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Rebuttal to 50 Excuses for Not Preparing
In response to a list of 50 excuses posted here:
http://totalcollapse.com/2012/05/20/the-top-50-excuses-for-not-prepping/
- “The U.S. Economy Is The Greatest Economy On The Planet – There Is No Way That It Could Ever Collapse” The Greeks said the same thing of their country before it collapsed. The US Economy WAS the greatest economy on the planet – did you fail to notice when we lost our AAA credit rating? Did you fail to notice that we have record high unemployment rates (the real rates, not the skewed ones reported each quarter that leave out people who have stopped looking)? Did you fail to notice that the price of fuel (not just gasoline) and groceries are at all time highs and still rising?
- “Once Barack Obama Wins The Election Everything Will Be Better” Been there. Done that. It didn’t get better. If you throw gasoline on a fire instead of water, it isn’t going to put the fire out any better the second time you make the same mistake. (You can put your favorite democrat, libertarian, socialist, etc, into this one.)
- “Once Mitt Romney Wins The Election Everything Will Be Better” Mitt thinks the things Obama did for the economy (you know, the ones that escalated it into a rapidly worsening state?) were GOOD things. His can of gasoline is only a little smaller than Obama’s can – but it is still gasoline, and he doesn’t know how to find water. (Insert favorite Republican or Constitution Party candidate here.)
- “When Things Get Really Bad The Government Will Take Care Of Us” Things are really bad. The government made it worse. They have no plans to make it better – only to use the economy as an excuse to take away your liberty, under the guise of “helping you”. There aren’t enough government resources to go around in a major crisis. If there were, things would not BE really bad now, they’d have “fixed” it by throwing money at it. When the government does something, it takes 99 people being taxed at 50% to take care of ONE person. In a major crisis, the equation just doesn’t work!
- “When Disaster Strikes I Will Just Steal From Everyone Else That Has Been Busy Preparing” Preppers have guns. They also understand their Constitutional right to defend their home. They also have rope. Some have handcuffs. If they have to wait for the police to arrive, they are prepared to hold you until they get there.On the other hand, if you really are in need, and you ask nicely, chances are pretty much any prepared person will share a meal with you. They won’t do your job for you, and they won’t adopt you and let you be a sponge. But if your children are hungry, they usually won’t let them starve.
- “The Rapture Will Be At Any Moment So I Don’t Have To Worry About Prepping” I guess if your goal is to meet God, and the Rapture does not come when you expect, you can die of starvation and meet Him that way. Your choice. I’d rather use a little common sense and do what I can to take care of my own needs.
- “The Economy Has Always Recovered After Every Recession In The Past And This Time Will Be No Different” It takes 10 years average to recover from major economic depression, and that is when the government has NOT been meddling in a way that makes the eventual fallout far worse. Even if it took just 4-5 years, that’s a long time to survive without any reserves or backup.
- “The People That Are Running Things Are Very Highly Educated And They Know Exactly What They Are Doing” That’s true! But what YOU think they are doing and what they are ACTUALLY doing is two different things! They are not trying to “take care of you”. They are trying to get money and power. Yes, they do know exactly what they are doing. The less you prepare, the more power they have to take your liberty and limit your choices. I rather like freedom. I rather like independence. But by all means, believe that the people in charge are smart – if they can enslave you, they are smarter than you are, for certain!
- “Wal-Mart Will Always Be There” Have you ever seen a Wal-Mart that was THERE, but which wasn’t any good? I have. I’ve seen a Wal-Mart damaged by a tornado. Shut down, doors closed and locked through the whole emergency. I’ve seen a Wal-Mart with the power off – cash registers don’t function without power, and Wal-Mart clears the store of customers, and locks the doors until the power comes back on. Have you ever seen a Wal-Mart after the interstate highways have been closed for three days? I have! A Wal-Mart does you no good if there is nothing left on the shelves. And it takes about three days to completely clean out a Wal-Mart of everything useful in an emergency.
- “Our Politicians Are Watching Out For Our Best Interests” See number 8. Our Politicians are watching out for THEIR best interests.
- “The 2012 Apocalypse Is Almost Here And We Are All Doomed Anyway – So Why Even Try?” Because an Apocalypse doesn’t destroy everything. It just makes a mess of things, involves a lot of war, and leaves the majority of people to live through it and clean it up. You aren’t going to die tomorrow – you are going to live. Horribly! (Ok, so that is melodramatic… but seriously, doesn’t anyone know what an apocalypse really IS?)
- “Preppers Do Not Have A Positive Mental Attitude” We absolutely DO have a positive attitude. Preppers believe that if they do what they can, even if it is just a little, they can survive what they have to survive. BECAUSE they are as prepared as they realistically can be, they feel confident.
- “If An Economic Collapse Comes I Will Just Go On Welfare” Um… what part of “economic collapse” do you not understand? The government is broke. It is borrowing more than the entire US makes. It is the most likely CAUSE of an economic collapse. And it means that when it happens, there won’t be money for welfare. There WILL, however, be long long lines of unprepared people, standing around filling out applications for assistance, on the hope that there will be enough of nothing left by the time their application is processed, for them to get help that isn’t available. Because people who rely on the government to fix things would rather stand in a line to fill out an application (somehow filling out an application seems productive to them even when it isn’t), where there is no real hope of getting something, than go out and work to take care of themselves.
- “There Are Some Things You Just Can’t Prepare For” Right. But there are some things you CAN prepare for, and SHOULD prepare for. It just makes sense to prepare to depend upon yourself when you realistically can do so.
- “Prepping Is Too Expensive” One can at a time. If you stock up on sale, budget a small amount each month to invest in storage supplies, or shop less often so you spend more on core food items and less on impulse buys, you can painlessly build a good food storage over the course of a year or two. I do this, it really works.
- “We Are Not Like Other Countries – U.S. Cities Are Designed To Withstand Major Earthquakes” Just like San Francisco. Right? The earthquake in the 80s only caused damage to a few of the major roadways, and a small percentage of buildings (earthquake and fire damage). Only PART of the city was shut down. Only PART of the city was damaged severely enough to be eligible for Federal Disaster Relief Assistance (remember what that is? Only available in a MAJOR disaster? Only available if there is NOT an economic shutdown?).
- “I Need To Save Up For Retirement Instead” Food storage pays a better rate of return. Who says it has to be one or the other? A little here, and a little there accumulates quickly for either one.
- “The Stock Market Has Been Soaring So Why Worry?” Which stock market are you following again? What goes up, must go down!
- “I Don’t Have Room To Store Anything” Of course you do. You just don’t want to make the effort!
- “Prepping Is For Crazy People” So is Welfare. Prepping also goes by other names… Wisdom. Prudence. Security. Emergency Planning (that is the one the Government uses when it is THEIR idea). Pretty crazy alright!
- “I Don’t Believe In Conspiracy Theories” I don’t either. I do believe in the normal ups and downs of life, and I do believe in the lessons history teaches, and I do believe in basic math that says that 2 + 2 cannot equal 14 trillion, no matter how you cook the books (of course, there’s usually a conspiracy beneath that one, but it isn’t just theory).
- “All The Food I Store Is Going To Go Bad” Not if you eat it first. Good food storage is rotated regularly. This ensures that you are storing things you actually EAT, and it keeps you in the habit of regularly using and replacing it to keep it fresh.
- “I Would Rather Spend My Time Watching American Idol” Keepin’ your food storage around your waist, are you?
- “All The People Who Freaked Out About Y2K Look Really Foolish Now, Don’t They?” No. They are the ones who have not had to fear as grocery prices escalated. They are the ones who have made it through unemployment with less pain and hardship. They are the ones who still have their homes because they were able to use food storage to reduce their grocery budget and still have enough to pay their mortgage. They are the ones who have been able to cope with high fuel price spikes because they had something to fall back on to keep their monthly expenses within their incomes. Besides, you got all anxious and wondered what you’d do. They got busy and planned what they’d do, and they weren’t worried at all about Y2K.
- “I Don’t Want To Look Like Those Idiots On ‘Doomsday Preppers’” So don’t. Apply some common sense. Sometime within your lifetime, a food storage is going to be a major asset to you. So it makes sense to have a reasonable food storage. If you know what “overboard” looks like, don’t go there. Just be smart about preparing for what is most likely – unemployment, financial loss, snowstorm, electrical outage, etc. Those things DO happen. To everyone!
- “An EMP Attack Could Never Happen” Whether it could or not is not really the issue. Electrical outages DO happen, internet interruptions do occur, hard drives crash, and lightening strikes. Often enough that you are going to be inconvenienced for anywhere between a few hours, and a week or more at some point in your life. The more dependent we become on electronics, the more likely it is that something major WILL interrupt it, for short or long periods. But the realistic interruptions are more likely to be the same old thing that has always caused problems. If you are prepared to last the week without ordering pizza over the internet, you’ll get along better!
- “There Will Never Be A Nationwide Transportation Disruption In The United States” Perhaps not. But there are frequently local interruptions, which will inconvenience YOU just as much as if there was a nationwide interruption. Big things are scary, and horrifying to consider. But smaller local disturbances are the things that are not just LIKELY to occur, but pretty much GUARANTEED to occur. Most of the nation won’t even notice – but YOU will. And if you have food in your cupboards when everyone else is searching the empty shelves at Wal-Mart in desperation, you won’t regret your decision to plan ahead.
- “Instead Of Being So Paranoid, I Would Rather Just Enjoy Life” Paranoia is not required. Wisdom is. Life is far more enjoyable when you don’t need to fear, and preparing keeps you from fearing. No need to get caught up in the impractical race to prepare for EVERY eventuality. Just do what is REASONABLE, within your means and capacity.
- “If Society Falls Apart I Wouldn’t Want To Continue To Live Anyway” Congratulations. You don’t need to prepare for anything. In fact, you probably better commit suicide tomorrow, because society has been falling apart piece by piece all around you and you haven’t even noticed.
- “There Will Never Be Another World War” They said that after WWI. And Santa Clause is real too.
- “I’m Too Lazy To Grow A Garden” So don’t grow a garden. Or grow a Lazy Garden. There’s an amazing thing about gardening… It takes a lot less work and expense than most Gardening Books or Seed Catalogs will let on (after all, they want to make it seem complicated enough to justify a BOOK on the subject, and expensive enough to justify BUYING all that stuff). Gardening is also addictive – once you grow something, and it produces food you can eat, that you DON’T have to buy at the grocery store, you get a feeling you get from nothing else – not even from laying in front of the TV eating potato chips. If you can’t expand your life beyond the TV and Ruffles, you will be pitied. If you think maybe you’d like to feel really good about yourself though, try growing a tomato plant in a bucket, or put in some lettuce in a corner of your yard. There really is nothing quite like it. If you need more on successful, easy, and cheap gardening, you can find it at http://books.firelightheritagefarm.com
- “If You Assume The Worst Is Going To Happen Then You Don’t Believe In America” Preppers never assume the “worst” is going to happen. They do assume Bad Things will happen though. And you know what? They ALWAYS DO! Even in America! That’s life, folks! Preparing just means you are smart about knowing that the Constitution does not give us the right to “happiness”, only the “pursuit of happiness”. It is easier to be happy when the Bad Things that are LIKELY to happen don’t have the power to derail you, because you were already prepared to handle them. Besides, what defines America has always been individual independence. You can’t be independent if you expect the nation to provide all your needs and protect you from calamity.
- “Deficits Don’t Matter” The government in Greece tried to say the same thing… And if you don’t know what that means, then the government financial deficit is not the deficit you need to worry about – a deficit in intellect is a more pressing worry for you.
- “I’ll Always Be Able To Get A Job In My Field” Good luck with that. Farriers thought the same thing at the end of World War I. They did not see the automobile as a threat to their livelihood – after all, horses were still less expensive, friendlier, and more prevalent, and horses were still the only practical choice for farming. They could not have foreseen the increase in credit which allowed for the rapid adoption of tractors, and family auto acquisition. The job of farrier disappeared overnight. So have hundreds of other jobs as technology has advanced suddenly into new areas that were merely theoretical, and for which a pivotal breakthrough was not anticipated. There are a dozen new college grads coming into the job market for almost every position available, and the government is strongly encouraging students to get degrees in understaffed industries. With the economy so bad for hiring, many people have gone back to school, which means that we will be seeing a flood of new graduates in the job markets over the next few years, and the markets will get increasingly flooded over a period of 4-6 years. That’s your job they are going after, one way or another.
- “If There Is A Financial Collapse All Of My Debts Will Be Wiped Out So I Might As Well Live It Up Now” Funny thing about financial collapse. When your creditor goes under, their records don’t just evaporate. They go into collections. Very aggressive collections. When high numbers of people default, the credit companies do NOT get more compassionate, they get more ruthless.
- “If Things Hit The Fan I Will Just Go Move In With My Relatives Who Have Been Busy Prepping” Most preppers are willing to share when someone is truly in need. But if you aren’t really in need, or could have avoided being in need, they aren’t going to have much patience with you! They also tend to operate on the “no worky no eaty” philosophy. Your relatives won’t have any patience with a sponge. If they let you stay, they are going to make you muck out the barn, weed the gardens, and butcher chickens, so you might as well start getting in shape now.
- “Those That Believe That There Will Be Massive Riots In American Cities Someday Are Just Being Delusional” Pretty delusional to believe that what has already happened could happen again.
- “My Spouse Would Think That I Have Finally Lost It” Your spouse probably already does think you lost it, so what will it matter? And really… planning ahead is pretty stupid. If you come at your spouse with both barrels firing and mount an all on frontal assault on Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and start spouting conspiracy theories and doomsday prophecies, with a budget that takes all available reserves for the next 8 and a half years, then yeah, they’ll probably wanna lock you up. But that isn’t what it is about. If you explain that you’d like to have a little extra food on hand, and not have the cupboards running from shopping day to shopping day, so that there is enough on hand in case you or they get sick, or in case you experience an income interruption, or in case something stops the stores from stocking up on schedule (this is more common than people realize), then they just might listen!
- “I Don’t Know Where To Start” Start with things you use. An extra box or two of Mac and Cheese. A few extra pounds of burger in the freezer. A few extra cans of tuna and mushroom soup, or pork and beans. A couple of extra bags of rice. A great way to start is just by shopping less often. This forces you to think ahead on your needs, and reduces impulse buys, leaving room in your budget to buy extra of sale items.
- “I’ll Just Deal With Problems As They Arrive” That’s a good attitude for things you CAN’T see coming. But it doesn’t make sense for things you KNOW are coming. Think about your life, and the things you are very likely to have to deal with. Plan for those things. There will still be enough surprises in life to hone your capacity for impulsive coping!
- “I Don’t Have To Prepare For A Natural Disaster – That Is What FEMA Is For” FEMA takes three days to get help anywhere. That includes water. And FEMA takes weeks to get financial aid to an area in a way that benefits individuals. When they do come in, you get what they think you need. If you have special dietary requirements, forget it. Big disasters are all FEMA handles anyway, and you are more likely to experience small disasters that affect only yourself or a few other individuals. FEMA isn’t gonna help you, and most of the time, there won’t be other organizations there to help either. And if things get really bad (we ARE heading there), FEMA won’t BE there at all!
- “We’ll Never See Martial Law In The United States” We’ve already got it. What do you think Homeland Security really is? 2020 Update, forcing businesses to close and enforcing penalties on compliance for “advisory notices” is a form of marital law, and not only do Americans not SEE this, but when they do, they just group together and march right into the gas chambers.
- “I Don’t Want To Scare My Children” So don’t. Teach them the wisdom of intelligent and calm preparation. Teach them that when you have to get up very early for a field trip, that you make sure you have your socks and underwear clean and found the night before, and that you go to bed early so you don’t end up tired and half dressed in the morning when you really need to be getting out the door to make it on time. Teach them that when you have company coming for dinner at the end of the week, that you plan the menu early, get the shopping done, and prepare as much of the meal ahead as you can so you don’t get bogged down with prep chores when it is time to welcome the guests. Teach them that having extra on hand means you can feed unexpected guests without fuss, and that if Dad or Mom loses a job, that you won’t be hurting for food during the time between the last paycheck and the first unemployment check, and that the decrease in income won’t kill you because you have enough food on hand that at least you won’t starve. Not starving is a good thing. Not scary at all.
- “Once I Get Rid Of All My Debt Then I Will Start Thinking About Prepping” If you have food on hand, it is easier to get rid of debt, because you are not tied to having to choose between paying the bill or buying the full complement of groceries. Even a little extra on hand can make it easier to pay off debts. Try the shopping less often trick – you’ll be amazed at what that can accomplish!
- “My Relatives Already Think That I Am A Nut Job – I Don’t Need To Make It Any Worse” If they already think that, then you have nothing to lose!
- “If People At Work Find Out That I Am Prepping It Could Hurt My Career” Ummm… yeah. No employer likes an employee that actually thinks ahead! If you go all overboard and stockpile flamethrowers and grenade launchers, and stuff your mattresses with packets of soy protein powder and dried spinach, sure they are gonna question your fitness for duty. But they are unlikely to come and inspect your house for extra cans of pork and beans and Hormel chili!
- “If There Really Was A Good Reason To Prepare They Would Tell Us About It On The News” Sure, just like they told you about the rampant inflation, and about Obama signing the NDAA. Never mind that what they ARE telling you is reason enough to prepare.
- “People Have Been Predicting Doom And Gloom For Years And It Hasn’t Happened Yet” Yes it has. It just hasn’t happened to YOU in a way you identify. It isn’t doom and gloom that makes a person prepare. It is the certain knowledge that life has its ups and downs, and it is smart to prepare for the inevitable downs.
- “The United States Is The Greatest Nation On Earth – There Is No Way That It Could Collapse” See #33.
- “I Don’t Plan On Becoming A Card Carrying Member Of The Tin Foil Hat Brigade” Nobody who is ever planned to be. You get that way when life derails you and throws you so far off the track that you can’t find your way back. You are less likely to end up there if you DON’T prepare, than if you do! I’d hate to be left with nothing but tinfoil to wear because I had not been wise about planning ahead!
If you need more help with preparing in smart ways, check out our farm site at MicroFarmLife.com.
The Rooster Who Crowed Too Soon (A Fable)
It was the rooster’s job to make the sun come up every morning. He would stand atop the fencepost, thrust his chest out, and crow, just as the sun first began to light the eastern sky. With each crow, the sun inched a little higher in the sky, until it was fully risen. Then the rooster would hop down, and strut off to boss the hens around. That was his job too – if he didn’t do it, the hens would not lay. But making the sun come up was his biggest job, and he took great pride in it.
He wasn’t a terribly old rooster. This was his first spring, and the only other rooster on the farm was several months younger, and only just beginning to crow. Obviously HE was not the one making the sun come up with his cracking and squeaking crow – the older rooster sensed the value of his existence, and looked with pity on the younger rooster.
It didn’t take long for the older rooster to notice that EVERYTHING on the farm centered around the rising of the sun.
When the sun rose, the farmer would appear to milk the cows, and to hitch the horses to the plow, whistling a tune, a little off key, as he worked. The farmer’s wife would come out to gather eggs and to feed the smaller livestock, smiling and talking to them as she moved through the farmyard. The older children would run for the schoolbus, and the younger ones would help the farmer’s wife, and then swing in the yard and torment the cat, laughing as they played together. The farm bustled with constant activity as long as the sun was up. When it went down, things were quiet, and the farm rested. Somehow, that bothered the rooster. He thought that it was so much more interesting and productive when the sun was up.
As the weather warmed, the rooster woke a little earlier each day. He felt a thrill of excitement at the power he had to command the sun to rise a little earlier, so that the farmer was compelled to begin his day at an ever earlier hour, day by day. It pleased him that not only was the sun obedient to him, but that it was there, waiting and ready for him each day, a mellow light already spreading across the horizon. The whole farm was at his command, the horses, cows, sheep and pigs all came under his reign, because he made the sun rise earlier, and so must they.
The hens were laying strong, for which the rooster also felt responsible. After all, he not only commanded the sun to rise, but he scolded the hens to make them lay. Without him, there would be no eggs. He felt warm all over as he thought about how much the farmer’s wife must appreciate his services. Soon, chicks began to pop up around the hen house, and he took great pride in his status as a father. He did not share in the care of the chicks, nor did he feel any interest in them – but he took great pride in their existence anyway. Every once in a while, he would order one around, just to make sure they understood that this was his job.
Soon the gardens were lush with fresh produce, and the chickens enjoyed a bounty of scraps of fresh greens from the garden. Of course, the rooster felt that he had provided well for the hen yard, after all, wasn’t the garden his doing as well, since he made the sun come up so the farmer’s wife could plant?
Then one day, the sun was no longer waiting for him. He was on time, not even early but he had to crow to get it out of bed enough to see the first light on the horizon. Within weeks, the sun began to ignore him the first time he crowed. And it grew worse as the summer progressed – he stood on the fencepost at the appointed hour, and the sun had to be wakened from an ever deeper slumber. He determined that he must simply explain more earnestly, and insist that it rise on time, so each morning he crowed until the sun felt shame for hiding, and slowly roused itself from sleep. That lazy sun! This, surely, was proof of how desperately the farm depended upon the noble rooster, for without him, the sun would certainly fail to rise at all!
Each morning at 5:00 am, the rooster began to crow, and as fall approached, the sun took more and more coaxing to begin the day. First it took one extra crow, then two, and more! The rooster was not pleased! The work on the farm was obviously suffering, since less work could be done in the shorter daylight hours. The hens began to lay a little less each week, in spite of his scolding. This was clearly the fault of the lazy sun!
The horses and cows began to grumble about the rooster’s crowing. The sheep and pigs baa-ed and grunted their discontent at being roused from their dreams by the piercing noise. The farmer’s children began to squabble and annoy one another in irritation over the early wakenings, and the cat was tormented more than usual, leaving the cat in a perpetually bad mood. The smiles left the faces of the farmer and his wife, and they grumbled as they did their chores, no longer talking cheerfully to the animals, short tempered and tired. The rooster noticed the change, and shook his head sadly, reminding himself that he must redouble his efforts to rouse the sun on time, because obviously the entire farm was experiencing negative effects because of the shortened days. He ignored the snide remarks of the horses and cows, and thought to himself how easy it is to lay blame in entirely the wrong quarter – the other animals were simply lazy, that was all.
One morning, several weeks after the crops had been harvested and stored, the rooster climbed up to his accustomed morning perch, and began to crow. The sun, lazier than usual, was even slower than the day before.
After about the fourth crow, the farmer stomped out of the house and threw an old boot at the sun, making angry noises as he did so. The rooster had to duck, because in his anger at the sun for not rising on time, the farmer had thrown carelessly and had nearly hit the rooster! The flustered rooster persevered though, and brought the sulking sun forth, in spite of resistance. It took some time that morning for the rooster’s ruffled feathers to settle, and each time he had to smooth his feathers back down, he pondered what to do to make the sun obey.
That afternoon, the farmer passed the hen yard, and pointed his finger in the direction of the rooster. He then spoke very sternly, and turned to walk on to the house. The rooster quickly looked behind himself to see who the farmer had been scolding, and determined that it must have been one of the hens. After all, they had not been laying as much lately.
At 5:00 am the next morning, the rooster began calling to the sun, bidding it to rise. It was so lazy by now, that it took a full hour and a half of crowing before the lethargic sun finally began to rise. The farmer stayed in the house, and did not yell at the sun again.
That afternoon, the farmer’s older boys came into the hen yard, and captured the rooster. He swelled with pride – the farmer must be preparing to thank him for his selfless service! The boys carried him to a wood block, placed his neck on the block, and chopped off his head. The farmer’s wife prepared chicken and dumplings for dinner that night, and the farmer said, “Well, that stupid rooster won’t be waking us at 5:00 in the morning in the dead of winter anymore! The only time we get to rest a little, and he stands out there crowing his fool head off when the sun isn’t even up yet!”
The next morning, just as a soft glow began to light the eastern edge of the farm, the younger rooster climbed atop the fencepost, gave a funny wobbly little crow, and bade the sun rise.
Moral: Tyrants usually come to a bad end, and nobody ever misses them.
THIS STORY and many more can be found on Amazon, for Kindle, in Laura’s storybook: A Little Romp Through Laura’s Storyland
“Healthy” Foods that Aren’t
Periodically, a new study will be released by some research institute or other, telling us that something else we love isn’t good for us. The medical community will gradually adopt the rhetoric, and repeat the party line about this thing being bad for us because this or that study showed it to be so. Then the manufacturers of those things we love will release a special version of it which supposedly eliminates the risk. As long as there is money in telling us things are bad for us, the trend is unlikely to continue.
There are deceptions in this at multiple levels – from the origins of the study (someone paid for it to be done – someone who wanted a specific result, so they could sell us something to “fix” it), to the supposed solutions. The “problems” they tell us about weren’t even problems to begin with, merely the way that the food industry had already messed up the foods we are eating. The solutions are the thing we are discussing today.
Any time a trend in food is started, a food manufacturer (isn’t it sad that we should call them that – you don’t “manufacture” food, you grow it, and prepare it) will produce some kind of food to capitalize on the trend. And then, pretty soon, the studies are reversed, and maybe that thing wasn’t so bad after all because now people who are doing it are in WORSE health than those who ate the bad thing to start with. And the answer to that is simple – the minute the commercial food industry enters the arena, trying to make specialty foods “convenient”, they destroy the foods that were supposed to help.
We now have a whole host of foods that we can buy, which are sold under the guise of being healthy, which in fact, are anything but. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Low Fat – At first, low fat meant they ATE LESS FAT. But that wasn’t very much fun. So food manufacturers started enhancing them – putting other things in to make them behave more like they had fat in them. Guar gum, emulsifiers, thickening agents, soy lecithin, and all sorts of things with unpronounceable chemical names. Things that aren’t even FOOD. Now, Low Fat foods are nasty concoctions that are almost all deadlier than the fat that they eliminated. Fat isn’t in fact bad. Unnatural fats, fats with chemical preservatives, fats that have chemicals in them to keep them from going rancid, or fats from plants that are not actually food in the first place. THOSE are bad fats. But good, whole, clean fat from meat and dairy, and that occurs naturally in vegetables and grains, are good food. Remember, Trans Fats are a manufacturing CAUSED problem – they only happen from trying to fry things in oil from plants we should not be extracting oils from in the first place.
Low Carb – Low carb originally meant to reduce the amount of PROCESSED carbohydrates in the diet. A good idea. Carbohydrates again, are something that is not bad at all – they are the staff of life. Refined carbs are nasty stuff – and should be replaced with true whole grains and whole fresh fruits and veggies. As soon as the trend gained ground, food manufacturers began releasing “low carb” versions of things (many of which, through slight of hand, weren’t even lower in carbohydrate), but they are SO loaded with chemicals and artificial substances, that they do far more harm than the less altered refined foods they were replacing. So again, we have a manufactured problem with a manufactured solution that causes more harm than the original problem, and both of which miss the point. Which is that carbohydrates are good for you, just eat good whole food that hasn’t been mucked about with by some company trying to “save time” for you.
SugarFree – So first off, sugar is not evil. If you over-consume it, then it is going to cause problems. But it is a fairly inert nutrient, that the body uses fairly directly, and it has no side effects in and of itself. It is not chemically altered or adulterated. A teaspoon of sugar in your herbal tea is just fine. A tablespoonful in each of five cups of coffee each day is going to cause problems! But someone decided sugar was bad when people began to lose all sight of reason in the amounts they use, and because sugar has been slipped into so many processed foods (especially those that are “low fat”). And now, you probably think it is evil, since you are told so at every turn – but remember, the people who are telling you that sugar is evil are people who are SELLING sugar substitutes – you may think they are objective doctors and health advocates. They aren’t. They are PAID to say it, by people who want to sell you something else. Artificial sweeteners are, to a one, MORE harmful than sugar, and not just a little bit worse either – exponentially worse. This includes all the “ols”, such as sorbitol, xylitol, erythorbitol, etc. And things like Stevia are not good for you in large amounts either. Agave and Honey are just natural forms of sugar, and they have the SAME effect on the body as sugar does – they just have well-paid marketing people who are publishing “sugar is bad and we are not” articles to make you think that they are somehow better (they aren’t bad – but if you overindulge, they’ll harm you too). And then we have the CHEMICALS that are added to most of the prepared foods that use artificial sweeteners or sugar substitutes. So Sugar Free foods are either: a. No different in health benefit from those containing sugar; b. More harmful because of the harm from the sugar substitute; c. WAY more harmful because of the added chemicals. Sugar isn’t GOOD for you. But it isn’t BAD for you either. If you like honey or agave or stevia, fine, enjoy them. But don’t fool yourself into thinking they are any better for you, because they aren’t.
Dairy Free – So let’s establish the health issues with real milk first. Lactose intolerance is often caused by digestive disorders, which are primarily caused by chemicals in our food and water supply (yeah, the chlorine in your tap water… that). And milk with artificial hormones and antibiotics in it is very harsh on the digestive tract. Plus, pasteurized and homogenized milk contains proteins that are much more difficult to digest than raw milk. So… again we have a series of sensitivities CAUSED by modern production methods. And then we have the food industry’s solution… Almond milk, Soy milk, Rice milk, and various other unnatural concoctions that first of all, do NOT have even CLOSE to the nutritional content of actual milk, and second, which are so full of chemicals and extracted processed substances that your body can’t even use it as well as it does processed milk! And foods that should have dairy, but do not, invariably have other substances that are much worse for us, in order to mimic the presence of milk in the food. Give me a cow. I’ll milk my own, thank you.
Gluten Free – People who have wheat sensitivities do so for a REASON. This is typically because of damage done from chemicals in food and water, and then from autoimmune disease which is a result of longstanding chemical damage, or from overexposure to specific proteins due to processing of grains. There is a close relationship between Crohn’s and Celiac – both are usually manifestations of the same problem. So the problems are caused by the same people who now want to hand us a “ready to eat” solution. Many people feel better when they begin to eliminate wheat from their diet. And then they find that their disease is progressing anyway. Now they need to eliminate corn, and then something else. They find that they go rapidly from Celiac (which they thought they could control simply by eliminating wheat) to Crohn’s (which involves an escalation of food sensitivities and intolerances and full blown auto-immune disease). Now, don’t get me wrong here. Truly gluten free homemade foods are not a problem. If you are actually eating things that are in fact good foods. But what happened is that the food manufacturers stuck their little noses into it again, and started creating convenient gluten free packaged foods. Sorry guys, but those things will make you sick! They aren’t healthier than foods with gluten in them – in fact, they are probably a primary reason why your disease is still progressing. The answer here is to get back to clean foods, and let your body heal. If you do, there is a strong chance you’ll be able to enjoy wheat products again, after you’ve healed up.
Whole Grain – Bet you thought that “whole grain” bread was good for you? It isn’t what it says it is. First off, it isn’t whole grain at all. It can be called that when it is only part of the grain. Whole grain includes the germ, which goes rancid too quickly for grocery store shelves, so all processed baked goods and packaged flours are not whole grain at all. They are better than white flour, but they will not supply the nutrients to provide the benefits from TRUE whole grain – which can help balance blood sugar, reduce cardio-vascular disease, reduce persistent obesity, slow the effects of aging, and a host of other nifty things. Not exactly UNhealthy. But not HEALTHY either. And any prepackaged baked goods, whole grain or not, typically contain a lethal cocktail of preservatives.
Salt-Free and Low Salt – Another instance where salt was unfairly blamed for a manufacturing problem. The problem with salt is not that it is bad. It is not. You NEED salt to live! In fact, if you transition to a healthy clean food diet, you’ll find you have to ADD salt, especially in warmer months, because your diet won’t have enough. The problem is that prepared foods absorb salt, and we lose the ability to taste it, so they put in more. And more. So much that it is in EVERYTHING. And they don’t just stick to sodium chloride (simple table salt), they put in all kinds of other flavor enhancers that include sodium in some form or other, all of them far more harmful than salt, but for which salt takes the blame. The only thing they use more of unnecessarily in foods, is SUGAR. So taking salt OUT of some of those canned foods would be a good thing, right? But that isn’t what they do. They take OUT the salt, and replace it with a SALT SUBSTITUTE. And those are FAR more dangerous than salt! But there is no money in taking salt out. There is only money in persuading you that you need something to replace what you didn’t need in the first place. Sad.
High Fiber – Forget the studies that say that high fiber is good for you and that oat bran helps your heart. They lied. High fiber FOODS, CAN be good for you, and so can oat bran, IF it comes with the rest of the fresh oat grain. Oat bran is just a food processing by-product that nobody had a use for, which they figured they could sell better if they could persuade people it was good for them (so they paid for a research firm to find a way to make it look like it was healthy). But it isn’t. Oat bran is as good for you as sawdust – it is inert, has no nutritional value, and your gut cannot break it down. So it WILL relieve constipation. But it won’t make you healthier. What WILL make you healthier, is fresh vegetables (not canned and fiberless), fresh fruits (with lots of natural fiber), fresh whole grains (with the germ intact), nuts, and mushrooms. REAL FOOD, that just happens to have fiber along with a high complex nutrient load. THAT is healthy food. Fiber isn’t.
Empty Organics – Organic potato chips are still potato chips – potato slices cooked in fat, and stored beyond the point of freshness. They have some simple carb in them, and little else. Organic cookies made from white flour, and treated with an “organic preservative” are still processed white flour and poison (organic poison is still poison). The organic label is meaningless if the food that it is put onto is the same old refined and processed stuff from which needed nutrients have been removed. Organic garbage is still garbage, and it is not, nor never will be, healthy.
Cage Free Eggs, Free Range Eggs, Veggie-Fed Eggs, Natural Eggs, Farm Fresh Eggs – All of these are meaningless names. First of all, eggs are very good food, IF the chickens are raised right. Chickens naturally eat greens, grains, and grubs (or bugs… yes, bugs). They do not naturally consume medications or antibiotics, they do not naturally consume soybean meal, fishmeal, cottonseed meal, or other industrial waste, and they do not eat preservatives, pesticides, or herbicides by choice. This is what is in chicken feed. They DO naturally scratch through horse manure, they gobble rabbit manure with delight (many animals do), and they think that cow patties are a wonderful place to kick up a rumpus looking for tasty edibles (the best worms are usually under them… oh, didn’t I mention that chickens like worms?). We’ll just pretend that we are ok with that, because there really isn’t anything you can do to stop chickens from doing that, at least, not when they are HEALTHY chickens, who are going to lay HEALTHY eggs for you. Cage free means that they are kept in a pen, not a cage. It doesn’t mean they are frolicking lose in the pasture. Free Range (commercially) means they have a miniscule yard to run around in beside their huge crowded poultry barn – for small farmers it means they eat on pasture during the daytime and are fed chicken feed at night (yes, the same nasty stuff that passes for chicken feed that the industrial chicken producers use). Vegi-fed is another unnatural term, with no good meaning. No chicken is 100% veggie fed unless they are raised in such tight confinement that they never see a fly or compost insect in their lives – chickens are omnivores, they eat bugs if they can find them, and most industrial layer houses are fertile ground for breeding bugs – layers of litter and chicken manure all over the floor. And “vegi-fed” chickens are usually fed with a nasty mixture of industrial vegetable waste products and processed soy. Natural eggs just means a chicken laid them. Farm Fresh Eggs means you probably got it within a week or two of it leaving the chicken if you bought it at the farm, but if you bought it at the store, it was laid months ago – and even if you buy them from your local small farm, chances are, they are still feeding them nasty chicken feed, so if you need clean eggs, make sure you ask, and find someone who feeds the chickens clean food.
Just because someone says it is healthy, doesn’t mean it is. There’s a marketing ploy for everything, and the food industry has teamed up with the medical profession in some very devious ways to persuade you that you should eat what they want to sell you, and that there is some benefit to paying the price they want to charge.
If it isn’t clean chemical free food, and if it isn’t real food, without the nutrients stripped out and chemicals put in, then it ISN’T healthy. No matter WHO says it is.
The Humble Brown Button Mushroom
It was the most commonly cultivated commercial mushroom until mid-20th century. Now, most people don’t even know that it exists.
Sometime in the early part of the 20th century, a mushroom farmer who grew brown button mushrooms for the commercial markets decided to propagate a mutant mushroom. Sometimes amidst all those brown mushrooms, there would be one that was pure white. He began to propagate them. He did it because he thought it would be a neat idea, and he thought that customers might buy them. And buy them they did. They liked the looks of those lovely white mushrooms more than the old brown ones – they didn’t TASTE any better (in fact, the browns have a better flavor to some people), but they looked so pretty that people just could not resist reaching for them when given the choice. Soon, the white mushroom completely dominated the mushroom markets, and the humble brown mushroom faded into near oblivion.
Of course, you could not raise white mushrooms in natural light – or they would get brownish on top, spoiling the whole point of their pristine glory. So mushrooms began to be grown in the dark. And after a while, people forgot that mushrooms could be grown any other way, even though virtually all other species of edible mushrooms do best with some form of natural light, be it full sunlight, or deep shade, or somewhere in between.
They also lost things they did not realize they were losing. Because the rich brown mushroom was not the same as that poor white mutant. The brown one was rich in nutrients. The white one was a poor substitute, leading to the popular myth that mushrooms are not very nutritious. If you judge all mushrooms by those nasty white things, then they are right. Other mushrooms though, those which have not been messed with, are high in protein, niacin, some are high in vitamin D, and other essential nutrients.
Some people now know nothing other than those white and gray musty tasting lumps that pass themselves off as mushrooms. They think that gray slimy things in a can of soup are the only thing that goes by the name of “mushroom”. And it is a sad thing. Because the world is full of mushrooms, and there are literally thousands of options that are better tasting, and better for you, that that empty little bubble headed ghost of a mushroom.
Even the mushrooms that are naturally white are more nutritious. And there are a lot of them.
The insubstantial mutant is responsible for more than that though. The rich brown button mushroom is loaded with nutrients and components that benefit your health. It helps with healing skin, avoiding problems such as ovarian cysts (and PCOS), or uterine fibroids. It also helps your body to alleviate damage done by chemicals to your intestines, circulatory system, pulmonary system, and skin. It supports regulation of the immune system to strengthen the immune system while also minimizing problems with auto-immune disease. That little brown button is a healthy food that promotes good health beyond the mere nutrients that it supplies. The benefits are strong enough to feel the difference if consumed twice a week.
The white button mushroom has merely a shadow of those benefits. Oh, it does help. But not enough to do more than slow down the damage to your body, and then a nearly insignificant amount. It does not have the power to reverse it, heal it, or slow it down enough to actually notice except in one minor thing – it can help to reduce damage to the intestines from chemical exposure from modern foods, and even then, it is not enough to do more than help a little. It makes a passing attempt on its way through, to slap a bandaid on one thing – while the little brown button mushroom gets busy in earnest and heals the damage instead.
So we have a lovely pretender, masquerading as food, completely replacing a smudged looking brown mushroom that held part of the key to good health in its matrix.
But this really isn’t about mushrooms. Because the brown button mushroom is only one example of trading the real for the fake.
White flour has replaced whole wheat flour – giving us a dead food devoid of the rich bounty that fresh whole wheat provides. Removing all the abundant nutrients which heal the body and give one energy.
Dead and embalmed foods have replaced fresh foods, giving the illusion of nutrition, but failing to deliver the wholesome elements that help us to age more slowly, maintain a healthy weight, and avoid deterioration in our nervous systems as we age.
Unripe and overaged produce, bred to be tough enough to withstand extended shipping distances, and coated in chemicals to make it appear fresh and appetizing, has replaced garden fresh local produce that is alive and all but bursting with nutrients. Produce is marketed as “healthy”, but it is only a shell of what it needs to be to deliver on that promise.
We’ve done it to ourselves. We know those things are not healthy, and yet we reach for the white flour because it looks prettier and feels smoother. We choose the most uniform tomato, even if it is embalmed. We select chemical laden foods because we don’t want to take the time to cook fresh foods.
And then we wonder why we are tired, overweight, mentally fatigued, moody, disease ridden and ill.
We wonder why we are suddenly told that traditionally healthy foods like bread, juice, animal fats, and mushrooms are unhealthy. They are unhealthy because they are no longer REAL bread, clean juice and lard, or nutritious mushrooms.
The solution is simple. Eat foods that are real, not just fake foods calling themselves real.
Try growing some humble brown mushrooms in shady windowsill, and see what you’ve been missing. Then maybe you might want to try growing a few sprouts in your kitchen, or milling a little fresh flour to bake a loaf of real bread.
The majority of those troublesome health problems that we take for granted in the US as part of the age we live in are optional. I don’t know about you, but if I have the choice (and I do), I’m opting OUT.
NOTE: I was diagnosed with Crohn’s prior to writing this post. This post was written when I was recovering. As of 1 year after writing this, I no longer have auto-immune disease, and no longer have Crohn’s. Mushrooms have been part of this – Paddy Straw, Shiitake, Elm Oyster, Portobello Shaggy Parasols, and Puffballs are the only mushrooms I’ve had access to during this time.
Polyculture Farming
So what the heck does that mean anyway? Polyculture means more than one culture – and in farming, it means you raise crops and animals, in a synergistic environment that BUILDS on itself, instead of CONSUMING.
If you delve into gardening books, you won’t get far in most of them before they start babbling about soil building and the sad state of a garden that is left too long without adding some kind of chemical fertilizer. The books that are aimed at vegetarians are the worst – they tell you that the best you can hope for is a 90-99% sustainability in a farm that tries to sustain itself with crops alone. They tell you to plant “green manure” crops, and till them under, to help replace lost nutrients. They tell you that you’ll “just have to” put on some kind of chemical fertilizer to make up the difference, and they say it in sort of an apologetic way, as though they really tried but there is no alternative. They’ll sometimes make a brief mention of animal manures, as though they are something shameful, or they’ll make a derogatory remark about them, and then move on as though they have been satisfactorily dismissed and now they can get on with the business of REALLY gardening.
And it is all hooey. Complete and utter tripe… garbage… balderdash… manure! The myth of 99% maximum sustainability is just that – a myth. On both ends.
First, because if you use plants alone, you can’t even achieve that, in spite of what they say. You can, at best, achieve perhaps an 80-90% sustainability. In other words, you are going to lose 10-20% of your soil fertility per year, and have to replace it with something besides just plant derived matter.
Second, because there is NO limit to the sustainability and soil building factor. If you choose polyculture farming, and add animals to the mix, you can achieve higher productivity per acre, and you BUILD soil at a rate which HAS no limit.
Of course, if you overload your land with too many animals, the land is decimated and becomes barren. So, ideally, you have a balance of animals and crops. And the simplest way to do that, is the most natural way… the way things used to be. Just grow ALL the crops that the animals eat, on your own property – and use the animal wastes to fertilize those crops. This achieves the highest degree of sustainability, and results in an enhancement to the soil of between 2 and 10% per year. It gets better and better, the longer you do it in balance.
- The plants feed the animals with hay, grain, legumes, and veggies, and you with fruits and veggies.
- The animals feed the plants with manure, and you with meat, eggs, milk, etc.
The garden and fields produce abundantly. The animals are healthy and produce better when fed crops raised without chemicals. The land is rejuvenated and vibrant. You and your family dine on the healthiest and freshest foods in the world. And it is all done without chemicals.
And all this happens on LESS land than it would take to sustain the same life with just green crops. Let’s illustrate:
It takes about a quarter of an acre to provide a vegetarian diet for a single person for a year – this assumes INTENSIVE cropping in a single growing season (it takes about half that if you practice year-round growing). This includes green manure crops to provide fertilizer – about half of your space has to go to producing green manure. It takes more than that for factory farms, which do not use intensive growing methods, and waste far more space, in spite of the fact that they do NOT provide space for green manure, and they use chemical fertilizers.
Now, there is a book out there that claims you can produce the “food” for one person on a vegetarian diet in about 4000 square feet per year. But he does not include grains or legumes in the amounts necessary. He just includes the vegetables and fruits, and a token amount of beans and peas. So his assumptions are different, and do not include what we are including. But the same rules apply – what he does in 4000 square feet can actually be done in less than half that space.
Ok… so how about if you take the green manure crops, and replace them with rabbit forage, and three rabbit hutches? You can now grow all of your vegetable and fruit needs, and you can grow all of your rabbit food, in about a SIXTH of an acre, instead of a quarter of an acre. You use the rabbit manure on the crops, so the crops produce better than they could with green manure alone. So far, win-win. And we haven’t even taken the reproductive abilities of the rabbit into consideration, and we haven’t even provided you with meat to eat yet.
So, if you start those rabbits reproducing, the equation gets even better… Let’s start breeding them – assuming 2 does and one buck. They’ll produce enough rabbit for you to eat one rabbit per week – very likely more, if you breed them about every three months.
It will take a little more crops to produce the meat, because you’ll have to feed those babies until they reach butcher age (at about 9 weeks). But those babies will also produce more manure for the garden, which means your soil fertility can be further enhanced, and your crop productivity can increase a little more. And since you are now eating meat, the amount of crops you need drops by about half – and the amount the rabbits need is less than that. So you now have the ability to provide for your needs on about an EIGHTH of an acre (about 5200 square feet), using intensive single season cropping. If you use year-round cropping, you can do it on about a third less – around 3200 square feet, including the space for the rabbit hutches. And you might just have some extra rabbits to sell. This means you could do it in a 50X60 foot back yard.
If you add in chickens, it gets even better. Now, you can feed the chickens on the garden waste and on redworms, grown in the rabbit manure. Chickens help control the harmful insects in and around the garden, giving you increased productivity across the board. They also provide you with eggs, So your needs for vegetable, fruit, and grains decrease a bit more, and your health improves with the variety. And of course, they put additional nutrients back into the soil, making anything they take out, completely replaceable. But since chickens eat so much that neither you, nor your rabbits can eat, they’ll make your garden more efficient just because more of the food in it gets eaten. Your garden gets healthier too, because you no longer have to use pesticides.
There’s a funny thing about chickens. It seems that if you have enough hens to make sure you have eggs through the winter, you are going to have way too many eggs through the spring, summer, and fall. Traditionally, the “egg money” from the farm was the mother’s spending money, to use for the things that her husband did not think to budget for. People do still buy farm fresh, naturally raised eggs – and if you raise those chickens without commercial chicken feed, but with foods you grew yourself, your eggs will be of unbeatable quality, and the egg money will be pure profit. If you choose the right breeds, they’ll also reproduce – giving you additional meat, or chickens to sell.
The equations are not quite as attractive once you get into raising larger animals – but they are not as distorted as people think they are. Properly managed crops and fields can easily produce more than we assume they can – astronomically more. Of course, natural pasture is easier to manage, and it is simpler to just let your cows, goats, and sheep graze without having to intensively manage the crops for the fields. But if you chose to do so, they could be fed abundantly on very little ground, with nothing brought in from outside.
Humans are, and always have been, omnivores. The human body was designed to eat a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and animal products. When animal products are tainted with chemicals from modern production and preservation methods, they become a means of carrying higher amounts of toxins and poisons into the body – hence the supposed “harmful” effects of animal fats and some other products – it isn’t the animal product at all, but how they were produced that is causing the harm. But when you produce them yourself (or get them from clean sources), they improve health and longevity, and strengthen the body and the immune system (the Weston A Price foundation has information regarding health benefits of butter, eggs, pork, beef, etc). Polyculture farming, then, provides a means to supply humans with optimal health, and it provides a means to enhance our stewardship over the land, putting back what we take, using less land to provide for our needs, and to responsibly care for farm animals.
Polyculture farming works because it is the way nature intended for us to provide for our needs. A truly synergistic environment, where you stir the pot, and it bubbles up with way more than you put into it.
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…
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.
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!
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.
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Gardening doesn't have to be that hard! No matter where you live, no matter how difficult your circumstances, you CAN grow a successful garden.
Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.
