Today I'm talking with Sean at Carlton Hill Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well. Sean's book - Exit Farming: Starving the Systems That Farm You   www.patreon.com/atinyhomestead Muck Boots  Calendars.Com If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee  https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00You'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 Sean at Carlton Hill Farm in North Carolina, is that right? West Virginia.  West Virginia. I'm in Minnesota. I am a Yankee. It is all the same to me. Sorry about that.  No problem at all.  Good morning, Sean. How are you?  I'm doing well. Good morning to you as well. How are you? 00:28I'm good. I'm going to start this off by saying I have a head cold. So if there's sniffles in the recording, it's me and I'm sorry.  How is the weather in uh West Virginia?  It's honestly pretty good. It was pretty dry and hot there for a while.  we last week, I think we got like an inch and a half of rain one day and weather's weather's starting to cool down in the mornings and everything. Everything's starting to feel like normal fall again. How's the weather up there? 00:54It's a little nippy. I think it's maybe 60 degrees and it's breezy and bright and sunny.  Oh, wow. Yeah, we've had a couple cool mornings dipped down into the high  30s. I actually had to start a fire the other morning. So it was it's it we've had some brisk ones, but overall, it's pretty nice. Yeah, even if I wanted to start a fire right now, I can't.  Our furnace is dead and we have a wood boiler, wood burning boiler  that hooks into our furnace with a blower. 01:23And so right now it's about 65 degrees in my house and probably will be for a couple more days, but then we're getting it fixed. Oh nice, well that's good. And just in time for the cool season.  Oh, of course, of course. That's what always happens. If the furnace is going to go out, it's going to be  in the fall.  And if the AC is going to go out, it's going to be in the spring. Yep, that's exactly right. 01:46Yeah, exactly. Because Murphy is an optimist and God love Murphy.  I have bad things to say about Murphy, so we're not going to go there.  All right. So  tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. Yeah. So ah I'm an author and farmer from West Virginia. I farm a one acre property with my wife.  We farm rabbits and chicken and chickens and quail. um Prior to that, I spent 12 years working for the federal government  and uh 02:14we bought this property, started farming on it to feed ourselves first and  then we sell anything that's left over to the community and then we also have some giving initiatives where we give back, whether it be farm products or uh pantry items uh to the people that need it most in our community. Fantastic. So are you strictly rabbit, chicken and quail or do you have a garden too? 02:41We do have a garden. So we  grow a lot of produce, we grow a lot of fruit. We use all of our rabbit manure as the only fertilizer for  all of our crops and everything. So the rabbit manure is kind of where life begins for everything. It feeds everything that feeds us, including the rabbits. And it's kind of a  closed system. But yeah, we also grow wildflowers and um any sales of  things like wildflowers. 03:07A portion of those proceeds go to purchase pantry items that stock are giving initiative, which is called Farm for Better. 03:15Awesome does farm for better have uh a website or a Facebook page or anything?  Yeah, so it's it's just part of our normal website, which is CarltonHillsFarm.com slash farm for better Okay, cool because I'm sure that people want to go check it out because they're gonna be like poor Where can I find stuff about that? um Okay, so tell me tell me how you got in this because I looked at your website a