Goodbye Granny Miller

If this weblog were one of my sheep or cows, it would have starved from neglect! I have been meaning to post about a couple of things, but real life sometimes intervenes. In my priorities, the real world should always take precedence over the virtual one. 

My wife has officially retired from blogging again, but has made arrangement to migrate her (and a bit of my own) useful "evergreen content" to the homestead bloggers network . That frees her from needing to maintain her site from an ever growing army of foreign spammers, while still giving continued  access to some pretty useful material about homestead skills.

While I  know many will miss her, I am happy because the less time she puts into a website, the more time she has to make me a pie or pudding!  

I also want to commend the some recent posting at Old Jamestown Church to interested readers. There is a good discussion about Christian manliness that both mothers and young men need to read.
 I genuinely fear that the increasing urbanization of our culture is producing only thugs or sissies.  The agrarian man is neither. I see no disconnect between enjoying my favorite flowers and a good 45.

Deliberate Agrarian E Book special

For many years, my friend Herrick Kimball has been the most active and consistent voice of the Christian Agrarian movement. Three things always amaze me about Herrick:

1.His dedication to blogging, giving literally thousands of hours of his time to share practical and spiritual assistance to those who wish to move towards a more agrarian mindset.

2.His mechanical ingenuity, which has been a real help to those of us who cannot afford $3000 chicken pluckers and $1000 garden carts.

3.His slow but steady progress on his own homestead, which has built real and lasting results. Its also much better than trying too-much-too-fast (those who do that often burn out financially or mentally).

I actually met Herrick in the printed word, before I ever knew about his blog. I first bought his Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian   at Lehman  hardware store a few years ago. There is no more readable book to summarize the agrarian ideal of faith, family and living the good life.

Right now, the e-book version is a paltry .99 cents. For less than a cup of coffee at a fancy shop, you can have a book to inspire your journey towards greater joy and freedom. Here is the link:

http://thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/03/new-my-deliberate-agrarian-ebook-99.html
   

Wie ein Hund sein Gespeites wieder frißt, also ist der Narr, der seine Narrheit wieder treibt

If the reader does not read German, look up Proverbs 26:11 for a translation. Apparently, All one needs to do to sell lambs to "retired" sheep raisers, is send them a picture like this during the dark days of Winter! Within 24 hours of this picture, I arranged to buy three lambs to start raising again (as soon as they are weaned).

The culprit

The culprit put a North Country Cheviot  ram on 3/4 Border Cheviot 1/4 Suffolk ewes. Good cross. 

Richard "der Narr" Großman

If anybody is looking for der Narr, he will likely be posting over here for a bit. 

Curs and Kerry Cows

Granny Miller (AKA my lovely wife who puts up with me and my dogs) snapped this picture of my young Cur-dog at ten months old.

Anyone who is a part of the tree dog world knows a bit about Curs. "Cur" means something derogatory in mainstream English, but in local dialects or idioms, means something different (I cringe whenever I watch Tombstone, and Wyatt Earp calls the Clantons "Curs"). To me a Cur is a specific  type of farm and hunting dog. There are several families of True Curs; Leopards, Catahoulas, blackmouths, and Mountain.  They are NOT Mongrels, but possible also not "breeds" in the outmoded Victorian sense of breed purity. The idea of the Cur as a distinct type of dog goes back at least to Thomas Bewicks natural history in  1790.  In the backwoods of the Appalachians and American South, Curs were bred for pure performance and "breeds" emerged around families. Between the name "cur" and the fact that only country people were breeding them, curs escaped the  nonsense that city folk began in the late 1800's with dog shows and breed "purity" (with undeniable roots in human racism and eugenics) that have now culminated in the genetic shipwreck that is the AKC.

That does not mean that cur-dogs were or are bred without direction.  I never breed dogs, but have owned 7 curs from different lines. The breeders I know, hunt hard and cull hard when they need to. The result are healthy dogs with good temperament that can herd, tree game, babysit children, and even flush birds. Family lines of curs are now pretty stable. I owned two Ladner Blackmouth Curs in the 1990's, and they have very different appearance and character from Mountain Curs. However, if an outcross is needed for some characteristic, the hunting dog registries have a generic Treeing Cur option.  The National  Treeing Cur Association (Of which I am a proud member)  works with all three registries to register dogs. The Association is mostly the dedication of two generations of one great family.  In all, the Cur Dog world is a good balance between maintaining pure type to lessen the genetic dice role, while allowing for optional out-crosses to maintain health and some hybrid vigor.

I mention this because I am dealing with a genetic bottleneck with our Kerry cows. We started with a bull and five cows, which was possibly 5 percent of the known national herd in 2012. After discovering their poor milk production rates, and the fact that most cheese customers don't care a whit about breed conservation,  We sold two cows to the nice folks at the Swiss Village Foundation for conservation a year ago. I now have a nice but ancient cow (born in 2001), a somewhat skittish 2 year old cow, and a two month old heifer. My young friend Adam Dean owns a six month old heifer as payment for  the trouble these few cows have caused both our families. I own two crossbred Kerry heifers and Adam has a pile of them, thanks to LTR Kody.

I debate with myself whether to keep messing with these few animals. Registration is kind of boogered up. I found out yesterday that one of my cows had a different sire than previously thought. The Irish  Kerry Cattle Society is both death on out-crossing as a means to upgrading and will not presently register ANY American Cattle. A large herd of Kerry cattle  in Virginia was scattered to the winds last year. A large herd in New York shifted to beef production . Semen importation from Ireland is currently legally impossible and the selection of US bulls more or less goes back to the same 4 or 5 lines. Most Kerry owners are in New England, and the breed is removed both geographically and ideologically from the mainstream dairy farming world. By my guess, there are now fewer cows in large herds than two years ago, so conservation breeding will be a great challenge.  Concentrated breeding for dairy production at even a homestead level will not happen without a major shift.

In my more caustic moments, my head tells me to send the remaining animals to the stockyards at take advantage of the current spike in cattle prices, but I wont.

As my wife says, I am getting to be an old duffer, so I need to make decisions about how to spend the rest of my days. I like raising young stock but have no interest in beef cow-calf. If I did, I would not look to the Kerry. I would look towards something like this. 

As crossbreeding material, the Kerry has a lot going for it, but as a pure breed, its value is really more historical than commercial.

If I sell the purebreds, they will likely go on a bizarre life journey from one new owner to another, as that seems the way with rare breeds (it seems tied to the 3-5 year turnover in new farm owners, who are mostly the people interested in rare breeds).

My gut tells me to out-cross everything to Jersey then back-cross to upgrade, but that will take more seed stock out of a dangerously low population, and prohibit future registration.

I get no ego satisfaction out of owning rare breeds, though I find livestock breed history endlessly fascinating. The rare breed world is plagued with too many personality conflicts, as evidenced by the three dueling Dexter cattle associations. There is even an alternative Kerry cattle association in the US which is a whole other herd and story. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy strikes me as effete and feckless in dealing with such matters.

For now, I will just keep feeding and cogitating.

Essential Garden Books: Resilient Agriculture starts with Resilient Gardens

This is a repost from my Kerry Cattle blog that I am in the process of  cleaning up.  Though I wrote the reviews below some time ago; I would only make one change. If the reader is only going to buy a small number of  gardening books, buy one of these two and Herrick Kimball's Planet Whizbang Idea book for Gardeners.  I owe Herrick's book its own review, but for right now, I will simply state that  it will complement either the Deppe or Solomon book nicely.
 
Carol Deppe’s The Resilient Gardener and Steve Solomon’s Gardening When it Counts: A Review Essay

We have no TV, but maybe 2,500 books in the house. While we have no shortage of reading material, we do not have huge selection of gardening books. There are a few old favorites on the shelf: mostly works by William Cobbett, John Seymour and Gene Logsdon. There are some histories of plants and gardening. We also have some antique books from the era when the line between farming and gardening was a lot thinner.

I think there are two reasons for our dearth of garden books. One is that we garden pretty much the way I learned as a little kid agrarian, combining my experience with my wife’s natural green thumb.  My dad was known throughout our small community as an exemplary vegetable gardener. As my wife once said, it would be easier to list the things he did not grow, than those he did. Dad’s main garden was an acre of straight rows, located behind our house on the four acres Grandpa gave him when he married Mom. Growing up, it provided us with everything from French Horticultural Beans to Potatoes.

When my wife and I returned to the old house on the adjoining farm, we took over my grandparent’s old garden, a well drained half acre plot enriched by decades of manure.

The second reason I don’t own a lot of gardening books is that most really don’t help the reader grow better vegetables. Many garden books are simply picture book eye candy for gardeners stuck inside during Winter. While I appreciate pictures of greenery during the 67 days of February, garden catalogues can accomplish the same purpose for free. I also find that many garden books sell gimmicks rather than advice. Most Americans look at raising vegetables as back breaking toil, so they buy books that promise oodles of vegetables without the sweat.

There are  two  recent  vegetable gardening books that are actually worth reading and recommending. The first is Steve Solomon’s Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times. The Second is Carol Deppe’s The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self Reliance in Uncertain Times. These books came to my attention via people I respect on the Internet. The recommendation came from two men who actually know how to grow food. not self proclaimed experts (The Web is full of bad gardening advice). I learned about the Solomon from fellow agrarian blogger Herrick Kimball, who stated simply that was his favorite gardening book. Having avidly followed Herrick’s garden for years in his blog, his simple endorsement got my attention. As I was finishing it, I read a review of Carol Deppe’s book by another agrarian blogger and pen friend, Scott Terry over at the North Country Farmer. Scott is an organic dairy farmer, and from our correspondence, I think he knows his business. His review intrigued me when he stated, “I’ve grown all the crops covered in this book and I learned a few new things by the time I finished”. The folks from Chelsea Green publishing were kind enough to provide me an examination copy of Mrs. Deppe’s book, so I could do this comparative review.

Both books and authors share some similarities. Both authors were part of the 1970’s “back to the land” generation. They bring decades of real life experience to their subjects. Both gained most of their experience in the Pacific Northwest, and don’t pretend to know every detail about gardening elsewhere. However, 95 percent of the information in both books is pretty universal. Both are good writers with a quirky sense of humor. Both also advocate a traditional approach to vegetable gardening that involves:

• Emphasis on the use of hand tools, especially the hoe
• Growing basic staples like Kale and Potatoes to gain the most nutritious calories with the least effort
• The importance of manure when it can be obtained (Both giving a positive nod to our famous neighbor Joe Jenkins’ Humanure Book)

These books both avoid foolish extremes of planting so intensive that the water bill results in $600 tomatoes, or the gimmicky no labor techniques that some praise but which don’t produce enough food to feed family though summer, let alone hard winter. Both authors also maintain a web presence to help others. Mr. Solomon is the founder of the online library at www.soilandhealth.org and Mrs. Deppe keeps a site updated under her name www.caroldeppe.com

Perhaps most important, both books also look at gardening as central to the family diet, not a garnish. Solomon describes this as being a “vegetabletarian” who does not shun meat, but frugally bases his diet on what he grows. For Mrs. Deppe, this information is presented around meeting the dietary needs of many people who cannot eat a typical American industrialized diet. We sell livestock, so I watch prices and trends with rapt attention. I believe that whatever happens in the future, the American cheap meat party is about to end. With high corn, high fuel, and low cattle inventories, there will be fewer steaks on the Nations’ grills this summer. Cheap meat is not the norm for human history, and we are about to return to normal. During the Depression, my family thrived on this farm. Nobody went hungry and there was extra for family members who moved back home and even hoboes got fed. However, even on a farm, meat was not part of every meal. When it did appear on the table, there was enough for a serving; seconds had to come from vegetables.  

Gardening when it Counts begins basic on soil fertility and the needs of various classes of vegetables. It continues with affordable options for soil building. This is essential to the new gardener who is turning over his turf for the first time, especially if that yard is a suburban lot. Most suburban housing developments had the topsoil stripped during grading, as the relative fertility needs of yard grass is low. The book then discusses some basics of Tools, including the essential need to sharpen hoes and shovels. This simple task is often the difference between pleasant hard work and drudgery (We have a few old hoes around here with three inch blades from decades of repeated sharpening. I don’t use them but cannot bear to throw them away)

Among the most useful chapters are Mr. Solomon’s insider’s look at the mail order seed business (He used to own a seed company), and his common sense information about compost. I have sometimes been guilty of buying cheap hardware store seed, but after reading this remembered why Dad always bought commercial grade seed. After reading this, my seed dollars will be more carefully spent. The chapter on compost will probably ruin a few myths among those who think that composted household garbage alone will grow top quality broccoli (Compost is not magic. The material used to make the compost influences its value as a soil amendment).

One of my favorite parts of this book is the thoughtful criticism of super intensive vegetable growing methods. Mr. Solomon continually points out through the book that plants need nutrients. There are useful diagrams of the subsurface root systems of most common vegetables throughout which show just how deep and wide roots must travel to obtain subsurface nutrients. As a stockman, I would describe the super intensive planting scheme as a “feedlot for plants”. Like a cattle feedlot, lot of inputs must be brought to the crowded plants to ensure growth.  I have read from defenders of intensive beds that nature plants that way. It does indeed, but nature’s concern is plant survival, not human survival. Nature’s approach often results in lots of scraggly plants, rather than a few good ones. I would urge the reader who doubts this to visit a woodlot that has been thinned, and one that has not. Man accelerates plant growth through management; that is the essence of gardening.

The Resilient Gardener begins with some of the best analysis about the common sense “prepping” that was once the American norm, versus some of the nonsense surrounding Y2K (and similar nonsense that is rearing its head again today).  Mrs. Deppe remembers when all but improvident families bought apples by the bushel in the fall and stored them in basements. In real hard times, buying and storing food bought affordably in season seems more sensible to me than expensive freeze dried foods. The author notes that expensive freeze dried foods will taste just as crummy in bad times as good. I also love that she advocates growing vegetables as a basic skill that is part of being a human adult. She also offers some sensible options to expensive land ownership, even in the expensive Willamette Valley where she lives. Her book represent a good lesson that anyone can grow some of their own food, even if they have challenges of health, age, or finances.

The book includes a very detailed discussion of the link between gardening and dietary needs. Mrs. Deppe suffers from some food allergies, and has developed her gardening around meeting her needs. This section of the book is very important for anyone who might be coping with both economic and dietary restraints.

Like Mr. Solomon’s book, this work also includes a section of basic tool use, but with an emphasis on working around natural physical limitations as we age. There is some great common sense advice about breaking up major tasks.

Mrs. Deppe also includes a section of poultry keeping as an adjunct to gardening which in her case means a duck flock. As this is a book about cheap living, she had some innovative thoughts on alternative poultry feeds.

The last half of the book discusses growing the staple crops of corn, beans, squash, and potatoes. I am eternally grateful for her passionate defense of the value of corn and potatoes in particular. Both crops have gotten a bad rap of late, mostly due to GMO corn and Americans’ over consumption of potato chips and fast food fries. Mrs. Deppe makes a good case that these crops should still play a role in the garden for anyone who wants to eat frugally but well. There is also some great advice on developing a breeding program for each of these crops and some recipes I cannot wait to try.

Which one to buy?

For the person who want to become a better gardener or is already a homesteader, I endorse both books. They are also uniquely valuable for both the new and the experienced vegetable grower. However, since this represents about a $50.00 investment many readers might only want one. In that case: Gardening when it Counts is best for the reader that is already fallen upon hard financial times. It is less money and the modest investment will pay for itself in the more produce from the first garden.

The Resilient Gardener would be more worthwhile for any reader that has health or dietary restrictions (food allergies, diabetes, etc). It also contains more recipes, poultry husbandry and some breeding information, so it would be better for readers who wish to mix animal keeping into their garden.

Making the Farm Pay!

Page from the 1916 Butler County Farm Directory. Click to Enlarge. HH Grossman was my Great Grandfather. My family has been breeding like rats in Western Pennsylvania for 200 years! We probably had to farm to feed all the kids! 

If you have not read the excellent recent Series on Family Economies by Herrick Kimball, you really should. I touched on a similar subject a few years ago here. DRAT! I linked the wrong post. THIS ONE is more to the point.

My family has been on the same farm for a long time, and I have direct connection to a pile of multi-generational farmers among friends and family.  In 1916, our farm was part of an agrarian nation and provided a relatively prosperous full time living for two adult men and their families. A short 40 years later, it was a hardscrabble place that only stayed in the family because my father and uncle wanted to keep a place to run our hunting dogs.  They paid the (then much lower) taxes by living poor, as they had been taught by their father.

I grew up here, with some knowledge of land capability and the demographics of the local food and farm markets.  We have made a bit of money in some years, and in others nearly lost our thrift shop shirts. I cannot emphasize how difficult it is to wring a cash profit out of farming without some pretty deep pockets and patience. Livestock is harder than fruits or vegetables in this regard. We mostly keep livestock these days for nutritional self defense (I ate at a supposed decent restaurant  last week and ended up sick for five days!).

If you are new at farming, you need to be spending most of your time competing with the grocery store, by growing produce and raising stock for your family. If you raise stock, you need to have a keen understanding of how to minimize feed costs. I have seen many small livestock farms by  exurbanites that have too many animals for the pasture available. There is nothing wrong with buying a bit of feed if you are

1. using the manure for the garden.
2. maximizing pasture for the full season in your respective climate.
3. have a rough idea about your feed costs versus grocery store meat of comparable quality and are willing to live with that.

A Shooting Party

Shooting for the Beef, An 1850 painting by George Caleb Bingham shows Americans enjoying the national sport of agrarian America.

Longtime blog readers may know I once hosted Appleseed clinics on the farm, but those have been moved to the much better facilities at the Slippery Rock Sportsman's club. I still endorse the Appleseed as the best basic rifle course in America, but alas can no longer afford the time to volunteer.  Farm and garden work is a bit slack this time of year, so this Sunday afternoon, I hosted my own shooting party. With cold weather, it is easy for people to fall into very bad habits like television sports, video games or spending too much time on the internet. Shooting get us outdoors, and interacting with our friends and neighbors. After some very perfunctory planning, I ended up with a dozen shooters.


In rural western Pennsylvania, interest in guns and shooting is deeply part of the culture. It is the reason that though we are a "purple state" politically, there is not a lot of political will for gun control in Harrisburg.  Local interest in guns and shooting crosses all lines of ethnicity, education, age and culture.  My party guests ranged in age from 15 to 63. Education among the adults ranged from advanced degrees to GED's. There were veterans of three wars, and the descendents of immigrants from at least 8 countries.  The only unusual thing about the party guests was gender and occupation: a statistically high number of both full and part time farmers and all male.

When I made the invites, I said, "Bring whatever you want to shoot." Party-goers brought everything one  might imagine: a .32 pocket pistol, the latest in AR15's, beat-up Deer rifles, a match grade M1A, an "Ohio deer gun" set up for 12 gauge slugs, 1911's, Ruger auto pistols, etc. When I made the first invitations, one guest asked if he could invite some others. I said "Sure, its a party. Only two rules, no booze and use your head about gun safety." Five guests thus came as strangers and departed as friends. There were no violations of the safety rules. The party was not a match. The only prizes were compliments for good shots and a bit of hazing for misses.

We shot handguns first at my 25 yard range, then went out to the 200 yard rifle range. Inevitably, everybody ended up having a chance to try each others' guns. This was a great help for the youngsters, who could learn useful information, such as the safety locations and manual of arms for various types of firearms. In between shooting, we talked dogs, Turkey hunting, farming,...... and guns.

Shooting is a great sport for many reasons, but one is the lack of a generation gap. The young shooters actually listened to the adults' advice and were delighted to be there. There are few other realms of activity where teenagers actually want to hang out with their parents and elders.

After the party, I found out some wives and daughters wanted to attend, but did not want to be the only female in attendance. It would not have been the case, had they known other women were interested. I believe I will be hosting another shooting party soon.



 



 

How Pelznickel saved Pennsylvania Christmas from the Quaker Scrooge

A Modern Day Pezlnickel ready to scare the kids at Landis Valley Museum

Today is "Second Christmas" and it was once a legal holiday in Pennsylvania. Second Christmas remains a legal holiday in Germany and is celebrated in England as Boxing Day and Ireland as St Stephens Day. I think we lose something with one day of Christmas as I once blogged about here.
I know I need more than one day. Western Pennsylvania Winter is a monotony of dark grey days and long cold nights. When nature is like that, God seems to me like a remote, uncaring, unhearing, entity. Thinking about God as a baby coming into a cold dark world into a barn full of  urine and feces is a good antidote for Winter's darkness: Truly Emmanuel.      

That Pennsylvania has any Christmas is largely thanks to the Pennsylvania Germans (once known as "Dutch"). Pennsylvania was the most ethnically diverse of all the original states, with English, Scots-Irish, and Germanic people each composing about a third of the population in 1790. The Quakers who founded the colony were once death on the holiday and still seem to be somewhat  uncomfortable with it, as were many of the Mennonite groups. The Scots-Irish who took their religion seriously were also anti-Christmas, bowing to the traditions of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. Pennsylvania Christmas was once the sole domain of a tiny Anglican minority and the Lutheran and German Reformed (who have always been far more numerous than the Plain sects). Even stalwart German Calvinists never seemed to have the issue with Christmas that the British Puritans did. The season began with Pelznickel scaring the kids, special Christmas markets,  and actual Christmas was regarded as a 48 hour feast of sausage, music, conviviality, and real hard cider.

The idea of a Christmas Holiday created a political issue in the state legislature in the early Nineteenth Century.  The Dutchmen wanted to close down state government for not just one day, but TWO! They won that fight, and by the time of the Civil War even New England states got somewhat on board with the holiday. Somewhere along the way though, we lost that 24 extra hours to party!

Froliche Zweite Weihnachten! 

Lyme Disease Update

Deaths' Head Tombstone from Old New England, stands in contrast to our death denying culture.

My wife is better mannered than I am. When she stops blogging for a while, she has the good grace to announce it. I tend to exit my little corner of  Cyberspace without any by-your-leaves. She recently shamed me about it, I am going to try to do the same as a measure of politeness to any regular readers.


My last post was actually on her blog, and about my Lyme disease. You can read my theory on Lyme here.  I wrote it a couple weeks ago. I am pleased to be slowly getting better each day. The best part is I finished my course of medicine. I am unsure where side effects of the antibiotics began and where the disease ended.

The Lyme has been frustrating. I am officially a codger in years now, but have not fully come to grips with the prospect of significant physical decline. I am much better prepared for death than disability.  For a long time, I have been in habit of preparing for death each morning.  I consider it right after the first cup of coffee and before my second cigarette.

Historically, the old farmers often feared disability more than death. In 18th Century New England, the angel of death stared you in the face every time you walked by the cemetery. Part of the colonial strategy at Bunker Hill was to keep the Yankee militia's legs shielded by a stone wall, so that they might be killed; but not hit in the leg and disabled. 

With the Lyme, I was not prepared for either the feeling that comes from being unable to do normal homestead tasks, or the feeling sorry for myself that results from inability.......

If I am smart, I might be able to use this experience as a preparation for growing older on the homestead. I do have some guides. Last year, I read William B. Irvine's book on Stoicism.  If the reader is a Christian believer, there is almost nothing in Stoicism that is inconsistent with classical Christianity. If the reader is not a believer, the Stoics may provide some useful grounding in life besides football, face book, and dancing with the stars.  Here is Dr. Irvine's lecture on growing old with grace. Its worth a listen.

Book Review: Surviving Off Off Grid

When my wife had her old Granny Miller site, (the infamous one that crashed) we received a free prepublication copy of Surviving Off Off-Grid: Decolonizing the Industrial Mind for our review. I wrote the following review back then, and recently dug it off the old computer to  revive it here because the Author has been donating royalties towards a new film. The film is called Beyond Off Grid.As we are now entering a new post-literate age, a film may have greater impacts upon many more people than a book. If you have not read this book, consider ordering it before the end of the month and help support the Beyond Off Grid. (I realize this is late, but better late than never). I am late because I fretted  about changing the original review essay a bit. Were I to write this review today, I would probability be more nuanced in my discussion of the relationship between agrarianism and Christianity, but I decided to let the original review stand. I think its  underscores the point that this is a very worthwhile book.  The central thesis about decolonizing the industrial mind is more pertinent today than when Mr. Bunker wrote the book.

 

I did not want to like this book. The author, Michael Bunker, is a self described “Christian Agrarian Separatist.” From my understanding of Mr, Bunker’s beliefs, he advocates that Christian believers should separate from the World around them. I am a Christian, and believe that agrarianism offers an excellent basis for a nation’s political economy. I also believe that the Bible has a lot to say about our relationship with nature and other people.  However, I get uncomfortable mixing my faith in Christ crucified with any other political, economic or social agenda. History seems to be on my side in this regard.  From Byzantine “symphony” between church and state, to Cromwell’s Commonwealth, to the 19^th Century Anglo Catholic Socialists, Christian vegetarianism, the “Dutch Christian Goat Breeders Society”, and liberation theology, the church has been there and done that. I also live in the graveyard of failed Christian agrarian separatist ventures (Zoarites, Harmonists, etc). Only the Amish/Mennonites have survived, but that is the subject of another essay. My objections to Mr. Bunker’s theology are not pertinent to why I think this book is important. Furthermore, I do not debate religion on the Internet. If Mr. Bunker would ever come to Pennsylvania, I invite him to discuss this topic at leisure on my porch over some beer or milk.

As the reader may suspect at this point, I like this book very much. This book is not an apologia for Mr. Bunker’s theology (though it informs him and is found throughout the book). This work is otherwise hard to categorize. It is part history, part cultural criticism, with some biography. It is explicitly not another “how to” book, but the intelligent reader will extract many practical ideas. The best way I can characterize this book, is that it is about mindset. Mindset is what lets the soldier, policeman or armed citizen win a fight. Mindset is the most important difference between the dead and the survivors in any crisis. Mr. Bunker’s thesis is that industrialism and urbanity have “colonized” the human mind in 21^st Century America, and he has set out to de-colonize it. This de-colonizing will create a mindset that will allow families to thrive in what may become an increasingly difficult future. 

While dealing with the lofty subject of human thought, this book is anything but academic. The style is very readable and conversational. The prepper or survivalist will find some serious tests to determine just how prepared he really is (starting with some discussion about what the word “Survival” really means). A person who has never thought deeply about how our nation devolved into the present mess will hopefully read this as a needed alarm call. The homesteader or small farmer of any level of experience will find keys to better his endeavors by thinking in new ways.

While I am not an advocate of agrarian separatism, I believe Mr. Bunker may be one of the few people who could write this book. His separatism gives him a perspective of distance from the “grid” (which is much more than mere electric power, including debt and wage slavery, and the omnipresent corporate/government alliance).

This book is also refreshing in its practicality. The Internet has spawned some self-proclaimed survival experts who lack any significant real world experience but the ability for noisy self-promotion. There is also a horde of romanticized back to the land resources that make the agrarian life seem like a breeze. Michael Bunker fits neither of these classes.  When discussing land, water, light, heat, building, tools, and food, the author speaks from a remarkable personal experience.  He understands that the old paths he has chosen lead to inevitable physical discomfort and a heap of hard work. Yet his realism does not deny the pleasures of an agrarian life. As a stockman, I especially appreciate his understanding of land and livestock that counsels how to make the two fit together wherever the reader might live, not just the author’s central Texas home.

He also directly confronts common objections anyone who sets out on a path of greater self-support will encounter. One is the charge that any uses of technology by an off grid agrarian represent hypocrisy. He demolishes the myth that a robust agrarian society means everyone must be a farmer. He also supports a host of “intermediate means” as an integral part of one’s journey, so the reader need not feel compelled to go naked into the wilderness and build a homestead overnight. Yet use of these intermediate means must be accompanied by thought. This part of the book is important for any homesteader who needs to explain to his consumerist friends why he has chosen this life. It also offers encouragement at any stage in the journey to independence.

The reader should be forewarned that the author is very opinionated. This is a consequence of his independency from the said grid. A free man can speak his mind without worrying about what a boss or customer might think. Sadly, America was once full of open speaking farmers like this. Maybe if enough people read this book it will be again. While this book is thought provoking and challenging, it is in no way offensive.

This is not a perfect book. There is some incorrect historical data. The author asserts on page 10 that the Romans “skipped the step” of respect for farm life (that the ancient Greeks had) making a statement that ignores the agrarianism of the early Roman Republic. There are a few others, but they are quibbles that could be corrected by a good editor. The bibliography is also very skimpy for such a wide-ranging work, amounting to only thirteen books (among which are books by the Christian gentlemen of the survivalist movement  James Wesley, Rawles, and Herrick Kimball whom I regard as an agrarian philosopher king.

Mr. Bunker has made compelling case about why this book is for everyone, and I agree.

This book deserved serious engagement, and more attention that it will probably get. I am hoping that the film may bring greater serious discussion of these serious ideas for our times.  

Link to Michael Bunker's Author Page 

Eternal Vigilance

One of my favorite blogs is Home on the Range. How can I not love a blog that centers on three of my favorite things  (guns, dogs,  and mealtime! )  Brigid understands the realities of the world as a very beautiful place, and the paradox that it is also sometimes a dangerous place. Her latest is a must read. Click on the quote from her poetic essay to read the rest.


"There is much we can be cleansed of, by the Water and by His blood, but there some things formed in the soul, which can not be bound by man, or removed with reason, things for which we should always be ready. For there will always be those whose capabilities for harm we can not always fathom but we should always dread. For  that I am armed with not just the Second Amendment, but the blued steel of eternal vigilance". 

Raccoon Recipes, Distributism, Chelsea Green Books, and Hard Cider

On a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on their farms";who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty. 

Henry Thoreau, Walden

Q. What do Raccoon Recipes, Distributism, Chelsea Green Books, and Hard Cider have in common?  
A. Christian Farm and Homestead Radio 

I am sometimes privileged to be a guest on this weekly show by Scott Terry. Scott is fun to talk to because he is like Thoreau's long headed farmer. He has that unique combination of being well grounded in real world practical skills (he is a full time dairyman, and was once a full time backcountry trapper in Alaska) but still extremely well read and a careful thinker.

Our last conversation covered everything in the title of this post block, plus we touched on Merle Haggard, the whiskey rebellion, the 19th Century Dutch Anti-Revolutionary Party, Ruger Firearms, coyote and bobcat trapping,  Henry VIII, and squirrel dogs!

And big city folk call us neanderthals, rednecks, rubes, and hillbillies?  I always smile inside when urbanites look down on country people as lacking sophistication. Real sophistication is complexity of thought and  a broad interest in the world around us.   

  

The Trade Musket and America's First Consumer Culture

My Lovely Wife snapped this picture of my current project gun. It is a reproduction of a Northwest Trade Musket. I bought it for a very affordable price from Gun Broker online auctions. I knew from the pictures I was in for a project. The gun was only barely functional due to rust and neglect. The bore was solid, but the lock and all the screws holding it to the stock, were really rusted. Somebody also tried to remove most of the screws with a non gunsmithing screwdriver and damaged the heads.  Each night for four weeks I applied gentle squirts of PB blaster, got the lock off and dissembled,  and slowly got everything in working order again. It is now to the point it fires reliably.  I need to decide whether to further disassemble and clean it up, or leave some of the "patina".  In the photo it is missing the ramrod. When this shot was taken, a new ramrod from Track of the Wolf was drying in my incredibly filthy shop (I just can't seem to work on a gun, take care of livestock and homestead, earn a living, blog, shoot and fish, and clean the shop at the same time!).

The gun itself is a 75 caliber smoothbore flintlock. It shoots a massive lead round ball nearly 3/4 of an inch in diameter. It will also shoot shot loads. Most original trade muskets were around 60 caliber, but were equally versatile.  Trade muskets were meant to be cheap but durable firearms for trade to native American Tribes. Different variations were made by the French and English at different times. Googling Fusil de Chasse, Type G trade gun, and Northwest Trade gun will bring up information for the interested reader.  Of particular note, is the musket owned by Tecumseh which is similar in dimension to mine, and has been wonderfully reproduced by gun maker Larry Spisak

While working on this gun, I thought a lot about their unique history in America. At the time of European contact, the Eastern Woodland peoples were an agrarian people. They were very skilled at horticulture, and may be one of the ten or so worldwide areas where agriculture sprang up independently.  They did not raise domestic livestock but managed woodlands through burning to maximize deer browse.  They met most of their needs for food shelter and clothing within their community, but traded across North America for unique items, like copper and quality flint.

Europeans were eager to get the deer skins and furs that native peoples had to trade. The natives were equally eager to trade those skins for new and marvelous stuff. Deer hide clothing gave way to linen shirts and wool for skirts, blankets and mens leggings. Dependent upon the tribe, the locally made  bow and arrows were either relegated to a secondary role, or thrown aside in favor of a European musket. The clay cooking pots (which had to function like a slow cooker) were forgotten for copper, brass, and iron kettle. Stone axes gave way to steel. Soon the traditional skills to make clay pots and bows evaporated as well.

Within a couple of generations, the native people of the East became almost entirely dependent upon a technology they could not reproduce. They were not stupid people. In fact they were highly skilled at playing the French, English, and later Americans off against each other. Many of their leaders  recognized what their growing dependency was doing to their culture and economy. It was simply impossible for them to develop the infrastructure to mine coal, smelt iron, and forge on a large scale. They only had one product to trade for the things they now needed-hides. Initially, this caused the Beaver Wars, that I once blogged about. Men were forced to hunt not for food, but to buy stuff they now needed. They began hunting for skins alone, even leaving carcasses to rot. They found themselves working harder and even going hungry as they killed quicker than the critters could reproduce.  Many became indebted to big multinational fur trading companies. From a combination of necessity and desire, their entire culture changed in a couple of generations. Without the ability to make what they depended upon, they became consumer oriented, rather than production oriented.


When I think on this too much, I am tempted to trade the musket and stick with the bow made from an Osage tree on the farm.
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The Civil War and the End of Agrarian America

Yankee Farmers in Enoch Wood Perry's Talking it over. A glimpse of the old northern agrarian culture that once was.  (Original at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) . 

READER NOTE: Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good (or at least the mediocre!). I wrote this back in July, and never published it for lack of editing. My blog is full of these essays in draft, so I am going to try to dust some off. 

“During the Civil War, the upheaval of American society resulted in much ugliness and some deterioration of taste. Before that time, agriculture and the preservation of tradition were a cherished part of the good life, but from then on the philosophy of ‘change for the sake of change’ became the dominant force in American thinking.”

Eric Sloane

The Southern Agrarian writers tend to focus the Civil War as a battle between an industrial north and an agrarian south.  Modernist historians frame the war in moralistic tones- “a new birth of freedom”.   

We forget that before 1860, the Old Republic was made up of a myriad of local cultures, many of which were in conflict with each other:

• The Southeastern planter class, who imitated the English aristocracy and hid their monoculture commercial agriculture behind an agrarian façade
• The North’s urban commercial classes (precursor to modern urban America),who fought for cheap labor through open borders, government public works projects,  and to preserve tariffs against free trade southerners. 
• The schoolmarm moralists of Greater New England (Precursor to modernist nanny state types), This culture settled a band from Northern Ohio to the upper Midwest and for whom the real evil of Slavery was also mixed with a number of other reforms, including eradicating "demon rum."    
• The old hardscrabble Yankee farmers, the cultural descendents of the men who fought on Lexington Green.
• Appalachian subsistence farmers who detested the lowland planters and were sometimes  staunch unionists in places like East Tennessee.
• The greater Pennsylvania German culture area, which stretched from Eastern Pennsylvania, down through the Shenandoah Valley into North Carolina, and westward into the Ohio Valley. This culture was built on a three legged stool of Christianity,  Family Farming, and the "Dutch" Language.   
• One of the big sectional divides before the Civil war was west versus east, with an emerging Midwest grain belt.

 When most American s read about the war today, they read through a nationalistic, modernistic eye (and also with more romanticism than they should).  Our movies tend to make cartoon characters out of historical figures as well. We want bad and good, forgetting we are all a mix of both. 

While the “North” ostensibly won, the old rural Jeffersonian North was as great a loser as the South. Many small communities lost so many men that they could no longer maintain their pre-war agrarian economy. Community cohesion was destroyed. Men who did survive were too changed to return to the life they knew in 1859. The urban commercial elites amassed more power  and wealth through wartime government contracts, and the power of the old rural Jeffersonian Democratic Yankees was forever broken.  Pennsylvania German culture survived until A pietistic schoolmarm president named Woodrow Wilson entered World War I. He demonized families including some of mine as un-American, despite the fact they had been farming, drinking hard cider, and praying in German in Pennsylvania since the 1730's.

War is a  great enemy of agrarian society.

Nine Pound Lion Heart

I am starting to work the Calhoun Pup with squirrel tails on a fishing pole. The idea is to get him excited and barking. He is very interested, but only a couple of barks. Setting up contrived situations in training can work, but it can also be overdone, creating a bored dog, or a dog that trees without game up the tree.

Once in a while though, I can't resist watching my beloved little female Rat Terrier work a tail. Lizzie weighs nine pounds soaking wet. She was the runt of the litter, but don't tell her that.  Inside that little body is the heart of a lion.

She lives to kill barn rats, tree squirrels, and run rabbits. I can't take her along to do any night time chores. She inevitably will start running nocturnal rabbits and I end up chasing her halfway to the back of the farm at bedtime. She lives to hunt. 

Her boldness worries me for her sake, as much as me being annoyed at finding her. When I was a little agrarian kid, we always had a pack of these little terriers around. The largest game in our area were foxes. In the late 70's  coyotes came in, and they routinely prey upon small dogs.  Coyote predation on pets seems even worse in more suburban areas. I should not hunt the little dogs these days, but as my wife says, "Would you rather live life to the fullest and get eaten by a coyote; or be a stodgy bored house dog?" 

   

Info Fasting

"A behavior should probably not be considered “extreme” if it was the practice of the entire human race from Adam until the mid-20^th century"

T. David Gordon

The undisputed king of agrarian bloggers,  Herrick Kimball, has been on a news fast. That is a good ingredient in the recipe for a happy life.
 http://thedeliberateagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/obama-wisdom-of-martha-washington.html

I must follow some pertinent local stories for my off-farm profession, but most "news" is really not relevant to my life. In fact, I think "being informed"  when defined as constant contact with the  24/7 information cycle, is probably bad for our mental and spiritual health. Among the damages are attitudes that create a cult of celebrity, whether around a politician or an entertainer.  

A lot of people I actually do admire seem to think the same thing.

Herrick Kimball
CS Lewis
Rev. Dr. T David Gordon
Rev. Franklin Sanders 

What do they all share? They all manage to be more original, thoughtful and well read than modern norm.

I got a shock a while back when giving some visitors a tour of a few really sublime areas of western Pennsylvania.  In the midst of some of nature's finest handiwork, some where checking their smartphones!

An hour a day spent on "news" can also be spent running dogs, shooting, playing fiddle, reading a real book or journal, or fishing. I know how that spent hour makes me happier. Since I spent a half hour in front of this screen typing this, its time to shut down and go enjoy a beautiful day outdoors! Hope you can do the same.