Food Self-Sufficiency Contest

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And that's just the way everything worked out . . . until our current cow dropped twin heifers! (The best laid plans, you know . . . . ) So now we only have a scant gallon of milk for our daily household use. But that's a small price to pay for what will probably be our replacement cows.

We freely admit that our goal of self-sufficiency is unattainable in the purest sense. We could never, for instance, produce the iron in a plow nor manufacture the implement in our back yard. For this reason, we're willing to accept what we call a durable technology.

Our definition of "durable" is a tool which [1] uses only renewable sources of energy as its driving force, [2] has a relatively long life . . . say, on the order of a human lifetime, and [3] when damaged or worn, can—in almost every instance—be repaired right here on the farm.

We rescued a forge from a junk pile, bought an anvil for $60 at an auction, and purchased a vise for an additional $30 at another sale. It's hard to believe how handy it is to be able to work metal! We find annealing to be a particularly valuable skill to have around the homestead, and there are days when we actually fire up our forge two or three times.

We first tried to farm this place with an old tractor. But it is simply impossible to operate a tractor in our rough woodland and on the small patches of land we cultivate. Besides that, we didn't like the expense of pouring non-renewable gasoline through such a piece of machinery.

Our attempts at using horses proved equally frustrating. Real draft horses are few and far between on today's market and, therefore, very expensive. The horses and mules which we did find that we could afford were usually of the "saddle type" and too small to do a significant amount of work.

If our limited experience with the animals is any indication, horses have at least three other major drawbacks: [1] They must be fed large quantities of grain when they're working. [2] Their harness is expensive. [3] Many horses become excited in a confusing or tight situation and immediately make a gigantic lurch or jump. The invariable result of this action—at best —is a broken set of harness, expensive repairs, and delays.

We got our idea for farming with oxen from John Scarlett's article in MOTHER NO. 21. Without a doubt, this was our single most important discovery and has meant the difference between failure and success in our operation.

It's impossible to list all the fine qualities of a team of working oxen here, but we can't resist setting down a few:

Oxen—especially when hand-fed from birth—are calm, steady, and forgiving. When confronted with an unfamiliar situation . . . they tend to simply stop and think things over. (This is an ideal response, since it gives the teamster a chance to gather his thoughts too.)

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