Navigating Off-Grid Living on a Multi-Generational Farm

Have you ever found yourself knee-deep in mud, literally, and wondered how life could get both so wild and wonderfully simple? Hayley Matwich from Three Pines Family Farm certainly has, and she joins us this week to share her tales of off-grid living, which include three trucks stuck and what it means to live "off grid". She takes us through the farm's infamous mud season as well as the transformation of her family's health when they embraced sourcing their own food. Hayley's anecdotes will not only make you laugh but also will provide you with insight into how your diet influences your well-being.

Journey into the heart of homesteading , where Hayley introduces us to her multi-generational farm; the highs and lows. From the patience it required to process a goat over five days to raising chickens, we explore the daily rhythms that keep their homestead thriving. She explains their journey from living in RVs to building a sustainable home complete with water systems—no small feat in the face of nature's challenges. Hayley's candid storytelling introduces us to the ingenuity and resolve needed to turn a patch of earth in the wilderness into a family legacy.

At the end, we go over the most common misconception about what it truly means to live "off grid". She shares  her faith to offer solace and strength through seasons of hardship. Grab a mug of something warm, and settle in for a conversation that promises to make you laugh, inspire you, and maybe even stir the longing for the simpler things in life—being connected to the land, fueled by faith, surrounded by family, and forged by the hands of those who dare to step off the beaten path.

Chapters

• 0:10 Living Off-Grid With Real Food
• 9:54 Homesteading and Multi-Generational Living
• 21:10 Steps and Misconceptions of Off-Grid Living
• 28:16 Faith and Strength in Hard Seasons

Transcript

Cicily: 0:10

Welcome everyone. I am super excited to be here with Hayley. Thank you so much for joining me, Hayley. Absolutely, I am looking forward to our conversation. Any funny stories?

Hayley : 0:27

Yeah, so we get, you know, all of the seasons up here, and one of the seasons that maybe everyone is not familiar with is mud season, and so we get like a pretty heavy spring, we get tons and tons of rain, and last year we had this awkward, like this awkward time where it was snowing, freezing, melting, raining, snowing, freezing, raining, melting, and it just kept repeating and repeating. So when we moved on to the property, there was no roads and we made them all, and so we had a lot of roads to make. And I'm not I mean, we're not, we're not the best at making roads, but like we made the roads mainly by driving them. So when we moved to the upper part of the property in November, there's a really steep driveway and there is basically mud roads. And when we were getting this freezing and then snowing, freezing, raining and repeat, we got stuck like a lot, like super, super stuck.

Hayley : 1:32

And it started with my dad. So we've all got white dodges, dodge pickups, and first my dad gets his stuck in middle of the road to leave, so we can't really get off our property. So we made a new road. My brother-in-law and sister were on vacation, so my dad borrowed my brother-in-law's truck because he got his road stuck. We tried and tried, couldn't get it unstuck, so he drove my brother-in-law's truck, got my brother-in-law's truck stuck on the road the only road off the top of our property so we used our quad trail. My husband was trying to get my brother-in-law's truck unstuck so that we could be passing through our road and not have to rock, crawl and cruise through trees and scratch up all of our trucks. And he got our truck stuck and it was so hard.

Cicily: 2:32

How many trucks are stuck? Right now? There's three trucks. Okay, three trucks stuck.

Hayley : 2:37

So we're trying, we're trying and trying to get them unstuck. My husband, we have a 10,000-pound wench on the front of our truck and we wrapped it to a tree. Nothing would get us unstuck. And then it froze and all of the trucks were buried in mud down to the drive line and differential and our trucks froze to our road. Our neighbor came over and tried to get our trucks unstuck and he broke the drive line on his truck. So we were super stuck and that resulted in basically an entire spring of.

Hayley : 3:13

We put laundry baskets on the front and back of our four-wheelers and we had to drive out to the neighbors with any groceries we brought home. We were currently doing laundry in town at the Laundry Mat, so we just had these heaping laundry baskets. Really really looked like a bunch of hillbillies Just trying to get home with our stuff and at one point I was like one part of our driveway is kind of like this, so I was holding like we were purchasing raw milk in town and I was like holding onto my raw milk and trying to get up the road. So that's my story. Good times. It'll probably happen again. Yeah, pretty good.

Cicily: 4:00

So you can find Hayley at Three Pines Family Farm. She talks a lot about Jesus off-grid living and making real food. Can you tell me a little bit about your food journey and and the diagnoses that led you to how you're living now?

Hayley : 4:19

So before we moved we've been up here for April it'll be two years and before we moved I had like a general grasp on nutrition as in like I knew I shouldn't be going to McDonald's and I knew, you know just things like that I cooked at home all the time. But I just didn't have a more in-depth grasp than that. And so after we moved a little bit, without telling my mom's story completely, a lot of it had to do with my mom. She has a lot of autoimmune issues and so many of those can be kind of reined in through diet and so she learned that and she actually just kind of stumbled like just kind of in the pits. She stumbled upon like animal-based eating and carnivore-based nutrition and she just dove right in like just cold turkey went into it and she was just like you should. She's like I'm starting to feel better. You know you should join me. And I was just like Florida, you know, my mom's out walking her dog and like I mean she was chair bound and she's out walking her dog and like getting sunshine and just like just doing a thousand times better in like four weeks. And I was like, yeah, if nothing else, to just support her. I knew it certainly couldn't help or hurt me. So I'm like, yeah, I'm there and I just did it.

Hayley : 5:50

The next day, poor woman had to listen to me walk into her trailer and complain every sink and day. I'm like this sucks, I want bread and. But I stuck it out and time went on and a lot of the issues that I struggled with. We struggled with infertility and I was like I'm just like I had hormone issues that if you went in there just like, well, we'll put you on this or that, and that's not the goal that I had. I wanted to be free of as many things as I could and so it just started to. It started to change pretty much every aspect of my life. I was sleeping better and that affects your hormones. All of these things were going on and they were just slowly being corrected by a complete 180 in nutrition Dropped 50 pounds. That didn't hurt my feelings one bit. Just a lot of things that we came up here to live a better, cleaner, more focused life. And you're pretty focused when you pretty much are just eating beef, eggs, butter, when you kind of throw away everything else and you narrow it all down. That was huge for me.

Hayley : 7:07

A lot of times when people are seeking nutrition, they're like well, what can I have? I can't have any of this. I can't have the bread, I can't have all of that. But this gave me a new mindset of like, just stop thinking about that, what you can't have, and make yourself a list of the things that you can have, and you will succeed. And I have and I feel so much better and I can't even go back to. I can't even go back when I eat bread. I feel like I got ran over by a truck and set on fire. So anyway, that's kind of my little testimony.

Hayley : 7:44

With real food, just I haven't had up until Christmas but I hadn't had preservative. I don't drink at all anymore. It just makes me happy to see how far I've come and just how I've been able to guide my family like that and educate my children on nutrition. Because when that starts young, I think about all the issues that I had that were rooted in nutrition and they get to skip that because they already will know and they will get to guide their children and future generations and maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn't, but it's a major one up on what I had and I thought I was growing up healthy. My mom did things different than other people did, but it's just been a life-changing thing and it's all because of food.

Cicily: 8:36

Awesome. Can you walk me through your food cycle?

Hayley : 8:41

Just like a day in the life. Yeah, how you gather, how you process, how you we primarily our meat primarily is either hunted, but as far as farm goes, we raise meat goats and chickens and ducks and then pigs, and so for us, we typically butcher one goat a year. However, this year will be, I guess, technically, last year is when we butchered that one, but this season we'll actually be doing four, and so we typically hang them for a few days. We do have to wait until it's cooler. We don't have a processing room or anything like that. We have to wait until it's cooler so that the bears won't just climb the tree and just pull all of our meat out. We actually had to hang our previous one just to my left. I was like the pinnacle of my hillbilly life, right there walking past a goat every time I went inside, so, but I mean, you got to protect the food. It was a weird winter. It's been warm, so we weren't even sure the bears were hibernating, so we just hung it off the porch. So we'll hang it for a couple of days. And then this year we actually went through a big learning thing and we realized that for us and life being busy and having the kids involved, it's better for us to just do it in sections. So we were just pulling pieces off and working on perfecting our skill and really doing clean cuts, because last year we were a little upset with ourselves when we were pulling stuff out of the freezer, so we broke it up over a couple of days and then ended up getting a crazy respiratory illness and that. So it actually took us five days on one goat. We learned a lot, anyway.

Hayley : 10:30

So we primarily grind all of our goat. It makes great sausage and then we do a couple of roasts and then we leave the legs for, like, big family barbecues and stuff like that. We'll do them slow on the barbecue and then typically we actually hand some over to a neighbor because he makes incredible goat curry and so he'll cook some of that up and invite us all over. And then eggs from the chickens we cycle our laying hands out pretty quick. I usually don't let them get older than two, just because if I'm going to feed them I want them to produce what they're going to maximum, their maximum production, and once they start to grind I just don't want to keep them.

Hayley : 11:15

We do chicks every spring, sometimes several batches. Once I get the off grid situation figured out, we'll go back to hatching. I have 130 slot incubator and I just have to figure out how to keep it running without any issues. So that's where we get our chicken. We'll probably do meat birds this year, but we're so new in our infrastructure so we're just kind of trying not to get in over our heads. And then we have pigs. This year that will be wintering, which will be a new experience. So five of those are set to go. We still haven't decided if we're going to take them to a butcher or do it ourselves, but that'll happen in the spring. And then, other than that, it's just hunting and gardening, which is not my favorite thing.

Cicily: 12:10

What's your garden setting up to look like in the spring?

Hayley : 12:14

So a little bit interesting situation. We put a lot of time into our garden. We had to make it deer proof Most people do but we have like an eight-foot fence around it and that's the first thing we did when we moved up here and we were all in trailers at the lower part of the property where the garden sits November. We moved up here last November and so the gardens down there were up here and we just realized we didn't love it. We want to utilize that space down there, but out of sight, out of mind, because we're on a I guess they call it multi-generational homestead. My parents help with the garden, my sister and brother-in-law help with the garden, so we just cycle on who's watering and we're all involved in planting and harvesting and stuff. But we realized we really don't enjoy going down there.

Hayley : 13:08

I personally love to just gawk at my garden on a regular basis. I want it in my face, and so we're moving our garden. So it's stacking up to be interesting. That's all I can say. I have no idea what it's going to look like. There'll be food in it, but something might eat it, if we're being honest.

Hayley : 13:29

And that's something that won't be us probably.

Cicily: 13:32

Yeah, can you walk me through RV, new property, rv to building and now transitioning to a full time homestead. What did that look like?

Hayley : 13:46

Yeah. So we rolled in all three families, that's 11 of us total it was 10, but we got a little mountain baby in the process. My sister and brother-in-law had their daughter in March. So we rolled up and we had no infrastructure. Our spring was undeveloped so we knew we had to live below the spring. So we spent the first almost full year Gravity feeding out of our spring for water Most important thing is water and then working on that. Being at the bottom of the property was really challenging because there was so much clay when it gets wet. We spent our first spring down there. I have so many mud stories, oh my gosh. But we knew we had to get up top and so we did that.

Hayley : 14:40

Got all the trailers up here Most nerve-wracking day of my life next to actually pulling them up this mountain. That gave me heart problems. I'm pretty sure that'll never go away. I don't know if I'm just a wimp, but something about watching your whole life just teeter on a switchback. We get up here and we're set up and then you got to get water coming up the mountain now instead of just gravity feeding down, and we've managed to get that pretty well.

Hayley : 15:15

Ironed out, we weren't supposed to start building our home for three years, so we still had another year that we were supposed to await, just like that's kind of how we figured would be the best sequence of events. But last winter our furnace went out in our trailer in the dead of winter. Fortunately, we all installed wood fire places and that saved us. But one of the big issues with RV living, especially long-term, is that you get a lot of condensation and then you're getting mold and you can run your air purifiers and your dehumidifiers and all that, but eventually you kind of can't keep up. And for us we had ice just trailing down the wall. I would wake up with a beanie that was soaking wet because the condensation from breathing at night was causing it to just pour down on us. My pillow was wet, pulling the bed away during the day just to get some airflow because I was finding mold Just long-term coughs and we knew health was kind of circling the train if we kept living in it. So we just went to town.

Hayley : 16:32

So we started, we broke ground April of 2023. And we moved in October 13th of 2023. And that was with my husband working a full-time job. Well, we have a mobile heavy equipment repair business and so he was working four days a week. I was like you can't work more than that, we can't just do this off of two days a week. So basically three days a week. We were out here mobbing away getting it done. We are not contractors. It was a very interesting time in my life. We'll see how long the puppy lasts.

Cicily: 17:17

It hasn't blown over yet.

Hayley : 17:20

It hasn't. I'm really grateful. We'll see what happens, but yeah, so it's just a metal building. They're designed to shops and people call them barn dominions, but it's like a steel frame. So I've got all the exposed steel inside. My husband keeps trying to convince me to cover it up and I'm going to fight him. It's a hill I'll die on. He don't cover up my frame.

Hayley : 17:42

And, yeah, we insulated it. We put the floor in, we put in the wood stove, which is a wood cook stove it's my favorite part of our house and then we moved in and that's all we've got so far no walls, it's open, we have curtains hanging everywhere and we haul all our water in from a bucket out front, which probably is going to start freezing this week. But yeah, it's been a huge blessing. It's one of those things that I wouldn't have expected to work out so well. It was a huge God thing. Like there's no way any of this would have lined up and just worked out and we got the right help when we needed it, the right suggestions when things were going wrong. It was kind of just an uphill battle, but it was like a peaceful one. It doesn't really sound right, but like it was a lot for people who don't build houses, but we built a house.

Cicily: 18:48

Built a house, you're living in it, and it was under a year. That's huge. Can you talk a little bit about having a multi-generation setup and how that supports you as being a Mama? Yeah?

Hayley : 19:03

it's huge. One of the biggest things that I think that a lot of people either aren't able to utilize or choose not to, for whatever reason, is family and previously how we were living. Before we moved here we were already so tight knit. I'm very close with my parents and I'm very close with my sister and my nieces, and we lived along a highway in Oregon and my sister was at the town at this end. I was in the middle and my parents were down here and it was everybody always converged for weekly family dinners, everything like that, and we just kind of developed this idea long story short, and moved up here together and, as a mom, like being able to watch my kids from the deck, just kind of cruise down to Nana's and see my niece just plotting up here in her oversized boots, slipping around in the mud and just coming up to say hi, having you know when you need that break or you need to connect with your spouse, or just you know.

Hayley : 20:19

We have date nights that literally consist of our kids just going down. We split them between my mom and dad and my sister and brother-in-law and we just like cook dinner, milk our goats, play some cards, and it's like date night. It's really valuable and I think it's really going to shape my kids just seeing like that tight family unit. I mean, we're not perfect, you know. Like you know, I don't want to paint like this overly dreamy picture but like, overall there's a lot to be said for living in close proximity to your family. And you know, we started going to church, we found a church. Finally we're half the church, all 11 of us. It's awesome, I love it. That's great.

Cicily: 21:10

Well, you talk a lot about self-sufficiency, and can anyone just do this? Or you know what are the steps? If you were to give recommendations or advice, what would that look like?

Hayley : 21:23

I get a lot of the questions in my messages and some of them are super funny because of the way that people choose to word them. Overall, my answer is, yes, anyone can. But the big thing to think about is like if I were to give steps they're based off my experience and how I got here I can talk about them and that's a good idea. It's a good starting ground. But when I thought about it further because I get the question so often and sometimes people are like, no, everyone can't do that, and it's like, yeah, I get that. We literally just walked away. We closed up our life and we walked away and then we started over here where there was nothing. It's not everyone can do it, but they might not want to.

Hayley : 22:22

The starting ground I would say is where do you want to live? If you want to stay in the same state or you don't, find out the cottage food laws. Find out the homeschooling laws, because it seems like homesteading and homeschooling are hand in hand and most people want to homeschool. So I hear a lot that the East Coast is fighting homeschooling. Do you want to homeschool? Don't move to the East Coast. Find out what the cottage food laws are. What are the property rates and then look for properties. I highly recommend a property with water on it.

Hayley : 22:54

They're really fine, so start now if you're thinking about it, but just things like that. People will ask how much money do you have to have to start out like this? Not a question I can answer how fast are you going to do it? Are you going to do it really fast? You need a lot of money If you want to do it really really fast, especially ground up. If you want to take your time and suffer a little, you can do it with less money.

Hayley : 23:23

But, yeah, finding an area that supports your beliefs, your goals. And if you want to be really remote, we're remote, but the surrounding towns, the ones we choose to affiliate with, they have what we need. We found a good church. They have homeschooling. They support homeschooling heavily. It's a huge ag town, so that's great for our personal business. So I mean you just got to find your spot and it takes some looking. You got to know what your price point is. You need to. You have to be able to live, you have to go somewhere where you can afford to live. So I mean those are I guess those are my biggest tips is find out where you want to be and then see what the community is all about and, honestly, just the property is the biggest thing finding it and I believe if you're meant to be on one, god will find it for you, because he dropped this one in our lab.

Hayley : 24:26

We looked at some lemons, oh, a realtor that showed us 180 acres for like this great price. I don't even remember it was a stupid price, this was the whole property. There was a couple of shelves. He's like I found you 180 acres with views, and we're like no, I'm not a Billy goat, it's a no. Well, and some real leaders, especially with these remote communities and stuff, they kind of vet you, like you have to stick around and put up with them for a long time. And it was kind of funny because finally the realtor was like so what do you guys do? And you know, trying to get to know us, because we had been making trips from Oregon to Idaho for months, nine hour trips, and my dad's like you know, my son-in-law and I are appliance repairmen and he's like, oh, and he's like my son-in-law repairs heavy equipment. And he's like, oh, and then it's like all of a sudden we get great properties to look at it.

Cicily: 25:24

It's like that's rude but I get it, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it definitely takes a certain spirit and a certain art. No-transcript I know it was mentioned back in season one Natalie talked about. You know, god gives you a vision, but he also asks you to plan for it. And where there is no vision, as people perish, mm-hmm, as far as you know what to expect when people find you, are there any big misconceptions that you want to address?

Hayley : 25:58

Oh, yes, there is. Yes, let me flip my hair back. If you are. If you are on social media and you post about being off grid, you get by the hundreds, depending on your following people saying that just debating off grid, you're not off grid. You're not off grid.

Hayley : 26:28

Off grid literally means I am not connected to the power grid. We source our own power. We have solar panels and generators and that's the only thing that it means. I still have a cell phone and, well, some people in the family have internet and I steal it regularly. I did. I am not.

Hayley : 26:48

It's not an underground bunker and I am not trying to live like a hermit. I'm a social person in general. I just don't want to be connected to the power grid and I want to be moderately harder to find. But that's all it means. It doesn't mean like I'm jubes day prepping in a cave I dug by hand. It's not. That's not what it means. And they just get nasty and I don't engage at all because it is so ridiculous of all the things you could argue about, why, why I?

Hayley : 27:18

I live off grid if you want to get technical and I am Preparing my life for things to get difficult. I want a life where I don't have all these fancy systems that when they fail if they fail, no, it's when something always fails I want to be able to fix them myself. Well, my husband will be the primary caretaker of that situation. I'll hand him a flashlight and, like you know, some wrenches. But I want to not struggle in the way that I know Many would and I would previously. How we lived previously we source our own water that's so important to me and we do as much of our own food as we can. And we're still working towards, like, even more impressive goals. But that that's my goal and I'm doing it off grid. So the misconception that having a cell phone Sure make you not off grid is very silly.

Cicily: 28:26

Debunked that yes, there's struggles, there's hard days. There's moments of saying, yes, this is exactly where we want to be. And it's very hard. Are there any Bible verses that help you get through those days?

Hayley : 28:44

Absolutely so. I have so many. I covered my house and I'm as we were building, but my two favorites Are Jeremiah 29, 11 and I know so many people are familiar with it, for I know the plans that I have for you says the Lord plans of prosperity and not of harm. And I've had to lean into that a lot because, you know, while we were sitting in a multi trailer, that's not God's plan for us to be in a multi trailer, but I firmly believe that when life gets a little uncomfortable, it sometimes it's God's nudge to move. If we're comfortable, that's fine. They're seasons for resting and being comfortable and God wants that for us. But there are times where we are very comfortable and he's like a go. And I'm not saying he's like here's a multi trailer for you, but I mean there was probably mold when we bought it, so I mean it was just like boom, lots of mold, maybe build a house, and we did.

Hayley : 29:50

Another one that I love is Ecclesiastes 311. He has made all things beautiful in its time and set eternity in the hearts of man, and that one has followed me around for like 15 years and it always pops into my head. He has made all things beautiful in its time and I apply that in this season of life when sometimes I'm really grumpy about hauling water inside and boiling it on the stove and using it to do my dishes and then doing more to draw back, and he had a little grumpy about that. But it's a season and he has. He is refining us through the seasons and they become beautiful again and then we encounter more challenges and more struggles and he refines us again and makes us stronger, because you do not become stronger when life is easy, when life gets tough and tricky. That is when you grow and and I've been doing a lot of growing lately so much growing.

Hayley : 30:53

That's not a complaint, that is true that is, realizing that I have a very unique opportunity to Just be growing continuously, and not everybody has that opportunity.

Cicily: 31:13

Thank you so much, kaylee, you're welcome.