Barnyard daydreams

You know how some people curl up with cookbooks rather than a mystery or romance novel in bed at night? Well, here’s what I do whennews of the industrial food supply gets too depressing to face—like when I read about Hallmark/Westland’s 143 million pound recall of beef (by far the largest recall in history): I pick up Hobby Farms or Back Home magazine, and engage in a little bit of agrarian escapist thinking.

I love losing myself in elaborate directions for making dandelion wine or building a wood-fired water stove, and perusing the ads for books I want to buy: The Hand-Sculpted House; Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens; The Backyard Lumberjack. This month’s issue has an article on growing your own tea, inventing your own variety of heirloom tomato, and the secret sex life of ferns. I also learned that the way to heal soil degraded by last century’s gold speculators is with mulch. I particularly enjoyed an article about pond-building written by a woman who went to Malaysia to study aquaculture, fell in love with a Dusun tribesman, and stayed. They now farm ducks and tilapia on an abandoned aquaculture facility in Borneo.

Hobby Farms is glitzier, but only slightly. This month I learned how to keep my laying flock in optimum condition, bottle-feed orphaned foals, kids, and piglets, and build lambing jugs, or pens for birthing ewes. The classifieds at the back are nearly as entertaining as the copy—there are ads selling alpacas, “that special fiber animal” and as for stools made from antique milk cans (“can-tiques”); ads from goat supply outfits and ads for colostrum collection devices (“udderly easy”); ads for electric incinerating toilets known as Incinolets, self-composting toilets, residential urinals and the Humanure Handbook; ads for scythes, women’s coveralls, thornless blackberry plants, and Australian cow semen.

These magazines have pretty much zero applicability to my personal day-to-day life, and yet I really get a kick out of reading them. They swell my admiration for the brave souls out there actually breeding llamas, erecting hoophouses, and converting oil into biodiesel, underscoring how much effort goes into the lifestyle they’ve chosen. Would that there were more of them and fewer crippled, exhausted cows turned into children’s lunchmeat.

Posted by Nathalie Jordi on Feb 22, 2008 at 11:18 AM
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Comments

Nathalie,
I share that love of reading the "back to the basics" and sustainable farming publications while dreaming of living a simpler life. I used to fall asleep at night reading Mother Earth News, Log Home Living and, like you, loving the ads as much as the articles.

Wind, solar and even creek bed "water jam?" power generation was always on the top of my cool list. I think it probably all started for me when I realized how sick and tired I was of living the corporate life, working in a cubical, commuting everyday, climbing that corporate ladder, acting as someone I knew deep inside that I really wasn't. (This was probably 15 years ago and I still haven't made the switch out of corporate life yet.) But way back, when I first wondered, "There's got to be a better way to live", I found The Simple Life by Scott and Helen Nearing. It was really life changing for me because it explained how it could be done.

Thank you for the article. It reminds me (yet again) how much I look forward to making the jump to an organic farm with chickens, ducks, heirloom tomatoes, potatoes right from the ground and a commute that consists of front door to garden.

I'd love to read more of your stuff. Please let me know how I can locate it.

Posted by:toddrobert |March 4, 2008 12:33 PM