journal/Archive/Vision/Farmstead.md

What is the land we have to play with?

• 2 acres of pasture
• 200+ acres of corn/soy
  • 1000+ acres from landlords
• Moberly's: 3 1/2 acres
• Backyard: 1 acre
• Treeyard: 1/2 acre
• Sweet corn: 2 acres
• CRP strips?
• Land bounded by moberly's / CRP strip?

Reinforce

• Mom's garden
• Chickens

Remove

• Monocrops where we can
• Big industrial machinery on food that feeds us

Amend

• Permaculture / orchards
  • Is there some land we can use for experimentation?
• Cow(s) on pasture

Eventuals

What should it become?

More accurately, what could we eat? What high-quality foods?

• Pasture
  • Chickens
  • Cow(s)
• Permaculture for fruits and vegetables - what do I eat?
  • Leafy greens
  • Tomatoes
  • Cucumbers
  • Some grains
  • Raspberries
  • Lemons
  • Apples
  • Potatoes?
  • Peanuts?

Where to learn from

• Doherty's
  • Book: "The Independent Farmstead"
• Polyface Farm
• Permaculture book

Dump:

1. Get out of the cash economy; get out of the demands that it will make on myself, my community, and my family. The farmstead is an economic model that fits this.
2. It's not a bunker, just a more sustainable vehicle. Keep the wheels from falling off. "Someone might shoot me, but the wheels won't fall off."
3. Steward the land, living things, and non-living things around to coexist harmoniously; this is man's calling, to make things work harmoniously.
4. Milk and honey are fundamental foods; milk is primary substance. All other food is an analogy to this first food.
5. Natures of things need to be considered; the 'default' state of reality isn't what we want to propagate, but we want to bring the real natures of things out.
6. It's not about control; it's about creative management.
7. Wendell Berry says we take one solution and split it into two (lucrative) problems: we ought to be taking problems and merging them into solutions.
8. Waste doesn't need to exist: we are just to figure out how to steward byproducts to where they are needed or will be most appreciated.
9. Use means of survival that are a way of relationship between you and the Lord.
10. We can't have high culture and have everything dependent on cash.
11. Grass needs to be grazed. Cows can live on only grass - and when they do, they are less diseased. Grass can and should be productive.
12. A cow can be sustained on grass for most of the year on about 2-3 acres of Appalachian land. How about on high-productivity land like ours? (for reference: our pasture is 2 acres)
13. The goal is not to produce money, it's to perfect reality. Even though we're smothered by survival needs, at the core, we're doing stuff to perfect it and to enter into relationship with it. The perfection isn't about extrinsic goods but about intrinsic natures.
14. In these things that are about relationship, nobody will do it as well as you, or someone you know intimately.
15. Self-sufficiency is not about having enough money: using cash is being dependent on people you don't know.
16. The resistance to small-scale farming is because it is possible.
17. In a world of "lab-grown meat", a cow is a symbol of resistance.
18. "I'm not going to go to Walmart. I'm going to provide this for myself."
19. Although, it's not individual self-sufficiency. The cow extends beyond the family by nature; it cannot be consumed by one family. You cannot have the illusion of your existence as an isolated being. There are no true edges.
20. Sustainability needs to be understood holistically.
21. It's not about ease of life, it's about quality of life, true life.
22. Perfection of natures requires a great deal of radical receptivity.
    1. Hm. My parents aren't too far off with this in me and my sister. Although perhaps too feminine.
23. Nature is not better without human beings.
24. Human persons are not there for our individual desires; we are here to perfect nature into a pleasing offering for God.
25. Insofar as the regime is about cash, women are oppressed.
26. Subvert structures of sin.
27. We should not depend on fewer and fewer, older and older, people who are more and more likely to kill themselves, to feed us.
28. Saf just died. I wonder what that will mean for the Peacocks, going forwards.