[goodcompanion]

Update–this position is still open!

[goodcompanion]

Probably the Vermont Harness Maker who made your harness is Gary Langdell, Hyde Park, I think. To my knowledge he is the only harness maker in the state. If you talk to him tell him that Bobby the Horse sends his regards.

[goodcompanion]

@Mano 3644 wrote:

i am not sure, for that i ask, is that a joke or is that the truth :confused:

It is a joke.

[goodcompanion]

Carl,

It’s possible that those of us at work “selling ourselves” as providers of the holistic food package, if you will, may make incremental advances into the market. I feel like the tide is turning, and that this kind of community marketing will grow stronger.

But it’s still a precarious place to be. When you hold up a carrot and say, “this carrot is not a carrot. It is soil renewal, perpetuation of hand skills, incorporation of the very young and very old into community life, water quality, preservation of heirloom plants, and a fossil-fuel free life. So it costs $2.00 per carrot. (exaggeration)

Some people grasp this immediately and choose to pay the $2.00. Most don’t, their own lives and budgets take priority until the point is reached when said lives and budgets are unmistakably going over a cliff. I kind of think that the tangled pile of injured people at the bottom of the cliff is where most of the realization takes place–history doesn’t provide any exceptions, unfortunately.

Kristin, you spoke at the beginning of the thread about concern about unsustainable use of cheap labor to operate at all. Worth acknowledging, but I think that the critical issue of our time and place is not the exploitation of willing young people who want to learn, but the loss of human skills. Kristin and Mark do more than anyone I know to reverse this trend when it comes to farming, and hats off to you for it.

Almost anything that truly perpetuates and spreads traditional knowledge and skills seems justifiable to me. Call an approach elitist, call it personally or socially unsustainable, I don’t care, so long as it gets you by for the time being and keeps the knowledge base from being crushed into oblivion by the blind, deaf and dumb Global Marketplace.

[goodcompanion]

@Kristin 3396 wrote:

Hi Jason-

I am trying to reconstruct the coffee-addled state I was in when I wrote that. Sorry to be so long responding. I was basically thinking that it seems healthier to me, in the long run, to help consumers to pay the real cost of food than to keep the price of food artificially low through subsidies. I guess when it comes down to specifics I’m talking about expanding programs like WIC, etc., to include even middle class consumers, while ‘defining up’ what those programs pay for, as Michael Pollan says, to fresh and even local food, not chips and soda. That way, farmers and consumers both benefit from the same dollar. At the same time, gradually do away with commodity subsidies. Reduce all these props over time, as people make adjustments in priorities and spending. I know policy doesn’t really work this way but what if it did? Just a thought, and probably not a very good one.

all best to everyone on this chilly and rainy morning –
Kristin

Policy can work however need dictates.

Currently low-income food subsidies use the general public purse to prevent hunger and malnutrition (defined in the most basic terms) for the bottom tiers.

While there are limited land tax breaks for farmers in some areas, there isn’t any expenditure in real terms on (re)developing small direct-market farms.

On the other hand, there is a massive expenditure of public funds on commodity agriculture. I would like to put a finger on how much federal and state money is used to construct manure lagoons and the like for commodity farms–I bet this figure dwarfs the budget of WIC a hundred to one.

Connecting the need for sound local nutrition with the need for viable local farms through policy could probably only happen after commodity food becomes unaffordable to a large portion of the public, making hunger and malnutrition problems of a scale that can no longer be resolved satisfactorily with a sliver of the budget. The public would have to recognize that commodity farms fundamentally do not address hunger and malnutrition and consequently vote to redirect resources from commodity ag to direct-market ag.

Of course the commodity ag lobbies would not be happy with such a move. Also, if a lot of this public money is spent helping commodity farms with pollution containment, would a drying-up of subsidies mean that farms would then be free to pollute or that they must build such facilities with their own financial means? My general impression is that it is simply not possible for most northeastern commodity dairies to stay in business without government funds to contain massive amounts of manure. And this is where our food and farming tax dollars and personell hours are allocated.

[goodcompanion]

I would bet that any glass shop ought to be able to make the mirror for it for not much more than it would cost you to buy the materials and do it yourself. Mirror’s just glass and they can usually cut all kinds of curves in glass given a pattern to work from.

[goodcompanion]

@Kristin 3039 wrote:

If we were to set our price ‘fairly,’ with everyone who works at the farm making a decent wage (and I’m not even talking about a middle class wage, just a decent working class wage), the share price would be outrageous. (When we figure out that number, I’ll post it here.) Or, at least it would seem outrageous to people used to cheap food. I think that’s one of the dirty little secrets of small scale organic agriculture. A lot of it is based on the cheap or free labor derived from interns or apprentices. It bothers me, because it perpetuates a system that is based on a false economy, and it’s not fair. Yes, we’re training farmers, but we’re training them to rely on cheap or free labor. What do you all think?

-Kristin

Kristin,

I think that this kind of compromise is just plain necessary to survive. Yes we are teaching our apprentices to rely on cheap labor, and so they must until circumstances change. But what you are doing is keeping skills and practices alive so that when they do change, you and those you have shared these skills with are prepared to be leaders.

When selling food that is, on the face of it at least, pretty comparable to what you find in stores, we can’t do much to mark up our food as long as the mass market defines the baseline. Maybe we shouldn’t try to do so if doing so undermines our efforts to engage average people with our farms.

We can wait for baseline prices to come up, I guess. In the meantime a variety of strategies can patch things together.

[goodcompanion]

Not being an ox-drover myself, I do see the immense advantages to oxen over horses. Yokes are much easier to make than harness, for one thing.

If the chief disadvantage is speed of work, this might not be a huge problem in a new economy in which we humans suddenly have a lot of time to devote to agriculture.

In considering what species will be most crucial in our animal-powered future, we can always take a look at our animal powered past. Is a post-peak world more likely to be like the post-civil war U.S., with a highly productive and competitive agricultural sector, backed by industrial production and national freight systems, or more like a colonial-era U.S., with most agricultural production and manufacture remaining very local? I think about peak oil constantly, and I tend to think that the latter scenario is a more likely place for us to “bottom out.” This suggests oxen instead of horses, pitchforks instead of balers, geese instead of chickens.

None of which is to say that horses, hay balers, chickens are not worthwhile. Even a farm that effectuates a transition to fueling its own machinery with farm-grown biofuel is making a move that can slow our energy descent, even if those farm practices are not sustainable over the long run.

One of the long run litmus tests is that of self replication. For instance, can you build a new oil refinery with the oil you refine and the machinery built and powered with oil? Absolutely, we do it all the time. Can you build a new solar panel factory with energy exclusively from solar panels? The evidence suggests not. Turning the question to animal traction, can we build a new equivalent of the wonderful mccormick number 9 mower without the oil-fired industrial apparatus we now enjoy? I don’t think so, but we might be able to maintain that mower for a good while.

Just some musings.

[goodcompanion]

Mr. Bactrian, a question for you.
Concerning your hump,
Is it one lump,
or two?

[goodcompanion]

Bonjour Mat,

Bienvenu! Peut-être un jour nous alllons avoir assez du monde pour avoir un discours sur ce sujet en français.

Bon chance avec votre projet d’atteler des mulets. Il faut parler à Donn Hewes aussi, il les utilise pour faire beaucoup de choses à sa ferme.

[goodcompanion]

Probably could but I have no idea what it would cost. Easy enough to find out I suppose.

[goodcompanion]

I just bought a crusty old haywagon gear, mostly to use for a future haywagon, but it is a possibility for the bakery wagon, and certainly within budget. ($50.)

Anyone tried replacing the auto hubs with straight round 1″ axles so I might use amish-made wheels with 1″ i.d. roller bearings? I am not much of a welder.

Incidentally, why is “crusty” never a good adjective except when used to describe bread?

[goodcompanion]

Berry is a friend of a friend of my father… But I understand through that my chances for an introduction, or anyone else’s for that matter, are almost nil. Very reclusive guy.

And hats off to him for that. He expresses himself best through the written word (I heard him speak one time, and, well, in my opinion, probably the time spent listening to him would have been better spent reading him instead). So why must every great thinker be a celebrity as well?

So he’s probably not likely to accept the nomination for pope, I know.

I am glad he is still full of fire. He must be way up there in age now.

[goodcompanion]

@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.

[goodcompanion]

Believe me, I’d like to. But if I can’t do it within budget then there is no project. I’d rather have the wagon in service this year on a rusty haywagon gear with four different-looking tires, and upgrade the gear later when resources allow, than table the project for another year.

Money’s an issue. So is time. But naturally so to are function and aesthetics. But it does seem that buying nice new wheels and springs that might be within my reach.

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