E33: Creating a Legacy Through Your Homestead | Jack & Kim Fuhrmann of Our Father’s Farm

You are going to love hearing the Fuhrmanns inspiring homestead story in this episode! They share about the health scare that led them to the homesteading life, how their homestead has become a blessing to their community, what it’s like to raise and homeschool nine children, and what has led their children to stay involved in the family business as they have become adults. The Fuhrmann family’s hearts for the Lord, for true health, for their family, and for community will encourage you to cast an intentional vision for your own family and homestead.

In this episode, we cover:

How Jack and Kim’s homesteading story began with time spent overseas
The evolution of the Fuhrmanns’ family homestead into a ministry hub in their community
The unique beauty of raising kids on a homestead
How a family health crisis led Jack and Kim to pursue natural healing through food
The practicals of managing a large homeschooling family on a homestead
Overcoming academic challenges and watching our children flourish into adulthood
How establishing a strong vision turns your homestead into a haven for family and community

Thank you to our sponsor!

McMurray Hatchery offers a wide selection of poultry breeds and supplies to assist you with raising your flock. Find what you need at McMurrayHatchery.com!

About Jack & Kim

After serving as overseas missionaries in Chad, Africa God toughened Jack and Kim up in preparation for a calling to homesteading life. They have owned and operated Our Father’s Farm in Gretna, VA providing southside VA with grass-fed, A2A2 dairy products through herd shares, pastured poultry, and grass-fed beef, as well as training in natural health. The farm has grown with the family and is more diverse every year. The Fuhrmanns are passionate about God, His Word, the family, and others. They love to encourage, educate and support others on their journey to whole health wellness. They are committed to raising the most nutrient-dense foods possible while stewarding as a family their land for God’s glory. They love teaching others why this choice is worth the effort and sacrifice.

Resources Mentioned

HOA podcast episode with Joshua Fuhrmann

Journey Back to Health by Kim Fuhrmann

Connect

Jack & Kim Fuhrmann of Our Father’s Farm | Website

Creating a Legacy Through Your Homestead Transcript

Amy Fewell Welcome to the Homesteaders of America Podcast, where we encourage simple living, hard work, natural healthcare, real food, and building an agrarian society. If you’re pioneering your way through modern noise and conveniences, and you’re an advocate for living a more sustainable and quiet life, this podcast is for you. Welcome to this week’s podcast. I’m your host, Amy Fewell, and I’m the founder of the Homesteaders of America organization and annual events. If you’re not familiar with us, we are a resource for homesteading education and online support. And we even host a couple of in-person events each year with our biggest annual event happening right outside the nation’s capital here in Virginia every October. Check us out online at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. Follow us on all of our social media platforms and subscribe to our newsletter so that you can be the first to know about all things HOA (that’s short for Homesteaders of America). Don’t forget that we have an online membership that gives you access to thousands—yes, literally thousands—of hours worth of information and videos. It also gets you discount codes, an HOA decal sticker when you sign up, and access to event tickets before anyone else. All right. Let’s dive into this week’s episode.

Amy Fewell Welcome back to this week’s episode of the Homesteaders of America podcast. I’m really excited to have two of my favorite homesteaders on with me today, Jack and Kim Fuhrmann. Welcome to the podcast.

Jack Fuhrmann Thank you so much. It’s a great blessing to be here, an honor.

Amy Fewell Yeah. So for those of you who are listening, Jack and Kim are actually going to be speakers at this year’s HOA conference in October. And if you came last year, you may have heard their son, Joshua, actually. He was a speaker last year. He’s going to be a speaker this year. And so we’ve just really fallen in love with this family over at HOA as we’ve gotten to know them over the last year or so. And so I thought I’d bring on Jack and Kim today to really talk about their farm story, which is Our Father’s Farm here in Virginia. For those of you who know, I love my little cow Hazel so much. Hazel came from their farm, and she’s grass genetics and all that. So you can check out a podcast that I did with Joshua, maybe ten or so podcasts back where we talk about that and their farming. But today, Jack and Kim, I wonder if you would just start by just kind of telling us your story. What inspired you to farm and homestead? And what do you have going on there?

Jack Fuhrmann Well, it’s a long, beautiful journey that we’ve been on with the Lord. But I think the… I grew up on a farm. But we didn’t really farm for a living. So I learned a little bit about nature and just working with animals. And I really loved it. And I had a bunch of brothers, and we grew up, and I saw it’s a wonderful place to raise a family. And so that kind of stuck in my head. But then I grew up. I got into aviation as a pilot. I met Kim after we came to the Lord at different circumstances, and the Lord drew us together. We ended up out on the mission field in Africa. And that’s the place where God really just, I think, started to grab our hearts and show us his design for everything— his design for family, his design for raising animals, his design for creation, and his invitation really for us to join him in his design. It’s interesting that the Lord had to take us out of our context here in our comfortable culture in the United States of America, and rip us out of that and put us in the middle of Africa in a remote area to where he started really teaching us—I would say—the fundamental skills of homesteading, as we even learned from the Arabs. We were ministering to the Chadian Arabs there, and we learned so much from them with their nomadic… hundreds of years of being nomads, working with their sheep and their goats and their cows. And we learned so much from them and their lifestyle that really challenged us and encouraged us and it drew us to the scriptures, where we began to see more and more of God’s design and plan for life. And I think, in the end, homesteading is really just a biblical plan for raising families. You know, our families are… Our home is not the building, the house, the structure that we’re in. Psalm 27—our one of our favorites—says, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” And he’s talking about the family. He’s talking about the people, the actual children he brings into the home and even the extended family and the growing multi-generational family. That’s the beautiful house, the home that God has for us to live in and to dwell together. And so those are some of the things that led us and drew us into this direction. So when the Lord directed us back to the United States—and now my mother lives with us—and we came back, and I just wanted to continue to work together with my sons and daughters. We have nine children. We worked together out there in Africa. And although we were coming back to the US, I didn’t want to go back in the airlines. I didn’t want to go back in the ministry. I didn’t want to be taken away from working and living and learning alongside of my children. The Lord really just put my heart… The Lord turned my heart toward the children. And that’s the work of the Spirit is where he turns the hearts of the fathers to the children and the children to the fathers. That’s not something we can turn on and off. It’s really… And he just really began to do that. And I just wanted to… I was willing to give up my career, change things just so that I could work with my sons as they were growing up into adulthood, and my daughters, and just really see them succeed. So a lot of what we do on the homestead is for the purpose of seeing our children growing in godliness and giving them opportunities to minister, to learn how to serve others, to learn how to raise their own foods so they can serve anywhere around the world that the Lord might call them. So we’ve been really blessed to be here on the farm.

Amy Fewell Yeah, it’s an incredible story. And for you guys that are coming in October, Jack and Kim are actually going to be talking about the multigenerational aspect of homesteading, and then they’re going to split up and they’re going to give separate talks. Their first talk is going to be together, and then they’re going to give separate talks: one for the men and one for the ladies. And I’m really excited about that because you guys have created just such a solid foundation on your farm. Kim and I have talked about this a lot personally, where you’re setting your family up for success, but it’s not just teaching them about farming. It’s really holding them close to the Lord during this time. And that’s the glue that keeps everyone together, right? So, you guys talk a little bit about how does your farm function? You have multiple children. You have your mom that’s living at home. What’s a typical day at your farm look like involving your family?

Jack Fuhrmann Yeah. Well, we wanted to raise beautiful, healthy food for our family. And if the Lord gives us an abundance for it to be… We can minister to others with it. Primarily now it’s turned into the cattle, the Jersey cattle. So we do the raw milk and dairy products. We serve several hundred families in the area with that. We also do the grass-fed beef, and we do the chickens and eggs. We do some gardening and stuff. But really in the last seven years or so that… It started birthing into natural health. So there’s a lot of people coming and they’re asking questions about farming, and we love to teach people how to process chickens and how to have their own dairy cow. We just love that. We delight in seeing families get a dairy cow. We think that’s just a beautiful, beautiful, essential product for every homesteading family. We like to see people succeed in those areas. And so we’re able to walk with people and help them do that. And then we have people coming, and especially it seems like Kim has an incredible gift and a ministry with the women and young moms and people just asking questions about raising the children and how do you do this and that and then about food and health. And she’s got some wonderful training in natural health. And so it just kind of birthed… We wanted our home to be this ministry center, this education center, this hospitality center, this food center. We wanted it to be a place where all kinds of opportunities could explode. So for the children as they grow older, that they can just branch off and do whatever, you know, however the Lord leads them. But this health side of things just emerged out of it. And Kim just does a lot of consultations with health. She can talk to you more about that. So we’ve got chores in the morning. Everybody’s out doing chores, milking cows, chickens, and dogs. And we’ve always got building projects going on at the farm. So we’re a fully functioning farm. But then we also have these health consultations going on. We teach classes sometimes on the farm. And so the ministry opportunities… God brings families here. We love having hospitality. People spend the night and eat. We have a great time together. So we love people. We love sharing the love of the Lord with people and teaching them the beauty, really, in God’s creation and his provision and his perfect design.

Kim Fuhrmann I was thinking that we have the blessing of routines and responsibilities. And people—I think all humans—our natural, flesh bent is to get off the hook and maybe not take responsibility and not be diligent. So the farm just really kind of gives everybody a really awesome opportunity to daily practice taking responsibility for life. And so even if you’re a little kid in charge of laying hens, they could die if you don’t take care of them. It’s an important job. It’s not just taking out a trash bag in a city. And when we lived in the city and we lived in a little neighborhood, you had to be really creative about how to get your kids to work and how to get your kids to learn responsibility and learn work ethic and all that kind of stuff. Now the more challenge is getting them to do bookwork and things that you don’t have as much time to do on a farm when everybody’s busy outside or somebody just found their math book. I think I spent more time homeschooling looking for math books than actually doing math. But we finally find a math book, and we’re sitting down with a ten year old to do the math, and the cows get out, and everybody’s got to run out and find them and get them out of the street or whatever. So farming has just got lots of excitement. And then having my son with his babies around the corner, that’s an added thing that we get to do that’s lovely and fun. But if they all get sick, we want to help his wife or whatever. So they’re just sort of in our family. And then my mother-in-law is 96 and half—she’s going to be 97 in June—and needs constant care all day long. And so even that’s a beautiful responsibility that we get to do that. It’s an honor to do these things, to live this life that God’s given us, interacting with the things that he made. And on top of that, I think it’s an amazing thing to provide nourishing food and nutrition for body, mind, and spirit. That’s really what happens. A lot of times people come here to pick up their herd share, and it would be more convenient for them to go to this town where we deliver, and they would rather drive 45 minutes and come here and pick it up just because they want to hang out for a little while once a week and see the kids, or see the kittens, or see the cows, or just visit. It’s just an awesome thing. And so we’re really blessed and glad to do this.

Amy Fewell Yeah, we find this to be very true with herd shares, too. My husband actually came home one day and he asked me, he said, “Why did you get cows?” And I said, “Well, because I wanted dairy cows. We were spending money in our own herd shares. And you know, for milk. We go through so much milk and milk products.” He’s like, “No, no, no.” He said, “Really think about it. Why do you think you have the desire to have cows?” And I just kind of looked at him like, “This is a trick question. I’m not going to get it right. Why don’t you just tell me?” And he said, “Because it’s just like a mission field.” He said, “You have people coming and you stand outside, and you talk to them about the Lord, and you’re talking to them about food, and then they open up.” You know, I have people pouring out their heart to me all the time. And just it is truly body, mind, spirit. And so, Kim, that’s one of the things that I love about your book, which I wanted to kind of shamelessly plug in here, because I have your book and I literally have scribble after scribble note on almost every page, and it’s been one of the most incredible reads that really is necessary in the health community. And so I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your book and what inspired you to write that?

Kim Fuhrmann Well, that’s such a good question. The Lord just laid that on our heart. I think my husband’s always encouraged me to write. When we were on the mission field, I was in charge of writing our prayer updates, and he would see them, and we’d send them off for prayer. And our prayer updates back then were like stories. We believed that a missionary really is a part of the body of Christ, and the missionary is not the head that’s so amazing and so thoughtful or not the heart that’s just beating with this love for lost people; the missionary is really just the fingertip of the body of Christ reaching far out to touch a faraway place that God wants to touch with the gospel. And the body of Christ is connected in touching the faraway place with you. And so those email updates would go out to people, and we literally invited them to come with us all the time, every week on their knees. And we needed them. We needed them to be praying for things we couldn’t even think to pray for. And so I got a lot of writing in that way. And so many people said, “You have to write a book. You have to write a book.” But probably one of the most important people that said it was my dad and my granddaddy, too. My granddaddy, especially. One of the reasons that Jesus laid it on my heart was because I didn’t have a book like that. I didn’t have a mentor like that. And I just got my kids shots, and I put food in the microwave from Sam’s Club bags, and I made macaroni and cheese out of a box. And I went to Africa and we almost died eating like that. I know that all moms really love their kids. I loved my kids and I thought I was doing a great job until one of my children almost died in Africa. And in Africa, you can hear the plane take off and you’re just there listening to a plane leave with your husband and your baby. And I was with four other babies, and I was so convicted. And it was through that— God giving that baby back and then having to learn how to build health back into that baby. I just threw myself on the Lord. I threw myself in submission to my husband who had been saying for years, “Don’t you think there’s a correlation to how we eat and how we feel? Don’t you think there’s anything there?” Yeah. And I would say, “Do you want to cut the onions? Do you want to make the dinner? Why don’t you just stay in your lane?” And I didn’t know how to listen to my husband. I didn’t know how to take guidance from my husband. And I’m still learning how to do that. So this book is just kind of a sweet little… I just want it to be a hug for moms. Here’s a brain dump from an older mom. All the things I wish I had known when I was 20, before I ever started having babies. And the things that you kind of need to know when you’re in the middle of a crisis, like somebody gets burned or somebody gets a really bad cut, or somebody is vomiting and vomiting and vomiting or somebody’s got a crazy high fever in your house. What do I do about that? And then on top of that, it’s what do I do so that we’re just maintaining and supporting wellness? How do I do that? Because you don’t maintain and support wellness by eating food that you microwave that’s had 27,000 steps away from anything God made. That’s not how you maintain wellness. You don’t maintain wellness by being bitter and angry and resentful and not getting enough sleep. You don’t maintain wellness that way. So how do we do that? And what does foundations for health look like? And so when I went to naturopath “doctor school”, I had to write a 55 page thesis to graduate. So this book is really just the thesis of what I wrote for getting my degree or certification. But the Lord just put it all together to make it into 350 some pages of how God designed things divinely and then how he expects us to take personal responsibility according to that design. That’s a long answer.

Amy Fewell Yeah, no, it’s a good answer, though. It’s really good. And you guys, we will link the book in the show notes of this podcast so you guys can find it on their website, and you can purchase it and all of that. But also, Kim is a writer for our HOA magazine, and so she’s kind of unpackaging even more in each issue especially for you ladies and moms. And so you might want to check that out, too, so you can read some of the amazing things that she has to say. I know she has for sure helped me with my little one and all of my non sleeping habits and her non sleeping habits. And it’s stuff… You know, I told this to Kim. I said, “No one taught me any of this stuff. I don’t have anyone here to teach me any of this stuff.” Mostly because my mother was from that generation of… You know, boxed food was becoming really super popular. Same concept, you know. And so it’s really nice to have that. And we love giving that a platform. Okay, let’s dive back into the farm things. So you guys have… You said you have classes on your farm. You’ve got the dairy projects going. You have your kids at home. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about homeschooling, because that’s quite a big task when you’re farming and homeschooling. How do you kind of manage that on the farm with so many children? Because we have a lot of families… We call them large families, but really they’re just normal sized, right? And so how do you manage that during the day?

Jack Fuhrmann It’s a continuing beautiful process, I think. And it was a long time, really. You know, some people take the government education system and courses and expectations and just bring them home. And that’s one way to homeschool. But that’s not really what we were led to do. We were, again, looking at God’s design in everything. Really feeling that God… How did God design children to grow in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? How did God design children to grow into capable adults without any adolescent years? Adolescence is not in the Bible, right? You go from a child to an adult, and there’s a transition period. But you’re drawing the young people up into adulthood and responsibility, and they’re just included in the process at a very, very early age. And so we wanted to say, “Okay, Lord, how do you design education to happen?” Of course, you go to Deuteronomy and we see how fathers and parents are the major, the primary educators, and the ones that are teaching and training the children. Education is so much more than just putting knowledge in our heads. Knowledge alone just puffs up and can cause lots of issues. Character is a much more important education, I believe, and character is learned by doing things together, by working alongside mom, working alongside dad. So, we still do… Don’t get me wrong, we have subjects. Kim will talk about those. And they have certain goals and things that we get to, but they really fall secondary to the primary goal of we want to be providing food for our family and for others. We want to be ministering to one another and our families. We want to be encouraging each other on in godliness. We want to know how to communicate well with each other, point each other to Christ when we’re going through difficult times, and be able to do that to our neighbors and minister to our neighbors. And so as you’re going along the way, we try to build our farm, our chores, almost everything we do, we try to build it to a kid level, meaning that I want the grandkids, I want everybody at the youngest age to be able to come alongside dad, to be able to come alongside aunt and uncle, to be able to come alongside and participate in the work. In their little minds, they’re a part of it. And they sit down at the dinner table and we’re eating the spread and they’re like, “I contributed to this food that we’re thanking the Lord for providing for us at the table.” And so letting them be a part of it. I think that’s the greatest homeschool education in the world. And obviously, they need to read, write, and arithmetic. What else?

Kim Fuhrmann Yeah, that’s challenging. Teaching people how to read was the big thing, right? We’ve got to get everybody reading.

Amy Fewell Right.

Kim Fuhrmann Even this is a beautiful thing. One of my children had everything—every dyslexia, dysgraphia, all the things. If we had sat him down in some kind of testing, he would have tested all those things. And I found out about all that when we were in Africa and there was no internet, there was no help. I didn’t know what to do. And I couldn’t get that child to understand anything. I would do flashcards. I would do write in the sand. I would do write on the sandpaper. I did all the things. And every day we started with “A says ah”, and every day we said, “A says ah” again. And he still didn’t know that was A until we both were crying and just put it all away. And the child is very intelligent and he’s an auditory learner. And this is the beauty of homeschooling where you ask Jesus how to do it, and he will show you how to do it for each child. And I don’t mean that you shouldn’t have a plan, and you shouldn’t have books, and you shouldn’t have standards because you should. But how do you get the child to the place where they can even learn anything? That sometimes is really unique per the child or per the… If they’re boys, if they’re girls, if they’re really, really active, if they love to draw, if they love to listen, if they love to sing. There’s all these different little things that different of the children love. And if you are in tune with Jesus and you’re in tune with the little person, then you can make it a beautiful experience instead of a crying over the notebooks and the workbooks thing. And so with that child, we were done crying. We are done trying to cram A’s and B’s in his head, and I just got him everything auditory I could get my hands on. Whenever a short term team came, just bring. Bring anything on audio, like this history set and all these books that are history fiction. Or bring me the Bible. Bring me the Bible on CD. And so he listened to the Bible. He memorized the Bible and he memorized the whole Sermon on the Mount. He memorized Romans 6, 7, and 8, the whole thing. He memorized lots of Psalms. And he still couldn’t read. And one day he was sitting at his desk and he started crying, and he said, “I guess I’m just stupid,” and we don’t like to say that word at all. And I said, “No, don’t say that.” “But I am, but I am. I can’t read.” And his brother had a stack of books, and his dad had given him a list, like, do this and do this and write a book report and give that to me at dinner and do these pages of math. So before his dad had gone to the office, he’d written all that down, and that little boy was doing this big stuff. And the other one was just sitting there trying to do a little tiny bit of notebook thing. And I said, “You can read.” And he was like, “No, no, I can’t.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, try to read this.” And I got a regular Bible and opened it up, and he started really getting angry. He was like, “I can’t read those tiny words.” And I got an index card and I put it under the words, and I said, “Just try.” And it was something he’d memorized. So he started trying to sound it out. And as soon as he realized after the third word, it was something he knew in his head, it all untangled and he just started saying the whole thing and reading it, all excited. “I can read! I can read!” And this brother came running in and they were so excited that he could read. And so then he just read what he’d memorized. Every day, that was his school: sit down for 45 minutes twice a day, and just read all the places that you… With your little index card, read it all—all of Matthew 5, 6, and 7 and Roman 6, 7, and 8, and all of those Psalms—until that untangles in your head. And do you know that’s what God did? And he also is learning the piano. And I think there’s something really amazing about instruments. If you can give your kids the gift of learning to play an instrument, there’s so much beautiful stuff that happens in their head. Piano is especially amazing because they can do strings and anything off of the theory of piano. But those were big things we did. Like, can you read? Can you read well? Do you love to learn? And an instrument. And so then the other things get done. Of course, the math gets done. And I remember going to the homeschool convention in Virginia when my baby was six months old, my ninth baby. So I had a six-month-old nursing baby, nine. And my husband was like, “Let’s just go to the homeschool convention today.” Like, we just got in the car and drove up there on a Saturday, and they had these cute little ladies in nurse outfits. And they were called “The Curriculum Doctors”. And I sat down in front of them because you were supposed to tell them what your situation was, and then they told you the perfect curriculum for you, and then they would take you over there at the fair to see it. And I’m holding this baby, and I was like, “This is my ninth baby. And here’s the other ages,” because I had a… I think he was a junior in high school was my oldest, and go down nine to a nursing baby. And my mother-in-law lives with us and we have a full-time farm business. And I just looked at the lady and she had tears in her eyes, and I got tears in my eyes, and we just looked at each other crying, and she said, “I don’t even know what to tell you. I don’t know what… How…” And I was like, “Me neither.” And so I just sat there and I prayed in my mind while I was sitting there, “Jesus, you have an answer because this isn’t supposed to be so overwhelming.” And we looked at each other and at the same moment she said, “You need tutors.” And I said, “I need a governess,” at the same time. And so she just said, “That’s it. And she started writing down all these things.” So we found kind of video curriculums, and we found some different people that could get me through the high school years of teaching people grammar, different things they wanted to know or needed to know. And so that first batch graduated. And I was really worried about them. Did they know all the things they needed to know? And had they learned all the things they needed to learn? But as they’ve grown up into adults, you’ve gotten to see Josh. And then Sam, my son, runs all the QuickBooks and all the administration for our business, and he does an amazing job. My one daughter is a nutrition therapy practitioner. She graduated the top of her class—mom brag—and she runs the health practice and manages hospitality for our home. So she’s handling hundreds of people every year. And then these health classes, she does all that. My fourth daughter is a doula and birth assistant, and she does literally everything around here. And then the last son that graduated, he has his own business flipping houses and managing rental properties and things like that and doing all kinds of stuff on the farm. He works on the farm full-time. That’s like a side gig, but he’s building a big barn right now. He’s in charge of that by himself. And his brothers and everybody are helping him do that. So it’s just been awesome to see them grow up. And it’s like you bite your nails and you worry like, am I teaching them everything they need to know? Are they going to be okay? If you really, really model loving the Lord, if you model needing the Lord and inquiring of the Lord all the time, if you don’t model trying to cram it in their head just to cram it in just to finish the book and do the pages… you know, that’s kind of not what we do. But they do love to learn. We do read aloud, a lot of books out loud too.

Jack Fuhrmann Yeah, we love to read out loud as a family. I think one of the beautiful things about a story is that Kim didn’t give up. And she didn’t like pawn him off and say, “That’s it. You’re going away to this school.” Or “Somebody else is going to have to teach you.” Or “This is impossible. I can’t handle this anymore.” It was hard, and there were times she felt like that, but she stayed in relationship, and they just stayed together and worked together. And that, I think, is the greatest education we can give our children is that you don’t punch out when things get hard. You don’t break the relationship or go somewhere else. You actually lean into the relationship together. You come to the Lord together and you watch what he does through it. He does beautiful things. He’s faithful to us. But we do need to release sometimes these government assigned expectations of what our children ought to know. It’s not really beneficial in a lot of ways, as most of us know who have been through the public education system. We know that 95% or more is really not very helpful for life.

Amy Fewell Hey, guys. Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode. We’re going to take a quick break and bring you a word from one of our amazing sponsors. McMurray Hatchery officially started in 1917. Murray McMurray had always been interested in poultry as a young man and particularly enjoyed showing birds at the local and state fairs. Nowadays, the hatchery is still completely through mail order, but they offer way more than ever before. From meat chicks and layer hens to waterfowl, ducklings, goslings, turkeys, game birds, juvenile birds, they even have hatching eggs and a whole lot of chicken equipment. Make sure you check out our Homesteader of America sponsor McMurray Hatchery at McMurrayHatchery.com and get your orders in today. And don’t forget to stop by their booth at the 2023 HOA event.

Amy Fewell Well, that’s a great segue into one of my last questions, and that is how do you attribute… You were talking about having all of your older kids are doing all of these things and running successful parts of your farm and your businesses. What’s the greatest thing that you attribute to keeping them on the farm? We see a lot of families wanting that multi-generational farm, and many of them are just still raising children. They’re not even old enough to be doing any of that yet. But what are some of the things that you attribute to your family wanting to stay and work the farm as they’ve gotten older?

Kim Fuhrmann I think one thing is to be quick to say you’re sorry and you’re wrong. I’m wrong, I’m sorry. To be sensitive to each other. To treat each other with love and respect. And just something that we’ve been praying, and we’ve asked friends to pray for us for 11 years… Consistently we ask people to pray. “How can we pray for you?” We say, “Pray that God would make our home the sweetest place on earth for us, that there wouldn’t be another place they want to be.” And there’s no reason that that prayer would be answered except God. There’s nothing good about us or perfect about us at all. We have to say we’re sorry to our kids and each other every day, sometimes multiple, multiple times a day. So sometimes I don’t even know why they would want to stay, especially with me. I’m crazy. But we just love each other. And then I really appreciate Jack because God… Before we even came here, it was kind of neat… When we were missionaries, we had to have a vision statement we wrote out as a team: how does God want to impact and reach the Chadian Arabs for Christ? How does he want us to do that? And so we fasted and prayed and sought God’s face, and he gave us a vision, and he did it. And then before we came on the farm… We hadn’t even bought the farm yet. We were looking. We read all the Salatin books. We read all the Five Acres to Independence kind of books and all that when we were in Africa and we knew that God was pushing us this way. And so something I appreciated Jack doing was sitting down and taking the time with the Lord and with me to write out a mission statement of what is this farm for and what’s it about? Even our father’s farm isn’t an accident. It’s got a lot of purpose in the name to remind us things, to remind our customers things, to just declare something and uphold him. And so, having a big vision that God gives you makes it so that… I didn’t even think about this. Maybe you did, but I didn’t think if we have this vision, our kids are going to want to be a part of it. I just thought, well, God, what do you want us to do? And he showed us. And then, lo and behold, it’s such a big vision, you need an army to do it. And, and as the kids grow up, they have an eternal purpose. So if they have an eternal purpose to what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be a farmer who happens to be following Jesus. You should be a follower of Jesus, who just happens to be farming right now. So if you’re on a homestead, first, you’re a follower of Jesus, and that’s a huge thing to be with huge ramifications that last forever and ever and ever. So the things we do aren’t just milk. The things we do aren’t just kefir and yogurt and butter and sour cream and all the things, right? Bone broth and blah, blah, blah blah. We actually have this eternal purpose that kids are excited to be a part of. And it makes me cry on the regular that my married son and his wife want to live right around the corner and be a part of it. I don’t know why they do, but they do, and they love it and we love it. And it’s such an honor and a blessing. And it’s a blessing to have kids growing up, and they have really cool jobs on this farm. They have really cool jobs through the farm. Really cool that they couldn’t have a job like that somewhere else. And then they’re loved and they’re nurtured and they’re appreciated. And we have to say we’re sorry all the time. And another thing is the art of the family meeting, learning how to have healthy family conversations with everybody and giving everybody space to share their struggles and their hurts and their frustrations and their dreams. And, so that’s kind of been a neat thing.

Jack Fuhrmann Yeah. Amen. I think it’s having a vision bigger than just ourselves. In our culture and, again, in our education system, it’s like you just want to take care of yourself and it’s me, me and me having a pleasurable life, me having a comfortable life. Maybe I’m going to pass some things on to my kids once I pass on or something, but I think God wants us to have this multi-generational vision. And one time I heard somebody speaking; it really challenged me. He said, “What’s your 20 year vision for your family? What’s your 40 year vision for your family?” Then he said, “What’s your thousand year vision? What’s your 100 year vision?” What do you mean? I’m not gonna be here a thousand years. But that’s how we really ought to be thinking because the decisions and the things we make now, if we’re thinking multi-generationally, if we’re thinking this decision is going to impact my descendants for a thousand years perhaps, then it really changes what we do and the decisions we make and what we prioritize and what we don’t prioritize. And I think that’s part of what Kim was encapsulating as well is that this is not just about me and building a business or a name for ourself. It’s really not. It’s building something for the future generations. It’s building something for you to take if you want by God’s grace and continue and branch off and do more from. But the knowledge that you’re learning here is going to help you no matter where you go in the world, no matter where you go in life. What you’re learning right here by being faithful to take care of animals and do chores when you don’t like to do them, those things are the skills that really are going to give you success in life and in your relationships and in everything you do. And the other big thing Kim started saying several years ago is we need to provide a safe, loving environment for the children to grow, for all of us to grow. Because Kim and I are growing as much or more now… And spiritually growing, obviously, in our spiritual understanding in our life and in our understanding of how to love others the way God loves. So we’re all growing and knowing we’re never stopped… You know, we graduated from homeschool, now we are continuing in this learning thing together. We’re always talking about what we’re learning. And humility, like Kim was saying, asking forgiveness. But to provide a safe, loving place for people to fail. You’re going to fail. We’re going to fail. As long as we’re failing and we’re turning to the Lord, we’re failing and we’re turning to Christ, then we’re growing in our failures and we’re growing in our relationship together. We’re growing and trusting one another, and we’re going to be there for each other in our ups and our downs. We’re not going to be departing from each other. And I think those things are what builds a bond between people. And Kim even sees it just in consulting with and helping so many people with the health and emotional issues. She ends up going in all kinds of areas, and it’s just the bond that you’re able to build is just so strong. So it is the Lord in the end. It’s us being humble, I think, and being willing to admit our failings to our children. I don’t need to act like I’ve got it all together. But there is a role that I have as a father that God ordained. I didn’t pick it. They didn’t pick it either. It’s something that God has done, and we can embrace it and recognize God’s beautiful design to work through that and to bless through that and to provide a multigenerational, beautiful, overwhelming blessing to be passed down to the future generations. The world and the culture wants to rip the families apart. They want to rip those relationships apart. They want to divide fathers against sons, sons against fathers, and daughters and mothers and fathers, the same thing. It’s a great division, so everything we’re trying to do to really, by God’s grace, set a foundation for a biblical home and family life is contrary to the world. It’s so different. So we can’t look to the world or anything the world is doing for examples. We can look to the Lord, to the scriptures, and we can encourage one another.

Amy Fewell Yeah. That’s so good. So good. I love it. Well, I’ve kept you guys for over 40 minutes, but I feel like we unpackaged a whole lot in this, especially for those who are going to come hear you guys speak in October. I know you’re going to unpackage your family, multigenerational, husbands, wives, all of that, motherhood at the October conference. I ask everyone before we hop off if there’s one thing you could say to our audience to encourage them or inspire them or just something that the Lord has laid on your heart to share with us, we welcome you to share it now if you have anything that you want to tell us.

Jack Fuhrmann I would say it’s worth it to stay the course. Here’s just… I wanted to show a little picture of our family. This is a recent picture of our family, so there’s my mom and brother and the family. But it’s worth it. And we’re in the middle of it, and it’s hard, and there’s days you just want to give up. But it’s worth it to walk in God’s ways that he has instructed and directed us in. It may not always look like it’s fleshing out for our benefit, but it is. And that’s faith. And that’s the faith walk that I think he calls us to. Do you have something?

Kim Fuhrmann I just had a verse come to mind when you said that: “Be not deceived. God will not be mocked, for in due season you will reap what you sow. For if a man soweth to the flesh, he reaps corruption. But if a man soweth to the Spirit, he reaps eternal life.” For homesteaders, it’s just such a sweet scripture of promise that you reap what you sow. And you don’t put it in the ground and see it pop up the next day. And you’ve got to get the potato bugs all pinched and in the little jars, and you got to do all the things to get the potatoes finally in your tummy or in the basement or in a canning jar. And so it’s a lot of steps and a lot of waiting and a lot of just faith and watching God do what he’s going to do and a lot of diligence, even being faithful to pinch the potato bugs. And so in every single thing in life, we reap what we sow. And so don’t lose heart. And for little moms, I just have such a heart for little moms. And God sees you and he gently leads those that are with young. He loves us, and we are precious to him, and we’re loved by him, and we’re safe in him. And we can be precious and loved and safe in our home. And we can be precious and loved and safe as we’re pregnant and as we have sciatic pain and as we’ve got cracked nipples because we’re nursing and it’s not going the greatest. All those things. And as you’re dealing with an angry teenager and as you’re dealing with all the things, he gently leads us. And if we just keep coming back to him, that’s like the key of maturity—emotionally and spiritually—is how quickly do I come back to Christ when I get knocked flat on my face? Because getting knocked flat onto our faces is normal for people. And coming back to Christ quickly is divine. And so I just pray that God would help us all to do that.

Amy Fewell Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us on this week’s podcast. We have really enjoyed the conversation. For those of you listening, you can find all the information about the Fuhrmanns and Kim’s book and anything that we share down there, it’s all down there. There are links to their website so you can find out more about them. Don’t forget, you can check out our Homesteaders of America website where you can find out who is speaking at the October event. We’re so sorry, it is sold out. You can purchase tickets if you get a pre-conference workshop. We do have some tickets available for that. But, until next time, guys. Thank you for joining us this week and we will see you next time.

Amy Fewell Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to this week’s Homesteaders of America episode. We really enjoyed having you here. We welcome questions and you can find the transcript and all the show notes below or on our Homesteaders of America blog post that we have up for this podcast episode. Don’t forget to join us online with a membership or just to read blog posts and find out more information about our events at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. We also have a YouTube channel and follow us on all of our social media accounts to find out more about homesteading during this time in American history. All right, have a great day and happy homesteading.

Homesteaders of America

E33: Creating a Legacy Through Your Homestead | Jack & Kim Fuhrmann of Our Father’s Farm