E35: How Home Milling Grains Can Change Your Health & World | Gary Leavitt of NutriMill

As homesteaders, we understand the importance of sourcing our food well and cooking from scratch. When it comes to baking, making the switch to freshly-milled whole grains in your home can take your family’s nourishment to the next level. If you’ve ever had questions about milling grains at home – how whole grain flour differs from white flour, how to store grains, what kind of mill you need – this episode is for you! Gary of NutriMill is sharing his expertise in grains, mills, mixers, health benefits, and more. Join us for this incredibly practical and educational conversation.

In this episode, we cover:

How NutriMill became the largest seller of grain mills in the world
The differences between NutriMill’s high volume mill and their more versatile mill
How baking with freshly-milled whole grains differs from all-purpose flour
Exploring the nutritional benefits of whole grains
How learning to mill whole grains helps you prepare for the future
Tips on preparing wheat for long-term storage
How consuming whole grains can increase your overall health and help you lose weight
A word of hope for the future of our nation

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 Gary

Gary Leavitt began a career in the Bosch Mixer and Grain Mill business in 1979. Starting with retail stores and then managing the national business, Gary became the exclusive distributor of Bosch Universal Kitchen Machines for North America (United States and Canada) in 1990. Today in addition to manufacturing different models of Grain Mills – including the number one selling electric grain mill in the world (the NUTRIMILL classic) – the NUTRIMILL company is the largest distributor in the world for the Bosch Universal Kitchen Machine. The Bosch mixer has been recognized as the number one rated mixer, worldwide, since the 1950’s for its performance and quality. Currently, Gary and his business partners, Jim Park and Richard Bruggeman manufacture a smaller companion mixer to the Bosch, the NUTRIMILL ARTISTE mixer. Both kitchen mixers share a variety of compatible accessories. Grain Mills and Mixers they believe offer families ‘better nutrition, better diets, and better overall health’. It has been their passion in business for the past 45 years.

Resources Mentioned

Check out the products Gary mentioned on the NutriMill website

Connect

How Home Milling Grains Can Change Your Health & World 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 the Homesteaders of America Podcast. I am your host, Amy Fewell, and this week, I’m super excited to have Gary from NutriMill with us. NutriMill is one of our sponsors for the HOA Conference, and he’s a sponsor for the entire year. So welcome to the podcast, Gary.

Gary Leavitt Thanks. Nice to be here. I appreciate you inviting me.

Amy Fewell Yeah. So we’re excited to have you on here. One, I’m really excited because I have a NutriMill grain grinder and that thing is a workhorse. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about that, but also because a lot of homesteaders are starting to mill their own grain. And I know they have lots of questions and who better to ask than NutriMill, right? So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what NutriMill does?

Gary Leavitt Well, we’ve been around since the 70s. I got in this business back in 1979, and we’ve always been in the grain mill business. In 1974, a gentleman was researching grain mills and decided to buy a company up in Filer, Idaho, called Magic Mill. And they had the number one selling grain mill in the country at the time. And it was a big wooden contraption that, you know, big five pound stones, and you could hook up a bicycle to it and he went up there to buy some and ended up buying the company. And he took that company back to his hometown of Salt Lake City, and then he thought, now what am I going to do with the Grain Mill Company? So he decided that people mostly mill grains, particularly in our audience and the people that we do business with, and homesteaders to make bread. So he started researching bread makers, and he found the Bosch mixer over in Germany. And he literally flew to Germany, knocked on Bosch’s door. And if you kind of understand this story, they were and they still are the world’s largest privately held company, and they are a nonprofit foundation based out of Stuttgart and probably not literally, but he knocked on their door and said, “I want to carry your Bosch mixer exclusively in America,” and launched on a handshake, which lasted for almost nine years. He was the exclusive distributor and we all got into the Magic mill, grain mill, Bosch mixer business, and we’ve been doing grain mills ever since. Since then, I bought out that company (through a long story that we don’t have time for) in 1990 and we launched who we are today. Before, we were a direct sales organization, so people say, “How did I never hear about NutriMill or Bosch?” We said, “Because if you didn’t attend a home party plan during those years, you never heard about us.” We were a direct sales organization. We were kind of patterned after the Avon business back in those days. And we had dealers and distributors all across the United States, but we were mostly west of the Mississippi River because of where our headquarters was. We had people in pockets in Ohio, eastern Canada. We even had a really great distributor back in Virginia for many years, but we weren’t as well known in the East as we were the West. About 1995, 94-ish, we decided to move away from that model of direct sales and get into more traditional wholesale retail business. And it just exploded our business. We’re the largest seller of grain mills in the world. We have been doing them, like I said, since 1974. And that grain mill predated 1974, but we invented high-speed milling. Do you have the classic mill, Amy?

Amy Fewell So I have the wooden looking mill, a little one that sits on the counter top.

Gary Leavitt Alright, you have our harvest bamboo mill. Okay. We’ve gone back to the future with that grain mill. We used to be in the stone milling business for years. High-speed milling, we developed in 1981. And high-speed milling… and I’ll just explain a little bit about the difference. The mill you have is our fastest growing mill. But we were out of the stone milling business for almost 30 years, and then we decided that there’s this huge demand coming in grain mills, but the big bulky ones that weighed 89 pounds, 5 pound stones and huge, you know, commercial motors on the back had gone away. When high-speed milling came out, there were 26 stone mill manufacturers in the United States. One year into high-speed milling, there were six left.

Amy Fewell Wow.

Gary Leavitt Because high-speed milling became the norm. So that’s what we do. We’re a grain mill and mixer business. We do a lot of other things, but primarily we’re really focused on grain mills. We publish a little thing about milling whole grains and the importance of it and the nutrition aspects of it, and we give these free all over the country, literally all over the world now. In fact, your viewers can just call us and we’ll send them one in the mail for free. But grains have been a big, big part of our focus, and particularly for me.

Amy Fewell Yeah. You’re a pretty successful entrepreneur, too. Which that’s a pretty awesome story to share, because I didn’t know all of that history about NutriMill and going back to Bosch, I also have a Bosch mixer. I had another mixer for years, and it just completely died on me one day. And I was like, you know what? I think it’s time for a change. So one of the reasons I bought the Bosch mixer was because of the motor. I liked how that was set up, but two, because I was grinding my own grains with NutriMill. Bosch has this super awesome sifter that you can use with your Bosch mixer, so if you’re doing large batches of grains at one time, you can actually sift that to make all purpose flour. And so I was kind of amazed at that and that both of those companies, you own and are very successful with.

Gary Leavitt Yeah, quick story about that sifter that’s interesting — the largest Bosch mixer market in the world is our Brooklyn, New York market because of the Jewish market there, and I would bet that 90 plus percent of every Jewish home within the Jewish communities have a Bosch mixer because it’s the only mixer that will make their Challah breads. But they also, for lots of reasons, they sift their flour and they actually developed that technology for us to manufacture that sifter. And so in that market, we sell basically one Bosch mixer and one sifter for every sale. And we also make a bottom drive stainless steel bowl that has a little bit more volume and they sell those one to one. So it comes with the plastic bowl but we manufacture in Europe the bottom dry stainless steel bowl and they sell two bowls with every mixer. So they’re a very unique market but thanks to them we have your sifter.

Amy Fewell Yeah, okay. That’s awesome, too. These little tidbits are fun to learn. Okay, some people don’t have a grain mill. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about how these mills work and what kinds of things that you can mill with them?

Gary Leavitt Well, we have two types, obviously. The one you have, the bamboo mill, and that’s our most eco friendly mill. It’s what we call our travel the world mill. Milling heads out of Germany, we built all of the components except the motor here in the U.S. And we assemble them right down the street from this office. They’re literally half a block from us, and so it’s our built in the USA mill. But we do have parts from other countries because if you’re going to be in the stone milling business, there’s only really one manufacturer who provides stones for all of us. And it’s out of Germany and they’ve been doing it for I don’t know how many hundred years, and they’re awesome. And they build corundum stones. Corundum on the hardness scale, there’s only one mineral harder than corundum, and that’s diamonds. So these mill stones will last you a lifetime. But when high-speed milling was developed, it’s kind of an interesting thing because I don’t want to tell you, you don’t have a great mill because it is by far our fastest growing mill. We’ve been backordered since the pandemic started. We can’t build them fast enough, but high-speed milling is very different. It’s high volume, low temperature, self-cleaning. And so your mill, you can mill about 10 minutes and what are you getting? About six cups of flour in 10 minutes?

Amy Fewell Yeah, about that.

Gary Leavitt And a high-speed mill, you can get 60 pounds an hour.

Amy Fewell What? Okay.

Gary Leavitt So people that are making large quantities, our classic high-speed mill is the number one selling mill in the world. The bamboo mill is our fastest growing mill because we realized years ago that we’re no longer dealing with just bread makers. You know, we have somebody sitting in a high rise apartment in Los Angeles that wants just some fresh flour for this, or some fresh oats for breakfast or some cornmeal to, you know, bake his pizza on. And they are looking for smaller quantities but more versatility. So I’ll make it real short: one mill is for volume flour, your mill is for versatility. You can coarse grind, fine grind and do all kinds of things. They both do the same types of grains, but very different in their output.

Amy Fewell Right. Yeah, I have yet to do corn in mine, but that’s the next… I actually just bought some bags of organic corn to try to make some cornmeal and stuff for cornbread and so I’m excited to try that. But, so people who cook with fresh grains and things, there’s a difference when you cook with them. So I wonder if you might talk a little bit about that and the difference in cooking with, say, like bread. What are some tips you might have for people?

Gary Leavitt You have five hours?

Amy Fewell I know, I feel like it took me a lifetime to try and learn it, and I’m still learning it, so.

Gary Leavitt Well, I’ll really simplify it for your audience and for you. Bread is the simplest thing in the world to make, but you can spend a lifetime toying with it. I’ve been teaching bread making classes for… Well, my first one was 1979. And those classes, I always ask, “What do you need? What ingredients do you need for bread?” And people will raise their hand — flour, water, yeast, honey, sweetener, dough enhancer. And it’s all over the board. And I tell them very simply, you only need two things for bread — flour and water. That’s it. That’s what bread actually is. You know, unleavened bread, what the Jewish people eat during Passover, that’s just flour and water. Now anything you add to flour and water creates different texture and different taste. So unleavened bread, you can salt it and spice it and make crackers. You can add yeast and make it into raised bread. You can add sourdough starter and make it into wonderful sourdough bread. You can add honey, sugar and molasses if you want a darker bread. Everything is for taste and texture and just play with it. We had some of the employees here who had never made bread and they said, “We’re selling this stuff, but we actually don’t know what we’re doing.” So I went upstairs, we have a little test kitchen upstairs, and I said, “Let’s make some bread today. Now we can do anything we want with bread. What would you like to do today?” And somebody said, “Well, can you make bread with candy bars?” I said, “Sure.” So we made the dough, we rolled it out, and we stacked some candy bars in the middle of the dough and then braided the bread. And you know how to braid bread? You make the cuts and you fold it over like a braid, and then we baked it and it was delicious.

Amy Fewell I can imagine.

Gary Leavitt So you can make chocolate chip bread, you can make seed breads, you can make sprouted grain breads. When you’re working with whole grains, which was what your original question is, and generally, if you’re using the whole threshed wheat or spelt or quinoa or, you know, some of the ancient grains, you’re going to adjust your water. Now you have a Bosch mixer, so I will tell you, you don’t have to adjust your recipes with a Bosch. The Bosch will tell you when you’ve made a perfect load of bread every single time. You just add your ingredients, make sure that you’ve got enough flour in there, and when it forms a ball of dough, quit adding flour and quit adding moisture and just let it need for another eight minutes and you’ll have perfect bread every time.

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 Homestead of America’s 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 Yeah, I really enjoy that Bosch mixer for that reason. It was a totally different experience, of course, using grains to fresh milled grains. But when I switched to the Bosch mixer from a different brand mixer, I was like, this is pretty incredible. There’s a major difference between these two. And I did learn that the mixer would tell you, when are you done and so it was a learning curve, but it was a good learning curve. And so then I started experimenting with things like einkorn and various ancient grains like you were talking about. So one of the reasons that I got the grain mill was because I wanted my family to eat more wholesome grains, and I had… I wouldn’t say I had a wheat allergy, but I had a sensitivity to wheat. And so when we switched over to those things, I thought for sure that my family was not going to like them because they were really picky. But one of the things that we found with whole milled grains is that to me, they taste sweeter. They just taste better than store bought flour. So I wonder what are some of your favorite grains to work with that are home-milled?

Gary Leavitt Well, I really really like spelt and einkorn is wonderful to work with. I have traditionally worked with wheat just because it’s the most readily available in every market. And you’ve got, you know, so many varieties of wheat. But I really like hard red winter wheat. It’s got generally the highest protein content. It has a very unique nutty flavor, but it’s also got a very robust flavor, makes a real robust bread. In our markets today, most people are using winter white wheat, which was developed by Wheat Montana Farms, I don’t know, 25 years ago. And they have a really good wheat and it gives you a softer, lighter loaf. Then if you want pastries, spring white wheat because it’s what they use in the baking industry. You already have your sifter, you know that you can get all purpose flour by sifting. I like the whole grains. Let me show you a little page in this booklet real quickly. This right here is why I recommend grains. Now, you said, you know, every grain is different, but when we talk about wheat, they remove all of this to get down to all purpose flour, and they have to add chemical nutrients back to that to even be able to legally sell it. But you’re missing all of the germ and the germ oils, the middlings, the bran and all those things are super, super important for taste and texture.

Amy Fewell Yeah.

Gary Leavitt Now, one of the things that I think is really important to realize is that when we take all of those things out and we turn it into baker’s flour, that’s why people are having wheat or gluten sensitivities. Our American diet is so overloaded with gluten that people are saying, “Well, I can’t handle gluten, my stomach won’t handle gluten, I’m sensitive to it.” And I’ve worked with people that have told me that they are 100% gluten free. The only people that really have to be gluten free is if they have celiac disease, and that is a tiny, tiny portion of the population, primarily Scandinavian. But if they start incorporating whole grains and you’ve got the bran and the oils and the vitamins — every kernel of wheat has 26 vitamins and minerals — and you strip them all out and you’re left with gluten, with some chemicals added back in for nutrients, in order to legally sell it, and we’re just inundated with gluten. So our bodies are kind of rebelling against that. They’re saying, okay, enough’s enough.

Amy Fewell Yeah. You know, one of the things that I love about whole grain… So we prefer the taste, especially of home-milled grains, not sifted over the taste of sifted flour. And even then, it still tastes better. But one of the things I love about using whole grains is… So for me, I’m an herbalist. I do a lot with gut healing and various different things, and so I know from a professional standpoint in the healthcare industry that whole grains have really good fiber content, including, you know, soluble and insoluble fiber, and they are both key for digestion. And so what you just said really hits the nail on the head. When you’re buying flour from the store especially, and you’re removing literally everything… I mean, even with a sifter, like you can still tell it’s not like store flour. You know, when you’re removing everything and then your body is just… It’s the same with the pharmaceutical industry, right? Like we have pharmaceuticals, they pull one thing from a plant and that’s it. But we’re not going to get on that topic today. But you know, it’s true. And so we have, especially in America, we are eating these pieces of real food, but not the whole food. And so our bodies are like, well, what do I do with this? Because I’m missing the other components of how I’m supposed to digest this. I don’t have it. And so whole grains are an amazing superfood, and our society has scared us away from them for that reason — the gluten reason and the way that we sell our products.

Gary Leavitt I call it the gluten hoax. I have another name for it, but I’m not going to say it on here because it’s a little offensive. But God created grains for man. And when he created grains, there’s a reason that the scriptures call wheat the staff of life. And more recently, we call it the king of all the grains. You know, the interesting thing about wheat, spelt, kamut, wheat, they have all the vitamins and minerals to create and give us a complete protein minus two amino acids. And those two amino acids you find in any bean, any legume and any dairy product. So if you added– let’s say you’re making chocolate chip cookies, and I can make chocolate chip cookies with 100% whole grain fresh milled flour and add a cup of bean flour or a half a cup of milk and feed my kids 100% whole grain, whole protein cookies, and they don’t know the difference between those are white flour.

Amy Fewell Right.

Gary Leavitt And we just have to understand that the reason that the wheat is called the staff of life is because if you store wheat, because a lot of our education over the years has been also about preparedness. That’s why we love the homesteader movement. They’re a God fearing people, they understand the need to be prepared against these unprecedented crazy times that we’re living through, and you can store beans and wheat and some powdered milk and some honey or some sugar or whatever sweetener you like, which will have long storage capacity, and sustain your family indefinitely with complete nutrition and complete health. And that’s really been our message for… I’ve been in this business 40 years, and that’s our message, is that take care of your families, take care of your nutrition, store things… You know what a loaf of bread costs in the store. If you make a really good quality loaf of bread here where we live in Saint George, that loaf of bread can cost you upwards of 6 to $7. Or we can make it ourselves for between a $1 and $1.20 and it’s better.

Amy Fewell Yeah, a lot better. And you actually touched on a part, too. One of the reasons I think I actually ordered this new mill right before 2020 or right as 2020 was hitting, and I remember having a hard time finding it for the very reason you mentioned earlier is they’ve been on backorder. But somehow I was able to find it and it came in a couple of weeks and one of the things that my husband (and we’ve always been big on this) but one of the reasons that, you know, he was like, “Go ahead and get it” is because of preparedness. We can store, like you just said, longevity. We can store berries, we can store all kinds of grains that we can then use this mill for in our home, and the vitamins and minerals and all of the good health content in these can sustain a family very easily. And you get filled up pretty quickly on bread, right? Like you don’t have to eat a ton of it to feel full. And so I love that you mentioned that because it’s another reason to get into milling your own grains and storing grains, and especially in the times that we’re heading into. And so talking about that, what are some tips you have for storing grains for long term? And are there any one grain better than the other for long term storage.

Gary Leavitt Well, any wheat — and I will include spelt and kamut in that — or type of product, the ancient grains or even the modern wheats, they have incredible storage capability. You hate to say indefinitely, but wheat was found in some of the tombs of Egypt that they were able to plant and grow.

Amy Fewell Wow.

Gary Leavitt Keep it away from heat, light, and moisture. That’s true of any food. The three things that will spoil food are heat, light, and moisture. Now, if you can vacuum them, even better, but then you still have to keep them in a cool, dry place. Now, oh, there’s so many things I could talk about in terms of storing wheat. I store my wheat in buckets, and I use the five or six gallon buckets. And I’ve used, over the past, diatomaceous earth. I’ve used the dry ice method. Now they make those little oxygen absorber packs, and I fill it up about a third of the way, drop in a pack or two, fill it up another third, drop in a pack, and then fill it up and then drop in another pack and seal the bucket. I’ve had wheat stored that I’ve used that I’ve had stored for more than 15 years.

Amy Fewell Wow.

Gary Leavitt Wheat will store literally for longer than we will be alive. And you can use it… I’ll just say one more thing about the beauty of wheat. A couple of things. One is it’s versatile. You can grow it into new wheat, you can grow it into wheatgrass which turns it into a completely different food group. Okay? You can sprout it, which then turns it into a vegetable. You can grind it. It’s just so versatile. You can take a thermos bottle, put a little bit of wheat in the bottom, add some boiling water, let it sit overnight, and then stir some milk and honey in it the next morning and eat whole wheat just like that. The whole kernel wheat is cereal. But the amazing thing about wheat is what it does to your body. Okay? It is almost the perfect food created. Again, the staff of life. You can build your body, build your blood with all these vitamins and minerals and oils and all of these things that work together in synergy to give you a perfect food, but at the same time, because of all that bran, it also flushes your system regularly. And so it’s a body building and a body cleansing food at the same time. People say, “Oh, I don’t want eat too much bread, I’ll get fat.” Well, obviously I do.

Amy Fewell Oh, stop.

Gary Leavitt But it’s not because of the wheat, it’s because of the candy I eat.

Amy Fewell It’s the candy in the bread that you make.

Gary Leavitt Yeah, but if you eat whole grain breads and get all this white processed foods and pastries and crackers and cookies out of our system, it’s actually you end up getting healthier, leaner, because it’s a body building and a body cleansing food.

Amy Fewell Yeah, I can definitely confirm that because within my health practice, I see a lot of people who go on diets where they completely eliminate any kind of wheat from their diet. Not because they’re sensitive to it, but because they’re going on an intensive diet to lose weight. That, and dairy. Those are the two things that people tend to go off of because they think they’re the quickest things that will help them lose weight. And the opposite is actually true. What they find is they go off of these products and then they’re just messing up their bodies even more. Because what (especially) wheat bran and the fiber in it do is, just like Gary said, they go throughout your whole system and pull out toxins and cleanse your body and your system and your GI tract. And so I had a friend one time who said she was going on the whole grain and milk diet because she had a milk cow, and that’s what she did. She did this for, I think it was like two months. She was trying to lose weight. And so she just ate, you know, good healthy protein, like, you know, chicken that she grew and beef from her farm, clean vegetables, and then with every single meal, she ate a couple slices of whole grain homemade bread and raw milk. And she dropped like 20 pounds in two months, simply —

Gary Leavitt It’s incredible.

Amy Fewell Yeah. Simply because she added the things society tells you not to add back to her diet and her body started healing. And so it is incredible. I love that we… This was not where I expected this conversation to go, but it’s amazing, right? It’s your reason why you’re doing what you do. You’re not just selling a product, you actually have a reason for educating people, and especially our homestead community, on why they should be doing these things if they’re not doing them already. And that’s why we love partnering with people like NutriMill, because you’re not an HOA sponsor because you just want everybody to buy your product. You’re doing what we’re doing. You’re educating people as to a better way of living and that’s what I love about this whole conversation that people get to see.

Gary Leavitt The reason we were a direct sales organization for so many years is because we didn’t want to sell our products to people who didn’t have a purpose and a reason and the understanding of why they were using them. We were looking to change people’s lives with whole grain nutrition and making their own food fresh and taking care and preparing whatever might come — a loss of a job, a sickness. We won’t even get into the craziness of this world right now because we could spend a two hour podcast doing that.

Amy Fewell We could. We might have to do that, Gary. We might just have to come on and talk about that.

Gary Leavitt Because, you know, we could spend an hour podcast on the milk crisis in this country. Because the thing I love about homesteaders is that they’re milking cows and drinking real food. And you hear all this stuff about getting dairy out of your system and, well, it’s because there’s a book. It’s out of print now called The Poisoning of America, and it was when the government came in and said, “We have to homogenize and pasteurize and blend milk from ten different farms and put them all into a big steel truck and take them to the milk processing plant.” We’re not drinking milk. We’re drinking overprocessed something, but whole milk is just the same as whole grain. It’s a different food than what we buy in the grocery store. There’s only one store here in Saint George where we can buy raw milk, and being able to buy that raw milk here in Saint George is incredible because of all the laws they passed against it. Homesteaders, a lot of them have cows they can milk it and drink it, but if they were trying to go buy raw milk, the government says, “No, no, no, no, it’s not safe for you.” Well, in my mind, that’s like craziness.

Amy Fewell Yeah, but you can buy all these other things that aren’t healthy for you, but you cannot buy whole, real, raw milk. Yeah.

Gary Leavitt Yeah.

Amy Fewell Well, Gary, I could literally talk to you all day long, but I won’t hold you too long. So, you know, at the end of every podcast episode, I like to give everyone an opportunity to just share what is on your heart. What is kind of burning in you, whether it’s something you’ve been learning about or something you just feel like you need to say. What is something you would love to say to our audience to close this out? I know, no pressure at all.

Gary Leavitt No pressure at all. I will say a couple of things. One is we have these stickers out at every show. We believe in life and healthy balance and it’s just, it’s been our motto for as long as I can remember. But life in healthy balances means not just food, but family, sustainability, preparedness. And I really believe, at the last conference we were at in Pryor, Oklahoma, we just spoke briefly and I basically said to the audience who was there, “I don’t know to what extent this country is going to keep going downhill. But the future of this country is in the hands of families.” The homesteaders are leading that movement and we are a Christian nation, and when we get away from being a Christian nation, we’re in trouble. But I see these homesteaders, and I see these rooms full of people that are committed to faith and family and God and nutrition and taking care of their families, and that’s the most important movement in this entire world right now.

Amy Fewell Yeah. That’s awesome. I love it. Gary, are you coming to conference this year? Because I would love to meet you in person.

Gary Leavitt Well, we’re sponsoring. I’ll be in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. We’re sponsoring the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho Homesteaders Conference. We got some people going to, I think, Springfield, Missouri. We’re doing the conference in Virginia. We’re one of the sponsors of the conference in Virginia, and I’m hoping to be there. One of the issues we have is because we have Bosch meetings every year that we have to go to. They’re a huge company, and they dictate when those meetings are. If it doesn’t conflict with that, yes, I’ll be there. But we will have a presence there. We have incredible employees and good people.

Amy Fewell All right, guys, well make sure you stop by the NutriMill station in October at the HOA Conference and all of these other conferences that they’re going to be at. Gary, we hope that you can come. I think you’d really enjoy it. We have a Friday night revival service. I think you would really enjoy it. And you guys that are listening, we want you guys to come too. Even if you don’t have a conference ticket, you can come to the revival. It’s completely free and open to the public. Last year, we baptized multiple people. It was just such a fun event. So if you want to come, please come. You can find Gary and NutriMill online. We’ve linked all of that stuff in the description of this video or the podcast, wherever it is you’re listening. And make sure you go buy a grain mill or a Bosch mixer if you don’t already have one, because they are super good tools. I know most of our team, I think has both of them, the NutriMill and the Bosch mixer. Many of us have switched over in the last couple of years, so they are tried and true and we really enjoy them. But thank you, Gary, for joining me today. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Gary Leavitt It’s my pleasure, and the most important work that I think the homesteader movement is doing is turning people to Christ.

Amy Fewell Yeah, I agree. I agree. All right guys. Well, until next time. Happy homesteading and we will see you next week.

Gary Leavitt Thanks, Amy. Appreciate your time. Thank you.

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.