Meet Jordyn & Josh Kelly of Dunn, North Carolina

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jordyn & Josh Kelly.

Hi Jordyn & Josh, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
We purchased our home with the goal in mind to grow our food after a medical diagnosis that left us anxious about the unknown future. We started with twelve laying hens, fifty meat chickens, and 1,000 square feet we humbly called a garden. We invited the community to help us with our first harvest day, and we haven’t looked back. Every year for the past five years, we have continued to expand the garden and grow in knowledge and community. We started this journey for our health, and now we focus on providing food for ourselves and our community! We now have roughly 10,000 square feet of space to grow organically cultivated produce and herbs. Along with gardening, we have enjoyed raising various livestock, including KuneKune pigs, dairy goats, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, and now Gulf Coast Native sheep. We strive for self-sufficiency but also want to share opportunities with our community to learn through classes, tours, and public speaking demonstrations.

It wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The first hard lesson we learned was, “Where there is livestock, there is dead stock.” We’ve lost our fair share of livestock, not only from our own mistakes but to predators and disease. We have had to follow the learning curve with every aspect of this lifestyle change. Thousands of seedlings didn’t make it into the ground, pests and predators taking what we worked so hard to grow and raise. This road has certainly been rough, but the harvest we reap is an excellent reward for our perseverance.

Let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
First and foremost, we are homesteaders. However, we are also educators, along with farmer and livestock breeder titles. We are most known for our breeding program of working Australian Shepherds. As our garden has grown, we attend several markets weekly as farmers. As educators, we are public event speakers offering herding demonstrations with our dogs. Other topics we have covered include chicken butchering, homesteading on a budget, and how to invest wisely in self-reliance.

We are most proud of our dogs and the work we do to produce healthy, sound puppies who grow up to be well-rounded, versatile adults in active homes, both working and companion. We match our puppies to families based on each puppy’s individual needs. We determine this using an instinct test when the puppies are five weeks old, and then temperament testing and evaluations are completed when the puppies are seven weeks old. We keep our puppies until they are ten weeks old and raise them using Puppy Culture and Avidog protocols for socializing. We strive for our puppies to meet at least 100 people by the time they are 10 weeks old, partnering with two yoga studios to offer Yoga with Puppies classes. We do so much more to help raise great examples of the breed, but we also do our part to ensure they go to the best homes and become a part of our family in the process.

Risk-taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
In a way, we take risks daily as nothing is definite nor controllable. Farming in any aspect is a risk, primarily financially but also when evaluating time management. Everything we have added and invested in our small homestead has been done with cash. We reduce risk by not purchasing on credit or adding more debt. Another aspect of our journey has been our road to debt-freedom.

Pricing:

• Our puppies are $3,000 each
• Produce is priced at market value

Contact Info:

• Website: www.workingaussieshomestead.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/workingaussieshomestead
• Facebook: Facebook.com/workingaussieshomestead
• Youtube: YouTube.com/workingaussieshomestead