Northern Farmer

One has to wonder about what’s all going on in this world. Sometimes some of the jobs a person has on the farm give hours of time to think things over undisturbed. No noise from the world to speak of, just quiet times reflecting. What will the future bring? Should I even worry? The dark industrial culture is on the verge of imploding from every direction. What will it mean to my family? Will the farm get taken away by mobs or the government when things go kahput?

Faith in God must be our family’s cornerstone. There is no other way that makes any sense. I do worry about the future sometimes, but try not to let it overwhelm me. We must keep on here, changing the farm to a Christian Agrarian family community for the next generations. It means much simplifying the way we live and the way we do our work. It’ll mean looking at our family as a small community, many having their own specialties in the whole of the farm. It’ll mean independence from many things that are taken for granted today. The farm and family will have to do a whole spectrum of things independently from society. It’ll have to have small scale metal working, woodworking, producing and storing foods for ourselves and surpluses to sell or barter. It should have home based textile mfg, soap making, and much, much more. It would be overwhelming to try to do this all on our own, but as a Christian Family Community it would work well. As the years change down the road there would be the possibility of even having some like minded folk join in with the family. There would be room if the farm is the same size as now. Production of goods from the soil would dwarf todays modern ag on this same acreage because of hands on intensive methods using and reusing everything from the farm itself. There would be little need for fossil fuels because of horsepower and well tended woodlots. The farm will not be the beef cattle farm it is today, there’ll be some beef around but as time goes on it is fairly costly because of the land base involved that could be used for more important projects for the community. There would be dairy, sheep, poultry,hogs, and ( I have to wince at this one), goats. The sheep would be important for wool once again as the were for ages past. Our own wheat, rye, oats and flax. Our own milling and people specializing in bread making and the like.

These ideas have been in my head for sometime now and we’re ever so slowly changing the aim of the farm to these directions. As one can see it’s a large task to say the least. Some of these ideas come not from homesteading books or magazines but from my studying Thomas Jefferson. This was how his plantation was run, and it ran smoothly, almost self sufficient for a couple of hundred people. I know he died broke, but that was because of his mansion taking up so much of his money. A lesson to be learned there.

I pray humbly to our Lord that He gives us the wisdom to continue. We’ll never do it without Him.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.