Northern Farmer

What a day with the outside cattle waterers, they were pretty froze this morning! But things are in working order now around here and we’re even a little above zero. At least we have a little snow on the ground protecting the hay lands, so the cold snap shouldn’t have bothered that.

Life here is moving along, everyday more exciting as things are falling into place here. So many plans and dreams, it probably gets boring reading them all the time here, but what can I say, that’s what I write about. The main thing here is to keep the farm going in the direction that if there was a huge disruption to the present ag system, we could keep going. I remember last fall after the hurricane when ag radio was whooping and ah hollering about fertilizer availability I barely listened or cared. When they were yammering about fuel and propane for the winter, we were unaffected by the news. So something must be going in the right direction here. Listening almost everyday now to ag radio, what can I say, it has entertainment value now, I listen to how we are going to be producing ethanol and farmers will someday prosper, now that’s good for a belly laugh. I listen to how trade agreements are going to make agriculture prosper, and I’ve got some ocean front property in North Dakota for sale cheap too. What a joke, all the stuff they brainwash farmers and consumers with.

So we’ll keep on with the dozens of plans for the future here. Self sufficiency the number one goal. A long way to go but at least it’s off to a good start. When a person reads all the different things that can be done on a farm or homestead for profit it does catch my attention. A person can dream, but there’s not enough time in life to accomplish them all. So that has top narrow down the things that we can accomplish here. One rule to follow for us is, the only saleable items will be our surpluses. Or stated a different way, we will only sell products that we enjoy raising and eating ourselves. That way it’s a pleasure to work with whatever we’re raising, plant or animal. We don’t want to just raise something for sale. That way everything that we raise helps us here directly on the farm first, feeding the family, supplying products for us, etc. That simple rule will help insure that our needs get taken care of first, plus we don’t “have too” earn money to purchase so many personal needs if the farm is taking care of most of them.

There are a lot of projects in the works for this year here as the changeover continues. Thankfully, there’s very little as far as construction goes. That’ll give more time to farming right. Plus I hate spending weeks working on one main project, believe me I’ve done enough of that. No, this year, Lord willing, we’ll be working on getting this place made into a Christian Agrarian dream. There’ll be a lot of experimenting with plant varieties, documenting everything about how the do here. Saving seed from the ones that do well. There’ll be yearly fruit tree plantings until the family orchard becomes huge. We have our own blacksmithing and machine shop setup, our own wood working setup, a rather large meat processing setup, along with all the regular things. Very little is required from the regular ag suppliers now except for tractor fuel, and that will be looked at long and hard in a bit. The main thing will be to get situated so if there is a severe disruption in the future we can do most of the work unaffected.

The posting I did yesterday on continuing education really helped us a lot here. This was a thorn in my side for a while now, but I can see a door opening to a better way. Things are falling into place here on the farm as far as the transition from modern industrial farming to Christian Agrarianism.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 5:52 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.