Homesteads, Farms, and Hanging on to Harmony

Have you noticed how the grocery store shelves seem rather thin? Not as bad as right after the start of the pandemic, but a slow steady drip of missing items and a rather rapid rise in prices is happening in my area. The last couple of weeks I've been suggesting getting to know your area farmers and producers. We've recently met a few around our neighborhood. We're now buying milk (sold "for pets") from a farm a couple of miles down the road. I've made contact with a pastured chicken producer who often runs workshops. As grocery store shelves thin out, knowing your local producers might be a good idea. So I thought it would be fun to visit some farms and producers this week and celebrate working with nature and enjoying the bounty. Our summer harvests have been plentiful (Not pictured: peppers, peas, figs, and okra)

Some recent clips of Jim Kovaleski, migrant farmer between Florida and Maine, provided the inspiration for this week's column on sustainable small scale food production. Jim works hard and is in tune with his system.

We made it back to Maine to spend time with our favorite Farmer, Jim Kovaleski! He scythes his neighbor’s meadow all Summer long and harvests the hay to feed his gardens and goats. The result is regenerative, living and fertile soil! As always, Jim dropped gold nuggets of information that you can’t find anywhere!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNAR8EZd1PA (15 min)

Jim Kovaleski is a Human Hay-Baler! He demonstrates the full process of creating hay bales using his custom-made, manual baler. Jim feeds the hay to his animals and gardens with this organic and sustainable approach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrzcZrYh6-g (25 min)

Now I admire and respect Jim, but I couldn't manage my place without my tractor. This week I used it to mow out my trail/firebreak system and a couple of fields. Then swapped out to my box scrape and touched up the roads after 6" of rain the previous week. And finally used the box scrape yesterday to push brush piles into the edge of the woods. In reverse a box scrape is a poor man's bulldozer. If the entire fuel system were to totally stop, I would move back to mules or horses, or cheaper yet oxen. The advantage of a tractor is you only have to put fuel in when you use it. Animals must be fed and tended everyday.

THE GRASS-FED MARKET GARDEN
Thriving Garden Beds With No Water, No Weeding & No Fertilizers?
Just Add Grass. (4 min summary from a couple of years ago)

Jim is known both in Maine & in Florida to be a very unique farmer. Through his winters in Florida, he is playing with the boundaries of rules by growing seasonal market vegetables in an ornamental presentation, making as beautiful front lawn curb appeal. But here in Maine, his method that stands out the most is the use of his freshly scythed (cut) grass in his garden beds.

This grass, or hay, has proven it's worth over & over each year for Jim. The proof this year was in spite of a drought, with no access to water - he was still able to produce an abundance of produce & he owes his prize-winning onions & other veggies to this grass-fed soil fertility.

Summertime in Maine is prime time for foraging wild blueberries! Jim Kovaleski took us to his berry picking spot to forage these delicious berries and we even found wild raspberries and blackberries! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNV-pW3ijM (5 min)

So what does he do with his place in Florida when he's in Maine? Take a look..
A Sea of GREEN! Lawn-Alternative Cover Crops @ Jim Kovaleski’s!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nqjM3rVWSQ (11 min)

There are so many options for Lawn-Alternative cover crops, such as sweet potatoes and peanuts. Jim Kovaleski has planted his whole front yard with cover crops for the Summer. These crops virtually thrive on neglect and when he returns, there will be hundreds of pounds of food to harvest

Jim's mentor was Eliot Coleman. Here he is in an intriguing conversation (to me) about his journey to community farming. It is a long term conversation about decades of the organic "back to the land" movement and where it is today, people my age speaking my thoughts. Hint: corporate capture(1.1 hours)

Eliot's mentors were Scott and Helen Nearing. Scott and Helen Nearing's book "Living the Good Life" also provided me with the urge to live on the land...and I was not alone.
The Book That Birthed the Back-to-the-Land Movement
How Scott and Helen Nearing's Living the Good Life shaped a generation.
(an article by Eliot's daughter)
https://downeast.com/history/living-the-good-life/

The book was Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, quietly self-published by the Nearings in 1954 before reemerging in the ’70s as one of the most influential texts of the back-to-the-land movement. In the years since, it has sold more than 200,000 copies, largely by word of mouth...

In 1932, the Nearings decided that living hardscrabble in the country would be better than in the city. So they moved to a run-down farm in southern Vermont, where they spent the next two decades developing an agrarian lifestyle that honored their anti-establishment, anti-consumerist ideals. They had three main goals, which they described in Living the Good Life: to make a living independent of paid-labor markets, to maintain and improve their health by working the earth and eating homegrown organic food, and to liberate themselves from profit-based exploitation of the planet.

3.5 min teaser

"So what's your gain, what's your advantage? (with living a life within the system)
Well, for two or three weeks you get to go to Maine or Vermont on vacation. Then it's back to the slave pen, back to the whip, back to the tyranny of doing that which in itself is really not worth my doing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evBpwQPn8QI (3.5 min)

Lecture on Scott's views on socialism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SWFfd4s-AA (1.1 hour)

There's a move to discourage meat consumption. As I've said many times I dislike CAFO production, but grazing animals are an integral part of the system. Think about the prairies prior to European settlement for example. Grazing animals can help improve our ecosystem and sequester carbon. They are part of the balance...

The mentor of many livestock farmers is Joel Salatin...
The Fit Farmer, Mike Dickson, has been visiting and creating videos with some of my favorite regenerative farmers. Beginning with Joel Salatin at polyface farms...
I DREAMED of doing THIS | Morning CHORES at POLYFACE (22 min)
Joel Salatin's SECRETS to raising PIGS for LAND REGENERATION & PROFIT (36 min)
The BEST CHICKEN SYSTEM I have ever seen | Polyface Farm (29 min)
The BEST way to raise COWS that I have ever seen | Mob Grazing at Polyface Farm (33 min)

Justin Rhodes also did several videos with Joel Salatin on various aspects of his production systems.

Mike also visited Missouri grassland farmer Greg Judy.
More MONEY & more BEEF raising cows LIKE THIS (25 min)
Greg Judy raises guard Dogs with Grass-Fed SHEEP (55 min)
Greg Judy offers lots of good advice in this video.

So we've explored pigs, chickens, cattle, and sheep, but to my mind the most labor intensive of all farm enterprise is dairy. I enjoyed the Irish perspective on successful small scale dairy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMEPldnVhZk (17 min)

Pete at Just a few acres near Ithica NY offers similar advice on small farming...

Just a Few Acres is a 45 acre seventh generation family farm in Lansing, NY, in operation since 1804. We are a diversified livestock farm, providing high quality, healthy meats directly to consumers in our community. All our livestock is grown using a grass-based diet, and we focus on a low-stress life for our animals. We operate our farm using sustainable practices, building healthier soil every year through innovative grazing methods. We believe a small family farm can still be a viable business in today’s “bigger is better” world, and that small farms supplying locally grown food to their communities can create a more resilient, healthy, and meaningful agricultural system. We are currently vending at the Ithaca Farmers' Market at the Steamboat Landing pavilion, Saturdays
9am-3pm, and at the East Hill Farmers Market, Wednesdays 4pm-7pm.

Building a financially sustainable farm is not an overnight venture. For us, it required years of frugality, perseverance, and downright stubbornness. In this video, I explain how we started growing the roots of our farm over 20 years ago by living below our means and saving money to eventually start our farm without being encumbered by debt. At the same time, what is best financially and what is best in life are not always the same thing, and I discuss how we navigated those difficult decisions to create a farm that is both meaningful and financially successful.

They have lots of video on their various operations somewhat similar to Joel Salatin and his integrated livestock systems.
Here's more on why he's a farmer (and why I'm just a homesteader)
5 steps to start your small livestock farm (15 min)

The economics of small farming only makes sense if you love producing food. As a retired teacher I wish we inspired all young people to do what they love rather than what pays the most. In my vision of utopia, every neighborhood and community would have a large market garden so that everyone can access and eat fresh local wholesome foods. Around population centers are small farms regeneratively raising healthy happy livestock. The giant grain and soybean fields turned back into productive prairie devoted to small livestock operations on pasture to supply quality protein as carbon is sequestered into soils. What a pipe dream instilled with my immersion into the "Back to the Land" movement.

Last Tuesday CStMS's essay on economics reminded me of Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful, economics as if people mattered". Here's a pdf of the book, and here's a nice one page summary.

For Schumacher, we currently have one overarching belief—universal prosperity is not only possible, but also the only way to ensure peace. This is a contradiction because we can’t achieve prosperity in the modern sense other than through greed and ill actions. We base our entire theory of economics on contradictions like this. What we need, instead, are smaller-scale methods which can be accessed by everyone, allowing us to be ourselves and to work in tandem with nature.

Schumacher explains his Buddhist economics (3 min)

Much of my philosophy of both farming and Earth science is based on the Gaia Hypothesis, which is now so well accepted it is often referred to as the Gaia Theory or Principle. The basics are that life forms shape the planet and the planet shapes the life forms. It was proposed by an interesting character, James Lovelock, originator of Gaia theory, inventor of the electron capture detector (which made possible the detection of CFCs and other atmospheric nano-pollutants) and of the microwave oven. It is a view of the entire planet as a system of feedback loops. Much like our body self regulates, it is the idea that the planet /ecosystem does the same in a balance of life and physical world.

Lovelock is a proponent of nuclear energy as a way to minimize global heating. He also suggests using diesel fuel in jet planes to put sulfur high into the atmosphere to mitigate heating. He suggests gathering people in cities to minimize transportation....just the opposite of my view to focus on small scale self sufficient walkable neighborhood systems. However, his Gaia Principle of the inter-relationship of life forms and physical planet has had a long lasting impact on my approach to homesteading and life style.

Eliot Coleman described organic agriculture as being self sustaining in the earlier video. By emulating natural cycles and using farm animals I think that is possible. We are all part of a web of life. It makes sense that healthy diverse soil produces healthy plants, which in turn feeds healthy animals and people...A positive feedback loop of health and nutrition.

Let's close out with something fun.
Here's an entertaining and interesting animated snapshot of a Hill Farm...
A country couple and their shepherd endure drought, flood, a monstrous bear, hunters and tourists during a somewhat odd few days in their normally quiet life. (18 min)

Farming has it's challenges that's for sure, especially in a cartoon! Enjoy the art.

I chose to teach and draw a salary (and for now a pension) rather than creating a farm. We consider ourselves homesteaders that supplement our food with a garden. We try to support our local producers, and the purpose of this essay is to inspire you to do the same. You have to appreciate the hard work needed to work against the corporate farming model and create an organic production system. Yes, their foods are more expensive, but they deserve our support if you can afford it. Check out the links in the intro to find farmers in your area. This is the time of year to buy in bulk and freeze or can any excess for winter. Will supply chains collapse? I don't know, but if they do I'll be glad the freezer and pantry is full, and winter crops are growing.

Have a good day, and I hope none of you are in the path of hurricane Ida. As always share whatever is on your mind in the comments below.