Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 14 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
You can't hatch eggs to provide yourself with hens to lay more without hatching out as many cocks as hens. What do you do with the cocks? If you keep sheep to shear your sheep will breed, unless you are very careful-or would you allow castration, vegetarian?
RELATED CONTENT
SELF-HEATING, SELF-COOLING HOUSE
July/August 1971
By Wendell Thomas
In 1948...
Medical Self-Care: The Seven Rules of Self-Care
Seven laws for better health, including home...
From North America to Italy and back again, heirloom grain corn ‘Floriani Red Flint’ packs a rich, ...
The commercially grown vegetables, fruits and grains that we are eating today are significantly les...
The following tips by a specialist in extension farm businesses may give you better understanding t...
As for the vegan (a vegan will eat no milk or eggs besides, of course, no meat), a vegan world cannot really suffer any large animals to live at all. If I become a vegan what would I do with the two sows I have got in my sty now? Do I feed them until they die of old age-not letting them breed of course? Or do I turn them loose to roam the roads and get what living they can? If I do that somebody's crops are going to suffer-if enough people do it there won't be any crops left at all. Man has a part to play in the balance of nature, and if he fails to play it that balance gets off-balance and nobody benefits at all. The only possible way in which, in a vegan country, we could suffer large mammals to share the same country as ourselves and go on flourishing would be to import large predators to control them. If we just let loose all the cattle, sheep and pigs that we have now, what does any vegan think would happen? What is the alternative to letting them loose? Well, kill them all, or castrate all but one or two of the males and let all but a few zoo specimens die out. I have never heard any answer to any of the above arguments and I am quite sure I never will, because there are no answers. As for the non-vegetarian whom the self-supporter is bound very often to meet who, with his legs under your table, a knife and fork in his hand, and tucking away happily into his share of a shoulder of mutton, says: 'Ugh! How on earth can you bring yourself to kill a poor sheep!'-well, the only answer to him is to take his plate away.
The good husbandman is not the tyrant of his piece of land, but should be the benign controller-and part of the biosphere himself He is an animal, and the fellow of his sheep and his pigs-and of his grass and his cabbages too: hasn't it now been proved that all life on earth derived from one cell? Take a five-acre piece of wilderness, or a five-acre stretch of a barley prairie, and there is really very little life on it at all-very little of the higher forms of life at least. Give that five acres to a true husbandman, to live and rear his family on, and you will soon find it supporting a very rich flora and fauna. The application of the intelligence that only man has is beneficial to the other life forms, but for this man must be free to harvest and control, not only among the plants, but among the animals too.
So while I would never try to persuade any vegetarian to become a carnivore I would never become a vegetarian myself. The vegetarian cannot share his holding with other large mammals. I don't think I have the right to be so exclusive.
Once you accept animals, then the greater variety of them that you have on your land the better. Each species draws something different from the soil, and puts something different back. The parasites that afflict one animal die when ingested by another. If you have nothing but, say, sheep, you will get a build-up of sheep-infesting worms on your land. If you have cows too, and alternate the two species on the various parts of the farm, the cows will ingest the eggs of the sheep parasites and these will die, and vice versa, and the animals of both species will be the healthier for it. Any vet will tell you this, and any commercial farmer who has any sense. Also, the cows will eat the coarse grass that the sheep won't touch, and the sheep, which crop much closer, will come behind the cows and crop the very short grass that the cows can't get. A cow grazes by curling her tongue around the grass; the sheep (like the horse) nips it off with her teeth very close to the ground. Thus put your calves first into a clean piece of pasture, follow them with your adult cattle, and follow these with your sheep and horses.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 | 14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
Next >>
