Category Archives: Philosophy and Thoughts

Things we add when the spirit moves us

It’s Amazing What Has Transpired

 

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What an amazing week this has been.  I guess I should be grateful to it for exposing what I had suspected in our system, but wow did this whole week go from an experiment to reality in the blink of an eye!  The neighbor to our south, who also owns our local wine store and raises angus beef cattle, said she completely feels our pain. One does not simply up and leave a farm on a moment’s notice.

We were simply going to check our ability to survive off-grid for a month and all hell broke loose.  1.  Our farm hand had surgery (we knew that was going to happen).  2.  Zina’s father had a stroke and is in the hospital for the foreseeable future.  3.  Zina is now not at the farm as a result and if he passes,  I have to now call my mother here because evidently one layer of farm hands as a back up is insufficient.  4.  Of all the damned luck.  I am seeing yet another therapist.  All I did was take ONE step down from his office and sprained my hip (It felt like a paper towel being ripped off the roll).  Of course, this set off a cascade of panic as I had to literally crawl to the house from the car when I got home because my hip couldn’t take any weight.  That set off all sorts of worry as to whether or not I’d be able to take care of the creatures in the morning.  Fortunately, by using dual hiking poles, like one would do cross country skiing, I was able to get it all done.  The last couple of days have pretty much been lying about, icing my hip, and cursing the universe.  It is mind blowing just how much could go unexpectedly bad in such a short period of time (Oh ya, our youngest Lab had a diarrhea episode last night in our bathroom.  Try cleaning that disgusting mess up while not being able to bend down!).   I’m pretty convinced that the universe is sadistic and it costs too much to live here on this rock because of our “civilization”.  We have a lot to consider going forward.  Please spare me the God and all things happen for a reason BS.

So, obviously, not much got done here the past couple of days.  BUT!  I have made goat milk soap in the past week or so, and just made my own CBD oil from Colorado Catnip grown right here on the farm.

That’s the important take away I think.  So many of us are completely tied to the grid and to corporations to supply us with our needs.  Instead of working towards self-sufficiency, our society has worked to tie us to a dependency system.  This is a Catch-22 in my opinion.  You get educated to get a good job.  Once you have said job, you have to pay for your own transportation, work clothes, housing, food, and insurance, all so you can earn money at a job to pay for all of those costs.  In financial planning jargon we call those “fixed expenses”.  You wake up in your dorm or fancy suburban prison cell, dress, go to your job, do your job and then come home and shelf yourself back into your housing unit to store yourself until the next day – all on your dime.   Essentially, it is the percentage of your earnings that are required of you to keep earning.  The rest is retirement savings (that you can’t use for decades), taxes to pay for military conquests abroad, extortion level medical insurance premiums and then “discretionary cash” – the money used to have a “lifestyle” so you don’t go insane from the treadmill job you spent precious time, money and life to get and keep.  In that venue, under the illusion of convenience, you either go out to eat, or go to the grocery store to acquire your necessary and, in many cases, unnecessary calories, of which you have no control over and which gets more expensive every year.  Because of this frustration, you end up spending more of your discretionary income in therapy trying to figure out how to survive in a world that is completely, and non-hyperbolically,  insane.

What we have discovered on the homestead/farm is just what usury levels of costs are built into the system for this convenience.  Canning, dehydrating and freezing food you grow yourself, reveals just how much of your earnings are being sucked from you because you let someone do it for you – because your slavery doesn’t afford you the time.  Can some food and compare that cost to the cans on the shelf.  Grow some broccoli and compare that to the produce department.  Shoot, even buy the ingredients for bread and compare that to a loaf of bread-like-substance at your so called grocery store.  If that doesn’t show you the stark madness of being dependent on our industrial ag system, not much else will.  Then, if you still remain unconvinced, compare the taste and nutrient quality of your tomatoes to a factory produced can of diced “tomatoes”.  The differences are stark.

Now.  For today’s lesson.  My cannabis plants are heirloom.  Which means that you can breed them and the seeds remain genetically true to the parent plant as opposed to crosses which do not.  I planted eight plants and kept the three females.  Those plants created close to 10 lbs of buds and dried down to just under 2.  That is more than I could use in a couple of years.  Cost……. 0.  The expense of infusing the oils was only the cost of the oils.  In a dispensary, a couple of ounces would run 50-100 bucks.  How long do you have to work to earn that kind of money?  If I could, for all of my physical pain, I would bathe in the stuff. This way, by doing it myself,  I don’t have to pay extortion level prices for something so easy to grow and create.  Why do you think they call it weed?  It grows like one.  Mine reached 7 feet in height……… just like virtually anything on a grocery store shelf, it is stupid simple to make yourself-  Most bread and pastas: 4 ingredients.  Mayonnaise: three.  Canned tomatoes: one…. and that goes for most vegetables, maybe a little salt.  Pre-made meals if canned or frozen yourself:  no preservatives and have a shelf life of years.   What price for convenience?  Pretty much your life.   What do you have to do that is more important?  Video games? Golf?  Movies? Shopping for shit to spend your money on but don’t really need? Hell, gardening could even save you a gym membership fee.

So perhaps we have been sold a bill of goods for iPhones, fancy clothes, and status.  After all, the best way to keep a prisoner from escaping, is to never let them know they are actually IN prison in the first place.

Use your job to plan your escape, not keep you enslaved to a version of reality that has no more depth to it than your flat screen tv.  We did it, and as Robert Frost said, “And that has made all the difference”.

Peace and freedom ya’ll.  This is what it looks like.  Live like a Hobbit.  Re-learn the old ways.  They work better.

 

This Is A Test, This Is Only A Test…..

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We have spent the better part of a decade building our farm and learning the lost skills our ancestors would have considered par for the course.  We try to live a simpler, more old fashioned lifestyle, deliberately.  As we think this society is in collapse, we intentionally separate ourselves from the majority of what urbanites would consider “normal”.  We are about as self-sufficient as two old duffs can be in this day and age so the time has come to put it all to the test.  For mental health reasons, I dropped out of the world for a few months at the beginning of the year.  I pretty much tuned out from society, ignored the news and learned that the emotional well being of others is not my responsibility.  I have three people to worry about in this world and I am one of them. To further this endeavor, it is time to put the farm through its paces.  So the second “drop out” this year is going to last through the month of November; but this time it is more physical than cerebral.  This homestead behemoth needs to be put through its paces.

As I have said many times, I think the biggest threat we need to contend with is economic collapse.  As we speak, the Fed is pumping BILLIONS of dollars a day into the “REPO” system – the overnight lending system  (too much to go into).  We are now in a covert QE4.  If this system freezes up like it did in 2008, It will make that collapse look like a happy ride at Disney Land. If liquidity is not maintained, people will not get paid, food and fuel will not get shipped and those “too big to fail” institutions may actually fail – or make everything else fail (In short, Great Depression mark 2.0).  This country is carrying a debt load, individually, governmentally and corporate that is, in numbers, like the stars in the Milky Way.  We will crash from a much higher height than 2008.  Don’t get fooled.  This whole thing is held together with rubber-bands and paperclips.  We are all whistling past the graveyard.  While the news says the economy looks good, the underlying systems keeping it afloat are collapsing.  Even if I’m wrong (I’m not) with all the other collapse issues happening in the world: fires, impeachment issues, fraud, civil unrest around the world, flooding and grain shortages, corruption, political and racial division, US concentration camps on our southern border, income inequality of biblical proportion, an administration based on nothing but verifiable lies and deceit, Fukushima, swine fever in Asia and a partridge in a pear tree, as well as the military admitting that it could be completely overwhelmed because of climate change in 20 years, we have decided to simulate a SHTF scenario (When the excrement hits the high speed oscillator). We are going to shift our solar system to critical load mode only and then live for the month of November on nothing but what we already have here. We will be pulling out all the non-electric cooking gear, live only off the solar for electricity, use our oil lamps for light, assume there is no gas for vehicles, no trips to the grocery store, and – as importantly – no news (like if the com sats were knocked out). Of course, Zina can’t just take November off from work, so I guess I should be saying “I” will be doing this (although she is only going to eat food from the farm and not go out or shop).  She also carries a “get home bag” in her car.   Simulations aren’t pure or perfect.  We are getting as close as we can.  The number one impurity?  I know when it’s going to start.  Reality would dictate otherwise.  The unknown and the surprise are the issues that will cause people to freak.

We are extremely prepared and this likely won’t be a big deal, but it will expose any holes in the system. Some of the weaknesses I already know about, some might be a surprise.  It’s all about being able to say that not only do we know how to do it, but that we’ve actually done it.

As you know, we have lots of livestock and they get to play along too. We will need to ration feed and not just run to the feed store should we run out. It just snowed a foot here yesterday and it went down to -2 F last night. I’ve already been contending with frozen waterers and those infernal GFCI outlets that kick off when you need them the most (2 am).  As I can’t get to a few of my smaller propane tanks and a couple of them need to be filled, I’d best get at it tomorrow. We are starting November 1st and are going all the way through Thanksgiving (We raise turkeys and we may try to do the holiday bird without the electric oven –  or use the generator to power it.  The oven range isn’t on the solar panel load – too much draw for the batteries).

I am actually looking forward to doing this. It is as much of a detachment from the world as we can simulate. Virtually all of the food will have been grown and stored right here on the farm. Realistically, we could go 2 years on our existing stored food (if you include two growing seasons) so this is more of a real time assessment than a thought process. I’m looking forward to being a hermit for awhile. After all, if it all falls apart, it’s going to do it whether or not I know about it through the propaganda we call media.  We have a couple of appointments already scheduled for the month that we can’t escape, so it won’t be perfect but………

How long could you go if you couldn’t get to the grocery store?  Do you have water should the municipal system shut down?  If you are on a well, can you purify your water should it become contaminated? Could you survive 2 weeks?  A weekend? FEMA says you can’t.  What about power?  Heat?  Should you be working on it?  Do you have medical supplies beyond simple first aid and know how to use it?  No? Our nearest hospital is over an hour from here.   What about simple showering and clothes washing?  Hmmmmm.

Stay tuned.  I will blog the progress as we go.  Tomorrow:  Get the propane tanks filled.  Get the rocket stove and Silver Fire stove and the Sun Oven out.  Make sure the water filters are cleaned.  Shut down the news apps.  Center.  Live like it has already happened.

 

The Days Are Shortening, Time To Look Back On The Year

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We’ve noticed of late that we can go out earlier in the evening to put the chickens to bed and the sun is coming up later in the morning.  Being someone that really has his clock aligned with the sun cycle, it means a bit more sleep (Don’t fool yourself, I’m still starting to wake up before 4 am.).

But with the change of season (Today is 91. What change of season? – oh ya, the season we used to have before we screwed everything up), it is time to look back on the farm and assess the damage.  More and more we are becoming creatures of farm routine instead of construction engineers.  We declared an end to the expansion of the farm and have found that we are really at the limits of what two old farts can expect to accomplish (especially when one is only here half the week and needs to re-coup from the week at the “money and health care job”).  Every fall, we take a step back and survey all that we can survey and assess how things went and where we are headed.

The first assessment is owning up to our physical limits.  While we can still work most city folk under the hay bunk who are half our age, since adding quite a bit of livestock to the mix, it is an unrelenting schedule.  My back is doing great, but I have to watch how I bend (which makes hay stacking an adventure).  While the pain is gone from the spinal issues, they didn’t put me back together according to the factory specs.  I am never not stiff and sore.  From my neck to my calves, I have to stretch out every day and give myself a bit of time to get it all moving in one direction.  Zina has increasing responsibilities at work, so there has to be something of a balance between doing some chores, but also being able to simply “be” with the critters (Something we have come to call, Farm TV).  What we have learned this past season, is that the most important farm implements, the humans, have been tested to their limits and adding anything more would probably become something of a health hazard.  After all, if you consider that pre-civil war homesteaders lived about 50 years we are pretty long in the tooth.  We STARTED this place at 50.  Of course, we were urban farmers long before this, but the farm started on 12/4 of 2012.  We are coming up on 7 years of an unbelievable amount of work, both in its building and production.  If we do say so ourselves, we are some tough old birds.

So with that admission, the adding of anything new to the place that expands beyond what we are doing, won’t happen.  We had considered other livestock and such, but we already raise about 85% of all we consume.  There isn’t a lot left to consider unless we wanted some giraffes and kangaroos!  Any new projects will be enhancements of what we already have;  Things that come up that make you say, “You know what would really make this work well…..”  For instance, now that we have jumped into the dairy goat world, we discovered that we don’t really have a good place to milk.  The barn has a dirt floor and is pretty dusty.  So we may get another shed, just like the one we just got for the bucks, to use as a milking parlor.  We don’t milk the old fashioned way by squeezing.  We use a hand held milker.  That does keep the milk cleaner, but having the ladies in a dedicated area, along with our goat gear, makes a lot of sense.  So those kinds of enhancement things will continue.

The farm is a multi-faceted operation.  It is simply not possible to keep the schedule of “have to’s” in one’s head and hope to remain sane.  We have, and are, developing a yearly calendar that has all the reoccurring tasks in it; from goat vaccines, to coop cleaning, house cleaning, animal feeding, etc.  We’ve found that if we don’t do that, our minds stack everything up in front of us like a mountain and it is easy to get discouraged.  I suffer from Complex PTSD and anxiety ramps up pretty quickly when things look overwhelming.  We need to eat this elephant one bite at a time.  If our time is managed well, the anxiety is reduced significantly.

So then, How’d we do.  Overall 2019 GPA:  A  (Last year would have been a C)

The first goal was to have enough of the build out done so that we could focus on our gardens in ways we hadn’t been able to do before.  We were constantly splitting our time between making and building things and trying to stay ahead of the weeds in the old garden.  This year was a splendid success.  The move away from the hilled gardens to the boxed raised beds around the greenhouse was just the ticket.  While we weren’t able to really be intentional about it’s tending like we’d hoped, it was certainly better than in years past (surgery years not withstanding).  I worked like a madman to get the remaining 9 raised beds, hail guards and shade cloth covers up (I will be making 5 more this winter to finish them all off).  Last September around this time, we had water hydrants attached to the well and run to the greenhouse and to the barn.  This overcame yet another drought this year.  The high pressure was able to bring drip irrigation and provide hand watering to all 40 raised beds.  The spring started off cold and wet, which set things back about a month, then it all dried out.  Our temperatures were easily as hot as the drought from last year, but the shade cloth kept the plants from getting scalded in the mile-hi plains.  The hail guards did their job as well.  So unless we move into the 100’s for temperatures next year (a definite possibility), we have the vegetable gardens in a pretty good place.  I have planted Broccoli, Cauliflower, lettuce and spinach for the fall planting and once the tomatoes give it up in the greenhouse when we get our first freeze, I will be getting the cooler weather loving things going out there.  Shameless self-adulation:  I’m a damned good gardener.

Evaluation of the gardens:  Excellent.  Only the Tomatillos failed, but they have been particularly difficult to raise here for years (The grasshoppers love ’em) .  Everything has produced extremely well.  We had our first bout of white flies and tomato horned worms in the greenhouse, but we won the battle (tomato worms are disgusting creatures). The garden has done so well that we are crying uncle.  Next year:  No hard beans.  We have mountains of them and the beds can be put to better use.  You have to grow huge amounts of black beans to get enough to care about.  Probably going to punt on the Tomatillos.  We’ll rotate the tomatoes to the outdoor beds.  We need to get the cool season stuff in earlier in the spring and start the warm weather stuff later.  Try some melons.  Create cattle panel arches for the vining plants.  Foot long beans look interesting.  Grow more Shallots, they are great.  Keep doing celery.  Trust the seeder when planting carrots.  The carrots did great but they are way overcrowded.  Stay on the weeding to the neglect of everything else except the animals.  I cannot believe how prolific the bindweed is here.  They strangle everything.  More sunflowers.  Put in a long raised bed for potatoes and create a dedicated asparagus patch.

Construction to enhance:  Build the permanent fence around the gardens, string drip lines to the apple trees, finish the remaining hail guards, and build the potato, corn and asparagus beds.

Livestock:  We are officially turkey and dairy goat ranchers.  They were the new additions here.  On the bird side, we have begun hatching all of our own chickens and turkeys.  If you have never had a home raised turkey, boy oh boy are you missing out;  Absolutely incredible taste.  We are also hatching and raising Jersey Giants as our meat chicken flock as well as a smaller bunch of Cornish cross “Frankenbirds” in the spring.  We added grow out coops this year and moved the brooders to the barn so we don’t have to have the dust that baby chicks create, inside our home anymore.  All of this has gone great.  The only issue we have had to contend with is that turkeys are Stooooooooooopid!!  Chickens put themselves to bed at night, turkeys couldn’t find their tail feathers with a detailed map.  They like to roost up high so even clipping their flight feathers isn’t completely helpful.  The teenagers have figured out how to jump over to the breeder stock coop and that finds themselves getting their asses kicked by the adults. I mean KICKED!  Like dead.  I guess, if we had to evaluate the turkey flock as a meat source, it would be to hatch a bit fewer and process them sooner.  It is certainly worth the time, but as we speak I’d love to just take my shotgun and …….    Turkeys is dumb, Mkay?

We bred our little Ginger (Nigerian Dwarf Goat) this year.  That has been so much fun.  There is nothing cuter than baby farm animals.  As I write, it appears that one of our other does, Cumin, is pregnant.  We put her in with Tank, one of our bucks, and it was quite the courtship.  All of about 5 minutes.  I think we timed things correctly.

Ginger gave birth to Switch and Neo.  We have been using Matrix names for the boys.  Our intact bucks are Tank and Dozer (Also, Switch, because we first thought he was a she… nope…. two boys).  Now as sad as it is, bucks, like roosters, are not needed in quantity.  We have absolutely no need for two more stinky, crazy, breed-able boys.  So instead of simply doing away with them (They are our firsts, so of course we couldn’t just drown them), we will be turning them into Wethers (castrated males) and they will spend their lives with the girls.

Which leads me to the next point: Enough having to download more cranial software.  You’ve heard the canard, “It’s all a learning experience”, or “Learning is a life long process….”  all that New Age tripe.  I am tired of having to download new software into my head!  We are virtually all self-taught!  I want to have life be kind of routine for awhile.  Once those babies were born, it was a flurry of activity in trying to figure out what needed to be done.  Sure, as usual, we read everything there was, but its a whole ‘nuther thing to have them in your midst.  When do you de-horn?  What’s the best way to vaccinate?  Is momma supposed to be milked once or twice a day?  What do you do with the milk?  If I drink it will I die?  Whew!  The babies are still alive this morning, must not have screwed up too badly…..  Enough!  Now that they are going on 3 weeks old, we’ve pretty much got this wired, and, of course, if you just shut up and observe, you find out that momma goat has already got a lot of this figured out.  Observation breeds answers in most cases.

Evaluation of Livestock:  Raising goats is way fun.  Like being a first time parent, the unknowns are becoming known.  Considering that we have been raising other livestock for years and that I have experience being around cattle, we probably should have cut ourselves some slack.  We are looking forward to goat’s milk soap, and tasty cheese, and milk for our coffee.

The turkeys are a great success.  They aren’t my favorite animal, but considering that we don’t eat a lot of beef, ground turkey for meat and sausage does the trick (and they don’t weigh 1200 lbs).  Not to mention the fact that a roasted, home hatched and home grown Tom is about the best thing around.

We will be reducing our chicken egg laying flock. We are giving dozens of eggs away and it simply isn’t necessary.  We will hatch any replacements as the older hens get beyond their laying years (and the elders will become soup).  Also, the Jersey Giants are a heritage breed so they will also be laying eggs (and turkey eggs are huge and taste just like chicken eggs). We apparently have the butt nugget area covered pretty well

Meat birds.  Between the Jerseys and the Cornish Crosses we will proceed as usual.  We’ve got that wired too.

Pigs.  We will either keep buying gilts and barrows in the spring, or we may switch to breeds like Kunekunes or American Guinea Hogs.  If we want to breed them instead of relying on someone else to do it, I cannot handle an 800 lb. boar and a mad momma of comparable size any more.  Pigs are awesome.  They are smart, playful and friendly.  However, they are the size of a Buick and even if they didn’t intend to hurt you they certainly can.  We’ve taken to taking a cattle prod out with us when we interact with them. They love to come and rub on you.  They are currently as big as me and can upend you for no reason and then accidentally stomp on you while they run out of the way (I’ve seen them do it to each other…. not conducive to a human chassis).  Pound for pound a hog is probably the strongest animal you can have on a farm.  With the other breeds mentioned above, they are about half the size and a lot more docile.  So it remains to be seen which direction we head.  Again, we already have the infrastructure.  Its not a project that will  “add to” the farm.  More, its how best to move forward given all the above and what makes sense. Stay tuned.

Goats:  I’m all in.  Now that we know how to handle the husbandry issues, these little folk are about as sweet as they get.  And wow!  We eliminate another couple of staple items from the store: Soap and cheese.

Donkeys:  What can I say?  They are the Zen masters of the farm. We love them to pieces. I’d have a whole ranch full of them if we could swing it.  They are very old, wise, souls.

Looking Forward:

Our number one goal is to live with the place and just putz and have a routine.  This is a tough way to live, but now that the construction is on a “want to” instead of “have to” level, we can putz around as we choose.  Putting the gardens and the livestock at the forefront, as well as our personal enjoyment, is goal number one.

What would I like to work on?

  1.  Put the permanent fence around the gardens and get the remaining hail guards and beds built.
  2. If there is anything I would go into debt for (we don’t have any), it would be a solar hot water heater, a wood burning stove and a metal roof.  I hate the idea that we are dependent upon a guy and a truck to bring in propane.  Hail reduces 30 year shingles to 7.  While we are technically considered “off grid” I could virtually eliminate our propane bill just by heating water with the sun.
  3. I am looking into a gizmo called a “Cool-Bot”.  It takes a regular window mounted air conditioner and lets you use it as the cooling unit for a walk-in refrigerated room.  While we don’t need it to be refrigerator level cold, our “root-cellar”/ pantry in the basement still gets too warm in these scorching summers.  If I can insulate the room and use this gizmo, it will further our food storage capacity immensely.
  4. New shed for a milking parlor.
  5. Weave more.  Because of the farm schedule, I’ve not done much this summer.  Also, I was planning on having a booth at a local craft show for Christmas this year.  There is no way I’ll be ready for that.  Next year.  That is my art.  I’d love to see Zina get back at her quilting and needlepoint as well.  Oh ya, get my telescope out.  I miss my stars.
  6. Get the water catchment system up and running.  Almost there, just need to finish it up.
  7. Keep doing the vermi-composting and get the bio-char burners built so we can further develop our on site fertilizer operations

The only expansion (that’s not an expansion):

We operate this place roughly via Permaculture principles.  Everything is based on zones and everything eventually is supposed to bring in or create more than it cost.  So there are two areas that will be addressed (one will take years).

The first is to plant more trees.  We have locust trees down our southern border.  I’m going to be taking some of the seed pods and grow a bunch and plant them down our drive way and other places to serve as wind and snow breaks.

The second is to create a “food forest”.  For details do a search engine for it, but suffice it to say that it will be put into the old garden.  It will be a combination of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and vines, ground covers and pollinator plants, all designed to create a huge area that keeps producing food annually, increases wildlife, supports bees, and feeds us, all in balance with itself.

I have a line on some roofing steel and will begin to create a “roof” or lean-to that will allow me to divert water from that structure (about 1000 square feet) into ponds and irrigation drains that will feed some of the water needs of this food forest creation.  This will kind of be my canvas to paint on.  I’ve seen some in Colorado and it can indeed be done.  However, given the decrepitude of my old farmer butt, it will be a long term work in progress….. I guess, as it should be.

My ultimate goal anymore, is that no matter what the coming climate catastrophe may bring, it is to work according to what I see as “right action”.  I want this forty acres to know that I tried my damnedest to heal it and live with it.  It will ultimately fail, but that is what I know to be right and the only thing I really care about.  When the universe folds up on this minuscule part of itself, I’ll be damned if I go down with a legacy that I was just smacking a white pebble down green grass in stupid clothes consuming everything and serving no purpose.

So the JAZ Farm flourished this year; partly because the weather was more cooperative, but mostly because we improvised, adapted and overcame.  It’s always an adventure and I would suspect there are surprises lurking in the shadows as well as we progress into our 7th year.  What a long strange trip it has been.  Stay tuned.

Delivered Via C Section

Ten pounds baby!  They all have been 5 lbs. or better this year.  We’ve been eating a ton of Coleslaw.  Later today or tomorrow the crock is getting stuffed to make Sauerkraut.  We each had a couple of bites from our first ever apple this morning – a little green Granny Smith. We thought it would make us pucker, but we were surprised.  Best tasting apple ever.   That kind of surprise always reminds me of why Citiots don’t understand why there are folks like us.  They’ve never really had fresh food with full flavor that came 50 yards or less from their front door.  Even when I hate it,  I love it.

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Our Veggie Gardens Won’t Feed us in a Real Crisis

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Once again, friend Ellen sent me an article that put me in the food pulpit.   The article is posted below.  This was my rant:

Oh! That is cool that I’m not a lone voice in the wilderness.  I have lambasted vegetarians and vegans for years about the slim landscape that can grow non-grain vegetables at scale.  There are about three areas on this side of the world (there are others, but three major areas) where vegetables can grow at volume.  Should we try what all the IPCC wonks say -that vegetarianism is the only way to save the planet – we will all starve because it CANNOT support a 350 million person population at a 2000 calorie diet with sufficient protein and fiber (not to mention micronutrients and vitamins). It might, if everyone did what I do….. Bwahahahaha!  Oh god, I crack myself up.   Florida, the San Joaquin Valley, and Mexico are about it.  The top soil is so depleted in the Midwest that it could never be readily converted to tomatoes, peppers and onions. Besides that, most of us have this thing we call winter.  I have given up on my species, because when they open their mouths about food, they haven’t got one flippin’ clue.  I DEFY anyone to come out here, in the vast grassland Prairie, and grow Broccoli at a significant scale.  1.  The soil is heavily alkaline.  2.  It’s 80% clay.  3.  The water is basically liquid rock (full of lime and iron).  4.  We get 13 inches of rain per year.  5.  We have that whole winter thing 6. The sun will send it into bolt the second it sprouts.  Animal protein wasn’t produced as a luxury.  It was designed to keep one’s food on its feet and mobile so it can feed itself, and be self moving (herded) to get it where it needs to be processed when needed.  Oh ya, they are also ruminants that can turn grass into protein.

But, but, but! Hydroponics and aquaponics indoors that’s the ticket!!  LED lights instead of the sun and all done in climate controlled grow facilities. Brilliant…… all dependent on coal and natural gas.  But what about solar panels to power them??  I’m not even going there.  The best all that can do is grow greens.  Ever try to survive on just Romaine?  Might work if you have some weight to lose, but that has a shelf life over time.  We are bloody fools.

Does anyone know what it really means to eat “in season?”  It means making nail soup, killing a hog, hoping you canned enough to get from October to June, not eat each other, and pray to your almighty Jebuzz that there isn’t some fucking plague of locusts when you try to restock for the next seasonal cold snap (winter).  May Day and Solstice were celebrations for a reason.  The emergence from dark dank hovels to bask in sunlight, screw, reproduce, plant and thank the ever lovin’ powers that you didn’t succumb to whatever awfulness made parts fall off of your neighbors.  But of course, it’s all May Poles and Easter Eggs, morphed into the re-animating of some dude with a hammer and chisel.

The actual article:

Can Our Veggie Gardens Feed us in a Real Crisis?

 

You Have To Graduate Sometime

 

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Imagine it.

81228154-B1EA-4629-8E88-AB7EF490A66CCreate it.

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Improvise, Adapt, Overcome.  Be the expert.

So many Homesteader, Small Farmer, Off-Gridders don’t give themselves enough credit.  Admittedly,  most I see are 30 and 40 somethings that have had it with the city, knew nothing about self-sufficiency, but needed to escape Cubicalville.  I get that.  But enough with the self-deprecation!  I know a lot of them, to avoid having to have a job at the same time, are trying to use You Tube and other means to generate incomes.  To that I say, “more power to ya”.  My answer was to work in high anxiety corporate hell until I broke down, and then take the money and run….. plunging it into our Shire.

But enough with the sad sack “We are all just learning and we don’t know what we are doing, we are just sharing our journey with you, tripe!”  As I used to tell my rookies when I was a training manager, that simply by passing the regulatory and licensing exams that have  allowed you to be here, you know more than 95% of the people you will meet and consult with……. act like it!  At some point you need to admit that you know what you are doing.  Admitting to setbacks doesn’t imply stupidity or lack of knowledge.  No amount of knowledge could help you get through the plague of grasshoppers that the folks in Las Vegas are contending with, or the drought that wiped out our gardens last year, or any other unforeseen issues that continually come up.  If you encounter it, it is called problem solving!  It isn’t some Romper Room childish phrasing you hear from the clueless, suburban, BMW driving, bedroom nurseries that “It’s all a learning experience!”  Hack Gag Puke!  That is someone else’s desire to level you down to their ignorance.  At some point you have to put on the big farmer panties and problem solve, adapt and overcome.  It’s not arrogance to say so.  How many tie wearing assholes have you encountered that think their heads are too big for their hats because they can swing a friggin’ golf club?  This is self-sufficiency boot camp.  You don’t get to stay there forever.  At some point you need to go out and be a specialist in your chosen and self appointed mission.  “Learning experience”….. blech!  That’s like getting tongue kissed by your dog!  I guess I won’t be doing THAT again.  See- I learned.  What a wonderful experience.  Tastes like dog ass.

They don’t have graduation ceremonies for this kind of thing so at some point (in our case, 15 + years) you need to walk away from the folks that self-deprecate, put on a robe and tassel, walk across your own stage and say “Yes, we are experts and we know what the hell we are doing”.  After all, even musicians become virtuosos at some point.  In our case, we be rockin’ self-taught, semi-arid climate, vegetable growing, virtuosos!  If you started down this path and you haven’t given up that means you are a problem solver.  It means you have skills.  It means that you can mentor and help.  Just because you were told by society that we should all act like sixth graders, be subservient and use (dear god kill me now) corporate speak (I just thought I’d reach out to you and…..  where’s my AR??!!) , doesn’t mean you need to bring that to your own life of freedom.  Be free.  Revel in your expertise.  Very shortly, you will be in high demand.  Your problem solving skills will be all you have.  JAZ Farmers excel in what they do.  Strap on the overalls and use your brains as well as your rake and shovel.  Let the Citiots all talk like Dick and Jane.  You are passed that now.  You know your food doesn’t just appear in wrappers in a cooler at the Walliemart.  Rise above it.  Don’t slog through it.  Rant Over.  The End.

 

Scientific Consensus Grows That We Have 18 Months To Save The Earth, Not 12 Years

I will be riffing and philosophizing a lot on this going forward.  It’s all over.  An insane and terrified species destroyed its habitat and still claimed itself to be divinely created and the most intelligent life form on its planet.  What a joke.  My heritage of reformed church fundamentalism is one of the most severe forms of this insanity.  It was all for nothing.  Progress was indeed synonymous with self-inhiliation.  We, indeed, were a shoe wearing virus.

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The IPCC gave us 12 years to set the wheels in motion to save ourselves from the apocalypse known as climate change. Now in the scientific community, a consensus is building that we have only 18 months to implement aggressive climate policy.

Which means “that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year”.

This does not mean we have 18 months before all hell breaks loose (at least for those in the temperate zones), but it does mean that steps to draw down carbon output to zero need to be in place to address the scale of the problem. Otherwise, our ability to save the biosphere will be completely out of our control.

The Trump regime, of course, will still be in office in January 2021. If he wins the 2020 election our fate is sealed. His environmental policies along with his war on the fight against climate change will have made Make America Venus Again a horrifying reality.

Matt McGrath of the BBC writes:

But today, observers recognise that the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.

The idea that 2020 is a firm deadline was eloquently addressed by one of the world’s top climate scientists, speaking back in 2017.

“The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute.

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One of the understated headlines in last year’s IPCC report was that global emissions of carbon dioxide must peak by 2020 to keep the planet below 1.5C.

Current plans are nowhere near strong enough to keep temperatures below the so-called safe limit. Right now, we are heading towards 3C of heating by 2100 not 1.5.

As countries usually scope out their plans over five and 10 year timeframes, if the 45% carbon cut target by 2030 is to be met, then the plans really need to be on the table by the end of 2020.

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With exquisite timing, the likely UK COP in 2020 could also be the moment the US finally pulls out of the Paris agreement.

But if Donald Trump doesn’t prevail in the presidential election that position could change, with a democrat victor likely to reverse the decision.

Either step could have huge consequences for the climate fight.

Right now a number of countries seem keen to slow down progress. Last December the US, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia blocked the IPCC special report on 1.5C from UN talks.

From the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: 

“We stand at the doorway of being able to bend the GHG emissions curve downwards by 2020, as science demands, in protection of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular the eradication of extreme poverty,” Christiana Figueres says, lead-author of the Nature comment and former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). “This monumental challenge coincides with an unprecedented openness to self-challenge on the part of sub-national governments inside the US, governments at all levels outside the US, and of the private sector in general. The opportunity given to us over the next three years is unique in history.” Figueres is the convener of Mission 2020, a broad-based campaign calling for urgent action now to make sure that carbon emissions begin an inexorable fall by 2020.

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The authors are confident that both technological progress and political momentum have reached a point now that allows to kick-start the ‘great sustainability transformation’. 2020 is crucial, because in that year the US will be legally able to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Even more compelling are the physics-based considerations, however: Recent research has demonstrated that keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius becomes almost infeasible if we delay climate action beyond 2020. And breaching the 2°C-line would be dangerous, since a number of Earth system tipping elements, such as the great ice sheets, may get destabilized in that hot-house.

“We have been blessed by a remarkably resilient planet over the past 100 years, able to absorb most of our climate abuse,” says Johan Rockström from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, co-author of the Nature comment and lead-author of the Science article. “Now we have reached the end of this era, and need to bend the global curve of emissions immediately, to avoid unmanageable outcomes for our modern world.”

Democrats are not sitting this one out. They have been working on climate policy to implement immediately, that is dependent on winning the Senate, the Presidency and maintain the majority in the House.

Hug your loved ones a little tighter today.

(https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/24/1873999/-Scientific-consensus-grows-that-we-have-eighteen-months-to-save-the-planet-not-12-years)