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Food Security Importance of Growing food.
If you have ever watched a war movie, or read a book about a fight for whatever, you have discovered a basic fact: Supply lines are critical. The fastest way to bring an enemy to their knees is by cutting their supply lines, of food, fuel or any necessity. It worked in the middle ages with seiges of castles, and in the 1980s with the oil embargo. Living in the US today, it is hard not to be aware that a great deal of our food is not grown in the US, but comes from abroad. We believe this is not a safe practice politically, not even discussing the quality of food that is transported so far between harvest and being eaten.
Food is one commodity that it is relatively easy to have the production of nicely spread out. No big facilities are needed, security in food is doable. Yes, it will cost more. The pathogens in our meat will also be fewer without the huge, fast speed processing plants. But, the cost can be offset by everyone raising some of their own food. I keep hearing predictions of food riots in the near future, this is not a future I want to live through.
Now, it may seem weird that anyone who makes a living growing food for others, is suggesting that as many people as possible grow their own. No, I am not cutting my own throat, so to speak. There will always be those who jobs are very necessary and who because of those jobs, don't have time to grow any food. Not everyone will live with land that can be used to grow food. So, there will always be some who need to buy food. But those who can, really should get used to growing at least some of their own food.
We have noticed that about 75% of the people who have joined our Community Supported Agriculture program also garden. We think this is wonderful. We plan on making known which varieties of produce have done best in our gardens and where we get our seed. We already do label the different varieties of the different types of produce we grow, so they can taste test for themselves. We want to share as much knowledge as we have about how we grow, with our shareholders. It is our sincere wish that they all become expert gardeners, able to grow their own produce. We have also noticed another fact, the gardeners in the program are also the ones who are bringing in new members. We do not fear running out of shareholders.
We were not born Americans, but this country is our home. We want to do what we can to help our chosen country in this time of trouble. We are not rich or politically powerful, but we do know how to grow good food in this climate. If we can share freely what we know, in our own little way, we hope to be of use in helping the US to weather this changing economy. July 15th, 2010
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An Essay on the Philosophical Principles That are Driving Force Behind All We Do. Okay, let's get the touchy subject out of the way. Yes, our Spiritual values are the driving force behind all that we do, but we are not here to discuss religion. I have met people of every known Spiritual Path that care for Mother Earth and that want to live sustainably. Our farm is not publically dedicated to any one Path, in that, people of all Religions are welcome to come and learn. We try to leave religion out of our discussions for this reason. An Attitude of Gratitude, is a big part of what we are about. We are grateful for the opportunities to learn, to build, to eat well, to enjoy the land. We do not focus on what still needs to be done, but on what we have. Contentment is a big part of being sustainable, always wanting more, more, more is not sustainable. I saw a bumper sticker the other day, it said: “Insatiable is not Sustainable”. How true. Knowing when to say, I have enough, is part of our life. Sustainability is looking at the impact of a resource on our world, finding the material that has the least impact and still fulfills the function. This does not always mean a renewable resource, sometimes a renewable material like wood or bamboo will use more resources over the lifetime of a project than a non-renewable material like concrete. An example of this is our raised garden beds. We are using cinder blocks, since they use the least amount of concrete for the application, the other option being solid blocks. Wood will rot out in 3 to 4 years, so it would have to be cut, milled, dried and trucked to our place every 4 years. That is a large environmental impact. Over a period of 20 to 30 years, the wood would do far more harm than using concrete blocks in the first place. Treated wood is not considered in this equation, since we are growing food in these beds, but many other options were. We do not look at non-renewable resources first, but last. The first place we look for building materials is the waste stream of our society. Sustainability and land fills are contradictions, they do not go together. We started to travel the path of not using a landfill about 12 years ago. We rapidly got our use of the landfill down to one small bag every 6 to 8 weeks, it has been at nothing for a few years now. Through out this site, you will find our creative uses of our 'waste' that we treat as resources. Since we buy very little that comes in packages, we eliminated most of the problem at the source. Our personal grooming products are all homemade, as are our cleaning products. Paper products are restricted to toilet paper, paper tissues and a few paper towels for cleaning up grease. We use our grey water for plants, so making sure that we don't get grease in the system is important. When we have a large groups here, we use the dishwasher, not paper plates. For the two of us, I was the dishes by hand. This shocks my Mother, as I was the kid that hated doing dishes and bought my first dishwasher at age 18, so I didn't have to do the dishes. Then, I didn't understand the damage dishwasher detergent did to the environment, I do now. My dishwasher runs on the same soap that I use to do dishes, so the dishes must be fresh, not dried on to come clean. Scrounging and building with landfill rescue is becoming high art, in many ways with a big thanks to Dan Phillips of http://www.phoenixcommotion.com/ Another resource is the aftermarketbuilding list at yahoo, which has many wonderful ideas although the list has been very quiet lately. Much of what we do comes from scrounge and using up what we find to do the job, rather than going out and buying brand new materials. Starting by looking at the waste stream of rural Texas, finding out the 100% paper feed bags are not recyclable for some reason, led us to look at papercrete, then paper adobe as a building material. We have done many small tests with these materials and are ready to do some buildings. The new hen and turkey houses will be constructed out of paper adobe. Sustainability is about more than materials and homemaking. It is also about being affordable financially and in terms of time management. If a sustainable system required huge amounts of cash to set up and run, I would seriously question it's sustainability. While I will admit that cloth napkins do cost more than paper ones, I am also aware that quality of each can make the cost comparable. Many people are doing what we do, for everyday dining, that is using the red, mechanics rags as napkins. They cost about the same as a high quality paper napkin and last for years. They also don't show stains. If I can't maintain my payments, then I can't sustain my lifestyle, thus, it would not be sustainable. Common sense with money is part of the equation. Time management is a big one. Designing and building a sustainable farm is a big job, the research alone has taken years, but that is because there are very few pioneers that are trying to live a totally sustainable lifestyle. Yes, we are taking this to a bit of an extreme, but for good cause. If we want to teach sustainability, we need to be totally sustainable. Our students then can see the many options that exist and how they work together. We do not expect anyone else to be as extreme as we are, but to present the options allows others to find parts of our life that will work for them, thus they learn to live more sustainably, each in their own way. One of the criteria we use when designing the farm, is how many purposes are served by each thing we do? For example, vermicomposting. This process uses up food waste, generates worm castings to use for starting and repotting plants, for making compost tea and it provides excess worms to feed the fish and the poultry. All this from a few hours a week to care for the worm bins and to use up a waste product. Weeding gardens is not an end to itself, but it also feeds rabbits. The gardens are our income, feed us and allow us to help others through donations of high quality food. Everything we do accomplishes more than one goal. The impact of choosing to follow a sustainable life also seriously influences what animals we choose to raise on the farm. The cattle and sheep are breeds that do well on a 100% forage based diet and do not require perfect pastures. The breeds of poultry are old breeds that still know how to forage for their own food, eating bugs, grubs, and grass for part of their diets. All animals produce healthy offspring with out the need of expensive additives to their diets, and their diets can come 100% from this farm. We are working on getting the rabbits off commercial pellets, but that takes a long time, since they have been bred to live on them for many generations. We do not want to impact the health of our animals, in any negative way. We love having happy, healthy animals that are friendly to us. They too serve more than one purpose, watching the animals play is great stress relief, especially lamby races. Well, I have wandered all over the place with this essay, but I hope I have given some insight into what living sustainably means to us. We are working hard to reduce our negative impact on the environment of Mother Earth, at the same time as we recognize the right of humans to exist. We are part of nature and we share this world. There are many factors that go into each and every decision we make, we do try to live in harmony with all of life. March 8, 2009 |
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