Eric Brown

If you burn bones you don't really have to grind them afterwards because they'll just kind of crumble apart afterward.  Burned bones are a great source of phosphorus.  If your soil is low in phosphorus it's possible you'll see a very noticeable difference pretty much immediately.

My wife and children and I grow all of the vegetables we eat, all of our fruit (maybe 30-40 different species in total, some in larger quantities, some in smaller, but an abundance overall), all of our nuts except for one Brazil nut every other day for a selenium supplement (mainly peanuts, black walnuts, hazelnuts, and chestnuts); all of our dairy (milk, butter, soft and hard cheeses...) comes from our own cows and goats; all our meat and poultry comes from our own animals besides game we trap or hunt; we grow/forage all of our mushrooms (shitakes, oysters, chanterelles, and several other species); we keep bees for all our honey (which we use for any ice cream or baked desserts we make, but we eat a lot of fruit and not very many desserts).  We could enjoy more fish but mostly do without fish, but sometimes neighbors will give us some fish they catch from nearby lakes or rivers, and we have gigged some frogs.  Other foods we'd like to eat but haven't, at least not yet, made ourselves and so have done without in the meantime are fermented meats (like salami) and soy sauce.  Beer might be nice -- we've grown some hops and some barley but never malted the barley -- but we make a little cider from our own apples and some mead.  (I used to make mead with regular extracted honey but now just make mead by rinsing my cappings.  I was surprised how much honey was still in my cappings even after letting them strain for a couple days.)  We've been growing our own mustard seed but we could enjoy eating more mustard than we've managed to grow.  We don't really miss chocolate at all, but we've grown to really appreciate desserts made with bitter fruits like elderberries and wild blackberries to fill a vaguely similar bittersweet niche as chocolate.

That leaves us buying a few extra grains to supplement our main staple grains which we do grow for ourselves (we grow all our own wheat and corn, which is somewhere around 90-95% of the grain we eat), vinegar (which is probably simple enough to do that we could easily enough have made it from fruits we've had without too much effort, but we just haven't made it happen), oil (which we use for mayonnaise and salad dressings -- we also make salad dressing by substituting various combinations of homegrown sesame seeds/cream/sour cream/soft goat cheese/bacon fat, but haven't given up on oil-based dressings and haven't grown and pressed our own oil), maybe a quart of maple syrup per year (to supplement our own honey, which is our main sweetener, and some sorghum syrup that neighbors give us for helping at their harvest time), the Brazil nuts, salt, black pepper, cinnamon, and maybe a tiny amount of some other spices (nutmeg...)  I think that's everything we buy.  Except for vinegar and the salt, it wouldn't be too big a deal for us to do without the rest, and if we gave up purchased vinegar, I'm pretty sure that would pretty quickly motivate us to make our own.  

Altogether we average about 17 cents per person per day on purchased food (just under $500/year for our whole family), and that's all at USDA organic prices.  I don't think the USDA organic label counts for much, but that's what we buy anyway.  

Of course, that doesn't include the production costs of what we grow for ourselves, but we make our living mainly selling at a farmers market, so the dollar costs of what we grow are largely entangled with our farm expenses, but our farming style is relatively very low-input, too.  Very roughly our total farm expenses are around $3000-$4000/year plus mileage (which costs us a lot less than the standard IRS mileage rate but which at IRS rates is around $2600/year, mainly for driving to the farmers market.)  Fuel for our two tractors is under $500/year.  We've spent a total of around $10,000 for our two tractors and implements over the last 18 years, plus nearly that much for repairs, replacement parts, etc.  We raise our hogs entirely on feed we grow or forage (surplus dairy, acorns...); we've managed to save back enough honey to feed our bees without any purchased feed for the last several years but have bought sugar for bee feed in the past and might wind up in a situation where we would again; we spend less than $5/year on hay for our goats, around $100/year for hay for our cattle -- we feed our cattle and goats entirely off pasture (plus maybe some garden/orchard scraps) most of the year -- and maybe a little over a $1000/year for grain (mainly just conventionally grown wheat that we buy direct from neighbors) for our chickens and ducks, so our poultry is by far our least sustainable/self-sufficient animal enterprise, but we really value having eggs, and the manure is a really valuable fertilizer (and it's nice to have poultry to eat, too.)

That's an overview of my family's food self-sufficiency story.

One tip I would offer to anyone wanting to be more self-sufficient in food is that it seems to me that one of the most important steps to food self-sufficiency is learning to eat and enjoy the foods that you can reasonably hope to grow for yourself in your location.  If you've grown up eating mass-produced supermarket-type food, your tastes and preferences are probably grown out of that food system, so learning to cook from scratch and to eat and enjoy the foods that you can grow is a really important part of being self-sufficient.  Being able to grow your own food isn't much good if you don't know how to prepare it or don't want to eat it.  Train yourself and your taste buds to cook and preserve and to eat like someone in your area that is self-sufficient in food even if you aren't.

Yes, we're still open to hosting visitors.  Sorry for the late reply.  I don't log onto Permies so often.  

(If I'm not posting in the right section or if there's anything else I'm not doing right, please let me know.)

My family isn't currently signed up with wwoof although we previously hosted farm visitors that we connected with through wwoof and in other ways for about 10 years with lots of great experiences, but we'd like to get back to hosting visitors more or less wwoof style.  If any of the following information leads you to want to connect with us, please message us with your e-mail address!

ABOUT OUR HOMESTEAD AND FARM:
We make our dollar living farming, mainly selling vegetables but also a little beef, some orchard fruits and nuts, mushrooms, and other farm products... almost entirely direct-market (farmers market, CSA...), but we're at least as focused on the self-sufficient part of our living. We're extremely (by modern American standards) self-sufficient in food. Over the last few years we've averaged under $500/year on purchased food for our family of 8. We grow/forage all of the vegetables we eat, all our fruits, all of our nuts, wild and cultivated mushrooms, all of our dry beans/peas, the heirloom corn we use for all of our tortillas and hominy and cornbread, all of our wheat, all of our honey; we raise goats and cattle for all of our dairy (milk, soft and hard/aged cheeses, yogurt, ice cream…) as well as for meat; we raise various poultry and occasional hogs; we process our own rennet, salt cure our own pork; our butter and animal fats provide all our cooking fats. If you come for a farm stay with us, you’ll not only have the chance to learn about growing and producing and preserving all these different things, but we also share all our meals together with our visitors, so you'll get to eat exceptionally homegrown-organic meals every day, too.

To the extent that we're able we're very willing to trade off profit (which isn't great with small farms to start with) for the sake of things like being able to eat our own food (as opposed to just growing the most profitable things and buying the rest of our diet from mass-market sources), avoiding disposable plastics, not outsourcing things to conventional farms (even if they're allowed under the USDA organic rules, like buying poultry from conventional hatcheries) that we can do in more responsible ways, etc.  So, for example, we do things like picking up lots of acorns (mainly by hand) to feed pigs through the months when there aren't acorns on the ground and to be able to raise hogs without purchased feed. We save a majority of the garden seeds we plant, well over 100 different open-pollinated/heirloom varieties, and propagate almost all of the fruit trees and other perennials we grow. We grow a couple hundred different varieties of several dozen different species of fruit and nut trees (and bushes and vines...)  We grow bamboo for stakes and trellises and countless other uses. We harvest grass seed for our own use. We manage our forest areas for lumber, posts, and some random uses like pine rosin to use for grafting, poplar bark shingles for siding, oak splints for homemade baskets, carving spoons, axe handles... We render fats to make our own bath and laundry soap.  We've built a small roundwood log cabin with trees from our own land with wood joinery (saddle notches for the walls, pegged lap joints for the rafters, etc.) done with hand tools, but still need to make windows, a door, and add a proper floor. We have lots more building and other woodworking-type projects that we'd like to prioritize in the next few years.

HOSTING VISITORS
We enjoy hosting visitors mainly for the opportunities to interact, make friends, share the food and farm things we’re passionate about, to inspire an appreciation in visitors for homegrown food and low-tech organic ways of farming, and to teach and mentor (and also learn from) people interested in doing the same kind of things we’re doing. We love to discuss visitors’ how-to, why-not, what-if… questions. Besides mealtimes, we spend a lot of the average work day working together with visitors, too, so there’s lots of time to discuss farming things and answer questions. We enjoy hosting visitors from all over, but we’ve particularly enjoyed the two extremes of international visitors and visitors from close enough that we've been able continue to connect and share in common interests afterwards.

Types of work we can frequently use help with from visitors include milking, setting out transplants, weeding, hoeing, harvesting, packing up for the farmers’ market, rotating/watering animals, fence work, food preservation, and lots of other random farm projects.

We have very limited space for housing visitors in the colder months but a couple options for when it's reliably warm enough to make use of unheated sleeping space in buildings without heat (roughly mid April or early May through early to mid October), specifically the log cabin mentioned above and space in a wood-framed building with electricity and internet access that we also use for drying/storing garlic and seed, for grinding grains, occasional woodworking projects and other things. We'll tell you more about the details if you're interested. In either case visitors would come to our house for use of running water and to join us at our table three times a day.

Visitors need to be able and willing to eat wheat, corn, meat, eggs, and dairy (with exceptions for day visitors.) We share all our meals with visitors, and we aren't set up to have visitors cook for themselves, so visitors mostly need to be happy to eat pretty much the same food we eat.

We recommend 3-5 week visits for first time visitors but we have sometimes made exceptions for shorter visits. Our farm is in a very rural setting, but we’re only about 35 miles west of Winston-Salem and about 60 miles north of Charlotte. We could pick up and drop off visitors from a nearby bus station, etc., but a car would be pretty essential for doing anything independently away from the farm during your stay, because bicycle and public transportation options are extremely limiting. Except for day visitors we can normally only host one or two visitors at a time. No drugs. No pets.

We're a Christian family with traditional Christian religious beliefs, but we're happy to host Christian and non-Christian visitors. Eric speaks German, otherwise we can pretty much only speak English. We're a family of 8 minus possibly one or two of our adult children that may or may not be living on our homestead at any given time.

If you're interested in coming for a visit, we'll send you more detailed information, links, photos, and an application. Feel free to contact us for any other reason.

I've used a commercial water stove for the last ~13 years and it served me great, but it finally started leaking badly enough that I had to drain it, and I'm pretty sure it's life is over.  I got it used, and I think it was made 30+ years ago, so it had a pretty long life.  I'm wondering if I could hire a mason to build me something that would work similarly.  If anyone knows of examples of outdoor masonry heaters, I'd like to know about them.  

My rough idea is to build something like a traditional masonry heater... include an oven for pizza or other baking... except maybe not use a traditional masonry heater flue design for the high efficiency super hot burns (so as to have more flexibility in burning larger wood, wood that isn't fully seasoned, other organic wastes...) ... then put a large (~500 gallon) stainless steel tank on top ... insulate the whole thing really well and protect it from the elements... and use that hot water the same way I've been using hot water to heat my house and domestic hot water (pumping the hot water to my house and running my domestic hot water through a coil heat exchanger in the water stove.)  I expect it would cost me at least as much as a conventional water stove, maybe even significantly more, but the stove itself would be masonry and therefore not susceptible to rust and leaks, the tank wouldn't be exposed directly to the extreme heat of the fire box, so hopefully it would last a very long time, and I'd have the benefit of a built in oven.  I don't know how well the heat would transfer to the water and whether I'd need to add extra pipes, pumps... to promote heat exchange from the masonry to the water, but I'm hoping that wouldn't be necessary.  Any thoughts?  Thanks!

And a related question: given the superior heat holding capacity of water, why isn't water used/more commonly used in place of masonry for holding and slowly releasing heat from masonry heaters?  I assume metal tanks were just too expensive traditionally, but is there a reason water isn't used to replace some of the bricks/stone/etc. used for the mass for heat storage in masonry heaters today?

Tyler Ludens wrote:he was rejected as an example by a previous poster because he doesn't yet produce the maximum tonnage of food that his acreage could possibly produce, or something.

There are surely a lot of different things that people are looking for out of permaculture, some of them probably at odds with each other. You may be right that my questions can't quite piggy-back on this thread very well. There were multiple interesting stories in this thread, though.

R Ranson wrote:My next step in this process took me to the local library where I found two books: Small Scale Grain Raising and Homegrown Whole Grains by Sara Pitzer. Later on I also discovered Uprisings : a hands-on guide to the community grain revolution by Sarah Simpson, which has a lot about communities getting together to grow their own grain.

Ranson, what do you think of these books? I've read Logsdon's book, but I haven't seen the others yet. Do you think they offer much more, particularly details on small-scale harvesting and post-harvest processing? I wouldn't really be looking for recipes in a book like this, but detailed advice on options for most efficiently threshing small grains on a small scale or how regular oats (with hulls) would have been traditionally/historically processed to be usable for human food... those kind of processing type details are what I would find especially valuable. I liked Logsdon's book a lot, but it left me with a lot of those kinds of questions.

R Ranson wrote:when I don't feel like malting my own grain and brewing my own.

I'd love to hear more about malting your own. I've gotten as far as growing and harvesting and threshing the barley, but then I was unsure about where and how to let it start to germinate without it molding or running into other problems, and then I wasn't sure how to kiln it. I have a friend with a cob oven that I thought might be ideal for kilning at the very end of a baking/firing, but he's not super close, and getting everything to match up in terms of schedules is tricky. On the other hand, I couldn't really figure a good way to do the kilning on my own.

R Ranson wrote:You give some great examples of what that diet looks like, and the challenges to acquiring the ingredients.

I'm completely oversimplifying the issue, I know. I would love to understand the heart of the issue in two sentences or less.

I didn't mean to say anything about diet really. Personally, there aren't any halfway normal food categories that I'm opposed to. I think my lists covered about every food category anyone anywhere in the world or in history has ever built a diet from except for vegetables, mushrooms, and insects (grasshoppers...), and I'm not opposed to those either. (I guess I didn't talk about coffee, spices, herbs, coffee, other flavorings... either.) If I missed any other categories, I don't think I meant to. I do have strong beliefs about responsible agricultural production, though, so how food is produced definitely matters to me, and that indirectly influences my diet choices. For example, although I'm not at all opposed to fish, I feel like my current options for fish are relatively poor and/or relatively expensive, so I hardly eat any fish, but I hope to develop better options for myself with time, and I certainly wouldn't discourage someone else from eating a lot more fish than I currently do, even if I'm mostly talking about the things I know more about. For another example, I would have no trouble understanding if someone else wanted to avoid grains because grains weren't consistent with his vision of permaculture, but that raises the question of how those calories can otherwise be met in a way that is fairly consistent with permaculture principles.

So as far as my discussion of food categories, my intention wasn't to outline any kind of diet in any way. My intention was to point out how huge the challenges would be (how many things would be unavailable to purchase) if one wanted to reach the 90% (and really even the 50%) mark, certainly the way I think makes sense to count it (as I described before), relying on what one could currently buy in locations like mine (and I think my location is as good an example as any.) In other words, it's not that I'm at all opposed to trade, but I am opposed to being content with the best of what's currently available on the market if we could make major improvements by doing things for ourselves instead. If the choice is between a narrower vision of self-sufficiency, on the one hand, and either accepting compromises to the basics of organic principles across a large part of one's agricultural footprint, or accepting USDA organic (or the equivalent in other countries) as the complete answer to responsible agriculture, on the other hand, then I don't think it's at all unreasonable to at least consider a goal of growing (foraging, etc.) 90% of one's food, especially if one values permaculture principles. So my point in discussing the various food categories was to make the case for why permaculture principles would reasonably lead some people to want to pursue a 90%+ self-sufficient diet.

And so my question, then, to put the heart of the issue in one or two sentences is this: I want to hear/read about clear (but not necessarily super detailed/lengthy) examples of people that have reached the 90% mark following self-identified permaculture principles. It seems like those examples shouldn't be that hard to find (especially if there's any merit in calling that a mid-level achievement like having taken a PDC), but even after reading most of this thread and following several links, I still haven't found any examples that come close. That's the heart of what I'm getting at.

That's not to say that some of the people mentioned in this thread don't fully meet the mark, but if any of them do, I haven't found so much as a simple assertion that any particular person has met the mark, even to the extent that one short interview-video was clear about how much food self-sufficiency that one couple in Oregon had achieved. (That simple interview was clear, but they weren't claiming to even meet the 50% mark, let alone 90%.) The seeming lack of comparable success stories, particularly by the 90% metric (which is a metric that makes sense/seems valuable to me), does make me wonder how effective self-identified permaculture ideas are when it comes to food and agriculture.

Tyler Ludens wrote:it would be great if everyone were practicing permaculture!

Tyler, thanks for your responses before and after my last post. I didn't see the one immediately before until after I posted the last post.

You said a couple things about "everyone." I think those are fine questions to consider and try to answer, but I don't think I meant for any of my questions to be applied to "everyone." My main question is all about the best examples that can be shared and talked about. Obviously some people will have accomplished more than others, will be higher on the eco scale, etc. I'm not trying to lay any criticisms on the low level people, but I would like to hear about people that have accomplished Paul's mid-level metrics with food (either individually or in community, particularly in some location in the US or similar to the US that I could relate to.) So to respond to your comment that I quoted, I'd like to see some examples of where permaculture can take people. It's a fair question, but I guess I'm personally not so interested in the hypothetical question of what it would look like if everyone started with the beginning steps. I'm most interested in what kind of outstanding examples there are from the mid-level steps, particularly when someone's food-agricultural footprint is 90%+ shaped by reasonably mature permaculture principles, free of the kind of compromises that may be commonly necessary/unavoidable in the earlier stages. Of course, food is just one aspect, but it's very important and fundamental, and it especially interests me.

Kurt, thanks for your very careful and thoughtful point by point response. Instead of talking about myself, I really meant to speak much more broadly to the question of the potential for buying and trading in contrast to more narrowly defined self-sufficiency, merely using my own location as an example of the kind of limits that are more or less the same in lots and lots of places. So consider my responses here in the same light. In other words, I'm content to grow/work towards the goal of growing (or foraging, etc.) a lot of these things for myself, but that's only because I don't seem to see as much potential in trading as you do, especially not without people primarily doing these things for themselves.

That's not to say I don't informally trade with neighbors. I've actually done quite a lot of that. Neighbors have also been very generous with me just giving me things (not that I'm needy, but I just have generous neighbors.) However, almost all of the food things I've gotten from neighbors aren't things I (or anyone else) could buy from them, and they're almost all things that my neighbors are primarily doing for themselves and merely sharing the perishable surpluses from the good years with me. So they're not available to buy. They're extremely unreliable. They're often just token quantities (although cumulatively they're significant.) They hardly ever consist of grains, pulses, or oil/oilseeds (precisely because people rarely grow these things for themselves), and if they do consist of dairy, pork, poultry/eggs, alcohol, or honey, they're almost always major compromises of the standards I laid out, i.e. generous gifts but generally a step backwards on the eco scale from supermarket organic.

As far as what can be bought:
1. Grains can, as you suggest, certainly be grown here local-organically. Like I said before a wide variety of items from almost all these categories used to be grown here before local agriculture was subsumed by industrialization and globalization.
2. A variety of pulses can also certainly be grown here as in most places people live, but the extreme rarity of local pulses on the market in any "first world" location indicates to me that the current market potential for pulses anywhere except in the home garden is extremely limited. Selling to alternative, niche markets and growing at that scale, even before forfeiting any cost-saving shortcuts for the sake of permaculture principles, adds substantially to cost/price. Where local pulses can be found, I think the relative price compared to the most affordable USDA organic pulses is greater than about anything else (at least 300% and probably 500 to 1500% of USDA organic prices). I believe in the value of community food sovereignty and organic principles no matter how cheap industrialized food gets in comparison, but customers are really going to have to know and trust their farmer before they pay 10 times the price of USDA organic for something that probably doesn't look or taste any better.
3. Raw milk from minimal grain dairies is available here locally, but I'm not aware of any such dairies that feed organic grain, let alone grain that represents any improvement over USDA organic minimum standards. Pasteurized all grass fed milk is also available, but all grass fed still allows for synthetic fertilizers, herbicides (used especially to prepare for planting annual forages), heat synchronizing hormone injections and other organically disallowed medications... things that may be used on raw milk dairies, too. There are also USDA organic dairies locally, but all of that milk is shipped to a processing plant three states away.
4&5. There are lots of pastured pork and poultry, but similarly, in every pastured pork/poultry operation I've heard about, the grain inputs are very significant in all of these products, and I've never heard of any grain that represents an improvement over commodity organic (and it's mostly far inferior.) That's not to say that I'm currently do much (or any) better, but it certainly leaves clear room for improvement over what's available to buy on the marketplace.
6. Lamb (and goat meat) might be more feasible in other parts of the country. Parasites may be a bigger limitation in the Southeast. Sheep can be managed here without organically disallowed medications but the solutions (careful rotation schedules, rotations that involve other species, including more browse in rotations, etc.) are relatively labor-intensive, and most organically inclined customers don't understand or care enough about these details to pay an additional premium for these steps, so the producers willing/forced to use synthetic de-wormers (and synthetic fertilizers, herbicides...) are the only ones I'm aware of in the marketplace.
7. Yes, there's plenty of potential for growing and wild harvesting a nice variety of tree nuts and peanuts, limited only by the time it takes some species to reach bearing age; they're just not for sale, probably for cost reasons similar to but mostly not as extreme as with pulses.
8. There is a malt house about 120 miles away that opened up within the last 10 years, and I think they have malted some local rye or wheat. I can't remember if it was USDA organic, but it's difficult for those kind of operations to justify paying a premium for local and then an additional premium for organic standards... and it's difficult for them to reliably source the quantities they need locally, which makes it hard for them to market the "local" at all, and the only organic type standards they can effectively communicate to their customers are USDA certification standards, so growers are pretty much forced to compete in the race to the bottom of those minimum standards, unless the malt house chooses to push the local angle instead, in which case there's no premium for any kind of organic. I don't know of anyone that's growing and malting barley on a smaller scale. A smaller scale gets to be very labor-intensive, and most people are focused on the craft of the brewing so much that the agricultural footprint is forgotten. Even "organic" supermarkets frequently have pathetically small selections of organic beer and wine, it seems to me.
9. Tallow (or beef fat to render into tallow) is the fat one could best hope to buy, but I think lard and oil are much more versatile in the kitchen. Oil seems particularly essential for mayonnaise and salad dressing.
10. I think the biggest issues with buying local fish are legal issues with selling game fish. Those aren't really issues for personal consumption, though. There are other possibilities, but I'm pretty sure they haven't found a way to market here locally.
11. Maple syrup is very doable here on a small scale but not done commercially, probably because there aren't woods full of sugar maples here. There are lots of beekeepers here, but they almost always have a heavy footprint in conventional sugar or corn syrup as feed, especially if they're trying to compete in the marketplace (similar to the issues with lamb.) Robbing honey hard and feeding lots of cheap syrup just makes a world of sense from a profit perspective.

Thanks for all the shared thoughts and ideas!