Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 15 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
Geese, too, are an important grazing animal and, except for that merry fortnight when they are being fattened for the table, they can live on nothing but grass. They fit very well into your ecology. Ducks are one of the few animals that will eat that revolting thing-the slug-and therefore are very useful for patrolling your land to keep these down. You can let them wander in your garden, within reason, and although they will nibble the lettuces they will also eat the slugs and the latter would do far more damage. And, after all, you can eat the ducks can't you?
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Hens will thrive in woodland, or any rough ground if it is not too wet (if it is wet then what are your ducks and geese for?). If moved across pasture they do great good to it, scrapping out the matted grass, eating thistle seeds and other weed seeds and manuring it. Put on stubble after a corn harvest, they save from waste the spilled grain and also scrap out wireworm and other monsters. Run behind larger animals, they help by spreading their droppings, and help themselves (and you) by eating any undigested grain.
The pig is a noble and magnificent animal. He will eat not only the food that grows on the top of the soil but will mine deep down and munch up the roots of docks and nettles, wire worm and leather jackets, and derive only the pig knows what health and benefit from what lies underneath. He is your best ploughman. On light land I have seen a pig completely bury herself-a huge sow with only her tail sticking up above the level of the ground. Keep pigs on a small area of rough useless ground, until they have dug it over and over and manured it again and again, and that land will have been turned into an easily-worked and fertile part of your holding. A small area per pig though-let Old Mother Common Sense say how big. But don't keep pigs there too long. Like other animals, they will eventually build up parasitic infestation if left too long on the same piece of land, but we will discuss all that in Chapter 6.
As far as crops are concerned, if you have plenty of animals, and use the plough or the spade and the hoe enough, you will have no difficulty growing the finest crops in the world and you won't have to spend a penny on fertilizer. There is a benign cycle-vegetable-animal-vegetable and so on ad infinitum-that will progressively increase, and not decrease, the health and fertility of your holding. I personally have nothing intrinsically against artificial fertilizers. I don't believe myself that you can really taste the difference between a cabbage that has had a pinch of sulphate of ammonia shoved on it and one that has not. If my land lacks phosphate I put some slag on it, if I can afford it, and find it very good stuff. But I have to admit I don't like paying for slag-or any other 'artificials'. I am mean. And if by good husbandry I can keep my land fertile enough not to need to import 'artificials', that I would far rather do. And I believe that the richer the micro-flora and micro-fauna you have in your soil the healthier the plants and large animals that live off the soil will be; 'artificials' suppress the micro-flora and micro-fauna, while 'organic manure' (droppings of animals plus rotten vegetation) encourages it.
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