Ever notice how everything gets blown out of proportion these days?
Everything has to be a big deal. You can’t just cycle across the country
like people did 20 years ago, now you’ve got to come up with a cause,
and a slogan, and a Mission Statement, and at the very least, an
impressive name.
So this year we’re running “The Sunflower Farm
CSA” which is an okay name, but I’ve decided I need to turn up the
hyperbole on it. So I’ve been experimenting with other names. “The Most
Totally Awesome Food Growing Vision” … that sort of thing.
But I
think I’ll settle on “The Great Sunflower Farm Food Experiment.” It was
an experiment on a number of levels. First off, I was checking to see
what it was like to be a market gardener after all these years of giving
my food away. It’s a whole different can of worms charging people for
your produce. It’s even tougher when you’re growing organically since
most people spend much of the year buying conventional produce that
looks pretty darn… pretty.
That part of the experiment has gone
well. So far the feedback has been great. I was paranoid for the first
weeks but have mellowed out a bit as each week we’ve been able to fill
each box with cosmetically appealing, and healthy and nutritious
produce.
We supplemented our produce with strawberries from John
Wise and blueberries from John Wilson (since we don’t grow enough of
either of these to share with the CSA.) I also have a friend called John
Wordsworth. It seems strange me to that I deal with three people named
John “W” on a regular basis, but I digress.
The second aspect of
this experiment was to determine if our water would hold out in a
drought. It has. This is a huge relief. It was pretty close to the wire
and I was almost at the point of having to let some stuff die, but we’ve
had a few rains lately and we’re past harvesting some of the stuff that
I had been watering, so the pressure off on our water system has eased
somewhat.
The third and most questionable part of the experiment
for me was wondering if I could grow enough food from our gardens to
feed the 11 families who are part of our CSA and have enough left over
for our own needs. In terms of what I wrote about in my book, “Thriving During Challenging Times,” this was the most important part of the experiment.
We
are all very much plugged into a very industrialized food system. The
bulk of our calories come from large-scale farms, which use a huge
amount of energy through fertilizers, pesticides and fossil fuels to
till, plant and harvest. I continue to ask myself this very important
question; How much of my own food can I grow? I’m a carbo-tarian. Or a
wheat-atarian. I love bread. I love pasta. I love cake! We use a lot of
flour and although I’ve grown wheat, it was a small trial. The majority
of my calories still come from someone else.
So if the zombie
apocalypse hits, and the zombies don’t get to my house, but take out the
traditional food infrastructure, will I starve? This is a poor analogy
because lets face it, the zombies will be after the easy pick’ns like
fans at sports events as opposed to wheat farmers who are usually well
armed and have combine harvesters to plow through the throngs of zombies
when they invade the farm.
Each week I start feeling better and better about my ability to be completely self-sufficient in terms of food production.
We
have about 1 acre under cultivation. There are also a number of other
areas where I have been building up the soil in preparation to expand
the gardens, but right now I am focused on what’s ready to go. And when I
see what we’re producing I feel pretty good about our ability to feed
ourselves.
A huge aspect of the question of self-sufficiency
revolves around what you eat. I know I’ll offend a few of you with this
suggestion, but homesteaders who want to derive a large number of their
calories from animal protein are going to have to have way more acreage
at work. When I see how much hay our neighbors’ cows were eating while
they were staying in our paddock, I realized that I would have to start
chopping down our forests if I wanted to eat beef. I’d need big hay
fields to feed them. Pigs might be a bit better since they seem to eat
almost anything and also do a good job of “tilling” the ground like
natural tractors. They would still need a lot of feed for many months of
the year. Chickens seem to require the least additional land available
to support them. They do like to chase down insects and are happy with
many of our scraps like potato peels and things. But I’m still buying
the bulk of their diet from our local feed store and so in order to be
self-sufficient I’d have to set aside a fairly large area set to grow
them oats and wheat and grains to get them through the winter.
The
reality is that most homesteaders cheat and use outside suppliers for
things like animal feed. Well it’s not cheating; it’s just easier to buy
it at the feed mill. Many of us “could” grow the hay or grains to feed
animals for the whole year; we just choose to let someone else do it for
us. (And as I discovered with my wheat growing experiments, there’s a certain economy of scale that the big producers have.)
The
easiest way to be completely self-sufficient on a small piece of
property would be to be vegan. No animal products at all. This won’t
excite many carnivores, but it is a fact.
On the other hand, a
farm that integrates animals and allows you to build up soil through
animal manure is a very good working model as well. I would suggest if
you want to eat beef you find yourself a farm with a hundred acres of
hay fields.
I still like a bit of cheese and some dairy products
and I’m pretty happy that our “Ladies” in the hen house are providing us
with eggs. They are doing a marvelous job of recycling grains from the
feed mill and table scraps and grasshoppers into high quality protein.
Quite honestly I’m not sure I’d be able to get as much physical work
done everyday if I didn’t start with a big plate of scrambled eggs and
home-fried potatoes and onions and toast (from wheat grown by someone
else). Oh and coffee. But hey, if we have many more July’s like this
year I’m sure I’ll be able to grow coffee here in Canada soon.
I
haven’t worked through the whole calorie thing yet… how many calories
you need, how many you can produce from your acre or however large your
garden is. But I do know that when I see how much we’ve produced this
summer on an acre it would provide us with a pretty good start. We’d
just eat a pretty boring diet with a lot of potatoes and frozen corn and
peas and tomato soup and oats and things.
All these vegetables
will need salt. On icy days sometimes the snowplow drops some pretty big
chunks of salt on the road. So if I get out there right away I could
probably scoop up a pretty good supply of salt. Does that count in my
quest for self-sufficiency? And will there be snowplows during the
zombie apocalypse? Of course there will! I can’t think of a better way
to take out an approaching mass of zombies on the road than with a
snowplow.
For more information about Cam Mather or his books, please visit www.motherearthnews.com/contributors/Cam+Mather
