E9: From humble off-grid beginnings to inspiring a no-till movement | Hannah Crabtree & Jesse Frost of No-Till Growers and Rough Draft Farmstead in Lawrenceburg, KY

Hanna Crabtree and Jesse Frost run a small organic farm in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. In their previous city professions, Jesse was a sommelier at a wine store in New York City and Hannah was an artist in Chicago. The couple met after they both relocated to Kentucky to learn to farm. When we featured them back in 2015, they were living in their off-grid cabin. With no running water or electricity, they really had made a dramatic shift from their previous city lives.  They had recently welcomed their son Further into the world and were making a living running an organic CSA in the tiny community of Bugtussle, Kentucky.

Since then, they have moved closer to town in order to set up their farm in an area with a larger customer base. In today’s episode, we delve into the reasons why they decided a shift closer to town was right for them in the long-run, their thoughts on the whether small farm businesses can realistically support a family without off-farm jobs, relationship advice for partners making a living together, and how they have started a movement calling for no-till farming and the need for a shift to regenerative agriculture practices.

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Transcript

Alissa Hessler: 0:00

Way back before the pandemic began, I had a question. What does it take for a city person to go country in 2015, I set out to explore through photography, writing. And now this podcast in February, I recorded most of the interviews for the first season. I plan to launch in April of 2020, the five year anniversary of the project, but then everything turned upside down. And it just didn't feel like the right time to launch because so much had changed overnight. As the initial shock of the pandemic wore off, it became clear that many people with the means to do so we're leaving cities in droves. Recent data has shown that nearly 16 million people have relocated in the US this year, making the concept of an urban Exodus even more relevant. So while some of the interviews in the season were conducted before the pandemic, the topics they discuss the questions they raise, and the answers they provide are more urgent than ever. I'm Alissa Hessler. Welcome to the urban Exodus. I've been asked by many single city dwellers, if it's hard to find a partner in the country. For Hannah Crabtree and Jessie frost. Moving to the country to learn how to farm is how they met, and their shared passions for art, advocacy and food were the reasons they fell in love. When I photographed their feature back in 2015, they were living in an off grid cabin with no running water, internet or electricity. They have since moved their rough draft farmstead to a larger small town in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. In addition to building sustainable small organic farm business, they have become advocates and educators for the no till growing movement through their popular website, podcast and YouTube channel. When we originally visited the both of you in 2015, your lives looked very different than they do now. Can you talk a little bit about your lives back then and how you ended up on that land?

Hannah Crabtree: 2:14

Sure. So we ended up there in bug TESL, Kentucky. That is where we had interned on a farm. So we met while we were interns on a farm there. And then we got married. And then we tried to start various variations of farms that didn't work out in that first year. And we ended up sort of being kicked off of our land and not knowing what to do and our original mentors there at bug tussle farm offered us a piece of their land. So we moved on to that land. And we like literally had nothing to start with. So we did the GoFundMe campaign because we had already sort of developed a community and a little following who were sort of following along with our story. And they helped us raise money to just build this cabin. And so that's what we did. We just had that chunk of the woods and we cleared out a little bit of space. We grew vegetables to sell at a farmers market and we had all different sorts of animals.

Alissa Hessler: 3:17

I know the two of you met well Wolfing in Kentucky. But can you tell us a little bit of your backstory and why you left Chicago in New York in the first place to learn how to farm

Hannah Crabtree: 3:29

for me. Being in Chicago, I got involved in beekeeping and really interested in beekeeping and sort of through that just more interested in food in general and realized I wanted to learn more about that and that a better place to learn how to farm than Chicago would be, you know, Kentucky where I was from. So I started looking into finding like to wolf or to volunteer on a farm and was looking for one that was either in Kentucky where my family was from or Nashville which is where I had gone to college and a lot of my friends still lived and bug tussle farm is in Kentucky but they sell their produce in Nashville. So that sort of felt like a perfect fit. And they had they were keeping bees it was a biodynamic farm which I was interested in. I just thought I would try it and see if I liked it.

Jesse Frost: 4:22

And I was living in New York City and I was working in wine sales through that job. I started to like visit farms, producers in Europe. In specifically in France and Austria. You'd go you know wine, it is this very kind of refined thing that you generally associate with like a nice dinner or something. But to go and see these kind of like dirty farms that are just so lush and beautiful and full of you know, all these bugs and insects and and that just really appealed to me and I loved running around with these farmers and digging in the soil and tasting the grapes and I started to like look for opportunities in farming and decided I kind of wanted to grow vegetables and not produce wine. But I wanted to be out in agriculture. So, and I also wanted to get back to Kentucky kind of like Hannah. And so I started looking for farms there and found bug tussle. And this would have been the year before Hannah 2009 was when I was searching 2010 was my first season. And then I can said she was she came to be the apprentice the next season. And that's, that's how we met.

Alissa Hessler: 5:27

For those of us who don't know much about it, what exactly is no tell? And why is it so important?

Jesse Frost: 5:33

Yeah, so it's, it's kind of hard to define. And it's not a new idea. Obviously, though, there are a lot of indigenous cultures that never, you know, never even saw steal, let alone the idea of tillage, and really respect the ecology and cared for interplanting and biodiversity and all of these things that we're kind of having to rediscover because we got so far from it. But essentially no till agriculture and how I like to define it as an ecological approach to agriculture, which seeks to keep the soil covered as much as possible with some sort of mulch and also living plant roots. And keep it disturbed as little as possible and keep it planted as much as possible. So like I said, living plant roots or living, you know, plant canopies as much as possible. And those things kind of contribute to soil health. And so what that looks like, is a lot of different things. You know, Hannah and I start started with kind of a deep compost mulch shows a deep mulching of compost. And then we would essentially just plant directly into that. And then when a crop came out, we would cut out the crop and then just put another crop in. And we're sort of moving towards a little bit more reliance on cover crops to sort of balance it out nutritionally,

Alissa Hessler: 6:46

when did you start experimenting with no till farming? And why is it become a passion to share the no till farming knowledge that you've learned with other farmers?

Jesse Frost: 6:54

Yeah, I mean, it's always been something that's, we've wanted to explore. But when we started, you know, our own projects, there was, there was very little information on how to do it. So what we would kind of run into is, we'd get these, you know, we'd start reading the soil health pamphlets from the NRCS, or wherever we'd read, you know, this or that soil health article, and at the end, it would just be like, you know, so the best things you can do are, you know, not disturb your soil, not till your soil and all these things, but then it would give zero guidance on how to do that we were like, great, great. Okay, so now what, and so we, you know, we found like, Ruth stout, and I think we had some old Mother Earth News, and I was reading some, we had a big collection of them. So I came across articles about Ruth stout and, you know, kind of hay mulch gardening. So we did that for a while, in the very beginning, sort of in like 2000. At the very beginning, that's kind of when we started getting off on our own a little bit. So we're sort of in like, 2012 2011 2012, we kind of experimented with some of that stuff. But we we ran into what a lot of people run into, especially here in the south, where it's like, we get a lot of humidity and rain. So the weed seeds in hay mulch will germinate right in the mulch because of the amount of moisture that we receive. So it starts rotting. And the weed seed starts germinating. So essentially, we were just planting grass in our garden, and it was really hard to keep up with. So we kind of just wrote it off a little bit, because the the only other alternative was sort of larger scale cover crop roller crimping. And that didn't really make sense on our scale. So we, we just kind of wrote it off and decided to go more towards like a system, a 30 inch bed system, you know, more like what John Martin 48 has, has kind of expressed and Eliot, Coleman and others. So we kind of follow that that's a really great system that's very, you know, ecologically minded system and very minimal disturbance to the soil and those sorts of things. And we always kind of at that time wondered if we could take it further. So we experimented in our tunnels and those sorts of things. And then we started to kind of discover other growers who were doing it throughout the world who, who just had decided, like, they weren't satisfied, kind of, like we had decided we weren't really satisfied with, with our system, we thought we could take it further, we thought we could reduce the amount of time that we were cultivating more and get rid of the weeds and, and so we started to see that there were these other systems, but there was just no information out there. So that's, that's kind of where the podcast, the no till Market Garden podcast was born, was that we found some of these other systems and we felt like we had to aggregate some of this information and get it collected for ourselves as farmers but then also be able to share it with others and that sort of you know, back to that in abundance mentality, just make sure to get that information out there because it helps everybody and in turn help comes back to help you so yeah, I mean, that's where it started and we wanted to be you know, we wanted to work a little less and not spend our time cultivating as much and figure out systems that encourage soil health and nutrient dense food and those sorts of things. So that's kind of what we're always working on.

Alissa Hessler: 10:11

What transformation? Have you seen since switching to knotel? Are you spending less time farming seeing greater yields? What benefits? Have you noticed?

Jesse Frost: 10:21

The main ones that we've seen so far, and like you said, we're still kind of transitioning into it fully for our farm over the last two years. The biggest ones is a reduction in the amount of time that we spend weeding, we spend almost no time weeding, and wow, I won't say that that guy that didn't get us in trouble last year, for one little week, one two week period, where we kind of had to dig out some weeds that got in the Pathways because pathways are a little bit more difficult to manage in our climate, because the amount of rain and the type of rainfall that we get washes out mulches. So it's hard to it's just on a technical level, it's hard to keep things like woodchips or anything in the pathway to sort of block weeds. But for the most part, in the beds, we we cultivate maybe once will spot cultivate about once every 10 days. And that's in the middle of the summer, you know, we'll just go around and pick out weeds that pop up here, there. And that's been the number one change. Some of the other ones are a little bit harder to measure because we've also just become better farmers in that time. So as we continue to improve our skills as farmers that also makes it's hard to decide whether or not it's the the boost in yield and productivity is from the system or is just from our skill level. So it's somewhere you know, it's a it's a little bit harder to measure. But we've definitely I mean, our crop production, everything is more consistent, bigger

Hannah Crabtree: 11:50

change in biodiversity, bugs birds, we've we've noticed huge changes in just the animals that we see on the farm, I would say that's another change. What about pest pest reduction

Jesse Frost: 12:03

in certain places, and then it actually is kind of seemed like it's bed by bed. So some beds are a little bit less compacted from previous tillage when we first got to the property than others and they've just they've that means that the plant roots are able to access you know, plant roots and the microbes are able to access the nutrients they need a little bit more easily. So that can be a factor. Heat stress, water stress, there are a lot of factors involved but one of the pests that we've seen so let's see last year, the first year that we went fully no till and a couple plots would have been two seasons ago. And it at the end of that season we had a lot of Harlequin beetle damage on our brassicas. This past year we didn't see but like two or three Harlequin beetles the entire season. So whether or not that's contributed to the soil or just to we've also ceased using any sort of organic sprays. So it's possible that then that nature's sort of balancing those things out a little bit for us. I'm also noticing we had a lot of slug issues in the first year that we did the mulch which is what often comes up people mentioned slugs when you talk about compost mulching or any sort of mulching we had some we had some slug issues at the beginning of the spring in the late winter last year and this winter I've seen like one slug so it's I'm I'm hesitant to say it's necessarily the system yet I don't want to just you know be an advocate without really having studied it so much but I but we've noticed that they're like Hannah said the biodiversity. In just certain past we don't really have as much flea beetle issues. Lots of little things like that, where you just noticed that they're they're kind of rebalancing themselves. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely something

Unknown: 14:00

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Alissa Hessler: 14:38

You too have basically built one of the only website podcast YouTube channels devoted to no telling. Was it difficult to put yourself in the spotlight.

Jesse Frost: 14:48

When we started the podcast? I kind of thought that I would be calling three or four farmers and that four or five farmers would be listening to it. And now I mean we're getting you know, 4000 downloads an episode and it's great Like, that's a huge for as nerdy of a podcast as we are. That's huge. You know, that's it's so niche, but people have really responded to it. So, you know, when we started the podcast and the YouTube and the website, like we didn't think it was, anybody was gonna care about it. But we knew that the people that did care about it, we'd appreciate it. So yeah, we've we've, we're really happy with how that's grown. And I can't say that it's like always that I'd anticipated what it would be like to be sort of in the spotlight and be of be one of the people who's responsible for that term a little bit for the term no till that is not a place that I really anticipated or prepared for personally. And I think that's, that can be really challenging at times and feel like a lot of feels like a lot of responsibility. And just to make sure that the conversation is moving forward and being positive. And to not get too personally wrapped up in it when when it gets criticisms. Because for so long, I've been good, personally about embracing criticisms, but it can be hard when it feels like it's a little bit out of your control at assert, you know, we've never done anything that's quite been at this level of popularity. So it's yet it can be kind of challenging. How do you

Alissa Hessler: 16:25

balance your digital presence and media production? With the physical labor of running your farm?

Jesse Frost: 16:30

Yeah, I mean, it's the I don't, I wouldn't say balances the word, Hannah's a huge help like it without Hannah, none of this is possible. And I don't think that she gets enough credit for the work that she puts in behind the scenes of just managing the family in house. And, and that's, that's an enormous element here. I get up at 330 every day and work until you know, the sun comes up. Or we have you know, I spent a little time with the kids and family in the morning, cook breakfast and those sorts of things, and then start farming. But usually the Farm Day is pretty limited. Like we rarely work past five o'clock. Usually we're able to be done kind of winding down by four. So it's usually like a seven to four with an hour break, lunch break kind of thing, a nap in the middle of the day. But then we the Knights pretty much I don't I don't. Personally, I'm not trying to do a lot of work in the evenings. Usually that's family time. So but it is a seven day a week thing right now. So that's so i It's hard because balance doesn't feel like the right word. It's unfortunately, we haven't quite totally struck the balance yet.

Alissa Hessler: 17:40

Do you have any suggestions for Burley based farms and small businesses to expand their customer base by sharing their story on social media,

Jesse Frost: 17:48

it's really good to it depends on what your goals are and where you're trying to sell your produce. But I think that some of the things that we learned were kind of connecting to people locally and utilizing some of the tools that are out there and social media to do that. So we utilized Facebook ads for a while, which can be, at least at the time was pretty effective for us, especially when we first moved because you can narrow it down really accurately, like don't be afraid to spend a little money to get some new customers. I think that's something that a lot of farmers try, you know, when they first get into the business don't really think about but it's, but if you're spending $5 on a customer that you'll have for 10 years and spends $1,000 A year or $500 a year with you. That's a huge, that's something that's hugely valuable. So I think telling your story and not being afraid to, you know, be the face of it. You don't necessarily have to put your family in there but it's okay to to be or be the face of it or just be the voice of it. Just be personal and and have fun with it and not always try and sell something just kind of get people connected to you by telling them what's going on. And

Hannah Crabtree: 18:53

yeah, I mean, I think it's talking specifically about rural areas. I don't think people talk enough about like old school marketing. Like we've had huge success with flyers and bulletins and business cards, you know, going to a local, all the local, like we'll do coffee shops, yoga studios, CrossFit studios, gems, like for us thinking about, you know, who is interested in organic vegetables and just going to those places. We I mean, that's the first when we first started doing a CSA we got almost all of our customers through just physical marketing, like going around and putting up posters. And then and then after that our probably our next biggest success would be word of mouth. So like, social media is super important, but I don't think I think especially when you're dealing in rural areas, like a lot of our rural customers are like, you know, 50 and 60 year old people like they're not finding us on Instagram and deciding they want to join the CSA like it's I think those things are important and not always talked about when you're when we're focusing on like your website and your online shop or whatever. But in a rural area, like people want to meet you, I mean, and being a part of that community, like, whether it's going to church or being a part of some sort of whatever in that community is going to make you a lot more customers than just yeah, having a good website. Well,

Alissa Hessler: 20:28

have you received any help from grants or nonprofits? I mean, I know that you had your crowd, crowdfunding to support your growth. And if he asks, Are there any resources you would recommend to other young farmers to look into to help establish their own farm business?

Jesse Frost: 20:43

So we had a case, we've had a couple grants from Kentucky State University, which is a, which is the small farmer grant that's available here in Kentucky. The we haven't had a lot of grants other than that. We've, you know, some of our capital has been like, for example, when we moved back to bug decimal, or our mentors actually gave us three years on that property before we had to pay for it. And then we had to pay for it in one lump sum. But we had that time. And that was a form of capital. So that was something that we've often thought about how we could do that for somebody else, at some point is like, give a small farm, a few seasons reprieve to be able to start a farm. That was that was huge for us. And so that was like a form of capital, something that somebody gave us, but wasn't necessarily money immediately, you know, the USDA and the FSA are good resources for loans and low interest loans at that. So that would be like something when you're ready to actually start taking out money there. They have, you know, you can get farm loans, but you can also get operational loans. There's like a $50,000 small farmer loan that you can get through the FSA. That's uh, they can give you a lot of capital right up front for getting some good infrastructure. And kind of like Hannah was saying to, it's good to, to maybe look for other people that are looking to farm and consider a collaborative idea or some sort of lease agreement to those are, those are good options for starting out, because they're so much less capital dependent. And you can take some of that burden and share it a little bit, maybe, perhaps with somebody else. I don't know if there's any others that we've received that. I'm not thinking of him?

Hannah Crabtree: 22:33

Well, I mean, we use the NRCS to get our high tunnels?

Jesse Frost: 22:37

I don't know. Yeah, that's a great one. Yeah.

Hannah Crabtree: 22:39

They're super helpful. What does that net Resource Conservation Service? Yeah.

Jesse Frost: 22:44

Yeah, National Resource Conservation Service. And they do, they do high tunnel grants, which is really important, nothing is more, you really can't make a better farm investment, and especially in vegetable production than season extension. So the NRCS offers a grant that will pay you for your high tunnel, and I think that's, that's, that's huge. They refund basically the whole thing. I mean, you can you can spend more than the amount of money that they'll give you per square foot, but they'll pretty much buy your whole tunnel if you do it, right. So that's that's definitely worth looking into is immediately go to your NRCS. And once you have your farm number, and

Hannah Crabtree: 23:23

offer lots of different like, they'll do help with irrigation. And I think a few other types of

Jesse Frost: 23:30

fencing and wildlife habitat.

Alissa Hessler: 23:34

What about people who are living in the city, and they want to learn how to farm and they don't have any capital, but they want to, you know, just get on the farm like you both did? What resources would you recommend that they go to to try and find farming opportunities where they can learn?

Hannah Crabtree: 23:52

Go to the farmers market, go to the farmers market and talk to the farmers I'm sure that they could find somebody to either work with or just volunteer with or? Yeah, that would be my first thing. If I lived in a big city. That's what I would do. But yeah, Wolf is a good example of Jesse wants to talk about that.

Jesse Frost: 24:12

Yeah, worldwide organ organization of organic farmers is just like a, it's a site where you can go and you sign up and they give you a list of all the farms and all the areas that you could want all over the world and you can you can apprentice with them. Some of those positions are paid, some of them are not paid. And you can do like two weeks stance or you can do whole seasons, just depending on which farm I think one of the things though, too, is deciding if you're if you're somebody living in a city, deciding exactly the area where you kind of want to end up or where you think you want to end up is a good place to start to and then start looking for farms in that area. That sort of fit your your goals and what you what you hope to learn. Because I think it may be tempting to go travel around Europe and work on those farms but if you ultimately want and ended up in Kentucky. It's just a good idea if you can to learn where you hope to end up.

Alissa Hessler: 25:04

Do you think I get this question a lot? Again, I don't feel like I am experienced enough to answer this question. Do you think it's possible if we move away from, you know, big ag Hmong monoculture crops, to repair the soil, the damage that they're that has been made for years and years and years of the same crop cultivations with lots of, you know, pesticides and fertilizers? Do you think that there's a way of repairing that soil? Have you have you, you know, met farmers who have successfully done that in your in your work?

Jesse Frost: 25:39

Oh, yeah, well, soils, soil is incredibly resilient. We've lost a lot of topsoil, but we can rebuild it. And we've also got a lot of wastes natural wastes around a lot of people, you know, get rid of their leaves and get rid of their, you know, yard clippings and all these things, like there's a lot of resources that can be pulled together to replenish soils, I do believe that because the soil is merely a habitat, you just have to repopulate it and give it you know, rebuild it and repopulate it. And plants through photosynthesis can do a large amount of that work when, when, when given the time and the opportunity. I think I think that is definitely something that can be done. It does take some it would take, it would take a lot of work. And it also takes a fundamental shift in how we think about food and farming and agricultural land. And waste, especially, I mean, eventually, we're going to have to get into the conversations of how we're treating humanure. And those sorts of things. Because that's an it's a taboo topic, and people don't like talking about it. But to think that we can continue to pull stuff off of agricultural land, run it through our systems, and then just dump it and not put it back on the soil is is irresponsible at best. So I mean, those kinds of conversations definitely have to be reached at some point and and really, really put some energy into.

Unknown: 27:05

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Alissa Hessler: 27:36

What about those people who don't want to pursue farming as a profession, but they want to look for manageable ways in which they can contribute, reduce their footprint and feel closer to their own food? Where would you recommend they start

Hannah Crabtree: 27:49

shopping from a farmer like makes such a huge difference. I know there's like that sort of meme thing that goes around about like, when you spend $5 at the grocery store versus when you spend $5. Like with a farmer at a farmers market. I don't think people realize how much like our salary is paid by, you know, in five, three and $5 increments every week by people at the farmers market, they pay for our family to live. And then our family is caretaking a piece of land. So like, by just shopping with a farmer or even specifically finding a farm that's practicing in a way that like you really connect with, like your your funding, you're paying for what they do that work they do to heal the land. So like if you can't grow food yourself, that just has such a huge impact that I don't think people realize, but yeah, it really is $5 bills like pay for us to own the land that we work. And that's how it works all over the country. And in in a lot of urban centers, you can find commute, you know, community gardens and things like that, that are doing. Not even just not only healing land, but educational work and just giving people the opportunity to connect with connect with the land in a way that like that will I think start to shift people's minds like it's really hard to have your hands in the soil and and not feel like a change come over you. I think so either. Yeah, finding a farm. That's just doing the good work and and supporting them or a community garden that you can grow in or that you can support is just, I mean it it seems like a cheap answer to just be like to say, you know, pay for it. But But I mean, our money is important in that way.

Alissa Hessler: 29:35

What plans and goals are you working towards? In the future?

Jesse Frost: 29:39

There are a lot of different goals like we have family goals, and we have, you know, ecological goals and I think like for ourselves, I think we really want to be you know, more engaged locally and politically and doing things that are affecting local agriculture and helping local farmers and also people who are Not as do not have the same capital privileges that we've had. And so that's something that we're trying to work into our farm. And we, you know, we want to engage our community and our customers a lot more to and be more locally minded and locally focused. And and then we just want to always be checking in with each other and making sure that we're headed in the right direction, you know, for both of our sakes and for our family. And though, you know, just constantly working on that,

Hannah Crabtree: 30:31

yeah, I mean, I think like, it seems like sort of for this year, like on just the farm level, we're focused a lot on what you touched on, like adding perennials, adding hedgerows, adding, you know, birdhouses adding an orchard those are some of our like, goals for this year is to work a little bit more into that stuff that every year you say we need to be doing these long term things, you know, we need to get those apple trees in. And I think that's one of our big goals this year is to really focus on more perennial like long term farm investments.

Alissa Hessler: 31:06

My interview with Jesse and Hannah was recorded in February of 2020. Before the pandemic, Jesse sent this brief audio postcard to tell us how they have been weathering things this year.

Jesse Frost: 31:18

It's late November, The gardens are pretty well shut down. At this point, we're getting ready to move to move farms after a really wild season. All the all the infrastructure, except for the tunnels are taken down and looking at a pretty pretty flat and not as exciting of a farm at the moment. It's just some cover crops and some plant residue. And we're gonna leave it that way for the next person to come and enjoy, you know, years of building soil. I'm very excited at the potential though from this, that more people will be growing their own for food, and I know that more people are considering moving away from the city. And that's exciting. Like I think that small towns should be booming again. And I hope that maybe that will be something that will come from this that people will move out of cities in hopes to gain some green space and learn to grow their own food and and have a little bit more control over that and maybe even know other people that are grow their own food and we can see some community kind of build from this.

Alissa Hessler: 32:41

That was Jesse frost from his rough draft farmstead in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. To read more about Hannah and Jessie and see pictures from our visit to their off grid farmstead back in 2015. Visit urban exodus.com You can find them at rough draft farmstead or no till growers.com or on social media at rough draft farmstead or at no till growers. Join us next week for my conversation with Sherry Powell, founder of the mission driven Gift Box Company yours rurally. Sherry was raised in a small town in Georgia, but moved to DC after college and built a successful career on Capitol Hill before moving to the corporate world in New York City. Growing up in a struggling rural community with a per capita income under $9,000 a year. Sherry's great passion in life is rural advocacy. She created yours rurally. To support and celebrate rally based entrepreneurs. Sherry has been an inspiration and a guiding force to me this year. And without her encouragement and friendship, I probably wouldn't have finished this podcast. You can find us on Instagram and Facebook at the Urban Exodus. To read more in depth features on folks who ditch the city and went country, visit our website urban exodus.com urban Exodus is a tremendous labor of love. If you appreciate the content we create, please consider supporting our efforts on Patreon. If you're a small business who'd like to sponsor an episode, please visit the podcast page on our website to learn more. A huge thank you to my team who made this podcast possible production by Simone Leon editing by Ari Snyder and music by Benjamin birtherism. I'm Alissa Hessler and this is the urban Exodus. Stay kind, stay joyful state resilient