Value-Added Agriculture

…teaching farmers to be business CEOs

In these times of Wall Street collapses, banking bankruptcies, massive unemployment, homelessness and increasing deprivation, we in the rural sector are already living in Great Depression-II even as the city folk and DC denizens keep talking about mere recession. We have a new President who has promised “hope” to Americans, and who appointed a Monsanto apologist to be Secretary of Agriculture, thereby slapping every struggling small farmer and ardent homesteader in the face.

Hope is all very nice in a made-for-TV movie or light novel, but we all know you can’t eat it, live in it, pay your doctor with it or drive it to a day-job. We’re going to need more than hope and slaps in the face to get through all this piper-paying. And despite Obama’s lousy choice for SecAg, there are some people in DC who do seem to understand that while cities are where the bread and circuses are distracting the population from their deprivations, if we allow the rural backbone to disintegrate people won’t just be deprived. They’ll be starving to death.

Many of us modern homesteaders came to our lifelong labors of love from those cities and megaburbs, once living large with boom economy jobs and the whole rat race. Then gave it all up very much on purpose so we could build new lives for ourselves and our families that really mean something. Those of us with college degrees (some quite advanced), may have even taken a few courses in basic business management and/or economics and/or marketing to help us get those city jobs we left behind when we moved to the hinterlands where the farmers live.

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Disconcerting: Tom Vilsack at USDA

As President-Elect Barack Obama has been very busy selecting key cabinet people and meeting with House and Senate leadership to ensure everyone’s ready on January 20th to begin implementing the Changes he promised, some of us out here on the active lifestyle progressive fringe are not happy with a few of the important choices.

By appointing Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the USDA (Department of Agriculture), committed homesteaders, small landholders and organic farmers like me now have to be concerned that efforts by our own government to make us extinct may NOT change when the leadership in DC changes hands.

In the diary Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You, kossack OrangeClouds115 lists everything that’s wrong with GMOs and Monsanto Corporation’s tireless efforts to own and control every aspect of agricultural production in the world. Note I said “world,” because it’s not just Big Corn Country like Iowa and Nebraska and Indiana that Monsanto seeks to own with its grotesque genetically-altered cultivars. It’s everyone’s ability to obtain seed and farm the land, from the US to Canada and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia as well as Australia. They want it all, they don’t need it all, and right here in Homesteading-USA we are the front and foremost line against this obscenity.

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The Every-Six-Month Soap Job

Awhile back I wrote about making your own soaps, and how much fun that can be even though it’s a lot of work. Besides, who are we dedicated homesteaders if we’re not people who actually enjoy working around our homesteads and doing for ourselves? It’s officially late October now, which means I’ve got a different soap job to do at my homestead.

I do this soap job every spring and fall, mostly just because I can. Besides, it saves my hard-strapped household of four adult-sized humans about $120 every six months on a single necessary household item, even after the not too high costs of ingredients and processing. Since some of the ingredients are also used to make bathroom and kitchen scouring powders, good ant and mouse repellants, and insect sting/burn/rash treatment, I figure the savings to the homestead overall for a year is pretty close to $300.00. That’s nothing to sneeze at, even though my labor is donated free!

This soap job is all about getting our clothes clean. Yes, I do way too much laundry – I still think my daughter and grandson pull clothes out of the drawers or off the shelves and toss them into the dirty clothes hamper if it’s not what they want to wear today instead of refolding and putting them back where they belong. They were gone out of state all of August and September and I didn’t wash more than three loads a week for just hubby and I. But I can’t seem to catch them at it, so I just do the washing (and the drying, and the folding, and the putting away…). It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it!

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Preparing for Winter

After the hard rains of leftover hurricane Fay flooded the basement and caused hubby and I to have to sleep on the living room floor on a fouton (and we’re still there, since it’s just us for a few more weeks), we got our first real cold front yesterday. Nights are down into the 50s and scheduled to stay there for at least a week, reminding us that it’s now time to think about winter heat.

So in between harvesting concords and muscodines, I’ve prepared the stove pipe cleaning mechanism. No, it’s not a nice English chimney sweep brush, it’s an old holey towel tied around other old rags and a large round river rock, onto which I tie a long piece of rope. We get up on the roof and remove the chimney hood, then drop this thing into the pipe so it will scrape down any accumulated soot. Which falls into the stove in the basement. The pipe runs straight up through the main floor and loft, so there are no bends and kinks. This is good if you’re heating with wood, as bends tend to accumulate more creosote and are difficult to clean. The tall pipe is the “central” part of our central heating system, giving off a lot of heat when it’s cold and making the single wood stove very efficient.

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Feeding The Hungry – Part 3

The Rural “Shares” Project

At last, we come to our current hunger project, begun some years ago and still going quite strong. It’s not something governmental or bureaucratic, it’s not something designed to guard food against anyone deigned to be “undeserving,” and it gets a lot of help here and there from community groups. All without publicity, without bragging, without self-importance, without insults to the hungry, without too much time and trouble by anyone. It’s just a project people here know about and many of them contribute to in their own quiet ways – a bit like stashing bags of food (then also clothes and toys and blankets) behind the dumpsters in a sneaky sort of way so the Dumpster People were taken care of and nobody talked about it at all. It just happened, because…

“This Is America. No One Should Go Hungry.”

We call it “Shares.” Because sharing is really what it’s all about. Our personal end of it only works in growing/harvest season, the off-season stuff is handled by actual community groups (Chamber, Ruritan and a few church-lady groups), but still quite informally. They took that over all on their own, and I’m just fine with that. Heck, I never told them not to make it formal, they figured that out on their own too. They just wanted to keep it going through the winter and spring, so did.

The way it was conceived to work was to simply enlist the aid of the people in our area who always grow a nice veggie garden in their ample yards. Here along the slow end of the Blue Ridge it seems like everybody gardens, some more than others, in or outside of town.

At first I approached my immediate neighbors, nice folks who live this far out in the woods as I do on purpose. The leave us alone, but are always on hand in emergencies (blizzards, forest fires), and not stingy on good advice about what to do for apple blight, what’s eating the grape vines, the best heirloom tomato seeds, etc., etc. After the county locked up the dumpsters I approached 4 neighbors the following spring and asked if they’d add a row to their normal garden, seed it with any extra seed they had after planting their usual rows, and donate the produce to my “shares” project.

I told them I’d collect the food, bag or box it, and get it to those I knew in town (at that little grocery store) who could get it out to poor families. I wasn’t really surprised when they enthusiastically said ‘yes!’ but I was quite encouraged that this might work. The really amazing part is that I didn’t actually have to do the organizational work at all, even in the first year! Before spring was over those neighbors had convinced more neighbors, who convinced more neighbors, who got the word out in town, which started the little old church-ladies going, which got the Chamber involved, and the extension service jumped right in with both feet and started donating seeds – just pick ‘em up, free to all. It sort of just made so much sense that it took on a life of its own.
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Feeding The Hungry – Part 2

Some Innovative Hunger Projects

Welcome to Part 2 of this series on feeding the hungry in your neighborhood. Before I get into the current homestead project, my family has been involved in some rather innovative hunger projects over the years in a number of places, both urban and rural, local as well as international in scope. We’ve found that while it’s nice to volunteer once or twice a year at the local soup kitchen or deliver Meals on Wheels to homebound and elderly folks in your town or city, there are things you can be doing on a constant basis that don’t require a lot of paper-pushing, government approval or desperate efforts to convince the hungry to swallow their pride.

And that last issue is one that homesteaders should understand better than most. There is a certain amount of shame attached to poverty and hunger in our society, so it’s a sure bet that formal programs are not going to reach all the people who are actually going hungry during any given week of the year. We’ve found that an individual approach, and an attitude of joyful sharing will reach more people than any amount of scary bureaucracy can. It’s just crazy how hunger programs can get so bogged down in trying to make sure nobody who might be able to afford food doesn’t ever get a bite of free food. THAT seems positively designed to thwart good efforts and leave way too many people out in the cold. Our current project manages to get around this pretty well by simply NOT means-testing anybody who comes for food. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t need the food, so who the hell cares? But more on that in Part 3.

First, our background is that we had become involved in a grant-funded hunger project out of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1983 called “The Whole World Family Supper.” We were the promo team and designed the brochures, wrote the letters, maintained the contact lists, etc. for the project. It didn’t get that far before the grant ran out (and we moved away), but my favorite aspect was that it chose a day – Thanksgiving – and enlisted missions/NGOs in many countries and depressed areas of the US to sponsor a giant pot-luck get-together on that day, the price of admission being a dish for the meal and at least two “guests” who could not afford to feast.

When we moved from Tulsa we located in northeastern Florida. There we became fast friends with a retired Air Force officer who maintained a boatyard in Saint Augustine. He loved the family supper idea so much that he became official host for the Thanksgiving pot-luck every year, setting up sawhorse and plywood tables end-to-end the entire length of the roofed dry-dock shelter (which made the spread at least 100 feet long). He also pit-roasted three huge turkeys and two ample hams every year, which were donated from two local grocery stores and the owners of the boatyard. The crowd was always colorful and culturally diverse, the smorgasbord piled with vegan dishes, every kind of vegetable dish you can imagine, more pounds of mashed potatoes and yams than should be allowed by law, veggie and turkey gravy in two-quart pitchers (constantly refilled), rolls and homemade bread loaves by the dozen, cranberry sauce and fruit dishes by the bushel, one 4×8 tabletop completely full of piled pies of every variety, and enough tea, lemonade and fruit juice to quench an army’s thirst! Again, price of admission was at least one dish of food and at least 2 people who otherwise would not eat a feast on Thanksgiving. There were often well over a hundred people present, and the feast lasted the whole weekend (lots of campers in the yard).

Thus for us, getting good food into hungry people’s mouths is sort of a “personal mission.” This is America, there’s just no excuse for chronic hunger. Thus shortly after we moved to the mountain I was appalled to discover one day while taking the trash to the county dumpsters that in this rural area where almost everybody’s got a garden going and there are always trucks full of produce in summer in parking lots or by the side of the road, there were whole families of “Dumpster People.”
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Feeding The Hungry – Part 1

Recognizing Hunger In Your Neighborhood

This will be a series over the next few weeks about a subject that too many of us try hard not to think about, and which too many believe does not impact their immediate neighborhood or region. People in America are going hungry, and for a number of reasons from apathy to pride to a real shortage of government funding, are not being fed. If you don’t think it affects you or your town or county, you’re sadly mistaken.

This series is about ways to tackle that problem head-on, and perhaps build a network of friends and neighbors who will help. Not a church-based group, or a government program, or something officially sponsored in ways that can end up harming the effort over time. Just people – the more the better – making sure that no one inside their sphere of influence goes hungry. The very BEST people to spearhead such projects are homesteaders, primarily due to our strong and energetic commitments to our own self-sufficiency. We’ve lots to offer, and everyone can benefit.

My family homesteads in the deep countryside, but not all successful homesteaders are rural dwellers. There is a huge urban homesteading movement that has been growing steadily over more than a decade, from the days when old inner-city neighborhoods full of boarded-up, badly neglected but once gracious homes were offered for sale for practically nothing to upwardly mobile Yuppies who would fix them up and turn the neighborhoods around. In many cities this movement has revitalized neighborhoods dramatically, and their mixed race and income status has not hampered efforts to form neighborhood solidarity and outreach.

On that level we rural homesteaders seem to be somewhat lagging behind, as we simply don’t have a lot of close neighbors and tend to be quite a bit more isolated, at least in the early years. I’ve been trying hard to promote the idea of changing that by networking with like-minded neighbors as well as old-timers, getting involved in local school and community projects, volunteering here and there, joining the County Chamber, offering extension courses, etc. Sure, we’ve more miles to travel (and with the price of gasoline lately, that can be a significant barrier to physical networking), but we’ve also got more skills and resources to offer than your average city-dweller.

Food issues are increasingly coming to the political foreground with food shortages and riots spreading across the world, increasing costs, poor farming practices, etc. Worse, many of those issues overlap energy issues – costs of fuel, transportation, chemical farming, pollution, etc. So I’m going to devote some posts here to those issues, and have added some food links to the blogroll that specialize in the broad overlapping political issues as well. I hope my readers will visit those sites regularly and get involved as much as possible in designing solutions from the homestead (urban or rural) that will help to address those issues.

For my part, I’m going to open Part 2 of this series with a description of hunger projects I’ve been involved in through the years, the better to promote my current project later in the series, one begun as one of my very first networking efforts after we moved to our mountain homestead 16 years ago.

“This Is America. No One Should Go Hungry.”

Posts to This Series:

Feeding the Hungry – Part 1
Feeding the Hungry – Part 2
Feeding the Hungry – Part 3

Earth Day ‘08

In honor of Earth Day (April 22) and Earth Week (April 20-26), I went on over to EPA’s Earth Day Events & Volunteer Opportunities page to see what’s happening in my neck of the woods. I live in region 4, which includes the entire southeast plus Kentucky. If you’d like to pick up on some opportunities in your region, just click on the map and the list comes up.

In Atlanta the Children’s Museum is sponsoring one of the biggest regional events for kids. EPA has a character called “Mother Earth” who will distribute vegetable seeds and help children plant them in pots, and she’ll be giving away sun visors for the “SunWise Parade” through the museum. Sounds like fun, but I’ve no little kids and it’s way too far to drive.

Lots happening in Florida, but I won’t be there until Saturday – for a funeral, alas. Knoxville isn’t that far to go for their Earthfest event on Saturday, but I’ll be in Florida then. Oh, well. Looks like there’s just not much happening – at least, nothing government sponsored – in my Western North Carolina mountains. But wow! I’m looking out my window right now at the new green baby leaves on my hardwood forest, at gorgeous sprays of white-white dogwood scattered throughout, the red azaleas are in full dress around my garden bench, the tulips and cala lilies and jonquils are everywhere, wildflowers are popping up in the garden terraces where I didn’t plant them…

There are some great ideas available on the International Earth Day site, and interesting news and projects on the EarthdayNetwork website.

Hmmm. I’m guessing the best thing I could do today is sip some nice fresh mint tea while sitting on my garden bench planning all the hard work I need to do to get the place in order. It’s a perfect 72 degrees and the sun is intermittent. Happy Earth Day and Earth Week, all you hopeless nature-lovers!

Links:

Earth Day goes political and corporate
International Earth Day
EarthdayNetwork
EPA’s Earth Day Events & Volunteer Opportunities

Cool “Eco-Tourism” Ideas for Homesteaders

I’ve been looking around at vacation ideas, delighted to discover a nifty partnership and grant program involving folks like the Ag department, the cooperative extension services, the park and forest services and even state and local arts councils, which they’re cleverly calling “Agritourism”. It’s really quite the innovative way to put some capital and ideas to work in the rural sector. Innovative, that is, unless you’re old enough to remember the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal.

I know that a lot of committed homesteaders spend their vacation time working on the ’stead instead of jaunting off to ski in Switzerland or tromping through the Amazon, but it’s really nice to take a few days off and at least get off the property for awhile. And the best part of supporting initiatives like agritourism is that it’s really, truly Green!

Even better, it’s Green without costing a bundle. It always seems kind of funny to me when things show up in my searches (this time it was “green vacations”) that simply don’t apply to anybody I know or hope to know in the idle rich jet-setter category. Ah, well. Maybe “Green” jet-setting is a new fad like bottled water – you know, the dumb things people do to look really cool without a thought to whether it’s actually cool or not. For instance…

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Your Perfect Homestead Christmas Tree

It’s now just one week until Christmas Eve. Have you found and installed your Christmas tree yet? The holidays around this homestead require a tree that must go up the week before Christmas and come down a week after Christmas, so let me lend a few homestead hints on that particular subject…

Our family stopped buying commercially produced Christmas trees as soon as we moved to our homestead in serious Christmas tree country. They’re a regular Big Cash Crop here, but take years to grow and a lot of work trimming so they’ll have just the right thickness and shape. Heck, there are Christmas tree farms in our immediate region that’ll let you come in with a hand saw and cut your own!

But that’s not what we do. We do have a cathedral ceiling in our little living room from when the loft was built, so we like our trees to be 15 feet tall. But even though Scotch pines and hemlocks and Frasier Firs grow wild on our property and in the forest around us, they’re rangy and thin from growing in a forest. You’ll have this if you don’t carefully trim your growing trees in view of future Christmases.

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