Thursday Bonus Episode with Appalachian Bluebird

Join me for a casual, quick 30 minute episode with Appalachian Bluebird who shares all about Appalachian history online. With many ties to farming, this Thursday Bonus Episode is a fun way to close out our conversations with U.S. farmers for a while. We travel overseas next week!

Huge thank you to Farmhand for sponsoring this bonus episode - if you're still using a basic email system and haven't switched to one that's actually made for farmers, what are you waiting for ?! seriously!!

farmhand.partners/newsletter?utm_source=global-stewardship-podcast

Click the link above to explore what Farmhand is all about.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to our very first ever bonus Thursday episode of the Global Stewardship Podcast. This is a podcast highlighting some of the very best food producers and growers around the world with a different guest every Tuesday, sharing about their day-to-day and their theology of land stewardship. But today's a bonus episode. Most listeners are farmers like me. So this episode is especially for you guys. I'm so excited to share that this episode is brought to you by Farmhand. The email system made just for farmers. Not only do I just naturally love wind systems and products are designed specifically with growers like us in mind, but I'm just so beyond grateful for the team at Farmhand for sponsoring this brand new show and supporting a farmer in this way. I think that that's just even more proof that they really do have farmers at the forefront of what they do. So if you're a land steward like me and you've got crops to tend to customers to keep in the loop fields to tend, let's be honest, wrangling a mailing list should not feel like hurting livestock. I've been there with my own marketing and I know that even though email does remain the most effective way to communicate with customers. I've just also found myself frustrated time and time again with my old basic email system that was created for anyone and everyone under the sun. It wasn't made for farmers in mind, and so that's where farmhand has come in. It's simple, powerful, and actually speaks our language as farmers, so whether you're selling CSA shares, you're announcing a fresh restock, or you're just letting people know where the farm stand is popping up this week, it is so night and day difference because it's made just for us. Did you know that I'm actually a certified marketing coach as well as a farmer and a podcaster, and I'm not telling you this just to sell you on my coaching or anything like that. My energy is actually totally on this podcast, so I'm not coaching right now anyways, but I share this because I think my email marketing story is really important for farmers to hear. One of the main reasons I'm so passionate about sending emails is because after years of thinking that my marketing was fine, or, I mean, it was cutting it at least after implementing weekly or sometimes every two weeks, emails, I literally 10 x my farm sales. You heard that, right? I 10 xed my sales and under eight weeks after implementing these practices, and then I just went on to keep mastering this practice because of how life changing it was for me, and the only change was great email marketing. Emails are not a thing of the past, you guys, they're still the number one way to reach your ideal customer, regardless of your industry. And you don't have to fight an algorithm. You're literally directly speaking to someone right when you want to in their inbox. And farmhand is the perfect system to use. If you're ready to spend less time on email, more time with your hands in the dirt, sign up or switch to farmhand today. There's a link in the podcast description, and if you do switch, please let me know. I would love to say thank you with some complimentary email review just for supporting Farmhand supporting the Global Stewardship Podcast, and for listening to this sponsored bonus episode, go to farmhand.partners/newsletter. Or better yet, just click the custom link in the description. I don't get any cash from it or anything, but Farmhand does track how many people click it, so just give it a click and check it out. Okay, so let's dive in. Today, I have Brittany on the podcast. She's online as Appalachian Bluebird, and her family's been farming since the 17 hundreds in Appalachia, or as some say, Appalachia. Appalachia, Appal, Appalachia. Okay, well, we'll get into that. Here's Brittany. Brittany, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This is going to be totally different than our normal Tuesday episodes. This bonus Thursday episode is just for fun. Can you tell listeners where you're coming from and the stereotypes of the people that you cover in a lot of your content?

Audio Only - All Participants: 3:56

Yeah, I'm from the southwestern part of Virginia. I grew up in Meadowview, Virginia. And, it's very stereotypical to say that this area and the whole of Appalachia is, you know, hillbillies, illiterate. Uneducated, especially because of the way some of us speak. Mm-hmm. And, Our dialect really comes from us being isolated for hundreds of years before the, you know, the internet and the TV and all of that. They kept a lot of the original dialect that the settlers brought here. Yeah. So that's why there's such a different speech. I have heard that stereotype my whole life. Not about just people in Appalachia, but southerners as well. A lot of these kind of. Older phrases that we now think are uneducated, like they've actually, a lot of times just they're words that have been preserved that disappeared in other parts of the country. It's a whole mindset shift when you look at it from that perspective. It is crazy how it was so isolated in that certain regions. Yeah. I spent a ton of time in England this year and. Did not expect this and was so mind blown. But a lot of these farmers throughout England that I visited, they were saying some of the same terms and phrases that I thought were southern phrases my whole life. I thought it was unique to my part of the world. And I show up in England and they're saying. The same things. Of course then I find you and I, I learn this again, like, oh, this is why this is happening. But, it's really just like preserved, formal English that has been preserved. And even in England, a lot of these phrases are vanishing as well. But I remember I was sitting down at a dairy farm for. A lunch with, basically three generations of farmers. But the, the older woman had made what I call lunch, but that's, you know, she was calling it dinner and we were talking about how well my grandma would've called it supper. Really interesting to see and to kind of have those. Conversations with them about language that I wasn't expecting to have that day. Yeah, that is really neat. And until I had my channel, I didn't really realize that there were, I knew that our language had came from there, but I didn't realize that they were still speaking those same things that were still speaking in Appalachia in the south. A lot of people are now losing that way of speaking and it's, it's also happening here a lot too. So it's interesting that we're living in kind of this in-between English right now, where some people still speak it and some people are moving forward and, yeah, that is really fascinating. My, um. My grandparents spoke almost full old Appalachian, just completely different than I speak. Mm-hmm. And then I speak kind of a mixture, but a lot of mine is gone and my children, it's just completely gone. it is really a dying dialect. Can you give some examples of some of those words that your parents or grandparents would say that you don't really say necessarily all the time anymore? Um, they would call a bag a poke. Yeah. they would do a lot of just taking whole words out of sentences. You know, I'd have brung it if I could in, you know, stuff like that. Yeah. A lot of the ones I've seen you post online, my grandma still speaks that way a lot I was so mind blown to learn from you that Chester drawers. Are not I, I always thought maybe it came from a place called Chester or a person named Chester made these drawers and can you tell people what Chester drawers are? It's actually a chest of drawers, but we just call it Chester drawers. I've thought I'm, my whole life I still call'em Chester drawers. Yeah, I do too. I didn't even know that until I was. Well, in my twenties and people listening are probably wondering, what are Chester drawers? It's like a, a, a chest of drawers. A dresser that you might put your clothes in or something, right? Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. That's so funny. Yeah. My grandma still says things like. instead of, will you take a picture of us? She says, will you make my picture? I think part of that is just because they used to actually physically make pictures, but it's super cute and love spending time with her and people who still speak like that. Yeah, definitely. so I first found you because you were sharing stories about your family's history how some things are the same, but also how a lot of things are different. And I really love that you, of inspire people to think little more deeply about how they're living now. Almost preserve some of these thoughts or phrases or traditions. I think that a lot of farmers, there's this kind of movement. People say, oh, we wanna go back to how our grandparents lived, how our great grandparents lived. And I certainly think that there are a lot of really great elements that we do need to bring back. But like they also lived in really, really hard times. Could you maybe share your opinion or some insight on that? Like, do we really want to live how our great grandparents lived, and what are some things that we should strive to bring forward? And then what are some things we maybe wanna leave in the past? Yeah, definitely. Um, my grandma always talked about her childhood being very, very hard because they started working when they were just four or five in the fields alongside their parents. And it was a really hard life. It, it is fun to think about the idea of it, but actually doing it may be a lot harder than we think. Definitely. Especially living just completely self-sufficient like that, it's definitely really hard. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's really hard when a lot of the weight is on one person. I actually just saw, uh, kind of a blog yesterday about somebody who said, homestead is the worst thing I've ever done in my life. I'm so glad I stopped homesteading.'cause it was really overwhelming for them, and they just had to basically give up their entire lives. And I think back, well, you know, people back then, they absolutely had to do it to stay alive. Mm-hmm. But they also were largely living in community, like big inter spiderwebs of giant families. A lot of extended family would be helping to support one another. And so certainly the kind of modern farming homesteading movement that's super individualistic, it might not exactly model that kind of living either in the first place. We're not called to do everything by ourselves. That's just not he or sustainable. Yeah, that's true. And it would usually take a whole family working to be able to do all that too. Mm-hmm. Do you have any, like crazy stories that you've heard or, uh, anything that you've uncovered in kind of your research that, uh, some just wild, wild things that happened back then that like, people would be totally mind blown if this popped up in a news story today? Um, well there definitely the kids, uh, my grandma's siblings would get snake bit all the time by venomous snakes. Mm. And, they never would, go see a doctor or anything like that. And her dad, uh, ended up giving arthritis and so his hands were drawn up and he wasn't able to farm anymore, so Wow. They being just completely dirt poor. Planting by the signs. Yeah. Have you ever heard of that? Yeah. Signs I have heard of planting by the signs when people go and look at, our planting calendars, there are people who plant by the moon phases, people who plant by the temperatures, and then people who just plant. Yeah. But we find that fewer and fewer people plant by. Any kind of astrology or anything anymore. Yeah, it was pretty mainstream here. My grandfather would still do it in the nineties. Wow. He would, you know, have his little Almanac calendar and look at it every day before he went out in the garden. Mm-hmm. But, um, yeah, they would, um, look to the moon and what sign the moon was in to plant and they had this whole system of each sign correlated to a part of the body. So they would say, don't plant when the moon is in the legs or the arms, and. They also would use it not only for farming, but they would use it like for haircuts, for wind to can, like they would say if you wanna do your hair, to grow long, to cut it during waning moon, so that it was a lot of folklore mixed in there with it for them. Mm-hmm. That is so interesting. Maybe just a lot more in tune with the natural world. I actually, I've seen you talk about that before it's very clear to me as a farmer, there aren't a lot of farmers in my area, so a lot of the people that I meet. From my perspective, seem extremely disconnected with the natural world. that's the whole point of this podcast to help people connect with where their food comes from. So obviously listeners will probably know where I'm coming from, but you share some really cool stories of just ways that your ancestors were so much more connected, almost on a, just a spiritual level. They just had this level of just being in tune with things that I know people are missing today. And it's interesting'cause I've certainly tapped back into that now that I'm a farmer barefoot walking the land, spending all of my days under the sun. And uh, so I know it still exists, but I'm certainly always striving to kind of have that connection that maybe our ancestors did have. Can you talk more about that and some of those really cool, crazy stories. Yeah, my grandmother, she would always go barefoot, so she was always, you know, grounding to the earth. Mm-hmm. Not even meaning to, and, she was constantly in the mountains, constantly, you know, dealing with the animals and everything like that. And, she had some abilities to see visions we thought she was just nuts for a little while that she was saying that. And, but then that we saw them come true sometimes and we were just like, wow, that's, yeah, that's interesting. And uh, I think it really had a lot to do with her just being so in tune with things like that. Yeah. Certainly. When you slow down your life and. just spend more time focusing on the the real living world. Yeah, it totally, it just changes everything. So talking about things that are kind of fading away. When I drive through this part of the US I see so many abandoned buildings and I think what rich, like such a rich history that these places, it's just so much happened here. And most of them were farm buildings. And just think of all the stories of farmers and makers and land stewards that used to be in these buildings that are now just dilapidated, rotting away, if not, you know, just being like torn down and developed over whatever. Can you tell us some stories that may bring these abandoned, overgrown places back to life? In our minds, Well, um, the, actually I filmed, one house, it was a beautiful house that had a little gingerbread trailing on it. Oh, nice. Cool. Well, a little gingerbread trim. Mm-hmm. And, it blew up. Everyone loved that video. And I didn't know anything about it at all. And, someone actually commented on the video and she had grown up next door to that house, that's so cool. Yeah. She told me the whole story about the little man and woman farmer that lived there and how nice they were, and I think she said that they had a pet parrot and she just gave like the whole background and then it just kind of brought it to life. There's, so much history and like real people living their real lives. And you just think, what did life look like back then? Mm-hmm. What did life look like back then? Well, uh, my grandmother's childhood, she lived up on a mountain from the main road, it's probably about a mile up onto a mountain. And she lived in a little white house and, um, there were 19 children. They weren't all children at once, living in that house, thank goodness. But, it was all these kids packed into one house. They would sleep five or six to a bed. And they would only go into town maybe like once a month. So they weren't really exposed to anybody other than their little mountain community. Hardly at all. Interesting. How do you feel about talking about the past but driving around and seeing a lot of the history kind of vanishing, you what is your perspective when you drive around and see things changing so much? It really is really sad to see it all change and see it all, some of it be bulldozed over. Mm-hmm. We had an instance like that in the town next to where I grew up not too long ago that there was an old plantation house there the house, they did preserve the house. There were, you know, graves, unmarked graves and everything all around there. And they demolished all of that to build a strip mall. And it was a big fight with the town and the historical society, not wanting them to do that, but Wow. They've went out and bulldozed it all. it's just sad to see history. Just taken over like that. Yeah. That is so sad. It's not just happening with older places either, but we hear stories of it all the time, but, farmland is getting developed, like absolutely crazy. I think 40 acres per hour are lost to development in the us. It adds up to nearly a thousand acres a day. Some places actually estimate more than. 2,700 acres daily. That was what the USDA said over a million acres per year are switched over and developed. And, so not only are these historical places being lost, but this connected way of life that we were talking about. And, it's super, super important to keep that from happening and to protect these places and. What do you see in the next generation of people in your area and, what are some things that we could be slowing down and doing differently trying to live a little bit more like our ancestors did in some ways. well, I do see a lot of people in my area kind of going back to their roots a little bit now. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of people in my area that are now wanting to plant their own gardens again. And grow their own food when, as you know, when I was a teenager, most of the kids just wanted nothing to do with that. And we just wanted out of it. And now a lot of people my age are wanting to do what our grandparents did. Mm-hmm. We're almost in this era where we tried it out, we tried to go a different direction with a lot of things and we very quickly realized that is not the way we need to be going. And we're doing a complete 180 as soon as possible back in the other direction. I do a lot of flower gardening and it, it, I feel like it really does just make you feel better to slow down and just mm-hmm. You know, have that time growing things and working with the land and all that. and we have the luxury, like what we were talking about earlier. People were doing it for their survival and we might not be doing that anymore, but what an exciting opportunity that is, that we can just enjoy it and not have the stress we're not in fight or flight mode. It's a really exciting opportunity for us to take a step back and steward the land without having that absolute desperation. For like, if we don't wake up and harvest this morning, we are not going to eat tonight kind of thing. Definitely. You had shared a story at one point that I didn't know about and my husband was like, yeah, everybody knows that. The switch for a lot of people from this self-sufficient farming to, they were given these industrial jobs. Can you tell us more about what happened in that switch? So before the Industrial Revolution, everyone around here was pretty much just farming to live. There were no jobs, public jobs or anything like that. Mm-hmm. And then the company towns came in and, you know, started the coal industry and also the lumber industry came in The company towns really exploited the Appalachian people because, they would pay them in script instead of paying them in money. Right? So that could only be used at the company store and just made them stuck. then if, head of the household, like the man got. Killed, killed during mining. The woman would just be thrown out and then she would have nothing because the home belonged to the company. Wow. uh, that also happened with the tobacco industry here. Tobacco was a big cash crop for Appalachia, and my family's grown up for generations until my granddad was the last one to grow it. There used to be a quota system that made it fair for small farmers to where you had a guaranteed price and you could only, grow as much as had been historically grown on your land. So it stopped like big farmers from just growing a plethora and not little farmers not being able to make any money. They, that was until 2004, and then the government did a tobacco buyout. And that stopped all of that. So then the big farmers could grow as much as they wanted and it just wasn't profitable for the little farmers anymore. Wow. I still see that happen in many types of farming around the world. We are still losing farms, small farms by the day, and are getting old. Most farmers are aging out yet people who start farming, I think it's over 80% of first generation farmers, their businesses fizzle out within three to five years. So as all of these small farms get kind of fought out and bought out, or aged out, who's gonna take their place? And you talking about People who were paid money by their employers that could only be paid back to their employers. Just that these people came in and they not only exploited the, like the lands and the natural resources, It is ultimately what has turned all of Appalachia into what it is today. rather than this land rich, self-sufficient place than it once was, hopefully this podcast will help, light a fire in people to care more about these things, where did your family stop farming in that, in that line of history? The reason they left farming altogether was my grandparents moved out of the mountains and more into, we're still in that, we were still in the Appalachian Mountains, but you know, just not as far back in the back county. it just kind of became the thing to do. Everyone was getting public jobs and farming was getting less, less profitable. My granddad always, raised a garden up until his eighties, but he, stopped doing anything for profit when the tobacco buyout happened. That's crazy. You just said raised a garden. I think that would be a good segue into us talking about some more of these things that people used to say that. do you happen to have a running list of these phrases or do you just kind of come up with them on I do, I do have a whole list. My, let's see, I wrote a list of ones that my Southern family use but then some of them are a little different. So I'd love to hear, you give a phrase and then I'll give a phrase. Okay. Well, like your pajamas, we would call bed clothes. Mm. And we would also, uh, like the comforter on your bed and the blankets, we would also call that bed closed. Yes. Okay. Now I have heard you say that like that's bedding. I think you've probably, you guys probably say this too, but. They'll say mash the gas, which is like the gas pedal in the car instead of press the gas or don't know what people say. Say mash the gas. Yeah. Um, same with like my grandma, when she is, trying to do things on her phone, a lot of times she'll say like, mash the button. Mash the button, not push the button. I think that's so cute. Yeah. Yeah. We say that one too. That one is hilarious. My younger siblings, they don't spend as much time with my grandmother. I was partly raised by her, so that's why I've heard a lot of these, my younger siblings are seven years younger. They probably wouldn't know any of these, yeah. That's the same with. My daughter, she grew up around my grandparents a little bit, but, they passed away when my son was a toddler, so he doesn't really remember them. So he has almost no knowledge of the old words like that. Wow. But kind of does a little bit. some that my grandpa would say is instead of saying like, oh, I'll teach you how to do this. He says, I'll learn you. Yeah, I'll learn you how to, And when I moved away for college, I went to college in Colorado. He'd never call it Colorado. He'd say way out yonder. Or like, oh, are you heading back up north? Actually, I now live a few hours north of Savannah and it still would be up north. Like, yeah, only a couple hours. mine would say that too, and then they would also say down the road a little piece. the hide and seat game, they would call that hoopy Hide what? Hoopy hide. And the peekaboo game, they would call that pea pie. Uh, they also, instead of mature, they say mature. Yeah. Mature, or people say, I guess people say mature. and I had a question for you. We used the word smelt if you're smelling something, I smelt that and my grandma would say, I smelt beautiful flowers. What do normal people say instead of smelt? I think that they say smelled like I smelled it. I don't know. To me that sounds wrong. I'm really sure. I don't know if that's slang or if I'm just so accustomed to hearing smelts. I'm sure listeners are gonna comment like, y'all don't know what you're talking about. Same with spoiled. My grandparents would say spoiled do you all say lightning bugs? No, but I do hear that fireflies, yeah, we say, we do say fireflies, but I'm sure that my grandparents would say lightning bugs. I'm actually doing a podcast episode on them soon as well with a lightning bug expert because, uh, they're really seeing population decline and a lot of that is because of industrial agriculture. I actually have somebody on the farm right now who's from Georgia and said that, you know her whole life, she saw them growing up and doesn't see them there anymore. And on our farm, we have them all night throughout this time of the year. They're so magical. I can't even describe, but she calls them lightning bugs and up here people call'em fireflies. But it's interesting that you brought that up'cause I have somebody I'm interviewing about that shortly. And the reason I even went down that rabbit hole was because I never have heard what my grandparents would've called them or call them because they are no longer down in Savannah it's just been so widely developed that they, we just don't see them. And growing up even they had already been gone, so I don't know what they call'em, but kind of sad. Yeah, that is something that, I say, and my husband and I still say these too, with my son, husband will say, like, mind your mother, mind your mother. I didn't realize that that wasn't something everybody says, but To listen, that means to listen or follow their instruction. For those who don't say these things, and I always say I'm piddling. P-I-D-D-L-I-N, I'm piddling like, meaning I'm just doing whatever, wasting my time. Like do, do, do. Piddling. I love that one. I say that all the time. Yeah, that is a cute one. Yeah. Until I started really deep diving into this, there were a lot of words and phrases that, you know, I would say, and my grandparents would say that I didn't even realize wasn't just how everyone said it. Yep. I'm still discovering more and more, and and I've, I mean, I have, I have been a lot of places I spent a lot of my childhood in Montana and, uh, actually young kids would make fun of my speech so much that. I always attribute, there was a day at the bus stop where I was there. I was in a really small community. In kindergarten we had like a few kids, but there were enough kids at my bus stop for me to be bullied about my southern. Language. And one day they had a sit down with me at the bus stop. I was probably five. And they told me, you can't say y'all anymore. It is you guys. And I, I really think that that was the moment I, oh shoot, if I don't fix my language, I'm not gonna fit in here. And I probably would've had a really cute southern accent but that was the moment I was culturally peer pressured talking like a northerner. So, Yeah. When my mom started school, um, she went to school saying that. Kids with blonde hair, had yellow hair and got bullied. Yes. Yeah. My grandpa would say, he would always call my hair yellow.

30:49

Thank you so much again, Brittany, for joining us on the podcast today. I thought this was such a great way to kind of combine talking about the past and the things that we want to bring forward. But also highlight that there are new things like farm hand that actually make farming so much easier for those of us who do grow food. Just what a fun way to have this conversation. So again, thank you so much, Brittany.

Audio Only - All Participants: 31:14

Well thank you so having me on here. Yeah,

31:17

Thanks again, guys for tuning into this bonus Thursday episode brought to you by Farmhand. Again, just so deeply grateful to farmhand for sponsoring an episode on a brand new podcast. How cool is that? Please click the link in the podcast description. Just click it and see what they're all about. It will really help me out as a podcaster and, would mean a lot to me. I think bonus episodes are just a fun way to have additional chats, but we will be back next Tuesday with a land steward from somewhere else around the globe. So for those of you who are listening from the us, you're probably have been thinking, isn't this the Global Stewardship Podcast? And I know the first few episodes had growers from the United States of America, but you guys have to realize that the US is absolutely massive, like as big as Europe. So we really have a lot of people that are doing really great things. But next week and a lot of the upcoming episodes are from people from other countries outside of America. So tune in on Tuesday. As always, I'm so grateful for each and every one of you who listens and share the show and just give any feedback that you may have so I can be better podcast host for you guys.