It is always a quiet, beautiful thing to wake up at Diamond E Ranch, look out past the barns, and see the morning sun hitting the pastures. But every now and then, ranch life takes a turn for the completely unexpected. Last week, our quiet corner of Nipomo became the official pitstop for a caravan of the most brilliant, chaotic minds on the internet.
If you follow the world of STEM or DIY engineering on YouTube, you probably know William Osman, Michael Reeves, Allen Pan, and Kevin McCulloh (better known as The Backyard Scientist). They were road-tripping up the Central Coast on their way to the Open Sauce convention, driving a low-budget, custom solar-assisted Taylor Dunn utility cart. When they rolled up to our RV pad looking for a place to park, charge their batteries, and camp out for the night, we knew we were in for an unforgettable visit.
A Different Kind of Ranch Tour
I always say that I built the barns here at Diamond E Ranch, but my wife is the one who filled them. Showing this particular crew around our rows of animal enclosures was a masterclass in comedy.
We started with our white call ducks and quickly moved to my daughter’s Chinese geese. For reasons we still don’t entirely understand, these geese absolutely hate men—a fact that Michael Reeves discovered first-hand as they immediately hissed and lined up to declare war on him.
Next, we visited Jupiter, one of our prize-winning Nigerian Dwarf breeding bucks, before heading over to see our rare New Zealand Kunekune pigs, Willow and Winston. Winston is a massive, tusked boar who looks terrifying but is a total sweetheart—though the guys immediately started debating whether the five of them could take him in a bare-handed fight (verdict: Winston would win).
We wrapped up the tour by introducing them to the undisputed patriarch of the ranch: Hercules, our family’s incredible 86-year-old desert tortoise who has been passed down through generations.
The Morning Goat-Milking Ritual
The real fun started the next morning. My wife brought the guys fresh goat milk shooters to wake them up, and then we decided it was time to put these city slickers to work.
We marched them out to the stanchion to milk one of our Nigerian Dwarf does. While William struggled to get a single drop, it turned out Michael Reeves possesses a completely natural, terrifyingly efficient “goat-milking gene.” He blasted a perfect, laminar stream of milk directly into a bowl of chocolate Froot Loops.
Kevin and Allen took their turns too, resulting in a bucket of fresh, warm milk that had a few floating stray hairs from the chaotic process. Tasting raw, warm milk right out of the pasture is a true homesteading rite of passage, even if the guys were a little spooked by the temperature!
Leaving the Gate Better Than They Found It
As any property owner knows, a ranch is a continuous cycle of fixing what’s broken. I happened to have two gates that needed some serious attention, and when you have a crew of elite fabricators on your property, you don’t let that labor go to waste.
We split them into two teams. Kevin and William took on our primary pasture gate. Kevin brought out a piece of his own high-tech gear—an 8,000-watt infrared cleaning laser—to blast the old paint off down to bare metal before they structurally reinforced the steel tube frame.
Meanwhile, Allen Pan and Michael Reeves tackled our bent gate. What should have been a simple repair turned into a heated, passionately nerdy debate over whether a “vertical up” or “vertical down” welding bead was structurally superior. By the time they finished welding, grinding, and painting, both gates looked absolutely fantastic—and I had the rare joy of just standing back and watching the show.
Sharing the Homestead Spirit
Before they loaded back up into their tiny electric cart to continue their 105-mile journey north, we talked about what we do here. At its core, Diamond E Ranch is about connection—connecting people to their food, to the land, and to traditional skills like our hands-on artisan soap-making classes. To have a group so rooted in modern digital technology appreciate the slow, scratch-built nature of homesteading was a beautiful collision of two worlds.
We snapped a great photo together right in front of our main property sign to commemorate the madness before they hit the road.
You can watch the full, hilarious behind-the-scenes documentation of their stay over on William Osman’s second channel. Check out the arrival and ranch tour in the video Michael fixed it, and see the goat-milking and gate-welding chaos in Wrong turn disaster.
Safe travels, guys! The gates are holding up perfectly, and you’re welcome back to the RV pad anytime.
Make sure you have a freshwater delivery system as well. So as you prepare your farm now is the perfect time to run some PVC and setup a livestock waterer.