Farming for Self-Sufficiency-Independece on a 5-acre farm
If we wish to grow food on a larger scale, then there are three things we can do effectively. One is to buy an agricultural tractor. The other is going in for one of those little garden cultivators: either a rotovator or a mini-plough. The third is to plough by horse.
 |
OLD SONG... Come all ye honest ploughmen, Old England's fate you hold!
|
HORSE ...
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...
A simple easy to make barrel-shaped devise increases the light output....
Organic Valley is now producing pasture butter, a decadent cultured butter from grass-fed cattle. W...
Maintaining Health in Pasture Animals
December/January 1995
By the Mother Earth News e...
In spite of the teachings of the
no-digging and no-ploughing school of husbandmen, people
still go on digging and ploughing, as they have done ever
since Neolithic times, and my guess is that they will go on
digging and ploughing as long as men live on this earth.
For there is really no other way of effectively growing
arable crops-at least, without the impracticable use of
enormous quantities of compost.
Cobbett says, in Cottage Economy: 'As to the act of making
bread, it would be shocking indeed if that had to be taught
by means of books.' I would like to paraphrase that: 'as to
the act of digging'. The only thing I will say about it,
realizing that the flight from the cities is likely to
include people who have practically never seen a spade, is
that you should nearly always dig a trench: that is, remove
one spit of soil (a spit is the wedge of soil cut by the
spade) out in a furrow right across your piece of ground
and dump it, then turn the next row of spits upside down
into the furrow you have left. Thus you always have an open
furrow in front of you to invert your spits into. When you
come to the end of your piece you should, in theory at
least, load the first lot of spits you dug out and dumped
into a wheelbarrow and cart them back to fill up the empty
furrow that has been left.
One way is to split your work down the middle and dig from
alternate ends. You can then throw the first spit of each
long narrow strip into the last furrow of the other. It is
often admissible, however, to dig by inverting the spits in
situ and not 'digging to a trench' when you are digging
land over for the second time, or just loosening the soil
around soft fruit bushes, or digging with a fork. But the
serious self-supporter is likely to be more interested in
growing food than in such counsels of perfection. But, in
my experience at any rate, the more you dig the better, and
it is better to dig badly than not dig at all.
If we wish to grow food on a larger scale, then there are
three things we can do effectively. One is to buy an
agricultural tractor. The other is go in for one of those
little garden cultivators: either a rotovator or a
mini-plough. The third is to plough by horse.
TRACTOR ...
In comparing these different methods of
cultivating I will merely draw on my own experience. We
have now a Ferguson diesel tractor which cost us $180.00
together with a fore-end loader, a link box, and a mounted
spring-tine cultivator. For $180.00 we could not have got
much of a garden cultivator which you can comfortably lift
off the ground with one hand. We can always borrow from a
neighbor a two-furrow plough to fit on the tractor (a good
secondhand one from a farm sale would cost us about 25
dollars), and we could certainly plough very deeply.and
well five acres in a day (if we were willing to spend a
whole day doing one job, which we are not). This tractor
will break up rough ground and bury any amount of rubbish
as it ploughs; if it hits a boulder in our boulder-strewn
glacial deposit of a farm, it just stops the tractor, and
if the boulder is no bigger than I am it will lift it right
out of the ground with its hydraulics. The spring-tine
cultivator covers a lot of ground, therefore it is easy to
make many passes with it, and it will pulverize the
roughest soil and make a seed-bed. Or almost make a
seed-bed-it is generally desirable to haul a set of light
harrows, or a ring-roll, over the land after it, to make
the tilt fine enough for small seeds. The tractor will work
in a small garden both with the plough and the spring-tine
cultivator-so long as the garden is quite empty of crops
and unencumbered. It becomes difficult when there are
patches of crop left which must be undisturbed, for the
tractor takes room to maneuver.
Page: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
Next >>
