The Sovereign Homestead Podcast

If you're seeing this in your podcast feed it means our first child has either arrived or is very nearly earthside!

Sammy and I greatly appreciate your thoughts, prayers, and good vibes in this time.

The podcast will be on an indefinite (though hopefully relatively short) break, while we welcome our first child into the world and find our feet as new parents.

Thank you all for listening and keep shining your light.

-Casey & Sammy (and Tater)

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WHAT I DO: Create Resilient Habitats Where People...

Floating wetlands are a "new" old technology that is well worth looking into if you are doing aquaculture at just about any scale - from small backyard tanks a few hundred gallons in size, on up to multi-acre ponds and lakes.

Floating wetlands take the essential functions provided by wetlands and concentrated them into a smaller and more mobile footprint. Wetlands are the kidneys of the landscape, and floating wetlands amplify many of those beneficial functions, such as:

What do we mean when we say we want to "opt out" of the system?

Firstly, it's the system(s) - the means of production, transport, communication, value transmission etc that we have to interface with to acquire the things we need to live in the modern world. In general, the further the distance a product or service must travel and the more technology involved means you will have less control over how to source it, how much you pay for it, when (and if) it is available etc. If it is produced or provided closer to...

Light is an essential human nutrient.

So much of our modern built environment is built without regard to orienting and integrating natural light, and our health - physical, mental, spiritual, emotional and communal - suffers for it.

The good news is that you can design your structures (or retrofit them) to bring natural light back into them and create buildings and places within them that support human thriving because they are well integrated with natural light.

Join me for a dive into the patterns of human habitation design that enhance our relationship with l...

Join me today as we discuss designing functional kitchen spaces that people want to be in.

Lots of people are inheriting kitchens designed more for magazine covers than for function - and where there is a lack of function there is a concommitant increase in friction, which means more stress and less joy.

Kitchens are the Zone 1 of Zone 0 - Zone 0 referring to the space inside the home. Kitchens are the heart of human life - communion over shared food, shared work, a space for being together, conversing, and generally connecting over the daily activities t...

Today I interview Joshua Longbrook on real world applications of Private Membership Associations for creating systems of support - i.e. the parallel society - outside the jurisdiction of the public (State dominated) sphere.

We'll cover what PMAs are, what protections they do and do not offer, how they are best utilized as extensions of a larger unincorporated Church, and the types of voluntary interactions they enable within and between local communities.

We'll also get into Josh's personal experience with running the Agora Food Club and how the structure has enabled many home-scale producers to...

Today's show is for those of you lucky enough to have a spring on your property. We will cover the basics of spring morphology and function - including the way I really think they work vs. what the textbooks say - and then we'll go over basic spring assessment criteria, and the main components of spring water collection and distribution systems.

Show Resources

How do we create a regenerative economy and all that entails when that work is arbitrarily outlawed, suppressed or actively disincentivized by the value systems that dominate our current culture?

HINT: We have to step outside of the current imposed power structure - no permission required.

My presupposition for this episode is this: Mainstream, state sponsored and enforced economic theory and practice has herded humanity as a whole onto a degenerative trajectory with respect to environmental integrity, social cohesion and individual well-being.

We are living in a debt-driven world - stealing from future...

Today's episode is a short primer on live staking - what it is, how it works, what its good for, what types of species you can use to do it, and how to harvest, prepare and plant your live stakes.

If you have perennially moist soils in need of stabilization, or are able to irrigate certain areas to ensure adequate soil moisture for establishment, you can plant hundreds of trees for pennies per stem and create living structures that provide many layers of function while getting stronger over time!

Livestaking is a great way to...

As within so without.

If we want to see changes in our external world (i.e. regenerating landscapes and ecosystems), we have to first address our internal state.

The older I get and the more I learn, the less I can say I know for sure.

This, though, is one of those things that I've arrived at as being one of those "indivisible kernels of truth" - something solid and constant upon which I can build a foundation for regeneration.

The external state of our landscapes is a direct reflection of...

Adaptive Management: Observation-driven management for constantly increasing resilience and ecosystem function by employing planned, purposeful disruption.

Prescriptive Management: Labeling your observations so that you can look up a prescription that fits that label. This is a much more myopic way of managing a landscape, as you're automatically confining yourself to pre-existing solutions for truly unique problems or challenges.

Adaptation is Nature's way. Nature is always changing - things may rhyme but they are never exactly the same. Therefore our management needs to change with this constantly changing landscape.

3 Rules of Adapative Management

When we design holistic ecosystems, we start with mapping out desired and required functions THEN search for, select and/or design elements/systems that provide those functions in a way that aligns with the site-specific context.

This is contrasted with how most people "design" systems - they see an ad or read an article and like the thing or the method/technique they see, and then say "I want thing A" or "I'm going to do technique B" on my land.

And then systems start being built around these sexy, cool things that are out...

If you are serious about food sovereignty, you're serious about building soil.

In this episode I detail 4 methods for creating your own soil fertility inputs from what you are already growing, can source on your property or very close to home, or are already in the course of putting food on your table. They are:

It is in the SYNERGY between these methods that the real exponential gains are to be found. I chose vermicomposting...

Today is an expose about one of America's dirty secrets - we're talking about the nation wide biosolids program.

Supposedly its a great way to beneficially cycle a "renewable resource" to help fertilize crop fields, protect water sheds and keep people healthy.

In reality, its anything but - and we know from first hand knowledge because we lived with it right across the street from us for months. 

For any would-be homesteader looking to re-locate to the country, be aware of the potential for biosolids in your watershed and potentially right across the f...

Today's show is all about the things you have to do to get yourself onto your land quickly without shooting yourself in the foot withe improperly located or oriented structures and roads.

Vehicle access is basically an absolute necessity in today's world. By their very nature, roads are a break from the inherent landform, and thus ALL ROADS CAPTURE AND MOVE WATER. This is just part of what a road does.

If you put in a road, or are inheriting a road without understanding that fact, you will pay for it later - all it...

New Year's Evolution. This show is about doing the most important work first - your own internal visioning - an rooting that vision in your heart to create a WHY strong enough to bear any HOW. If you haven't done it yet, give yourself the gift of creating your Minimum Holistic Goal. It is the ONE THING that will make everything else that comes after easier, more fun and more effective.

Creating a legacy worth inheriting starts in you. 

Let your life be a love letter to future generations and leave beauty in your wake. Th...

Duckweed is an amazingly productive floating aquatic plant that is highly palatable to a wide variety of small and large livestock (ruminants, pigs, poultry, fish etc). Duckweed is a tremendous ally for those of us looking to create independence from centralized commodity food systems. You may not want to eat duckweed (though you can) but what you eat is very likely to benefit from having duckweed in its diet (and your wallet will thank you for it!).

Show Resources

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WHAT I DO:

In this episode I am sharing what I have come to call the 7th Generation Principle - a principle guide post of sorts that I've been refining for nearly 10 years now to help guide my design work (for my own life and for others) in the direction of inter-generational regeneration.

Basically, it seems like throughout human history we've actually lived in a truly sustainable fasion - i.e. regeneratively. Some of those examples even persisted for quite some time, but now we are left with very few intact cultures that can successfully transmit the cultural values of...

In today's show we discuss the idea of the Carnivore Homestead.

For those of us that eat a mostly animal-based diet,  we want to produce mostly animal-based calories from our homestead production systems. I got news - just because we like to eat steak doesn't mean we aren't going to grow plants - in fact, we've got to grow them in greater quantity and quality in order to feed the animals that become our food.

Carnivore homesteads have to be regenerative by their very nature if they are to be sustainable. Join me as we d...

Today's episode came out of a Permies.com thread on Carnivore Homesteading. The seed questions for the thread was, for those of us enjoying the benefits of a carnivore lifestyle, how can we produce more high-quality animal-based calories for our own consumption from well designed and integrated systems at the homestead scale.

Basically, there are three main focal points that need attention here:

Just a quick update on recent events here and announcement for taking a break until Novemeber 1st to visit family and dive into some design projects here in Tennessee and North Carolina.

You can also follow Sovereign Homestead Design on YouTube.

We've been having massive technical issues with our webhosting and emails this past month - basically incommunicado as far as our ability to reach out to the world, BUT, our Instagram account @honeybadgernursery is still up, detailing some of what's going on at the homestead. The Honey Badger Nursery website is still down, but...

Today we look at another Sovereign Food System - what I'm calling the Pantry Pond.

Basically a homestead-scale aquaculture system designed to maximize your food sovereignty via independence from the centralized systems of supply and distribution for any of the inputs required to grow what you want to grow - fish, aquatic vegetables, crawfish, shrimp, water fowl etc.

Well-designed homestead-scale aquaculture systems aren't that common here in the modern U.S., and yet they have a tremendously long and productive history in many cultures the world round.

Because aquaculture is so context and...

In today's show we are talking about creating Sovereign Food Systems.

I think this will be a series, or at least a collection of episodes, each one focused on a different type of sovereign food system that can be applied at a variety of scales across a broad range of contexts.

Basically, a sovereign food system is one that has eliminated any dependence on inputs from centralized production and distribution systems for its continued operation. 

I believe these systems are increasingly important in light of the war on independent food that we are s...

Today we discuss permaculture design principle #12 - Collaborate With Succession.

The more that we can align our designs, systems and management styles with the inherent successional trends already present in our landscapes, the greater our yields will be with fewer resource inputs required. This is all about energy efficiency, and it starts with OBSERVING AND INTERACTING (Principle #1) with your landscape to identify the patterns that are already present. Your land is telling you what it wants to become, you just have to have the eyes to see it!

Show Resources

Today we take a deeper look at the 11th permaculture design principle: Make The Least Change For The Greatest Effect.

This principle is about economy of effort. When designing a sovereign homestead, we need to make sure that our systems are providing us with not only the right types of yields, but also in sufficient quantity and at a reasonable return to make our continued tending of the system worthwhile.

Living systems that provide for generation after generation exhibit a high degree of economy of effort.

We'll look at how you can analyze...

In today's episode we take a deep dive into Permaculture Design Principle #10 - Optimize The Edge. We will discuss:

This week we look at Permaculture Design Principle #9: Choose Small-Scale, Intensive Solutions.

This is all about managing intensively in a small footprint at the start - and expanding what works and changing or eliminating what does not. We'll talk about the importance of testing your systems before expanding them by conducting Safe To Fail experiments. We also talk about PROFIT - that most important of words - that little bit of surplus energy above and beyond what the system requires to maintain and sustain itself that you can use to conduct safe-to-fail trials that will lead you...

Today we take a deeper look at Permaculture Design Principle #8 - Integrate, Don't Segregate.

This principle is fundamentally about 'stacking functions' - a common term we hear a lot in perma-speak - but what does that really mean and HOW do you go about doing it?

We'll talk nuts and bolts of creating functionally redundant systems, including:

Design from pattern to details.

Anyone who has read a permaculture book has heard this - but how to actually DO IT?

Today we talk about Natural Constants and the Yeomans Scale of Permanence as tools you can use to help you design from big, broad, largely immutable patterns down to small, granular, actionable details.

This is how you can ground the small actions you take in any given moment to a 7th generation vision - each action is informed by the many layers of contextual foundation that underlay it.

Today we're talking about the 6th permaculture design principle: Make No Waste.

In Nature, "waste" = food. How can we design our homesteads and the various life support systems on them such that the "waste" from one becomes the food for another? How many energetic loops and connection can we create between elements, systems and organisms?

We'll discuss one of the simple tools for enacting the Waste = Food principle - called Input/Output/Intrinsic Analysis. We'll also talk about the switch that flips once you change the way you view what most of our society calls "...

Today we continue our Deep Dive series on the 12 foundational principles of permaculture.

In this episode we take a deeper look at Principle #5: Use And Value Nature's Gifts / Collaborate With Succession / Work With Nature, Not Against It. There are numerous different ways this principle is written, and we'll explore the nuance of all three of the most common versions, as well as what you can specifically look for in your landscape and within your unique context to better align your design and management of your homestead with natural pattern, and how you can both increase your harvestable...

In today's episode we continue with our Permaculture Design Principle Deep Dive Series with Principle #4 - Self Regulate And Accept Feedback.

We talk about why those two terms - 'self regulate' and 'accept feedback' come packaged together, and how each is important to create an environment that promotes rapid iteration and 'safe to fail' testing of systems followed by planned amplification or dampening based on the results.

We'll go through the Cynefin Sense-Making Framework as a tool for understanding the context in which you are in and adjusting your Decision Model to suite it appropriately...

Today is the third episode in our Permaculture Design Principle Deep Dive series - Obtain A Yield.

This is all about intentionally designing living systems on our homesteads that provide for our needs to live a great life.

Join me as we discuss...

Today we take a deeper look at the second of the core permaculture design principles - Catch And Store Energy.

This is what designing a functional and resilient ecosystem is all about - energy in vs. energy out. Everything that is alive needs to bring in more energy than it expends in order to 1) sustain its own existence and 2) to reproduce. If we design our homesteads and homes to catch and store useful forms of energy, we can create a holistic system that works for us even when we aren't around. 

In this episode we wi...

This is the first in a series of episodes that will go into depth on how to apply and leverage each of the 12 foundational design principles used in permaculture. 

The first design principle is Observe and Interact. It is the keystone design principle, from which all others are held together and applied toward a functional end.

Join me as we discuss:

Today we are talking about homestead security.

It's a topic that is left out of a lot of "mainstream" permaculture design books - and really its hardly mentioned at all as a design consideration. We live in a weird time, when for just a few short generations, and then only for a select few people, we've been able to delegate our security to "the authorities" (911, the cops etc).

We are quickly heading into disruptive, turbulent and hard economic times - with that comes an increase in crime - we are already seeing it, and have...

In today's episode we re-cap the takeaways from the 2-day grazing school I attended at Greg Judy's Green Pastures Farm in Clark, Missouri. The school was awesome, with great instruction from Greg and his co-instructor Abram Bowerman of Still Waters Farm in Spickard, MO.

Intensively managed ruminant livestock are the tool for building soil rapidly, at scale over broad acre landscapes. The benefits are too numerous to enumerate here, but suffice to say if you have even a couple of acres, you need to get livestock on them and you need to move them.

Anything l...

Today's episode is a short one about just doing the next thing.

You don't have to have everything mapped out ahead of time. If you have a set of principles (permaculture) and a long-term, BIG vision (your Minimum Holistic Goal - aka your "10 Year Vision"), it becomes very easy to prioritize and act on the next most impactful thing, without having a master plan.

It's the SAPA framework - Survey, Assess, Prioritize, and Act - a short acronum for a decision-making loop based on permaculture principles.

Survey (Observe And Interact),  Assess (Integrate Feedback), the...

Today's show is all about getting clear on what makes a homestead sovereign vs. a modern homestead vs. just a homestead.

SPOILER ALERT: It's all about CHOICE. A well-designed homestead gives you more choice - more freedom to say NO to those things that are not in alignment with your highest quality of life, so that you can say yes to the things that are.

We then go into the SAPA Framework for conducting your own sovereignty self-assessment for your life and landscape, applying it to all the basic survival needs: Water, Nutrition & Calories, Shelter...

Today's show is the interview I just did with Jen and Sammy of the Millennial Pioneers Podcast on What Is Permaculture?  We talk about the basics of what permaculture is about, and tangible, simple ways to get started integrating permaculture design and mindset into designing our own lives.

We are living in a time when the bills racked up over the past centuries and decades of over-taxing our ecological support base, looting our economy and profligately expending energy are coming due. Permaculture design can solve a lot of the problems, or at the very least help us n...