It's Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature

Do you remember the ad for that God awful modified motor oil they sold for butter substitute where Mother Nature would get angry when she mistook it for butter? Not likely, She might mistake it for motor oil but never for butter.

So here's the first principle of Eleuroculture which will greatly increase your odds of succeeding with a direct use economy: Don’t fight your land.

That might sound painfully obvious and yet that’s what most people do. Agribusiness does it as a matter of course. It decides what crop it is going to grow or what livestock it is going to keep and it then mangles and twists the land to suit it. The energy and cash input required to do that is beyond the means of the hardscrabble homesteader.

If the homesteader is Hell bent on growing a certain crop or keeping a certain animal, he must needs find land suitable for that purpose. However if the homesteader already has land, he must ask for its cooperation in whatever horticulture or husbandry he is going to attempt.

Get to know your land. Sit on it and observe it quietly and listen to what it has to say. Find the ears to listen.

If you have no grass, don’t attempt to keep a cow. If you have no browse, don’t attempt to keep goats. If the climate is very dry, don’t try a fish pond. If it never gets cold in the winter, don’t plant apple trees. If it never gets hot in the summer, don’t grow sweet potatoes.

To be successful changes in your land must be slow and subtle, which is to say, sustainable. Only ask the land to produce what it can naturally produce. Homesteaders make the mistake of getting livestock the land cannot support and hoping that through the seasons they will somehow make improvements on the land so that it can support that menagerie. It never happens.

Putting more animals on the land than the land can carry is not sustainable or is the would be homesteader taking advantage of the benefits of the direct use economy because hauling in foodstuffs for the animals is only another way of buying the meat and milk and eggs with cash. It is like trying to heat your house by burning old soggy leaves in the furnace, it works fine so long as you have plenty of coal or oil to continually kindle the fire.

Assess what the land can naturally carry and then grow only those crops and keep only those animals. If you want to keep a cow but don’t have grass, grow the grass first. If you want to grow strawberries but there isn’t enough organic material in the soil, compost it or grow a green manure crop first.

But what of the notion that keeping animals or growing plants even in an unsustainable agribusiness manner at least gives the homesteader some skills and practice? I’m afraid it doesn’t. The motto of the most successful language teacher I ever knew (and I knew a good number) was Se aprende lo que se practica (One learns what one practices.) Growing corn with a mechanical seeder and chemical fertilizer offers no skills that are useful in growing corn from the natural fertility of the soil using hand tools. Basing a homestead on unsustainable practices puts the homesteader farther away from a direct use economy than if he had done nothing. He will have dug himself a hole in terms of finances, condition of his land, culture and mindset that he will have to fill in just to start from zero again. Alas, most homesteaders who make this rum start eventually throw the shovel in the hole out of frustration and abandon the whole process.

You must cooperate with the land in other ways too. Don’t become enamored with an underground house if you own a swamp. Don’t design a house around wood heat if you have no access to trees.

So first and foremost adopt an attitude of cooperation with Nature which means not attempting to bend and twist your land to do things it is not naturally suited to do.