Category: Farm/Country Living

City People Are Crazy

Recently, some teenagers in my area were camping out and decided to kill and eat a duck for their supper. Bad idea. They were caught.

Now, in the real world, this would have been treated like the imbecile case of poaching that it is, but Benton County is run by city people, who are crazy. There was a hue and cry for a charge of felony animal abuse. Lots of people were itching to get those kids under psychiatric treatment. What could be a stronger sign of mental illness than hunting out of season?

You can see the article here.

This is not an isolated case. A guy in Albany was cited because he had an old, skinny horse, whose skinniness and age were taken as signs of neglect, even though there was a younger, well-fleshed horse on the same pasture (how can you starve one horse and not the other when they’re running around together all the time?). If you’re not in a rural county, it’s important to slaughter your animals before they become old, skinny, or lame, or you’ll be arrested. Even if they can be cured, a convalescence within sight of a cell-phone Samaritan may land you in jail. Don’t risk it.

If you’re planning to move back to the land, don’t make the mistake I did by moving to a county dominated by city people. They’ll sic the law on you. Find a rural country, preferably one dominated by farmers. You’re trying to get away from urban attitudes as well as urban architecture, and this requires that you have at least a county line between yourself and the nearest urban population.

Farmers on the edge of town have always been slapped with nuisance lawsuits for being farmers (the sound of roosters crowing or tractors running, dust from plowing, flies, etc.). This is one reason why such farmers are eager to sell out to developers: city people won’t let them farm. But now we’re being threatened with jail or mental institutions.

I grew up in Del Norte County in California, which is an impoverished county in the redwoods. The largest segment of the economy was unemployed loggers, and poaching was universal. The game wardens looked the other way if you weren’t selling venison in the street, because it helped people feed their families. But by the standards of law enforcement here in Benton County, everyone I grew up with belonged in the loony bin. Go figure.

Achieving a Negative Carbon Footprint

Carbon abatement is for sissies. Let’s stop thinking like consumers and start thinking like producers. If there’s surplus carbon dioxide, instead of releasing somewhat less of it by modifying our personal consumption, let’s figure out ways of sucking it back out of the air and using it for our personal production.

So what can we make with all that carbon dioxide? Well, lots of things, but for the sake of this post, let’s make trees out of it. A good stand of trees will turn greenhouse gases into biomass and lumber. Planting a stand of trees on our own property is a way to take charge of the problem directly. You can buy a lot of rural land in need of TLC for the price of a hybrid car, and doing so will be much better for the environment.

According to some statistics I’ve used before (see my February 2007 newsletter), if you take 16 acres of pastureland and plant trees on it, you’ll achieve a personal carbon footprint of zero, even if you live to be 100 years old, harvest the trees every 30 years, and otherwise do nothing about greenhouse gases. If you plant more than 16 acres, your carbon footprint will be negative! This is infinitely better than what you can get by altering your consumption style.

Taking the tree route is not very hard. In large areas of the country, forest is the default condition: unless you mow, plow, or keep cattle on it, your land will turn into a forest on its own.

So I recommend that you get some nice acreage somewhere, not too expensive, and allow it to revert to woodland. Put a house or a cabin on it, while you’re at it. What the heck.

Do this on low-value land that never should have been cleared in the first place. It’s cheaper that way, and it takes ecologically marginal land and turns it back into what it wants to be. On our farm, we’re letting the forest reclaim a good-sized chunk of our property.

A negative carbon footprint ought to be low enough to satisfy the most guilt-ridden soul, and the timber income every thirty years is nothing to sneeze at. Lumber is durable and won’t turn itself back into carbon dioxide anytime soon, and the amount of carbon in the soil remains much higher on timberland, even after logging, than it is on pasture or cropland, if the trees are allowed to come back.

I think you’ll find that you can do amazing amounts of carbon fixing by acquiring land of your own and reforesting it — orders of magnitude than you can do by the lifestyle changes that are normally recommended. Nature is so much more powerful than we are that she should always be called upon to do the heavy lifting.

Why There Aren’t Any “Real” Free-Range Eggs in the City

I’m sure you’ve noticed that real, grass-fed free-range eggs aren’t available in city supermarkets, and that they’re pretty rare even in the country. Not only that, but the few farmers who produce them rarely expand their operations. At best, they keep the same number of chickens every year.

This has been true for ages. Why?

The answer is that free-range eggs aren’t very profitable. Anyone who can make a buck from free-range eggs can make two bucks doing something else. If this weren’t true, the farmers would be expanding their flocks as fast as they could.

Why isn’t it profitable? Because consumers aren’t willing to pay what it would cost. By my calculations, real grass-fed free-range eggs would need to retail for about $10 per dozen in city supermarkets for the farmers to earn a living equal to the U.S. median family income. Of this $10 per dozen, the farmer would receive about half, while wholesalers and retailers would get the other half. (That’s how it always works.)

Out of the farmer’s half, most goes to expenses — feed, interest, depreciation, equipment, replacement chickens — and only $1.69 per dozen goes to paying the farmer’s wages.

(I’ll post the assumptions and the calculations later, but in this post I want to cut to the chase.)

People can complain about factory farming as much as they like, but until they are willing to pay $10 a dozen for eggs, factory-farmed products are what they’re gonna get. You’ve basically got your choice between factory farms that uses cages and ones that don’t, and factory farms that are organically certified and ones that aren’t.

If you buy ’em in the city, non-factory-farmed eggs are gonna cost you ten bucks. Activism will have no effect on this whatever. Farmers deserve to get paid, and so do the wholesalers and retailers. Real free-range eggs are expensive to raise. Nothing real will happen until enough people put their money where their mouth is. Ten bucks a dozen.

Urban Farming

For some reason, everyone with a Web page and a copy of PhotoShop is talking up the wonders of “Urban Farming.” Urban farming is a brand-new, exciting concept (not to be confused with “gardening,” which it resembles in every way, and which has been around since the stone age.)

Breathless descriptions of Urban Farming can be found everywhere, including mandatory pictures of the habitats that will be used by urban gardeners and their pod-people overlords.

Habitat for urban farmers and their pod-person overlords

Weird, isn’t it? And the looming structures are not exactly friendly-looking, are they?

But we can fix it with a little bit of context. If we’re gonna build cloud castles, let’s do it right! Something like this:

Cloud castle with urban farming

I’ve always been amazed that anybody falls for this gibberish. Urban gardening isn’t a new idea. It wasn’t new 5,000 years ago. But in the Magical Land of Trendy, all things are possible! At least on paper.

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It covers what’s happening on the farm, and at Norton Creek Press, a poultry calendar for chicken stuff we oughta be doing this month, any other spiffy country-living and telecommuting material I stumble across, and anything I can’t resist tossing in there. This email newsletter has been running since 2003, but I put it on hiatus a year ago to try blogging instead. The verdict? Do both!

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