In case anybody else missed it, like I did, Gene Logsdon’s great short story, The Man Who Created Paradise, has been published online, in it’s entirety: http://organictobe.org/index.php/2008/09/02/the-man-who-created-paradise-by-gene-logsdon/

We are pleased to announce that over the next year, the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (www.cefs.ncsu.edu) has been funded to reach out across the state and together with our partners ask: What will it take to build a sustainable local food economy in North Carolina?

Join us for the 2009 North Carolina Farm to Fork Summit.  We’ll be working on the Statewide Action Plan for Building a Local Food Economy.  See you there.

I’ve had chickens on my little urban homestead going on about 7 months now. When I contemplate what I’ve learned it’s really quite amazing.

I learned that chickens can escape from a crudely built chicken run easily, even in spaces you think are too small for them. They especially can figure out how to get through holes in the roof. I use a dog run now and it seems to be really effective as well as very spacious.

I learned that it takes a while for chickens to get accustomed to you, but once they figure out that when you come out goodies arrive, they will swarm you.

I learned that waiting for straw to go on sale after Halloween isn’t worth the trouble of not having straw for the chicken area. Just buy it when you see it at the stores. (Don’t forget you can also use dried leaves, but they do get shredded pretty quickly)

I learned that you don’t need to feed them layer feed. They don’t even really like it. They prefer scratch grain mixed with oyster shells just fine.

I learned that being in a cold area means you have to change the water container twice a day because it freezes, but that still doesn’t make the heated water dishes worth it (to me).

I learned that chickens (mine at least) don’t like the light on in the coop, and even when you turn it on when it is super cold, they like it so little that they will actually sleep on top of the coop in the cold to avoid the light.

I learned that chickens won’t use the nesting box you have planned for them so either. Just deal with it or, make every nesting box they do use unusable until they eventually use the one you want them to.

Do any of you chicken farmers have any other thoughts to add?

Join the discussion in The Barnyard

No, nothing like the movie. I’m talking about actual buckets. Five gallon food-grade buckets with gamma-seal lids, to be exact. Six of them.

Maybe you’ve heard of the concept of a bug-out bag. It’s essentially the bag you grab to take with you when the hurricane is coming. Or the wildfires. Or the zombies. It’s an emergency kit. But instead of a duffel bag, ours are in buckets. The bucket itself is pretty useful in an emergency, for anything from water storage to a stool or table to a makeshift toilet. Or even a drum, if you get bored enough. I often hear that after the initial rush, emergency situations can get unspeakably boring for those affected.

The bucket is also watertight, or very nearly so, and rigid, so the contents don’t risk getting smushed. And you’ll be amazed at how much can fit in one. The gamma seal lids make it wonderfully easy to get into the buckets without using any tools or four-letter words. The last thing you need in an emergency is to be wrestling with your bug out kit to get at its contents.

Why six buckets? We’ve got one for each family member (two adults, three kids), and one “communal” bucket with more general supplies. Overkill? Maybe. But there are all kinds of scenarios that could require us to leave at different times, or take two vehicles, or otherwise split up. Having one container per person makes it easy to make sure that spare glasses, medications, clothing, diapers, or comfort items stay with the person who might need them.

What kinds of emergencies are we trying to cover? Who knows. It’s the old Boy Scout motto: Be prepared. The idea is to cover a wide range of possibilities. In an actual emergency, you may not have time or you may be too stressed to think of all the things you might need. By planning ahead, you are thinking and acting in a calm and rational state, so that if the worst happens, you only have to grab and go.

Does this sound like paranoia? Two words: Hurricane Katrina. Two more: September Eleventh. But really, bad things happen on a smaller scale all the time: Housefires, floods, chemical spills, tornadoes. Your odds are low, but don’t assume they’re zero. And with as crazy as things seem to be getting in the economy, where “biggest _____ since the Great Depression” is gradually getting replaced with “bigger _____ than the Great Depression”, predictability is kind of going out the window.

Now I should say that not everything you might want in an emergency can fit in a bucket (sleeping bag), and for some things it’s not practical to store them there (birth certificate). So I’ve also made a “Grab List” to be kept with the buckets. The Grab List is just sort of a brainstorming tool that you can scan during an actual emergency, to jog your memory. On it are anything from the practical (cooler, boots, water filter) to the sentimental (wedding photos, baby pictures) to the more frivolous (books, MP3 player, favorite toy). The list should be ordered from most important / most likely to be missed down to the trivial, so that if you only have a few minutes, you can just stop reading before the end of the list. And when making the list, remember that your future self may not be thinking clearly when reading it, so put things like “cell phone with charger” or “wedding album (top of bookshelf).”

The contents of the kids’ buckets are much different than the adults’. They’ll need less stuff to begin with, and less of their stuff is likely to be critical, so you can always throw in some extra goodies to get them through what is bound to be a stressful time. (Don’t neglect the adults in this regard either, but remember the kids are just kids.) If you have kids, imagine the difference it might make to their mental state – and yours – if the scary emergency is suddenly a cross between a slumber party and a holiday.

By the same token, imagine the difference it might make for you in an emergency, to be calmly grabbing a few buckets rather than scampering around frantically trying to get your brain to figure out ten things at once.

In deciding what goes in the adults’ buckets vs. the communal bucket, it often comes down to practicality. If it’s cheap and / or easy to build in redundancy, go for it. Remember, we’re trying to cover, at least to some extent, the possibility of having to split up, because you just never know. In some cases, I had the same item in both the adult buckets and the communal bucket because it was trivial to do so. That way you’re not thinking, “So who gets the bucket with the toilet paper?”

Oh, and one thing not included is First Aid items. I have two pre-assembled First Aid kits stored with the buckets. I also included a very basic printed First Aid Booklet with each. On my Grab List is “Where There Is No Doctor”, which can be purchased or downloaded for free here. or purchased new & used here.

So on to the actual lists. These are examples, and you can always adjust to suit your needs or the types of emergencies you feel susceptible to.

Kid’s Bucket (Example):

Medications
Spare glasses
Children’s Tylenol
Children’s multivitamin
Bowl, Plate, Cup
Silverware
Activity books
Crayons
Pen & Paper
Poncho
Towel / cloth
T-shirt
Sweatshirt / sweater
Jeans
Underwear (x2) (or diapers / pullups)
Socks (x2)
Toothbrush
Toothpaste
Scarf
Hat
Mittens
Sports drink (for hydration)
Baby formula & bottles
Snacks (non-perishable)
Toys / Games

Adult’s Bucket (Example):

Atlas & state map
Addresses, phone numbers, & directions to places you might need or want to go
Compass
Bowl & Plate
Silverware
Thermal coffee mug
Multi-spice shaker
Bug spray
Pepper spray / mace
Can opener
Cards
Dice
Cash, including coins
All-purpose folding knife
Knife sharpener
Duct tape
Electrical tape
All-purpose glue
Super glue
Emergency blanket (mylar)
General purpose soap (like “camp soap”)
Hand sanitizer
Cough drops
Dental floss
Deodorant
Toilet paper
Toothbrush
Toothpaste
Lip balm
Headlamp (or substitute flashlight, but I like the headlamps)
Medications
Vitamins
Nail clippers
Spare glasses
Pens & Paper
Scissors
Screwdriver
Towel / cloth
T-shirt
Sweatshirt / sweater
Jeans
Underwear (x2)
Socks (x2)
Poncho
Hat, Scarf, Gloves
Work Gloves
Water purification drops
Waterproof match case w/matches
Lighter
Magnesium fire starter
Candle
Whistle
“Girl stuff” (*)
Condoms (**)
A distracting paperback
Snacks (non-perishable)
Sports drink (for hydration)
Cash, including coins

(*) Menstrual pads can be used as emergency bandages.

(**) Besides their intended use, condoms have other uses in an emergency. If they are not lubricated or otherwise treated, they can hold water. You can also use them to waterproof something (like a bandage). Or there’s always balloon animals.

Yes, it all fits. Tip: Put the clothes in first. You probably won’t need them right away, and that way you can smash ‘em down as much as you want without fear of crushing anything else. And pick compact snacks, or keep them in a separate bag for easier rotation.

You’ll notice the clothing choices are kind of specific. Jeans are more durable than, say, sweats, and a sweater can go over a t-shirt when it’s chilly, and be removed when it’s warm. You’ll also notice the snacks are not at all specific. Don’t worry about nutrition. Worry about calories and comfort. Remember this is for short-term emergencies, not long-term.

Communal Bucket (Example):

AA batteries
AAA batteries
Emergency blanket (mylar)
Emergency radio (crank or similar)
Filtered water bottle
50-foot cord
Folding shovel
General purpose lotion (Curel)
Hand sanitizer
Cough drops
Anti-Diarrhea medicine
Decongestant
Anti-inflamatory / pain reliever(s) of choice
Laxative
Mouthwash
Camp shower
Lighters
Matches
Candles
Mirror
Pens & Paper
Folding mini-scissors
Duct tape
Sewing kit
Scissors
Hammer
Pliers (needlenose)
Pliers (slipjoint)
Screwdriver (with multiple tips, or else multiple screwdrivers)
Wrench (adjustable)
Zip ties
Cable saw
Trash bags (small)
Trash bags (large)
Clock (manual-wind)
Cash, including coins

I primarily used two books in putting this all together (The Crisis Preparedness Handbook, and When Technology Fails), though I did glance at a few other lists and add in my own ideas. Remember, this is not a definitive list: Feel free to add, omit, adjust, and rearrange as you see fit. If you have any suggestions for things that are missing, feel free to say so in the comments.

Compiling all this stuff can be spread out over time, and as budget allows. That’s the advantage of advance planning. Now that ours are just about done, I have to say that I worry a little less about Bad Things. And that by itself is probably worth the money spent.

“Mom!!!!!!” I cringed as I heard the horrified voice of my teenaged daughter. She was in the bathroom and I knew what would be coming. I walked into the bathroom and watched with slight amusement as she tried to coax any drop of water from the empty faucet. “You mean there is NOOOOOO water? What about hot water?”

I gently explained to her that there was in fact running water — in the spring house and that she was welcome to run and get it.  I would be more than happy to warm it on the wood stove so that we would have hot water. Of course, I understood that she was dismayed that we did not have immediate water coming out of our faucets (there is such immediate gratification in a little thing such as running water).  Like many teenage girls, she prided herself upon her appearance and this decision to live without so much took away the pleasure she found in grooming herself. Fortunately, we have a good relationship and she let my joking slide off her shoulders.

When we bought the house, we understood that there would be little things that we would have to learn to do or do without; running water among them. The Amish had a system jerry-rigged to provide running water with the use of a pressure tank and a diesel engine. We did not like the safety issues that this system provided us. So, we decided to forego running water: hot and cold.

The lack of running water meant that we needed to go to the spring and carry jugs of water, we would heat our water on our kitchen stove as well as our living room “heater.” The lack of running water meant bathing in “bucket baths” (sitting in a bathtub with a bucket of water and bathing oneself), or using a 5-gallon solar shower which we filled with heated water. We would do dishes by heating water on the stove and then filling dishpans of water. The rinse water would be saved and used for the flushing of the toilet, which was sparingly flushed.

Adjusting to a life where we had to work for our water was not easy — often we recalled late at night that we needed some water for brushing teeth or flushing the toilet. This would mean trudging through knee high snow by the glow of moonlight to the spring house. Over time we learned. We adjusted our routines and became adept at managing our water.

The other day, my teenaged daughter turned to me and commented that going without water wasn’t as difficult as she thought it would be. I gently smiled as a recalled those first horrid days without water. I felt confident in our new skills — we learned and adapted, and could adapt again.

What does a small farmer look like?

Well, according to Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas):

“That small family farmer is about 5′2″…and he’s a retired airline pilot and sits on his porch on a glider reading Gentleman’s Quarterly — he used to read the Wall Street Journal but that got pretty drab — and his wife works as stock broker downtown. And he has 40 acres, and he has a pond and he has an orchard and he grows organic apples. Sometimes there is a little more protein in those apples than people bargain for, and he’s very happy to have that.”

By contrast, here’s the picture Senator Roberts paints of a big farmer:

“That person is in Iowa. He’s got 2,000 acres and he farms and he farms with his dad. Two brothers are gone because they can’t really sustain that on the farm. His counterpart in Kansas, in my part of the country, has 10,000 acres. And his tractor costs about $350,000. It’s amazing, in terms of the costs. But these folks are the folks who produce the food and fiber for America and a troubled and hungry world.”

You can read more at The Ethicurean.

So what do small farmers actually look like – as opposed to the ones Senator Roberts’ comic book?

You can add your own photos by uploading to Flickr with the tag robertsmeetsmallfarmers

The following is an interview with Albert Bates conducted as part of the process of writing A Nation of Farmers, by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton which is available for pre-order now and will be published in March of 2009 by New Society Publishers. An edited version of this interview appears in the book.

Albert Bates’s latest book is The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times. Bates is described as:

an influential figure in the intentional community and ecovillage movements. A lawyer, author and teacher, he has been director of the Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and of the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee since 1994.

Bates has been a resident of The Farm since 1972. A former attorney, he argued environmental and civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and drafted a number of legislative Acts during a 26-year legal career. The holder of a number of design patents, Bates invented the concentrating photovoltaic arrays and solar-powered automobile displayed at the 1982 World’s Fair. He served on the steering committee of Plenty International for 18 years, focussing on relief and development work with indigenous peoples, human rights and the environment. An emergency medical technician (EMT), he was a founding member of The Farm Ambulance Service. He was also a licensed Amateur Radio operator. More on Albert Bates.

Albert Bates

Spring 2008

A Nation of Farmers: I wanted to start by asking about something I’ve heard you say in other interviews.A lot of other people, even some of the cheery folks, tend to talk about peak oil specifically in really gloomy, sad terms.You tend to talk about it as a potentially positive development for humankind, and I wondered if you could talk about why.

Albert Bates: There are a few reasons behind that I think everybody at some point has to go through the process of having the realization.That may come as kind of a rude awakening, or it may come as “Aha, I told you so!”, but at some point everybody goes through it. It tends to deepen as time goes on, and people have their own periods of weeping and gnashing the teeth, but then you have to cope, you have to get up and do something about it. I think the more important thing is to have an attitude that something can still be done. You can’t exclude the possibility that the future is still malleable, that there is still an opportunity for positive change if we exert our capacity or our abilities to do that.

I think it’s important to paint a positive vision for the future to galvanize the kinds of changes that people are capable of, rather than to focus on the various dystopias, which is all too common in peak oil literature. We’re going to have to talk about energy and energy descent, and that’s ultimately about energy ascent — which is to say re-energizing. Re-energizing communities and culture, re-energizing the way we go through our lives so that we’re much more of our human selves, so that the separation that we’ve lost with nature is repaired. And that’s the key to realistically embracing the possibilities of our situation rather than being overwhelmed by the kinds of challenges that our situation presents us with.

That’s part of it. And then the other piece of it, this whole idea of neurological evolution and the way that the human brain works and hormones and things like that. One of the kinds of things that we’re investigating in recent years has been the feedback mechanisms, the chemical stimulators within the brain. What we’re learning, slowly, over a long period of time now, is that people who have a pessimistic outlook tend to close off parts of their brain that would normally function to provide alternatives, lots of ideas. And people who have optimistic attitudes tend to produce the kinds of body chemicals that stimulate the creative centers in the brain and produce the kinds of ideas that might actually provide solutions for some of the problems that are confronting us. So what we tend to do by being pessimistic is create a self-fulfilling prophecy that we cannot get out because we’re stuck. If we actually have an optimistic outlook, even though it’s unrealistic, it has a better chance in the long term of succeeding than even a very cautious attitude.

ANOF: It’s reinforced even by biology and chemistry! That’s very interesting. Well, you certainly have a positive vision for the future and you’re working towards it. Your most recent book, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, talks about preparing for a transition to a new way of being, to a new way of living. Could you talk in broad terms about what that transition itself might look like? I think some people have the expectation that we’re going to flip a switch and things are going to be post-carbon.

AB: Yeah, it’s not actually going to go that easily. I think that’s kind of wishful thinking, and I think the key theme that I’m harping on these days when I go out and talk or lecture or give permaculture courses or speak to groups of students is that what we need more of is resilience. That’s essentially the quality of defense in depth that allows a community to provide for most of its essential needs: food, energy, water, raw materials, from multiple sources, most of them local. So that in the event of large-scale system failures, collapse is averted because there’s smaller-scale, local community resilience, and that has the wherewithal to fend for itself.

Getting to that, that idea of resilience, actually means traveling back on a development path that we had previously gone the opposite direction on. In a sense it’s kind of a reversal, but at the same time, it’s something that we are familiar with, that we know how to do, because we’ve been there before. We actually have a lot of things that we’ve developed in the last century of high-tech, fossil-fueled, civilized progress, and we can apply many of those same kinds of things to this new paradigm of living locally and having multiple resilient systems.

To give you an example, the bicycle. The bicycle has advanced hugely in the last 20 years and even more in the last 50 years. If you look at that kind of progress and you say, ok, apply that now to getting to the post office to pick up the mail, or the postman delivering the mail, or the cop on the beat instead of going around in a cruiser being on a bicycle. That kind of thing is actually more doable now than it would have been back when everyone had a single gear clunker that weighed a quarter of their own body weight. At the same time, I don’t want to completely throw out those heavy-duty steel frame models. Arguably they won the Vietnamese their independence. They were the workhorses that carried artillery shells up the mountains to Dien Bien Phu and ran supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail through all the B-52 craters.

ANOF: Are you at all concerned about the loss of knowledge concerning low-tech technologies that could come into play? I’m thinking here everything from pottery making to just even basic food production and farming skills, because we haven’t been doing that.

AB: No, I’m not in the least, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve had the benefit of having had a forty-year experience with that which many other people don’t have. And so I have a certain level of confidence and ease that many people who have not had that forty-year experience may not.Let me break that down for you with some history.

The Farm started here in Tennessee in 1971. It came out of an exodus, a hippy exodus from the cities — San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, New York’s East Village, and so forth, and arrived here at this cattle farm in the middle of the forest where land was 70 dollars an acre. And for hippys, that was less than the cost of a kilo at that time, to get an acre of land, you know? We didn’t understand at that point, myself included, why it was so cheap, and I’m including myself even though I didn’t actually get here until 1972 when I shelved my law career in favor of retiring young and came out to the country.

The reason that the land was 70 dollars an acre was that it had no soil. It was essentially a clear-cut in an oak forest, made a century earlier, and it had actually been clear-cut several times by the 1950s and turned into a cattle ranch which pounded the ground in an area with 50 inches of rain in winter and dry dusty summers, to the point where there wasn’t any soil left, just chalky clay and gravel. Our first objective, our necessity for the first couple of years here, was simply to make soil.

We got horses from the Amish. I was somebody who grew up in Connecticut and my high school sport was equestrian arts like dressage and stadium jumping and that sort of thing. And so I was enlisted by the horse crew to work behind draft horses in the field, and to teach others how to work with horses and care for them properly.

There was a certain amount of carryover there, I mean a horse has certain kinds of needs that I knew how to fill, but I had to learn other skills that you don’t get when you work a yearling on a lunge line. I had to learn that gee and haw turn them right and left. I had to learn how to work with old-fashioned harness and double-tree hitches. I had to learn how to make canvas collars because we were vegetarians and actually pretty serious hard-core vegans, and we didn’t believe in using leather at all. So we replaced everything we had that was leather with something that was not leather, mostly riveted canvas and nylon.We had to re-make all of the harness and tack.

So I learned how to do that. My friend Eli Gifford went off to Maryland to learn to be a ferrier so he could come back and make horseshoes. And we learned how to make crops with draft horses, and in three years time we took a bunch of art majors and English majors and by 1974 we were nearly food self-sufficient. We grew pretty much everything we needed to feed 800 to 1000 people, the exceptions being things like rice and fruit, which we also would have gotten around to eventually. Fruit takes a while, but we had probably 20 acres planted in fruit trees and bushes.

We had to go out and buy toilet paper , matches, light bulbs, salt and things like that. But by 1976 we had a hundred-man farming crew here at the farm. We had a cash crop of sorghum that we made into molasses for our sweetener. We had a canning factory that could turn out a thousand gallons of ketchup in a night. We had a walk-in solar dryer for herbs and sliced vegetables.

I gradually moved off the horse crew and onto the flour mill crew, and worked with a five-man team re-learning the skills of making wheat flour and buckwheat flour and cornmeal and grits and groats and horse feed and peanut butter and coffee from soybeans and things like that. We went out and salvaged old milling equipment, old flour mill equipment from places that had been abandoned for years, and took all that small-scale, intermediate scale kind of stuff and brought them back to The Farm and built elevated buildings that functioned like giant machines. It was village-scale stuff that nobody used anymore. And we put it back to work.

Like I say, we had about 300 acres under till in Tennessee. We had some people come to join The Farm who had lived in Florida. They had some land in southern Florida, and so we used their place to stay and we rented land near there to grow food in the winter. We had some folks who joined The Farm from Michigan and they had a nice apple orchard, so we sent a few hundred people up there and farmed that, too, and had the apples to bring down to Tennessee. We dried some of that fruit and made fruit leather at another satellite farm near Denver. By the early 1980s, a network of more than 20 such places had formed and were coordinated from our base in Tennessee, using ham radio.

Gradually, over the course of a decade or so, we re-learned all those skills. They’re not so far away. People in other parts of the world still have them. Our Amish neighbors never lost them. And so it’s not so difficult to do as you might think.

ANOF: It seems to me that when we’re talking about food production, today we’re facing two simultaneous problems. The first being that fossil fuel energy used to produce food is becoming less available and so it’s more economically expensive. But also using that fossil fuel energy to grow food is more ecologically expensive. Is food the intersection of these issues? Could it be the catalyst for a greater social change? By that I mean, peak oil and climate change the flip sides of the same coin. And so I’m wondering, because so much petroleum is necessary to continue industrial agriculture, and because burning that petroleum and the other fossil fuels used in agriculture are warming the planet causing our climate to change, because both of those are coming to bear on the same issue, that is, how we eat, could food be the issue that really puts peak oil and climate change on the map?

AB: I think that’s entirely possible. It’s hard to say exactly what’s going to put it over the top. There are 37 countries right now that are in serious food shortfall, and that’s why you’re getting riots in Haiti, Egypt and Mexico, in some places banging pots in the street and in others people actually dying in riots. They’re protesting in a lot of different places — they’re protesting in France, they’re protesting in many parts of the world, Africa and so forth. It’s true, that’s definitely coming to the fore. I’m not certain everyone makes the connection yet, however, between the shortage of food and the energy and climate crises.

We’ve got essentially four converging factors on the food supply. The first is the high cost of petroleum products, and that includes the fertilizers and chemicals, the fuel for the tractors and the combines, and the storage costs, the transportation, the drying of the grain and so on and forth. All of that is bearing on the costs of the food and making it much more expensive. We’re watching in the US the average market basket increase in price about 30 percent a year, just the same as the rise in the price of crude oil.

Now we’re seeing the second shoe fall, which is the competition over land created by alternatives to fossil fuels, specifically biofuels.You see a lot of places that are starting to switch over their corn production or their soybean production or some other things to biofuels, and that’s putting more price pressure on food. A lot of that corn and soy production was not for food anyway, but that is another story.

The third thing is you have the whole world moving towards the American or European food standard. I have to say the US food standard, because even the Germans eat only a third of the meat in an average day that US citizens do. And so we are losing the caloric efficiency of eating lower on the food chain. Every time you move up the food chain a notch and eat something that ate something else, you’re losing about ten times the caloric efficiency. The typical chicken might cost you 30 calories for every 10 calories that you’re actually able to achieve from the protein value of the food that the chicken ate. I’m making this more complicated than it needs to be, but you get the picture. Essentially what’s happening is we’re moving into a meat-eating culture worldwide, and because that requires a huge amount of grain, a huge amount of land and so forth, it’s putting pressure on food prices.

Also, we’re running out of food. We’ve got oceans that are running out of fish now. They’re starting to catch tuna in the Gulf of Mexico that are really just fry because they cannot meet world demand by what is left in the Atlantic. If you catch one of those Blue Fin Tuna that are as big as the ones that we had 10 years ago, you’d get 275,000 dollars for one fish! So what they’re doing, to satisfy the new Chinese craving for sushi is they’re going and catching the fry, and that means of course that there won’t be any of those big tuna anymore. That’s a world population issue, and a dietary fashion issue, that’s coming to bear on the food supply.

And then the final issue is the climate change issue, which is essentially saying that you’re not going to be able to grow food in places that you’re accustomed to growing food, because of the change in climate. We’ve had two revisions of the USDA planting chart here Tennessee while I’ve lived here, because they keep having to move the isotherms northward to reflect the change of seasons because of global warming.

ANOF: Not to mention then chaos caused by the late freezes and the early frosts, and the heavy rains in some places.

AB: Yeah, not to mention all the pests that can survive that didn’t used to be able to survive and are now invasive. That is also another function of the fossil fuel era, which is moving those sorts of things all over the world and finding them new niches in which they have no predators or in which their favored food supply lacks resistance.

ANOF: You talked about The Farm and the evolution of food production at your community. Could you talk about cooking as an important building block of the community? I’m thinking here of the technologies and the skills that it takes, but also the sharing and the communal aspect of eating and cooking together.

AB: When I first came here, I arrived on a cold November day. I had just walked the Appalachian Trail from north to south, and I had been on the Trail for 103 days and had been making my own meals, cooking for myself every day. I came in here and they had turned an old line shack that had been a cattle feed storage building into the community kitchen. There wasn’t enough room inside to seat anybody, but they had enough room in there for a few stoves, a bread oven, prep tables, dish washing sinks and so on.

People who lived on The Farm in those days lived mostly in busses and tents and things. We hadn’t had time or money to build buildings yet. So we would take turns; each tent would take a rotation in staffing the kitchen. We would create these huge meals for 300, 400, 500 people in long lines — tables outside and people sitting on the ground — and we would cook. In those early days we didn’t have the advantage of giant pressure cookers, so there would be a bean watch that would go overnight for the next day’s soybeans. It takes eight or ten hours cooking soybeans to denature the trypsin inhibitor in soybeans to make them edible, unless you are a ruminant with multiple stomachs and can chew cud. In a pressure cooker you can do that in 45 minutes to an hour and a half. Without that you have to watch the pot for eight, ten hours. So we were taking turns, on rotation, doing that sort of thing. We had a chore wheel. Pancake breakfasts would go on for hours, if we tried to feed 500 people a pancake breakfast.

So we learned how to do these kinds of things, but here’s the interesting thing about all that. If you look back in American history, you can see that there’s been a lot of communal experiments over the years, a lot of weird strange cults and stuff that came over from various different countries and settled in North America, and a lot of those didn’t survive. Most of them didn’t survive, and several of them had fairly serious death tolls the first few years.

We survived, we made it. And part of the reason we made it was we were able to feed everybody from soybeans. Soy was our miracle plant. It was the wonder bean of China, and for 2,000 years people in Asia had been developing a marvelous cuisine. The Indonesians had developed tempeh, the Javanese had developed ontjom, the Malasians yuba, the Japanese natto and sufu, and the Chinese had tofu, soy milk, and yogurt and things like that. We just kept pushing that envelope and taking that into the hippy realms of California cuisine — soy burgers and soy burritos and soy cheesecake and soysage and soy pizzas and soy coffee and things like that. We were the Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck of soy. And because soybeans in those days cost about three dollars a bushel, which is 60 pounds — today it’s probably up to about seven dollars a bushel — what that means is that you can feed one person their protein needs for a year on three to seven dollars if you can make it tasty enough to repeat almost daily.

So we could actually make some very elegant world fusion dishes, and to do that we built ourselves a soy dairy, eventually, where we could make milk and tofu and ice cream; frogurt, whipped cream, mayonnaise and things like that. And then we also eventually developed canning and freezing and processing plants to help produce things that would last for longer periods of time. Pickled eggplant was one of my personal favorites. We got into texturized vegetable protein and soy isomers and various forms of frozen deserts, eventually buying an ice cream factory at salvage prices and selling Ice Bean to an 8-state region.

ANOF: It sounds like the eating was really an important part socially, a cohesion, a wonderful thing to look forward to.

AB: There’s actually been a study done by a guy at the University of British Columbia. A professor there did this lovely study where he looked at what is it that communities that have lasted the longest, intentional communities that lasted the longest, what are the factors that they have in common. And one of those that he signaled as being pretty important, that you can pretty much rank the longevity of any community based on this, is common shared meals.  The more often people come together, the better their odds. So if they come together daily, three times a day, their odds are excellent. If they come together a couple times a week, their odds are still good. If they come together once a month, they’re still better than not coming together at all. There’s a direct correlation there between people eating together and getting along in a community.

ANOF: Certain sociologists say the same about individual families don’t they?

AB: Probably so. You know, the other thing about it is that there is a joy in cooking, there’s a joy in providing for others by the fruits of your labor. And you see that personal satisfaction of watching other people eat what you’ve just cooked and complimenting the chef and so on and so forth. All of that is a self-maintaining, self-gratifying kind of effort, but it’s also very important from the standpoint of kids growing up in that and propagating that meme of the happy family out to larger and larger groups of extended family and community and so forth. We had lots of kids living in close confinement here — in the early days we didn’t have much in the way of housing, so people were living thirty, forty people to a standard house, what you’d call a house in the US today. And so a lot of kids being raised there in those communal settings, going to meals three times a day with everybody else, all the other kids, all the other grownups, and seeing this kind of interaction over the food. It has an effect of making the community more stable from the kids up. As the kids grow into that, they grow up more stable in their social relationships.

ANOF: It’s funny — it’s much maligned by a lot of modern Americans, the idea of growing their own food and, God forbid, cooking it, anything other than a prepackaged microwaved meal — but there really is a joy that many people are missing out on.

AB: That’s right. You can go back — I don’t know how old you are, but for me, I’m in my sixties now and I go back to the early days of television and I remember Mrs. Goldberg, you know, and the old 12-inch black and white TV and the Honeymooners and stuff like that? There were always people standing around the stove, right? There were always people who were making a pot of spaghetti sauce or something. That’s what they did. You go to an Amish community and you see the same thing; you go to a Hutterite community and you see the same thing, which is that there are people who are the cooks. They’re the ones who really take pleasure in making sure that everybody’s well-fed all the time.

ANOF: You mentioned successes and some failures in the intentional community movement. I see them as having been wonderful incubators for ideas during the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. What do you think of as their role in the 21st century?

AB: Well, I think you hit the nail on the head; they’re incubators. There was never any sense, I think, in any of the intentional communities that somehow that was the mainstream. People went to intentional communities or joined experimental spiritual communities or bohemian tribes specifically to live outside the mainstream. What they’re were doing was living on the edge, experimenting, trying to be true to their personal values and to live in a way that didn’t offend their personal values and life goals or make it impossible to raise sane children. If they were lucky, they’d find a bunch of people who had similar values and could live together, practicing what they believed, and that’s the nature of the intentional community.

Now once you’ve gotten to that stage, you’ve freed up a certain amount of creative energy, and you can begin to explore interpersonal dynamics, gestalt therapy, the opportunities to work together in various forms. And as you do that, you begin to actually advance new ideas and new memes which quite often then spread out into the larger mainstream. So the mainstream may not notice, or may not credit the intentional communities with starting some of these things, but actually those kinds of things come into general use after a time because they’ve been proven out in small experiments out of the limelight.

It’s kind of a Jeffersonian way of looking at the larger society — every separate entity is its own sovereign and creates its own ways of doing things. And as long as they’re peaceful towards each other, they can experiment to their hearts’ content. That’s how the more liberal thinkers among the US founders– Jefferson, Franklin — saw the States, as opposed to the federal government, in the early days. I’m showing my Southern roots here, because I have a view of states here that’s different than people in the North. [laughs]

ANOF: Well, I’m in North Carolina here, so I’m familiar with that. [laughs]

AB: That’s how the Framers thought, if you go back to the Constitutional Convention, or read the Federalist Papers, particularly the southerners. They felt very strongly about having the States as crucibles of experimentation on their own terms, and not be welded into mere divisions of a single homogenous central government, and all look exactly the same.

ANOF: Right. And for our book, A Nation of Farmers, we’re talking specifically about Jeffersonian vision of democracy because I feel like he had this idea of fairly self-sufficient individual farms, of a people who were marginally sovereign as families or groups of families. They still interacted with others of course, and traded amongst their communities, but that certain level of self-sufficiency insulated them, gave them a certain amount of freedom because they weren’t beholden to others for their basic needs.

AB: That’s right. Here’s another piece of that, which is that one of the tensions that you always find in intentional communities, indeed anywhere that people are living together, is this continuum between privacy and public space, or personal space and public space. People want to be able to be left alone, but they also crave the company of people and the opportunity for conviviality. So you have to have a balance in your life, and you have to have a balance in your space, and you have to have the development of forms, patterns that allow for people to be in whatever place they want to be in that given moment and be able to move freely.

If you’re successful in creating those kinds of forms where people have the option of being public or being private, where people have shared purse or common enterprise but they also have the ability to provide for their immediate needs or their families’ immediate needs, then you get to a certain point where you can actually obtain enough happiness, enough contentment, that actually new creative energy comes forth that might be more synergistic, more multiplicative than what you had when everybody was just sort of contending for what they individually needed.

ANOF: [Aaron] I’m trained as a landscape architect, so it really bothers me to see what post WWII land development has done to the previous design strategy of a series of private to semi-private to more public spaces as you move farther from the home. What we have now mostly is a really private space, the home with a deck in the back, and then these transportation quarters that move you at high speeds to really public nasty spaces, and those are really your only two options.

AB: Here at the training center, one of the courses we teach is Ecovillage Design and what you’re discussing is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about — pattern language, Leopold Kohr’s sense of management scale, and the Jane Jacobs idea of having shared spaces but a continuum of privacy and public space, and transportation corridors and viewscapes that are pedestrian-scale, government that is personally connected and locally accountable, and that sort of thing.

ANOF: You mentioned the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm, and you helped found that almost fifteen years ago?

AB: 1994, so actually that’s about right, almost 15 years now. I’ll take you back a little there, because I had a number of years after being the horse farmer that I described earlier, and a flour miller, where I would have to describe myself as more of a ronin. You know, that’s the samurai who gets kicked out because the lord can’t afford him anymore and so he kind of becomes a freelance samurai? I retired from farming and flour milling, and also a short career as a brickmason, and was working with The Farm’s alternative energy crew, and in the process made a number of inventions, some of them patented, for solar powered hybrid electric cars, bamboo windmills, tofu presses, flour sifters, mobile concentrating photovoltaic collectors, that sort of thing. We displayed a lot of that at our Appropriate Community Technology Pavilion at the 1982 World’s Fair, which was an old Victorian house we helped keep from being leveled to make room for the fairgrounds.

In 1977 I started an organization called the Natural Rights Center, which was based on this concept that there are transgenerational torts — wrongs by some persons against others — and that we actually have a transgenerational threat matrix; our nuclear energy, transgenic, climate-tampering technology, all those kinds of things, are creating conditions for future peoples which they will be powerless to do anything about. It’s being imposed upon them by the present generation, and that’s actually criminal conduct, organized criminal activity, and that there ought to be something that can be done about that if you take it to a court of law.

So my push over the next twenty years — eighteen years, actually — was to take that stuff and make it into civil rights battles, human rights battles, internationally, and also to write legislation on various things to improve the situation. I got into the Who’s Who for law, Who’s Who for science,Who’s Who for engineering, and Who’s Who for emerging leaders. And I decided at some point that I was much too much of a Type A individual to be doing that kind of stuff; I was getting high blood pressure, I needed to get out of it.

So I retired from that. Once I really understood climate change, I got out of that whole thing of fighting the bad guy, and I purchased a small business called Mushroompeople which was a way of improving the health of the forests and the health of people by using mushrooms — forest mushrooms, rather than the kind that are manufactured in large factories. We brought that to The Farm and started a little mail-order business selling kits to farmers for making a living from growing forest mushrooms. I stayed with that for a few years and then some other things intervened.

The Farm was awarded the first Right Livelihood Award — we shared it with an Egyptian architect, you may know, Hassan Fathi — and that brought me to a conference in Italy where we were talking about the things having to do with the future, and Helena Norberg-Hodge, another recipient of the Award, said an interesting thing. She said, “Ecovillages are so important to the world that people ought to be paid to live in them.”And I thought, I don’t think we can actually sell that idea very easily, but I think that you have the right idea, the right sentiment. We’re actually getting more information about the way we need to live in the future by that way than we are from all of the grants that are being paid to scientific or academic organizations to study climate change or to deal with some of these other major issues or resource limits. Just by people changing their lifestyles it would change the world tremendously, but nobody knows how to do it. And yet, ecovillagers are doing it.

So about that same time, because of that same conference, I got invited to a meeting in Denmark to kind of coalesce the ecovillage movement.We set up the first conference on ecovillages and sustainable communities in 1995 in Scotland, and at that conference I was elected to the board of the Global Ecovillage Network, although a year earlier I had already founded the Ecovillage Network of the Americas. That launched me off onto a new career out of the mushroom business and into twelve years of traveling ecovillage to ecovillage all over the world, talking to different government authorities, talking to the UN, doing things like that, and kind of being “Johnny Ecovillage Seed” for this concept.And now I’ve retired again.

ANOF: [laughs] How many times have you retired?

AB: If you ever get me to a college where they do a commencement ceremony and I’m the speaker, my advice: “Retire early, retire often!”. [laughs] So I retired again, because I had taken that about as far as I could take it. After a dozen years I was president of the Global Ecovillage Network, president of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas, and I got tired. So I’m now a simple permaculture teacher, teaching here at The Farm in this training center. Our effort is to try to empower people to create change through personal lifestyle choices and through creating communities, whether these are transition communities like the Transition Towns movement or new villages like ecovillages or modified intentional communities or whatever it is. We give people skills and tools to help them do that.

ANOF: It looks like we’re going to have a shortage of arable land going forward, as our human population grows and as we salinate, and desertification and deforestation…

AB: We’ve got a shortage now, and it appears that that shortage is growing. The thing about that is that there’s this whole bugaboo about people saying that since the last ice age we’ve been depleting our soil and that we’re in this irreversible decline now; we’ve past peak soil and we’re now on this downslope, and so we’re going to face this huge famine from that. My personal experience is, I know how to make soil. I teach people how to make soil. We’ve been making soil here at The Farm for years and years and years; we know how to make soil. It’s not difficult to make soil, and I say the same thing for arable land. We can make arable land.

One of the things I do when I go out and talk is I go up there on the stage and I put up the projector and I have this short Shockwave Flash movie of Geoff Lawton making forest in the middle of the desert in Jordan. He is growing mushrooms in the soil and the mycelium is locking up the salt in the desert so that the soils have tilth and come alive. And we can do that: we can take all of our deserts and turn them into farmland. Lately I have been researching the paleoclimatology of the Sahara and I am beginning to think it is even possible there. We can at least reverse the desertification trend in the Sahel, and it is possible we can reforest in Chad and elsewhere where there are aquifers.

ANOF: How about our suburbs?

AB: Well, suburbs are poorly designed. Being an architect, you probably understand. They need some redesign — David Holmgren has some interesting ideas about that. You can take out every third house or every fourth house and begin to cluster up a bit and have connections between houses, and have land that has farming uses or other kinds of common activity. But the suburbs need redesign if for no other reason than they don’t have essential infrastructure within walking distance. They need to have food production, they need to have water, but they need to have shops, schools, churches, theaters and clinics, a cemetery and things like that in every suburb.

ANOF: How much does food production and cooking factor into the systems you teach at the center?

AB: We do two long-term apprenticeships here at the center. One is in natural building and the other is in food, principally growing, although there’s a certain amount of work in the kitchen as well. There’s a bit of overlap there — the people who come to do natural building also get to learn about cooking and gardening. We do concentrate on those because we feel that it’s pretty important that people change their lifestyles, and a chunk of that is how they make food, how they prepare soil, how they preserve water, how they go through droughts.

Climate change is real. I mentioned the USDA changing it’s charts; we’ve got an isotherm migration here of about 35 miles per decade since about 1971 when The Farm was started here. It’s been speeding up that whole time, so now it’s estimated to be closer to 70 miles per decade. That’s moving from southwest to northeast; that means that we’re warming here at a rate of somewhere between 30 and 70 miles per decade, and the climate that was here when we got here in middle south-central Tennessee in 1970 is now up in Lexington, Kentucky. And the climate that we have now in middle south-central Tennessee in 2008 was in Nashoba County, Mississippi back in 1971. That’s real.

Now, can you actually provide for food when you have a sustained drought like they had in Georgia or Tennessee last year? You can, if you know what you’re doing, if you know a few basic skills like mulch, like rainwater storage and replenishing your aquifers and things like that. So we teach all of that. We did not lose any of our crops in the drought of 2007. The deep mulch retained moisture at the roots. I think of that when I travel and see all of these gardens and fields laid bare for the sun to bleach out all the life-giving bacteria and soil microbes. How 15^th Century!

ANOF: Derek Jenson, the author, has this great quote — I’ll have to paraphrase because I can’t remember exactly — but he says something like, “The great thing about everything being so fucked up is that there’s so much to do!”

AB: And the other Derek Jenson line that I often quote is, “We’re fucked, and life is very, very good.”

ANOF: [laughs] Well, you seem to have a handle on so many of the changes that are going on and you’ve been doing this for so long, I just appreciate getting a chance to talk to you and interview you for this project.

AB: Well, let me just close by saying something about the future for us. We may soon find that the model that we’ve created for a business here for the Ecovillage Training Center will not sustain past the period of no airplanes flying or people having the ability to travel long distances to come take a course here. And national currencies could become worthless also. So we’re actually looking at a transition now, and some of our effort is directed toward the surrounding communities — going out to several counties around us and teaching these skills at the very simple level of where people are at in the surrounding areas rather than telling them that they have to learn permaculture or something. I have learned much from my friend, Rob Hopkins, and the Transition Towns movement, and I think that offers a strategy that is the next step after the experimental vessel of ecovillages. It is really a synthesis of ecovillage and re-localization, intentional community and sustainable development.

Then also the example of The Farm has transitioned out of its early days of more self-reliance into much more bourgeois living in people’s middle age or later years. And so we actually have to go back and say, “You know, we learned a whole lot back in those early days of the 70’s; we sure could be doing a lot more of that now again. “We’re having to re-learn or think about reclaiming some of that earlier skill set. So we’re in a transition here.We’re stable but not static. It’s much tougher now, because our population has aged and our youth are still somewhat disinterested, but we’re moving. We’re in the process of changing ourselves. Events will force us to speed that up soon enough.

Best of all, we have tools we did not have in 1971. We have permaculture, biochar, E.M. (effective microorganisms), compost tea, biodynamic preps, aquatic garden systems, and activated water. We can terrace slopes with our bulldozers and road graders that can run on pond algae and used cooking oil. We have Japanese forest mushrooms, tempeh, and home-brewed beer.

I’m happy, because the children have, to a larger extent then they may appreciate, already got it and they’re turning around and heading in the right direction pretty quickly. My son, Will, is living in a passive solar house and farming; he’s got several acres in CSA vegetable gardens now, and he’s coming by all the time and asking for different bits of advice and tools and things. One of my next-door neighbor’s kids, Biko, has spent several years living in ecovillages in South Africa and India and has returned with a whole new set of skills. That’s the kind of thing that gives me real hope — that the next generation is hip, they’re on board, they’ve got the vision, and they can see what’s possible. And having done it all myself when I was young and full of crazy ideas, I don’t worry that they can do it just as easily as I did. And everyone else can too.

ANOF: Thank you for your wonderful vision of the future.

For more about the book, A Nation of Farmers visit http://www.anationoffarmers.com/.

This is a guest post by a little mouse who’d like to remain anonymous.
We think she’s written a superb piece for such a small creature, and that this
might help someone who feels unable financially or personally to begin with
food storage to take a step.  The piece is long, but valuable we think.

The Curious Tail (er…Tale) of How This Piece Came to be:

I was surprised … no, shocked…when I heard Ms. Anon E. Mouse squeaking
at me yesterday afternoon.  Ms. Mouse and I have frequent chats, but always
before they have been in the dead of night, when EvilKitty is safely shut
into the laundry room, dreaming of catching a…….well, never mind that.
The dogs are also sound asleep, and only the twitch of a paw or a soft
puppy-bark reveals that rabbits are romping through their dreams.

‘Ms. Mouse,’ I said, ‘What are you doing out of Mousel in broad daylight?’
(Ms. Mouse does have her little harmless affectations and naming her Mouse
Hole after a village in Cornwall is one of them.  She spells it the way it
is pronounced.)

‘Urgent, urgent, urgent,’ squeaked Ms. Mouse in reply.  ’It has come to my
attention that some Feckless and Foolish Humans have no food storage
whatsoever!’

‘Yes, I’m afraid that’s true,’ I replied.

‘Everymouse knows that food storage is important.  Everymouse has bread
crumbs, cheese and peanut butter set aside for an emergency!’ squeaked my
small friend.

‘I have even heard,’ continued the furry creature twitching her ears, ‘that
some humans think they don’t have enough money for a basic food storage.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid that’s true also,’ said I.

‘Foolish humans!  I always knew that mice are more intelligent!’ said Ms.
Mouse in reply, hastily adding ‘Present company excepted, of course,’ so as
not to hurt my feelings.

‘I’ve written a Very Cheap Food Storage Plan for foolish humans,’ continued
the benevolent rodent, ‘and I want you to send it to Hen & Harvest.’

‘But Ms. Mouse,’ I protested ‘the readers of Hen & Harvest are sophisticates,’
I continued ‘They already know about food storage.’

‘Cats?  Cats?  Where are the cats?’ exclaimed my furry pal in alarm, glancing
nervously over her shoulder.

‘No, no, Ms. Mouse,’ I reassured her, ‘Not that kind of cat.’

‘Oh,’ she said, mollified.

‘But even if Hen & Harvest readers are … sophisti…no, I cannot say that
word.  Even if they are knowledgeable, how do you know that they don’t have
friends or neighbors who don’t already know these things?’ demanded Ms.
Mouse.

I was forced to admit that I don’t know.

‘So,’ instructed Ms. Mouse, ‘Send it to Hen & Harvest! But don’t reveal
my identity,’ she instructed.

‘But Ms. Mouse, don’t you want to be credited with the Plan?’

‘No, no, no, positively no.  No time to answer questions, no time at all,’
she replied.

‘OK, OK, Ms. Mouse,’ said I, ‘Would you care for a thimbleful of mint tea?’

‘No, no, must rush, must rush, work to do, work to do,’ exclaimed the
rodent.

‘What are you doing now, Ms. Mouse?’ I inquired.

‘Must rearrange food storage, must move bread crumbs behind cheese to make
more room for winter food,’ squeaked Ms. Mouse.  ’Must go, must go, must
go:  too much work to do!’

And with scarcely a twitch of her ears, Ms. Mouse scampered back into
Mousel, and dragged out a very long piece of paper.

‘Here’s the Plan,’ she exclaimed, ‘Send it!’ and off
she disappeared into Mousel.

I.
The ANYWAY, Very Cheap, System of Food Storage for Emergencies
and/or Inflation for People Who Think They Cannot Afford Food Storage

While people in other countries MAY think that their government will come
to their assistance quickly in a natural disaster, and Americans *used to*
think this, we know from bitter experience in New Orleans that this is no
longer true,  More recently, three entire years after Katrina, we know that
many, many people in Houston received very inadequate help after Hurricane
Ike.

We have a very large country, very prone to natural disasters of one
kind or another. Hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, ice
storms, mud slides:  fortunately, the bad effects of at least some of these
disasters can be mitigated by sensible preparations.

Americans have also seen TERRIBLE inflation in food costs for the past
year.  Foods costs across the USA vary a lot by area, but my husband and I
estimate that – in our area – the prices for foods have risen from 30% to
40% *IN THE LAST YEAR*.

These figures are, of course, not reflected in the official
government-issued statistics on inflation; the government removed both food
and energy costs from the inflation statistics a while ago.  But we are
experiencing this terrible inflation in food costs, and we know darned well
what we are experiencing.  We aren’t stupid.

OK, moving right along – what can we do?

Can you scrape together $5 extra each week for about three months (at MOST,
and maybe you will need the extra $5/week for less time than this)?  If you
can, I can suggest a food storage plan for you.  If you cannot, then I
cannot help you with storing food.

I believe that most people can manage $5 extra per week for about three
months (at most – and it should be less time than this, as you will see in
Part Two). This can be in food stamps instead of in actual money;
food stamps will work for this.  If you can get food from a food pantry or
food bank, that will also help.

If you can get more money together, you can accomplish this plan faster.
But if you can only get that little bit extra money together – and not
permanently, only for a while – you can do this plan; you cannot do it
*instantly*, but you can do it.

In what follows, I’m assuming that you live alone. If you live with other
people, you’ll need to increase quantities.

1.  First step:  Set a goal, make a plan, write it down.  Write down what
you need to do each week to accomplish your goal.
The initial goal I suggest is this:

=============================
Initial Goal

To have on hand, at all times, enough water to keep you alive for one
month.

To have on hand, at all times, enough natural and nutritious food -
no junk food – to keep you alive and functioning for one month *without
needing to cook anything*.

This food must not require refrigeration, and it must keep for a fairly
long time.

================================

This – to me – seems like a very reasonable *initial* goal.  When you have
accomplished this initial goal, then you can stop and re-assess the
situation.

You may want to stop there.  You may want to increase the variety of food
that you store.  You may want to get some means of cooking in a power
failure (assuming that your kitchen stove is electric, which is the worst
case).

You will probably cook some of the foods that I suggest *in normal times*.
But you can safely eat these foods without any cooking at all, if
necessary.

If you need to evacuate the area, if you have a car, or a friend or
relative with a car, you can take some of this water and all of this food
with you.

If you need to evacuate the area and you must do it by public
transport, then you can only take what you can carry.  Some things cannot
be helped.  So there’s no point in worrying about them.  I try hard to be
prepared for what I can be prepared for, and to let the rest go without
fretting about it.  I pretty much succeed at this now.

OK, so how are you going to accomplish this initial goal?

First, you must learn and follow the Basic Rule of Food Storage:  Use what
you store, and store what you use.

This means that you must ONLY store what you will actually eat.  You will
*regularly eat all the items you store*.

People with more money can afford to buy other foods for storage.

But people with very little money – like you and like me too – cannot
afford that.  We must USE WHAT WE STORE AND STORE WHAT WE USE.

I am assuming also that you can only get to a regular, normal supermarket.
So I’m going to suggest a plan that can be accomplished completely, totally
at a normal supermarket (as they exist in the USA, the UK, Canada, probably
Australia and all of Europe and so on).

If you have an Aldi’s you can get to, or a Wal-Mart Supercenter, these will
probably have the same foods cheaper, so that would help.  If you can get
to a store that sells bulk foods, you can probably get one particular item
cheaper, so that will help.  But if you cannot – OK, you can do this at a
normal supermarket.

Don’t forget – you are going to set your own goal (which may be the goal I
suggest or may not).  And you are going to write down a plan to accomplish
this goal; week by week.

Then you will start on your Plan.

Here’s what I would suggest for Phase One of your Plan.  Phase One may take
you a week; it shouldn’t take more.

1.  A hand-operated can opener.  I think there are people who only have
electric can openers (I myself have never had an electric can opener). If
you only have an electric can opener, then please buy a hand-operated can
opener the first week.  It can be a cheap one.  You can buy these in normal
supermarkets, although perhaps a Dollar Store will have one cheaper.

2.  If you have a gas stove, make sure that you have matches.  We have a
gas stove; it has electric ignition.  But when the power is off, we can
light the top burners (only) with a match.  We cannot light the oven with a
match, because the burners are sealed in and inaccessible. But we can light
the top. So far as I know, you can light the top burners of ALL gas stoves
with a match.  So buy a box of matches if you don’t already have them.

4.  Do you have a bottle of multi-vitamins on hand?  If not, please buy a
bottle of multi-vitamins.  They don’t need to be expensive ones, the
cheapest ones available will do.  If you can only afford a small bottle,
buy a small bottle now and get a larger bottle later.  We try to keep one
year’s supply of multi-vitamins on hand.  But please get enough for at
least 30 days, that’s important.

3.  Store enough water for a month.  Water should definitely come before
food: people can go without food an awful lot longer than they can without
water.

So far as I know, everyone who has running water in the USA and Canada can
safely drink the water that comes out of their taps.  You cannot afford to
buy water.  So you will store the water right as it comes from the tap. You
are going to store enough water to keep you alive for a month.

This is a minimum of one gallon per day.  You’re not going to drink a whole
gallon of water any day, but you are going to wash your hands at least once
per day and you can splash some water on your face (then catch it in a
dishpan or pot and use it to wash your hands).

So you’ll need 30 gallons for one person, for one month.  What can you keep
it in?

You may already have this much water: if you have a hot water heater in
your home or apartment, see if you can figure out to drain it.  You might
need to slide a dishpan under the drain place, but you can probably do
this.

I don’t want you to do it now; I just want you to know that is a
possible source of water if you need it.  I want you to know how to do it
if you need to.  If you cannot figure it out, ask someone who knows how if
you possibly can.

Large, empty clean soda bottles, with tops, are great for storing water.
Ask everyone you know if they can please give you the empty bottles if they
drink any soda at all.

Empty clean apple juice bottles are equally good – or any fruit juice
bottles.  Ask everyone you know to give you fruit juice bottles.  I drink
V-8 juice occasionally, and it comes in very nice reusable bottles too.

Empty clean whisky or wine bottles are also fine – again, ask everyone you
know.  (Some cheap wine comes in gallon or half-gallon glass jugs – these
are perfect.)

If anyone you know buys bottled water, those bottles are fine too.

If you cannot find ANYTHING else, then you can keep water in clean plastic
milk jugs.  They are not the best container, but they are better than not
keeping any water at all.  Milk jugs will become brittle and break
eventually, but they should be OK for a month. (Meanwhile you can work on
getting better containers.)  Wash milk jugs very carefully and rinse,
rinse, rinse – then fill with water and keep them out of the sun.

If you have any empty 5-gallon buckets, they will be fine too.

I do not recommend drinking water from a bucket UNLESS THAT BUCKET IS
FOOD SAFE; some are, but some aren’t.  Would I drink water from a bucket
that is not food safe IF IT’S THE ONLY WATER AVAILABLE IN AN EMERGENCY?
You bet I would; it would be an awful lot better than no water at all.

You might be able to get large buckets by asking at a doughnut shop – the
icing for doughnuts comes in buckets.  They are food safe.  You might be
able to get some from a supermarket bakery and again they will be food safe
- also perhaps from a sandwich shop.

If you have a cat, you may have empty cat litter buckets.  I do NOT
recommend drinking water stored in a cat litter bucket – although they are
not dirty: the actual cat has been nowhere near them.  They are not
food-safe plastic.  But if you have no other possible way to store water,
it would be better than having no water at all.  Maybe you have a friend
with a cat who will give you some of these.

You don’t need to treat water in any way if you replace one-third of it
every month.  Just count how many bottles of water you have stored, and
dump out, rinse, and refill one-third of them each month on the first of
the month.  Then none of the water will be more than three months old.

Where to put the water?  Let’s just say this:  if you really want to do
this, you’ll find a place to put the water.

I will also make one more suggestion about water:  for some natural
disasters, people have considerable warning.  Hurricanes do not sneak up on
people; ice storms or blizzards generally don’t either.  We have warning.

I have always seen advice to fill your bathtub with water if you think the
power may go off.  It seems to me that this is terribly bad advice:  I have
always tested the bathtub in every one of the many, many places where I
have lived and every single one of them has a slow leak through the drain.
No bathtub that I ever lived with will store water overnight – in the
morning, it’s all gone.

But what you can do is to put any kind of large container(s) in your
bathtub and then fill the container(s) with water.  I’m thinking here
specifically of the very common 18-gallon Rubbermaid or similar totes used
to store various items. Many people have these around.  But ANY large
container will do for this purpose.

That way, if the container should spring a leak, OK, it’s in the tub
anyhow, no problem.  If the container does not spring a leak, you’ll have
more water.

You can flush the toilet with this water or drink it (in an emergency only)
or wash with it, whatever.  If you have warning, you can also fill any
large pots and pans you have with water, and any 5-gallon or cat-litter
buckets you have too.  Fill any containers you have with water if you have
warning of a hurricane or ice storm.

You should be able to accomplish the initial water storage goal (and the
can opener, matches, and multivitamins, if necessary) within one week.

Next you sit down and think about water.  You might decide to store more
water, or you might decide that this is enough water.  You can work on
getting better containers for the water too, especially if you had to use
milk jugs – they will become brittle and fall apart eventually.

Congratulations on a job well done!  You’ve accomplished Part One now.  Now
we’ll move right along to Part Two.

II.

By the way, I’m calling this the ANYWAY, Very Cheap System of Food Storage,
because you are going to eat these foods *anyway*.  You’re going to eat
them as part of your regular diet.

People with more money can store foods that are different from their
regular diet.  People with very little money cannot do this.  They must
store foods they’ll eat anyway…. problems or (hopefully) no problems!

In Part One, you took care of water storage for a month. You also
determined that you already have – or you bought – a manual can opener, and
matches if you have a gas stove, and at least a month’s supply of
multi-vitamins.

Now we need to think about food.  The initial food goal I suggest is this:

============
To have on hand, at all times, enough natural and nutritious food -
not junk food – to keep you alive for one month *without needing to cook
anything*.

This food must not require refrigeration – and it must keep a long time.

===========

This seems to me a very reasonable *initial* goal; after you have
accomplished this, then you can reassess the situation and decide where you
want to go from there.  You may want to stop there.  You may want to get
more varied foods.  You may want to get some way to cook in an emergency.
You may want to continue to with more of the same foods.

OK, how to accomplish this initial goal, and to spend the minimum necessary
amount?

This is what I suggest; but I caution you:  you are going to be eating
these foods *regularly* and *anyway*.  If you are allergic to any of the
foods I suggest or cannot eat them for some other reason, or you just
cannot stand them, then you need to find a substitute.

The quantities given are for one month for one person.  If you have more
than one person in your household, you will need to increase the
quantities.

The first food that I suggest you buy is rolled oats:  you can buy – in
every supermarket that I have ever seen in the USA or Canada – regular
rolled oats or quick-cooking rolled oats.  (I hope you can eat oats; it is
difficult to find a substitute for them because you can eat them uncooked,
and that is not true of most grains.  I know of two possible substitutes,
but they cost considerably more.  More on that later.)

Please don’t buy instant oats which are generally jammed full of sugar and
artificial flavor and are a rip-off. But regular or quick-cooking rolled
oats are a very valuable food.

You may call these ‘oatmeal’ or (as in the UK) ‘porridge’ or ‘porridge
oats’.  They’re the same thing.

The usual brand I see in supermarkets is Quaker Oats.  Store brands would
be fine, and might well be cheaper.  If you can get to a store that sells
foods in bulk, they might well be cheaper there.

Yesterday, we bought regular rolled oats – in two large plastic bags – at a
little general store here that has a few bulk foods.  We paid $0.71 per
pound – we bought approximately 15 lbs of rolled oats.

I eat these regularly.  My husband also eats ‘porridge’ for his breakfast
regularly – he prefers the quick-cooking oats and he has enough on hand at
present; so we didn’t need to buy any for him yesterday.

We’ll come back to the price per pound in a little bit…..

You can eat these oats in one of three ways – and two of them do not
require any cooking because oats are actually partially cooked before we
buy them, as part of their processing.  This is why we can eat them
uncooked.  I do eat them uncooked, regularly, in homemade muesli.

1.  Cooked, in normal times.  Then you have hot oatmeal for some of your
breakfasts.  This is a very valuable and nutritious food.  Add raisins, or
other fruit, and if you wish, serve with milk.  My father didn’t put milk
on hot cereal (including oatmeal), he dotted it with butter or margarine,
then sprinkled a little cinnamon and brown sugar on it.  Hot cereal is nice
that way too.  You can cook oatmeal either on the stove top or in the
microwave.  Just follow the directions on the box.  If you cook it in the
microwave, it wants to puff up and get all over the place.  Use a VERY
oversized glass cup or casserole dish:  that will prevent this.

2.  Uncooked, and mixed with fruit and yogurt – this is called muesli.  I
eat it for breakfast most days.  Just the uncooked oats, fruit, plus
yogurt. Add raisins and sunflower seeds if you wish, during normal times.
You can soften the oats by mixing them with yogurt (or fruit juice) ahead
of time, or you can do it, and then eat them right away.

3.  As a cold cereal:  in this case (and I eat this too), you put the oats
in a bowl, add raisins if you have them, perhaps a sliced banana if you
have bananas.  Then you pour milk over them and eat them as a cold cereal.
If you have no milk, you could use fruit juice.  If you have no fruit
juice, you could use water.

The nutritional value of rolled oats (with no additions) is as follows:

Rolled oats, dry – 4 oz   Calories – 434
Grams of protein – 18

You could eat – IF YOU HAD VERY LITTLE OTHER FOOD AVAILABLE BECAUSE
OF SOME EMERGENCY – 8 oz of oats daily.  That would give you 868 calories
and 36 grams of protein.  This is a *very* substantial part of a woman’s calorie
and protein requirements; it’s even a substantial part of a man’s calorie
and protein requirements, for that matter.

So I’m going to recommend that you wind up with 15 lbs of rolled oats *per
person* for storage for emergencies – figuring on eating 8 oz of them per
day.  I do *not* recommend that you eat this many ounces of oats except in
case of dire emergency.

I do recommend that you eat oats for breakfast two or three times per week
*in normal times*.  I do this, I eat about 4 oz of oats for breakfast
(about 1/2 cup), along with fruit and yogurt.  Or if I want a hot
breakfast, then I cook the rolled oats with raisins, then slice a banana on
top, and add milk.  It’s a very substantial and good-tasting breakfast.

How much will this 15 lbs of rolled oats cost?  Well, let’s assume that you
must pay more than the $0.71 we just paid per pound.  Let’s assume you pay
as much as $1.00 per pound.  The 15 lbs of oats will have cost you about
$15.

Once you have managed to save the 15 lbs, then you just keep replacing it;
never let it go much lower than this.  Or you can decide to buy more and
keep 20 pounds on hand, if you prefer.  Or 30 lbs or even 50 lbs.  I
wouldn’t keep much more oats per person on hand than that.  But they do
keep a long time.

Note that you are now buying the oats *as part of your normal breakfast
regime*.  So you don’t need to set aside separate ‘food storage money’ for
oats anymore; you can use your normal food budget for this.  This gives you
more money for other food storage.

If you cannot eat oats for some reason, the only two substitutes that I can
think of *that don’t require cooking, do not require refrigeration, and
keep a long time and are very nutritious* are sunflower seeds or
Scandinavian-style crisp bread, such as Kavli and Wasa Brod.  The crisp
breads are available in normal supermarkets.  The crisp breads are mainly
whole grains; they are nutritious.  I don’t know if sunflower seeds are
available in normal supermarkets or not.  If they are, you want to buy
uncooked, unsalted, sunflower seeds if at all possible.  They won’t keep as
long as oats or crispbread, however.  (Sunflower seeds would be a really
valuable addition to your oats, if you can afford to buy them.  In normal
times, they should be kept refrigerated or frozen.)

Now what other foods do I recommend you start buying for the *bare bones
minimal, cheapest possible, useful food storage*?

I recommend that you buy canned beans too.  Not baked beans, just plain
canned beans.  There are many kinds, they all have approximately the same
food values, and they all cost about the same as far as I know.  If you
live alone I suggest you buy the small cans of beans – approximately 16 oz
per can.  There are black beans, kidney beans, white beans, pinto beans,
many, many varieties.

In normal times, you can base many, many dinners on beans – tacos, chili,
soups, frijoles refritos, salads, beans and rice, etc.

In normal times, you’ll probably want to cook most of the beans (but they
are used in salads and cold plates too).  You don’t *need* to cook them.
You can buy one kind of beans only, or two or three, etc.

I base our dinners on beans *at the very least* two nights per week.  I
recommend that canned beans be rinsed very well with cold water before
eating (in normal, non-emergency times) if you are concerned about sodium.
Even if you aren’t concerned about sodium, I think they taste better if you
rinse them first.

You can find hundreds, probably even thousands, of bean recipes on the Web.
RecipeSource.com is one of my favorite recipe sites; just put ‘beans’ in
the search box and you will be presented with 2008 recipes using beans!
That’s a lot of bean recipes.

Beans are *good food*, and they are a very versatile food.  They are also
good for your health.

I’m looking at a can of black beans; they are probably my favorite kind of
beans.  The can of beans has (the whole can, in total) 315 calories, and
24.5 grams of protein.  If you ate the whole can of beans, which I only
recommend in case of emergency, plus 8 oz of oatmeal, this would give you:
1183 calories, which – together with two other foods I will recommend in a
minute – would be enough for a woman to keep going for quite a while in an
emergency, indefinitely, in fact – unless you are already emaciated BEFORE
the emergency.  You also probably have at least some other food in your
house, which you could add to your diet.

It would also give you 42 grams of protein.  This is not the RDA for a
woman’s protein, but it would certainly keep you going for quite a while,
well more than a month.  You wouldn’t develop malnourishment in a month’s
time if you were eating this much protein each day together with the
calories you would have.  Many women throughout the world live *their
entire lives* with lower daily protein figures.

Other beans have very similar food values.

What does a can of beans cost?  We can get them (or we could get them
anyway, until very recently for about $0.50/can ON SALE ONLY).  But let’s
even say that you need to pay $1.00 a can.  I don’t think you will, but I
don’t know what food costs in other places, after all.

If you plan to store 30 cans of beans (per person), then you would need to
spend $30.  BUT you can also start eating these beans regularly, as part of
your normal food.  And I would recommend that.  Then if you know that you
have eaten two cans of beans in a week, and you are still increasing your
supply of beans, you buy four or six cans.  Simple.

When you get up to 30 cans of beans, then reassess the situation.  You can
maintain that inventory, or buy more beans.  Up to you.

Let’s assume that you want to accumulate the 15 lbs of oats and the 30 cans
of beans before you start eating them…. You have now spent $45.  If you
can only spend $5 per week for food storage, this will have taken you nine
weeks.  If you can spend more, you can do it faster.

But it’s really not fair to consider these costs all as food storage costs;
you are going to put these foods into your regular diet, after all.  Some
of this money can come out of your regular food budget.

Now what other food do I recommend you buy as part of your basic,
bare-bones food storage?

I recommend that you buy cans of tomatoes too; they are very useful when
cooking beans (in non-emergency times as well as in emergencies).  You can
buy stewed tomatoes, or diced tomatoes, or whole tomatoes – they are
equally useful.  Perhaps the diced tomatoes are a little more useful.  You
can eat them without cooking them.  They are perfectly safe to eat
uncooked.

These will provide you some vitamins and some more calories (but not many).
They will also make the beans much more palatable.

So for a month’s storage for one person, I suggest you buy – as quickly as
your money will allow – 30 (small – 16-oz) cans of tomatoes. I recommend
that you use them as part of your regular diet also.

When you have 30 cans of tomatoes, you can either maintain that level, or
increase it.  Treat the tomatoes just as you are treating the beans: always
replenish or increase your supply of them.  Rotate them – eat the oldest
ones first.

The last recommendation for a basic, bare bones emergency food storage
supply:  I’d get cans or jars of fruit.  Applesauce is very useful and
nutritious, and most people like it.  If you live alone, get the smaller
jars.  It will make the rolled oats more palatable.  Many people normally
eat applesauce; it can fit into your normal food regime nicely.

I also recommend that you get some other fruit in cans – both my husband
and I like canned pineapple packed in its own juice, so we keep a supply of
that on hand.  If you prefer peaches, then get peaches, or some of each, or
some other fruit altogether.

I’d recommend building up to 30 cans or jars of fruit, just as you did with
the beans and tomatoes.  Treat the fruit just as you treat the rolled oats,
beans, and tomatoes – replenish whatever you use.

At the end of this plan, you’ll have the following on hand, and your supply
of these will not diminish:  you will always replenish them.

15 lbs of rolled oats
30 cans of beans
30 cans of tomatoes
30 cans or jars of fruit

All of these are now being eaten as part of your normal food regime, so all
the money to replace them should now come out of your normal food budget.

NONE OF THESE FOODS IS EXPENSIVE.  And you would have enough to live on for
ONE ENTIRE MONTH.

Don’t forget to take one vitamin pill per day.

Now that you have one entire month’s food supply safely on hand,
congratulate yourself on a job well done!  Then think about what you want
to do next.

The foods I personally would add next would probably be raisins and dry
skim milk. Both would add interest to the rolled oats.  And you can use
both of them in your normal food regime. After that, pumpkin and peanut
butter would be good additions, as would cooking oil. And CHOCOLATE, of
course.

The next thing I would probably want to buy is a guaranteed method of
cooking food:  Sterno would do (don’t forget that you need matches to light
it).  You can probably buy it in a normal supermarket or hardware store – I
have often seen it in regular, normal supermarkets.  You can build a little
holder for it from bricks.  Then you put your pot on the bricks, and the
Sterno under the pot.

After that, I would probably want a few herbs and spices – maybe oregano,
cumin, and chili powder for the beans, and cinnamon for the oats.  Some
brown sugar would be nice on the oats as well.  Maybe you already have
these in your kitchen.

I cannot think of any food storage plan that would be cheaper, and yet have
the following features:

1.  The food must all be nutritious.
2.  It must all keep a long time without refrigeration.
3.  You must be able to eat it uncooked if necessary.
4.  It must all fit into a normal diet.

If you do this, I absolutely guarantee that you’ll be glad, and that it
will give you a very good feeling of security.

I hope you will never have an emergency, but even if you don’t, you will
always feel a more secure with (at least) one month’s food on hand. This is
definitely worth the little bit of work and expense it requires.

You may want to continue and gradually build up to a three-month’s supply
or to vary the foods.  You may want to think about non-food items too:
garbage bags, a basic first-aid kit, whatever you would really need in an
emergency.

But always keep that bedrock, bare-bones one month’s supply – always
replenish what you use.

[The following is a guest post by Pat Meadows. Yes, we just ran another review of this one, but Pat's extensive knowledge of container gardening and related topics warrants revisiting this book...]

‘Fresh Food from Small Spaces‘ is an exciting book, an inspirational and
informative book. Ruppenthal’s main topics are container gardening,
sprouting, fermenting, growing mushrooms, and small livestock (chickens and
bees only), making compost and worm boxes. He lists and describes steps
that anyone can take towards helping to build a more sustainable planet and
living more lightly on the earth, as well as being more self-reliant.

I was very glad to see a short chapter on ‘Survival During Resource
Shortages’ and one on ‘Helping to Build a Sustainable Future’. The
‘Introduction’ also touches on these topics.

I was also glad to see that Ruppenthal recommends the use of Self-Watering
Containers. I know from personal experience (and from being the listowner
for a list devoted to Edible Container Gardening) that this is a very, very
superior way to grow vegetables in containers.

What the book is *not*: it is definitely not a how-to book. It is *not* the
only book you’ll ever need about *any* of the topics that it covers. If you
buy the book thinking that it is, you’ll probably be disappointed.

Instead, it gives an excellent general overview and introduction to some
very disparate topics. It gives you ideas for things *you can actually do*.
The author also points you towards more detailed sources of information on
each topic. I doubt if *anyone* could have written a detailed instructional
guide on all of these very different topics.

Major disappointment: the only illustrations are black-and-white stock
photos. Some color photos – and more personal photos – would have been a
great addition. This is really a very glaring lack. (Shame on you, Chelsea
Green Publishers!)

Second major disappointment: no index. I would have expected an index in
anything published by Chelsea Green, a quality publisher.

Major plus: The book is referenced, with endnotes. There is a list of
resources as well.

Ruppenthal writes well, and I would definitely have given this book my unalloyed
praise if it only had better photos and an index. I have no other criticisms.

[Note: A rerun from Sharon's blog last year, but it is that time again....]

If we’re to become a nation of farmers, and a nation of people who take home and small scale agriculture seriously, I think it is important to think about our seed sources. After all, without good, safe, reliable sources of seed, there is no agriculture – period.

I’m a big advocate of buying locally, but as I just told a friend, seeds are one thing that I don’t always purchase from my local retailer. There are several reasons for this. The first is that my local retailer tends to carry commercial garden center varieties of seed, which come from very far away. There are good reasons to want to buy local seed, from plants that have already adapted to your particular climate. Often the seed I mail order from far away is more local than the seed that I would buy from my neighborhood garden shop. The second reason is that I can often get organically grown seed if I buy by mail – and even though you don’t eat the seeds themselves, there are excellent reasons to want to avoid drenching the field your seeds are grown in with pesticides and chemicals. Also, small seed companies often struggle to get along, and they need all the business they can get. Finally, there is so much variety out there in food plants that buying locally simply wouldn’t allow me to try as many different things – if I had to rely on local sources there’d be no Glacier Tomatoes coming early, no Stein’s Late Flat Dutch Cabbage hanging on in my garden until December.

There has been a heavy consolidation of the seed industry in the last few years, to its detriment. The darkest force here has been the evil Montsanto, the Satan of agricultural corporations (and that’s saying something since there are quite a few other dark angels out there), who bought up Seminis a couple of years ago. Now Seminis is the wholesaler that provides much of the seed for the seed trade, including many classic hybrids and nonhybrid varieties. And last year, Seminis has bought Burpee seeds – the largest single mail order supplier. Now I have a fondness for the Burpee seed catalog, and there are a couple of non-hybrid varieties of theirs I love – a red french marigold, a cherry tomato. But I won’t be buying there again. Pity, but I have no desire to support Montsanto’s chemical agriculture, their attacks on farmers, their attempts to patent seeds created through laborious home breeding. And I try very hard to avoid Seminis varieties of seed. Because Seminis is a wholesaler, and sells to many of the seed companies that send out your catalogs, it can be difficult to tell where your seed originated. That means that I’m pretty much limited to some of the funkier catalogs out there. The good thing about that is that those catalogs have a large selection, a lot of neat stuff, and are usually good stewards of the environment. Giving them my money is an excellent thing.

Fedco seeds, for example, out of Maine, was the first catalog I know of to drop all Seminis varieties, and I applaud them for it. I love their catalog, and their web site, and they have wonderful prices and quality. Much of their seed is locally grown, a lot is organic, and they are well worth the visit. They do not sell seed year round, so if you are planning a fall garden, order now. They also have one of the best selections of fruit trees out there in their tree division, and I get most of my potatoes from them. They are my source for, among other things, the bulk sweet alyssum I undersow among my cucumbers and melons to attract pollinators and they were the source for my beloved “Benchmark” green beans, sadly discontinued this year. But I’ll trust their recommendations that the replacement is even better.

Baker Creek Heirloom seeds is totally out of my region, and I don’t know for sure that they don’t get any seeds from Seminis, but I doubt it. They have the biggest selection of open pollinated (that is, not hybrid) seeds I’ve ever seen in a catalog. They were started by a 17 year old boy, who is now a 27 year old married man, and it is run as a family business. One of my first seed orders ever came from them, before knew about local seed, and I get a lot of things from them anyway – I’ve almost always been happy with their seeds, and they carry many things suitable to my climate. Plus, they have wonderful service and are strongly opposed to GMOs and are interested in the political implications of our seed choices. Black Futsu squash is pretty amazing, as is their huge collection of sweet peas.

High Mowing Seeds is another one I recommend. They grow all their seed locally (to their Vermont area) and while they are expanding their hybrid offerings, offer an alternative to Seminis by growing out many of the classic OP varieties, including Waltham Broccoli and Long Pie Pumpkins. They have good prices, good service and they sent me 25lbs of buckwheat within a week of my order. What more can you ask for (full disclosure – the family that runs it are somehow connected to the church my mother and step-mother attend, which is how I got my first copy of their catalog, but I assure you my alliegence is purely to their seed) from a seed company?

Seeds of Change is sort of the Industrial good guy. They have a very polished catalog, and lots of wonderful varieties. They are not local to me (NM), but I like them anyhow. I’m not sure I totally trust anyone who has a line of processed foods, but they also do a lot of neat plant breeding, and have a great book section. Italian White eggplants produce very well for me here in upstate NY, and Golden Giant Amaranth is both beautiful and a delicious and nutritious grain crop. Their prices are high, and their bulk selection isn’t great, but they are worth a look.

You’d think I might want to buy seed from Gurneys, Vermont Bean Seed, Totally Tomatoes, Select Seeds and Jung’s, and sometimes I wish I could, but they are all essentially the same company now, part of the great consolidation, so I mostly avoid them. You can read more about this at www.gardenwatchdog.com

There are three grey area companies that I do sometimes support, although less and less because I can’t find out their policies on Seminis. I’m very fond of the Pinetree Seed catalog and Johnny’s seed company was the catalog I grew up with – until I was in my late 20s, I thought all seed came from Johnny’s. And then there’s Territorial, the fascinating catalog focused on the pacific northwest. I like them, but I am increasingly focusing my ordering on companies that grow more open pollinated, non-commercial seed. Still, Johnny’s was where I discovered “Fortex” pole beans, and got my very first and still beloved Jacob’s Cattle seeds.

Given a choice, my favorites are the catalogs that are in a different category entirely – not only are they good catalogs, but they are noble causes, and any money you spend there will enrich the world.

Bountiful Gardens is a terrific small seed company that is run in part by John Jeavons, the person who has most devoted himself to figuring out how to feed the world in small spaces. Not only do they have great seed, but they are a great cause. They also have a remarkable variety of compost, fiber and other uncommon crops. For those of you in northern CA and the Pacific NW, this is probably the place to buy, but all of us can get some wonderful things from them. I’m going to take another stab at rice this year, from their offerings. Don’t forget to look at their books, if you are at all serious about feeding yourself.

Sand Hill Preservation Center, run by the amazing Glenn Downs, is devoted to preserving heirloom breeds of poultry and seed. They are a single family operation, and you have to wait your turn for things. But if you can get things from them, you should. They are well worth your dollar, and virtually everything they offer is produced on farm. While you are picking out seed, don’t forget to check out the chickens and ducks – I definitely want some Marans. They do not take internet orders, and they are picky about how things work. But that’s ok – they are such a good cause that we just have to get over ourselves and wait politely for this tremendous gift they are giving us. Don’t forget to say “thank you” for keeping our heritage alive and our food more secure.

Finally, and in a class entirely by itself, is Seed Savers Exchange. You can buy seed from them directly, and they have a wonderful selection. Even if you don’t save seed, you should become a member – the Seed Savers Exchange has been losing members, and more and more people are the only repositories of a particular kind of tomato, or green, or millet or pea. The Irish potato famine and the corn blight of the 1970s should be evidence to us that relying on one particular crop is unbelievably dangerous – we need all the genetic diversity we possibly can get. The people at Seed Savers are keeping our heritage, our history and possibly our food security alive, and they need you at the very least to join up and give them money. But why only do that? Because the very best place to get seed is not from a catalog at all, but from your own garden, or your neighbors. So join seed savers and consider maintaining one or two or 20 varieties of seed yourself. Grow them out year after year, and save a little to trade to others. This is good practice for yourself, and enhances your own security – after all, if you ever couldn’t get seed, having some at home is a big thing. But most of all, it is a way of your participating in the provisioning of the earth.

There are great books out there about seed saving – my personal favorite is Suzanne Ashworth’s book Seed to Seed, and I’m also fond of Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, which is a surprisingly fun read for ordinary gardeners, even if you never plan to breed a thing. Because the amazing thing is that when you grow out a plant and save seed, you *are* breeding. That is, the plant begins to adapt to your region, and after a few generations, you’ve got a strain of something that is truly your own. It is a magical process, and one I’m still experimenting with. But more people need to do it.

Sharon