Natural cycle of growth and sustainability

@Carl Russell 19 wrote:

Someone brighter than us will come to solve the whole mess. Well I have no problem stepping back to find those more archaic lifestyle choices, because I can clearly see that they represent the way forward….Our past is full of wisdom if we can mature enough to embrace it….I have gotten a lot of work done over the years with my animals on my small farm, but not without being creative about how to make ends meet. Sometimes the tractor is the way, sometimes it’s substitute teaching, but we can get nowhere with the animals if we don’t keep working at it. I have found my profit in places where money doesn’t count, and the processes of using the animals are fantastic for providing those rewards. An old ox-teamster from Nova Scotia told me that there is a difference between making a living, and making a livelihood….It is our modern objective to turn time, food, fiber, soil into money. Robbing from the energy stream to spend it on things that require energy systems that further erode our resources.

Whoa, that’s deep! Much more philosohical than I expected from a forum on draft animals. I agree it is sad that we now expect someone else to deal with the mess we are creating in some distant future. Since it won’t happen in our lifetime it isn’t worth worrying about.

Past wisdom is what I hope to embrace in the not too distant future. And since I will be pensioned profit won’t be a factor. Rather it is more about the quality of life that we are seeking. 25 years ago, when I first started in the feds I picked up a part-time gig at a local horse farm. It was a tax write-off for some rich guy who liked to play with race horses. All I did was muck stalls, brush down a couple of boarder horses, and help bring the baled hay in. It surprised me how much I enjoyed it and how it took me back to times that didn’t seem so great originally but seem to have grown on me through the fog of nostalgia. I’ve spent 30 years making a livelihood, now it’s time to make a living.

@Carl Russell 162 wrote:

Obviously, if certain practices reduce the effectiveness of an enterprise then the choice to use that practice could be seen as unsustainable, regardless of how “sustainable” the practice truly is. With so many things there is an ideal that we may never achieve, but that ideal is still the consolidation of the philosophy that drives us.

Fortunately for me, this farm won’t be an enterprise. It’s meant to be therapeutic. There was a boarder at those stables that never got ridden. Never could figure out why the owner didn’t just sell him. They said he was too mean to be ridden, just plain vicious. I’d like to say I proved them wrong but I never dared try it. I’ll tell you one thing though, that horse surely did love to be brushed. And I could spend an hour just brushing him down and talking to him about my job. I think it was good therapy for both of us. That slower pace and more intimate relationship is why I am looking at horses in the first place.

@CRTreeDude 168 wrote:

I think something that has been lost is the American Dream….Sustainable practices also include a sustainable standard of living. It is unrealistic for those of us who were fortunate enough to be born in the USA to assume we can forever live at a standard of live several times higher than the rest of the world.

Madison Avenue, television, and the media are largely to blame for that. And the really said part of it is that for every 1 American who finally gets smart and starts to curtail his spendthrift ways there are at least 10 Chinese and/or Indians trying to emulate his old consumeristic lifestyle with total disregard for the very consequences that caused him to change his lifestyle.

@Carl Russell 2287 wrote:

By developing relational markets for farm fresh food like raw milk, on-farm slaughtered meat, local grains, CSA veggies, etc. farmers can have much more control over their markets. With that kind control there is more room for diversification and low volume production.

But this is not enough without a reduction in consumption. Relational marketing significantly reduces distribution costs, or at least it lets the consumer absorb it directly. But there is still a large cultural acceptance of the heavy use of energy that characterizes so much of our food production system. By tying up energy and resources in equipment and infrastructure, we create an economic expectation from the Earth to be able to cover that cost.

Thanks for being my voice.

On the note of low volume production, I have to say that that’s right on the mark. It’s impressed me during the learning curve of the first year and a half of running the bakery just how little we need to do to make ends meet so long as we can eliminate waste. It is astonishing how much waste of all kinds is inherent in most bakery operations, in driving, packaging, but most significantly, loaves left unsold go in the dumpster, or perhaps if someone really goes the extra mile, to the food shelf. 33% is not unusual.

I couldn’t bring myself to pitch so much bread having worked so hard to bring it to that point. So we’re using non-conventional sales techniques instead, and it’s working great so far. Far better to bake 60 loaves and sell them all than 90 and throw 30 away.

Sustainably managed natural systems just don’t yield all that much. But if we all farmed or logged to meet the basic needs of people around us rather than to make a living on the sloped playing field of globalized business, maybe they wouldn’t have to.