Tag Archives: sustainability

Hogs, uncouth relatives and nannies

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It starts with the clang and rattle of a lid being removed from the feed barrel. A deep belch like rumble, like that of an uncouth relative rolls from the woods, answered by other noises, all gastric in tone. The hogs have awakened. From various locations in the woods, for they all seem to have their own special sleeping spaces, the sounds grow in volume and slowly converge near the gate. I’m still a couple of hundred yards away and unseen. But they know I’m there and impatiently wait until I round the corner swinging a five gallon bucket of feed in one hand.

The feed bucket contains the contents of 10 cans of food purloined from the picked over debris of Donald’s belongings. After we bought his old house we spent a day hauling the bits and clutter from his life to the dump. But the canned food, a few hundred cans worth, well that was worth saving. So each day for the past month I open and heat about ten cans of creamed corn, sauerkraut, carrots, black beans, northern beans, mustard greens, spinach, sweet potatoes, add about five pounds of shelled and cracked corn and slop into the trough, turning deep belches of hunger into grunts of contentment.

Simon Fairlie in his essential work Meat: a benign extravagance
has an interesting chapter titled “The plight of the pig in the nanny state” dealing with food waste due to excessive interference by an over protective bureaucracy. He touches on how a complex system of food waste collection from homes and businesses in Germany and Austria fed six million hogs a year. That is until forced to stop this practice by the E.U. in 2006 and move their production to commodity grains. The ostensible reason was the danger of feeding tainted swill to hogs that could pass on pathogens to humans. The reality was that their system produced statistically zero cases. Provided one follows basic food safety controls feeding slops to hogs is safe, useful and makes sense and has fed pigs for tens of thousands of years.

Instead the E.U. has moved to an expensive system of feeding an omnivore exclusively on grains: grains that could be used to feed people. Hogs have always been the companions of humans living off their excess waste. The timidity of the E.U. certainly had no impact on the third world. Predictably hog production in Europe has declined even as pork consumption has remained steady. China and other countries with less strict controls and perhaps scruples over food safety have filled that void. Shipping pork at a lower price for thousands of miles in container ships to a consumer that had a perfectly sound system of low cost production at hand…now, that makes perfect sense!

In a world of population overshoot, waste of food products seems senseless. Yet every day one hears or reads about the struggle of landfills in the modern world to deal with food waste. Some ingenious people come up with overly complex methods to turn it into compost, methane farms, etc. with high tech and high energy inputs. But the simple low cost method of feeding pigs that feed us is abandoned, except by the small farmer, in favor of subsidized grain production.

The age old “A pig is health” or “a pig pays the rent” are simple testaments to the enduring relationship between hogs and food security for thousands of years of human history. Sometimes a wheel does not need to be reinvented.

Speaking of wheels, the sun is starting to rise and soon our “uncouth relative” will be demanding attention out in the woods.

Saturday Chores and Making Lye Soap

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Saturday: Up at 6 with a breakfast of sausage, eggs, grapefruit, coffee and toast, exercise and head out the door: mulch, weed, collect eggs, find old eggs, feed pigs, repair fencing, burn brush, salt cure ham, make lye soap, use liquid manure, move gravel pile, go to a party, find kitten in middle of intersection, Cindy finds home for kitten, return home, find bucket of garden scraps for the pigs left by kind neighbors (thank you Melanie and Sara) and bags of fresh produce, turn in to bed and another Saturday is done.

Instructions for making the lye soap: We have been making this soap for the past two years.

5 pounds 7 oz. lard (rendered from fat back)
12 oz. lye
22 fl. oz. ice cold water
Peppermint extract

In our quest to use the whole hog it was inevitable that soap making would work its way onto the agenda. Perhaps we have cheated by not converting wood ash into lye? Instead we use commercially prepared granulated lye. The process is fairly straightforward. What follows are basic directions. See the link at the bottom if you want to try this yourself.

1. Wear goggles and use rubber gloves (lye is quite caustic).
2. Pour your cold water into a plastic bucket.
3. Stir in your lye and stir with a wooden spoon. The solution immediately heats up. My directions told me to cover the bucket until it reaches a temperature of 85 degrees. My solution hit 85 in 30 seconds. Maybe my ice cold water was not ice cold enough?
4. Meanwhile melt 5 pounds and 7 oz. of lard. I was a bit short and only had 5 pounds. So, I modified the amounts required on water and lye. The quantities need to be precise.
5. When the lard reaches a temperature of 95 degrees begin stirring in the lye water. Then stir in the peppermint.
6. Stir until it reaches the consistency of pudding.
7. Pour into your soap mold. Mine was a wooden crate that originally held the complete Inspector Morse DVD set. I placed wooden dividers to create individual bars.
8. It takes about 2 weeks to fully cure.

The big question is whether you used the formula accurately to create soap? Or, did you goof and create a convenient way to remove skin? To date we have been pleased with the results. Use the following directions when making your soap. http://www.ehow.com/how_4695940_lye-soap-lard.html

Fruit Pruning

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Putting on a workshop takes a lot of work and planning, having someone else conduct the workshop…not so much. Last Saturday we had another in our ongoing homestead workshops, this one on pruning fruit trees. Our orchard is still a young but firmly established thirteen years old containing a mixture of Southern and English heirloom apple, pear, peach, plum and cherry trees.

Looking over the orchard this summer I was reminded of the need to do an annual pruning in the fall. Knowing a few basics, this chore is done each fall with modest results. The epiphany hit. What would Tom Sawyer do? Aunt Polly is, after all, mighty particular about how this fence gets painted.

So, last Saturday with ten workshop attendees in tow our certified fruit tree pruning specialist (Andrew Merriss) conducted a workshop using our orchard to demonstrate proper techniques: pruning to diminish pathogens and pests, understanding tree growth from leaf and flower buds to shoot elongation.

It was well received by all, quite informative and at the end of the workshop we had a number of nicely pruned, formerly out of control, pear trees. And I think that if I have been good this year instead of my usual sweet potato and switches Santa just might bring me a pruning ladder.

Jack Frost

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An early morning walk down the lane behind the house, a small woodlot of a few acres on my right. On the left, screened by a copse on the edge, runs a long steep pasture. At the far end lies a fallen oak straddling the two worlds. I sit on the trunk with Tip and watch the sun rise on one of my favorite views.

The pasture is smooth, clear of any obstruction, rock or tree. The grass is short and green, covered with a thick sheen of white crystals left from Jack Frost’s nightly visit. The pasture has folds and hills as it rises up the ridge. A starkly sensual sight as the sun rises and illumines through leafless trees selective contours of the land.

The blankets of frost quickly disappear in streaks where the sun touches the hill. In minutes the pasture is rippled with stripes of green. It will be another hour before the sun will vanquish the frost from the pastures. Another hour yet before all the remains of a cold night will be the skim of ice on water troughs and crunch of grass in shade of the porch.

From my desk, as I write, the view is of the chicken yard and coop. The light has crested the hill and hit the coop window, a window of ancient and honorable pedigree. A large rectangular piece of zinc lined glass, each pane four inches square of distorted lines from a pre-mass production furnace. The window, one of a handful rescued from the Jacobs Agricultural Building at Chilhowee Park when it burned around 1900. A grand palace of a now vanished agricultural heritage, its relic gives reflected light to our hens on their roosts.

Robbie

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Robbie, our six-year old English Shepherd, was put to sleep yesterday. I picked him from the veterinarian’s office packed in a box and drove home. I started digging a grave in the middle of the garden. Cindy came out and got a spade and joined in the work. In very little time we dug down three feet a tidy rectangle.

Cindy went back to the house. I opened up the box and took Robbie out, such a beautiful dog even in death. For a working breed he had lovely quiet disposition, sometimes too quiet and easy going for his job as farm dog.

He was the classic “lover not a fighter.” The exception was with Becky or a strange dog; from time to time they would without warning tear into each other. Just last Sunday as we walked in the woods, Becky and Robbie sparred for a full ten minutes, leaving each other bruised, bloodied and ready for more.

On Tuesday morning well before dawn, we let Robbie and Tip out of the mud room; Becky stays out all night. By the time we had coffee and Cindy left for work, Robbie had traveled the quarter-mile to the road, been hit by a car, walked up the drive twenty yards and collapsed in shock.

Cindy spotted him curled up in the grass at the side of the driveway and rushed back to get me. Using a blanket, we wrapped him up and put him in my truck and took off to the vet. Not Robbie’s first rodeo: a fractured tibia from catching his leg between metal slats jumping off a hay wagon, a severed artery of unknown cause.

The x-rays showed a smashed pelvis and hemorrhaging in the chest cavity. Two nights and three days in the hospital and he came home. The internal bleeding had stopped, but they couldn’t do anything with the pelvis. Cindy took Robbie to a vet on Friday that specializes in surgery on dogs. They did more x-rays. This time they discovered that the pelvis was worse than originally thought, but they could fix it for around $3000. No guarantees, but a reasonable prognosis with a long recovery. Surgery was scheduled immediately. First, though, bloodwork in response to Cindy’s observation of urinary incontinence. The vet discovered that Robbie’s bladder had ruptured. Repairable, with more surgery. In the blink of an eye, we were now looking at vet bills totaling $5000. A decision had to be made immediately.

What is the value of a loving and loyal pet? Do we love our pets more or less when we make decisions based on cost? There is no easy or correct answer. Cindy, who was back at work, would probably have opted for the surgery. In a hurried, emotional phone discussion, I suggested it was time to let our much loved Robbie go. We made the choice, and I called the vet and asked them to put him to sleep.

He was still warm when I pulled him out of the box. I held him for a few minutes before laying him on the dirt. Shoveling dirt, gently at first until covered and then faster, until the grave was filled and mounded over the top. Cindy went out later and spent time at the gravesite.

He now belongs to the future as much as the past.