(no subject)

[greenstorm]

Some days you trade someone a pig for a freezer and $200.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

i love those farm trade deals! we traded a thanksgiving turkey (live) for a goat (also live) two years ago, and another turkey (oven-ready) for the stud-fee for breeding our two goats last year.

[greenstorm]

They're really my favourite way to deal with animals leaving here. It hurts to transfer animals (dead or alive) for the soullessness of money, but trading them for other animals or for food is emotionally fulfilling.

How big do you grow your turkeys?

[yarrowkat]

we've raised both heritage breeds and standards. if we have the poults arrive the first week of April, standard toms get 25-35 pounds (25-30 is more usual - but there's always a really big one in the flock!), with hens coming in around 10-18 pounds. heritage toms are more likely to be 20-25 pounds, hens 6-15.

they're our primary cash crop. we sell them for $7/pound dressed weight (or $6/# if you come help process) and usually make a couple thousand dollars doing so. since the egg sales pay for chicken feed and not always that, we rely on the turkey money to fund some projects every year.

[greenstorm]

I guess I don't remember what grocery store birds used to weigh. I know last fall folks had problems with turkeys because everyone wanted smaller ones, because they had smaller gatherings. That's probably over now down there?

[yarrowkat]

it's actually been an increasing trend for the last few years, that folks want smaller birds. we had switched to raising heritage birds only, because they're both smaller and more pleasant, a few years ago. we didn't have any trouble selling our usual 40 birds last year, though - we offered to part them down in case folks wanted to freeze them, but only a couple people requested that. we had a wait list as usual, and had to refer latecomers to another local farm.

i think the smaller bird trend is economic. the bird is the expensive part of the meal, so getting a smaller one and having more vegetable dishes is more affordable, even if you're hosting a giant gathering.

[yarrowkat]

on another topic, the new US Secretary of the Interior is Deb Haaland, who is a member of Laguna Pueblo (and New Mexican, and we all just adore and appreciate her so much). with the Canadian investigation into the residential schools going on, Haaland is launching a similar investigation in the US. it's going to be really rough, as the full scale of the atrocities is revealed. but so needful, and i really hope, ultimately healing for us to face it as a culture..

https://kfor.com/news/national/sec-of-the-interior-announces-federal-indian-boarding-school-initiative-to-shed-light-on-the-unspoken-traumas-of-the-past/

[greenstorm]

I saw that! I'll admit I didn't and still don't want to think about this happening in the US too, it's a little too big for me. I know there are significant legislative differences between how those groups are handled across the two countries and also haven't looked into that, do you think there would be some form of reparations made?

The Canadian government just passed legislation revoking the doctrine of discovery, which has some very very significant ramifications in my province since it removes most legal standing for Canada having jurisdiction here.

I've been keeping an eye on Deb Haaland, it was lovely to see her get in and be given a meaningful position.

There doesn't seem to be such a strong push over there to somehow combine governments or empower indigenous people within government create an enmeshed but more fair society, it appears from here to be more of a push for self-determination through separation. Does that seem accurate?

[greenstorm]

Now that I've sous vided a turkey breast for sandwich meat I'm not sure I'll go back to roasting a whole one. The meat from the different parts cooks so much differently. Maple-miso braised legs are a revelation.

Are your vegetables down there so much cheaper than meat? Being up in the north of Canada definitely skews my sense of economics, and growing a bunch of my own food does too. As does being in Canada generally, I remember your meat/dairy as being so dirt cheap compared to ours, folks used to regularly cross the border to buy them.

[yarrowkat]

Are your vegetables down there so much cheaper than meat?

very much so, yes. and Albuquerque is only 4 hours drive from Mexico - we are on a major shipping route that runs from South America to Canada and basically everything is available here, and much of it quite inexpensively. mangoes are to be found four for a dollar most of the summer, for instance. i offer that particular example because i have been told that mangoes don't make it to Canada at all (by Ysabet, who is on the opposite side of Canada from you so that may create its own differences). there certainly are specific expensive fruits - and artichokes out of season are unreasonable - but artichokes also grow in my yard, and in season they're very inexpensive.

[yarrowkat]

i think self determination through separation is about right; very "american," that. lol. individualism even when it's collective! if the tribes can get more power to do their own thing in more places, we all benefit, as from what i can tell, locally the tribes are doing a much better job of stewarding their lands, promoting biodiversity and species preservation, and making sure each member of their group is taken care of (food, shelter, medicine) to the best of their ability. Jemez Pueblo recently used money they're making from film studios, who want to shoot movies on Jemez land, to open a hospital there in the Pueblo. everyone in that region of NM benefits, and by all accounts it's a top-notch facility.

and, gosh, if we can bring more native people into positions of national power! i feel like Interior is an especially potent position for Deb to have, because of her background in environmental activism and the overall more integrated, holistic approach that many native people take towards the environment and public lands.

[greenstorm]

Vancouver is a wonderful town for food, and mangoes even make it up this far north for about half the year but they are Not Cheap up here (I think in season, from the markets that nice white people don't go to, they can be got perfectly ripe by the case for about $1 each in Vancouver). Things can mostly be got but in a grocery store in winter the veggie components of, for instance, a good meal-sized greek salad cost out about the same as a meal-sized ribeye steak. Artichokes are harder to get and I am deeply envious.

Of course, up here nearly everyone eats some wild game meat or fish and some foraged berries even if it's not a significant part of their calories for the year.

I admit I'm a little rusty thinking about meat in that way since it's so abundant for me, and fresh non-preserved veggies are either a grocery store luxury or very seasonal. It's just another part of my retreat to the periphery of society though.

[greenstorm]

Yes, that position in particular is a great fit. I observe the situation where indigenous folks need to leave their land to get power within colonial governments. It's a hard trade-off even when the rest of us benefit.

I see that provision of services that spills over into surrounding communities here too. I'm very interested to see where it goes generally.

I also see so many settlers abdicating actual critical thought and evaluation on the environment because they expect native folks to step in and fix things. I'm pretty apprehensive about where that will end up. The Nations generally have the will to swallow the trade-offs that need to be made in those situations, and to do so compassionately and with care for their people. As they start making more landscape decisions here we will see whether settlers can keep up with those priorities. Part of decolonialization has to mean internalizing the innate complexity and value of a functioning landscape enough to make those decisions ourselves too.

[yarrowkat]

yeah, i haven't bought meat at a grocery store in years. sometimes we sell chicken, though, so i try to keep up on what the co-op's prices for free-range chicken are, so that we price ours mid-market rate. the last three years, we've coordinated with another household to purchase a whole cow, which arrives in huge bags of paper-wrapped packages of steak and roast and ground beef and so on, and we split it between our big freezer and theirs. the price per pound is astonishingly low, though of course, you pay the whole thing up front so it's a little intense in the moment, but then it takes us most of the year to eat through it. we will probably never raise a cow; they're very intense on the land and we are not that large of a project really. it turns out we all really like goat meat, though, so that's a happy outcome.

$1/ea for mangoes is not terrible! i don't think artichokes ship very well, and that's part of why they're so spendy. i wonder if you could grow one indoors? they're frost tolerant and they survive mild freezes - they die back in the winter here and return in the spring.

[yarrowkat]

I also see so many settlers abdicating actual critical thought and evaluation on the environment because they expect native folks to step in and fix things.

that is an extremely good point. i would like to say that i'm glad to see anybody in government working towards ameliorating the climate crisis, and i am, but i also wonder if i have been guilty of this pattern of thought. i'm going to sit with that and make sure i'm not deferring responsibility to others.

[greenstorm]

At the very least active learning and support are needed, but I do see so much handwaving about how indigenous folks just know this stuff, or just care more, and those... are not immutable features of the universe and indigenous folks shouldn't shoulder the burden of this work alone. It's so tempting to either try and rush in without listening or to defer the work to them but we cannot.

[greenstorm]

I'm reminded every year that, for several months, Desert Hills in Ashcroft is basically the exception to all this. I've considered moving closer just for the produce.

They're deeply rooted in Mexico, though, so that's something.

I love beef and have thought from time to time of buying part of a cow but with just me that's... a lot. Goose breast helps in that regard, it's a real red meat that can be seared rare like a steak, but nothing can replace a good kitfo.

I have artichokes in my geenhouse this year, and I did successfully grow them a little south of here once. The secrets are a variety that flowers in its first year, starting them real early inside, and warm rich siting. Artichokes are one of my very favourites; nearly pre-memory when I lived in Los Angeles as a small child my parents would boil up artichokes and crab and we'd have dishes of melted butter to dip. Maybe we ate it outside on a blanket?

Eating with fingers is the best eating.

[yarrowkat]

yeah, this has to be a team effort on the part of as many people as possible, or we won't escape it. dumping it onto someone else because they're presumed to know more is another way of deflecting blame for the problem - someone else made this mess, someone else will clean it up - i see the insidious face of american exceptionalism raising its head.

[yarrowkat]

oooo, i hope they do well and give you lots of artichokes!

we have done the "meal of things you dip in butter" too, and i love it.

[greenstorm]

I see it that way in a lot of cases, and I also see lots of folks thinking that we made this mess and so we're incapable of fixing it, so we need to turn it over to other folks and it's somehow not our place to learn or think about this. And there's certainly some truth to us needing to learn rather than always lead, but-- there's not an aboriginal gene for being good at landscape or environmental management, that's specifically a set of knowledge and values and priorities and ways of making decisions. Our culture needs that too! We cannot just maintain a culture where we helplessly wave our hands and say "we don't know how to do better, our culture just wrecks things" and then expect indigenous folks to fix that. So, yes, it really needs to be a team effort, and not just aimed at our symptoms.

And, I mean, you are certainly placed differently than many of the folks I'm thinking about; you're very present in working on culture change and environmental awareness outside of ENGO campaigns.

[yarrowkat]

yeah, there's no group of people who have immutably this or that quality. i feel like the idea that we got into this so we *can't* get out of it is victim-based thinking, and also sort of feels like folks need to revisit some kindergarden lessons - if you made the mess, you clean it up. though of course the climate emergency is vastly more complex than a child spilling toys; the principle still applies. if our parents & grandparents generation created it, that does not absolve us from doing all we can to repair it.

we are certainly trying, here - not just growing a big garden and raising animals, but also teaching a dozen or more people each year how to do that, through the wwoof program, and also some principles & basics of community living & resource sharing - but there are always ways in which we could be more engaged, more active.