texican Hatfield

I've done half a dozen wells with the portable drilling rig (Hydra drill?  I walk by the rig every day, but haven't used it in over a decade).  Gets very difficult to get below 150'.  Pumping the fluids down to flush the cuttings becomes very difficult.  Going through rock is a bugger, but they do make rock coring bits, and cutting bits.  I got in a 'jam' once, and my drill bit broke, going through a 3' section of sandstone.  Time was critical (didn't want to have to set casing, and then pull it... otherwise the well would fill in with sediments) so I got some plumbing fittings, welded up a cutting bit, and welded carbide teeth on it.  Worked great, saved a bundle in money and time.

But... going thru 300' of rock... it's not going to happen.  You'd need a rig as good as the regular drillers, and a high dollar pump, to pump the fluids in and cuttings out.

One of my relatives has a road boring machine, and they can bore through solid rock... but it takes ages to do it (days).

The well I drilled for myself produced good initially, then realized the iron content was too high to use (the water would turn blood red if it set... not what you want to wash clothes with).  First year of drought, it went dry.  I ended up building an 8 acre lake instead of getting a professionally dug well.  Now I have a 6 to 8 year supply of water (if we ever got a drought that'd last that long, sure the world as we know it would be over) and gravity fed water into my house.  Gravity flow beats any kind of pumped water.

Paul, can you even get 'organic' lard?

I come from a long line of farmers and ranchers.  My grandfather ran hogs on over 10K acres, raising them organic I guess you could say.  He had the territory, the hogs were marked, and they only ate the natural foods they could get, and got fattened up in the fall on the acorn mast crop.

He'd slaughter half a dozen at least once a week, while the weather was cool enough.  You could boil down the fat for lard, but it would be a liquid lard.  To get a hard setting lard, you had to pen them up, and feed them corn, or other grains for at least a month.

We use lard exclusively here, for cooking oil.  I have a source for unlimited pork (my back pasture, and the vast woods surrounding it... also my local butcher gives me their entire output of excess meat cuttings... we feed our animals RAW), and make fresh lard each week.