Articles \ Member Training – Combining With Others To Be Free

Member Training – Combining With Others To Be Free

Posted by Ben McClintock, Monday, 20 Jan 2025. Training held Monday, 20 Jan 2025.

TRANSCRIPT

Our Heavenly Father, we pause before this training tonight and thank you so much for the opportunity to be here and the technology that brings us together. We're grateful for those who would participate and for the mindset that we have of seeking for things that are true. We pray for Ben to be guided. We pray for our hearts to be open to things that we learn that we need to incorporate for those who would speak to us. And we're just so grateful for... The good things that we have in our life and pray for those who are struggling and suffering from the evil and the bad things. We thank you so much for our savior and say this in his name, Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Pam. So just want to give everybody a reminder for this Wednesday at 7 p.m. Mountain. That's January 15th. We have our book club and we'll be covering chapters four, five and six of Inside the UN. Encourage you to, you know, it's open to the public. So please encourage your friends to come join us, even if they haven't been able to do the reading. Just would love the discussion. I thought we had a really good discussion last time.

So it'll be good to see everybody that can make it there on Wednesday at 7 p.m. Mountain. So let's go ahead and get into the bulk of the meeting as we've got a few guests with us tonight and wanted to appreciate. them for coming here. And just a little bit of background for what we do every Monday night. Members of the Tree of Liberty Society meet together to discuss things that are going on, principles, threats to liberty. And then some things that we can do about it. And one of the things that we've talked about is, as hopefully everybody else on the call knows, we talk about how a lot of the solutions that are offered out there are designed to take away power from us. And they're designed to look like we're trying to do the right thing and move in the right direction. But they're actually designed to give more and more power to a central entity. And so as a part of the solutions to be able to. restore lost liberty I talk a lot about how we have to have a community of people that are not dependent on the system because when you're when you are dependent on somebody else for your sustenance you are a slave to them in one way or another and so to be able to have true freedom there are different aspects that we need to be separate from you know, at least independent of the world at large. And so I wanted to bring on a guest to talk to us about what they're doing along those lines in one way.

And so it is, I just wanted to kind of, I guess, I don't know about, I don't want to say disclaimer because I'm not putting down anything. I'm just saying that this isn't like, I'm saying that this is the solution for you and your family. I'm saying this is an option. This is something somebody is doing, and it might be worth looking at. And then looking at there are lots of different individuals doing different variations of what this organization is doing. And so I wanted to bring on a representative of the Riverbed branch. And so we have Philip Gleason. I want to introduce Philip, founder of Operation Self-Reliance. It's an initiative. of Operation Self-Reliance. It's an initiative and the Utah OSR Land Cooperative. He's currently the CEO of OSR Green LLC and the Arizona OSR Land Co-op known as Coastal Grove.

Hopefully I pronounced that right. A second off-grid agricultural land co-op. In addition, a board member of the Academy of Self -Reliance currently resides on his two-acre off-grid homestead at Riverbed. And you can learn more about what they're doing at riverbed-ranch.com. So, Philip, thank you so much. I'd like to turn some time over to you to talk to us about what you're doing. And we can go from there. Hopefully, we can take some Q&A. But we finish at 10 o'clock. So whatever you need from now until then. Philip? I'm happy to be here. Thank you very much for taking time and letting us be a part of this. To give you the short version of what we're doing is we're helping families transition from a city lifestyle of dependencies to a country culture of self-reliance with like-minded neighbors while remaining debt-free.

So that last one is kind of a challenge. The like-minded neighbors description is we're looking for people who want to be self-reliant, people who have integrity. people who like people, and then people who understand choices have consequences. For example, if your neighbor's using Roundup, that's going to affect you indirectly. And then the last thing is you have the resources to make a transition. So with that kind of understanding of what like-minded people are, we're creating communities based on self-reliance. What that means is that our research, and I'll turn some time over to Jesse here in a minute, is that we've found that there are communities around the world, not very many, but a few communities around the world that are agriculturally based, and that they own these communities together collectively.

Now, it's not a commune, it's a different, but it's a cooperative approach. So cooperatives are an opportunity for a group of people to come together and create a community that would be very difficult for a single individual to do. And we've found that to have these types of self-reliant communities, there's... one in peru that uh it's called grana percon they're about 3 500 people but they've taken i think it was 2 000 hectares and They planted two million trees and changed the environment and created an amazing self-sustaining community that's become a world retreat for people to go and see what they're doing. You have similar things over in Italy and Spain. In fact, one third of their country's national product. is created from co-ops. I'd like to take a few minutes and turn it over to Jesse and have him explain what happened in Brigham City and what he learned from that. About seven or eight years ago, I was doing some research for a book I wrote and ran across an account of Brigham City in the 1860s and 1870s. It really, really caught my attention. In fact, they achieved what I would consider to be an economic miracle. It would have been around 1863, a fellow by the name of Brigham Young challenged another fellow by the name of Lorenzo Snow to build a self-sustaining community.

The problem at the time was that merchants from New York would bring wagon loads of goods to the Utah Territory. and sell them for four five six thousand six hundred percent markup so it was draining all the capital out of the territory and so brigham wanted to create this uh have lorenzo create this self-sustaining community. So it took him a while to figure out how to get started. What he finally did was set up a cooperative store and he went around town and invited everyone in town who produced anything to sell those goods through the co-op store. And then he also invited every family to purchase one share in the cooperative. And so their funds created the capital that was needed to buy goods from the community and then sell them through the co-op store. Then he went on vacation to Hawaii for a couple of years and when Lorenzo got back there was ten thousand dollars in the savings account for the co-op store.

So he took that money and set up a tannery. So they took hides from the local ranchers and produced belts and hats and saddles and whatever else you make out of leather in those days, and sold those goods through the co-op store. And they just kept doing that over and over again, creating new industries, hiring local people, and then selling those goods through the co-op store. By their 10th year, their board of directors estimated that they had achieved 85% self-sufficiency. Now, why that's so important, is in their 10th year there was a worldwide recession um the rest of the utah had 20 unemployment brigham city had zero percent unemployment they also were building homes for the widows and the orphans and they gave work to the indigents passing through town so i'm i'm reading about this when i had beloved neighbors losing their homes due to unemployment And I thought we should be building towns like this. And so that's when I ran across. Actually, my doctor referred me to Philip with Operation Self-Reliance, gave me his phone number, called him up and invited me to come watch his presentation. I brought my wife and my sister. And by the time it was over, I realized he was going to end up doing what I wanted to do. I joined up.

We were the 16th shareholders in the Utah OSR Land Co-op. Back to you, Philip. All right. So Operation Self-Reliance Initiative is helping these families make these transition. And what that is, we have a four-step process. First, we find and identify like-minded individuals. and essential resources, and then we network them together. Then the second step is that we provide and direct people to the knowledge base that it takes to become self-reliant. We've identified that there's essentially six facets that are needed to create a self-reliant homestead. And that begins with earth or dirt and then you have to have some water then you have to have some food and then you've got to have shelter and then you've got to have some power and you've got to have some sanitation so that's the building block for creating a self-reliant community so if you can build a community and what research has shown is that if you can build a community of over 200 of these blocks you're going to have a community that is sustainable for generations it's scalable continues to grow because of the breadth and depth of the knowledge base and all the people involved. Because one of the things that happens to a lot of these smaller communities is that when the kids grow up, there's not a place for them. There's not enough industry. There's not enough room. And so historically, you find that if you have over 200 members, these continue to grow and expand. So the knowledge base is critical, and we've learned a lot the last five years. Jesse and I are actually, we have our own two acres, and we've learned, well, I'll just give you a quick overview. On my two acres, if you're utilizing square foot gardening, you have almost 90,000 square feet. So it's not what you've got, it's what you do with what you have. The USDA and universities have shown that you can actually, in 120 square feet of grow boxes, you can actually grow enough nutritional food to sustain an adult to keep healthy organ functioning. That's 120 square feet.

So if you take and figure out that you've got almost 90,000 square feet, there's a lot that you can do. In fact, I'm putting in the infrastructure and anticipate that on my two acres, I'll be able to feed 40 to 50 people. Now, I don't have the energy or the time to do all the work required to do that. Being the oldest of 18 kids and having seven adult children and 30 grandchildren, with what I'm watching in the world, I anticipate that I'm going to have some family and friends show up and I want to be able to feed as many as I can and have a safe place. Because of an experience that I had as a young father. It didn't last very long, but I had three little baby girls that were three and under and went through a short period of time. I was unable to feed them, keep them warm or give them a drink. And it was before wet wipes. And so I wasn't even able to change their diapers. And I got to tell you that rewired my brain at that time. So I'm sensitive to those things. So the education element is critical, and that's part of our OSR. We have the Academy of OSR. We have over 80 webinars on it. And if you do the research or the assignments on the first 20 of those, you'll actually be able to put together your transition plan to change from the city to a country culture.

Now, the third step is that we help organize people and provide training for land agricultural cooperatives. All right. Now, a co-op is different, especially here in Utah. We have Title III, which really opens up some opportunities for the small agricultural producers. And it's based on co-ops are based on member centrics. in other words the members are the most important and they drive the board whereas general corporation law is it's board driven so and your influence on the board is based on how much uh you've invested into the co-op or into the corporation so it's a different matrix and so teaching people how to operate in those and it's a different bookkeeping it's But essentially it's a group of people that are working together to accomplish things that would be difficult for a single individual to do. So, and we also are finding that going through this co-op approach. that because everybody owns a part of the whole, it's not a subdivision. People act more like a family. They help each other. They get more creative in working together. And we're seeing some amazing things take place. Now, because it is different, we've got... probably 3%, maybe 5% that don't get it. So we're working through that process right there. But the bottom line is finding like-minded individuals who want to be self-reliant and creating a community based on knowledge and willingness to work and wanting to be self-reliant.

The last thing that I would say is that agriculture is important. If you have a house and no food, that's kind of the end of the story. But if you can produce food and you can actually dig a hole in the ground if you have to. So you got to get your priorities straight. Building out homesteads based on those six facets, and I'll just tell you what our contracts require. You build a house, it's got to be passive solar. So you want something that's not going to turn into a freezer in the middle of the winter if you run out of fuel. So we have it set up so your home has to be a minimum of 600 square feet. We recommend a minimum of 800 square feet. You got to have a garage or a barn or some type of storage. We don't care what size it is because we don't know if you're raising horses or you're raising worms. But you got to have some type of storage to deal with your animals or feed or those types of things. But it needs to meet the wind and snow loads. So a really cheap metal shed just doesn't cut it. Then you got to have a greenhouse. Especially with the weather patterns now, you don't know when frost is going to come. You don't know when hail is going to come. So you at least need a stable portion. And we have that your greenhouse has got to be a minimum of 600 square feet. We recommend a minimum of 1200 square feet. And again, keep in mind what you can do with 120 square feet if you have the knowledge to know how to do that. That knowledge goes all the way back as to your nutritional needs. Then you've got to have a garden and an orchard.

And again, if you're doing square foot gardening, you're looking at an average of four to five pounds per square foot of production, basically whatever you want. But you also have got to build in your nitrogen cycle so that you, bottom line is if you feed the ground, it'll feed you. So you need to look at your nitrogen cycle, and that's where rabbits and chickens and goats and sheep come in. And then you got to have water. You got to have a well. And we encourage people to have a well because a well is much easier to protect your water source from contamination from the atmosphere. and there's a lot of things going on there and so we encourage you when you're looking for a place that you have a good well water source where we've got here in utah we've got an underground river that works really well for us and we hit it about 60 to 80 feet down in arizona we have to go to about 350 feet so and then we require everybody to have their own well. It may or may not be a little cheaper if you put four or five families on a well, but here's the problem you have. If your well goes down, your power goes down, four or five families are not going to be able to get help from their neighbor. because it just takes too much electricity. But if everybody has their own well and their own solar system, we figure that we can suffer a 50% failure rate and still keep doing what we're doing. And then the last thing is you've got to have sanitation.

Without proper sanitation, you're going to be fighting disease and other things that are associated with that. Now, That's the building block that's set up for the two, two plus acres for a family. And like I say, my infrastructure that I'm putting in is if I have enough labor here, I will be able to sustain a large number of people. But it takes planning ahead of time. And you have to really decide what you want to do. The last thing that I think is really important for people to consider, Jesse's conducted a survey and found that people that are participating in our project are freedom -loving people, and essentially they're looking for a healthy place and a safe place to raise food and families. So the last comment is that We have lost a great deal, or misplaced is probably a better word, the knowledge that our great-great-grandfathers had in being able to be sustainable on their land. And so we're regathering that information and condensing it down and then teaching people principle-based management. not only for themselves and their families, but how to work together. And so we have a member -centric board, which means that the members direct the boards instead of the board just telling everybody else or the stockholders what they're doing. We have the members, and then we also have representatives. down in Arizona that we're putting together, it's called a community council. So where you have five to 10 families that have representatives, a male and a female, that female input is critical for a community to have it well balanced.

And you find a lot of this in Native American cultures and other stuff that they have more of a balanced approach. That gives you an overview of what we're doing. And I learn something every day out here from my neighbors because of the breadth and the depth of their knowledge base that's out here. And so I want to conclude with, you know, you've heard if you give a guy a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Well we believe that if you can teach people how to teach how to fish, you can feed a nation. And so it always comes back to agriculture and food. And so that's what Operation Self-Reliance in 20, 30 minutes is what we're doing. And we're finding great success with that. Okay. Thank you. I'd like to open it up to some questions. Is that okay? Absolutely. Okay. So I'll start off and hopefully anybody else on the call, if you've got questions that you'd like to chime in on, please do. But you mentioned, hopefully I understood you correctly, that of like people that come out there, you have like a two to three percent that maybe don't catch the vision and they leave.

Did I understand you correctly? Some leave, some because it's hard work. And then you have some people that are starting, for example. We have 135 members out here and our 1,245 acres and our large amount of water is all paid for. And so it's a hard transition for them to feel comfortable owning the land together in a group. So they're wanting to turn it into a subdivision. You're talking about 3% of the people. So in our Arizona one, we are clarifying this. upfront, very close, that it's not an option to change this out. Because there's a big difference between a subdivision and an agricultural land cooperative. And it comes down to community. And so the people that understand this are having an amazing experience. I've made more best friends out there than I made in the previous 70 years. The watching things, we have our own volunteer fire department. We have the rescue rangers. These type of people are more interested in being self-reliant instead of relying on the government or a church or some of these other things. And I'm not saying those are bad things. I'm just saying. People who want to be independent tend to be self-reliant. They're problem solvers. Now, we've got a few, and I mean, we're talking less than fingers on one hand, that out of 135, that they haven't caught the vision yet. And so it's an education process. So, you know, we're trying to do gentle persuasion and long suffering, but it is an education.

But we've closed up some of these gaps that have allowed people to say, oh, yeah, I think you got a great idea, but we want to change it. We want to own our own property and be independent of everybody. And we're going... uh you're you're missing the point are you seeing what's happened with just these first families getting together and going out there and if you try to change it into a subdivision and turn it into a well here's another term um a social babylon that that don't really understand that there's much more power as a group of like-minded people than people isolating and trying to segregate. And what can I say? The bulk of the people out here open their arms and reach out and help others. And then there's a few, that very small percentage that are fearful and want to gather more and more power and want more land. When the key is not what you've got, it's what you do with what you have. Does that make sense, Ben? Yeah, yeah.

So that seems pretty wild to me that they would make the investment, like just make the plunge and go out there without having that, like without being in line with what the vision of the community is. Well, that was... And I have to say, in the very beginning, you only know what you know. And this is the first time we've done all this. And so we've got the bulk of the people that are out here doing it. They get it. And they're building an amazing heritage. for the upcoming generations. And trees are being planted, crops are grown, houses are being built, barns are going up, greenhouses. We've actually taken this dead land out here and it's coming alive. I mean, just in one 10 foot by 20 foot area, I created a rabbit colony a little over a year ago and I took 150 rabbits out of that last year. so what just one more follow-up and we'll go we got some other questions um what would you say would be like just to be prepared oh did it freeze mike did you can you hear me okay you can probably hear me still but the video froze okay um breaking up a little bit ben you want to repeat that yeah i was just saying that um what is the the biggest learning curve what what is it that when people come out there if they're prepared for they're like will help them transition easier?

Getting a significant transition plan. It's always cheaper. to do things on paper first and get a transition plan that's viable, that'll work, and then sticking to that instead of saying, okay, yeah, I want a homestead. Let's see, I'll get some chickens. I'll do this. I'll do that. But you need a transition plan. That's one of the things that we help teach people is how to create the transition plan and what triage, if you want to use the word triage, the best. things to approach up front. And the reason we're so good at this is Jesse and I have made so many mistakes. So we, we got some hands-on experience to help the newcomers. Folks get to learn from your, from your mistakes. That's good. So we've got a question in the comment is you talked about some courses, but we're not sure. Are they? Didn't see them on the website. Where do they find the courses to take to learn those things you're referring to? Jesse, you want to address that? Yeah. Let me share my screen if that's all right. Yeah. Let me look at, okay. You can do it now. I think that's the right screen. Yep. Okay. This is academyOSR.com. Are you guys seeing that? Yes. Okay. Yep. So. Well, let me go to the homepage first. So this is our educational nonprofit. And if you click on the path, meaning the path to self-reliance, it goes to this page that explains the course and how it works. If you go ahead and click on the subscribe now, then...

What we have here is the first 24 lessons. They're the core of this whole thing. There's, I think, 80 in total, but the first 24 are the most important. And if you work through these lessons and actually do the assignments, by the time you get to the end, you'll have a solid plan for your own off-grid homestead, no matter where that is. And so we encourage people to really take this seriously if they subscribe. uh there is a monthly fee for that but you can do it as fast as you want but again we do encourage people to to take it seriously and to and to actually do the assignments and then after after you get your solid plan you can specialize by looking at some of these other lessons and tweak your plan according to your own personal interests but the first 24 are the or the solid core of the whole thing. Awesome. Hopefully that answers your question, Rod. Maybe make sure to put the link in the chat as well. iPhone, you've got your hand raised. Go ahead. Well, I was just wondering, when you start like for building homes and that, are you basing this like off of the Amish, the way everyone gets together and helps construct it?

A really good question. We have some of that take place on there, but it's not required. What has actually been happening because of the kind of the people here is that, well, We started out getting together on Sunday nights as residents and saying, telling people, okay, this is what we did this last week. This is what worked. This is what didn't work. We recommend you do this or don't do that. Or by the way, we found a great supplier for this. And then, oh, by the way. uh thursday afternoon if the wind is good we're going to be putting the plastic on my greenhouse we could use some extra help and we'll invariably have 10 15 20 people show up to put that plastic on and other times to say, okay, I'm getting ready to do the metal on my roof. If anybody's available Tuesday morning, we could sure use help and you'll get three, four, five show up and help. And so this is the kind of people that we're coming across that's wanting to get involved in these communities. I might say we're not tax protesters. It's not a religious statement, though we do follow the Judeo-Christian ethic. We don't have a militia, but we do have what we call the OSR Emergency Action Plan. And so there's a lot of volunteerism that takes place. Does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. You're welcome.

Go ahead, Micah. Where's that button to raise hand? Anyway, whatever. I'm like, professionally, I'm a mechanic and also work on all kinds of weird machines and stuff. You're like gold. Androids and air cold equipment. So I was just wondering what kind of, I guess you kind of answered my question already. set up shop and just get everyone's stuff fixed so they can eat food for the winter you know that was a thing yeah we we have several people out here that showed up oj wilkes is one of them he he's an it guy during the day and then at night he fixes stuff and and um uh he charges for his mechanic ability he charges 45 bucks an hour and uh For example, I had an issue that I spent several thousand dollars trying to get fixed, and I took it to OJ, and OJ, within 10 minutes, he found that I had a cracked spark plug and that it didn't create a problem until it heated up. I've had three electricians come to my property to help me with various issues. All three of them refused payment. Yeah, we have plumbers. And it's interesting. You start a project like this with one person and then gradually, if you've got the concept and other people see what you're trying to accomplish and you have a direction, they gather. Jesse and I will spend more time talking people out of this because they're not ready. We don't. So we've been accused of being lousy salesmen. But at the same time, we want people to be successful.

And so we say, go back and work on your plan. You've got some disconnect in the size of house you want and the size of budget you've got or your skill set or a couple of those things. And of course, we try to be as gentle as possible. And every once in a while, we get somebody gets really upset. But it's. You know, I had one guy say, I know I can build a 3,000 square foot house for $50,000. And I go, okay, tell me how you're going to do that. Well, first of all, having the background, I could tell that he couldn't even buy the materials for that. and then we have others say okay i can build this house out of tires and i can do it for 25 000 and i go okay i want you to get 20 tires and i want you to stuff the dirt in them and then you tell me how you're ready to do 2500 of those tires and so it's helping people connect with reality and and to get a transition plan that's viable but there is a a need for everybody. I mean, people who have a little bit of construction that has some farming understand and people that are mechanically inclined are like gold in these communities. I'm just not, I'm not much of a gardener. I'm much more of a... Let me tell you. The old ladies that show up out here are master gardeners. So if you're just willing to go talk to somebody, they will actually show you how step by step. Because I was like that. I could build anything. But I didn't have, you see these thumbs? They're not green.

But now the third year, and they came out. I got to say, I also had some grandkids come out and spend some time with me because their parents wanted to learn how to work. And they said, Grandpa is going to teach you how. And, you know, but I took these grandkids and I tied them up or not tied them up. I connected them with a couple senior citizens out here, and they took my grandkids under their wing and started teaching them how to plant, how to water, how to harvest rabbits and chickens. And boy, I learned a ton. just following my grandkids around so would you say that people that work there or that live there do they um are you guys so far out that you guys that everybody has to work remote or do they travel into town every day or is there are there some uh occupations where there's enough people that live there that they can sustain themselves off of the local community great great question we have all of the above and in the beginning It generally will bring in some services from the outside until you start getting enough core. people to be there but we have those that go into town for three to four days a week and then they come out and work on the weekends uh i mean we've got a physical therapist that spends four days out and then three days at the place we've got a chiropractor he spends three days in town and then four days out here uh we've got another gentleman that goes into town and spends four days and he works at a troubled youth school in Delta, Utah.

And then you have a guy who leaves for two or three weeks at a time and works. He's an electrical tech. He works on submarines and deep sea and oil rigs. And so he goes out and makes a grundle of money. And then he comes back and works on his property. Then we have a hardware salesman. He goes away for a week or two at a time and then comes back, and then he works a lot online. We used HughesNet in the beginning, and now a lot of us have gone to Starlink, and that's worked really well for us. Micah, I wanted to tell you something. You would be a great gardener because you know how to use a wheelbarrow. There you go. I don't think I need to teach you that. I'd just rather fix all the wheelbarrows and trade everyone a bushel of carrots at the end of the season or something. There you go. You can do stuff that other people can't do. And anybody would love to have you there to push their wheelbarrow. So is that all a wheelbarrow pusher? Yep.

Let me share you a real life experience out here that happened this last summer, early fall. My sweetheart of 51 years had a stroke. And so we ended up in the hospital. And while I was in the hospital with her, I had previously over the last five years picked up five stents. And I was sitting in there and all of a sudden I had chest pain. So I had my daughter take me down to the emergency room, the same hospital that my wife was in. And it turned out that I needed a double bypass. Now I had just planted all kinds of garden area in my greenhouse. And I was really... frustrated because i wasn't going to be able to water everything so i figured it was all going to go away and about two days later while i'm in the hospital one of my neighbors called me up and said by the way i don't want you to worry about this Some of your friends and neighbors are showing up here in the next hour, and we're divvying up all the water responsibility. So when I showed back up in two, two and a half months later, I had the Garden of Eden. And that's the kind of neighbors that are drawn to a project like this. Jesse's showing you some pictures of the activities. that are going on. But that was a real blessing to me. And it turned out to be a blessing for those that came because some of them who didn't have the experience came to me and said, thank you so much because I was able to see and show my husband what this two acres is supposed to look like. And so we had a real win-win. So Sal has a question. He says, do you have any experience with humanure? With humanure?

Yeah. Not at this point. We are required by the state to install a state-approved sanitation system. We wanted to use some composting toilets, but they said no. So there's some issues. Now, with that said, I've researched this. We know that urine is great to put directly onto your garden soil. The humanure needs to be turned into the ground. If we find that we have more people than our septic systems can handle, we will actually be using a compost pile with a straw going on top of the humanure and converting it that way. If we had sawdust, we'd use that or wood chips, but we're not doing it, but in our OSR emergency. action plan. We will be training people how to utilize human ore. I talked to the guy from the county or the state. I can't remember which. He said the only reason Utah doesn't allow like composting toilets or a couple of others is because nobody's taken the time to push through to change the law. Other states around like Arizona allow other possibilities. So what's your capacity and what percentage of that is filled at each of the communities? You mean the capacity of where we're at?

We currently have 135 of the 250 openings here in Utah. And we're just getting a start down in Arizona. So we've got... What do you say, Jess, a half a dozen that are sitting at the door waiting for us to get our building permits and sell their homes? Yeah, they're trying to sell their homes and get their plants finished. What part of Arizona are you guys in? Yeah, we have 1,300 acres there, and it's beautiful. It's got trees. It's got... open areas uh there's uh two plateaus we already have a lake we have a house we have a big uh we have four wells already put in um what area in arizona is that snowflake oh i used to live in snowflake yeah we're about what 35 40 minutes out of snowflake towards like uh as the concho or where like it's on the way to concho kind of it's nine miles as the flow as the crow flies east of snowflake but it you have to go nine miles towards concho and then go nine miles south to get to it once once all our roads are done so be a lot shorter way to get to it i'm trying to pull up the map google earth so in your utah location um what is it really arid like is like is it really windy or like what kind of things are how is it and then what's your plan to to change it or is it just to keep it the way it is for like the climate you talked about how in peru they planted a bunch of trees and it changed the climate um Yeah, we're all planting trees. For example, I've planted about 70 trees, 60 fruit trees.

My neighbors planted over 200 trees. So they're just getting a good start. That's going to change things. I mean, when we first got started out here and the wind would blow, the dust would just kill you. uh but now we've got enough crops going and and irrigation and our roads are in place with gravel on it we got a concrete batch plant that's that works for us up here uh we've got some of the big agricultural started so uh we anticipate that getting the trees uh getting the grass and the forage crops down that's going to temper the climate a little bit. And yeah, you see, we're high desert. We're about 4,500 feet and it's dry. It's an old river bed, but the soil is amazing. I grew all kinds of squash, corn. And in my greenhouse, I was able to get about 60 kernels of Hopi blue corn. And it's normally five or six feet tall. But because I had enough water in it, they got to be 10, 11, 12 feet tall. And I have over five pounds of seed now just from, well, I had 60% germination. So I had about 35, 40. Stocks of corn came up. So yeah, we're, we're changing it. The soil, we started at 2% biomass. And when I get done, I hope to have, you know, 10 to 20% biomass. Cool.

So I was asked about somebody about a, you mentioned building a house for 50 grand and they were wondering how that was possible. Well, if you're trying to meet the International Building Code, it gets a little challenging unless you've got a very creative engineer and you want to do rammed earth. But the labor is very intensive. And then the reinforcing to meet the seismic and wind and snow loads is another issue. If you didn't have to deal with those issues, yeah, there are ways to do that. But you're basically looking at utilizing the uniform building code, a minimum of about $100 a square foot, all the way up to depending on what kind of building materials and the degree of competency you got to have to put all this together. We've seen some that go as high as $400 a square foot. So the main thing that we look for is that, and we try to work really well with the counties so that they know we're not trying to create, well, what can I say, trailer parks that just turn to trash. but that we actually have homes that are passive solar and we put in our contracts also that whatever you put in is going to have a 10-year life expectancy so for example if you're putting in a hoop house and you're using a poly that's only going to last three or four years then we want you to put a couple extra covers in storage so that you got 10 years we There is a strong possibility that we may find ourselves with five to 10 years of interruption of goods that are normally available.

Okay, one last question before we officially close, and maybe we'll have like an after time if anybody has any additional questions. But if somebody wants to come look at what you guys are doing, how would they go about arranging that? Jesse, you want to tell them there? Yeah, I'll just put a link in the chat. That's our Eventbrite listings of what we've got going. If you happen to be, well, yeah, if you want to take a look at that, you can tour Phillip's off -grid homestead. And if he's feeling chipper, he'll take you to other people's homesteads as well. Anyway, yeah, that's a possibility. So we're also doing a Super Saturday down in near Show Low, Arizona on February 1st. And obviously anyone's welcome to come to that. We'll be talking about all the different elements that are required and building an off-grid homestead, kind of a 30,000-foot view. Great. Well, thank you both, Phillip and Jesse. I appreciate the time you've come to. So tell us about what you guys are doing. We're going to have a closing prayer. And then if anybody has any questions, if you guys can stay for a few more minutes and see if any more questions are asked.

I was wondering, Samuel, would you be willing to give the closing prayer for us? What's Samuel's last name? I forget. Bigly. Bigly. Okay. He might not. Yes. Oh, your iPhone. Oh. Okay. Go ahead. I'm sorry. Our dear, kind Heavenly Father, we are grateful for the opportunity of coming together in this capacity to be able to learn these principles of becoming independent as we have been taught often by Thy servants and are required to do in order to be able to survive in this world as things are today. We ask for Thy guidance and direction as we move forward and strive to apply these principles into our lives please bless each one that stands in need of a blessing may thy spirit and blessings continue with us and abide with us in all that we strive to do watch over and protect us we ask in the name of thy son jesus christ amen

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