When we moved to our farm seven years ago, both Mark and I knew the homestead would be a full-time job and working a "real" job too would slow things down dramatically.  Neither of us come from wealthy families, though, so we needed a source of income.

About that time, we went to learn how to slaughter chickens at a friend's farm.  They had a Whiz-Bang Chicken Plucker and Mark was very taken by its ingenuity.  When we looked the product up on the internet and realized that the inventor, Herrick Kimball, was running a small home business based on that (and other products), Mark wondered if we could do the same.

To cut a long story short, Mark ended up inventing a POOP-free chicken waterer that has reached thousands of chicken-keepers in the U.S. and around the world.  We had to tighten our belts for the first year because the microbusiness barely brought us above the poverty line, but then word of mouth helped Mark's invention take off.  Soon we had enough spare cash that Mark was able to hire another local homesteader to help me in the garden part time, giving him time to work on inventing an even better chicken waterer.

Imagine how thrilled Mark was yesterday, when his role model wrote about the EZ Miser on his blog.  We'd sent Herrick a review copy just on the off chance he was willing to give our waterer a try, but his kind writeup went far beyond our expectations.  In fact, Herrick told me he plans to write a review of Trailersteading shortly as well, which prompted me to remember that I wanted to read and review his recent Planet Whizbang Idea Book for Gardeners.

Stay tuned for more tips from an inventor very much like Mark in a later  post.  In the meantime, be sure to add The Deliberate Agrarian to your reading list --- this is one of my top-ten favorite homesteading blogs and should be required reading for both the aspiring and established homesteader.  Enjoy!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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