Nature's Pace

My tale has wound its way to the point where the subsistence small holder is ready to increase his lot through direct use economics. We have some small capital as startup funds from our dealing in Caesar’s lucre and we then have an eye toward closing the purse strings and coaxing along our increase to some other tune than the clink of coins.

In this paradigm your wealth increases at Nature’s pace, best to be familiar with it. There is only so much biological growth that is going to take place on your bit of truck and that is the dividend, wages, and interest you get for your labor and investments. Forget all the MBA blather and talk of bottom line and profit. None of that obtains; Nature is not interested in it and never has been.

Look about on your farmstead and you will see what might be viewed as an unused resource, or else it might be viewed as a vacuum. Climate, water, soil condition, the happenstance of plants and animals all contribute to it, so somewhere there is an opportunity that Nature offers the observant. Begin there.

Here is an example: Our corners, oddments, and waste places support a natural growth of some very nutrient rich plants: lambs quarter, plantain, purslane, dock, dandelion, clover, poke, and many more. Here is an opportunity. Of course while they are in their prime, which is just about all spring, summer, and fall, we eat them directly and better was never had. But Nature is much overly generous. Gather all the abundance you can for your own table and abundance remains.

So we began with rabbits. As the previous post describes, we bought some breeding stock and materials for cages with the money in the mason jar designated for such things and wrote it off and forgot about it. Contrary to what you might read about rearing rabbits, the do fine on “weeds” and scraps so long as you have some knowledge of their nutritional requirements and the nutrients in the plants.

Soon there is an increase, and if a little skill and wisdom is used, there will be quite an increase. The rabbits are meat for the table; but also the rabbits have been creating piles of manure with its fixed nitrogen. Also processing the rabbits has yielded offal, skins, and bones. Now we have two more assets, or “vacuums” to fill. The byproducts go to provide cat food and dog food so we can have the use of those indispensable animals about the farm. The manure goes to the garden. It is rather high nitrogen but can be used directly to fertilize plants.

The increased growth of organically fertilized plants is something to behold. This year some old horse manure was piled on a garden bed to further compost and beside it some volunteer parsnips germinated. By midsummer they were over 6” across at the crown. Once a cartload of rabbit manure was dumped on a compost heap and it contained a single pumpkin seed which germinated. The vine ran more than 50’ and made several hundred pounds of pumpkins.

The surplus of garden produce from the animal fertilizers creates other vacuums. A family can eat a couple of score of pounds of squashes and pumpkins, but it’s not very difficult for the well composted patch to produce half a ton. Likewise with root crops and the tops and haulms of other plants. Pumpkins are excellent chicken feed and goat feed, especially in the depths of winter when the richness of vitamins and calcium will boost egg and milk production. In fact, boost it so far, the homesteader is likely to have too much milk. Yet another vacuum!

A small cow of modest production will give far more milk than a large family can use directly or processed into cheese, yogurt, butter, sour cream, ice cream and the like. Add a few goats to that and you will be positively awash in milk. This vacuum is met by getting some pigs. Pigs will become quite ponderous on a milk diet. Further, pigs confined on a fallow garden will plow it deeply with their rooting and manure it in the bargain.

The agribusiness way of doing things is to come up with a scheme, calculate the cost of the materials, labor, equipment, seeds or stock, feed or fertilizer, the cost of getting rid of the waste, the price for which it will sell and see what is the margin of profit. This is a disastrous formula for the sustainable subsistence farmstead. Each project and enterprise must fit like a puzzle piece into the next one. There are no wastes on a sustainable farm, only opportunities.

In practice the natural accumulation of farmstead wealth cannot be short-circuited by purchasing it. It must be allowed to grow at Nature’s pace. Anything beyond that is greed, and Nature is very quick to punish greed.