Supply Chains

[greenstorm]

Further to my previous entry, here's what I'm thinking about the ubiquitous "you don't have to worry about food: you're set."

I certainly have enough meat. I have 12 chickens, a dozen geese or more, and 6-8 100-150lb pigs that could be eaten this summer with no negative impact to my breeding program. However, to keep those animals alive till slaughter, and also to keep my breeding stock eating and producing more meat, I need a ton or two of grain per month. My grain is grown locally, in the next town. The farmers there buy seed grain, and they work their land with equipment that requires fuel. I am dead certain they all have loans to navigate. I pick up the grain using fuel.

I have eggs coming out my ears.

I can grow enough veggies to eat year-round if the animals don't get into the garden and eat them all. I need to till the garden (fuel input for my little rototiller) and I buy seeds for most of my food. I also need to water the garden, which requires electricity for my well. Once that food is picked I don't have a root cellar, so I need a lot of freezer space and heat (electricity or propane) for canning. It takes significant time to scale up that kind of food production. This is the best possible time of year to scale it up, though: before the beds are planned, while more ground can still be turned.

Calorie-providing foods, carbs, are a different thing again. Squash, potatoes, grains: to provide for myself they definitely need space and protection and skill. I can do potatoes; I don't really have the skill for the others here yet. I'm working on that, and trying to learn a little all the time. I'm testing some corn this year, it's a flint corn variety that apparently ripens in 60 days and grows the height of my knee. It was grown by indigenous folks in Quebec originally.

So when folks say they think I'm set, I think they don't understand that I require inputs, and that those inputs take time and skill to scale up. I've been focusing on animals, and using animals to shape the land, so far. I've been playing in the garden. If I had to eat only what I grew it would be slim pickings and pretty repetitive. If I had to eat only what I grew, with flour and butter and milk and occasional veggies (especially out of season) available at the store, I'd have a bounty for one person or even two but I couldn't support a community unless folks put in a whole lot of work with their actual muscles to beef up on fencing and do weeding and pasture-moving and whatnot.

I am thinking very hard about my inputs these days, though. They seem to be invisible to most folks but I really hope those supply lines are maintained.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

i hear you. we have very similar inputs - our poultry feed is grown & milled locally, but we have to go get it, and while we're scaling up our duckweed-growing-for-chicken-feed experiment this year, it isn't nutritionally complete for chickens - it could potentially reduce our feed costs & need, but won't eliminate them. the goats require alfalfa hay - which we're fortunate to buy from the guy next door (literally), but also minerals, dewormer, and when kidding season comes around we're going to need medical supplies for that, as well as another fridge for milk storage and a barn sink (working on that part this month). we support our host of volunteers through bulk-buying at the grocery stores - we definitely eat what we grow, but if we were limited to that, we couldn't support this many people - and the only grain we've had any success with is corn, which takes more acreage than we easily have, and which i cannot eat. we hope to get on solar this year - we were an inch away from finalizing loan paperwork for it when all this went down and we had to press Pause on it - so at some point, electric won't be external for us - but gas still will. and going solar here doesn't mean off-grid - it means grid-tie, and that's one of the reasons we can afford it at all. farms & homesteads in this day & age are definitely part of the web of modern commerce.

i hope your supply web remains stable and safe!

[greenstorm]

I'm lucky that I could probably do my own calories starting this year as long as I had feed, but as you say with more people more inputs are needed. How are you with potatoes? It seems like an unlikely climate, I imagine, but I know so little about it.

That's too bad about postponing solar, that would have been so nice. I hear batteries are so much better nowadays.

Best of luck on your supply web too.

[yarrowkat]

potatoes do okay here. we are not great at harvesting them, but probably could devote a lot more space to them if we needed to. they actually handle the sun just fine - we get a couple volunteers every year in a sunny bed where we used to grow them regularly. i'd like to make a raised bed for them - we had one experiment with that that failed, but i think we could make a better design now.

we wouldn't be doing batteries when we do the solar install - we'll be doing grid-tie. and then possibly investing in batteries a little bit at a time (they are more efficient these days but outrageously expensive), so that when push comes to shove, we can disconnect. still hoping we get ourselves on solar this year - we DO have a mutually-signed agreement with Affordable Solar. :fingers crossed:

[greenstorm]

Ohhhh, I see. Full on grid reciprocity. That's super interesting; I see how it can help with costs.

I always do potatoes in my "new beds" as part of the lasagna bedding process when I break new ground. Probably when I have enough beds I'll switch to some sort of stackable high-density system. Urbanite space-saving habits die hard.

[yarrowkat]

our trouble with potatoes has been our heavy clay soil plus the dry - they're so hard to dig out of the ground, but stackable systems dry out fast here. i tried them in an old rubbermaid trash can one year, the method where you put about 2' of soil, and when the leaves get big, you bury all but the top layer in more soil, and so on to the top. even in that container they dried out too easily. but we've gotten a lot better at automated watering systems since then - that was years ago and i think i was relying on myself to hand water. i should probably try that again.

[greenstorm]

Automated watering is magic, and I'm so lucky with my well. That's definitely the kind of intensive i was thinking of.