Hard Men Podcast
Hard Men Podcast
The Family Economy with Rory Groves
What is a productive household? I sit down with Rory Groves to talk about his new book, "The Family Economy: Discovering the Family as it Was Designed to Work." We talk about the Industrial Revolution, how it reshaped family life, and what God's design is for the household and marriage as a central economy.
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This episode of the Hardman Podcast is brought to you by Joe Garrisi, with Backwards Planning, financial, by our friends at Alpine Gold, by Max D Trailers, salt and Strings, butchery, premier Body Armor and finally, by Reformation Heritage Books. Well, welcome to this episode of the Hardman Podcast. I am your host, eric Kahn, and very excited, delighted even to have on our show once again Rory Groves. Rory, thanks for joining me for this episode of the podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Always good conversation, Rory, one of the things we'll talk about in this episode. You've got a new book the Family Economy Discovering the Family as it was Designed to Work. We'll, of course, jump into that, but for our listeners who don't know what you've been up to, there's a lot of things that you guys have been doing as a family, so give me just a little short, I guess, introduction to who you are and what your family's been up to.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well. So, as you mentioned, my name is Rory and we're the Groves family. I've got six kids, ages 13 down to two, and my wife, becca and I have been married for 19 years actually coming up this weekend.
Speaker 1:Awesome.
Speaker 2:And we live on a little farm. I hesitate to say hobby farm. It started as a hobby farm but now it's just a farm because we actually depend on it and we've learned over the last dozen years or so a little bit about self-sufficiency and how to turn this into something productive. That's not so much economically we're not a market farm so much but we produce as much as we can for our own families, which is really what our goal is here in our farm in southern Minnesota. And so along the way of kind of attempting to become more productive, work together and do some of these things, I started to discover. So my background is as a technology consultant and I'd worked in IT my entire career since I was a little kid. That was all I ever wanted to do, and one of the things I noticed started to happen was I just lost my interest in all the high-tech gadgets and gizmos. As I was digging in the dirt and herding sheep with my son and doing other kinds of projects, building a cabin and just having fun out here on the land. I just noticed that some of my priorities started to change. Also, of course, children started to come into the picture, come into the view, and it's not something I had thought about that much as a young man or even when we were first married. So as our family change and as my work change, it's just one of these things that I desired to have more of a start spending more of my time with my family doing productive work and the stuff on the computer and the business strategies and the plans. I'm an entrepreneur, so I've always had some, some kind of iron in the fire when it comes to building a business or a tech business or two building a business or a tech business or two but anyways, you know those things, just they didn't really bring the fulfillment that I could get out of just spending a day picking pumpkins in my garden with my kids. You know what I'm saying. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely so it was.
Speaker 2:It was those kinds of experiences that led me on a line of questioning that really changed my life, and that was is there any option for men today who want to work with their families and not have to be separated from their families in order to earn a living? I just wanted a no answer to that question and I started doing research and I ended up. I didn't start out this way, but I ended up putting a book together that's called Durable Trades, and that book is goes into the 60 plus. Viable professions that still interact with family in some way in the modern age is really where I expanded my horizon, so to speak, as to what was possible.
Speaker 2:We don't have to fit into this corporate industrial model. That's not the way that we live for most of human history and we don't have to live that way today. There's a ton of examples out there of families who are doing things together and all the benefits that accrue from that. So the second book and the goal behind it was this is about four years after I released. Durable Trades is, as I talked to more and more especially dads who are in this position of wanting to do something more with their family, not be so separated from their families as their primary vocation. They were asking questions that I thought it would be helpful to put together a very practical resource, something that they can get their arms around the idea of the family economy and then also start working like right away, put into practice some basic principles that will help to bring their families together and hopefully discover a way that they can find productive labor together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great, and one of the things you guys do is the Gather and Grow. That's great. And one of the things you guys do is the Gather and Grow newsletter yes, one of my favorite things about it is this actual paper newsletter. So we found this in our family. Like when that shows up, of course the boys want to open it. It's something physical you can hold. If I was going to say to my boys like, hey, check out this email I got with a newsletter from Roy Groves, I don't think people would care, but there's something about and I've seen the photos like your family is actually compiling them and mailing them and there's something about that. It's interesting the way that you've been able to include your family. I want you to talk just a little bit about that. Like what, what exactly are you guys doing on a daily basis that they're involved in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, that, that, I mean that newsletter, is a great example. Just, the kids went over to help grandma this morning do some get ready to move? But I told them on their way out the door start thinking about your article, because we're going to put together the next newsletter here this week. But this newsletter started as just a way to chronicle what we were doing on the farm. We just, I mean it's just, it's something that God put, I think, in Becca and I in my heart is that we love to share, just like the, the, the enthusiasm that comes along with learning something new, and and so when we moved to a farm, I mean we just anyone that we would drag them off the street and say look at this, you can tap a tree and you get sugar out of it. You know these are just kinds of things that we would do.
Speaker 2:So we started this newsletter I mean, I think it's been about eight years ago and we just had this random idea. We used to get a quarterly newsletter from a pastor out in Nebraska and it was just. It was like the perfect pace, the perfect tempo. It wasn't too much information, it was just a couple of pages. And we said, what if we did one like that about homesteading and just kind of share what we're learning? And I think our first newsletter was like three pages. It wasn't anything really that big of a deal. But as it went on and we had like 30 families, we just sent a quick email out hey, we'd like to do this. As anyone want this, we'll just print it up and mail it to you. And so that's one example of where you know that never started out as any kind of a business or there was no plan. I mean, it was just something that we could do together. And I talk about this in the book a little bit is sometimes those things which maybe even seem recreational at first, they actually will turn into something viable given some time and space. And so what we did with the newsletter was it just continued to spread word of mouth and we kept talking about when durable trades came out. People were interested in following along on our journey and what we were learning. And our kids are growing and they're learning and they're articulating different things about their experience with the family economy. So that's kind of been this.
Speaker 2:I'd say this kind of pulse that we have on our family. Every three months we get together and kind of reflect what's going on in our family, what have we learned about homesteading, about family economy, what has God teaching us in this time? And then we invite other families to share their stories If we run across someone. I, just a couple of days ago, I just met somebody who has renovated a barn on their property. They purchased a barn with the intent of hosting weddings and they're excited to get other Christian families to come out and utilize it in that way. And so I just said, hey, write up your story. I'd love to run it in our newsletter because there's so many different ways that families have found they can work together in the modern age and then they're able to just really strengthen those family bonds, whereas if it's just an economic concern, you're not always getting the benefit, of course, with the paychecks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's exactly right, and this is one of the things you talk about in the book that I really like this concept of the productive household, household as economy, people working together. This is in the introduction, but you say after centuries of working the same ground together, generation after generation, it was unthinkable that a job should separate a man from his wife, a father from his children, a family from its home. And you say families worked together. What is the importance do you think of stressing that families are working together in some sort of meaningful you know, whatever the vocation is, but that they're working together? And why is that so central being a productive household to having a robust household?
Speaker 2:Well. So there's a couple of tacks I could take with that. There's one example that I like what Kevin Swanson says, that he talks about. You can think of a family economy like an axe head and axe handle, and that's why there's an axe on the front of the book. That's representative of that concept. And if you take an axe head and you go out and try to chop down trees with the axe head, you're going to make a dent in a tree but you're not going to do too much damage there. But if you put the axe handle, which really represents that, husband and wife coming together as one union, aligned for one purpose, then the capability of productive labor increases 100 fold. And so and he goes on to say these are this represents all the basic elements of the family economy. So there's a basic level of what if we were combined and joined? Not because there's an economic incentive involved, although there might be an economic payoff involved but what if we were combined and joined because we really wanted to share one mission and one purpose? And as Christian families I'd say that purpose we would call a calling right Under God. What has God called our family to do and how could we join together, in other words to affect something that we wouldn't be able to do on our own, apart, or that we wouldn't be able to do if we're separated out into corporations and with some corporate missions or something like that. So that's the one tack is that there's the capability, the possibility of far more productivity and end results as a family economy that has a shared mission.
Speaker 2:But I would say, as a believer and as a Christian father, number one, before all else, is discipleship. Yeah, I mean Deuteron, all else is discipleship. Yeah, I mean Deuteronomy 6 puts it right before us you know, you shall teach the laws of the Lord, you shall have them as frontlets in front of your eyes. You shall teach them to your children as they lie down, as they wake up, as they walk by the way, as they sit in the house. So there's all these elements of the families together. Why? What's happening when the family's together? When they're not together, it's discipleship. And the opportunities I will just say the opportunities for discipleship present themselves through working together in ways that other forms of eating together or even worshiping together or going to church together or going to recreation it's a different dimension and it's very profound in some of the best times that we've ever had in terms of me having these live conversations with my children, having them with my wife. They've happened while we're working together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so important. I think of one of my favorite quotes from the great philosopher ron swanson uh, but he said that, uh, child labor laws are destroying this country, and it is interesting. One of the things you talk about in the book is, if you look at what the family is today, right, a lot of times it's like a hotel room where in the evenings, everybody goes out to their own work. It's all separate, and for a few hours maybe in the evening, you come together, you eat a meal and watch Netflix, yeah, and it sort of robs the family. I think of its potency, but part of an element of that is that we have this view in our culture today where children ought not to be working, whereas that wasn't always the case, and this is something you talk about in the book. But why is it so important that even the littles can learn how to work in this family economy? Why is it so important?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean it's important because if you don't have a work ethic, you're basically going to fall behind in life. You're either going to learn it as an adult in a very painful way, or you're never going to learn it as an adult in a very painful way, or you're never going to make it. There's a I know an Amish family and I talked to him one time about this subject, about how do you develop a work ethic in your children, and one of the comments that they made was they kind of have a conventional wisdom around Amish communities that if child does not like working by the time they're 16, they're not going to make it.
Speaker 1:You got to have that before 16.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and not just, not just willing to, but like to work, and nobody, you know we're we're by nature we're, we're lazy creatures, you know we, if we try to avoid work if we can, that's comfort is our pursuit by default, and so so training children to actually have an intact work ethic, to be successful in this world, in this material world, but also to be disciplined, self-disciplined, I mean, all of these things are things that parents would want of their children. Well, it only gets harder the longer you wait to do that, and if you're waiting to teach a work ethic to a child after he's a senior in high school or 14 or 15 years old, where he can get legally get a job to your point regarding child labor laws, it's going to be way, way too late. That child needs to be learning a work ethic starting around the age of three years old. I mean, there need to be some practical things that that child can engage in, and historically, that was the family economy.
Speaker 2:Three-year-olds were going to work, and I mean they weren't obviously doing. They were collecting eggs, maybe, or maybe, you know, maybe they're helping briefly picking raspberries in the garden. They're doing something, though, and there's a productive or there's a meaningful aspect to it. It's not just a keep them occupied kind of chore, it's not just clean your room, make your bed, wipe your nose, you know. It's not just that kind of nonsense, it's actual productive stuff. Like you know, collecting eggs is like we eat. This is how we eat and everyone has to pitch in feed the animals. That's another one. So one of the things that I like about and this is a little bit of a tangent, but one of the things I do like and why I picked I like about and this is a little bit of a tangent, but one of the things I do like and why I picked homesteading is to be kind of a central core of our family economy is because of the variety of things that younger children can do. You don't have to have a farm. I make that point in the book. You don't have to have a farm in order to have a family economy. It's just that it lends itself better to younger children's involvement.
Speaker 2:And then, going on from three, you know, from the ages five, six, seven years old, aristotle says that give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man. And what's he saying there? He's saying that by the time a child turns seven, basically the concrete has been poured. You know, the dye has been cast. If we are not involving our children in those early years, we're going to really miss an opportunity to have an impact on them in their later years. You can't really make up for lost time when it comes to children. You have the window of time that you have. So seven, eight, nine years old this is really historically.
Speaker 2:If you go back and you read, like Puritan New England, you're reading about pre-industrial times. Seriously, by the time a seven or eight years old, that child is with his daddy in the workshop or with their mother in the domestic duties of the household and they are just working. At that point. I mean they may be doing some literacy lessons and some of those kinds of things, but by and large they are entering into a real capacity of work with their families. But by and large they are entering into a real capacity of work with their families. That's how we train. There was no such thing as the word teenager until the 20th century. Think about that. Yeah, it was never known to be a disruptive, chaotic period in a young person's life. The teenage years were essentially. They were adults by then, and they were expected to kind of carry their own weight, and they were perfectly capable to do so.
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Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really interesting.
Speaker 1:One of the things you mentioned in the book is and I think a lot of us I know there was a time where I just never had thought about this but even the introduction of public school.
Speaker 1:This comes in and it's pushed especially in periods like the Great Depression, where they're like we need to keep young people out of the workforce, but it's also like we're going to send the men and women to factories and so we need to have something that just occupies the children during that time, of course, with a family business. One of the things I found really interesting is number one. You find out how productive children can actually be and what a productive thing they are for the household. Now I've often wondered I want to get your thoughts on this but part of the whole abortion industry is really an idea that children are a tax and a cost and they're a burden. But then when you're a part of the productive economy, you realize, especially with the household, you're like wait a minute, a 12 year old can be wildly productive and I wonder if it's just how we view them because of as we'll get into, because of things like industrialization. I wonder if you think that's true kind of how that that view of children has dominated.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. I totally agree with that. The the view of modern culture towards children is that of burdens, and the Bible calls them blessings. So we, we, we reduce the number of children. Look at the fertility rates alone. I mean. According to the CDC, america has been below replacement level fertility for 50 years. Wow, 50 years, going back to like 1971. Wow, and so there's this, this cultural kind of assumption that children, like you said, are burdens and that the way to prosper economically is to have fewer of them, because that leaves more disposable income for mom and dad and then you don't divide the inheritance so much across. That's completely counter to how we viewed children and family for the last 5,000 years at least.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where children were actually assets to the family economy. And the more children you had, the greater inheritance. Guess what? When it's your turn and you're not the one that can punch the clock anymore, guess who's taking care of you? Right, they didn't put their faith in stock markets and things like that. It was their children. It was their children who took care of them and they took care of their children. And so the family network, the support, the bonds, the relationships that was the focus, that was the inheritance of previous generations, before we got into this industrialized, modern way of work, which really began to isolate and break down all those relationships in order to mass produce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting. One of the questions I've had about the Industrial Revolution is whether or not it was inevitable. A lot of people today, I think, especially in some of our reformed post-millennial camps, there's a tendency, almost in an evolutionary way, to view all progress as good. In like an evolutionary way to view all progress as good. And so I wonder if you would talk just a little bit about the industrial revolution and what that did to the family. And then I want to preload that with a question Do you think it was inevitable? Could it have been a different way, or could we go back?
Speaker 2:Yes and yes. One of the things in the book that I go into is is the primary impacts of industrialism on the family. That was my goal and it's light. I mean it's one chapter so you can get through it pretty quick but there's a number of ways in which the family, specifically the traditional family that we know and love, was kind of put through the crucible during that time and came out never the same. But to answer your question, was it inevitable? I would say yes, because, just like the cycles of history, it's inevitable.
Speaker 2:Whenever you get into a certain level of apathy and prosperity in a nation state, there's this kind of supremacy of greed. I guess you would say, and kind of like, hey, what are all these relationships? And like, what were we saying Burdens, yeah, you know, these young people are burdens, these old people burdens. What's a way we can handle this more efficiently? So I do think that happens. It happened in Rome. I mean, you see a massive amount of urbanization, industrialization happening in Rome, back in, you know, the third and fourth century industrialization happening in Rome back in the third and fourth century, just before they collapsed, of course, but they just overextended themselves, but they had, I mean, compared to the rest of the world. For its time they were incredibly advanced with aqueducts carrying water, on indoor plumbing. I read somewhere that they had underground air conditioning for some of the households in Rome so incredibly industrialized society by the end. But they didn't start that way. They started 800 years prior as an agrarian kind of what would you say, yeoman farmers and self-sufficient economies, family economies. So I would say that progression is pretty typical. We went back in the dark ages, back to more of that agrarian, self-sufficient, community, communal approach. I mean, we had the monasteries we had that were keeping knowledge and learning alive and they were teaching people agriculture and all of these things. You can just go look up if you want to. But then we came out of that with the great enlightenment and we started the trek towards the supremacy of humanism again and that led to hey, what do we need all these people for? What do we need these burdens for? Isn't there a way we can make more money again? So I think this is a cycle of human history that has to play out, unfortunately, that until people realize and are reminded again that it's not about the material abundance. Like Jesus spoke very prophetically he said what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul, forfeit his soul, and when we get caught in that cycle again, we have to go through the pain of another reset. So that would be it, and yes to that. It is a cycle, and can we go back? Yes, and we will go back, because, whether we want to or not, we'll have to go back.
Speaker 2:This kind of life in this industrialized, hyper-industrialized society is unsustainable. We're $35 trillion in debt right now. This is just one country. I'm not talking about all the Western nations. Every time I look up that number, it's like another $5 trillion. Our money is being inflated away. People are trapped in corporate positions that they don't want to be in. There's essentially the reestablishment of all the same mistakes that happened last time. We went into a dark age, so we will go through it. We will go back. The question is is it really dark? Is it actually going to be a dark age, or is there a better way to live, and could we avail ourselves of that right now without having to go through the pain and suffering that would be brought on by a cataclysmic event such as some people have talked about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's interesting too, I think, because of you know we'll post things. You know eating red meat or drinking raw milk or you know having you know locally I guess harvested eggs and stuff like that from people in our community. It's interesting when we promote these things because a lot of people on kind of the middle left will say you need to stop promoting like red meat, there's not enough of it to go around and until we get the factory meat stuff up and running like you need to, you know, calm down with this. But it is interesting because the idea that you look at America and the landscape, you look at the great plains, you look at how much land is actually there, it seems absurd to think like you could have local food production. It's actually not that complicated of an answer and I was talking to a guy who was a cattle rancher in Wyoming and I think they have about 10,000 acres and we were out there during calving season and it was interesting to me. I said, well, this is really cool. You know you grow the beef that we eat and he was like, well, actually, all of our beef goes to China, whoa. And I was like wait what?
Speaker 1:And then recently my wife was telling me. She said, yeah, the city has stopped the recycling program. And I said, really, what happened? And she said, well, it turns out they weren't actually recycling anything. And people got mad and before that they had been recycling, but what they were doing is they were taking all of our recyclables and once again sending them to China.
Speaker 1:And you think about the fossil fuel expenditure of doing something like that, which is ludic, and, uh, so you look at all that and I think you pointed this out like in durable trades, we talk about it now kind of how these complex systems have a way of collapsing. I was talking to another guy in the energy industry and he was saying, like in america, people don't realize how fragile the infrastructure is for energy, from power plant to getting it to your home, and right now, like most of our stuff is made in China. So you know, during COVID, this was a big deal. A transformer would go out and they'd say, well, it's a two year wait for a new one, right? So you look at that and it seems kind of I don't know if you agree, but it seems like sometimes the solution to complexity is simplifying Like yes, not actually rocket science?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not. Sometimes it's the only solution. Yeah, and that's exactly what will happen and what has happened historically and I'm just using history as as a prediction here. I'm not making anything. That that's bold. The scandal is to just say that it could happen Right In the first place, but that's what everyone thought when Rome was sacked. Right, it could never happen here, right, but that's.
Speaker 2:The Roman Empire was highly complex, highly complex, and they simplified I mean not because they wanted to, but because they could no longer sustain the complexity, and so we'll go through something similar like that, and I don't know what the timeline horizon is on that. But one of the things that's interesting about this and I've been asked about this before, because I'm not really like a fleet of the hills kind of survivalist, I mean, I don't think that there's anything wrong with being a prepper or having supplies on hand to survive the winter, such as like every frontier farmer would have had, for you know most of American history. But the thing is that I discovered is that the landed life learning to be more self-sufficient, working with your family, providing food for your from your own, you know, by the work of your own hands Was far superior to the upscale consumer American life, way more satisfying, way more gratifying. We just had brats last night and my wife said, hey, everything on the plate is from our farm and we had she's right. It was brats from our hogs that we just had butchered our farm, and we had she's right, it was brought from our hogs that we just had butchered. We had kale salad, we had what else was in there, I don't know carrots or green beans or something like that, but everything on the plate, even pay. We even went out and had pears from our pear trees. That's like us. That's a level of gratification that you just had I hadn't known or experienced before.
Speaker 2:So it's simple, though we didn't even go to the store for any of that stuff. We raised it all ourselves. We didn't pay money for any of it. We just grew it in the ground and picked it. And yeah, there's a lot of learning. I mean, I guess you could say there's that, but to me the simpler life has always been the more fulfilling life, and so I'm not really particularly afraid or avoiding any of this. I think wise people in this day and age would take the pains to begin learning how to do more things for themselves, because you're going to have an immediate benefit even if no crisis does actually end up coming, at least not in your lifetime.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. One of the I'm sure you've heard this too One of the criticisms of homesteading or kind of any of the realm of work that you're doing to kind of revitalize interest in this subject matter is something like you know, you get these guys. They're obsessed with like a Victorian age or some past era and it's sort of like this boutique, niche-y, like you know, arts and crafts type economy. That's not really a real economy or something like that. What do you normally say to people if you hear that sort of criticism?
Speaker 2:Well, if the question is if it's not a real economy, I would say, well, it is. I mean it is. I wrote a book about it and you can, they're all viable. I mean you can. You can, they're all viable, I mean you can. You can take your pick if you don't think any of them are viable, but they are, and we see that happening all the time.
Speaker 2:It doesn't look the same way that it would have looked 150 years ago. There's technologies that have advanced or replaced certain, certain modes of work, but the same basic core of it and the ethos of it is the same. But secondarily. If they are saying that it's kind of a bygone era and it can't happen anymore, I would just say that this is the way that humans lived for 5,900 years. Do we think that the way that all humans have lived for close to 6,000 years is the thing that can't happen anymore, or do we think that the way we've lived for the last hundred years can never be any different? Yeah, I just don't. I mean, I think at that point there's just speculation on the table and I think history bears out better than you know what we've got today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, definitely agree with you. One of the things that you've done is you've worked with a lot of people. Obviously, you have people out to the farm and you've interacted with a lot of people, have done a lot of speaking engagements. So one of the things that sounds like that has happened is is people are asking like practical questions. You know what do I do in the book? I found this really helpful. You have a family gifts inventory. But walk me through that. Like where, where do you normally point people if they say like okay, I'm, I'm on board with some of these ideas? I don't know where to begin Practically. Where should they start?
Speaker 2:Okay. So if you could only do one thing, you got to worship together with your family. I divide in the in the last chapter of the book I have this topic of work, worship and wisdom. It's kind of how I sum up the family economy. I say that you got to have at least these three elements work, some mode of working together. Worship every family should be a church and wisdom, which is you have to take primary responsibility for educating your own children. And if you don't have all three of those, I would say that you don't have a family economy. That's the bare minimum.
Speaker 2:Now it can be a lot more than that, of course, but the one place that I would start and that I would tell people is that every family, no matter what your circumstance or pay grade or property situation is, everyone can worship together at home as a family, and that is a historical function that used to be in the household for thousands of years. It used to be in the household for thousands of years. It used to be practiced by all of Christendom. We know the early Puritan ministers. They used to go around and check and make sure people were still. You know that they were doing family worship, and on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:It was a matter of church discipline if you didn't, yeah, you could get right. You get kicked out of the church if you weren't doing it at home, and so it was very serious. I think I've heard Joel Beeky on your program before talking about that. Yes, it's a very serious thing, and it was taken serious because the churches knew that if the families weren't worshiping together, pretty soon it was going to be churches weren't going to be worshiping and there were going to be weak churches. So that's one thing, one area you can start.
Speaker 2:And the second thing about worshiping together is that a family economy really is. You've got to have a vision, you've got to have a shared mission that you're on together, and how are you going to discover that? I mean, you can go, look at ideas and see what other people are doing and maybe something about that resonates with you, but ultimately, I believe that every family has a calling by God to do something that's unique to that family, and so I'm not going to be able to answer the question, eric, you're not going to be able to answer the question of what a particular family can do or should do, but God is able to instill vision in a family if they seek him, and so that's where I would point every parents get, get your children together and start a daily regimen of worshiping together and I go through that a little bit in the book too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then I think that's great. You know it's. It's another instance, I think, where all the responsibilities given by God to the family including like vocation, discipleship we just have this tendency where I think it's just ease, it's easy to farm that out to other people. Maybe during COVID, I think, was one of the first times I saw in mass, you know, we had something like 2 million new homeschoolers. Yes, right, parents looked at the curriculum and they're like this is garbage, this is, this is, but they've been teaching this to your kids anyway. So, as you sort of recapture that, I think it's really, it really becomes pivotal and, as you said, sort of a just foundational piece. We start worshiping together, we start praying with and for one another. That vision starts to take shape. I want to ask you about sort of the inventory portion of this. Walk me through. What does that mean? To like take an inventory, have a family meeting?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So the family gifts inventory so this came out of when we had our first Grovestead gatherings, this little annual event that we, a little shindig, we throw on our farm here once a year. We get a bunch of families together and we talk about all this stuff, and so the family gifts inventory was one of the things that we came up with and it was the thing that we had the most positive feedback from, probably about anything that we've done. So I put it in the book.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's very simple. I mean I can explain it in two minutes. But basically, you know, with the premise, starting with the premise that God joined you together, he says you know, what God has joined together, let not man put asunder, right? So God joined you together, husband and wife, as one flesh, and there's a purpose, there's a reason why you're together now and that's part of your responsibility is to figure out what that is. Part of your responsibility is to figure out what that is. One of the clues to how you might be able to figure out what that is is to just look at all the gifts, the talents, the interests, maybe the education, the dreams that you individually have and start to write these out. So you start with dad. I say start with dad because he's the one that's responsible before God for the vision of his family. So start with dad and write down all of his gifts and abilities and aptitudes and the things that really you feel in your heart that you're supposed to be doing or that you're drawn to, and then do the same thing for mom. And then start with the children, the older ones, who are able to make a contribution. What did God gift them with? What are their strengths and weaknesses, what are their favorite subjects in schools? So you just kind of sit down and you go through the list, like this, and you're just putting out things on paper and then you begin to ask the question now, with all of these gifts, my wife calls it, do the math. So, after you've taken the inventory, do the math. All of these gifts, my wife calls it, do the math. So after you've taken the inventory, do the math. All of these gifts, what could these add up to in a shared family economy? So you start to come up with some pretty interesting possibilities and I'll just give you one example.
Speaker 2:In our family, my wife and I, we just we loved hosting people, we love teaching, we love farming. So we started to look at the different ways that how could we use our farm, where we're located, as a venue to teach, because we enjoy doing that anyway way. And what would that look like if we as a family put hosted events here on our farm? And that was absolutely right out of that same kind of mindset. And our kids have fallen right into that venue, that avenue of our family economy. And now, as the other thing I'll say is that as your children age. They're going to start to develop their own gifts and talents and part of your responsibility as parents is to incorporate that into your family economy, because it's never one thing.
Speaker 2:A family economy is many things. We're involved in many different aspects and some of them are revenue generating and some of them are just productive. But some of my older kids, you know I'm encouraging them in craft and in woodworking and weaving and baking and doing some of these things. Now, what's pretty cool about that is we've created a marketplace for our own children to sell their wares, essentially, and we invite other families to come do it at the same time.
Speaker 2:So this past season, back in Memorial Day weekend, we held a fair called it the Farm and Family Fair, and we had several hundred people descend on our farm for a whole day of just good times and every family that was vendoring at that fair was a family economy.
Speaker 2:That's great. We had a shepherd there that was that was shearing sheep, and we had a potter there with her family. We had a publisher, a family that publishes books together all kinds of different things, people growing plants and selling baked items and we had families who sang together on stage. So the whole idea was to showcase the family economy. But all of that a roundabout way to say, well, I put it out there so that you guys know that that's there, but also to say it was really cool because we had created a secondary economy for my own children to make things and sell at this, essentially this craft fair. But all of that started because Beck and I were just following what we felt the Lord had put on our heart to work out and all these new opportunities started to present themselves to us.
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Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really cool. I think the other part of it is teaching your kids to work. Yeah, but I've talked a lot with my pastor friend Adam, here in the local area. It's also about setting your kids up. This is something that we've kind of lost in our culture.
Speaker 1:You know, I can remember being a kid and it was like well, you know, what vocation are you going to do? I don't know. Go to college, figure it out. You know, pay an exorbitant amount to take another like English comp 101 class that is like lesser than your ninth grade. You know high school English class and and you're you go there to kind of figure out what you want to do. But but I love what my, my friend Adam, does. So they started a dog kennel business and they've got some breeding of gun dogs and stuff like that. But he said one of my main points in doing this was I wanted to be able to raise my kids in the business. And then you know, like now he's, he's trying to start another kennel and the whole point is that you know, when my daughters and my sons you know get married, start their family like, they will have economy. That's already underway.
Speaker 2:Yep Exactly.
Speaker 1:Right. So it's like maybe one of these businesses that your boys is doing now can be, uh, you, a full, supportive family type thing, and I think this is crucial. Often in our society we think again, you start doing this at 18, but it really isn't that way, because these things take time to build up, and I think also one of the things that the family economy is really helpful for in these productive household businesses is figuring out what each kid is good at, because I'm sure you've noticed this, like you know, each year your kids is so different. I look at my boys and I said you know some of them like he's got an entrepreneurial spirit and I could see him, you know, kind of working in this field. He really likes this. Another boy is like give me a shovel and a plow and just put me in a field all day and I'll be there for 14 hours and I'll love every minute of it. And so correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like you're also using these experiences to sift through giftings for each of the kids?
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, you want to expose your kids and that's the thing, too, where it's so important to get them started young, because you want to expose them to a lot of different things out there. And then you, especially as a dad, you're watching to see what makes them tick and then you're trying to stay. The challenge I have right now is just trying to stay ahead of them and keep them challenged because they're so quickly maturing in responsibility and taking on more projects. My oldest son, Ivor, he's 13. He's going to be starting a woodworking apprenticeship and, very seriously, I mean I could see a few years from now, him having a very viable business on his hands if he stays with it, and it's something that is a good fit for him. But it's something that I've noticed about him since he was eight years old.
Speaker 2:I've just kind of had this hunch, based on some of his gifts and tendencies, that he would probably make. He's very meticulous, very detail oriented. He could do rough construction, but he'd probably be better at woodworking, you know, at cabinetry and that kind of thing. And so this is this is going to be a fun season for us, because he's going to come back with some skills and he's going to have a workshop and we're probably going to see him start to put together some furniture and this will be a slow ramp up. Within the context of our family, we get to kind of shepherd or incubate, you could say, what could be a future career option for him and his future family. So these are all, but this is the thing about it, eric is this is normal. This is always how it would have worked.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was within the family that you would discover the gifts you would send your kids. Maybe if you weren't skilled in a certain skill or a trade like if you weren't a blacksmith then you could send your kid over to the village blacksmith to start an apprenticeship with him because he had a propensity towards that type of a skillset. These are things that were very common and very easily. They didn't need easily handled. They didn't need to go to higher education and rack up $180,000 of school debt and spend the first 25 years of their life, you know, sitting in a desk. They could get started with these things when they're 12, 13 years old.
Speaker 1:What is interesting too, because I think about like with the kids, my boys especially, if you just like, follow some of the giftings and interests. You know my middle son. We signed him up for forging classes Nice and there's a it was some guy in Salt Lake who was actually on Fortune Fire and so they have this cool forge and they teach them and they get to do different projects. He loved it. But but again there's another one where you're kind of like getting to experiment a little bit what do you like, what would you? You know, what would be a good fit for your giftings? But it's also funny because I've never met a kid that says you know, dad, what I really like when I pray and when I think about it and what I'm longing for are spreadsheets.
Speaker 1:I just there's just something about the desk all day long that I just coveted. I just want it so bad. So it's interesting too. I think this goes back to the question about, like, the sanctity of work itself, where I and I always find this funny. You know, we'll do publishing, so there's a lot of computer time, a lot of reading manuscripts on PDF, whatever, and then it'll be like, you know, I was telling my wife. It was like a Friday. I came home and I'm like, okay, I got to do the brakes on my truck. And she's like, well, you could pay somebody to do this. I'm like I could.
Speaker 1:But there is this perverse pleasure that I have and actually being able to fix something that I own, you know, and like Chris Wiley talks about this, well, you find this sure enough in boys.
Speaker 1:It's like, no, they want to get their hands dirty and greasy, they want to be able to touch the real world around them, and so I think part of it too is, uh, you know my, my oldest son. He writes a lot of the uh historical introductions for the King's hall and he really likes that. But it's like we'll spend, you know, a good portion of the week in the office. He's shipping books, doing stuff like this. But he'll say, like dad, we needed to, like we need to, we need to be doing some projects this weekend around the house because my hands need to be like in the dirt you know whether it's planning a new fruit tree, or you know we're doing irrigation or whatever it is. So I think also having that mix where we're helping the kids rediscover like the joy of hard work, you know, and good work I'm sure you guys see that too with the girls in the household too, it's like recovering these lost arts of homemaking and there's a beauty to it. Yes, it's harder, but there's a glory to it as well.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and you can't go and buy that kind of fulfillment. There isn't a product for that, it's called doing it yourself. I mean that I guess that's part of why that's such a big movement right now, the do it yourselfers. But but there's a, there's a satisfaction. That's that is missing in in a consumerist culture for those kinds of things. So absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:My other question is in terms of like, if people want to reach out to you, talk to you about some of these things, you've got events that you go to. How do people track what you're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to comment on what you said before. The lately we've been doing a lot of travel and and speaking and things like that. We've just been invited to different things different homeschool conferences around and that actually has taken me out of the farm quite a bit and I've had my older children stepping in to more and more roles on the farm. So I find myself, you know, sitting on a computer typing out talks or doing research or reading for something, and I'm like I got to get my hands dirty.
Speaker 2:And this is it's, my brain is starting to hurt so I have to but. But that's a that's the beautiful thing about if you have a lot, you know a lot going on in your own family. If, if the intention is it's not, you don't have to try too hard to find something to go fix or something to that that needs weeding or there's all this stuff, or yeah?
Speaker 2:there's just stuff going on all the time when you have multiple ventures like that going on. So, um, we have been, let's see. So you're asking about our events, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, how people can follow along with it? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, um, if you want to follow along. So we have a ministry called gather and grow that we set up to do the events on our farm. And go to gatherandgrowus and you can see if there's things coming up or resources that you'd like to learn more about what we're doing, sign up for the newsletter there. But also we're moving around a bit. Becca is actually going to be teaching at a homemaker conference down in Columbia, tennessee, in a couple of weeks. We've we've kind of done a lot of the speaking circuits this year, but next year we'll be at some of the homeschool conferences and some of the other homesteading conferences too. So we'll just have all that on our website if people are interested in following along, or we'll put it in the newsletter too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, awesome, and just so people know, we'll put it in the newsletter too. Yeah, awesome, and uh, just so people know what, we'll put it in the show notes as well. What? What is the website?
Speaker 2:Gather and growus.
Speaker 1:Gather and growus. Okay, perfect, so encourage people to check that out as well. Uh, one of the other questions I want to ask you uh, we were talking about offline before we started recording, uh, but the ways in which productive economy affects marriage was something interesting that you put in there and you kind of have some anecdotes, I guess, of how you know you go from what like an apartment and a tomato plant and life changes. I want you to share some of that, just because I think that a lot of people this can feel daunting. It's like a totally different worldview in a way to to embark on like, really hard work and hard projects with the family, all that, uh, but just talk about what it's done, I guess, for you in marriage, in that relationship, to actually be a part of a household economy together.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, that was one of the. The chief benefits I would say is that the way that it strengthened my marriage with my wife. Like I said earlier in the show, we've been married 19 years, so it's not like we're spring chickens and all of this, but we started in earnest kind of building our family economy about five years ago, and up to that point there was, you know, becca was a help me in the sense that she helped with the children. We were homeschooling the kids, maybe helped around handling some bills or things like that clerical kind of stuff, but my main job was programming on a computer and there just wasn't really any way to join forces. There's just no matter what. She couldn't help me. Even though I had my own business. She couldn't really help me with that in any meaningful way, and so at best we kind of had just like an amicable indifference to the line of work. I was really excited about what I did, but I couldn't bring her into that.
Speaker 2:Well, all of that changed when we sat down. I remember I finished the manuscript for Durable Trades and I was, you know, I hadn't told her about all the different jobs and possibilities that were out there until I got far enough along in the manuscript. So I sat down with her one evening and we just looked over all of these different possibilities for careers because we could kind of everything was on the table at that point and it was just like a whole new door open to us where we were like, well, the whole goal is to be together and what of these trades or what are these professions would suit our family? What are we gifted for to do together? And that was the first time, I think, vocationally, I had ever really thought of forming something around the gifts of my wife and myself and our kids, and so that just created a whole new direction. And we have been working together ever since and I mean like full on everything we do Monday through Friday, we are working together.
Speaker 2:In some we're moving together on the same ship. I guess you could say we're not always on the same ship. I guess you could say we're not always in the same room of the same ship, but we're always moving in the same direction together, and so that is a very interesting paradigm that I wasn't familiar with until just very recently. But it is again like a lot of these other things we talked about. It's the historical precedent. I mean Wendell Berry talks about it. What does he say? Marriage was an economic necessity, and it was, and so were children. These were things that you needed each other in order to survive. They weren't kind of emotional or lifestyle decisions, whether to marry or not be married. So in the sense that it reinforced our marriage, we just found ways of like working together, talking through vision, praying together. There's so many things when you start a business, as you know, if you ever have partners, there's so many.
Speaker 2:You get to know each other quick because there's so many things you need to work through, and it's the same thing in a family economy need to work through, and it's the same thing in a family economy. It unites the husband and wife into really one flesh. That I think that God intends us to be. And when he put Adam and Eve in the garden, if you want to go theological on it, you know he united them as one flesh for the purpose of having dominion. He put them to a task and there were no corporations that Adam can go off and work for and Eve stay home with the children. They were doing the task together under Adam's direction. So that was one big thing.
Speaker 2:And the other thing I was walking, we were at a fair in our local town the other day and there's a town, there's a street that cuts right through the middle of the town, called Division Street, and I was thinking you know it's interesting because the word die there is in division. Die means two. If you break it down or double, you could say in the Greek so you have two visions and you have, like you know, the north side of town and the south side of town. But the thing is, in a marriage, if you have two visions, you have division.
Speaker 2:I just think that's very interesting because unless husband and wife are on the same page and going the same direction, if they're both separated out and pursuing separate careers, separate goals and economic and all of that there really isn't going to be a uniformity in that marriage. There isn't going to be a uniformity in that marriage. There's going to always be pulled in separate directions. And I think that's a lot of what we've seen happen in modern America with the divorce rates that we have, with the family breakdown that we have. We have families that it's like two separate careers and Exactly Families that just they no longer share the same vision that they once did for so many generations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1:Uh, obviously, in marriage I even think about you know, one of the oddities when we started like the King's hall and we started new Christian impress was it wasn't the thing we expected, but probably the biggest piece of feedback was, uh, we love how Brian and Dan and Eric, you guys are friends and I think about that.
Speaker 1:But probably behind the scenes, what a lot of people don't know, is that, yeah, because we're you know, we own a business together and we pastor together, so really, like 90% of our week we're working with each other. There's a lot of conflict you have to work through on a continual basis, but I don't think that you could have just the power and solidarity of that friendship without the work right, people think like, oh, you guys must hang out a lot, and it's funny because we actually don't like hang out and you know, like drink coffee or drink beers together after work. We work together, yeah, and so it does create an environment where it's like, no, I would die for that guy, because you're involved in a mission and a vision that everybody fundamentally, to execute the mission Well, the mission and the team has to be bigger than any one individual, and so you would say well, yeah, it's the same thing with a marriage If you actually have meaningful work and meaningful mission, it's going to bring you guys even closer together. So I just think that's really cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely that's what we've seen. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Rory, I appreciate you coming on the show. Of course, for our listeners, I want to make sure you guys pick up a copy Again. We'll have links in the show notes. That's Rory Grove's new book, the Family Economy discovering the family as it was designed to work. Again, rory, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so?
Speaker 3:much for having me, Eric. It's been a pleasure.