This is just beautiful. I don’t know how to describe it. There are images involved, you have to take a look:
Thanksgiving. Since the beginning, Americans have connected the BOUNTY of the Land and the Goodness of Life to DEMOCRACY. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison – farmers ALL – envisioned an agrarian society. We have since evolved into a VERY different kind of society.
Our experience aligns with this pretty well. At least one member of most of the local farms we know work off farm with the exception of a few very large “corporate” farms. We obviously both work “off farm” as well, but our goal isn’t profit, it’s to provide for our own family. If at some point our farm products could pay for themselves and the food we have to get “off farm” for our family, I would be absolutely thrilled. Right now our chickens pay for their own day to day costs which is a very small step (chickens don’t need much) but our first mini-milestone.
“EVER thought of chucking it all and moving to the country? According to the Agriculture Department, an increasing number of Americans are doing just that, by embracing a “Green Acres” lifestyle. But few of them are making a living at it: more often than not, their work in the fields is subsidized by an off-the-farm job.”
A good short article on urban farming including poultry and beekeeping in San Francisco, California. We hope to get bees in the future ourselves.
“Each morning when Colin Phipps’ two young sons get up, they run outside to the chicken coop to gather eggs for breakfast. Next year, the family is planning on expanding their farm by adding a little pig or a hutch of rabbits. Just another day in rural California? Not exactly. Phipps lives in a row house in Bernal Heights — one of the city’s many high-density, single-family neighborhoods. The houses here tend to be more like cottages, the backyards downright postage stamp-sized. Yet Phipps is not alone.”
I was really disappointed when I found out that 2008’s Slow Food Nation event was going to be held in San Francisco only because we’d moved from the Bay Area ourselves just a year prior. I wanted to attend!
We’ve been members of Slow Food for the last two years. For the most part it’s primarily meant making a small financial contribution to the organization. This last year we were able to attend a Slow Food gathering for our (new) local convivium here in Snoqualamie Valley. I’m really glad to see that our area has it’s own convivium actually, most of the active ones are surrounding large urban areas (Seattle, San Francisco, etc). While I think it’s quite important for urban dwellers (as we once were) to reflect on these topics as they certainly have specific challenges, I also think it’s great for those of us in the agricultural regions that often supply these large urban areas to kind of get out and celebrate what we contribute to the system.
This article spotlights the Victory Garden put in place for the Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco. I can definitely see the logic for taking these large evenets to “the big city” (better audience for change and larger exposure) but I hope they don’t entirely lose track of their roots. I’m also not trying to deny those determined urban farmers, I want to see more of them!
“Farm aid, the annual concert dedicated to raising funds for the American family farmer, has been held in such agricultural strongholds as Manor, Texas, and Ames, Iowa. But the most recent venue, the distinctly nonrural borough of Manhattan, is not as incongruous as it seems. With its estimated 600 small-scale farms (which are often large-scale vegetable gardens), New York City is part of an urban agricultural boom in the U.S., where rising food and fuel prices are making city farming seem less and less outlandish. In July volunteers began transforming the front lawns of San Francisco’s city hall into the first edible offerings on that site since 1943, when civilians across the country were encouraged to aid the war effort by growing victory gardens.”
This may seem like a bit of a non sequitur, but one of the motivations for us around raising our own animals is because of concerns for commerical animal treatment. We half-jokingly refer to commercially raised products as cruelty-X, for example “cruelty chicken”, “cruelty beef”, and on rarer occasions “cruelty carrots” (yes, in most cases that’s a joke). It wasn’t a conscious decision, but started occuring in our conversation as we became more eduated about commercial operations (including organics unfortunately!). Yet it remains as a regular reminder when we make decisions to go the “easy route” and disregard, or fail to research, the origins of the product of choice. This article is enlightening because it also demonstrates how far reaching commercial livestock products are. I didn’t realize that there were animal products in the laudry aisle. The feel of fabric softeners has never appealed to me, but now I have another reason to avoid it.
“Dihydrogenated tallow dimethyl ammonium chloride
A derivative of rendered fat from cattle, sheep, and horses. Just boil it down and mix with ammonium (NH4). After a series of chemical pit stops, out comes a quaternary ammonium compound, or quat—a positive ion in which the hydrogen is replaced by long-chain organic molecules. Quats effectively coat your clothing with lipids, making the fibers soft to the touch. These fats also make fabric a bit less absorbent—don’t use on towels or cloth diapers—and the positive charge neutralizes static electricity. There are a few other quats in Downy, with easily pronounceable names like 1-methyl-1-tallowamidoethyl-2 -tallowimidazolinium methylsulfate.”
We often relate to two movements which are similarly focused but opposite directions in our adventure. One is “urban farming” and the other is “homesteading” or “back-to-the-land”. This is a great article about real people’s experiences in urban poultry farming. Even though I don’t think it would change our decisions, I wish I had known more about this when we were living a more sub/urban life. One of the biggest revelations for me, out of our experiences to date, really is just how incredibly easy it is to keep chickens.
“For Brooklyn real-estate agent Maria Mackin, the obsession started five years ago, on a trip to Pennsylvania Amish country. She, her husband and three children—now 17, 13 and 11—sat down for brunch at a local bed-and-breakfast, and suddenly the chef realized she’d run out of eggs. “She said, ‘Oh goodness! I’ll have to go out to the garden and get some more’,” Mackin recalls. “She cooked them up and they were delicious.” Mackin and her husband, Declan Walsh, looked at each other, and it didn’t take long for the idea to register: Could we have chickens too? They finished their brunch and convinced the bed-and-breakfast owner, a Mennonite celery farmer, to sell them four chickens. They packed them in a little nest in the back of their Plymouth Voyager minivan and headed back to Brooklyn.”
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