Welcome to the Farm

The purpose of this blog is to discuss ideas on independent ways of doing things at home. Much of it will fall under the heading of recipes and animal husbandry, but other topics will come up as well. Under what conditions these ideas might be needed or wanted will of course be open to speculation, but whatever your predictions are for the future, the fundamental principle is that it is good to know how to do many things for yourself, even if you never have to. Like the seat belt and other safety measures, it is better to have knowledge and not need it than the other way around. Whether one is contemplating personal economy, or survival in difficult times, or just the enjoyment of learning a few new tricks, feeling competent to handle more things independently can be very satisfying. It can be fun in small things. In large things, it can be vital. Knowledge is the ultimate safety net. It has been fascinating to me over the years to note how acclimatized we have become to industrial answers to every how-to question. Consider one comment I have heard many times: "You make your own mayonnaise? I didn't know you could do that!" Now, it isn't that making one's own mayonnaise is important; it is that the mindset of assuming inability in a thousand small activities of life has become pervasive. What do we think people DID for mayonnaise for all the centuries before Hellman and Kraft came along? We have become far too accustomed to the idea that we cannot do things without industrial support. We are trained, year after year, into this perspective. If you ask the TV or the radio or the magazine ads, they will tell you that you cannot or must not DO, that you need outside support, and that the RIGHT answer -- if not the only answer -- is an industrial one. I am not denying that in many cases, an industrial answer really is a blessing, and when that is the case, I am as glad as anyone to take advantage of it. But sometimes the industrial answer is not the blessing one might imagine, and at other times, it may not even be available. For those times, if we can fall back on a little bit of old-world knowledge, we will be the better for it. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, many kinds of old-world knowledge fell into disuse, and even into oblivion, for lack of documentation, or lack of transmission from one generation to the next. This is not good. It is, in fact, quite dangerous. Putting ourselves in a position where we are, as a culture, utterly dependent for our survival on forces beyond our control is really just asking for trouble. My grandparents understood about cows and gardens and chickens, but my parents didn't have to bother with all of that, because their culture had become so modern; so the knowledge was not carried forward to us children. Those of us who have returned to rural roots have had to work diligently to dig up information on how to do things like our forefathers did. The "back to the land" movement that began in the 70s, and is still ongoing, has helped greatly in the rescue and preservation of this kind of knowledge, and I am grateful for it. I hope that I can add something useful to the conversation in my turn.