Meet Jamie & Rex
Happy to make your acquaintance!
“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”
– Samwise Gamgee
We’re two millennials from the Deep South’s suburbia (Mississippi & Alabama) who decided to YOLO into gaining sovereignty and self-sufficiency on a small homestead in northwest Wyoming.
It can be difficult to know when to pull the trigger on buying land, animals, and tackling absolutely foreign challenges but we agree with Sam in that sometimes you just have to start.
We make mistakes, fix them, and learn from them how to improve going forward.
These are the lessons we want to share with you.
We have such grand goals and expectations for regenerating our land but we balance that with the knowledge of how much work it will take to get those accomplished. Baby steps and realistic expectations help keep us sane as we tackle all these new adventures.
We believe in…
- Sound money
- Strengthening community relationships
- Healthy land makes healthy and happy animals
- Healthy and happy animals make healthy food
- Healthy food makes healthy humans – food is medicine
- The right for each individual to choose his or her own destiny
- Regenerative agriculture and working in conjunction with nature
Our Homestead
We live on a lovely plot of land north of Powell, Wyoming at an elevation of 5054 ft. Wyoming overall is quite dry and Powell receives on average only 6.8 inches of precipitation and 11 inches of snowfall annually. The average high is 59 degrees and the average low is 30 degrees. Don’t let this fool you! We’ve had temperatures as low as -30 degrees (with wind chill it was -50!) and as high as 100 degrees.
We have a shorter growing season with our first average frost on September 15th and our last average frost date on May 26th.
There’s lots to fix and improve here on our homestead, but we are learning so much in the process. We also have amazing neighbors to boot!
Each of the animals we bring to our homestead serve a purpose from rodent management, livestock protection, fiber, milk, and meat production, and land management.
On the homestead, we have…
- Salmon Faverolle Chickens (our rooster’s name is Napoleon)
- One chicken lady of unknown age and origin – Boudica
- Mini fainting (myotonic) goats – Pender (buck) and Peaches (doe)
- One Nigerian Dwarf wether – Pesto
- The best rodent mitigators – Monty, Mr. Thumbs, and Dread
- Our Maremma Sheepdog (LGD) – Juno
Upcoming projects we’re tackling
If you have experience with any of these, shoot us an email!
- Rotational grazing with electric fencing and GPS collars
- Fiber production from sheep and alpacas
- Milking sheep
- At home butchering
- Meat rabbits
- Sprouting grains for winter fodder
- Raising mealworms
- Growing an orchard and windbreak
- Tanning hides
- Beekeeping