Erin's land journal

I'm trying to sort out my animal situation. My energy is deeply limited, so I need to figure out who to spend it on and who not to.

Animals take a lot of constant work, unlike the garden which requires bursts of seasonal work. To some extent that constant work is important for me since it gets me up and moving every day. To some extent it's a problem, because it makes vacations etc difficult. To a large extent it can be ameliorated with infrastructure where more $ = more freedom. For instance the difference between hauling water from indoors, hauling water from the spigot on the side of the house, short-hosing water from a field standpipe right next to the pig field, and having an heated or geothermal automatic waterer is a tremendous gradient from a ton of daily work to a once-daily stroll. Likewise feed has a work gradient from shoveling off the truck and hauling daily through tractoring to the location and finally tractoring to automatic feeders.

I had hoped to be in a different place with infrastructure finances by now, but between my 2019 job loss and shift and the chimney/roof repairs and the covid/abattoir situation I am not. So it's time to make some decisions.

I love geese. I'm at 28 right now - white chinese, brown chinese, roman, pilgrim, embden, and saddleback. They're low-care except for winter water, and keeping them inside in the cold of winter and then in breeding pens is probably going to make my spring a lot better. When they were free-ranging in spring there were significant poop issues on my driveway. I'm happy to increase my goose population (highest ever was 44 and that's an ok summer number, as would be a slightly higher number). I'd like to add a couple brown chinese females, several classic roman geese (non-poof-headed), maybe one saddleback pair or trio, and eventually either cottom patch or shetland (shetland probably aren't genetically viable anymore and are thus a functionally dead breed, which is sad because I love them). They are almost all rare, they're great lawnmowers, I find them super rewarding. I think it's fair to cap myself at 1-2 males and 3-4 females of any of the breeds that aren't vanishingly rare, with a cap of maybe 3 males and 6 females of roman, saddleback, or shetland (hahahaha, that would be the largest or second-largest shetland flock in north america but I can dream) and only 2 very rare breeds in that case. I'm not concerned about having too many geese, really, except insofar as I have housing for them. They will always be worth the feed bill for me and a bunch of people seem to like the meat so I seem to be able to sell them ok.

Ducks are very hardy, good layers, and ornamental. They're entertaining. They smell weird. They mess up water. In winter they eat a lot, and they're expensive to slaughter. They make a really great size bird for me personally to eat, unlike a goose which is so huge. I'm involved in Anconas, which are a newly created breed, cayugas which are basically living jewels, the snowblower duck line which is excellent farm utility, and pekins which I want to incorporate into the snowblower line for size but hopefully retain some of the great laying/brooding qualities. So I do want to keep ducks, they can hang out with the geese in winter outside of breeding season, but I don't want to overwinter more than two dozen-ish. I can sell ducklings pretty well in spring if I hatch them out, and probably hatching eggs. Selling whole ducks for food is less worth it between abattoir costs and how small they are; adding some size to the line might help.

Chickens make chicken eggs, which I like scrambled or fried or mostly boiled (duck and goose are too rich for me when cooked that way, though I think I could get used to duck soy eggs). They also make chicken, which isn't super replaceable by other meats for a bunch of things. They're good at turning over the litter in ways ducks and geese don't, and they likewise turn the top inch of soil pretty well in a garden while de-bugging and removing weeds. I'm settled mostly into hardy breeds (chanteclers and americaunas) and the longer I keep breeding here the better I'll be. Keeping a couple chickens is great. Keeping a bunch of chickens is a pain, this despite the hatching eggs and chicks selling pretty well. A dozen or eighteen chickens with two to three roosters, replacing about half every year? That sounds about right. I'll keep playing with my chantecler/americauna mix with a bit of whatever will bulk them out a bit.

Dogs keep everyone safe, they stay.

Cats are not completely aligned animals, they catch some vermin which is good but I'm allergic to them which is bad. However, I have these cats and they live here now. I manage them by controlling access to parts of the house and I should probably get a hepa air filter.

All of the above need minimal alteration/infrastructure changes except maybe more goose houses. Now for the difficulties.

Pigs. Oof. I started pigs as tillers for the garden and they're fantastic like that. Like chickens they'll eat anything. Ossabaw pork is unrivaled and can't be bought. Lard for soap is a lot of fun. I really believe in this breed and it's vanishingly rare and getting rarer by the day with the way feed costs are going. They require the most outside inputs in terms of feed and I was going to say butchering help, but that's not entirely true. They require more labour from me for butchering because there's no one who can do them justice, who works on regular pigs. Handling 3' of backfat and a 2" loin eye instead of 7/8" backfat and a 4" loin is just... folks who butcher commercially run on muscle memory for grocery store cuts, and my pigs are nowhere near that even a little. Also castrating them is really, really emotionally difficult; there's a shot in europe you can give boars that essentially functions like castration and I wish that would hurry up and be approved here. Breeding is less controllable: with birds you remove the eggs and you don't get babies, sometimes you even need to put them in an incubator to make babies. With pigs it's super difficult to keep a boar separated from the females when they're in heat, both of them will go through most fencing, and then a boar can't be kept alone so he needs a companion, and she needs a companion, so that's at least four pigs if you're separating the boar. Pigs can be artificially inseminated but Ossabaws can't since there's no frozen semen for them. So anyhow, I really, really want to keep pigs on the landscape but they're a tremendous amount of work. I need to reduce the numbers I have and keep them low. I wish so much there was a vet within a couple hours that would castrate for me and/or that shot would be approved (I just looked this up and Improvest* was I think approved and starting pilot trials in 2010, it was in a 2016 piece of legislation that's now defunct, but I can't find it in modern legislation, gotta look into this more so this is super promising, it reduces boar taint and keeps girls from getting pregnant, this may let me keep pigs! Yay!). I also need to keep extending my fencing if I want to keep pigs and extend my gardens, but I guess that's true anyhow (I'm lookin' at you, deer/moose).

Muscovy ducks are not entirely practical here, but they are lovely. They're sweet animals, they make beautiful sounds, they're beautiful. Their feet will frostbite in ambient conditions in winter so they need to be confined either with electric heat or with deep-bedded compost. They make a completely different meat to other waterfowl, basically a clone for beef, they lay sporadically but prolifically when they lay, and they are good incubators. Locally there is a disease (?) which kills them when they are young and go out on the land, so they need to be kept indoors when young until they're a considerable age. So, these are an optional pet-slash-incubator, and they require an indoor either heated or deep-bedded composting space

Costurnix quail are weird in the practical/impractical scale. They lay like champs, year round, tremendous volumes of eggs by body weight. The eggs are annoying for practical purposes but really great in salad dressings, tartares, etc. A couple in a greenhouse are tremendous helps in reducing pests. They make lovely noises. They take up almost no space. They're fiddly to eat, have short lifespans, and need to be kept in groups with many more females than males so they're not the most practical meat animal. They need to be kept enclosed at all times since they have no sense. Their infrastructure is out of scale with everyone else's so they really need their own setup, though I'm having some success sharing a completely enclosed space with chickens. I'd love to have a couple in each greenhouse all summer, which requires the greenhouse be sealed, but it's hard for me to have animals for the summer and get rid of them over winter. Along with muscovies these are definitely on the luxury list. Unlike muscovies these are one-more-different-thing, since the muscovies can go in with chickens/ducks in a deep bedding situation, but also unlike muscovies they can be set up with significantly easy auto-feeders and auto-waterers.


Ok, those are the animals. Now what increases my capacity?

-Pig immunocastration shot. Look into this.
-Automatic feeders. Easy to make for birds, harder for pigs. Might be worth it to buy one in for pigs. Have to figure out how to keep them from being buried by deep bedding for the birds (deep bedding rises the floor by 2' slowly over the course of the winter). I should make the bird ones anyhow.
-Hand-filled automatic waterers. Easy for chickens or quail. Hard for waterfowl in winter (55-gallon-drum with a hole cut on the side?) but easy in summer, and not really a thing for pigs unless I built a tank that filled their bowl via float valve and somehow couldn't be destroyed.
-More livestock houses. Working on it one at a time.
-More rotational pastures. Working on one or two added per year.
-Standpipe by the barn. $$$. This might happen in the future but won't happen now.
-Tractor. See standpipe issues above.
-Plumbed-in automatic waterer. I should probably actually cost this out but it would make chores into basically floating on air and so I suspect it's nor affordable.

Ok, gonna let that marinate for a bit.

Quick fb repost here, since I haven't written on this much:

I just want to acknowledge how many core beliefs food touches on how our bodies relate to the world and its creatures, and how big and significant restructuring that relationship can be, and finding good meaning in a new type of relationship. Especially if it's been such hard work to preserve the old relationship for so long.

I've never been vegetarian or vegan. There were many years where I was known-source-animal-products-only, which many times looked like functional veganism.

Two things led me to my current system, which is to grow 75% of my calories and carefully source about 15%, then let the last 10% be what it will:

I've always had a very deep relationship to plants where eating their bodies and products feels equally significant to eating the bodies and products of animals. It feels more comfortable for me not to divide creatures into two categories and treat those categories differently, but instead to develop a relationship with each type of plant and animal and fungus and understand how it fits into the environment as part of it also fitting into my body.

I began to let go of 100%ism in everything. I'm allowed some softness and some ease. That roughly 10% is so I don't need to count my calories, go hungry when my mind or circumstances won't allow certain foods, or stand apart from social sharing. I've allowed myself to make choices that are easier sometimes. Allowing myself this grace changed my relationship with food from one of control and scarcity to one of recieving bounty.

When prompted further

It's not a stretch to think of the biotic part of the environment (plants, animals), myself, and the abiotic part (rocks, mineral dirt) as basically a flow of molecules through various patterns, enabled by solar energy that comes in from various routes (photosynthesis and then burned in mitochondria, water driven through heat energy into the air and then back down again, gasoline from so long ago). Anything I eat is a set of molecules that becomes part of my body because of the way it was previously part of the biotic (usually) world: genetics and sunlight and water and soil and heat work together to make specific plants and combinations of plants grow here, which are sometimes in turn eaten by certain animals, which are in turn eaten by me. The environment is always becoming part of my body through this process, and then my body is always becoming part of the environment in return.

Growing most of my own food it's easy to understand this because I can see it. I've been drinking primarily my own well water for over 4 years, and watering my plants and animals with it. "Extra" water ends up in the sewage lagoon on my property, where it evaporates into the air and then falls as snow. I'm not sure where my aquifer comes from but it may well be recharged by the snowshed that tends to concentrate moisture here. I've been eating my own meat for several years: a lot of that is a nutrient flow in the form of grain from the next town over but some is from local grazing etc.

We all know that this happens in an abstract sense. The relationship I'm developing is about knowing how it works in particular, starting with my body and tracing forward and back: both the flow of actual molecules and the diverse and amazing energy and pattern sources that allow patterns to perpetuate. So: my environment becomes really cold in the winter and a lot of energy is needed to store food to use during that time to keep the system moving. But also: animals use a portion their food energy to collect and store food energy in their bodies really efficiently; they can collect all the leftover cornstalks and tomatoes from the garden and turn that into food for me that's ready anytime I can do a slaughter, and they self-perpetuate and self-heal. Plus, my body itself prefers a lot of fatty and meaty types of energy to high-carb foods. Emotionally, I have a set of beliefs about evolution and life that includes the acceptability of raising animals for meat. The Ossabaw hogs I raise are particularly good at making use of the energy and conditions I have to self-perpetuate, unlike maybe pink commodity hogs would be. And finally, my body is more able to produce the right kind of energy to feed the pig than it would be to raise enough sunflowers or canola, for instance, to supply my fat energy needs.

So I characterize the environment as a pattern where my own body is woven through it like a single colour in a complex painting: biophysical, genetic, emotional, intellectual, energetic, input, output. My goal is to use my emotion and intellect and physical energy and I guess spiritual drive to bring all these things closer to a robust, sustainable, and pleasurable system. I've started fairly directly, with things I consume/eat, and step the process out from there. Eating is the most basic form of fitting something into my body, after all, and being able to obtain it through my personal characteristics is one step out from that. Then there's the downstream side, but I think maybe you get the point? It's easier to know all this about something that is grown by me or someone I know. Or, for instance, the vanilla co-op I buy vanilla beans from has tight direct relationships with their suppliers and they teach us a lot about the ecology and processing of vanilla too.

An exercise for farm class is to envision what arrival would look like: if everything turned out right, far in the future, on an average day. A lot of participants talked about people and people are important; I love the idea of the land swelling during the quarters and cross-quarters with harvest celebrations and workshops, with a tiny village springing up of tents and tiny houses and camper vans. I want that feeling of people bustling, everyone cooking or making something, all the campstoves and outdoor kitchen full as folks prepare for an evening bonfire potluck. I want to see everyone chattering excitedly around the fire about what they learned that day, sharing experiences where everyone noticed something slightly different and it bubbles up as enthusiasm to share and talk and process and then, if these are the right people, as the fire dies down the talk drifts towards how to make the world better in concrete ways. Can you use cottonwoods to bust up concrete and plant in it? What does functional aquaponics look like on a small scale if you're trying very low inputs? What does a system look like if you prioritize aquifer replenishment? And also questions about the space right here under our feet: would it be better to shade the creek a little more? Maybe it would be more efficient to have the goosehouse downhill? What about trying a long-straw wheat?

There also need to be days when I wake up and go out alone and walk and look at everything. Every day there will probably be something that surprises me, a question that makes me think, something that I work at in the back of my mind when I go to bed that night.

The land itself isn't a jigsaw puzzle, it's an organism. When you go to a garden someone will point to a plant and say "that's a rose" or something like. I want to be able to point to something and it has so many uses and interconnections and purposes that I don't really stop until I've described the whole farm: this is an apple tree, it feeds us apples, it feeds the geese apples, it purifies the goose water, it shades the rhubarb, it stabilizes the slope, so on but more. Like any organism change is always occurring and homeostasis is more conceptual than real: annual crops come and go, numbers of animals or plants wax and wane, predation on crop plants swells and diminishes through the years. New organisms are added, seeds are selected so even remaining organisms change over time -- the Mammoth Russian sunflower I started with is maybe squatter and stronger two decades later, and occasionally throws multiple heads, or the KARMA mircle tomato is bigger and a little earlier -- but the whole is still itself in the same way that eating a sandwich instead of a steak or going to sleep or getting a sunburn or even replacing an arm with a prosthetic doesn't change your own essential nature.

For this visioning we are asked about customers and what they appreciate about this specifically, and the thing folks receive from me would be the story of interconnection. There's never just one thing: this is not a goose farm, or a soap farm, or a seed farm. This is where the soap is made from the same molecules as the charcuterie goose breast because it is one system. Everything isn't available all the time: it's a seasonal celebration of the land's generosity, maybe a basket per season that goes out full of treats and stories. Folks could open it and learn, open it and play with things within that they'd experienced before but differently, and things they hadn't experienced before. Breeding stock, seeds, and workshops connect the place to the places and the work of others. Part of the joy of it is that folks don't need to know what they need when they come: there's room to talk and discover that on the way.

The exercise asks, who supports you? Who is there to help you on the farm? I think of a workshop, many hands making light work, and that is one kind of support. There's another kind of support that is the recognition of purpose, that is belief. This is the support that acknowledges that it is worthwhile and desirable and sometimes achievable to change a little corner of the world. This is the support that also loves the land. I can't imagine having this kind of support.

The exercise says: you have just received word that the thing that happens next is about to begin. What is that thing? And that thing is that the organism produces offspring. The next thing would be that people with ossabaws and ancient grains and weird corns and geese have their own Places and there is a flow of information and genetics back and forth and the world is actively changing because more of these things are being grown and preserved, because people feel they have a network that helps to support them, because we're enabled to do this and we aren't alone. That's the long future, the next step.

Then we were asked to write a vision statement, which is the big soul-goal of the place and how it fits into the world as a whole and isn't to be shared, and a mission statement which is more concrete and achievable.

The vision statement will be something like: We who touch this land all know, together, that we are so many kaleidoscopic pieces of one intricate glorious system of systems; we all come away with better tools to steer those systems as authentic selves in collaboration with other entities. Standing on this land is to feel all the systems ticking like clockwork, to love those systems, and to know we have a place within them.

Or a little less woo:

Plants, humans, and other animals knowing together that we are so many kaleidoscopic pieces of one intricate glorious system of systems and giving humans better physical, intellectual, and emotional tools to steer our piece of that collaborative system.

The mission statement will be something like: Promoting creative place-based systems through hands-on experiential knowledge that supports diverse human, plant, and animal partners in flourishing in appropriate interlocking niches.

PERSONAL VISION EXERCISES for farm class.

Identity: What is your identity? How does your identity influence your desire to be a farmer?

I don’t define myself by identity in the same way that many folks on the left do nowadays. Identities are explanations after the fact for the experience of self. So, I’ve always felt more relatedness to plants than to humans. As such, my ecosystem has felt more like my family than my family has in many ways. I suspect I relate to creating an ecosystem the way many people relate to creating a family: the land is my partner, together we build a diverse and robust web of entities such that they’ll live on beyond me. Orr maybe I relate to the land as a helpmate: I assist the land in producing bounty for folks.

Turns out this sense of relatedness to nonhumans is common in neurodiverse folks.

As a poor person I’m scared to farm because I want financial stability/security. I won’t get anything from a parent’s death so my retirement is on me.

As the daughter of someone whose parents were farm-adjacent and who left all that on purpose, I don’t have any ancestral ties or wisdom coming through my family.

I was read as a smart, pretty, skinny girl as a kid so I was not encouraged to do outdoor or manual labour things. I didn’t learn to fix things or that I could use my muscles to literally change my surroundings. I have a lot of learning to do because of my late start.

Values: What are your top values?

Security. Generosity. Curiosity. Flexibility. Growth.

Purpose: What is your personal purpose?

To maintain and support complexity, to seek knowledge and pass it on to those interested, to inspire interest, and to nourish. To connect through interest and joy.

Contribution: At a later time, when you reflect on your life, what do you hope to have contributed?

The feeling of abundance. Reverence in folks for this system we’re part of. The continuation of knowledge.

I want someone who thought they could never do this stuff to have stars in their eyes when they learn that they can.

Joy & Misery: What conditions bring you joy? What conditions make you miserable?

Financial instability and feeling like I’m producing a fungible product for financial gain both make me miserable. Identical routine makes me miserable. Lack of autonomy makes me miserable. High risk of waste makes me miserable.

Experimenting and discovering brings me joy. Generosity and gifting brings me joy. Teaching to interested folks brings me joy. Sharing brings me joy. The wheel of the seasons, relatively predictable but fluctuating each time, brings me joy. Planning brings me joy! Working towards a goal brings me joy. Periods of intense focus interleaved with periods of less work bring me joy. People who also love this stuff bring me joy. Working outside and using my muscles brings me joy, as does solving weird one-off problems with what’s to hand. Having the time to do something right brings me joy. Exploring complexity and unraveling it, but knowing the thing is too complex to fully understand, brings me joy. Learning brings me joy. Good systems - fitness of system, place, and goal - bring me joy.

Work: What is your ideal workplace?

My home land. People are there individually or small groups sporadically, and then there is time on my own to look deeply at what’s going on.

Time: How do you want to spend your time, and what is your ideal work-life balance?

I want to spend my time 65/35 inside/outside-ish. I want to always have a new project or iteration to be puzzling through. I’d like to have spikes of work intensity with long focused days interleaved with quiet low-demand days, but with a small level of constant demand.

I want to spend my time observing, measuring, and making something slightly different each time.

Tl;dr if you want to keep genetic diversity in domestic animals, and/or you want there to be domestic animals in our future, actively buy animal products from small diverse farmers. Also I'm burnt out and struggling some.

You can save seed from rare plants and skip growing it for a couple years. You can keep those seeds in a freezer for quite awhile and you don't lose the variety. Animals are different. To preserve domestic animals you need a big enough gene pool of live, young or breeding-age animals. Sure you could freeze semen and ova and hope someone revives them someday but that requires a lot more tech and it isn't being done to the breadth of genetics we need to preserve. Plus, animals have not only genes but culture. Three years ago my geese did not know how to dig for potatoes or shake their own apples off trees: they learned. My sows make better nests when they're around older sows who have made nests.

If you believe animals are a useful and necessary part of ecosystems and human food systems-- obviously I do, for many reasons I won't detail here, but you can definitely ask me about it-- this is a hard time. We're losing an awful lot of our diversity.

Feed has gone up from roughly $14/bag last year to $20/bag this year for me. That's a lot more money out of my pocket, my discretionary income, every day. Animals eat every day. I'm trying to figure out ways to keep this working but I'm not sure I've recovered from the 2018 evacuation or the covid abattoir disappearance where I couldn't legally sell meat to reimburse costs.

I don't really *like* selling meat to people I don't know, either: meat is the outcome of a pretty intense and special relationship between me and my animals. That relationship should also include the person who eats that meat: it should be done with reverence and something like love. So I waffle on what to do, I spend money to feed animals in order to keep the breed alive, I spread the genes and support other folks raising animals when I can. I spend money on feed instead of on housesitters for vacations and so I don't really take vacations, and I burn out, and I feel dark about the future of all of this.

When I put my hand to these plants and animals I can feel the chain of people who made domestication and husbandry choices generation by generation. Every person who breeds a plant or an animal makes choices that change it, just a little bit, honing it for the next person, fitting it better into the environment. One break in the chain and animals are lost, plants may be lost. I'm a link in that chain. In cold winters oils and fats are so important to survival, and they're hard to get from plants and take good soil (which will be mostly underwater soon, tbh) and a lot of physical labour. If someone needs a small, very hardy animal that can forage and sort itself pretty well over winter and provides huge number of calories at some time in the future they will have that animal, in part, because of my work with Ossabaws and various geese. Maybe they will be able to have a kinder community because of it. If someone needs to grow vegetables in a short season (short because it's north, or because part of the season is too hot or too dry to grow in) they will in part have those because of my stewardship and spread of those seeds. I have trouble thinking of charging for that too: the more people have these seeds the more likely they are to survive.

Whenever someone gets breeding stock from me and grows their own animals out, or gets seeds from me and shares their own saved seeds with friends, or learns a skill from me and shares those skills with friends: that makes it worth it. When people honour the connection of their food and their ecosystem and their body, that brings me so much joy.

When I'm burnt out I think, if folks today don't support diversity then they don't deserve to have it given to their future generations. It's not a good way to feel.

So I'm looking at what to do going forward, I don't know what that will be at this point. This is just a rambling post in keeping with my Dinosaur Farm videos, trying to be real about what this experience is for me without shining it up any and maybe looking for some words of encouragement. I'm putting myself into a bit of a farm business class to see if that helps me thread all these needles and come up with some sort of useful tapestry of action.

Meanwhile I'll likely be down to the coast with ducks and geese (and maybe pork?) and soap this fall; once I have abattoir dates I'll be taking deposits.

I know a lot of you are actively working to make the world a better place in your area of knowledge or expertise. This is mine. I wish us all so much success.