Off-Grid Living for Agrarians, Part 7: Food Production 1

This topic (food production) will take two parts, so make sure to read both of them.

When I was in the woodworking class at Homestead Heritage, I had some discussions with the folks that live there and there were some interesting differences (other than doctrinal issues) in our concept of Agrarianism, homestead living, etc. In their 14 minute video presentation the announcer says that the people there don't want to live in a "museum" or to live in the past. They want to embrace and encourage those skills and doings of the past that enhance family and communal living, while embracing those modern things where they also assist in the overall goal of peaceful, simple living and brotherhood. Well, these things are admirable, but an outsiders view might be valuable here. Most of the folks who visit Homestead Heritage are basically what we here call "worldlings". They live in the city or the suburbs and they actually do visit Homestead Heritage because it is like a museum. They see it as a Living History Farm and they want to see horses pull hay trailers and they want to see crafts made by hand the "old fashioned way". Once again, this is all admirable, but we here in our community didn't visit in order to see a museum. We want to learn what we can in order to inculcate the things we learn into our lives. I visited Homestead Heritage while I am already living an off-grid Agrarian life. So I was a bit of a curiosity to them. They are used to worldlings asking them how they make molasses or how they build barns, but while I was there they were asking me how I live without grid electricity and how I store food without a freezer. You see, they have embraced enough of the world's system that they live much like the world does. Sure they farm the communal pastures with horses, and they grow (corporately) a lot of their own food, and they have maintained (again corporately) many of the skills of yesteryear, but the average family living there lives on less than an acre and has grid power and grid water. They live in the suburbs of a pretty large city. They live 2-3 miles from the city of Waco, Texas. They basically are suburban folks who have pitched in together to work some communal fields and raise communal crops. This is way better than the average suburbanite, but I think it still falls short of the Agrarianism that we are talking about in this series. All of this is to say that we desire to separate ourselves even further from the "grid" system, not because to do so will be to live in the past or to "live in some museum", but because we think the grid system is:

1. Unreliable, and requires Christians to, very dangerously, rely on some pretty corrupt and evil systems in order to maintain survivability. Naturally the world system is in constant danger of disruption, and so, by default, anyone hooked to it or who relies on it is in a perilous state of reliance on that which is unreliable. It is one thing to say "oh, we rely on God", when in fact you are relying on a system which is completely contrary and antithetical to God and His ways.

Which brings us to the second point...

2. The system is evil. It naturally deprives man of the ability to survive and thrive outside of it. It is so overwhelming in its tendencies to corrupt men and cause them to become helpless dependents, that most people do not realize how really helpless and dependent they have become.

I explained this to the folks at Homestead Heritage and it seemed as if they agreed. I think they might have some long-term plans to lessen their dependence on grid power and water, but I don't know what they are.

Secondly, and this is the main point of this part, their system of food production, while interesting and admirable, does not seem to emphasize the necessity for each individual family to raise and grow most (if not all) of the food consumed by the family. Each family lives on a small tract, and may have a garden and some chickens, etc., but most of the bulk of the food production is communal or corporate and therefore must be purchased by the individual families from the company store. This requires most of the men (at least) to work off of their own property in order to make enough money to supply the family. This, to me, is the opposite of the concept towards which we ought to work.

Food Production

Our process ought to be working us towards self-sufficiency in our food supplies. This means that each family ought to focus on producing as much of their food as possible, and in increasing it each year by learning better techniques, by learning new skills, by working harder, and by diversifying. Start by trying to figure out how much of your food you produce. Maybe if you are new it is 0%, which means that you are currently dependent on the world system for 100% of your food supplies. These worldly food supplies grow worse and worse each year. Worse in total nutrition, worse in toxins and poisons in the food, worse in every possible way OTHER THAN in the way they look. Modern commercial farmers will tell you that they have learned to make food LOOK better, by making it worse for you and by reducing its overall actual quality. I was reading the Growing Great Garlic book by Ron Engeland, and in it he admits that smaller garlic that is a little less appetizing to look upon is actually more flavorful and probably better for you - but the commercial buyers and restaurants want the bigger and more robust looking garlics. This means that their overall ACTUAL quality is diminished in order to make them more salable. And this is an organic gourmet garlic grower telling it like it is. If organic gourmet growers are telling you this, what do you think is happening to the non-organic corporate grown industrial crops? The point is that you should be lowering this percentage of dependency immediately, and increasingly working to drop that percentage each year.

Ok, so I am going to go through the major food areas and discuss them individually:

Meat. Currently (as of late winter 2008) my family is producing about 80% of our own meat. Eggs are considered meat in our economy, so I will discuss them first. The first structure we built (actually acquired) here on the ranch was a chicken coop. I built the first coop out of a dilapidated hunting blind we found on the back of the property. I put a new floor in it and built it into a small coop and moved our 50 or so chickens into it. We quickly built a fenced pen around the coop with some old hurricane fencing that had been donated years earlier. We are still using this coop as our main coop today. We had egg production immediately (since our chickens were already producing), which means that we had protein growing from the land from day one. You may have to start your chickens from chicks, but you still should be producing eggs usually within 5-6 months of getting started. I would put in a chicken coop and get chickens before even beginning to think about where you are going to sleep and what you are going to live in. How many chickens to get is really based on the size of your family and how many eggs you eat. By the way... EAT MORE EGGS! My family will eat up to a dozen eggs on the days we eat eggs. So we usually keep between 30 and 60 hens. This winter, when the hens are usually not producing as well as normal, we were still getting 6 eggs a day, which allows us to have eggs at least every other day. As of yesterday our production was going up (due to the warmer weather) and we received a dozen eggs yesterday. Eggs are good and wholesome and provide a boatload of necessary nutrition. They can also be stored. They can be dried and powdered, stored in waterglass, larded, etc.

The great thing about homestead meat production is that the safest and best way to store meat is on the hoof. So begin by thinking of what type of land/pasture, etc. you have available and begin to determine how you will provide protein for yourself. If you are on a small homestead (less than 5 acres), you will want to focus on small, fast reproducing animals. Consider pigs, rabbits, pygmy goats, chickens, turkeys, quail, etc. You may want to have a milk cow or some midget cows, but it would probably be better to milk a goat and use goats or sheep for meat as well. If you did have the pasture and feed production enough to keep a small milk cow, you would get a calf every year that you could grow and butcher for meat. If you keep goats for milk, then you will want to maintain a small herd so you can always butcher some goats for meat. If your homestead is larger, you definitely want to consider having a few cows - for milk and for meat. I recommend the pure Texas Longhorn for many reasons, click on the article and read all about it. As I said, for the smaller homestead, you should definitely consider rabbits and fowl. At our old homestead we produced quite a bit of our meat from turkeys, geese, and chickens. Make a decision on your meat production based on the availability of space and feed. If you will pen your animals then you need to allot enough farm space to produce most of their feed. If you will free-range your animals (which I recommend), then you need to study on pasture management and rotation so you can do this without constantly having to buy feed and supplements.

Some folks have problems with eating pigs, and if you do, then just skip this paragraph - but for the rest of us the pig is the answer to a whole lot of problems. Pigs are easy to keep, they reproduce fast, they are cheap and clean if they are allowed to range and fend for themselves, and they produce an enormous amount of meat in a very short time. I currently have 6 pigs that were born here on the land - and three of them will be butchered in the next two months. Our problem is not "how will we have enough meat?", but "where do we put it all?". Pigs are also good in an animal/pasture rotation system. They plow up the ground, deposit very rich manure, and do great benefit to the soil.

We also keep Longhorn cattle, and thus far we have butchered one small bull. If the Lord wills I will butcher one steer this fall, and another one the next fall. After that, if the Lord allows, our cattle production will be up enough for us to butcher two cattle a year, which will be more than enough meat for our family, with enough left over to barter, trade, sell, etc.

We raise meat rabbits, and will be butchering our own product starting in the next 20 days. My oldest daughter Tracy is in charge of rabbit production, and she is doing well. She will still have to learn to butcher, but she has butchered chickens and other animals and does pretty well with it. We also will be increasing our chicken meat production, and we hope to add Turkeys this year sometime.

So you can see that meat production is critical, but it is entirely doable - and at a remarkably low cost. I will discuss food preservation at the end of the second part of this "food production" section, so in that section we will discuss what to do with all that meat we are producing.

Ok, that is it for meat. I'll move on to vegetables and other foodstuffs in the next part...

Michael