Yesterday, we launched our USA ??  sourced T-shirt shop (all designs are handmade by us). Three months of work to design, source, and connect with a provider is coming to a peak.

Go check it out right now.

Josh modeling and looking all cool ‘n stuff. With Lewie, our sire (another venture of ours is Guardian GSDs! Follow @texasgermanshepherds for those adventures.)

Any kind of launch, especially when you’ve put painstaking hours into the design of each and every product, is an exciting moment. This was no less.

The first sale went to a neighbor of ours in Round Rock! (Hey, Rileys!!)

It’s time to update the blog, because the mission here at the farm has changed a lot.

The Story Behind Our Farm Venture

We’ve been entrepreneurs for 10 years. Julia McCoy is a writer, author, and business builder, and Josh runs our tech and websites. 

Why we started McCoy’s Little Farm, it was early 2020.

The pandemic hit. Times changed, fast. One day, we saw the grocery store shelves completely empty.

We found ourselves asking… what if supply chains broke down – for real?

Surprisingly, we couldn’t come up with a good answer. It seems America is a land of plenty, but where and to whom do you go to learn how to grow your own food and live off of your own land? When we started these conversations, it was hard to find even a handful of people that had a plan. There were crickets. ? 

The only answer we felt safe with: build our OWN food supply.

As we studied the times objectively in 2020, we decided to escape the city (Austin/Round Rock), acquire land, and start a farm. We put an offer on a new house with acreage in Texas Hill Country, moved, and began to slowly build our own farm – in the middle of the pandemic, mid-March 2020. It was an incredible blessing to find and buy an incredible house with land, right before the market explosion.

Golly, LITTLE did we know how incredible creating our own food source would be!

We exited our leading company so we could buckle down on our new endeavors. Josh taught himself, using YouTube videos and courses, how to build, grow and maintain his own organic, non-GMO indoor and outdoor greenhouses. Now, he grows over 30 different heads of produce indoors; so successful, his kale has reached an incredible five-foot in circumference, and next year we’ll work on another 30’x40′ outdoor greenhouse space. This is his indoor hydroponic garden. He’s constantly adding to it. 

growroom

Indoor hydroponics.

Our outdoor greenhouse. We’re prepping for planting in 2022.

He also managed the install of a a full solar off-grid system for our farm, with complete battery backup, and a self-sustaining rainwater source. It’s rather wild to take showers every night and realize rainwater is sustaining us! Interestingly enough, with the 30,000 galloon tank we have, one rainfall lasts quite a while.

I studied chicken-raising, and raised a flock of 2 day old chickens with our 7-year-old daughter (6 at the time). Now, our chicken-raising is so successful, the chickens we raised in 2020 are raising chickens of their own with no help, and we average 15 delicious eggs a day!

A baby chicken born on the farm. We do nothing but check on her a few times a week. Momma Hen does everything else!

Lovely eggs from a variety of hens we’ve raised.

We are well on our way to building a sustainable farm.

40-50% of our food supply is now grown on our farm, and our long-term goal is permaculture and fruits/berries/vegetables that give us a variety of food supplies.

Our sustainable food endeavor has been so surprisingly successful (we went into this knowing NOTHING!), we want to share the excess AND inspire America to get back into sustainable farming. We think BIG!

 

Here’s the causes stirring our hearts now.

OUR #1 GOAL (national awareness and bringing the “fun” back into sustainability): First, we want to write children’s books (Julia and our daughter Jaina!) that involve and delight children in the art and beauty of American farming. We have a chicken series, The Chicken Chronicles, on standby that we need about $5,000 in funding to start the designer and formatter with. We will be both educating and storytelling kids on the art of chicken health and chicken raising. We will write almost a dozen books in this series, born from the real-life hilarious anecdotes of our wonderful chooks. Our goal is published on Amazon and in libraries/bookstores everywhere! Look for this to come out next summer. There will be more books, including some on gardening!

OUR #2 GOAL (local community): Additionally, our goal is to use sales from our T-shirt shop (read the third goal) to re-invest in our greenhouses to be able to deliver fresh greens and food to the homeless shelters and kitchens locally here in Texas. On ONE day in Austin, Texas, it’s estimated that 3,160 people go without a home and potentially fresh food as well. This includes 2,238 people living unsheltered in tents, cars, abandoned buildings, and other places not meant for human habitation. We want to provide fresh food to these people in need and do weekly drop-offs at food kitchens.

? FUNDING – THE HOW: We decided to take our entrepreneurial skills and build a t-shirt store, designed with beautiful, hand-drawn designs by us and our design team, and printed here in the US (our provider, Printful, allows us to choose a marketplace partner that does just that – prints these beautiful, comfortable shirts here in the US!) for a goal of raising funds to share our sustainable food venture with the world.

Will you help us? Just one sale helps our mission!

We believe that Americans should be taking back the land that is theirs, and raising, growing, and maintaining their own crops. We believe in restoring the long-lost art of clean, local eating, which brings a new level of health and vitality.

Let’s make America full of sustainable, home-grown, family-made food again. ?

Want to help with this important cause? Spread the word and buy a shirt for a friend or two! Please leave a review on our t-shirts after you purchase. These are some of the COMFIEST t-shirts you’ll ever wear (guaranteed); and they’re printed in the USA! Our T-shirt store: etsy.com/shop/mccoyslittlefarm