The Larder

My land ethic journey is something of an experiment in ‘self sufficiency’ and sustainability.   This part of the journey is a personal passion of mine, in part because in my work as a technology leader in Ag  business for 25 years I’ve paid a lot of attention to ‘Ag issues’, sustainability, carbon footprint, livestock well-being and the like.  

I’ve approached these issues with a number of conflicted feelings.  

• Genuine sympathy and pleasure, that a certain type of consumer actually cares how the food they eat impacts the world, the environment in which it’s produced, and the producer.  
• Frustration and anger that many of the same consumers are so easily manipulated by marketeers into buying organic, or worse ‘gmo free’ (I’m sure I’ll have a rant on this at some point, but if you want to avoid GMOs, buy organic, at least then you’re not avoiding safe plant incorporated protectents to take in more (largely equally safe) synthetic pesticides) foods, so far out of season they can’t begin to be local,  from industrial food giants who often operate in all the ways they these same consumers seek to avoid.
• And a scientific bent that makes me want to read primary literature when I encounter information or opinion that doesn’t seem to pass the sniff test.

All these feelings lead me to the simple instinct that people who care most deeply about these issues, as I do,  would be well served to PRODUCE MORE OF THEIR OWN FOOD. Chicken’s are the gateway livestock, get some. Get a shovel and dig up your suburban lawn and try to grow a potato.  That sort of thing. So by way of striving to change yourself before you change others I’m paying some attention to this on Maggie’s Farm.

Mid April in Southern Wisconsin is an useful time to start such an experiment because it’s at this point in the year when your larder is emptying out.  So to the degree I want to understand how I do in this experiment it’s useful to have a starting point in some of the key consumables.

In the larder today 4-14:

Fuel:

Firewood-  none (we’re out, plenty in the woods, great frustration of the executive job that paid for the farm was the inability to actually finish any single chore on the farm while so employed).

Diesel-  400 gallons of Ag diesel

Gas- we’ll not be tracking this with rigor, sorry purists, this is Leopold not Muir

Electricity-  15.5 kW solar array, one year old, grid connected from Drew’s Solar of Madison WI.  Great folks: http://drewssolar.com/

Propane (heats the home when the wood runs out, as in today, and provides hot water for the dairy barn).  House tank 800 gallons, barn tank 400 gallons.

Food (mostly tracking the stuff we aspire to be self sufficient on):

Veg and future veg-

• Green beans- canned: 1 case of 12 quarts
• Potatos (i’m right there with you Dan Quale)-  ~ 10 lbs, now all seed potatoes
• Dry Beans-  About 1 quart of lovely native american heritage beans from Seed Savers that we’ve been growing for 3 years now-

https://www.seedsavers.org/good-mother-stallard-bean

• Some rotting pumpkins and winter squash that will likely yield viable seed for the garden
• About 100 dollars worth of new commercial garden seed, mostly from Gurney’s www.gurneys.com ,who are unpretenscious, have good germination (unlike seed savers for example) and have an annoying pricing mechanism around 50% discounts that carefully exploited makes their price almost reasonable.
• The residues of 5 years of similar seed buys, carefully saved
• Some hop rhizomes on the way from Northern Brewer
• Some well established wild Asparagus and some poorly established new aspargus beds

Animal protein and sources-  

In the freezer-

• About ¼ of a delicious farm raised hog that Amanda bought from one of her cheesemaker mentors
• The equivalent of 1.5 lambs, grown here on farm and butchered nearby, consisting of the cuts we don’t like the most (this is what happens when you eat the whole animal)

Sources-

• 6 chickens of three laying breeds, now 4 ish years old and still seasonally knocking out an impressive 1 egg/ bird/ day, almost entirely on food they scavange for themselves for 9 months out of the year.  Chickens are gateway livestock, everyone who cares about food issues should have a few.
• A vibrant flock of East Friesian/ Lacaunne composite dairy sheep, now in the 4th year
• 4 Berkshire Gilts promised by my former employer as a retirement gift,  but not yet picked up,
• Abundant deer and turkey on the back forty.

Things I’m unashamed to source elsewhere:

The New York Times

Seafood from https://sitkasalmonshares.com/

Wine from all over the world

Beer from the upper midwest.

And so we begin:

The grass is barely greening.

The soil temp is all of 45 degrees F, tops.

If it were 1850 we’d be eating our seed… the goal would be to finish 12 months next spring in a less tenuous position, and feel good about how that’s been done.