We recently connected with Eric & Monica Bland and have shared our conversation below.

Eric & Monica, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

One of the defining moments in our life as farmers and becoming mentors ourselves was when we moved to Texas.

In 2013, as our family was still growing we started to realize the need for healthier foods and more ways to take care of ourselves within the community and not relying on big businesses to supply everything for us. In the middle of 2014 we had the opportunity to move across the country and begin that transition of truly, becoming more self and community sustaining. We moved from a townhome right outside of Baltimore city, to 10 acres of beautiful land here in Texas. The Lord gave us a home and ability to start increasing our knowledge and skills of how to live from the land he’s given us as well as the community he surrounded us with.
When we arrived, we realized that we really didn’t know anything about how to farm or raise our own food. Raising chickens in the suburbs of Baltimore was a lot different than Growing all your own meat and having a big vegetable garden in Texas. We had no idea how to care for cattle or pigs or any of the animals that we wanted to grow, but we knew there had to be someone to help us. With the help of social media and a kind neighbor, we were able to start raising our own food that very year. We invested in three head of cattle, chickens, and even some pigs within the first year. Without the Lord leading us to our neighbor (our mentor) for his help and advice, our journey would’ve looked a lot different. So now, we try and do that for others in the community that we meet.

Back in Maryland we could garden and raise chickens but never to extent we do now!

Eric & Monica, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Eric and I are the owners of Bland’s Promised Land Ranch. We are a large family that seeks to glorify God by encouraging others to live out their dreams and find their way through community and self sustainability.

We raise as much of our own food as we possibly can and by doing so we try to encourage others to find ways to raise their food as well. We also encourage people to barter and to work together as a community to become less dependent on the store. We have assisted in different events where people come together and practice and learn skills for homesteading, Skills like processing your own meat birds or even canning that meat once you process it. By living a life like this, we know that not only when we sell our meat products, but sell our services as mentors and teachers, we are showing others our genuine desire to help them reach their goals. Whether we’re selling grass, fed beef or farm, fresh eggs, our customers and friends know that we also consume and raise the products that we sell.

How’d you meet your business partner?

We met in high school and quickly became friends, we married a year after Monica graduated and started our family a few years later. Having a large family (8 kids) Has really given us desire to give them good things, like clean foods, and providing them a way to live their life to serve God as well. When we were living in Maryland, we were only able to really grow our own vegetables and raise some chickens however, we weren’t even doing those things at our townhome because there was just no room. We used our parent’s yards to grow gardens and raise some chickens.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When moving to Texas, we really didn’t know much about how to grow our own food or how the Texas climate was going to impact our ability to grow vegetables or even raise animals. So when we got here, we just jumped in with both feet. Unfortunately, we learned along the way that the weather in Texas can be very harsh. In 2015 only nine months after we moved here we encountered crazy amounts of flooding in our yard and lost our entire vegetable garden that we had just taken time to plant. I didn’t stop us and we started over but it was a rough first year here. We encountered storms that we had never seen before in Maryland, we had injury after injury on the farm. Learning how to take care of large animals, and trying to maneuver, our family life around all of that, was very difficult. By 2020, when we started our YouTube channel, we started realizing that you have to show people the hard parts so that they can get through it the way you did. Sometimes some simple encouragement is all it takes to remind others that they don’t have to quit when it feels like too much. So even after years of trials, we started our YouTube channel as a way to encourage others to be resourceful and to basically mentor them via social media.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.blandspromisedlandranch.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blandspromisedlandranch?mibextid=LQQJ4d
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@blandspromisedlandranch?si=7JDjqQAafW3vi3NC
• Other: https://linktr.ee/BlandsPromisedLandRanch?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabNQGygDBYOVZoHwgjfeMSVKGrJftjgMjUkM1Av1ysNs0D_yn7L2iZ1He8_aem_-UTn7CaeajC5CjThVUfd0g

Image Credits

Seasons Photography