The Feed Store

When my wife and I started our rural homestead, we were suburbanites with a lot of ideas. For one, we’d do everything organically. No question. Second, we’d endeavor to only use hand tools. Scythe, sickle, spade. We’d become experts in the old ways. And third, we’d limit outside inputs.

Folks reading this site might, and there is a minority of the public that spends the time and money to grow produce or seek out good, local farms. But most people only really think about food when they can’t get it or when the grocery bill increases. A big reason we have the system we do is that the majority of the populace prefers cheap, convenient, processed food.

Cows do not kill people; people kill people. Especially people who claim cows are the problem. Cows are key players in solving the problems created by industrial agriculture.

What I’ve just attempted to describe are the joys of the edge. Freedom, I believe, has a limited half-life when it’s in the heart of civilization. Anarcho-pastoralism means that there’s the most freedom near the edges, but freedom-lovers are ever in a struggle to move outward.

These benefits and this healing can only begin to happen when beauty is allowed once again on the farm. One cannot truly have a good farm without it.

I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay.

Whether hunting or watching TV at home, you will never be alone with a good dog by your side.  Dixie and I may never get another bird, but a bird hunt is a great excuse to get out of the office, away from a lunch at the faculty lounge, away from this or that electronically amplified human crisis and into the rhythm of nature. 

We will speak to gatherings of farmers in seventeen different counties throughout southern Georgia. Along the way we will travel 1750 miles.

A tended garden inevitably involves some choices, as well as planning which tree species will fruit better with more sunshine.

I enjoy certain utilitarian advantages by heating with wood, but I also prefer the habits of mind—attention, connection, succession, frugality—that my woodpile’s growth and contraction inspires.