For those of you living in Ohio and looking for resources about locally grown food, check out Locally Grown Ohio. It’s a cool weblog dedicated to local food.
DLH
Read more at my Farming weblog…
Category Archives: farming
Get out of the market
There’s been a lot of talk over the past several years about the incredible volatility in the commodity food market, especially with staple crops like corn , rice, and wheat. Prognosticators, researchers, and talking-heads go on and on about what to do to control a market that, like most commodities, proves to be beyond control.
I have an idea that would help eliminate such volatility in its entirety: get out of the market altogether.
“But,” you might say, “where will all our food come from? We can’t possibly grow enough to feed ourselves without the market, right?”
Well, yes, we can, and it can happen once we start growing food ourselves and buying what we can’t or won’t grow ourselves from people we know.
The problem with the modern commodity food market is not that there is not enough food, it’s that there are not enough people involved in raising it. The commodity food market exists because such a small number of people produce food that it has to be grown using industrial techniques that involve turning food into a raw material for manufacturing.
Contrary to what you may have learned in your history and sociology classes, the history of the world is not the history of people almost starving to death every year until the last half of the 20th century. In fact, people fed themselves quite well for the most part, usually on plots many people would think of as large gardens rather than farms. If they had not been able to do so, how do you think the world could have reached 6 billion people? They had to come from someone, somewhere, and where they came from they were well fed.
We can return to the same idea now, if we choose. It is possible for more people to return to tending gardens, growing small plots of staple foods, caring for small herds of food animals, and all without giving up the parts of modern life most of us enjoy. And, for those who want to go even further, the possibilities are endless.
But we all have to take a first step, and for most people that means passing up the grocery store in favor of the farmer’s market or the stores many local producers have set up to make their produce available to the wider public. If we all take that step, such markets and the producers who populate them will increase in numbers, prices will go down, and food markets will stabilize at the local level. It’s really rather simple, but you have to do it first.
DLH
End note: links to local food resources:
Local Harvest – Eat Wild – Seed Savers
Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association
Columbus, Ohio North Market – Dayton, Ohio Second Street Market – Troy, Ohio Downtown Farmer’s Market – Piqua, Ohio Farmer’s Market – Covington, Ohio Farmer’s Market
An open letter to farmers big and small, sustainable or not
Dear farmers,
I’ve read a lot about how none of you want cuts to federal farm subsidies or programs. I’m betting no one whose federal budget is on the chopping block right now wants their funding to go, but the extreme nature of the budget crisis means that something is, by definition, going to have to go.
My proposal to all of you is that we be the ones who stand up and say, “We don’t need the money.”
You see, from my point of view as a small farmer just getting started on the sustainable agriculture journey, the reason we have such a hard time making money and getting our message out as farmers is because so much of the money and so much of the message is controlled by the government. Because the government controls the money and the message, we farmers have very little control over how the money gets spent and what gets said.
For those of us who have decided to go it alone, the experience is quite different. I know from first hand experience what kind of money can be made and what kind of message can be put out there by a single farm. People are hungry–literally and figuratively–for what we are doing and they want more. In the next few years, unless something dramatically changes for us, our farm will be paying for itself without the benefit of a single government subsidy or program.
How is this possible? Because I, and those who work on and support my farm, understand that farming is a calling and a lifestyle, not just a job. I am my farm, and because of that, I care very deeply about what happens to it. Therefore, I am willing to put in the kind of blood, sweat, and tears that a mere job could never demand.
Now, is that kind of commitment for everyone? Of course not. Yet, I cannot help but notice that, if your’re not willing to make that kind of commitment, then what are you doing?
For those of us who are willing, the path leads away from the government. We don’t need government sponsored local food programs. We don’t need government price supports for commodity crops. We don’t need government rules telling us what, when, where, and how to plant.
What we need is our own determination and perseverance, and in a few years using those things, we would be free to do the thing we have come to know and love.
So let’s stop this dependence on the government and start our own independence based on the merits of our own effort.
DLH
How to get started growing your own food
Over the past couple of years, I have received several requests from various people about information on how to get started growing one’s own food. While there is no foolproof way that I know of, there are all kids of places someone can start, but I will share several things that helped me.
A few great books to start with for information are Four-Season Harvest
I also subscribe to the magazines Grit, Hobby Farms, Mother Earth News, and Rural Heritage, all of which have regular great information on small-scale farming. They also provide advertising and links to all kinds of places that have resources for small-scale farmers.
Of course, getting started raising one’s own food also requires the proper equipment and resources, and those depend entirely on what kind and scale of food raising someone intends to undertake. A good way to figure out what you may need is to seek out someone already doing what you want to do and see how they are doing it.
I also find that attending farm and heritage festivals and shows can provide all sorts of good information.
In the end, though, the biggest thing someone has to do is to do it. My own adventure into food raising started because I just started doing it, first in a tiny garden when I still lived in the city, and then eventually on my in-laws’ farm as I took over operations here. The biggest thing I learned from that experience is that you have to set aside the fear of failing and just try things until you find something that works. Once you do that, you will find it leads to many things that work.
And, once that happens, you’ll find that people start coming to you for advice too.
DLH
Farming: The farm uniform
While I’m sure most farmers don’t think of it this way, there is a definitive uniform most of us wear as we go about our daily tasks. It’s a practical collection of clothing and tools that help us get our jobs done.
Here at Innisfree Farm, the uniform is pretty well defined. At its most basic, it consists of a hat, t-shirt, pair of jeans, socks, and a good pair of steel-toed work boots. Added to that is a good multi-tool and a pair of work gloves. During the winter, the ensemble expands to include stocking caps, sweatshirts, long underwear, and winter work gloves.
Some farmers replace the work boots with mud boots of one sort or another, but I find the risk of crushing my toes often outweighs the benefits of staying clean and dry. Further, almost any kind of clothing can be worn, as long as it covers most of the body and is tight fitting enough to avoid getting caught in machinery, a problem that is especially present in the winter when we have to wear more clothing.
Some accessories that often go with our uniform include a good flashlight, a toolbox filled with our most commonly used tools, and a water jug. Sometimes, a pair of suspenders can be useful to help keep one’s pants up when the work requires constant bending over.
Overall, this is a time tested uniform for farming as I have seen it in use.
DLH
Read more at my Farming weblog…
Farming: Little pastures
One of the transformations in thinking I have experienced over the past few years as I have taken over the farm and learned how to farm it is how I look at grass.
Before, I thought of grass in the way I think a lot of people do, as an ornamental ground cover that functioned as much as a constant bane because of its demand for care as it did as a nice place to walk and hang out during the warmer months. I didn’t tend to care as much as some about what my grass looked like as long is we mowed it periodically, mostly because I just wasn’t willing to do the work to keep it up.
Now, I see little pastures everywhere I look. I see places people could keep a few chickens or a milk goat or a beef cow. I see land better suited to the raising of food than to the constant maintenance of a crop that serves virtually no other purpose than to fill the gut of ruminants and to keep the dirt from washing away.
What has been most startling to me is to learn that my realization is nothing new. In fact, before the industrial agriculture revolution’s heyday in the 1950s, most Americans outside of cities thought the way I do now, and it turns out most Americans lived outside of cities.
Before industrial agriculture, Americans considered it their privilege and right to grow their own food. Food independence meant personal independence, and personal independence was among the most important of life’s concerns.
Of course, most people today are far from independent. Whether they rely directly on the government for their well-being or whether they depend on corporations for the same, they have given up their independence for the myth of security that never existed.
And so, they see yards where I see pastures, yards that need to be mowed, sprayed, fertilized, and cared for like a pet because someone told them that’s what they should do, without realizing that they could probably be feeding an animal and themselves for a lot less on that same lot of ground.
I hope I am planting a seed, though, for some people, so that, when the time comes, they might consider changing that yard into pasture or a garden or some other effort at gaining independence for themselves and their own. I think we’re going to need a lot more than that before it is all said and done.
DLH
Read more at my Farming weblog…
Because it’s a farm
I heard today that our tenant farmer–he plants our 100 or so acres of tillage–thinks my wife and I are ripping off my mother-in-law because, well, there are goats eating grass in the front yard and chickens eating grass in the back. That’s not how things are supposed to be, you know, because now the farm looks like… a farm.
This kind of nonsense has been an ongoing part of my acclimatization into the world of someone trying to farm sustainably in a world filled with industrial workers whose job happens to be the planting and harvest of organic manufacturing components. Most of my fellow farmers have lost sight of the age old understanding borne of thousands of years of human agriculture, which wisdom states that the farmer feeds himself and his own first, the people around him next, and then sells whatever might be left to buy the things he cannot grow or make himself.
To our tenant farmer, the secret to farming is to borrow tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to plant and harvest thousands of acres of crops that humans can no longer directly consume, to sell those crops for prices determined by speculators who never have his best interest in mind, and to dump his commodity into an industrial supply system whose product he has to pay for even though it could not exist without his tireless effort. And, if there’s a bad year, he could easily fold and have very little or nothing to show for it.
To me, the secret to farming is what I have already noted. First, plant and raise food–food people can eat straight from the plant or animal without the intermediary of industrial processing. Second, raise that food to feed me and mine first. Third, make sure the people around me are fed. Fourth, sell whatever is left to buy what I cannot grow or make myself. The thing is, even in the worst years, it is possible to eke out an existence following that method– if it weren’t, most of us would not be here today.
So, yeah, our farm looks like a farm, and that’s on purpose. We can eat what we’re doing here. How many farmers can say that?
DLH
An oil tale
I doubt very many people give much thought anymore to the tired media adage that the United States is addicted to oil. Sure, people see the price of gas, and they understand that price is somehow tied to oil, but what they’ve never comprehended is that the price of almost everything else is also tied to the same price of oil.
I think about that addiction a lot these days, because I think both its existence and its end will come to define who we are as people here in the early 21st century. I think about it mostly because I wonder how any of us are going to succeed at providing for ourselves–and I’m not talking about whether or not the internet will still work or whether we’ll have cell phones, but whether we’ll be able to feed, clothe, shelter and protect ourselves–once the oil’s gone.
For me, this point is driven home by our precarious food system. Right now, virtually every part of the process most people depend on to feed themselves depends on oil to work, yet most people don’t even understand that it is true.
If we start with, say, seed corn produced to plant, the seed itself is already so laden with oil from the previous year that it’s kind of amazing it even exists, but for my purposes here, I will concentrate on this year. Most seed corn is grown hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles from where it is planted, so oil fueled, lubricated, painted, and upholstered semis must haul it from where it has been stored on oil-based tires across oil-paved roads to get it to the seed salesman.
Often, the seed bags are printed with oil-based ink, as are the shiny sales brochures and the price sheets, along with the oil-based dies used in the hats that were shipped from somewhere in the far east in oil-powered cargo ships. Farmers come to get their seed and paraphernalia in pickups as oil fueled, painted, upholstered, and tired as their semi brethren across similarly oil-paved roads.
Once back at the farm, the seed goes in the oil lubricated and painted planter, sometimes manufactured overseas and shipped to the States in oil-powered cargo ships and hauled on oil-powered locomotives and semis. But, before the farmer can use the planter, he must sometimes plow with his similarly oil-dependent plows using is oil-guzzling tractor, and then spray oil-based fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides using the same tractor.
Then, finally, he’ll actually plant, using the same oil-dependent tractor, followed by more spraying throughout the spring and summer, all dependent on oil to even exist, let alone happen.
When fall comes, the farmer will pull out his oil fueled, lubricated, painted, upholstered, and tired combine, shipped via oil from who knows where, to harvest the corn and dump it into his oil fueled, lubricated, painted and tired semi to haul it to the elevator where oil fueled, lubricated, and painted locomotives will haul it to processing facilities where the corn will be rendered into its constituent parts, then packaged and shipped by other oil fueled, lubricated, painted, upholstered, and tired semis across oil-paved roads to other factories where those parts will be combined into other oil-soaked parts into what most people think of as food.
And, it doesn’t end there, because then the food, as they call it, will be packaged in oil-based ink printed cardboard and loaded on yet other oil fueled, lubricated, painted, upholstered, and tired semis to be hauled across more oil-paved roads to warehouses stuffed full of oil-saturated goods from all over, to then be hauled again to your grocery of choice, once again using oil.
And we’re not done yet.
Because, you will get into your oil fueled, lubricated, painted, upholstered, and tired car and drive, sometimes quite a distance, to get to your oil-filled grocery to by your oil-based things you call food, but on the way home you’ll be so tired that it’ll just be easier to burn some extra oil waiting in the drive-through of your favorite oil-saturated fast food joint that was actually five extra miles out of the way.
When you finally get home to eat your oily food–let’s face it, even most of the carbon dioxide the corn plant used to make whatever part of the corn ended up in your food came from oil somewhere along the line–you’ll do so unironically in your house on your couch in front of your television watching cable all of which could not exist without the consumption of billions and billions of gallons of oil.
And to think that, just a little over a hundred years ago, most people had no idea what oil even was. Most of them lived on farms, still farmed with horses, and planted seed corn they grew the previous year using the same horses they fed with grass from their own pastures. They hauled their corn to the local market in wagons drawn by the same horses, and the people who came to buy it walked or rode horses themselves.
Now, I’m not saying we should go back to how things were a hundred years ago, but then again, I don’t have to, because the question that should be on everyone’s mind is how expensive oil has to get before we won’t be able to afford to do it any other way than the way they did it a hundred years ago. And how many people will be able to even do anything like that living in their suburbian sprawl, floating in a sea of oil they depend on everyday for their very survival, yet are so unaware of that the fact that they are probably sitting on, touching, eating, drinking, even exhaling oil right now that the idea would be a shock to them if they bothered to notice.
No, Americans aren’t addicted to oil, they’re consumed by it, and they have no idea what is going to happen to them when the oil runs out.
DLH
The flow of the seasons
We moderns get very put out by the changes of the seasons, even most farmers. We see the seasons as interruptions of the process we think we should be able to pursue all of the time, and because of that vision, we miss the important processes the seasons introduce.
I’m coming to realize that the reason the seasons put us out so much is because we rarely do certain kinds of work when the season is appropriate. Before we can even begin to correct this kind of problem, we must first identify what the correct season is for each kind of work, and then we must plan our work not just for the days or weeks ahead, but for the whole year, at least in general terms.
This is not just my own idea. Before the incredible rise of industrial agriculture, most farmers understood this premise. They knew how to make their work count for the most in every season because their lives and livelihoods depended on such efficiency.
What we must do now is relearn what they once knew because, in many ways, their way was better. I am not suggesting that we should embrace every part of their way of doing things, but certainly there are aspects of their way that are far better, and there is always the opportunity to improve on what they were doing–what we have now is abandonment, not improvement.
Of course, I’m not really just talking about farming either. Really, that old way should apply to most of life, not just how we create our food. I know that is a grand dream, but I think we should always be trying to make life better, and such a pursuit demands that all viable options remain on the table.
DLH
Ice farming
It’s 7 December and it’s 0 Fahrenheit with the wind-chill here in west-central Ohio, unseasonably arctic for this time of year.
Unfortunately, farming responsibilities don’t stop just because it gets bloody cold, so the question becomes how to carry out one’s daily duties without getting hurt. I’m not an expert on this yet, but I can tell you what I do:
- First, keep in mind that everything will be frozen. Gates, even doors, will freeze shut had have to be coaxed open. It’s really important at this point to check and see whether animal waterers have frozen over. Usually at this point, I’ve discovered the best solution is to just rotate out water throughout the day. It won’t go on forever, and it will keep your animals healthy.
- Second, keep in mind that this kind of weather will freeze you. Keep covered in layers even if it makes the work harder. I typically wear long underwear under my jeans, a t-shirt and sweat shirt, a coat, gloves, and a knit hat. One thing to note is that you will probably sweat under all those clothes.
- Third, the dry air and sweating under your clothes will dehydrate you as quickly as the summer heat will. Drink plenty of water and drink it often.
- Speaking of similarities to summer, take regular breaks in a warm place. If you have to stay outside, find a place to set up a heater so that you can get warm.
- If you start feeling bad, numb, or uncomfortable in some other way, get inside. Those are all your body’s way of telling you something is wrong. Listen to it.
DLH