sastyk | January 12, 2010Ok, as you all know from my "Pyr-Buck-Bees-Sheep" post, I need inspiration to get this book cooking again. So I know you've told me before, some of you, but I want to hear about how you are making a lower-energy life where you are, or how you've found a new place to do it. I'm also looking for a couple new people to profile for my book - I've had some dropouts, and would love to add a couple of new participants. I'm particularly looking for people who are trying to AIP in very dry climates and deal with water issues, those adapting in rental housing, anyone adapting as part of a religious…
sastyk | January 12, 2010Until I saw Ilargi's lovely obit for Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis and who rescued Anne's diary, I hadn't realized that she had died at 100. I can only add that there is a life worth mourning, and Ilargi's piece is well worth reading:
The Dutch language would be a hell of a lot poorer if not for the centuries of Jewish culture that enriched the country, and most of all Amsterdam. Rembrandt and Vermeer, and all of their 17th century peers, would not have created what they did without the Jews. The tulip bubble, well, perhaps, but the spice trade that made…
sastyk | January 12, 2010Note: This is a revised version of an article I wrote for ye olde blogge about how to keep warm if you need to.
Despite the fact that I believe people should use a lot less energy, I am not proposing here that people in cold climates go cold turkey on supplemental heating ;-). This post is, instead, about *how to survive* if you find yourself without heating fuel in a cold climate. Why do you need to know this? Because it happens, and more often than you think. How could it happen? Well, you could live in a place that requires minimal supplemental heat, and have a sudden, unusual cold…
sastyk | January 11, 2010I've never had so much trouble writing a book before. Depletion and Abundance was hard, but it was so thrilling that someone wanted me to write a book that I could barely see straight from excitement. A Nation of Farmers was a project I had been passionate about for a long time, and the collaboration with Aaron was truly inspiring. Independence Days seemed like such a logical next step - help people who got the basic idea of needing to eat better do it year-round. I did three books in two years, and by the end of the marathon I was exhausted. And then came the idea of doing a book on…
sastyk | January 11, 2010I'm back after four days of teaching a workshop at my house. It was awesome. It was exhausting. It was fascinating. We milked goats (note, very small adorable goats sell themselves. It is not necessary to talk them up, just to frisk people trying to hide goats under their jackets on the way out ;-)). We talked lactofermentation. We laughed a lot. We cooked on the woodstove. We knit stuff (ok, they knit stuff, I didn't knit much, since I was trying to manage everything). We talked about the future and where we think it is going. We laughed a lot. We talked about growing things and…
sastyk | January 6, 2010For four days this week, 10 women are coming to my house to play apprentice. We're going to milk goats, make sauerkraut, knit socks, talk about depletion and climate change, make teas and syrups, cook on a woodstove and figure out where to go from here and basically have a four day slumber party ;-). This is going to be exciting and fun, I think. It is also pushing the limits of my pantry.
You see, I knew that there would be 11 of us eating at my place for four days, but what I didn't know was that we had a brake fluid leak. Our car went into the shop for snow tires (yeah, I know, we…
ejohnson | January 5, 2010
My journey to the world of snowflakes started about 15 years ago and began with my love for microscopes. Upon showing images from the microscope to friends they had little interest in all the wonderful biology, but were fascinated by the images of snowflakes. There had been little done in this field since Bentley fist took snowflake images from his barn in the hills of Vermont approximately 100 years ago.
I live and work in one of the snowiest cities in the United States. Rochester N.Y. is situated between Buffalo and Syracuse and it is often a coin toss which city gets the most snow.…
sastyk | January 5, 2010Today is the first day of Aaron's and my new "Finding Your Place" Course (for anyone who would still like to join, we've got two remaining spots and since the class is asynchronously online, you won't miss anything by starting today or tomorrow - email me at Jewishfarmer@gmail.com). I've been teaching Adapting-in-Place, for people who intend to stay where they are and want to lower their resource consumption and build greater resilience for several years now, but this is the first time Aaron and I have taught a similar class for people who are either considering relocation or definitely…
sastyk | January 4, 2010Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street.
Who will grow your food in the coming decades?
A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe…
sastyk | January 4, 2010I've always meant to write a post with this title, but somehow never got around to it. Then I saw The-always-amazing-Zuska's latest about the way that Erma Bombeck's name is being used to derogate people as being unserious and tied somehow to domestic life. Somehow I hadn't realized that "Bombeck" was an insult - although it shouldn't have surprised me, given our deep social contempt for women and women's traditional work (the subject of most of Erma Bombeck's humor.) Not that I needed another reason to be bored and annoyed by the eternally over-rated Steve Pinker, but here's one.
This…
sastyk | January 3, 2010A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article about the problem of manure handling on large farms. . From the title "Down on the Farm, an Endless Cycle of Waste," which completely misses the point that manure is not "waste" to the end, the article failed to ask any of the really pertinent questions raised by really large scale industrial agriculture and its chronic problems with manure handling.
In function it is something like a Zamboni, but one that has crossed over to the dark side. This is no hockey rink, and it's not loose ice being scraped up. It's cow manure.
Lots of cow manure.…
sastyk | January 3, 2010Longtime readers will know I'm a deep admirer of _The Automatic Earth_ where Stoneleigh and Ilargi do economic analysis. I think Stoneleigh has outdone herself this time, with a primer on resilience, cycles and where we're headed. Definitely worth a read - probably two reads.
I particularly like this bit of work on resilience, which clarifies and expands slightly on Buzz Holling's.
Resilience arises from a redundancy that has the appearance of inefficiency and a lack of critical structural dependency on specialized hierarchy, neither of which conditions are likely to be met at the peak of…
sastyk | January 1, 2010In the comments thread to my previous post, Greenpa, who apparently gets a kick from watching She Who Cruncheth over at The Crunchy Chicken and me competing, suggested that I ought to try to top her "latest post." In the interim, La Crunch put up a fascinating post about bull semen and the genetic diversity of dairy cows, which left me deeply, deeply confused. Was I supposed to top her by talking about some other crisis in genetic diversity? Spotlight some other species' semen? Or was I supposed to put my own contributions to species diversity up for scrutiny? (Sadly, we don't pass muster…
sastyk | December 31, 2009What is your blogiste doing instead of writing posts and working on her new book these days? She is frantically trying to make her home a suitable place for the workshop she's running in it in a few days. That means moving furniture that might get moved and discovering things horrible beyond description. It means sorting out things that ought to have been gotten rid of years ago. It means discovering that the bottom layer of my laundry pile has entered the "composting" stage.
Of all the domestic virtues, the one I lack most deeply is tidiness. This is exacerbated by four kids under 10,…
sastyk | December 30, 2009The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a…
sastyk | December 30, 2009Today is "Year in Review" day in which I post my predictions and my evaluation of last year's, but first, here's a meme I stole from the fabulous Dr. Isis in which I list the first blog post of 12 months, plus the first sentence of each blog post. I figure they'll make something really strange, which is always good. BTW, all of these are from ye olde blogge which is still alive and kicking, so if you'd like to read more of me (as though this weren't enough ;-)), you can go there.
January:
My New Year's Resolutions came 'round (and were kept about as well as all new year's resolutions)
One…
sastyk | December 29, 2009From time to time my co-author on _A Nation of Farmers_ and I teach classes on practical topics about adapting to lower energy life, food storage and preservation, garden and farm design, etc... The classes are offered online and are asynchronous (ie, you don't have to be online at any particular time - we post stuff, then people respond as they are able, and then we respond as we are able...).
We're offering two such classes in the next couple of months. First, Aaron and I are offering "Making Your Place" which helps people who are considering relocation, concerned they may have to…
Once You've Got the Chickens, You'll Hardly Notice the Yaks: Re-Inventing the Diversified Small Farm
sastyk | December 29, 2009Over at ye olde blogge, on one of my Independence Days updates, a reader commented on something that I'd posted. I'd mentioned that we are having trouble with goat parasites - most specifically, meningeal worm. Meningeal worm is a parasite is hosted by snails and transmitted by the feces of white tailed deer. It is worst in camelids like llamas and alpacas, but goats are a secondary host, and two of does, Selene and Mina, have it. It is most common after a wet summer and warm fall - this past summer was the wettest in living memory here - we had almost 20 inches of rain in June alone, and…
sastyk | December 28, 2009Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they've entered into, and I was struck by how useful an example it is of the kind of ecological vicious circle that we face all the time:
To compensate for low prices, herders have been increasing supply by breeding more goats -- a classic vicious circle. Mongolia's goat population is now approaching 20…
sastyk | December 27, 2009As I've mentioned, we raise our own dairy goats and milk them, and we drink the milk raw, or rather, unpasteurized. Since I wrote my last piece about the goats, I've had several people email me asking for advice about their dairy choices - one person living locally wanted me to sell her raw milk, two others asked if I advised people who can't get their own livestock to source and purchase raw milk. So I thought I'd write a piece about raw milk and your options.
Perhaps the first thing I want to say is that I actually don't have that strong an opinion on this subject, believe it or not.…