When you grow up watching Little House on the Prairie like I did, you develop a rather romantic notion of homesteading and “living off the land.” It seems like every day would be an exciting TV-episode-worthy adventure. The truth is a little less glamorous—and a lot more rewarding—than that.
The truth is tending a garden and raising animals is hard work. Rewarding work, no doubt about it. But it’s hard. You can’t neglect a backyard farm for a week while you go on a luxury cruise. Your livestock doesn’t care whether you have the flu or your boss has you working overtime. There are weeds to be pulled, tomatoes to be harvested, and, especially, animals to be fed.
Unlike other authors, I won’t try to tell you to avoid this adventure if you are a disorganized person. I am a disorganized person. I am also committed to providing the highest-quality food for my family, on a livable budget. So for many of our food items, producing as much as we can for ourselves is the best way to save money while not sacrificing quality. If you are motivated to take even the smallest step toward an independent and self-sustaining lifestyle, you should! Together we’ll explore ideas for how to make the most of your situation.
You might think, If this is so much work, why bother? or Why do I need to produce any of my own food when I can just run to the store and buy some? There are several reasons to tackle this task, which I’ll discuss in-depth here and throughout the book. Please don’t feel like you have to jump into everything I’ll talk about here. But even one step toward more self-sufficiency is a step in the right direction.
There is a growing food crisis in America, and much of the world. As the cost of fossil fuels increases, and the availability of those limited resources decreases, the fact that most of our food is shipped thousands of miles before it reaches us becomes more and more important.
According to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, most food in America is shipped 1,500 to 2,000 miles before reaching the end user—you.
With a single provider sending produce or meat to millions of people, the risks are compounded when something goes wrong. For example, in a highly publicized case in 2011, a cantaloupe recall occurred due to Listeria contamination. When a single farm experienced a Listeria contamination, the outbreak spread across a minimum of 24 confirmed states. More than 140 people were known to have been infected, although it’s possible that not all cases were diagnosed or properly reported.
The large-scale and widespread nature of our food supply makes it more tenuous than most people realize. A war breaking out in a country thousands of miles away, or a drought on the other side of the country, can severely disrupt our commercial food supply. While most Americans went without juicy and delicious melons during the cantaloupe recall, my family was enjoying the last of our cantaloupe and watermelon crop worry free. And while cantaloupe is hardly a must-have food, the potential problem is present in most of our food products in the United States.
From an economic perspective, the United States is now more dependent than ever on foreign imports for our food. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we have experienced an increase of imported fruits, vegetables, and grains of more than 100 percent in the past 20 years alone. And if shipping costs continue to rise, and global drought and weather upheavals continue to decrease food production, we will see the cost—and precariousness—of these imports rise dramatically.
In fact, CNN Money (money.cnn.com) ran a report from World Bank in April 2011 that the price of food had risen more than 30 percent overall in just a single year. A record number of people across the globe fell into the poverty level because of this food pricing increase. For most people, when they are entirely dependent on what’s available on the grocery store shelf, these numbers can be frightening.
For others who, like myself, have chosen to produce as much as possible in their own backyard, these numbers are less frightening. I live on a corner lot in a rural Oklahoma town. My front yard looks like an average suburban home, and my generous corner-lot backyard brings the full size of my home to just under a quarter acre. But in that quarter acre we can produce around 40 percent of our food needs and still leave room for the kids to run and play.
What would the difference be if everyone produced even a small garden and kept a backyard flock of chickens for eggs? Well, we ran that experiment once in our nation’s history. In the 1940s, spurred by Eleanor Roosevelt’s Victory Garden at the White House, more than 20 million American homes had home gardens. These efforts produced as much as 40 percent of the produce consumed in the United States. These numbers reflect my own experiences and show that a return to the simple backyard farm can make a huge impact in the level of food available in the United States today.
Eggs collected fresh every day right out of the backyard. It’s only the beginning of what is available to you right outside your back door if you’re willing to stretch your comfort zone a little.
This isn’t about a fad or “going green” or anything like that. Backyard farming to support an Earth-friendly lifestyle is about developing a system that is sustainable for the long term. And part of that is understanding how our current food industry is not.
When I married Sidney and learned more about country living, I discovered what a long-term mind-set homesteaders have, even when operating on a small scale. You rotate your crops because that is better for the land three or four years down the road. You don’t pollute your land because that can ruin it for decades, and then what will your grandchildren live on? I think in many ways, getting closer to my food at its source, and paying close attention to the land itself, has made me more aware of the damages wrought by modern agricultural methods.
One of the biggest factors in this destruction is the separation of plant production and meat production. We have a system where thousands upon thousands of animals are housed and raised in very small spaces, creating a huge amount of manure and waste. Meanwhile we have farmers growing a huge amount of grain crops on soil that is being rapidly depleted, causing them to use synthetic and petroleum-based fertilizers that are much more costly to the earth and the health of the land. The traditional, historical model was much more simplistic on one hand, and infinitely more complex at the same time.
OVER THE GARDEN FENCE
According to a 2005 study by Cornell University, organic farming producing the same yields of corn and soybeans as conventional farming used 30 percent less energy, less water, and no pesticides. The 22-year trial study concluded that organic farms reduced local and regional groundwater pollution because they did not use agricultural chemicals.
In our little backyard, for example, the soiled bedding from the goat shed is shoveled into a large compost pile. Muck from the chicken coop is also added to the compost bin along with the few plant-based scraps that aren’t eaten by either goats or chickens. In the fall the goats are turned loose in the garden area to clean up any weeds or leftover debris from the garden, and then the chickens get their turn to scratch around. They consume grubs and pests, while naturally keeping the soil fertile. The entire bed is covered with any hay the goats have failed to eat so that isn’t going to waste, and the garden increases in fertility for the following season. All this happens without a single drop of petroleum-based fertilizer needing to be applied.
This wheelbarrow of straw and manure from out of the chicken and goat pens is on its way to the compost bin. In six months it will feed our soil, which will in turn feed us. If properly managed, the backyard farm can be a mini-ecosystem working in harmony.
From the chickens’ perspective, they are given the chance to live in the healthiest way possible, doing what chickens do. Their waste is quickly composted or scattered gradually throughout the property in their moveable pen, and never has the ability to build up to such noxious levels as to become a pollutant and damage the land.
ON A DIFFERENT SCALE
Even if you live on a smaller area than we do and can’t let your chickens free-range at all, you can still implement a system for using their waste sustainably. Keep two compost areas going and use the aged compost from one bin in your garden area, raised beds, or container gardens, while you are filling up the second compost bin. Keep plenty of brown matter to mix in with your chicken manure to prevent any odors from building up. (See Chapter 6 for more information about composting.)
The benefits to the earth are even more extreme when you consider the savings in fossil fuels. In their book Ready, Set, Green; Eight Weeks to Modern Eco-Living, Graham Hill and Meaghan O’Neill discuss how a small-scale farm utilizing entirely organic methods will use 60 percent less fossil fuel per pound of food than its conventional industrial counterpart.
We’ve all heard about the growing ecological expense of modern food. Author and food writer Michael Pollan put a heavy number on it when he stated that agricultural systems use 10 calories of fossil fuels for each food calorie produced. In 1940, the trend was reversed, with 2.3 calories of food for every calorie of fossil fuel used. It should be clear that this trend is unsustainable.
As you’ll see when we discuss tools of the backyard farm, my husband and I have been successfully growing a large portion of our own food for years now with a minimal ecological cost. If we run the motorized tiller it’s only once a year. No tractor. No petroleum-based fertilizers. No toxic waste to be hauled off or contaminate the water supply. No extensive irrigation system to tax the water supply. The smaller scope and varied crops of our backyard farm mean that we are working with a natural cycle instead of against it.
ON A DIFFERENT SCALE
In a perfect world we would see even the major industrial agricultural complexes adopting these organic principles. A 2007 study by the University of Michigan, “Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply,” concluded that organic farming techniques could as much as triple production in developing nations. Most (but not all) crops are equal in production when organic and conventional methods are compared, according to a 2007 article by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations titled “Can Organic Farming Feed Us All?” It is totally possible for sustainable and Earth-friendly methods to be implemented on a global scale.
Healthy soil, like what you’ll create in your backyard farm, retains water better than poor soil. A thick layer of mulch helps conserve water even more. And in your small-scale farming practices, it’s easier to be wise and careful with your watering practices.
Our region experienced a severe drought in summer 2011, and by July we were under watering bans. We were able to use gray water from bathing and cooking, as well as dipping into the small, aboveground swimming pool we could no longer refill, to keep our garden growing well throughout the rest of the season. Compared to larger ranches, like the one my in-laws owned which was without water and lost the majority of that year’s crops, our backyard farm produced more than enough for a summer’s bounty plus plenty to store over the winter.
There are so many considerations to take into account when it comes to the ultimate cost of the food we eat. Entire books and documentaries have been devoted to the topic and I’ll not reiterate that here. What I want to share is my experiences with the cost of backyard farming.
I’ve found that we save a tremendous amount of money on our produce compared to what’s available in the local grocery stores. We tend to break even on the overall cost of our meat, mostly because we get the hay for our goats from the ranch my in-laws own. For urban backyard farmers who are importing hay or feed year-round, you might find that your meat prices increase slightly.
There are so many factors that go into what this adventure will cost you—property taxes; the cost of living in your area; the initial investments in things like livestock, fencing, or other equipment; and quite frankly, how “fancy-schmancy” you want to get with it. Do you need a top-of-the-line chicken coop that costs more than your lawn mower? Then chances are you won’t save any money on your poultry and eggs compared to the prices you’ll see in the grocery store. But I can tell you that last year we put 38 chickens in the freezer at an average of 51⁄2 pounds each for about $.50 per pound altogether.
Here’s my secret in keeping the financial cost as reasonable as possible. I’m not a purist; I’m a get-it-doneist. I don’t tend toward that naturally, but my husband grew up on a country ranch where they can make almost anything from duct tape and old barbed wire. So when we wanted a portable chicken yard, he made one out of some old lumber left over from another project, old chicken wire from our hatching-out pen two years ago, and a tarp that has seen better days. And you know what? It does the job more than adequately, and the chickens don’t care that it cost us $5 in nails instead of $500 brand new.
A chicken coop doesn’t have to be fancy, just suitable for the purpose. This portable one moves easily around the yard, provides safety for our foraging hens, and costs only a few dollars.
When I had a baby in April, I purchased all my plants as started seedlings from a local nursery, and the costs of the vegetable garden were twice as much as usual. Compare that to the year I purchased seeds for everything and spent only $90 for seeds that will last two to three years even if I don’t save any! All of these things can make a huge difference in what the costs will be for you, and what the savings might be for your family.
A 1996 study by H. Patricia Hynes, an author and professor at Boston University, showed that for every $1 invested in a community gardening area, there is $6 worth of vegetables harvested. I estimate that we save about $400 per month on our grocery bills for our large family because of the food we produce for ourselves, both from the garden and the livestock. Your situation will be unique, of course, but through the various parts of this book I’ll share any tips that I’ve gathered along the way to help you save money on this self-sufficient living journey.
Having said that, there are things that are worth so much to me, I would invest in them no matter what the cost. For example, grass-fed chicken from my own farm, or someone I know locally, is something I would invest in even if the cost were significantly more than the grocery store counterpart. Feeding my family nutrient-rich, cruelty-free, and sustainably grown food is important to me, so there are times when we pay a higher cost either in money, or usually in time, to make that happen. There is a comfort and satisfaction that comes from knowing exactly where my family’s food came from.
These chickens are being transported from a chicken house for slaughtering. They were extremely crowded and as I followed behind the truck I could see that many were already dead. I followed this truck for more than 50 miles on the highway—extremely stressful and traumatic miles for the chickens.
One benefit that is harder to quantify is the potential savings in medical costs and health bills for your family. Often, positive eating habits mean fewer trips to the doctor!
A study published by the British Journal of Nutrition showed that red meat from grass-finished animals tested with much higher levels of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids than grain-fed feed lot animals (the meat that is typically available in grocery stores). It also showed, in what may be the first human study on the subject, that consumers who ate the grass-finished meat showed higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids (the good kind of fat!) in their blood work. This meat also has higher levels of vitamin A, CLA (the good cholesterol), and vitamin E precursors, according to a 2011 article written in Mother Earth News. Precursors are the nutrients in food your body uses to create vitamins, and vitamin E precursors are important for cancer-fighting properties and helping to prevent diabetes.
THORNY MATTERS
As consumers begin to educate themselves about the health benefits of pasture-raised beef over commercial feed lot operations, labels are becoming more confusing. One of the things you might see on a label is the term “grass-fed,” which you might think would mean the cow was raised only on sunny grass fields. Unfortunately, the term is often used when the cow is raised on a pasture early in life, and then spends several weeks in a crowded feed lot. When looking for healthier meats that haven’t been finished on concentrated grains in a feed lot, look for the term “grass-finished.” This means that instead of being sent to a feed lot for the last weeks of life, the cow goes straight from pasture to table.
Pasture-raised chickens produce eggs with higher amounts of iron, vitamin A, vitamin B and folic acid, and omega-3s. They also seem to actually have lower levels of cholesterol in them. And with backyard chickens being some of the easiest livestock to keep, even in a small suburban backyard, these are steps that can really add up when it comes to your family’s dietary health. Chapter 12 talks more about raising your own chickens.
The other thing to keep in mind is that when I have something ready to eat, I’m more likely to eat it. That is, I don’t usually think to myself, “Gee, I think I should eat a summer squash today.” I’m like everyone else—I have a sweet tooth and a half. However, if I go out to the garden in the morning, and we have two ripe yellow squashes, I will harvest them and bring them in. Now I feel obligated to eat the squash, instead of buying a bag of processed munchies and eating those as I might otherwise do. Several studies show that gardeners eat more fruits and vegetables than nongardeners or the average consumer. Surround yourself with delicious, high-quality food that you’ve invested your time and effort into and you will gradually change your eating habits by default!
And let’s not underestimate the health benefits involved in the act of gardening itself. Many studies continue to prove benefits, like the research by Kansas State University that showed improved hand strength and self-esteem even among elderly participants who gardened. A paper published by Community Food Security Coalition cites several studies showing the various benefits of gardening in reducing risks of obesity, heart disease, and even blood sugar levels in diabetics. Who knows, perhaps gardening could be just what the doctor ordered.
I’ve found that I’m able to enjoy many of the benefits of small-scale farming right in my own backyard—even in a small town. Being a small-scale farmer has huge advantages for those who only work their farm on a part-time basis. Starting small is also a benefit for those who are testing the waters to see what level of this lifestyle they want to adopt. Our family has been slowly adding new elements to our backyard farm each year to see what steps we are comfortable with.
Cost of Land and Equipment
One of the seemingly obvious benefits of a backyard farm is the lowered cost of land. However, you must take into consideration the fact that land near large urban centers is usually much higher in price than land in rural areas. I’ll talk more about the costs of purchasing land versus using the property you already own in Chapters 2 and 3.
Regardless of whether you’re buying a new place or using your existing place, the costs will be more reasonable when you have a smaller farm. In my area of Oklahoma, for example, you can still find a 1-acre lot of land for anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000. With a modest family-sized home you can find something for less than $100,000. Compared to a large-scale farming or ranching operation that sells for millions of dollars, you can see how reasonable the prices are to start something like this. For most families you can begin the first steps with what you currently have available to you.
Equipment is another huge cost factor. A garden up to a quarter acre in size can be easily managed by hand without the need for motorized equipment. A larger garden size, or for those who aren’t as physically fit to turn a garden by hand, even a good-sized rototiller can be purchased for a few hundred dollars.
A backyard farm has no need for tractors, mechanized irrigation systems, or other expensive farm equipment. Even our outbuildings are modest—an open shed for the goats, a chicken house and portable chicken yard for the chickens, and an 8×10 shed to store equipment is all we have on our property for our backyard farm, and all of these my husband was able to build himself.
OVER THE GARDEN FENCE
The cost of land is a lot less when there are improvements needed before you can get started. If you’re willing to trade time and effort to, for example, build fences or clear timber, you can often save on the monetary cost of land.
Ease of Maintenance
One of the biggest benefits of having a backyard farm that is smaller in size is how easy it is to maintain! I can turn the chickens out, feed the goats, and look through the garden for whatever is ready to harvest that day in less than 30 minutes. Fencing in the garden was a two-day, part-time job for one person. Even planting our seedlings, potato starts, and seeds can be done in a relatively short amount of time. And weeding and harvesting chores are easily done by hand.
When we experienced the huge drought mentioned earlier, we were able to do some hands-on things to prevent losing our crop that larger farms wouldn’t be able to do. The small size allowed us to do things to keep our garden productive.
When it’s time to clean out the chicken house, it doesn’t seem like a daunting task. It takes a few minutes, fills a single wheelbarrow with muck that goes immediately to the compost bin, and as a result I don’t put it off or have to schedule a huge amount of time to devote to these tasks. Milking our single goat takes 15 minutes in the morning—not hours and hours. The small scale of chores on the backyard farm makes them easier to tackle.
Intensive Production Possibilities
When we plant, we cram our garden to the maximum. Because we regularly apply compost, mulch, and amendments to our garden, we keep the soil fertility at a high level. This means we can space our rows closer together and grow more in a smaller amount of space. Our chores of planting, weeding, and harvesting are all done by hand so the garden rows don’t need to be kept far enough apart to accommodate tractor tires. Last season we barely had space to walk between the rows.
The other aspect of intensive production we employ is to tie and trellis many of our vegetables, growing them vertically. I hand tie my little cucumber plants if they don’t find the trellis on their own, and weave my tomatoes through the cages and fence. It’s no trouble at all when I’m already walking through the garden and weeding or tending it anyway.
This hands-on attention just isn’t possible on a large-scale farm. Chapters 4 and 7 will share more secrets for maximizing your garden space.
While there are certainly a huge variety of benefits ranging from economical to health-conscious, for me one of the biggest benefits is the sense of accomplishment that comes from achieving something on this magnitude. Sitting down to a meal that was produced almost entirely in your backyard is an amazing feeling. Seeing your children learn to respect the value of life is eye-opening.
Teaching your children the benefits of healthy eating is easier when your day-to-day activities give you a chance to show hands-on appreciation for hard work and good food.
(Photo courtesy of Tim Sackton)
I’ve come a long way from my initial forays into self-sufficiency. And there’s so much left to learn! Each year I push myself to take another step and investigate a new challenge. The benefits of the lifestyle we are adopting are more than I can enumerate and far outweigh the inconveniences.
