2026 Expo Speaker Bios

Daniel is multi-generational farmer and son of the "world's famous farmer" Joel Salatin. He’s grown up in the farming landscape in Swoope, VA Farming right out of the gate has giving him a lifetime of experience, mastery and confidence that comes from a life’s work and passion. Today he leads an ever-growing team at Polyface Farm. Daniel finds the most joy in his family, teaching, team building, healing soil, farm design, a growing relationship with Jesus, working with livestock and hunting.

Managing the day-to-day flow of the farm, he works with cattle, hogs, meat birds, layers, turkeys, rabbits, sheep, and forestry, but most importantly- People. This keeps him learning something every day in a high energy, outdoor workplace. With over 30 years on hands on experience in the land healing, healthy food growing world, Daniel is practical in his approach and teaching.

He will be teaching about raising meat rabbits, processing rabbits, and how to transition to rotational livestock grazing, and will be included on at least one of our panels. 

Topics: 

How Many Farm Animals are Enough

Raising Rabbits for Profit including a Rabbit Processing Demo 

Daniel will also be on a Panel Saturday

Shawn and Beth Dougherty have been farming together since the 1980’s, for the last twenty years in eastern Ohio, where they manage 90 acres, much of it designated by the state as ‘not suitable for agriculture’. Using intensive grazing as the primary source of food energy, they raise dairy and beef cows, sheep, farm-fed hogs, and a variety of poultry, producing most of the food, feed and fertility for humans and animals, on the farm. Concerned that farming is so often dependent upon multiple off-farm resources, from feed, fuel and fertilizer to water and electricity, their ongoing project is to identify and test the means by which farming was done for centuries with a minimum of off-farm inputs. Their research has led them to identify grass conversion, especially the daily conversion of grass into milk by dairy ruminants, as a key to whole-farm sustainability, combined with the integrated nutrient feed-backs that are possible with a community of diverse animal and plant species, domestic and native. They are the authors of The Independent Farmstead, 

Topics: Choosing a Homestead Dairy Cow  

Growing Feed for Farm Animals 

Beth will be leading a cheesemaking Saturday. 

They will both be on a panel on Saturday. 

With more than two decades of experience behind him, Greg has learned how to make farming successful by mimicking nature with his grazing management, and building his operation on leased land. He's well-known in the grazing community for sharing his experience to help others be successful. Along with his wife, Jan, they raise cattle, sheep, mushrooms, pigs and chickens on 1620 acres of owned and leased land in Rucker, Missouri. He is the author of No Risk Ranching. Think Like a Grazier and more. 

Friday topic: Focus on the economic and ecological benefits that entice cattle farmers to switch to regenerative grazing now, given high cattle prices. With farming input prices skyrocketing, regenerative grazing is the best way forward to eliminate off farm inputs. Learn how to out your farm in the profit column every year.

Saturday topic: Detailed look at modern fencing designs and integrating water infrastructure for rotational grazing. This talk will detail economically fencing and water design techniques that work. Don’t break your bank putting in expensive fence and water that you don’t need. Have 40 years of proven practices that work.

Brandon will demonstrate the art of butchery and make it look and sound like poetry. Farmstead Meatsmith is the only abattoir, butchery and educational operation of our kind in the country. Brandon says: meatsmithery appeals particularly to small farmers, homesteaders, their interns and anyone enthused by localized agrarianism, which includes urbanites with zero agricultural experience and even vegetarians who object not to meat, but tormented livestock

Learn from Brandon as he dispatches, scalds and scrapes a butcher hog and then demonstrates various old world curing processes. No power tools needed.

Scald and Scrape Hog Butchering 

8 a.m. Friday

Processing/curing 

9:30 p.m. Saturday 

The Moody family has been making traditional foods, including with grains, for decades. John Moody is the co-founder of Rogue Food and along with Joel Salatin the Rogue Food Conference. He is the founder of Whole Life Services and Whole Life Buying Club and the former executive director of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund. John discovered more than a decade ago that his diet was literally killing him with duodenal ulcers, seasonal allergies, and other health problems, so the family began to transition to real local foods and local food distribution. Involved with farming, food, and homesteading. He is the author of Frugal Homesteading, The Elderberry Book and co-author with his wife Jessica of DIY Sourdough. John is a well-known speaker at conferences, events, and media including Mother Earth News, Wise Traditions, and Hobby Farms/Chicken Magazine. The Moody family farms and homesteads on 35 acres in Kentucky.

Topics: 

Food Freedom: What You Can Do to Protect Your Family's Food Future

Food freedom isn't just a headline—it's about your ability to choose, grow, buy, sell, and share the food you trust. Join John Moody of Rogue Food as he explores the current challenges facing independent farmers, homesteaders, and consumers, and discover practical steps you can take to support local food systems, strengthen your community, and preserve your freedom to make informed food choices.

Five fall tasks for a less weedy spring garden

Now is the time to start planning and making improvements for your 2027 garden season!  John and family have been growing for 16 years, and can teach you how to grow more, weed less, while improving your soil and reducing your reliance on inputs and chemicals.   Come see what you should be doing today to make next year one of your best growing years yet! 

Farmer and Shop Owner at Whispering Willow Farms nestled in the hill country of Central Arkansas. Her farm offers a variety of organic fruits and vegetables, all grown without the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. They pride themselves  on providing fresh and healthy produce to their  customers year-round. Jill's book  The Tiny But Mighty Farm leads the beginner gardener into everything you need to make your gardening venture successful along with her newest Sourdough book and planner. 

Topics: 

The Tiny but Mighty Farm: How to Grow More Food in Less Space
Think you need acres to grow a meaningful amount of food? Think again. In this session, I’ll share the exact strategies we’ve used to maximize production on a small farm. We’ll cover crop selection, trellising, pruning, succession planting, and intentional garden design to help you dramatically increase your harvests without increasing your footprint. Whether you’re gardening in a backyard, on a homestead, or on a few acres, you’ll walk away with practical tools to grow more food with the space you already have.

Small Farm, Big Income: Multiple Revenue Streams for the Modern Homestead
Can a small farm generate real income? Absolutely. In this session, I’ll share how we’ve built multiple revenue streams from a small acreage through produce, flowers, value-added products, educational offerings, events, direct-to-consumer sales, and digital products. Attendees will learn practical ways to diversify income, increase profitability, and build a farm that supports their family’s goals without needing hundreds of acres.

Bo Brown​ is the Owner of First Earth Wilderness School, and Author of Foraging the Ozarks and Foraging the Central Plains. Bo has been teaching outdoor skills for decades.. He is a songbird field biologist and field research technician. He conducts programs for Stone Age wilderness survival skills, and Natural Education at his schools property along the Niangua River. 

Topic: Wild Food as Medicine

Patrick Byers is a retired Commercial Horticulture Field Specialist with University of Missouri Extension, serving 9 counties in southwest Missouri. His educational background includes horticulture degrees from the Universities of Nebraska, Missouri, and Arkansas.

Patrick’s 33-year career has touched all aspects of horticulture, and his current job

focuses on advisement to fruit and vegetable farmers with the goal of supporting sustainability and profitability. His passions include berries (especially elderberry),garlic, native fruits and nuts, hops and orchids. 

Topic: 

Starting and Maintaining an Orchard, from choosing a location, to varieties that work well in the Ozarks, to maintaining your orchard. 

For decades  "the Mud Family" has been building with local natural materials and teaching at homestead and DIY events across the country such as the Mother Earth News Fairs and the Ozarks Homestead Expo. Our travelling show includes interactive displays, participatory lectures and ongoing "Hands In" building demonstrations. There are no spectators in life. Everyone can get muddy with Uncle Mud.  Uncle Mud is a popular lecturer, author, builder, teacher and encourager of constructive fun. He can be found in several full length movies on Homestead Technologies, on his Youtube Channel, and at www.unclemud.com. 

Topics: Build Your Own House from Clay and Straw

Build Your Own Earthen Pizza Oven, 

:

Cheap Heat for Your Home or Greenhouse with a Rocket Mass Heater. 

DIY Composting Toilet 

Kids Activity: Kids' Mud Pit" where kids of all ages can build their own (free) fairy house to take home out of clay soil, straw, sticks, leaves and found objects.

Friday & Saturday

 Monty is an organic gardener and natural beekeeper, turning his suburban backyard from lawn to an oasis for food production. He keeps honey bees, using natural, treatment-free methods, primarily in Layens hives and makes and sells hives. He shares his progress and lessons learned with the world via YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Topic: “You Can Keep Bees, Naturally!”

In the world of conventional beekeeping, practices of manipulating, feeding,

and treating hives have overtaken reliance on the bees’ natural processes. Returning to a more natural model of beekeeping can reduce our workload, provide a better hive environment, and improve bee health, naturally. Monty will explain 5 basic principles of “natural” beekeeping and how you can begin or transition to keeping bees in a more natural way.

Mike Snyder is a myco-educator who has been studying and foraging for mushrooms for over a decade and loves nothing more than to share what he has learned with anyone who will listen. He and his wife Cara are the owners of WildWise Botanicals. They built a straw bale house, are a homeschooling family, and grow a variety of herbs and mushrooms on their South-Central Missouri homestead. He is on the Board of the Missouri Mycological Society and heads up both the Speaking Engagement and the Research committees for that organization. He is a certified mushroom identification expert in three states and serves on the Cultivation Committee of the North American Mycological Association. He stays busy with speaking engagements, forays, workshops and classes he provides around the region and has been fortunate enough to teach a large number of people about foraging and cultivating mushrooms in recent years.

Mike will cover in-detail how and why mushrooms can be a powerful addition to your health regimen and how to effectively craft your own extracts using wild-harvested or cultivated mushrooms. Several species will be covered, including Reishi, Lion’s Mane, Turkey Tail, and more. He will go over how to forage your own medicinals as well as provide tips on how to purchase quality mushrooms online and elsewhere. This will be the perfect opportunity to discover ways of collaborating with fungi to improve the lives of you and your loved ones! He may have his new book available, Foraging Mushrooms of the Ozarks. 

Topic: 

Foraging Mushrooms of the Ozarks 

 Dewayne is a national speaker on all things homesteading from wildcrafting to animal husbandry. He has studied microbiology and has a degree in agriculture. Dewayne is a Cherokee citizen and as a child he spent much of his time in the Dine and Navajo Indian reservations. Dewayne can teach on so many topics from meat goats to herbalism to emergency preparedness, rainwater collection and so much more but we will have to pin him down to one or two. He will also be doing several demos throughout the event at the Goat Education Center at the Livestock Barn along with Pat Cotten of Bending Tree Ranch. Pat Cotten has operated the ranch since at least 2001, focusing on developing well-muscled and healthy breeding stock. Bending Tree Ranch is recognized as one of the primary sources for acquiring Fullblood TexMaster bucks. TexMasters were developed to meet commercial demands by crossing Tennessee meat goats with Boer goats. 

Pat Cotten is an educator and writer in the homesteading and agricultural communities. She regularly teaches hands-on courses—such as livestock medical management and injection techniques—and co-authors the monthly publication Meat Goat Mania

Topic: Meat Goat Benefits

9:30 a.m. Friday 

Demos at Livestock Barn 

2 p.m. Friday, 

10 a.m. & 2 p.m. Saturday

Topic 2: (Dewayne) Rainwater Catchment and Uses

 Saturday 4 p.m.

 Lana Stenner is an author of the Grace Filled Homestead and the Grace Filled Cookbook, Grace Filled Grit podcast host, college professor, and backyard farmer. Twenty-five years ago, Lana and her husband, CJ, decided to ditch their fast-paced hustle for the simple life. They found a small farm on the edge of town, moved their four little children into a 100-year-old fixer-upper, and began to focus on God, goats, and gardens at the Grace-Filled Homestead

Topics Friday

 Kids session: Backyard chickens

25 Years- What We Have Learned

Saturday afternoon 

Kids Story Time along with Ruthann Zimmerman

Kody Hanner is a homesteader, proud homeschool mom, and founder of The Homestead Education, a company dedicated to teaching children self-sufficiency through hands-on learning.

Inspired by her family’s move to Idaho andher background in agriculture, Kody saw the need for curriculum that blends

academics with real-life homesteading skills. Through The Homestead Education, she empowers families to think outside the box, raise self-sufficient children, and embrace lifelong learning. Her mission is passionate about lighting a fire that will start a revolution to create change within a world that no longer works.

We wish we had room for Kody to speak several sessions... be sure to visit her booth at the Expo. 

Topic: Raising the Last Generation That Knows How

We are the first generation of parents expected to raise children with no skills, no purpose, and no connection to how the world actually works. And we wonder why they're struggling. In this powerful and paradigm-shifting talk, Kody Hanner challenges modern parents to take back what was stripped from us—our role

as the first teachers of civilization. With raw truth and lived experience, she makes the case for reskilling the next generation

through gardening, food preservation, herbal medicine, critical thinking, trades, resourcefulness, and emotional strength. This isn’t about prepping. It’s about preserving humanity. Ron can also join to share a father’s perspective. Her busband may be joining her on staage for this one. 

 After transitioning their lives from Washington State, Ann and her husband established their homestead in Missouri. They operate a small-batch (maybe not so small)  fermentation business called Crunchy Cultures, selling probiotic-rich goods—such as kombucha, sauerkraut, and kimchi—at various farmers markets and online. 

The duo focuses on food preservation, gut health, and partnering with local growers. 

They will also have a booth at the Expo selling their fermented products 

Topic: Fermentation: What, Why and How

Fermentation is often mysterious, intriguing and misunderstood. Anna is here to help you learn what fermentation is by dispelling the many myths and fears that surround it and teaching you why you should incorporate fermented foods in your life. Watch a live demonstration creating fermented foods to get the answers to your questions so you feel confident in creating these super foods in your own kitchen.