On September 13th and 14th of 2024, we were able to host our first ever Homesteading-ish conference in Charleston, WV. The two day event was held at our home church, Bible Center. Over 20 speakers presented more than 30 unique topics from finance, organics, bee keeping, pigs, sawmilling, and other great homesteading topics. 

Many people have thanked us for setting up this conference and hosting it, but we would be remiss if we didn’t give the credit to where it is really due. Last October, I was contacted by a friend of mine who happens to be the chairman of our local conservation district. That position is an elected position that every state has. The chairman, Terry Hudson, has followed our Youtube Channel for a while and we have had some interactions with the use of the chicken processing trailer. Terry has a great small farm about an hour away from us where for years he has offered incredible vegetables and farm to table dinners. Anyway, he contacted me and asked me what I thought about partnering with them to develop a homesteading conference the following year. They had some funding from NRCS and other sources to put on educational courses at various venues. Terry wanted to form that into a new conference that catered more to the homesteading crowd.

Planning for the conference started last fall and his team and I worked on it every month leading up to the event. I never realized how much work goes into planning an event like this. Securing the venue, booking speakers, and selling tickets are just the basics. The details were where it really got difficult. Issues like how do we schedule the speakers so there are enough unique and detailed topics that people feel like they really took a deep dive into a specific subject but not frustrate them because they can’t attend all of the sessions going on at once – that was tricky.

I felt the anxiety building on the day of the event got closer. I really started to doubt whether anyone would show up despite having modest ticket sales. I also decided I would do two different presentations as well as host the event and emcee the round table discussion on the first night. What was I thinking?!? Fortunately, people came pouring during our check in period. All of our guest speakers showed up, presented, and hung out and visited for the duration of the event. I didn’t even say anything I would later regret (Kelly helps me recognize those things afterwards). 

At the time of writing this post, we are a couple of days away from getting the conference development team together and doing a full assessment of the conference. We have exit interviews to review, income and cost analysis to do, commentary on our speakers to discuss, and a multitude of other topics to go over. I am excited, however, with how the first event went and, at this time, cannot wait to start planning the next one. 

We will be updating our conference website soon and will tease out any new information about Homesteading-ish 2025. Be sure to check out the site homesteading-ish.com and follow up on facebook too in order to get the latest updates on next year. I want to thank all who made it and tell you Kelly and I really appreciate you all taking the time to come hang out with us for a couple days.