Food Self-Sufficiency Contest

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Oxen are not unduly expensive nor are they hard to find. As soon as we read Scarlett's article, we went out to the calf pen and chose two bulls of about the same age and size. That's how easy it was to find our team.

Oxen are not difficult to train. None of the four of us had ever seen another team of the animals work before but, by following the simple instructions in John's article, we soon had our pair working together beautifully.

You do not have to spend a lot of money to "harness" a span of oxen. We wrote to John Scarlett and, following the directions he sent by return mail, made our own sliding yoke (which is far superior to a standard yoke) with just the crudest of tools. Our only expense was a few cents for having the yoke's beam sawed out and a few dollars for nuts and bolts.

Oxen are sure-footed and work well in brush and other tangles, and their simple gear is much harder to foul than the harness on a team of horses.

Oxen are "easy keepers". The animals can get by reasonably well on no grain at all if they're allowed all the forage or hay they can eat.

We use our span to pull a moldboard plow, disc harrow, spring tooth harrow, standard tooth harrow, row cultivator, two-row planter, mowing machine, hay rake, and hay wagon. "Bigun" and "Mawry" are also invaluable for dragging logs out of the woods and hauling firewood on our cart. We even used them for two years to turn the "sweep" on a homemade irrigation rig to pump 1,000 gallons of water an hour 15 feet up slope from the Little Buffalo River to our garden.

And, lest you think these marvelous beasts have "spoiled" us, we hasten to add that our healthy respect for the true cost of all the energy they contribute remains . . . since we must still provide the pasture and hay that our oxen eat.

The design for our solar oven was taken from MOTHER NO. 25, and we couldn't be more pleased. The unit, which cost us $20.50 to build, gets its heaviest workout in the summer . . . when heat from our wood-burning cookstove would make the house intolerable. In addition, the oven saves us the work and time that we'd otherwise waste cutting wood for our summertime cooking.

The empty oven will go up to 350° F on a particularly clear day, and on hazy days it registers 275—300°. Cooking is somewhat slower with the rig than with the cookstove, but we think that most foods—yeast bread, pan bread, potatoes, meats, and a dozen other things—taste better when cooked slowly.

Pressure canning 1,300 quarts of food on a wood cookstove (as we did in 1975) is a lot of hard work, and jar lids—when you can get them—are expensive (we spent $35 for the 80 dozen lids we used in 1975). That's a lot of effort and money to put into the sterilizing and storing of massive amounts of water.

We've tried sun-drying our garden produce several times and—thanks to the heavy dew we have every night throughout the summer-it's completely unworkable for us (even when we cover the food or take it inside each evening). Electric dryers are too expensive to operate and they use non-renewable energy . . . and we don't care for oil-fired units because the fumes from their burning fuel (which is also non-renewable) always seem to taint the produce they contain.

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