From scaling a handful of pre-sold meat chickens into a profitable farm business to running classes, events, and online courses that now support her household, Beth Declercq has mastered the art of making a homestead pay for itself all while raising eight children at home. In this episode, she shares how she focuses on core income streams, grows profitable ventures, and even employs her own kids through the family’s LLC to teach them skills and keep more of what they earn. If you’ve ever wondered how to turn your homestead into a sustainable source of income without stepping away from family life, you won’t want to miss this conversation. Listen in!

In this episode, we cover:

• Beth’s path from city living to a thriving 10-acre homestead with her husband and eight kids
• How a focus on real food in 2011 grew into a diverse, mostly self-sufficient farm
• Creating a dedicated “scullery” to handle the mess of preservation, milking, and butchering outside the main kitchen
• Setting a goal for the homestead to be financially independent—and the strategy that made it happen
• Scaling from 100 pre-sold meat chickens to 750 a year, with profits funding the rest of the farm
• Focusing on core enterprises—meat chickens, on-farm events, herd shares, and poultry processing—rather than striving to make every element profitable
• Paying kids for their work in the family’s LLC-run enterprises as both a tax strategy and life skill
• Hosting entry-level classes and community gatherings to generate income and build relationships
• Turning repeated questions from followers into online courses and a membership that now supports their household income
• Encouragement for homestead dreamers to start small, accept imperfect beginnings, and build skills and income streams before they’re urgently needed

Thank you to our sponsors!

Nutrimill.com | High-quality small kitchen appliance products that function well, are easy to use, and promote healthy eating

McMurrayHatchery.com | A wide selection of poultry breeds and supplies to assist you with raising your flock

About Beth

Beth didn’t grow up homesteading—in fact, she and her husband were both raised in major cities and didn’t even see a chicken in person until shortly before they began raising their own. Their journey into this lifestyle began with a desire to provide higher quality food for their young family, but it quickly grew into a deep appreciation for being involved in every step of the process. Over the past decade, Beth has gained knowledge and skills from a wide range of sources—books, videos, and hands-on instruction—and now finds joy in sharing what she’s learned. Her passion lies in helping others who are just beginning their own homesteading journey and offering the same nourishing foods to her community that she once longed to provide for her own family.

Resources Mentioned

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Making Your Homestead Pay for Itself While Building a Family-Centered Life Transcript

Amy Fewell Welcome back to the Homesteaders of America podcast. I’m your host, Amy Fewell, and today we have a special guest with us—like always, right? I always have a guest that’s special. We have Beth Declercq. Beth, am I saying your last name right? 

Beth Declercq You said it right. 

Amy Fewell Perfect because see, people always get my last name wrong, so I have to ask. Welcome to the podcast, Beth. 

Beth Declercq Thank you for having me. Okay, so how do you say your last name? Because I always say fuel, like… 

Amy Fewell That’s right. Fuel, like gasoline, you know. 

Beth Declercq Usually people can say ours right, but they cannot spell it. Like even some of our closest friends. They miss a C. It’s a weird one, so… 

Amy Fewell Yeah, people always say our last name “Fee-well” instead of “Fewell” and my maiden name was easy. My maiden name was Carpenter. So going from Carpenter to Fewell is kind of interesting. 

Beth Declercq Okay, so my maiden name was not easy. It’s Dutch and it’s really long and so I thought for sure, I’ll marry a Jones or a Smith or something simple. Nope. I’m going to pick a name that ends with a Q. That makes sense. Is my mic picking up roosters and dogs? All I hear is farm out my window here. That’s the background of the homesteaders though, right? 

Amy Fewell It’s okay, when I was trying to do a live stream the other day, I have a heifer that is in heat and she just wanders our property and she stood right outside this window that’s in front of my computer and she just mooed and mooed and I’m like, “Stop!” 

Beth Declercq A farm is not a podcaster’s dream. I have been known to drive and do podcast episodes in my car—just like far away from kids and animals for the sake of trying to have a quiet space, but you work with what you got. 

Amy Fewell I feel you. Okay, Beth, I’m actually gonna let you do your own intro, so why don’t you tell us who are you, what do you do? 

Beth Declercq Okay, so back to Declercq. As she said, my husband Tommy and I live in Mid-Michigan, Mid-Lower Peninsula, just about an hour north of Grand Rapids and we have eight kids. We just recently moved from five acres to ten acres. And we were both born and raised in the city, but we got bit by the homesteading bug… Really, we got bit by the “real food” bug, probably 20… 2011 it was. And that is what spiraled into doing what we’re doing today. So we were just kind of exposed to the reality of our food system, wanted to clean up our diets, started sourcing things locally, started gardening on a small scale in the city. And from there, it’s just been kind of little by little. We moved out of the city 10 years ago and started raising things at scale and more meat and processing it ourselves and eventually got the milk cow. And now at this point we have… I’d say about 80 to 90% of our meat we grow and process ourselves. 50 to 60% of our produce at least, fruits and veggies. And then, like I said, we have actually three milk cows now and some laying chickens. And yeah, we’re a pretty diverse homestead at this point, but it did not happen overnight. It’s been 12 years of just kind of slow and steady progress to get to this point because we were learning as we went. We didn’t have any of this skill base, so slow and study has been our story.

Amy Fewell Yeah. I started following Beth a little while ago, a couple of years ago, but I really got to know Beth through the Homesteaders of America magazine. You wrote an excellent article for us. That said, I want to be Beth when I grew up. It was the scullery article that you wrote. I have it here somewhere, but it was this beautiful article about her homestead scullery. And why don’t you tell us what a scullery is—that way everyone knows. 

Beth Declercq Yeah, I mean, scullery. We certainly did not make that up. But basically, about five years ago, we got to the point in our homestead production, where it was taking over our kitchen space. You know, there’s certain seasons, or certain times of year, where you are just so in the thick of preservation and in processing. And what I think most homesteaders will relate to is that it’s very challenging to live in that kind of state of preservation and processing, while also still having to feed people, right? Like the amount of meals that we make with 40 bushels of food, you know, all over the counter and jars that have to be cleaned and put away, it just, it was a lot of work to work around. So we had a third stall on the back of our garage and we decided to convert it into this summer kitchen, is what I was initially planning it to be. So it had a concrete floor, we put plumbing in so that we could add a sink, and it was going to be a spot where I could do some preservation. I could keep all of my giant milking buckets that were taking over the counter, you know, wash them out there, and then naturally we ended up doing a lot of our chicken and pig butchering out there as well. So I called it the scullery because, you know, things need to have a name. Like if you’re telling a kid, “Hey, go put this in that room in the back of the garage,” it doesn’t flow very well. So I decided to call it the Scullery because I was reading about, you now, how they used to have sculleries as kind of the place where they did the dirty work and the prep work in this back of kitchen room. And I thought that was kind of, you know, what we’re doing. We’re doing all of the dirty and the prep work and the stuff I don’t want in my main kitchen. So that’s how the scullery was born. And it’s been very well received and coveted, I think, by a lot of homesteaders, but seriously such a blessing to have that second space. Though I will warn you: it’s great to have a second space to work in, but it also means that you have two kitchens to clean. So don’t forget that reality is that cleaning one kitchen is fun, cleaning two is twice as fun.

Amy Fewell Yeah, we are in the process of trying to finish our basement and put a kitchen down there because our basement walks right out into the back field where the milk cows are and so I’m like, yes, we’re gonna do this one day. Maybe not right now, but one day we will. But anyhow, okay, so you have all of these homestead children running around and I always ask the question to every homestead mom: “How do you get it all done?” 

Beth Declercq And every mom says, “We don’t.” We either have seasons where we drop the ball on things or we outsource stuff and both is the case for me, just like any other mom. You know, like there’s seasons for heavy preservation, there’s season for heavy house cleaning and they’re not often at the same time. So this time of year we are just in the thick of it. So the house is not the priority, the laundry keeps, you know, it keeps rolling just enough so that people are clothed and in that, things aren’t getting you know questionable. And I’m also really blessed that my mom’s retired so she steps in a lot and kind of just continues. And I have big kids so that is something that still feels very new, but is a huge blessing because when we first started, we were very much in the phase of… I think our oldest was… She had to have been five when we moved out of the city to the first property. So it was a lot slower—those first five years on acreage because I just had all little people that didn’t do anything really productive-wise. But now they’re big and they can definitely contribute and they do contribute. So it’s not all me, it’s a team effort. 

Amy Fewell Right. So with all these kids and all this learning how to homestead, you might be a professional now, right? Because you’re starting to teach people how to do this. So why don’t you tell us a little bit… One of the things that I follow you for is because you have incredible advice when teaching and educating people on how to homestead, but also how to do it financially. So why not you kind of tell us how you started on that journey and go into it that way. 

Beth Declercq Yeah. I would say this has definitely become one of the things I share the most about because there’s a ton of people that are teaching how to can and how to butcher and they teach it really well. But what I have just naturally shared as we’ve gone on our journey is just the financial aspect of homesteading, like what does it cost to do certain things for us? And that kind of led us into generating income from our homestead as well, which really was just born out of need to have more money to homestead. I think that there is definitely a savings factor in growing your own food but there’s also an upfront capital cost to get to the point where you can do that savings. You can raise your own meat chicken for a year for less than buying it from the store but you have to pay to do that and still be eating chicken kind of in the meantime. So what happened is that about six years ago I would say, we had gotten to the point where we were very diverse. We were growing a large amount of our food, but I kind of got this realization that we only could continue to grow our food as long as my husband’s off-farm job was stable to finance us buying the feed and buying the animals and things like that. And that got a little uncomfortable because you think of self-sufficiency and kind of being in charge of your food source as a huge comfort—especially as a mom with a lot of mouths to feed—and so I decided that I wanted our homestead to make enough money so that it was self-sustaining (or I called it financially independent as a homestead) so that way if my husband lost his job or if he got sick and couldn’t work, you know, we’d only have to float the the household. We wouldn’t have to sell off our milk cow or our plucker or all these things that we had invested in. So that was what kind of started us generating income. And I guess now I’m forgetting the question, but we got to the point where that kind of became a game, where it was like, okay, the meat chickens are paying for the meat chickens—we’re selling enough that ours are free and we can buy hay for our cow. And yeah, I don’t know. Do you want me to go into kind of all the different things that we do now for income or what? 

Amy Fewell So what’s the first thing that you started selling to really jumpstart this? Was it the chickens?

Beth Declercq It was. It was meat chickens. Yeah, we did meat chickens for a year or two. Not enough for our entire year’s need because again, that was a lot of upfront money for us as a one income family, growing, adding kids. And so we decided we would do a year. We did 100 chickens, and we pre-sold 50 of them, thinking that that would make our 50 free, and it would give us kind of upfront money to pay for the chicks and the feed and everything. And it wasn’t quite that. I think it ended up being maybe about 75% of the cost, but it was still good and it worked. So then we went to raising 150 chickens and we sold half. And then we raised 200 chickens and sold half and we’re at the point now where this year we’ll raise 750. We will sell about… I think I’m gonna sell 600 of them. I’ve sold almost that, but 150 is about what we need for our family at this point for a year, which sounds just crazy. But we’re 10 people, so that’s probably not unrealistic. And then the other 600 we will sell. And of course those 600 that we will sell are gonna more than pay for our 150 that we keep. So the extra profit from that will cover things on our homestead that don’t make money because that’s one thing that I’ve learned is that initially when I started to generate income from our property, I thought everything needed to cover itself: the layer chickens needed to cover the cost of themselves, the milk cow had to cover the costs of themselves. But then I realized that that is not a super efficient way to generate income because it’s really hard to make everything profitable at a really small scale. So what I have kind of leaned into now is having what I call “core enterprises”. So we as a family have really three or four main income streams that finance our entire property. So meat chickens are one of them. On-farm events is another one. We do a small raw milk herd share, and then we offer chicken butchering, or really poultry processing, as a service, and that’s it. Those four things are what pay for all of the food that we grow, all of our homestead projects. They also pay our kids because they’re employed by our homestead technically and they’re obviously giving labor that’s beneficial. They need to be recognized for that. But yeah, the layer chickens never make money. Like the pigs, they never make money. The garden never makes money. So that’s what’s worked best for us, but it’s been a lot of trial and error to figure that out. 

Amy Fewell I’m sure. So how long did it take you… So here’s the thing: people will listen and they’ll automatically say, “Okay I’m gonna do that.” But let’s be realistic—how long did it take you to build up to raising 700 and some chickens for your community? 

Beth Declercq Yeah, I think what happened is that it started as an idea, but it was probably four or five years in before I changed it from being this, you know, thought that I could accomplish without any real strategy or any intention, and I changed from being an idea to being this is my business. This is something I have to do and I have to actually pay attention to the numbers, I actually have to have a marketing plan, and I actually have to have some type of systems in place to make it sustainable for my family. Because if you don’t have a system in place, things get chaotic and stressful very quickly and then you quit because it’s not working and it’s not fun anymore. It’s the same for having any animal. If you get an animal with this idea—let’s say you get a milk cow—and you’re gonna have a milk cow, and you’re gonna make all your own home dairy processes, but you don’t establish a system that, hey, twice a week, I’m gonna go through the milk fridge and deal with everything, and these are my recipes for cheese and yogurt and whatnot, and that’s gonna be my process, you’re gonna get two weeks into having a milk cow and have 30,000 gallons of milk and be stressed and overwhelmed and out of jars, and want to quit because you can’t handle it, or you’re just dumping it all to the animals to feed them. So it was not too long though after I decided that it was going to be a business to raise meat chickens that we scaled pretty quickly. I think in 2021, we were raising 300 and we kind of went to 400, 500, 750 over the next few years. And we probably could have scaled faster, but again, we had small kids. They were on the cusp of being able to be contributing but not quite there yet. So as soon as they were, it was like okay, this is what you’re doing now. 

Amy Fewell Yeah. So let’s break off of the farm animals real quick—and then we will come back to that because I have some more questions—but you mentioned paying your kids, and I think that is a very underutilized thing for farmers. We pay our kids, too. I actually pay my oldest son to milk (I mean, I do milk sometimes, but I’m not milking right now with a small baby) and so he’s been milking, the last part of my pregnancy up through now, and we pay him to do that. And so why don’t you kind of talk a little bit about that and how beneficial that is, especially from the business standpoint. 

Beth Declercq Yeah, so beyond the fact that obviously it’s motivating for kids to get paid for their work and not to feel like a grunt, it’s super beneficial from a business standpoint. Our homestead, personally, is set up under an LLC because when you’re generating income, there’s only so long that you can avoid that being recognized. So we set up an LLC to be the receiver of the income. It’s not me personally that’s earning income, it’s my husband personally, it’s this LLC, our homestead business. And so that way we can put expenses against that income for tax purposes to hopefully not end up paying taxes or paying much less than we would if it was just me straight making an income. So the kids not only are doing the chores… So here’s how we do it. We don’t pay the kids for doing chores that contribute to the family—just like we don’t pay them to do dishes or to put away laundry, we don’t pay them to do chores that are personal family related. But if it’s meat chicken business, if it’s butchering business, if it’s raw milk business, those are the things they get paid for because those are things we get paid for. And we do just like a flat rate depending on what it is, so for processing chickens, they get a flat-rate per bird just because it’s way easier for me to keep track of. But you can pay, I don’t know, I think it’s pretty much the same across the board in all states, but you can pay your kids through your business like $13,000 a year before they have to claim any income that’s taxable from it. So that’s huge because we’re not gonna be able to pay our kids that much a year, but if they’re making $5,000 a year that they don’t have to pay taxes on, when they’re 10 years old, that’s crazy, because you put that into a savings account, or even better, if you put it into a Roth or something like that, that’s just gonna set them up so much for the future while also benefiting us as a business right now. So that’s kind of our main incentive with paying them is just kind of that long-term picture of they’re learning how to manage money and they’ll actually have some to work with once they’re out of the house. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, a lot of farms… So our farm is set up as an LLC as well. We’re not a registered farm or anything, we’re just straight business. And so we realized once we started making an income off of the farm, okay, we need some more expenses or otherwise I’m just handing over money to the government and I don’t really like the government, so… And so that’s when we started realizing, okay, we can pay our kids and we were already doing it for some other businesses. Like my oldest son works with my husband, who does HVAC and electrical. And so it is such a benefit to teach your kids skills and homesteading, but also teach them business and have them motivated. So, you know, like our oldest, he’ll be 16 next month, and he’s been paying a Jeep off that his dad has (my husband collects vehicles, it’s great) and so he has this Jeep that our oldest son wanted to buy. And so, he’s taking that and putting it towards a Jeep, you know what I mean? So it’s like, okay, he can buy his first car with his farm money, you know, with his milking money and all of these things. So I love that you do that with your kids too. So anyone who’s listening to that, it’s definitely an option. I think you’re right. I think it is about the same across the board for most states and tax brackets. 

Beth Declercq I think it’s too, like one thing I’ve noticed about sharing just financial stuff in general, like on Instagram and whatnot, is that a lot of people have just a limited experience with money when they get into adulthood. What you learn is from your peers or from TV. And yes, kids are kids, but still, they are learning, like you said, business alongside us and seeing that, hey, this chicken cost us $12 to raise and you’re selling it for $28. That’s a pretty sweet return on your money. Buying this lottery ticket for $12 that may or may not make me money, that doesn’t seem like a good investment. And so, you know, not that we’re going to curb all bad habits, but just being thoughtful of what the return on investment is for how you’re using your money, and teaching delayed gratification. We’ve got one kid that’s saving up right now for something that’s several thousand dollars that when he finally gets it, he will feel the weight of like, my goodness, this took so much time for me to save for, which just gives them more appreciation and respect and care for it. So there’s just endless value to it. 

Amy Fewell Okay, going back to your farm and making money on your farm, you were talking about you hold events on your homestead. So what kind of events do you host that make an income for you guys? 

Beth Declercq Yeah. So the events were something that… I’m very introverted. I’m perfectly able to have a conversation, but a lot of people is something that’s very tiring for me. So I was not super excited about the idea of events, but I had a friend that really encouraged me to do them. And kind of the pitch was that we were only on five acres at a time, so our production capacity was limited. Like you can only grow so many meat chickens on five-acres. You can only have so many milk cows in the way that we wanted to farm, in a way that was sustainable for the land. And so events, they don’t require any space. I mean, you can literally be in town and have people in your yard or your driveway or your kitchen for a class. And so there’s not as much limitation income-wise as far as event space. So that was what started it. The first one I did was just a basic vegetable gardening class. All of my events are very very entry level because I am not an expert at anything but I know a lot of things pretty well so kind of the rule of thumb is that if you’re thinking about teaching a class but you don’t think you know quite enough, just realize—you just have to know like two steps ahead of the person you’re going to be teaching because the value in that is actually that you are gonna teach them in a way that’s more understandable. Meaning that, you know, somebody who just learned to garden five years ago is going to teach it at a way more basic level than like a college professor who’s a professional of biology and horticulture and is going use terms that are so out of a newbie’s realm that they can’t even grasp it. I see this with my kids too, where it’s like I’m trying to teach someone to tie their shoe and they’re not getting it and then the child that’s one or two years older then says, “Oh, do it like this.” And it’s like instantly, they figure it out because that kid teaching might not be an expert, but they learned it recently enough that they understand the struggle and the questions a little bit better. So classes, we have done Gardening, we have done Meat Chicken (both raising and butchering), Pressure Canning, Water Bath Canning. I’m getting ready to do a new one I’ve never done before, which is just Home Dairy 101. So we’ll make butter and cheese and yogurt and kind of those basic first dairy products. I’ve done a crochet class. That was like a winter class I did that was fun. And I’m sure there’s a couple other but we’ve also kind of moved into also doing gatherings, so literally just social events where people can get together and just gain inspiration and fellowship. And we do usually one in the spring, that’s a women’s event only with vendors so we can also support each other, and then the fall one is kind of the harvest themed family event. And we do a whole hog roast and yeah, those have been really profitable, but I also think, you know, like you get, it’s important to have face-to-face interaction. Teaching online is great, but you’ll never get away from that need for face-to-face interaction with people. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, and it builds community too, is what a lot of people don’t realize. Like I don’t know how you do it, but a lot people will do events for their customer base or just people that support their farm in general. I love that you do fellowship events because you know, getting together like that is what builds community. And that’s how you make more sales too for people. So a couple more questions and then I’ll let you go. So you started with chickens, you’re doing these events, but I believe you’re also doing some online stuff too. Is that right? 

Beth Declercq Yes, so kind of not willingly. I fought it for a long time. I never intended to be doing things online income-wise, but I’m glad I did because it’s ended up being a blessing, I think, for both me and the people that, you know, are able to learn from me in that capacity. So I have a couple different things. I have some courses. My biggest thing is that I have a membership that is specifically about building productive and profitable homesteads. Kind of the natural progression of when you share things a lot openly online, people start asking a lot of questions and you can answer questions but only for so long. So at some point I finally kind of condensed and organized everything that was frequently asked questions, and of course the first topic that I did it about was meat chickens—condensed it all into an online course so that somebody could just go and get all of the information in an organized fashion. Because what happened is that people used to save things on highlights and Instagram so you could refer back to them, but that gets really messy. Like you go back and look at my highlights and yeah, the information is there but not in a very like consumable way. So I always tell people if you do not want to pay for a course, that’s fine. It’s in my highlights, but you’re gonna have to really kind of chew through things to get all of the stuff. You can’t just go immediately to how to build a chicken tractor like you can in my course, see the video, download the plans, be good to go. You gotta watch like 20 videos of my explanation of it. So I will always share things for free still, for people that that’s the only way that they can access it. But I do have a few courses and an online membership where things are just a little bit more digestible so that they can implement them quickly.

Amy Fewell Yeah, and so you’ve got all of these ways, you’re a mama, you’re bringing in all of this income to pay for your homestead. And I assume you’re making even an income on top of that, right? Beyond just paying for your Homestead. 

Beth Declercq Yeah, so at this point we kind of see it as two different businesses. It is under one, but the homestead property, it has to support the homestead property. Any extra gets poured back into it because there’s always more infrastructure to build, there’s always equipment to upgrade. So we don’t take an income from the farm at all right now, even though we could, because we just want to continue to grow and build that—especially since we moved recently and there’s just a lot of things that we want to change here. But the online income has actually been what’s been able to just as of recently support our house, so that is like what our family is able to, you know, buy diapers and pay our mortgage and things like that. So I’m very thankful that I decided to do stuff online because I think one of the challenges and dreams that a lot of people have is that, you know, they’re building this thing, but one spouse is away or both spouses are away and you only have so much time. And so it definitely was a dream of ours for my husband to be home and to be able to build this with us and to not have to do it after working 12 hours a day. And that’s not everybody’s goal, but that definitely was our goal. So having generated this kind of alternative online income so that he can be home now has just really given us a chance to ramp up things faster as well. And he’s just… He’s home. So it’s good. 

Amy Fewell Right. Now I assume you probably had no technology experience before you started building a course. So how did you come about doing that? Because I know I can already hear people, “Well, that’s great, but she probably knew how to do all this stuff before.” But most of us didn’t. Most of us did know how to these things. So why don’t you kind of tell everyone how you did it? 

Beth Declercq Yeah, nope. I didn’t know anything. Even though I am technically millennial, I’m 35, I am very resistant of technology. It’s, you know, kind of a necessary evil in some ways, but I have no desire to be like fully, you know, automated and stuff. What I’ve learned now, five years into this probably, is that there’s two ways to figure out new things online that you’ve not done before: you can do it the way I did it, where it’s just trial and error—doing it bad for a really long time until you figure out how to do it semi-decent. But I’m still not good. Like, my website, it’s there, but it’s barely there. It functions, but it is not anything professional by any means. The other option is you outsource it. You have somebody that you hire to do. At this point, I’ve hired somebody for some things, but I haven’t hired them for everything. So that’s why it’s still kind of just good enough. But just like with homesteading, you do it one at a time. Like the first thing I ever did for my online business was I had to make a landing page to collect emails, you know, with a lead magnet, which were all these words that I didn’t even know what they were, but it was like my first landing page took me probably five hours to set up and get working correctly with the thing on there. I can make a landing page in about two minutes now. Like, you figure it out and you get better at it. But there’s so many resources on YouTube and podcasts. I mean, don’t be afraid to ask people either. There’s been many, many people that have blessed me with their willingness to just coach me through things. Shout out to Dee Porter of the Porter Homestead. 

Amy Fewell Oh yeah, yeah. 

Beth Declercq Pretty sure every homesteader’s website guru for when I mess things up and I need her to fix them. But yeah, just one bite at a time is how you do it. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, you know, one of the things I love about you and a lot of all of these other homesteaders and farmers that are doing it and making it happen and making it work is that most of us, myself included, we didn’t know what we were doing when we first started. And here’s the difference in making it and not making it: you will not make it if you do not wake up and just start trying to do it. Even if you don’t know how to do it, just try to do it. I can’t tell you how many people I have met or mentored or even hired that are not self-starters and self-motivated. And so if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re like, “Oh, I can’t do that,” then you’ve already defeated yourself because you’re not going to be motivated to get up and do it. But if you really just sit down and say, “Okay, well, they didn’t know how to do it, and I don’t know how to do it, but I can try and I can learn,” and you’re motivated. You have something to motivate you—like Beth’s motivation was getting her husband home and having the farm pay for itself, and that’s a pretty big motivation. It should be really a motivation for everyone for the farm to pay for itself, right? And she did it, and she’s doing it, and you’re rocking it, and you are a mama of eight, right? You said eight? 

Beth Declercq Yep. 

Amy Fewell So it is possible for everyone. And so I just want to encourage you guys that are listening: people like us didn’t really have people to teach us how to do it, and now people like Beth are teaching you how to do it. So whether you’re doing it for just yourself or your family, you can go to Beth’s website. She can help you there, you know, look at your homestead finances, learn how to build a chicken coop (like you said, a chicken tractor), talk about making an income, and hopefully you guys glean some information too just from this episode alone before you get directed over there. But Beth, I’m going to let you go. But at the end of every podcast, I like to ask my guests, “Is there anything inside of you that is just burning to share with our HOA audience, whether it’s farm related or family or whatever?” Is there anything you think our audience should know before you get off here?

Beth Declercq I just want to echo you saying like anything worth doing is worth doing bad. I’m pretty sure Joel Salatin said that one time, and I just totally believe that—you have to do it bad if you ever want to do it good. And if it’s worth doing at all, then then you’ll accept that. But I think a lot of homesteaders, they really thrive on the goal of being in charge of your food source, being in charge of your families nourishment, but don’t discredit the other elements that it takes to live. Like take some of this episode and really put some thought into your finances, what your security level is, pay off any debt if you can, save some money, generate income streams. I really do believe that businesses, self-employment, is going to be such a huge part of the next generation as people are just kind of moving away from the traditional workforce. And that’s not to say that everybody needs to because you’re always going to need hospitals. I’m always going to need a midwife. I don’t want every woman to listen to this and say, “Yeah, I can’t work anymore because I have be at home with my homestead.” There’s places for everybody. But if you’re feeling that nudge or that desire to be able to generate income for yourself, then you have to start small and you got to start now so that way, when the time comes where you may need it, you’ve gained some traction at that point. 

Amy Fewell Absolutely. And I 100% agree with you. I think you touched on something that we could create a whole another podcast for, and it’s that, you know, self-employment really is setting the foundational legacy for future generations and your family. And that goes along with hiring your kids to do stuff, right? It’s generational farming and homesteading and business and for whatever is coming in America and the world, it kind of sets your family up when your farm is paying for itself and you know what? Your community is definitely going to need your food that you are growing, and so why not get started now? So Beth, thank you so much for coming on the HOA podcast. We’ve really enjoyed it and we will have you on again soon. 

Beth Declercq Thank you, I appreciate it. Good chatting with you. 

Amy Fewell Absolutely. Alright guys, check out the show notes of this episode. You can find all of Beth’s information there. If you have any questions, by all means, leave them below on the YouTube channel or wherever you’re listening. And until next time, happy homesteading.