Woodlot Manifesto, Part IV

Safe and guilt-free milk, eggs, cheese, and meat. If you call petting it one day and pinging it with a .22 the next “guilt-free.”

Can one consider what conventional agriculture does to the land without feeling ill? I would love to have 10, 20, 80 acres and know that that land is safe.

Contrary to the insinuations of many, this is not a Marie-Antoinette-playing-milkmaid pastime. Science has proven again and again that small plots yield more per acre than large because of the better attention they recieve, and my guess is that’s a good thing. You know what *is* Marie Antoinette? Chasing dandelions, which are edible, out of a nice big fat patch of lawn grass, which isn’t. Double points if you used herbicides when a weeding fork would have done the job.

Whenever there’s not enough drama already present in our lives, we have to make it up. This is my theory as to why college and professional sports are so popular—same for soap operas and barhopping. Most of these extra drama sources are a waste of time and/or money. As I understand, farms can be fairly dramatic places, and it tends to be productive drama, and I think I’ll be a lot happier with that kind of life looking back at it.

We have some autoimmune disease in the family, so the substantial dirt collection afforded by farming just might be a good thing for the chilluns. (Check it out at http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/8_14_99/bob2.htm)

It’s a real alternative lifestyle. We talk a lot about anti-consumerism and “down with suburbs,” but how much do we translate that into action? Enough to actually scale down spending and time working away from the family? I think it would be fun to, by the life we live, give other people permission to think outside the box.

A pasture full of sheep and good forage: Best Food Storage Ever. (Cans of pudding mix don’t make more cans of pudding mix.)

We in the church talk a lot about enriching ourselves through continually learning new skills and perspectives. What better training ground than farm? Fixing machines, midwifing cows, navigating marketing and legal codes, understanding genetics to breed your chickens to be healthier, trying to see the world the way a bee would (and that new perspective suddenly showing you a few things about what people are and what they aren’t)—I can’t think of a better education than this.

I get stuck trying trying to figure out to cook from the “What do we want to eat?” standpoint. Maybe my creativity doesn’t work in that direction, or maybe everything I cook is so uniformly mediocre that it makes no difference and bears no choosing. And cooking with lame half-dead groceries isn’t very inspiring either.
On the other hand, when I try to figure out what to cook from the “What do we have?” direction, things go a lot easier. We have onions, sweet potatoes, and black beans: Looks like feijoada tonight! A ready supply of seasonal ingredients is probably what I need to avoid culinary vaporlock.

Being able to see the stars at night.