Today I'm talking with Jim at The Brickson Family Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jim at the Brickson Family Farm in Baudette, Minnesota, I think is how you say it. Good afternoon, Jim. Good afternoon. It is Baudette. Okay, cool. And you said it's right at the Canadian border?

00:27
Yeah, we're about three miles from the Canadian border. Actually, the town we live in is Pitt, but there's not too many people. The township isn't that big, so they attach us to Bidet. Oh, okay, yep, that makes sense. So you said it's terribly cold up there. It is, it comes with the territory, though. It's the price we pay for solitude, stay away from all the rat race of life sometimes.

00:51
Yes, I understand. We moved to outside of LaSore, Minnesota for exactly that reason because we lived in town, Jordan, Minnesota for 20 something years and we were done. So we moved out in the middle of soybean and cornfields and we love it. We've been here four years and it's so quiet. It's so wonderful. All right. So tell me all about yourself and what you do at your farm. Oh.

01:18
We do a lot of stuff. Right now we're trying to do not so much because it's been cold. But my wife and I are both Navy veterans and work for the Salvation Army after our Navy career for well, until retirement as pastors. So we went back to college at a late stage in our life, became ordained and we thought nothing better to do than start a farm when you're 60. So we bought this

01:46
little home set up here, 50 acres and a house and a few buildings and just kind of been feeling our way through and trying to find out what works for us and what doesn't work for us. And so right now what we're farming is Dexter beef cattle. We have a small herd of Jersey milk cows and I don't know, a couple pigs. I think the pigs are going to go this year. It's just too hard to maintain pigs in the wintertime.

02:15
So we're probably just going to do like a finishing operation. Same thing with chickens during the summer. Yeah, we stopped our chickens back a couple months ago because we didn't want to feed them through the winter because they don't give us a lot of eggs over the winter so they don't earn their keep very well. So I understand what you're saying. It's tough. And they're expensive to keep too. People, you know, they're easy to raise but the bird, I mean chicken feed is expensive and...

02:44
I think we were selling our eggs for like four bucks a dozen at the farmers market and people were kind of scoffing. I'm thinking, wow, that's cheaper than in the stores actually. But no, I think my wife said the other day, there's like 10 bucks a dozen because of this new H1N1 scare. So the price of eggs are going crazy up here. Yeah. My husband stopped at Hy-Vee on the way home yesterday and bought two 18-pack of eggs, two separate containers of 18 eggs.

03:11
and he said it was $9.99 for 18 eggs. Oh, I ate the most expensive egg salad sandwich of my life today for lunch. Right. Yeah. Well, she freeze dried quite a bit of eggs before before we downsize our chickens. Actually, it was the chickens we didn't really didn't really go until. Oh, November, I think was the last of our chickens left here. So we were collecting eggs up until that point.

03:38
Yeah, this inflation is no joke. I'm very worried about people who can't afford to eat right now. And there are people in the world who a year ago could afford to eat just fine. And I bet there's lots who cannot afford to eat right now. And it makes me really sad. We worked on this side of that for about 18 years, my wife and I, with the Salvation Army, trying to provide for those that can't or couldn't.

04:08
And we were surprised because the stereotype that comes with that is that they've always not been able to but I was so shocked as we're going through our time there the amount of new people that were coming because Because life has just gotten too expensive and how humbling that is to have to ask somebody to help them out Yeah. Yep. It's it's a rough time right now and I am

04:32
I am so glad that we moved when we did. We now have room to grow a garden. We canned tomatoes this year. So if nothing else, I will have spaghetti sauce and as long as I can afford pasta, we're good. But it's just crazy. Yeah, it rained up here so bad this year. We didn't really get much. Our garden really was kind of a fail. I don't think anybody's garden up here really did much because of the amount of moisture we had.

04:59
Let's just say if you live in Minnesota and you got a good return on your investment on your garden this past season, I'm real happy for you because ours did not do great. It was rough. But like I keep saying, we're into 2025. I have everything crossed that this will be a much better gardening season. I'm really hoping. So did you have background in...

05:26
farming or growing things before or was this a new thing for you? Well, kind of. We're from Mankato. My family and I, well, I grew up a little bit in Mankato and then in our younger years, we moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin and lived there. During the summers, I farmed with, there's always tobacco to be picked or corn to be detasseled. So I did a lot of that, a lot of milk cows during the summer times. So

05:52
That was about the extent of our farming or my farming. And I brought my wife here. I imported her from New York City. Oh, good job. She's from Manhattan. Yeah, we haven't been back in a long time. So she, the person I thought would be the hardest to fit into this lifestyle, she's grabbed onto it a lot harder than I have. Oh, awesome. She's done well, going from, you know, one of the largest cities in America

06:23
You know, what is, but at the whole county has 3000 people in the county, uh, Lake of the woods County. Um, and Pitt might have 20 people. I not maybe even not even that. In fact, they're the only county or the only, uh, you know, the only county in the state of Minnesota that does not have a stop and go light. Oh, really? Wow. Okay. So it's a little bitty town. Well, uh, the whole county is real small. Yeah. There's no.

06:51
There's no even, you know, the big attraction up here is walleyes. The Lake of the Woods is very touristy. And when the fishing is good, our population quadruples overnight. And then when the fishing is not so good, it's back to just us folks again. Yeah, it's actually really interesting to hear you say that because I grew up in Maine and Maine is a tourist state. And I feel like Minnesota has tourist counties, but Minnesota is not a tourist state. No.

07:20
So, but does your wife still have her accent from New York? No, she, uh, well, she does. If we go back to New York and she gets by her, her family and friends, she, it takes her about five minutes, but, uh, she sounds like she's from Minnesota. No, the extra O's and everything. Nice. I have tried really hard not to pick up any accent and dump every accent I ever had.

07:47
And it's worked. Everybody's like, where are you from? And I'm like, nowhere. I don't have any accent. It's gone. So, um, okay. So your dexter's are your your beef cattle. Is that right? Yeah, we do dexter beef. And we chose dexter beef because actually we got into beef before we were one of the lucky ones before the price of beef went through the roof. So we were able to

08:16
to start a small herd of beef cows and we went with dexters because we just plain couldn't afford to go the Angus route. The calves were way too expensive, maybe not so for the time. I mean they're a lot cheaper than they are now but we just didn't have that kind of money to invest into a herd so we bought a small herd of dexters and kind of based our herd on that.

08:46
So we've since bought a few more. I mean, we've bought a couple more. We're starting to look at registering our herd for nothing more than just the ability to be able to look back and find out what's working and what's not working. So and our milk cows, I mean, we just bought a milk cow. I swore after milking when I was a kid, I would never milk again ever in my life. And I'm really finding that being part of the

09:14
The nicest part of our farm right now is being able to milk. Yeah. Yeah. It's been, uh, it's a lot more calm if the, well, if the cows are behaving. So sometimes, sometimes the herd boss is not real happy and she makes everybody else not happy. Okay. And we chase them around a little bit. I mean, it's just, it's just a different life, I guess. But so that's probably pretty much our main thing. We do have some sheep too, but the sheep.

09:43
We bought the sheep to clean up the pasture. And now that that's done, we're probably going to move the sheep on too. But the farm we bought was deserted for 20-some years. There was nobody here. And so the pastures were all overgrown. The house was dilapidated. We had to do quite a bit of work. So we tried to see what worked and what didn't work. And

10:09
So far the beef cattle and the milk seem to be the thing to go do. Yeah, I'm surprised that your herd boss, as it were, is a pain in the butt, because I hear jerseys are actually...