The Plain Values Podcast EP #01 – Shawn and Beth Dougherty on gain through grief

Marlin Miller:

Can we talk about the house fire?

Shawn Dougherty:

Oh yeah, yeah. One of the best things that happened in my life

Marlin Miller:

That years ago, two years

Shawn Dougherty:

Ago, right? Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

You just said one of the best things that happened in your life.

Shawn Dougherty:

Oh my gosh, fabulous. And I knew it on the day that I came back. I did. I don’t know that my wife would necessarily agree with this.

Beth Dougherty:

I had a different perspective as the house. I came home to my house fire, and in the seconds as you turn into your driveway and you realize, oh, my house is going to go, before my mind could formulate fears, I could see my children on the lawn. And at that point you’ve had two things put in front of you. Like there’s my house and there’s my family, and they can’t even exist on the same scale. So I was really very, I mean, I just sat on the lawn and watched the house burn.

Marlin Miller:

I just got done having nearly an hour and a half conversation with Sean and Beth Doherty, some wonderful friends of ours. They’ve written for plain values for many, many years. And I don’t believe that we have ever had the deep conversation into family and the conversation around how they watch their life grow and build into the joy and contentment they live in every day. These questions, I, that for some reason came to me as I was thinking and praying through this whole time, just provided just a beautiful framework for a wonderful conversation around their family, around their house fire. If you enjoy learning about someone’s history, about their family, about the way they think about the way that they want to live, this one is a real treat. This episode of the Plain Values Podcast is being sponsored by my friends at Azure Standard. My friend Spencer just told me about a new program that they have launched, it’s called Around the Table.

And around the table is this beautiful synergy between Azure and their food and their trucking and the local church. Here’s how it works. You set up a drop, you choose a coordinator, you order your food, and you pick it up and the church gets a small percentage back to put into any ministry that they want. It is a fantastic opportunity to encourage and help the churches get to know the people in their own backyards. I love it. It’s wonderful. You can call Spencer at nine seven one two hundred eight three five three nine seven one two zero zero eight three five three. Or you can shoot him an email at the ta***@***********rd.com and tell em Marlon sent you. Let’s jump right in with, were you guys both born in Ohio? No, we’re southwest.

Shawn Dougherty:

You’re Southwest? Yeah. Yeah. So I was born in Lubbock, Texas.

Beth Dougherty:

I was born in Houston. So we’re both Texans born.

Shawn Dougherty:

Really? Yeah.

Beth Dougherty:

And that’s not something you just, that’s not casual if you’re a Texan born. So we grew up in Texas, in Oklahoma. We didn’t come here until 1990. Yes. I grew up

Shawn Dougherty:

Mostly in Oklahoma.

Beth Dougherty:

Sean was 30 when we came.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah. Okay. So what was life for you as kids in Texas, in Oklahoma? What were your parents like? Did you have a big family?

Shawn Dougherty:

I had five brothers. And the thing that really, so I grew up really, we were just at a conference where we were talking about mom and dad and my mom and dad were very much believers in the systems. Dad did not go to World Wari because he had flat feet, but that’s that generation.

Marlin Miller:

When you said

Shawn Dougherty:

Systems, what does that mean? Oh, the educational system. The medical system.

Beth Dougherty:

They belong to that generation for which the past had a lot of dark stuff in it. I mean, his dad was a kid during the Gospel Bowl in Oklahoma, and they believed the story that came, especially after World War ii, that says technology is going to relieve us from all these terrible things in our past. And Dad was, Sean’s dad was a salesman for Eli, the drug company, and then he was chief pharmacist for St. Francis, St. Anthony, St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City. And he believed in drugs. He believed they were going to do what they said they did. So mom and dad, they were the best people on the planet, but they weren’t questioning?

Shawn Dougherty:

No, they believed in the educational system. So we were actually put in, we’re Catholic. So we were put in Catholic school to begin with. And this was a hard time. Vatican two was a very hard time, and Oklahoma was particularly liberal. So they pulled us out of the Catholic schools because dad would say, it’s going to be easier for me to say that what you’re hearing in a school isn’t exactly right as opposed. He did not want to contradict the church and perceived that if he said that what father said wasn’t accurate. But in any event, they generally, so we were put in public school and they would say they knew that there were things going on, drugs and things like that in the schools and stuff. But generally they came from a, that believed in the medical systems and believed in the educational system and believed in all that kind of stuff. I’m not sure exactly why we

Beth Dougherty:

Fell so far outside the box,

Shawn Dougherty:

But we didn’t even, early on we were doubting, you’re

Beth Dougherty:

A thinker and I’m a contrarian. And that got us a long way. But we started out just as two people, and I think about five years ago, we realized, oh, I know why we married one another. You were the only person I knew who was going to farm with me, and I was the only person. So we knew we wanted to live on a farm. We knew we wanted that life. Both our grandfathers are farmers, we’re farmers. We were very comfortable in the country food growing world. And we also knew we didn’t want to be commercial farmers. We’d seen enough of that to see a lot of things wrong with it. But I think starting there and saying, our life’s going to be different, Sean started it by saying, first, I want always to have more time than money,

Marlin Miller:

Really.

Beth Dougherty:

And that meant that we were going to do as many free or cheap things about our lives as we could. We were going to do for ourselves, not by our solutions. And so that meant it’s why he chose to be an educator. He had his summers off. It didn’t pay very well, but we didn’t need it to do that. We just needed time. And then I think that you’ll know this is true. I know some things about your life, so I think you’ll know this is true, that when you begin to pursue one good, especially one that isn’t the norm, I’m not sure how many really are the norm, but when you begin to pursue it, single-mindedly, it leads you to a lot of other things. And you find that having taken that one step down the road, less traveled, you’re getting further and further from the road that’s more traveled.

Shawn Dougherty:

And I would say that one of our first steps in that was home birthing. So that was an unusual choice. It was at the time. And Beth, Beth had just met. We had some very, very good friends. And Beth was thinking, well, you explained what you were going to

Beth Dougherty:

Do about perfect. I definitely, I belonged to the generation that heard unremitting pain for hours and hours and hours was what? Labor and delivery. And I wanted nothing to do with it. I was like, sign me up. I want a cesarean section. Wake me up a week later. I want no part in this. And about three days before we got married, some close friends showed up with their two day old baby and their birthing story. And it had been a home birth actually with Fredda Miller of Buron Ohio. Bur Ohio. That’s right. She trained. She was training in Grand Prairie, Texas. And so she was a student midwife, and our friends had gone to her. That’s how we ended tied to Bergen in 1990 because we were having a baby and there was Frida, but at the time, she had come back up here and we had our first baby under another student.

But it was the story. It was that instead of a picture of a couple who is just caught in the toils of how industry does babies and no choices, here’s this story of a natural event that has its level of risk and heroism, not danger. We weren’t looking at it. Wow, that’s dangerous. Let’s do it. But all of a sudden birth went from being a product that the industry sells us to something that was going to happen regardless, and we could do it by ourselves or we could do it with a trained they person. And it was an adventure. I would say that I think we always had a taste for adventure and not much of a taste for the conventional.

Shawn Dougherty:

And then that same couple as we were heading toward homeschooling and things like that, she said, why in the world would I send my child to school just when it becomes helpful at home? So she homeschooled and we said, well, we can,

Beth Dougherty:

Yeah, this is a big shift.

Shawn Dougherty:

And then we’re reflecting on, and it doesn’t take very much to look at the medical system or the educational system or the financial system or any of these systems to say they’re not working very well. The food system, the ag system, they’re not working very well. And you can either go along with them or you can say, I think I can do this. I think I can do this better than they would want to do it. Plus I really do think that their goals are so different from what our goals are and our goals were. And I’m very pleased that my boys, they’re the ones who are married.

Beth Dougherty:

You have daughters

Shawn Dougherty:

Too, I know, but I’m talking about my boys who are married, the children who are married, they’re all boys. And when they say, dad, if there’s anything that you taught us is that family’s the most important thing. And when family’s the most important thing, you kind of have to jettison these other, what we need to do is be creating alternative everything, alternative educational systems, alternative food systems, alternative medical systems alternative. And we’re finding that having been in those alternatives for a very long time, they’re way better. Way better.

Marlin Miller:

So I’m not going to let you off the hook with your childhood, your mom and dad, your siblings and all that, but I want to ask you guys question before we get there. Lisa, my wife was a teacher in the local public system for seven or eight years, and we chose to homeschool our kids as well. And she felt a lot of what in the world, you’re a teacher, what are you doing? I’m sure, I’m sure. I’m

Beth Dougherty:

Sure that it was seen as betrayal.

Marlin Miller:

Oh, she lost friendships. It put her through the mill. You were a college professor,

Shawn Dougherty:

Right? Yeah. Yes. I guess I was at the time. But most of these, you were a college professor for 25 years. This is a Catholic institution, and I would say most of the faculty

Marlin Miller:

Were

Shawn Dougherty:

Homeschooling.

Marlin Miller:

Okay, now that I did not know. And then that makes a lot more sense.

Now here’s the follow-up question. I was thinking of you guys, one thing that I love about you guys among the many is that I don’t think of Sean and Beth and go, man, they are really, really good at one thing. You guys are wonderfully general just on the farm and in life. I’m trying to think of how to ask this question because I want to just almost preach, I am so tired of the specialization of life and you talk to this guy, well, I’m a surgeon, but I only operate on the left kidney and the fourth quadrant. And it’s like, come on.

Shawn Dougherty:

Well, this is what Wendleberry goes on and on about is that this specialization has really hampered us in being able to do things. So no, when this generalist, yes, you’re right. I would not say that we’re,

Beth Dougherty:

We’re very much generalist. In fact, don’t examine us too closely on any specializations.

Shawn Dougherty:

But what that means is that when we want to add onto the house, we do it. And we don’t really know what we’re doing. But we figure, and this is where if there’s anything that came out of the homeschooling and the homesteading world for my children is that they’re problem solvers because they’ve seen me try down a road and then they say, oh, dad, let me help you here. And yes, they’re much better at all those things,

Marlin Miller:

But you guys are okay admitting and saying, you know what? That didn’t go so well and actually failing in something and say, well, let’s try it again. And you figure it out.

Beth Dougherty:

I think specialists end up having to depend on other people for 99% of their guides, specialists, and they’re narrow band.

Shawn Dougherty:

That’s right.

Beth Dougherty:

That’s right. And we wanted to have a life with our children, growing food and keeping animals. So that’s not specialization. But even more so as you begin to try to, I mean, if you want to farm unconventionally and raise all your food, you have to be a reader of nature of ecosystems. Talk about not specialized, right?

Marlin Miller:

Huge, huge variety,

Beth Dougherty:

Right? 30 billion or whatever it is, 3 billion living things in a teaspoon of soil. That’s a really broad spectrum. And here we are trying to manage a big spectrum and all the things we wanted to eat and all the things, the things we wanted to eat, wanted to eat. And I think it is good for your soul because it backs you out of the picture far enough to begin to read that this is how God made creation. His creation is beyond our understanding and oriented to our happiness and to our wellbeing. And I think it’s part of why we’re okay with Shauna and I, especially our kids are pretty good, decent specialists on some things. Each of them has at least a handful of skills they’re very good at. But I’ve always been okay with our generalization and the fact that I can make a decent loaf of dark brown, nutty bread, but I’m not a baker. I’m not a particularly talented cook. My daughters are better at a lot of things than I am. But that big picture of managing a whole ecosystem is so beautiful. I always wanted to prove cheese making’s a good example. Anybody can take clean raw milk and make a cheese and it’ll be good and wholesome and delicious. You won’t necessarily win prizes with it. But was that the goal healthy?

Because you know where it comes from. Oh, it’s phenomenal. We where it comes, we it

Shawn Dougherty:

All the time. And the flip side of that is the specialist who we began to really question the knowledge of the specialist as they were trying to lead us. If we had done it with home birth, if we’d done it with home education, the specialist would not have chosen the paths that we chose. They would’ve said, oh, no, no, you’re doing it totally wrong. I’m

Beth Dougherty:

Trying to remember the scientist I read recently. We do a God of research, and I was reading a scientist and he said, oh, you know who it was? I think it was Alan Williams who’s a grass grazing, but he is a geneticist. And I think he said all scientific research is anecdotal. And what he meant was it’s all contextual. If I take something out of its it’s living system and I bring it over here and I test it, I can tell you what happened under those circumstances. But I know more have a fact about that thing than if I had observed it in its natural setting. In fact, yes, because I took it out and I don’t know what it will really do in its natural setting. I figure as though Naga just is anecdotal. It’s contextual. That’s a safe place to start from anywhere. Sean said to me, Sean is the source of a God of my logical statement. And he says, it’s really helpful to start a statement with, well, in my experience or that has not been my experience because that’s about the biggest factual statement we’re able to make and in nature and in farming. That’s really true.

Marlin Miller:

Well, that segues unbelievably well to my next thought. Again, just a small little complaint. I’m so tired of everybody being so certain about everything.

Shawn Dougherty:

Yes, yes. Everybody is so sure When I enter a conversation, when people are certain, I think I’m bored already and I’m not really interested in you preaching at me, they’re not even listening. I’m very interested in us probing a question together. One of the things that happens when we get our friends together is so often we are probing interesting questions. What does it mean to make the Sunday Sabbath Day holy? What does that mean? And I had that conversation with my kids recently. We had a little bit of a discussion is work on Sunday. If it’s work that I like to do,

Beth Dougherty:

It’s not work. That’s right, that’s right. Or is it okay if I do your work and you do my work? I’m not sure that’s exploration so much as it is.

Marlin Miller:

Right. Justification. That’s right. So now let’s go back to your childhood and your family.

Beth Dougherty:

Well, you were talking about people wanting to be so certain people being adamant about facts and my childhood gives me an insight into, or I think it does, into why people are so vehemently attached to their own opinions. And it’s sort of like this, when I know something is true and you question it, I’m not threatened. We can discuss it together and maybe you’ll see what I’m seeing. Or maybe we’ll each clarify the other’s view and we’ll together we’ll see things a little bit more clearly. Or maybe you’ll clinging very strenuously to your opposition of something I know to be true. And I’ll be sorry and it’ll probably la the conversation a little, but it won’t threaten me. I’ll still know it’s true. If Jesus says to you, how do you know? I mean, if anybody says to you, how do you know, Lord?

You’ll think, well, I’ll try and help you see that, but at the end of this conversation, I’ll still know Jesus’. Lord, I don’t have to get head up about it. Right. Well, my childhood doesn’t really merit a whole lot of looking into, but my dad was a, what’s the word? He was a relativist. He was, there’s another term for him. I can’t remember what it is. At any rate, I have a very loving mother and I love my siblings, but it wasn’t a secure childhood in any way. It was in many ways, very, what’s the word? Threatened. It was an unpleasant thing, and it was largely unpleasant because daddy didn’t recognize any reality beyond whatever he made up. So our reality was reality is whatever the meanest person in the room says it is, or the meanest person who’s glad daddy basically. But that was genuinely what I thought was real, that the universe doesn’t have real, the idea of objective reality was repugnant to me because the only reality I had been offered was whatever daddy said it was under threat.

So I grew up without, I wasn’t thinking, well, let’s go find the truth. That would be nice. I was simply thinking that human interactions were interactions of competition and force, and whoever had command of the greatest coercion named what the rules were. When you believe that, when you get the chance, you get older, you make up your own story, your own reality, and that’s the one that you clinging to. And your friends or the people either have similar realities. We can all think of instances. We know people whose life choices are bound to a falsehood, and they make friends with other people who will support that falsehood. And there are other friends of the people who maybe don’t support that falsehood but have their own falsehood. And we all just, I’m okay. You’re okay. Right. But what that means is you can’t have a sense of humor.

You can’t have a sense of proportion. You can’t stand to be threatened. That’s why Daddy was so mean because his reality wasn’t real. Real reality didn’t hold it up. So he felt constantly threatened. And I think when you back up enough and you say, I didn’t make the world, but it’s evident that somebody big and powerful and loving that all beauty and goodness and truth come from somebody. And then you meet that somebody and you realize he’s been trying to meet you. He knows you, and he’s been trying to get you to notice him. You can get to a very safe place and you think, well, whatever’s true, it’s going to be okay. It’s all good.

Marlin Miller:

How old were you when you saw that there was more to a father?

Beth Dougherty:

I went to college. I went to a Catholic college, and I had the interesting experience of being in long-term contact with a bunch of young people for whom there were three things I didn’t recognize. First. When you had a conversation with them, they clearly thought there was something called truth that you were supposed to be figuring out. And that was my first glimmer, that there might be something objectively true,

Marlin Miller:

Totally foreign to you.

Beth Dougherty:

Totally foreign.

Shawn Dougherty:

Totally

Marlin Miller:

Foreign,

Beth Dougherty:

Totally foreign. They were also,

Shawn Dougherty:

Isn’t that interesting? I read Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s book, and I thought, oh my gosh, this is the weirdest. Do people really have this experience? And Beth’s response was, that’s my life. And I went, are you kidding

Beth Dougherty:

Me? It ends with some sort of sort of questionnaire.

Shawn Dougherty:

That’s right.

Beth Dougherty:

And he’s reading it to me, show me just how awful the book is. And I kept waiting for him.

Shawn Dougherty:

The book is great story. The book is great. Phenomenal book about an introduction to a world that I was totally outside of my experience.

Beth Dougherty:

He’s reading it to me, this questionnaire at the end, I’m sitting going, I’m waiting for him to get to the bad part. And he gets to the end and I’m like, and when are we going to the bad part? I can’t remember where we were. I’m

Shawn Dougherty:

Sorry. I just

Beth Dougherty:

No, no, that’s all right. So these kids, they obviously thought there was something called truth. Again, I thought of that as a power play, but I was interested. So they thought there was truth. They were chased. That was a new experience for me because people in the world, they don’t treat other human beings as sacred in that way. And they were happy. And I had never seen happiness like that. Just the content, the quiet content of security. I am loved. The world is good,

Marlin Miller:

Real joy.

Beth Dougherty:

And I thought, these people are loony. And I was really turned off by the fact that they were all religious. I’m like, they’re loony and they’re religious. Two things, I don’t get it, but day after day I’d think, yeah, but what have I got? I could go jump under a bus. That seems like the logical thing to do with this eventually, and I like this, or I could see what they’ve got. So I really did just, I jumped aboard ship because their bark was floating and mine was sinking, and I thought, fake it till you make it. It was beautiful. I could see that their myth there, self delusion was beautiful. And that I think was that, I wonder how many people have this experience in the end, Bishop Barron, Bishop Robert Barron says, you can argue about truthful the truth. You can argue about what’s good, but beauty is kind of incontrovertible. And in the end, that’s very convincing because beauty couldn’t happen on accident. You try and make beauty happen on accident, go into your bedroom and start throwing things around. Beauty won’t happen on accident.

Marlin Miller:

It cannot evolve.

Beth Dougherty:

And so that for me was utterly convincing. I can remember being in Colorado in the mountains and looking up at the stars and thinking, gee whiz, that can’t be an accident. And

Marlin Miller:

It hit you square.

Beth Dougherty:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

So that was in college.

Beth Dougherty:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

When did you guys meet?

Beth Dougherty:

My first day of college.

Marlin Miller:

Really? Okay. Was he in the Looney bin?

Beth Dougherty:

Oh yeah. He was a, oh

Shawn Dougherty:

Yeah, was

Beth Dougherty:

He was a senior.

Shawn Dougherty:

I was going to daily math and had these great friends and

Beth Dougherty:

He was a senior and I was a freshman and he was a drama major and he was a phenomenal actor. I could sit and watch him for hours and he was this pain in the neck who said, I go to daily mass, you want to see me? That’s where you can see me. So we didn’t see each other that much. We’d have dinner together after was in mass. In Rehears a lot.

Right. It was busy

Shawn Dougherty:

Theater.

Beth Dougherty:

And so I got exposed to the beauty of the Catholic liturgy. You sometimes hear it called smells and bells, meaning incense and bells. But it was beautiful and intentional and you hear the word of God proclaimed as though it’s the word of God. And I thought, well, for a lie, this looks really good.

Marlin Miller:

Wow. So you met in college? Yeah. When did you get married?

Shawn Dougherty:

So Beth, she was a freshman. I left and did professional theater for a while. And I think we were kind of waiting. Beth would say We’re waiting on me, but we were waiting. I was waiting on you to get out of school. I mean, there was that and waiting for God, waiting for God’s timing and stuff like that. So we ended up getting married very soon after you graduated.

Beth Dougherty:

Sean,

Shawn Dougherty:

The next.

Beth Dougherty:

Sean did love being single. It was a very good single guy. I did love being single. He was good at, he loved the minimalism of it, but we got married pretty close after I got out of school.

Marlin Miller:

So how many kids total? Eight. Eight? Okay.

Beth Dougherty:

Eight and one in heaven.

Marlin Miller:

Yes, that’s right. Really?

Beth Dougherty:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Can I ask about that?

Beth Dougherty:

Oh, most people have one or two of those. Yeah. We lost a little girl between our second daughter and our gas baby. I was 45 I think when our gas baby was born. We have eight spread over 21 years, so it was what the Lord sent.

Marlin Miller:

Wow.

Beth Dougherty:

Yeah,

Marlin Miller:

There’s something, I’m only 48, just a baby. The older I know, I know there’s still moisture back there, but the older I get, we have a few up there as well. And now that pop is home, heaven gets a lot closer when you have somebody

Beth Dougherty:

There.

Shawn Dougherty:

We had a woman, kind of an odd bird who at our

Beth Dougherty:

Church,

Shawn Dougherty:

And I don’t remember the whole story.

Beth Dougherty:

I can’t remember why she did that,

Shawn Dougherty:

But one of the things, she came up to us and she said she had a dream about us. And she said, who’s the third girl? We only have two girls. She said, who’s the third girl? And we said, don’t know. And she said that

Beth Dougherty:

It was about four years after we got off that baby, and she described her as a 4-year-old.

Shawn Dougherty:

And she said that that girl told her to tell us that anything we want just ask just

Marlin Miller:

Isn’t that beautiful? Wow. Did you give her a name?

Beth Dougherty:

Madeline, Pierre, Rosemary,

Marlin Miller:

Madeline.

Beth Dougherty:

I knew I wasn’t going to have very many more babies. I had to use up all the rest of my names, Madigan, Pia, Rosemarie.

Shawn Dougherty:

But that really did. You’re absolutely right. That does bring heaven closer. Again, we were just at a conference and my oldest son and I were on stage and we were talking about the future and what are your dreams and stuff like that for your family and stuff like that. And my dream is that we are all together. It’s great whatever we do on earth and everything, but I want to have a really big party in heaven and I want everybody to be there. All my grandkids and kids and everybody else. That’s my dream.

Marlin Miller:

When about a year or so after dad passed, and that’s 14 years now. Yeah. Excuse me. About a year after that, we were matched with a little baby girl in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And we packed up our two kids and we drove out there and they had told us that she had some heart issues. They didn’t tell us how extensive they were. And we walked in to the hospital and someone snagged us and put us in a room. And then a doctor came later and told us that she had died that I think the night before or the morning of or

Speaker 5:

Something.

Marlin Miller:

And her name is Amelia. And one of my regrets is that we didn’t, they just told us to go home. And one of my bigger regrets in life is that I didn’t push back and say, Hey, can I have her body

Speaker 5:

Right. That’s my

Shawn Dougherty:

Baby.

Marlin Miller:

Absolutely.

Shawn Dougherty:

That’s right.

Marlin Miller:

And also to meet the birth mom and just to be there and just get to know her. And we didn’t know any better. And so we just drove

Shawn Dougherty:

Home. I think we have to have these experiences periodically where we really think I should have done differently, but then that affects us for the rest of our lives

Speaker 3:

That

Shawn Dougherty:

We don’t do things like that. Again, we do push back prep

Beth Dougherty:

For that.

Shawn Dougherty:

We do push back the next time, or we do. And I do think, God, we look at it as regret. I really blew at that time. I think there is something to that. I mean, we rehab, but I really do think God’s prepping you for the the more important time.

Beth Dougherty:

I also think that those happen because we were talking earlier about specialization, institutionalization, they happen because we’re not doing things on a human scale. We’re not interacting as people with other people, but people with institutions. And that’s a situation that all of us are in our little ways working to correct. I was talking to one of my boys just a couple of days ago, and we were talking about things that you can’t change. We look at the way this country, the physical reality of this country is treated, the soil, the land is treated, and we look at the way people eat, and that’s a huge problem. And I would say it can’t be fixed. Now we know some wonderful people who farm very well, provide top quality food for a lot of other people and are good to the soil. And in 30 years, they haven’t converted a ton of other people to farming like they’re farming, but they’ve made a dent, right?

And we’re at the opposite end of the spectrum, helping individual families step out of the conventional ag conventional food system and grow their own food. Now, if somebody said, we need to fix this situation tomorrow, we just need, or next year we need better food for everybody, they couldn’t make it happen. So it’s impossible. But what we can’t do as a group, we can do as individuals, it’s like conversion. We can’t convert the world, but the world can convert the world one heart at a time. And if enough people say, well, that’s how I want to eat. Most people can make that happen for themselves on some level. So it’s doable, but it’s not doable. Institutionally, your institution didn’t offer you that personal contact with your child, but you’ll never let anybody do that to you again. Pop

Marlin Miller:

Had a way distilling wisdom down into just little phrases. Those are our prophets. Oh, oh my goodness. The higher you get on the ladder, the more you can see, are you nuts? The older I get, the more I realize how unbelievably wise that is. And he would often say, Marlon, don’t ever forget. You’re just one guy, but don’t ever forget. You’re one guy. And it’s exactly what you’re saying. That’s exactly right. That let’s not think too highly of ourself here, but let’s also not forget that we can make a dent that we

Shawn Dougherty:

Can change. That’s absolutely right.

Marlin Miller:

And that impact, and all of a sudden a family changes and it starts to change a community, and then the community changes the county, and then all of a sudden it grows into something big. I was going to go someplace else, but Oh, there it is. So one thing that I’m starting to think of this whole AI thing, and I know this is a huge can of worms, I get it. But let me just share this and then just ask for your feedback. I was watching a podcast where a guy was talking about this whole huge change of quantum, and I don’t even understand the basics of what quantum is, but he was saying it is millions of times more than our current fastest computing. And the host said, what in the world should we do? And the guy just very, very quickly said, talk to your neighbor. Get to know your friends. Have real conversation, talk, get to know people, and don’t do it through the phone and through the zoom and do it with face-to-face. And it just reminded me that ai, no matter how unbelievably intelligent and fast it is, it’s only working on its inputs and input is still human. So I don’t even know what that means. I just know that it’s over my head. So anyway, feel free to weigh in.

Beth Dougherty:

Well, I was laughing because ai, when you keep cows mean something else. Very true. And I was thinking, yeah, AI is a problem. I really don’t think bulls do a better job, but what’s, that’s also real community, right?

Shawn Dougherty:

I think that with things like that, it is a little bit hard to just ignore it. On the other hand, that’s kind of been our response to it. I mean, it’s not affected us very much that we know of, and it certainly doesn’t affect how my potatoes grow in the ground or how I milk the cow or any of those things. So yeah, we don’t think about it

Beth Dougherty:

A whole lot. I think the other piece of it is that the more you understand the complexity of the natural world, and you look at how we’re farming, how we’re feeding ourselves, you look at the medical system, the more you can watch any societal change and think we’re teetering on a razor’s edge, I’m not really worried about where AI is going to be in 20 years. Maybe it is something I should worry about, but as Sean says, we don’t know much and we’re not encountering it. But I do actually think that a country of people whose soil is dead, whose food comes from 1500 miles away and who are on average on six or seven drugs a piece, and let’s look at obesity rate diabetics.

Shawn Dougherty:

My entertainment comes virtually. All my entertainment comes through wires.

Beth Dougherty:

When you look at that, I’m not scared of that culture. That culture is so close to imploding. I’m not anxious that it should do, but I believe it will. So then I think you guys can tell me about your projects and I’ll think, well, if you’re around to accomplish that, maybe I’ll worry about it, but I’m not sure you’ll be around to accomplish it. Especially

Marlin Miller:

When you dump into that whole mix, the plummeting birth rate. Yes,

Beth Dougherty:

Yes. Right. Of those, you put your finger on it. It said, it doesn’t matter what metric we’re looking at, they all look like human obsolescence. Those dumb mistaken plans don’t make me feel threatened.

Shawn Dougherty:

And I think partly too is as you launch and Beth has, when she speaks to women often at women’s conferences, one of the big questions is, how do we have the courage to do what we do? That’s to

Beth Dougherty:

Break with the culture

Shawn Dougherty:

So completely. And for us, having now done it for 40 years, where our 40th anniversary is coming right out, we are seeing that the payoff is huge. I mean, we, there was no birth control that we used, so we just had the kids that God sent us. Oh my gosh, that’s what everybody should do. We live in the country. Oh my gosh. That’s what everybody should do. Nice. We homeschool. Oh my gosh. That’s what everybody should do. Should everybody do it? Yeah, I think everybody should do it. That’s hard to say. On the other hand, we have had such, the fruit of that has been so good and so rich that I’m so glad that we, and why were we making these choices? Because as Beth says, we were taking the next good step.

Didn’t know where we were going with this as somebody was telling us recently. There’s no manual

Beth Dougherty:

For this, right? There’s no playbook for the way things have been going for anybody really. There’s no playbook,

Shawn Dougherty:

But we just, what’s the next good thing to do? The next good thing is to not put them in school. The next good thing is to move to the country. The next good thing is to add on an addition. We have too many kits.

Beth Dougherty:

Next good thing. Next thing is to plant a tomato. But I think we’re very effectively distracted from that next good thing. I’ll plant a tomato next year, this year. I just have to, I mean, what are the things that used to distract us, a better car, a higher paycheck, newer sports?

Shawn Dougherty:

I

Beth Dougherty:

Think there’s a lot

Shawn Dougherty:

Of things like that

Beth Dougherty:

Being asked to the right parties. I dunno what Dunno.

Marlin Miller:

This episode of the Plain Values Podcast is sponsored by Kentucky Lumber. Derek Geier and his family are an incredible group of people. Derek told me a story a few months ago that absolutely rings true with what I want our family to be about and who we want to care about. Derek was telling me a story about his family showing sheep, and they do a thing in their hometown where the night before, I think the main competition, they bring kids that have special needs in and give them a chance to walk and show the sheep along with the kids who are actually showing the sheep. Derek told me that there was a young man whose arms were waving rather wildly and nobody of the kids that were showing sheep chose him to walk with them. And so he was last and he was left out. And Derek said, Marlon, he said, I was so amazed to watch our son, Joe go over and pick this little guy.

He said his parents reached out. This little guy’s parents reached out the night before. He was telling me the story with tears in their eyes, and they were so grateful to Joe and to Derek that their son would do that and make much of their son. Guys. That is the kind of company that is the kind of family that is the kind of value-based company that I want to do business with. And if you need anything as far as wood flooring, anything at all, trim, please give them a call. You will not be disappointed. Derek and his team are fantastic. You can find th**@***********rs.com. Can we talk about the house fire?

Shawn Dougherty:

Oh yeah. Yeah. One of the best things that happened in my life

Marlin Miller:

That years ago, two

Shawn Dougherty:

Years ago, right? Yeah. You just said one of the best things that happened in your life. Oh my gosh. Fabulous. And I knew it on the day that I came back. I did. I don’t know that my wife would necessarily agree with this. What? But I was driving to go pick up one of my sons at the airport. We were getting ready. The whole family was getting ready to go to the Rory Fee Homestead Heritage Conference. So we were all going, and I had gone, one of our sons had flown into Pittsburgh, so I’d gone to go get him, and I got a phone call that said, don’t worry, I don’t think the house has burned a whole lot.

Beth Dougherty:

I just said, you may not be able to get up the hill because the fire trucks are in the way, but we’re all fine.

Shawn Dougherty:

Yes. In any event, as I was walking, we parked down below at Airbnb and then I walked over to the house and from the angle I was walking at it, you didn’t see very much. But as we kept moving around, it was getting worse and worse. It was clear that the fire had done a lot. No, I knew that my sons were going to rebuild. I knew that they were going to help us rebuild. We had a hundred year old house and it was a house we loved, and we would’ve been happy in that house. We would’ve continued to be happy in that house. But this was a great opportunity because I knew that the kids were going to rebuild it. I knew that we were insured, so I knew that the finances would be okay. I did not know how expensive it was going to be. And there were some very generous GoFund. There were

Beth Dougherty:

Two fundraisers that were just beyond generous for us.

Shawn Dougherty:

So in any event, that has gotten us through. But they did rebuild it. And I have an architect, I have a stone mason, I have timber framers, I have electricians, I have plumbers, the whole thing. And it’s not just the boys, it’s the girls as well. And it became this great educational experience as all of the kids. One of ’em is a member of the timber frame, Gil. So he taught everybody else how to timber frame. And they started timber. The timbers came in, they arrived on January 1st. By January 17th, the timber frame structure was completed.

Marlin Miller:

Get out of here.

Shawn Dougherty:

They had done that all 17 days. They had cut it all and they had locked it all together.

Beth Dougherty:

And we don’t work on Sundays and we don’t work on,

Shawn Dougherty:

But it was so exciting to watch that happen. Then it was the rest of the build and the build did take a year and a half or so to do, but they really were very careful about how they built. And it’s a work of art. It is a beautiful,

Marlin Miller:

It is a work of art.

Shawn Dougherty:

Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

I will never forget. I will never forget what our neighbor Ivan said, and Ivan is an Amish furniture craftsman now farmer. He’s great. He knows what he’s talking about. Because he built That’s right. He builds. He built furniture well, and he builds his little houses. He does. And he looked at me and he said, Marlon, he said, I’ve seen a lot of timber framing. I’ve never seen anything with this detail and this quality in a house. He said, I’ve rarely seen it in this good in furniture, let alone a house.

Shawn Dougherty:

The boys would start to cut something and if it didn’t fit exactly right, that’s not me. I would get it into place and I’d say, done. Finished. So they would pry it back apart,

Marlin Miller:

Pull it back apart, which that is. And I believe you told us that you guys built it all green.

Shawn Dougherty:

Yes. So as it dry, it’s super tight, locked

Marlin Miller:

Together. It’s never come. That’s right. I mean it would. That’s right. That’s right. Unbelievable. Well,

Beth Dougherty:

I had a different perspective as the house. I came home to my house fire, and in the seconds as you turn into your driveway and you realize, oh, my house is going to go before my mind could formulate fears, I could see my children on the lawn. And at that point you’ve had two things put in front of you. There’s my house and there’s my family, and they can’t even exist on the same scale. So I was really very, I mean, I just sat on the lawn and watched the house burn. It’s traumatic because you’ve lived in it for 25 years.

Marlin Miller:

All the memories, all the little things

Beth Dougherty:

And the homelessness. I mean, we had A, B and b, so I knew where we were going to live, but we all have this nest. That’s the place we go back to. And it wasn’t there anymore. But I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and it becomes evident very quickly if you think about it, that if the Lord wants to give you a gift, like a new house that your whole family can have as a project, first he has to get rid of the old one. And when you stop and think about it, losing your house is, I don’t mean it’s nothing like, let’s put it in perspective, it really is just nothing. It’s a pile of sticks, some stuff that you had collected, and if anything really happened, you’d know right away that that house was not a big deal.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah. Keep it in perspective.

Beth Dougherty:

We have, we’re still working on it. We will be for the next 10 years probably, but we have had a gift we wouldn’t even have known. We could ask for, Lord, can we work for two years on a family project in which every one of us is. I think that that’s

Shawn Dougherty:

Part of it is that every summer was the summer of the barn or the summer of the building. We’d

Beth Dougherty:

Have the project

Shawn Dougherty:

Every year. And you lived year and we were running out of those things. My who was still at home were the four youngest. We just didn’t have as many the projects. Only youngest

Beth Dougherty:

Bud’s married,

Shawn Dougherty:

I guess. That’s right. But he was very active. He was a very big part of the thing. So my oldest was able to get away from his work and come back and be our general contractor. And one of the things I loved too was that he didn’t really know the four youngest as well.

Beth Dougherty:

When your kids are spread over 21 years, the oldest are a generation away from the youngest. Wow.

Shawn Dougherty:

It was funny. At one point I said to my youngest, I said to him, what is Luke to you? And he didn’t even understand what that Luke is our oldest. He said, what do you mean? I said, well, what’s the relationship of Luke? And he said, well, he’s your brother, right? And I said, oh, no, no, no. He’s your Brother. And he went, yes, he did not, how long ago did that happen?

Beth Dougherty:

About 10 years ago. He was about seven. He was seven or eight. That’s amazing. But he’s the same. There’s only a year between our youngest and our oldest son’s first. So they just run togethers and they knew that they were uncle and nephew, but it had never occurred to Raymond to sort of do the math on that

Shawn Dougherty:

One. Wow. He’s your brother. Yes. But that those four youngest became Luke’s crew and the playfulness. Beth had raised

Beth Dougherty:

Mutual appreciation too.

Shawn Dougherty:

Yeah. Beth had been the primary educator, obviously as mom almost always is in a homeschool setting. And so she had given them all the same books and the same stuff. So any of the four youngest would start a quote from something and the oldest one would know what it was too. And it was delightful to see this play out as the oldest got to know his four younger siblings. But I love working with my kids. It is my favorite thing to do. And we had two years of, I did Not light the fire, but if I had known it was going to be this good, I might have lit a fire.

Marlin Miller:

Wait, wait, you said light. I thought you said like,

Shawn Dougherty:

I’m sorry. I loved the fire. I did not light the fire.

Marlin Miller:

I get it now. Okay. Okay. So you guys have already answered all the questions that I have down about what happened, what you felt, what goes through your mind when you see that this is our house on fire,

Then these beautiful stories that come out of that and your family and the community. Was it not, I remember I was at the Homestead Festival when Rory. Yeah, I remember you were got up and said, Hey, by the way, and there are what, 4,000 people there? Three, four or 5,000 people there. And he said, Hey, our friend Shauna Beth just, and he goes down the row and they raised a chunk. They did.

Beth Dougherty:

It was a big chunk. Chunk.

Marlin Miller:

They raised

Beth Dougherty:

A chunk,

Marlin Miller:

Right?

Beth Dougherty:

Absolutely. Every opportunity we get, we try and share this. It made the difference between having a house, rebuilding a house together,

Basic stick construction, get it up there, get it roughed in and get in and the gift of our time together. And that was what it really gave us was the time to put together all of our knowledge and all of our mutual time in that house and our knowledge of how it had been used. It was an old farmhouse. It had burned once before we ever got there, and it was so many houses that were built without plumbing and electricity and then had them put in, it had been damaged to God in the process, and we had made it do things for 25 years. So it wasn’t really intended to do or it couldn’t do any more or it couldn’t do well managed. There were no good food storage spaces. We needed to cheese cave in a root cellar. We needed places to put canned goods. We needed places to hang cured meats, and we jury rigged all that. We had to be able to process milk in there. We jury that now with all of that history in the house and all of our knowledge of how you had to step around this and hold the hook on that just so we could go in and build the thing as it should have been built to function.

And it’s worked beautifully. I mean, we’re in it. We’ve been using it. We designed it to be used, and it’s a joy the way health is a joy when you move around and you just feel good. It’s a joy to use the house.

Shawn Dougherty:

But apart from the house, what happened as people came around us, the community and then the homestead, I really began to feel the homestead family. And that Homestead family is so much bigger than our local community. It’s huge Now. We speak at conferences all over the country, and these are lovely people.

Beth Dougherty:

The homesteading movement before 20 17, 20 18, such as it was, and my parents were sort of fringe homesteaders when I was a kid.

Shawn Dougherty:

There was a lot of,

Beth Dougherty:

Right, we spoke at those events. So we began speaking at Homestead events in 2010, and for those first years, we made sure that at some point in a talk our Christianity showed, but it never showed at the beginning or they’d have checked us off right there, don’t need to listen to these people. They’re going to Christians. It still is in certain circles, really about commercial production of organic food for sale. So it’s not really a family or even a community thing. It’s an industry thing, nothing against it. But it had that collection of individuals rather than community feel. At every event you felt like, well, here are a lot of people coming together for something, but they’re not really being joined into a mass. And they’ll all go home and forget it. Then about 20 17, 20 18, and I would say Amy Fuel. Amy Fuel,

Shawn Dougherty:

Absolutely.

Beth Dougherty:

And the Homesteaders America people deserve a big chunk of this. Amy Fuel said, I’m going to have an event, and she got Joel Ston to come. He is her neighbor within a couple hours and a lot more people showed up than she expected. I think she thought, oh, a hundred, 150 and she had 500. She planned it again that year. We were there. I think that was 2018. It was bigger. What was apparent very quickly was that these were different people. These were Christian families coming together, feeling a call. And we started, I remember when we started to hear people in 2021, that was HOA, had an event that year when most events were still closed. And people would say, we’d say, well, so how’d you get into homesteading? And Well, in 2018, God told me to move my family to the country. Or in 2019, I had a dream to take my family to the country. Now, Marvin, we’re talking about going from

Shawn Dougherty:

Over and over and over again.

Beth Dougherty:

We’re talking about going from a very tiny demographic, that tiny subset of homesteaders that were Christian to lots and lots and lots of people at Homesteaders of America at the Homestead Festival, Ozarks, Ozark home, all these homestead things are popping up and they’re packed with Christian families who will tell you, well, three years ago, I bought a place in the country and I left my accounting firm in Boston because I’m supposed to live in the country and be family with my family. These aren’t preppers. That’s a totally different thing. And they’re not running away. They’re running too. They’re just people who

Shawn Dougherty:

Felt, and they’re not trying to make a lot of money.

Beth Dougherty:

Right. Well, and that’s the

Shawn Dougherty:

Big one. It’s not microgreens

Beth Dougherty:

Gets us right to the heart of what we’re talking about, which is God made a nature that wants to feed you and give you healthy. There aren’t dollars growing on trees. There’s food and health growing on trees. And these people, instead of saying, this year, I like to picture myself instead of in my nice suit, in my nice office, I’d like to picture myself in my overalls on my tractor in the country, but that my bank account’s going to look the same. And that’s how the Homestead movement, a certain part of the Homestead movement used to look people who didn’t, they weren’t envisioning changing their life or their lifestyle. They were envisioning changing their garb and their setting. I want to be a homesteader now. Just the way you might say, last year I was into rowing on the Potomac, and this year I’m going to, it’s more of like a

Marlin Miller:

Goal to be checked off or something.

Beth Dougherty:

Yeah, something like that. It was a fashion statement almost.

Marlin Miller:

But then let’s go back to 20 17, 20 18. And guys, I’ve heard the same stories. I bet you have. I’m thinking of a friend that I met in Idaho from California, and he said, he called me a couple months later and said, Mar, I’m looking at two places around the country. Would you add anything? And I told him about Middle Tennessee, and he said, that’s one of ’em that’s on our list. Guess where he ended up?

Beth Dougherty:

Middle Tennessee.

Marlin Miller:

I gave him a hug a couple days ago at the Homestead Fest because that’s where they moved. And those stories are everywhere. Absolute. Absolutely everywhere. That’s right. So where did that come from? Did the Lord simply say to a whole huge plethora of families, it’s time to

Beth Dougherty:

Go? I think so.

Marlin Miller:

That’s what I think. But why

Beth Dougherty:

He’ll show us.

Shawn Dougherty:

Well, I think one of the things that we definitely are seeing is how fragile the current system is. You can count on food, as Beth said, being traveling 150 miles and that continuing

Beth Dougherty:

1500.

Shawn Dougherty:

Yeah. Now there these exercises or these ways of farming, these ways of doing this, this is a really young experiment. It’s only happened since, really since World War II or

Beth Dougherty:

So. Well, really, I mean, if you want to take a good closeup on modern ag, what you’re seeing isn’t something that we’ve tried for

75 years. It’s something that we began a break earlier than that. But after World War ii, it was a decision of the government hand in hand with big industry people with names like Rockefeller and Kellogg and Ford, that our country’s agriculture was going to become industrialized, and it was enacted in fiat. You can go back and look at your history books. Don’t look at your history books. Do your research yourself and find out that was a choice. And it’s a choice that has never worked. That’s why we are where we are, because each step we took izing, mechanizing, and

Marlin Miller:

Then subsidizing

Beth Dougherty:

It. Subsidizing.

Shawn Dougherty:

Thank you very much. That the only, and that it’s continuing. But as Beth says, it’s never really worked. It’s never worked. We keep,

Beth Dougherty:

Every year there’s a new bandage. Every year there’s a new, well, this will fix it. And what’s interesting, Morgan, is that in 19, I’m going to say 41, but it might’ve been 40, the yearbook for the Department of Ag in the US

And the yearbook is sort of with this collection of studies and essays and things written by many people in the Department of Ag and some people not in the department about American Ag for that year. That year, the book was entitled Grass. And it was one big fat book of a whole lot of people explaining that ecological health, and there is no agricultural health without ecological health. Ecological health depended upon those parts of the planet, which are not naturally going to go to trees being mostly kept in grass because grass is endlessly productive. It’s harvestable many times during the year, all Y properly managed. It makes its own soil and fertility. Every tillage act that we engage in decreases soil fertility. And prior to, not very long ago, like your great grandfather people knew that the only way to put that back was to put it under animals again. Put it in grass, graze it, it’ll gain in fertility. So in 1941, the USDA’s statement about American agriculture was that we should put great swaths of crop land back into grass.

Marlin Miller:

Okay.

Beth Dougherty:

And in 46 we were plowing, that’s what I was going to say. Fence row. Defense row.

Marlin Miller:

That’s what I was going to say. Your grandpa lived through the Dust bowl. Okay. Okay. So this whole thing, I’ve been studying epigenetics and how trauma can go generations deep, right? Yes. The whole thing of the Bible verse that talks about things are

Beth Dougherty:

Passed, he means it to the seventh generation. He that’s not vindictive. That’s fact. It’s factual. That’s

Marlin Miller:

Right. Do you feel like that his living through the Dust Bowl literally in Oklahoma when that whole thing just totally fascinates me to no end because they tilled everything under and it all blew away. It all blew away. It blew into New York City for crying out loud. Were you alive when he was alive? Did you ever talk to him about it?

Shawn Dougherty:

Oh yeah. No. Didn’t ever talk to him about that, I don’t think. Grandpa, you mean? Yeah. I don’t know that I ever talked to grandpa about it. Yes, he was alive. I was alive when he was alive.

Beth Dougherty:

What did your dog say about it though? Your dad remembered watching his dad.

Shawn Dougherty:

Yeah, he did remember, and we would hear stories once in a while that the rain would be coming in Oklahoma, right where they were. There’s the South Canadian River isn and then they’re seeing the South Canadian river in Oklahoma. But any event they would watch the rain come, hit the South Canadian river and then slide down so it didn’t hit. And watch the story is watching Grandpa cry as the rain didn’t come that direction. I was not, my agricultural background started, I guess when dad bought a farm a quarter of a mile down the road from where he had grown up. And so we would go out there weekends and farm and stuff like

Beth Dougherty:

That. You kept a big garden and he kept a lot of cows.

Shawn Dougherty:

The big change is that my dad’s, there were 11 kids, two room house, and they all became professionals.

Beth Dougherty:

They owe,

Shawn Dougherty:

They all became medical. Kidding. No came medical pharmacy. Now many of them had land and they did some farming and dad did some pretty good farming.

Beth Dougherty:

And when he retired, he retired to be a farmer. That’s

Shawn Dougherty:

Right. But they all said, we are not living that same way. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. And that’s the break. And the Amish are doing it now a generation later where they’re not passing on their agriculture. And so the Amish are bringing us in to speak at their conferences and we think, why are you bringing us in to speak at your

Beth Dougherty:

Conferences? We thought we were a comic rug,

Shawn Dougherty:

But it’s because it’s not getting passed on. And what we are doing, what we’re trying to do in our book, which is right there, the Independent Farmstead, our book is an attempt to capture that knowledge that was passed on this way orally. And that got broken. And it got broken with my dad. I mean, my mom knew how to do piece chickens. Dad knew how to farm. They all knew how to do all that. But that did not really get passed on to the next generation. And again, the same thing is happening world. I think

Beth Dougherty:

It’s worth pointing out too, that mom and dad, your mom and dad would have as recently as that they would have actually learned from their parents mostly some fairly sustainable things like seven year rotations and putting things back into pasture to restore fertility. So when their generation, and I would say partly traumatized by things like the depression, although that was dad more the Dust Bowl person because Mom Doherty was in Modesto, California and wasn’t, the depression didn’t bother her that much. But in 19 40, 44, 45, 46, as we were coming to the end of the war, the United States had industrialized in order to provide war material for the winning of World War ii. If you can call that war, if you can say it was ever won. And coming out of the war, we had the infrastructure now for heavy equipment, chemicals and meals ready to eat. And we just big industry wasn’t going to lose the foothold, the foothold, the stranglehold it had gotten on the US economy. So from 19 40, 41 saying all that gun needs or much of that gun needs to go back into grass, we went to No, we’re just going to make mega farms, manage them with machines and everybody’s going to be blessed by moving into town and eating TV dinners. And that’s when that

Shawn Dougherty:

Gap, that has not changed very much in the sense that our son, just several years ago,

Beth Dougherty:

We have a son who’s a veterinarian,

Shawn Dougherty:

Right? And he graduated from Ohio State University and he would come back and tell us, here’s the model for future farming. And it was horrific.

Beth Dougherty:

Big bubble, methane capturing bubble, everything mechanized. That’s been a dream of the industrial ag sector for, I mean, Wendell Berry was writing about it in the seventies, maybe eighties, but a long time ago. And I laugh. I think you want to make God laugh, tell ’em your plans. That’s a plan. I don’t think the thing that’s missing is that we sit here and we feel in ourselves that biology is frail, it’s fragile, it’s prone to problems. Like we have to feed it and tend it, and we still know it’s going to die. And that’s what industrial ag overlooks completely.

The reason that the average dairy cow today is slaughtered after one or two lactations as opposed to having maybe 15 or 20, right? It takes a lot to raise a dairy cow. You don’t slaughter her after one or two lactations if you don’t have to. Why do they? She doesn’t want to breed back. We’ve got like a 40% breed back rate in dairy cattle. Well, where did that come from? Well, it came from in 19, 20, 30, 40 as we began ramping up production and offering them grain and then throwing them metabolism off and then offering them 15 now I think different kinds of additive into their food, not additives into their food therapies. And it gotten us to dairy cows that produce 8, 9, 10, 12 gallons a day for one or two lactations and then they won’t breed back and they become McDonald’s hamburgers. What a silly game to be playing.

Shawn Dougherty:

And we are looking at the other side of farming, which is that fertility keeps coming back, it keeps getting better. What could you do that you’ve got this bucket of milk and it’s going to keep coming every day, twice a day. The richest best food. And all you have to do is put an animal on grass. You don’t have to give it grain.

Beth Dougherty:

You have to manage on grass, you have to manage

Shawn Dougherty:

On grass. But that whole pattern is so beautiful and we’re seeing it all over our farm. Our son, my brother came to visit us for a little bit and he looked at our potatoes and he said, man, those potatoes, he said, where are all the potato bugs? I said, if you have good soil, if you have nutritious soil, the potato bugs aren’t there. And he said, I didn’t know you could have Potato bugs.

I mean potato, not potato bugs. I didn’t either, but it’s exactly what happens. And when we started out, our soil was terrible. We were killing potato bugs all the time. But we’ve just watched this through the nutrition, the soil change.

Beth Dougherty:

Soil fertile. Yeah.

Shawn Dougherty:

It’s amazing.

Beth Dougherty:

Well, and to go back to the most asked question right now and for the last couple of years is women who say often with tears in their eyes, how do you know it’s okay? How do I know that if I keep making these choices for my life and for my children’s lives, it’s going to be okay? And the answer is in that thing, that idea that if I take a cow and I move her over grass in ways that imitate nature, if I will simply show up, pay attention, move a little white string, move the cow milker that every day the soil will be better, the grass will be better, the cow will be better, and there will be another bucket of milk

Marlin Miller:

And you’re better.

Beth Dougherty:

That’s right.

When I was in high school, I remember the learning, the principle of entropy in physics and entropy says, well, systems move from more complex to less complex. Well, that’s fine if you’re talking about a computer or a car or maybe a star system in the sense of things, maybe wind down, it isn’t true of life. Well managed gets more complex. And the evidence of that is in any two acre pasture that somebody is managing with a single dairy cow for milk and soil, when I use it, it gets more complex, it gets more fruitful. There’s more soil. It’s not moving from less complex, I mean more complex to less complex. It’s going in the opposite direction. What’s the input? The human obedience and love and

Shawn Dougherty:

Not cleverness,

Beth Dougherty:

Acquiesce

Shawn Dougherty:

To

Beth Dougherty:

God’s order?

Shawn Dougherty:

I think cleverness has kind of got us, and maybe that’s not the right word, but cleverness is a way of getting around God’s pattern. I’m better

Beth Dougherty:

At, that’s how we use it anyway. That’s right. Because it’s very clever to capture water high, put a pipe on it and put pressurized water your house. And that’s nice. So that’s a kind of cleverness I think that we use legitimately. But we substitute the cleverness of say the Haber Bosch process, which lets us capture nitrogen out of the atmosphere and make ammonium nitrate that we can shove under a plant and for a brief time it’ll be very green, but we’ll kill our soil

Shawn Dougherty:

And we have unintended consequences as will Harris

Marlin Miller:

Does All this not it points back to when you’re talking about the industrialization and big ag. They are coming at the grass and the land and their worldview is rooted in arrogance and just

Beth Dougherty:

Massive pride. Give fellow men with the same arrogance.

Shawn Dougherty:

I was just, I’m a member of the soil and water supervisor soil and water. It is a challenge for me because their methods are not our methods. And we were just talking about the farmer who is out there and what can we as a soil and water help them to farm better. And she said, the person who is talking about it and she does the ag, she said, I’ve been trying to get them to rotationally graze. And this guy says, I’m not rotationally grazing. I’m not rotationally grazing. That’s just off the question. I mean, that’s

Beth Dougherty:

Not the, was this one of the members of the Soil and Water Conservation District board who said, I won’t rotate?

Shawn Dougherty:

Oh no, no, no. This was somebody that Wendy was going out to a farmer that she was going

Beth Dougherty:

Out to try and help. Oh, help. He said, save your breath. I’m not going to do it.

Shawn Dougherty:

Yeah, I’m not going to do that. There may be a good way of doing this. I am not going there. And I think, what do you do with that? If someone is so tied into this is the way, this is the way my dad did it, this is, and I am not interested in a better way,

Beth Dougherty:

Even conventional grazing of that kind. It can only go back to like 1886 in the invention of barbed wire. The idea that you can own grazing animals and not manage the grass they’re on is that young. And yet, yeah, our arrogant says, I shouldn’t have to take that care. I shouldn’t have to work that hard.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah, man. Two more questions. Whatcha guys reading right now?

Shawn Dougherty:

I’ve been reading a very interesting book called The Church and Farming, where it’s a Catholic priest

Beth Dougherty:

Who

Shawn Dougherty:

This is writing about the same time that Wendell Berry is writing about that the systems are getting worse and worse and worse. And he is seeing this Pope Leo the 13th saw these changes that were happening as people move more and more into the city. He was seeing that wasn’t incompatible completely, but that the life of the family in the city, it’s a very different kind of thing. It’s harder to make that work. You don’t have chores for the children to do. So they have a very different understanding of what work is and work becomes this thing that you try and get out of as opposed to this ennobling thing. So it’s been very interesting to read. I can’t remember who wrote that. You probably remember the

Beth Dougherty:

Is this a fahe?

Shawn Dougherty:

It is a Fahe father. Right.

Beth Dougherty:

And I’m reading a book called The Geography of Nowhere by a novelist named Howard. What’s his first name? Something Howard Kunzler, K-U-N-T-Z-L-E-R. And our architect slash master, our son Thomas, is a timber framer. He was a guild, timber framer for about five years. And then he went to Notre Dame and got his master’s in architecture and now he helps people design human spaces. And I think this was his book, and it’s a really interesting, well-written, entertaining, but sort of grim book about the history of the US as a country that didn’t have a past. And that came into being hand in hand with the industrial revolution. Before we were even a country that people we now call our founding fathers were already aware. We had a serious land use problem that all over this continent, people would arrive, put some seeds in the ground where that soil out move west where that soil out move west. And so they were already addressing at that time the need for a different kind of agriculture. Well, Kunstler is talking about how did we get to where we are right now with really ugly architecture and cities that are held together by superhighway conduits. And there’s a whole lot of history in it and it’s a lot of stuff I didn’t know.

What it does really usefully is it takes the reader who has accepted as not even inevitable as though we accept our world as though it is the only world it has always been. Thus we’ve even say things like human nature doesn’t change. And what we think we’re saying is so now is just like any previous time, well, human nature may not change, but now is not like any previous time because no previous time had the resources that we have nor the power we have to do things with him. And he’s sort of making you think the way you live and the way you do your job and the way you spend your money and shop and whatever aren’t inevitable. They are the result of some very recently made choice, much like our agriculture, some very recently made choices that have not been for the betterment of the human being. Just as polio. The 13th was pointing out that when families cease to act like families, they stop being families. How do families act? They’re of mutual assistance to one another. How much mutual assistance is there between five individuals who share a roof and all have different destinations all over the city all day long and don’t have meals together? Probably not much. Are they still a family? Well, biologically, yes. Maybe economically, yes. But relationally no. And kunstler is inviting us to notice that the relationships we have with one another as a society aren’t inevitable.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah, that’s really interesting. I’ve been studying, when you go back into Genesis and you see that Noah’s sons after the flood started building cities all of a sudden, in a way, I think it is, I think it was his great grandson maybe, and I forget the name now, I’m sorry, Nimrod. Nimrod was the hunter. I think it was him,

Beth Dougherty:

He city maybe

Marlin Miller:

Of his brothers that built all these big cities. And I’ve kind of come to see it as though in building the cities, they were giving God the finger. I think they were. That’s interesting because God said what God said, go spread

Shawn Dougherty:

Out. Well then what did he do to Abraham? He took him to a land flowing with milk and honey. So that’s the movement.

Beth Dougherty:

Yeah. He took him out the city.

Shawn Dougherty:

Out of the city. It was

Beth Dougherty:

New cities. That’s right. And he promised his descendants that then milk and

Shawn Dougherty:

Honey. That’s right. So there’s this movement out of the city and back to the country, back to that lifestyle. And we really feel like that the land flowing with milk and honey, the cow bees, the natural life for us as we have moved in that direction, how do you know whether you’re moving in the right direction or not? In hindsight you say, oh, those were really good choices. And that’s exactly what a land where you’re milking the cows and where you’re doing that. Yeah. We just feel,

Beth Dougherty:

I think the other way we know that we’re moving the right direction is we receive inner lights. There are moments when you

Shawn Dougherty:

Read the Psalms and suddenly become alive because you’ve been living this.

Beth Dougherty:

Yes. When you experience the knowledge that you know didn’t come up with on your own. And it comes out of, this is why I think for me, you asked about my childhood and how did I become a Christian? And I became a Christian as an act of desperation, which isn’t, I mean that’s okay. That’s one way. But it has been for me as an adult, my certainty of God’s presence, the intimacy that we experience with our savior as we walk. The Christian path for me has come, you’re damaged if you’re raised a relativist. If you have to be in your twenties figure out there might be something that’s true, then you’re not working with the same set of equipment. But as I have watched how nature works and you don’t need a PhD in this, in fact, PhD is probably going to work against you if you’ll get out and believe in a few simple natural principles that somebody can explain to you and you can go, oh, that makes sense.

Yeah, I can see why that would be true. And then you move forward with that. God reveals himself to you in every little tiny thing you see. And it opens you up to the idea that although truth, God’s nature is way bigger than you’ll ever understand, it’s still knowable. You can a child looking at his mother doesn’t say, oh, there’s so much complexity there. I’ll never understand her. She’s his and the child knows her. And that’s how you feel about nature. And so you get to a place where you trust because you’ve had that experience. That’s how we have the nerve to do this. And I don’t know where I started. It was something you said about how we know.

Shawn Dougherty:

Got me.

Beth Dougherty:

I think we know because God is good and it’s really evident. But you have to be there and you have to pay attention. You have to be listening.

Marlin Miller:

Wow. Last question. Yeah. How can we pray for you guys?

Shawn Dougherty:

Well, one of our big, we’re getting ready to go on the Camino, which is a pilgrimage,

Beth Dougherty:

The Camino Santiago in Spain.

Shawn Dougherty:

It ends up where St. James was martyred.

Beth Dougherty:

No,

Shawn Dougherty:

No, no. Where he was buried. And so we’re getting ready to do a 250 mile walk from somewhere in Portugal, Porto Porto in Portugal to this place. And our prayer is that we have fertility for our

Beth Dougherty:

Two of our son, William and his wife Ashley, have been waiting for a baby for two and a half years now. And we thought this would be a good walk. And so recently I changed my prayer every morning in my bravery, which is sort of a Catholic prayer book, I have a little reminder to pray for Bud and Ashley’s baby. And I thought, I’m not praying for one. I’m praying for a whole slew babies for bed and Ashley. So that’s our intention. And we would be so excited for lots and lots of people to be sort of biting the Lord’s ear babies for bed and Ashley, they will make phenomenal parents. Oh man.

Marlin Miller:

Gosh, thank you. Oh, this has been, delight been so much fun.

Beth Dougherty:

Been a pleasure. The only thing that was missing was Lisa

Marlin Miller:

Next time. Next. Next time. Yeah. She has her hands full. I’m sure that I know she does. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure. This episode is brought to you by Homestead Living Magazine. Homestead Living is a monthly print magazine that interviews all the big names in the homesteading world and they focus and educate in a wonderful way. You can learn more and su*******@*************ng.com. So home. If you got anything out of this podcast, you will probably love plain values in print. You can go to plain values.com to learn more and check it out. Please like, subscribe and leave us a review. Guys, love you all. Thanks so much.