Off-Grid Homesteading in Tennessee
In 2007, we bought 90 acres of abandoned coalmine property in rural TN. It looked pretty worthless, but we saw it's potential. In 2009 we built a small home, doing the work ourselves, and began our homestead. We brought chickens, ducks, turkeys, and a few goats with us, and quickly added our first 3 Scottish Highland cattle. Over the next few years, we continued to both expand the existing flocks and herds, and add new facets to the farm - geese, alpacas, bees, hoophouse for winter vegetables, gardens and more gardens, etc. In 2010, 2013 and 2016 we also added boys, the second actually born here on Solace Farm.
We currently have about 35 cattle, 50-100 goats, 10 alpacas, 20-50 sheep, 40+ ducks, a handful of chickens and turkeys, and 2 beehives.
We practice management-intensive grazing/mob-grazing with our livestock, and try to avoid chemical use on the farm whenever possible. This is both better for the animals and the land, which improves every year. We keep a second herd of my milk goats and sheep, and the mama alpacas during the summer, and our middle son has become our resident cheesemaker.
We are off-grid, with solar power, well and rainwater and wood heat (and no AC!). We try to avoid over-used catchwords like "green" and "eco-friendly" but the truth is, we are very concerned about the world we live in, and caring for it. We try to minimize our impact on our world (our boys have never seen a Walmart!) and this carries over to our products. I wrap most of my soap in simple brown paper, hand-cut from our duck-feed sacks, and the origami boxes for my little Tree of Life soaps are also hand-cut from feed-sack paper. All our packing materials are collected from local friends and businesses - we cut the large cardboard boxes down into smaller ones, so even the shipping boxes are often handmade :-) I may use plastic bubble wrap in your package (unless you request plastic-free packing) but rest assured it is 100% up-cycled re-used plastic! We also rely heavily on shredded paper we make ourselves, again from the paper feed sacks.
We try to use local ingredients if we don't make them ourselves - the honey in all the soaps is our own raw honey, but since we don't keep pigs I use local pastured non-GMO lard from a fellow small, sustainable, off-grid local farmer in my soap (and for all our cooking). Our 100% grass-fed grass-finished tallow also comes from the same farm, since we don't produce enough from our own herd to supply all my soaping needs, although I do render it all myself here.
I, Amy, make soaps and salves, spin wool, knit, milk and make cheese (and too many other things!) in my "spare time" between raising 3 boys and homeschooling the older 2, and farming, gardening, local farmers markets, and general homesteading. Caleb manages the livestock, the homestead at large, and increasingly the gardens and boys as my soap and fiber businesses grow. In the last few years, we've almost entirely transitioned to full-time farming (or technically soaping to support our farming habit!) - Caleb only works off-farm 2-4 days a month as a PA at an urgent care clinic.
Our motto here is "by hand" because we truly appreciate the "old-fashioned" abilities that seem to be fading from our collective memories, such as hand-milking, cheesemaking, butchering, tanning hides, canning and dehydrating produce, soapmaking, papermaking, spinning and knitting wool, cutting and splitting firewood, using handtools such as scythes, and many, many more. We enjoy sharing what we've learned with others who are looking for that knowledge and experience, so we host interns such as WWOOFers (WWOOF-USA.org) and college students year-round. We always take interested, hard-working, reliable help, so get in touch if that happens to be you :)
