Today I'm talking with Emily and Nathan at Small Scale Rebellion. You can also follow on Facebook.

If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment.

Or just buy me a coffee

00:00
If you're a homesteader who wants to get paid for your content without living on social media, check out SteelSpoonFarm.com. Founder Jen Kibler teaches you how to build a real blog or your email list and use Pinterest for sustainable marketing. Inside her coaching group, Content Seeds Collective, you'll get weekly live coaching, a private community, and access to her Root Seller Resource Library full of tutorials and templates. Join today for just $37 a month and start building a business that doesn't depend on the algorithm.

00:26
A Tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Seals Spoon Farm. You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Today I'm talking with Nathan and Emily at Small Scale Rebellion in Canada, and Emily told me, where in Canada? Where in Canada are you, Emily? We're in the West Kootenays of BC. Okay, thank you. Welcome, you guys. Good afternoon. How are you?

00:56
We're good. Thanks for having us. Thank you. I always start every podcast with how's the weather? How's the weather where you are? That's a little gloomy. Yeah, we're over winter. It's just dragging on. But the words are coming back and you can kind of tell that spring is just around the corner. So it's like the final stretch. Yeah, I stepped out on my porch about two hours ago, maybe three hours ago now.

01:25
and I could hear birds singing and I was like, oh, the blackbirds are back. have a, um there's a word. Can't think of it. We're in a flight pattern for these blackbirds. They come back every spring. Migration pattern. There we go. And this is the earliest they've come through in the five years that we've been here. So I think we're looking at an early spring. Yeah, for sure. It was like a really mild winter, all things considered here.

01:55
So we are looking forward to hopefully an early spring, but also a moderate fire season because normally if the snowpack isn't very good in the winter here, we have like horrible fires. So fingers crossed that doesn't happen. I'll cross everything I have for you because wildfires are a terrible thing. And that does not mean that burns are a terrible thing.

02:22
Burns are important for agriculture and for growing things, but they need to be not taking down structures that people live in or killing people. So that's my caveat there. All right. So I was very excited to stumble across you guys on Instagram. Tell me about yourselves and what you do at Small Scale Rebellion. So we're farmers first and foremost. um Our farm is called Confluence Farms.

02:49
And we started Small Scale Rebellion as a way to teach other farmers how to have profitable farm hubs. a farm hub is composed of four components. It's online ordering, a, help me out here. Home delivery, a collaborative.

03:13
a full diet offering. we do local food aggregation. So we've become like a one-stop shop for all things local. And then we also do free choice ordering exclusively. And so people can order what they want, when they want. And then we even have like a credit-based CSA. So people buy credits to our store. And then that way we get money upfront, very similar to a CSA, except you don't have to commit to like a weekly CSA box for 20 weeks. You can just pay us. uh

03:43
for credits and then use them whenever you like. And what we discovered is that when you make eating local easier, a lot more people will start doing it. Yes, because humans love convenience. And instead of fighting that, I think it's important to, you know, just embrace it because if you don't, it's really hard to make it as a farmer. Oh.

04:11
Absolutely. And what you're doing is amazing. So what made you decide to do this?

04:19
Um, well, it kind of happened by accident. We actually started, um, we had this kind of goal of just growing all of our own food for a year. And when you start growing food, you always end up having too much food. And so you end up giving it away to friends and neighbors. And we were doing that for a few years and then COVID happened and we didn't really have, uh,

04:48
That kind of affected our income. And we were getting ready to grow like a half acre worth of food, which thinking back now for two people is like an insane amount of food. Like it shouldn't have been growing that much, but we, didn't know what we were doing. We're just like, Oh, let's just grow a little bit of everything. And then COVID happened. And then we were kind of locked inside and thinking of ways to make money and we were already growing food. So we're like, Oh, why don't we just start selling the food that we grow? And so we decided to grow even more food. And then.

05:18
because of lockdowns, like, well, what if we do like online ordering and home delivery? And so we started doing that and then that started taking off. And then we had an opportunity to move to the Kootenays where we are now and start a farm on an elderly couple's homestead who were looking for farmers to come in and kind of take over the farm and to help them with the property. So, and moving here was like our ultimate dream. Like our ultimate dream was to start a farm in the Kootenays.

05:45
And then we just kind of stumbled our way into it. And then, yeah, it's just been kind of growing ever since. we've been refining the model and making it better. And now it's at the point where it can support the two of us full time, full year round with just a half acre and the two of us. no, employees or volunteers. Wow. That's, that's amazing. Okay. I have two questions. First one is what, what are the Kootenays? Is it mountains?

06:13
Very mountainous. Yeah, it's like rural, very rural BC. We're in the boreal forest. So it's like green mountains in every direction, lots of rivers, huge freshwater lakes. It's a really, really beautiful and popular area. There's a lot of actually Americans that live here too. It's like an international kind of hub because there's lots of snowboarding and things like that here too. So there's like Australians and New Zealanders and Americans.

06:42
people from all over the place kind of in this one little unique area. Okay, thank you. Cause I didn't know what they were and that helps. Um, and then if you are growing more than a half an acre of food, you must have equipment. You must at least have like a bobcat tractor or something. No. we're doing a half acre like exactly. And it's all by hand.

07:10
That's one of the really like when we started our farm, we had no money like negative amounts of money and we've just been very scrappy at um Making it work and We don't have like a walk-behind tractor. We don't have anything with an engine except for our Delivery vehicle, so it's all no till um regenerative ag

07:38
And we have permanent beds and you know, we just make it work. Um, and you know, we would have, if we had money in the pat, in like the first couple of years, we definitely would have bought a lot more tools, but not having the money made us half to get creative. so we like borrowed tools, we got tool donations. Um, we traded neighbors for different services, like tilling.

08:06
And we just kept everything super duper lean because we don't own our land and we've had to move our farm three times, four times in the past five years. we just, you know, having a bunch of equipment wasn't an option. And it actually turned out to be good because like, what we realized is that you don't actually need to spend a whole lot of money to farm.

08:36
You just need like really good systems. And then if you do like things like local food aggregation, you can get your sales up by collaborating rather than trying to grow everything yourself. oh So it was a very int...