Have you ever wondered how a life-altering health scare could lead to a complete lifestyle transformation?
Our guest for this episode, Kyle LaPointe, and his wife Megan not only faced this but turned it into a thriving local farm venture. From their roots in the construction industry to becoming the co-owners of Reviving Real Foods and Texas Foothills, Kyle takes us through their inspiring transition sparked by serious health issues that led to a gluten-free, heart-healthy diet.
Their journey wasn’t easy, with several challenges including setting up their farm store, distillery, brewery, and tasting room amid a pandemic. Yet, their resilience and innovation helped them navigate through these hurdles to create a flourishing business. Take a deep dive into their innovative farming methods, an intensive regenerative rotational grazing system, and their unique offerings like goat yoga classes and farm tours, aimed at connecting people with animals.
But their story doesn't stop there. What really stands out is how they have leveraged principles from their previous careers in the construction industry to build a thriving local farm. They've fostered strong community ties and significantly improved their health and well-being. Listen in to hear how they prioritize quality over cost, sourcing organic and Texas ingredients for their products. Discover the benefits of local farming and how it's possible to provide high-quality products at a reasonable rate, all while enjoying a calmer, more fulfilling lifestyle. Experience the passion and commitment that Kyle and Megan bring to their farming venture, a testament to their resilience, creativity, and relentless commitment to quality and health.
www.revivingrealfood.com
Music by: Kim Cantwell
Bowie Mural: Located at Creative Cakes
Connect w/Aaron: www.aarondegler.com
Have you ever wondered how a life-altering health scare could lead to a complete lifestyle transformation?
Our guest for this episode, Kyle LaPointe, and his wife Megan not only faced this but turned it into a thriving local farm venture. From their roots in the construction industry to becoming the co-owners of Reviving Real Foods and Texas Foothills, Kyle takes us through their inspiring transition sparked by serious health issues that led to a gluten-free, heart-healthy diet.
Their journey wasn’t easy, with several challenges including setting up their farm store, distillery, brewery, and tasting room amid a pandemic. Yet, their resilience and innovation helped them navigate through these hurdles to create a flourishing business. Take a deep dive into their innovative farming methods, an intensive regenerative rotational grazing system, and their unique offerings like goat yoga classes and farm tours, aimed at connecting people with animals.
But their story doesn't stop there. What really stands out is how they have leveraged principles from their previous careers in the construction industry to build a thriving local farm. They've fostered strong community ties and significantly improved their health and well-being. Listen in to hear how they prioritize quality over cost, sourcing organic and Texas ingredients for their products. Discover the benefits of local farming and how it's possible to provide high-quality products at a reasonable rate, all while enjoying a calmer, more fulfilling lifestyle. Experience the passion and commitment that Kyle and Megan bring to their farming venture, a testament to their resilience, creativity, and relentless commitment to quality and health.
www.revivingrealfood.com
Music by: Kim Cantwell
Bowie Mural: Located at Creative Cakes
Connect w/Aaron: www.aarondegler.com
What happened to my hometown. It seems so different when I look around.
Speaker 2:It's funny how things have changed since I was young. What I wouldn't give you. Go way back and take a long look into my past. Remember this town the way that it used to be.
Speaker 1:Welcome to my hometown, our little town on the map and home to the world's largest Jim Bowie Knife. To show you around our beautiful town is our tour guide, erin Degler. Erin has a love for road trips, taking the opportunity to stop along the way in small towns across the US, just like our very own Bowie, texas. Spend a little time with Erin each week as he takes you around Bowie, sharing the value of the small businesses, the organizations, the history and, of course, the people that make up my hometown. After this podcast is over, make sure you give it a like, a share, and please subscribe and review this podcast. I would now like to introduce to you your tour guide for today in my hometown, erin Degler.
Speaker 3:Welcome back to my hometown. Thanks for taking a little time to stop by and join me today. Please welcome my guest today. Fairly new to Bowie, he has been here a resident for the last three years. He went from a career in construction to a career in farming and soon to be distillery, brewer and vintner. Please welcome the co-owner of Reviving Real Foods and Texas foothills, mr Kyle LaPointe. Thank you, kyle, for joining me today. No thank you, erin, pleasure to be here, as we're sitting here in soon to be.
Speaker 2:I guess the distillery. Yeah, this will be all three phases, so this will be a trifecta, as I call it, of licenses and permits, so everything will take place under this one roof. So we'll do wine making, beer making and spirits. That's going to be quite a bit.
Speaker 3:So we're going to back up to kind of a little bit before. How do we get here? Okay, how are we sitting here? Just because you've just been here just a few years in Bowie and my hometown, you know a lot of times my hometown people think, well, it has to be lifelong residence about. But I'd like to, you know, get behind. What's the purpose of coming from here, from the Metroplex, because you grew up in the Metroplex, right? Yes, I did Mid-Cities, yep, mid-cities.
Speaker 2:And went to school there, Yep. So I grew up in North Richland Hills and back when that was still kind of farm country, you know, Keller and Southlake weren't even really anything but tiny small towns at that point Sorry, my wife's driving through with the farm equipment right now.
Speaker 2:She's going to get water to everybody. So yeah, we started. It was probably 1983 when my parents moved down from Detroit to here, so I was one and a half two years old. I only know Texas because, you know, no memory is really before that. We grew up in the mid-Cities and went to high school there and started working construction. My dad had a construction company. So did you do that while you were in high?
Speaker 3:school.
Speaker 2:I did so yeah, I mean, that's how I paid for my first truck and how I had gas money and spending money there in high school was I would typically work only during the summers and I would just work full time.
Speaker 3:Construction, as in house construction, road construction. It was roads, bridges.
Speaker 2:You know, I remember building parking lot for Carroll High School there in Southlake when that was again still a small school. Yeah, it's a little different now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a lot different world than it was then. But yeah, so we ended up, you know, I worked in the construction field, just kind of really liked it, like I liked the camaraderie of the people, I liked how, you know, all the trades had to come together to build something and always really figured I would do something with numbers. But then it really came into pass that you know, that construction was kind of like I like to work hard, you know, I like the results of seeing something built at the end of the day and, you know, and I really liked the people. So that kind of steered me towards the college career of like where do I go, what do I do? And at that time it made a lot of sense for me to do an engineering degree because that would allow me to take certain steps in the construction industry, to go a certain leadership path and or be able to talk and communicate better with the highway departments and the inspectors and everybody of that nature. So I took that route and went civil engineering and looked at all the schools, you know.
Speaker 2:Basically it came down to A&M and OU and I crossed the border and went to OU. For a few reasons it's a really nice campus. At the time they were really pushing academics and since I had really good grades and things like that, they gave me lots of good scholarships and opportunity to get more. So the school was very affordable and it was on the up and coming. You know, I always say that I brought in Bob Stoops because that was my caveat If you want me up here, you better bring in a top notch coach for this football program. Because what year was that?
Speaker 1:1999., 1999.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so me and Bob started at the same time and now it was just. It was such a great time to be at OU. A&m was a great school and it was really a toss up. But in the end they didn't really have any scholarships or anything like that, and even in state with like tuition grants and things like that still an expensive school. Good school though. So, yeah, went to OU, did some fun stuff up there while I was, you know, did the engineering groups concrete canoe, played a roller hockey for OU. That was a lot of fun. And then, you know, got back down here and pretty much moved back into the Metroplex and Hultum City and then Richland Hills and and your dad still- have a construction company at that time.
Speaker 2:No, we all. Yeah, my dad still did, and so I went to work for that company, which was at that point in time JL Steel, and so my dad's business partner, oscar Trevino he's now a long term mayor of NRH there. He worked together for a while and then decided, like between my dad and I, that maybe it was a good thing for us to go off on our own and do our own thing. So split that business up, and then my dad and my wife and I all went into the construction business together Just no real major plans. We went and separated and did the subcontracting work, which was mainly rod busting, rebar work within concrete, on lots of big jobs, and it took us all over the place. It took us to New Orleans for about five years. So I spent a half time living in New Orleans and half time living here.
Speaker 3:So we'll back up just a little bit. You mentioned wife Yep, so did you meet her before you went to OU? Did you meet her at OU?
Speaker 2:I met her after OU and so we talked about rebar. We actually met at the dog park in Fort Worth, so at that point in time there weren't a lot of dog parks. I took my dog over there and we just started talking and it was kind of one of those like hey, what do you do? And I'm like, well, I work at a construction company. And she's like, oh, that's neat, I sell rebar. I'm like you what? Like no one sells rebar.
Speaker 1:Nobody installs rebar.
Speaker 2:This is such a small world and so she did. She was working for a smaller supplier there in Haltem City and we just kind of hit it off and things progressed from there and you know married about. I think it was two years later, maybe three, and so I got married there in 2007 and moved up here after that. But yeah, so with Megan and I we had a lot in common and she actually ended up working with us at the construction firm.
Speaker 2:Because, she kind of been around that RISL and she had already been around it and then she started to do some was it financial consulting, financial advising? She worked for a merit prize for a couple of years and got out of the construction business and then came back in it and yeah, so we continued that construction firm and it was going pretty well for a while.
Speaker 2:And then you know, just the industry had started to change and some of the things that drew me to it weren't really there anymore. It got a lot more adversarial. Texas was always just a fantastic place to work construction. You know you'd shake somebody's hand and make a deal and you knew that two years later that deal was still in place and nothing was going to change. And then just it kind of changed and you know some of the Kind of changed in Texas that way.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, like there were a lot more of those companies and people that were out there that did business that way, they were kind of getting phased out of companies and then you know, the next generation coming in didn't really have that same attitude and weren't learning it the same way. You know it wasn't like me, thrown into the fire right. When you start to work like, oh okay, well, today's we're pouring concrete. What time do we start? Well, we start at 4 am. What time do we finish? Well, concrete shortage, so we'll finish about 10 o'clock at night.
Speaker 2:You know, young buck, even though it's a lot of strenuous work like that's, it's hard you have to break into that kind of stuff. It was just trial by fire back then. So once you got through that break in, you know you were pretty tough and it's just not quite that way anymore and everybody's suffering from higher end shortages and trying to find, you know, qualified people that really are wanting to do that work and it just became more of a. You know, some of the things that I was good at was, you know, negotiating contracts and arguing contracts and then making sure we're tracking our numbers and doing things correctly, and that became such a piece of the puzzle. That was not fun, right.
Speaker 2:Like you don't want to be arguing with your customers all the time about what you're owed, and but when it became, you know it used to be one, maybe two companies would have that problem and you just over time choose to not do business with them or choose to and just understand you're going to have to suffer through that argument. But then even some of the companies that we'd been working with for a lot of years, they just kind of adopted that same philosophy.
Speaker 2:And so this time you and dad still have working together, Still working together yeah, and so we kept doing that and you know, there's still some amazing lifelong relationships you build from working in those industries and I've still got some of those today. And it's kind of what brought us up to Montague County because I used to come up here. My parents were really good friends with the Uighurs who were always up here in my memory because they started buying property and moving up in the St Joe and Forestburg type area die mound really and they started up there years and years and years ago and we were kind of like a about a 10 year gap type family. So they were 10 years older than my parents. So, like all their sons and daughters were about 10 years older than me and my sister and all their kids were about 10 years older. So it was like a stagger.
Speaker 2:I never really had like a super close relationship with like Dwayne or Tom or any of them guys are Brian, but because they were just you know that much older than me but we would come up here thanksgivings and different events that they would invite us out for and I just, you know, learning how to shoot guns with Dwayne and like firing things that were way too big a caliber for me and watching. You know just oh, it was just fun. You know just a part of life that grown up in the suburbs of Fort Worth, I really didn't do that.
Speaker 3:You don't get to experience that a whole lot.
Speaker 2:No, and my dad's not much of a hunter, fisherman or anything like that so never really did that with anybody, except for folks outside the family.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, that when we started doing those different things in construction that built that lifelong relationship, gave me some idea of what Montague County was all about. And I really remembered there's the beautiful winners and coming up there at all the different events, fourth of July and you know just random things we'd be up here for, and it was always gorgeous. And back then it just felt like it was hundreds and thousands of miles away. But you know, in your 10 years old, wondering when you're gonna get there, then you realize it's not that far once you've worked in construction for a while and a 300 mile commute really not a big deal.
Speaker 2:So we, yeah, we went through the construction business, started doing that and in 2007, I had some health issues so I had to have open heart surgery at 25. And it was kind of a wake up call from my wife and I. We thought we ate pretty healthy and we started researching different things and realized, well, maybe we're really not. Maybe some of these things that we read, like you know, canola oil, maybe not the best thing in the world for you. Or the seed oils, like in general they process with chemicals maybe not the best thing for you and we started doing more alternative diets a alternative at that point but it was really more going back to natural raising of animals and things of that nature.
Speaker 3:So we started that and then about and you didn't really grow up around raising animals because you're in the city, Did not? No, no, so I mean we raised like a little Maltese dog right.
Speaker 2:That was about all that we raised, but my wife was a you know pretty darn close to a master gardener.
Speaker 2:So she had garden for a long, long time and so that was an easy thing for her. Growing her own food, you know, in the backyard was pretty easy. And then things like I could help with my skill set Like I'm very engineer based, so like I can build spreadsheets and track seed counts and like, okay, we planted this many seeds and we got 80% germination and help out with that kind of thing so that when she's ready to go, she can do the things she loves, which is, you know, actually being in the garden and tending to it and making sure that everything's watered and pruned and looking pretty and the weeds aren't in the way. And so we did that. We just started raising our own food in the backyard and then we really went hard into the diet to eat, naturally, probably around like 2011. And we started reviving real foods around that time, maybe 2012, really as a blog, as a way to, you know, inform other people what we were doing, how we ate, cause everybody looked at us like we were crazy.
Speaker 3:I mean yeah, I mean cause that was 10 years ago and that's still. I mean now we think of it. Well, that's pretty common, but even 10 years ago that wasn't really that common.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, it wasn't even common out in places like California where It'd be kind of weird if you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So finding the foods, finding sourcing all the things was just, it was difficult. Like you just couldn't find they didn't have gluten-free flour and we did gluten-free since about 2010. And you know, just things like that that we found were healthier for us. I went off a gluten and it got rid of acid reflux. Like you wouldn't believe. Like I was on prescription drugs and then doing the tums by the barrel and then it just you take gluten out and about three weeks later it's like, and I just don't have that issue, oh, I'm gonna have a piece of bread and then right back to it and then okay, I guess I won't try that.
Speaker 2:Took a long time to get gluten out of my life. I mean I love bread but once I did it was. You know, it's kind of life changing when you do that diet stuff. I mean I shed so much weight like you wouldn't believe it just.
Speaker 3:And that really wasn't the goal. It was really just to be healthier. It was right to-.
Speaker 2:To eat heart healthy truly and to eat body healthy truly, because of your open heart surgery.
Speaker 3:Those were really dietary things that you could fix.
Speaker 2:Were some of them genetic too. Yeah, and you know we kind of traced back. I had cancer as a kid, so that was kind of a you know a part of what we feel like caused the you know the heart issues later, because they weren't systematic, it wasn't across the entire heart, it was just my front artery and you know just one of those plain hockey and ended up hurting it and then I was in good enough shape to where we didn't catch it for a while.
Speaker 2:So it took about six months before we finally caught it and but by then they were like you need to stay in this hospital because you got about 25% blood flow and that's not good. Let's get you under the knife. And it was pretty quick. After that they got it done and I mean I woke up. Yeah, my chest cavity had been ripped open. That wasn't the most pleasant thing in the world, but I had. I didn't realize just how long that had been going.
Speaker 2:I'm pretty sure I was having, you know, some of those issues. Even playing hockey in college, like some of those times when I should have been in my peak physical condition I would wear a little faster than some of my. You know friends and we're all working out together, we're all at the same level. But I always knew it was like man. Just I feel like I should have more wind than I do. So it was a long time coming. It was something that was there, but what it was? In the old widowmaker right, some people have that front artery that's a larger portion of their blood flow, and that's me. So I had. They said 70% was that one artery and I was 100% blocked. So but if I hadn't been working out and doing those things and being healthy. On that side of things, it would have been really bad. So you know, we started that healthy eating and we learned quite a bit, and and so then you just start the blog.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it starts out as a blog that we hardly ever touched right, Because Megan is far too busy to sit down and put words to paper and you know, we this time. You're both still in construction. We're still in construction. We're still working probably 60 to 80 hours a week and then coming home and working on the garden and you know, in the evenings and it's probably three to four hours worth of time just in the garden. So it was nonstop.
Speaker 3:And so and so, when people might say, well, I don't have time to eat healthy Right, working that many hours, you still have time when it's a priority.
Speaker 2:Well, we still had time when it was a priority. There became a point in time where the construction business got overwhelming and then it was difficult, and that was when it became something that was really frustrating for Megan, especially Because you know I'm more prone to go. You know what? I'll just cheat and eat something not so great, and she is she is.
Speaker 2:No, she's not going to cheat there's she not going to take a step out of that line? So because of that she's able to really devote that. But it sacrificed the time, either at work or with what you're eating or, you know, worst case, with the daughter doing homeschooling Cause we were doing all that at the same time but.
Speaker 3:So you're working all those hours, yeah. You're homeschooling, yeah, and trying to eat clean, healthy, all of it, wholesome diet.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and it's just one of those things that when you're passionate about something, you find the time, you can make the time, and we're both just naturally hard workers. We don't like to just sit around. So it wasn't hard for us to find the passion for the things we liked, but it became more increasingly difficult on the construction side to find that, that get up and that drive. For me, it was always about making sure I provided for my family, you know, and making sure everybody had a paycheck. And beyond my interior family I mean, at one point in time we had about 125 people working for us, you know that's a lot of families, you gotta worry about.
Speaker 2:So the energy level that it took in there. When Megan really decided to step back and not be like basically take a step back to 40 hours of work a week, she really developed a passion for the growing of the food and at the time, you know, you just couldn't find the type of chicken we wanted to eat. Nobody did the things we wanted to. We could find some good grass-fed beef and we were buying cows from a farm down near Brenham, texas, for about, you know, since about 2005. And so we had great grass-fed beef but we never really had much else. So we would get fish shipped in. We would get like if we were ordering anything it'd be shipped in. Or then Burgundy started to pop up Burgundy pastures in, you know, south there near Benbrook and closer down to Hillsborough, and we were able to get some food, but you know it was limited and so we still kept growing our own and increasing that and it just took a while to realize that it was beyond just a hobby for Megan, that it was really truly her passion. And there was a point where we really had to both get back into the construction full-time and she had to go away from the garden and didn't, and it went into all sorts of disrepair for about a year and it just it made her miserable. And that's when we really realized, like you know what, let's figure out how to make this thing work without you putting in all those construction hours and let's you know, let's let you focus on your passion. And so we did that and she was able to really get going.
Speaker 2:And so from about 2012 until you know, 2020, starting before that, but really from about 2012, we could eat everything from our farm, so from our little mini farm in Richland Hills. We had an acre and a half and we abutted Megan's mom's property starting in about 2017. She moved there maybe 2016. So we had two backyards that we made contiguous and it was about an acre and a half. So did you have animals there? And we had everything. Richland Hills was very nice about not having regulations on animals as far as, if you had more than a third of an acre, you could have any animal except a pig, a large frame animal, one third of an acre per animal. So we had, you know, started out with chickens, and I always tell the story that Megan said I need two chickens. I'm like, oh, chickens, I don't know about chickens. Finally, she convinces me. Why do we have six chickens? Well, because, this.
Speaker 2:Well, because this and so you know, two became six and six became 20. And and that whole story. And then it's goats. We need goats. Well, they're great, they'll mow the lawn. Oh, I made a mistake. They don't really mow the lawn, they eat the weeds. But sheep mow the lawn, so let's get some sheep. And then eventually, we just it was all working well we milked the goats, we, you know, we drank the milk from our own animals and we ended up getting a dairy cow and and you're one and a half acres.
Speaker 2:In our one and a half acres and the you know COVID stuff started to come in and it was like, okay, covid hit and everybody's freaking out. Oh my gosh, the shelves are out of meat. And in February of 2020, we processed five lambs and we ate like kings the entire year. So, while everybody else was struggling a little bit, we had freezers full of meat and it was just wonderful. We got to eat all the stuff. That was super healthy, we knew exactly how it was raised, we didn't give it any grains or any of the things we didn't agree with, and so, yeah, we were able to eat like that and do really well.
Speaker 2:And then also, the construction company was like you talk about a 180 in a construction industry. It used to be like if you, if you as the quote unquote office person weren't at the office, then it was just assumed you weren't working right, like you just kind of had that. You had to be their mentality. Well then, all of a sudden, it's remote work. We were built for it, we were ready to go, I had the technology in place, but it just wasn't a culture that it was in place.
Speaker 3:You had to be at work. I mean, we had to be at work to know that you're working. We don't see it seven. You can't be working from home.
Speaker 2:Well, and people will, just, they won't call you, they'll just show up at your office at seven right.
Speaker 2:And so you better be there or else you know something could go wrong. And then there's always that thing with the business owner. You're always a little bit fearful about things that are happening when you're not there, so you want to make sure you're there to handle any problems. And then, yeah, COVID hit and we were able to go 100% remote. And that's what really took us down the path to come here was, you know, we're literally walking the milk cow in the front yard. It's a harness trained cow, so we've got it out in the front yard so it can get extra forage. And people are looking at us awful funny. And then we just said, okay, it's about June, let's look at getting some land. Maybe we need some more hay of our own, Maybe we need to do something else. This is about June of 2020? June of 2020.
Speaker 2:And we, you know, went through the paces and went through the motions of trying to find some properties and Megan's like, well, let's look west. And I'm like, well, why west? And she said, well, let's look south. Well, that's really expensive right now. Well, and I just said, well, what about North and Montague County? Like I mean, and I explained to her some of that history or reiterated. She knew it, but you know, sometimes you hear it that third time it sinks in a little more. And so we started looking up here and she got a list of about 10 or 12 places that were within reasonable amounts and things of what we were looking for and we kind of went through the paces of well, do you get something that's bare land and build it, or you know what, do you do? And.
Speaker 2:I told her at the time. I said you know, we're just, we're about to be at a world changing situation. Everything's going to be more expensive for the years to come. Interest rates are bound to go up because they're darn near zero, like now's a good time to buy, but also now's not necessarily a good time to build something, because it's only going to get more expensive as the building goes on. So if we can find something that's already built, that'll be a lot better. And we started looking around about five of the places that already been sold by the time she got there to go look at them. And then this property was under contract and it didn't go through and then popped back up right around that same time and she showed up here and she calls me and says you know, we're gonna put an offer on this one. I wasn't even out here, she had just come out by herself because I was still working.
Speaker 2:And you know, she calls me and tells me it's, this is the one. It's great and about twice as much land as we were looking for, which is now about half of what we need. But it had so many things on there that fit what we were trying to accomplish. And, sure enough, like within that same day, there were two offers put in with us and another person, and we're lucky that our offer was accepted and we were able to make that journey.
Speaker 2:It took about I think it was October technically when we fully moved in by the time all the paperwork was done and we started moving in was October, but we got to come out several times before then and get some things started.
Speaker 3:So and you still have the construction company going.
Speaker 2:Still have the construction company we were actively trying to reduce, like our manpower, and try to shrink down the company a little bit, which by doing so was gonna free up a lot more of my time, because running 120 people and I was working about probably 80 or 90 hours a week just on the construction business, like switching down to 16, 20 people I mean that was like taking vacation for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a huge reduction.
Speaker 2:Yes, and you'd think that the that that would have worked. But part of the game plan that I had was well, we're doing specialty subcontracting. Maybe we switch and try to do something a little more broad Cause our guys are, they're really loyal people, they're really hard workers, they're just, they're good bunch of folks that we had left when we had to trim down to 20, it was not like we trimmed a lot of fat. There was still good people that they went somewhere else and they were in high demand. So I know they were able to work. But the last group that we had about 16 workers in the field and about three in the office I mean we had.
Speaker 2:We had a really good group of people but just trying to do that and sell that product of being a little more do it all type subcontractors, it was still a tough time for people and it didn't sell very well and it was hard to really make it work. And then we had we worked on it for a while Our crews were able to help put the rebar in on this building that we're in right now. This building was originally supposed to be our construction office in Hulton City. We had a five acre plot of land there that we were able to sell in 2021. And they didn't want this building, which paved the way for us to kind of build it out, restructure the walls, change the way it was built.
Speaker 3:And so you already had all the materials.
Speaker 2:Metals were already here, they were in our yard, and so we had no purchase cost on the building itself and when they didn't want it we did okay on the property, sell out anyway. So it was like well, it is not gonna get any cheaper to pour concrete, it's not gonna get any cheaper to erect this building. Let's put it up now and we'll see what we're gonna do with it. We knew there was probably two or three things. Worst case scenario we stack hay to the roof because we're running all grass-fed animals and nice to be able to keep hay in storage. But I plumbed some floor drains and things back there just in case the brewery might pop up. And at that time I had kind of shifted to. Maybe a distillery would be better, because that's something that in our construction time we could do, that part time, where brewing is a little more involved and you need a. It's got more time involved in the process and also you have to drink it quicker.
Speaker 2:So, you have to get it to your, you have to get it out of your tanks faster, you have to get it into people's hands faster. With distilling sometimes it's more like well, you know, wait in six months, not a big deal. So if you get really busy in construction and you can't touch your stuff for a little while, it's not gonna kill anything, you're not gonna lose any product, you're just gonna lose production time. So that's why we kind of shifted towards that distilling side of things, brewing being my hobby background for since about 2007 as well, so that was for me, just a.
Speaker 2:It wasn't a hard thing for me to come up with a business model, because I'd scratched through about 20 of them going through life trying to make one work for a brewery. But the biggest ones were always where are you gonna put the building? How are you gonna get the permits you need? How are you gonna go through cities to get all the things done? How do you do all that while paying rents and waiting on the TABC and the TTB to get their permits? Sitting here, today is literally day 100 since I submitted for our permits.
Speaker 2:So we're so it's a slow process. Yes, we are 100 days in and I have really good attorneys helping with it and they are probably the best at getting your stuff the fastest and, yes, still at 100 days. So if you're thinking about building a building like this and you're in a downtown area or something and you're paying your leases on or you're paying your mortgage on a property in a building like this, you're 100 days waiting before you can touch your product. You got a lot of overhead that's sunk in before you ever really get started. So for us, we're a little bit lucky in that it's ours. It's from the hard work and dedication of what we've done throughout the years being there when we needed it for something different.
Speaker 3:And so then moved here about three years ago reviving real foods. Does it start to take off? Cause, of course, you go from an acre and a half to now you have a little few more cows probably, you have a few more chickens, a few more sheep and goats, and so when does that start to take off? Where you think we're gonna start offering that to other people, not just to feed our family?
Speaker 2:So once we got out here, that became the plan instantly, so we incorporated officially at the end of 2020. So, prior to getting out here, or maybe just after getting out here and starting a farm, like you said, increasing your herds, increasing your flocks None of that stuff happens overnight. So we had that plan. Okay, what do we need to increase? How many cows do we need to have? Let's source some other cows that we can use for meat. Let's add these. Make sure we're doing different things. We're following the plans that we want.
Speaker 3:And all this is going on spreadsheet, which is oh, yeah, yeah, All of it, which is your good. I mean, that's where you.
Speaker 2:That's where I live.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I live in those spreadsheets, and you also do rotational grazing, yep, and so, for those that don't know, you rotate the herd to different pastures to let those Right, and we.
Speaker 2:So we do what's actually called intensive, intensive regenerative rotational grazing, and the intensive comes from we move them every day and back. When we were first starting, we didn't have nearly the quantity of fence because we're setting up an electric net fencing which comes in about, I think they're you know, there's 16 sections, I think they're 120 feet long or 160 feet long depending on the fence that you buy, and we didn't have enough of them. So when you put your animals in that fence they eat the grass really fast. Well, they need more grass. You gotta move them.
Speaker 2:There were times where Megan was setting up a fence and taking the one down in the back and putting it to the front and moving all the animals, doing that three times a day and it's a tremendous amount of effort but it's a labor of love and she had figured out by then. She absolutely loved to do it. You know, wouldn't catch me out there three times a day, I'd make an excuse I possibly could to not do it that second time, let alone the third. But yeah, we. So we started that and we knew we needed more animals, we had to increase the herd size and the flocks, and so we were. You know, god blessed us at the right times. Like I said, with COVID, we had all of our sheep had boys. There was not a single girl born in that year and we had no room for another girl.
Speaker 2:So if we had another girl, we would have had to sell it because we you know you typically don't end up eating on that side. So then we got out here and our first year, or a first birthing, was all girls. So like we need to increase the flock size and boom there's I think it was six U's that we had. So that allowed us to then, the following year, really increase our production. And, yeah, it just it took a while to get there. 2021 was, you know, maybe $800 worth of revenue, as we were, you know, selling what little we had, but still preparing for ourselves. And then 2022 is when we really got everything full size and we were able to make reviving real food start to happen for real. And also, at that same time, we decided to completely shut down the construction company.
Speaker 2:And so, april of 2022, we were given an opportunity from an argument on a construction contract where we felt like we could raise our rates. The project was already over time and we just were offered well, you can leave the contract or we can argue about it with lawyers. And we just said it wasn't really worth arguing about. Lawyers were offered to remove ourselves from the contract, so let's just go. And then we called all our other contracts because that was our biggest job left and just said can we bail on these two, or what can I do to finish this one, or how do we get out of this? And we had a bunch of you know, the folks that we were still working for were good folks and they let us out of contracts that we had to get out of and they, you know, let us finish our jobs faster on the ones that we couldn't.
Speaker 2:And we button that thing up and shut it down. And it was. You could tell it was the right thing to do. Emotionally it was tough, you know. I don't know if anybody has ever had to lose a business before, but it's. When you run in your own small businesses. It becomes almost like another child to you.
Speaker 2:You know, so if you lose that thing, even if you knew it was coming, even if it's a good thing, it's still you know it's tough, it is tough yeah.
Speaker 2:But it allowed us so many more opportunities and I stayed and worked on another construction job for a little bit and then it was about November of 2020, or, excuse me, november of 2022, that we just decided it's now full time everything we're gonna do.
Speaker 2:Full time farm let's really get this distillery and brewery and winery up and running. Let's get all that stuff in motion, started building the business plan more officially for what we're doing on the distillery. I started working full time on the farm, which allowed us to do quite a bit more expansion and really, you know it's. We're probably 10 or 20 fold from what we did in 2022 to what we're doing in 2023, and just still on the rise. So we're increasing our animal count all the time, but doing so with the type of animals we raise grass-fed only. Our chickens are all natural and they get organic, non-soluble, non-corn feed, and doing things like that makes it a little more difficult, slower. Keeping them on pasture and not in the same little area all the time takes a lot of work and so we've been building structures and and just the two of you and your kids have.
Speaker 2:Just the two of us, and Charlotte is 12. And so she helps out and she's really big help and she's still homeschooled. She's still homeschooled yeah, so she, we've changed it right now Today's Tuesday, so she's taking her day off because we've never really had a weekend once we started doing the farm, because farmer's markets happen on Saturday and then Sunday, and then you know, we get a badder on it with your farmer it changes the weekend. Cows don't know.
Speaker 3:It's Monday cows don't know it's Saturday. They don't know if it's winter time, summertime.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean they don't care if it's 100 degrees out.
Speaker 2:You still gotta feed them, still gotta get them water.
Speaker 3:Because you also, like I said, you go to farm markets.
Speaker 2:You have you also have a food truck, yep, that you set up and and, yeah, we took the food truck to second Mondays for close to a year. We set up at second Mondays starting in 2021. And we didn't have much to sell, but occasionally we'd have an extra goat or maybe some puppies or something like that. We'd just bring something and for a while we would bring baby chicks that we needed more chicks for our egg laying hen. So let's order twice as many and we'll sell some of them at trade days and at least get your name out there. Not allowed us to meet some really cool people. Some folks that bought from us back in those days are still close friends now and we built some great relationships. We loved second Mondays and we tried the food trailer out there and it worked okay. But we just noticed that the food trailer by taking about a half a day to prep and then spending all day out there on Saturday with both of us and then a half a day on Sunday cleaning up and getting back it was just such a difficult thing to leave the farm for that long, since we were doing so many more animals now than we were before. No-transcript, you know it was okay. We didn't. It wasn't anything to shake a stick at, it was an income. It was good, but it taught us a few of the things that we learned.
Speaker 2:Well, some of the things we made could be sold at the farmers markets, including our soups, which became a really popular thing. When you start with the animals that you raise naturally and you make your own bone broths and then you turn that into a soup, you don't have to be a professionally trained chef to make something fantastic. And although my wife may not be professionally trained chef, she's made tens of thousands of meals in her day and she's probably one of the better cooks I've ever, you know, had the opportunity to eat the food you know with any continuity, mm-hmm. So she makes some tremendous soups and we sell those at the farmers market. And we never would have thought of that if it wasn't going, using the food trailer, going to the Christmas tree lighting last year and doing those fun things. It was, it was really a blast, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:But now we keep it. You know, we move it around the property a little bit. We'll take it out every now and again. It it's still a mobile, it's a trailer, it's not a truck, so we don't have to keep that part of the engine running or anything, but we do move it around and it'll be a semi permanent home out in front of the tasting room at the distillery. But you know, for the most part, yeah, it's available for us to take out.
Speaker 2:If we ever get in a pinch and want to go, we just, you know, with all the farmers markets, we went to one farmers market for about three to four months in 2022, then it became two and now we're at five and it takes a lot of time. But with me doing the full time on farm as well, mm-hmm, it allows Megan and I to kind of trade off in those scenarios, so she doesn't have to completely leave the farm, she can stay back. Sometimes we'll split on Saturday and we'll both go to a different farmers market, being Saturdays are usually the best day at the farmers markets, mm-hmm, but it it takes a lot of prep for us to both be gone for, you know, six hours.
Speaker 3:I don't know it takes and so and. But people in Local can also come out here and buy by beef yep, we.
Speaker 2:So we have all the different animals we we call ourselves. It's reviving real foods, but we jokingly refer to ourselves as the EIE I o farm because we got a moo moo here and a click click here and a bad, bad there, and we, we raise them all.
Speaker 2:So our rotational grazing program starts with the dairy animals in front, so Nigerian dwarf goats and Jersey slash, mini Jersey cattle, and then those go in the first paddock. The second paddock is our meat cows, meat cattle, and the third paddock is our sheep, which are katahden hair sheep, and so that's where our sheep and lamb come from. And then we have turkeys and chicken that follow in free-range mobile coupes. That's our fourth paddock and our fifth one is our pigs. We're currently raising American guinea hawks. So that's our five animal rotation and they move daily and those meat products are available here on our farm Pretty much.
Speaker 2:If you, you know send us a message or you know call us or whatnot. We're. If we're here, we're open, but we open on Fridays as well. So we go to a farmers market Friday morning. We take what's called our farm store, which you talk about my construction days, the first tool trailer I ever had Pouring concrete out on highways. I I still have that today and we gutted it, cleaned it out, put five freezers in there and a full-size refrigerator, put flooring in and electricity through the wall and we can unplug that, take it to a farmers market. Plug it back in and bring it back here. Plug it back in and it can go wherever we need it to be Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:So that farm store. We open it up every Friday starting at 1 o'clock. We're pretty much open until dark and anybody wants to come by and buy their meats and whatnot. That's a good day to do it, because we're always open then mm-hmm. Eventually, the distillery water and brewery tasting room it'll be open then too, and we'll start doing hot food as well. Mm-hmm. So it'd be more limited. We're not gonna have, you know, a 15 course menu or anything like that it's. It's gonna be a few different items, but they're all gonna be farm to table. You know, as much as we can possibly grow on our farm and and get to our customers and then the distillery and brewery.
Speaker 3:You wait once. So what happens once you get your permits? And so what's the next step after, after that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know the next step there is, man, just more red tape and trying to get things through. You got to get your label approvals, you got to get your formulas blessed by the federal government and then the state government and Lots of little things like that that. I'm trying to line up all the dominoes right now behind the scenes so that when it actually happens you can start that. You know that domino fallen and everything will fall into place. First thing we'll probably end up doing we'll end up distilling some rums. If you look around here, I've got some sugar, I've got some molasses and things already in place that I can use for making rums. So we'll start by doing that. And we've also got a couple of wooden barrels. You can see some wooden barrels back here. Several of them are used, so they're not going to be used in our production on the distillery. They're actually going to be more decorative for the building, but there's two of these that are brand new and so we'll make sure they're. They're perfectly ready to go. We'll fill them up with that rum and we'll age a rum to start and we'll have some white rum. We'll have a wood barrel aged rum and Then we'll also have beer, that will start pretty much right away. So the rules for beer, spirits and wine are all so wildly different that it's really why we ended up going with the whole package Mm-hmm, because first thing I'll be able to serve, probably within two or three weeks of getting our licenses from TABC, will be beer.
Speaker 2:And you know, our first beer we're gonna make is gonna be a Belgian paleo and it's kind of another history thing. Friend of our family, I ended up meeting in the brew club. I didn't realize who he was, his son was a best friend of my cousin and like, but you know, I just don't know each other through these different avenues. And then turns out We've known our families, have known each other since 83 when we moved down here from floor or from Michigan, mm-hmm, and it was, you know, just those circuitous path by which we came back together and I kind of liked that.
Speaker 2:He was a mentor for me when I was starting to brew. He was a lot better brewer. You know, it still is a lot better brewer, but the the stuff he had made at the first meeting that I ever went to for a homebrew club he had this, this beer, and it was a Belgian paleo and we have a little competition where everybody who shows up brings in a beer. They judge them and, you know, first place gets a little Ribbon, second place does to you and my beer got a second place and his got first and and I'd sit there with him drinking that beer Just waxing over it same as is one of the better ones I've ever had, is great, and so it allowed me to, you know, really get a passion for the competition side of things and.
Speaker 2:Really tasting the quality that somebody at a homebrew level could produce and yeah, so I wanted to kind of give back with that one. So we're gonna design that recipe together and then we'll get that into place and in our tap room I we can sell by the pint and we can sell to go containers and things like growlers. So we'll have that set up right away and as soon as that beer is ready to drink we'll have it on tap. So will that be in this building?
Speaker 3:that we're in.
Speaker 2:Yes, so the way this building is set up, you've got 150 feet internal and that's all enclosed, and the bay door at the end of the building that we're looking at past the camera that is going to be opening up into our tasting room, so that 25 foot bay. It's actually 50 foot of patio, but 25 foot of it will be semi-enclosed.
Speaker 2:And that'll be our tasting room. So beyond that door, where those tables currently are, we'll have a bar in the back here and we'll have the tasting room available right there. So the idea will be we're going to try to make it as open as possible so that people can experience being out here and looking out on the pastures and seeing the animals when they're up here. Right now they're working their way back down towards the compound side of the property and they just spent a month up here. So if you were here three weeks ago, you'd have all the cows and all the sheep and everything right out there.
Speaker 2:So they all grazed together and they all grazed together in their paddocks, so they run like a snake. So when I say that there's five paddocks, there's one in front and then one behind it, and then two, you know, or third one behind it, fourth one behind it, fifth one, and then there's an empty paddock either in the back or in the front. And if it's in the back, that means we haven't set up the new area. So we take that fence down, we put it in front and now there's an empty paddock in front. Paddock one moves to that paddock zero.
Speaker 2:Paddock two moves to paddock one, three to two, four to three, five to four and now you have an empty paddock in the back again. Rinse and repeat. You take that fence down, you put it in front and those animals they move throughout the whole property. It takes about three months for them to make every section of the property, depending on the time of year how fast you have to move them. Sometimes it could be two months, but it allows the grass and the animals to not exist where they'll kill each other.
Speaker 2:So animals can kill the grass and all the good stuff that they like and it can be bad for them to be on their waste products for too long. So by the time they get back through they don't really have any of the issues of fly larvae or of their gut bacteria or gut issues with the larva that can exist there if they're on their own feces for too long. So we don't have to have worm issues very often. We've only de-wormed animals twice since we've been out here and they were both animals that we had to bring in and put in quarantine because they came from off our farm. They were basically returns. People had bought them but it was no longer.
Speaker 3:They had gone somewhere else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no longer a life choice for them to be able to have those animals. And they were like, can you take them back? And we said, yeah, we can, but we put them in quarantine and usually animals in that kind of a stressful transition can have problems. And so we de-wormed them and put them back in there into the herds and flocks and they went just fine after that. So, yep, that little rotation program that we do is pretty neat.
Speaker 2:We do experiences and training programs. We had Buies FFA out here about three weeks ago doing a training course on our rotational grazing. So they actually got in there. We moved all the structures, we opened all the gates, we moved one to zero and two to one and they got to see how it all worked, how you set up the fences, how you take them down. And not everybody gets to experience that on an agricultural level, because by the time you get into the degrees that are offered in agriculture, a lot of them are focused on larger scale farming, not to say that there's not programs out there, but they're just less common. And so, doing what we do, it's nice to be able to share that through experiences and training and the different things that we offer. As far as that goes, we do goat cuddles. It's a good way for us to.
Speaker 3:So how does that? How do goat cuddles work?
Speaker 2:There's a lot of folks who just don't have a chance to be with animals like we do, I mean we're out there every day Goats are. They're about as close to a dog as you can possibly get.
Speaker 2:They are so friendly, especially when you milk them every day, and so people get an opportunity to just come out hang out with the goats and we'll set up chairs and tents so it's comfortable and the goats will climb in their lap and, depending on what the experience is, they're usually a little baby around and they get to hold the babies and everybody. Just the goats are really fun animals. And especially if you don't have to own them.
Speaker 3:And you've also had goat yoga.
Speaker 2:We've done goat yoga as well, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I guess people are out here doing yoga and goats are climbing on them. That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:You know our goats are. You know, they're maybe not traditionally trained for that. There's some folks out there who have some goats that they train to bounce on Everybody's back and run in a circle and do some really amazing things. Ours are more curious. They'll jump on a back every now and again, but they just love to cuddle up. We had some times where people were looking at the goats and then the goats would just lay on their yoga mat and then now you've got a yoga mat that is completely inundated by goats and they're having to try to do a stance and climb over the goat and make all that happen. So yeah, it's a pretty crazy deal, but you know, everybody takes it a little different. So the goat cuddles. Sometimes people get in there, they play with the goats and they just see the shiny objects that are the other animals. Oh man, now I see pigs and now I see the. Can I touch the sheep? And so yeah, let's go through it, we'll do that and we do farm tours that basically you don't spend as much of your time with the goats, and then we do farm tours where you spend a little time with all the different animals and it's just a good way for others to get an experience with the animals that aren't used to it. There's even a lot of people who are professional farmers. They may have only ever raised cattle and sheep. You know, they've really not spent a lot of time with goats. They've not spent a lot of time with pigs. Just because we tend to go that way, in a monoculture with our agriculture these days, you focus on one thing that you're good at. We're kind of the opposite. We want to do it all, because you know not that we claim to be the best at any one of those things, but you need them all and the ecosystem really helps when you have more things together.
Speaker 2:We make a bone broth with our chickens that we raised here. We sell the bone broth. Well, the products that are left over from the bone broth, they go feed our pigs. And once we're done here in the distillery, the same thing will happen. The items that we make in here, the leftover grape must, all the different things that come from the winemaking process and the beer making process that'll go feed the pigs. You know, typically they won't go to anything but the pigs, but maybe it's possible with some of the beers that we might be able to give some of the spent grain to some of the chickens, but that's really more of a Megan thing.
Speaker 2:She makes sure the diet for all the animals are perfectly in line. The corn will be a question, because we don't currently feed any corn to any of our animals and we won't use a lot of corn. But when we make a bourbon or you know, an American whiskey, typically it's going to have corn in it. So what do we do? Do we dispose of that? Worst case scenario? It's a compost pile item and then we turn it into new ground and we use it here. So everything that we grow stays on our farm and if it doesn't, it's packaged as a food product and sold to somebody that can eat it.
Speaker 3:And so then you do have a garden also. We do Just making have a huge garden, it's between about a half an acre.
Speaker 2:So, it's fairly large garden. It's currently not as well kept as we would like it to be, but it's getting better in each and every year. The soil is already building quite a bit. We've finally got a little bit of water infrastructure around there so it's not so hard to hand water. We've got some piping in and automatic timer so it gets water every three, four days. And but this summer was brutal and once it got brutal, we ended up focusing most of our time on the animals and on our farmers markets and then getting all this building set up and equipment moved out here, and so yeah, it was. It was quite the transition to try to get everything set up and ready to go while also being in the drought at the end of last year in a drought all through this summer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we did not focus as much on the garden as Megan would like.
Speaker 3:She loves it. She loves it, it's her favorite, and so will those also be sold. Typically, we were a garden.
Speaker 2:Right. So typically we've used everything that we grew in the garden in our soups. So when we say we make farm to table soups, it's typically going to be the animals we've raised, turned into a bone broth or the chicken would be chicken that we raised and bone broth from the chickens that we've raised. And then I think we just ran out of our onions and so we use onions from Brushy Creek. They're over here in Montague and we've got our own garlic that we've been raising for about a decade. So we've been using the same strand of garlic for over 10 years and so that goes in all our soups and I would say the vast majority of what we end up growing in that garden goes in our products that we sell more so than just goes out as its own product.
Speaker 2:People like Brushy when they have something they got a row that's as long as it's building or times 50. And that's how much it takes to really grow that much vegetable to be able to share with the world. But for us you don't need that much in one batch of soup or elderberries. We grow our own elderberries and Megan makes an elderberry syrup and so a lot of times of the year we're able to use our elderberries. If not, we buy an organic. But using the elderberries that you grow in the garden is just an extra little touch that really shows that you've got the care in your product.
Speaker 3:And they can all find all of this on your website.
Speaker 2:Yes, Our website has an online store. We go through Square. We try to keep the inventory up, but if there's something missing on there and you need it, just message us on Facebook. Send us an email revivingrealfoodswithaness at gmailcom. Our website has the revivingrealfoodwithoutaness because during that transition of construction and work in too many hours, we didn't pay the bill on renewing the website address, and then somebody bought it and wanted to sell it back to us for like $2,000. Well then, after five years they didn't care about it anymore and they let it go. So now we've got both of them. We've got all the infrastructure built on the one with no S, but it's really. Reviving real foods is the official name, and so, yeah, we.
Speaker 3:So with the S is the email, the S is the email. The S is the email, the S is the website.
Speaker 2:Or you can go with the S and it'll direct you to the right one. So we've got all that stuff set up on our website. We try to give as much of the information like links to our experiences and our tours and all that's on our website. The Texas Foothills has very little on the website yet. That's brand new fledgling and I have not had the hours to spend putting that website together, so it's a work in progress. It started but it's not done, and so there's really no products for Texas Foothills other than we've got some shirts and things and contracting with local folks to make those and that's been a fun experience working with other folks around here to do that. Then we've got yeah, delve experiences is who we do some of ours with and then Airbnb experiences, so when you actually go through the booking it goes through those sites.
Speaker 3:Could you also have an Airbnb out here?
Speaker 2:So, on site, the family that was out here before the Doshes lived here for 47 years and they had built a second house in 2009.
Speaker 2:That second house is what we moved into. When we first moved out here, we renovated the original house so we got rid of some things that were a little older school the wood paneling and put up drywall, and then we made that house what we wanted while we lived in the second house. And then the second house became our construction office for about two years and so, after the construction office was done and we didn't need that anymore, we spent some time like, what is this Do we? We did some podcasting ourselves in there and things like that, and then it was just well, why don't we turn this into an Airbnb? So it didn't take much to get there and we spent a little bit of money adding a little furniture and bedding and cleaning it up. And then we kind of one day decided, well, we've got enough pictures, let's put it up. And worst case scenario, somebody will book this weekend and we'll have to stay up until midnight cleaning it every day. And then our text went off that we got a booking for that weekend.
Speaker 2:And we went.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess I know what we're doing every night till midnight and we spent all the rest of the time, got it all spick and span and you just don't realize, even in that short amount of time, how many drawers end up with stuff in it that you just need to take out. So, yeah, we've been running that since late January of 2023. And that's just been a blast. So we've got folks coming out here this weekend and for different reasons. We had somebody come out last month for, and stay for almost the entire month for, work, and then we've had people come out here. They're in for celebration or wedding or something along that line, or even, on the other side, funeral or something less joyous occasion. But then these folks coming in this weekend is for a baby shower and then they're going to do some of the other tours. While they're here they're going to purchase some of the things we give an opportunity for people to get custom farm to table meals that we only offer people that are staying here.
Speaker 3:That Megan cooks.
Speaker 2:That Megan will cook. She gets me chopping all the stuff up and then she comes in there like the Michelin Star chef and does all the final touches and then I slave away making sure the rest of it happens. But no, she does a phenomenal job with it and for us it ends up great because we often get so busy. Finding the time to cook for ourselves sometimes can be crazy, even though it's our favorite thing to do. It's great to have that reason to do it. Okay, well, somebody else is good. Okay, good, Now we'll be in there, we might as well make this too. We make this too, and then usually it's able to make us meals for a couple of days. So, yeah, we've got just a whole lot of those fun things going and we're hoping that Texas foothills and reviving real foods becomes kind of a neat place for locals to come hang out, but also for folks coming in from out of town to have a neat place to hang out.
Speaker 2:You can hear other than my wife motoring by on the UTV it's pretty quiet out here or my phone going off with an alarm over there. It's usually just what you're experiencing right here nice and quiet. Even if the train goes through. You can barely hear it. It's just bucolic. Sit out on the patio, enjoy a beverage, have some farm to table food and just relax.
Speaker 3:So, with all this, do you ever miss the construction business, or are you?
Speaker 2:Not really at all, you know. I mean, it's all the things that really drew me to that construction industry. It had gotten different. So, like I love the working together with the trades, well then they all got mad at each other. No respect for the oh, those carpenters are terrible. Oh the rodbusters, they're awful. So all that camaraderie had just kind of gotten argumentative Out here it's like the opposite. Now we're doing farming, and if you need help from a neighbor, a neighbor's going to come and help you. It doesn't matter if they have problems too. Everybody's here to help, and that's the same reason why I got into construction.
Speaker 2:I love that mentality. I love if somebody needs me, then I can be there to help them. If I need them, they can be there to help me. And so, yes, all the things that I wanted in construction, they're still here. They're just in farming.
Speaker 3:Just a little different. Just a little different and not as much hustle and bustle. It's a little calmer.
Speaker 2:It's calmer. I mean still hustle and bustle still a lot to do, plenty to keep you busy.
Speaker 2:We're working the same amount of hours we were in construction, but, at the end of the day, the food that we're creating is what we're eating, instead of the dollars that we're creating, buying food that we're eating and trying to make sure we're vetting it and make sure it's exactly what we're looking for. So, by going in there and having all the things that you've ever wanted to be focusing on, which is all the meals that we've been prepping, all the things that we're trying to make sure that we're eating healthy, and that's also our living, it's just one less thing you have to worry about. So we know, at the end of the day, whatever we're eating is going to be super healthy.
Speaker 3:And not just you're using it for your family and you're making a difference, but you're sharing it with our community, with our county, with our neighbors around us by selling those products and selling. We don't have to go in the store and buy them. Are they going to be a little bit more expensive? Yeah, they probably are. But what's your health worth? How much are you spending on medications? How much are?
Speaker 1:you spending on the doctor.
Speaker 3:I think when you balance those out, is your life going to be shortened by those medications you're taking, by those unhealthy habits you have. You know, when we start to weigh those in with the cost, we start to see some of those costs are very nominal compared to some of those other ones of buying those grass-fed homegrown meats.
Speaker 2:We've always said that same thing you're either going to pay your money to the doctor or you're going to pay it to the farmer. Which one do you want? And they pay it to the farmer. They pay it to a neighbor, right, yep? And we've always said that same thing. If I go hand a hundred dollar bill over to Charles at Dry Valley Dairy and then he takes a hundred dollar bill and he hands it over and buys some hay with it, like that hundred dollars can go around this entire county a thousand times and there's still a hundred dollars in this county.
Speaker 2:And as long as we're working together on those kinds of things, that's just feeding commerce across the way and it just becomes a way we can trade something. But you also work alongside of people, and Megan actually does for Dry Valley Dairy. She goes over there and Moon Lights as a cheese maker. So like last night she went over there helping to do some fermented cheeses and just fun stuff like that. Do we always have time for that? No, but it's because of the relationships there we can ask each other for help and we've had times where we were haying this field and something went wrong with our equipment and then here comes, charles, with a bunch of his haying equipment and helps us out.
Speaker 2:So you get those kinds of relationships that you make it worth it, but then also again you get to eat it you're helping other local folks and I just I really look forward to being able to have people out here and they can just show up and know that what they're getting is healthy, know that what they're getting is as local as possible. Even on the alcohol side of things, we're going to source as much Texas and organic and non-GMOs we possibly can. It's a little more difficult on that side, just like it was for healthy eating a long time ago. We'll limit what we can make. Some of the styles won't be available to us, but we'll do as many as we possibly can and that way, people on the same side, all of our vodka's and light alcohol's like that, they're all going to be made with organic grains and organic grapes. So it's just, in the end it's not that much more expensive. It's the way.
Speaker 1:I kind of look at it.
Speaker 2:Everybody else is trying to cut their cost on every possible way they possibly can, and that's not our goal. We've said it from the beginning. If we were trying to just sell our animals and just sell our meat to make our living, the prices would be so unaffordable for everybody it wouldn't work. But if you sell your meat at a reasonable rate and you're not losing tons of money on it or maybe you're breaking even, well, at least you can then make some money having people come out and stay at the Airbnb or having people come out and do an FFA class. You can cover your costs in different ways if you're open-minded, but you never have to cut your quality, and that's our big deal.
Speaker 2:After all the years in construction we fought that we were always the premium construction company and then it became too competitive and getting a job was difficult when you were the higher priced company and there was less people that cared about that quality extra and they really just wanted the cheapest price. So to compete, you had to get the prices down. Well then, you're not. Really you're not doing what you're passionate about because you're not giving them the premium service. You're giving them a discount service. But you're gut, you really still want to give them the premium, but you can't afford it because you'll lose too much money. It became that battle. When we started doing this, I said you know, no matter what Megan, we got to make sure that we do not sacrifice the quality of what we're trying to provide. So if it means that we have to go get a side job, it means we have to get a side job.
Speaker 2:If it means that we have to find other things to do around here to make some money. Bring people in for tours. Let's bring people in for tours and we'll make sure that by the end of the day, the quality stays at the highest level, and it's everything we want it to be. And if that particular item doesn't make money, it's not the end of the world. We'll make it up somewhere else.
Speaker 3:And I think you know small business owners sometimes when they have multiple revenue streams. That's one way of being successful is you don't have to make a ton of money on this one product because you're making a little bit of money on all these products that really make up reviving real foods. It's from the experiences, from the Airbnb to the meats to soon to be the distillery All those little things make up the business. So you don't have to sacrifice quality because you don't have to make. That's not your only business where you got to make a ton of money on and you still. It's a win-win because you're making a living but you're also giving the customer a good quality product and a reasonable rate.
Speaker 2:And you give them a full package experience. You know so many people out there these days. They would like to have just that one item that they're good at. That happened to us in construction. So we're doing Rebar. Well, rebar is the entirety of an entire industry, so much to it. It can be a high rise, it can be this slab that we're standing on, it can be a highway, a bridge. But things got so tight knit that by the time it was done for us, I mean there were crews that only wanted to do the cages that went in the columns on bridges and only the cages that went in the ground for the drilled shafts, or only did the paving. Or well, man, I mean it's so micro niche that when those things aren't available, what else are you going to do? And I kind of look at it like this yeah, we could specialize and raise one of these animals and probably do an even better job with that one animal. Let's do it, let's go.
Speaker 2:When you go to a restaurant, you're not just gonna order one lamb steak and call it a good. You want the green beans with it, you want some mashed potatoes, you want something else with your meal to make it more substantial. And why not raise it all? Why not make all that, make it all a better quality? Because in the end you want it all anyway. You need it and it gives that full experience for people that are coming out. They know when they get something from us that they're gonna get. They know they get that care that we put in to the food for ourselves. They get that for themselves too.
Speaker 2:And typically we don't charge. We probably could charge more, especially at some of the farmers markets and the different things. Rates are typically higher than what we're charging, especially since we're kind of at the top end. We're really at the very, very top end for what we're making, but we're not at the top end for the prices we try to make it. We have to charge what our costs are and try to make a little bit on top of it.
Speaker 2:But in the end we want to give people the opportunity to try it. And if we were making every penny we possibly could and paying ourselves a huge salary and doing those things, it would make it less available for everybody. And now it's still probably pricing some people out, but it's not pricing everybody out and those that can afford it if they wanna throw extra on the table. They're always welcome to do that, but if they can't afford it, great. We gave you a price on a product that everybody can deal with, so it's trying to help as many people as possible live like we do and as far as healthy eating, and just have the opportunity on all phases. Same thing with the alcohol. It's not the best thing in the world for you to drink that stuff, but if you're gonna do it, why not put the best thing you can into the product?
Speaker 3:And so, just wrapping up, just being here, having interactions with Montaic County and Bowie for a lot of years, what makes now, what makes you call Bowie my hometown, you know?
Speaker 2:Montaic, really outside of Bowie, Day one of moving out here. We had it set up to where we were supposed to have our furniture and everything delivered. Quiverful is a company we've used before. They're really nice to move and they were supposed to show up on a certain day and then we got a call that hey, we gotta move the day up, that you're gonna be moving two days, so you can close two days early. Okay, great, so we close on a Wednesday, we start moving what we can, but the movers aren't showing up until Friday. And we got to meet a whole bunch of people in those two days but we hardly. I mean, we had air mattress on the floor kind of deal as how we were living. But I think I knew for sure that this is where I wanted to be.
Speaker 2:After, like day one neighbor pulls up and we had an issue with moving our old Jeep and he had grabbed a trailer and we drove down, picked up the Jeep and brought it back over here, no questions asked, no like oh yeah, favor, or anything like that, Just helping me out. And then Friday came and we got our furniture there and I just remember walking back up the hill and hearing this noise going. What is that? We were like it's so loud and it was the compressor on our freezer, because we hadn't had any equipment, nothing out there, and the compressor on the freezer was so loud comparatively to the quiet nature. Those two things. That's really what brought you know. I knew at that point.
Speaker 2:You know, now we're here like it's so quiet, it's so peaceful, yet you still have the camaraderie of your neighbors, and like it was home immediately.
Speaker 3:This was it. Yeah Well, thank you, kyle, for spending a little time with me today. Thank for sharing about the process and everything that you do. And again, how. Where can they find more information about you? Yep.
Speaker 2:So RevivingRealFoods, revivingrealfood or revivingrealfoodscom or the EIEOfarmcom. You can go to TexasFootHillscom. We're on Facebook Instagram. We try to do as many social media posts as we can there. We were trying some YouTube stuff for a while. There's also a channel, but it's hard to keep up with all of them.
Speaker 3:So that one's hit the wayside, and on Facebook they can see it working around doing stuff. And they can see all your experiences, Yep. And then you can look at Airbnb all the pictures and everything all on there.
Speaker 2:Yep Farmhouse on the Hill is our Airbnb and you know it's just a lot of fun. It sleeps, like you know, between four and six people, so it's a 16-under-square-foot house. It's nice and big, it's only. The only issue that we limited to is the fact that it's only got one bathroom, so we try to save, you know, six people one bathroom. It's probably about maxing that out. So you better know each other if you're going to have all six in there and it's a really nice, quiet place to be.
Speaker 2:And then our website. We've got a square store. So if you go to our Re5enRealFoodcom and then click on the farm store, it'll take you to all the things that we have available, from chicken, you know, to the beef we've raised, to the lamb which is almost out for our 2023. Lamb is almost already sold out. And you know just everything that we make our soups, our broths, elderberry syrup, and you know all the things are available for pickup on Friday or, you know, again, we're available any if we're here we're open and outside of Boo you're on like five, like 10 minutes, less than 10 minutes Outside of Boo.
Speaker 3:So we'll put all those links on our show notes, on all that so everybody can contact you, they can go check it out, they can see what everything, what it's all about, out here.
Speaker 3:Well, I appreciate it, and we'll look forward to coming out here and sitting outside on the patio that's right in front of us. That'll soon be the bar and tasting room and all that. So thank you, kyle. I appreciate you taking a little time to join me today, and thank you to each of you for stopping by and visiting with us. I look forward to seeing you around my hometown.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to today's podcast. If you would like to connect with Erin, you can do so by going to erindeglercom or find him on social media as Erin Degler on Instagram, facebook and YouTube. Once again, we greatly appreciate you tuning in. If you have enjoyed this show, please feel free to rate, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcast. We greatly appreciate that effort and we will see you around in my hometown.