Balancing a Growing Farm and a Growing Family
Join Janelle Maiocco, CEO of Barn2Door, and Erica Benoit of Benoit Family Farmstead for a candid, "un-sugarcoated" conversation about the joys and chaos of raising a family on a working Farm.
For more Farm resources, visit: barn2door.com/resources
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast, the go-to podcast for do it yourself Farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman, and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale buyers. This podcast is hosted by Barn2Door, the number one business tool for Independent Farmers to manage their business, promote their brand, and sell online and in person.
Let's dive into today's Independent Farmer Podcast.
Janelle Maiocco: Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Janelle Maiocco, CEO of Barn2Door, and your host for today's episode. As many of our listeners are aware, Barn2Door builds software for Independent Farmers all across the country. By getting a system in place to sell direct market to local buyers and manage orders, Farmers can skip the middleman [00:01:00] and build a strong business with recurring sales.
Barn2Door is built for Farmers, which means we build whatever Farmers need to easily sell online and in person. To both wholesale and retail customers, including tracking real-time inventory, and we just debuted helping Farmers with local delivery. In today's conversation, we're going to visit with Erica from Benoit Family Farm, who is part of our Farm Advisory Network.
And we're gonna talk about kids on the Farm. I can't even wait. This is such a fun, fun topic. As soon as I mention it to anybody, they're like, I'm gonna listen. I can't wait. Welcome back to the podcast. Always love chatting with you.
Erica Benoit: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Janelle Maiocco: Can you just tell everybody where you're sitting right now? 'Cause it's so fun.
Erica Benoit: I am sitting in our Farm store that is also a chicken butcher shop. So we run our chickens under the 20,000 bird exemption here in mid-Missouri. And this was definitely a dream come true.
Janelle Maiocco: I love it. It's also your office, right?
Erica Benoit: Yes. Which comes in a lot with children like this helped me out a lot, having my own little space that's quiet and I don't get asked a million questions.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, I appreciate that. I just did a [00:02:00] podcast recently with Rachel from Shenk Family Farms, and her mom was watching the kids and she was on the front porch. So it was like, yep, it's a thing, right? You need to sort that out, especially if you need to have a quick conversation like this. But, yes, I get the privilege of viewing your background, when we're chatting.
Okay, so to the subject of the matter, just before we dive into Kids on the Farm, which is so juicy because you just see so many people doing this now. I mean, it's been forever. Like when has it never not been true? Right. Where families work together on a Farm I feel like it's such a thread of Healthy Hope in today's day and age. So it's kind of a nice place to sit, and discuss. But before we get started, let's give them a quick background on your Farm.
Erica Benoit: Yes. So we are located in Centralia, Missouri, which is pretty close to the right in the middle of Missouri. We do Dexter cattle, dirt-raised hogs, pasture chicken. We do some eggs plus our Farm store, where we're selling a lot of meat, and we've added in other Farmers products too to our store.
Instead of putting more on our plate, we just created a community [00:03:00] now, which has been fantastic. This was my grandparents' Farm that we bought from my grandma in 2015, which is when we had a almost 2-year-old and a two month old, so we dived in headfirst, kids in tow, and it's, been fantastic. I'm hoping not to sugarcoat things too much for you today and really give everybody the raw details of how crazy it is here. A lot, but I wouldn't change anything about how we did it or the order we did it. It's been great.
Janelle Maiocco: I actually love that you said you won't sugarcoat it because it is true often when we're chatting. We're talking about your retrospective, right? Like you've gone through it, you've learned so many things. Now you're at this point in your Farming business, with so much to share, but it's been through trial and error and tons of learning and just like any entrepreneur or business owner, or even founder out there where you're sorting through, a lot of different things.
Narrowing it down, getting efficient. You've done such a good job. By the way, if you're listening to this and love today, go listen, 'cause Erica's done a number of podcasts with us, and it's just rich gold in terms of all sorts of things. Your marketing, your [00:04:00] Farm, growing wisely, tracking money, all of the things.
But very fun today to talk about kids. So in 2015, you had a 2-year-old and a two month old. Fast forward today. Tell people the ages of your kids, and how many 'cause that changed as well.
Erica Benoit: Yes. So my oldest is 12. He'll be 13 in May. My second is 11, my third is eight, my fourth is five, and number five is on the way.
Janelle Maiocco: What is the due date?
Erica Benoit: Middle of August, so the middle of our busiest season of the year. It'll be fine. Everything always works out. It's gonna be good.
Janelle Maiocco: I'm so excited for you. Congratulations. Okay. So it goes, is it? Boy, girl,
Erica Benoit: So, boy, boy, girl, boy.
Janelle Maiocco: Okay. Well, there you go. Boy, boy, girl, boy. Okay, wonderful. And then one on the way. very exciting. Can't wait to dig in. Because you really had the Farm for their whole lives. Like if you're two, like that was the oldest when you first bought the Farm, I would suspect them participating on the Farm was just so natural. Remember back to [00:05:00] when you first noticed them picking up chores or responsibilities? Was it more organic early on or were you already like, okay, we need to think about what this is gonna look like at different ages? How did that work at the beginning?
Erica Benoit: Well, there was no planning of all this at all, so there was no like thought process of, hey, we should keep them involved.
Like none of that really crossed our minds. And me and Jared had to work together to build the fence to do anything. You can't just leave a 2-year-old with a newborn in the house. Like, they were just always right there with us. So whatever we were doing, they were right there.
The youngest was probably like strapped to my back most of the time. Our oldest, gosh, there was times that he would just like get in the pigpen. There were so many unsafe moments. But he saw Jared climbing the fence and feeding pigs, and we would turn our backs for a minute and he'd be in there with our sows and our boar and oh, it was so scary.
He just watched what we were doing and you know, picked up on it. It takes twice as long to do things with children. Everything just took forever, but they learned, all those little things that me [00:06:00] and Jared weren't exposed to it.
All that I can't even think of. They just pick up on so much and we had to learn everything just the hard way. They're out there watching us build fence that we had no idea. Like we've built that fence three times and so they're remembering now like how it's built that's keeping them in. So there's a lot just little things they've picked up on that I wish I had been exposed to, or Jared had been exposed to, whenever we got started.
Janelle Maiocco: I feel like that is literally the biggest gift.
I was chatting, just yesterday with a Farmer from Middle Tennessee and it's actually a whole nonprofit Farm. It's super cool. They just literally grow food with all volunteers and give it all to the food bank, it's amazing. She has volunteers and she's like, sometimes people have no idea, like they don't even know how to use a shovel.
I was remarking to her we have so much convenience. It's just so easy to do everything and not to get everything prepackaged or preda and a lot of kids wanna learn how to cook or they wanna learn how to do things, but they just didn't grow up doing those things.
Well, we didn't have to the same way we used to have to. It's just such an amazing skillset [00:07:00] that's been so largely lost, and it makes sense why it's been lost, but I also love that you're seeing it come back, and you're seeing people be very intentional about arming their children with really basic life-giving, self-supporting information and skills. And I love that your kids are getting that. Like that's just normal.
Erica Benoit: Yeah, some, sometimes I forget how much they have been exposed to and know until I see like other children that don't know it, or even adults that don't know what my kids know. So then that's when I really realized like the importance of what we're doing. I will say that I read in a book when my kids were young to make sure that they have tools that are their size for them.
And so we have shovels are, they were the small shovels you get at the store, like they're like gardening shovels, but they fit them. And smaller buckets. smaller hammers, just little something like that, like a, the 3-year-old can't use a full, full-size shovel and you can't expect 'em to, but when you give 'em 'em a small shovel and they're able [00:08:00] to actually accomplish something whenever they're doing like digging a hole and they're actually able to dig the hole. That's pretty big for them. Like they feel really good afterwards.
Janelle Maiocco: You're like, could you build a whole bunch of holes right in a row where I need this ditch? That would be great.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah, like their playing is working. They're playing, they're digging their holes. They are like putting water in holes and building like trenches and really understanding how water works and how, the land flow of, you know, different levels that the water's gonna flow down.
Just like little things that they were able to just figure out on their own that we didn't learn.
Janelle Maiocco: Well if you didn't grow up on a Farm, it's far less likely that you're gonna learn those amazing things just by, testing and trying and experimenting and putting two and two together of everything they're seeing and interacting with animals.
I feel like that's such a powerful thing. There's so many articles and commentary out there about how, kids growing up today literally think chickens come from a grocery store. And that's not a surprise to you, to hear me say that. But it's just, so neat for them to just contextually be in such a [00:09:00] rich environment.
Erica Benoit: Yeah, how to just treat an animal, how to give the animal respect like we have so many animals that get out all the time. Somebody will yell, like AL's out, and the younger ones know to go in the house immediately. The older ones know they have to come find us. There's this protocol that they have learned over the years of if something bad is happening and they can see it.
You know what to do in that situation. That's so important for the younger kids, especially to know if you're yelling at 'em to go in the house, you have to immediately go in the house this could be very dangerous, very quickly. And they know to do that and you don't have to sit there and beg them to go to the house. Like they know exactly what to do when that situation comes.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. That's awesome. Wow. That brings back memories. I totally remember cows being out, like cows out or the neighbor will call and be like, uh, your cows are here. Which is a little more benign, but yes, getting them home is a whole nother thing, so I appreciate that.
It's good. Yeah. And being creative and knowing the parameters and knowing danger too, I think is also. A whole different kind of street smarts, which is really neat. I could [00:10:00] just talk forever about this, but, okay let's start the top down, like your 11 and 12-year-old, sons.
What are they doing right now in terms of Farm chores and then also what you feel like they're learning right now?
Erica Benoit: So we'll go back two years ago when their Chicken S chores started. Two years ago, those two raised a thousand chickens on pasture from Broder House. They even helped to butcher them I was just so proud of them for being able to do that. And they would just brag about that to everybody that's a lot of chickens and a lot of responsibility for them to do that. And they would, they'd go out there, they'd hook up the chicken tractors to the four-wheeler.
They would pull them, they would change their water and their feed. That was a very big. Responsibility to put on them. And they just thrive. Like every time we give a little bit more responsibility, they just thrive each time. so now this year we're doing 4,000 chickens and they're doing all of it, but there's so much that we all help together.
That's kind of like a family thing now that we're all helping together. 'cause I'm not gonna put. That much [00:11:00] responsibility on 'em at this point. It's not their fault. We just keep growing. So to understand that they're still children too.
Janelle Maiocco: Do they understand the, business aspect of it too?
Erica Benoit: yes. So they're in charge of every morning they do chores with Jared. I've finally gotten to the point where I am no longer doing. The chores myself with Jared, it's Jared and the older boys. And then my daughter helps. She's just like, we'll just say different. But she also grew up differently than the older boys because we were just in a different time in our Farm.
But she's a very Fairweather. Farmer right now. So the weather's nice. So she's collecting eggs.
Janelle Maiocco: Because life is not always fair weather. So you'll, uh, help her with her thick skin? Yes,
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah. But for now, that's just works for us. and so they're water watering the cows here in a couple months when we start moving cows, they'll move cows. They do like the puls in the brooder house.
Janelle Maiocco: Is it when you say they'll move the cows with the sows? Is that feeding them and cleaning and like shoveling out?
Erica Benoit: So we don't really have to do a whole lot of that a couple times a year. We'll clean out the fair ring pins. In our [00:12:00] barn. and so I've gotten upgraded to the tractor driver where the boys all scoop the manure and then I just drive the tractor and dump it.
Janelle Maiocco: Hey, those are amazing helpers. Are you kidding me? 11 and 12-year-old boy and then you have an up and coming, daughter at eight. And they should be proud of their responsibilities and contribution.
The confidence giving and self dependency and the pride of just like I'm a contributor. People wanna be useful and they wanna be helpful and they wanna be part of something bigger and. It's just you've created that.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah. And they know in order for our family to survive, we all have to work together. We all have a job to do. 'cause that means that you're able to stay home and I'm able to homeschool you and me and Jared are here on the Farm because we're all putting in all of this effort.
So we get to live this life because we work so hard to get to this life.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. That's incredible. And so they're really doing daily chores. Do they do chores mostly like morning and evening? How does that look?
Erica Benoit: So they do [00:13:00] in the morning and then in the afternoon they have to go and water cows again.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. I appreciate that. My grandfather had a dairy Farm and my father had a dairy Farm and a chicken Farm combined. And then we were more hobby Farmers, right? But we always had pigs and cows and chickens and huge gardens and all of the above and whatnot. So, it was neat to have those responsibilities, but boy, it's they eat every day too.
Erica Benoit: My second boy, I'm pretty sure he is made the several times, like, if we didn't have this many kids, we wouldn't have to raise this much food.
Janelle Maiocco: I love it. Yeah. There's different ways to respond to that, I suspect. Oh, that's good. Okay, so your daughter is helping with eggs, which is huge, collecting the eggs. And then, what else?
Erica Benoit: Yep. Collecting the eggs. She also, when we move chicken tractors, she's in the back of the chicken tractor, like making sure the chickens don't get stuck under the chicken tractor. She just keeps them moving and then she'll unhook and hook up the next chicken tractor to the tractor each time. Very simple job, but very good for her. Very easy.
Janelle Maiocco: Love it. Yeah, absolutely. I [00:14:00] appreciate that. Okay, and then your five-year-old son, what's he doing now? Right. Looking up to all of his older siblings and…
Erica Benoit: Yeah. A lot of times it's like, just stay outta the way. But I know that we have to put in the same effort as the older ones. Otherwise is just not gonna be useful or have the skills as everyone else. So he does a lot of watering the chickens opening up the big waters and then he's putting, filling 'em all up. Sometimes he just hangs out with the older boys, does whatever they're doing, when we're butchering chickens, as long as his attention span is still pretty short. Sometimes he has a job of hitting the timer.
Whenever we're scalding chickens. We have a timer set for like 50 seconds sometimes you just have to make up jobs for that age too. Like sweeping the floor or when they were younger, his job was to watch the four-wheeler.
And so basically like stay here on the four-wheeler, but I had to make it into a job for him. So it's like, can you stay here and make sure this four-wheeler doesn't go anywhere? And he was very good at that job. Even though it was like, it's not actually a job, I [00:15:00] just need a nice way to tell you to stay here and don't move.
Janelle Maiocco: It's a responsibility. Like you said, at the beginning of your two eldest sons, it took twice as long to do everything and then now they're good at it.
They're contributing and they're actually taking, chores off your plate, or putting you in the tractor seat versus being the one scooping. Yet you still have up and comers, right? But there's more people to learn from too, right? They get to learn from their siblings and watch how it's done with somebody closer to their size and everything else. So it is different with each child.
Erica Benoit: Yeah, and the youngest one will like, help hold boards or if we're building something then, he's holding like the screws or just little things he is very good at. But again, his attention span is so small.
So we also have to remember like they're all just kids. They can't sit there and work at a job for eight or 10 hours at a time and not get bored with it.
Janelle Maiocco: Yep. It's a balance and I love that you're like, it's their age. The tools need to be the right size, and then the duration of the tasks or the responsibility of the chores is obviously gonna [00:16:00] vary.
Erica Benoit: Yes. And also not getting mad at them if they do it wrong, really give them a ton of grace because they're learning and even though we were good at something or we have it done a certain way, that doesn't mean that's how they're gonna do it or how they're successfully gonna get to the same result that we do.
So really giving them a lot of grace and room to grow and learn on their own.
Janelle Maiocco: Do you ever find that they, this might be like I'm asking you to reach into your memory bank, but things that they have. Figured out in a different way than you expected. Like they surprised you? With a good idea.
Erica Benoit: There's several times my oldest is very mechanically minded, each kid their mind works so much different, but the oldest one, he can look at something and figure it out. One day we were building like a door and we were short on lumber and he was just like, well, why don't we build it this way?
And then we would have enough lumber for it. And we're like, you know, that makes a lot of sense. There was a part that broke on our lawn mower and he was able to just look at the directions and figure out how to do it.
We kind of give them the ability to try out things like that too, especially [00:17:00] if it was like a $30 part that he replaced. So if you messed it up, well then it's not like I'm spending $300 on this part to fix it again.
Janelle Maiocco: Also, who cares if it takes twice as long, right?
You're like, I don't care. It's getting fixed and you're learning this is a win, win win. okay. 'cause you do have older sons now, like 11, 12. Talk to me a little bit about power tools and tractors and things like that.
Erica Benoit: Yes. So the older two, they can drive the tractors. We have a, compact tractor with a loader bucket. They're able to do everything with that, that they need to do. my daughter drives the side by side now, so she kind of has a little bit more responsibility with that. driving the tractors that's a big one. It makes it a lot easier on us, even if we're just shuffling things around and they're able to back it up while we pull something else in.
That's nice not having to get on and off of something so much. Power tools. This Christmas, they wanted a battery powered weed eater, and one wanted a chainsaw. So I think I did get a chainsaw, but it was like, I can't, like a reciprocal saw or something.
I'm not really sure what it was, but it was like a smaller version of a saw and I was like, you guys realize these are gifts that are making you do more [00:18:00] work. And they were perfectly fine with it. So that was pretty exciting to be able to buy 'em Power tools.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. I literally bought all the males in my family power tools this Christmas too. That's just doesn't go away.
Erica Benoit: And whenever they're older, they'll have those tools to get started that me and Jared are still trying to afford to collect those tools. When we started our Farm, we had a hammer and a drill, and a chainsaw was all we had. The amount of Chicken or sow huts that we built with a chainsaw. It was embarrassing. They all fell apart, but like, that's all we had.
Janelle Maiocco: It's amazing. And please tell me, and promise me you're keeping Christmas lists because that's gonna be a fun one to look back on one day.
I remember when my husband, we, would bite really dumpy houses and fix them up ourselves. And the day that he actually got a nail gun versus just the individual nails was like heaven come down. I don't know, it's just like such a game changer. But you appreciate that I love that that's what they're asking for, but it's such a brilliant gift. 'cause to your point, it's such a neat thing to actually spend your Christmas money on for your kids. ' but it's [00:19:00] such a big gift for a very long time.
Erica Benoit: Yes. And can we mention that it's tax deductible too, because I mean, that's stuff for the Farm, right?
Janelle Maiocco: Yes. Please mention that. You're so good about that. If you were to give yourself advice right now. For yourself in 2015 when you just bought the Farm. And of course you're getting settled, maybe I should say 2016 or 2017. But to yourself, if you were gonna be like, Hey Erica, former self 2017, you've got a couple of small babies that are up and coming on the Farm.
What advice would you give yourself about your kids with regard to life on the Farm?
Erica Benoit: Oh, so for myself in general, I wish I, somebody would've told me to. You didn't have to do so much. Like I was doing anything and everything. I was running everywhere.
And so now with this last one, I'm taking time off After the baby's born, I'm actually gonna heal my body. We are not taking on any more work. For a year after the baby's born, we'll just stay stagnant.
Janelle Maiocco: It's like a holding pattern. We've done that a few times in our life too. It's just a good decision for [00:20:00] the time being, for everybody to be where they are without a lot of change or extra. You're already getting extra. You don't need to add onto it.
Erica Benoit: Yes. Yeah. So just my expectations for myself. I've really lowered them a lot. For the kids wise, I think a lot about like all the things that I did that I thought were necessary during that time, that honestly it didn't put us ahead whatsoever maybe just playing with the children more or just taking that time to really focus on them instead of growing our Farm.
'Cause it was gonna grow anyways. So maybe appreciate all those days better, even though those were some really rough days.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, that's so much. I know we talked a lot about chores and all of the freedom and flexibility children have on Farms growing up to, like you're saying, engage with animals and even frankly in dirt and figuring out how all the things work together.
But what about homeschool? How does that work? What's that balance look like for you?
Erica Benoit: Oh, I'm still learning that balance but homeschooling revolves around our busy seasons.
So as soon as chickens [00:21:00] are out on pasture, we cannot be homeschooling. It's, that just adds so much extra work to us. But I mean, even though we're not homeschooling in the books, we're still learning so much through all of the chores and all the Farm stuff that we now have to do. Yeah, and just kind of being very flexible with that.
Some of the books that we're doing the kids are two years advance in and it doesn't really matter. I don't know, there's so much stuff that I'm learning in their books that I'm like, I'm never using this. They have so many life skills and just, street smarts.
They could figure so many things out I'm not putting down education, like education is so important. Being able to read all those things are so good, but it's okay to take a day off and do other things too.
Janelle Maiocco: Oh yeah. And you're gonna check the boxes on like reading, right?
Like reading, writing, arithmetic, sort of the core things. Absolutely. But science, you're standing in the middle of it. Art, you're standing in the middle of it. And of course you can build on those projects, but business, you're really teaching practical math too. I think there's so much to be said for [00:22:00] that, I have to say.
I homeschooled for a while too and loved it. Again, never a disregard for just, education, et cetera, but in their situation, we had done the math on, and this was kind of younger elementary years, but by the time they filled out a worksheet, and, finished quickly, and then if they had to wait for other kids to finish
I calculated at one point, all the quote unquote sort of downtime the amount of actual, like thinking time, schoolwork, teaching was quite small compared to the seven-hour school day, especially if your kids are really fast at completing things, which might happen to be. It was like, okay, I can accomplish, let's just say it was an hour a day where they were actually quote unquote learning and I was like, okay, yeah, I can do this. Right? It was very empowering to be like, I can absolutely cover language spelling, you know?
Math, reading literature, whatever it was those really mainstream things and to your point, have them even work ahead ' cause it's at their pace. And then I would take them to the science museum and to the zoo and to like Farms 'cause we were just [00:23:00] an urban Farm at the time and teaching them skills.
Like for anybody out there, 'cause I know there's a lot of folks that are really taking on homeschooling, Farming, and I just applaud that, but don't feel bad. If you feel like you have to do hours and hours every day. No. They can learn a lot and pull them into the business side of it and, you know, teach 'em all those things too and the life skills, it's just so rich.
Erica Benoit: Yeah, we try to be very open about the business side of it too. Like our older ones are starting to ask well, how much did that cost? How much are you charging for that? And really being completely open with them of how much it costs, how much we try to make off something.
They should be aware of that. 'cause hopefully one day they're gonna be taking this over and they need to know how to make those decisions and they have to know what's going on.
Janelle Maiocco: I agree with you a hundred percent. Are they often at the, like in your store that you're sitting in right now transacting with customers as well so they're helping people check out and those sorts of things?
Erica Benoit: It depends on the time. During like harvest season, my husband helps his cousin's family run the grain cart. So he's gone all those Saturdays [00:24:00] and so the two older boys, and then sometimes my daughter kind of hops in and out. They'll take turns. We're open for four hours. So one will come in before lunch, one will come in after lunch, and they are, you know, bagging the groceries and filling the freezers up.
For the most part right now, as long as me and Jared are in here, I say it's our time away from the children. Like me and Jared are here and the kids are like, yes, we get a break. We don't have to deal with mom and dad. we all kind of get a break from each other and it's sometimes it's very well needed.
Janelle Maiocco: I actually think that is just a huge nugget of wisdom, right? Like if anybody who's been on a holiday with their family for a month straight or some, you know, or, well, that's not a good example, is it?
Erica Benoit: Well, just summer break,
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. Summer break. Great example of like when you're full-time with everyone and you're not used to it. Like, yeah. Build in breaks. you do need breaks. It's an ebb and a flow. And that's a great piece of advice though, of having kids on the Farm and homeschooling, et cetera, is to build in.
And your kids are gonna be a range of, introvert to extrovert too, right? And so some are gonna need more breaks. You know, whatever it is to give them a mental break and a break from all the [00:25:00] family relationships, et cetera, can be super healthy.
Erica Benoit: Oh, yes. Yeah. And I think last Saturday, the older three got a little annoyed with the younger one. So their 5-year-old was down here at the Farm store helping, and his job was just open the door for customers. And he was the cutest little door opener and everybody loved it. And it's just another one of those little jobs that he felt so good about doing of course he was adorable, so that helped out too.
Janelle Maiocco: That is just pure brilliance. Well, I was gonna say in terms of life skills, which they're just mounting at this point when you have kids on the Farm and everything that we've chatted about, but the fact that they are around a store environment where. It's the family business. I mean there's stories of this in so many capacities with small business owners that aren't Farmers, but maybe they're restaurant owners.
Even knowing how to engage customers and customer service and you have to think about the customer and Oh, they need a bag, and how do you put things in the bag? Those are all just incredible lessons.
Erica Benoit: Oh, yeah, I also think we need to talk about what we give to our children for doing all this. So starting out up until [00:26:00] like last year, we weren't able to make enough money to pay the kids so we would do like special evenings of buying ice cream and ice cream toppings and kind of doing just like an ice cream Sunday night or, there's a local bakery that after we butchered chickens, we would go there for ice cream and cookies.
That was just a huge treat. Butchering chickens is not fun, but when you're really looking forward to that ice cream and cookie afterwards, you can get 'em to do a lot of things. Now we're able to pay, the older boys get paid weekly. They just have money that just automatically deposits into their account weekly.
The younger two they'll get paid like a couple dollars a week depending on if they did anything. But it kind of gives them a little bit of extra spending money. My daughter's really into crafts right now, which gets very expensive. And so when she wants the money, then she's collecting eggs really well then she gets her money and then she gets to go buy something.
So she's kind of put that together, that the more work I do, the more money I make, the more things I can buy. Which is good for her to know and have them experience what it's like to have money and [00:27:00] spend money instead of never making money. Then you get your first paycheck and you blow it all because you don't know what it's like.
So really having them have that experience. We also treat them like adults when it comes to earning money. When we go to an investor, they are talking directly to the investor, they get to decide if they want to invest money or just keep it in their checking account.
They kind of get to decide all those things and actually talk to the person at the bank I want them to be the ones talking
Janelle Maiocco: Oh, I love that. That's so empowering. And you're right there, so you're participating in the conversation as needed. That's great. It is so good to think through incentives. We used to always have conversations around like, hey, there is a portion of chores and responsibilities that you need to do as being just part of the family you're a contributing member. This is the expectation.
But then to your point, there's also the like above and beyond and the incentives to do that, you kind of have to figure out what that line is, in terms of what's the extras. Incentives are amazing, right? You'd rather use a [00:28:00] carrot than a stick. We had an exchange student live with us for a year.
So I had at the time, between my two and that I had three high school boys and I would put chores up on a whiteboard. I'd put like 10 every day. I'd have to make sure I have at least 10. And they ranged from pretty quick You know, take out the garbage to something far more do the dishes or, whatever. It could be a range of things. I just said, you have to choose two a day. First come, first serve.
Erica Benoit: That's a good idea.
Janelle Maiocco: And then I was like if you don't then you're stuck with dishes after dinner or we'll wait till you do at least one till we even eat, or something like that.
But some of them would get up and choose the first two easiest ones at the crack of dawn. Right. And you're not nagging anybody. They're just doing it. And then if somebody's always a procrastinator, well their chores are gonna always take longer because the hard ones are what are left, right?
But it's just nice to have a system because the last thing you want is to be a nag so that's the neat part of having, to your point, an expectation or chore list. But then also potentially opportunity for acknowledging the above and beyond hours and contributions. Especially if they're involved in a quote unquote business venture. It's really [00:29:00] fun then.
Erica Benoit: Yeah. I've been in the mindset of if I'm doing this to make money and my kids are helping they should get paid too.
But also, my daughter, she's in charge of laundry that's such an important thing that our family needs is somebody that just switches out laundry, like just three times a day and switch it out. And I'm like that's kind of like part of being the family, but also that's so important. Like that means that I'm able to do other things. So I think that I'm gonna have to start like that being.
Janelle Maiocco: like allowance or something, right?
Erica Benoit: yes. Like part of her chores that she gets paid for is the laundry. I kind of think of the Farm wives, we're in the background doing things, but we're so important too.
What's happening on this Farm, but it kind of gets overlooked. So I wanna make sure that she is understanding that her job is important too, even though it's not outside, you know, not getting all the recognition, but that's such an important job to help the family run.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. It's good for you There are always jobs in the background no matter what. I even look across my company and there's some [00:30:00] that are, you know, get a lot of recognition really regularly. Right. Just because they're either customer facing or our design team's always making beautiful things and everybody always is like, Ooh and awe, and they get all this love.
And then you have finance team doing budget and doing taxes honestly helping. File taxes all across the country and everything else. Because we have Farmers everywhere, so that's not a thank you. Right. That's just what gets done in the background are all these things you know, are helping build inventories for Farmers or whatever it is.
But there's a lot of thankless jobs that go on. And to your point, you're right, we always try to make sure we're scanning around and, balancing out the appreciation a little bit and making sure that the people who don't naturally in the course of a day get appreciated that they're also very aware how important they are to the overall success. Okay. I bet you're probably thinking about different things that we could or should talk about. If you have any others, let me know. Otherwise, I do have another question.
Erica Benoit: Okay. I was just gonna say like in the summertime, we're butchering a ton of chickens and we're doing so much work down at the Farm store.
Another fun thing we do [00:31:00] is we keep soda and snacks at the Farm store, which is not natural food minded whatsoever, but we went so long not being able to buy sodas or like the junk food at all. It's such a huge treat and the kids like love it, we come down here and we get to eat some cookies or some sort of snack and we get a soda.
It's a huge treat and a good morale booster a little bit for the kids too. They love it, but it's only during the summertime and only when we're between chickens. So it's another one of those fun things that we do.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. I love that. I love that. I love it. That is such good advice.
You're gonna think about a million things after we. Close up this podcast and you're gonna be like, oh, I wish I would've said that. Can you just email me and I'll put it in a blog? Whatever comes to your brain that we didn't, 'cause I know there's a million other things. 'cause you, there's just one experience after another that you have.
Okay. My sort of last question, is just like memories. If you think back on kids on the Farm, generally speaking. What are a couple of memories, like two or three memories that just jump into your mind as [00:32:00] experiences as a family or with your kids on the Farm?
Erica Benoit: Yeah. I think about whenever we only had a four-wheeler out here. We didn't have our side by side. I think we got the side by side last year. so this old four wheeler and we were all piled on it. when I envision my family like two or three years ago it's like Jerry driving the four wheeler and I'm sitting like on the side and there's two front and two kids in the back and we're all just piled on this thing that can barely run because we're all on it.
So that's kind of how I, picture us getting things done was just all piled together like that.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that picture. That's the perfect one. Okay. I'm gonna wrap us up today unless you have any last words, although I feel like you're fitting so many good things in.
Erica Benoit: I think that's it for today.
Janelle Maiocco: For today and she's going to email me with more ideas and we'll put 'em into a blog as a follow up too. 'cause there's so much to think about when it comes to kids work fun. School and all of the things. And I'm so excited that you have a fifth on the way. Congratulations. More hands on the Farm, right?
That's how they used to do it that's just how Farms [00:33:00] were run and same is true today and it's really encouraging and inspiring. So thank you for joining us today. Hey, follow Erica on her Instagram handle. It's @BenoitFamilyFarmstead. That's B-E-N-O-I-T Family Farmstead.
So @BenoitFamilyFarmstead, please go follow her on Instagram. You'll learn all the things. Listen to her other podcast too, that she's done on the Independent Farmer Podcast. Lots of great topics that we've covered including a few recently, which has been a lot of fun.
Here at Barn2Door, we're humbled to support thousands of Independent Farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools to help Farmers make more money, ditch the office work and look like a pro. We literally talk all day every day to Farmers and Farmers working with Barn2Door, can go to office hours daily or schedule one-to-one meetings with team members for consulting on their business.
Farmers like Erica actually host office hours as well. So we have our team who hosts office Hours. Erica and other Farmers similar to her that we work with host, it's called the Connect Program ' cause it's Farmer to Farmer. So [00:34:00] she might be hosting an office hour, five or 10 Farmers will show up and they'll have a conversation, ask all the questions, directly and get ideas specifically for their Farm.
So, really neat program, that Erica is a part of, which is really fun. We exist to support Farmers like you, like Benoit Family Farmstead, and if you're wanting to learn more. About selling direct or having a business system in place, which is what we help with for Farmers just to make it a lot easier and including easier for you to sell and buyers to buy. Check out Barn2Door.com/learnmore.
Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast. Thanks, Erica.
Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn2Door, we are passionate about empowering Independent Farmers to build a thriving business. To all the Farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local [00:35:00] communities. You are the backbone of our country.
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