Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 9 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
For the last eighteen years Sally and I have been probably as nearly self-supporting with food as any family in north-west Europe. We have a very good idea of what it is like and what it involves, and therefore, I feel qualified here to utter a solemn warning.
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It is beyond the capabilities of any couple, comfortably, to try to do what we have attempted. If a married couple settled down on five or ten acres of good land, in the British climate, and devoted their entire time to being self-supporting in food, clothes and artifacts; and if they knew how to do it, and had the necessary stock and equipment, already paid for, they could succeed. They would be working just the fifteen hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, that is, if they were to maintain the standard of living, and variety of food and of living, that they could maintain in a town. They would be very healthy doing this, they would not be bored (because they would never be doing the same job for long and would be doing a great variety of tasks), but they might sometimes wish they could sit down.
Thoreau, when he lived at Walden and wrote his famous book about it, lived almost exclusively on beans, and he didn't work very hard at all. He spent a very large part of his time there wandering around in the woods, peering into the depths of his pool, thinking and dreaming and meditating. I think he was a very sensible and enviable young man indeed. But he didn't have a wife and a family to bring up. Personally, I would not be prepared to live for two years and two months (which is the time Thoreau spent at Walden) on beans. Sally certainly wouldn't either, and we would be very hard put to make the children do it. We have, in fact, lived for eighteen years on the fat of the land: we have probably eaten and' drunk better than most other people in this country: our food has been good, varied, fresh, and of the very best quality. We have never been self-supporting-but we have been very nearly self-supporting. We have lived extremely well on a very small money income, and the tax-eaters have not done very well out of us. We have not contributed much to the development of the atom bomb, nor to the building of Concorde. When the latter breaks the sound barrier over our heads, and scares the wits out of our cows, we have to endure it, but at least we have the satisfaction of knowing that we haven't paid for it.
We started our life of partial self-sufficiency with no stock no land, no tools, and no money at all. Therefore, we have always had to work at money-bringing jobs, Sally at potting and myself at writing; and we have had to do the self-supporting work in our spare time. We have both had to work harder than people should have to work. But supposing there had been a small handful of other effective 'drop-outs' in the vicinity? Supposing, instead of having to keep both cows and pigs, we had only to keep cows? And swapped milk for bacon? Whenever we have been near another 'self-supporter' we have immediately found our task lightened considerably. We could share tools and equipment, 'know-how' (I apologize for borrowing a word from the culture that I have opted out of), and partially specialize: for example, trade asparagus for globe artichokes, mutton for salt fish pottery for wooden vessels.
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