If I wanted to inspire you to believe that you can grow enough food for a family of five on 5 acres, I would recommend reading “The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency” by John Seymour. There is no other book available that so completely details how to take an organic, wholesome approach to providing for your self.
But, if you live in the US and already have 5 or more acres, or if you plan on doing so, then you need to know what Joel Salatin has to say in “You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start and $ucceed in a Farming Enterprise.” He is a well-known promoter of grass-fed poultry and beef and an out-spoken advocate for family farmers in Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Like most original thinkers, he is also a cracked pot. More than once I felt like cracking the spine of his book against the nearest wall when he veered off into right-wing nut-so land. So allow me to spare you the outrage and distill the nuggets of gold buried in the mud of his wing-nut philosophies.
The bottom line reality is that most of America’s farmlands have been reduced to 6 inches or less of topsoil. Generations of monoculture, slash and burn, erosion, drought, and chemical dependency have turned once fertile croplands into barely sustainable grasslands. Simultaneous with this rape of the earth was the imposition of an industrial model of production on an essentially organic process. Salatin sees this quite clearly and yet he blames liberals, tree-huggers, and eggheads for allowing it to happen.
The main mistake was treating agriculture and animal husbandry like an assembly line chemistry project. With an emphasis on standardization and end-results, the essential process of farming has been subverted, perverted and polluted. And the whole concept of family farming or small-holding has been denigrated as a money-losing enterprise. The rise of agri-business has been the death of the small family-owned farm. Salatin blames government without seeing that it has served the interests of the agri-business lobby that was rapidly gobbling up family farms as soon as they foreclosed.
Salatin indicts the entire food producing industry:
When you buy a hamburger from your local fast-food outlet, you are eating beef from a cow that never saw daylight. It was locked into a feeding trough, shoulder to shoulder with other cattle, eating a mix of antibiotics, chicken manure (!), bone meal from other cows (!) and grain. It stood knee deep in its own shit. It never got to chew its cud out in a pasture. It has been treated like raw ore being turn into I-beams. Factory-produced beef is full of sickness and can kill you.
When you eat a chicken bought at your neighborhood grocery store, you are getting an animal that was packed into a warehouse with less than a square foot of space. It also has never seen the sun or felt the wind or tasted anything remotely natural. It had its beak cut off – without anesthetic – so that it won’t peck other chickens to death because of the stress of being so jam-packed against them. And it shits. And the shit lands on the floor and dries out eventually and because chickens scratch, this dust fills the air. The chicken breathes fecal dust all its days. It is shot full of antibiotics but its lungs are still lined with actual crap. If you take one of these chickens and boil it down, the broth is a nasty shade of brown/gray. Factory-produced chicken is full of sickness and it can kill you.
If you buy a tomato at the grocery store, you are most likely eating the fruit from a plant that literally never grew in the earth. It was hydroponically grown in a chemical solution, injected with artificial flavor, red dye and vitamins and arrives at your produce sections at least two weeks after it was packed and shipped. You might as well be eating a nerf ball.
So, we’re eating shit and our land only grows grass. Here Salatin emits brilliance: He takes what he’s got and turns it into a white-collar salary. Put your cows and chickens on the grass that you’ve got and reduce your feed bill by 30-50%. Let the sunshine disinfect their natural animal functions. Feed them living green stuff to kill their diseases. Let them lay a layer of manure on the top soil, scratch it in and build another inch a year until you can plant your own grain and kiss the big-boy grain providers good-bye.
But the key to Salatin’s approach is selling direct at retail or above prices. The most interesting chapters of his endless rant had to do with accounting and marketing. The gist of his accounting is to keep a careful record not only of your expenses but, of your time. Then, pay yourself at least $25 per hour. Work out the per unit value there from. Pay no attention to what the supermarket is charging. You are producing a superior product. It’s wholesome, natural and additive free – and you deserve to be paid accordingly.
Then, go out there and sell it. Not everyone has the personality to do this or the daredevil gustiness to put their product on the line and demand a higher price. Salatin has that kind of evangelical fervor. He has preached his gospel of “God’s Own Plan” for whole food goodness at every PTA, garden club or Moose Lodge that would have him for the last 25 years. I commend his passion. Salatin can rant with the best:
http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm
This is a good read and presents some of his basic principles and prejudices. I disagree with his position that anyone should be able to brew up spaghetti sauce in their roach-infested kitchen and sell it to whomever they please. Since I can’t be in the kitchen of everyone who provides food to me, I rather like knowing someone else is inspecting the premises. I plan on building the kitchen on my farm to surpass health code requirements.
But, I digress.
After spending quite a bit of passion ranting against the mechanical, industrial production models of big agi-business, Salatin presents his alternative – which is, at its core, a mechanical , industrial model of production. Yes, his cows get fresh grass and sunshine – while being moved along inside of electric fencing. Given their freedom, most cows would prefer to wallow under shade trees but Salatin drives them forward across his prairie grass with an electric prod.
Instead of the one-square foot of space they get inside agri-business chicken warehouses, Salatin’s chickens get a whopping two-square feet inside of a 12 foot by 10 foot by 2 foot high chicken wire cage that is moved every other day across the prairie grass two days after the cows.
There’s no question that his model is an improvement over standing in shit and breathing fecal dust. At least his animals do get fresh air, sunshine and fresh grass. But, his successful production depends on controlling his herds and flocks. On the one hand, he exalts allowing animals to enjoy their “animal-ness” while on the other he assures us that they have “no souls” so we shouldn’t be bothered about eating them. Or controlling them. After all, that’s what God intended we should do.
I had wild vacillations of moods reading “You Can Farm” and “Pastured Poultry for Profit$.” I veered between admiring Salatin and abhorring him. I want small farmers to succeed and everything that helps them is good to me. But, I have reservations about endorsing a man who takes pride in being sloppy and lazy about farm building projects and considers his children as so many peons to do his bidding.
He tells us that his young daughter just loves getting up before dawn to help Dad refill the feeding bins for the chickens out on the pasture. I bet she does; since she is home-schooled, does she even know of any other activities that might please her more? The photographs of her in her home-spun cotton dress, squatted down by the movable chicken coops caused me undo ire – can’t the man buy her a pair of blue jeans? Doesn’t he understand what a cold draft up a skirt can feel like at 5am?
I know this criticism may be petty but I felt it exemplified the callousness of Salatin’s ego-driven success. He’s a salesman and his product is his farm produce. You may replicate every aspect of his production model and still fail if you lack his ability to sell, sell, sell! So the hinge on which his system swings is ego and personality. I have met a few of his disciples and they all had that slightly perspiring edginess that defines cult followers.
One of them told me in a whisper, “I couldn’t keep my chicken boxed up like that. I let `em go in the pasture and it works just as well, I think.” I looked at the photos of his flock roaming freely across his pasture and bought a couple dozen eggs and a stew chicken who had passed her prime egg-laying. The eggs are superior and we’re having Chicken and Dumplings tomorrow. I don’t’ mind eating chickens who have had good, productive lives. It’s not because I think they don’t have souls; it’s because I know they have spirits and I respect the sacrifice of their lives to mine. I pay homage to them and thank them for providing for me. Salatin doesn’t get the idea of Nature’s Plan and, for that and his hatred of intellectuals and “eggheads,” I’ll never be one of his true followers.
Bottom Line: Salatin’s process of adding an inch of top soil per year to your land by driving animals in cages across it actually will work – if you’re a lazy S.O.B. who is off giving lectures to sell your products.
On the other hand, if you are willing to work hard and shovel all the free cow manure available from dairies and the free horse manure from stables and invest in a manure spreader and a tractor to plow it into your grasslands about once a month for a year, then you can add six inches of top soil in a year! And grow whatever you want in that nitrogen rich mix. But, I’ll wait to write that book after I’ve actually done it. Yep, Hubby and I often joke that the locals are going to call us Manure Farmers for the first year until they see our yields in the second year…
I believe that Peak Oil is going to throw us all back into being reliant upon local providers of food. And I plan on being one of those providers. You, too, can join the real Green Revolution if you have cash for land and the inclination to work hard. There are no get rich quick schemes even tho Salatin claims there are. It’s easy for him to say; he’s a snake-oil salesman, selling another model of unnatural animal confinement and calling it wholesome. Well, honestly, more wholesome. Is that good enough?
I’ve gone thru at least three drafts because I kept getting bogged down in my dislike of Salatin’s basic prejudices. I’ve tried to present his models in as positive a light as I could. But, you know, my chickens are going to roam free and my milk cow is going to lie in the shade all she likes. To hell with productivity. As long as I’ve got what I need and my extras can give nourishment to others then I’ll consider my farming venture a success. But, my animals are really going to enjoy true “animal-ness” and aren’t going to get electric prodded into my presumptions of representing “God’s Plan” on our Mother Earth. I don’t believe I’ll starve but the surplus remains to be realized…
Thanks,
I only wish more people thought about where their food comes from. Best of luck with your farming ventures and I look forward to reading your book. THe pending soil crisis in this country and worldwide is something that most people are completely unaware of. Here in the Northeast, we rip up our good soils and sell them to folks in the ‘burbs so that they can grow nice chemlawns.
I have friends who have a CSA farm in Western Massachusetts, in the area where Community Supported Agriculture was first practiced in this country.
They feed 240 adults, and however many children are attendant thereon, on about 2-3 acres under cultivation at any one time by two farmers and four summer apprentices. Perhaps another 5-7 acres of the 35 total is in pasture. They also have chickens, sheep, cows, and pigs, all raised organically, eating non-pesticided grass and clean table scraps. Each fall, the farm offers its members meat from the animals that have been raised that summer.
Other things available: eggs, homemade bread (there’s a small bakery setup with professional oven), honey, herbs, flowers, berries.
They farm organically and biodynamically, but when they started their farm was a worn-out hull, rated as unusable by the state ag people. The place is a living example of what is possible for organic farming, and it only took them 35 years.
I salute you for your determination to farm organically and be self-sufficient, but I think there are better models than Salatin. Google “CSA farming” and read some of the links there. Read Eliot Coleman’s books, Four Season Harvest or New Organic Grower. He grows incredible vegetables year-round in a state that Jim Hightower recently described as having “no topsoil and a 30-minute growing season.”
It’s possible to grow enough vegetables to feed the average family on a good bit less than an acre. If you have that much, you can keep half in green manure each season and rotate crops.
That’s why I had such a hard time reviewing Salatin’s books. His business, Polyface Farm is a CSA!
I think the whole idea of applying “production models” to farming is wrong. If you respect the soil in harmony with animals, you can get high-yields from very small holdings. I’ve done square foot gardening and I know what can be done with enough manure. The next level is having animals to produce your own manure and it can be done on a couple of acres. Given 10 acres there is no reason a couple can’t produce for 200. I think the main aspect I take exception to is his idea of slow top soil accumulation through no effort on his part — let the animals do it, is his motto. I believe a lot more can be accomplished in a shorter period thu the back-breaking labor of shoveling shit.
Eeuuwww. He’s got a CSA? Other CSA-ers I know would not be amused. I’ve run across a couple of so-called CSAs that are not in keeping with the original spirit.
Respecting the soil in harmony with animals is what my CSA friends do because they also farm biodynamically. He is particularly adamant that visitors not step on the beds, lest they crush the micro-creatures that live there.
And, yes, shoveling shit is a better way to build soil, I think.
when I talked about his marketing methods. A CSA is basically selling direct at above retail prices to a group of member/customers. Polyface Farm keeps around 400 suppporters from year to year. Most market garden operations or farming ventures don’t start out with a ready-made customer base. You have to go out and promote your products — that’s where Salatin’s endless PTA, garden club, etc., presentations come in. That’s how he gathered a customer list and how he expands it. When he was first getting started, he also went door-to-door calling on chefs at upscale restaurants, directly demonstrating the superior quality of his eggs.
For those with less showmanship, he suggests taking your goods to the nearest farmers market and meeting customers that way, slowly building up a regular client base to the point where they want to come out to you instead of you going to market.
There are other means of distribution as well. A local woman has now gone entirely CSA with 241 customers and she delivers a box of goodies to their doorsteps every week.
I think this is an important aspect that people often overlook. It does you no good to have the world’s greatest produce if you don’t have people ready to buy it. Having people signed up in advance does take the anxiety out of that part of farming.
In his starting years, Salatin took any surplus he had and gave it away at the local market. He’d stand there with his cute kids and shove a free carton of a dozen eggs into the surprised hands of people entering the market. The next week, those same people would come looking for him and buy his eggs.
How did your friends build up their customer base?
My friends had a sort-of built-in customer base because they’d been farming locally for some years before going CSA. Plus, they’re in a very blue state, in a very socially-aware area. I was part of their steering committee for the first half-dozen or so years, and it was an interesting experience in collective management.
Most of the people I know of who’ve gone the CSA route have been some kind of organic farmers first. A few have started from scratch, but then they have to do a lot of marketing, which is next to impossible when you’re working in the fields all day.
Some have thrived as farmers, although no one is going to get rich that way. Others have found it too demanding or whatever and faded away after a few years.
As for CSAs, I knew Robyn Van En, who pioneered the concept of CSAs in this country. This center is in Pennsylvania, but Robyn lived in Western Massachusetts, where there’s a huge support system for local farmers.
I found one enterprise locally that produces compost as their premire product. It’s a farm, they call themselves a farm, but what they do is make bags of Bedding Soil, Mulch and Composted Cow Manure to sell at Lowes and Home Depot. It shows that you can be a for-real manure farmer and make a living. The world is so strange, is it not?
Now, now, let’s not diss on hydroponics.
First of all, that tomato probably isn’t grown hydroponically, unless you paid extra for it. Hydroponics isn’t cheaper than traditional dirt agriculture, even once you take into account the substantially (actually, vastly) greater yield per acre. But that’s not the point.
Hydroponic agriculture is a better use of land. If more food was grown with hydroponics, we could reduce the amount of land devoted to agriculture, leaving more for wildlife. Properly managed — and obviously not everything is — hydroponic farms are less damaging to the environment because they eliminate runoff of fertilizers and silt. Being largely closed systems, they require fewer fertilizers, which also reduces the huge quantities of oil required to produce them. Dependence on pesticides is also greatly reduced for food grown in greenhouses.
Hydroponic food can be grown with higher nutrient contents than dirt-grown plants left out to the vagaries of weather and pests. It also hasn’t been slathered with pesticides.
Your store-bought (and most likely dirt-grown) tomato is tasteless and tough because it’s been bred that way, not because of how it’s been grown. The common tomato cultivar is designed to be packed in boxes, finish ripening on the way to the store, and last a long time. That means that it’s tough and low on sugars, among other things. Better tomato breeds, grown either way, will taste a lot better, but be more expensive because they can’t be transported as easily or stored as long. The common cultivar is just as bland and tough whether it’s grown in dirt or a hydroponic trough.
Any form of agriculture involving livestock is a suboptimal use of land. Mind you, I like meat, and I like it a lot, but you’ll starve a lot sooner eating that steer than eating the vast quantities of grain it took to grow the steer.
If you don’t have five acres of land, and let’s face it, most people don’t, hydroponic agriculture is a space- and energy-efficient way of growing healthy food that can help you towards self-sufficiency no less than dirt farming. Not all technology is a bad thing.
I investigated hydroponics several years ago, and the organic way of doing it was just getting started. Has that been developed more or abandoned? It sounded like a good way to grow food, considering the environment where I live.
In the woods here there are so many insects and other critters that like to eat what a person grows, that it is a real struggle to get anything at all. Hydroponics looked like it would solves a lot of the problems here, but it wasn’t organic enough when I checked it out. There was the problem of aphids, scale and whiteflies still to contend with, but ladybugs and lacewings did a pretty good job of controlling them. I still have swarms of ladybugs hanging around my greenhouse and house.
Beds in a greenhouse are heavenly during the winter, and sprouts can really fill in when you don’t have any other fresh greens. Since sprouts aren’t fertilized, maybe they could be considered a bit “hydroponic.”
There are some mixed methods that involve soil, eliminating the need for heavy fertilizer. I’ve been investigating some of these lately. FutureGarden has an interesting self-irrigating system that can use either soil or a more “traditional” hydroponic setup with an inert medium. It’s absurdly expensive, but if you look closely at it, it’s not hard to replicate yourself except for the special valves they use. If all you have to do is buy the valves, though, it won’t require a second mortgage.
The beauty of their system is that it requires no power — it utilizes the pressure changes caused by the uptake and evaporation of water to pull more water into the system as needed. Viewed in that light, buying the whole system isn’t quite as daunting when compared to the high electricity requirements of the standard systems.
Mind you, though, I’m not endorsing their setup as I haven’t actually tried it myself yet, but I’m giving it some serious thought.
In hybrid soil-based systems, there are fertilizer options that are entirely organic. Some of the ones I’ve seen use ground seed meal of various types, all of which are high in natural nitrates. If you were going to do it on a large scale, it would be more economical to buy the seed in bulk and mill it yourself. I have tried a few of these and had good results. (This is especially true of my lawn, where I absolutely refuse to use chemical fertilizers or pesticides.) You can’t use these in “pure” hydroponic systems, though, because some of the nutrients are not water-soluble; they need to decompose in soil to be released.
As far as composting options go, check out Humanure. Yes, it is about composting human waste, which can be done safely, contrary to popular belief (and codes, in most urban areas). Human poop turns out to be even better than chicken manure as a fertilizer. Even if you aren’t interested in composting human waste or live somewhere the codes prevent it, it is one of the better guides to practical composting in general.
You can use compost in hydroponic systems, incidentally. Many, though not all, of the nutrients are water-soluble once they’ve been broken down by the microbes, so you can steep compost in water and use the liquid. It involves more work than artificial fertilizers because, well, there are microbes in it, and you have to clean your setup between crops. I believe it should be possible to pasteurize the fluid with a passive-solar approach, but that’s on next year’s experiment schedule. In the meantime, the Solar Cooking site has some info on solar pasteurization.
I was reporting what Salatin has to say on the subject. I’ve done hydroponic tomatoes myself and while I agree with the advantages you point out. I came to see the process as a trade-off — it requires less land but consumes more energy. Now that energy costs are rapidly rising I’m not sure it can remain cost-effective to substitute artificial processes for natural ones. I think the middle ground is greenhouses for some crops like tomatoes but planting them in soil.
Agreed. Some crops are very well suited to hydroponics and others to high-density soil agriculture. Corn and wheat spring to mind as very bad choices for hydroponics. 😉
I think, though, that the high energy input requirements of hydroponics are less of an innate requirement than a lack of imagination on the part of the people who originally developed the systems, working on the assumption that we’d always have a lot of energy and petrochemicals to rely on. As the energy crunch gets worse, I suspect we’ll see more energy-efficient solutions.
The big barrier for most folks where hydroponics agriculture is concerned is the exhorbitant startup cost. Even if you do all your research and make as much stuff from cheap parts as possible, it can break the bank. If I didn’t find it as interesting as I do, I don’t know if I’d have gotten into it.
Hey, could a bunch of hamsters on those wheels run generators and power the pumps that way? Just kidding…I think.
I can see where you are coming from in your assessment of his suggestions, I have a few comments some might find interesting.
One reason for confinement is to create out of shape animals that have more tender meat. We found after several years of butchering our own meat that at least a month of confinement was necessary if you wanted meat that you didn’t have to just keep chewing and chewing and chewing what seemed like forever. It would help to pressure cook it, but even then it was a challenge.
Confining in a pen that is moved is a huge improvement over the “factory farms” in that there is fresh air, plants and bugs, and really protects from predators when it comes to the chickens. Everything likes chickens, it seems. Possums, weasels, dogs, coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, bears, you name it – if it was a carnivore or omnivore it went after chickens. That was a real challenge when we had flocks.
We had one hawk that swooped down and knocked a chicken in the head with it’s balled up talon, knocking it out and making it bleed from it’s eyes and beak, then landed to finish the job. That was not more than 10 feet from our back door!
I happened to see it and stepped out, scaring the hawk away. We thought we may have to have chicken that night, but then the bird finally woke up and seemed to be Ok. That chicken always hung out beneath bushes or whatever cover it could find after that. Guess it became agoraphobic.
Keeping the cows from standing in the shade under trees helps to control the ticks that accumulate when the cattle hang out in one place all the time. Moving them controls all sorts of insect parasites. Same with the chickens. The important thing is to have a good length of time before they cover the same territory so the bugs can die off from lack of blood meals.
Another issue: if you use heavy machinery on your land, it tends to pack the earth, stifling the roots of the plants you want to grow. You can plow the ground, but below the level of the depth of the plow the ground will be packed hard. For most plants this is not an issue, but for those with long taproots like corn, it can create a real problem. Drainage can also be an issue.
So, it appears there may be some good reasons for his system, although it would be nice for the pens to be a bit bigger. But, they can’t be so big you can’t move them. They get heavy fast!
Thanks for writing this diary, it brings back my back to the land days when I was apolitical.
As someone who has done animal farming, I’m sure you know more than I do. My area of experience is in vegetable growing. My husband is the one who knows about cows and chickens.
Salatin emphasizes that his grass-fed beef and broiler chicken meat is leaner — and healthier to eat –because his animals get exercised, i.e., moved across the landscape. He is not confining them to the point that their muscles get slack. The tenderness of his products comes from their youth. The broilers get processed at six weeks and the beef at 6-9 months. He does sell layers who have outlived their egg-producing peak and tells his customers they will have to pressure cook, crockpot or slow boil these tough old birds.
My husband’s plan is to till and harrow in manure for a year with a small tractor. After that, I’ll build up deep vegetable beds and they’ll never be tilled by machine again. Heck, they’ll never even be walked on again!
But, starting out, you have to do something to break up the hard pan. Six inches of top soil is not enough so tilling to a depth of 18 inches while mixing in manure is the only way I can think of to effectively transform poor soil into cropland. I’ve done it on a smaller scale with a garden tiller but when you set out to transform a few acres I think you have to use a tractor.
The chicken predator issues you bring up concern me, too. Even covered by their wire cages, Salatin’s flocks are murdered during the night by weasels and foxes who dig under the movable coops. He describes spending a night sitting in the dark, with his rifle at the ready, waiting for a possum to come back and get a fatal surprise.
His solution is maintaining woodlands near his grasslands. He figures if there are enough chipmonks and squirrels available most predators won’t feel the need to go stealing from coops with a heavy human scent on them. Still, he factors in a percentage of loss into his costs.
I’m not currently interested in growing broilers. I want layers and while I’ll let them run free during the day — exposing them to hawks and suffering a few losses — I do plan on locking them up at night in a regular old coop close to the house with a well-trained dog to protect them.
We tried double-digging for beds to loosen the soil which worked well but was a LOT of work. That is not practical for large areas.
“The chicken predator issues you bring up concern me, too. Even covered by their wire cages, Salatin’s flocks are murdered during the night by weasels and foxes who dig under the movable coops. He describes spending a night sitting in the dark, with his rifle at the ready, waiting for a possum to come back and get a fatal surprise.”
I was assuming they were brought into a sealed coop at night. Leaving them out in the cages is definitely a losing proposition. We fourd they usually need to be in something that has wire on all sides, even the bottom, that is sealed up completely. Dogs tend to sleep. 😀
Yeah, I’m surprised he just leaves them in a pen all night. Beginning to wonder if this guy is doing more marketing than actual farming. The “chicken plow” method uses a lightweight but spacious chickenwire enclosure to which one more lightweight A-frame-type coops are attached. At night the chickens go inside and the door is closed. When it’s time to move the “plow”, the chickens are shut in the coop, the wire frame is wheeled to a new weedy spot and the coop wheeled over an reattached, and the chickens let out into their new grazing ground.
They leave behind a patch of weedless, bug-reduced, manured ground ready for the next planting. Since part of the purpose of this system is to create a plot of good ground, there’s no incentive to crowd the chickens — the bigger the enclosure the bigger the “plowed” plot.
BTW, I see the latest Mother Earth News has been testing free-running-raised eggs vs store eggs, and finds startling nutritional differences — less cholesterol, much more vitamin E and omega3 and other good things. I wish they’d include eggs from some of the big “cageless” producers. I don’t see how they can get all the eggs they do, distributed to Wholefoods and regular supermarkets all over, and still have “free-range” hens in any meaningful sense.
concerning free running chicken and their tenderness:
I ate a lot of very delicious chicken, well cooked, in Africa, where chicken run around and eat whatever they find. I saw these chicken alive, before I watched it butchered and prepared. (Actually it was considered impolite by the locals for a host not to show his guest the animal he intends to cook for you – speaking of real hospitality of very poor people – and I have seen guests refusing the animal shown to them as well – I was quite shocked at that too)
You need to know how to cook the meat and need to have the time to prepare it in a certain way, so that the natural tough meat tastes tender and doesn’t have to be chewed on for minutes.
First, to get rid of the feathers, you actually hold the meat of the whole chicken over the flames of fire, be it wood, charcoal or gas. The skin gets a bit burned and shrinks nicely and the feathers come off easily. Remove all of the feathers with great care.
Slice the bird in smart chunks and hold the meat again over open flames of fire, so that all the meat pores are closed and the skin a bit blackened and burned. Then spice the meat and throw it in boiling salted and spiced up water.
Let it cook slowly for at least two to three hours, til it feels softer and if you eat it, it should feel like as if you had to chew quite a bit on it, but it looks like it should be done pretty soon. The trick is, to close the pores of the meat completely and give it a kind of roasted taste by holding it over open flames, before you ever cook it.
Take the meat chunks out of the broth after you had cooked it that long and start simmering tomatoes pepper and may be garlic in oil, spice the meat with ground red hot pepper and salt, rub the salt and pepper into the skin.
Then put the meat into the very hot oil and roast it slowly for at least 20 to 30 minutes, turning the meat so that it gets crusty on all sides of the meat chunks. When nicely brownish and crusty put the meat aside.
Chop some tomatoes and onions and put them in oil til well done and all the tomato juice has completely evaporated, then add a little broth and let evaporate again etc. may be three to four times. The tomatoes must be well simmered so that all the acidity is gone.
Then put the roasted chicken meat chunks together with the tomatoes and add more broth. so that it looks you have a clear soup with chicken chunks. Then add peanut butter into the tomato, chicken mixture, so that you get a nice thick tomato peanut sauce with the chicken chunks in it and let them simmer at very low temperature another twenty minutes or so. Ad hot red pepper.
Serve the whole thing with rice or couscous … and you never want to eat “tender” chicken anymore. BTW there are two ways of using peanuts in the sauce. You could use peanut butter (ie made from roasted peanuts) or you could use cooked peanuts that are then crushed and made into a paste. The latter sauce will look whitish and is actually great with beef. I prefer the peanut butter style though.
Believe me the meat is delicious, you still feel a bit of the crusty outside, but softened by the simmering, and inside you have still juicy and tender meat. It just takes a lot of time to prepare it this way.
By the way I have eaten wild running porcupine that was prepared in a similar fashion and it is just …
oh …. can’t tell you … melting away on your tongue like … a kiss?
except maybe a few vegetables in containers.
But I sure like shopping at farmers’ markets. Ours, even here in the rural “heartland”, has a couple organic vegetable farmers and an excellent provider of organic, free range chicken, eggs, and beef. You can also get organic stuff from the Amish stores.
-Alan
If everyone farmed, I wouldn’t be able to find any customers!
I believe that if there are more organic farmers, if buyers like yourself can taste the difference and are willing to pay more for it then the world will be a better place.
the organic greenmarkets do good biz here in NYC. It made me laugh, though, seeing your exhortation of “only 5 acres!” Ye Gods, even in Brooklyn it’s rare to see someone with more than an apartment…
As long as organic farmers provide good quality merchandise, they’ll always have takers in the big cities (especially the big cities where a large percentage of the population is obsessed with food.)
This is fascinating to me, I’m not even a gardener, let alone a farmer but I have been wondering just how I could at least augment our food supply. Actually I’m the lucky recipient of wild black berries and raspberries but one can hardly live on them. So, you’ve given me a lot of ideas to explore. And I sympathize with the difficulty of giving someones ideas a fair reading when you dislike a great part of them. I give you credit for getting past the line about animals not having souls, I’d have heaved the book against a wall then.
Afterward, I contemplated definitions: I’m not really sure humans have souls. The word “soul” suggests that humans have some special link with divinity. But I am convinced that every living thing — humans, animals and plants, even fungi — have spirits that should be respected and appreciated.
If you want to do a bit of vegetable gardening in your back yard, I recommend “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew. It will get you started in gardening without overwhelming you. You will have to purchase composted manure unless you can drive out to a horse stable and get some for free. Buying chemical fertilizers is what has put many small farmers out of business. To sustain cropland, you must have animals to supply the manure.
It’s always a good idea to have a stock or direct supply of food because shit happens. There are power black-outs, hurricanes, earthquakes — all kinds of things can interfer with your food supply. It’s a secure feeling to know you can survive in an emergency. If Kunstler is right, we’re going into a “Long Emergency” and people need to be more self-sustaining.
In the short term, growing some of your own food is extremely relaxing and once you taste the difference it’s hard to go back to the factory-farm foods at the grocery store.
Sounds like you’re actually doing what I’ve fantasized about for so long. I’d be interested in knowing more about where you are, whether you already have the land, where you are (or not) in the process. Do you have your own blog or anything like that? I bet a lot of us urban fantasizers would be very interested in following your plans, ideas and progress and doing our ignorant kibitzing.
This Salatin guy does not seem all that unusual to me. I’ve run into a lot like him — the kind you’d expect to be all liberal and environmental, but they turn out to be far-right haters of “tree-huggers” and “commies”. I’ll bet he’s a member in good standing of the water-fluoridation conspiracy theorists, too. There seem to be two main channels of back-to-the-land types: on the one hand people of the Nearing-Rodale-Wendell Berry school, and the other that have roots more in the rightwing militia/survivalist/selfsufficiency/apocalypse view.
The chicken enclosure you mention sounds like the “chicken plow” that was developed, I think, by an ag school in CA. I always thought it was really elegant. I don’t know why he’d make it so crowded tho. A minimal frame of 2bys to hold chicken wire is going to be pretty light even when it’s pretty big, especially if it has wheels at one end, or an easy way to attach them. Two women I knew in Wisconsin had one that I’d guess was 10’x18 and maybe 7′ high, and the two of them could easily lift up one end and wheel it to the next location. Then they’d wheel the hen house over and attach it to the pen.
My grandfather had maybe 50 chickens when I was a kid. They could have gone pretty much where they wanted except the garden, but preferred to hang out not more than around 20 feet from the hen house. Maybe because their corn/oats/oystershell diet made them uninterested in foraging. Plus they were the dumb white kind. I always speculated that the pretty kinds probably had more spirit.
Anyway, what I started to say was, it would be great to keep in touch with your aims, ideas, and progress in a more permanent space than a scrolling diary. If you have the patience to hang a little with us wannabes, I’m sure you’d become the center of a pretty lively and curious little community. One thing I’m curious about is why you want to do beef — it’s a lot less efficient than poultry, no? And seems a lot less return for the labor. I hope you stay in touch, one way or another.
Here in my big-city backyard in the midst of an Officially Sanctioned drought, I have to boast that it looks like we’re going to be self-sufficient in kale, at least, til the first hard frost, maybe as late as January. It required about 20 forty-pound bags of dubious topsoil and alleged compost, but figuring farmers-market/Wholefoods prices, will actually turn a “profit”. Real city gardening is a cool movement, too, but its limiting factor now is the need to buy inputs like manure, compost, and even compostable materials. This year I’m using newspapers as the main dry compost ingredient, but not feeling entirely easy about it.
We’re in Lynchburg, VA, looking for land primarily in Bedford and Campbell counties. Instead of a blog, I think I’ll have to start up a web site and run a diary on that. I definitely want to document the process for all who may want to follow along. So far, I’ve been using comments and diaries here on BooTrib to do that.
What we want to do is get 10 mainly level acres with five cleared and five in hardwoods. A bordering creek would be a plus. It needs to be within a 30 minute drive of the Community Market in Lynchburg where we could sell our surplus. On this land, we will build a small log house, a small barn, a greenhouse and a large vegetable garden. To start, I want a flock of chickens and then, a milk cow. I have a goal of making us 90% self-sufficient in 3 years.
After that I hope we will expand the garden and the layers to support 200 customers so that by the time Hubby retires in 10 years we will have an enterprise that sustains us. Hubby wants a few pigs and beef cattle for a well-rounded diet but I don’t anticipate us doing that in the first phase. He’s also got an obsession with having Araucana chickens that lay green eggs to go with smoked ham from the pigs. I bet you can guess what his first name is…
It’s going to be interesting to see if we can actually accomplish our goals. My experience is in organic, deep-bed vegetable growing. He grew up on a small farm with chickens, cows and goats. Between us, we do know how to do it. It remains to be seen if we have the physical stamina.
Don’t worry about using newspaper. Newspapers use vegetable-based inks and the paper turns to pulp after a good soaking. I’ve used newspaper as a mulch below sprawling plants like squash and zuchinni and found it to be perfect for keeping the fruits clean and free of slugs and borers.
A solution for your drought situation that we used in the suburbs of Atlanta was a “gray water system.” Google that and you’ll be amazed. For under $200 you can re-route the water from your washing machine to your garden beds. You do have to use biodegradable, phosphate-free detergents but you probably do that already. Also, the Method brand at Target sells a eco-friendly dishwasher detergent so that water can be routed to your garden, too.
when you start your website or whatever you decide. Whether you want a big bunch of kibitzers butting into your plans is of course your call. I think it might become an exciting experiment in a different approach to “community agriculture”. Might require a ruthless hand when it comes to culling the herd, tho. I’ll bet there are a lot of folks like me and some of the other posters here who know about stuff that would be useful for you, even if we’re not farmers. I know a lot about marketing, for example.
When I go to the farmers markets around here I like to try and figure out what’s working and what isn’t. What’s obviously working like crazy is cut flowers. They’re the folks with the long lines and big returns on labor. Since you won’t be selling pot, flowers looks like by far the most bucks per sq ft of dirt. I wouldn’t find it very satisfying, meself, but there’s certainly an argument to be made that feeding the soul is even more important than feeding the body (Tho not many hungry people would buy into that). I wonder if this is mostly a phenomenon of big-city markets, and folks in the county/far burbs are content to grow their own?
I’d have thought fresh herbs would be huge and profitable sellers, too, but there always seem to be tons of basil just wilting away in the sun. I don’t get that. Maybe it’s true about nobody cooking from scratch anymore.
Going back to the weather, I was talking to a guy from Michigan who mostly sells wonderful apples and tomatoes. It’s too early for the good apples, so he had some peaches now. He says this has been the worst summer for the peaches he can ever remember. 90+ days that drop to the low 60s at night and make the peaches stop growing or fall off the tree. And then to top it off he gets hit with a big hail storm so most of the peaches last week looked like they’d been used for target practice — riddled with .45 cal-sized holes. What a business.
Looking forward to your website or whatever other followup you decide on. There has to be some radical change in the way American food production and distribution works or we’re going to lose everything that’s best in our country. Folks like you might just be the best hope for making that change happen, one tomato at a time.
PS — Are you saying the newspaper mulch stopped stemborers? I gave up trying to grow summer squash ’cause even when they produced in our crummy soil (basically used to be sand dunes), the borers would get them, and all the stuff about using bt, slitting the vines, etc., didn’t go any good. So if you were referring to squash stem borers, maybe I’ll give it another try next summer. (Can you imagine the humiliation of being the only person in the temperate world unable to grow vast excesses of zucchini?)
I have this fantasy too, though my own goes much farther. I am really concerned about the future of this planet. So, I want a completely sustainable, off-the-grid, community. To be completely wacky, I envision buying land with mountains, so I can dig a fully contained shelter within the mountainside. I know, far too unrealistic, but a girl can dream. I envision greenhouses, and agriculture, some animals as well. For the shelter, I would like hydroponics. Add to this, solar panels, wind turbines, vegetable fuel, and geothermal power, if possible. I would like to enlist a variety of people with multiple backgrounds, eg., doctors, agriculturists, animal husbandry, chemists, alternaltive energy experts, craftspeople, etc.
More realistically, I would like to buy a house in the country with a few acres and produce my own food, water, and power. Maybe join or create a small co-op or something.
I, too, would love to follow your progress. Great thread and great comments, all!
The Long Emergency..?
he think s we will all soon be farming
Yes, I referred to it in a comment upthread. He really doesn’t think that everyone will be farming. Heck, we’ll need blacksmiths and candle-makers, too. 😉
If you can find the job in the works of the Bard, it is worth training for.
Fortunately, lawyers never go out of style (the world’s second oldest profession 😉
I imagine everyone will have a small garden for things like herbs, greens, tomatoes etc., and some will do big gardens for potatoes, corn and other large acreage crops.
And yes I bet you are right about other professions. In fact, there will be a lot less office workers, and more people that actually make things like baskets, dishes, and clothes.