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Winter Gardening – Myth and Reality
Who doesn’t love luscious veggies and fruits in the wintertime? And we all have visions of dollar signs dancing in our heads when we think about buying them in the winter. We see those same dollar signs when we think of growing them ourselves, in a greenhouse. Because you’d surely have to HEAT that greenhouse, to get good stuff in the middle of winter!
Some common misconceptions about greenhouses lead most people to feel that it is too costly to buy one or build one, and too costly to operate one, and that the results are even then, so chancy that it is not worth the investment. They feel that it is not worth having a greenhouse when it is only used to extend the season by a month or two on either end of the gardening season.
Those ideas are completely false! A greenhouse can in fact, reward you through the entire winter with good things to eat, and it can do so at very little cost beyond the initial investment.
Actually, the truth is that many vegetables can be grown in a greenhouse, or even without a greenhouse, in the middle of the winter, in every state in the US. Even Alaska. Ok, not ALL of Alaska… but some of it.
There are two factors which make it work:
1. Don’t try to grow tomatoes or strawberries in the winter. If you do, you will need heat. Don’t try to grow heat loving plants. This will only cost you huge amounts. Choose plants which naturally do well in the winter. There are a bunch of them, and you can grow them in a variety of ways, even if you don’t have a greenhouse, in most areas of the US.
2. Protect your crops from the wind, and use coverings that help hold warmth. Many plants can stand temps well below freezing if they are protected from wind. As long as your area gets enough sun, you can probably raise crops successfully in an unheated greenhouse.
Now, lest you think this is some sort of radical new idea, or hype that just won’t work, let’s give you a little history…
This is traditional gardening. This is how people survived the winter in the middle ages. It has been practiced for centuries, and still is used prevalently in France. Just look up the definition of the term “bell jar”. The art was lost to the US, partly because of the market culture that developed here. But it still works here, and has been proven to work even in Maine.
You don’t really even need a greenhouse. You can do it with coldframes, tunnels (plastic over wire hoops), or even floating row covers (lightweight fiber cloth) in milder climates. In severe climates, you use a combination of methods, to give two, or even three layers of covering – a double walled greenhouse or tunnel, with a row cover directly over the plants. You can even purchase an inexpensive rack style grow-house for less than $50, with four shelves, to get started on the cheap if you want a greenhouse (you can throw a quilt over it in the winter to keep it insulated on especially cold nights).
It really works. We have seedlings coming up right now under a floating row cover. It is about two months too late to plant a winter garden in Oklahoma, dipping well below freezing several times a week now, yet our plants are thriving – we decided we’d rather plant late and have small crops than none at all, and it looks like we won’t have cause to regret that decision.
So what did we plant? We planted mostly things that do well in the cold anyway. Crops that were developed to grow in the winter, or to thrive in colder temps.
We have planted a mesclun mix, two varieties of lettuce, and spinach. We have cabbage, broccoli, beet, collard, dill, and some other greens to plant as soon as the walls are onto the greenhouse. I also planted alfalfa, which we’ll let grow a few inches tall, and then harvest for the chickens (it is worth it to me to keep some crops in the greenhouse for the animals, because they give us other food that we need) – I’ll do the same with wheatgrass, which grows well in cool soil.
There are other plants that grow well in cool temps also – peas, arugula, endive, raddichio, miner’s lettuce, corn salad, and many others. I don’t happen to care for the pungent ones like arugula and endive, but look forward to trying corn salad.
This kind of crop will grow well without any heat at all, as long as it is given sufficient protection. In the event that you feel heat IS needed, you can use raw compost (fill the floorspace between your planting pots with compost, or put it around the outside of the greenhouse), or a small woodburner (even a small fire will keep things above 15 degrees until the sun comes up, which is all that is needed). When things get cold, just add another layer of protection – row covers over your plants inside the greenhouse or inside the coldframe, or a coldframe inside a greenhouse, etc.
These techniques keep the investments that you make constrained to primarily reusable items, instead of pouring money into the cost of heat. Most things will germinate as long as the soil gets warm at least for part of the day, and does not freeze. They do germinate and grow as seedlings better in the late summer and early fall than they do in the winter. But as long as you can meet that criteria, they’ll even do it later than you thought. They’ll just do it slower.
Plants grow more slowly in the winter than they do in the summer. The cooler it gets, the slower they’ll grow. That means they’ll consume less moisture also – so you won’t need to water often. When you do, you’ll want to make sure the water dries before the temperatures drop too cold at night, because it can cause more damage if they are wet and then the water freezes.
The real key to making it work, is one that we’ve been trying to infuse into everything we do in our farming efforts: Work with nature, not against her. When you do, you are letting nature do the majority of the work, while you just nudge it along to reap the harvest, instead of fighting against her, expending unreasonable resources, for a mediocre result.
Once you get winter crops growing, you’ll be surprised at what you harvest. Often, the plants are small, but they taste wonderful. Nothing beats the flavor of sweet green cabbage leaves, pulled from young cabbage plants in December. You’ve never tasted tangy flavorful cabbage like that – not a hint of sulfur in it! If you try it in the springtime, you’ll be sadly disappointed, because that flavor only comes from cabbage that is grown in the cold.
So if you want fresh veggies in the wintertime, don’t think that they need to be shipped in from Chile. You can grow them in your own back yard, if you select the right veggies, and protect them in the right way.
Of course, you may spend a WHOLE LOT more on salad dressing…
Scambusters – Email SEO Solicitations
We can help you get more traffic! Your website is not ranking as high as it should for your top keywords. Free Marketing Assessment for your website. Marketing suggestion for insertnamehere.com.
If you are in business online, you’ve seen emails like this. Some of them may cause you to think they actually LOOKED at your site, and actually WANT to help you.
They don’t.
WITHOUT EXCEPTION, every single email you receive offering Search Engine Optimization or Marketing services is a SCAM. They aren’t all the same KIND of scam, but they are all scams. And no, there isn’t EVER an exception to this.
If you reply, one of several things may happen:
1. They just want your website access, so they can set up a phishing site inside it without you knowing. This is the kind of scam that doesn’t even pretend legitimacy.
2. They may just run an automated SEO Analysis on your site, and give you the results. Problem here is that computers CANNOT THINK, so ANY kind of automated SEO Analysis is completely bogus. That’s right. Meaningless. All that oh-so-scientific “keyword density”, and “frequency of h1 tags” garbage is just that… garbage. REAL SEO requires a thinking brain behind it, and only a real person can do it.
3. They may actually perform a service. Badly. NONE of them do a good job. NONE OF THEM. They typically do one of about four things:
They may do quick and dirty black hat SEO. Black hat refers to the stuff that every search engine forbids. And which will penalize your site eventually, if not immediately. They may completely trash your text, and replace all your good descriptions with stupid keyword strings. It always fails, for search engines and people – so you lose search engine traffic, and your site looks trashy to those who visit.
They may set up a scraping blog to pick up and redirect traffic for your top keywords. This is, again, completely ineffective, and will get you penalized. This kind of blog is ignored by search engines and people, both. You lose, and you pay for the privilege.
They may engage in “article marketing” for you. This one is VERY dangerous, and again, completely ineffective. Scammers like this are the reason our company no longer recommends article marketing as a viable marketing method – the article databases are so polluted with badly written unoriginal and downright shady articles, that even good articles don’t work for marketing anymore. Only one or two article sites even rank with the search engines, all the rest are ignored, and these companies who offer the service will tell you they are submitting to 50, 500, or even 1000 article databases. It is all meaningless, since none of them will get you any traffic anyway. It can be dangerous because they do not check facts when writing articles for your company – in the worst example of this, a medical company paid for this, and the writers wrote articles that opened them up for medical liability lawsuites, using statements like “this surgery has no risk”, and “results are guaranteed”.
They may spam blogs, forums, and social networking sites for you. Typically, they promise a certain number of submissions. They will then load everything into their automated system, press “go”, and walk away. Your spam (yes, it is YOUR spam) will be submitted to all those websites that have any kind of ability to do so – whether or not the topic is related. A few do look for related topics, but they do so strictly by keyword matching through a computerized system, so it is highly inaccurate, and often ludicrous. One or two actually hand-submit – but they aren’t any better at it than the computers, and the results are no better. At any rate, any site owner who owns a site which it WOULD be worthwhile to have your link on, will promptly remove your link, and report YOU for link spamming. Any sites it actually stays on are sites that are ignored by search engines anyway, and which people never visit either.
What they SAY they will do, and what they do, are completely mismatched. ANY company that emails YOU to solicit business, is breaking the law. Any company that emails you, offering to get your website in the top ranks, is fraudulent, and does NOT know their business. After all, if they could get a website to the top, why do they need to send you email spam to get business? They’d be getting all the business they wanted directly from the search engines themselves!
Just remember the rule – NO email offering SEO services (or anything else) is EVER legit. EVER. No matter how enticing it sounds, dump it where it belongs – in the virtual latrine.
Good SEO companies offer services you can monitor, and take the time to get to know your business, your goals, and what makes your company unique, before they dive into any work for you – including any kind of assessment. They’ll consider what your customers want to see, and then optimize THAT to attract search engine traffic. They’ll recommend or carry out marketing methods which work for YOU, and which reach your specific target market in meaningful ways. They won’t automate ANYTHING that requires a personal touch.
And they won’t ever solicit your business via an email that you did not ask for.
Government Doesn’t Protect Our Food
This is actually a rather involved topic, so I’m gonna have to see if I can be concise, and coherent enough to get a few points across, without covering the entire spectrum… Hmmm…
First off, we have a myth in society that if the government did not protect our food, that we’d all be slain in a matter of days by foodborne illness, harmful chemicals, or deadly plants or substances masquerading as food.
This is purely a myth. In fact, the truth is precisely the opposite.
The government SUPPORTS, and actually MANDATES that our food be polluted with harmful chemicals, it PAYS growers to ENSURE that your food is contaminated with superbugs, and it approves for human consumption, chemicals and substances which are provably deadly. Yes, all of these statements are substantiated, and completely unexaggerated.
The myth that food is a dangerous thing without government involvement is a lie which has been perpetuated BY the government.
Here’s an example: On every box of eggs, there is a notice that you need to keep eggs refrigerated. And government legislation requires that eggs be refrigerated from the time they are gathered, until the time of sale.
While this is a great boon to refrigeration suppliers, it is completely unnecessary. Eggs have a natural protective coating. If the eggs remain UNWASHED, they will keep for two months or more at room temperature. After they are boiled in the shell, they’ll keep for about 4 days. The eggshell is a marvelous natural protective container, which is much better than any manmade device at keeping eggs fresh.
Now, it IS true that eggs, once broken, or cooked out of the shell, will pick up contamination, as will any other food. They DO require refrigeration at that point.
But up until the mid-1900s, fresh eggs were kept on the counter, boiled eggs were carried in pockets as travel food, and the human race not only survived, it thrived.
About the same time our government started requiring refrigeration for eggs, it also started requiring producers to WASH all eggs intended for sale in the US. It is actually illegal to do so in some other countries, because of how important that protective layer is on the outside of the eggshell, in reducing food contamination. But because our government seeks to encourage factory farming and mass production, it determined that in order to keep the playing field level for larger companies (which cannot survive without government intervention), they would intentionally ALLOW a contamination issue to survive – then not only to ALLOW it, but to REQUIRE it.
YOU think that eggs require immediate and continuous refrigeration because our government has told you so. But they lied. They created a problem, then insist that you take action to keep that problem under control – only you can’t. You will still have more contamination issues from your refrigerated eggs than you would have from unrefrigerated eggs that had been unwashed.
Another myth is drinking water. A whole nation of people now think that if the government did not mandate safe drinking water, and require chlorination, that we’d all die of cholera. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Polluted drinking water is caused by careless handling of wastes, and by overcrowding in population centers, NOT by failure to chlorinate. And drinking water in the Middle Ages (when it was completely unregulated) was actually SAFER than it is today. People lived more spread out, without the huge densely populated cities of today. They drank from wells, rivers, springs, streams, and ponds, and nature is a wonderful cleaner of water. The bacteria they did ingest was typically of low concentration, and merely served to strengthen their immune systems. In fact, today, chlorination itself causes far more harm than contamination by pathogens ever did.
Chlorine is a poison, and when consumed daily in glass after glass of water, it slowly kills you. It is a prime causative factor in all forms of Irritable Bowel Disease, and causes auto-immune disease over time as wells. Long term consumption of small amounts of chlorine contributes to heart disease, diabetes, persistent obesity, chronic fatigue, cancer, asthma, and many other conditions which are on the rise.
Our government not only disseminates false information about our risks, it mandates and supports harmful actions in many other ways, besides just chlorine in your water.
Commercial baked goods are REQUIRED to be treated with preservatives. Preservatives are just like chlorine – poisons, which slowly destroy the human body, one cell at a time. They contribute to the same long term disease processes. The irony here is that the preservatives do NOT reduce foodborne illness. They merely extend the shelf-life so bread can be shipped across the US and stay on store shelves longer before it develops HARMLESS mold, that looks unsightly, does not taste good, but which poses no health risk.
Factory farming is supported by the government, while safer small farming is actively persecuted. Government subsidies are only available to large farms, not small ones (which they were originally designed to help). Large scale factory farms COULD NOT financially sustain themselves without government subsidies and without regulation enforcement entities being willing to ignore compliance requirements for larger farms (many regulations are in fact written to EXEMPT larger farms from food safety laws – the very farms that cause the problems are the ones exempt from them). They can ONLY exist because of dishonesty and funneling of taxpayer dollars into the corporate farm coffers. And yet, virtually ALL serious food contamination issues stem directly from factory farms.
The conditions which cause the development of superbugs, or which cause mass-contaminations in serious enough concentrations to actually make people sick, only occur in large scale operations, with the attendant supply chains.
Hence, our government is CAUSING the very safety problems they are claiming a NEED to prevent. Their increasing regulations in the name of “food safety” have served consistently to protect large farmers, chemical corporations, and to persecute and harm both small farmers, and consumers. Every time. It has invariably done the opposite of what was promised when the legislation was proposed. And it was designed to. If there were no more serious issue of foodborne illness, there would be no more capacity to use this issue for political gain, and that is all it has been used for.
Foodborne illness was simply NOT a serious problem prior to the 20th century. It became an issue precisely when the government became involved in promoting mechanized farming.
Mechanized farm equipment is expensive. In order to make a mechanized farm profitable, the farm must be many times larger than a man and animal powered farm. Thus, mechnization of a farm creates a large scale factory farm, where things get seriously out of balance.
Don’t believe me? Most people scoff at the idea that horse farming can be profitable, yet we have living proof that it is more profitable than factory farming, AND without government subsidies. The Amish are probably the most visible example – they have horse farmed for centuries, and still do. The average Amish farm is 80 acres. This is the maximum amount that a family can manage successfully. Most Amish farmers make a good living from their acreage. No, they do not have Television, or cars, or other expenses which we consider “necessary”, but they do have financial security, nice homes, are well fed, and their communities thrive.
Many other small farmers have returned to horse farming, and are profiting more from their farms now than they did with a tractor.
It is not only POSSIBLE to profit more from a small farm, it is MORE LIKELY that a small farmer will profit without intensive mechanization.
In contrast, the average factory farm is thousands of acres of land, and the debt load is crushing. They typically have literally a million or more dollars worth of un-paid for equipment being used on the farm – and it may not be paid off before it reaches the end of its useful life. Profits per acre are very low as well, because mechanized farms produce less per acre than horse farms, and sell wholesale through costly distribution chains.
To scale it down further, a farm that is managed by hand – without either horses or tractors – is statistically even more productive per acre, with even higher profits per acre than horse farming (up to 20 times more productive than a factory farm, and up to 10 times more productive than a horse farm). Generally, only 2-5 acres can be managed this way, but it is enough land to provide a comfortable single income within a family.
These smaller farms do not market through supply chains (the supply chain – from farm to store shelf – is responsible for 90% of the store shelf price), they market direct to the customer, and therefore can earn a higher amount for their labor than larger farms are able to do. If you can sell your eggs for $3 a dozen on the farm, you can earn far more by your labor than a factory farmer who has to sell his eggs for $.30 per dozen to a packing house.
Small farms also typically run livestock and crops side by side, providing a synergistic environment that more closely mimicks nature, and which reduces the costs of outside purchases for both fertilizer and feed. This more natural way of farming is advantageous to the farmer, the crops and livestock, to the land, and to the community, and it has a powerful effect on reduction of harmful pathogens due to the increase in helpful microbes in the more natural environment.
Small farms do not develop superbugs – they typically use far less antibiotics, and their stock runs in lower concentrations, which reduces incidents of widespread contamination. Since superbugs and high concentrations of contaminants do not develop, cross contamination to vegetables and fruits is not a problem.
All of this means that with small farms (the kind the government wants to put out of business), not only are the initial risks lower, but the customer and producer are close together, and very little time passes between production and consumption. That alone is responsible for a 1000 fold reduction in foodborne pathogens. Bugs simply do not have time to develop. With industrial ag, crops and food often spend many weeks in the distribution chain, or on store shelves, often exposed to moisture, in conditions which allows a small contamination to become a massive one.
Many of the regulations which our government declares to be necessary are NOT supported by governments in other countries (putting the lie to their claim that “science” is the basis for the regulations). In fact, in France, for example, washing eggs is forbidden. They recognize that more harm than good comes from washing eggs, yet our government requires this dangerous procedure.
There are many other examples – pasteurization of milk, which kills all beneficial bacteria which would normally help in keeping harmful bacteria in check, while all sales of raw milk are becoming criminalized because the government has declared raw milk to be “dangerous” (more foodborne illness occurs yearly from contamination of pasteurized milk than does from raw milk, because once pasteurized milk becomes contaminated (and it always does, just a matter of time), there is nothing to slow down the growth of the harmful pathogens – which is why raw milk left on the counter gives you good tasting and healthy buttermilk, but pasteurized milk left on the counter gives you nasty vile stuff that will make you sick if it stays out for too long). Organic farming requirements which make true organic farming disqualified for the label are the brainchild of our government under the guise of “protecting” us. Another law involves requirements for “grading” eggs, which merely measure size, yolk age, and shell quality and which have NOTHING to do with food safety, yet which our government routinely labels as a safety issue – all it does is increase the price of your eggs, hinder farmers, and keep the egg graders employed in a useless trade. And many more illogical, stupid, and harmful regulations.
Government regulations and enforcement do not keep our food safe. In fact, they CAUSE foodborne illness and food related disease, and then use the resulting chaos as an excuse to burden the industry with more regulation, which invariably lets the offenders ride, while punishing the farms which were not the cause of the issue in the first place.
And lest we mistake this for capitalism run amok, it is not. This is NOT capitalism. If it were, the government would not be involved at all. True capitalism lets the buyer learn for themselves, instead of expecting the government to protect them. This is socialism creeping in – preferring one industry over another, handing out money taken from one source to benefit another. Redistribution of money to benefit favored classes of industry. That is not capitalism.
Hence, government regulation of our food is making the situation WORSE, not better.
We would be much better off with no regulation of the food industry at all, because what we do have is either ineffective, or counterproductive.
Skills, Artistry, and Competition
I share almost everything I know concerning successful website and business operations. I even share that knowledge with my competition when they ask. I sometimes volunteer to share trade secrets with my competition. I often publish articles or instructional pages with specialized instruction which most people in our situation would not share without charging for it.
We not only sell website services, we also sell webmaster training instruction. So why in the world would I GIVE away what I’m selling? Wouldn’t that undermine my profits and train my competition for free?
That has to be one of the biggest myths of paranoia in the business world. It is perpetuated by people of limited imagination, who think that the only way to do business is the same way everyone else is doing business. When you are competing with a gazillion other businesses and have not truly differentiated your business with a good dose of the best elements in your personality, and when you have failed to truly connect with your customers or clients, then yeah, it is a bad idea to be too free with your competition.
But when you are not just one of the numbers, but something unique, and when your business is as much YOU as it is standards of excellence, and ESPECIALLY when you’ve diverged from the other lemmings in your particular professional arena to develop NEW and BETTER standards, or more effective policies and procedures that give you an edge and make your clients feel the difference, then you can share your expertise freely, and you’ll have little to fear from your competition.
Why is that?
Skills are just skills. If you learned them, then anyone else can. There is no issue of competition there. If you don’t kindly help someone when they ask, and they are trying to learn the same skills you already learned, then they’ll just go learn them somewhere else anyway. So there is no real profit or benefit in NOT sharing them.
There IS a benefit in sharing them. You establish yourself as THE go-to expert. Many of those you help will soon be approaching you with subcontracting proposals, or referring clients or customers to you when they cannot meet their needs themselves. Plus you get a reputation as a REALLY NICE, and HIGHLY QUALIFIED person. Yes, your competition will in fact help you gain that reputation, and to uphold it. They will quote YOU instead of other experts in the industry.
So no need to be paranoid about sharing skills. Be nice, and helpful, and it will help you more than it harms you.
Beyond skills, a wildly successful business also requires something totally unique and beyond the norm. For us, it was development of a totally new and separate standard for small businesses, as differentiated from corporate businesses, because the website needs were totally different, but this was almost never acknowledged by web professionals as a group, and when they did, they merely scaled down the same old corporate standards, which in fact, did NOT scale down effectively. This is the thing that makes you a BETTER option than your competition.
So, with the first thing, that unique thing that you developed and created, those individual methods for operations that separate your success potentials from your competition. The stuff of which trade secrets are made. The same question arises as for skills. Won’t sharing them hurt you and get you more competition?
Not really. In fact, the same thing is true. YOU are the one who developed it. That makes you the undisputed expert. You’ll get MORE people who will cooperate with you, make referrals, and improve your reputation than you will those people who would cause harm to your business by what you share.
Everyone thinks that sharing that kind of information will backfire and someone will steal their concept and set themselves up in direct competition, claim the fame for it, and sink the originator of the idea.
That is actually EXTREMELY rare. Pretty much the ONLY time it happens is when someone has a good IDEA, but no ability to actually do anything with it! If you are already successful based on some unique changes you’ve made to your business, then you are not in that category.
In our years in business, there have been people who tried to immitate us, or even to steal our systems and pass them off as their own. So why am I still recommending sharing openly?
Because the people who are the type to try to steal something rather than build their own, invariably lack the self-discipline and determination to actually turn what they stole into anything effective. They think they can steal it, slap up a quickie website (they’ll NEVER take the time to build a good one), and that the money will pour in without any effort on their part. They are completely blind to the fact that even if you have a great product or service, it takes a LOT of work, patience, repetition of boring tasks, and time, to actually earn anything from it. They make a hasty slapdash effort, and never even climb out of complete obscurity. No one else EVER knows that they have what they stole, because the very characteristics that caused them to steal it will ensure that they never make a profit from it.
You might also feel that putting it out there in print will just mean that other people can read all about it and never have to pay you for it, especially if you are selling training on the topic. Again, there is no need to fear that it will decrease your profits, quite the contrary.
A body of toothsome information validates your expertise. It helps people realize that you know things they don’t, and that they CAN’T find elsewhere. If you hide all the really juicy bits, then they have no reason to feel that you know anything that every other of your competitors does not know.
When you write about just a bit more – and actually start sharing those secrets, then people really understand the depth of your expertise and how different you are from all the rest. Oh, a few will read that, and feel it is all they need. But the hungry ones – the ones you REALLY want as students, they’ll want it straight from the teacher. They’ll realize that they can learn it much better from an organized training program than they can from digging through a website to get it bit by bit, or having to assemble it and sift the quality from multiple websites. It will increase your client base, not decrease it. And it will increase your reputation, not undermine it.
So, again, you really have nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, by freely sharing information, including your own specialized knowledge, even in referenceable ways.
The last element that makes your business successful is your personality, or your artistry. This is the part that no one else CAN immitate. It is all you, and comes from something within you that you cannot teach to anyone else, nor can they successfully copy it. They’ll inject their own personality into it, and even if they INTEND to become “you”, they’ll persist in being themselves, and they’ll appeal to a completely different clientele than you do. So no need to fear that – you are each an artist, with your own style, and customers like what they like, and having more or less competition isn’t going to make some personality types want to work with YOU any more or less. It is beneficial to have good associates to refer problem clients to – a client who just cannot work well with your style may do well with the style of one of your competitors, and by referring out, you get out of potentially difficult situations and still come out looking good.
Now, I’m not recommending that you give away your product, or that you give away, for example, your website content or other intellectual or material assets. THOSE, they have to get on their own. I would not give away my templates, systems, site structures, custom software, or other items that I typically charge for. I don’t print my curriculum online. But I share most of the secrets in it, here a little, there a little. That sharing goes on working for me night and day, convincing people to invest in our expertise.
There is no need to be paranoid of your competition. Make friends of them instead, cooperate with them, and build a professional network that benefits all of you. There is far more to gain by being open and helpful than there is to lose.
This is true of your customers as well – be willing to educate them into being informed customers so they know how to make good choices. If they are do it yourselfers, be helpful, and answer short questions (there comes a point where you can’t answer time consuming ones, but up to that point, be helpful and generous). You don’t have to give away any hands-on work – but answer emails kindly and generously. It pretty much always comes back to your benefit.
I’ve answered questions for total strangers countless times. Some I never hear from again. Others come to me later for services when their circumstances change – sometimes they come to me many years later. They remember me because I helped them when no one else would. Often, it comes back to me by way of a referral. Someone calls, again, often many years later, and says that they were referred by someone I helped, who could not say enough good about me. They validate my expertise, my integrity, and assure the prospect that I won’t charge them unreasonably.
You can’t buy that kind of advertising.
Once you rid yourself of the resentment of your competition, and open up to cooperation, you start an amazing synergy that helps all of you be just a bit better than you could be on your own.
And there isn’t ANY reason to be paranoid about THAT!
Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting, to help businesses identify and encourage artistry in their own business.
Content Marketing
About three or four years ago, online networking changed. We used to be involved in several forums and lists, where we were able to contribute to lengthy conversations, give advice, help people with website problems, and generally make ourselves look like the knowledgeable experts we are. That interaction and relationship development yielded a steady stream of clients, already pre-sold on our services. They knew we were good, and we were the people they wanted to hire, before we even knew they wanted to hire us.
Then FaceBook and Twitter took over. The popularity of instant and short interaction superceded the appeal of lengthy conversations. Now, networking is almost impossible online, because everybody wants interaction condensed into 144 character blurbs. The emphasis of social has trumped business interactions, and the ability to network through these venues for purposes of gaining pre-sold clients is weak in comparison to the old forum formats. It is fickle, capricious, impatient, and since it has the attention span of an immature gnat, using it with any degree of effectiveness (and it may not be a lot), is completely EXHAUSTING, because you have to keep finding “new” and “fresh” ways to get in front of people and get them to notice you among the SEA of other people screaming for their 2 seconds of attention. Oh, there are people who will hotly disagree with that assessment, but they are pretty much ALL people who are selling something related to marketing with FaceBook or Twitter.
Truthfully, this change threw us for a loop. We didn’t realize it right away though, because we still had lots of momentum going from the previous venues, even though they had dried up. We were also doing a lot of local networking through teaching classes, giving presentations, and attending luncheons and after-hours events.
It became baldly apparent after we moved and those local opportunities were gone, that we had to reassess, and figure out what was still working.
About that time, I decided to consolidate some of my domains. I mean, 86 active websites is a bit much to manage when your life is getting busier for other reasons. So I started letting some of them go. That had more of an impact on our business than any other single change we had ever made. Customers and clients simply dried up.
The reason is Content Marketing. I had many websites that were instructional sites on various topics related to our business. I blogged, and I wrote extensively. All of those sites were interlinked with our main websites, and all of them brought us several clients per year.
Now, you must understand, I am NOT talking about quickly content scraping sites, nor am I talking about sites where you post the same overused articles everyone else is posting, or where you rewrite badly written PLR articles (ok, so they are ALWAYS accurate, ALWAYS grammatically correct, but COMPLETELY unoriginal, and lacking in inspiration or creativity). I am also NOT talking about “Article Marketing”, where you paste your articles into article sites that the search engines now completely ignore.
No, what I am talking about is 100% hand-written, unique, creative, personable, helpful, and informative information, which you put into sites that YOU own.
You, saying what no one else is saying. Writing about answers to the questions your customers keep asking. Writing about your expertise, about things your customers need to know that they might not think to ask. Having fun with it, being yourself.
That kind of writing is like candy to the search engines. They LIKE original stuff. And it is great for capturing less common search terms, which make up the BULK of organic traffic searches. That random, unpredictable, completely spontaneous happenstance that occurs from people just being people, rather than people trying to game the computers into abnormal results. You just create good stuff, and then sit on the sidelines and scrape up the leftovers – which, in the world of the web, are an AWFUL LOT of good quality customers and clients.
This kind of marketing provides a wide range of benefits:
1. About 1% of the search terms used in any given industry are responsible for about 10% of the traffic. And EVERYBODY is going after that SAME 10%! There are a gazillion other terms, which you don’t even have to PLAN for, but which occur naturally in well-written content, which are responsible for the other 90%. They are like seagulls, all fighting over a whale carcass, so thick that most of them can’t even get a nibble, when the whole beach is strewn with fish, which are being ignored as everyone fights over the whale. Forget the whale. Clean up on the fish and it is easy pickin’s in comparison!
2. The clients and customers you get are the ones you WANT. They are ones that looked at the most popular options and DID NOT WANT THAT. So if you are offering something really special, you don’t want people who don’t care about how special it is. They won’t be happy customers. You want the ones who KNOW they want something better, and content writing appeals to them. They’ll dig a little deeper, find you, and be glad they did.
3. The customer is pre-sold. They KNOW you know your business. So you spend less time persuading them of your value, and you are able to get right to closing the deal.
4. You don’t even have to come UP in the first ten pages of the search engines for your main website, and you don’t have to pay for costly ongoing SEO (a single SEO review and optimization, with a short training session is sufficient). If you have other sites referring traffic to it, or other sites helping with the sales process, your main website can have relatively low traffic, and low search engine placement, and you can still clean up. We once had an “SEO expert” criticize our site, and ask us how we got any customers. I told him how I did it, and he flatly told me that there was no way I could make money unless I was showing up on the top positions for the top keywords on my site. He was wrong. Well written content is naturally optimized for the less common search terms, and when you get enough content, it sits there working for you regardless of your position for top keywords.
5. The longer you do it, the more power it has. Search engines like new and fresh content, but they also like old and stable content, as long as it is unique and good quality. So when you write good stuff, and keep adding to it, the power of your writing just grows and grows. Each article is a drop in the bucket, and adds to the existing power. It does this even if each article gets relatively little traffic.
6. When you have content writing as a cornerstone of your marketing, you can feed it automatically into Twitter or FaceBook, via RSS, and increase the exposure. Write once, and automatically cover multiple areas of contact.
Without that, you end up having to find ways to be clever and witty and to market in little sound bytes, instead of being able to be a complete person.
7. A single exposure is sufficient to convert a customer. With most types of marketing, it takes seven or more exposures to a marketing message or individual before someone decides to act. With content marketing, this dynamic changes. Because the exposure is more detailed and more comfortable (they do it on their terms), and because they looked for an answer and YOU provided the one that helped them “get” it. A single article that helps someone understand, or teaches them something they value, or makes them laugh, or which echoes their own feelings on a subject, can do more to persuade in a single encounter than multiple exposures to other types of advertising.
Many things about the nature of the web have changed in the last several years. The nature and expectations of the average web user have changed. But Content Marketing has not changed. Write good stuff. Post it to your own website or blog. Set up more than one, organized by interest, and interlink them. In about a year, it will start to pay off, and it only gets better from there.
Content is still King, and a nice informative or humorous article with an ah-ha moment still has more power to bring in paying customers than any other method of marketing that is not face-to-face.
Good Germs, Bad Germs
I ran across a statement in a study recently that discussed the ways in which farm kids were healthier than city kids. Lower infection rates, and lower allergy/sensitivity rates. I hope nobody takes offense at the labeling of “farm kids” and “city kids”. I offer no definitions, so you are free to fit in whichever category you like!
Well, there’s usually two big differences between farm and city kids.
1. They more often eat food produced at home. That is, food that is NOT sterilized to death, and coated in preservatives, detergents, and artificial colors and flavors, with the good stuff stripped out and a handful of enrichments thrown in.
2. They are usually exposed to WAY more natural germs, allergens, and things like saliva, manure, blood, raw milk, etc.
So how can it be, if they are AROUND more stuff, and that stuff is (according to the USDA), not as clean, how can they be healthier?
For one, the absence of even a portion of the chemicals that load your food is a health boon to anyone. That alone will strengthen your immune system and reduce your allergies. Commercial organic foods are still laden with a host of contaminants, but they are usually a fair bit better than non-organics, so this may be a way for you to test and see if this makes a difference for you.
But beyond that, it is that very EXPOSURE to germs that MAKES farm kids healthy.
Not all germs are bad. In fact, about half the germs out there are actually GOOD for you. Another 40% or so are neutral – they don’t hurt you or help you. The other 10% are the ones that give germs a bad rap.
The good news about those bad ones is, that most of the time, even THEY are harmless – because you are usually not exposed to a lot, and you normally have enough good bacteria to reduce the effect before your immune system even has to handle it, and what is left is easily dispatched.
So from that paragraph, maybe you start to understand that even bad germs really aren’t that much of a threat most of the time. And there are more factors than just your immune system at work. And one of those factors is….
Ta-da…
Germs!
That’s right. Good germs.
Normally, the world has a pretty good complement of good and bad germs. And the good germs do a lot to keep the bad germs in check. They are a great ally. This is why traditional fermented or aged foods are able to be safely consumed, even though they’ve not been refrigerated. Traditional fermented and aged foods include:
- Sauer Kraut
- Pickles (salt brined pickles, not the vinegar kind)
- Sourdough Bread
- Yogurt
- Buttermilk
- Cheeses
And all kinds of other ones that most people don’t know about anymore, but which used to be traditional foods in ethnic homes across the world.
If you keep conditions right, the good germs will grow, and the bad ones won’t. If you leave it in the wrong conditions, the bad ones will grow and things will get nasty. So certainly, there are rules about keeping those bad ones from taking over.
Recently I made cheese. I left fresh, unpasteurized goat milk out on the counter for about three days, until it was nicely curdled and separated, and smelled about like cottage cheese (at this point, it was safe to drink – it is just buttermilk – that is how buttermilk is traditionally made). Then I dumped it into a pot, heated it up to a certain point (which, incidentally, killed all the good germs in it). I added some lemon juice, stirred it until it curded up, and then strained it. The lemon juice went out in the whey, leaving me with cheese that tastes a lot like very expensive chevre.
When I recounted this on FaceBook, someone expressed surprise. “Won’t leaving the milk out make it get sour?” Yes, it does. But…. If you leave out raw milk, you get buttermilk because of the natural bacteria – those natural bacteria grow faster than the opportunistic bacteria floating around in the air. If you leave out pasteurized milk, you get nasty sour milk, because all it has are those opportunistic bacteria. Raw milk naturally contains a lot of GOOD bacteria, so even if it is left out, it is still very healthy because it just means you get more good bacteria in it. Beyond a certain point it will get nasty – when the good bacteria use up all the available food for themselves, the bad bacteria will move in and feed on the good bacteria and what is left.
Outside the body, germs do some pretty cool things, besides just making interesting patterns on things you leave too long in the fridge (please don’t eat those things, they are NOT the good kind of germs). But INSIDE the body, they do even cooler things.
Inside your body, there are all kinds of germs that help your body function better. Most of them live in your intestines, and aid in the process of digestion, but they also function there as the first line defense against foodborne illness. That’s important, because a lot of the things that hurt bacteria OUTSIDE the body are also things that hurt it INSIDE.
Preservatives, chlorine, detergents, pesticides, herbicides, and all those things that are designed to kill life outside your body can also kill it inside – first the intestinal bacteria, then the cells that line your intestinal walls.
If you have a healthy colony of bacteria in there, it serves to protect your body a little against occasional exposures to such contaminants. On regular exposure though, not only are the friendly bacteria killed off, your intestines sustain damage as well.
Those bacteria do a lot of things. They help keep your intestines healthy and your immune system healthy. Good bacteria is responsible for a portion of the digestive process – it helps to break down food into the nutrients that are absorbed by the intestines. If you become deficient in intestinal bacteria, you also become nutritionally deficient.
Good bacteria also help maintain a balance in the fungus in your body. You have various yeast strains (candida is common) in your body. They are always there. Too little bacteria means they get out of control, and you’ll get painful fungal infections on your hands, armpits, legs, etc. It can create a weepy, swollen red and painful rash, or it can cause dry cracking on the ends of fingers and toes. Fungal infections usually show an outward set of symptoms, and a few cartons of yogurt or a bottle of kefir can often clear them right up – eat the yogurt, it works just fine from the inside out.
So… what about those neutral bacteria, and even the bad ones?
Regular exposure to them, in small amounts, helps to strengthen the immune system. You are expose to salmonella, e coli, shigella, and other bacteria on a daily basis. Farm kids are exposed to even more of them. Most strains are not even harmful, but even when they are, it is in such low concentrations that it doesn’t make you sick. What it does do, is give your body practice in recognizing and destroying that kind of invader.
So why do people get sick with those illnesses? There are several reasons:
1. Usually it is from a fairly high exposure. Modern food handling means that if food is contaminated, a LOT of it is contaminated in a large facility, and then it will spend a significant amount of time in transit – time enough for it to incubate and grow.
2. Often, it is a superbug. More aggressive, and nastier than normal. Those bugs were created in mass farming and processing facilities where chlorine and other disinfectants are used on a daily basis (so pathogens become immune), and where the bugs come from animals that have been treated regularly with antibiotics so the disease is also antibiotic resistant.
3. If you are eating foods with preservatives and drinking chlorinated water on a regular basis, your own intestinal bacteria may be depleted, giving you no front line defense.
4. If your immune system has not been exposed to small amounts of normal germs on a regular basis, you won’t have much strength with which to fight a heavy exposure.
5. Antibiotics from either a prescription or passed to you through meats or dairy foods, can upset the bacterial balance in your intestines.
Now, I’m not at all suggesting that we never wash our hands. But I am suggesting that most of the time, water is all we need. Food should be washed in water, not detergents – those detergents are harmful to you in more ways than one. And homes should be kept clean, but do not need to be kept sterilized – that ends up backfiring on the entire household. The use of anti-bacterial soaps should be avoided except when you have a need to sterilize your hands, for instance, when you need to bandage up a child, or if you’ve just helped a goat give birth (sorry, I couldn’t resist…).
Certainly there are times when disinfectants are required. After handling things that are specifically high risk, absolutely. But for day to day living, most of the time we aren’t doing that. Peeling a potato is not a high risk behavior. Handling meat that has spent a few too many days in the fridge, is because it has become a pool of concentrated harmful bacteria. Use some judgment and clean up with water, unless you feel there is a reason to believe there is a high concentration of germs all in one place – like washing the dishes.
There’s no such thing as perfectly sterile anyway, and if you are bent on killing every germ in your path, you are going to kill more good ones than bad ones, and it will come back to bite you.
So get some good germs into your life. Not only will it help you, but it will make those unplanned encounters with the bad ones much less risky!
Researchers Announce Birth Control Breakthrough
Two researchers in an obscure town in the US have released a report in support of the only known 100% safe and effective method of contraception. This method is completely safe, has no uncontrollable side effects, is extremely affordable, and has been used successfully throughout every culture, society and historical period on record.
The method is known historically as “abstinence”. When used correctly, it is the only birth control method which provides 100% effectiveness. No other method, including sterilization, can make that claim, as all other methods can, and do fail, a certain percentage of the time. This method is also 100% effective in preventing STDs, and completely stops the sexual transmission of AIDS in all users – again, something that no other method of birth control can even come close to claiming.
Largely ignored by medical professionals, and pharmaceutical companies, this method has been actively ridiculed by pro-abortion factions. Their ridicule has been somewhat puzzling to researchers who have compared safety statistics, effectiveness rates, and mental stability statistics between groups who use abstinence, other forms of birth control, or who have chosen abortion. Abstinence is far safer for women, no woman has ever died due to overdose, or due to malpractice on the part of a careless professional. It cannot spread infection, is never practiced in unsanitary back alleys, and does not have risks of mechanical failure. Indeed, the use of abstinence, especially outside of marriage, has been shown to provide a wide range of health benefits. It can be understood by any person who is old enough to be able to define the parts of their body, and the vocabulary required to safely practice it is so simple even a two year old can master it. One simple word, “No” is all that is required.
This method is simple enough that any parent can teach it to their child. It can be taught in schools in a matter of a few minutes. Since there is no health risk attached to this method, training materials do not have to be cumbered down with lengthy and costly legal disclaimers. Training materials are simple, in-depth anatomical diagrams are not necessary to effective teaching. It can easily be taught without embarrassment in a co-ed teaching environment.
Abstinence is the most cost effective form of contraception. It is the only method of birth control which can be used absolutely free to the user and the public, and is able to be used effectively even among the poorest populations. Teens can use it without permission from their parents, since no prescription is required – given this easy access by every sexually mature individual, one would think that “pro-choice” advocates would be promoting this as a means for individuals to control their own reproductive health, but strangely, they prefer to press for public funding of prescriptions and abortions instead, both of which present significant risks and costs to individual users.
Abstinence is usually effective without any form of professional or mechanical assistance. For people who have difficulty properly implementing it, there are various assistive devices which may help, but which are in no way required. One can even use ordinary duct tape (a single wrap, around the knees) to help individuals who are having difficulty with proper implementation.
The single fault found by the researchers was the lack of major corporate profit potential. Because abstinence does not require a prescription, pharmaceutical companies do not stand to make money from promoting it. It does not require a medical procedure, so doctors are usually not enthusiastic about promoting abstinence either. The risk of damage from using is non-existent, as is the risk of contracting a disease or infection through the use of abstinence, so all secondary income streams which could potentially result from such “accidents” have been similarly removed as motive for pharmaceutical and medical professionals to promote abstinence. Since mental illness never results from the use of abstinence, and since individuals who practice it have higher than average self-esteem, the mental health industry has found little motive to promote abstinence as a desirable choice, and indeed, most mental health professionals are largely uneducated about abstinence, due to limited professional contact with indivuals using this method of birth control and reproductive health enhancement.
The findings of the researchers show conclusively that widespread implementation of this birth control method would increase both female and male reproductive and mental health, and eliminate all risks from dangerous drugs and surgical procedures related to unwanted pregnancies and STDs. It is the hope of the researchers that attention may be brought to this safe, healthy, effective, and affordable method of avoiding unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.
A Nasty Bout of E Coli
I don’t get sick easily. This one hit me like a Mack truck. Lasted almost a week, and left me completely wiped out.
Since we are now raising some animals, you may raise your brows and say, “Well, what do you expect? Eating raw eggs fresh from the chicken, and raw milk without even pasteurizing it!” But I didn’t get it from the eggs, or the milk, or the home butchered duck or rabbit, or the homegrown veggies (fertilized in real manure). Nope… not one of those things gave me anything so debilitating. Even though my sometimes less than hygienic teens are now doing the washing and processing of our milk and eggs, they still didn’t make me sick.
I got it from a pasteurized, USDA scrutinized, nationally branded, and nationally distributed dairy product.
The fact is, on your average small farm, the risk just isn’t what people think it is.
And the risks on the supposedly sterile certified farms are not what people think they are either!
If you do not use unnecessary antibiotics with your animals, you do not grow superbugs. The greatest danger for foodborne illness comes from superbugs – those that have become really nasty because they are growing in animals with constant, or frequent exposure to antibiotics.
If you are exposed on a regular basis to normal foodborne bacteria, such as those normally present in healthy raw milk, and farm fresh eggs (you know, eggs that are only a few days old, not eggs that have set in warehouses, and distribution centers and trucks, and then on grocery store shelves for months before you get them – with any bacteria in them growing the whole time), the few harmful germs that are there are not plentiful enough to sicken you, and they serve only to strengthen your immune system, and they are accompanied by many healthy bacteria that do the same. The majority of bacteria in raw milk and raw eggs is healthy bacteria – on the grocery store shelves, they’d call them Probiotics and charge you a premium for them, but they are simply more effective where nature put them in the first place. (Kind of amusing that commercial yogurt consists of taking perfectly good milk, killing all the good stuff in it, putting a little bit back and letting that little bit grow – would have been best to just leave the good stuff there to start with.)
If a facility produces a small amount of fresh food, and some is contaminated, a few people get sick, and usually not very badly because the contamination does not have time to grow.
If a large facility, which produces massive quantities of food has a contamination issue, it usually affects large portions of the product. The product then goes into distribution channels and is fairly well aged by the time it reaches the customer – so the contamination is compounded by the extra time the bacteria has to incubate and multiply. Not only are more people affected, but they are affected more severely.
So while it may seem odd that daily life that is steeped in manure does not make me sick, and that a supposedly “safe” commercial dairy product did, it isn’t odd at all. In fact, that’s how it normally works.
There simply is no safer way to stay healthy than growing your own. The barnyard isn’t the real minefield, the grocery store is!
I Don’t Want a Brand New Luxury Home with a Pool
We’ve been house hunting. And hunting. And hunting. You’d think there would be a lot of old homes out there that have NOT been recently remodeled. But it seems not.
My eyes and brain are weary from reading enthusiastic descriptions of high priced properties, all describing the luxurious new features that will keep me from having to lift a finger prior to move in.
That’s fine, if that is what you want. We don’t. We NEED a fixer upper – and not just a ramshackle run down mobile home (we’ve got one of those, we don’t need another!). We need an old home – 100 years old or so. Built before things like OSB and composite materials were commonplace. One that has been neglected for a while, but not abused. One that the owner did NOT renovate by tearing out the old solid wood cabinets and replacing them with cheap (but lovely) new kitchen cabinets with particle board where you can’t see it.
We need a house that has character. That has a few cracks in the old plaster walls, that haven’t been ripped out and replaced with drywall. Wood floors that are not laminate, and which probably haven’t been sanded and refinished recently. A sink that is enamel, with a few chips in it, that got that way from a century of use, not from carelessness. Windows that are wood framed, not vinyl. Old wood siding, in need of scraping and a new coat of paint.
Realistically, this is what we can afford. Medically, this is what I require.
Homes, it seems, are now disposable. Old farmhouses are abandoned, left to rot, while a cheap mobile is pulled up on the property to live in. When the mobile gets old, it is towed off and a new one brought in. An old farmhouse left to rot for 20 years is no longer repairable – it doesn’t have enough of the good structure left, and repairing it with safe materials is prohibitively expensive.
Somewhere, in the middle, is the house we need. And it seems to not exist. Well, I can find a HOUSE, but it is usually in the middle of downtown Dallas or something. Not on the acreage we need.
And then there are “gated communities”, “ranchettes”, and “covenant communties with a great HOA”. You can have ’em. They are designed for people who want to pretend that they live in the country, while taking the city with them. Home Owners Associations are about controlling the actions of your neighbors, not about preserving property values (have you compared the prices between those neighborhoods and the unrestricted ones lately?). Horses are sometimes “allowed”, but anything practical is promptly squashed.
So all those enthusiastic claims of how wonderful this house is, and why it is worth way more than we can afford just don’t impress me. I just want a simple old house that hasn’t been messed with, on a few acres of land that allow chickens and goats, so that I can grow livestock and crops.
It shouldn’t be so hard to find.
More than a Web Developer
I’ve been deeply immersed in web design and technology, and the small business arena for the last 10 years. I’ve loved every minute of it (ok, so not so much some of the hair pulling technical puzzles, but most of it!). I’ve loved the creative side, the puzzle element, and the associations with absolutely wonderful people. But I think I’m near the end of a season in my life. I can feel it coming apart – my interest is declining, the desire to go to the next level with it is fading. Other interests are reasserting themselves into my life again. I’m ready to be more than a web developer again.
I don’t know if it is the farm stuff that is piquing this interest or whether it is partly the poor economy and the effect it has on our business right now. Whatever it is, I find that I am pulled by things I have had no time for the last 5 years. I want to crochet again. I want to bake and make things for my family. I want to be a part time web developer, and have a life around it again.
It was necessary for me to be completely immersed in it for the time that I was – we would not have been able to build a business for our family if I had not been there first. So it was good and needed at the time. It was the season for it. I don’t have any regrets about it. And I don’t want to completely abandon it. But I’m ready for it to no longer dominate my life – for it to be a rewarding part of my life, but not the whole of it.
I used to read a lot (not just novels), I cooked a lot, made craft items, built some of our own furniture, and did a lot of home do it yourself stuff. I painted, drew, and designed things. In the thick of business, every creative effort I had was channeled into that – there was no time or thought left over. I read technical books. I created site designs. I “painted” custom graphics. I designed site structures.
I find myself longing for something else now. Not absent of what I have, but balanced with what I have. I’m finding that the “simple” life as described in the bucolic ramblings of the nostalgic is not really simple at all. And it is in no way unintelligent. It is complex, difficult, and involves a lot more than just drudging hard work. There is a highly academic side to it – you learn, or it fails miserably. A good farmer is an artist, a scientist, a veterinarian, a creator. He must be. Less than that does not succeed.
But the farming is only part of it. I miss parts of me that got set aside to develop the business. Again, it was the right and necessary choice at the time. But it may just be time now to bring them back.
I’m ready to be more again.
Regulatory Constipation
So apparently, the purpose of regulations by the government, is not to achieve a specific definable goal, but rather, to simply regulate and require – facilitating adherence to those regulations does not seem to be part of the perceived purpose of the government of the State of Wyoming.
First of all, we started researching what it took to raise quail, for the purpose of food production (eggs and meat). It all seemed pretty simple – apply for a permit, and away you go, at least, that is what people from other states were saying.
Wyoming seems to want to go out of their way to make it more difficult than it needs to be. First of all, the state claims ownership of all gamebirds in the state – including those that you buy and have shipped in from out of state, and including those that are non-native to the state, and which could not really survive in the wild here. They do not care, you are merely a steward over “their” birds, and you must account for each one, track breeding, disposal or destruction of the birds, ensure that the birds you produce are marked to distinguish them from “wild” birds, allow on-site inspections whenever they ask, etc.
There are two types of permits – the free one, that allows you to have up to 100 birds, not for commercial use. And the one that costs $130, for a “Gamebird Farm” which does allow you to sell them. It sort of assumes you are raising them for hunting purposes, on a substantial property. Ok, we can deal with that, short and long term.
Then we found a rather buried reference to a health inspection certification – attached to another section of regulation. This is what it states:
“A certificate of veterinary inspection completed by an accredited veterinarian from the state of origin within ten (10) days prior to importation of game birds and/ or game bird eggs into the State shall be required. In addition, a statement signed by the supplier of the game birds shall be submitted to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Attention: Permitting Officer, 3030 Energy Lane, Casper, Wyoming 82604 on a form prescribed by the Department attesting that the game birds and/ or game bird eggs and premises of origin are free of infectious, contagious and communicable diseases. Diseases include, but shall not be limited to, Newcastle disease, Salmonella, pullorum, avian cholera, duck viral enteritis, Mycoplasma gallisepticum, and avian influenza. The statement shall also indicate that no game bird within the flock of origin is known to be infected with or to be exposed to avian tuberculosis. Game birds and premises of origin shall have been free of said diseases for at least one (1) year immediately preceding the date of shipment into the State and the premises shall not have experienced an undiagnosed mortality of more than ten percent (10%) of the game birds during the same one (1) year period.”
Failure to comply can result in at least, the state destroying your flock, and most, fines and imprisonment.
So we started asking questions to find out just what the two prescribed forms WERE, and how to get them – our game warden is clueless, he’s never dealt with this, so he doesn’t know (good guy, no insult to him).
We called the State Veterinarian (because another regulatory document said we had to send a form to them), and they had no clue what we were talking about. They referred us to Fish and Game. You’d think someone in their office would know what we were talking about? Nope!
They suggested we talk to the permitting officer. Her secretary didn’t know what we were talking about either. Then we talked to the permitting officer – she explained that really, all we needed was a completely different form, provided by the state of origin, which didn’t really even specify the things that the regulation stipulated! Only the form she said IS required, is NOT the form that any of the hatcheries supplies as a rule. But she did not have an official form. It did not exist.
So we have a regulation, calling for something that does not exist, created by people who do not care whether it is enforced or not, and which is enforced by someone who isn’t even sure what it is that is required to meet the standard.
Wow. Compliance is a headache, and when it comes down to it, completely voluntary.
Here’s the thing…
I don’t have to do ANY of this if I buy in state. Of course, what I need is not AVAILABLE in state, but oh well… I could still buy diseased birds in state and never have to comply.
Furthermore, I could start doing this in my back room, where nobody sees it, order out of state, and not tell, and no one would be the wiser. The regulations are COMPLETELY unenforceable… even if the state appointed overseers DID know precisely what the regulation meant!
I’m sure that the state could be just a little more organized and helpful in encouraging compliance. This is enough to make someone give up!
This doesn’t seem to be an issue with a single department either. One would think that your state would want to encourage people to survive there – especially in a state that is so hard to live in as Wyoming. You’d think they’d want to encourage enterprise. You’d think that if they had a law, they’d want to help people to obey that law.
This seems to be an increasing issue with government where business is concerned. The creation of completely unenforceable laws that punish those who try to comply, while ignoring those who don’t.
Something is wrong with this picture.
Who’d figure it could be so hard to get a chicken?
We started trying to get quail. Wyoming goes out of its way to make it particularly hard for someone to raise a few quail in their garage. Quail, you see, are gamebirds, and gamebirds are “owned” and managed by the state, even if YOU buy them from OUT of state, and they are regulated by the state. Even if they are essentially domesticated Quail that are non-native to the area, the state manages them.
So, quail take time. Lots of time. File for the permit, find a company that will comply with Wyoming’s certification requirements, wait for them to ship, hatch them (wait for that too), brood them, grow them, and finally they start laying. And then you can only have 100 of them. The eggs are so tiny that that is just about enough to keep a family in eggs (about 80 females, 20 males, for fertile eggs).
Quail would not meet our needs completely, for meat and eggs (they could, if we wanted to get a Game Farm License – $130 per year… maybe someday so we can sell quail eggs, but not now). So we were going to need something else. Keeping in mind our requirements:
- Has to be able to be cage raised, in a small space.
- Has to be productive for both eggs, and meat.
- Has to produce small eggs (easier to digest than big ones).
- Needs to be domesticated, not considered wild game (leaves out pheasant and some other options).
So we were left with Bantams. The do ok in cages, produce small eggs, and some breeds are good layers.
But it is very hard to find them this time of year. We can’t order chicks (several companies have them available), because they’ll die in the box before they get to the Wilds of Wyoming. So we have to order eggs, or find live animals near enough to go pick up. Both have proven difficult.
Getting chickens is easy. Getting a specific breed, is not so easy. Getting them when you want them, out of season, can be hard too.
I’m getting an education. But I’m also very persistent, so I’ll eventually get it done, in spite of the obstacles.
Because I’m now reacting to one of the ingredients in the B-12 supplements… so I need eggs that I can actually digest. It is causing enough problems to be a daily reminder that we need chickens. Soon.
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