We recently connected with Blaze Baxter and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Blaze, thanks for joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

My husband and I were living the “California Dream” with our six figure jobs, a gorgeous home & all the stress that went along to maintain that lifestyle. We found ourselves living for the next vacation & missing our children’s special moments along the way. After many years of illness & doctors brushing things off as stress, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune immune condition that made me question & second guess everything about our lifestyle. We were both ready for a change. I obsessed over food choices and gut health. We made the decision too sell everything, my thriving business, get out of debt, & purchase much more sustainably. Our goal was for me to stay home, & grow as much of our own food as possible. I became a certified health coach for my own education. We moved to Oklahoma with a single truckload of belongings. This was 2013. We were almost immediately hit by a tornado & lost our small home so what did we do? We bought more land, lived in an RV and built an even smaller home as we could afford to pay cash. Last year our youngest daughter became paralyzed at 22 from a medication reaction. She moved back into our 900 SF home with us. Through everything, the risk we took to make huge changes in our lifestyle has brought our family closer & we are definitely all healthier & happier for it. We now raise, grow and butcher 95% of our own foods. That’s true wealth. More time & nourishment with zero food miles, My job now is to teach others that they can do the same.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I realized there was a huge disconnect between farmers and health. Something one wouldn’t expect. As a nutrition coach first, my goal is to educate farmers & homesteaders to “practice what they preach”. Most work so hard to sell you veggies on Saturday that they grab some fries for dinner because they’re wiped out.

I have a passion to teach balance. “grow so small you cannot fail”. We can’t feed the world and not care for our own body, that’s not sustainable.

I teach homesteaders how to regeneratively grow they’re own foods, butcher, harvest & plan for seasonal eating to get out of the grocery store whether they have an apartment patio or 100 acres. Many believe a vegan diet is the way of the future but healthy meat that never leaves your farm and is fed a species appropriate & seasonal diet of grasses, will always be healthier for human and soil than a factory made veggie burger with a laundry list of toxic ingredients disguised as food. I want people to be connected to their foods, their farmers and take their health into their own hands. Food choices heal or damage you. We all have a choice to care.

I struggled to find good information on how to learn all the things I needed to grow and raise livestock in Oklahoma. Old school farmers still depend on agriculture inputs like corn & soy. I knew enough to know I wanted a healthier end product than most were providing. I now teach classes from everything from seasonal canning, growing, getting started with chickens to butchering pigs.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Our first storm season in Oklahoma, just months after purchasing our home, we went down into the storm shelter believing this was just something we had to get used to, I reasured my girls everything would be fine. It wasn’t. We opened the door to see our house was no longer standing. As our California friends expected us to head back “home”, most having thought our move was crazy in the first place, this was the actual event that solidified for us, Oklahoma was our home. The amount of people who jumped in to help with all of our needs, the care, the comoradarie was overwhelming. This, I later recognized as a step in the path that led us to the homestead we were meant to be at. We were homeless for 9 months yet never left our little farmstead. Living in RVs and tents later led us to the goal of finding our perfect 20 acres & not caring that it didn’t yet have a home. We had done it before, we knew we could do it again.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

September 2021, our daughter was paralyzed from a medication reaction. She was released from the hospital with a neurological disorder that caused seizures and she has not walked since that day. She had 2 full time jobs, college & a small business from our farm as well as her own home, car., Lovely life to look forward to. We were empty nesters who became full time caretakers overnight.

I thought that was the end of Bad Baxter Farm. Our world still revolves around her medical appointments & she’s worth every minute. I’m thankful our lifestyle changes allow me to be with her 24/7. Had we stayed in CA, I could never have afforded that luxury. Although I have slowed down to keep family first, I have used my own balance to adjust farm life while not ridding the important values and high standards we have for our food sources. My homestead is my medicine. Less is more still reigns true. I’m not trying to get rich, I’m trying to feed my family nourishment unavailable in a box or bag, in a way that heals not only us, but the soils. It’s all relavent, it’s all related. Food may not make her walk again, but we’ve found things that help keep seizures at bay. This in itself is such a reminder that healing always starts in the gut. Food can heal most things, I still believe this to be true. I’ve seen it myself.

With this life change, or even looking back at the pandemic, the consistent thing has been that we are so much less affected by outside inputs or world changes because we have what we need at all times. My land is my grocery store, my gym & as modest as it is compared to how we were living, it’s all paid for. I love showing others how to attain that kind of health & wealth regardless of what life throws at us.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thenakedhomestead.com
• Instagram: Bad.Baxte.Farm
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/badbaxterfarm?mibextid=ZbWKwL
• Other: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/BadBaxterFarm