Saturday, June 04, 2005
Back To Nature? What a CROCK!
Back in high school, I wove this wondrous vision of moving out to the farm and becoming self-sufficient to a bunch of my friends. Far too many of them took it seriously, and I've actually heard it mentioned some 30 years after we got out of high school.
To start off, a bunch of long-hairs and hippie girls showing up at the old homestead in Oklahoma would probably get some of us shot, most of us pounded by redneck locals back in them days. At the very least we'd have been ostracized if we didn't show up at one of the local churches every Sunday and toss a few bucks in the collection plate.
The hardest thing to get them to understand is, especially on a small farm (40 acres in my case), you have to WORK to make that land support you. If people aren't going to get outside jobs and bring in some money, it's worse. First, you have to set part of the land out for pasture so you can raise some cattle. Then you have to make a deal with the local butcher to slaughter it, cut it up for you, package it so you can put it in your freezer and have meat for a year. The vegetarians of the group don't have this problem, of course.
Next, you don't make a little "truck garden" and grow a few veggies. Oh, no. You've got to lay out a few ACRES. Then it's got to be plowed. Then you pick the foods everyone wants and plant it in VERY long rows. There's corn. Then there's popcorn. Incidentally, I've seen it so hot some of the popcorn pops right there on the cob. Soy will grow there, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, peas, green beans, potatoes, radishes, squash, artichokes, okra, even watermelons and strawberries IF you have enough water to keep them happy. You can grow several kinds of beans. Wheat grows nicely, even winter wheat. Collard greens, kale and rhubarb grow wild. Sometimes you can stop by the road and gather some outside a farmer's fence.
Ya GOTTA have chiggens. Fuggin Chiggins I call 'em. In general, the domesticated chicken is one of the stupidest creatures in nature. Everything kills them, happily and easily. If you put the wrong kind of floor in their "roost", rats will chew off their feet while they sleep. Certain snakes like to crawl into their nests, swallow some eggs, go climb a small tree, drop out and break the eggs inside them, and go snooze after a big meal. I once saw my normally elegant and too-refined-for-the-farm aunt get so mad she grabbed an axe and a six-foot snake, stretched him out on the ground, chopped his head off, then cut him into sections so she could get her eggs back. You also have to watch your rooster. His job is to protect the hens, and a smart, strong one is a surprisingly formidable beastie, but he knows one of those eggs contains his successor as Stud and Ruler of the Roost, so he'll break eggs if you don't watch him. Old hens are often too tough to fry. You gotta make soup out of them.
Even with a nice field full of bugs and seeds, chickens can't eat enough to sustain them. You have to buy feed to supplement their diet. Same with cows. They eat hundreds of pounds of grass, but you still have to have a nice stash of hay to get them through the winter, and extra food to keep them from getting skinny and less valuable on the meat market.
Now you have to decide how you're going to get around the farm. You don't want to waste the miles on the tractor driving it everywhere. You either need a horse, a dirt bike, or an ATV. The horse is, of course, the least polluting and the most fun. But again, he's gotta be fed, curried (brushed), washed, his stall kept clean and dry, and he needs a ton of shots and medicines to fend off the myriad diseases he can get. I forgot, you gotta do that to the cattle, too. ALL the cattle. We also didn't get into milking. They want to be milked, some twice a day. They have to be milked. They prefer the first milking somewhere around sunup. Hard to do after a night of partying. I'd love to tell you about "cow-kickers", which are essentially leg cuffs for cows that have a bad habit of kicking you and your milk bucket across the room just for the hell of it. Ah, yes, Moo-Cows in bondage. Gotta do it, though. They kick hard enough to break your ribs.
Now, you either have to have a HUGE wheat grinder to grind your own, or take it to a center and have it done. I don't know exactly how that works, but I DO know you don't make bread out of wheat seeds. Same with your corn if you want cornmeal, and believe me, you do. After a great deal of experimenting, I discovered my grandmother's secret recipe for pancakes involving mostly wheat flour, but a small amount of corn flour mixed in, and dumped in a HOT griddle. Add homemade butter, and you may never leave the breakfast table. Syrup is nearly superflous.
You also have to drill for water, and you cannot do it yourself. You HAVE to hire a well driller. Water is VERY deep in the ground, and even when you get a well, you can't count on it being around forever. Some idiot neighbor may decide to dynamite some rocks or a big batch of stumps, and the underground caverns holding your well break open, and drain the water even deeper. Now, the back-to-nature types may want a hand-pump on the well; me, I want something electric and powerful pulling my water up from 200 feet. Takes a LOT of pumping to do that. I also need that pump to water the crops.
Now, in prepping for winter, you gotta kill a piggie. I don't care how cute they are. Watch "Southern Comfort" some time with Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine. You'll see how the Cajuns do it. Well, everybody else does it the same way.
Same problem if anybody wants mutton. Somebody's gotta be tough enough to slaughter little lambchop when he's about to hit puberty.
Another huge farm problem: Assholes in the city dispose of their pets by taking them out in the country and dumping them out, telling their tearful offspring that Fido will find a nice home with a friendly farmer. First, Fido is freaked and disoriented, and probably won't go near people till he's desperate. If he hooks up with other previously dumped Fidos, they often form packs, and kill the farm animals, since they're easier to kill than wild ones. He's going to get huge ticks all over his body, giving him lots of diseases, his hair is going to get matted and full of burrs and other plant seeds, he's going to get fleas, and if he lives long enough for his last shot to wear off, he's a prime candidate for rabies. The friendly farmer sometimes will re-domesticate one or two dogs that show promise of being good farm dogs. Know what he does with the rest? Shoots them in the head. He HAS to. IF there is a local humane society, it's already jammed to the walls with stray pets, and they don't have enough medicine to euthanize them before more flow in. Same with cats. My uncles used to allow about 7 around the farm. They'd fix the females, and the cats earned their keep by killing mice in the hay barn and dairy barn, in addition to keeping them away from the house. It's also a blast to shoot milk out of a cow's tit all over a cat's face. Cats love it. Cats get run over, just vanish (probably eaten by coyotes), but there's always some dumbass dumping Fluffy off somewhere, so if your other cats like Fluffy, and you're down a cat or two, you keep her. Otherwise you take the shotgun and blow her head off.
There's also the problem of cottonmouth snakes, four or five species of rattlesnake, copperheads, coral snakes, scorpions, lyme-disease carrying ticks. That shotgun gets a LOT of use. You also have to learn all the various snakes, because you don't want to kill off the non-poisonous mousers and ratters or you'll get a vermin infestation you won't believe.
If you've opted for a horse, or even just raise a lot of cattle, those adorable little prairie dogs leave holes all over your land that your animals can step in and break a leg. Yep. Gotta shoot 'em. Forget the shotgun. You either need a .22 that's super accurate, or something a bit bigger that guarantees to kill them.
I've just scratched the surface, too. I could easily come up with another 100 or better things you have to do to make it on a farm. But on the other hand, if we ever have a global or even continental economic crash, people will be eating each other in the cities within a few months.
If you have a farm you own, a fish pond and enough guns to keep the cannibals and two-legged predators away, you can survive indefinitely, and eat pretty well while you do it. If you love electricity, I'd suggest a lot of windmills, a battery system, and maybe some solar panels for the spring and summer.
Enjoyed your karate post as well.
So when're you gonna hop over to Korea for a week to train with some hard-hitting Buddhist monks?
How's the Dadso?
Kevin
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