Abraham Palmer

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since Dec 27, 2016
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Grew up in or on the edge of suburbia in a bunch of different places as an army kid and liked both school and the outdoors. I've never worn the permaculture mantle but keep dabbling over the years in so many of it's topics, I think it's the best type of people for me to learn from. Had a career in IT systems that eventually wore me down and then became a bread baker. I'm looking again now at how I could do something useful in this world with IT, while still running and refining my small bakery that takes local grains from field to table.
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Carrboro, North Carolina
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Recent posts by Abraham Palmer

I might be to blame, but I haven't gotten no till to work yet for my Summer or Fall planted grains. I have moved my grain trials around to lots of different places so the soil is rough and has a big weed bank, but I'm really a bread baker and not a farmer. Once I have done an initial BCS rotary plowing the first year, in successive years I have good luck mowing a field (weeds/cover crop) and doing some relatively shallow horizontal tillage with a BCS and then jab seeding it with a Chinese style hand machine. This Summer my daughter and I marked the corn planted rows and then planted cowpeas in between. I really like the result, but maybe planted the cowpeas too thick as they have in many cases climbed and pulled down my Lofthouse Flour Corn stalks. I still want to be able to just harvest by hand and then scythe everything down and jab seed through all the vegetative matter, but I haven't gotten the timing/grain varieties/weed pressure right yet.
--Abraham, Piedmont of NC, https://boxturtlebakery.com/
I run a home-based bakery and mill all my own flour. I switched to mostly using KoMo mills in 2012 and now have thousands of pounds of grain I have put through them. They are compact so I keep 1 for gluten-free grain milling and 1 for the other grains. I do love them and can't remember if I have posted before on these, but here is my experience:
- Speed: This is the first mill I've ever had which actually performed to spec and does 1lb/minute on my XL and XL+
- Fineness: You can get finer flour and a better shearing action of course on larger stones, but the quality I find is very adequate
- Temperature: I mill in the humid Southeast with lots of higher moisture content local grains so this has been one issue to work around. The flour temp itself is easy to keep cool with all but the hardest grains like Kamut. (you can freeze it before milling). For the mill motor itself, I had to add an extra fan to keep it cool enough on the XL+ to mill continuously. (I often have to mill for several hours). The XL is a less beefy setup and even with the fan still has to rest to cool down between 20 minutes runs.
- Corn: I find that larger grains like this are better cracked first to avoid putting lots of torque on the top stones (I use my slower Retsel mill to do this). The great thing is that the gravity fed straight path down to the horizontally slung stones works really well and you can re-mill siftings and whatever you need without it clogging.

More details and pictures on my blog: https://boxturtlebakery.tumblr.com/search/mill
3 years ago
I just ordered the book because I have good luck already with some of the Lofthouse seeds here in my Piedmont region of NC and am eager to learn more. I don't do much planting in nice garden beds - I've been on a bunch of different borrowed land with often poor soil conditions, dry, overly wet, or weed pressure. My experience is certainly that typical seeds often don't make it, but there are always a few landrace survivors no matter how hard the conditions.
--Abraham
3 years ago
I use a couple of KoMo mills for my home-based bakery and can also attest to their quality. I've milled now thousands of pounds of grain on the same grinding stones. I mill about 90lbs in the morning for my bakery prep days. My only problem in 8+ years is where it turns out there was a safety switch in the on button that had to be replaced (free under warranty). The Komo Fidibus XL mill turns out about 1lb/minute, but I have to rest it half the time to cool it off.  I have a bigger-motor version of the same mill, the XL Plus, that is supposed to be able to run continuously, but in our Southern heat/humidity/higher grain moisture only goes about 2 hours. I also regularly run white rice in them to avoid glazing the stones.  (I've now rectified this problem by running a fan on this mill for extra cooling and now can run it continuously) Running fans on these mills helps me keep the flour temp to < 115 degrees. I don't think the flour produced is super fine - they are still really small stones - but it is OK and easy to sift if you need it finer. If you want fine flour at home, I think you just have to go with a hammer/impact mill. These mills are the only ones I have found of 1/2 dozen I have used that actually mill to their rated capacity. For things like corn, I actually crack it on my Retsel and then finish it on the KoMo because the large grains going in the stones produce a lot of excess force. There is a lot to be said for the old 8" Polish iron mill which has a pre-cracking feature as a part of the auger.   Tumblr Post with Picture
4 years ago
Yes definitely all very good food for thought and this clears up my question I had related to the recent Dealing With Drama podcast. My neighbor, Barbara Fredrickson, runs a research lab dealing with positive psychology and boils a lot of positive psychological effects to a having a good enough ratio in your life of positive moments to negative moments. (Scientific tabulation of the effects of too much "ick" in your life). Some organizations I want to be active in, but there is too much negativity and it is difficult to change so I just need to pare those down. For others, I think it is good to think how to apply suggestions like these to make participation more positive, productive, and generally rewarding.
Thanks,
--Abraham
6 years ago
I listen to these podcasts while I am working in my home bakery and the banter is an entertaining way to pass the time of my 14 hour days. I'm amazed at the inability of some people to just put in a little more effort. That said I feel like I need a part 5 to layout your ideas of what you want to change. I think you already had the benevolent dictator type of thing laid out well, but I missed what is changing other than reminding people in this series of stories that yes the dictator will occasionally, when provoked, act like a dictator. I haven't tried out a bunch of different models, but I live in a consensus-run cohousing community and while I think the results are often pretty good, it definitely weighs us down with a certain amount of decision-making overhead.

Sidebar: I used to be in an amateur dance group that had a sort of rotating dictator position that vastly simplified decision making and gave everyone who wanted a shot at leadership their turn. The whole group supported the model and it worked really well.  

--Abraham

Benjamin Bouchard wrote:Is that the Canadian snath? Looks more like it. In which case it'd be ash, rather than hickory. If you bought it from Lehman's or Scythe Works it's the Canadian.


I got it from a local guy and am not sure where it came from and certainly could be wrong about my memory of the wood-type.  Sorry to lead anyone astray.
8 years ago

David Livingston wrote:Abraham
Was this a straight snath or a curved one ?


It has two gentle curves - one at each end. I don't know the specific type, but it was built specifically for the Austrian-style blade.  
8 years ago
I broke my hickory snath trying to cut down some mature sorghum with a grass blade.  I was only cutting down a few and thought what harm could come if I did it gently, but then I read on the web after the fact that this is a major user error.  Given the cost of snath's these days, I'm going to try to fabricate one out of bamboo.  I have a length picked out that already has one nice curve in it and I've read how you can heat green bamboo and then clamp it while it cools to make the second curve.  Please post if you know using bamboo for this purpose is a stupid idea in advance, but otherwise I'll post the results of the experiment.  Maybe if that doesn't work, I could bend some aluminum electrical conduit. [I've been reading the forums for a while, but this is my first-time posting so hello all   ]
8 years ago