The Brickson Family Farm

A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Jim at The Brickson Family Farm. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Jim at the Brickson Family Farm in Baudette, Minnesota, I think is how you say it. Good afternoon, Jim. Good afternoon. It is Baudette. Okay, cool. And you said it's right at the Canadian border?

00:27
Yeah, we're about three miles from the Canadian border. Actually, the town we live in is Pitt, but there's not too many people. The township isn't that big, so they attach us to Bidet. Oh, okay, yep, that makes sense. So you said it's terribly cold up there. It is, it comes with the territory, though. It's the price we pay for solitude, stay away from all the rat race of life sometimes.

00:51
Yes, I understand. We moved to outside of LaSore, Minnesota for exactly that reason because we lived in town, Jordan, Minnesota for 20 something years and we were done. So we moved out in the middle of soybean and cornfields and we love it. We've been here four years and it's so quiet. It's so wonderful. All right. So tell me all about yourself and what you do at your farm. Oh.

01:18
We do a lot of stuff. Right now we're trying to do not so much because it's been cold. But my wife and I are both Navy veterans and work for the Salvation Army after our Navy career for well, until retirement as pastors. So we went back to college at a late stage in our life, became ordained and we thought nothing better to do than start a farm when you're 60. So we bought this

01:46
little home set up here, 50 acres and a house and a few buildings and just kind of been feeling our way through and trying to find out what works for us and what doesn't work for us. And so right now what we're farming is Dexter beef cattle. We have a small herd of Jersey milk cows and I don't know, a couple pigs. I think the pigs are going to go this year. It's just too hard to maintain pigs in the wintertime.

02:15
So we're probably just going to do like a finishing operation. Same thing with chickens during the summer. Yeah, we stopped our chickens back a couple months ago because we didn't want to feed them through the winter because they don't give us a lot of eggs over the winter so they don't earn their keep very well. So I understand what you're saying. It's tough. And they're expensive to keep too. People, you know, they're easy to raise but the bird, I mean chicken feed is expensive and...

02:44
I think we were selling our eggs for like four bucks a dozen at the farmers market and people were kind of scoffing. I'm thinking, wow, that's cheaper than in the stores actually. But no, I think my wife said the other day, there's like 10 bucks a dozen because of this new H1N1 scare. So the price of eggs are going crazy up here. Yeah. My husband stopped at Hy-Vee on the way home yesterday and bought two 18-pack of eggs, two separate containers of 18 eggs.

03:11
and he said it was $9.99 for 18 eggs. Oh, I ate the most expensive egg salad sandwich of my life today for lunch. Right. Yeah. Well, she freeze dried quite a bit of eggs before before we downsize our chickens. Actually, it was the chickens we didn't really didn't really go until. Oh, November, I think was the last of our chickens left here. So we were collecting eggs up until that point.

03:38
Yeah, this inflation is no joke. I'm very worried about people who can't afford to eat right now. And there are people in the world who a year ago could afford to eat just fine. And I bet there's lots who cannot afford to eat right now. And it makes me really sad. We worked on this side of that for about 18 years, my wife and I, with the Salvation Army, trying to provide for those that can't or couldn't.

04:08
And we were surprised because the stereotype that comes with that is that they've always not been able to but I was so shocked as we're going through our time there the amount of new people that were coming because Because life has just gotten too expensive and how humbling that is to have to ask somebody to help them out Yeah. Yep. It's it's a rough time right now and I am

04:32
I am so glad that we moved when we did. We now have room to grow a garden. We canned tomatoes this year. So if nothing else, I will have spaghetti sauce and as long as I can afford pasta, we're good. But it's just crazy. Yeah, it rained up here so bad this year. We didn't really get much. Our garden really was kind of a fail. I don't think anybody's garden up here really did much because of the amount of moisture we had.

04:59
Let's just say if you live in Minnesota and you got a good return on your investment on your garden this past season, I'm real happy for you because ours did not do great. It was rough. But like I keep saying, we're into 2025. I have everything crossed that this will be a much better gardening season. I'm really hoping. So did you have background in...

05:26
farming or growing things before or was this a new thing for you? Well, kind of. We're from Mankato. My family and I, well, I grew up a little bit in Mankato and then in our younger years, we moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin and lived there. During the summers, I farmed with, there's always tobacco to be picked or corn to be detasseled. So I did a lot of that, a lot of milk cows during the summer times. So

05:52
That was about the extent of our farming or my farming. And I brought my wife here. I imported her from New York City. Oh, good job. She's from Manhattan. Yeah, we haven't been back in a long time. So she, the person I thought would be the hardest to fit into this lifestyle, she's grabbed onto it a lot harder than I have. Oh, awesome. She's done well, going from, you know, one of the largest cities in America

06:23
You know, what is, but at the whole county has 3000 people in the county, uh, Lake of the woods County. Um, and Pitt might have 20 people. I not maybe even not even that. In fact, they're the only county or the only, uh, you know, the only county in the state of Minnesota that does not have a stop and go light. Oh, really? Wow. Okay. So it's a little bitty town. Well, uh, the whole county is real small. Yeah. There's no.

06:51
There's no even, you know, the big attraction up here is walleyes. The Lake of the Woods is very touristy. And when the fishing is good, our population quadruples overnight. And then when the fishing is not so good, it's back to just us folks again. Yeah, it's actually really interesting to hear you say that because I grew up in Maine and Maine is a tourist state. And I feel like Minnesota has tourist counties, but Minnesota is not a tourist state. No.

07:20
So, but does your wife still have her accent from New York? No, she, uh, well, she does. If we go back to New York and she gets by her, her family and friends, she, it takes her about five minutes, but, uh, she sounds like she's from Minnesota. No, the extra O's and everything. Nice. I have tried really hard not to pick up any accent and dump every accent I ever had.

07:47
And it's worked. Everybody's like, where are you from? And I'm like, nowhere. I don't have any accent. It's gone. So, um, okay. So your dexter's are your your beef cattle. Is that right? Yeah, we do dexter beef. And we chose dexter beef because actually we got into beef before we were one of the lucky ones before the price of beef went through the roof. So we were able to

08:16
to start a small herd of beef cows and we went with dexters because we just plain couldn't afford to go the Angus route. The calves were way too expensive, maybe not so for the time. I mean they're a lot cheaper than they are now but we just didn't have that kind of money to invest into a herd so we bought a small herd of dexters and kind of based our herd on that.

08:46
So we've since bought a few more. I mean, we've bought a couple more. We're starting to look at registering our herd for nothing more than just the ability to be able to look back and find out what's working and what's not working. So and our milk cows, I mean, we just bought a milk cow. I swore after milking when I was a kid, I would never milk again ever in my life. And I'm really finding that being part of the

09:14
The nicest part of our farm right now is being able to milk. Yeah. Yeah. It's been, uh, it's a lot more calm if the, well, if the cows are behaving. So sometimes, sometimes the herd boss is not real happy and she makes everybody else not happy. Okay. And we chase them around a little bit. I mean, it's just, it's just a different life, I guess. But so that's probably pretty much our main thing. We do have some sheep too, but the sheep.

09:43
We bought the sheep to clean up the pasture. And now that that's done, we're probably going to move the sheep on too. But the farm we bought was deserted for 20-some years. There was nobody here. And so the pastures were all overgrown. The house was dilapidated. We had to do quite a bit of work. So we tried to see what worked and what didn't work. And

10:09
So far the beef cattle and the milk seem to be the thing to go do. Yeah, I'm surprised that your herd boss, as it were, is a pain in the butt, because I hear jerseys are actually really easy going cows. Oh, she is very easy going. But when she wants to be in charge, she lets everybody know. OK, so and I know it could be just something minor. We could change something in the barn. And when it set her off a little bit, so we try to milk every day at the same time. We were once a day milkers. We don't milk twice a day.

10:40
We found that that transition was easy enough. Our oldest cow was already once a day milking when we bought her. And the other cows that we've been getting, we've been getting out of the Rochester area from a dairy. And of course they're twice a day milkers. So there's a little bit of transition time there. Oh yeah. But it seems like they're coming along real well. Uh-huh. The twice a day milkers, when they're going through the transition, do they yell a lot? Are they like, hey, come milk me? No. No?

11:09
No, the Jerseys are pretty laid back. They really are a good cow. The cow, the other cow that we have right now, we got her, part of the reason we got her was we had a calf we needed to tie on her. Actually, it was the other way around. My wife will look at me funny if I say this wrong. Okay. We got the Jersey cow twice a day milking and we picked up a calf to put on her side to help us with the milk. Is that right? Yeah, I got the okay from that, yes. So we were like kind of.

11:38
calf sharing for the first month or so day milking her. Doesn't make the calf eat and he's a happy guy. can't talk, how many gallons of milk do So our oldest cow is a Jersey and she's

12:08
two and a half to three gallons a day. The other Jersey that we have right now is about at the same. We actually have another Jersey, but we only have one other one that we're milking. It's about the same. So we're bringing in almost five gallons a day, which has been okay. I mean, it does what we need it to do. And Minnesota gives us a good opportunity for selling raw milk too. So they're...

12:35
there are provisions in the state of Minnesota for us to be able to not be overwhelmed with too much milk. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you is do you have a market for the extra because that's a lot of milk for a family to go through if you're not moving it on to other people. And it's just me and my wife and a couple dogs. We actually, our first thought was that we were going to feed the balance to the chickens and the pigs.

13:03
because it's supposed to finish the animals off really nice. But the demand for raw milk has been so high that we really haven't been able to make butter since like October. The milk goes pretty fast. So we also don't leave anything in the display refrigerator for more than three days. So if it's cold, it's got to be cold. I mean, it has to be cold and fresh or it just goes away.

13:32
I love raw milk. Oh my God. We don't have it very often for us. It's a treat and we maybe get a gallon once every couple of years just because we can. And we don't really use it to cook with. We just drink it or we have it in our coffee because we love it so much. Yeah. We just had one of our customers came and got milk and she's looking, trying to make sure that...

13:59
What's the fact, Ken? I mean, what are we looking at? Good butter. And I think our cream has really started to improve because we've been feeding our cows a little bit better. So this whole thought of, you know, the regenerative farming is what we really wanna do. Or it's just really tough, especially up here, to be able to just grass feed your dairy cows. And we tried, we really tried to just grass feed them.

14:27
And it just, it was the condition of our animals was really going downhill. So now our, our milk cows, the cows that are in the stanchion get, uh, they get about three pounds of, of, we call it their candy. They know exactly what the candy is and where it's at. So you have to get, and that's, that's really improved our milk quality too. So, um, and at the Jersey milk too, seems to be a little bit more golden or yellow. Um, which is.

14:54
I mean, if you think about that, the milk you buy in the store that's homogenized and pasteurized is pure white and you get raw milk and it's got some color to it and you're like, huh, that's different. So it was a little different to start out. That was one of the observations I got when we first started that it was just a different color milk. Yeah, but it tastes so good. Yeah.

15:23
And I think the taste comes from what you feed them too. We're feeding high quality alfalfa hay to the cows all the time. And I think that makes a big difference. Absolutely. And I'm just gonna say something. I don't think that grain is evil for cows. I mean, I know that there are a lot of people who want exclusively grass-fed cow's milk or grass-fed beef, I get it. But.

15:50
I'm not one of the people who's like, oh, if you feed your cows grain, you're doing it wrong. I don't think that's true at all.

15:59
Right. Well, to be clear about that, our beef cattle, our dexters are 100% grass-fed. We don't feed them any grain. We give them a mineral supplement that they can have at choice whenever they need it, and they have plenty of water. So there, we don't do any of that. The only reason we started doing the grain was because the condition of our animals was getting, it was really dragging them down, milking, or we had some that were on calves too. So it just was really hard on them.

16:29
The long and the short is we started trying to find a feed that was better, something that we can give them that was going to be digestible and not just be zero benefit for the animal. We tried to go the non-GMO route and we can go that way. You'll pay a lot of money for it. And I would if I could. We really don't, we'd have to ship it from someplace else. We're buying a lot of our minerals and stuff from Mankato from a big gain.

16:59
So, but we still can't get a full-time feed from them shipped up here. And if it was, it would cost us a lot of money. So, I was at the feed mill about a month ago and talking to the nutritionists up there saying, look, I just want to put together a non-GMO type of feed for our cows to where I can look at our customers and say, look, it's the best that you're going to get and we know that we're doing the best that we can.

17:24
And he said, that's fine. He says, we can get you a non-GMO. And he said, there are some farms out here that have non-GMO. But his statement was, is if you knew how much stuff they spray on their property before they plant that, you wouldn't think much of the non-GMO. So the herbicides and the rest of the stuff that they put on it. So we've gotten to where we're more selectively trying to find a better quality feed or a grain that comes from a farm that we can trust.

17:51
Yes, and in the meantime, you are doing the absolute best you can. I know you are. I can hear it in your voice. You are doing the best you can by your animals and by you and by your customers. So thank you. Yes, I it's so hard, Jim. I talk to so many people all the time with a podcast and every farmer, it doesn't matter whether they're raising livestock or produce or pecans. Everybody is doing.

18:20
the best they can with the knowledge they have to put out quality products. And the, I don't want to say pain, but the angst that I hear in people's voices all the time about feeling like they're not, you know, like they're coming up short on what they're trying to accomplish is so sad. And I want you to be proud of what you're doing because you're doing something that is important.

18:49
So you're doing the best you can. I'm proud of you. And we started a farm at 60, so we're now 62. There's a lot of great resources out there to start with. Going back to where Minnesota, the state of Minnesota is allowing farmers to sell raw milk from their property. That really, I mean, it really is a struggle, but it's a good deal in a sense. Now, if we bottled our...

19:18
our milk, we'd have to have a bottling license. We don't have that. Right. So right currently, if I sold you a gallon of milk, you'd have to come to our farm and draw it off our tap. And that takes responsibility, I think, off of our shoulders. But it's still that might sound all good and dandy, but it still makes it to where you're still responsible for giving out a good product. You know, you get a whole bunch of attaboys and it just takes one old craft to make it all go backwards. So

19:48
We really are very, we keep searching for a better way of doing things. Not that, and I think that's how me and you got together a little bit. There's got to be a better way to do it. The Facebook farmers that aren't farmers that have a lot of opinions and create so much controversy without having any education. Us raw milk producers have some great resources at our fingertips.

20:17
Institute out of California. I'm just now looking into that and there's so much training and so much good resources through that group that I don't It can only help you. It can only help you be good. So if the idea is to give the quality product the best you can do then I think that you don't quit learning you keep learning and keep teaching because somebody gave to you so you need to give it back. Absolutely. Yes, I am in complete agreement with you.

20:45
I am a big believer in people sharing what they know with the people who are coming up behind them because this has to continue. People who grow things are so important because without the growers, we're not going to eat. It makes me mildly crazy sometimes because people who don't know farmers don't know people who grow things.

21:11
They're like, oh, well, we'll just get whatever we need at the store, whichever store has the thing. And I'm like, do you not understand that the food that you eat has to come from actual food? It has to come from produce and animals. And now like, well, yeah. And I'm like, no, I don't think you understand the way that this works. And I do spend time talking to people and trying to explain the process. Because

21:40
We grow our food in our garden and I know the process. You have to do things a certain way to get a yield on what you put in the ground. So it's frustrating to me sometimes and that's part of the reason I started the podcast because I am not a farmer. I'm not, I just grow plants sometimes because I like tomatoes and cucumbers. I'm not a farmer. And spaghetti sauce. Yes, yes.

22:09
And I love to cook, so. You know, I've got to say some of the, and I'm not, my wife and I are not strangers to hard work. But I will tell you that farming is pre demanding and I don't think it matters what kind of farming you're doing. If you're dirt farming or animal farming, it really, it's all hard work and it all has to be done whether you want to or don't. Like we're married to our cows. Oh yeah. We can't go anywhere without them. And I don't think that when.

22:39
Somebody sits down, we're so used to like you said, going to the grocery store and getting a gallon of milk, sitting down and drinking a glass of milk and not thinking anything of that or how it got there. So we know firsthand how, what it takes to put it on our table. And sometimes it's not so glamorous like this morning when it was so doggone cold. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's hard work and.

23:05
everyone who does it needs to be commended for committing to it because you can't do this without being committed to what you've chosen.

23:15
And not without not without great failure you can't and even even those even us we've been very committed. How we could count the failures many times over of things that didn't go the way that we thought they would or the way that the textbook way of of having things happen. We just had two calves die this last week for no reason just died and. We had them in a barn they were well on their way that they were bottle calves so but that's quite a heartbreak.

23:44
You know, it really is a heartbreak when you you put a lot into an animal and they just kind of don't make it It's not like you just walk out there and say oh that one's gone. So we'll just find another one They're not that easy to find They're not that easy to find and it's expensive to replace them and not just money wise you you put energy into that that You're not gonna get back, right? So yeah, very true. Yeah, it's hard. It's I don't want to be a bummer but

24:13
this lifestyle is hard. You know when things go right they go really right but when things go wrong they go really really freaking wrong. Yeah you know the people you again YouTube is one of those things that we watch a lot of YouTube and have we didn't start the idea of a homestead because of YouTube but we found YouTube because we were trying to build a homestead and it was before oh gosh it was back

24:43
I don't know, it's probably been five or six years now that we've been kind of planning this, making this go forward. So you hear all the right way or how these people that have been so successful, Greg Judy is from Moora, Minnesota. I don't know if you knew that or even who Greg Judy is, but he's a very big regenerative farmer down in Missouri now. And to listen to him talk and the way he thinks that it's a piece of cake, but I will tell you what, you can't grab a whole armful like that. And that was one of the hardest things.

25:13
that I had to learn. My wife was like, you need to slow down, you need to slow down. And I was like, but you can't just do part without the other. And a lot of times I think humanists, we want to grab the whole pile and walk with it. And we end up dropping half the pile. So a lot of failure because of trying to not necessarily think too big, maybe dream too big, or misunderstand the way that it should be. So I'm glad they don't have room for a hundred milk cows. That's all I got to say about that.

25:41
I'm really glad we don't have room for any cows because my husband would want 10 and I'm like, no, one is more than enough. Thank you. We'll pass. The other thing that I have found in our four years of living here at our little homestead is if you're married, you got to be able to talk with your spouse about decisions on the farm without getting into fights. Because if you can't communicate with your spouse.

26:09
you're gonna break up over a living. All for sure. And I said, it's really difficult sometimes because my husband will come to me and be like, I was thinking I wanna do this. And I'm like, have you researched it yet? And he's like, no. And I say, okay, take some time. These are the answers I need from you to think about this. And then we can talk about it. And then he goes and finds me answers and then I go and look it up too.

26:38
And we end up having debates about whether the thing that he wants to do is a good idea or not. We've had more discussions and debates in the last four years than we had in 20 years before that. And it's not a fight. It's just that we both have our ideas about how things work and what makes sense and what doesn't. And we have to come to some kind of middle ground on it. You know?

27:04
Well, Lee and I had a little bit of a head start. We worked together in the same office building for, you know, 16 years, 17 years before and went to college together right next to each other for the two years to finish that off. So we've had a lot of experience. But even with that being said that if you both can't get your arms around it, it makes it very difficult. I'm not saying that it can't be done or that I haven't done things without Lee's blessing. But I'm saying when that happens.

27:31
When that happens, not that if it'll happen, but when that happens, it makes it very difficult to pull through the other side because it does take both of you to run the farm. There's no way I could do this by myself. Yeah. Yep. Exactly. And in our house, two yeses is a yes, one no is a no. That's on the big stuff. That's how we've decided to resolve things. You're tough. It has to be that way because my husband is stubborn and...

27:59
He digs his heels in and I try to explain things that I've looked up and found out about what he wants to do and how that plays out. And he doesn't, he can't hear it right then. So, so we do a lot of, have you considered? Have you heard what I said? Did you think about what I said? There's a lot of, of, um, repeating back to each other so that we know we're not just being mean and stubborn. We're actually considering the other person's opinion.

28:29
Right? Sometimes I just have to go through things. I got it. I got to go through it and either win or lose. And I don't always win and I don't always lose. So that wasn't meant to sound arrogant. I'm going to use the example of we bought red wattle hogs. And my plan was is to create our own little herd or, you know, sows and a couple boars to create our own, you know, heritage breed hogs up here in Minnesota.

28:59
And so we spent thousands of dollars, thousands, on getting the pens and everything we needed and the genetics from the boar. We drove to Michigan to pick up a boar, for goodness sakes, and he wasn't cheap. So we had probably, I don't know, $4,000 worth of animals that we went through trying to create that. This year, two of our three sows, we put in the freezer because they were with the boar all year.

29:28
and didn't get pregnant. So, and they were proven self. So we bought them as guilts and then had, they all both had a litter. Well, the next year they decided they were gonna take the year off. And you spend all that money and these, I have these ideas of how it's gonna work out in the end. And it just never seems to work that way. So I really don't, the two chores I hate during the winter most is the pigs and the...

29:57
chickens. I just don't like doing the extras on that. So we kind of got to, and my wife was happy I got to this point, but that we're going to just buy feeders and finish off whatever is whatever we have that our friends, families, customers would like to have. So if we sold six pigs, that's what we'll raise and not raise them during the winter.

30:25
because oh my goodness, it's just busting water up and you can't have an automatic drinker for a pig in the winter because they will tear it up. Anything that the pigs just have a way that's part of the pigness is they tear stuff apart. So pigs will be shortlisted on our farm just because of that because it's been so much, we've lost so much. And again, at our age, I'm 62 this year. So if...

30:54
If my children, one of my children, we have four of them, but if one of our children decided that they wanted to farm and came up here and farmed, that might change the outlook on it. But we have a son that's a chief in Hawaii in the Navy, and we have two daughters that have professional jobs down in southern Minnesota and northern Illinois, and none of them want to come up and farm. So it was kind of my dream.

31:24
that they would want to do that. My youngest daughter married a farm boy. So I was kind of hoping that they would think about that. And of course with the parents come the grandchildren, which is the best part, but they just don't want to leave what they have to come up here and go farming. So if the question that was before my wife and I was, do we want to invest another three or $4,000 in another set of...

31:51
of pigs and try to do something a little bit different. We learned a lot. And because we don't have anybody coming up, it turned out to be a big fat no. Because we already wasted three years on the ground with our pigs, we'd have to do it all over again. It would take us three years to get back to where we should start going in the black. And it just wasn't I just can't see myself doing that through the winter for three more years.

32:21
when it's so cold up there by Canada. Yeah. It makes sense. So, to end this on a really good note, what is your favorite thing about this choice that you've made for your life? You know, it keeps me busy. A lot of people say, man, you are crazy for doing that. And maybe so. It keeps me engaged in life. And I'm not so sure that I would be able to engage in life without something.

32:49
constructive to do with the responsibility. I'm a combat veteran and I don't want to wave that out there but sometimes life is a little bit difficult but through being able to farm for now it's helped me get through some of the things that I struggle with. So one of them is I would probably sleep all day long if I didn't have something to do outside. So I don't know, that's probably my favorite part. For now we're committed till we're 65.

33:18
And the next jump will be until we're 70, but I think at 70, I'm going to be done farming. God willing that we're still alive and we're going to find a nice little place to retire and that gives some of our grandchildren an opportunity to grow up and say, you know, I'd sure like to farm, right? I don't want to farm. So it really, we don't really care that we don't have anybody coming after us because it wasn't, we didn't buy the farm and start the farm so we'd have kids to have the farm.

33:48
When we started, we bought the farm to have the farm so that I could engage in life and be productive.

33:55
Awesome. Well Jim, thank you for your service and thank you for your time and talking to me today. I've really enjoyed it Thank you so much. Thank you. Have a great day. Yep, you too