Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 13 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
But we are not considering this kind of farming at all, for we are not concerned with growing cash crops on a large scale to sell to the urban masses, but with producing subsistence crops of high quality to eat ourselves or perhaps trade with our immediate neighbors. Therefore variety is what we must strive for. Firstly, because growing a variety of crops, and keeping a variety of animals, is more fun. (That is the most important thing of all.) Secondly, because it is better for the soil: each crop takes something different out of it, the pests and diseases of each crop die of starvation the next year when another crop occupies that piece of ground, the plants feed the animals and the animals feed the plants, for the two kingdoms to which these creatures belong are completely complementary.
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At the Broom, which is the name of the five-acre holding on which Sally and I spent our first eight years of trying to be self-supporting, we never brought in any fertilizers of any kind at all, and yet as the years went by we found our land growing better and better crops. We used no sprays, hardly any, if any, insecticides, fungicides or herbicides (I do remember once or twice squirting some stuff over the apple trees, but I don't believe it did any good) and yet we never seemed to suffer any trouble from pests or diseases. The reasons were-that we had a great deal of animal manure, we never grew the same crop twice running on the same bit of ground, and we grew such a large variety of crops that no single pest or disease could ever get any sort of a hold at all.
Another advantage of growing and keeping a multiplicity of crops and animals is that in this way you can spread your labor load right round the year. The agri-businessman has a huge investment in sophisticated machinery to enable him to cope with his one huge crop all at the same time, and that with practically no labor at all. There is a man in Cambridgeshire who farms ten thousand acres, growing nothing but barley, With the help of three men. I have seen his land-it is a desolation and an affliction to -the soul, but it grows an awful lot of barley. (Not a very high yield per acre but an enormous yield per man.) But if you are working by hand you cannot deal happily with large amounts of any one crop. By diversifying you always have something to do but never too much. Your harvests, and planting times, and all the other work-load peaks, come at different times.
And now we come, inevitably, to the great question of animals or no animals. Are we to be vegetarians or not vegetarians?
The world can support a certain number of vegetarians, but for reasons that I shall now set forth I don't believe it can support a population which is all, or nearly all, of this persuasion. The non-vegan vegetarian I think we can discount, that is if he is a vegetarian on moral or ethical grounds alone. If he just doesn't eat meat because he doesn't like it that is his own business entirely: after all plenty of people don't like boiled turnip and nobody else worries about it. But the man who takes a high moral attitude about not eating meat, and eats eggs, drinks milk or eats butter and cheese, wears shoe leather or wool, just does not have to be taken seriously at all. A cow won't give milk unless she has a calf every year, and every other calf she has, on average, is going to be a bull. What do you do with the bull? Let it starve to death or feed it until it dies of old age? If you do the latter your five acres soon aren't going to be supporting anything else except bulls-and it won't support them for long. We have only to go to the parts of Hindu India where they really don't kill cattle, and have no export outlet for them, to see what happens there. The children starve while walking hat-racks wander about picking up any bit of stick they can eat and eventually provide the vultures with poor pickings indeed.
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