Dryland pasture, livestock, ten years of somebody else’s deferred maintenance—and one self-appointed German Shepherd foreman who insists Doc is merely the help.
MAJC Homestead is an eight-acre experiment in turning dry eastern Washington ground into working pasture—without pretending the weather owes us a favor.
Doc came to this place outside Ritzville with a retired soldier’s tolerance for hard jobs, a paramedic’s instinct to fix what is bleeding first, and an engineer’s inability to leave a system unimproved. The farm had roughly a decade of deferred maintenance waiting for him. It still has plenty.
The big project is dryland forage: catching limited water, moving it slowly, and convincing about six acres of pasture to feed livestock in a place that gets around ten inches of rain a year. Progress arrives in green strips, rebuilt parts, and fewer trips back across the property for the tool that should have been there already.
“If it works perfectly the first time, I probably didn’t build it.” — The unofficial MAJC Homestead quality standard
Everyone here has a job. Some guard, some graze, some produce breakfast, and some mainly supervise at very close range.
Farm foreman / service dog in training
Nearly all-black long-haired German Shepherd—with white tufts inside her ears and brown “toe stripes” tracing down to her toes—apprentice service dog, and undisputed executive management. Sammi is learning to herd the sheep, watch the property, and make every farm project take 20 percent longer in the most photogenic way possible.
Official position: she does the work. Doc is just the help.
Why these sheep
That one line is the whole breeding plan. Doc chose St Croix ewes because they are small-bodied, happy to eat scrub, and so disease-resistant they barely need a vet. They have the thin, quick, almost elven build that suits rough ground without turning every week into another appointment.
Then there is Chuck, the Dorper ram: shorter, squatter, broader, and built like somebody compressed a much larger sheep. Dorpers grow fast, carry real muscle, and make excellent meat.
Their Royal White crosses get the useful parts of both breeds—St Croix hardiness and Dorper size and growth. They stay low-maintenance long enough to reach freezer-camp age without needing real veterinary care first. These are breeds chosen for homestead scale, not industrial scale: low work, honest meat, no livestock-management hobby disguised as efficiency.
Why American Chinchillas
The American Chinchilla is an endangered heritage breed on the Livestock Conservancy’s watch list, which is strange because it may be the perfect homestead rabbit. It grows fast, has an excellent meat-to-bone ratio, raises large litters with good mothers, and leaves behind a pelt actually worth keeping. The breed is American; the gray coat—black, white, and gray hairs all mixed together—looks like chinchilla fur. Hence the name. No marketing department required.
Most rabbits are good at one lane: pet, meat, or pelt. The American Chinchilla does all three. Giant breeds cost too much to raise for a terrible meat-to-bone ratio. Little breeds barely bring meat to the discussion. The all-white New Zealand, the commercial meat standard, produces a pelt that tends to fall apart when it is skinned.
So why is the versatile one endangered? Because the industry did not need the perfect rabbit; it needed the perfect factory rabbit. White pelts take any dye, white carcasses look clean on a processing line, and once big rabbitries standardized on one breed, the rest of the system locked in around it. The Chinchilla’s advantages are homestead advantages. They mean little to a processor moving ten thousand rabbits. Then cheap store meat pushed backyard rabbit-keeping aside, and the breed nearly went with it.
Projects, animals, repairs, pasture experiments, and evidence that Sammi was involved.
Build the system. Fix what breaks. Film the part where it breaks differently.
Army discipline, paramedic triage, engineer brain, farm reality.Doc is a retired Army Combat veteran who served as a combat medic paratrooper in a European branch of the 82nd Airborne, a former paramedic, and a lifelong tinkerer with an engineer’s mindset. He runs the farm solo while managing AUD-ADHD (ADHD combined with autism) and a service dog who is still working out which one of them is training the other.
I work slowly because of a neurologic issue — some days my legs just don’t work — so this farm runs on stubbornness and automation.
The camera stays on for the good ideas, the ugly repairs, the animals “helping,” and the moment a clever shortcut becomes tomorrow’s full project. Farm life is funny enough without sanding off the rough edges.
"I'm ambitiously lazy. If there's anything I've got to do more than three times, I'm going to automate it or turn it into a system because I don't like the mundane and I don't like to have to remember things. I may not be brainless, but I strive to be."
Questions, farm stories, tool recommendations, or a strong opinion about a repair Doc hasn’t tried yet? Send a message through the farm’s social pages.