Meet Jen Moore | Homesteading Mom/Small business owner

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jen Moore and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jen, how do you think about risk?
Taking a risk is the first step! It’s definitely the foundation for literally anything you want to do in life. If you think about it, we have all been taking risks since before we could even walk. The beginning of our journey of creating our homestead, we were sitting at the table in our 2-story home on 15 (useless) acres with a mortgage payment, car payment, tractor payment- and we knew that if we truly wanted to live a sustainable life and earn an income from it that doing this, being tied to this much debt would just set us up for failure. We had to get away from all the payments, we had to start from scratch. Were we scared? Oh, my goodness yes! We already had kids, so the unknown outcome was really scary. However, we knew deep down that for us to succeed, we needed to be all in. We needed to take that risk that brought us where we are today. So, we said let’s do it! We sold everything we had, got our debt to zero and lived in a 5th wheel for those next 3 or 4 years building our homestead from the ground up with no mortgage, we made some HUGE sacrifices that were not easy but anything good is going to take work.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I grew up a city girl. I never planted a seed in my life, never had anything more than a dog and a cat to take care of. I had never even picked up a shovel. So, you can imagine the level of experience I brought to the table here, ha! All I knew was that I wanted out of the city and to live on a farm. Alex, he grew up in a family that raised pigs, sheep, chickens and grew a garden. So, he had much more experience. Alex and I always knew we both wanted to live self-sustainable on a homestead. We both knew we wanted to raise and grow our own food. I honestly never thought about how to generate an income from it, and I have no idea why to be honest lol. He already had a plan of turning our homestead into an income producing farmstead long before we made the commitment to do it.
It took us a couple years just to finish building our house. Then, it took us about a year to get our property ready for animals. We had to fence our land, build some animal shelters and outbuildings because we wanted to be ready to add livestock and go. Alex had a plan to go a little larger and take our excess to sell at the markets so that we can make money from how we want to live. Makes sense if you think about it. Farming for your family is a lot of work on its own and being able to make a living from it too is pretty necessary.
Once we got things situated and moving along to the point where he could leave his 60+ hour work week job to work on our farm, we set a date for his last day. We set it for 1 year out after we gathered our livestock. We decided what would be best for transition was if I started doing local farmers markets selling our products that we were now able to start marketing to our community. We wanted to get a foot in the door and start building our brand. We felt we needed to establish our business in the community so that when he left his job, we would already have an income flowing.
Doing it the way we did ended up being a huge help- the smartest decision we didn’t know we made. We weren’t sure what we wanted our main focus of product to be. So, we started out with making soaps, goat milk lotions and cinnamon rolls. We had a few more things here and there that we threw in and paid attention to what our customers wanted most from us. It didn’t make sense to keep offering what wasn’t selling.
Anyway, there was a lot of evolution for our business. It wasn’t easy because there were some products that we personally liked that didn’t do as well as we wanted. Thats when being able to see that and removing our feelings about it contributed to our business growing better. To be honest, it isn’t always easy on the ego when you need to do that lol.
In the meantime, I had grown my social media presence. I found a wonderful community on places such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok who had similar lifestyles, interests and/or goals of doing the same as us. We learned so much already from them and still continue to. I talked about what we were doing a lot and the response of people wanting to help our small business was amazing! Thats when we saw the need to offer some of our handcrafted items online. I learned that supporting small businesses didn’t mean only supporting locals in your area! It’s incredible the support we receive from our out-of-state family and friends.
We have worked so hard to be where we are now. A true labor of love. We focus on detail and strive to make improvements constantly when we see when and where it needs done. We have noticed the tendency to worry about competition in ourselves and with others, some worry about what they bring to the table that isn’t already being made. What we learned is that it truly doesn’t matter. In fact, having competition is healthy. It keeps us on our toes. Competition is what keeps us improving and keeps us making the best products we can make. Small scale means attention to detail, it means quality, it means care. Nothing we make goes without putting our whole heart and effort into it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Obviously, we start out by going to all the local farmers markets! Every market here has its own amazing vibes. From the live music to the amazing homemade foods and vendors, it’s a guaranteed good time! There is always something amazing to discover at farmers markets, so many creative makers and hardworking farmers ready to offer their up their labor of love. I’d take them to one of our local wineries, a lot of the wineries here make their wine from local owned Vinyards around our area. If its summertime, we would be going to a nearby lake and enjoy snacks and fun out on the water with our paddle boards. The views around our lakes are breathtaking with the pines and the mountains as their backdrop.
If they wanted to get into more history of our area, we would go see the world-famous ruins at Mesa Verde and would definitely be sending them to stay at my friends newly renovated, spaghetti-western themed motel, Mesa Verde Motel located in Mancos, CO. Their whit, attention to detail and customer service is a wonderful experience all on its own!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Absolutely there is recognition due here! My husband, Alex. He is so good at setting goals and sticking with them. There were many times during our hardest years of sacrifice to get here that he was able to hold on to our vision and remind us of why we are doing what we chose to do. On top of being great at remembering the vision of what we wanted to work toward, we were able to this off of a single income. He worked a 60+ hour a week job, then would come home and work on our home. We didn’t hire any outside work, so it was just him and I plus our kids when they wanted to jump in and help which surprisingly, they were all about helping build everything on our farm!

Website: https://alexjenmoore.wixsite.com/farmwifelife

Instagram: @whosthatgirl_itsjen

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQe7yDzOUn6NdB_c-Tc8g9Q AND ALSO https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW12TwdO4vNKnRWspNhAq8w

Other: My Etsy shop where you can grab a piece of our made-from-scratch 3-year-old Sourdough starter that we use to create all of our locals-favorite sourdough baked goods for our farmers markets to bake for your dearest family and friends or for as a gift for someone you know that’s been wanting to do sourdough! Use this special code GITERDONE at checkout for a discount on your sourdough starter! https://www.etsy.com/shop/jenjenmoore?coupon=GITERDONE1&utm_campaign=Share&utm_medium=social_organic&utm_source=DSMT2&utm_term=so.smt&share_time=1662053384000