We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful William Crumpler, II. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with William below.
William , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?
In life we have our own goals, aspirations, and timeline on how we want things to go. But God’s plan for our life is the only thing that really matters. God used failures and disappointments to push me into a different path. A path that I could have never imagined. I was very uncomfortable doing something out of the normal but I trusted that everything was in God’s hand. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. Roots are the part of a plant that absorb nutrients and water and transport them to the rest of the plant. It also is the anchorage for the plant that keeps it strong and standing tall. To overcome those feelings of being uncomfortable, failures, and disappointments I had to have Faith in God and trust His process. Not just ordinary faith but strong deep rooted faith. Without having rooted faith in God I wouldn’t be here today. So it was only right to name the business Rooted Faith Farm.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Rooted Faith Farm is an urban family farm/apiary that focuses on using what God put on this Earth to feed, heal, and nourish the body. We offer wellness products such as soaps, elderberry syrups, body butters, and honey. We also educate about pollinators and beekeeping. Growing up as a young black male being famous, well known, or successful was something that I always dreamed of. The majority of people that I saw and thought were famous or successful were either athletes or entertainers. I chose basketball with hopes and aspirations of being someone that everybody knew and liked, with dreams of making it to the NBA. As I got older I realized that dream was harder than I thought and far fetched. As time went on I found myself just going through the motions trying to figure out life, not really knowing who I was as a person. By the end of 2015 I found myself in a very dark place. Very depressed, looking for happiness in the wrong places, and thoughts of not wanting to be here anymore. I felt like a failure because I wasn’t where I thought I should be in life. Early 2016 my parents rented a plot in a community garden but couldn’t take care of it because it was a little bit too much work. I decided to take over not knowing anything about growing food or plants. I threw some seeds in the ground and planted a few plants. After a month or so I went back to the plot and was amazed at what a tiny seed turned into. I never realized or thought about where food came from. I just knew you could go to the store and buy it. I walked around the community garden and saw that other people had lots of food growing and wanted to know how I could get my plot to look like theirs. So I spent my free time doing research and watching YouTube videos about growing food. At the end of 2017 while doing research I came across an article that talked about how honeybees were in trouble and that we need pollinators to pollinate flowers in order to produce food and seeds. This was intriguing to me so I did a little more research and saw that you could become a beekeeper and help save honeybees. I jumped out on a limb and ordered some bees, a bee suit , and the equipment needed to keep bees. My focus shifted to honeybees and I did as much research as possible so that I would be ready when the bees got here. The bees got here in May of 2018 and I instantly fell in love. The next couple years I spent my free time between growing food and being a beekeeper. 2021 I turned my hobby into a business and started dating and married my wife who also happens to be into wellness. Genesis 1:29 states, “Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” Nature is what brought me out of a deep place. I realized everything I was looking for was all around me. Everything we need is in nature. Joy, peace, happiness, food, medicine, etc. We just have to take the time to connect with nature, enjoy it, and use what God created.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
My wife is my business partner/my right hand/best friend/motivator/everything lol. I can’t remember exactly when I met Danielle, but I have been knowing her for about 20 years. She is my cousin’s best friend and I would always see her when we would hang out. My cousin started trying to hook us up around 2017 but I was not really ready to date anyone. My cousin stayed persistent for the next 3-4 years and I finally gave in 2021. We started dating in February 2021 and ended up getting married November. We have a beautiful daughter that will be 7 years old this year and a son that will be 1. Both my wife and surprisingly our daughter is into herbs and using what God created to stay healthy so it was a perfect match. Me and Danielle are motivated to keep pushing and grow this business so that our kids and their kids will have opportunities available when they get older.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
When I first got into beekeeping in 2018, all the articles and videos that I would watch stated that you had to put chemicals in the hive to make sure pests wouldn’t take over and that you had to feed sugar water, which is considered imitation nectar, to honeybees. Both didn’t seem healthy or ethically right so I went against the grain and started to learn to keep bees in a different way. A way called natural or treatment free beekeeping. It is not good to put chemicals on fruits and vegetables that we eat because those chemicals could do harm to our body. So what’s different with honeybees? Sugar water, which I consider koolaid is also not healthy for our bodies. So what’s the difference with honeybees? Honeybees can fight their own pests on their own. In the wild nobody goes out and treats honeybees. Most do not know that worker honeybees only live about 6 weeks. They spend the last two weeks of their lives going out searching for nectar and bringing it back to the hive to turn into honey. Honey is one of the things bees use for food during the winter. Most worker bees do not even get to enjoy the honey because of their life span. But they understanding the benefits of storing honey for the next generation to have food during the winter as there is not much nectar around because of the weather. This will be my fifth year beekeeping and I am still not treating bees or feeding them sugar water. I let them do things naturally. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard beekeepers call me crazy and tell me that it will never work. I use those words as motivation to keep trying to do things naturally and let the bees operate like they did before we started messing with them.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.rootedfaithfarm.com
- Instagram: @rootedfaithfarm
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RootedFaithFarm