pete host

Scott Obar wrote:I'm a bit discouraged as I go on youtube and see homesteading/permaculture farm channels, and it seems everyone also has some sort of job (usually digital-related, but sometimes a defacto job in town), a wealthy spouse, or they are making their income from youtube, or from hosting workshops, airbnbs etc.

Haven't posted for a while, but this one I can empathize with. This answer wont please a lot of people, but so be it.

My short answer is : there are none, it's a sham. You cannot make a (over poverty levels) living, in countries like US/CA/FR/DE/... based only on a basic homesteading/permaculture scheme. Or at least, what most people envision under these terms. At least, I haven't met one in my own country, and I've been working with farmers for almost 30 years.

This leads to the next question : how come so many people "try and sell you permaculture/homesteading" ? Short answer : Because this is a viable business model. Selling dreams is profitable. And there's a shitton of those on youtube. And you know what, I don't even think it's unethical. Those people do good to those who need to dream a little to hold on to what they're doing, and not despair. They can even lead an urbanite to discover agriculture and dig into farming.

Now, that being said, is it a lost cause ? I guess not, but believe it or not, I think we're still too early into this trend as of 2022. We've been too early for decades. The current economic system almost totally prevents small scale farming from being profitable. For starters, because food is too cheap. As traders say, "being right too early is being wrong". Financially speaking. For this type of activity to be viable, we need for de-globalisation to proceed a few steps further. But given the current status of the world, and given our benevolent leaders don't lead us into some totalitarian dystopia, profitability even on small scale could come faster than most think. So I'm a strong advocate of : If you can afford it, farm some, even on a thenth of an acre. Or become friends and give some of your working time to people who farm.

Now there are farmers like Fortier, who live correctly from their enterprise, but he works his ass off, on a very rationalized veggie farm, and he has tons of street smarts. This model works. There are other legit small scale farmers who publish here and there on the internets, but most of the time, they're busy farming.

For the record, I do homestead, I feed my familly 80%, but this only goes so far. I also have a half-time job, and my wife works in town.

Ellendra Nauriel wrote:

pete host wrote:

It is nowhere near a profitable activity,

I got a chuckle out of this line. I grow seeds for a living!

And so I too have to respond. Of course if you concentrate on only one activity, if your business is selling seeds, then you will hopefully be profitable. A lot of people do try, a good few manage to keep those businesses running for decades.

But the question opening this topic (why so few people save seeds) addresses the gardening/homesteading population at large. If your business, for example, is market gardening, then the seed producing activity is an unprofitable one in most cases and one had better, from a business/financial POV, buy seeds than produce them oneself. It's the main reason why most professionals don't save seeds. Money is time, time is more profitably invested somewhere else for them. period. As for amateur gardeners, on the same line of reasoning, their time is limited and they'd rather spend it growing things (or so I guess) than spend it growing things *and* producing seeds.

Now, to make my point clear, I am of the opinion that time and money considerations, taken to the extreme (which is the norm nowadays), are driving us towards dangerous levels of fragility as a society. I am market gardening. I have chosen, as a few 50 professionals in my region, to produce my seeds. It takes me time, make my business less profitable (marginally so, but undeniably), but makes me more resilient.

Sara Rosenberg wrote:I save seeds because of Joseph Lofthouse.

I originally thought that seed saving was only done in order to save money (win)! However, the development of a plant more suited to my soil conditions was incredibly appealing and letting cross-breeding happen in order to have the chance to get new, tastier happy accidents happen is appealing. Plus, I like knowing that the seeds also came out of my own plants that have 0 poisons dumped on them.

Agreed. Joseph is amazing. His view on seed saving really helped us make sound decisions. I mentioned the case of "labour/space intensive" varieties as comes to seed saving : some, like cabbages really justify the effort. Some, like carrots are better done with Joseph's approach. We only do maintain a big "carrot landrace" for example, not individual varieties. Same goes for winter radishes, and a good few promiscuously pollinating plants .

[EDIT 11/5/19]: I didn't do Joseph Lofthouse justice enough : not only does he have ethics which resonate with my own, but he really pushed the envelope of what individuals can do with seed saving : I used to painstakingly maintain my varieties as "pure" as possible, which took me a lot of time. I now only maintain a few varieties "pure" (the 4 cabbages I talked about : cauliflower, headed cabbage, kohlrabi, brussel sprouts) because I don't have the resources to begin a landrace experiment with those. For the rest, I adopted his approach which could be summarized (if I dare) : let them cross, aim for taste, precocity, forget the rest.

In my very biased opinion, people don't save seed out of :
- lack of time
- ignorance
- lack of curiosity

Worst constraint is lack of time. It takes time to save seeds properly. It is nowhere near a profitable activity, given the ease with which one can buy from a variety of industrially produced seeds from any gardening store. I do save seeds from 100 varieties, every year, and that includes hard ones like biennial brassicae (not the kale/collard types which I hate to eat and will starve you to death in winter), carrots, etc... which cross like hell and don't have a long shelf life. It takes time and effort. Learning with good books is a start, a pre-requisite. Carol Deppe's or Suzane Ashworth are the best as far as I'm concerned. But when one gets serious about seed saving, collaborating with other seed savers locally becomes necessary. For example, our little community here saves seeds from 4 varieties of cabbages, 4 varieties of corn : that means any one of us can only, for one year, save seeds for one of the four corns, and one of the four cabbages, and we share both the seed saving and the harvest between us. But as we need to account for crop failure, it takes 8 people to save the 4 brassica varieties, as we do doubles. Coordinating this reasonably modest effort in a time and age which values comfort, cut prices, and leisure,... takes even more time, a lot of persuasion,... and a good dose of passion, to be honest.

Then comes ignorance. By that I mean, not ignorance of how to do it, but ignorance of just how much important this is, if one truly believes that permaculture, homesteading, independence is important, or that collapse-SHTF scenarios are probable. When/if a SHTF event occurs, however unlikely, people won't be able to "begin" saving seeds that year. Or the next. Seed saving is something that has to be planned years ahead, especially as comes to quantity. Our local group has given itself the following goal : to save enough staple seeds each year to be able to feed 300 people. That's a lot of seed potatoes, that's a nice set of half gallon jars full of squash seeds, that's even an impressive few pint-sized jars of lettuce seeds. And for most of those, we double or triple the needed quantity to be on the safe side.

Last comes lack of curiosity, which imo, is the least problematic. I did begin to save seeds because I was very curious of how it all worked. I've been doing it for 20 years now. But in our group, there are a lot of people who couldn't care less about the magic of seed saving, but have understood the strategic importance of doing so.

And for the courageous/passionate folks out there, its all very doable. Start small, ramp it up as you go. Have fun in the process.

Tom Strode wrote:
A biggie, that doesn't seem to get mentioned in the discussion of "tea's" is that anaerobic is bad.

I agree that vanilla ACT needs to be aerobic, yet old and tested practices such as nettle manure (to mention only one, there are lots of variations) clearly go into a long anaerobic phase. Anaerobic is not bad per say in a tea, depending on what one intends to breed.

Tom Strode wrote:
The synergistic action of the soil micro-organisms with the plant roots was one. For the soil to work it has to have roots in it, so cover crops work better than mulch.

Very true. I now tend to mulch, plant crop seeds, then now and then, just weaken whatever grows inbetween (either cover crop i planted or plain "weeds") by slicing it very roughly with a hoe in one quick pass. That being said, in an intensive organic garden, theres root enough per square inch even with mulch added. The thing that lacks is plant diversity, and I guess weeds / diverse-cover-crop play an essential role here as comes to roots, so I dont suppress them, just weaken them a bit to give my main crop a headstart. I need to mention I live in an area which combines the disadvantages of drenched soil (in the winter & spring) and arid soil (in the summer & autumn) : soil is very thin, rock-layer is not deep, and building as much good soil/humus as possible, fast, is a priority. Mulch (letting cattle quickly trample a cover crop is my favorite mulch method) + no till helps a lot. ACT didn't have obvious impact on my test beds. Now on other soil profiles it might be the other way around. Its mostly the silver-bullettery of ACT i'm disagreeing with.

I cannot make up my mind on Elain Ingham's recent activity (past 10 years) because she has left the field of scientific studies, and her claims on compost tea are not backed by the kind of evidence I'd like to see / read about. There's a thread on permies where Diego Footer chimes in which is interesting (about a few regenerative ag proponents) if one wishes to read between the lines.
Another woman does excellent scientific work, its Christine Jones  and luckily she's not retired from scientific publishing. I tend to follow her articles.

My main problem with compost tea is that it does very little for fungal innoculation (it cannot) and macro-arthropod / nematod breeding. ACT breeds mostly bacteria. I've gotten excellent results on some species, nilch on most others. I've decided to let it drop, and replace ACT with soil structure tending (including making fungus rich compost and mulch), which takes a few years, but gives significant results in my soil tests.

Hi Cassie,

Been reading the letter for some time, decided I'd chime in on this one (hence created forum account).

You're right on so many counts. One often overlooked and important characteristic of email marketing done right, is that it helps bring to life what i'd call for lack of a better term, the web 0.0
The web has become a friggin nightmare when compared to the nineties / early 2000 as comes to finding relevant / interesting info. Yes there's never been so much stuff in it, but the noise to signal level has seriously deteriorated.
Whenever I come across a website where :
1) there's no social media stuff whatsoever
2) attention is given to content over form (one of my favorite being Leo Babauta's Zen Habits)
3) the author knows how to write and does not waste my time telling me a 800 words story about her gran making pancakes to sell me a new forex investing scheme.

then it gets my attention. And I don't switch much, once I'm settled.

I work in different fields and for each one I try and find a curated letter like yours. That's a total of about 15 to 30 informational emails a week, which I can manage. I cannot read / monitor a full forum (except if I get paid for it, and even so it better not gob up more than 1h of my daily time), even less the whole network. But I can be pretty efficient at casting my nets at new info with 20 or so good curators.


Have an excellent day,
best,

Pete