Barrel Hoop #3

Barrel Hoop MicroFarm

"All things are connected: the context of everything is everything else."-- Wendell Berry, "Bringing it to the table"

71'f (85f high) sunny

This farm is a work in progress, and will hopefully stay a work in progress for the entire time it exists.  It is the hope that we will be able to get almost all of our food from it.  The goal is to bring as little, of anything, onto the place, and to take out less than that.  Energy will hopefully all be from renewable, sustainable, reasonable, and clean sources.  The goal is to live in and of this local environment, and to be a benefit to it, while benefiting from it.

I am thinking of creating a stock pond, for fish.  In keeping with the scale of the place, it will really be a macro, outdoor aquarium.  The neighbors down the road actually have a pond, complete with turtles, fish, ducks and more.  They also have many times more land.  Their pond, as will be ours if fed naturally from the rain and run off.  I need to learn more about aeration, and avoidance of mosquitoes.  I wonder if they would become raccoon food? 

It seems that somewhere in the middle of the 20th century in this country, and subsequently in others, we left behind our understanding of our binding relationship to the rest of creation.  A view that had seen us thru all of time before that time was given up in exchange for an exploitation of and an attempt to subjugate that which we are connected to.  Some have never forgotten this connection and still live by methods and philosophies that support and celebrate it.  The Amish farmers are an example.  Small mixed use farms still survive.

A blood donor can only take so much from his body before the money gained from the sale of the blood is of less benefit to his over all health than the blood itself.

Current Industrial Agricultural practices are extractive and over all, and with time, have shown to be costly to the health of our land.  No nation can remain strong without healthy land that can grow food.