The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

In 2011 a full quarter of the U.S. population are dependent on food stamps. As unemployment keeps on rising, the government strangely keeps slashing the food stamp budget to appease nutty Republican radicals who insist those hardest hit by the Great Recession are just “lazy” and undeserving of aid that might require corporations and billionaires to pay taxes. Why one of the political parties in our nation believes that Americans will quietly and without complaint starve to death in the streets in order to protect billionaires from paying as much of their income in taxes as their chauffeur does has never been explained by the financial sector’s pundits at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Major cognitive disconnect.

But serious food supply issues encompass much more than just market manipulation and governmental paralysis. Consider some of these issues while attempting to get a picture of how dire the overall situation is…

Honey Laundering: China’s at it again – Adulterating pet and human foods with melamine wasn’t bad enough – though one corporate scapegoat was executed by the Chinese government hoping to save its place as cheap ingredients supplier to the world – the latest food scam involves honey. Not just fake honey in those little bee-shaped plastic bottles, Chinese honey brokers are creating honey by mixing sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn/rice syrup, barley malt and a variety of unrefined sugars. Failure to police storage requirements has resulted in heavy metal contamination as well, primarily lead.

If you’ve been thinking about beekeeping for honey (and handy pollinators), this is the year to get busy on it. Extension services in many rural counties offer literature, evening classes, and instructions on building hives. Agents often know who in the area builds hives for sale, and aren’t shy of giving out that information. Many people who are trying hard to eat better and healthier are being taken in by the Chinese honey scam, and big food processors using that fake honey in their supposedly ‘natural’ food lines are risking their markets. Grow your own honey or buy locally from someone honest.

Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector – Late July brought the second largest tainted meat recall so far, when Cargill’s meat packing division recalled ~36 million pounds of ground turkey products tainted with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella. The biggest recall was in 2008, when a slaughterhouse in California recalled 143 million pounds of beef due to allowing downer cows into the mix. The dangers to public health from e.coli, salmonella, listeria and other bacteria, and from adulterants and contaminates are high, yet our government doesn’t give the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] the power to force food recalls. Companies have to do this voluntarily, and they don’t often volunteer until people start dying and CDC tracks the source down.

If your family eats meat, now is the time to seriously consider raising your own or contracting with a neighbor who raises meat animals. A side of beef from a calf pastured for a year, dressed whole chickens raised happily free range, maybe rabbit stew meat, a slab of locally smoked bacon and/or ham… buying from known sources or doing it yourself could easily save your family’s lives. The more that control of our commercial food supply gets concentrated into the greedy hands of a few, the more danger is present overall. Avoid it like the plague it truly is.

The Nation has a good article looking at How change is going to come in the food system despite united resistance of the big corporate players to cater to public demands for better, less adulterated and far less fattening foods. There is a lot of good information in this article’s analysis to arm yourself with when next you try arguing with a friend, relative or acquaintance about the importance of healthy food and the severe shortage of it in our commercial food supply.

And finally, the good news. The New York Times informs us that vegetable gardens are booming in a fallow economy. We homesteaders have of course known this all along – and have done more than our share to get more people digging and grow the local markets – but we should always welcome mainstream coverage that helps to spread awareness. Recent movement in many states to allow the use of food stamps at farmer’s markets and bulk purchases straight from farmers are helping more people to get more and better food than they could purchase in the grocery store.

Many localities are also sponsoring seed exchanges through the Lions or Ruritan, sometimes through local Chambers of Commerce, 4-H and FFA clubs at high schools. These have committees in charge of getting open-pollinated seeds from local gardeners and farmers, packaging them, and then distributing them free in the late winter and early spring to local residents planning their season’s garden crops. Local schools and civic clubs are offering gardening classes and contacts to suppliers of tool exchanges, equipment like chicken coops and bee hives, and farmers who sell chicks, calves, kids and kits to those wishing to raise their own meat animals. Local butchers are making a comeback, and in many states the Extension Service offers classes all the way up to Master Gardening certification. So get busy, and get your neighbors busy making best use of all these developing local alternatives to Big Ag and Big Food, Inc. We will be a much happier and healthier nation for it, and probably much smarter as a people for our awareness and direct involvement in this most important aspect of everybody’s lives.

Links:

NYT: Vegetable Gardens Are Booming
How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System
Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector
Honey Laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey
Risks of tainted food rise as inspections drop

Yet as is true of all the ‘best’ tools to amass for homesteading purposes, the question of what type of weaponry one may need is tied to what type of situations any weapon will be expected to deal with. Sometimes that may mean firearms. The homesteader will have to take into consideration what types of wild animals are most likely to be encountered in their location, whether or not someone in the family hunts for food, the likelihood of having to put down injured livestock, and any property or personal protection needs the family may encounter. In many cases the best tool for the job – and the person wielding the tool – could be a BB or pellet gun. Which is surprisingly effective at discouraging bears from the trash or compost without actually hurting them so as to leave an injured bear on the property (a real, live danger). These can be well less than deadly, but also come with CO2 cartridges that can turn them into effective small game/bird hunting weapons.

Your basic pump-action pellet gun will also discourage a fox from the henhouse without killing it, but you’ll probably have to spend enough time guarding the henhouse with it that the fox learns to associate chickens with the ouch. If you are a good enough shot with a long, compound or crossbow, these weapons are every bit as deadly as a rifle for most encountered critters that must be killed. There are entire weeks set aside in my area for bow hunting game, and there is never a shortage of hunters making use of the no-gun time span. Just remember that arrows are as deadly as bullets – small children don’t need access to pointy sticks of any variety. Older kids often take to archery like ducks to water, which is why it’s a regular feature in many youth organizations’ listed activities.

For actual firearms individuals will need to be aware of various regulations and responsibilities associated. Traditionally, homestead firearms have fallen into the long gun classification – rifles and/or shotguns. The caliber of long gun you may need should be dictated by what you’re most likely to be shooting, and how good an aim you are. You have to be a pretty good shot to kill a chicken-stealing fox with a .22, while also being educated enough about guns to know a .22 won’t stop an angry bear (but just make him angrier). And despite what you may remember from fictional television westerns, no kind of gun is the best weapon against a snake. Having had to deal with a rabid raccoon at our homestead this summer – big threat to pets and kids as well as all other wildlife in the area – the mess you can expect with a shotgun can be justified by being able to kill quickly and surely with just one pull of the trigger.

For home protection, the homesteader is in the same boat as anyone else with the expectation that the likeliest target in a showdown will be human. Some deep and honest soul-searching is required before rushing off to the gun shop, more than just the question of what type or caliber of gun you should get. If you honestly can’t think of any situation where you could shoot at another human being, don’t get any kind of gun for home protection. Bluffing with an unloaded gun can get you killed in a tense situation much quicker than simply giving a burglar what he came for.

If you have small children in the home or who visit regularly, keeping a handgun where it would be handy to YOU in an emergency situation could well prove way more dangerous to your family than not having a gun at all. My husband and I chose early on in our homesteading life not to own any kind of handgun due to a steady supply of children around the place at various times. Even though there have been a couple occasions over the past twenty years when grandpa’s shotgun did have to be pointed in the general direction of invading humans (home/property defense), in neither case would a handgun of any variety have served better.

Trust Mother Earth News to have excellent information on this very subject. This link is to an available 6-page article, and there are links to Mother’s over coverage in a sidebar. I think most homesteaders can get a very good feel for the questions and issues there.

Pioneer Living has some good member discussions some may find informative, and Homesteader Life blog has treated the subject as well. The FreeLibrary offers a good article on the .22 as an entirely adequate weapon from Countryside Publications, .22 caliber: the homesteader’s weapon. It also takes a look at various types auto-loaders and the handgun vs. rifle pros and cons. Much good information is out there for anyone planning to enter a homesteading lifestyle, or is just now getting around to meeting the challenges of said lifestyle that would call for designed-to-be-deadly tools.

Meanwhile, for those of us who started our homesteading life with Better Homes and Gardens in our monthly magazine roundup along with Mother Earth and Organic Gardening, I have just recently discovered what is to me a ‘new’ high-end country-living (or just consuming) rag: Garden & Gun. A friend’s newly-opened establishment in WNC was featured in the June/July issue of Garden & Gun “Summer in the South” review issue, thus I encountered this publication. I’ve gone ahead and paid for a subscription, as I can see this will be a new favorite of mine in the rotating magazine rack.

Useful Links:

Choosing a Homestead Firearm
.22 caliber: the homesteader’s weapon
Homestead Guns and Some Thoughts…

I’ve been looking into the various classified ads locally for livestock I want, to get an idea on budgeting first for proper quartering and actual animals. Chickens are of course a first choice. Also want bees, been looking at hives and queens for sale. If I can site them properly, bears shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Goats are sometime in the future, will need more fencing than we’ve got.

On those classified pages I discovered an awful lot of meat rabbits for sale, and remembered some homesteader friends in Virginia about 25 years ago who were big into meat rabbits. At the time we’d recently become vegetarian and I rejected the idea for our just-started homestead, but all these years later I think the ease of raising rabbits might make them an excellent livestock choice… so long as I don’t have to be the one who slaughters and prepares them for sale. There are surprisingly ample markets locally for good rabbit meat, especially organically raised. Even including some of the high-end eateries and B&Bs who are my regular fresh organic herb and sauce customers.

I ordered a book entitled Raising Rabbits to Survive, which promises to be a very handy reference and educational tool. Even better, the book comes with 5 supplemental books covering just about everything you need to know.

In the meantime and most serendipitously, I also encountered an interesting 5-part blog series about the same subject, which is immediately accessible. Looks like this is something my homestead should be seriously aiming for, before the year is out.

Many of you, like me, will remember raising and keeping rabbits as pets as kids back when we lived in far more urban areas, and think bout how rabbits as livestock could be a considerable cog in our self-sufficiency machinery as homesteaders. Because homesteading these days isn’t always about living way out in the country.

Rabbits are quiet, they don’t take up much room, and with proper care and feeding will readily reproduce on an amazingly quick schedule. You might be surprised that there’s a market for rabbit meat, but homesteaders I knew a quarter century ago raised meat rabbits as well as chickens and goats, for that very purpose. They never could manage to saturate the market. Go surfing through some of the internet’s ample offerings of food and recipe sites for “rabbit recipes.” You’ll get way more than just a camp version of rabbit stew. Things like honey roast rabbit, Chinese sweet and sour rabbit, fried rabbit in breadcrumbs, Louisiana Creole rabbit… the possibilities are endless.

One Rabbit Recipe site notes that rabbit meat is high in protein, low in fat, uric acid, cholesterol, sodium and calories. It is also easily digested and is recommended in diets that restrict red meat. Rabbit is all white meat, fine grained and has a mild flavor. It substitutes well for any recipe calling for veal or poultry. I haven’t personally eaten meat (other than fish) for about 40 years, but I’m not averse to growing rabbits as an organic meat offering if I don’t have to do the slaughtering. I’m fairly sure I could find someone locally who would do the job for a cut of sale price at any of a dozen local organic meats suppliers and cooperatives.

So. How easy or hard is it to go with raising rabbits as a homestead food stock? Apparently not that hard, or even terribly expensive. If you’re willing to do the work. Here’s an overview of the series by DawnG I mentioned, and hope interested readers will take the time to check each installment out. They each contain valuable and useful information.

Part 1 introduces the many good reasons to consider rabbits as livestock, and lists some of the downsides. Such as how difficult it is to not love them as pets. Which for many of us, might be overwhelming.

Part 2 talks about food independence on the homestead, even if you don’t plan to make money (or trade) on your stock. Very good rundown on the details of proper housing for the rabbits, food and watering details, and things to look out for. DawnG also suggests supplying your rabbits with toys, as their teeth grow perpetually and they need things to chew on as well as to play with.

Part 3 looks in depth at rabbit food, commercial and supplementals. She includes the proper protein/fiber ratio for producing the best meat, and varying feed requirements depending on season. Some of the supplementals are things our homesteads can provide quite readily for free, which means they won’t be an added expense. Grass hay, sunflower seeds, fresh or dried fruit, fresh veggies and herbs, weeds and lawn clippings, etc. I figure all the bruised and otherwise compromised fruit and veggies I usually compost could go through rabbits first. Then I could compost the droppings!

Part 4 looks at the best breeds to get as your original breeding stock, and what to look for in each one as to health and pedigree. I had no idea there were so many meat breeds, or that there are show rabbits, and stud rabbits, and an entire sub-business involved in selling such rabbits to other homesteaders for starting their stock. Maybe that’s something a vegetarian could go for as far as participating in meat production.

Part 5 gets into the nitty-gritty about… um… rabbit sex. How old your buck and does should be before you let them breed, what to look out for, what records to keep to ensure your best breeders are the ones producing stock (and not getting eaten), and how to care properly for pregnant does and fresh litters. Also advice on paying attention to mothering traits, culling does that don’t measure up.

All terribly interesting, not very expensive an investment, and something to seriously consider as part of our homesteading adventures. The economy isn’t scheduled to get any better for at least a decade, as social support systems are scheduled to be cut to the bone or entirely eliminated. Self and community sufficiency is only going to become more and more important in the coming years, we homesteaders need to be ahead of the game.

Links:

Raising Rabbits to Survive

Series: A Rabbit in Every Pot – DawnG
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

As the situation in Fukushima, Japan is not getting any better – thus the bulk of my terraces aren’t yet tilled and crops not yet planted – I thought it might be a good time to talk about something different. Homemade pet foods and treats! Not just leftover tuna for the cats, or plate-licking for the pooches, but real, honest to goodness pet foods and treats you can make in the kitchen for your furry housemates.

The last couple of years have been tragically tainted with the scandal of Chinese protein imports containing more melamine (a plastic they make dinnerware out of) than actual protein. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of pets died painfully in the wake of the scandal, and babies who got melamine in their infant formula suffered and died as well. So for many animal-lovers, having some ready recipes for tasty, nutritionally balanced (even vegetarian!) pet foods and treats will be welcome.

On our homestead we have 1.5 dogs (our shepherd/lab mix Lady Starfish and McDuff the Border Collie who spends half the year with us), 4 cats and two birds. Someday we want chickens and goats, but we’re going to need some serious bear and fox proof fencing first. These are the pets. We feed the dogs and cats a diet exclusively of dry, higher end food. Through the years we’ve had various vets and other experts explain why this is a better diet than cans of by-products. Avoiding kidney problems in older animals and dental caries (not to mention ‘dog breath’) is good enough for me.

If you read the labels on various mid-range and high end ‘diets’ by major manufacturers, you will find what might be a surprising amount of grains and vegetables. Even though dogs and cats are indeed carnivores, they – dogs much more importantly than cats – need some plant foods as well. Most pet owners know that their animals will eat dinner leftovers with relish and grass/weeds when they’re feeling ill, but it’s good to know what kinds of grains and vegetables are best digested. And what kinds of foods to strictly avoid. Some of the recipes below give a good indication of that.

First, here are some good links to recipe and sharing sites that offer a variety of foods, snacks and other nifty pet things (like dog shampoo, toys, cat litter and more) that you can produce at the homestead.

Savvy Homemade: Pet Food, Treats and More
Healthy Recipes for Pets
Home Cooked Pet Diets

For the carnivore part of your homemade pet foods – animal proteins and fats carnivores need in their diets – you will want to stay away from byproducts as much as possible. Remember that cats require more fat in their diets than dogs do. So if you bulk purchase ground beef, turkey or chicken, be sure to add extra fat for the cats. This can be chicken fat, beef tallow. Do NOT feed pork, bacon grease or lard to cats, avoid it for dogs. Unless your dog works for a living – like herding sheep or some other physically demanding job – he usually doesn’t need additional fat in the diet than what comes in your basic ground meat.

You will want to purchase a nice supply of certain fats and oils in those gel-caps that can be punctured with a pin and squeezed out. Vitamin E, fish (cod liver) oil and Omega-3 are highly recommended. Powdered kelp capsules and plain flaked nutritional yeast are good to keep on hand in some bulk. Garlic oil gel caps can be substituted for chopped garlic in many recipes, avoid onions. Dairy products are useful, but you want mostly the casine (protein) from milk and not the lactose and other things. Eggs are excellent sources of both protein and fat, more high-quality than meat, poultry or fish. Cooked eggs are better than raw. You can refrigerate dry cottage cheese and pour off the liquid before using, but live-culture (unpasteurized) yogurt is well tolerated by pets even if they usually don’t tolerate dairy well.

Carbohydrates can come from grains like rice or wheat, or from potatoes (dogs do better than cats with this carbohydrate). Cook these before you measure out for a recipe. Leftover pasta without sauce is good. Oatmeal adds fiber, as do vegetables. Suggested vegetable foods include carrots, peas, pumpkins, beets, even squash from the garden. Other good choices for fiber include rice and wheat bran.

Cats need about 25% fat in their diet. Chicken fat is better tolerated and more nutritious than beef, don’t give them lard. Dogs and cats both need supplemental calcium, which you can provide from bone meal or ground up antacids such as Rolaids, Tums, etc. Avoid adding excess amounts of vitamins A and D, which can be toxic to pets.

Now for a few simple recipes. Do click the links to sites that offer a variety of recipes, read up on the needs of your pets, and experiment a little! Your furry friends will love you all the more for it, and are certain to express their approval and preferences on favorites.

Vegetarian Kibble for Dogs

4 cups 3-grain (unsweetened) dry cereal
2 cups soy flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp. bone meal
1 Tbsp. nutritional yeast
1 Tbsp. powdered kelp
1 tsp. cod liver oil
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 tsp. vitamin E
4 eggs

Mix dry ingredients, add wet ingredients and stir until moist and well-mixed. Drop 1/2 tsp. at a time on greased cookie sheets and bake at 350º for 30 minutes until lightly browned. Cool and serve, or store in air tight covered container.

Fresh Breath Dog Biscuits

1.5 cups whole wheat flour
1.5 cups unbleached whole wheat bread flour
2 Tbsp. baking soda
1/2 cup chopped fresh mint leaves
1/4 cup milk
4 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 egg
1.5 Tbsp. dark molasses

Combine all ingredients in a food processor or beat with a mixer until if forms a ball. Press or roll out between sheets of waxed paper to 1/2″ thickness. Cut into 1×2″ strips and place on lightly greased cookie sheets. Bake at 375º for 20 minutes until lightly browned. Cool and store in an air tight container.

Fishy Feast for Cats

1 tin of fish in oil – sardines or any other tinned small fish steaks
1/2 cup soft cooked rice (preferably brown)
1/2 tsp. finely chopped fresh parsley or 1/4 tsp. dry

Mix all ingredients well in a food processor. Store in tightly closed container in the fridge.

Kitty Kibble

3 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups soy flour
1 cup wheat germ
1 cup coarse cornmeal
1 cup nonfat dry milk
1/2 cup nutritional (brewer’s) yeast
1 tin of fish in oil – sardines, mackerel or other fish steaks)
5 Tbsp. vegetable oil
2 cups water

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mash fish in a separate bowl until it is chunky, add to the dry ingredients along with the oil and water. Add more water a little at a time if the mixture is too dry – you want a doughy mix you can roll. Roll between wax paper sheets to 1/4″ thickness. Cut with a knife into 1/4 inch squares (bite size pieces). Place pieces one layer thick onto lightly greased baking sheets and bake at 350º for 25 minutes. Toss them after 12 minutes so they bake evenly to a light brown. Keep in air tight container in the fridge.

So, all you animal lovers out there, get busy finding your way into your pets’ heart with some yummy goodies!

Links:

Savvy Homemade: Pet Food, Treats and More
Healthy Recipes for Pets
Home Cooked Pet Diets
Home Made Cat Food

Most environmentally aware people try to keep up with the science, the debates, and the drafting of policy that will hopefully address Global Climate Change (a.k.a. Global Warming). The hope is that we can diminish human contributions to greenhouse gases before the planet becomes unlivable. Things like developing energy sources that don’t require raping the earth or poisoning the air and water (Mountaintop Removal) or never-ending oil wars, conservation at home and at work, switching urban transportation fleets to biodiesel, purchasing hybrid cars, commitments to rebuilding infrastructure such as the electrical grid so it doesn’t ‘lose’ nearly half of our generation capacity, ending the decimation of tropical rainforests, etc.

And many of the people young and old who are paying attention and doing what they can to mitigate their own carbon footprints are also well aware that with some tweaking of our antiquated agricultural policies that were originally designed to ‘beat’ the Soviets in some kind of mock Cold War game of who can produce the most corn, we could be saving 20% of our fossil fuel consumption simply by switching the nation’s primary shipping systems – trains, ships and semi fleets – to biodiesel made with alternative feedstock crops. Along with our agricultural machinery. A combine can run just fine on biodiesel – or, with a pre-heater refit, straight vegetable oil.

Yet there’s a huge contributor to climate change that people don’t seem to be particularly aware of or take seriously as far as choices they could make to lessen their own impact. It’s not about carbon dioxide, which is the primary focus of most attempts to mitigate Global Warming, but about other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane. For these the agricultural sector is again the most significant contributor, and it all revolves around our hard-to-kick habit of eating way too much meat.

Meat production accounts for a majority of the deforestation both in the tropics and temperate regions. Researchers from Johns Hopkins published a paper in the journal Public Health Nutrition last year examining the shortcomings of media reporting about agricultural (thus food choices) contributions to climate change which illustrates why this aspect of the issue is escaping so many otherwise concerned citizens.

According to the United Nations meat production accounts for 9% of human CO2 production. Yet meat production accounts for 65% of humanity’s contribution of nitrous oxide, which has nearly 300 times the greenhouse impact of carbon dioxide! Meat production further produces 37% of the methane contribution (a gas 23 tomes more greenhouse potent than CO2) and 64% of ammonia – a potent contributor to acid rain. Land use dedicated to livestock production includes 30% of the planet’s entire land surface and 33% of global arable land just for growing food for those cattle, swine, chickens and such. Together, livestock production accounts for a fifth of all global emissions. Which is higher than all transportation sources combined.

Truth is that feed enough to produce a single pound of steak could provide adequate nutrition for 5 humans. Not to mention livestock production’s contributions to water shortages and pollution loads, epidemic obesity in the population that for some reason believes it needs meat 4 or 5 times a day, thus serious contributions to the notably lousy health of our population across the board – and cost of health care for so many obese, sickly meat-eaters.

Beef and lamb are the most inefficient and most polluting meats, pork is a bit more GHG efficient (but not less polluting per water quality and usage), chicken is lowest. By simply not eating meat during one meal a day, we could cut our GHG emissions overall by more than 10%. Individuals could still maintain their weight problems, hardened arteries and high cholesterol levels just fine despite skipping the bacon or strip steak once a day. If they chose to eat meat only once a day, they might lose some weight and find themselves in better overall health while lessening their personal contribution to global climate change by half!

Chances are that the world’s governments aren’t going to do enough in the next decade or two to delay or prevent massive global climate change and all the deadly consequences of that to humans and the rest of the life we share this planet with. Chances are that individual people’s diet and lifestyle choices will kill them sooner than they might have liked no matter what governments do or don’t do in the future. For those of us who have made serious lifestyle choices to become more responsible and more aware by doing as much as we can for ourselves, we’ve a big investment is staying healthy and active, in wholesome food production and preservation, and in educating our children, friends and neighbors toward healthier lifestyles and smaller footprints on the face of the earth.

Everyone dies in the end, all generations. The questions today are how much of the world will we take with us when we go, and how much will we leave to future generations so they have a chance to experience life too. We faced a similar dilemma with our vast arsenals of WMDs a generation ago, and while it still plays a role in international tensions, we no longer live our lives under Damocles’ Sword threatening to make us extinct 400+ times over just because we can. A decision was made in the ether of humanity’s collective consciousness to have a future, to allow life to continue its evolutionary journey on this rock. We could make such a decision again, without too much sacrifice and both we and future generations would be much healthier and happier for it.

Pick a day and go meatless. Pick a meal and skip the meat in it every day. Switch to chicken and stop eating beef or pork or lamb apart from holidays once or twice a year. If enough of us did just that much we might buy the future some time, and time is a precious – but diminishing – commodity right now.

Here are some links to sources readers may find helpful in educating themselves about this aspect of global climate change, and possibly for help in making the right choices…

WaPo: The Meat of the Problem

AAAS: Climate-Friendly Dining … Meats

IA State: Food, Fuel and Freeways

Why is the Media Afraid to Tackle Livestock’s Role in Climate Change?

Cornell: Food for Livestock or People

In view of recent weeks’ events concerning an off-season outbreak of a new flu strain in Mexico that quickly spread around the world – and caused WHO to get all the way to 5 on its pandemic alert system before things eased somewhat – it’s a good idea for those of us in the 21st century’s “back to the land” movement to examine some issues with livestock production in general and how we get around those issues on our own homesteads. Many homesteaders avoid livestock, but many others keep chickens, a cow or more, goats, pigs, rabbits, and some pasture a few calves every year destined for the organic beef market. What does all this mean for us?

Thus far the new flu strain, which according to the CDC is a “unique” mixture of human, avian and swine flu strains, looks to have originated in the CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation] system of swine production for human food. These operations, where thousands of animals are confined in close quarters and intensively fed for maximum weight gain in minimum time, can according to researchers and epidemiologists serve as fertile genetic recombination factories for the various strains of influenza due to lack of good waste management practices and regulation, proximity of swine CAFOs to avian CAFOs, water contamination, worker contact with infected animals. Add to that the difficulty of dealing with viral rates of mutation as well as getting effective vaccines into production from one year to the next, and you end up with a situation of concern not only to public health authorities, but also to small producers who happen to live anywhere close to such intensive CAFO operations.

Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, Inc. has been linked to the current swine flu outbreak via one of its “outsourced” CAFO operations in Central Mexico. The number of Smithfield CAFOs in contiguous counties in eastern NC have long been causing problems with water and air pollution that should be of serious concern to residents both urban and rural, whether or not they eat pork (or any meat at all). And the proximity of any CAFO operation in the proximity of your homestead may affect all sorts of decisions about whether to keep livestock, what kind of livestock you will keep, and how all aspects of your involvement should be managed.

If you share a watershed, reservoir source or well aquifer with any CAFOs, or if air currents are such that your family can occasionally smell the waste from an avian (chickens, turkeys) or mammal (cattle, hogs) CAFO, the concerns are serious. If you sell milk, eggs or meat to customers in the community, you may also find yourself afoul of the NAIS (National Animal ID System) – but that’s another story.

There is no vaccine for avian flu in bird CAFOs or on the homestead. It can and often is spread by migrating wild fowl, so the best protection for your free range chickens is to keep their range to a reasonable area (which you’ll want to do anyway to keep them safe from predators), keep their coop and bedding clean even if you drag the coop regularly, keep their water supply separate and apart from ponds where wild fowl water, and cull any chickens displaying signs of illness.

There are vaccines for hogs to protect against several varieties of swine flu, though those change annually as do human viruses. There is no vaccine for the current strain, or the one begun in NC a few years ago, but if you’ve a pig or two each season, it wouldn’t hurt to get them the latest vaccine if you’re anywhere close to a swine CAFO. Again, keep their water fresh and separate from possibly contaminated sources (streams and rivers that bear a waste load from upstream intensives), never feed them raw slaughterhouse waste or uncooked meat/fat scraps.

Goats have their own share of health issues, but nothing like cattle, swine or fowl. Best to call the vet if they’re off their milk or feed, looking and acting ill, etc. You don’t want to be dosing any of the livestock on antibiotics as a regular thing, but if you’ve dairy goats or cows, beware of mastitis and such – they’ll get better with a few day’s treatment, discard their milk for the duration.

Many homesteaders raise rabbits for meat. Rabbits are almost always kept in confinement, so your best bet with them is to make sure their cages are large enough to let them move about freely, and they should also be kept clean. Whenever a cage is empty, clean it out thoroughly with bleach water before putting in new bedding and introducing new animals.

With all livestock, do NOT harvest sick animals. Sick culls and animals that die of mysterious causes should be either buried deep enough to prevent wild animals from digging them up or cremated. There is a lot of information out there for the proper care and feeding of home-grown livestock, and your area extension service will also have good advice, vet recommendations and literature you can get for free. Before going into livestock, get to know others in your area that already have stock, and talk to them at length over some nice iced tea about the details. Most are very willing to help you out, not only with information and good advice, but often with starter stock as well.

And where you get your starter stock counts. Check out the breeder and his/her operations to ensure you’re not getting animals with genetic or disease issues. Some sources are listed below, and I’ll have more information about specific types of farmstead livestock in future posts.

Links:

One Acre Farm: Homestead Livestock
Countryside: Livestock on the Homestead
Small-statured animals
Miniature Dairy Cattle
Swine flu strain has genetic roots in U.S.A.
Swine Flu Story Illuminates Disease and Injustice
La Vida Locavore: Swine Flu

Now that the weather’s turned officially cold and the wood stove is going all day and night, there’s time to reflect upon the year and make new plans for the future. I’m still working on how to get “free range” chickens that won’t get eaten by the many foxes and coyotes that haunt our cove, sans the serious fencing we can’t afford. Also working on finding some metal fence poles for the garden fence through our local Freecycle network, nobody’s willing to come off any so far.

I find my mind once again drifting toward renting a backhoe for a week and dredging down in the creek so I’ll have a set of three tiers of pond that I can stock with rainbow trout. So I’ve been looking into the whole aquaculture thing, the issues with pollution and antibiotics and quality of feed, cost of fingerlings from the state, etc. What kind of engineering do I have to do to my creek? What kind of pollution controls? Who gets to police my little trap-falls?

After two days’ worth of homework, I’ve decided that my plan doesn’t fall under the regulatory purview of the state beyond their “stocking rivers and creeks” section. Yes, since it’s private land I’ll have to pay for the fingerlings, but because these pools won’t be anything but slightly-dammed hold-backs the size of my back deck, there should be no issues about waste pollution or anything like that. I will probably need a permit from the state in order to get the fingerlings, but once they’ve determined the operation is so minor as to not really qualify as “commercial,” it shouldn’t cost that much. Sell a few dozen fish a year.

I’ll put fingerlings in the top pool, twice as many as I figure will live long enough to make it to the second pool after a year. When it comes time to transfer with 6-8 inches long. I figure the second tier will be big enough to hold about a hundred small fish comfortably without moving them to cannibalism, and I’ll feed them regularly with quality food.

The third pool will hold full grown trout until they’re ready for market. Now, you (or I) can cook up a fine meal of fresh trout from 6 or 7-inchers, and I’m pretty sure I will. But to sell to local eateries and B&Bs, I’m thinking bigger specimens. That’s a cash crop as well as occasional protein for the family.

The price varies according to where you sell the fish, and how you sell it. I’d not be farming enough to be a big supplier, but there are some fine eateries that already buy whatever organic herbs, veggies, sauces and such that I can produce. A 12″ trout should give two filets of about a pound apiece. This means the facility can offer a a total of four meals, each with 8-oz fresh rainbow filet (plus rice and whatever veggies) from each foot-long trout. Currently, $15.00 per fish isn’t unreasonable even wholesale, as trout is an expensive item in these already-pricey establishments. An 18″ fish could easily go for $20.00, as it will provide two more 8-oz. filets. If I have to do the filet-ing, it’s gonna cost ‘em more! Even though I can put the leavings in the Pogie-Matic (blender) and compost separately for great organic fish fertilizer for the garden…

For whole trout dishes (grilled, top closed in sassafras smoke is the most amazing thing EVER), most restaurants prefer trout in the 8″ range, and these can go for around $10.00 per fish. If I stock new fingerlings every spring, I should have a good supply of the 8-inchers by the second year, and expect to garner approximately $360 per year on this cash crop if I only sell 3 dozen fish, plus however many big ones I can turn into 8-oz filets and sell for $5 apiece (~$30 per fish). And I get the fertilizer, which will save on gardening expense. On a scale of having about a dozen ‘extra’ large trout to filet every year, that’s another $360. Minus costs averaged out, I should be able to clear $700 a year on fish, plus have a ready supply for dinners and entertaining here at the homestead! It’s always nice when your land and labor can return cash for things you can’t grow at home. Every little bit helps!

All this (the herbs and the fish) cost money to produce, even if it’s the homestead that’s doing most of the actual work, it’s till my money for seeds, cultivation, fish food, fingerlings, and my back that takes the abuse. Many people would think this is definitely NOT worth the trouble, but I’ll be gardening anyway, and dipping my toes in the creek whenever possible – there might as well be fish in it. If your dream is a self-sufficient homestead – as mine is – you don’t need all that much income. Just enough.

Links:

Mother Earth: Small-Scale Trout Farming
USTFA: Farm-Raised Trout
NCSU: Trout
BNET: A true fish tale

There is a resurgence of hope across America in the wake of Tuesday’s election of Democrat Barack Obama as President, promising a new direction of change for the future of our nation. Those of us who have been paying attention to the global financial meltdown, increasingly severe food shortages in the wake of global warming, and the outrageous poisoning of our citizens and livestock/pets by corrupt Chinese producers (a glaring example of globalization’s failures), are hoping that a new dawn in America will bring with it the serious changes to our agricultural policies that have grown increasingly necessary through decades of decline.

Now, politicians don’t generally talk much about agricultural policies while they’re stumping for votes in big cities. And they’re often so ignorant of agricultural issues that even rural dwellers – actual farmers – get nothing but pablum and platitudes in response to their questions. Luckily, journalist Michael Pollan wrote a great ‘open letter’ in the New York Times in October entitled, Farmer in Chief. This is a must-read for all of us committed to self-sufficiency, locally grown foods, the viability of family farms and homesteads, and the future health of an environment we all depend upon for life.

Pollan begins his letter to “Dear Mr. President-Elect” with an honest caution -

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Pollan goes on to explain issues like climate change, energy independence, health care and the general health of the economy in terms of our dependence on food depend crucially on sound agricultural policies. He explains very well what ‘went wrong’ with our food system over the past several decades, and how the antiquated, fossil fuel dependent system cannot be sustained. We no longer have cheap fuels and unlimited water supplies, our policies are haphazard, our subsidies unfair, our planning non-existent. Pollan then offers his particulars in this 9-page article, and the reasoning behind them is fascinating reading. He offers a complete rationale for organic farming many of us have been promoting and practicing for years, in three not at all ‘simple’ steps…

1. Resolarizing the American Farm
2. Reregionalizing the Food System
3. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

I’ve added my voice to the growing calls for our leadership to pay serious attention to the many complex issues of our food supply – which IS our ‘national security’ – by sending this article as a link in a congratulatory email to President-Elect Obama. This is an immediate action issue, as Obama is right now choosing his cabinet and advisors. Agriculture and food policy issues must not fall to the back of the line. So add your voice to the calls for sane policy and firm leadership today!

You can also sign petitions and keep up to date on incoming news at the Organic Consumers Association. Don’t forget while you’re there to sign up for their email newsletter too!