“A bad day up here is better than a good day in the city…”

The title quote comes from a fellow I got to know at MIT, name of Toby.  He used to teach a hands-on blacksmithing course in the basement for the Materials Science department.  A few days ago I had occasion to drive up into north central Vermont to pick up a piece of optical equipment for work, and my route took me right past South Randolph, where Toby and his wife Elizabeth have set up a homestead.  I had heard third-hand that they had a pretty remarkable off-grid place up there, and had intended to visit all the time we lived in Lebanon but never got around to it.

When I was a kid growing up in the woods with no telephone, there was no way to set visits up on short notice, so it was common practice for friends to just appear unexpectedly in the dooryard.  So that’s what I did – I dropped in on them unannounced at lunch time with a bottle of cider.   From the intersection (not really even a village) of South Randolph I stopped where a quirky fellow was doing some repairs on an old farmhouse (using hand tools and an antique hand-cranked drill press) and asked for directions.  Up a winding dirt track between rolling pastures I found their remarkable homestead.  I had heard that they had spent two winters living in a tent, and had finally built a cabin.  What I found was a tiny timberframe building, perhaps 12×16 feet plus an extra bent on one end to form an open porch.    On the right just inside the door was a bed, then a small heating woodstove.  In the far corner there was a kitchen consisting of a small bench with a sink and an old cast iron wood cookstove.  In the middle there was a table for eating on, and the left side seemed to be given over to storage of various items.  The walls were a single layer of pine planks, and the floor was gravel or rough planks, I can’t remember which.  Lighting was by oil lamps and beeswax candles, which they had apparently just finished dipping.    Water was provided by a hand pump from a deep well that protruded up from the ground at the side of the kitchen, and there was a privy in the woods.

The entire place was furnished in a most agreeable rustic style, dominated by well worn wood, iron, and natural fibers.  A hand-cranked coffee grinder dominated the far wall.  They invited me to join them for lunch, which was excellent and consisted of good bread, various artisan cheeses, a salad of mixed greens including some from their garden, and sparkling cider.  This meal did not seem out of the ordinary for them and they had no notice that I was coming; in conversation it became apparent that despite the outward appearance of privation they were accustomed to eating very well.

The larger setting was 50 hillside acres, with pasture below and woodlot above, vegetable gardens, two workhorses, several head of cattle, and a small herd of sheep.  Despite the distinct rustic feel the homestead was not allergic to technology; they had a bulldozer which had been used to make the roads and the building sites, a battered pickup, and a small WoodMizer band mill for sawing out timber for a more substantial residence planned for the future.  There was apparently even a telephone, though it was half a mile down the hill in an old pre-existing barn on the edge of the property.  This was not a hairshirt existence; they didn’t seem to be preparing for an apocalypse and growing the majority of their food, nor did they seem in a hurry to do so.  Clearly a lot of work had been done on the place, but surely in three years more could have been done, had they been hell-bent on working, but this didn’t seem to be the goal.  They seemed truly to be living what they felt to be the good life.

Something about Toby and Elizabeth’s homestead struck a strong resonance with my memory.  Here was a homestead very much like the way I grew up, not implemented haphazardly by 25 year old hippies freshly moved east from teaching mountaineering, but rather by two professionals who had been living in the city for years and working in the heart of a modern university until they suddenly pulled the ripcord.  Here was a carefully-crafted simplicity executed more out of intentionality and style than governed by economic austerity as in the case of my own childhood.   If Toby and Elizabeth can transition from Cambridge to a hill farm, intentionally and consciously paring away so much of  modern life, subjecting themselves to all manner of physical hardships in exchange for the pleasures of a carefully crafted rustic rural life, then surely all kinds of other arrangements are workable as well.  I’m reminded of a guy named Snowberg who worked as an engineer at Southwest Windpower, all the while living in a cabin tent secreted away against all regulation  in the national forest that surrounds Flagstaff.  He did this through every season for years, showering at a gym, cooking at work, and saving his money, then embarking on a years-long kayak tour of the world.  How much cooler is that than the much more common story of professionals who make piles of money and manage always to spend a little more than they earn, living in constant fear of disruptions and feeling like they don’t have any options?

Visiting the homestead filled me with joy, not because I want to emulate what they are doing (I’m pretty happy to have electricity and the internet, and my ideal setup would involve a machine shop rather than a sawmill), but rather for the reminder that many different kinds of life are possible, and that positive changes can be made quickly and boldly, with creativity and intentionality.  Some aspects of modernity that on the face of it appear no-brainers are not so obvious on consideration.  It seems pretty sensible to hook up a small electric motor to the apple crusher, but then you have no need to throw a party and  invite all your friends to lend a hand.    Life is the most important engineering project most of us will ever execute; it seems a shame never to tinker with the factory settings.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Someone else named Ben asked me to post a recipe for Strawberry Rhubarb pie.  Most of the recipes I’ve put up here are healthy or crunchy in some way, but this is pretty much straight up – good though.  We always had a big patch of rhubarb growing in the garden when I was a kid, it was about the first thing up and it’s not useful for a whole lot besides making pies, but it’s great for that.  It’s at its best before the strawberries come in fresh, but fortunately both strawberries and rhubarb freeze well.  The pie crust recipe is not specific to strawberry-rhubarb, and the detailed instructions are for the benefit of pie neophytes.

Crust:

• 1.5c white flour
• 1c whole wheat flour (pastry if you have it)
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, cold
• 1T sugar
• 1/2t salt
• Around 1/2c cold water

Mix up the dry stuff, cut the butter into thin slices, and mix it in, trying to keep it from sticking together back into a big hunk – this makes the next part easier.  The next part is laborious but important:  you need to break the butter into pea-size pieces and integrate it into the flour, but without smearing or really mixing it in – you want distinct hunks of butter, which flatten out when you roll the crust out, making it flaky.  Of course, using whole wheat flour makes it harder to get a nice tender flaky crust, but I find it difficult to bring myself to bake anything with all white flour.  Anyway, I incorporate the butter with two regular dull table setting knives, one in each hand, working them across one another in the bowl with a shearing action.  You want to do it quickly, because once the butter gets to room temperature it starts to smear.    Once  the butter is broken down to pea size or smaller, incorporate the water in little dribbles while mixing the crust with a fork.  The amount of water is not entirely predictable or an exact science, basically you want to add enough so the crust can be formed into cohesive lumps by hand, but no more.  Too little and it will not hold together well when rolling, too much and it won’t be as flaky.  You want to minimize handling to avoid melting the butter or toughening the gluten in the flour – definitely don’t knead it.

When the water is incorporated, form it into two flattened lumps like oversized hamburger patties, and put it in the fridge to cool a bit, wrapped in wax paper or the like.

Filling:

• 5-6c fruit, fresh or frozen, about equal parts strawberries and rhubarb, cut into grape size chunks or smaller
• 1c sugar
• 1/4c corn starch
• 1/4t salt

If the fruit is frozen, it’s usually a little soupy, so I drain off a bit of juice, maybe a half cup or so, before mixing in the other ingredients.  If the fruit is fresh, you want to mix in the sugar etc. and let it sweat for maybe 20 mins before proceeding.  Either way, at the end you have a bowl with a mixture of gloppy stuff in it.  The main failure mode with strawberry rhubarb pie is that the filling comes out too soupy; pouring off some of the liquid in the case of frozen fruit guards against this, but if you wanted to be sure in the case of fresh fruit, you would dose the fruit with some sugar and let it sweat out, then pour off some juice and try to guess the amount of sugar to replace, along with the corn starch and salt.

Assembly:

Flour a countertop and a rolling pin.  By this point the crust should be just a little bit chilled.  Take half and roll it out to a round a bit bigger than a 9″ pie plate – I use a deep glass dish.  It’s normal for even a properly formulated crust to crack a bit at the edges during rolling, I  weld them together by carefully applying the rolling pin directionally to move material from thicker spots toward the break and manually join the edges before running the rolling pin over to smooth it out.  Meanwhile you want to pay attention to make sure it comes out more or less round.   The same amount of crust will stretch to a 10″ pie plate just fine, though you will want increment the filling by 20% or so.  Lay the crust in the dish and pour in the filling.  If the crust is marginal in terms of structural integrity, it helps to have a large flat sheet metal object to help with the transfer operation.  Some recipes call for bits of butter to be put on top of the filling for certain kinds of pie, but I never do this – there’s plenty in the crust.    For a strawberry rhubarb pie I often do a lattice crust, where you roll out the top crust, cut it into 5/8″ wide strips, and weave it onto the surface of the filling.  But that’s kind of gilding the lily; it’s fine to just flop the top crust over top of the filling and prick some holes in it with a knife.  Then I trim the bits that lap over the edges with a pair of scissors, and form a fluted edge with my fingers to join the top and bottom crusts.  It helps to wet the interface with a finger dipped in water, to keep the top and bottom from separating while baking.

Preheat the oven to 425F.  Bake for around 15 mins, or until the top is almost as brown as you want it to end up.  Then turn it down to 35o and bake it for maybe another hour, till thick goopy filling starts to bubble out in one or two places from the openings in the crust.   To be honest I don’t really time things when they are baking, at least not pie.  Especially for strawberry-rhubarb, you want to let it cool till it’s slightly warm at most before cutting into it, so the filling sets up.

Debugging:  If the filling ends up watery, next time add more cornstarch, or work harder at getting some of the moisture out of the fruit before mixing the filling – see above.  If  the crust breaks up when you try to roll it out, you might need more water, or you might just want to do all white flour till you get the hang of it better.  If the crust is tough and isotropic rather than lamellar and flaky, maybe there was too much water, or just too much mixing in the process of forming the crust.  Often the lower crust is a bit sodden in making fruit pies with uncooked filling; if I were more of a perfectionist I might explore pre-cooking the crust or the filling, but I’m not that serious about my pies.

12″ Morbark chipper

What with global warming and concern about releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, I’ve become increasingly hesitant to burn the brush that we generate in the process of creating the new orchard.  Also, increasing the level of organic matter in the soil is a key component of low-input agriculture, which suggests making use of the brush in a productive way.  So last Saturday we rented an 80 hp diesel wood chipper and went to town on the big windrow of slash that Joshua and I made last fall in clearing to the south of the orchard for sunlight.  The 12 inch chipper is a big, heavy machine; about as much as the Kubota tractor was able to move.  Alexis and my mom and dad all pitched in, along with a local fellow named Nick, and we made quick work of the pine and other assorted brush.  The machine has an imposing maw consisting of two big jagged steel infeed rollers, and the upper one articulates up and down to accept branches and even pieces of tree trunk up to the nameplate diameter.  The infeed rollers force the wood against a tremendous steel flywheel with cutters on the axial face, and the resulting chips are thrown with great force out a chute that can be rotated to the desired direction.  Working with the machine is a bit intimidating – there’s two big yellow cables inside the infeed chute that you’re supposed to grab and pull to reverse the feed direction if you get snagged on something that’s getting sucked into the cutters, but it’s hard not to think of that scene at the end of Fargo as arm-sized hunks of wood rapidly disappear into the chute.

When we finished with the brush on the ground, we felled the two remaining trees in the area between the orchard and the southerly stone wall, and fed the brush into the chipper to make another pile, and on the way out we felled a misshapen pasture pine by the upper cabin and fed its branches into the machine likewise.  In all we probably made over 10 cubic yards of chips, which can be used as mulch around trees and under fences, or perhaps mixed with manure and composted.

The expense of renting the big machine for a day and the hassle of transporting it (it needs to tow behind a 3/4 ton pickup or bigger) tends in the direction of marathon sessions, and by the end of the day I felt like I had been run over by several species of ungulates.  It’s tempting to think about getting one of these machines to have around, but the little ones that are more affordable are much less awesome than the big expensive ones, and we probably wouldn’t have enough use for a big one to justify it.  So probably we end up renting one every once in a while, and letting the brush pile up betweentimes.

Orchard Weekend 2009

The third annual Five Islands Orchard Weekend took place May 9/10, and was well attended by a large and enthusiastic crew.  Brandon and Sharon, Roz, Eric, Jonah, and Ken came up from Boston Friday night, and Eerik and Kristen joined us Saturday, along with Chrissy from Dartmouth, who brought her two very entertaining pups.  My folks also pitched in, and my grandparents observed and provided encouragement.  The weather cooperated for the most part, and all the major objectives were achieved.  The last apple trees from the nursery bed were planted in the orchard proper, along with the two cherry trees from year one,  and around five new apple trees from Fedco, including the intriguing Redfield and the amazing Wickson.  We also transplanted the Cornell high octane sugar maples from the nursery bed to their final homes along the stone wall leading down to the cove, in the spaces we’ve been clearing over the last two winters.  We also temporarily planted some new Black Walnut and Basswood saplings in the orchard, as well as three hazlenut bushes in a new nuts-and-berries bed out behind the upper cabin.  The maples and hazlenuts were fenced in, and the attachment of the plastic deer netting to the main orchard fence was upgraded on about a third of the perimeter – more to come.  Finally, Brandon enthusiastically led a crew to dig a ditch and place a small culvert under the orchard path to dry out an area that has been annoyingly wet in spring weather since we started the project, in the process getting fantastically dirty and looking as happy as the proverbial pig in… mud.

All in all, it was a great weekend, and a huge amount got done.  Thanks again to everybody who pitched in!  The apple trees are in bloom and Cider Year 5 is less than 6 months away!

Photos courtesy of Brandon are at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingswept/sets/72157617878385781/

Semi-healthy dessert: two recipes

In our household we have this problem where we want to eat healthy food, but we really like dessert.  There are other options (like, say the heck with it and keep fudge brownies around all the time, or banish sweets from the kitchen entirely), but the best solution is to come up with desserts that aren’t really that bad for you.  Here are a couple of favorites:

Bread Pudding:

The first step is, never throw out any scrap of bread.  Ends off the old loaf that nobody wants to eat once a fresh batch comes out of the oven, hunks that get stale sitting on the counter, pita pockets that sit in the back of the fridge for a month, even slightly moldy bread can get the surface layer shaved off – hasn’t killed me yet.  So you cut rejected bread bits into cubes about half to 3/4″ square, and you accumulate them in a gallon ziploc in the freezer.  When the ziploc is pretty full but not yet bulging, you’re ready to go.

Split the contents of the bread crumb bag between two 1.5 quart glass baking dishes, the ones that are the size and shape of a small loaf pan, pressing it down to consolidate – might want to wait a bit until it thaws and press some more.  Tradition permits addition of copious raisins mixed with the bread at this point; I’ve also done frozen wild blueberries with good effect.  Meanwhile, mix up the following:

• 5 eggs
• 1c sugar
• 2t vanilla
• 2t cinnamon
• 1t nutmeg
• 5c milk, approximately, skim works fine though recipes call for whole or even half and half/cream
• 1/4t salt (or more, depending on how salty you bake your bread)

whup that all up with a fork in a bowl, and pour it on the bread.  Try to judge how the quantity is working out when the pans are about half full, so you can add a splash of milk to the bowl and stir it in, if needed to get the volume right.  It doesn’t have to cover the bread (especially since the bread is probably sticking above the surface of the pan) but you want all the bread saturated – you can help by pushing it down with a fork. Let it sit for a few minutes if it seems to need time to soak.

Now, put the two pans in a big lasagna pan (glass is nice so it won’t ruin the seasoning or start to rust) and fill the lasagna pan up most of the way with water.  Then put it in a 350 oven for around 1.25h – the water bath helps regulate the temperature so the egg/milk solution solidifies without burning.  You know it’s done when it’s puffed up in the middle and brown, with no more goopy stuff oozing out from the center when you poke it with a fork.  Let it cool a bit to set up firmer, then eat it – it’s good warm or cold, with ice cream, cream, or nothing at all.  I don’t feel guilty at all about eating it as breakfast or any other meal; as Alexis points out it’s basically french toast.  If the bread is good sturdy whole wheat stuff like what we make, its tasty and downright virtuous.

Carrot Orange Cookies

These are a new addition, courtesy of Bill and Jessica, friends of Abby and Matt out in Madison.  They are somewhere between cookies and scones, leaning toward the scone side, but where eating scones that aren’t really fresh sometimes seems like doing penance, these stay moist and are cookie-like enough to qualify as dessert.

• 1.5 sticks butter, softened
• 3/4c sugar
• 1t vanilla
• 1 egg
• rind of 1 orange
• 1c carrot, cooked (I grate fresh carrot finely, then microwave it for 1 minute – seems to work well
• 2c whole wheat flour (this is one recipe where 100% ww flour works really well – must be something about the carrots)
• 2t baking powder
• 1/4t salt

Cream butter and sugar, mix in vanilla, egg, orange rind, and carrot.  Add dry ingredients and mix.  Since I don’t measure the carrot very carefully, the dough often comes out goopy, so I add a bit more flour.  It ends up thicker than muffin batter but not as stiff as typical cookie dough.  Drop spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet; I don’t really form them, just sort of glump them on there, so as to end up with 20-24 cookies.  Bake 350 till done – I couldn’t tell you how long since I don’t generally time cookies.   They flatten out a bit in baking but still end up craggy and uneven.

These really are surprisingly good.  I think with a splash of milk to thin to batter consistency they would make fine muffins or quick bread as well.  It would be interesting as well to try using less butter and more carrot – I bet they’d still be pretty good.  Likewise wheat germ, sesame seeds, all kinds of hippie goodness.

pedal grinder design refinements

The pedal grinder worked pretty well last fall, to the point where it seemed worth going over the design in an effort to produce a more durable, corrosion resistant, and user friendly version implementing the same basic functions.  The main issues with the current implementation are:

• Construction of plywood
• Steel bearings exposed to apple pulp
• Difficult to clean without tearing down the entire assembly
• Chain assembly is a bit noisy
• Some shaft-sprocket connections are insecure and tend to slip

I’ve taken a first pass, as indicated in the Solidworks snapshots below.  Key aspects are:

• Frame of T slot extrusion, protected from apple pulp by side plates
• Side plates and diagonal chute plates of polypropylene
• Thin curved lower shrouds (of lexan or acrylic) contain flying pulp and give a view of the action
• Side plates, cutter drum, and secondary crusher drums remain in place; diagonal chute plates and lower shrouds easily removed for cleaning
• Key elements of drive train unchanged (and not shown yet) – I looked into switching to timing belt for the 3x speed increase between the jackshaft and the driven drums, but the sprockets for timing belt are quite expensive at McMaster compared to the amazingly economical 40 pitch roller chain sprockets that we have been using from Burden Surplus Center.  So the current plan is to get some spare sprockets and turn them down on the lathe to fit bike chain (pitch is the same, but standard 40 pitch chain is much wider than bike chain).  I suppose we could get bike sprockets and fit them to shaft collars, but that would probably be more expensive and more work.  We’ll still have the old chain as a fall back
• Easier to tension drum drive chain by moving jackshaft bearings in T slot
• (not figured out yet) Integrate a standard derailleur to tension the bike chain and allow shifting gears
• (also not figured out yet) – cam or other reciprocating mechanism for operating an automatic feed wedge – this probably won’t be a high priority at least while there are friends around who are happy to force the apples in with a wooden plunger, but it might be nice to have the interface figured out in order to add features while machining the side plates.

Ridiculously veggie lasagna

Somebody recently asked for the recipe for the veggie lasagna that we make.  The problem is that there isn’t really a recipe, and the formulation has changed significantly over time.  But, here’s a reasonable approximation.  The basic idea is to make a lasagna using homemade sauce with a ridiculous amount of veggies, both because it tastes better that way and to stretch out the cheese, which is not as good for you or for the planet, and the pasta, which by my way of thinking is mostly there for organizational purposes.

So start by making sauce in a big pot.     Our big lasagna pan is about 10×15 inches, and for this you want to end up with at least two quarts of sauce for a pan that size.  Ostensibly this is a tomato-based sauce, but by volume it is something else entirely – what it is changes depending on what’s in the fridge.  It reliably starts with a couple of chopped onions and a healthy gout of olive oil, followed by the better part of a head of garlic, minced.  Then we add whatever veggies are around – last week it was a big sack of frozen broccoli from the garden, an even bigger sack of similarly frozen zucchini, a cup or so of frozen peas,  and several carrots.  Obviously fresh is the thing in the summer, or when foraging at the grocer’s.  The structural integrity of the finished lasagna will be better if the vegetables are cut up relatively fine, especially if they start fresh. When all that is simmering along OK we add some form of tomato product – might be commercial red sauce from a jar, semi-processed tomatoes in a can, or tomato sauce we put up in jars last summer (sadly just used the last of that up).  By this time it’s usually pretty soupy, so we add somewhere in the neighborhood of a cup of TVP, which consolidates things considerably.  Then probably a couple tablespoons of one of those Italian herb mixes that someone gave us, and salt to taste, quantity depending on whether there was any in the sauce you used.  You let that simmer for a while till it’s good and thick.

So now you have a massive quantity of vaguely tomato-ish vegetable sauce.  One variation that I especially favor is to throw in between 1 and 2 cups of frozen pesto to the sauce at the end – I typically grow a patch of basil about the size of a coffee table, and by harvesting regularly end up with close to a gallon of frozen pesto  by the end of the summer, all frozen in serving-size bricks.  Round about late winter I realize we’re never going to eat that much pesto under ordinary circumstances, and it starts going into lasagnas and things.  Obviously to make or buy that much pesto would be an exorbitant expense – one of the great luxuries of the garden.  The pesto makes the sauce look kind of drab, but it tastes great.

The rest is more or less as usual.  We grate a pound of part skim mozzarella and a good sized brick of Parmesan, leaving a bit out for the top, mix in a pint tub of ricotta, and boil a pound of regular lasagna noodles.  Then start assembly, in the following order: sauce, then [pasta, sauce, cheese] n times, where n is 3 I think.  The most annoying part is breaking up the cheese finely enough, since the ricotta makes it gloppy.   There’s probably some more sensible way to do it, but I haven’t experimented in that direction.  Anyway, the key is, after the first layer of sauce, which is maybe 1/8″ thick, since it’s just there to keep the noodles from sticking to the pan, you want the layers of sauce to be at least a quarter of an inch thick, basically so they completely obscure the pasta below.  That’s the only way you’ll ever use up as much sauce as you’ve made, and it’s also how to pack the most flavor in.

When you’re dangerously close to the top of the pan, add a final layer of pasta.  Out of deference to lasagna tradition we often use plain red sauce over the last layer of noodles for brighter color, then grate on the last bit of cheese.  It bakes at 350 for a good long while, probably close to an hour, till the cheese starts to brown and the whole business starts to lift out of the pan around the edges.    That’s pretty much all there is to it.  I suspect that as time goes on we will continue to increase the ratio of vegetable to other ingredients, until it is more properly some kind of strange casserole.

Energy Hunter-Gatherers to Energy Agriculture?

Isaac Berzin (founder and creative vision behind GreenFuel Technologies in its early days, now a professor in Israel) once proposed an analogy that I thought was pretty interesting, and relevant in this time of uncertainty about our energy future, and so I report it here.

Isaac suggested that the way modern society has been using energy over the last century or more is akin to the way hunter-gatherers provided themselves with food in prehistoric times, and predicted that we will soon make a transition akin to the one that replaced hunter-gathering with agriculture – that we will begin growing our own energy in situ.  Now this obviously makes literal sense in the case of algae biofuel, where photosynthesis is actually doing the critical work.  But you don’t have to believe in the promise of algae biofuel (which is still very much in its infancy) or cellulosic ethanol (likewise) to appreciate the core insight.  I think the analogy also holds for other forms of renewable energy as well – we already get significant amounts of power from maintaining and operating our stationary, long-lived “wind farms”, and it’s not too hard to imagine an array of PV modules in the yard as a sort of  “kitchen energy garden”.  This stands in strong contrast to our present practice of nomadically scouring the global energy plain for rich herds of petroleum “food”, slaughtering, devouring and abandoning in sequence West Texas, the North Slope, the North Sea, and the Persian Gulf.

It seems to me that archaeological study of the prehistoric transition to (food) agriculture offers a dark cautionary note: recent research provides strong evidence that the size, strength, and health of humans actually took a dramatic step backwards with the transition to agriculture – see for instance this piece by Jared Diamond.  It occurred not because it was nutritionally superior (it wasn’t), but rather because primitive agriculture could support population densities sufficiently high to drive off the hunter-gatherer competition with their necessarily sparser numbers.  I don’t endorse his thesis (that the transition to agriculture was the worst mistake our species ever made), but the important point here is that the replacement of a mature hunter-gatherer technology with an immature agriculture technology was accompanied by a centuries-long transition period of acute suffering.  Once again, the transition seems to be occurring not because of inherent superiority or cost (renewable energy is an expensive pain in the butt) but for technical reasons – we’re just plain running short.  There’s further cause for concern: in the prehistoric case, the areal productivity of the new agricultural technology was truly improved relative to that of its predecessor (which was after all similarly dependent on sustainable solar “income”), while we are presently burning our fossil fuel “savings” at thousands of times the rate of formation.  Let us hope that this time we can somehow manage the coming transition without the stunted legs, rotten teeth, and epidemics of bubonic plague.

What happened to Tom Friedman?

I woke up Sunday morning to find that Mr. Flat Earth has had an epiphany:

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

When even the number one chearleader of global capitalism has finally realized that a finite planet can’t deliver an ever-increasing flow of crappy consumer goods, it’s time for a nice tall glass of cider.

Farming with horses?

For Christmas my sister got me a subscription to Small Farmer’s Journal, which is charmingly written by a character in Oregon name of Lynn Miller.  The quarterly magazine (large format, mostly black and white) contains tons of information about small farming, reprints of old articles on how to grow certain crops, and narratives from people who went back to the land and stayed there.  It took me a little while to realize that the editors have a serious soft spot for draft animals (the older issues carry the subtitle “featuring Practical Horse-farming”); in fact it seems to be a large part of the purpose.  The pages are peppered with photos of large hitches of beautiful horses plowing and harrowing soil, with a few oxen thrown in.  Now I have nothing against draft animals.  My uncle always has a team of oxen up in Mt. Vernon, and I freely admit that to a person given to romantic tendencies there is something fantastically stirring about these images of draft power.  And I am hardly one to throw stones, as a person who not so many years ago spent most of my spare time for over a year building a seventeen foot traditional wooden dory, which now sees the water once or twice a year.  And it means a lot to me that most of the wood in that boat was cut sustainably off of North End land by my father and mother, and that since we used copper rivets instead of iron nails the dory may well outlast me, given care.

All of that is by way of establishing my credentials as a person with tendencies toward picturesque anachronism. But little alarm bells go off in my brain when folks like me start promoting some anachronistic activity on grounds of practicality – to the extent of making claims that horse farming is cheaper or more practical than tractor farming – and when it begins to take on the dubious contortions of religion.  For instance, the Amish have a charming tradition of using draft animals and shunning power, but they also have a strong instinct for economic survival.  For a long time (until less than 100 years ago), it was reasonable to farm with horses and ground-driven implements – where the rotary power to run the mower or manure spreader or other implement came from the livestock, but via a rigid shaft attached to the wheels of the implement.  But as farms got bigger, horsepower could not provide enough power to drive the larger implements, and a curious contraption known as the power forecart has come into existence – a horse-drawn 2-wheel wagon with a seat and a gas or diesel engine, with the engine driving a PTO shaft and a 3 point hitch (and probably hydraulics for good measure).

Now, I have nothing against the Amish or power forecarts.  I just want us to be honest with ourselves, and say “We love working with horses and this chimerical horseflesh/motorized contraption allows us to get our farming done at a sufficient scale to be profitable while allowing us to work with the animals we love.”  Or maybe “This forecart system lets us strike a balance between economy and tradition that allows us to keep our children in farming and our social institutions intact.”  Or follow our not-so-conservative conservative rabbi friend, who might say “We use this forecart system not because it is practical, but precisely because its impracticality embodies and demonstrates our devotion to god.”  Those seem like honest, self-aware answers.  Similarly, I freely admit that my cider orchard is little more than an overgrown hobby, that I will never produce cider apples at less cost in time and money than I could buy cider, and that it would be a lot less work and more straightforward to hook my pedal-powered apple grinder up to a nice, quiet quarter-horse induction motor (hell, the flywheel already has a v-belt groove machined right in!)

So, no complaints here about anachronism, acknowledged honestly and with good humor.  But switching over to my engineering hat, my interest this morning is to try to understand whether draft livestock on small farms can and should be a part of a localized intensive agriculture future.  Out of familiarity, I’ll take the land the nascent orchard is planted on as an example – this is about 30 acres of land, but only 5-6 are cleared, and of that less than 1 acre is in any kind of active production.  By way of background, in earlier posts, I did a rough calculation suggesting that intensive agriculture would require at least one half acre per person to provide a well-balanced vegan diet.  This paper (which seems to be written by an intelligent, practical person) indicates that an average horse consumes about 4 tons of hay per year.  Most of the people in Small Farmer’s Journal seem to be using workhorses, and typically in teams of 2 or more.  A percheron being at least 50% heavier than a mill-run sporting horse (and putatively working much harder), we’d need to provide at least 6 tons of hay per year.  Yield for hay nationally appears to be around 2.5T/acre, and Maine being colder and less sunny than many places, probably 2T would be as much as you would want to assume.  So 3 acres of ground would need to be set aside to keep just one workhorse going – and it’s common to put several in a hitch to perform common farm tasks.  That’s not too surprising since even a small cat1 tractor is ~25 hp.  More than half the available land would need to be used to feed the workhorse, even though we would only need to use it every once in a while – and this is on a much bigger piece of property than many people doing local intensive agriculture will ever work.  (Eliot Coleman’s rule of thumb is that one person can tend around 2 acres maximum.)

So, it seems that the basic problem is that the quantity of land required to keep even one workhorse dwarfs the scale of a typical cottage farm.  Further, a family doing small-scale farming won’t need a horse all the time (I imagine most use is concentrated in spring and fall), but the horse will eat all that time. In contrast, a tractor only eats when you use it.  I’ve never worked with draft animals, but based on my experience doing small farm tasks with (and maintenance on) a 30-year old used diesel tractor, it is hard for me to see how draft power will be truly practical until fuel is well over an order of magnitude more expensive than it is now.  More than economics, though, the main issue is practicality.  I read somewhere that small farms taken as a whole have a -30% profit margin; that is small farmers farm out of love, and subsidize their farming with work off the farm.  Now, people who farm out of love are welcome to use whatever form of power they want, and god bless them, but my interest here is to understand whether on-farm horse power would make sense in a hypothetical future where people were operating small farms as a significant (though perhaps minority) share of family net revenue.  For many, maintaining a source of off-farm income is likely to conflict with optimal care, and a only a limited number of people will be willing to sign up for the twice-daily-without-fail routine of keeping livestock.  Even my parents (who once kept pigs, sheep, and goats) have whittled down to chickens, as the one type of livestock neighbors can be consistently found to tend (so that they can take a vacation).

One effect of the high baseline feed requirement of draft animals is that the economics improves substantially as utilization increases – that is, if you are going to have draft animals, it makes sense for them to be working much of the time.  So (again in a hypothetical future world where there were a lot more small farms), perhaps a more workable system would be to have a few teamsters in any given region, who hire out to a number of local farmers on a daily or hourly basis, perhaps partially in trade for hay and feed.  (The same thing could theoretically be arranged in cooperative hippie communes, should a scalable model ever arise for how to form and maintain them.)  But in a thought experiment comparing [guy plus two workhorses and tack] with [guy plus 20hp tractor], it’s hard seeing how the guy with the horses wins, again excepting the situation where fuel costs $100/gallon.