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A former military family has ditched their comfortable suburban life to live completely off-grid as they rebuild a 160-acre farm on the other side of the country. Veteran Colby Myers served in the U.S. Army Special Forces, known as a Green Beret, for 12 years, during which time he fell in love with his now wife, Caitlin, while stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The couple's journey since has combined what life can look like for veterans after serving – with a project followed by hundreds of thousands of people as they breathe new life into once-farmed land. During Colby's time in the military, he lost two close friends, and when his father passed away, he found his values shifted, and realized he wanted to build something that would last. Having welcomed two children – Ryder, aged seven, and Indianna, five – the couple said their suburban life was comfortable but disconnected from how they wanted to raise their family. Colby's grandfather passed in 2024, having been born and raised on an old farm in Missouri that remained in the family, untouched for a number of years. So, the couple decided this was the opportunity that they had been looking for, packing up their things and moving cross-country in May 2025.
Transcript
00:00We were living in this beautiful city. Everything was kind of perfect and we just looked at each
00:04other and yearned for something more. We referred to it as Sleepy Hollow when we first got here.
00:09We pulled in and we got stuck like within three minutes. We could not access the property.
00:16We decided to move into a neighborhood but we felt like something was missing and then his
00:21grandfather who was a farmer for many many years passed away. We had an opportunity to come and
00:27breathe life back into the farm. My grandfather was born on the next hill over and grew up here.
00:33My grandfather's failing health the last several years had kind of prevented him from really
00:37maintaining this property. There was absolutely nothing. No structures, no buildings. It was
00:43essentially abandoned. We first lived in an RV for eight months and they thought that was the coolest
00:49thing ever. Camping out for eight months and then the farm life. The animals, our garden, all of that.
00:56They have been a part of that process. You know, every step of that process alongside us doing it with
01:01us. We have a little bit of history of flipping houses. We enjoyed that process of starting with
01:07nothing and just watching it transform before our eyes. We also hired the Amish to help us with that
01:14and that was actually really neat. Just getting to know them and we're in a big Amish Mennonite community
01:20here. Being able to watch that process and then watch your vision come to life before your eyes has
01:26been really, really neat. You know, it's nothing about health in mind. So I kind of introduced him to this
01:32lifestyle of healthy living and eating and finally I think you started to sort of adopt that, you know,
01:39the same habits and that's what kind of led us here to farming. Organic way of farming is kind of
01:46the old
01:46way of farming. Modern farming is very chemical driven. So to farm organically, you kind of go to the old
01:54school methods of farming. All of my equipment that I have, which I'm massively undersized, is mold equipment.
02:02Like my stuff is from the 40s and 50s and I'm having to like weld on it and wrench on
02:07it and put new
02:08bearings in it. Our goal here is to create an ecosystem that would help support not just our
02:14family but all the local farmers around here. Up here it's very rural, very agrarian. Our nearest
02:19neighbor is over a mile away and it's just totally different. So life kind of slows down on here.
02:25It's 40 minutes to go to the grocery store. We just want a simpler lifestyle where we slow down and
02:29the
02:30little things become big things like catching a frog or chasing fireflies. I think that really is
02:36American. Kind of as American as it is.
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