55.1 Inches

The near inch of rain we had on Tuesday brought the annual total to just over 55 inches. That's a lot of indoor days. A lot of runoff. There is no more predicted for the remainder of the year; that's fine with me.

While on vacation, I read a book about Sepp Holzer, a permaculture farmer in the mountains of Austria. I've watched several television specials about him, too: his 100 acre farm shines like a jewel in the midst of surrounding spruce forest, with 70 ponds and wetlands, 14,000 fruit trees, various animals and market garden beds.

He advocates building raised beds in a unique way. He digs a trench about a yard down, and drops in a downed tree. He piles dirt on, and sod with the grass facing in, ending with topsoil on the top. He aims to have the final bed about a yard or so wide and a yard or so high, so it looks, from the side, almost like an inverted ice cream cone. The tree in the middle offers free nutrients to growing plants for about a decade.

This is quite inspiring.

Quite inspiring, too, is his idea that you simply scatter 40 or so varieties of seeds as you walk the land, and then harvest the crops as they come up. And if you don't harvest 80% of your crop, that's fine, as the animals will come and consume the produce.

So I got to thinking about our farm. How could we be Sepp Holzer in Virginia?

I also had begun to wonder about milk production as a long-term goal. After all, it was not the easiest thing to find someone to come and care for the animals for ten minutes each day (truly: just check the water and check the chicken feed; not onerous tasks). If we had milking to complicate the absentee care, would we ever get off the farm? And even once a day milking becomes, well, extremely regular. Any task that's supposed to be done once a day is, by definition, a chore. Do we really want more chores?

Phil pointed out that last year at this time I read a book that really inspired me. We spent six months trying out the full-service CSA I'd read about in The Dirty Life. This was a good reminder. It's fine to be inspired, but to completely overhaul our own plans because I want our place to look like an established, successful farm is a bit ridiculous.

Before bed, I read the first chapter in one of my Christmas books, Harvey Ussery's Small-Scale Poultry Flock. I have eagerly read Ussery's articles in various magazines for several years, and the first chapter was just what I expected: elegant, informative, easy-to-read, persuasive.

He spoke of why chickens and eggs are so inexpensive, of the horrors of industrial production in America. It was helpful to hear that, even as an "expert," his chicken and eggs "cost me (considerably) more than I would pay for either equivalent in the supermarket." This has certainly proven true for us. Our feed and bird costs alone came to $4/lb., not counting infrastructure or time. To spend $3000 on broiler chickens felt like the height of ridiculousness, and I have had plenty of bitterness over that.

But Ussery makes the point that laying hens in commercial houses do not have space to stand up fully; that they are debeaked (mutilating and painful), fed GM waste materials, fed antibiotics every day of their life so they do not die, processed inhumanely and in filthy conditions. Two-thirds (yes, 66%) of supermarket chicken have salmonella, campylobacter, or both.

Foodborne illness costs about $1850 for each person who gets sick. My chickens started to not seem so expensive.

Ussery also mentions the moral dimension. If you eat a bird who has lived in horrific conditions from birth to death (and he details this much more extensively), he argues, "we are eating that anguish."

On a day that seemed dark, dreary and discouraging, I am encouraged to say that I did not eat that anguish.

And I will not grieve over the expense of my food again.