Off-Grid Motivation: Nonconformist Series & Desert Build Update

In this reflective episode of Occupy the Land, Ernie gives a comprehensive update on current projects while sharing the deeper “why” behind everything they do. With the concrete work pad complete, the stamp press and welder are fired up for mass-producing EMT struts for the 20ft geodesic sphere root cellar. He discusses ongoing food production plans (orchard, greenhouse, potato garden, biochar), energy redundancy, and the motivation from emceeing the “Nonconformist Series: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse.” At 65, Ernie emphasizes self-ownership, rejecting delegation of authority, converting paper wealth into real assets, and building for Generation Next. A motivational blend of hands-on build progress and the philosophy driving their desert homestead journey. Peace.

Transcript:

Hi. Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land, dawg. What we’re doing today is just going over where we’re at on some of the projects that we got. You know, I had to get a whiteboard and put it in the other workshop because I. I’m just, you know, it’s building up a whole bunch of stuff that we got to do.

Now we’re getting ready after we got the pad out here in front of this work area. It makes it easier for us to be able to produce the struts. Here, I’m going to show you the, stamp press. Now this. That’s the die. That’s what makes we process these EMT conduits. And each one of these ten footers get us about three.

Now, this is just a sample. Now this is what we’re doing. We’re going to be flatten it. Rounding it out and punching the hole. And these overlap. And then you have a bolt that you put them in. Now this is like twice the size of the bolt that we normally do. I have it the where it’s going to be facing out in the root cellar that it’s going to lift itself up on, up off of the ground on some little concrete, you know, like upside down, you know, butter dishes or something.

So that we have the area to pack around with the Khaleesi, the cow, Crete with some Portland. We make cow Crete. And that is going to be the ceiling in the wall. And the embedding of the sphere into the for the root cellar. Now this we use to, cut these into length and then we stamp them out on the stamp press.

Now I used to use a grinding wheel, cut off a wheel. This blade, man like butter. I I’ve been where you’ve been all my life. So we’re going to be showing you a lot of this stuff and making sure that you understand that we have, an understanding of what we can do. It’s it’s a it’s a big project.

It’s going to be a 20ft round sphere that goes in to make the root cellar. But the thing was, we know we have to grow food. We’re going to need to make sure that we have a place to store it. And down at the bottom of that thing, it’s like 70 degrees might be napping down there. Now, one of the things that, got us busy this week that I’ve been, you know, I spend a lot of time on is I’m the emcee for the nonconformist series surviving the Zombie Apocalypse.

And you can go search that the non conformance suit conform this series and, you know nonconformist. You know. What does that mean? We all conform their own tribe. We all have like minded people that we associate with. But, not conforming to what the general public opinion of the zig file to the man. And, he’ll do what the government says in lock down, wear a mask.

So it’s a nonconformist, but they are doing all of this stuff. They asked me to emcee, and, I had an opportunity to do a segment, but I got. No, I got Occupy the land.org. There they go. Check me out there. What I really wanted to do was to be able to provide a use case for all these presentations and talk about it between them, and that’s what we’re going to be doing.

And we’ve already done a lot of it. That’s why this week I had to watch like a dozen videos that are, you know, 35 to 50 minutes apiece and going through those and taking notes and doing the introductions and the outros and what we learned, you know, in this series. So if you go to nonconformist series and you go to, Naka poko.com and they’ll send you there, but you do a search on non conformist series survive in the zombie apocalypse.

Well, the main thing that they had in there, there’s a lot of stuff on health, a lot of things on food growing food prepping, animal husbandry. I got a lot out of it and I’m very optimistic. I was inspired, you know, because I know how many people are going to be inspired by this information. They we’re being faced with a lot of people are not doing well, and it’s because of things out of their control.

Well, what’s in control is you now, the health thing we’ve really been focused on, we’ve gotten a lot healthier. We feel a lot better. We’ve been isolated from, you know, the poisons of needles and, city life. And we really enjoy it out here. And it’s it’s a mental thing too. And there’s a lot of information in the nonconformist series on that as well.

So I wanted to make sure that you knew about that, because there’s a lot of information there that can inspire you and give you information about doing this kind of thing. And you may be, you know, infotainment, you know, with Occupy the Land. But the real point was inspiration for you to do it or that you can do it.

And there’s a lot of one of the gentlemen, I think it is Portugal or Spain was talking about, and of course in English, but it was all about being able to prep. And you live in an apartment, and a lot of it was health supplements. What you can store high density, you know, nutrition and calories. That was very an informational angel.

And we did a lot of that when we were traveling around on our bus on the LA Bus Liberty tour. So I know a lot of these people and I wanted to make sure that you had an opportunity to go sign up, because it’s not for like another week after, you see this video and it is so informative from like minded people that Donna and I, you know, share opinions with.

And we have them, you know, one thing I did want to mention, I do a show every other week with a gentleman named James Corbett. He’s, a Canadian that covers mostly U.S. politics, living in the sunny west coast of Japan. And he’s very popular. He does a great documentaries and so on. But he and I understood that at the root of all this was a lack of understanding what the philosophy of liberty really is all about.

It’s about the principle self ownership. There’s a little flash animation that’s been around for decades, and it’s very powerful. It’s only eight minutes long and it’s translated now into 54 languages. We created this site Libre tosh dot Earth. Liberty is a Latin root word for liberty, libre, tosh, earth, and you’ll see all the languages in there that you can forward to friends and family around the world.

And it’s already taken off. We’ve only had it up a month, and it’s, you know, getting really crazy and, you know, the traffic on that. So that’s the base that you understand. It’s about self-ownership that you own yourself, that you own your life, you own your liberty, you own your property. You know, it’s just three ways of saying the same thing.

You know, life, liberty, properties, past, present, future. I mean, it’s said, you know, my life, and and it’s not just breathing in and out, you know, life. It’s living. You know, it’s taking your liberty and fashioning raw material into your property and. And that’s yours, yours, yours, mine, mine, mine. And this is what sustains us as we’re building this on occupy the landlord on Occupy the Land.

Our whole thing was about being more self-sufficient and self-sustaining and building something for our family, for our kids, and our grandkids. They’re now all going to go move out here, but it’s nice to know you got a food producing place to just who live and thrive. And we have enough energy now. I have three stations. We have the workshop.

Solar production and inverters and battery backups and so on. We had the garden area for Donna, and we have the main one for the bus, you know, one is none, two is one, and three is one and a half, you know. So I definitely wanted to have that energy thing going on. So we put a lot of focus on electricity.

All of our tools are, you know, battery operated or electric at least. And then, except for the compactor and or chipper, those are gasoline. And, you know, I got to change the oil all the time. I put fuel stabilizers in and so on. Now we have fuel cells that we use for diesel for the tractor. And Don is a big truck, but we need it and it’s expensive now.

Oh my goodness. Oh and oh now we got here. And how many gazillions of dollars we got to do now. And should we get it now. Now you think it’s going to go down. I don’t think we’re really willing to risk it. You know we’re going to go ahead and stock up on the fuel. So we’re going to get to the, production of the struts for the sphere.

That’s going to be the root cellar. Then on top you know, it’s ten feet up and then you have a floor. And that would be a workshop. I have a 3D printer, I have a bunch of other things that it’s just too dusty, you know, dirty out here. You do that kind of thing. So we have it, you know, stored.

But we’re going to go ahead and start breaking that out once we get that second floor of the sphere over by Donna’s, garden area, because she’s going to be using that for a lot of her little honey do’s and sewing we were actually wants to do. I don’t care, but I get a little bit of it. So that’s what we’re going to do.

Now, one of the things that I got to do is The struts as I produce these and fashion them and you punch them out and they’re ready. I got a storm somewhere, and we had a wheeled rack that we had done it before, and we’re going to go ahead and we’ll take the welder and I’m going to build a rack on this door.

There are six different sizes and they’ll the longest one will fit on there. So that’s going to be another project for me to do that and put, each one of them keep it organized and we color code them and so on that make that a lot easier. But it’s, a lot of these little things, it just takes up time.

And they are working on my tractor warranty work of the fuel injector of something. But, you know that in there you go warranty working. You know, it’s a thing. So I get a loaner. So I’m going to go ahead and get a tractor skid steer. And it can take a lot of my attachments. And I’m going to go out man I’m going to use it.

We’re going to get some digging done on the sand pond, because the upper terrace is where we’re going to be doing. You saw, a couple videos ago that we created biochar there in a big area that we’re going to do in the orchard. Now, we have a neighbor that raises rabbits, not for eating or meat. His wife shows them there’s a bunch of them and man over the meat, they got a pile, a rabbit poop.

And we’ve used it in the garden. That stuff is awesome. And you look it up now. Oh, that’s the best. And we had got one box sent to the post office of earthworms that Donna got. Put it in there. You can’t dig down an inch without freaking saturated with earthworms. So that soil in there is just awesome. Well, they’re going to let us take all that they got, man.

We don’t want it. You’ll take it. So we’re going to get the, tractor, the skid steer or whatever, get that over and start putting it. And what we’re going to be doing the orchard and start planting trees before it gets too hot. Then you have an area that you may have seen what we’re going to be doing, a potato garden.

I think I’m going to expand out about three times the size. Know, take out some of the more creosote by the road and in the air. We just need to produce food. You need to get carbs. You need to get starch. You need to get calories. Well, here in the desert, sweet potatoes grow really well and really fast, and they’re very dense in nutrition.

So we’ll get that started. Get some trees started down his garden. We’re doing some stuff we, the big dome that we have over, on the old workshop area is a 30ft pad that I use for doing maintenance on the vehicles and the tractor and so on. But that big dome, I think we’re going to bring it over to Donna’s garden area and make a big giant greenhouse, because we need to get into more food production.

I feel it common. And what we’ve done. Yeah. Here of late as we went ahead, you go to Sam’s Club, Costco and you stock up, you get a pallet of where you spent 5 or $600 and you can, you know, rice and beans and, you know, mashed potatoes, flakes and and dried milk. What you whatever spam tuna fish.

You get a lot of this stuff that you can have a, well, spam that always go get on. You’re on the spam list. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to go ahead and, stock that up to get us through growing season, but probably not going to be able until the fall or we’ll start, you know, harvesting a bunch of stuff.

And then we got to preserve it. Now a lot of times in the summer you can get, you know, strawberries and blueberries, a lot of thing in season, very cheap, you know, a lot cheaper and you grow it. And Donna really likes the white grape. So she got some great plans that she’s doing. And the home that we had in North Phoenix, it grows grapes.

We have a lot of that, a lot of grapes there, and pomegranates and apricot and and, fig trees. So we already know what can grow here in the Sonoran Desert. You just need water. And what’s happened is you checked the news last year, there was a hardly any monsoon here in Arizona, but we have, you know, La Nina and El Nino and whatever.

And all it is, is a very warm area in the Pacific, you know, and that has a big impact on our monsoon. Well, they’re anticipating a big giant monsoon season coming this year. So we’re going to put some things on hold to get prepped for the water retention in the Sam pond, because I want that water. And we got at least a couple of acres of storage over there.

And it’s going to be it’s like 326,000 gallons. I think it is per acre foot. So you get a couple an acre foot of that and you got water for a while. So that won’t be a problem anymore because all we need is purify just for our drinking and so on. And, and we have, a sand filter that we have for getting, you know, let it settle and then have it filtered, and then we’ll go through some, filtration, you know, certainly for our use on the bus, but for animal husbandry, for growing, for trees, for the garden.

Man. I’ll take the desert water, you know, we’re fine. So that’s what a lot of the things. And we got timelines on these. You know, there’s a lot of times, I mean, we have family things that we go to. We have, you know, different events that we participate in. We have our radio show that we do, we have the new site we call.

So we spend a lot of time another thing. So when we get out work and we got to be productive, thus the tractor. So that’s what we’re going to be doing. And I wanted to encourage you to go check out the nonconformist series Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse and be inspired, you know, by not just us, but other people that have the same mindset and the philosophy that we do that you own yourself and everything that derives from that, you know, quit delegating authority to someone else to fix it for you.

They don’t have your interests at heart, you know. And if your wealth is in paper, you know, it’s on a statement on a computer screen, or you get mailed and cut and it’s gone. So you need to convert that into assets. What are you going to do with that money? Buy food when you need it, energy when you need it, you know.

So go ahead and get it. You know, get your, you know, solar outfit going. You know, learn about that. Have you know, food that is not going to make you so desperate because when you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you’re without shelter, you’re going to make bad decisions, and you make decisions in fear or under stress. And you’re probably not the best one.

So you need to prep now. And there’s a lot of people, a lot of information in these presentations. I watched, you know, all the videos, doing the mic for it and so on. I’m inspired. As much as we try to inspire you to just do it. When Donna and I, we’re on our sixth. I’m. I just turned 65.

If I can do it in the desert, what’s your excuse? You don’t have one. So thank you for, listening. And I encourage you to check out the nonconformist series Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse. So thriving now is what we’re focusing on. And then we’ll get back to the build here. The next video for next week, because I got a, you know.

Well, some stuff. I gotta get some stuff prepped. We got to start punching out the struts. And once we start doing that, things are going to go fast, and it’s going to be fun. You know, learn a lot, pace.

Off-Grid Motivation: Nonconformist Series & Desert Build Updatehttps://t.co/jl2fCoCkIm

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) May 9, 2026