Think Horses

As a basis for successful self-sufficient living this post isn’t an advocacy to use horses as draft animals. While horses are certainly more conducive to success than heavy machinery, the use of anything but human labor should be approached only after careful examination.

Rather think horses is from the old saw about any type of diagnostic work, when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. That is, default to the common, most likely explanation rather than the most bizarre, exotic and unlikely.

If I were to rank order the things that undermine the success of the subsistence homestead, the thing that would be at the top would be the tendency toward the exotic. Faced with the prospects of some homestead task, growing gardens, raising animals, building a house, providing fuel and energy, etc, and realizing that the homesteader does not possess the skills, work hardness, and patience to see the task through; it is so easy to muse about bypassing the task by means of something exotic. For example: Faced with providing fodder and grain for livestock the ordinary, well established method of doing so is by raising a plot of corn. The would be homesteader quickly sees that it’s a lot of work and requires some knowledge and skill. The Appalachian expression “a hard row to hoe“ did not come about for nothing.

But wait! Didn’t I read somewhere that sunflowers can be used effectively for animal feed? Yes, that’s the ticket. I can’t grow corn, but instead I’ll muse about raising sunflowers. Sure, someday I will have a large field of sunflowers and that will feed all my animals. No, I’m not making this up. Someone a few years ago actually proposed this as the underlying basis for their homestead. Needless to say, they are still buying all ConAgra feed for their animals.

If there is a common, much used, ordinary solution to a hardscrabble subsistence need and the homesteader can’t or won’t do it, substituting an exotic solution will not help. If you can’t succeed at the ordinary, it is even less likely that you will succeed at the exotic.

Now I thought that relying on raising sunflowers for livestock feed when the person had never even raised a hill of corn in her life was an extreme example, but since that time I’ve heard far more amusing stories even to the point of relying on mushrooms, chicory weed, and dishwater to feed farm animals when the erstwhile husbandmen had not been successful at cultivating grass nor grain to feed the animals.

This phenomenon takes many forms. Market gardening failed so the gardener notices one day that a braid of 12 perfect garlic bulbs sells for more than $12. The internal cash register begins to ca-ching! Why at four big bulbs at least per square foot of garden space, let’s see, 100’ by 100’ garden, ten thousand square feet is, oh my gosh, $40,000 income! Typically the aspiring garlic grower has yet to grow a stalk of garlic for their own kitchen so what they don’t realize is that garlic takes very fertile soil in very good condition. The bulbs in those perfect braids of garlic were selected from the farm run of harvested garlic with 20 bulbs going for commercial garlic powder and minced garlic with only one or two suitable for braiding. Then the garlic grower himself doesn’t get the $1 a bulb retail price but more like ten cents.

Want to find out what using alternative heat would be like? Cut some firewood and put on an extra sweater in the winter and see what life is like with the heat pump or furnace turned off. Too much drudgery and inconvenience! And not nearly exciting enough to the imagination. Rather plan on a complicated solar collector with underground storage, which never seems to materialize even after years and years while the ax and saw lay rusty and unused.

Having never raised a pig or a goat, there are dreams of raising alpacas, ostriches, emus, and food grade chinchillas. Having never raised corn or wheat, the homestead’s grain needs will be met by raising amaranth or emmer. Having never built a garage or a doghouse, the homestead housing will be made of old soda bottles or egg cartons.

The homesteader who has not succeeded with the ordinary is very unlikely to succeed with the exotic. Some research into honeybees brings the aspiring apiarist into contact with Top Bar Hives. Having raised bees in both the ordinary Langst hives and TBH’s, I can attest that the latter requires a great deal more skill and knowledge than the former.

Sometimes it’s not an exotic animal or crop per se but an exotic breed or variety that is going to make all the difference in the small holder’s mind. Can’t raise an ordinary sheep, but if it were the rare South Albanian Flat Nosed sheep, well, that would make all the difference between success and failure. Fact is, it won’t. Raising sheep or any animal is 99% the same no matter the breed. Two unfortunate myths go along with the mystique of the rare breed:

1). It cost just as much to feed a “good” animal as an ordinary one
2). If the animal is bred for top milk, meat, wool, (etc) production, then even under less than ideal conditions it will do better than an ordinary one.

Highly specialized breeds of plants and animals were developed for highly concentrated fertilizers and feeds. On a hardscrabble farm where much of the fertilizer is low concentrate compost and much of the feed is forage, these highly specialized breeds and varieties will do much more poorly and often fail outright. A highly specialized breed will not spell the difference between success and failure on a farmstead.

What about a milking Devon cow? They are supposed to be triple purpose: milk, meat, and draft. You could have only a few of theses and not have to have separate oxen, dairy cow, and beef cow, no? No. A milking Devon would give milk if managed by a very experienced dairyman, but not as well as a dairy cow. It could be slaughtered for meat, but only by an experienced cattleman and it still would be inferior to a beef cow. It could be trained to pull the yoke, but only by an experienced drover and it wouldn’t work as well as a regular ox nor horse or donkey. Such triple use animal would only perform in the hands of a homesteader skilled already in dairying, cattle raising, and draft animals. It won’t make up for lack of those skills and experiences.

So to succeed at self-sufficient living, don’t view the exotic and out of the way projects as substitutes for ordinary knowledge and skills. Pace yourself to the drumbeat of horse’s hooves, not zebras.