After writing for years at OneStraw I’ve been looking for a venue now that I have settled. I wrote very sporadically at Farming Ontology but frankly the hustle needed to maintain an audience on a WordPress blog post Google Reader is more than I am interested in given everything I have going on. Medium seems interesting and I will likely cross post much of what I do here to both the WordPress blog and to Medium to see what works.
About me and this space. I’m a nearing 50 empty nester who studied Philosophy after bailing on my Forestry studies even before they began back in the early 90s (though I have come back full circle). I am unabashedly progressive, socially liberal, and quite pragmatic -ideas need to work in the real world. Finally I strongly prefer small/natural, often slow, simple solutions to large complex problems. I believe that community takes work and is critical to our collective future. The farm is my dream, but its also my side hustle. By day, I work as an executive in supply chain for a Fortune 50 company which gives me access to not insignificant resources, and
incongruities like using an all electric Kia EV6 as my tow vehicle, but severely constrains my time. What you will find here is primarily my musings, projects and adventures on sustainable small scale agriculture, forestry, and farm-steading as I work to put my 20 years of research, trials and thought into converting my 14 acre (+60 acre jointly owned woodland) from an estate into something rather more productive.
Goals of the property are somewhat plastic - here are my initial thoughts, with an update from this past Spring, but in general it is to build interconnected systems that use a mix permaculture design, American farming traditions, and new science to heal the land, improve its holding capacity, produce a surplus, and become a social and teaching space. Among the tools in that quest will be sequestering carbon through biochar and rotational grazing, creating more edge through Silva-pasturing, tapping into historical wisdom through raising heritage breeds and heirloom fruit trees and mimicking old crop rotations and farm system design. To me, it is clear that small farms work best when they are integrated, and I use late 19th/ Early 20th Century New England and Upper Midwest farms as an inspiration and work to mimic their basic structure of non specialization, multispecies farming allowing for what is now called intelligent or permaculture design, but what my grandfather farming in the 1920s-60s would have called ‘common sense’. It is my fervent belief that small farms tend to work best with a mix of animals (poultry, ruminants, pigs), with woodland for fuel, fodder and lumber, and design to produce much of their own needs, within a diverse and interconnected system, so that is the system I am working to build here.
My primary farm income is through the sale of piglets (30 in 2022, likely 50 in 2023) from my herd of 14 Kune Kune pigs, though last year we sold over 200 pullets and fertile eggs from the small poultry flocks and a number of twee goatlings. Also on site are ruminants / grazers to make the system work— namely the two mini donkeys, 4 Dwarf Nigeran Does and Cosmos Chaos their buck, and my bestie Tulip the Jersey Cow, born this past spring. In 2021 I was approached by some neighbors to form and join an LLC to purchase a 60 acre woodland that backs up to my farm which was to be placed into land trust (and has been!) to secure the remainder of this section of the valley as greenspace for agricultural and forestry use. After the purchase of the woodland, I have also purchased a portable band-sawmill to selectively harvest from that woodland to help accelerate my creation of useful infrastructure here at the farm and tap into ‘waste’ streams of slab wood for fuel and sawdust for bedding.
I am not thrilled with the paid subscription model on Substack, but have set them as low as possible should anyone be interested. Think of the OneStraw as the Appendix and Archive of most of the information that got me here - there’s something like 400,000 words therein. I look forward to learning with you all as I share my adventures here at the farm and we work to find a way forward through the Current Unpleasantness. Thanks for coming along.
-Rob
Do you make cheese with the milk from your Nigerian dwarf goats? I read in Hobby Farms that it’s ideal for that.