 We had spent our last bit of money on some milk cows. The mistake I made is I had never milked a cow. And the cows I bought had never been milked and they were pregnant. So we're waiting every day. And I remember all of a sudden it just occurring to me this thousand pound animal probably doesn't want me, you know, yanking on its nipples to get milk out. My name is Jason Craig. Welcome back to the Till and Keep podcast. Today I'm going to interview a good friend of mine. His name is Jim Curley. And the tagline I like to introduce him with is I sold it all to buy a little farm with no debt. Good morning. Good morning. So we began this podcast talking with Connor Gallagher. He's a CEO of a big business. And the conversation we had was that a lot of men today, it's, you know, in our primordial, our original vocation that we work, right? And this podcast is not exclusively for men and fathers, but they were dealing with the fact of the economic arrangement for our life, the ordering of our life and the need for physical things, you know, the need for food, shelter, those things, you know, drives a lot of what we do. He brought up, you know, that the original meaning of the word economy means household management. Today, however, the economy and the household are practically totally severed. And he was making some really good points about the need for businessmen to be more intentional with using some of the skills they might have in business and bringing order to the home. Instead of just bringing, going out to a job, which makes money, bringing the money home to be consumed in the home. He said, you know, you need to come home with yourself and your own skills and do the work of bringing order to your household, even if your household doesn't have work. I was bringing up our answer to the problem of the severing of, you know, the quote unquote, economy from the household, but actually bring it back to its original meaning, bringing work back into the home. And our story was discovering that when I was studying for a master's degree in theology and I was working for an apostolate I still worked for called fraternice. Fraternice trains men to mentor boys. It provides an opportunity for men to be brothers amongst themselves and study the virtues, grow in virtue because we do that better in fraternity and brotherhood, but also with a very intentional eye towards the next generation. So it's a place for fathers and sons. And I was, as I was studying that for that and kind of had that work in my mind, it was the question was, why do we have to do this? Why is it so difficult for men and their sons and men and their families and fathers? What's going on? And I was drawn to the writings of Chesterton, Belock, McNabb, a lot of the guys known in the Catholic land movement that have known as the Catholic land movement in England that they saw industrialization as the problem. And in this podcast, we are not trying to defend the pros and cons of having more goods. I guess I think there are, that is an argument worth having. It's just not, you're the wrong person to argue with. We'll be two on the same page. But in that process of studying those things, I did come to the conclusion that a lot of the tension we find in our work, in our lives is that we're pulled away from each other because we have not really recovered from the reordering of society away from tradition, away from land, and away from working together in the home as an economic unit. So I, we didn't sell anything because we didn't have anything. I think we were in a foreclosure. Yeah, this was a while ago, but we did have a bit of a, we being my wife and I, we had two kids at the time and pregnant with a third. We jumped ship from the city and moved back to our home state of North Carolina. And we didn't buy a home state because we didn't have any money but we landed on a homestead that we were able to barter some work for and have free reign over like a hundred acres. It was a little bit absurd, which we didn't know how to use a hundred acres. So it was, it went from an apartment to a hundred acres. Wish I could go back now, know what to do now, but that was, that's how we started, you know, cutting our teeth. We actually used our last little bit of money that we had to buy some milk cows. And then we bought some pigs, we bought some pigs and realizing as they got older that they don't actually make themselves into bacon and sausage or some processing in the middle. And a friend of mine through church said, you should talk to Jim Curley. I'm pretty sure it was through our friend, Jim Dorcek that he said, yeah, and you came up and helped us kill our first pig. I think it was in July or August. We might be on some kind of anniversary right now. July 27th, 23, this might be our 11th anniversary of meeting. And it was the first time I had, you know, processed an animal with anybody and that was with you. And since then you have been a friend and a mentor, whether you like it or not or whether that's good. And we've kept in touch and we're not that far away from one another. But so what I want to do today though is that you're ahead of me in dealing with the question of how do we order our family in our present situation? And you live differently than even we do because while I maintain a full-time job, you, I get, was it 20 years ago? 19, almost 19 years ago, almost 19 years ago. We're gonna say 20, 20 sounds better. We're gonna say 20, roughly 20 years ago. Tell me how you got where you are and what you did. Yeah, so we, you know, Lori and I, even before we were married, we had this romantic notion that we were gonna, you know, live on a little farm and, you know, leisurely garden and, you know, have a couple animals and I'd shit quilt and I'd make wooden toys or something like that. So we had this idea in mind. Matter of fact, we had a chock full of nuts, coffee can with a written on a permanent marker, saving for a farm, right? But as we got closer, you know, as, you know, our life went on, we had kids, I'm working. That was always in the back of my mind, but now it became something different. Now it was, life seemed a little unnatural. Remember, you almost took the words right out of my mouth. It was like, the only thing that our household produces, I went away every day and produced money and then brought it home, we all consumed it, you know? And it just, it didn't seem natural. With the kids, let's say with the boys, we'd go backpacking several times a year and I could tell that they just, they wanted to be free to the outdoors and this was really the more natural life for them instead of, you know, living in the suburbs and in our little, you know, quarter acre fence yard where they were trying to always dig the China or something like that. It just, and the time I spent with them, I wasn't working with, I mean, the close I came in working with them was, you know, on backpacking trips and it was a totally different experience. Like, this is, this environment should be the way it is all the time. And so at some, you know, and we were, I was reading Chester D'embele, Bob McNabb, you know, I was John Seymour, the Nearing's who wrote The Good Life. I mean, so I was reading all this stuff for different reasons. And so when the opportunity arose, which was we had been saving money, we were, you know, getting out of debt and then my company laid me off. It was great. My boss was sorrowful. I'm like, yes, this is what I've been waiting for because we're in a pretty good economic situation. So you were delaying it. You had the idea, but you were delaying it because you kind of had a sweet gig, is that what you mean? Yeah, I mean, I had a good job. I felt it might be irresponsible. Here's this gift I've been given. Good job, good salary, good boss. I wasn't really happy about, you know, it's really going to work every day. I wasn't that interested in it. But it's like, how could I, you know, seem like this was a gift I was given. I couldn't just throw it away on this whim. You know, for several years, Larry and I have been praying about guiding this direction and opportunity and then finally the opportunity came. And it was actually at the right point. You know, if it had happened a year before, it might have been said, you know, we can't, we'll have to put this off again. I gotta get another job. We're not out of debt yet. We're not, you know, so the only debt we had left was our mortgage, which was, which we had a good payment down on. And then we sold the house, bought something cheaper and had a little, little nest egg to say, this will keep us going the first year. So you sold your home, you were able to pay off your mortgage and have a little and purchase a homestead, which I finally visited this year. And that's the one you're on now, right? So you bought, you bought a whopping 1.9 acres in an old farmhouse in Bethune, South Carolina. And so you, the reason I'm asking about this is it seems, I see a lot of people moving towards the homestead and almost shooting themselves in the foot. And I mean, perhaps I'm in this category in some ways, not when we first started maybe now. Where they sort of continue the model of financing and debt and everything just farther out, trying to keep it, where they just kind of tack on homesteading as another to do and that requires money really. I mean, so there's people that find themselves actually the homestead becoming just another expense. Your, the way you did it is actually different. You shifted to a totally different way of life to I think probably the first, not having a mortgage and then having a piece of land that you intended to make fruitful. You had that in mind, you knew to do this we needed to be out of debt or what was your, or that would just, I mean, no one loves debt, but... Well, we knew, well, yeah, first of all, I knew that being totally out of debt would make us much freer. I had actually learned the lesson of debt from a friend of mine in the city who had 11 kids and was a manual laborer. And that's another story, but he sort of taught me about debt and freedom and in that sense, but yeah, no, I knew what we were doing was a risk. I wanted to make sure that we always had a roof over our head. And I figured in South Carolina, the primary taxes on this place were only a couple of hundred bucks a year. And I figured I can come up with that. So we were always going to have a roof. So it was really important that we went there debt-free so that we could try to live the life we wanted to live. You know, yes, we still need cash. And I've always had some kind of part-time job while we've been out here, but it's a part-time job that has always allowed me to, you know, it's part-time. In other words, so I'm out there doing the chores, feeding the animals, killing the animals with the other family members. So it's, so we have cash, but the idea was we want to be as debt-free so that we can actually live the life and not sort of pretend as a life, you know? That we could actually- I mean, if you're thinking about it on a spectrum from between the suburb and the homestead, what a lot of people like myself are doing is supplementing their home with their homesteading, meaning most, they're still predominantly, you know, run by the money that they make and the expenses of the household that they pay for with that job. You're actually kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, meaning your money is but a supplement to the rest of it because your general needs and time is spent on the farm. And I think the observation, you know, in different stages in our homesteading and in ordering of our home at different times, knowing that to do that probably does require that sort of financial situation that capable of being, so, you know, someone who's in a whole bunch of student loan debt or something just probably can't do it and to romance about it too much might be abstraction. But you were able, so you're supplementing your natural economy, which you're growing food and doing work with the, you know, the money economy, the artificial economy. Because we're kind of doing the opposite. Now, we have milk cows, so it's not a petting zoo, it's real work, you know, but that's the, you know, we have milk cows and pigs. You have done primarily pigs, right? I mean, that's, and that's how we met. Yeah, no pigs, Chase, we had, I'm trying to think, when we met, we definitely had milk cows then. Yeah, you were milking a Daisy or? Mabel. Mabel, now Daisy's the last name, Mabel. The Brown Swiss, right? Brown Swiss. Actually, the Brown Swiss was Dolly, so we probably had her too. We probably had both of those at that point. And up until a few years ago, we always had a milk cow. But yeah, that's. Yeah, I mean, you tell me, if you have a milk cow, you've, I don't know, crossed some sort of line into craziness or in a good way. Well, you know, it does, you know, it does give you this stability of place or prison fence, whichever way you wanna, you know, look at it, I mean, you have to be there. And I know that you all just went to milking once a day, which gives you more time. In some sense, it could give you more freedom depending on what you're doing. We never took that step, but, you know, we could have, but it is, I mean, you have to be there once a day, every day, and maybe twice a day, every day, and you can't miss. I mean, you do harm to the cow if you miss, so. Yeah, so those leave you, I don't know. If you're listening, you're not familiar with milk cows, you have to milk them. That's just, there's no option. So when a berry says having a milk cow gets you out of all sorts of things you don't wanna go to. But we have, we moved to once a day because it's about 30% less milk, but 50% less work. Our idea was that would give us time to have a better garden in the evening. And I'll just say it was a great idea. But you, in that time though, you, all right, you sold the farm and then you've, I think pigs has been your, I mean, that's like, I don't know, that's what you're known for, that's what you. Yeah, I mean, we were, we were, you know, we'd get a steer, actually not a steer, we'd get a bowl every couple of years to impregnate our cow and then we'd have beef. But generally chicken and pork was what we ate for meat. And so with seven kids here, we, you know, we were killing, you know, a large hog every four to six weeks, year round. So we got about pretty proficient at it. At least my kids did, you know, so. I don't know when this occurred. It seems to be after when we moved to homesteading, but I know that a lot of people learn a lot these days from YouTube on how to do these things. I have somewhat mixed feelings about it, but instead of, I don't know, criticizing that as a model, I'll just say, we did, you and I didn't learn that way. And I think actually, maybe even my way is better because I got to go to putt on your experience, meaning I had people, you were teaching me and then my friend Clifford, you know, I had these, it was interesting to men who just did their pigs differently. But that's where I learned from, and you didn't have YouTube, certainly. And, but tell me about the first time you did a pig. And if you don't mind, because I have some insight or knowledge here, make sure you arrive at the describing yourself, looking over a book and then figuring out where the tenderloin is. Yeah, no. So how did you guys figure it out as my question? Yeah, no, we had, so I consulted a bunch of books on slaughtering or especially on pigs. And the best book we actually found, we actually found it in the Richardson County Library, it was, can't remember the name, I remember the author's, Gita Dardic, it was written probably in the early 70s. And, you know, we had this book out during the whole process, you know, we're, it was a July, a very hot June or July day. I mean, it was like 98 degrees or something like that. And, you know, we have the book out, if you go to the Richardson County Library now, you find that book, there are stains in it from our first experience. We're gonna need a listener to verify that it's Richardson County, South Carolina. We actually, I have, I actually found a copy of the book eventually and have my own copy now. But it is actually the best guide for all. I mean, it's a small game all up to cows and steers. But, so we did that and we are, we started something like four o'clock in the afternoon, it was hot. I mean, the boys had built this eight by eight shed and I had this bathtub in it with these big blocks, you know, 300 pound blocks of ice. And there was an air conditioner in there that we had run a wire to try to keep it warm because we killed it. And then we brought it to the shed, hung it up to, you know, eviscerated inside. There's three of us in there doing it and we couldn't keep the shed cooler than like 78 degrees even at 10 o'clock at night. And with the ice there, with the air conditioning there and I know one of my cohorts. So we had gone in and bought three little pigs together. The other two guys lived in Columbia and we just shared the cost of the feed and then we came to processing time they came out. And this was the first one. And one of my friends cut himself and went in. The other one decided that he was gonna save the head to make head cheese. So he took the head and went in and I'm in there. It's 11 o'clock at night. We've been at this since four in the afternoon. We had no idea what we were doing and we're, and I'm practically, I'm not gonna say I was in tears but I felt like I should be in tears saying, what have I done? And I have two more of these to do, you know, in the upcoming weeks. But, you know, we finally got him done in on ice and went in, had a great, you know, great time retelling the stories of the day. Next day we're butchering it and we were pulling the parts out and wrapping them. I pulled this part and said, okay, here's the tenderloin. We wrap it and then we get deeper into the pig. And I'm like, oh, this is the tenderloin. What was the thing we wrapped? And it turns out it was the kidneys. We wrapped the kidneys as tenderloins. So, Yeah, so I've heard the story because you and I, Jim, the listener is, Jim helps us on our farm, which we call St. Joseph's Farm. They're calling it St. Joseph's Farms now. There's other people joining around and I'm trying to get Jim there. This really my life goal at this point to get Jim as a neighbor. But we do weekends with fathers and sons or sometimes workshops just with guys wanting to learn about pigs. But with fathers and sons that maybe, you know, live in a city or a suburb and they want that experience and we kill a pig together. We spend the whole weekend basically around this pig. I mean, we do it on Friday, we cool it overnight and then we butcher in the morning and we start cooking and we split the wood to cook half of it and usually butcher the other half. If there's something amazing, I like to say, it doesn't matter if the father shows up with the son, he can be a chattacus of totem, nerd or a nihilistic, rebellious, public school kid, whatever, you put a bullet in a pig's forehead and everything changes. It creates a series of events. This is what Craig Tafaro, our new neighbor who's a butcher, he says, you know, when I kill a cow, I can't believe the series of events that are now demanded that I'm not getting out of us, that we're gonna have to now bring this. So Jim and I do these weekends as this sort of act of very natural culture. So this is what humans do, you know, your food doesn't just, well, it takes work, but doing the work, of course it's less perhaps efficient than just going to buy it at the store, but actually doing that work together has been, I cherish that time, I mean, us doing that. I guess that's what we've done. Most of the hours we've been together, we have either, I don't know, maybe a little bit of drink and beer beforehand, but then kill the pig together. But I think actually that experience you described, if you don't have that of, how did I get into this spot? I'm not gonna make it. And you have to come to that when you're on the homestead. Those moments of, I can't believe this is not this, oh, it's the simple life and it's idyllic and it's really hard. Ours came, I remember that moment, I mentioned we had spent our last bit of money on some milk cows. The mistake I made is I had never milked a cow and the cows I bought had never been milked and they were pregnant. So we're waiting every day. And I remember all of a sudden it just occurring to me, this 1,000 pound animal probably doesn't want me yanking on its nipples to get milk out. And sure enough, my wife and I, we went in, we had trained her in a stanchion and I had a jar of iodine to clean it off and I reached forward to put the iodine to clean the teet off and she kicked it and iodine is red. So it just looks like blood splattering all over this barn and it wasn't even a barn. We had screwed some boards onto like an open shelter and I kept trying to go to milk this cow and she had just had a calf where the calf's hollering. Of course it's gotta be summertime. There's manure, there's flies, I'm sweating. My wife is there with a baby on her back strapped to her back. I think it was Peter strapped to her back on some kind of baby carrier or something. I remember saying to her, I don't think we can do this. Like having this moment of doubt, I'm kind of embarrassed I said it out loud but I just remember one of the guys I emailed when I was still in the city, hey, I want to be a homesteader. And he said, they said, you can't do it. You don't even know what it's like to have a cow with mastitis kicking at you or something. That he was very, and here I am in this moment of, maybe he's right, but my wife being there with the family, needing the milk, we had spent our money. We needed this milk to eat. It wasn't, I don't know, this wasn't an add-on. This was a necessity. And then my wife, she says, if this was one of the kids, you wouldn't let them get away with kicking you. We've got to get through this. And see, there's a little trick. You can hold the tail up, anyone in the back. And so she's back there holding the tail up in the air. While the cow is, we call it anger pooping, I don't know if the listeners don't know. Cow can actually pass, sort of express its displeasure with you by expelling manure that's not quite digested yet. So it's even worse. So she's back, it's coming towards her. I'm on my hands and knees on the milking of this cow one hand at a time, and we made it through. But it was, I think that was our moment. I don't know, that was your moment of like, what have I done? Yeah, no, I mean, there's, I can think of several, and one of our moments like that had to do with milking too. And when it's not just a hobby, that you can take up or give up, but you need it, there is, and you come to that point where, as you said, I don't think I can do this, but you have to do it and you keep going. There was a moment, we were putting in a wood stove and... Yeah, I see it behind you. I was gonna wonder if you could tell that story because there it is behind you. No, and I was actually talking about this with my son Connor the other day. So the chimney had three flues in the bottom. And so we wanted to put the wood stove in, we had to knock out the flues to get the stove pipe through the chimney. And the only way to knock them out was to lower someone into the chimney with this huge crowbar and they would bang it and just knock the bricks out. And I didn't even know all the details of the cell sign with my son the other day. Basically, they hooked Connor up to a come along, Nicholas and Matty did and lowered him in. That way they could crank him out if he got stuck. And at some point, and I'm on the inside, I'm assembling the wood stove from down here and doing the stove pipe here. And I'm talking to Connor, he says, we can't do it. You're talking to Connor through the wall? Yes, I'm standing where the wood stove is and he's in the chimney there, just above me. And he's telling me, we've been at this all day and we're not making much progress, it can't be done. And I said, well, Connor, this is gonna be our only source of heat. It has to be done. And I'm sorry, I can't fit in the chimney to help you. You guys have to do it and it has to be done. And they did it. But it was, and I'm thinking, I hope we can do it because otherwise I'm gonna have to be in the chimney because we did have to do it. I mean, this was gonna be, this was our heat. So it was that moment when we got Dolly, I'm milking her and she's kicking like crazy and Matthew's there and says, Dad, let's do this later. And I'm like, we can't do it later. You know, I'm scared. He says, I'm scared. He says, I'm scared too, because she was going nuts. And it was just like, there are these times that especially if you are depending on it, you don't have a choice. Or your other choice is, I think I'll abandon my family so they won't know, you know? So they won't know why I'm leaving. To, I mean, to go back opening about your story of, the reality of debt and trying to homestead, just the economic reality that we face if we're wanting to live a different kind of life, you've chosen one that has allowed you to work with your family to do these things. But it just comes with, it's a whole different ordering of things where you can't escape reality. I think, I mean, that's what, I mean, that's what debt is. I'm buying something I can't afford very often or something perhaps I shouldn't afford. Now the other side of that, most of us dads and families, the debt we take on is actually to usually justifiable in some way, because we're trying to, you know, provide a home for our family or whatever. And maybe we have a senses of luxury and superfluous goods that we don't actually need. But I think, you know, most of them are actually doing that for, you know, or noble reasons than just consumerism. But till you're really having to work directly for those goods, there are, I guess realities, lessons of formation of character that doesn't happen. Or at least, you know, in the last episode Connor was talking about just, he's a good businessman. He's able to like come in and make decisions and see problems and fix them and create systems. But I don't think I'm inclined that way naturally. It takes a lot of effort out of me, but I can, I like working with my sons and I like working with my children, I like working with my wife. And I think the home set for us is provided a, you know, the place where that happens without intentionality. So if you're trying to come up with an exercise, a trust fall-like exercise of how to get your son to have good grit and character, probably wouldn't be lowering him down to chimney with his brother's in a, but you needed to heat the house. Yeah. I mean, it has been a pleasure to work on a daily basis with a family. You learn a lot about each other, you know? I mean, for, you know, dad comes in, throws money on the table and, you know, we party, but we don't know, my kids don't know how I earn that money or what I have to do. And they don't know very much about themselves because they're just spending it. I was, I was talking to one of my sons this past week, but, you know, when the, when each of the boys went off to college, by that time, when we were doing projects together, we were working like as equals. Sometimes it took me a little letting go saying, you know, Thomas, you were in charge of this, I'm just your helper, you tell me what to do because I didn't have time to plan the project. And so he's in charge. And, you know, somewhat little letting go because I'm used to giving the orders, but now, but he is, but by the time they went off, they were, you know, I was working with them as equals, you know, building fences, building chicken coups, building, you know, this shed or that shed. And it, and I knew who they were and they knew who they were, you know, and we sort of sort of knew our place because they had been tested. They've been tested, tried and, you know, sometimes succeed, sometimes fail, but they, you know, they knew who they were. So, yeah. And you had all that experience together. Yeah, I mean, and that is, that's what most people are trying to do. I mean, when they try to go to the homestead, from the, when families have their, or like to call, have their agrarian moments, like, should we do this? The reason, what they really want is to find each other and find God. I mean, that's what they're after. Jim, we've gone through 30 minutes really fast. Do you mind, we're gonna have to have you back on because I happen to know all of your stories and I'm looking forward to teasing them out of you. So thank you so much for being on it, on the Till and Keep podcast. I appreciate your time. Okay, well, thanks for having me. Good to see you. This episode of Till and Keep has been brought to you by Tan, Fraternus, and Sword and Spade. Till and Keep is a podcast that shows how the primordial command from God to Adam to Till and Keep the garden applies whether you toil on a farm or in a concrete jungle. Visit tillandkeeppodcast.com to subscribe and follow the show and use coupon code Till25 to get 25% off your next order at tanbooks.com.