Farm News 09-10-06

Sunday morning, after chores, 67°


Ducks


Taking a half dozen drakes out of the duck flock has made a big difference in duck behavior. They are quieter, which is interesting because it is the females that are noisy; drakes have a soft, deep quack while females have several higher pitched calls and much louder. Generally, the quieter the animals, regardless of species, the happier they are.

Ducks give the impression that they are happy, usually. Four or five hens will get together and quietly quack to each other until one breaks out into, “QUACK, quack, quack.” Then the others have a nice laugh and they all go back to patrolling for grasshoppers. It sure seems they are happy to me.


Flower Seeds

It is time to collect flower seeds. Zinnias, Marigolds, Cosmos, and Four O'Clocks, all annual plants which need to be replanted from seed each spring. Perennial plants, those that, once established, will come back from the roots and bloom every year, are a bit harder to start, usually. Chrysanthemums, Coreopsis Daisy, Pyrethrum Daisy, Ozark Sundrop, and Purple Coneflower are all perennials that are easy to start from seed.

Gather some seed. If you don't get around to planting it in the spring, then toss it out into a place you don't mow; you might get some flowers anyway. I like to spread Purple Coneflower. Hummingbirds and butterflies like it and it shows up nicely. So, when I walk by a plant that has some ripe seed heads, I pluck of a head or two. I've noticed that Purple Coneflower does okay with full sun all day, will grow in clay or gravel, and doesn't need watering. When I come to a spot that looks sunny, I drop off the seed heads. It's been working that way for millions of years.


The “Farm” of Farm News


Living in the country is fun, unless you believe in things like 'work' and 'leisure'. Doing it right requires enormous amounts of time but only occasional very hard labor. There is little time for what we call leisure. Paula sews while watching TV for instance. In fact, living in the country and 'doing it right' requires more time than two people can invest over a fifty year time span.

Until recently farms were operated by communities, not core family units as we have today. For instance, imagine that we have 160 acres, a square piece of land ½ mile on each side. What would it take to operate it as a self supporting residential community?

Let's give our imaginary quarter section (160 acres, ¼ of a square mile), a stream through the middle, northeast to southwest, winding through about 60 acres of rich bottom land. Another 80 acres is hillside wooded area, covered with second growth Red Cedar, Honey and Black Locust, Osage Orange, Elm, Hackberry, and Cottonwood. The final 20 acres is hilltop open grassland.

Three hundred years ago the same piece of land would have consisted of 80 acres of rich bottom land, covered with mature stands of Oak and Hickory caught up in huge tangles of grape and other vines, 20 acres of small trees and brush, and 60 acres of open hilltop grassland dotted with huge old Walnut and Oak trees. In those days the bottoms were wooded and the hillsides tended to burn clean in the occasional fires. Three hundred years ago the bottoms grew trees and the high lands grew grass. Along the stream would have been a strip clogged with beaver dams over and over, until a wide alluvial flat developed with a thick growth of Willow, Sycamore, and other fast growing trees.

Four hundred years ago the human inhabitants of this area might have lived in a small village on the stream growing crops in clearings in the alluvial flat and hunting the rest of the area. To survive they would probably have to join into hunting societies with groups of hunters from neighboring villages. I wonder what then was the population density in terms of people per square mile, after a period of several generations without heavy war pressure from neighboring communities? Can we, with all our technology, now greatly increase the population density and make it sustainable over centuries?

I have a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, which makes me qualified to answer the last above question with, “Maybe.”

The point of all the above is that I have a plan to save the world. The plan is built around a concept of the ideal retirement community; a community existing in a sustainable 160 acre environment. Yes, retirement communities, with or without shuffleboard courts, can save the world.

To be sustainable a community must be able to maintain a zero sum balance of accounts with the rest of the world. If the community uses electricity made from coal mined in Wyoming, then the community must somehow restore to the environment the energy used in mining and shipping the coal. Stand beside the railroad tracks north of Lawrence, Kansas, for a day and you will see fifteen to twenty coal trains pass, each train made up of over one hundred hopper cars neatly filled with coal. To be sustainable the community is going to have to get by with very little electricity produced with coal from Wyoming.

Fortunately, there are some intelligent people working on the problems of sustainability. For now, it has to be a goal, not a requirement.

There is a large social component to sustainability. The community isn't sustainable if the land is sold, the buildings and trees are bulldozed out, and it is all planted to corn. I'll try to remember to write soon about social part of sustainability.


Geezer's Magic Mule Jerky


There has been a huge response to the announcement that Geezer's Magic Mule Jerky—Kicks Your Ass Into Gear would soon be available via the internet. Like all the really good stuff on the internet, we will have to give it away for free, charging for it could land us in hot water with various agencies concerned with public health. Also, the huge response I mentioned said that he would try it if it was free. Now that I think about it, he might have just been trying for some free dog food. Oh, well, he was a huge enough response to make me optimistic. And, as we can't sell the jerky, we will make our money by selling advertising space on the bags in which we pack it.

John, an unemployed friend, has a college degree in business of some sort, needs a job, and is a great candidate for CEO. With this business plan, John's skills at doing very little, and Calvin's muscles we should be able to build a thriving business in no time at all. Once it is up and running we can have an IPO and get rich.

The struggle between creative entrepreneurship and governmental concerns for public health, welfare, and tranquility is a never ending one, arguably fueling the engine that drives progress ahead of chaos. Having nothing more important on their calendars, the congress of the United States is planning to debate a bill prohibiting slaughtering horses for human consumption. It's already against the law in Kansas to eat your dog, no matter how hungry you get.

Well, Calvin and I don't give a damn what the law says about it, if we find ourselves in a good position to butcher a horse, pony, or mule, we will butcher it. We might be in such a good position pretty soon. Calvin has two five month old foals in his trailer, a colt and a filly. There were both bottle raised, so they're gentle, but they really aren't worth much as horses. However, it appears to me that they will need to grow for a year or so before they would be worth butchering and I don't want to raise them. Maybe, though, we could trade the two of them for a two year old mule.

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