Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 3 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
Then I was married, fortunately to an Ohio homesteader. From 1940 until his death in 1968, John Loomis and I developed Lane's End Homestead into a fully productive, family homestead. There on our four seven-acre fields, eight of woods, and two of orchard and garden, we had our cow, a few sheep, chickens, bees, a pig or two, and a beautiful team of Belgians. We raised all our meat, milk, butter, cheese, and eggs; all our grains and feed; ground our flour and baked our bread; produced all our vegetables and most of our fruit. All we bought was coffee and salt, and occasionally, citrus fruit. What a delight, then, to follow the Seymours through their near score of chapters, most entitled (characteristically) by single words: "Land," "Horse," "Cow," "Dairy," "Pig," "Bacon," "Meat," "Grass," "Fish," etc. Especially moving are their first and last chapters, where their titles grew to two- and three-word phrases: "What Is It? Why Do It?" and "Last Word. " Here is all the fun, challenge, and creativity we had at Lane's End, unrolled for re-experiencing and relearning or for learning anew. One thing is sure, on a homestead learning is never finished.
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Like the Seymours, we got involved In telling others about it. Possibly the ego needs this, but it all seems so important and significant and too good to keep In. In the early 1940s Dr. Borsodi suggested that he and Lane's Enders issue a monthly journal to "Interpret current events from the decentralist point of view " It immediately intrigued us. In 1943 we began The Interpreter, whose function was to report our experience, exchange information with others, and espouse what we began to label the "green revolution."
Centered in Ohio, we were close to and naturally friends with Louis Bromfield and his famous organic Malabar Farm at Mansfield, Ohio. This brought us in touch with the American Friends of the Land group initiated by Bromfield, and in turn with the British Soil Association and its founder, Lady Eve Balfour. Eventually we received a visit from that gracious lady, who introduced us in 1950 to Sally and John Seymour in Wales, with whom we immediately became pen pals.
Through the years we have compared notes, read and exchanged each others' writings—the Seymours on The Bloom in Wales, the Loomises at Lane's End and The School of Living In Ohio. We've produced and lived from our production, we've written and traveled In the interest of organic living, we've failed and succeeded, we've laughed and loved and learned.
Now there Is an American edition of Farming for Self-Sufficiency. In Britain it is selling "like hot cakes. " It joins a swelling list of how-to-live-on-the-land treatises here, to supply all those who see doom in urban decay; who want surcease from devitalized, preserved, and processed food; who have fled to the suburbs and find life there too simple and routine; who know that education is living if it be in a resourceful, productive setting, and that such living is itself education.
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