06/18/2026
The one thing about homesteading is you always need to willing to reassess and pivot. Life never goes the way we think. For those of you who have met me in person you know how much I love my cows! So this may come as a shock but we sold the cows…all but one anyways. In January, our church was doing a fast. You could fast whatever wanted from food to social media. It’s an amazing time every year and I have learned to look forward to it. This year I had asked God to give me answers to my medical issues. Many symptoms that didn’t connect. So God gave me an eating plan, mostly meat. I had heard of the carnivore diet and thought, yay! God is going to do some healing. Well just a week into it and I landed myself in the ER. I could barely walk the stomach pain so bad. I couldn’t eat anything anymore and I spiked a fever. After a CT scan and testing, it was confirmed I have Alpha Gal. My body hit a point of no return as far as eating beef, lamb, venison and pork. I went Alpha Gal free for over a month and got the acupuncture. I have been able to add back in some dairy. I have a limit on that too. The acupuncture did not help with the meat and I am still highly reactive. I could keep trying it but at the end of the day it’s just not worth it to me. I feel so sick for weeks after eating red meat. I still get violently ill from pork and even just cross contamination from pork. Eating and Alpha Gal free diet made nearly all my symptoms go away. I thank God for revealing my health issue like I had prayed for Him to do. God is so faithful! And yes, it was a long process of grieving because this affects so much of my life in little ways I didn’t realize. But God is so good and He did give me a peace and gave me a new direction.
That being said, we sold all the cows but Edith. Because cows are herd animals we need at least two cows. So she will keep her calf until she has another one and if it’s a male it will go to feed our family since everyone else can still eat beef and then if it’s a female she will be raised for a future milk cow for another family one day. Edith has been with Jake, From Steak Farm and Sweetums for a couple weeks now and seems very happy with the arrangement.
Onto the new adventure! We will be focusing on meat poultry. We have started a small flock of turkeys. We got our wonderful turkeys from a local farm, Jireh Hill Homestead. We got hatching eggs and let our Brody hen hatch a few and then bought some already hatched turkeys. I’m still deciding on what breed meat chickens I want to get. I would like something I can hatch on my own.
We will see what the future holds! We are excited about what is to come while leaving things open for God to lead us.
