I’m halfway through Kunstler’s post modern novel A History of the Future. He ties in all the things we talk about on TBP and provides a glimpse into a future that Hardscrabble Farmer has already embraced. The future won’t look anything like what we have today. The unprepared will die off rapidly. Self sufficient families and small communities will survive. It’s not far off. Maybe Hardscrabble will let me earn my keep on his farm in the not too distant future.
More Hardscrabble wisdom:
One of the things we will do on occasion while working around the property is to scout out homesites for the children. Each of them has a favorite place and their reasoning for why it should be situated there. We discuss things like water, leech fields, views, construction of roads, etc.
I do not assume that each one of them will remain here on the farm, but we have made it clear that there would be nothing that would please us more than to have them pitch in with us to make the land more productive and expand our capacity in order to support the families that they will one day build for themselves. We have also made it clear that the first child to marry and have children will be given the farmhouse and that my wife and I will move into the cottage where we will continue to assist in every way possible as they become the primary stewards of the land.
When I came of age I was prepared to leave the nest, to make my own way and support myself at each level that my capacities could sustain while I decided to choose my path. I always had the support of my family, but never was I treated as a minor child again. I earned my own income, made my own decisions, selected my own path. Had my family not been careerists working for companies and government I would likely have thrown in with them as we always worked well together, but they were from the generation that “got jobs” rather than continued in the family tradition of farming that had been the staple of past generations. To this day my father is proud to say that it only took one generation for us to get back to the farm, something I know he would have loved to have done had he not followed the mid century tail chasing of a career. The photos on our walls of my children’s great-great-great grandfather and his son and his children clustered around in the dooryard smiling into the camera reflect a family living a life not much different than the one we live today.
Multiple generations working together, living together, sharing resources, supporting each other in times of difficulty, extolling one another to do their best, passing on traditions and skill sets are force multipliers that cannot be quantified by government statisticians. On Friday of this past week we slaughtered and processed 100 chickens in a day, working under the light of the full moon at the end and filled our freezer with enough meat to carry us through another year. Last night the children cut up herbs from the garden while I parted the birds and my wife prepared vegetables from the garden for our supper. When we ate together the joy we shared at that table was palpable- there was pride, delight in each other’s company and an epicurean delight in the aromas and flavors of something we were responsible for jointly- from the incubation of the eggs in May until the final feathering under the orange super moon of July.
I can see where things are heading because we are lucky enough to have perspective. In the not too distant future children will become as disposable as spouses are today. The very idea of family will become as quaint and passe as hoop skirts and horse drawn buggies. The Brave New World future that the elites have planned for us will become the norm and most of humanity still playing along with their idea of society will become as isolated and atomized as a current resident of Super Max. But out here in the cracks and crevices of the world there will still be remnants clinging to the world of tradition like a weed in a rock, waiting for inevitable return to a world that functions as it was designed. Our society is on a path to its own destruction because it is built like that proverbial house on a foundation of sand.
Our oldest son is circumnavigating Mont Blanc somewhere in the Chamonix Valley and he is hopefully getting his fill of life without our support, learning to be his own man. His siblings who were at first grateful for his departure- he acts every inch of the eldest child- speak of him daily now in glowing terms, wondering how he is doing, what he is seeing and when he will be home. Last night the youngest boy went missing for a few hours after dark and when we found him he was sleeping in his brother’s room, his face pressed against a thread bare stuffed animal that his brother keeps on his bed. We let him stay there and smiled at the thought that as small as he is now, soon he will be grown like his brother. As for the eldest this may be the first of his separations from us leading to a life somewhere else, or it may be a simple break to refocus on what he has left behind, only time will tell, but for our family he will always be welcome at 18, 26 or 85 to a life in the shelter of our shared history.
HS, your words always lift me up. Thank you. I can relate to much of what you describe on your son’s leaving the nest. My own single offspring, a 20-year old, is preparing to once again go off to college, having spent his freshman year away but returning almost every weekend to visit a girlfriend who went to school locally. This past year he stayed local as well, living here at home while attending community college. Next month he leaves to live on campus at a 3rd school about 2 hours away, but won’t be coming home much. So the wife and I will suffer another set of withdraw symptoms. Mixed feelings of him going his own way, yet a loss of his presence on a daily basis. Such is the cycle of parenting.
I’m not a farmer nor do I have the financial resources to move to another country besides my mom would never leave. I can probably last longer then most people .Maybe a year at best then I guess my only wisdom will be my 308 M1a and my Colt 45 .Maybe the Lord will go ahead and take me on to heaven before I get that disparate.
I didn’t know A History of the Future was released yet? Kunstler give you a pre-release copy?
WHY on earth would you do this:
“On Friday of this past week we slaughtered and processed 100 chickens in a day, working under the light of the full moon at the end and filled our freezer with enough meat to carry us through another year.”
IF you have the land, chickens cost nearly nothing to feed, leave the meat “on the hoof” so to speak, it’s fresher, as half of your stored chickens are going to be freezer burned by the time you eat them and you have the added cost of keeping them frozen for all that time.
@A, admin provided a hyperlink to Amazon for the book in the opening paragraph of this post.
Kunstler sent me a proof copy over a month ago.
I don’t think it is for sale until August.
It is already for sale at Amazon in 3 formats: Kindle, hardcover, and audio CD.
Click on the link in the first paragraph of this post.
It just won’t be released till Aug 5. I think I’ll wait for the library to get it.
Anon guy.
Several reasons.
We live in a cold weather climate where Winter lasts close to five months. During the warm months the chickens are free to forage on grasses and insects rather than supplying them with feed, which costs money and produces a flavorless bird in comparison. Keeping chickens during cold weather months requires housing them in confinement, which isn’t healthy, uses additional bedding, requires clean-outs during Winter months when the snow would make it impossible and requires additional energy consumption by having to provide additional heat and light for the birds that is more economically utilized by keeping the freezer running. Once the freeze sets in we unplug the freezers and let Nature take care of that problem. Keeping layers over Winter is a big enough task, trying to do the same with meat birds is prohibitive.
We are a small family farm which means the most precious commodity is our time. To set up and process a bird at a time is wasteful. When you do a larger number at one time you conserve fuel necessary for scalding, you produce enough waste to compost, you only have one set up and one cleanup rather than a hundred (the same amount of tools and equipment is required for one or a hundred), you get everyone together at a single time rather than try and orchestrate that kind of cooperation on multiple occasions, and you get to do it in the best weather possible (try doing it when it’s 10 below and you want a chicken for dinner). Not to mention the hundred other obligations that are seasonally based, like firewood, hay, etc. that preclude harvesting every meal as they occur.
If packaged properly and frozen at the right temperature there is no freezer burn- at least that we have experienced. Plus we produce some surplus to sell to neighbors and friends to cover our expenses. And we’re energy self sufficient so it costs us nothing to keep them frozen.
Family farming is not like being a hunter/gatherer although we frequently practice seasonal hunting gathering techniques ( I just came in from picking five quarts of high bush blueberries in the rain because they were ready) and chickens are domesticated animals with specific limitations.
Doing them at one sitting is logical, expedient, purposeful and fulfills the requirements of our family without having to be slaves to corporate food production.
Thanks for asking.
“I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.”
Benjamin Franklin
bb: you have an excellent taste in firearms!
HS,
Excuse my ignorance (about farming and much else), but are leech fields good or bad? Only thing I know about leeches is using them as fishing bait.
@ hardscrabble farmer
Hey thanks for taking the time to respond! It’s good to hear how other people do things. I guess I just made some automatic assumptions like you had larger animals as well and were keeping a barn warmed anyway, etc. This was my case, we had to keep a barn heated anyway so having the birds running around in there also wasn’t a big deal.
I didn’t know the part about the “proper freezing temperature” and such to prevent freezer burn, I will have to look this up!
Thanks!
Ah Hardscralbble, how I wish for such a life. Such connection to the earth, the family, the sacred.
For the past couple years I’ve had the real pleasure of working with my son on rehabbing a home. Plus he is my Jack of all trades around my home and my hub’s business, so we work together all the time. We speak of a life like yours. Who knows what the future will truly be, but one thing I know for sure, my son is the only person on this earth that has always had my back. That might be because I’ve always had his.
Thanks for sharing HF
Iska, he meant “leach fields” which are part of a house’s septic system. If he builds like we did, it will be a constructed wetland with leach beds. In our state, we’re required to have a standard septic as back-up, but have never had to use it.
Iska –
A leech field, aka drain field, is part of your septic system when you are not on city sewer.
Some thought needs to be put into their location. It would be a major bummer to find out that where you put it is the best location for your garden, shop, or driveway after it is installed.
as for leech field good or bad….
when they are working – good.
when they are not – very bad.
When I was in Los Angeles, I saw 6′ rows of corn growing between the street and the sidewalk, amazing.
There are small community farm plots in LA. However, when push comes to shove, all those starving eaters will crash the plots like hungry locusts and consume any and everything in site. I tell my relatives, who have garden plots, that this is the logical outcome. The municipalities should devote more money and time getting their residents to take up plot farming. But, I can see that the supermarkets and farmers being against that. When the money collapses, the supermarkets and farmers, as a source of food, will dry up. That’s when we can take to eating each other.
I’m two years behind in making my cold boxes, but am determined to do it this summer. Living is hard there is so much to do. We are so interdependent. Second to out right war, the destruction of money, which makes trade and civilization possible, is the worse thing that can happen to a people. I curse the Keynesians. I curse the FED and their accomplices for what they did. The American people were asleep at the wheel. When the American people have gnawing hunger pang, and their EBT cards are worthless, maybe then they will be focused on the calamity that has befallen them, albeit too late.
Looking forward to the Kunstler book. I read both the other novels and enjoyed them. Just post-apocalyptic adventure romps really, and not too reality based. But they made me think.
Leach fields are generally bad, imho, these days, when we need to be conserving our water. Nevertheless, a toilet that flushes is a nice convenience. I personally have two leach fields, but out in the country I’m slowly taking steps that will turn the one out there into a historical footnote in the annals of sewage disposal.
LD built me a greywater collection sump the week after the SUN meeting, which now catches the drainage from the new shower I built. Eventually the sinks and the washing machine will connect to that. A waterless toilet will complete the changeover, and the septic leach field will be unnecessary.
All water to the gardens.
Compost toilet may be the answer, although I never saw one in action. The new toilets are 1.28 gal flush.
They are raising hell in the sewage pipes. Sanitary engineers have complained that there isn’t enough water per flush to push the solids down the pipe, therefore ‘transport problems’, in ASSE engineering terms. One should install a 1.6 gal flush if possible and make it a 2 flush lever, one for liquid wastes and one for solid wastes.
Sewage piping is 3″ to 4″ in diameter. The engineering reccomendation, now, is 2 1/2″ pipes to keep the water from running around solids in the soil pipe with 1.28 gal per flush.
You think oil is precious, water is doubly so. So, live on the Olympic peninsula.
If I was single I would honestly be looking up HSF to see if he needs a farm hand. There is no better purpose in life than self sufficient productivity.
I’m a fucking scientist, I’m so damned dependent on others its not even funny.
In the collapses I have read about people were afraid of going outside for fear of being robbed or murdered. Especially in the economic collapses that led to civil war.In civil war hungry people will take what’s in your garden. Farmers become targets and anyone else who have things of real value. Most of you will not be able to grow a garden . Most farmers will not be able to farm for fear of being shot.I hope our collapse doesn’t trun into a civil war but it might . Read the first hand accounts of people whohave been in these situations. Theirs to much magical thinking about what your going to do.
TPC, my brother and I are both scientists, and you’d be amazed how helpful that is on a farm, particularly chemistry. One of the reasons we can grow a clean crop with few pesticides is our understanding of insect, bacteria and fungal life cycles and dependence on temperature, humidity and other factors. Farmers need to be mathematicians, chemists, veterinarians, mechanics, marketers and managers all at the same time.
A couple of notes on leech fields and sewage disposal fro experience:
Because we live in an area made up of glacial till the majority of our ground that isn’t ledge (exposed bedrock scraped clean by the glaciers) is made up of eskars and drumlins. This material is excellent for drainage and when siting a field there is no better location than one that percs well. It should always be downhill from the dwelling and as far from the well head as possible, never less than 300 feet.
The septic tank that holds solids should be sized according to level of use (number of occupants, bathrooms in house, etc). Gray water- such as that from bathtubs, shower pans and laundry should NEVER be routed into a solids tank, but rather routed directly into a basement drain or runoff line. The reason for this is twofold- one is to relieve the pressure on the tank and the second is one not many people consider. The solids tank is meant for allowing solids to both settle out so that the remaining gray water can pass through the D-box without clogging the drain pipes. Unless you do all of your washing with baking soda, most commercially available soaps, detergents and cleansers contain some kind of germ killing compound. Solids are broken down by bacterial decomposition, filling your system with the very substance that negates this principle and prevents further breakdown of solids will shorten the lifetime of the field by at least 50% if not more.
Hope this helps.
Honestly I would rather be in the thick of the collapse then on a remote farm fearing the day the savages finally snuff me out.
Our revolution is going to need heroes that step up to lead and restore order. If we don’t have enough patriots on the ground exacting positive change then we will form a tyrannical government even worse then the current one.
To hide on a farm and refuse to help your fellow citizens is selfish
I’m looking forward to die a glorious death.
Dunce
Your name is appropriate.
If you haven’t heard it, Sally Fallon’s “raw milk saves family farms” talk at the E.F. Schumaker is worth a listen: https://archive.org/details/SallyFallonMorell
Listening to Gone With the Wind now (awesome book). The situation others here worry about happened: the “Yankees” took everything from the southern farms: the livestock, the stored food, and trampled the fields. No one can store enough ammunition to protect against that. What was the best solution then is probably the best now: good relations with neighbors. After all, the marauding thugs can’t get to everyone via foot (even if they know where to go) and some food won’t be stolen. Eventually the thugs will run out of easily stolen food and through hunger and injuries they’ll die off, not of course before they’ve inflicted a lot of damage. As long as you band together with your neighbors, you can grow enough to survive even if most is stolen.