Control Your Destiny by Leaving The City Behind with Jesse Fisher

April 18, 2023

81. Control Your Destiny by Leaving The City Behind with Jesse Fisher

Are you tired of living in a city where you constantly rely on external resources? Jesse Fisher has a solution: living in a self-sustaining community. In this episode, Fisher describes his journey in creating a new type of living where individuals are responsible for producing their own food, water, and power. People purchase shares of farmland and build their own homes in these communities, which aim to produce more food than they need and export the excess, creating a more self-reliant way of life. But what are the challenges of living in such a community? Join us as Fisher shares his experiences and knowledge on building better communities.

 Topics discussed in the episode:

 - Living in a self-sustaining community

- Utah's agricultural co-op law

- Building passive solar homes, solar water well and water distribution systems

- Producing own food and water

- Ensuring resilience in case of disasters

- Growth of the local economy

- Infrastructure for building a self-sustaining community

- The community as a refuge in case of national crises or disasters

 Facebook:  

- Jesse Fisher - https://www.facebook.com/top10traffic

Website:

- Riverbed Ranch, Utah:  https://www.riverbed-ranch.com/

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Here's the link to the trailer for the documentary film I'm making: Built to Last: Buyer Beware.

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Transcript

00:00:00:06 - 00:00:32:11
George Siegal
Hi, everybody. I'm George Siegal Welcome to the Tell Us How to Make It Better podcast. I came across a guy a few weeks ago that is doing something that I thought was pretty interesting. He's putting together communities in a program called Operation Self-Reliance, where people are living or will be living off the grid. Jesse Fisher says he's helping people achieve ultimate preparedness by setting them up to produce all their own life-sustaining food, water, and power surrounded by others doing the same thing.

00:00:32:20 - 00:00:34:03
George Siegal
Now, while this may seem like.

00:00:34:03 - 00:00:55:02
George Siegal
Something that isn't right for everyone, the concept of being self-sufficient and not relying on all the existing services that we're stuck depending on is pretty interesting. I'm George Siegal And this is the Tell US How to Make It Better podcast. Your home is probably your biggest investment, and every week we show you warning signs and solutions to help you protect it.

00:00:56:03 - 00:01:04:23
George Siegal
Tell us how to make it better. Is partnering with the Readiness Lab, the Home for podcast webinars and training in the field of emergency and disaster services.

00:01:05:01 - 00:01:08:04
George Siegal
Jesse, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time.

00:01:08:11 - 00:01:10:13
Jesse Fisher
You're welcome, George. Appreciate opportunity.

00:01:10:23 - 00:01:33:19
George Siegal
Now, when I came across your information, I'm fascinated by it because I'm real big on resilience and having people build homes the right way. And you're kind of taking it to an even bigger step by taking people off the grid so they're not dependent on all the services that tend to fall apart in disasters. So tell me what you tell me about what you have going on.

00:01:34:03 - 00:02:04:01
Jesse Fisher
Well, actually, this is a project called Operation and Self-Reliance. And what we're actually planning to do and doing is build five off-grid self-sustaining communities along the Rocky Mountains. So our first one is in Utah. The second one, we're making an offer right now on some land in Arizona for a second location. So the idea is that you join the co-op.

00:02:04:01 - 00:02:25:12
Jesse Fisher
It's very similar to a housing co-op in New York City, where 75% of the people who own an apartment own it through a co-op. So you pay for your share. And the apartment comes with if you want to sell your apartment, you sell your share in the co-op. So you're a co-owner of the entire building. We're doing the exact same thing.

00:02:25:12 - 00:02:44:23
Jesse Fisher
But with farmland. And the idea is that you would build your own passive solar home, greenhouse septic systems, solar water well and water distribution system and greenhouse and start producing your own food and working with your neighbors.

00:02:44:23 - 00:02:54:04
George Siegal
So so you really have to be in to doing all that stuff to be in the community. Like if I said, Hey, I want a retirement home, that might not be for me or.

00:02:54:06 - 00:03:21:00
Jesse Fisher
No, actually, no, actually, that would work. In fact, we have ten shareholders in the Utah location who have purchased two shares. So they're going to use one to live on themselves and the other one for like a family retreat or Airbnb or something as an income-producing property. But we're organized under Utah's agriculture Co-op Law, Title three of the Utah Code.

00:03:21:12 - 00:03:42:24
Jesse Fisher
And so the land has to be agriculturally productive. You don't have to do all the work. You can have your neighbor or some guy down the street who needs more property. Maybe he wants, you know, to have some extra goats or something. And you just somebody has to work the land. So it's either you or a neighbor or whoever.

00:03:43:07 - 00:04:07:16
Jesse Fisher
But, you know, the bar is quite low. So the Utah law says you have to produce in a census year. So that would be 2030. Is the next one $1,000 worth of agricultural products or services? That wouldn't be very hard at all, especially with inflation going up by 2030. You know, maybe what Apple trading would do and I don't know.

00:04:07:17 - 00:04:28:04
George Siegal
That's going to say get one cow. That might yeah, that might push it across. Now, what I found really interesting about that is how resilient do you build these homes? I know every place in the country has its own potential disaster. So when you're in the Rockies, you know, you're probably dealing with the potential for tornadoes, snow, ice, things like that.

00:04:28:17 - 00:04:37:17
George Siegal
What thought goes into the structures? Do people come out and build their own home? Is it just part of the master plan where you have certain houses they can build there? How does that work?

00:04:39:12 - 00:05:23:18
Jesse Fisher
Actually, the the the vast majority of the restrictions come from government. The co-op is like building something that will keep you from freezing in the winter and cooking in the summer. So it's the county, it's the state health department that requires a septic system. It's the county that requires it to be a certain size and it has to pass the international residential building code as long as you can get your architect or your engineer to stamp your plans on his little red stamp that says you qualify under the international residential code, you can build your house out of Legos.

00:05:24:04 - 00:05:45:03
Jesse Fisher
We're not in Iowa. And in fact, most of us are allergic to HLA. So we don't really impose any kind of standard. It's just we want you to, you know, we prefer living neighbors, so we want you to build the house in a way that you'll survive in the winter if your power service goes out. So that passive solar and.

00:05:46:02 - 00:06:10:05
George Siegal
So considering it's off the grid, do you think it's important to at least establish some type of standard because anybody could really build anything I didn't see the word resilience anywhere in your description. I like all the other stuff because that's the things that everybody falls apart on. There's that there's a community down here that's inland from Naples and Sanibel Island called Babcock Ranch.

00:06:10:05 - 00:06:12:04
George Siegal
I don't know if you read anything about them.

00:06:12:12 - 00:06:13:09
Jesse Fisher
After Hurricane.

00:06:13:09 - 00:06:35:14
George Siegal
Ian last year, but they built with a lot of off-the-grid systems of power and water and things. So when a big storm hit, they weren't going to be victimized like everybody else. And they had almost no damage from the storm, but they put the preparedness angle into what they were building. Are you guys I mean, I think that's not being encouraged, but.

00:06:35:15 - 00:06:38:01
George Siegal
Or it's being encouraged but it's not being insisted upon.

00:06:38:24 - 00:07:17:00
Jesse Fisher
Yeah. We're not into creating more laws and rules that be enforced. No. Our focus is on your system itself as being resilience. So for example, if you're dependent on Costco for your food, you're. Yeah, that's it's not very resilient. You know, we've seen in COVID how easily the shelves can be emptied. And if you're producing all your own food, all your own water, all your own power, you're not at risk if there's a disaster.

00:07:17:14 - 00:07:49:01
Jesse Fisher
For example, the Utah State Water Rights Division, I think they were fishing for a bribe anyway. They were stonewalling us for a year, wouldn't allow us to drill any wells. And finally, we hired an attorney and magically their cooperative. So being independent, they wanted us to have a centralized water system. And it's like, well, we're out in the middle of the desert if the pump goes out on the centralized water system, we've got 250 households that don't have water.

00:07:50:12 - 00:08:12:21
Jesse Fisher
That's not very resilient. If we what we're doing is trying to build a community out of building blocks. Each brick is completely independent. So if your neighbors well goes down, you can run a hose over to his house and help them out until they can fix this. Well, but if we have a centralized system and it goes down, everybody's screwed.

00:08:12:21 - 00:08:26:04
George Siegal
What kind of reaction are you getting from people? I remember an episode of The Twilight Zone where this one family had a bomb shelter, but nobody else did. There's the threat of nuclear war and everybody stormed their bomb shelter.

00:08:26:04 - 00:08:30:09
Jesse Fisher
I think I saw that when I was a very young little kid, when I said, yeah.

00:08:30:19 - 00:08:45:06
George Siegal
So do you think about that? I mean, the resilient community or not, the resilience community, the bunkered community, the off-grid people, a lot of people go, oh gosh, those guys are crazy until something goes wrong. And all of a sudden you're the smartest guys in the world. What kind of thought?

00:08:45:17 - 00:09:12:06
Jesse Fisher
Or thinking on that is that we're we're literally 80 miles from a metro area. And between us and them, it's a desert. So, you know, it'll take about a week if things fall apart. It take about a week for people to realize we got to get out of Dodge. By then, they've used up most of their gasoline. Driving around looking for food and water is a do they even know we're out there?

00:09:12:06 - 00:09:28:03
Jesse Fisher
And they do. They know we're producing food. So we're thinking that 70, 70, 80 miles of desert isn't going to be very enticing. Marauders will want to stay where the people are, where the victims are now.

00:09:28:14 - 00:09:42:21
George Siegal
So is there any kind of commute that anybody going to work outside the community or the people that are going to live here? Pretty much their life is there. And maybe they take maybe they load up the wagon and the horses go into town. But they're really not it's not a daily thing.

00:09:43:21 - 00:10:13:11
Jesse Fisher
No. There's only one horse on the road that so far one tame horse. We have wild horses just north of us, have small areas, let's say, as far as I know, everybody reports to me. So everybody is doing their own thing, basically. But I do know there are at least two people who commute one commutes to Delta, which is 50 miles away, and the other commutes to Dugway, which is 30-something miles away.

00:10:14:01 - 00:10:22:17
Jesse Fisher
But the rest of them either work online or they're retired, or they work there at Riverbed Ranch, helping build neighbors homes and stuff.

00:10:23:24 - 00:10:40:14
George Siegal
Now, when you choose a community to do something like this, does it have to be an area that's out away from everything in an open space? Could something like that work closer to where more people live? Or then you have to deal with county and city regulations.

00:10:40:14 - 00:10:47:07
Jesse Fisher
And it just every now every square inch of land in the United States is inside the county. As far as I know.

00:10:48:02 - 00:10:49:13
George Siegal
Just in terms of a bigger city.

00:10:50:13 - 00:11:28:09
Jesse Fisher
Yeah, we're trying to avoid bigger cities being too just too close. And the property in Arizona is like 15, 18 miles from the closest community, which is a fairly small town. So I think we'll be okay there. We really just want to be a producer. You know, you hear people talking about how consumers this and consumers then it's like, I personally take offense at that label and I consider myself a producer.

00:11:29:08 - 00:11:40:11
Jesse Fisher
So the concept is for this community to be the largest producer of agricultural products in whatever region it is.

00:11:40:16 - 00:11:55:24
George Siegal
How do you survive while you're getting it up and running? So you're going to I'm moving out there. I have my house, I've built it. But the neighborhood's kind of playing catch up and there's not a whole variety of things to buy so I can live on. What's that? What's that process like?

00:11:56:24 - 00:12:15:06
Jesse Fisher
Well, yeah, that's been really interesting. We've never built towns before, so in fact, we don't know anybody who's built towns before. So we're you know, this is a learning process for us as well. And what we're learning is that it's a little slow at first because the only people who can move out are people who work online or who are retired.

00:12:16:08 - 00:12:45:21
Jesse Fisher
And so then the people who can come are those who can do work for those people who are there. So it's a it's a slow growth of the local economy. So we've we started this well three years ago at Riverbed Ranch when we found that property. And there are some families that have been there for that amount of time working online or well, one of them goes out every couple of weeks and works on oil wells.

00:12:45:21 - 00:13:02:22
Jesse Fisher
But so it's a slow growth process. We were hoping that we can speed that up by being a little closer to a community in Arizona. We'll see. We're learning as we go. George. We haven't got all the answers.

00:13:03:12 - 00:13:18:04
George Siegal
I would imagine it would be very, very challenging. It makes you think what the pilgrims had to deal with and all the people that were the pioneers that moved across the country, I don't think I would have survived 5 minutes with that. I probably would have been the third or fourth wave. They call me when once you guys have developed the community.

00:13:18:10 - 00:13:26:18
George Siegal
So what are people doing them that are out there? So they have to drive 80 miles to the grocery store. Maybe they go every now and then make the Amazon out there.

00:13:27:07 - 00:13:58:02
Jesse Fisher
Actually, I actually I talked to the manager of the UPS in the local metro area, Orem, Utah, and he says, I've got packages piled up for you guys and I don't know which, I don't know who to give them to to distribute them anyway. So we worked it out that they would come out twice a week. I think in the winter they came out once a week and then FedEx says has this beefy truck that they send out because we're 30 miles on rock roads from anywhere.

00:13:58:12 - 00:14:31:23
Jesse Fisher
So it's most people will you know, they'll go into town and either 80 miles to Costco or 50 miles to a regular grocery store and in Delta, Utah, and pick up supplies that they need. A couple of the third couple of families fact to one family that's been there almost the longest. They're producing vegetables that they're selling locally to the other residents, a riverbed ranch.

00:14:32:20 - 00:14:44:19
Jesse Fisher
They have several great three greenhouses, I believe, and they produced lettuce and vegetables that they sell locally all summer long.

00:14:45:18 - 00:14:48:11
George Siegal
But you're not likely to get uber eats to come out there and.

00:14:49:04 - 00:15:09:18
Jesse Fisher
No, you know, you pretty much need a four-wheel drive truck if you don't want to ever get stuck. We've had a really, really wet winter, very, very unusually wet winter and spring. In fact, there's flooding in Utah right now.

00:15:10:24 - 00:15:28:09
George Siegal
But for that, drone delivery is kind of an interesting concept when you see that it's being done that way. Because for communities like yours, I mean, I think you'd have to be somewhat creative to come up with that. So if I decided today, okay, I want to take my family off the grid and we're moving to Utah, what am I looking at to get some land out there?

00:15:28:09 - 00:15:37:02
George Siegal
And, you know, the cost would be, I guess, up to me to put whatever house I want there, but to just get the basic things going. What what's involved with that?

00:15:37:02 - 00:16:04:22
Jesse Fisher
Yeah, we've got some ballpark figures. So as I mentioned, this is a cooperative. So your share in the co-op costs 35,000 and that gets to whichever 2 to 2.4-acre lot you pick. There's still 120 of them left and it comes with two and a half acre-feet of water shares. If you're in the western U.S., you know how crucially important a lot of shares are.

00:16:06:00 - 00:16:34:04
Jesse Fisher
And a prepaid well permit. So and then we estimate to put in your infrastructure we used to recommend people build their house first so they can live there and then work on everything else. Now, we're after having had experience, we're saying now do your infrastructure first. But in the very first thing you put in your septic system so you can live in an RV on your lot if you had to or had an RV.

00:16:34:14 - 00:17:04:17
Jesse Fisher
But in your septic system, your solar system, your water. Well, we've got a well driller from a local not-too-distant town who basically camps out at Riverbed Ranch and drills wells all day, every day, septic, solar, a greenhouse. So you can produce, get your food producing, going right away. And all of that infrastructure, including the share, runs about $100,000.

00:17:04:17 - 00:17:14:24
Jesse Fisher
So this isn't this is one of those hippie commune communities that you can just show up and start helping. You've got to have some assets there.

00:17:14:24 - 00:17:33:06
George Siegal
Now, it's tough enough, though, when I'm building something in a large city, it's tough enough to find good craftsmen or people to work that do a good job. Now, you're 80 miles away from, I guess, civilization. How tough is it if you have a crew coming out there to build something for you? What's that process like?

00:17:33:06 - 00:17:38:11
George Siegal
I would think they have to go back and forth every day. Do they is their house? I mean, I can't even fathom how they would do that.

00:17:39:04 - 00:18:14:13
Jesse Fisher
The company that did the stucco on my house, had done work for my neighbor out at Riverbed Ranch. And so I said, hey, come help me. Well, the neighbor had a big RV on his lot and the crew just stayed in the RV during the week and then went home on weekends when I had them work on my house doing stucco, one of the crew members was female and I guess she wasn't very comfortable living in the RV with the other men on the crew.

00:18:15:01 - 00:18:40:07
Jesse Fisher
So so they started coming out on weekends, which drag it out. So that was a challenge. But there are about five or six people who moved to Riverbed Ranch and said, Hey, here are my skills. If you need my help, let me know. And those guys are busy constantly. So there's a contractor, there's a handyman who is a retired dentist.

00:18:40:07 - 00:19:03:11
Jesse Fisher
He hated being a dentist, so he became a handyman. He did all the walls in my house and he's doing my plumbing and he's going to help me with laying the floor tiles. So there are people available. It is a challenge. It's much more challenging than in a big city, obviously, because we are out in the middle of nowhere.

00:19:03:11 - 00:19:32:04
Jesse Fisher
I was just going to say back to the costs involved. Sure. Passive solar home, bare-bones, minimum. The county requires it to be at least 600 square feet, which is like a one-bedroom. A lot of us have the strategy of building the smallest thing we can stand first, then get your permit to move in that I remember what that's called and then and then immediately apply to remodel your house and make it bigger so that you can be there on-site.

00:19:32:04 - 00:19:53:02
Jesse Fisher
So my house, my starter home, my off-grid starter home is 864 square feet, two bedroom, one and a half baths. So my plan is to add on another three rooms that I can use for an office and storage and food processing or whatever else we want to do on our property.

00:19:53:04 - 00:19:59:07
George Siegal
How's it how's it built? So is it a wood frame? Is it a shingle roof? And what do you put out there?

00:19:59:20 - 00:20:36:17
Jesse Fisher
Yeah, there are all sorts of different types of homes being built out there. It was simply built simple. Why I felt that it's the owner of a concrete company here locally for about ten years was toying with this idea of building a kit that any family could work together and raise this house and what it is of 16-inch centers of wood, it's four-foot centers of steel beams.

00:20:37:05 - 00:21:05:10
Jesse Fisher
And then the space in between, it's nine inches of EPS upper foam, which is massively insulated once you put outside and sheetrock on the inside, you can literally heat your house with less than a hairdryer in the middle of the winter. In fact, in my home with all the windows on the south side, it gets up to 70 degrees with no heat.

00:21:05:21 - 00:21:39:21
Jesse Fisher
It's just the sun coming in, the windows and the insulated value. Now we do have some purists in the group who freak out because a couple of us built our homes out of Styrofoam. And I get that. It's just that it was very fast. It went up in a very short amount of time. If you have a crew of four or five people, you can put up one of these shelves and the week other people are using compressed earth block the regular stick frame houses, but with quite a bit bigger.

00:21:39:21 - 00:21:45:19
Jesse Fisher
So two buttons so that there's gobs of room for insulation and then.

00:21:45:19 - 00:21:47:07
George Siegal
More foundations for these.

00:21:48:09 - 00:22:13:17
Jesse Fisher
Yeah, yeah. We have our own concrete plant. It's so cool. Instead of waiting a month and paying twice as much for concrete from Salt Lake or wherever else, we can order concrete for the next day. Yeah, we encourage everybody to have their own home-based business. And he decided being a contractor, he said, Well, gosh, we need concrete.

00:22:13:17 - 00:22:36:03
Jesse Fisher
So he set up a rock quarry and a concrete plant on a portion of the co-op property. We have an additional 500 acres for whatever projects our shareholders want to do together individually. And there was a corner of the property that had a whole bunch of rock. So he set up this huge rock quarry thing and produces all the concrete.

00:22:36:03 - 00:22:39:06
Jesse Fisher
We need it delivered the next day. It's so cool.

00:22:40:02 - 00:22:42:05
George Siegal
Awesome. So when do you hope to move into your house?

00:22:42:09 - 00:23:08:19
Jesse Fisher
Well, that's a good question. My wife needs to work one more year. She works for the local school district and before she can get her pension. So the house will be done long before we get to move into it. Right now, I've got this. The roof, the walls, the well, the walls aren't sheetrock. I'm getting ready for the four-way inspection.

00:23:09:12 - 00:23:15:04
Jesse Fisher
As soon as the plumbing is finished, we can get the inspector in there and start sheet rocking up. Yeah, because.

00:23:15:04 - 00:23:20:11
George Siegal
It's tough enough to get an inspector here in the city when you need one to come out. Good luck getting them to drive it.

00:23:20:12 - 00:23:46:09
Jesse Fisher
Well, we're in a small county. This county is you know, by the time our community fills out completely with all the possible residents, third or fourth largest town in the county. And so it's not a very highly populated county in the western half of Utah. The counties are really long and narrow and so the population is all on the end.

00:23:46:14 - 00:24:03:17
Jesse Fisher
But I-15 Highway, we're in the middle of that county, literally in the middle of nowhere. But the inspectors, they'll come out quite frequently. They prefer to have several projects to do all at once. You know, after making that trip.

00:24:04:06 - 00:24:07:09
George Siegal
Sure. You're getting a lot of Californians. And if celebrities moving out there.

00:24:08:17 - 00:24:34:11
Jesse Fisher
We did have a professional. But was he a baseball player? Yeah, a professional baseball player. Was looking at it, but he didn't. But we do have residents from California lots and a lot. We have residents from Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and then the rest probably from Utah.

00:24:34:16 - 00:24:39:07
George Siegal
So give me your dream scenario. Long-term goal with this. What would you like to see happen?

00:24:39:11 - 00:24:46:05
Jesse Fisher
Well, actually, I don't know if you've noticed, but America seems to be on the decline. Yeah, kind.

00:24:46:05 - 00:24:46:06
George Siegal
Of.

00:24:46:06 - 00:25:15:17
Jesse Fisher
Notice that register. So kind of what we're doing is, I don't know, you could call them Cities of Refuge if you wanted to. I suppose so. These five communities are planning on building all producing much more food than they'll need. So we'll be exporting gobs of food. And let's say there's a national crisis of some sort. Maybe the terrorists finally figure out that take out our power grid.

00:25:16:03 - 00:25:25:02
Jesse Fisher
And I think it tends to be the farmers, the people producing food who get through those kinds of transitions.

00:25:26:04 - 00:25:39:03
George Siegal
The best. I look forward to following your progress with this and wish you success with it. I'm I'm for anything where somebody is trying something innovative to make things better. And it certainly seems like that's what you're trying to do.

00:25:39:03 - 00:25:42:07
Jesse Fisher
Yeah. Yeah. And we're learning a lot in the process.

00:25:42:19 - 00:25:44:10
George Siegal
Thank you for joining me today on the.

00:25:44:10 - 00:25:48:13
George Siegal
Tell US How to Make a Better Podcast. All Jesse's contact information is.

00:25:48:13 - 00:25:52:16
George Siegal
In the show notes. My information is there as well. I hope you'll become a.

00:25:52:16 - 00:26:06:03
George Siegal
Subscriber of the podcast and I also have a contact form there. So if you have a story of building or remodeling or being a victim of a major disaster, let me hear about it. We can feature you on an upcoming episode.

00:26:06:16 - 00:26:07:21
George Siegal
Thanks again for listening.

00:26:08:07 - 00:26:10:23
George Siegal
See you next time.