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[greenstorm]

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.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

Plus, animals have not only genes but culture.

so many people told us that our goats would be unfriendly if we let the dams raise them, that we needed to bottle feed. but we felt that they would learn how to goat much better from goats than from us, and we did let the dams raise them. we, or friends, were in the pen for some amount of time every day playing with them, but they learned how to goat from goats. of our does, two out of three were dam-raised, and while one of them doesn't like people, she's not hard to handle - just kind of misanthropic. i don't think it's her parentage, just her personality. and her kids are super super sweet and climb into your lap.

and goats are good for this area because they are very very heat-hardy, and eat a more varied diet than sheep or cows.

i am always nervous about new turkey customers - how does this person know us? will they understand what we're doing, how valuable this is? it usually works out fine, though new people are not always repeat customers - sometimes the price of organic cage-free heritage meat is too prohibitive, which is an unfortunate part of the situation, too. otoh, we have customers who have bought a bird from us every year for the last 12 years and have weathered all the feed-related prices and everything. we're paying about $16/bag for meat bird feed, up from $12 due to a fire resulting in the destruction of our local feed mill. that local mill used to give you a 15% discount for buying a ton at a time, so we always scheduled our feed runs to hit that discount, and of course prices were steadily rising anyway. now that is no longer available and everyone in the area is stuck with the Tractor Supply chain, which doesn't grow or process or package locally, which Oñate did.

we're looking at starting to raise maybe muscovy ducks next year. i have read that they are good foragers, easier on the garden than other breeds, and fairly quiet, which is certainly a plus.

[greenstorm]

Ohhhhhh. Muscovies are the sweetest imaginable birds. They make sweet noises, the are super friendly, their meat is dark (their breasts are *so* dark, if you grind them you can easily sub for a more robust beef cut) and... they fly. Up to my second floor deck, to peer in the window and say hi. I completely recommend muscovies, though they will want a source of bathing water and they will muck it up, and they will go off and make a secret nest and come back with a lot of babies.

Right now I have pigs and geese in part because they can eat a combination of hay and grain, more hay with less grain or vice versa.

Any chance of your local mill reopening?

[yarrowkat]

i had read that about the dark meat, also! how's their flavor? i think coming up with a bunch of babies on their own is mostly a plus.

we're hoping some enterprising soul buys the mill, which is now for sale, and fixes it up and reopens it as a mill. but then it would be under new ownership which is also a crapshoot. here's hoping.

[greenstorm]

The flavour is rich, on the gamy side, very strong for a domestic animal but not as strong as mutton. I like them. I really often cut up a breast and put it in with carrots and boxed japanese curry for dinner.

[greenstorm]

Oh, or butterfly the breast and cook like chicken-fried steak. And the legs are best like this: https://honest-food.net/goose-recipe-spanish/

[yarrowkat]

oooh! i'll bring this recipe to Terra, thanks! we generally are pretty good about strongly-flavored meats here - we eat lamb & goat regularly, though i'm not personally a fan of mutton.

[greenstorm]

I love strongly flavoured meats too. I wish I could get goat here but it's a really scarce meat, lots of populations like it in the area and it's not very available.

[yarrowkat]

goat is amazing. at this point, we're only eating what of it we raise ourselves, but in the past we have gotten it from other farmers, usually trading for turkey. a lot of people around here raise goats, because they don't require grass, and can live on a huge variety of types of vegetation, and they're heat-hardy. lots of originally-African goat breeds around here for that reason.

[greenstorm]

I get asked about goat a lot but my fencing is just not up to the task. If I move I'm looking at san clemente island goats though...

[yarrowkat]

there is that. goats are definitely work! and they're mischief-makers, which is sort of fun, but also omg sometimes it's a lot.

[yarrowkat]

our current ducks (someone gave us 5 chocolate runner ducks and they are WEIRD) have a kid's wading pool, which they manage to muck up in about two seconds flat, but which we nevertheless dump every day and refill. i imagine we'll continue using it.

[greenstorm]

Runner ducks are excellently weird. I love them but I think it's too cold for them here. Someone should breed penguin pattering into them though.

Yeah, the daily dump/refill/immediately dirty seems to be a great way to water trees and bushes.

[yarrowkat]

omg, penguin patterning in them would be hilarious! these ones are plain brown. they chuckle all the time, which is a sound i've come to really enjoy. in our new duck run, we're building in a drainage system that'll run the water out away from the coops. we don't currently have a tree in that area but could in the future.

[greenstorm]

My dream orchard would have a raised pond with some sort of easy ramp and a wide hose running out of it that I could move from tree to tree. That water is so great for growing with all its fertility.

[yarrowkat]

ah, that's a lovely idea. we accidentally killed a tree one time by dumping too much chicken-poop water on it - it was a young tree, but we're more careful about the nitrogen levels now. some poopy water is great, but too much is too much. being able to rotate it around a variety of plants would be so nice!

[greenstorm]

It's like so many animal products: such a valuable garden input but one has to be careful with it and it's work to use it right.

[squirrelitude]

My dad started and ran a seed company for a number of years, mostly focused on heirloom vegetables. "Preservation through propagation", but he also collected the stories that went with the seeds people sent him. It was a pretty important part of my upbringing and left me with a deep desire to work with the plants and the soil and to collect and nurture the rare varieties.

I'm so grateful to the people who do this important work, and I hope I can get back to contributing to it as well some day.

[greenstorm]

Your dad makes me happy. Do you have any old catalogues/variety write-ups with those stories?

[squirrelitude]

To some degree, yes! The catalogs had only small snippets of most of the stories, but I expect most of them are in his seed database. He's mostly out of the business now -- he sold the company -- and I believe he's working on deaccessioning most of his seed bank to good homes and in the process is probably running across a lot of these stories. Perhaps they'll end up collected in a book.

(I'll DM you with more details, as I try to keep my account disconnected from name searches, if not entirely anonymous.)

[greenstorm]

That would be a great book. I would love to see more stories in something like Tatiana's tomatobase too, where there would be room for more parallel and contradictory stories that come with a variety. And maybe testing to see which were overlapping varieties or names. And, and... anything that's more information or a consolidation of it, really.

/laughs