Food Self-Sufficiency Contest

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And so—for $72.25—we've built a dryer which circulates clean, controlled, smoke-free air at any temperature up to 150° F through anything we want to preserve . . . and which is heated by the renewable fuel that we cut from our 120 acres of woodland. It works like a charm, and we figure that by disconnecting a single length of pipe—so the smoke from the fire will go up through, rather than around the drying chamber—we'll be able to use the rig as a meat smoker when we butcher this year.

We've managed to locate and buy two steam engines.

One weighs only 100 pounds and puts out five horsepower. We plan to set it on wheels with a small boiler and pull it around from the irrigation pump, to a washing machine, to a battery charger (for some household lights, a car radio for news and weather reports, and our electric fence), to a grain thresher, to a concrete mixer, etc.

The other powerplant—which we call "Big Mama"—will be used for larger jobs, such as driving a cordwood saw (thereby freeing us from the gasoline-hungry chain saw).

We paid $200 for the five-horse engine, $100 for Big Mama, and $135 for our boiler. Another $100 (for pipe and fittings) should put both powerplants into operation. At that point we'll be well on the road to "all the comforts of home" that we either need or want . . . compliments of the renewable fuel from our homestead's 120-acre woodland.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is very proud of its solar-powered energy system for spacecraft . . . but we don't think NASA has anything on us. The grass in our pasture and the trees in our woods gather the sun's energy and store it for later use. Our oxen then consume the grass and use the energy derived therefrom for draft work . . . and we cut the wood and burn it in our stoves, steam engines, and food dryer. Even the nutritional value of the things we eat from our garden, orchard, woodland, and the animals we butcher originally comes from the sun. NASA hasn't got a thing on us.

Our fondest hope for the future rests with our 80 Chinese chestnut trees. We planted the trees as small seedlings in the fall of 1973 and gathered our first 10 pounds of chestnuts in the fall of 1976. They're great! We like them!

Although it may be nothing but a daydream, we hope that our trees eventually will produce 100 pounds of nuts per tree. That's 8,000 pounds of food with a protein content roughly three times that of corn . . . or the equivalent of 24,000 pounds of corn. At today's prices, that's a harvest worth $1,400.

Pipe dream or not, we expect to feed most of our chestnuts to the livestock in place of grain. This kind of "tree culture" has been done before by other people in other lands and we like the idea. Silva culture, once established, requires no annual replanting and cultivation and protects and holds the soil better than more conventional forms of agriculture. We love our chestnut trees!

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