The Scythe

This is Brian again. (Note: so far, all these posts have been from me, but soon, you should start seeing posts from other folks who live at Camp Pleasant...Adam, Berea, Sean, or Melissa...)

I am absolutely obsessed with farming. Farming, to me, is a lifestyle that strives to live in balance with the ecosystems around you, while at the same time recognizing where excess is and how best to distribute that excess and feed people GOOD FOOD. It is a subtle art of balancing biodiversity and fertility with harvest and consumption.
I like to consider that we are humans that live in a specific age. It hasn't always been like this, nor is this current culture one that is likely to stick around for very long. I see our age as one that is entrenched in an industrialization that is eating up its resource base at an astoundingly fast rate, while at the same time, we are awakening to that fact and beginning to call for solutions.
Sadly, many of our solutions are just as harmful as the industrialized models we seek to replace. So we must remain vigilant when we activate. We should definitely steer this ship away from its current course, but not any old direction will do.

Back to farming. What does all this mean when it comes to producing food on a piece of land? It means a lot. Today I want to share some experiences we are having with trying to find alternatives to using fossil fuels to prepare fields for production agriculture.

In the above picture, you can see "hard red winter wheat". It was planted last fall, by the farmer before us, as a cover crop, and now, at the beginning of May, it is beginning to make seeds. It has only just begun, though, and the seed heads are still green and milky.
We want to plant vegetables and grains where this winter wheat is. Conventional thinking would tell us to plow and till it. And we have used some small machinery to prep some areas like this. But today we are trying an alternative: the scythe! In this pic, Adam is sharpening his scythe. He has a really nice scythe. A nice scythe makes ALL the difference.

Here's Sean, helping out. The area we are mowing will get a few different treatments: some will be tilled and planted into corn and sorghum ("conventional route"), some will be mulched and transplanted into (fun, risky alternative), and some areas we will spread seed (buckwheat, dry beans, clover/rye) first, then scythe. We're also leaving some areas so that we can harvest the winter wheat for flour, chicken feed, beer, and, of course, for future seed.

This pic shows the wheat stubble after scything. It is 4-12 inches tall. Again, having a good scythe makes all the difference. Having a few people working together is a good way to go, too. Scything is extremely rewarding and it feels amazing for your arms and back.

This is the beginning of Berea's vegetable patch. Berea is planting watermelons mounds here, as well as transplants of several veggies. We've unrolled a roll bale on top of the stubble, so that the area is covered with 6-12 inches of hay (young hay with few seeds in it, hopefully). We're hoping the hay will kill the wheat stubble and any weeds that are in the field. We'll see...!

Sunrise at Camp Pleasant

Some pics from Sean's eye...

KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN

We have been keeping chickens at Camp Pleasant for about a year and a half. We started with about a dozen beautiful hens, who grew up happy. When full size, we realized our coop seemed a bit small (even though most chicks are probably given much less space). So, we started to simply open the door and let them roam free, during the day.
There were a couple of problems with this "wild and free" range practice. One, they don't give a rats ass about wildflowers, and will dig up a perfectly good, rare wildflower to get at a bug. And two, they get picked off by racoons, and foxes.
Racoons turned out to be some special predators. Even when we stopped letting the chickens out, the racoon returned, and figured out how to climb a fence, pry netting from fence, and open a latched door. By the time we got our chickens secured again, and caught the racoon, we had lost 5 chickens.
So, last year, when a friend had some extra "pullets" (teenage chickens), I brought some home to join our flock. I made the assumption that all the chickens would be laying hens... But we ended up with 5 roosters. Five roosters is way too much for a confined coop, and they soon started to terrorize the hens. Our beloved laying hens became victims of an onslaught of abuse and straight up gang rape. We could take it no longer.

That's me, Brian, on the left, holding the first chicken that we killed. It was the most aggressive...a fact that I thought might make me feel better about killing it. We tried to keep the "best chicken", but when it came down to it, deciding who gets to live and who has to die transcends reason. Fact is, you are killing something that doesn't deserve it.
It helps to have someone like Rob (at right) around, who has some experience, who grew up eating fresh chicken, and who can help keep people cheery, even when their hands are covered with blood.
I'll spare you all the bloody pictures taken during the kills, but share this picture because I think it does a good job of showing the reality of slaughter...not only do you kill a living thing, but you immediately "process" it into something you can eat. Here we are busy cutting, plucking, soaking, and gutting two roosters.
Several hours later, we have fried chicken, and Sean takes his best shot at gnawing through the tough skin of a year-old rooster. The meat tasted amazingly GOOD, although it was very chewy. We had fried chicken for several days. It was an interesting feeling, to go to work with lunches of meat that I grew and killed.

I've been everything in terms of eating: vegetarian, vegan, raw (ok, for only a couple weeks), freegan, and localvore. Now, I'm somewhere in between localvore and freegan...although we all buy more crap than we'd like to admit. This experience definitely made me question meat eating. But more to the point, it made me question my domestication of chickens altogether.
We like things to be replinishable and sustainable, and we LOVE eggs and chicken manure. (Chickens are undoubtedly some of the most helpful creatures for the small farm/homestead.) To keep the chicken flock alive and going, we need at least one rooster to fertilize the eggs, and when those eggs hatch, we get a mix of sexes, and end up with too many boys to maintain a healthy population of laying hens. I cannot see a way around the death of the young boys to keep the girls happy. Of course, this is an insane line of logic, and so I am led to question the entire paradigm of domestication of this species. Is there a way to keep laying hens, and to hatch your own chicks, without killing roosters? Or is domestication problematic from the get-go, and something we should steer away from? Or does the consumption of these animals make sense?

I certainly don't have the answers to these questions, but I am glad that I am surrounded by people who pose and consider them, together.