter. That was almost as old as I was.

But it was stories of people building their own plates out of things they found around them, all of these ways in which people may do and that’s made do but also turned their life and their house art.

I’ve worn out six copies of that book and on to be able to write some articles for Lloyd to become friends with him. And he introduced me to the crew at Mother Earth News Magazine.

I started writing for them, started teaching mud building at their fairs, and actually started with just having a mud pit that the kids play in because their parents had come to these fairs.

Each of them with a huge list of different workshops they wanted to participate in different events they wanted to see. They’re just dragging their kids around to go to all these things until surprise, surprise, the kids kind of melt down.

So we wanted to do something that the kids get to have fun and it turned into amazing success. Get them sculpting little fairy houses, building things with the bricks and sticks and mud and stuff that I had sitting around for my presentations.

And then later I ended doing presentations for the up because they got curious and so I’ve been doing that since about 2012.

It’s grown into also going and building houses for people teaching workshops all over the country.

We’ve been go to Jamaica. I teach mud building workshops because people up in the mountains only make 20 bucks a day and a sac of cement is 10 bucks and nobody can ever finish their house.

So we go up and find clay and we find fiber and find sand and we mix everything together, build houses.

And we’ll go walk by the side of the road pick up all the bottles of people drop. And because there’s no trash service there, turn them into windows. Because it can get really expensive with windows in your house there.

Everything has to be shipped into the island.

You know, we’ve even started teaching a two week shop class for homesteaders up in the mountains in Montana every summer for permies.com. Do get people to have the skills and the confidence they need to go out and have their own place out in the woods, whether it’s wiring so they can set up their own solar or, and understand how much power they can use before they start to build their battery bank.

Or whether it’s letting them drive a 16 ton excavator or weld or push a sawmill. These are things that, don’t really get taught in school, but are really quite handy, if you’re going to do things for yourself.

So nice little confidence builders and the materials that we try to use for these confidence builders are also materials you can get out of a dumpster or on Craigslist or dig a hole in your backyard or, instead of buying two by fours, go out in the woods and find the trees kind of in the shade of another tree and not going to do well. Especially when to do it with a tree that that has that maybe has some character to it and even curves around something else that he grew around.

Those little trees make a great handles for a door that is spending 30 bucks and driving 40 minutes to a big box store. Go for a walk in the woods with a handsaw come back and shape something a little bit.

That’s God’s hardware store.

Brian: At what point did this go from being a hobby to almost like a profession or a way of life for you that when it grew into you basically being a teacher? How did that come about?

Uncle Mud: Well, I had some wonderful opportunities. 2004 I was in California for computer business for a workshop for computer business I own there wasn’t any place, less than about $200 a night to stay in.

But there was campground with a hot springs about an hour away. And I went there. There’s these people sitting in a corner laughing and scribbling on a piece of paper. And they just kind of struck me as having fun.

And whatever they were doing, they were very intent on that they were having a good time with it.

When I got home. I was on the internet, and I found some pictures of houses being built with natural materials. There was a guy on the internet who had a natural building school, but the number for the school was, it was disconnected and there was there were only about six pictures of anything you’d ever done. 35 years that were on the internet.

I needed to find this guy. Was getting ready to buy a plane ticket and fly back out west. And see if I could find this guy and a friend, I mentioned it to a friend who said, Oh, he’s not going to be there then actually be about six hours from your house at a natural building colloquium.

So I grabbed my daughter and who was thinking at the time, we drove out to Bath, New York for the Eastern Natural Building Colloquium and met about 200 of our new best friends.

Got me several lovely natural builders, including SunRay Kelley, whose work I’d been admiring and who happened to be the guy who was sitting in the corner with his friends scribbling away designing the Harbin Temple that they later built with drawn clay and beautiful cedar wood went on to write a book with him and get more and more involved with helping people teach workshops.

Learning was, I was going along, how to do this stuff myself? And how to support other people’s efforts, by publishing books on these subjects or getting a group together to learn how to do it in the process of managed to survive a heart attack.

But that told me that I needed to do something else with my time other than ended all in front of a computer being on call for 24 hours a day, does that was taking a toll on my health.

So at that point, I dropped down to about half time, got a partner for that business, and started doing more traveling and more empire building and teaching writing.

And that daughter that was with me when she was six, has actually built her own two storey treehouse, she turned 18 and moved into it and lived there for about a year before going off to be a missionary and then coming back and getting married. And she just left to go work on a civil engineering degree.

So she wants to be able to just stamp her own plan, so she’s been right in the thick of it with the natural building thing. My whole family has a bunch of friends, we end up being, The Mud Family, traveling all over together, doing events together.

Brian: That’s just that’s so awesome. Living the dream there, it seems. I mean, you could tell and for those of you who are were listening to this and may not have heard me discuss it before, I got to meet Uncle Mud at the Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, Oregon, and got to see his one of his presentations on the Rocket Mass Heaters.

And you can just tell from how you carry yourself and how your crew around you all carry themselves that you’re having a good time.

I mean, you’re doing one presentation right after the other. I think you’re probably one of the most prolific presenters there for the entire thing. You’re just go, go go.

And you could tell you’re having a great time and obviously by how much you travel and everything else you must enjoy it right?

Uncle Mud: Yeah, absolutely. We actually have figured out a way for my wife and my kids to travel and do this with us to. You know, one of the things about having a midlife crisis and I would say a heart attack is a midlife crisis. If you survive it, is that we were able to like reassess what we want to do, and start planning for a better outcome for our time.

Sometimes, it’s a little challenging, like when you have to jump in the car and drive a quarter of the way across the country to go to go each for two days straight, and then drive again, that can be a little much, but we’ve been able to figure out how to keep the cost down.

I mean, we got a little camper we’ve made out of our Prius that just fits us and it’s good enough gas mileage, that we can afford to do these things rather than having to have a big RV and in a big bill to go with it.

And we can spend more time together and focus on the thing that we care about.

Brian: That’s great. We’ve been talking to a lot of other speakers and vendors from the Mother Earth News Fairs and just kind of looking at, you know, the business end of things and why they plug into these things.

So besides the enjoyment that you get from it, what is your organization or everything that you’re doing right now or your business? What do you get out of going to these Mother Earth News Fairs?

Uncle Mud: The most amazing thing is that the Mother Earth News Fairs, people who show up for those, tend to self select, as really great. I mean, the relative ratio of cool people to jerk is really, really low there.

Compared to host a being stuck in traffic on your way into work. There’s a pretty high ratio ratio there, infact it’s easy to become one of them myself. I’m much more interested in hanging out with people who have already decided that they’re going to do something that they care about whether it’s having chicken or living off grid, or just homeschooling or building a mud house.

There’s a certain focus you get, people get, when they say I’m going to come to the fair and learn about this.

Or even the people who come there to teach or organize it and choose to spend their time organizing cool fairs like this rather than, say something that might be more lucrative like working for an amusement park or something.

The people just have this dedication to something that is feeding their souls.

I really like being around that and it makes it worth the effort, we’ve been transitioning from being dependent on my wife being a full time teacher.

She’s been still a full time teacher, but she’s been able to work the production in in the work for an online charter school, that of being in a school that takes all of our time and has time each day, every day.

That up now we can, we can work online in the car while we’re driving to an event or while we’re camping somewhere if she has to, and that gives us a great deal of freedom.

The rocket heaters gone from thousand dollars a month, propane down to $75 a year for hardwood cut off the local flooring mill that the bit of freedom itself and do other things I want to do with that time. Like stop and visit people who’ve been doing other cool things and take pictures and video and report on that.

We’ve been starting our own version of podcast again, or we just we go visit somebody do something fun. We’ll post the video on YouTube under the Uncle Mudd channel. Most of that actually been collecting Patreon.

Patreon.com/UncleMud, we’ve been collecting all of the things, we’ve been writing the interviews and and the projects that we’ve been doing. Over the last 15 years. We’ve been collecting that in one place, so people can come and look at it and kind of join us on our little adventures.

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: Where did the Uncle Mud moniker begin? How did that come about?

Uncle Mud: Well, we were at a workshop where….my name is Chris, and there were about seven other Chris’s there. So when somebody would say Hey, Chris, and all of us would look up, it kind of got the pointless like saying, hey, you started calling me Mud instead.

Because I always the one in mud, actually adopted that and Uncle Mud came to better represent the sense we want to create for this, because the natural building tribe has become an extended family for us.

We always know that people will stop by and visit they with us when they’re on their way through and we can do the same thing and catch up on their little projects and on who’s having babies and who’s going to college and gone and built themselves a little cottage in their parents backyard.

That sense of family just keeps getting bigger and better and my mother sisters and my brothers will show up and build something with us or go with us to check out something cool that like Deek Diedricksen up in Vermont does YouTube channel videos of the cool tree houses and tiny houses that you visit.

He was at the Mother Earth News Fair here in Texas to hear our doughters tree house. Saw her presentation on her treehouse and invited us to come and teach at one of his workshops. Because they learned how to build cool things out of junk mail us like old washing machine doors to make funky windows for their tree houses, things like that.

But they didn’t know how to use the mud. So we came down and showed them, because it’s a really cool tool for your tool belt. And we just keep running into situations like that.

Brian: That’s so cool. Very cool. Would you have any recommendations for anyone looking to have the type of ability to do lifestyle design like you’ve done for yourself?

And let’s say someone’s in a similar position, they’re stuck in a position either they have a business that they’re kind of stuck with or they’re in a job that they don’t like, and they want to break out and do something like you’ve gone and done.

What would you recommend to them?

Uncle Mud: Well, the first thing is probably to take a radical grip on your finances. Money is the reason we have anything nice is that my wife, Heather will pays very close attention to the money coming in and going out.

Often her mood is very much affected by ratio of those things. And my goodness, like, last year, there was a time when she just was in a really bad mood because we seem to be behind on things. And it was puzzling to me because as far as I was paying attention, it seemed to be making good money.

And I finally said where’s all the money going?

She said well, we’re just short because I paid off the house. And so you’re in a bad mood because we don’t have any money because we don’t have any money because you paid off the house so that we wouldn’t have to spend that money.

And she says, Yeah, basically.

I said, that’s okay. Well, weather this and we did and she just looked at it and said, You know, that’s actually going to be doing better than any of the way other ways we could invest our money right now. So let’s get rid of a liability.

Let’s pay down the car early. Let’s accept that something might be a little bit of a struggle, but let’s take this as a game and make a challenge out of it.

And there’s so many things that are really games to do the people and the companies that make lots of money off of their game like a mortgage, for instance, that’s an old French word for death pledge, back then 30 years was a death pledge.

Now we live a little bit longer, but by then the house is worn out that we need a new roof and now we have to borrow money for that and so on and so forth.

But just figuring out ways to lower your expenses, gives you a great deal of freedom to then go do something else that you want to do.

And then if you figure out how to do something that pays the bills, but it’s also something you love. Even if you’re only able to do it part time, like the mud building.

I still have to go in and punch the time card keep sometimes we keep my computer business going, but I’m able to spend more more of my time and energy doing this thing I love just really kind of focusing on something I would recommend to people who want to be able to make those decisions.

So maybe two bedroom apartments that have a three bedroom apartment. We wrote an article from other news a few years ago.

And it’s actually been evolving since then, have this notion of too small to fail in opposition to the bank, that we all seem to have to support with our tax money because it’s too big to allow it to fail.

But on the other end of that, let’s just say we do an experiment, where instead of spending $600 a month for our share of the rent, or an apartment, we go make a deal with somebody to build a little cottage in their backyard.

Maybe that cottage is not on land I own so that kind of risk and it might be in an area where not legal to be something like that and live in it. So that the risk, and you don’t know very well how to build something. So that’s a risk.

But we’ve been conditioned to believe that a 30 year mortgage on a couple of hundred thousand dollars is no risk at all.

Or even though who knows what’s going to happen to the economy in the meantime, who knows if I’m even still going to be with the person that I made this big purchase with, that I’m going to continue to pay on, you know that the risk that we’ve been conditioned to think is, is perfectly natural.

But if I spend $6,000, building a cottage, and I live on somebody else’s land, with the agreements that is theirs after five years, and I walk away after five years, instead of spending $600 a month on rent, I walk away with $30,000 in my pocket, and that that was a risk even if it doesn’t work out with this damn there for a year before I get a job someplace else or they’ll walk away with 1800 dollars compared to the money that would have been flushed down the toilet by being a renter.

Or maybe I’m there for three months and I get the building halfway done and have a fight with the person who’s whose land it is or something else doesn’t work, and I have to leave.

Well, I’m down 1,800 dollars, by comparison, but I can kind of walk away from that crash landing of 1,800 dollars. Now if I’d gone and bought $60,000 tiny house on wheels, and parked into these people’s place and then found out that I can’t park it in that town, and I don’t have a place to park it. Well, that’s a lot more risk for relatively diminished returns.

I mean, now I’m tripled screwed because now I’m finding a place for me to stay. And I’m paying the mortgage on this tiny house that I couldn’t live in and I’m planning on paying for a place to store it, keeping the expense low. Like like my daughter’s treehouse.

We got maybe $2,000 into it and a fun family project, there was every chance that we could get a note saying, hey, yeah, people can’t live in treehouses, stop it.

If it was used for you month, or a year, and then that happened. Well, okay. I’m disappointed, but I’m not. I’m not devastated. I’m not trouble financially for it. So there’s these risks that we can take that are now too small to fail.

Brian: Absolutely. Great point. And really good advice for those of you listening.

Uncle Mud, if we were to talk a year from now, if we had you back on this show, and we were to look back over the past 12 months, what would have had to have happen for you to feel happy with your progress?

Uncle Mud: Oh, wow!

Well, there are a lot of things that would be exciting that I’d be very pleased if they happen like building more buildings with people. I actually enjoy a lot more the process of supporting somebody else’s build just got back from North Carolina where we built a pizza oven with a community and a rocket mass heater to heat one of the houses in this intentional community and all the friends and family neighbors came out in support of this.

We got it this whole thing done in a long weekend. It was fantastic fun and you know, generally natural building is a slow process, but we get enough hands in it and it’s a fast process and it’s a fun process.

So doing more of that is what I’m looking forward to this year. Spending more time encouraging people follow their dreams and to not be scared of them.

Start with something that didn’t work three times you could still be excited by it fourth time and have it work and then do something bigger and then do something bigger get yourself comfortable with taking a particular chance and then when it when you’ve got it well practice do more that can become kind of natural for us.

Whereas we could also become natural for us to hide in the house watching TV all day or only going out to work and get groceries and then you know we come to the end of our life and what do we have to show for it?

But if we figure out how to do something so that we can be around our babies and our grandbabies being around our sweeties more being out in nature or or out on the road, if that’s what you like, these things go our souls in a way that simple paycheck doesn’t, as much.

So yeah, finding more cool projects to do with people that would make me very happy. Watching, I enjoying watching my kids. I have an eight year old at home and another in college right now, going off and, you know, living their dreams and kind of fun to live vicariously with them without having to stay up late and take tests and all that.

Just get to enjoy their successes and encourage them when things don’t go as well. We’re actually gearing up to do more workshops.

We’re going to be in Jamaica the second half of January building rocket heaters and like a water heaters and we’re building a bath house down there out of bottles that left by side of the road by people because they don’t have a trash and, and reason Cobb and the local limestone, we built a pizza oven in a village where most of people there hadn’t ever had pizza at a pizza party for the village.

It was a lovely, lovely thing to spend time on. It’s really kind of fun the our adopted village called Mr. Muud but they they come out and and get in the mud with us and and we’re looking forward to demonstrating more with composting toilets down there.

Because you know, the water down there is just what you can catch off your roof. And if half the water in your house going through your toilet that uses it up pretty quick and then you got to spend a lot of money to get another truckload of water up there.

You know, but not just down in Jamaica, this coming week we’re going to be in Neosho, Missouri at the Ozark Homesteading Expo, just teaching these kind of classes, building a pizza oven on a trailer that somebody’s going to take home from the event, but not until after we’ve made some pizza with it.

And then it will be….in mid September, we’re going to be in Seven Springs, Pennsylvania, for the Mother Earth News Fair. Doing the same set of things. Topeka, Kansas for the Mother Earth News Fair, in mid October, we’re going to be building a pizza oven there.

We’re building a couple of rocket heaters between now and then. We do really enjoy getting people to come out and work with us on the things you want to learn how to do.

Something like this, you can come to a workshop where we feed you and teach you everything we know. And you participate in the build, so that you’ll be able to do it when you get home. Or sometimes we have internship positions where people just come and stay in our treehouse and, and work with us on a local project.

We’re really enjoying the quality of the relationships we get with people who are so interested in improving what they know and what they can do. That’s a fantastic type of person to hang out with.

Brian: Yeah, that is so cool. What a great opportunity. What could listeners who may be interested in finding out more about all things Uncle Mud, Besides the Patreon and Facebook site that we mentioned, is there anywhere else they can go?

Uncle Mud: So I have a website, UncleMud.com.

And if you want to join us one of the fairs, go to MotherEarthNewsFairs.ccom, is a good place to connect with us and see what our schedules are going to be at, we’re going to be at all the fairs this year in Texas and, and the Tennessee and Virginia and Oregon, Pennsylvania and Topeka in 2019, 2020.

We’re gonna be working with people on buildings and ovens and so forth appear in Cleveland, Ohio, I live out in the boonies of Cleveland, we have wonderful partners that we work with in Michigan and Washington State and down in North Carolina do build.

And we try to keep it local because you know, you’re going to find the soil slightly different, wherever you are. Certainly the climate different than Texas permitted you where it is here.

We want to figure out how to stay cool in Texas, with passive cooling and here up in Cleveland, we want passive heating. We want to try to keep warm, six months of the year.

You know, whatever your climate, we kind of want to make sure that we get the right information, because it’s easy to look on YouTube or get a book that was written for Australia or the Southwest, and then wonder why it doesn’t work where you are.

Like, we’d like to have people succeed better than more often than that.

Brian: Absolutely.

Well, are there any questions that I didn’t ask you that you’d like to answer?

Uncle Mud: Let me ask us, what are some of your favorite things to interview about?

Brian: I love digging in to the person’s background and their causes, and the things that they’re really interested in and not you’ve covered most of that. And then I also like to see where they’re thinking in the long term as far as their business and where they see things going. And you you pretty much covered all that. So…

Uncle Mud: Yeah, well, so you and I would definitely agree on the power of story.

You know, we get so much bad news, even on our Facebook feeds. So much of the chaos of what the world is going through, and relatively a little encouragement and just finding out that somebody succeeded in doing the thing that you were sort of thinking about is very encouraging.

Instead of your cousin telling you Oh, yeah, well you know those people got out services called on them you’re going to go down in flames because you don’t know what you’re doing and whatnot. Now let’s let’s stick with something positive.

But yeah, there’s there are things to be aware of, but they shouldn’t be paralyzing us. We should be continuing to try to live our dreams and our adventure, and we should be sharing with each other, the successes and the nuances that lead to success.

So don’t tell me a failure story. Unless you’re telling me the specific of the things that didn’t work on the road to the thing that worked.

Or telling me where you are on that road, even if that is included a bunch of breakdown. Let’s figure out where to go from there, rather than giving up, and the stories that we can share of people succeeding and Okay, what’s your recipe for a limewash?

What’s your replacement for straw when you couldn’t find any?

What have you done for lowering your electric bill so that you could afford to go off grid with a couple of solar panels instead of $60,000 array so that you could continue to watch the big TV and and have the air conditioning.

Let’s all just like chat about what worked, instead of just throwing up our hands and saying, well, I guess we’re doomed. We may be, but we’re gonna have a good time on this trip.

Brian: Absolutely. I love that most about you. It’s like your bio says about sharing the can do spirit and I think that’s what you’re all about. I can’t wait to see more from you in the future. We’d love to have you back on the show because I know we’ve just barely scratched the surface of your perspective on things and where you’re going from here.

So Uncle Mud thank you so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Uncle Mud: Well, thank you for having me. I have the Uncle Mud Facebook page. And if you’re doing something fun, or you’ve had a success with building something out of mud or junk, I’d love if you’d share it with me on the Facebook page.

Because the stories, let’s share people’s successes and be proud of what we’ve done. Even if it has cracks in it. That your crack that you’ve made, and not some experts fancy thing, but it’s yours.

It was good enough and I’d love to see more and more and share more and more examples, if it’s good enough.

Brian: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Uncle Mud: Absolutely. Have a lovely day.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Really a great interview, something worth going back and relistening to. I know I got more out of it, relistening to it again.

I like Chris’s focus on collaboration. Networking with other people, always finding another way to be able to plug in with people who either have more experience than you and something or even less experienced than you and something and being able to take your skills and meld them together into something better.

That’s a really cool approach to life.

Just in general, approaching life in a different way, you know, not accepting all the norms just because that’s the way it is. That’s the way we grew up with it, really questioning things, but doing it in a real light hearted manner.

And it’s given power to his concept of lifestyle design, being able to just live the life you want to live.

At the same sense, if you’re looking to change your life, taking that radical grip on finances that he talked about, you know, paying off your debt, being too small to fail, having those situations where getting rid of those risks that are keeping you from growing, that whole makes a lot of sense.

One of the strongest concepts that he put forth was that idea of having a tribe and what he called his Natural Building Tribe. So people with all the same direction, having an interest in natural building, he’s created a community there.

It’s a community that spans the globe, he’s been able to go all over the world, training people how to do these very simple techniques.

And in some cases, it’s life changing.

He’s developed that sense of family with complete strangers. And that’s a real magical ability to have and you can tell that he has it and he’s growing his business that way, which is really cool.

Overall, I’m certain this is not the last we’ll hear from Uncle Mud. He’s got a really interesting perspective on things and a lot that we can learn from whether you’re going through a midlife crisis or not.

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.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact.

Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

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.

Mother Earth News Fair 2019 – Recap

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Sean E. Douglas and Brian J. Pombo
Mother Earth News Fair

Episode 020.

Have you used live events to promote your business, your book or your speaking career?

Podcast Host Brian J. Pombo and Producer Sean E. Douglas attended the Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, Oregon from Saturday, August 3rd to Sunday, August 4th 2019. Located at the Linn County Fairgrounds, Brian and Sean give their reactions, thoughts and tips for attending and profiting off of shows and expositions like the Mother Earth News Fair. Listen now!

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcript

Brian: How many people do you think actually put their email address down off of that crowd from what you could tell Sean.

Sean: If we’re playing the game. So if you understand the 80/20 principle. 80 percent of the crowd was signing up for it, which pretty much blew me away, every single time I saw that. From my observation, I was definitely making note of that.

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: Alright, welcome back to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast. Today’s episode is going to be quite a bit different because what we’re doing instead of interviewing somebody from the outside, I have producer Sean E. Douglas with me.

He also joined me in Albany, Oregon for the Mother Earth News Fair.

And we’re going to talk about our experiences there.

First, we’re going to go off of why we went. What made this one standout in our mind of something that we wanted to highlight on the show, and go to when it happened this year.

And really, that comes back to an episode with Brad James from BeePods.com.

He’s the one that mentioned Mother Earth News Fair off of the podcast, we had a small conversation with him about how he got involved with them and was giving a speech at one of the other events.

So that led us to look a little further into Mother Earth News Fair. We were very familiar with the magazine. And as we were looking into it, we noticed a number of speakers that had all the media capabilities.

They had been on podcasts before many of them had, many of them had written books. And it was something that was interesting to us that we wanted to explore via the podcast.

So in leading up to the actual fair itself, we decided to start emailing and calling some of these people and seeing if they’d be willing to be interviewed on the show.

Sure enough, they did.

As you may have heard up until now, and if you haven’t, go back and listen, we had 11 episodes with a different interview on each episode, all from different backgrounds, some of them writers, some not.

We produced them over a very short period of time in order to hit that deadline of the show itself.

The last one that you may have heard with from Jereme Zimmerman was taken at the show itself.

So you got to hear us on location and it was interesting, what were your expectations going into it Sean.

Sean: Well, thankfully as Janice Cox was so nice to print out the whole schedule there and the different speakers and times for you when she met up with you to do your recording.

We were able to hit the ground running on understanding the different speakers, especially people that we’d had on the show. We wanted to try to hit up as many as we could.

While we were there for the two days and trying to map out most of them would speak more than one time. I think there was only a couple that only had one speech if I’m not mistaken. Most of them are speaking 2,3,4 times maybe even putting on workshops.

Definitely expected to want to get in there and see as many people as I could and me personally, you got to understand I’m probably about as city slicker is you’re going to get.

Overtime as we’ve been doing the self reliance and learning more about the field.

Brian knows a lot more about these things than I do.

And it’s been a really educational and an eye opener for me and this series that we had before we got there was an no exception, it was very much eye opener for all the different range of topics that were being covered from the different speakers.

And so I was really curious to get to sit down and spend some time listening to them, see them in action and see people that were listening to different questions that would come up.

Really want to see that, wanted to see all the different exhibitors and how things were laid out there, how everything was set up. What the bookstore looked like, because I heard some things about, they have this really nice bookstore, you know, so I had an idea of how it might look.

But really being able to go in and see this atmosphere, and how it all worked together. Being there, it exceeded what I could picture in my mind. And it was, it was just very fun time. Before you knew it, the two days were up and it was time to go home.

Brian: Yeah, no, it really was it in terms of my expectations are very similar. I have been to expos and events like this previously, but none quite like this.

None put on by a world famous magazine like Mother Earth News. None that were that professional in terms of directing people. My expectations just weren’t there.

As far as that goes, I knew there was going to be vendors. I knew there were going to be speakers. I knew they’d probably be selling some books there because of all the writers that were going to be there.

Besides that I wasn’t quite certain how it was going to all play out.

I wasn’t sure how big it was going to be. They’ve got six different ones every year, depending on which event you went to. It may be larger or smaller.

I think this one in Albany tends to be over on the smaller end of things from the speakers that I know of that went to the other events. So I wasn’t sure about that.

But with first impressions, let’s talk about first impressions.

We showed up Saturday morning. We got there.

I was surprised how warm it was. It was very warm weather.

A good portion of the event was outdoors, also that was interesting.

This kind of see the mixture of the indoor and the outdoor parts of the event.

One thing I knew right away, there was going to be more to see than we could possibly get to the fact that there were 10 presentations and or workshops, going at any given time that you had to choose one out of those.

One, unless you want to only get partial viewings, you had to jump around to one of the 10 stages to catch whoever you’re interested in seeing.

One thing that we figured out pretty quick was that we were not going to see everyone that we wanted to see or at least get to see them speak.

And sure enough, there were people that I had met through the podcast that I did not even get a chance to go up and say hi to because we were so busy. That’s just part of the first impressions.

We’ll get into a deeper dive as we go along. What were your first impressions Sean that first morning when we got there?

Sean: Oh, yeah, it was a real eye opener.

In trying to get in. You know, there’s people there at the gates obviously they’re attentive making sure that you got your wristband or this, that and the other. But very very friendly, not super locked down like a you know, it’s not like…oh boy, if you go to a sporting event or something like that these days, or obviously going to the airport.

That’s a whole nother story as far as trying to get into a place like that, but no, no, it’s not super intensive or anything like that trying to get in.

So that’s really nice, again, friendly.

I think everybody there was seemingly in a pretty good mood. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the different stages were at.

It didn’t seem to take too long. Getting in there, figuring out the layout of the place, and taking it all in.

And as we were doing that I was surprised we kept running into different speakers as we were just walking around and then Michael Foley, Leah Webb, and a few others even before we even sat down.

And first one we watched was the Shockey’s and Kirsten was doing her speech. I think that one started about 45 minutes after we walked in the door or something like, that half hour after walked into the door.

So just taking in a lot of stuff. That’s all I can say.

Brian: And you mentioned the Shockey’s talk, so we got to see Kirsten and Christopher Shockey they were the first speech that we got to witness. And I had some notes I was looking over.

It was interesting because it was outside, it was it was slightly breezy. And you could kind of hear that it was kind of over underneath a large tarp and the tarp was kind of hitting up against the poles a little bit.

You could hear that they were kind of next to a petting zoo. So you could hear a few animal sounds here and there that they kind of integrated into their presentation but kind of joking about it.

Kirsten was the one that did most of the presentation. It was very professional, very interesting.

Kind of a good starter on just fermenting vegetables and the the concept behind that how to do pickling in a traditional fermented pickle in way is really good stuff.

We jumped from…..we’re going to go a little bit deeper. Just kind of giveing some highlights, just so you know, we kind of jumped from speaker to speaker after that.

We got to see you Jereme Zimmerman discuss beer making. Then we saw Leah Webb talking about belly biochemistry that was very interesting, lots of heavy duty knowledge on that one.

And then we saw Frank Hyman with Hentopia show some live examples of ways that you can create water feeder. I mean, he discussed it on the show.

So if you listen to what he was saying he was going to talk about, that’s what he talked about.

And it was it was a lot of fun. He’s very entertaining.

And then we got to see Janice Cox, talk about lavender for health and beauty.

So these were all people that we had had on the show. It was great meeting them in person.

Afterwards, many of them you were directed back to a signing table, which was over in this bookstore area, which is kind of an area in the expo that’s kind of cornered off where all the books being sold by the Mother Earth Mews Fair were there.

Most of the authors had their books in the bookstore and after they had had spoken many of them, you can go and get your book signed with them. That was a really interesting process.

So you watch a speech, you’re encouraged to go by the book and have it signed. Anything else you want to say about that first day shot?

Sean: Yeah, just a little bit further on having them go for the signing. The people that I made note, here we saw in total in the two days, and we’ll get into Sunday, we saw nine speakers, five on Saturday, four on Sunday.

And part of that is because on Saturday and ran an hour longer, I think it went till six and on Sunday and only till around 5. And most of those people that we watched, they had they were going to do a signing either right after or very, very soon after, and I didn’t look at the ones that did not do that when we were at their speech.

There were other times where it was quickly afterwards that they did that on other speeches. So this is something that definitely was….definitely is something that somewhere down the line that Mother Earth News is organized with their speakers to try to at least do that. It seems like at least one speech for most of them every weekend. So that that’s really good. I mean, when you think about it, I mean, a lot of the tie within this is going back, that’s your funnel, that’s where your call to action is, if you will, to go back there and do the signing and go to the bookstore and get them there.

But also I noticed, with various speakers not to say that they wouldn’t want to take questions or anything like that…everybody was friendly and all these things. But more to say that because you can see pretty much after a lot of these talks, you can see like a little bit of a crowd wanting to get around the speakers right after they were done.

Waiting to ask questions, and I’m sure, if I had to sit down with Andrew Perkins or whoever with Mother Earth News. If they weren’t doing this kind of thing before, they probably may have gotten bogged down with these questions. Right after the speeches, and so you can see a clear call to action to go back to the bookstore for a signing in to answer questions. And that’s part of the thing there.

But it also frees up that situation from getting kind of bottlenecked there so that they can also in turn, get ready for the next speaker to get ready. Because as you said, they could be having like up to 10 of these things going on at one time.

And there’s one after another that’s happened and again and again. So if you put it all together, it just makes sense for a lot of different reasons to have that kind of thing going on.

Brian: Mmmhmm.

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: Absolutely, it was great because there were different ways that they encouraged people to go purchase the books or to go and sign.

One of the ways that we saw on the first day, both Frank Hyman and the Shockey’s, had these flyers that were handed out during their speech. And you can tell they’re put together by Storey Publishing, because well, it says Storey Publishing on it, but also it has that they have a similar look to them.

So on one side, it’s got their picture, it’s got the picture of their book, that the item number, the price of it when their book signing is the fact that that you can get 20% off of the bookstore, which seemed to be a constant thing all weekend.

And then on the other side, they’d have details about that person.

So for example, the Shockey’s on the other side had a few recipes one for green peppercorn mustard, one for holy fermented bazell is really cool, nice little recipes on the other side and area for another.

And then on the other side of Frank Hyman’s four ways a hatch is better than a hinged roof.

And so it’s kind of a step by step talking about the advantages. That’s a neat little way to be able to get people to do the next step to be able to go through the process.

Another neat thing that we saw happening, and the first person we saw doing it was Leah Webb, and that was hand around a…..did she have a clipboard?

I believe she did. She had clipboards.

Sean: Two clipboards.

Brian: Had two clipboards. And she was asking for people’s names and email addresses and what and the reason for it, she said, if you put your name and email address down, I will basically have a raffle at the end of the speech and give away one of my books.

How many people do you think actually put their email address down now for that crowd from what you could tell Sean?

Sean: If we’re playing the game, so if you understand at the 80/20 principle….so if we’re playing that game, I would say we’re at least on the 80% side.

So that meaning at least I would say 80% of the crowd was signing up for it, which pretty much blew me away. That that would happen.

And that was not the only person that I would say…..every single time I saw, that from my observations, because I was definitely making note of that.

I would say from playing that 80/20 game, it’s going to be on the 80% side that we’re looking at for the conversion rate.

Brian: Yeah, that was pretty incredible. And you got to think about that as a speaker, if you’re a speaker, and you’re looking to get out there, how can you get the most out of this experience?

Well, one way is to encourage them to purchase something, purchase a book, if you’ve got a book for sale.

Another way is to get their information so that you can have an ongoing conversation with them after the show.

I mean, it only makes sense that they would do something like this. And there were a number of speakers that didn’t do anything of that sort.

But there were also a couple other speakers. I know Gary Collins did, I know, Janice Cox also passed around bags, they had little slips of paper that you can fill out.

I believe that was setup by Mother Earth News because that’s their publisher, you can see how the book publishers do everything they can to help out the process.

Also, just because a person’s a speaker, or has written a book doesn’t mean that they’re running a really full scale business on this.

What we’re talking about is the business aspects of all these things.

As we discussed throughout all the interviews leading up to this, why would someone want to write a book?

Why would someone want to give a speech at an event like this?

And so we’re kind of talking in and out of all these things as we go along, really entertaining speeches, and presentations, on on all levels. I mean, we enjoyed everyone that we saw. And it was very, very interesting if you’re just wanting to get some info, especially on a particular topic that you know, is in this realm, and you know, a certain speaker is going to be there.

It’s worth the price just to go in for that, let alone all the vendors have great presentations and everything going on.

There’s always more that can be done in terms of business.

And we’ll be talking more about that in future episodes. But just to see what was done.

I’d also like to mention, Chris White, who we had on the show from DripWorks.com.

We got to talk with him a little bit. We didn’t get to catch his speech, but he had mentioned how he told people about his booth, but he didn’t necessarily see people go over to his booth right away after being done with the speech.

But he found people filtering through all throughout the rest of the weekend. That had been to the speech that saw him there and came over because they saw a speech.

So even though he didn’t have a book for them to purchase, he did have an opportunity for them to come by the booth and take part in the activities that were there at the Drip Works booth. So that was pretty cool.

Sean: I forget if I asked him or not if he had something he was giving away during his speech, trying to mirror and match some ways. They do this with the books where there’s maybe there’s something given away or there’s a speech, you know, hey, they’ve got a draw to do signing or something like that. Was there a draw right after the speech to get them to that table so that they would go there right away?

But yeah, he was, he did say we’ve seen steady people coming in through the rest of that day.

And we talked to him fairly early on Sunday. And they seem fairly pleased that they’re just steady people coming back again and again, that they had saw the speech and one drop by and say hi and inquire about Drip Works, so that was terrific.

One other point I wanted to say on the speaking before I forget and also for that this is it’s a biz podcast. So we are talking about business stuff, but I do not want to undersell, I learned so much, again, I like I said I’m like a city slicker on a lot of this stuff.

I learned so much stuff from these people, in sitting down, and hearing what they had to say, taking notes with everybody all the way through, you know, even from a health standpoint, at least to start out, you know, I was so impressed by Leah’s conversation that I bought her book, and I’m implementing some of the things she’s got with her cookbook.

So I’m really pleased about that, just on a personal level, did not expect to get anything like that out of out of this, this whole ordeal, but just for my own benefit, I’ve gotten that.

But I learned so much stuff in getting to see again, like Kirsten Shockey, you know, they had the cameras up there and it was really nice to see her working on the fermenting and everything.

So I mean, I really enjoyed what the people had to say. I mean, it’s not just all business.

And it was very much an eye opener and I am very much encouraged to learn more about these types of things just over time.

Don’t expect to learn it overnight for sure.

But another thing that I thought was great and the first person we saw again, the Shockey’s, had their books right up there at the front, nice big books.

Most of them have you know, big lettering on the covers and you can see it, we were way in the back, I could see those things nice and clear from the back, you know, that you see that.

And again, you’d see a lot of these people have in their books right up there at the front and I thought that was terrific.

What a great way to remind people that you have these books.

And it’s, it’s right there. You can’t can’t dispute the it’s right there you can see it fresh in their minds as you’re talking. There it is.

So I thought that was another great idea that you’d see consistently through the different talks.

And it was just really nice. I know like Uncle Mud. We saw him on Sunday and he was kind of doing his own thing with his whole setup but they had the book layout right there for all his stuff, he pretty much had that spot is pretty much dominated his little area through the whole weekend.

But he had his books right there that you could get, you know, there were people available to help sell books or what have you, right there for his purposes, too. And so it just it was just it was great stuff.

Brian: Yeah, and that Uncle Mud we’re looking to have him on the show in a future episode here.

He was the specific talk that we watched of his was on rocket mass heaters. Really great personality, really interesting guy, got a lot of interesting background to go off of so I can’t wait to be able to talk deeper with him on that.

We got see Andy Brennan from Aaron Burr Cider. We got to see Gary Collins from the Simple Life.

We got to see Crystal Stevens from GrowCreateInspire.com, and she’s also someone that we were hoping to have on the podcast in the future, but you definitely want to check out her stuff.

Just a really good day on Sunday.

Got to meet a lot of great people.

Well, the whole weekend we did. Got to meet a lot of great people, didn’t get to see close up all of the vending opportunities there all the booths and everything that were set up. But we did get to meet a few people.

We’re going to have some of those people on the show get to talk with them about their final experiences with The Mother Earth News Fair and kind of give a wrap up to this entire series.

Now, it doesn’t mean it ends a lot of our relationships with these people, we’re going to go beyond that.

And we’ll have them back on the show, or have them on the show for the first time, even though we met them there. But we’re really going to, we’re going to go in a little bit deeper and find out some more people’s perspectives on the Mother Earth News Fair, this particular one for 2019 from Albany, Oregon, and, you know, overall impressions for me was that it’s very well organized, very clean, very straightforward.

Once you’re there for a few hours, you get an idea of the layout, and the overall process of the whole thing.

And there’s lots of opportunity for people with businesses. If you have a personality business, it really works out great because you may be able to get one of the slots to speak somewhere.

You could promote a book, you could promote anything that you possibly selling would fit that crowd. And it’s very much a self reliance based crowd, a homesteading crowd, you got a whole lot of anything that’s even closely related to that was represented there at the Mother Earth News Fair.

I know there’s a couple of the sub niches that I know people in that have been at those events in the past and I’m hoping to see them back again in the future and really see it.

Some even more variety at the shows, but lots of fun our overall impression was it was I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope to be able to hit up some of the other ones.

Also, who knows maybe even take part in some of the opportunities myself that any overall impressions from the whole event, Sean?

Sean: Yeah, I mean, you pretty much summed it up pretty good right there.

Definitely would like to go back again and it would be awesome to go check out some of the ones that are beyond just Oregon. I know talking with some of the speakers there were different, this was set up a little bit different than some of the other different one.

It’d be interesting to see how the layout is different, especially I think it was in Pennsylvania, Andrew Perkins was talking about how that’s a whole nother type of feel, with that one that’s very unique from the other different ones, the other ones that they have.

So like definitely like to check that out one day totally plan on going back again next year.

It was amazing. The first day there’s so much to take in because it was the first time that we had gone there and to see how it all was and you’re processing that by the second day, okay, you kind of got an idea how the feel is and how things are going to go.

And so it was a little bit different and I’ll be very interested to see how the second time we go out there how that’ll go had a great time.

Everybody seemed like out there they were doing it’s just a really fun time, just like you, while the stuff we’ve heard and the episodes that we put together. It held to it.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: So we’ve got a few more episodes to go in our Mother Earth News Fair series. So be sure and listen to those and we will continue on we’ve got some great interviews already lined up after the series also stay tuned.

Thank you for joining us on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast. If there’s anything that you’d like to hear more about, please let us know if there’s anyone you’d like to be on the show please let us know and you have a great day.

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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Andy Brennan – Aaron Burr Cider

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Episode 011.

Do you truly love what you do as a business? Is your passion so clear to others that it’s undeniable?

Andy Brennan is truly passionate about his craft and trade. Andy is the founder and owner of Aaron Burr Cider and author of Uncultivated: Wild Apples, Real Cider, and the Complicated Art of Making a Living.

A life-long artist, Andy did not set out to be a wild apple cidermaker (though always intrigued by the fruit), a writer nor a speaker. His publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing, were able to seduce him to attend and speak at the Mother Earth News Fair being held in Albany, Oregon. Due to his interest in visiting Oregon, (he admits a desire to interview some Pacific coast trees) he unknowingly was set on a direct course to be interviewed by Brian J. Pombo for the Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

How does a struggling artist end up becoming an apple farmer? How does he stand out in the growing and crowded cider market?

The way Andy mixes his business with his philosophy, while continuing an uncompromising life is instructive and liberating to any searching or struggling entrepreneur. Listen now!

Find out more about Andy Brennan: http://aaronburrcider.com/

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

 

Full Transcript

Brian: Have you found any way around that yourself?

Andy: For sure. The best solution is always to build intimate relationships with customers which ask questions and you know, certainly large companies, they don’t have the time or the inclination to have one on one relationships with their customers.

Even though I said I’m an introvert, I can’t hide from the fact that bonding with my customers is the only thing that that’s going to save, I think people like me from actually becoming road kill to bigger, faster and cheaper.

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: A homestead farmer who began making cider in 2007 from wild apples. After rising to national prominence with his cider company, Aaron Burr Cider. He wrote a book Uncultivated, which just came out.

Andy Brennan, welcome to The Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andy: Thank you. It’s great to be talking to you, it’s an honor.

Brian: Yeah. So, who are you, and just let us know a little about what you do?

Andy: My name is Andy Brennan and I am a homestead farmer, Apple farmer and cider maker. The town of Wurtsboro, New York, which is 75 miles North and West of New York city.

It’s in the foothills, the first few mountains as you’re approaching the Catskill mountains and we’re very close to the Hudson Valley. But in terms of a cultural region, we’re more associated with the Catskills.

Brian: So how did you end up here? What’s your life story up to this point?

Andy: Well, I was an artist first. That’s what brought me to New York city from originally I’m from the Washington D C area. And after art school, I ended up in New York.

Like a lot of people ended up living on couches for 10 years, trying to be the, you know, famous artists or whatever.

Eventually I got jobs working in architecture that at least pays little or as the art wasn’t working out.

After finding a sort of a love for Apple trees, I then looked for land near New York City where I can, grow apples.

Brian: Very cool. So what form of art were you interested in?

Andy: Well, I’m a painter and ever since I was a kid, I excelled, I guess in art, but also perhaps at the expense of being extremely bad at all the other subjects. It was kind of the one field in which I showed any talent for.

I’ve always been encouraged, I suppose, on that level to draw and paint. That’s how I ended up in art school.

But, uh, I’d say I’m not, I’m currently innovative paint as an artist. I’m inspired by people like Sazon who just looked at his work and say it’s just about the act of seeing transcribing, um, that act of seen on a painting or on a canvas.

So it’s not, I guess you would say I am. I worked from life and it’s somewhat realistic.

Brian: Very cool. You’ve written a new book, like we mentioned the full title Uncultivated: wild apples, real cider and the complicated art of making a living. So tell us about that.

Andy: Uncultivated is my original title was a book in which I wanted to describe my, methodology as an Apple grower and why I feel like that’s important to cider making.

The subtitle is – wild apples, real cider, which is an ancient drink, to distinguish it from the modern sort of a hard cider that most people are familiar with and the complicated art of making a living.

It’s a reference to what it’s like to be an Apple grower and cider maker at a small homestead farm level.

I should mention that subtitle was proposed and we loved it by a man by the name of Ben Watson, who’s not just my editor. He’s also the publisher of one of the most popular cider books out there.

But he’s also the guy who organized the Cider Days, which is the nation’s largest cider event. I worked very close with him on the book and I owe him a great deal of gratitude because I’m not a writer, I’m a farmer.

Brian: So what led you to write the book in the first place?

Andy: Well, originally I wanted to explain sort of the 101’s to people. I get at the farmer’s market all the time, People asking like, how do you make cider?

Or what makes these apples different than conventional apples?

And I wanted to explain that or give it the full space to thrive. What makes it different and what is cider and all those things.

But, there’s another reason and I think this is really what I ultimately was fueled by when I wrote book. Well, I want to show people what to look at, what to see when they see cider, what types of businesses and farms are growing apples.

In keeping with the ancient tradition of cider and, a world that modernity has really overlooked. I find it stunningly beautiful.

The cider world, the Apple world, these old homestead farms. And I wanted to paint that picture for people so that they know what they’re looking at when they approach cider.

Brian: Excellent. So did you enjoy the process of writing a book and getting it published?

Andy: I really did. It was…I’ve been writing blog journals now for 10 years, which is just more like a diary that I would publish. And I think there’s like two readers. I’ve been doing that for a long time.

When approached by my editor about writing a book, my original thought was that I would take all these blog posts, many of which weren’t even published. They’re just on my computer and I would sort of create a narrative which tied them together.

But it morphed into something different as I was writing it and it was just absolutely obsessed writing for on average, 12 hours a day for every day, for, for a year.

Brian: Wow.

Andy: I never got tired. I woke up and I just couldn’t wait to get writing again. So yeah, I really enjoyed it.

I should also say the last year when I did write, it was an off year for Apple, so there was literally nothing to do on the farm, so I really lucked out that way.

Brian: Yeah, that’s useful. Do you see yourself writing another one in the future?

Andy: Maybe.

Right now I don’t. It feels good to be a done with that project and I’m just in love with being out in the orchard right now. The same sort of passion I had for writing last year is right now, it’s just applied to my orchard and not excited about making cider this fall.

I just want to spend every moment working with the trees. And, um, so that’s where my energy is now, although I do have ideas that are brewing so it might happen.

Brian: Yeah. You’re slated to present at the Mother Earth News. Fair. One of the main reasons how we found you. What are you planning to be covering? Especially in, I guess you’re going to be in Albany, Oregon, which is the one that I’m going to.

Andy: The thing I’m most known for is wild apples because it’s 75% of all the cider I make is from wild Apple.

So they’re not even on my farm. And I wanted to discuss wild apples and what makes them different, which is such an enormous topic.

Again, I kind of want to introduce people, wild apples to tell them about what makes them so special. So it’s going to hinge on that. And I’ll talk about what they mean to cider, what they mean to a homestead farmer, what they mean to businesses even.

Which are, like I said, it’s all that’s all tied to the book, but an introduction to wild apples and what makes them so important. Because they are to a human.

So that’s one topic and the other I’ve just been asked to do another talk the following day on cider, which really does need its own full focus.

The second day I’ll be talking about, making cider and the 101’s and the history of it and that stuff.

Brian: Have you been to any of these before? These Mother Earth News Fairs, and have you presented on them?

Andy: I’ve never been to the Mother Earth News Fairs. In the Northeast here we have these organizations called Maca and, and Nopa and these are statewide and Northeast organic conferences.

And there’s one in Maine called the Common Ground Fair, which is I think very, very similar to the Mother Earth News Fair, which is largely small scale farmers and homesteaders.

Involves everything from, you know, seminars on solar energy and siphon by hand. Same sort of demographic and these are my people.

We just don’t have a Mother Earth News Fair in our area.

I’ve been excited to be a part of it. And I’ve read that magazine since I was in my twenties, long ago.

So yeah, it’s right up my alley.

Brian: What do you hope people are going to get from watching your presentations?

Andy: I hope they’re inspired to make cider and, if not cider, wine or whatever fruit grows in their area. I really don’t want to live in a world where it’s just specialists to do one thing that’s part of living on a homestead farm.

You don’t just tap your maple trees or grow vegetables and sell eggs and have honey. You do all those things, rather than just one.

I’m hoping to inspire people to embrace what is, I guess, my specialty in cider.

I’m not fond of calling myself a cider maker.

That’s just one of many things that I do, but I want people to realize just how simple and natural it is and hopefully they’ll making it and become part of this, tradition themselves.

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: So why are you doing this? Why are you coming out to present?

You’re going all the way across country and everything else. What do you hope to get out of it personally?

Andy: Well, there’s a lot of reasons why I wanted to go to Oregon.

One is I have a great number of my cider customers are in Oregon and I think the demographic of that state is sympathetic to what it is I’m doing. So they’ve always been interested in my cider and sold around the state.

I have like minded people and so on the cider front, I’ve wanted to do that. And my publisher also, has asked me to promote the book and I….selling stuff is not my specialty and I feel it makes me nervous but I’ve agreed at least to do, four or five events to promote the book.

This is really an opportunity to accomplish many things or let’s use a phrase, to shoot you birds with one stone.

But this is more like five birds, a lot of things that are all coming together for this.

Brian: Very cool.

Are you going to have some time to check out the rest of Oregon while you’re out here?

Andy: Yes.

I have a couple of days. My distributor who’s a company I should mention as console on, they mostly distribute line, Ian is his name.

He’s lined up some accounts that I should visit and I think we’re going to do a couple of tastings at the swine or restaurants and he’s going to show me what I should be looking at and people were going to be able to try your cider, that are already out there now with that distributor.

And I’m toying with the idea of bringing some very, very odd ciders, although it’s going to be hard to bring them while traveling.

But yeah, they’ll be able to drink that at the fair.

Also there’s a couple of wines stores that are doing pourings where I’ll be talking as well. I know I’ll be in Portland, and a couple of other towns up there. I’m drawing a blank on where they are, but certainly the fair and then a couple of places around Portland and perhaps further.

If anyone listening is interested, my website probably says that, which is AaronBurrCider.com, and there’s an events page.

Brian: We’ll link to it in the description too. Tell us about that name Aaron Burr Cider, how’d you come up with that?

Andy: Do you know Aaron Burr?

Brian: Yeah, I’m a history buff so. Lol!

Andy: Oh wow. My wife and I are real history buffs too. And we moved to this farm, which was bought by William Brown and 1817.

The Browns had it in their family as the homestead farm for 150 years. As we were researching the deed, when we took it over, we were intrigued by the lawyer who wrote the deed and that was Aaron Burr.

And this was 1817.

And we we’re thinking, you know, could this be the actual, Aaron Burr, who shot Hamilton?

And sure enough, as we did the research, his political career was over at the time and he returned to law and that’s what he did for the next 30 years.

He, mostly sold property deeds. Back in 1817, there were huge properties that were getting divided and sold to homestead farmers. It was a lot of need for that type of a paternity.

Brian: Wow! That is…that’s quite a cool story to go along with the product. That’s great.

Andy: If I could also say we wanted a local name who represented the area, which we very much believed is the prime time or the peak of cider production, not just in America but in the world, which was just after the revolutionary war in the early 18 hundreds.

Cider production in America was just…..the only thing I could think of it as an analogy would be, like 15th century Florence, when there were artists in every loft.

I mean, every town had a cider maker and the Apple cultivation, was just at its peak then.

Brian: Have you got the travel module promoting the book you’re putting on presentations?

Have you got to travel a whole lot, I imagine Oregon’s probably the farthest you’ve traveled, right?

Andy: Yeah. Short of resisting traveling, promoting because after writing the book, like I mentioned, I’m really just in love with farming again and I want to get into the groove and give the trees the attention that they might not have had last year.

So I’ve been resisting it and I only have maybe four or five events lined up before the big harvest this September.

Brian: Well that’s great.

I think what you’re saying is pretty common, especially in this industry and in this niche. A lot of people, they have their own place and traveling is kind of outside of their realm, having to travel a whole lot, especially if they’re interested in what’s going on at home.

You have any logistical tips, anything that for people to keep in mind while they’re traveling, especially if they’re resistant to it?

Andy: I need a lot of alone time. That’s the plight of the introvert.

I just, I love engaging with people and telling people about wild apples and cider if they’re interested in that. And, I didn’t really love it, but my interaction with people…I’m sort of like a cell phone battery.

I go out and then after maybe about two hours or three hours, I just crash and I need to be alone and recharge.

So, you know, that I think is a textbook definition of an introvert and that I need that. And if I have that then, I like to travel.

I’m really excited to see just how apple’s also are adjusting to the soil out there compared to, you know, I know it’s a very different climate, but a different soil structure and I’m used to the Northeast apples so I want to interview some trees while I’m out there.

Brian: Yeah, I think that’s really good tip, especially for people who are more introverted to be able to have that set on their schedule ahead of time. So it’s not completely miserable the entire trip. I really appreciate your time with us.

Could you tell us if a listener is interested in finding out more about you, your book, about Aaron Burr Cider, where’s the best place for them to go?

Andy: Well, our home page, Aaron Burr Cider is really a directory to all the different projects, which includes the book and the cider.

I want to say that it’s not just us. I mean there’s so many other great cider producers out there and small farmers.

I was really, really lucky to have a lot of attention thrust on me, early on as cider was sort of taking off.

In some ways. It’s not fair.

My trees are my trees and somebody else has their trees and the way we all have a relationship to the land. And, I appreciate the focus and the interest from customers.

But, I would say any local, Apple farmer is deserving of that attention.

And, um, I think it’s a local drink.

I appreciate customers far and wide interested in our cider, but, ultimately I think it’s about people bonding to their region, their land.

So, I encourage people to really dig, because the small producers are out there. They just haven’t been as lucky as I am in terms of reaching the people.

Ultimately, I hope that’s what brings them back to apples.

Because you know, the nation, we were all Apple growers and we need to be, we need to be again, so many great lessons there.

Brian: Absolutely. And are you still doing your blog journal? Are you keeping up on that?

Andy: Yeah, I still do about a post every two months or so. And that was always my case.

I keep a lot to myself because I feel like sometimes I’m just a curmudgeon, just jaded and depressed by what’s happening in the modern world. And so I often, I’ll write something, I’ll give it about a week before and if I think there’s something positive, I’ll publish it. But a great number of my rants don’t go unpublished.

Brian: Can people reach that from the Aaron Burr Cider website?

Andy: That’s also linked to the website.

We have all these weird projects because like I mentioned, I’ve got an art background.

I have something known as The Aaron Burrlesque, which is supposed to be the antidote to Hamilton, the play, which any anti-federalist knows to be federalist propaganda.

So, The Aaron Burrlesque is the additional anecdote to…I think his name is Lin-Manuel Miranda, his famous Hamilton play.

That’s a photo series, that’s on the website.

The blog is attached to the website.

We have a whole line of underwear, which is a really long story. People wanted us to advertise our logo on shirts or something like that because we have a neat logo. Has the old gun, the duel gun. And I’m opposed to the sort of corporate advertisement in public.

So we came up with the underwear and I said, well, if you’re going to wear our logo, nobody’s going to be able to see it.

So we have that because they’re all just art projects, really.

Brian: It’s great that you allow yourself to be so expressive and to find new ways to be able to put things out there and just kind of follow passions the way you do, it’s really refreshing.

What makes wild apples and wild Apple cider, so uniquely different that comes straight from a domestic orchard?

Andy: This is a long story, but I’m going to try to say as fast and I’ll say with each sentence it can unfold into a huge topic on its own.

But my interest in wild apples as a farmer is that they exist unsprayed and apples are the most sprayed crop in America. And there one of the most in the world.

They’re extremely manipulated and they have to be because about 150 years ago, we’ve kind of stopped the evolution of the Apple.

Meanwhile, every other disease and insect has been keeping pace. And, now these trees are sitting ducks.

So that sort of describes your conventional orchard, um, monocrop environments, which is what is now a sitting duck for diseases and insects, which can destroy your crop and literally kill the tree.

A wild Apple is an Apple tree, which has figured out how to acclimate to the environment. And it’s a very diverse environment.

Here in the Northeast, they’re everywhere.

They’re along the roads and old pastures and they don’t get any of that attention and yet they still survive.

So that’s one way to describe a wild apple, but just even genetically, it’s very different than a farmed apple.

This is fascinating. And um, and every single Apple are five seeds in every single seed, it’s going to become genetically its own variety.

So whereas in your grocery store, you have five varieties that we all know, golden, delicious and red delicious and McIntosh apple. In every single Apple, are five new varieties that this world has never seen.

And then on just one tree alone, there is, on a good year, there might be a thousand Apples.

So that’s 5,000 varieties that this world has never seen.

And the point of that is to put as much heat out in the world and see what survives and what type of genetics are needed for that, for where that seed just happens to end up.

That’s not done on farms.

What happens on a farm is they fall in a particular variety, let’s say a Granny Smith and they’ll take a piece of wood from the original Granny Smith, which is a variety and they just graph that onto the root system of hundreds and thousands and now hundreds of thousands if not millions of trees.

So that what grows above that graft union is just one variety, Granny Smith. And every single wild apple tree, if it’s a from seed, it’s going to be its own variety.

Brian: Wow!

Andy: I should also mention that genetically they are infinitely more diverse than humans and humans have not cloned or at least to say that we’ve never had two humans exactly the same on the planet.

So I find that, alarming that something that as sophisticated as an apple tree is not able to given the green light to express itself genetically.

Nor is it allowed to defend itself or acclimate to various environments.

I’m telling you about apple trees and sadly as is true of pretty much everything, from farmed animals to farm crops. Apple trees are particularly diverse and I believe they might be the most genetically diverse plant in the plant kingdom.

Brian: That is really interesting. You know, I’ve heard it expressed on occasion some pieces of that, but I’ve never heard it said quite that way. That’s really interesting.

Is there anything else that you want to cover?

Andy: We’d like to say something about, I don’t know how to do this and even after writing the book, I still don’t know how to do this, how to really say what I find is important about running a business in the modern world because we have the economy is constantly going up.

Costs of living are constantly going up.

And as a business owner, usually it’s just assumed you’re going to be larger next year than you are this year.

But that doesn’t really apply to a farmer. You can’t enlarge your farm.

You have a relationship with the land and a limited amount of acreage or so or a limited amount of trees.

And there’s an economy to be worked out on every homestead farm on how to survive and how to maximize what you wait and get from your farm. But in the end, that’s not the larger economy just demand so much more.

So there’s a real disconnect between farming sustainably and that includes cider that includes, fur sure, apples and particularly the old versions…or I should say the real versions of the apple seedling tree.

All these things are in direct competition or I should say out there that they’re so easily or antiquated by a world where everything is a cheap and expanding and homogenizing and it’s really, we live in a world where efficiency is King and expansion is King.

Those are not applicable principles for what I feel like is real cider and real apple growing in the end.

Agriculture is about a relationship and I think that I tried to cover that in the book. I don’t know exactly how to do it, how to give that limited scale business, just deserts.

So what I did, at least in the book is I really tried to focus on the people and the culture around me in the farm and hopefully the reader empathizes and will understand just what’s at risk or what sort of just overrun by the modern expanding economy.

Brian: Do you have any clue as to what possible solutions might be to some of that? Have you found any way around that yourself?

Andy: For sure, the best solution is always to build intimate relationships with customers.

Which ask questions, and you know, certainly large companies, they don’t have the time or the inclination to have one-on-one relationships with their customers.

So yeah, even though I said, I’m an introvert, I can’t hide from the fact that that’s bonding with my customers is the only thing that that’s going to save, I think people like me from essentially becoming roadkill to a bigger and bigger and faster and cheaper.

Brian: Wow!

That is a very, very, very important point there that you just made. I hope everybody that’s listening catches that because it’s such a simple concept, but that one thing, like you said, it’s the thing that the big guys can’t do, even if they have an inclination too.

They’re not able to do what the smaller operation can do in terms of having that one-on-one relationship.

So that’s really important. That’s a really great point.

And your book plays into that too because you’re helping to educate and like you mentioned, kind of answer the questions that people already had about the process.

Have you found that to be true?

Have you gotten feedback as far as that from your customers or future customers?

Andy: Yeah, I can’t believe how much people seem to like the book.

You know, I’ve even been mistaken as a professional writer.

So yeah, I’ve been fortunate that way that I think the book was a success. And, every year I make cider and some years it’s fantastic.

But I don’t know how I did it and it just happened that way and I could never repeat it. And that’s really how writing the book was. I think it is good, but I have no idea how I could ever do it again.

Brian: Well that’s great. I mean, if you’ve been able to achieve that much with one book, that’s a huge deal that so many people go through their lives, including business owners and homesteaders that never get to do anything like that.

So that’s fabulous that you’ve been able to reach out like that and been able to make a difference.

Andy: I want to share that attention with all small apple farmers and cider makers and encourage everybody to dig deep and find those local resources.

Because like I said, I’m just one of literally thousands around the country.

Brian: Absolutely. Well, fabulous.

Hey, thanks so much for being on the show, Andy.

This is a lot to chew on and you’ve got so much information and such a depth of thought put into everything that you do that we’d love to have you on the show in the future sometime. And in the meantime, look forward to meeting you out at The Mother Earth News Fair In Albany Oregon.

Thanks again for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andy: Well thank you. Thank you for your podcast. I’m looking forward to meeting you.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Andy’s a really sweet, really smart guy. Lots of fun to talk to. A lot of this conversation went back in my mind to the importance of understanding your own nature.

If you happen to be a nonconformist, if you happen to be an introvert and allowing room to continue being who you are, just like he talked about, allowing time to just be alone while he’s out and traveling, it really comes down to know thyself.

I think it’s cool how he has this history, this background story to the name of his cider, Aaron Burr Cider.

It’s great to have those types of things. I know he didn’t do it on purpose, but the fact that it came about and he’s taken advantage of that, that shows a lot of ingenuity along with all the different ways that he’s able to be artistic and be himself and be able to express himself even in ironic ways when it came to putting his brand out there on underwear and everything else. It’s just very funny. Very cool.

Right toward the end, the point he made about relationships, about really having that one-on-one with your customers and how the larger corporations and brands, they can’t compete with that.

You could bring something completely different and be able to have that one on one relationship and be able to be an actual person to your customers.

Not just a personality, but be a real person, someone they can talk to on the phone or communicate via email.

I think that’s important and it ties in so great with his book because his book puts himself out there.

It’s him spending hours and hours and hours putting this book together. I mean that talk about blood, sweat and tears.

I can’t wait to get into that book.

It his passion for a worthwhile cause. He has this concept of the way that it was the way we should be paying attention to our agriculture and our plants.

It’s important to have that. It’s important to be able to voice that and have that be tied to your brand also so that people who either already have that cause in mind can be connected with you and your brand and also it brings other people who have liked your cider.

Now they can come in and learn this story.

That’s something they would not have known otherwise and you can bring new people into the cause. Overall, I expect really big things from Andy Brennan in the future and can’t wait to try his cider at The Mother Earth News Fair.

Outro: Join us again on the next off the grid is 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.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact. Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.

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.

Andrew Perkins – Mother Earth News Fair

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Andrew Perkins
Mother Earth News Fair

Episode 008.

How do you use events in your industry? Do you interact with your customers (and potential customers) in-person? Can they experience your products or services in the real-world before purchasing them?

Andrew Perkins is the Events & Business Development Director for Ogden Publications. They publish the legendary self-reliance periodical Mother Earth News. He is one of the main people behind developing the Mother Earth News Fair in 2010, which is a live representation of the magazine. They have grown out the Fairs to six annual shows, spread throughout the continental United States.

Though he started out in the field of journalism, Andrew found himself in the Ad Sales Department and eventually handling large-scale events. We are talking with him about that journey, and what people can expect to find at a Mother Earth News Fair.

Can you profit from using events in your business? You’ll be surprised to find out how, as well as other incredible tid-bits in this first episode of our mini-series about the Mother Earth News Fair of 2019. Listen now!

To find out more about the Mother Earth News Fair go to: http://motherearthnewsfair.com

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company:
http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcript

Brian: All right. This is the first in a full on series of episodes that we’re going to be doing here at the podcast, all about the Mother Earth News Fair’s.

So what are the mother earth news fairs?

This all stems back from the legendary magazine Mother Earth News. If you don’t know much about Mother Earth News, you should go and check it out if you go to their website and their about section.

Here’s a quick synopsis. They’re the most popular and long running sustainable lifestyle magazine. Mother earth News provides wide ranging expert editorial coverage of organic foods, country living, green transportation, renewable energy, natural health and green building, lively, insightful, and on the cutting edge.

Mother Earth News is the definitive read for the growing number of Americans who choose wisely and live well.

So the Mother Earth News Fair, is like a live presentation of this magazine and their snippet off motherearthnewsfair.com website says, the fair is your passport to money saving hacks, health boosting remedies and environmental strategies from leading experts and entrepreneurs around the country.

In addition to presentations and hands on workshops, you will encounter a vast marketplace of bounding with innovative resources and products to enrich your life.

We even host book signings featuring some of our favorite authors who are available to field questions and hear your stories one-on-one.

It’s also an ideal destination to meet and network with likeminded enthusiasts from across an array of fields from natural health and beauty to homesteading for profit and beyond. Admission for children is free and there are plenty of youth oriented activities including live animals.

With our growing emphasis on interactive programming. You can learn new skill sets live and onsite more than ever before that Mother Earth News Fair is truly an immersive experience where the magazine comes to life.

I think you’ll get a feel for what these things are all about. These original episodes all take place previous to the Mother Earth News Fair that is happening in Albany, Oregon, August 3rd and August 4th of 2019 we’ll also have episodes that take place at the fair and we’ll be talking with people after the fair who attended it and get to hear their perspectives on what went down.

So without further ado, first episode.

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: Andrew Perkins has been with Ogden Publications since 1999.

Starting as assistant editor, he moved over to ad sales when the company acquired Mother Earth News in 2001. He worked on a variety of special projects before launching the Mother Earth News Fair in 2010 since its inception, it has grown to six locations for fairs and are held every year across the United States.

Andrew Perkins, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andrew: Hey Brian, thanks for having me.

Brian: Yeah, why don’t you let us know a little bit about who you are and what you do for Ogden Publications.

Andrew: Well, sure. You summed it up pretty well there. So currently in my role, my title is the events and business development director and a large part of my intention currently in how we’re organized is on what we call our marketing side of our business and business development side of our business.

Currently, a lot of my time is developing and growing the events.

Our flagship events, as you mentioned, are the Mother Earth News Fairs. And through those flagship events that you also mentioned are held annually around the country in a variety of places.

We’ve developed, extension programs, breakout sessions both during the fairs and leading up to them and sometimes shortly after.

So that’s consuming a lot of my attention, we’re entering a phase where we’re actively looking for new locations that we’ve never been before. It’s a lot of logistics work that goes into that work.

We plan out, you know, a year or sometimes two in advance. And so that’s been consuming a lot of my time, but that’s okay because I’ve got a great team.

We have a fairly substantial ancillary product, merchandise business, you know, we source product and we manufacture products that are endemic to the interests of the folks that read our magazines and visit our websites, Mother Earth News being the large one.

So I oversee that, but we’ve got a great team that is working day in, day out on that initiative. But those are the two big main things.

Brian: Got it. So we got a little bit of your resume background and everything.

How did you end up at this point, personally?

How do you connect with all of this? How did you end up at Ogden Publications and so forth?

Andrew: Sure. So, you know, I grew up close to where we’re located, which is in Topeka, Kansas. And I started with Ogden publications fairly shortly out of college.

It was maybe less than a year out of college. And my background, my degree was in journalism with an emphasis in business that was in the late nineties. The job market was kind of tough.

I wanted to stay in the field of journalism at that time, it seemed like a good idea.

Ogden is one of the few innovating company when it comes to consumer publishing. And a job opened up as an assistant editor for a magazine here that we still produce called Grit.

At the time we only produced two magazines. The magazines had just been acquired by our current owners. So there was these two rural lifestyle magazines.

I think they just launched a third one. And so I came in as an editor, worked for years on the editorial side of our business. I mentioned to our publisher at the time that I was go getter. I’d like to experience other sides of the business and really learn as much as I can and absorb as much as I can about the business in our industry and a opportunity came up to move into ad sales and I thought, well boy that’s not quite what I was thinking.

I don’t know about sales, but then I meditated on it for a little bit and I thought, you know, if I’m really going to be serious about understanding comprehensively how this business works, I need to go outside of my comfort zone.

I got into ad sales shortly after that we launched, actually it was soon after that that we acquired Mother Earth News.

So I was around when we acquired that and my jump into ad sales stemmed from somebody who was currently selling for some other publications that we have moved over to work on the Mother Earth News project. And that’s when I kind of got called over from the editorial side and jumped into ad sales.

Soon after that we launched another publication and I was gratefully picked to be a team to help coordinate the launch of this other magazine.

It was a motorcycle enthusiasts magazine, which was a fun project for me. And when I was working for the motorcycle magazine in that launch, I started building up a fairly decent product portfolio that were endemic to classic and vintage motorcycle enthusiasts, apparel, books, things like that.

With the success of that, we all recognize a need to sort of build that up across the entire company. This is all goes along with the evolution of the publishing industry over the last 15 years.

You know what I mean? Publishers who are on their toes and not back on their heels are constantly innovating and trying to figure out ways to engage with their readers as the landscape changes and print as subscriptions decline and advertising conventional ad sales move from traditional print to digital, now to social media, publishers have need to reinvent themselves.

That’s the same for us. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be on the forefront of that. Of course the Genesis of that was what I was doing then.

It evolved into this idea of, hey, here’s our biggest title, Mother Earth News. Back in the 70’s Mother Earth News used to have a location in North Carolina where they were published, but a physical location where they developed an eco village. Where they invented and they built things and they tested ideas that authors wrote for articles.

They were doing things that were really engaging people beyond just words on paper. We kind of thought this was back in 2008, 2009 we thought, you know, maybe we don’t buy land and build out this permanent spread just yet. But what if we took the idea of what the eco village was, what the inspiration for that was.

And we developed an event where people can come and we’ve developed this tremendous community of folks that are specialists in these various areas that are covered in the magazine there.

They’re pretty renowned authors and well-known influencers. What if we create an environment where we can bring that community together, invite our readers and they can engage on a personal level.

That was an idea that was an approved idea and we launched the first one in 2010 since there, it’s just grown every year and it’s exciting thing to be a part of.

Brian: Where was that first one at?

Andrew: It was on a ski resort actually in Pennsylvania. It’s called Seven Springs Mountain Resort is about an hour Southeast.

Brian: Very cool. Who’s the ideal attendee for the Mother Earth News Fairs? Who’s just the perfect person that you think would get the most out of it?

Andrew: Well I like to say everyone of course, but for sure people who are interested and very passionate about being more self reliant for themselves, whether that’s growing their own food.

If you want to get into beekeeping or raising small heritage breed livestock, I think that if you’re that type of person, whether that’s on a hundred acres or a thousand acres even or if that’s on a half acre, I think that the Mother Earth News is the best event opportunity that you could possibly find in the country.

And I especially think that that’s important for young people. 20 somethings that are getting hip to things like charcuterie, food preservation, and all of these DIY things that grandma used to do back in the days or maybe even great grandma and we just don’t see anymore.

The industrial food environment that we’re in and they want to learn what it’s all about and what to do, they can get a taste of that at the fair, literally, figuratively.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. So what do you hope people are going to walk away with when they’re done at the fair, let’s say they went for one day or two, what do you hope they’re really going to walk away with?

Andrew: That’s a good question. I think the number one thing that I hope to see or that I wish to see is that people come in with a certain amount of hesitation, even anxiety about doing these things that they’ve always thought that they’ve wanted to do, but don’t know if they can invest the resources are at the time or they’re just scared to kind of jump off that tipping point.

The hope is that they come away realizing that it might be a little bit easier than they think.

It might be, quite a bit more economical that they think. And they have a few key pieces of advice and some resources hopefully, that they picked up from our bookstore that can get them on at least on the track that they want to be on.

So that’s the number one thing.

But lately we’ve really put a lot more into the hands on experience of being affairs.

This is something we started actually in Oregon two years ago, at the Oregon fair. We call it our hands on sessions.

So for years, up until a couple of years ago, really the programming was information-based only.

You came and you sat in a classroom setting, you listened to and will presentation and maybe watched a PowerPoint and you know, some of them are incredibly good and that information is incredibly valuable and they’re still popular and valuable, but we wanted to create an environment where people can actually get in and do some of these things.

When you say what do you want them to take away with them when they leave the fair, we actually do want them to take away cured meat, sauerkraut, a stitched leather bag that they just did from themselves, a home herbal remedy concoction that they learned how to make an a class. So real stuff.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. That’s great.

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: We have business owners and executives who listen because we look a lot at self-reliance style businesses on this podcast. What do you think from that perspective that they would be able to get from an event like this?

Andrew: Well, you know, we work very hard and we have all along on really getting in with our companies that get involved in our partners that get involved, making sure we understand what level of engagement that they’re track that they want to get out of these people.

If they recognize, and that’s sort of the entry point, they recognize that our constituency is one that they’re interested in engaging with.

Then the next step is to figure out what level are they excited about to engage with them at. That could be, you know, sort of a conventional participation. You have a booth, maybe you want to just get your name in front of them as much as possible. So the stage screens have the digital screens have the logos on there.

Maybe they want to curate an aspect of the programming.

We have great partner of ours that’s been a partner for years is the Livestock Conservancy. Their involvement is very important to us and I think important to them where they’re excited to engage with their members in these areas that we go to in the country by curating a stage of their breeders to come and talk about the challenges and the surprises and maybe even the basics of getting started with some of these breeds.

That’s an example of engagement that we can work with them on offering.

We’ve had tractor companies that come in and they’re like, we got to sell tractors and we found the way we sell tractors to get people on them and to get digging with them and going with them.

So we’ve put together field days that are adjacent to the fairs where people can come in and just test drive tractors all day, that kind of thing.

Those are just a few examples that we try to work with them after we’ve gotten an idea of what level they want to engage at.

Brian: Great. If someone’s interested in becoming, like you said, a curator, a sponsor and exhibitor, a speaker or contribute in any way to the fair, who should they get ahold of and how should they do it?

Andrew: The easiest way is to go to our website. We have a contact us form and that contact form includes specifically if they’re interested in getting information on either exhibiting or sponsoring and we’re certainly responsive within, 24 hours on those inquiries.

So that website’s, www.motherearthnewsfair.com.

Brian: Great, perfect. And then why are you doing it as a company? You know from your perspective, what’s Ogden Publications and Mother Earth News get out of putting on these events?

Andrew: A key point from a business standpoint, candidly is what I already sort of talked about it to be an OnPoint publisher in 2019, you really have to be out there knowing who your audience is, knowing what your niche is and then getting in there and really understanding how to engage them in the face of some of the challenges that the industry is facing.

One of the ways that we recognize that we need to do that from a business standpoint is to offer a real life, real time engagement.

Social media can’t take that away from us like they may have done with advertising and free blog websites maybe can’t take that away from us the way they may have traditional print subscription.

Nothing can replace that sort of face to face time.

That’s really important for us. Now, me personally, I couldn’t be more fulfilled in my career as it turns out than to go to these events year over year and see these people really see their lives change and it’s exciting for me because it’s also very apolitical.

I introduce myself as somebody who works with Mother Earth News and if they’ve not heard of it or if they’re not aware of it, you know there’s oftentimes the context that it’s sort of a hippie rag.

And then of course I know that a lot of the background is much more sort of on the liberal, libertarian side in terms of the political spectrum. But all in there are people who just want to learn how to do things for themselves and you see these people of different walks of lifes and different perspectives come together and just sort of sit in a room and make cheese and sauerkraut and all get along and it’s like, oh hey, we really have needed something like this. Through all the noise.

This is such a great experience. So it’s really fulfilling for me to see that and be involved in something like that versus other occupations that I might’ve gotten myself.

Brian: Absolutely. What’s left, I know you’ve put on quite a few of them already this year. We have Albany, Oregon coming up, which I’m going to be attending with my podcast producer Sean.

Are there any other Mother Earth News Fairs that people can plug into?

Andrew: Yeah, we’re halfway through the year, so we will have six this year. We’ve done the first three. Albany, Oregon’s the next one that’s coming up two weeks from today on August 2nd and 3rd, I believe.

Then in September we’ll be back at Seven Springs where the first Mother Earth News Fair was. I highly recommend of all the events, that one is unique because it’s held in a resort setting.

Everybody stays there, we hang out at night versus going back to the hotel or wherever. It’s truly special in that regard.

It’s also a two and a half day event and there’s a lot of extended programs outside of just the fair.

Then we’ll wrap up the year in October with our own hometown fair here. And you can find the specific dates on that on our website.

Brian: Great. And if listeners are interested in finding out more or purchase tickets, they can find them on your website at motherearthnewsfair.com.

Andrew: Yeah.

Brian: Fabulous. Well is there any questions I didn’t ask you that you’d like to answer Andrew?

Andrew: I always point out that the Mother Earth News Fairs are family oriented events. They’re very kid friendly.

We have a full slate of kids programming that happens. Kids typically love the animals. The breeds that we bring in and for that reason kids 17 or under are always free at all of our fairs.

So that can save quite a bit and make a difference when deciding whether or not to come.

Also, I should point out that we have a free newsletter.

It’s called Mother Earth News Live. You can sign up for it right on our website.

We kind of hit people up for it pretty square. So it’s not hard to miss and that’s a free newsletter.

We send it out weekly. It’s updates. It’s not just like updates and this is what’s happening. I mean there’s actual content, relevant stuff to what people might be doing, but it was also the best way to stay up to date on what we’re doing with the Mother Earth News Fairs and it’s also something that we use to give exclusive discounts too.

And so it’s the best way to save if you’re interested in that.

Brian: Awesome. That’s really great, Andrew, I really appreciate you giving us time. This is going to be the first in a series of episodes that we have where we’ll be interviewing other speakers and contributors to the Mother Earth News Fair and so can’t wait to find out more and I can’t wait to attend the one in Albany.

So appreciate you giving us your time, thanks for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Andrew: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Closing Thoughts With Brian: This is a great kickoff and intro to the Mother Earth News Fairs and to the idea of event marketing to begin with. When you hear this, don’t just think about the mother earth news fairs, just think about how you can use these things to be able to help your business.

A lot of these principles go across the board. Some of the stuff that Andrew mentioned, I’d like to point out real quick.

Number one is the reinvention of publishing. 20 years ago, paper and ink magazines were still very popular and still very, very big business.

Since the advent of the internet, it’s slowed down magazine growth, not because print is dead, but because print now has competition from online.

With that extra competition comes a reshuffling of all the power structures and it takes old publishers time to figure out the new paradigm.

Well, this new paradigm doesn’t need to be stuck in the ink on paper era. It can go beyond that and it has gone beyond that.

Like he mentioned, the Eco Village that Mother Earth News used to do. Already had a live place that people can go to and be able to get the three dimensional aspect of what they’re talking about in the magazine.

All they did was they took this and put it on the road, included a whole bunch more people.

So you have all these authors and experts and entrepreneurs that are working in this marketplace all coming together.

At one place, all different political persuasions and perspectives all mixing together in a giant melting pot. It’s a beautiful thing.

I can’t wait to go and it brings an aspect of reality.

There’s one thing to read about something. Even if you’re reading about it online, you can read about it, you can see the pictures of it.

There’s something completely different to getting your hands in it, to meeting the people that wrote the articles and so to get back to your business, how many senses are you activating in the person?

Let’s say you have a podcast, maybe you’re getting to them audibly. Maybe they’re able to see a blog posts so they can see pictures.

They can listen to you?

How else are you activating the other senses?

Do people have a chance to be able to meet you one on one?

Do people get to tour your facilities?

I’m just coming up with random ideas. How can you make this fit your business if you don’t put on an event?

Do you attend events?

Do you put yourself out there and make yourself real for your customer?

That’s the real question. There’s a reason why publications like Mother Earth News are going to survive and it’s because they’re thinking outside the box.

They’re not stuck in their medium. They’re willing to go beyond that.

They have a podcast, they have events like the Mother Earth News Fair and many other things that they’re doing to be able to get out there and reach the market and deliver the same product in a different way.

Social media can’t take that away from them.

They no longer have to worry about the competition from online marketing. They can be their own thing.

Andrew was basically referring to this engagement environment and you’ll hear that discussed over and over in the other conversations that we’ve already had.

You’ll be able to hear them as we broadcast them out there.

For example, Frank Hyman who wrote the book Hentopia, talks about how he has these workshops where he shows people how to build water systems for chickens and he brings people up on stage to actually try the process.

Deborah Niemann talks about it being Disneyworld for homesteaders.

This is an engaging environment. This is an experience, not just a display, to go look at how are you providing an experience for your customers.

And if you’re not, what ways can you come up with that experiential treatment?

We can go on and on and I’m sure we’ll have Andrew on in a further episode, but for now, make sure you subscribe to this podcast. Go to offthegridbiz.com and subscribe.

If you’re interested in learning more about events, go to BrianJPombo.com/secrets.

I’ll catch you in the next episode.

Outro: Join us again on the next off the grid is 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.

If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact.

Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor. 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.