Latest / Conservation Stories / From Local Food to Field to Fork: Dana Dykema’s Journey into Hunting

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From Local Food to Field to Fork: Dana Dykema’s Journey into Hunting · Conservation Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Hello, I'm Dusty Timmons with Conservation Stories, and I recently was afforded the opportunity to go to the Hunt Fish Podcast Summit held outside of Houston and interview a number of venturing people for the conservation stories that you'll be hearing over the next couple of weeks. Included in these are people from all walks of life that are involved in conservation and charitable organizations that I feel will be really interesting. I hope you enjoy the podcast as much as I enjoyed recording the interviews for you.
• 0:29
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• 1:25
  Speaker A: this evening with Dana Dykema from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is a little bit further away from home than I am. Even I'm eight and a half hours away from home. But she's dead. But there's a lot more miles between here and where home is for Dana than is for me. Dana is with Has Impact podcast Ignite podcast Ignite podcast I got it the second time, but you know. But she is and got a very interesting story as an adult on Set Hunter. Her and her husband both have started hunting recently and gotten into it, but her I'll let her go in with the work that she's doing with the Ignite podcast and how that came about. Then tell us a little bit about yourself and about how you got to this point in time.
• 2:13
  Speaker C: Yeah, I still have to sort of ask myself that question. Like how did I get here? I decided to become a hunter and I got my licenses in Canada. You need your firearms license, your possession and acquisition license, your pal, and then you need your corps, your hunting license. So there's two separate courses you take. Each are two days long. And then once you pass those two courses then you submit all your paperwork to the rcmp. And then if you have A spouse, like I do. Your spouse has to sign off that you're not insane and that you're not going to be.
• 2:50
  Speaker A: Thank God that they don't have to do that with my wife.
• 2:53
  Speaker C: X. And then eventually you get your little. It's like a driver's license in the mail. You get your pal in the mail saying that you are certified, you're able to buy a firearm, and then you get a fwid. I can't remember what FWD stands for now on the spot, but that enables you to buy hunting tags. And you're a certified hunter, so you've got those two things. So I got those two things two years ago, and since then it's just been like I've just been launched into the hunting and conservation space, which has been really cool and such a gift to me, I feel like. And then all of the people I've met, you know, how I got into hunting was through my business at the time. So I was like your middleman between you and your farmer. Really got into regenerative farming. Do you know anything about regenerative farming?
• 3:52
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 3:54
  Speaker C: So, yeah, knowing where my food came from was really important to me. And I recognized that there was a big lack of access in my area to the local food that was just an hour and a half away. It was way easier to get, you know, peppers from Mexico than it was peppers from Chilliwack, which is just down the street, basically. So I said, this is is a problem. You know, we don't have great farmers markets on the North Shore here where I live. And so I started building relationships with farmers out there and asked if I could just start distributing their food, just see what happens. And it ended up being super successful out of the gate. You know, it was 2021, and there was a big push to support local at that time. So I just came into it at the perfect time. And so I started educating about eating seasonally, eating locally, ideally no spray, and knowing where your food comes from. And then through my business, I met people who hunted, and they wanted to order my food to sort of supplement their meat. They had their meat taken care of as a hunter, but I brought a lot of vegetables, produce and eggs, so they would order from that. And then they started inviting me to. To their meetings. You know, the backcountry hunters and anglers of B.C. started getting involved with that. And then I started listening to podcasts about hunting. And there's two in particular that I really love. The Hunter Conservationist podcast with Mark hall and Silver Core Podcast with Travis Bader. So I would just ping pong those two podcasts and I'd be always sharing about them on my Instagram. And so Mark hall sort of took notice of me eventually because I'm constantly yakking about him on Instagram. And he said, hey, why didn't you come on my show as a guest? So I did. And then I told him at that time, I was just thinking about it, and then he's like, well, if you get into it, let me know. And. And then I did. And I then I started telling my customers that I was getting into hunting, and that didn't go over as well as I thought it would. People are cool if I bring them, you know, cabbages and carrots, but they're not as cool when I started telling them that I'm gonna go shoot a deer myself. You know, it still lines up as knowing where your food comes from.
• 6:06
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 6:07
  Speaker C: And as a meat eater, I think hunting is like the antithesis of that.
• 6:11
  Speaker A: I mean, it's. To me, you know, when you're. It doesn't get more personal. You know, you're talking about taking control of your diet and taking control of what you eat. That's about as much in control as you can get.
• 6:24
  Speaker C: That's what I thought. But not all my customers agreed. So then Mark reached out again and asked me if I wanted to join his team. He's part of the Origins Foundation. I don't know if you're familiar with the Origins foundation with Robbie Kroger. So that's a. Robbie's South African, but he's based here in America. And the whole purpose of the Origins foundation, which was previously called Blood Origins, they rebranded recently, is to tell the truth about hunting. And so that's his whole. The whole mission of the foundation is to tell the truth about hunting and conservation. And there's different branches around the world. There's India, there's Spain, there's Canada. So Mark said, hey, I'm the director of Wild Origins Canada, Blood Origins Canada, previously. Why don't you come on board with me? So he really took me under his wing, him and Robbie, and just having access to these guys that are so knowledgeable, so passionate, and I don't know, they have amazing bandwidth for all this stuff because, you know, Mark has a full time job and then he's doing all this podcasting on the side. And so he taught me a lot about hunting and conservation issues in Canada and the things that we deal with and politics and just, you know, with all the different species, we've got going on and different issues that they deal with, with politics and people. And so I've learned a lot from him. And so just getting into the space really was through me just putting on my hand saying, where can I help with bhabc and then with Mark. And then I met people, ladies who had been through the Women Hunt program and they became friends of mine. And I applied to be in the Women Hunt program, which is an application process for just 12 ladies to go down to San Antonio, Texas every November and be part of this crash course of how to hunt. It's called the Field to Fork program. And the application's open every May, just for the month. And you have to answer some essay style questions. And I did that twice. I didn't get in, but I told my friends, like, I just feel like I belong in this family, in this community. I feel like I'd be a good fit with womenhunt. And this summer, well, six months ago, I saw Renee Thornton sort of creep in my Instagram. I never talked to her, but I saw her watching my Instagram stories. And then in July, she reached out and said, hey, I got your number from, from Brandy, who's our mutual friend and Women Hunt alum. And she said, I want to talk business with you and I've got this idea for a podcast and I want you to be the host. What do you think? So I didn't have to think too hard that this is something that, yes, I would definitely want to do this. And Mark was very supportive of me and super happy for me. And so I joined the womenhunt team and yeah, been just learning how to podcast, learning how to use know Rodecaster and do all this technical side. Because with Mark, I just had to have the fun job of his talking, pass everything off to him.
• 9:36
  Speaker A: That's what I like too, when I just get to go into the studio and I don't have to worry about screwing something up, right? That's all my troubles. I'm like, oh, let's not mess this up too much. Well, when you the, the journey, you know, to hunting in Canada, you know, with firearms, the extra layer of firearms, I mean, you know, it's. Everybody can get one. Every US Citizen can get one because we have, you know, the glorious second Amendment and everything. But it. So that's, you know, that, that adds an extra hurdle to get through that seems, you know, from an outsider's perspective, it seems like it would be very daunting to think about going from nothing to that, just going and having the courage to say, okay, you know, I'm gonna. This the step I'm gonna take. And these, you know, this is my end goal. And here are the steps in between it that journeying through that is hard enough as an, as an adult onset hunter. You know, most about the vast majority of hunters obviously been, you know, they went out with dad when they were a kid and, you know, it's changing a little bit now and you're seeing more and more adult onset hunters is, you know, as the people, you know, the Gen Xers and millennials, and now they've got Gen Z coming in and that distance from the farm, whether it be from the hunting hunting side of it or from the growing side of it, keeps like it's getting, getting further and further away. When you did the, when you started, you know, being the go between in the grower, in, in the grower net space is that, that's fairly, I mean, it's, it's more common now, you know, than it was, but it's still fairly uncommon. It's still fairly new. Is that still going pretty good in kind of that connection between the grower and the consumer? Is it still growing well, or is it.
• 11:25
  Speaker C: I think people just love their convenience, you know. And so it was going really well when it was trendy, but it really backed off. You know, the first year I did it, I went from my first week with nine orders of something called a harvest box. So it was like 15 different produce items that were ready for harvest that week. And then like six weeks later, I had 85 orders.
• 11:52
  Speaker A: Wow.
• 11:52
  Speaker C: So I was like, this is, this, you know, business entrepreneurial thing is really easy. You know, you just, you just start something and it just grows. And then, you know, we had to take a break because by. I started in November and then, you know, because we're such a temperate climate compared to the rest of Canada. The farmer that I worked with, his farm grows until, you know, February. There's still enough variety at his farm to furnish my harvest box. But there was a hunger gap, as he called it, Farmer Dan, where we needed to just take a break for a couple of months as new, you know, the next spring harvest started to grow. So, okay, we took a break and I wasn't worried at all. I was like, well, we stopped with 85 and we were just like, this is just going to grow exponentially. Well, I never got over like 50 and that was like a really good week. I would say after that, for the next two years, my average order would be like 35 to 40 boxes. I just could not get over that hurdle again. And because it just fell out of trend. And so people love their convenience. It's a really, it's really tough. And that's why I still think it's so important to support our local farmers and ranchers in what they do because they work so hard and it's tough for them to do everything to, you know, to be the grower. You know, they're planting their crops, they're feeding their cows or whatever they're doing. And then they also have to market themselves on top of everything and then destroy distributed at all, keeping their costs down because the margins are so tight as it is. And so I took that, all that off Farmer Dan's shoulders with distributing to North Van. But it just wasn't as trendy. So it was challenging for the next two years. But I expanded. I met more growers, blueberry farmers and foragers. So then I had seasonal mushrooms and lily spears and you know, we did eggs and we did some bacon, we did a little bit of meat. But there was sticky bylaws that I really didn't want to get in trouble for. And I wasn't hanging on to product. People had to meet me. They had like two hour window on a Tuesday where they had to meet me. And most of the time people were really good about that. And it worked, it worked pretty well. But it became to be a lot just doing everything on my own. You know, I have a family, I have a husband and four teenage kids now. So trying to. Even though it was only like technically once a week, it was still a week long thing because I'm constantly marketing and trying to be relevant and current in front of my audience and always getting new customers as well to keep the wheels turning on it. So it became quite stressful. And there's a lot of bylaws that I did I didn't do because I thought they were dumb and just a money grab. But that was also stressful because I'm like, oh man, if they catch me. And they're like, oh, you can't park there. You don't have your bylaw. You didn't pay us for your permit. And I'm like, man, I'm only here for two hours. I don't want to get a permit and pay more money for that. So certain things like that I just didn't do. But it all became very stressful. And then as I got in with Mark and thought, you know, I really like this hunting community that I'm Getting to know farming community was amazing, but I live in the city and I'm never going to be a farmer, so I can only go so far with it. Yeah, I was, I felt like an outsider looking in.
• 15:33
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 15:34
  Speaker C: Even though they were all lovely and really welcoming, I just wasn't a farmer. But I could be a hunter.
• 15:40
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, as a farmer you still feel like you're on the outside looking in. I mean that's the challenge with, you know, and people like you that have done that, you know, that, you know, taking that distribution load off of that. I mean there's, there's a number of growers I've talked to in Texas that you know, like, yeah, I would do that, I could grow that. But then what do I do with it? You know, and there's not, there's a decided gap from, to get from point A to point B, to get it from the grower to the end to the consume the home consumer. And you know, some people are like, well, I can take it to, you know, there's, you know, there's some grocery stores in Texas that are really good about trying to buy local produce. But even then it's still, it's an extra hurdle. And you know, this kind of juices work, the squeeze type deal, it's like, you know, stay with what I know or to branch out into this other thing. And if I branch out in this other thing, I've got to go kind of small to kind of get into it to make sure I don't over extend tend myself. And then all of a sudden that half acre is taking up the time that it takes you to do, you know, 200 acres because you're having to do that marketing and everything. And you know, there's been some, some movement on that that's interesting to talk about and see. But when you moved into the, the Ignite podcast and you just started that, you've just got, you've got nine episodes out right now.
• 17:00
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 17:00
  Speaker A: Which will work really well because I've got about a nine hour drive tomorrow. Perfect. I'm gonna, I might catch up with
• 17:09
  Speaker C: about an hour.
• 17:09
  Speaker A: So catch up with you tomorrow. Catch up on it tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I believe that you'll beat me home tomorrow.
• 17:16
  Speaker C: I will, yeah. Direct flight. The way here I was not direct flight. So it took 13 hours. But yeah, tomorrow's a direct flight back.
• 17:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, you'll, you'll beat me by a good bit. And we get to losing that an hour's sleep. When you went into that, when you, when you first started. Tell me about your first hunting trip, the first one that you took.
• 17:39
  Speaker C: Yeah, so the first trip that I took was with my then 12 year old son. I homeschooled my kids, you know, at varying ages and stages. But at that time In November of 24, I was just homeschooling him and a friend of mine who lived in the Fraser Valley where I had been distributing for. And I met her through my business. She and her family moved up north about six hours north of me. And she said, well I see you're getting into hunting and she's a butcher herself. You know, why don't you come up, we got lots of whitetail around here and you know, feel free to take a buck off the property. So like that's a great soft launch. You know, I don't have much experience in the backcountry at all and then with my kid as well, you know, being on someone's farm was like a nice safe place to start. But we only had two days to get it done. You know, just the pressures at home. I could only really afford to go for two days. So the first day we went and we wandered all around and we saw tons of sign but no deer. So I'm like that's fine, you know, we're just up here, we're just trying. And then the second day, the morning we got up super early, sat and froze our butts off in the deer stand and didn't see anything. And then you know, tromped around the property all day. Is about 150 acres that she's got. I don't know how much ground we covered. Felt like we covered a lot. But we had one more evening to sit. So I'm like, let's go over here in this ground blind kind of thing and just see what happens. So I was preparing for a long sit. We got in there about 3:30 in the afternoon and figured we had about an hour, hour and a half light left. So I was punkering down for just another long, cold, miserable, boring sit, seeing nothing but only like 10 minutes in. And Isaac's to my left and I'm looking over at him just to see how he's doing. And then his eyes go super big and he's going buck. And I follow his eye line and there's a deer that buck right across the field from us into the woods. And it was, you know, this buck is stock still and his ears are all flared out and he's like, I heard something and I'm sure this deer I thought, he's going to hear my heart pounding from across this field, and then he's going to take off, and that'll be our story. But he didn't. And so I'm like, don't move. So we're both just sitting there, and then I see the swish of his tail. So, like, okay, he's calming down, he's chilling out and relaxing. This is good. And so Isaac started to coach me, like, grab your rifle. I just felt like an eternity. Like, to grab my rifle that was against the wall in front of me and to get it up just felt like so hard because I was sure that this deer was going to take off, but he didn't, and he kept. He just stayed there. And he was munching away on some twigs and leaves or whatever, and I managed to get my scope on him, and my heart was just racing so hard. But we've watched a lot of meat eater, and we've done a little bit of shooting at gun ranges and stuff. So Isaac, you know, even though he's never taken an animal, he knew what to tell me about how to take a shot. You know, get your crosshairs on just below his shoulder, just behind his shoulder, and at the bottom of your breath, Mom. Then squeeze the trigger real slow. And. Okay, so he was a great, great hunting buddy. So I did all that he told me to do. And, you know, that deer sort of lurched forward for a second and took a couple steps, doubled steps, and he fell over, and that was it. And I couldn't believe that that just happened. We gave him a few minutes to expire and went up to him, and there he was. You know, I just. I couldn't believe that it all worked out like that. You know, I had such a nice, soft launch on my friend's property, and a buck came in, and, you know, it was all good and legal. You know, like I mentioned, my friend said, come on up. There's tons of whitetails up here. And a whitetail, you can get any buck. You know, it could be a little forky, could be a massive thing. But when I saw this deer, I'm like, that's not a whitetail. And so I had misidentified this deer. So it was mule deer. And there's. Mule deers are different. You can't just get any buck with those. They have to be four points, and. And you have to have a tag. So I had a tag, so I was okay there. And he just had that one last little time there was legal. So I Had a, you know, my heart just dropped into my stomach for a second when I realized he wasn't a whitetail. And I just, you know, might have made a big mistake here. But I just thank the good lord that everything worked out as it did. I would have been devastated and that I, you know, who knows, maybe I would have never hunted again if I decided that, you know, I screwed up so bad and I could never get out there again. But I'm glad that it all worked out. And I was super embarrassed to tell that story at the beginning. I didn't want anyone to know that I had potentially made a really big mistake. But now I know the difference for sure. Can look at any deer and tell by the antlers who's what. But I think it's important to tell those stories because let's know that people are human. Yeah, things out, I mean, that's, you
• 22:54
  Speaker A: know, when you're new to it and you know, when you get buck fever, it's. You mean it, it's. You get tunnel vision real quick. I mean, I've, you know, I hunted for years, years, and I still have tunnel vision. You know, I've, I've, you know, I don't hunt whitetail near as much as I used. I used to hunt them religiously. I mean, that was my, that was what I did. And you know, I got kids, gotten older, got kids. And then I got end up in game bird hunting. And they're the number of birds like I have Bob white quail, which they tend to hold close and flush next to you. And they come up in this big thunderous flush. And it never fails. At the first flush of the season, I nearly wet my pants every time. I mean, you know, I'm like, this is getting embarrassing that I'm, you know, 51, pushing 52. And happens every year. And it is invariably, you know, that without the. The one of the tricks they tell you is, you know, pick one out. Don't shoot in the heavy, just pick one out. Yeah, it takes me like three weeks into the season before I remember, oh, hey, I gotta do. And you know, I've been doing it a long time. And so, you know, everybody makes, you know, everybody has. I would almost be willing to bet you that just about everyone has a story that would mimic that. And you know, I have this same story hunting on a place that had mule deer and whitetail and there was no mule deer. See that mule deer tag available. And I line up and I see this. Don't. I'm gonna pop that Dough from here and shot. Mercifully, I missed, because once she ran off, I realized that I'd misidentified.
• 24:28
  Speaker C: Of course, I.
• 24:29
  Speaker A: You know, and I was, like, going, oh, thank God. I'm not a good. You know, and I was. You know, I was a teenager, and I thought, you know, I was all that in a bag of chips. When you moved into. When you met up with Renee Thornton with the Women Hunt deal, I interviewed Renee the other day about the Women's Hunt program. But from someone who is. Who is utilizing that program, tell me a little bit more about the women's hunt program and the mama bear that they've got.
• 25:04
  Speaker C: Yeah, so there's. There's the mama bear field camp, which just started this December, was the first one. So Emily Rickett, she is an alum of the Women Hunt program. So she went through it in 24. And, you know, the whole goal of the women Hunt program is not just to give these ladies a great time for five days and then say, hope you had fun. Yeah, you know, carry on. It's really to support them in their journey moving forward, whatever that looks like, and, you know, and pair them with a mentor. And in Emily's case, she had this idea of getting kids and some kind of female adult, whether it's mom or grandma or godmother, whoever, and just get them out sort of doing a similar deal, just learning how to hunt together and learning how to break down an animal, learning how to, you know, process it and what all that looks like, because how many. How many kids, especially these days, see a dead body like that and know what to do with it? And so that just happened in Michigan for the first time. And then there's the Ruby May. Ruby Mayflower Blake Legacy Fund, which is a fairly new program as well. There's a lot of, like, new stuff happening.
• 26:27
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 26:30
  Speaker C: So Ruby. I never met Ruby, but she was a friend of Gray and Rene's. And she and the wife of Derek Blake, they lived up in Alaska, you know, not too long into their marriage. A couple. They've only been married a couple years, and they had a fresh baby. She's only three months old. But Ruby tragically died in a drowning accident, and her first marriage had been. She'd gone through some trauma there. And after she died, Derek wanted to do something in her honor, in her memory. And so he approached Gray and Renee saying, hey, I've got this idea to do something in Ruby's memory that would help other women who have gone through trauma through hunting. So. So, because that was really big part of Ruby's story was getting out hunting. Getting out in the woods and the outdoors was great for her. So he wanted to provide that opportunity for other women. So now he's taken out two ladies the past two years. It's again an application process and they've been able to do some pretty incredible hunts together. And yeah, just he is supporting them and they're healing journey and I think it's really good for him as well
• 27:45
  Speaker A: as he heals as well. You know, something to put a marker in. Know that and know that it's, you know, continuing a legacy on is important. Speaking of continuing legacy on, are any of your children interested in getting into hunting?
• 27:58
  Speaker C: My boys are. So I've got boy, girl, boy, boy. All the kids have been out at various times. My daughter, she. She gets it. She's like, yeah, I get it, mom. I just. I just am not there.
• 28:10
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 28:10
  Speaker C: So she's been out shooting a bunch and she went with my husband and they got a grouse, which was cool. And I think she had fun just being with him out there, which is the most important part.
• 28:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, just getting out with the kids and stuff is, you know, that's taking my kids out is a lot of fun. I got the. I have boys. I have twin boys.
• 28:31
  Speaker C: Okay.
• 28:31
  Speaker A: And I got the unique experience of this last September getting to take my son and his new wife out hunting. And it's the first time I ever got. That was honestly, it was the very first time I'd ever got to take a female hunting because my sister, we're also. My family is also boy, girl, boy, boy. And I'm number three on that list. And so I've got an older brother, an older sister and then a younger brother and. But my sister did not hunt to the time. But, you know, taking that, it was, it was an. A unique experience. It was just different because, you know, I'm used to, you know, stinky old boys going hunting with me and all of a sudden I've got this lovely young lady that I'm taking with me. And it was. But it was so much fun watching her out shoot my son. That was. That was a lot of fun. I did enjoy. I did enjoy that. Yeah, it's like give him all sorts of grief on that, but I mean, but she's pretty much a natural at it. I do know that you mentioned you have a son that's going to be in the States for college this next year and he happens to be going. And I did look up where he's going to be in, in Kansas. And he needs to find some buddies that can then figure out how to get, you know, get somebody taking hunting even if he has to go bow hunting. I'm not sure how, how the firearm restrictions go. I don't know. I know that the visitor can shoot. I don't know if he can possibly or anything like that. But that's a pretty good place in Kansas with some pretty good bird hunting. And there's a lot of public land in Kansas that he can take advantage of.
• 30:03
  Speaker C: Oh, that's good to know.
• 30:04
  Speaker A: And so it's some pretty cool stuff. Get the Onx app. It's good.
• 30:06
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 30:07
  Speaker A: It shows you where all that stuff is. But you know, he doesn't have to be, he doesn't have to be put it on pause just because he's leaving Mecca to come down here, you know.
• 30:15
  Speaker C: Yeah. So he's harvested a whitetail. Daniel has. And then Wesley, my 50, 15 year old, he got his first whitetail this fall as well. And then Isaac was with me when I got mine. But yeah, Isaac definitely wants to. He's been out fishing with me more than the other boys have. So yeah, just trying to get everybody out as much as possible. I got Isaac a little 410 shotgun for Christmas this year.
• 30:38
  Speaker A: Nice.
• 30:38
  Speaker C: We haven't had a chance to get out there yet. You know, we live in the city and, and getting past the city limits and, and out to where nobody else is is a bit of a barrier for us. So that's the hard part. Just finding the time to do that.
• 30:53
  Speaker A: That is one, one good thing about living in rural America is that it generally takes, you know, when I, when I was growing up, it, it literally took me 30 paces and in 30 steps I could be shooting. Wow. And I grew up on a farm which we didn't have a lot of. It's, it's, it's kind of an amazing conservation store actually. And it, it's a. Not as much conservation story as it is a ecology change story. Growing up as a kid and not having any deer within 150 miles of where I grew up. And I remember, I still remember hunting rabbits and quail as a 14 year old kid. And I won't tell you that I drove the car, you know, 12 miles to get to the place without a license, but I did.
• 31:40
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 31:41
  Speaker A: And so, but I mean it was farm country back then, so we drove back there and. But I remember being on that hunting trip and finding the first deer track I'd ever seen in, in where I live. And following that for a quarter mile, just thinking, oh, my God, there's a deer track. And now I have so many of them in my vineyard, I don't even, I don't even acknowledge their existence anymore. It's just like, oh, there's another deer, you know, and so it's the change in, you know, it's a change in the. Well, the herd has increased. It's a mule deer and the herd is increased because the parks and wildlife has done a really good job of managing it. And then the change in the crops that we grew, we started growing more peanuts and said, our area is cotton is king and cotton is not terribly palatable to much anything that's not insect. And so when we started growing peanuts, we started seeing more of them coming in. There's more forage for them. You know, of course they required peanuts, required a little bit more water, so there's a little bit more standing water, just puddles. And so they were able to make it through and survive better. And it's gone to a pretty fair sized herd now up there. And so that's, that's pretty cool to watch that and watch the change of things over, over time. But it's, it's going to be very interesting. Interesting to see what happens in your journey. I'm looking forward to following Ignite podcast and, and see where you go from here on it. You're. You've got four teenagers, correct?
• 33:11
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 33:11
  Speaker A: And so two years ago, you still had what, you had three teenagers or two teenagers?
• 33:17
  Speaker C: I had three because Isaac just turned 13. Yeah.
• 33:20
  Speaker A: Okay, then how in the crap did you have time to do that? That is, and that is the amount of, you know, having two teenagers and they were, you know, at the same age, going to the same place. You know, I took them to the same baseball field, they played on the same baseball team and that kind of stuff. When you have four of them, that is a amazing amount of dedication you put into getting, getting to the field.
• 33:47
  Speaker C: Oh, yeah, no, it's. It's been intense. Fortunately, my husband knows me very well. Like, once I decide this is what I want to do, then he's like, well, I guess we're going to do it. So even if I say like, well, I guess we don't have time, and he's like, well, we both know this is going to happen because this is what you want to do. He is trying to reign me in a little bit as much as he can. You know, I'm quite involved with my local fish and game club and they wanted to get me on as a director, as practice president. And my husband's like, no, you can go to the meetings. And not like a, yeah, you can go to the meetings but don't like, you have enough on your plate as it is. So he's just been supportive because he just knows if I don't get this out of my system, I'm just not going to be any fun to be around. And they won't stop talking about it and sort of kicking the dust around it and you know, kind of pouting around it. So he might as well just give
• 34:50
  Speaker A: it, give it five or 10 years and you can be the president. Get them, get a couple more, get a couple more kids in college and a couple out and yeah, that was the most amazing thing. It. My kids have been out of the house for four years. Actually more than that. Five years, I guess now. Good lord, I'm getting old. And it took me that I was. My wife and I were talking the other day, I was like, you know, we're actually empty nesters. And she looked at me and she said, we've been empty nesters for five years. And I'm like, yeah, I know it. But I'm just now realizing that I'm not an empty nester. And so. But well, I. We're gonna. I'm gonna make this a little bit briefer than we've had because I know you gotta get up early in the morning and get on the airplane and you got a trip back and I don't want to make you stay up late, but I appreciate it. Thank you, Dana for your time.
• 35:38
  Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
• 35:40
  Speaker A: What's your tell your podcast again and your Instagram handle and all that stuff so that we can have.
• 35:45
  Speaker C: Okay, so the Instagram for womenhunt is womenhunt and you know, I have power there to put stories up. And then Tuesdays is my day to drop stuff. There's so much going on. So there's, you know, kinda have to schedule when I could talk about the Ignite podcast there. So. The Ignite podcast, if you look up Ignite podcasts on Apple or Spotify or
• 36:10
  Speaker A: whatever it is on Spotify, I found it today.
• 36:12
  Speaker C: Yeah, it's there. And. And then wildshieffoundation.org you go there. And then there's a Women Hunt tab and all the drops downs with all the things that we've got going on. And then my personal Instagram is. Is public. So it's just aanandykima.
• 36:29
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 36:30
  Speaker C: And I'm always there one last thing I want the.
• 36:36
  Speaker A: The Legacy fan find Ruby Mae, Ruby Mace, Ruby Mate. Is there a link on the. The Wild Sheep foundation where people can donate directly to that, or does it have its own.
• 36:46
  Speaker C: I believe so, yeah.
• 36:47
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 36:48
  Speaker C: Yeah, so that's. That's definitely something that we support and I want to see grow. And I haven't looked at their website myself in a bit, but I would expect that there's a way to.
• 36:59
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 36:59
  Speaker C: To give there.
• 37:01
  Speaker A: Well, there you've got a few things on your plate.
• 37:03
  Speaker C: Yeah. And still. Yeah, still. My feet are wet, but it's pretty fresh still.
• 37:10
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 37:10
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 37:11
  Speaker A: Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I look forward to following you on Instagram and Spotify and following your journey through it and hope everything works out well for you. And have a safe trip back to Canada tomorrow.
• 37:23
  Speaker C: Thank you. Well, enjoy all the Ignite podcast episodes. I will drive.
• 37:26
  Speaker A: I will. I'll get them all nine listen to tomorrow. Thank you very much.
• 37:30
  Speaker C: All right.