My Grandkids Farm

There's Only So Much West.

2010-12-28T15:43:00.000-06:00

The Lincoln Highway Seen
by Kass and Eric Mencher

We in the "New World" have a handicap in that our entire history has been one of exploiting natural resources. "Go west young man..." is embroidered on our society's genes in orange thread.

The reason one could (and was expected to) "lift themselves up by the bootstraps" was the existence of vast tracts of virgin territory containing timber and mineral ores and ancient fertile soils and of course coal and oil and gas - all there for the taking, just a short ride off toward the sunset.

Of course we're currently burning through those gifts like the lottery winnings they are, but we've convinced ourselves it is us that is special, when it reality it was only blind luck that put us in the right place at the right time and the right color and (usually) the right sex. In other words, we were 'Born on third base and thought we'd hit a triple' – to mix metaphors.

As we subdivided and privatized and populated and mined the commons, "growth" was inevitable and so a "growth economy" made sense. The role of government was small since there was a huge surplus to go around and that always makes governing easier. Until, that is, the early period of industrialization when the production of "capital" wealth outran the ability (and will) of government to protect the populace from the rapidly concentrating power wielded by monopolists.

Teddy Roosevelt and the "Trust Busters" interrupted the march of the industrialists for a time but by the "Roaring Twenties" the wealthy overclass once again had money to burn - and gamble. They inflated another speculative bubble in commodities and the stock market that even the little guy eventually tried to ride. Of course when the little guy gets on board you better know it's time to get off - think real estate in 2005.

During the depression, income taxes on the rich were raised and the ensuing fifty years saw the most uniformly prosperous time in US history. Everyone prospered, the owners made money and the workers shared in the success. Unfortunately the political tides of the last 40 years have shifted and the citizenry duped into believing if you let wealth concentrate, eventually some will "trickle down" - contrary to past experience. As a result, wealth is concentrated more than at any time since the great crash of '29, the "rights" of corporations are judged to be protected by the Constitution and more and more, control of the very essentials of survival; food, shelter, heat and even water are being privatized, purchased and controlled by corporations simply because that's all that's the only place left for them to spend their vast cash reserves.

Our whole system is based on the government loaning money into the economy at interest. That interest has to come from somewhere and the somewhere is "growth". The problem of course is there can be no growth without the availability of cheap raw materials, the gold-nuggets-as-big-as-your-fist-just-waiting-to-be-picked-up and of course most other minerals, the big stands of timber, tall-grass prairies, endless fisheries, easy fossil fuels... are all gone or going fast.

So here we are at the end of another speculative bubble blown because too much money was in the hands of too few people with no adult around to keep them from betting it instead of investing. Except this time IS different: all the "A better life for our grandkids" is gone - leveraged/strip mined/clear-cut/sub-soiled/off-shored/free-traded/trash-compacted and land filled.

There is no "west" left... it's all private property now...

NEAR THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY TERMINUS, SAN FRANCISCO
by Kass and Eric Mencher

A Movement

2010-06-01T21:29:00.000-05:00

If you missed my wit and wisdom I apologize for my absence - and recommend you get out more! I've been hanging out at peakoil.com again, a sad thing to admit, I admit. Anyway I was thinking about the Deepwater Horizon mess and...

I can't help but consider the irony of the Horizon rig blow out occurring within days of the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day - which itself was inspired in no small part by the Santa Barbara spill of '69.

In fact, the entire "environmental movement" received a kick in the pants because of the widespread news coverage the Union Oil rig blowout received. Tricky Dick fooled everyone (especially the Corporatacracy) and signed the Environmental Protection Act and later created the Environmental Protection Agency in the wake of the public outcry prompted by that "spill".

The Santa Barbara leak didn't cause the tree-hugger movement to materialize from scratch, Silent Spring, written a few years earlier might have been the spark and Dirty Hippies everywhere were certainly ready for a Movement of some kind but those images of oily birds (I can still remember) on the TV every night did the trick.

Pew research recently found 25% of Americans are very interested in the story of the Horizon, more than any other current event. It's 6 weeks after the explosion now and we haven't even seen many dead bird pictures yet - that is a very long time to keep Americans' attention.

I wouldn't be surprised if the various threads of climate change, "green marketing", Peak Oil and outrage over The Leak combine with a kind of national existential angst (if there can be such a thing) to form some new "Movement".

The whole "slow food" - "locavore" thing is good as far as it goes but doesn't go very far. TT "resilience" and "energy descent plans" are the right kind of medicine if the sugar coating were removed - the economic situation, especially if unemployment stays flat or if there is a second leg down, would be the thing that could take the simley face off the Transition Town sign.

I don't see it being the Partiers, angry demands for Nothing! don't seem to me to have very long legs to begin with and anger at too much government doesn't really offer much of a solution to the problems outlined by GW/PO/the economy or The Leak either. In fact, they seem to me on the opposite side - Warming/Smoreming, Drill Baby, deregulate just like Ronnie - - and now that I think about it, I haven't heard the Partiers solution to The Leak.

I'm thinking todays' graduates might be ready for some kind of movement, tens of thousands in debt with no job prospects and employment flat-lining in a two-year old recession. And remember the last 2 recessions were asymmetric jobs wise, the recovery took much longer than the drop and this one still isn't trending up much.

Then you've got the Boomers, they were 20 about the time of the Santa Barbara blowout. They were the first wave of the granola-eaters, then they put on leisure suits, then changed to power ties. They have always set the tone and remade the world in their own image. They are about 60 now and control all the money like old folks always do, I wonder if they have another change left in them or if they are just tired and scared for their nestegg?

That leaves the 25-54 demographic and I really don't have a clue about what they might do or think about all this distraction. I'd venture they are probably most directly hit by the credit/housing bust but maybe less affected by unemployment? They do have kids though and it could be The Leak hits a nerve with them more so than other groups.

I don't usually make bold predictions but I'm going to predict a movement coalescing around The Leak. I think it will have elements of conservationism certainly but my crystal ball doesn't show clearly whether it is the Teddy Roosevelt brand of protecting resources so they can be better exploited or more of the Earth First brand so I'll guess radical environmental.

Likewise I can't be sure if it will be socialist or fascist or anarchist but I'm leaning anarchist because government has become a corporatocracy and most know it already. If they don't know it now, they will by the time the corporations exercise their constitutional right to free speech in the coming elections - the ultimate right of a natural person endowed on corporations, newly granted by the Bush SCOTUS .

So, by that line of dubious reasoning we arrive at an enviro-anarchist movement populated by aging hippies, unemployed and homeless moms and dads, unemployable grads with iron clad contractual agreements to pay back student loans to the government and various and sundry economic refugees.

Hmmm.

Babies.

2010-05-09T16:52:00.001-05:00

Because you can't be a momma without babies, here are some of the babies at the grandkids' farm today.

Gram had a big day too, we went to Wally's, then ate Taco Bell, then came home and built fence.

Happy day to all you Moms out there!

Gardens!

2010-05-07T15:41:00.000-05:00

After babbling on about "living on the edge without money" I haven't been able to write much lately because I've stumbled on more design work than I've had in 6 years! It's all good tho! (mind yer speakers)

Anyway I want to talk a little about the garden.

Hickchic, one of my faithful readers (I always wanted to say that) and family are starting their little farm from scratch, what a pleasure that must be! We bought an old farm, the house is almost 100 years old and I'd bet the kitchen garden has essentially been in the same spot all those years - it's been there for at least 40 years anyway.

Our soil is a silty loam, 24-30" of topsoil over a limestone chert/silt-clay fragipan. On top it's only slightly acid but as you dig deeper it gets more acid. The former owners were Amish and I was surprised the garden was so devoid of organic matter when we arrived. This type soil is very tight and poorly drained without organic matter and the less it drains the more acid it gets and the less it drains. I'm no chemist but somehow the tiny grains of silt don't clump together as well when pH is low and this makes for very small air spaces, when the particles clump together it makes passage of air and water easier. Anyway, without much of anything organic, the soil took forever to dry and compacted like cement when it did.

Our first garden here beat us, plain and simple. We came from the Central Valley of California, where sandy soil and sparse rain means there really isn't much of a weed problem except where you water. Not so, here. In fact the first two years we were effectively run out of the garden by spiny amaranth which is really hard to eradicate unless you get it extremely young.

So one of my main criteria for locating the farm - over 35" of rain, was my first hurdle.

Since I'm not much of a cultivator and I don't like to use more chemicals than I need to, I decided to build some raised beds. I simply used the scraper blade on the little tractor to scrape 6-8in of topsoil from between the beds-to-be up onto the new beds. Here are a list of raised bed benefits:

Drainage raises pH
quicker warming in the spring
less compaction
easier to mulch a wide area than a narrow one

Raised beds do quite a few things, first in the way of pH, by scraping the path topsoil onto the bed topsoil they gave me a deeper layer of sweet soil (less acidic) instantly and because they promote drainage, the soil stays sweeter.

We've added lots of carbon as mulch - wood chips, straw, spoiled hay and also lots of well rotted manure and stirred it thoroughly each spring to get oxygen to the breakdown bugs. I'm very happy with the improved tilth and will probably not till most beds after this year - tilling is good for incorporating organics but every time you add carbon (the woody part of plants) and stir, the soil the bacteria that breaks down the plant material uses nitrogen to get started and will take it from the soil if you don't add enough. In fact, tilling can actually burn up more organic matter than you are adding by giving the aerobic bacteria a shot of oxygen, causing them to break down all your hard won compost really fast - just like in your compost pile.

Report to the Grandkids, MMX

2010-04-26T17:44:00.000-05:00

Since this is the grandkids farm, it only seems appropriate to give a periodic report on the state of the farm, so here goes part I.

We still own the farm, no liens or encumbrances - Ye Haw!

Soil fertility balance sheet:

(-) We sold a small amount of alfalfa hay last year and about 2 dozen calves
(-) Traded about 25 bales of grass hay for putting up the other 25
(+) We didn't hay all fields - mowed some and let it drop as usual.
(+) We continue purchasing/bartering for feed concentrate imports
(+) We brought in a good wagon load of straw (with help buckin' from your pregnant Auntie/Mom!).
(+) Most of our firewood last year was from off farm.

I need to get a couple soil samples to take to the Extension but I'm going to say that we probably are still down some fertility on balance due to putting up hay on shares.

Water
Still my biggest concern long term is water, both quality and availability. We are downhill from two dairies. One uses a lagoon to capture and spread from a freestall barn, the other is more traditional with lots of runoff. I don't mind receiving some of the "tea" that runs off but worry about the groundwater quality as well as level as dairies really use the water.

Good news is there isn't any new (or old) industrial development nearby or uphill, no big CAFO ag barns/lots and no new urban refugee barns either!

Stay tuned for an upcoming post on water.

Improvements:
Capital Improvements [cash costs in brackets]

Greenhouse Project: increased solar gain, new poly roof covering, new (recycled) south glass, hydronic heated benches, propagation cabinet [mostly recycled, $100 plumbing, $75 poly, misc hardware]
New hen house. [a few 2x4s]
New back steps [recycled lumber, new composition railing]
Still working on Gram's kitchen...

Equipment, facilities:

9 new calf hutches [2x4s]
New 8x12 calf shed [2x4s]

Cash income/expenses:
Last year was pretty tough cash-wise: Pops got sick, graphics work was virtually non-existent, calf market was in the toilet. But, work has been picking up since the first of the year, calves are bringing better, Uncle Sam is happy for a while, we're working the hospital bill and meds/supplies aren't nearly as bad as we thought.

I was kind of slow this time last year and Gram did lots of the gardening. This year I've been doing more graphics work so she is doing most of the gardening. We had thought this would be the year went much more into market farming as a necessity but we pulled back at the last minute as graphics jobs started coming back. We did wholesale some starts to the feed store, and depending on his success selling them we may put up a small hoophouse this fall.

We ate lots of homemade beef and pork and potatoes and onions and beans last year! We went shopping a couple times at Sam's and used the pantry a lot. We've worked on our few utility bills; the phone is a bare bones plan, the Great Thunder Bottom Internet Antenna is at the lowest level of service available, we have plug strip switches on the Evil Standby Red Eye phantom loads if we can remember to use them and of course we have had curly lamps everywhere since whenever.
We haven't had cable or satellite TV for years but I recently splurged and signed up for Netflix - $8.95/mo - good time are here again! I finally watched Crude Awakening!

All in all, the last couple of years were a good experience. Our income mix is is much improved. Although graphics still comes exclusively from CA, 2 new clients are more diversified than I've had in a long time - health care and small business advertising. We have even more experience with sick calves, one day we hope to be able to keep most alive.

We remembered too that pantries (and Rule #4) are there for a reason.

How Big is Too Big?

2010-04-20T19:22:00.001-05:00

The average US home has grown in size from 1,000 square feet in the 1950's to somewhere in the 2,400sf area in the late aughts. At the same time, the number of people per home has dropped from 3.5 or so to 2.5 or about 1000sf per person.

http://all-classic-ads.com

Is it any wonder the amount Americans owe on mortgages has increased from about 20% of the size of GDP to 70% of the size of GDP? Over 2/3 of the value of everything this country makes in a year. That just floors me.

www.calculatedriskblog.com

I didn't talk about housing in my 5 Rules mainly because there are so many ways to gain shelter and I obviously have a bias toward small towns and small farms. But if I were to add a sixth rule I think it would be KISS - Keep It Small, Stupid. Granted, we now live in the largest house we've ever owned, but that's the key, we own it.

Several bloggers I read were talking about housing and households this week - Calculated Risk (a great economics site if like me, you understand charts better than equations), John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk and some others. They talk a lot about declining resources and that dovetails right into the whole idea of a less-is-more lifestyle.

When we decided to abandon CA to the real estate flippers 6 years ago, we had a few criteria; somewhere in the center of the country, east of the treeline and south of the 200-day growing line (think somewhere south and east of central Kansas) - away from cities, 20+ acres of tillable land, 35"+ rain - those we my criteria, plus - - -

an old 2-story house...

So yea, we have over 1,000sf per person in our house but we don't owe anything to the bank and that makes all the difference. But as far as being the wisest decision, an old house (ours is just under 100 years old) isn't the best. This old place is framed with oak - yep, oak, so it's gonna stand up for a while longer and the foundation and framing are about as straight as they get so I have no qualms about putting in time and money bringing the insulation and mechanicals up to snuff. But it is a long process and if you or yours don't have the experience of living in a work zone for a really long time you need to think long and hard about a fixer.

Much better (if you all the parties can agree) would be building a new, frugal home from scratch. I love this old house and I'm trying to get all the holes plugged and some solar gain but it's tough, starting new with solid plans would get you to frugal fast. I'd build a small, bermed, passive solar house using plastered ICF walls (basically a Styrofoam/concrete sandwich) and galvalume or tile roof. I'd spend all I had on the envelope and finish the interior as I could get the goodies.

There used to be a formula, back in the pre ETF/bundled securities days, it was called a qualifying ratio and when we bought our first house we needed the housing cost to be less than 24% of our gross income and all our loan payments plus mortgage to be less than 28% - oh, and 20% down too.

Dropout Economy

2010-04-13T18:43:00.000-05:00

A Time magazine article a few weeks ago really struck a nerve. The premise put forward was kind of a new underground economy populated by dropouts.

As conventional high schools and colleges prepare the next generation for jobs that won't exist, we're on the cusp of a dropout revolution...

As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

So I looked up the author - Reihan Salam, like I usually do and was surprised to find he is a conservative. Not that that's a bad thing, just that this little ball-gazing effort was quite liberal - in the strict sense of the adjective:

Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas;

The dropouts he pointed to were of the young version but the underground economy he imagined could be one I'd fit right into. Today there are a large number of people who've been out of work for a long time, many are indeed blue collar and a large portion are also 50+ undergraduates. Salam thinks unemployment is so cushy and attractive nowadays many freeloaders would rather draw unemployment than find a job. I'd have thought perhaps his vision is more of a conservative's nightmare of the return of long-haired hippy types until this:

The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials.

Wow. What a mouthful from anyone even sort-of aligned with any political party.

Anyway, it's a great idea starter for anyone thinking about slipping out of the fast lane...

Rule #5, Don't be Dependent - The Marlboro Man Paradox

2010-04-11T18:10:00.000-05:00

Wayne McLaren, the first Marlboro Man, dying of lung cancer at 51

Individualism is participating in society for the sole purpose of furthering one's own interests. The Marlboro Man is the modern icon of individualism. He (at least one of him anyway) died of lung cancer, I assume because he believed what he was told by those making a profit from his addiction. Philip Morris for it's part was simply furthering it's own interests by lying about the dangers of smoking - that's as individualistic as it gets. It's ironic the icon of individualism died as a result of unfettered individualism.

Americans have this image of themselves as rugged pioneers who sally forth to tame the wilderness - and get rich off it's untapped resources. The Marlboro Man is the perfect icon for this myth, a lone agent rounding up the doggies and trailing them to market. He is Chisholm, Crocker, Comstock and Rockefeller.

Our society is stuck in Manifest Destiny mode but land and natural resources (and wild cattle) free for the taking are quite gone. But like the Marlboro Man with cigarette dangling, we cling to the myth and condemn any suggestion of contributing to a greater good as socialism.

At the same time the nagging feeling that the end of our endless resources is indeed nearing and the theme is often repeated that things may not be better for our kids after all. The result - I guess, is the mass, ugly re-expression of our selfish gene at virtually any political question.

Living at the margin is selfishly individualistic if you are an individual but it could just as easily be a model for collectivists if that's your thing. Taking advantage of society's overflow seems a perfectly normal niche, after all we're omnivores, quite good at invention and utterly adaptable.

So when I say 'don't be dependent' I'm not talking about trying to be the Marlboro Man, the poster boy of dependence, in fact exactly the opposite. Avoid dependence on the systems we all take for granted, the Just In Time delivery of stuff - food, heat, lights, transportation, entertainment, and perhaps most of all, the 9-5. The added benefit is achieving a measure of resilience in your personal economy that makes you better able to withstand the normal ups and downs of the larger economy and maybe even the turns that aren't so normal.

It's not so difficult to change...

Marlboro had a female target audience till Leo Burnett came up with the Marlboro Man Campaign and changed the brand almost overnight, probably one of the most successful ad campaigns ever...

Rule #4, Don't Get Hungry

2010-04-08T19:09:00.003-05:00

"Get Hungry?" I imagine you yelling, "I'm so fat I can't get into my pants! Food is so cheap today how could I ever go hungry?"

Ironically that is exactly the problem. In the rich world today, the cheaper the food, the more likely it's filled with empty calories, made from highly subsidized ingredients like added sugar and Hi Fructose Corn Syrup, over processed grains and added fats. Whole grains, fruits, vegetables fish, etc, are more expensive than a Big Mac menu - and no wonder, the food pyramid and the farm subsidy pyramid are exactly reversed.

In the Rich World, producing the essentials for survival; food, water, shelter, (along with all the diversions in the Bread & Circus isle) are in the SEP Zone (Somebody Else's Problem). The good citizen takes little notice except for paying very close attention to what is the popular, most advertised product of the moment. The citizen's responsibility then is simply to work and consume what's offered in the price category matching their education and income, the lower the income, the emptier the calories, the less you are satisfied, the more you eat, the fatter you get.

Remember Rules 1 & 2 are about getting off the buy-cycle and number 3 is getting rid of your day job, so the wise, edgy person learns to be more ant than grasshopper. Conveniently, since you have less time alloted to "a job", you have more time to devote to your pantry.

Rule 4.(a Stock up.
Fill your pantry with food you buy at the warehouse store and on the sale day and from the local farm and from your own harvest. Once you get it full, just buy, grow enough to replace what you use. Voila! instant Food security.

The pitfall when trying to take advantage of the margins around our current society is mistaking cheap food for good food - exactly the same problem as buying really cheap stuff thinking you are buying stuff really cheap. Low priced, over-processed pre-digested, HFCS/fat/salt laden, individually-wrapped-just-microwave-and-inhale, mystery food is bad for you, just look at the correlation between income and obesity - the less you earn the more you weigh.

Rule 4.2 Grow food.

Wherever you live you can grow some food. Because much of what passes as food at the supermarket is beat into mush - even the good stuff, you need fresh raw fruits and vegies. To be overly simplistic, if you eat some fresh asparagus and leafy greens with your extruded mush and HFCS Whatchmacallit patty, your blood sugar won't spike quite so high or fast so you'll feel satisfied longer. And who knows, you might feed your kids some vitamins and minerals by accident!

On the edge, I 'work' less and make less money so not only do I need to take advantage of the harvests and seasons, it's probably one of the biggest benefits. Our food production system has been ruined just as surely by consumers demanding a product with a quality appearance and a cut rate price as every other product. Foreign manufacturing of some worthless widget sold by a screaming barker on the Bread & Circus channel is silly. But to concentrate food production wherever the overhead is the cheapest is downright dangerous. Today monoculture is the norm, miles and miles of exactly the same crop, every fruit designed to ship. But worse, more and more crops are grown predominately in just one region of the world - then shipped to markets everywhere.

The queue for all the rich world goodies gets chaotic pretty quickly when there is a hiccup. The complicated string of just-in-time deliveries it takes to get those goodies (including your food) to the line is long and always subject to such hiccups. As the system gets more complicated and the string longer I expect it to fail more often.

Do you know where your next meal is right now?

How about the meal you'll eat 7 days from now?

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Rule #3, Don't Specialize!

2010-04-07T07:17:00.001-05:00

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.   Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Falling Down

OK! The first of my 5 Rules; #1.a, One point Two and 2.1 aren't all that much fun, in part because they go against everything we were raised to believe it means to be an American, namely, do the right thing so you can buy more stuff than the Jones. I say stuff is an addiction and competing with the Jones for stuff is the root of unhappiness - why do you think the slang for addiction is "Jones"? [I don't know if thats the reason or not but it fits my purpose perfectly!]

My first two rules, Don't Buy and Don't Borrow eliminate the need to pay interest to buy unending piles of worthless stuff so you don't blow a gasket like Douglas did in Falling Down. Now you can start getting to the fun part: reducing and diversifying your income. This is really the best part of living on the edge. For many years I struggled and sweated through my cheap dress shirts trying to make a little more money, first working for someone else on salary, then in my own business. Every time I succeeded in making more money I got a bigger mortgage, ran up more CC bills, bought (and replaced and replaced) ever more throwaway stuff. All the while I thought I was doing what I wanted but I was mostly just paying the Stupid Tax that keep the Bread and Circus Show on the air.

.
Just one word...

Mr. McGuire was right, plastics were the future, but they'll be past soon enough. What's the word now?

Telecommuting. I'm no guru and I have no crystal ball but that's my prediction anyway. I have a diversified income but my primary tool (most years) is a computer and internet connection. If you do any portion of your daily grind on a computer you can probably find a way to make a living anywhere you can get a connection. I can't express how convinced I am that one day not to distant, the current model of "driving till you qualify" for the size home you desire, then driving back in to work everyday will be untenable for a variety of reasons.

Telecommuting is great for rules 1 and 2 too, because it eliminates a wide variety of stuff from your debit column, from commute expenses (you know, like a car and gas) to clothes, to restaurant meals, to child care. Seriously you can save a ton of money by not having a "Job". It also allows you to design everything about your work life, from hours to t-stat setting to choice of Muzak - I'm listening to Dan Tyminski on some-guy-from-Japan's music list on Last.fm just now. And as you can see, my office looks like a bordello, which is very soothing.

But best of all telecommuting puts you in charge of your time, get your work done by 6a? Cool, do something else!

And that's the key to making enough cash to keep the tax man away and buy a soda pop here and there, you need to diversify your income. Jobs - and job categories - are increasingly transient, very few people retire with a company pension any more. The last thing you should do is put all your eggs in one basket - the corporation don't do they?

I can't tell you what will work for you. Because we choose to live in the country, in addition to graphics we raise calves, do some odd jobs - carpentry, general farm labor (GASP! and a white man too!), wrenching, upholstery, sewing, sell some vegetable starts and excess produce, some hay once in a while (though I hate selling off fertility) and we're always casting around for something new - that we we like to do.

Another advantage of telecommuting is disconnecting income from cost of living. IOW, I can live in SW MO, with an extremely low cost of living, yet do work for clients in and at rates a shade below what I'd get in the Bay Area of CA - which I do (sometimes).

The flip side of that is if I can work from the Ozarks, someone else can work from Bangladesh and undercut me as well, I've tried eLance.com and Freelancer.com and I have gotten some work but it's tough. But the cat's out of the bag on that one. Whether you live in LA; Gutwater, Missouri and your job can be done over a cable it will be done from a cheaper place one day. You might want to think about that. My best advice is to get yourself a good rep (if you do freelance like me) or make yourself valuable in a way someone in Chindia can't before your job goes that way without you.

Working at the edge of the rich world takes a little bit of courage if you've been a company man your whole life. But this isn't your fathers world anymore and playing their game doesn't always pan out. Homo evolved to be the King of Adaptation, it's time to take advantage of your genes.

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Rule 2. Don't borrow trouble...

2010-04-06T07:17:00.003-05:00

I just found out the first true credit card was introduced the year after I was born. Funny, I thought all along I was born with a minimum payment due. The Rich World runs on credit, interest is the dues you pay to play the game.

Previously:5 Rules, Rule #1, Rule #1b-recycle

Diners Club was actually first the first "Charge Card" to allow purchase at multiple businesses (resturants) in '50, but charges were due at the end of the month. Previously, retailers (department stores gas stations) would offer their own card. AmEx and Bankamericard (now Visa) were the first to take us down the road of revolving credit cards and the Minimum Payment Devil!

My goal in living on the edge has 3 facets; first, enjoy a small country life, second, use stuff the rich world sorta dribbles out the side of it's mouth so I need less money, and third, have a personal economy and infrastructure not totally dependent on BAU. Let me tell you about me and BAU...

discoverpa.blogspot.com

My first bit of credit was for a new refrigerator. We'd used hand me downs and even an old Coke ice box and block ice but I was ready to make the leap into BAU. My Dad co-signed for me, he said, "I'll sign for you, if you're sure you want me to – you'll never be out of debt again you know."

Of course he was right, I ran 'em up then paid 'em off with every house we sold. We'd swear them off and be good till the next time the car broke or school clothes time or whatever excuse seemed handy. We got in over our heads many times but I don't think we ever missed a payment.

Anyway, we're out of the interest business for good now. Long story short:

After the recession started our one card (that we used for cash flow - calf money isn't a regular thing) jacked my rate from 7% to 16% for no reason (except that the law was about to change preventing them for raising rates for no reason)

Then a few months later I got sick and wound up in the hospital, I wasn't sure how that would turn out so we skipped a payment - they jacked my rate to 29.9%

As soon as I saw that statement I decided I just wasn't going to pay - [expletive deleted] 'em!

6 Months later I offered them 20% to give up and they took it.

That makes me feel bad, not that they're crooks but that I knew they were crooks and still wound up in a place where I broke my word. It's too bad for them too. Now, just a few months later, I have 2 pretty good new clients, the calf market is up and the calves I was raising to pay off that card would have made a big dent in the balance, but they could not see past jacking me to ridiculous rates, late fees, and then over limit fees. Had they worked with me they would not only have made their their money back with interest but more in the future. Oh well, $20k is no great loss to them and in the end "they" finally broke us of our habit and now we're learning to get some cash savings built like we should have done years ago.

But there are other ways to save for the future more in line with living on the edge. An unexpected offshoot of raising calves is they are as good as money in the bank, in fact, their return is much better than bank interest. Basically we put in some time and maybe $100 dollars and stick 'em out on the grass where they can gain weight. We don't need to sell them at any particular point (as long as we have grass), the bigger they are, the more they're worth (albeit with diminishing returns) and we can sell them 48 weeks of the year and have cash in a couple of days.

The same goes for storing hay, raising a pig, keeping chickens, growing and preserving food from the garden - even cutting firewood and unless you are really lucky those are all lots more fun than your office job. After all, there is nothing magical about money, it's just a store of value. Whether it's a gold coin, FRNs or 1s and 0s on some hard drive somewhere, it's only worth what someone else will give you in trade.

For someone trying to live in the margin, the reason to not borrow is pretty obvious; every dollar you borrow comes with a Business As Usual tax in the form of interest - if you're trying to escape BAU, why support it by paying the tax?

Rule #1.b Recycle

2010-04-04T13:09:00.001-05:00

Crimes Against Furniture

Not recycling where you return things to be reused by "them", this is the kind where you reuse things. The classic is the spool table which I think should be the photo beside the definition of recycling, come to think of it, in this case it is.

Previously: 5 Rules, Rule #1

Obviously you aren't obligated to have a spool table to qualify as someone living on the edge, (which from now on I'm just going to call "Edgy") Here are a couple of Edgy examples from around the house:

Reupholstered $15 chair

Piano - free for hauling, table - homemade (but not free)

Working chute: hiway barriers panels, salvaged gate - even the headgate was a rescue.

I have any number of other examples, like the heated greenhouse benches and the soon to be unveiled Hen House from the Edge - in fact our entire house qualifies! It was rundown and inefficient with a roof beginning to fail, a porch roof that already had and the mechanical (and 1 outlet/room electrical) systems virtually kaput when we bought it - that's major recycling!

Nine by 9 Photography

The point here is there are basically two ways to spend your life, ride the BAU-go-round and specialize in one or two things so you can make enough money to pay other specialists (or little Chinese girls) to do/make everything you can't - or - spend your life learning to do things yourself. There is a pile of rich world stuff just laying along the edge no one wants to touch...

Not yet anyway...

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Rule #1, don't buy junk.

2010-04-04T07:11:00.000-05:00

Buying stuff is necessary, but buying stuff that barely makes it through the trip home is crazy.

Mixing Machine

25 or more years ago, Susan wanted to make bread. "Cool!" I said, I can buy a tool - mixers, miter gauges, mattocks, they are all the same if you are a true tool fool like me.

So at the next opportunity (this in was pre credit card days) I bought an expensive (for us) mixing machine. On a consumer cost scale of 1-5 it was probably a 3 and that was expensive for a carpenter.

She smoked it on the first double batch.

Use it once...

This was the early '80s when there was still a blurry line between sturdy and cheap. That line was quickly fading as plastics and "engineering" made everything better - or at least cheaper. I think that's the corner we've worked ourselves into, everyone wants a deal, the low price always, and that's smart but it has created the throw away society.

We waste about the same amount of food as we did in the 60's and only twice as much as we did 100 years ago. But we waste 100 times the amount of "product"!

Containers and packaging made up the largest portion of MSW generated: 31 percent, or about 77 million tons. The second largest portion came from nondurable goods, which amounted to about 24 percent, or about 59 million tons.*

What is really sad is that in addition to the 24% of the waste stream comprised of "non-durable goods" another 18% is "Durable Goods"!

Lots of throwaway stuff gets recycled, but the price paid for junk never gets refunded.

I try to buy stuff that can be fixed...

I took that plastic mixer back and bought the largest kitchen aide consumer model available. We still have it. It did need repair one time, Susan's brother in law took it apart and replaced a gear and guess what, it was the only plastic part in the machine.

I'm not really sure there are many products that can be fixed any more, especially the household variety. Parts for the kitchen aide blender we bought 15 years ago are no longer available, the unit looks the same as it has for 50 years but the working parts are new and improved - all plastic in other words. But it's worth a look around if you use something often, it seems sweet to buy 3 cheap somethings for the price of one good thing until you turn around and all 3 are broken.

I buy old stuff...

This too is becoming more difficult as the stuff Gram bought 30 years ago gets tossed out with her doilies after she passes. When I was shopping for a good sturdy sewing machine for a Christmas present, I asked a repair guy's opinion and he told me the best machine I could buy - by far, was any model made before about 1965.

The other problem is many times useable old stuff gets bid up by dealers who resell it as "antique". This really hurts, I'd like to find a useable corn sheller for example but they go for so much as "primitives" I wind up twisting cobs by hand...

Buy one good thing...

Finally, I try to buy the best if I possibly can and forego the other 2 things. I'd rather buy a used Honda small engine anything than a new whatever with a brigs; a Lie-Nelson plane is a wonderful thing if you are a tool fool...

*Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2008 (PDF) (12 pp, 1.22MB)

Silk Purses

2010-04-03T06:12:00.001-05:00

Living on the edge of modern ag has kind of become the subtext here at the blog. I'm a Junker/Cobbler/repurposing aficionado at heart and enjoy the functionality of a well turned out Sow's Ear Faux Silk Purse.

But beyond the simple satisfaction of a successful kludge, my overall goal is to negotiate my life to a simpler and lower energy level, whether as a preemptive move in the face of lower fossil energy availability or just as an escape from the brass ring grabbing contest, the plan is the same. Hopefully a side benefit is leaving a place and a way for my kids and grandkids to adopt if they want or need.

About three years ago, after racking my brain repeatedly distilling my thoughts on "powering down" to bumper sticker sized morsels for posting on message boards, I came up with my Five Rules. I use these to judge how/what/where to spend my time and meager resources and to what extent I'm successful.

Here are Pops' 5 Rules for Living on the Edge of the Rich World:

Don't buy
Don't borrow
Don't specialize
Don't starve
Don't be dependent

I want to talk about these one at a time so I'll start with the firstest and hardest, Don't Buy - or the longer version, Quit buying worthless stuff and learn to live on less.

If I add together what the SS Administration says I've made in my life to what I've made selling the houses we've lived in and fixed up over the years, it comes to over a million bucks (inflation adjusted it's more like about $756.38 but whatever). Boone Pickens says the first billion is the hardest! Point being, I don't want to come off like some monk sleeping on the floor in a lotus position and eating air. I was up there in the 80th percentile a few times and by golly I tried to spend it before it stagnated and I caused the downfall of the entire economy.

But hey, buying stuff is the American Way. The self evident, god given right to pursue stuff was in the opening line in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. And even though "property" was replaced by "happiness" in the final item, we all knew what they were talking about and so we all became the undisputed champions of stuff consumption. As a good American, I've made myself happy by buying every kind of stuff from candy bars to bass boats.

We left California for the Ozarks for a couple of reasons, first and foremost, it was clear the run in home prices was way overdue for a fall. I learned at the time the typical cycle since WWII was 7 years peak to peak - in '04, prices had not peaked for 20 years - that's 2-0 years! When I read the execs at the big home builder Incs were selling off their stock in their own companies to "diversify", well...

Real estate prices, or any price really, makes no difference if you aren't buying or selling. The thing is, as we sat and watched the "value" of our house double over about 3 years we had that pile of airball equity staring us in the face. But it was only accessible 2 ways, borrow against it (and inevitably find ourselves underwater) or sell and move to a lower valued area.

I was almost 50 and chained to the merry go round. I had a huge nut to crack each month and any little blip in the economy (oh, I don't know, RE bubble, credit bubble, commodity bubble) would cause my little free lance graphics business to go poof! The same old roundy round, chasing a buck just gets old. And most importantly Susan, my wife, and Miss, my daughter, were ready to abandon the coast - finally!

Anyway, when it came time to jump the shark, the first step was deciding we could get by without buying so much stuff. Turns out, buying stuff is a hard habit to break and is what keeps most people working 50 hour weeks. We've been here almost 6 years now and we still get to jonesing for stuff from time to time. Stuff seems to multiply spontaneously (though of course this is illusion), and as it does there is an equal and opposite decrease in wallet mass.

But stuff is like food, you need to have some to survive, the key is deciding what and how much.

After chores post more...

Living on the Edge of Rich World vol III

2010-03-20T14:10:00.002-05:00

So a neighbor came by yesterday with 60 dozen double-yolked, fertile turkey eggs and asked me if I wanted some, I said sure.

Turns out he "knows a guy" who works at a turkey ranch and this is turkey incubating time. Turkeys, like all good "modern" CAFO organisms, can't reproduce without human help and part of the industrial process is candling the eggs and discarding the doubles.

Eggs of course are the perfect naturally packaged food capable of remaining edible for at least a couple of months with no refrigeration. With a little care and you can extend that out to 6 months or more.

Eggs with an intact shell are pretty well hermetically sealed - if you handle them carefully and don't wash them, momma hen's own tamper proof container is sealed with an airtight coating known as "bloom". The only thing you can do to improve their 'shelf life' is try to keep out air and keep in the liquids after 'the bloom is off the rose' – sorta-speak.

Anyway, quite a while ago I had purchased a gallon of Sodium Silicate, known as 'waterglass' to your great-gram. We had a bunch of new hens and way too many eggs. Turns out we gave away eggs till things settled down in the hen house and so I still have most of the waterglass concentrate. I paid about $20 for a gallon of concentrate, I think though, if you check the link at the bottom of the blog you can see why the price is $30-something now.

From The Pure Food Cook Book, 1914

WHEN eggs are their cheapest and best, in May or early June, and before the really hot weather has come, the wise householder will put away, in water glass, a liberal quantity. If possible, " put down " enough to carry the family through the months when eggs " soar." If carefully packed, and if there are not more than three or four dozen in a crock, and again if they are kept covered with the water glass, they will keep well.

I posted these directions on a message board a few years ago:

One gallon of the solution (1 pint of sodium silicate solution to 9 or 10 pints of water yielding a little more than a gallon) should preserve 75 to 100 dozen eggs (900 - 1200 eggs) according to Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living Old Fashioned Recipe Book. If you want smaller quantities just keep the ratio intact at the 1:9 ratio. ie: 1/2 cup to 4 1/2 cups or 1 cup to 9 cups or 1 pint to 9 pints of water. Here are the details of the method referred to as the Water-glass method. Pack the eggs when they are between 24 hours and 4 day old. Older eggs don't keep as well. Unfertilized eggs will keep longer than fertilized eggs.

Start with a clean crock* or (6 gallon food grade) deep plastic pail. Boil the water and let it cool before you add it to the waterglass. Then pour the mixed solution into the crock or pail. Remember not to fill the crock or container more than about one third full of the solution because you will be adding eggs.
Add the eggs. Do not wash the eggs before preserving them because the egg shell has a natural sealer on it that will be removed. Dirty eggs can be washed and used immediately. Make certain there is an extra 2 inches of solution covering them. In hot weather it evaporates pretty fast so watch it carefully. Cover the container as tightly as you can to ensure that no insects can enter the container. Store it in a cool dark place. Don't let it freeze.

It starts out as a clear liquid but gradually turns to a cloudy jelly. When adding additional eggs or making up for loss due to evaporation, just be sure to cover them with about 2 inches of solution mixed at a 1:9 ratio. Preserving the eggs in this manner will keep them for up to one year. Eggs should be washed thoroughly before using.
Be sure to follow any safety tips or directions on the sodium silicate container or from the pharmacist while handling the solution or Sodium Silicate itself.

Another old link, and 'nother link with instruction for use of dry sodium silicate, and last but best, the great egg stor-off from, of course, Mother '77.

And a more modern use for "waterglass"but don't tell where you heard it...

I looked for an old-timey version of "turkey in the Straw" and found Liberace but decided to link this by Cousin Emmy because it's just better on it's face.

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*Most any container without a toxic history should do to store your eggs but be careful when using a croc...

Sunshine

2010-03-19T20:51:00.000-05:00

Just some wandering around pictures after 2 weeks of gloomy overcast.

Turns out most illustrate my poor maintenance schedule.

The brush hog and it's enemy...

Hookin' Up in the Sticks

2010-03-17T20:57:00.002-05:00

So a big part of getting by down on the farm is finding a way to make modern day egg money. Sure you can have a town job and still live in the sticks but then you're basically a suburbanite with a big lawn and a bigger fuel bill. I know, I once lived in the California Sierra Nevada foothills and worked in the central valley. A commute of over an hour wasn't bad when I was a mid-level toadie but once I opened my own business, the drive plus 12 or 14 hour days made me feel like I only saw home on the weekends.

For me the perfect solution is to telecommute.

You need a couple things to "earn-by-wire". First you need the gig, that's something you'll have to figure out on your own but secondly you need the wire - or wireless. I'm no expert on internet connectivity except for in my own office so let me tell you about my experience.

After spending several months shopping for a farm online we decided on our general area and flew out to see the chosen few places. The picking was easy, in 10 midwest and southern plains states we only had a handful of prospects and after a quick trip we found we had lucked into one place fitting our criteria almost to a tee.

We had already reviewed about everything we could about SW MO generally but the internet connection required us to settle on a place first. I do commercial print graphics and routinely transfer fairly large files both upload and download so a good connection was a pretty big priority. I knew cable obviously was out and DSL was probably out as well since The Place is around 5 or 6 miles from a town of only 4k but I checked anyway.

Sure enough, no DSL. So right away I was down to satellite or wireless or - gulp, dial-up. I was concerned about weather interference problems with satellite and cell service was spotty. Though we're only talking 6 years ago the cell networks here really weren't made for quick data transfer waaay back then and anyway we had very bad cell reception.

I just happened to stumble on a local company who had a wireless network just for internet conection! I arranged for them to do a site survey and they said we were golden so we pulled the trigger and signed the contract on the farm.

Skip ahead a couple of months and we are unloading the trailers and wondering where the guys are to install the antenna that was supposed to have been up by the time we arrived - welcome to the Ozarks bub, cool yer jets.

We get a dial-up account established and boy is it slow, I mean so slow that sometimes my machine just gives up trying, this is definitely not good. Several calls and here comes Mutt and Jeff and a ladder.

So we get the antenna up and boy it works fine, it ain't DSL but it ain't bad.

A couple of months go by and overnight the speed goes to pot, a few calls and a few excuses from Mutt about how Jeff is working on the problem and all of a sudden no connection whatsoever. By this time I have an unrelated computer virus on the PC and a Mac with no modem. Let me tell you, I love the Ozarks and wouldn't leave for the world but that weekend driving around Springfield Missouri trying to find an external Macintosh modem while a good client's big job is on deadline is one for the books!

In the end the job goes out because I got lucky and found a Mac modem and am now back to rejoicing over a dial up connection that barely connects. The calls and visits from Jeff and Mutt go on for months, replacing the modem, re-tuning the antenna, ducking my calls.

Finally I'm talking to a new not-Mutt/Jeff guy. This guy bought the franchise from the first guy who really only wanted to sell the service, not necessarily keep it working. Turns out the big antenna that my little antenna was trying to talk to had been moved lower on the tower to make room for the new fangled, faster type antenna at the top! Not surprisingly the old-fangled antenna was moved lower at the same time my reception went to pot.

But what is surprising is nobody told me my connection would never work without upgrading to the new flavor antenna or asked me the many times we talked if I wanted to spend some more money to get a better connection.

Of course when they told me what was going on I paid the $300 to get the new antenna installed on my roof and new modem-receiver-electronic-gizmo and have had pretty good service since, not counting a few outages after ice storms, tornadoes that sort of thing. I get about 1mb down and 500k up for $49/mo. and out in the toolies that ain't bad until they get fibre that last mile.

Finally, I have three pieces of advice about country connections for the telecommuter:

Make sure the people you are talking to understand you need the connection to make money to pay their bill – you are not just surfing for porn or cake recipes.

Have a back up dial up or a friend with a good connection.

Know where the fedEx drop box is.

P.S. Neither Mutt nor Jeff were bad guys, just in over their heads, I never did pay for the first antenna installation or any service till the new antenna was up.

Little Mucker Survives!

2010-03-15T17:53:00.000-05:00

Here is yesterday's little mucker all dry and happy, notice the milk mustache, actually he may not be so happy, he looks like he's thinking he should have a THREE qt. bottle!

Just a little more on raising calves, we bring them home and bed 'em in little hutches for the first 3 weeks or so. By that time if they are going to get sick they usually have and we can treat them in isolation so we know just what's happening. By that time they are starting to eat some grain and are rambunctious enough to keep up with their cousins or we leave them in the hutch a little longer.

When they are ready we put them in groups of 5 in a larger pen and feed them replacer from a bucket with 5 nipples for a few more weeks before we start weaning. At 6 weeks or so they are on just one bottle for one last week, high protein feed and good grass hay. We try not to let them out on grass till they are about 3 months, if they start grazing too soon it retards the ability of the rumen to absorb nutrients, remember that back in olden wild cow days before dairies, dairymen and Ben and Jerry's, calves stayed with mom and nursed pretty well till mom said enough – certainly longer than 6 or 8 weeks.

Raising bull calves is a fine balance, obviously you want them to be happy and healthy and the longer they are on a bottle the better but milk replacer doesn't come cheap, figure $15 a week, good sweet starter grain is maybe $3 a week when they get going, plus straw and hay and vaccines and meds and miscellaneous supplies and the occasional and sometimes more than occasional failure and pretty soon it's a hobby because you aren't even breaking even.

Then you always need to figure in the cost of pilferage...

Orphans of Industrial Ag.

2010-03-14T21:39:00.002-05:00

It's kind of hard not to feel sorry for dairy bull calves.

From the standpoint of the dairyman they are at best a byproduct of the process, at worst a nuisance and cow killer. When a heifer calf hits the ground, you can bet she is swept up and fawned over from the first moment, little bulls like this not so much. The little dairy where I trade a couple hours worth of chores a day for bull calves is a mom and pop outfit. They care for each cow like no thousand cow dairy could, they know each girl by sight, who her mom was and who her girls are.

Still when lots of things are going on, like today, a little guy like this can get forgotten. Today 3 cows calved, one cow went down with milk fever (calcium deficiency) then died in the hay barn right in the way of the feed wagon. The vet had to be called because I thought one of the dry cows had been acting funny and this morning she was pushing like labor though she wasn't due for weeks - turned out she had a dead calf in her - not a pretty situation.

I sometimes call modern Holsteins "Frankenstein Milk Monsters" because they are bred for just one thing: to provide your double chocolate chocolate chip ice cream as cheaply as possible. To that end they are selected for - what else, giving milk in the largest amount with the least input until they fall over dead, which isn't but a few years nowdays. They are big, they have a hard time standing on slick concrete holding pens and sometimes fall and "Split out" ruining their ligaments I suppose and though they get hand fed, watered, lifted with a tractor and sling for exercise they usually expire.

Though sires are also selected for small birth weights at least somewhat, many times the dam is a huge bruiser (a good thing) and she throws a huge bruiser calf and if it's her first or second calf it can kill her. There are two first time moms in the hay barn over there, due to birth paralysis they have hobbles on their back legs to keep them from falling and splitting out.

One thing they are never selected for is being good moms because they don't usually see that calf but just for a few hours. That's what happened to this guy, they were in a nice lean too shed up out of the muck but mom would have nothing to do with him. A good mom starts licking a calf right away and soon cleans him dry, it stimulates the calfs circulation and makes it want to get up and suck which in turn helps the mom "clean" – expel the placenta. But of course none of that matters because people take care of all that stuff, mom goes on the milk string and calf goes in a hutch.

This guy is gonna have a hard time, he got pretty cold before I got him home and rubbed down. He went right after the bottle though and it warmed him up enough to start shivering, a good sign. He's wearing the red poncho to help warm up (and my belt because I couldn't find the velcro). His hutch is nice and warm and I shoved him in and hope he'll stay inside, it's misty and kind of windy though only about 40*.

Dairy calves as opposed to beef calves are quite helpless, many are so large as to not be able to stand on their own, especially bull calves which are larger than heifers. Many times the reflex to nurse seems to be missing as well, I was feeling pretty good so far, we have 5 babies (out of 20-25 in the next couple months) and I haven't had to use a stomach tube on one - till this morning... and the same calf this evening. It is imperative for a calf to get a gallon of colostrum (first milk) in the first 24 hours. It contains moms antibodies and the calf's a ability to absorb them decreases by 50% every 10 hours from birth. Without those antibodies that kid is gonna have a hard time surviving without lots of meds.

Don't get me wrong, I don't bring home the little muckers because I feel sorry for them, I bring them home because it's one way to make some cash money in the country on the edge of modern farming. It's hard to not like the little shits when they are little and frisky out kicking and bucking when we move them from the hutches to group pens at a couple weeks. And though I cuss at 'em when they are daring me to keep them alive it makes me feel good when they do good.

Still, I hope to buy some old line dual purpose heifers this year, maybe old line milking shorthorns, red polls or Devons. Some old "family cow" line that was abandoned when the transition to concentrate feeding began in the 40's and 50's. Some line whose moms don't need chains and butt jacks to calve, remember how to mother a calf and haven't been bred to be walking udders.

It would be nice if there were a market out there for just a good sturdy family milk and meat cow that gives a good amount of milk and calves that grow meat instead of just hair and were raised on grass by their moms instead of being orphaned in the muck.

Greenhouse Heating

2010-03-12T09:00:00.002-06:00

I need to have heat in the greenhouse to get a good enough start to sell starts! This last February was 6* colder than average, and the average is around 20* at night with many below 10* (we'll just ignore the record of 29* below).

I don't have a lot of bucks to invest so let me tell you how my system came about: The first piece fell into my lap back in the summer when I saw a 60 gallon water heater sitting in front of my neighbor's milk barn. Being the curious junker I am I ask what was going on and the story went "the bigger chiller unit we installed caused the main breaker to keep tripping so we replaced the electric water heater with a propane unit"

Ah!

So after I did him a favor and took the WH home, I stuck it in the shop thinking I would do something with it one day. Well one day came a few weeks ago when it dawned on me I could make that water heater into a radiant hydronic heater for my greenhouse benches. Here is a shot of 2 benches, each with it's own "curcuit" of tubing for hot water to cycle through:

I attached coils of PEX tubing to the underside of the bench tops and sealed the bottom with 1/2" rigid foam insulation - foil side up. The pex is plumbed to 3/4" pvc pipe, a supply and a return, and ran around to this work of engineering mastery:

Here you have your basic washing machine motor and pump assembly protected by a preciscion fitted plastic pot. Affixed to the top of the pump is the fully programable control unit (in the Folgers can). The control unit contains all the guts of the washing machine wiring because I couldn't figure out which of the 9 wires coming out of the motor would make it run. I just left them and the timer all connected and after a slight adjustment to the timer clock rendered it not a timer at all everything basically became an on/off switch.

If you look back at the pics of the seed cabinet, I think you can see behind it a sheetrock wall - you can see a bit of it behind the heater in this shot too. This building was a garage built sometime early last century and so it has a stemwall foundation. I'm building walls inside the old north wall and insulating them as I scrounge the materials, I'll do the north half of the roof as well. Here is a section through the wall so you can see I have about R-30 insulation with the part at the floor being rigid styrofoam.

Yet to be accomplished is connecting the pump to a line voltage t-stat I had hooked up to heat lamps for the previous incarnation of the greenhouse and completing the tubing installation on the last 2 benches. The washing machine pump setup is overkill since the motor is way overpowered for this job, if things work out I'll replace it with something more appropriate – when something turns up more appropriate that is...

My costs:
Benches, water heater motor/pump, wiring, breaker box - $0
200 ft PEX - $50
"Gator" fittings 10 @$6 = $60 Ouch!
PVC $40 +/-
40A 220 breaker - $20
_____________
$170 total

I could have bought a Blue Flame propane heater and installed it for about the same but I'm thinking this will be much more efficient since I'm heating the underside of the trays with radiant heat and not the air of the entire greenhouse. Placing a cover over the benches using a cage structure (you can see the fence wire I'm experimenting with in the top photo and previous post) I can trap the heat right at the bench. Also in the back of my brain is plumbing the black water barrels as a solar collector / heat sink during the day.

The added benefit is that when starting seed or propagating from cuttings the soil temperature is what's important – which is why the seed mat in the starting cabinet, but with this setup we could theoretically start seed right on the benches.

Greenhouse Improvements

2010-03-11T20:25:00.001-06:00

I'm having a hard time keeping up with my blogifying but here is some of what Susan and I have been doing in the greenhouse.

I am slowly getting the seed cabinet where I want, here is the new shelf and grow lights.

Right now we have some 72 cell flats on the shelf for germinating larger seeds like peas and what have you that are too big for the 3/4" soil blocks. The shelf is going to work out good when we get to the stage we are really starting a lot of seeds in soil blocks, 3-5 days on the mat till everything germinates then move that group up on the shelf for another week under the bright lights to get some true leaves going while another group goes directly on the heat mat to germinate.

You could start a crazy amount of seedlings in a little box like this - +/- 1800 a week every week!

Here are what we have out in the sun, those are all 72 cell "plug" flats; everything from tomatoes to beans - 850 plants would have been 300 or so more if I hadn't accidentally left the heating mat in the seed cabinet unplugged on a 14* night – Doh!

BTW, I made the benches and parts of the seed cabinet from an old deck I tore down and the slats are the recycled lath from plaster we took down in the house.

Sprouts!

2010-02-19T17:14:00.002-06:00

Sprouts. Some with their seed cases still hanging on.

Pretty amazing how that whole plant fit inside that little seed huh?

Sprouts!

The seed cabinet is working great after a couple of operator hiccups.

Initially I had rigid foam insulation on the front and decided to replace it with some double-wall poly I scrounged so the sprouts could get some sunlight. After a week of overcast skies the sun came out and heated the cabinet somewhere over 120* according to the recording thermometer - I thought I'd cooked $40 worth of seeds.

Although spotty in a couple of places just about everything has germinated - I may have cooked some of the cabbage a bit early but I think we're going to be OK.

Forming soil blocks and planting seeds

Making Blocks

Here is the setup setup, in the metal tray on the right is the soil-LESS mix (peat/pearlite/sand) I use for blocks. After experimenting a little with ratio and moisture to get the blocks to hold together, packing the soil into the maker and extruding them onto your substrate goes pretty fast. I use a plastic sheet like the stuff to put on bathroom walls and a heavy piece of sheet metal to move it between the bench and cabinet.

Then just place one seed in the little dimple in the top of the blocks (you can sort of see it in the inset photo) and cover with just a very light sprinkling of soil. Part of the deal with soil blocks is that the growing roots won't grow out into the air but instead wait till the block is planted into a container. If so much soil is used that the spaces between the blocks is filled the roots just continue growing and intertwine and generally make a mess.

Heating
Here is the working part of the cabinet.
You can see the thermocouple (the temp sensor portion of the thermostat) is buried in some soil and covered with a square of plastic to keep the soil damp and the same temperature as the soil blocks. If it were to be just dangling in the open air it would be cooler than the soil blocks and make the heat mat stay too hot.

I use a recording thermometer, which of course, records the highest and lowest temperatures. Obviously it doesn't do any good if you've already cooked or frozen your seedlings but it does let you know if the thermostat is doing it's job.

And on the inset you can sorta see the polycarb sheet on the front of the lid and the shade screen Susan stapled on to keep me from turning the cabinet into a Sahara terrarium!

Growing Seedlings

On each sheet of plastic is a grid so each set of soil 20 blocks is identified; A1, A2, A3, etc. As the seeds are "planted" I make a note of what grid they are on so they can be identified down the line.

Ideally, cool season crops would be set on a second shelf where the soil would be cooler and hot season plants like tomatoes, peppers, etc would be right on the mat, they like temps above 70*. Thay will come in time I hope. My next project is to hang a fluorescent grow light in the cabinet (should have already done that...)

BTW, you can see loose soil around the edges of the blocks, it's there to help keep the blocks moist.

Sprouting soil blocks on plastic sheets in the cabinet on the heating mat.

There are over 1,200 plants here!

Everything is heirloom this year. The closest seedlings are tomatoes, 12 varieties plus some tomatillos and ground cherries, then some cauliflower and other brassicas and on the far end are peppers, eggplant kale and whatall.

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Today's Farm News
More People Choosing Local Food.

Farm Blog O' the Day
Not Dabbling in Normal

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New Boy Scout Motto: They'll Prepare

2010-02-09T16:37:00.002-06:00

If the Boy Scouts were formed today instead of 100 years ago, "Be Prepared" I'm guessing would be way down on the nominations list for a motto.

How many people do you know who could make it through a week or month without going to the store? How many even have enough water or heat for a few days if they were cut off from whatever it is that makes the water heater work?

One difference between life on a small farm and life in a town of whatever size is that many services taken for granted by the urbanite are self-maintained by the rural dweller. Granted, many country folks (including lots who own farms of substantial size) are simply suburbanites with an extra long commute and pretty well act that way regarding their own "infrastructure" - i.e. they call someone when the faucet just sits there instead of running.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/teotwawki/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Of course our primary energy comes on wires and wheels like everyone else's but because we don't have town jobs (at least not steady ones) we do need to think about our personal infrastructure a little more – we can't call the plumber at the first drop or even first drip.

We have a well, septic tank, propane tank, burn barrel, wood lot/pile/shed, pond and various other ways of harvesting runoff, not to mention the pantry, store room, freezer and meat on the hoof/foot/whatever.

None of which make us all that much less dependent than city folks, it just make us a little more aware of how thin is the veil of "modern life". And it certainly is much easier than life would have been here 100 years ago when the Boy Scouts were formed. In those days "Being Prepared" was required every day not just when something out of the ordinary happened.

Like the guy in Maryland whose power went out along with his heating oil after the big snow. He tried to dig his way out with a front-end loader - to get to a motel 6 I guess - but failed at that, so he went to a shed and ran the engines on his various vehicles until they ran out of fuel. Luckily his cell phone still worked because the state police came in a helicopter and carried him out.

Greenhouse is a Go!

2010-02-05T18:10:00.000-06:00

I'm getting antsy to start planting! If the difficulty I had ordering from Johnnyseeds.com was any indication so are a lot of other folks.

I've made a deal to sell starts at the local feed store this year. We decided to compete with our little greenhouse in town and the big stores 20 miles away by only selling "heirloom" plants mostly. Along with that we are expanding our garden out to market size - maybe an acre this year. Plus putting in some brambles...

Anyway, the GH project is to a place we can at least get started. Here is the south side with the recycled storm windows finally installed:

I only have one layer of good 6mil UV resistant poly on so far (the only thing here store bought) but will get on another layer on before the seedlings come out of the cabinet.

Speaking of the seed cabinet, here it is with the front and top hinged up. You can see the vinyl sheet on the bottom under which is the heat mat with the thermostat on the cabinet and the thermocouple ready to stick in a bread pan of soil to control the temp.

I'm going to build a shelf and hang a grow light inside for plants to get a little bigger before they re potted out. BTW the cabinet is 5' wide, 2' deep and 2' tall and if I were to fill it up with 3/4" soil blocks it would sprout 1,800 seeds at once!

Finally, here are some of the benches, 2'x8' (2 are pushed together in the foreground). I'm set up for standard 1020 trays, you can see 72 cell plug flats closer and six-packs beyond.

Theoretically we can get 3,400 plug cells or about 300 6-packs on the benches without getting too cramped so we'll start everything in plug trays they move them on to 6-packs as it gets closer to march(?) and stick them outside under some heavy row covers.

That's the plan anyway. This year is going to be all about balancing what hope to sell as starts and what we'll plant ourselves.

I always knew I'd be doing this eventually, I just wish I'd gotten around to it sooner!

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Today's Farm News
Ag Touristas

Farm O' the Day
www.rareseeds.com I've linked here before but I like 'em!

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Don't Be Dependent!

2010-02-03T12:02:00.000-06:00

This is just a general rant,

Don't be so naive as to think a little bad luck can't put a cramp in your style.

Sometime after Katrina showed the world that even the good old US isn't omnipotent, a website went up called http://www.ready.gov/

There, the Department of Homeland Security (a title that gives me the willies but that's another story) urges everyone to do the unthinkable, namely, take a little responsibility for themselves.

Now, this isn't a call to "bunker up" just a reminder that sometimes bad things happen and you might need to take care of yourself for a while till things get back to normal.

He [the Lawton, OK mayor] couldn't emphasize enough that residents need not worry about their water being turned off. However, there is a possibility that some could run out of water sooner than others.

A couple of jugs like this filled with tap water and a few drops of bleach could make life lots easier, we have used them or loaned them several times. You can use big soda pop bottles too but be careful of milk jugs because some will degrade and leak.

HaHa! Buy 'em from Amazon!

More on living on the edge of the rich world

2010-02-03T07:04:00.003-06:00

It really is amazing how rich we are, we replace possessions from simple boredom. Out in the country old timers are pretty frugal but (along with dairies) your exurbanite neighbors can be a goldmine - and I mean that in a nice way!

One neighbor bought an old farm like ours and with his town jobs is slowly fixing the place up. Along the way I've brought home such castoffs as dozens of sheets of corrugated metal (in various stages of decomposition) more than enough to build a dozen calf hutches and a loafing shed and there is still enough for a new hen house.

He had the 20(?) year old windows replaced on the farmhouse and I snagged those and the storms too. The storm windows made the new wall on the greenhouse and the window sash are in storage waiting to be installed in the sunroom on our farmhouse (when I get it built). Bt the way I'll post up pics of the newly refurbished greenhouse soon.

I've hauled home a mostly working cook stove, sink and water heater for our summer kitchen. Salvaged half rusted tractor implements from fencerows and barn-corners; a brush hog, disk, carry-all, 3 pt. scoop, piles of pallets, all sorts of scrap lumber and even a wooden, belt driven winnower and a kerosene heated incubator.

Remember:

Use it up, wear it out.
Make do or do without!

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Todays Farm News
Sustainable ag in the Farm Bill?

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Farming on the edge of industrial Ag.

2010-02-01T11:36:00.001-06:00

We are in a fairly rural area and since I'm such a scrounge I've discovered a few things a person can put to use by getting to know the local "big guy." Dairies in particular use lots of inputs to keep those girls producing and have lots of "stuff".

There are strict rules regarding the safety of milk and of course there are lots of chemicals involved in keeping things clean. Teat dip is a disinfectant and sometimes comes in 55gal plastic barrels. This contains sodium chlorite at a low concentration but I'd not use the barrels for anything food-wise. BUT fill 'em with water and they are great as thermal storage in the green house!

Many dairies feed silage (chopped fermented corn and stalks) and they use a very heavy grade of plastic to cover and seal the pile, sometimes even reinforced like ripstop nylon. If you make a habit of dropping by regularly, you can probably haul off more white/black 6-8 mil plastic than you can use - and they don't fill their dumpster.

Net wrap is another item in the waste-stream you can intercept. Ask the farmer to toss his old net wrap in a pile or a barrel you provide and it'll save him having it hauled off. You can use it to tie melons off the ground, drape it over a heavy wire strung between posts as a trellis for peas and beans to climb or as a barrier to keep birds from fruit trees.

I'm going to focus more on what we are doing in coming posts, next time some more recycling...

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Today's Farm News
Obama proposes cuts in welfare to rich mailbox farmers

Farm o'the Day:

PEACE OF THE EARTH FARM

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Another Organic (dogma) Fight

2010-01-31T13:03:00.001-06:00

I guess I must really be contrary to get into a tiff with the crew over at The Contrary Farmer blog.

That's Gene Logsdon's blog, he's a great author of books like All Flesh is Grass (that's an Amazon link btw) He went off the other day about how the government is going to ruin organic farming by providing subsidies for specific programs farmers adopt.

I'm not going to rehash the whole thing, it's as simple as government never does good vs. government can do good - sometimes, you can read what was said there if you want.

But my rant here is more about me vs. true believers of all stripes. I have a hard time fitting into groups where agreeing 99% of the time is as bad as being a complete heretic. Of course all groups feel that way:

"What, you say you agree with most of the concepts of permaculture?!"

"You think organic is best yet also believe the government should encourage it just like they do the big guys?"
"You think oil will get harder to find and extract but we won't even notice?"

"You think oil will get harder to find and extract and we will all die?"

You don't BELIVE 100% the party line regarding GMOs (AGW, Y2.012k, vaccines)?

You don't BELIVE 100% in seed balls (caveman diet, high colonics, colloidal silver, Ben Bernanke)?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/teotwawki/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I guess that's the reason I'm tapping here, I'm the only group I agree with most of the time - not always, but mostly.

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Today's Farm News
Ohio offers grants to promote on-farm research in sustainable agriculture.

Farm o'the Day:

Today's farm o' the day is actually 30 farms...

Poverty in the 'burbs

2010-01-27T12:09:00.003-06:00

Not surprisingly the decade of the naughts (or maybe they will come to be known as the oughts) saw a rise in suburban poverty as commodities of all kinds - especially fossil fuel, began what might be permanent inflation. The Brookings Institution, in The Suburbanization of Poverty found an increase of 25% in the level of poverty in US suburbs.

Between 2000 and 2008, suburbs in the country’s largest metro areas saw their poor population grow by 25 percent—almost five times faster than primary cities and well ahead of the growth seen in smaller metro areas and non-metropolitan communities.

The peak of the Great American Credit Hoax saw the banks reading the tea leaves regarding their little scheme of making profits from "fees"and their own over-exuberance around the whiz-bang "securitized mortgages" and put the breaks on credit. Home "owners" of course had become quite comfortable rolling their plastic debt into ever-increasing home debt. Unfortunately, someone realized somewhere along the line that home prices were a musical chair illusion and all of a sudden the music stopped.

There are over 14 million salespeople in the US, more than 4 million janitors and 3.48 million hairdressers, etc but only 438,490 farmers, fishers and woodsmen (woodspeople?)

It doesn't seem too surprising, to me at least, that since the cities are where all the "jobs" are, in a climate like this that is also where the "lost jobs" are too.

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
-- Wonderland, Chapter 6

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Today's Farm News
Land for Good seeks to support farmers, landowners and communities that keep agricultural lands working by providing an array of services, including farm transfer planning, farmland access, leases and other land-use arrangements, farm design and land planning and conservation development.

Farm o'the Day:

Home Sweet Farm Blog

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Bringing Home the Bacon

2010-01-25T07:05:00.004-06:00

Research in the early 1970s found half of respondents would prefer to live in a small town or rural area instead of a suburb or urban setting.

But as it turned out, what they really wanted was to have both - any surprise there? People want the feeling of living in the country but they want all the conveniences and amenities of the city too. In other words they want to commute!

So as usual the Boomers got their wish and moved onto little 5-10 acre plots outside of the cities and built 3,000 sf boxes and planted a horse in the lawn for decoration. For little town fans like me they did some good things including adding to the rural tax base, which improves schools and infrastructure of all kinds. But as far as supporting any of the local businesses in the small towns they moved near, beyond the gas n go at the onramp to the interstate I doubt there was much impact.

But now that we've entered a period where the price of gasoline seems to be stuck above $2.50 I wonder if those folks will start shopping a little closer to home? That would be the idea situation for the small town, commuters carpooling to the city for employment but spending their paychecks at home and building up their local economy.

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Today's Farm News
by Pops
Small Farm Mobbed!

Farm o'the Day:
http://apiferafarm.blogspot.com/

*1 Residential Preferences and Population Distribution 1973

Small Farming IS Diversified Farming

2010-01-22T18:07:00.001-06:00

I do outside chores for a neighboring dairy in trade for their bull calves. We raise the little buggers on the bottle and then get them up to a size to sell as feeders usually around 400-500 pounds.

Now this isn't nearly as pastorally photogenic as frisky calves frolicking around their mommas on a pretty meadow but on a small farm of 40 acres like ours, making very much moola as a cow/calf operation is hard. You must feed momma the whole while she is pregnant and nursing a calf to weaning age. The net effect is you are feeding 1,200 pounds of cow/calf to nourish a 200# calf. Once our calves are on the pasture we can feed 5 with the same amount of grass as one cow/calf pair.

Raising bottle calves entails 6-8 weeks of bottle feeding, then transitioning to grains and hay and only after several months to grass. They are kept in single hutches for a couple of weeks to get used to the bottle and so we can keep a good eye on them.

The first big challenges to their young immune system comes at around 2 weeks as the passive immunity they received from the colostrum collected from their mothers in the first days after birth begins to wear off. Once they are starting to eat grains we put them in groups of 5 and continue feeding milk replacer. Finally at around 6 to 8 weeks and once they are eating grain well and starting to pay attention to hay they are weaned.

But the truth of raising bottle calves in any number is that poop happens! Mix in some spilled hay and bedding of whatever kind and what you have is the makings of some fine compost. Of course w that is black gold for market farmers. Our tight, silty loam soil can use all the loosening compost we can pour on. We follow organic rules for hot composting but still always let it mellow the required time before applying to crops: from raw manure to harvest - 120 days for ground contact crops like carrots and 90 for above ground crops.

So in just that little chain there is labor trade, cattle ranching, hay farming and market gardening. The best part is the fertility from the hay and feed concentrates brought on the farm for the most part stay here, cattle use very little of what they eat - and heaven knows I don't sell enough vegetables to export much fertility!

Replanting

2010-01-21T06:52:00.000-06:00

Have you heard the saying "It's never to early to plant the first time"?

I got off to a good start here last year (at least as far as posting regularly) but then became sidetracked - ran-off-the-rails is closer to the truth, so I'm going to start over. I'm going to try mixing in more of what we're doing along with my observations as to why I think the rebirth of small farming is important.

Next time I'll let you in on my dirty little secret: I have more unfinished projects than I can count.

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Today's Farm News
by Pops
Hoop House Grants

Farm-Blog o'the Day:
Freshman Farmer
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Short Post Sunday.

2009-04-26T12:43:00.002-05:00

I need to get some stuff done today since I'm not hitched to the machine but I did see a couple of sites I thought worth a look.

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Today's Farm News
by Pops

Organic Study planned by USDA

Hoop House Webinar May 7th

Farm o'the Day:
Energy Farms
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Young Family Farmers

2009-04-23T13:55:00.012-05:00

I was going to talk about some ways people 25-45 (call them Young Family Farmers for now) might start a small farm. Unlike the older folks we've been talking about these have quite a bit less capital but lots more energy and time.
But they are also going to need the little place to make some money to get the note paid. The advice always given to little folks is to either put in a high maintenance crop or sell a value-added product and organic fits in here.

Aside from the lag time to get certified I thought I'd look at how the "organic" brand is doing lately.

The trend looks down in the UK and check out the rancor in the comments! But the big brand in the US, Organic Valley acts like things are peachy. Perhaps because they are using the model of the big boys and putting the farmer on contract - not much new there.

"...market researcher The Hartman Group found that the use of organics began leveling off in 2006, a trend it expects to continue this year, and an Information Resources survey of 1,000 consumers in May found that 52 percent were buying less organics because of cost concerns."
--Reuters, 1/09

This is a bad sign as far as the small farmer goes. One of the few ways to make a go of a small plot is produce a premium crop for a niche market. The "brand" Organic once had the cache of a better quality, premium, boutique product for those in the know and able to afford the price premium. I'm gonna say it was another of us Boomer's vanities.

The up side was it gave lots of little guys a market to sell into which allowed them to make a go of building a small farm, the downside was like any other product you make more in volume so lots of big growers got on board and well, you know.

Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food and other writing claims that big organic uses the identical industrialized system as mainstream producers - not really much of a difference and I think consumers are gettin the idea.

As someone who spent a good portion of my working life in marketing, I can tell you 2 things; every advertiser says:

Make the logo bigger
Make "quality" bold

The second thing is the word "quality" is something the consumer can no longer hear.

Organic as a practice is a good thing in my book, but it might not have quite the payback of some other "benefits" with lower or no cost
But there is a new "brand" and it's Local! It's the 100 mile diet...

It's the Locavore! Check out these links. And these articles...

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Today's Farm News
by Pops
Rural agenda (comentary)
Organic and Value Added

Farm o'the Day:
Local Farm of course :^)
...

The Experienced Farmer

2009-04-22T14:56:00.009-05:00

Since I talked about 45-54s yesterday I'll dig into 54+ folks today.

Obviously the age brackets I'm picking are pretty flexible, a couple 35 with no children could fit into the "Empty Nest" and a healthy 60 year old could too. At any rate it gives me somewhere to hang my ideas .

Retired New Farmers.

When I think about these "Experienced" folks I'm thinking folks very much like the Empty Nesters but with a sizable enough poke to own their place outright and have enough to cover living expenses as well. Probably these people have or will be moving to the country with an eye toward spending some Rocking Chair time.

But with the economy in the shape it is and the warnings that it might take a while to get back to where it was (which I kind of doubt will happen period) they may see or even seek relatives looking to lend a hand for room and board. Of course the owners can get around and take care of the chores they enjoy but they can also be teachers, coaches, bankers and cheerleaders for their kids and grandkids.

Now I don't know how well this might turn out. The retirement strong counties shown here are some in good ag areas but many others in not so good areas. Also if neither the Experienced owner nor the hard luck relative have any real experience growing food or fiber this might not be such a great plan.

Still, this is really the contribution we see ourselves making now and down the road, learning a little we can pass on to our kids so they can give it a shot if they want or need. Not just by having Christmas dinner and the grandkids over to Ipod in the summer but to actively encourage and sponsor them to get involved with the farm.

Just as an aside, our youngest grand daughter is quite the girly girl but received first place in her third grade science fair for an experiment to guess the ability of a soil sample to grow radishes by doing a shake test to find the soil type.

Of course this leaves out a very important person - the older old farmer:

One fourth of U.S. farmers and half of farm landlords are at least 65 years old. Farmers and landlords aged 65 and older own a combined one-third of farm assets.

--- Rural America Fall 2002

Obviously there are "experienced" farmers out there who could be convinced by their offspring to rent out a piece to give the kid a start and perhaps more kids will do that but I'm pretty sure they are probably more than willing for gramps to kick the bucket or they would already have been in there lobbying.

This is perhaps the most disheartening thing in the whole business, old Moms and Pops with a lifetime of knowledge and fruits of labor to pass along and no one who wants to accept the gift.

The one place where the government could really make a difference is to set up a program to match up willing workers intent on sweating their way to equity with older farmers wishing to see the farm continue into another generation whether its their blood or not.

This could take several forms, like crop share lease options, the dairy Share Milker idea taken into beef or farming or many I'm sure I haven't conceived.

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Today's Farm News
by Pops
‘One size fits all’ farm policy unwise

Rural Economy In Deep Downturn

FarmBlog o'the Day:
Obama Foodorama!
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"How" Now...

2009-04-19T14:23:00.011-05:00

So I've touched a little on the who, what, when, where and why...

But not the how of rebuilding our small farms.

Anyone who decided to read more than a little of my blogification already knew most of the reasons why a diversity of small farms is important for our future but most all of us have a hard time figuring out how to get from here to there.

Jay Leno said about immigration, it's not impossible moving ten(s) of millions of people over a border:
Mexico did it.

Hopefully there is a migration to small towns and small farms well before stoop labor is an attractive career choice.

I've posted some links already about what seems a growing number of people and organizations making a move to farming - from micro to mini to little. Most show smiling laterday hippies growing vegies to eat, sell or trade.

Digging up a flower bed or even an entire lawn is daunting but a far cry from actually moving to a little farm and trying to make it pay at least it's own way, if not immediately paying yours.

There are probably several ways we could classify the "Hows", I'm going with individual action for a start and try to divide by age groups just to figure out some of the ways singles, couples or close family could make a move.

The first of the "How Groups" I'm gonna call Empty Nesters just because I know some about this one.

We're 52, late in '03 we started talking seriously about the RE market in Central California going POP and various other things that worried us to one extent or another, so we bailed out.
Our kids were in the service and so not a limiter of where we could move. I'd always wanted a little farm and Susan had always wanted an old 2-story house, we found both (luckily in the same place) here in SW Missouri. We arrived here labor day '04.

So the main features of this group would probably be:

45-54 years with a fair amount of capital.
A transferable/telecomuting/web-based/self-employed or otherwise "location neutral" income.
Aptitude and experience in whatever type of ag you see for yourself.
Manual skills and tools - the more the better for this age I think.
And perhaps most of all, an understanding of the fact it will be you who are the stranger in a strange land.

There are probably lots of individuals who could make a change at 50, perhaps not so many couples but still this is a prime age group I think for pioneering a movement. This group is probably well able to make a transition. Capital could allow either a low mortgage, or outright purchase along with necessary repairs /improvements, real world experience would augment the somewhat reduced physical ability of middle age and a few more years also clears some of the stars from the eyes.

These may in fact be some of the folks identified a Exurbanites elsewhere but who make a transition from simply long distance commuters to people more readily identified as farmers. As well, this age group has a large influence on their family. Parents, children, all sorts of relatives become interested or at least curious when one makes a big jump.

A nephew (40's) has already relocated here, our daughter (30's) bought a corner of our farm for after hubby retires from the service and a sister (60's) is looking.

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Today's Farm News
by Pops
Here is a cool place to sell your farm made stuff online, www.Etsy.com
An article about etsy.

Farm o'the Day:
Flat Creek Farm
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Whence the new farmer? Pt.I

2009-04-17T16:40:00.011-05:00

I think this is a lucky time.

A spreading Global Depression following close on the heals of a much touted New Global Economy.
People losing jobs right and left, some or many of which won't come back.
Recent memories of huge run ups in commodity markets, food and fuel prices.
Probably news in the next several months of another farm-bust like the '80's which was also preceded by big commodity price jumps then much lower demand, too much debt, etc.
We have a climate problem finally acknowledged by the biggest per capita fossil fuel using nation on the planet.
And speaking of politics a new government with at least a short term will to fund just about anyything.
Oh, and the re-realization that house prices don't rise 20%/year forever.

Those are all good things in the sense that "One doesn't learn anything from being successful."

On the other hand there are lots of good things going on prompted by Being successful - least in the fiscal sense. This is the Slow Food, Organic, Eat Local, Grass Fed, Farmers Marketed, CSA, No Preservatives, Free Range, Free Trade, etc, etc. movement that simply wouldn't have come about without the disposable money and "Lifestyle" options we have had of late.

Now don't get all bowed up and write me off because I just stepped on your green toes, just ask any of your favorite vendors at the farmers market how much of their income is usually received in food stamps?

The point is each of those alternate ag outlets cost the consumer more either in money or time than going to the supermarket and that is a good thing because any time you try to go up against the efficiency of big ag you are gonna need a higher return.

Combine that with "The increase [in gardening] is 40 percent greater than the figure two years before, marking a spike in food gardening not seen in 30 years,"
and
Jarden Corp. says sales of its Ball and Kerr canning and preserving products are up more than 30% from 2008.

And:

So where will all these new farmers come from?
Washington --Santa Clara -- Sacramento -- Wall Street :^) --

Because first you gotta know how to grow stuff...

So how big is little?

2009-04-17T11:00:00.006-05:00

I've rambled a little about what I think my grand kids farm shouldn't be like but not much about what it should.

First, there is no minimum or maximum size. Kind of funny considering all my blabbing about small farms but small is not so much about the size of the farm but more about the farmers idea of the size of the world and just how much it can give.

I have relatives in California who own a little almond orchard, less than a dozen acres. Now that is pretty small, but if you remember a ways back I mentioned that area of CA produces 80% of all the almonds consumed in the world. My relatives little farm is bordered on all sides and for miles and miles in all directions by other farms ranging from a few acres to hundreds. Not only is that type of farming no different than a huge wheat farm from the standpoint of monoculture but it is even more wasteful because each little farmer has little incentive to improve efficiency, reduce inputs, etc.

Granted, the concentration of almonds in a small region probably leads to some improved efficiency post harvest in processing - but again that is in a world of cheap energy.

Just down the road is a great little farm and fruit stand. I stopped at this little stand for years and watched these folks not only make a good living but also improve their land. There is no comparison between their soil and my relative's orchard. I just noticed 32ac of this place is for sale if you have the dough...

Almonds are harvested by shaking the tree with a large machine, the almonds are left to dry, then swept into windrows by another machine and finally picked up by a third. As you can imagine, the flatter, smoother and more bare the soil, the better, so the soil is sprayed and rolled to prevent anything from growing - (Almond Production Manual, pg. 198) - you can use a cover crop but not many do as I remember.

The ideal of a farm for a small world is epitomized in Management Intensive Grazing. A huge amount of the grain we grow goes to feed our food animals - somewhere around 80 calories of input creates 1 calorie of meat. Cattle for example are evolved to eat grass and we aren't, wouldn't it make sense to feed them grass on a rotational basis? Instead we confine them in pens standing knee-deep in shit and feed them corn and antibiotics.

Our little farm raises dairy bull calves on 30 acres of grass divided up in 3 ac paddocks and further as is needed by the number and age of calves, seasons, etc.

You can see in this pic I just snapped, last years grass is greening in the foreground, on the right side is grass the calves have been on 4 days and at the top the next 1 -1/2ac they'll get when I take down the temp fence with the white post.

I'll talk more about this, but basically, if you have rain, a decent soil to start and are able to get a good stand of mixed grasses and legumes (to fix nitrogen in the soil) there aren't too many inputs. The cattle harvest their own food, disperse their own manure (which returns most of the phosphorus and potassium) and by stocking correctly they eat everything evenly keeping down brush and unwanted species.

This method is pretty well scalable to whatever size the harvested crop is marketable - and it works for dairies too - as well as goats, sheep, pigs, horses, chickens...

So Why Care About Little Farms? Pt.III

2009-04-16T11:25:00.004-05:00

So modern ag is energy, soil & monoculture intensive.

I doubt many farmers would disagree but they might also point to improvements made in methods and energy use over the last 40 years, much like the rest of first world society has achieved. And when pointing to their new GPS based tillage and chemical application hard/software, improved genetics, fuel efficiency, etc, they may say just as economists have for years, 'The Market and innovation will save our bacon'.

Interestingly this "belief" is being challenged more and more, even by economists seemingly intent on defending the idea of infinite growth. On page 37 of this copyrighted paper, after 36 pages of pretty well the same critiques of Malthus, the Club of Rome, Hubbert, etc as usual the author says exactly what they said:

"The ability to substitute capital for natural resources is limited by physical laws of nature. It simply is not possible to produce an ever-expanding level of material output from an ever-decreasing quantity of material input. No amount of capital–resource substitution or technological progress can overcome that constraint. The same is true of energy—the amount of work obtained cannot be greater than the amount of the energy expended as an input. Recycling durable nonrenewable resources can increase the life of a given resource stock, but 100% recovery and reuse is not practical, so the process cannot continue indefinitely. Consequently, sustaining the economy ultimately must rely on renewable natural resource inputs."

Economics of Natural Resource Scarcity: The State of the Debate
Jeffrey A. Krautkraemer [PDF]

I didn't think when I started this Blog the crux of my whole argument would come from an economist! I would only add this:

And it must happen in my back yard.

So Why Care About Little Farms? Pt.II

2009-04-14T17:26:00.009-05:00

So modern ag is energy intensive, and we are running out of cheap energy.

But it is also "Soil Intensive".

Of course it is you say, where else can food be grown? That was the question before the discovery of the New World.

Plato's lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country's soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat's strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe.
-- Richard Manning (a really great article in Harper's)

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - Wheat Field with Crows (1890)

That same article goes on to point out that around 1960 the supply of virgin prairie was pretty well used up in the US to but we came up with another little trick:

Souped up genetics in grain to utilize fossil fuel based nitrogen fertilizers and irrigation. It worked great, we added about 3 billion (mostly poor people) to the load.

In all of this blather about modern ag I haven't mentioned it's one completely unique feature. Ag has always been energy intensive, once mostly human, then animal and finally mechanical, and it has always, at least to the grain farmer, been soil intensive, use up the fertility of the soil and move on.

But more than anything, modern ag is about specialization, concentration, control and above all profit.

From genetics, the vast majority of corn for example carries the trait of resistance to a particular herbicide - Roundup Ready corn. I'm sure you may have heard what happened to the Irish when the relied entirely on one crop for sustenance.

To climate, around 80% of the almonds grown in the world are from a few counties in California. Which of course brings us back around to the problem of distributing those crops to all corners of the world with ever more expensive energy.

To culture, many large farms use minimal if any crop rotation or fallowing, which increases the need of ever more chemical inputs and soil degradation.

To control, 40% of ag production is under contract. The Agribusiness conglomerate tells the farmer what when and how to raise the crop and the farmer puts up all the capital and labor. Additionally the conglomerate controls the processing, distribution and marketing of many products from farm gate to cash register.

If most of these points seem negative it's because in the long run they are negative. And though many of the problems associated with large modern farms can be replicated on a small farm it's a lot harder to do. And likewise a lot easier to try something new!

We should care about the future of the small farm because it's very existence is not dependent on the energy intensive, soil-mining, profit-driven, mono-cultural, subsidized, homogenized, globalized model.

If there is going to be a place where the seeds of a new, old agriculture can flourish, it will be the small farm.

So Why Care About Little Farms? Pt. I

2009-04-13T17:09:00.009-05:00

Small farms produce only a vanishingly small portion of our food and fiber and are home to a similarly small number of citizens.

Small farms typically produce only a fraction of the total household income by farming - the balance provided by non-farm income.

In fact, according to a group of Purdue University agricultural economists in 2002:
An economically viable crop/livestock operation in the Corn Belt would have between 2,000 and 3,000 acres of row crops and between 500 and 600 sows. *1

Small farms are at a disadvantage complying with new health/pollution/certification regulations and so lag behind larger producers in implementation.

Since they are poorly capitalized (if capitalized at all) they are ill-equipped to take advantage of advances in technology whether mechanical, electronic, genetic, or any other for that matter.

So why care about the future of an outdated production model left behind in the wake of modern technology?

The quick answer is modern technology is predicated on cheap, non-renewable resources, Andy Rooney's grand dad knew that...

I'm not a "Believer" in impending doom, but I agree with Andy that it is out there somewhere. When it comes to food, those starving people you see on TV aren't starving due to our inability to grow enough food but rather of poverty, corruption of their government, or their inability to acquire land to grow their own.

The world today produces more food per inhabitant than ever before. Enough food is available to provide 4.3 pounds for every person everyday: 2.5 pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of meat, milk and eggs and another of fruits and vegetables.

So again if modern farms are so good at growing food, why be concerned about small farms?

The first hint is "modern" equals energy intensive:

It takes 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce one calorie of food energy. (Pimentel)

Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. *2

The entire industrial era has been based on cheap and easily accessible energy, first old growth forests, then surface coal, and for most of the past century, relatively shallow deposits of oil. The world is not running out of fossil energy; by most estimates about half of the earth’s total fossil energy reserves are still in the ground. However, all of the easy sources of fossil energy are gone.*3

Now don't get all worried that having read this far I'm now going to try and convince you we all need to go back to grubbing in the dirt for spuds, that isn't my intention. What I do want to investigate, among other things, are methods using less, much less, energy.

Again this isn't going to turn into a rapturous rant on a particular Guru's idea of Agricultural Nirvana - you can bet there are book store shelves filled with those titles.

At any rate next time I'll talk more about some other difficulties with modern ag.

*1 http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/demographics.html
*2 The Oil We Eat -- Richard Manning - http://harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915
*3 Ikerd

There's Rural, Then There's Rural

2009-04-09T15:21:00.006-05:00

Once you get out into what the USDA Economic Research Service's Rural-Urban Continuum terms "non-metro" areas - especially these:

7	Urban population of 2,500 to 19,999, not adjacent to a metro area
9	Completely rural or less than 2,500 urban population, not adjacent to a metro area

...You are officially in the sticks!

But the USDA also defines rural counties based not only on their primary economic activity (or lack thereof) but by Urban Influence, Commute Distance, You Name It!

What all the stats boil down to is there is a wide variety of of "country", from sparsely populated areas adjacent to federal lands and or recreation areas, to those with either a service or a manufacturing based economy to those defined mostly by their poverty...

There is also a census area called a Micropolis - a small town with an influence over a larger rural area which make more sense than trying to define on a county only basis.

But of course it is those really rural areas based mainly on farming or like my own predominately farming but diverse enough to not fall strictly in one category or another that I'm interested. They comprise a tiny portion of the population of the US and somewhere around 600 counties mostly in the center of the country.

Burbs: Ex's and Beyond...

2009-04-01T17:09:00.007-05:00

Exurbanites are probably in the worst situation going forward.
Though they are probably well heeled, they most likely have a fairly high mortgage,
Are by definition commuters to a large town or small city,
Have little in the way of options should their personal economy go south,
Have little or no interest in the agricultural potential of their property,
And if it is possible, have even less in the way of local connections than do suburbanites.

As opposed to suburbs, the exurbs are pretty well a white elephant in a major or permanent downturn. There has been way to much money invested in home/pool/garage/luxury to ever be viable in anything less than a great growing economy.

Which isn't to say they would have no value whatsoever, just not the kind originally intended.

Those are all pretty subjective views but are the impression I get from reading stuff here and there about those newly relocated past the outermost ring of suburbia and my simply looking around my own neighborhood.
---

But there is another type of "urbanite", it's the ones raised in the country or small town who has become more or less dependent on a city income, city consumption habits and probably debt levels, but continues to relate to the attitudes, associations and community from which they came and still reside.

He could be farming 1,000 acres of rented land or living on his grandparents farm and just putzing around or in a little house just off the square. But he or he and she both currently drive 20/30/40 mile one way to a job in town.

They probably spend most of their money shopping in town but maybe they they also spend a little at what is left of the local businesses. They may go to the same church as their parents, their kids probably go to the same school they did and that's where they go watch the game on Friday night.

I'll call these the transurbanites. I'm truly not sure but they may be an important part of the future of my grandkids farm.

Cities Aren't All Bad.

2009-03-31T16:38:00.005-05:00

It seems to me that there will be some large cities livable in in the future, I'm just not sure which ones. Resources of all kinds will become more scarce as our population increases including most notably, energy, water and arable soil. A truly walkable older city, as in pre-automobile, with fairly low tech utilities like water, sounds great.

I've never been to NYC but I believe the water is gravity fed for the most part, it sure looks like people can walk just about where they need to, or at least they once could.

Newer cities, large and small aren't as fortunate, they were designed with the car in mind. There isn't a house within miles of the city center or the light industrial section - the zoning board won't allow it. These cities were either conceived after Levittown or simply renewed their urban core to such a point as to be inextricably linked via freeway to suburb.

But don't count Levittown out yet:

In brief, we find that the more suburbanized is employment -- that is, the more sprawl -- the shorter the average commute.

--Traffic and Sprawl: Evidence from U.S. Commuting, 1985 To 1997: UCLA

So even if you live in the ever-maligned suburb but can locate near your work, you are almost as well off as the city dweller who walks everywhere, at least from the commute perspective. After all these suburbs near business parks and strip malls are sort of like the the pre-auto cities albeit with much much lower population density.

Really I'd prefer the well rounded 'burb with some light manufacturing to most any large urban center simply due to the huge expense of changing infrastructure even slightly in the city. The 'burb could change relatively quickly and cheaply to meet dire needs much like some have done to gradually meet lesser goals.

If the energy fairy pulls a Mr. Fusion out of her ear to fuel the commuters and the transportation of goods and food in and out all will be well until we run up against one of the other key resources I mentioned.
---

Norman Borlaug is still out there trying to encourage triticale to provide (like he hoped his improved wheat genetics would);

'a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation,' a breathing space in which to deal with the 'Population Monster'

Of course the last time around we didn't deal with the monster, we just ate more.
---

The infamous 1,500 mile salad, overpopulation, and arable soil limits along with a good measure of extreme monoculture and the limits of our ability to control nature are coming together right in plain sight:

The once-mighty water infrastructure is old and insufficient, with new canals and storage facilities years if not decades away from completion. Meanwhile, the state's population may double by 2050, heralding bigger water battles between cities and farms.

Water scarcity clouds California farming's future

.

Owning Verses Working

2009-03-27T13:21:00.002-05:00

There are a multitude of factual reasons why re-localization might be a good course for families going forward. But I want to start off with some more subjective observations about why people chose working for wages vs. working for something they own.

Historically and currently in many areas of the world, subsistence farming is one of the hardest ways of making a living, it's hand to mouth, hard, dirty work with frequent set backs and periodic starvation. It's no wonder industrialization quickly lured - still does in fact, many off the farm with the promise of relatively easy work and all the store bought luxuries available in the cites.

Like most lures the benefits were many times imaginary, at least for the first generations. But as the manufacturing base grew, many struggled to find a way off the spinning room or killing floor and even into ownership of their own business.

But odds are the majority populated what was the growing Working Class, and their kids followed in their footsteps.

None of that is news, but the thing that stands out to me is at the very time they abandoned ownership of a hardscrabble plot of land to toil for wages for another, was the exact same time that mechanization was making it's way into farming and transforming it from a struggle for basic survival into a business!

Like in many things, the amount of breathing room and opportunity for profit provided by the mechanization of agriculture allowed just enough slack for innovation to accelerate at a rate far beyond what it had been in previous generations.

To be sure, much of that innovation was misdirected, which is a different topic but the fact remains, many with a great understanding of the land and seasons quit just at the time of greatest opportunity. And yea, you guessed it, there was somebody right there to snatch up that land for a pittance.

This continued all through the 19th century at the very time huge strides were taking place on the farm. The thing that is so striking about this period is that between 1820 and 1890 the effort required to produce 100bu of wheat declined from 300 man/hours to 50! And although the turn of the century was also a time of increasing pressure from railroads, bankers, etc, it was also a time of relative prosperity for farmers.

----
My great grandfather was in the Run for the Cherokee Strip in the 1890's. In researching old land records in a dusty little clerks office trying to locate the original homestead a few years ago it struck me how many homesteads were sold as soon as they proved up their claim. And even more interesting are the pages and pages of newly deeded farms bought by one person and then pages more bought by another and so on.

Now whether those homesteaders were shills from the get-go or couldn't make a go on a small plot of land in that country or were just ready to get back home I have no idea but the fact remains there were willing buyers with cash in hand to snap up those properties and amalgamate them into huge tracts for ranching, farming, and oil drilling.

But still most of those original homesteaders sold out.

By the way, my great grand father didn't sell, in fact he bought the neighbor's place.

My Grandkid's Farm

2009-03-26T22:16:00.000-05:00

Most of the time when I post on some message board it is about "Doing". This is a place for me to ruminate on the point of it all - all the doing that is.

One thing I have realized in web posting from time to time is simply seeing my own words on a screen helps me understand the things I feel in a more concrete way - Chew my mental cud in other words.

So while I'd be happy to hear input or have others take something away from whatever ramblings I come up with here, I guess this is really more for me and hopefully my grandkids someday.

But you are welcome to eaves drop...

-----

What I what to hash out in my mind is how it may be possible for future generations to "Advance to the Past", not by retreat but by taking the best of what we've learned about science and technology and downsizing it to a more human scale. Or put a different way, take the lessons of the past, good and bad and combine that with lessons of the present, good and bad to create something better than either.

Obviously, my thoughts are to a future of little farms and tight knit little towns where I hope my grandkids will one day live.

Speaking of tight knit, there have been arguments why industry, agriculture or even culture in general, may or may not be sustainable or even moral raging since way back. And Bumper Sticker Slogans are nothing new either, the derogatory term Luddite comes from a mostly mythic figure who inspired tradsmen to go around trashing hosiery looms in the early 18th century - not out of fear of technology but anger at it's effect:

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening -- it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs.

--Thomas Pynchon
Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?

So I'm not a Luddite in either sense, not in fear of technology, nor anger at the machine. But by the same token I don't have fear of the opposite either, which would be the fear that at some point technology will fail to save us - which I'll call Peterism, or just fail and kill us, which I guess would be HALism.

I guess I'm more of a Claptonite. The key is to use any resource whether it be natural or man made, to it's best use before it's gone and those things that you can preserve, don't ever let go.

Its in the way that you use it,
It comes and it goes.
Its in the way that you use it,
Boy don't you know.

And if you lie you will lose it,
Feelings will show.
So dont you ever abuse it,
Dont let it go.