Farming for Self-Sufficiency

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Independence on a 5-Acre Farm

Copyright © 1973 by John and Sally Seymour. Introduction copyright © 1973 Shocken Books, Inc.

Ah, the vicissitudes of time. Two years ago, when there were NO currently relevant small-scale-farming introductory handbooks available, many of us welcomed the publication of Richard Langer's Grow It! with open arms. Now that we're all older and more experienced, however, some folks find it increasingly easy to criticize that breakthrough beginner's guide (see the Feedback sections of MOTHER NOS. 23, 24 and 25).

Which brings us to another breakthrough book that is just as important (probably more so) now as Grow It! was two years ago . . . and which may well come up for its share of criticism in another 24 months or so.0

Be that as it may, John and Sally Seymour's record of 18 successful years on a shirttail-sized homestead in England is important now and should offer welcome encouragement to today's back-to-the-landers . . . both real and imaginary. I started serializing the book in my No. 25 issue and I'm sure that many readers will want a personal copy for their home libraries.—MOTHER.

MEAT

The running to the butcher's dally Is a ridiculous thing.

WILLIAM COBBETT

And a very expensive thing as well.

BEEF

We send an ox a year to the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse charges about eight dollars to kill it but they pay us eight dollars for the skin so this doesn't cost us anything, but there is the carriage in there and the fetching of the meat back.

We could kill the meat here of course. I have killed several bullocks in Africa and shot and cut up many a wild buffalo which is almost exactly the same thing. But to kill an ox you need a clean airy building which is high enough to hang him up in, and the means for hauling him up. After all, a very big ox can weigh a ton. I know a farmer who gets the butcher to come and kill his bullocks for him, in his hay barn, and he hoists the carcase up with the fore-end loader of his tractor.

You can only consider killing an ox in the winter of course (in Africa the meat had to feed thirty or forty people so it didn't have to keep). And really the individual family can only consider killing, or having killed, an ox if there is a deep freeze. A family without one might conceivably cope with one quarter of an ox, so if there were four families in some sort of community, or at least in liaison with each other, and no deep freeze, an ox might be killed between them occasionally, but they would then have to salt a lot Salt beef is all very well but, like the sailors of old, one can have too much of it.

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