A SUSTAINABLE DIET includes food that is grown on your farm or in your region and some of that might be animal products. Some land is better suited to pasture than to crop production. Including animals in your plan will expand the ecological footprint of your diet, since the land that grows the food that the animal eats needs to be considered. You can plan a diet of only plants, but you would be hard pressed to fill all your nutritional needs without taking supplements, which are not part of a sustainable diet. If that plan, which would involve a smaller area to grow your food, doesn’t supply your needs, it is not a complete plan and needs to be expanded anyway.
In Chapter 3 I mentioned that if your diet only consisted of plants that you grew, in as small an area as possible, you would have to pay careful attention to getting enough calories, protein, and calcium. If you only ate plant foods, and even if you got enough calories, protein, and calcium from them, not only could some nutrients be out of balance, but the one nutrient that would still be missing would be vitamin B12. Our bodies can store B12, so if you had plenty of it in your diet for years, you would have extra that would carry over for quite some time, even years, if you stopped ingesting it. Eventually, though, you would run out. We happen to be at the top of the food chain and our bodies are adapted to a vast array of food choices. If we add just a little bit of foods from animal sources to our diet, we can fix these deficiencies.
In researching this nutritional information I discovered that the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) that I have long been familiar with have undergone some changes. The RDA is now part of the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs), which includes a set of four reference values: (1) RDA is the average daily dietary intake of a nutrient that is sufficient to meet the requirement of nearly all (97–98%) healthy persons; (2) Estimated Average Requirement (EAR) is the amount of a nutrient that is estimated to meet the requirement of half of all healthy individuals in the population; (3)Adequate Intake (AI) is based on observed intakes of the nutrient by a group of healthy persons and is only established when an RDA cannot be determined; and (4) Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) is the highest daily intake of a nutrient that is likely to pose no risks of toxicity for almost all individuals. The EAR for vitamin B12 for males and females age 14 and older is 2 mcg and that’s what I’ll be using for my calculations. The requirement is higher for pregnant and lactating women. The updated (1997) RDA for B12 is 2.4 mcg for age 14 and older.
Eggs were the first food I looked at for their B12 content. I found that the amount of B12 in eggs has dropped considerably from USDA’s 1999 Standard Reference Release 13 that I found in Nutrition Almanac, to USDA’s 2012 Release 25 that is available online.1 I also consulted Bowes & Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used which has the 2008 Standard Reference Release 21. Food from animals that are on pasture has more nutrients than food from animals raised in conventional confinement systems. USDA’s information is taken from conventionally raised animals, so I decided to go with the earlier B12 value which is 1.75 times the current (2013) available value. If you are interested in a sustainable diet, you would be eating eggs from chickens that have access to pasture. Mother Earth News magazine has taken an interest in the nutritional value of eggs and has found that eggs from hens raised on pasture may contain significantly more vitamin A, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E, and beta carotene,2 but they didn’t test for B12. There is a 1974 British study3 that shows the B12 content of free-range eggs to be 1.7 times that of eggs from factory farms.
I could meet my need for vitamin B12 with 2.6 large chicken eggs a day. Those eggs would also supply about 10 percent of my calorie requirement, 35 percent of my protein, and 7 percent of my calcium. If, instead, I consumed only 1 egg plus 1½ cups of whole cow’s milk a day, I would meet my need for B12 and provide 15 percent of the calories, 40 percent of the protein and 45 percent of the calcium I need. Adding the milk really increases the calcium. Cow’s milk has more than five times the B12 that goat’s milk has. That’s a puzzle to me, since there is not such a difference with the other nutrients. To get the same amount of vitamin B12, I would need 2 eggs and 2.8 cups of goat’s milk. If you are not a milk drinker, you could use milk instead of water to make hot cereal with your cornmeal or make yogurt and cheese with it. You might prefer to eat duck eggs, rather than chicken eggs. One duck egg provides 190 percent of the B12 requirement for an adult. Duck eggs are larger than chicken eggs, but comparing the same weight of duck to chicken eggs, duck eggs contain 3.7 times the vitamin B12 of chicken eggs.
Rather than eggs and milk, you could get your B12 from fish. Three ounces of light tuna canned in water would be enough. However, in a sustainable diet, locally harvested fish would be on the menu, not canned tuna. Three ounces of catfish would meet the B12 requirement and the same serving of trout has almost double that. I don’t know much about fishing, so I won’t be addressing that in this book. If fishing is a part of your life, or could be, include that in your diet plan. If you are getting your food from the water, you would want to work toward making sure the water is free of contaminants.
In a sustainable diet, when you are eating eggs and drinking milk, or eating cheese and yogurt, you also have to consider everything involved in bringing you those foods. These things are produced for you by the females. In order to have females, just as many males will be hatched or born. Those young males will become part of your diet, as will the females once they are past production. Otherwise, what would happen to them? They could just live out their days somewhere, I suppose, and that would leave an even bigger ecological footprint. I don’t like to use the word slaughter, because that sounds like a vicious act. I don’t like the word process either, because that sounds too industrial; but at some point, those animals will be killed to provide food for your table. When that happens, think of having shared your life with them, and now their energy will become yours. That energy is not going away. With that in mind, say a prayer of thanks before doing the deed and continue with respect for what you will receive. If you are buying your meat, rather than growing it yourself, buy it from someone who has the same values. When you grow and eat a sustainable diet, you become part of the food system. At the top of the food chain, there is nothing that is going to eat you, but maybe you could arrange to be buried in the woods at the end of your days to complete the cycle.
Having a few hens in the backyard is usually the next step in homesteading after putting in a garden. A shelter can be cobbled together from almost anything, although some of the chicken house designs I’ve seen are quite elaborate (and expensive). Times have changed since I got my first hens and keeping chickens has become quite the thing. Local ordinances might have rules about what kind of chicken shelter you have, how many hens you can keep, etc. If your locality doesn’t allow chickens, there is probably a group of eager citizens rallying to change that.
You can expect a hen to lay about 200 eggs a year — more in the first half of the year and less in the second half. I never put a light in my chicken house to push the hens to lay more, preferring nature to take its course. It seems that as the days begin to get the least bit longer, the number of eggs increase. Two hens would provide you with enough eggs to average an egg a day with a few extra for the year — it just wouldn’t be an egg a day each day. Sometimes during the year you would be eating lots, and sometimes little or none. If you are concerned about B12, that’s okay. Since your body can store this vitamin for a long time, you don’t need to ingest it every day. Those extra eggs you eat in the spring will provide the B12 you need later. Even if the hens are taking a vacation from giving you eggs, they will always need to eat. You can let them out in your yard to harvest what they can from the grass and insects, adding nutrition to their diet and yours.
Letting the hens out on grass is necessary with a sustainable diet, but controlling them is not as easy as one might assume. They can fly over a four-foot fence. If the area is large enough, however, they won’t. At one time, I had all my hens in portable pens, inspired by reading Chicken Tractor by Andy Lee and Patricia Foreman. I moved the pens around the pasture to a fresh spot each day. If you do that in your yard, be prepared to have some low spots where the chickens have dug holes — even after just one day. Also, be prepared for chicken poop to be in your yard (and on your shoes). About Thanksgiving, my hens would all be moved to the chicken house with a yard enclosed by a six foot high fence. They’d go back out to the chicken tractors in March when things started to green up. We have fewer hens now, and I like them to not be so confined, so I don’t use chicken tractors anymore, but they are a great way to manage chickens in limited space.
Now, our hens are sheltered by the chicken house all year, but they have more room to roam, even in the winter. In the process of doing other fencing projects, it turned out the fences we put up allowed the chickens to be free to wander everywhere but the yard and garden. That’s something to keep in mind when making your permaculture plan. I’ll talk more about fencing in Chapter 12.
I buy old farm books when I find them. They provide great information on how things were when every farm was small and diversified. I have to sort out the good information from the not-so-good — such as using creosote on the chicken roosts to prevent lice. (In case you don’t know, creosote is a banned product now.) One book4 told of the necessity to raise growing pullets (young hens) on pasture, in addition to feeding grain. It was suggested that one acre could pasture 600 pullets (about 74 ft2 per pullet), reducing the cost of raising them by five to ten percent. According to Joel Salatin in Pastured Poultry Profits,5 it is possible to reduce grain consumption by 30 percent when the chickens are on pasture, with no drop in egg production. When you buy chicks or hens, it makes a difference where they’ve been before you get them. You want ones that have been raised on grass, or have had parents raised on grass. With no other choices you could order from a hatchery, and I suppose everyone should do that once in their lives. It’s an adventure to get a box of chicks in the mail. Locally, you could find poultry advertised on Craigslist, the local newspaper or swap news, or inquire at your feed store. They always know who’s doing what.
Getting the chickens out in the grass allows them to eat the grass, weed seeds, and bugs; which is healthier for the chickens, the grass, and for you when you eat the eggs. I find my chickens love to dig around in piles of leaves and along the fences. They are known to keep down the tick population. For good egg production, foraging like that isn’t enough. If I grew enough grains here, I could feed them that, but that’s not the case. I buy organic corn, wheat, and oats and grind my own feed. The mix I feed my chickens is 60 percent corn, 20 percent wheat, and 20 percent oats. I have been doing this since 2000 when I became concerned about genetically modified ingredients, especially soy, in the chicken feed. I keep ground oyster shells available to them for extra calcium. (You can buy ground oyster shells for this purpose; I don’t grind them up myself.) Although, since they are out scratching in the ground, most likely they are picking up calcium there. You can also supply calcium in their diet by feeding eggshells — crushing them first so that the chickens don’t get the idea that they can just eat eggs. I feel that by having my hens free-range during the day, they are balancing out their diet on their own, picking up needed grit, vitamin D (from the sun), and other things that hens kept in confinement need to have provided in their feed. I could put out less feed and keep more hens to get the same number of eggs, which is easier to think about now that I’m not selling eggs. Sometimes farmers who grow grain will sell it to you out of their bins, right at the farm. Make sure to ask about their growing methods and seed source.
My grain mix does not have enough protein for raising chicks. The chicks grow and feather out much faster when I give them worms, in addition to this mix. I kept a worm bin going in my house for many years to drag around to the classes I taught. It was handy for putting food scraps in during the winter. By spring, the bin would be at peak production, just in time to harvest some worms for the newly hatched chicks. I use an incubator for hatching eggs, but having them hatched and raised by a broody hen would be better. Studying the chicken feed issue has always been on my to-do list, but a little further down than the other things I’ve talked about in this book; so I haven’t considered it as much as I would have liked. Fortunately, my friend Harvey Ussery has. He has tested all sorts of things, including breeding black soldier fly larvae to feed his chickens, and he tells you about it in his book The Small-Scale Poultry Flock. The old farm books I’ve found often have lists and descriptions of all sorts of things to feed chickens and other animals.
When I had fifty layers and sold eggs, I would hatch out at least fifty chicks each year. About half of those chicks would be roosters, which would be taken for meat by 12 weeks of age. The laying flock would consist of 25 hens in their first full year of laying and the same number in their second year. By fall, the new pullets would be starting to lay when the oldest hens were slacking off. That’s when we took the old hens for meat. I kept close financial records and broke even money-wise with the egg sales. Our profit was food for our table in the form of meat and eggs.
Although hens will lay eggs quite well without a rooster being around, a rooster is needed to fertilize the eggs in order to have chicks. One rooster for every ten to fifteen hens is a guideline. They can be noisy with their crowing. Lucky for us, our neighbors enjoy the sound. It is part of country living. Roosters are usually banned from city and suburban lots — all the more reason to work on building community so that someone is keeping roosters with their hens and raising replacements for you if you need them. Even if you have your own rooster, predators abound and can wipe out your flock, or part of it, in short order.
If you want to have ducks you can raise them without a pond, but you should still provide some water for them to splash in. I don’t have experience with ducks, but Harvey mentions them in his book, as well as guineas, and turkeys. A three ounce serving of roasted chicken or duck provides about 15 percent of the daily vitamin B12 requirement.
When we first moved here in 1984 I bought two Nubian goats for milk. We didn’t have any fenced pasture yet, so I tied them out each day, keeping a water bucket handy. We fenced a very small area so that if I was gone for any length of time during the day they could stay there. We had a shed that I put them in each night. I was worried that dogs might come along and bother them when they were tied out. After a year and a half we fenced some pasture. That was a lot nicer than putting them on the end of a chain each day. In some countries it is common to tether goats and cows and that’s how the grass is controlled along the roadsides. I could only imagine what people would have had to say if I had tied my goats along the road. Come to think of it, it would be easier than mowing the ditch.
I made a milking stand from scrap wood we already had. For whatever else I needed for milking, I used what I had around the house. Goats are easy enough to put in the back of a pickup truck, providing you have sides on it. They can even jump in and out without a ramp. Some people move them in a van or car. You would need to consider moving them to take them to a buck to get bred, unless you keep a buck yourself. Be aware, a buck can be smelly. If you bring goats home as dairy animals, make sure you know how you will get them bred when the time comes.
Although books I’ve read show that one goat could give you up to four quarts of milk a day (one gallon), I believe I got a quart of milk a day from one goat, with two milkings a day. The second goat was not always producing when the first one was. Being tied out each day, rather than free to wander the pasture, could have affected the milk production. The condition of a pasture will always affect how much milk a dairy animal will give. We hadn’t done anything to the pasture — there was already grass there and we let the goats eat it. In order to have milk, a goat would have to have given birth. A six-month old goat kid, taken for food for your table, could yield 30 pounds of meat and bones.6 We only had dairy goats for three years, in the midst of fixing up an old farmhouse, raising children, etc. Goats like to browse on bushes and trees more than grass, and are often used to clear areas of brush and poison ivy. If you move to someplace that has an overgrown area you’d like cleared, goats just might be the answer. A temporary fence of livestock panels7 could control their movement and is fairly easy to move.
For seven years we kept a milk cow. She was too big for the goat shed, so we fixed a place in the barn for her. The goats hadn’t been in the barn because we were using it for other purposes at that time. I penned the calf separately at night and milked only once a day in the morning. The calf took the rest of the milk during the day. If we had to be gone overnight, the calf took all the milk. The calf was taken for food for us at about ten months. In our area we have a local butcher who comes to the farm, kills the animal there, and takes it back to his place to age in his cooler for a few days, until he cuts it into pieces for the freezer. Legally, that’s okay, since we are consuming the meat. If we were to sell the meat by the cut, it would need to be federally inspected. Someone, or a group of people, could buy an animal from the farmer and have the butcher process it for them, and that would be legal because it would already be their animal. In the not-so-distant future, I believe traveling on-farm processing units will become the norm. If you were receiving 0.7 gallons of milk a week (1.5 cups/day) from a cow producing a gallon a day, you would be getting ten percent of the production. Using conservative estimates, if the calf was taken for meat at ten months, you would get about twenty-three pounds of meat for the year, plus bones for broth. That would be about seven ounces per week for your diet.
Having a cow and milking once a day worked well for us. The biggest problem was getting her bred. There is a small window of time when a cow is in heat. If you miss that, you have to wait until the next time. She will give you clues, such as mooing constantly. You could go out and lift her tail to find physical clues, but with only one cow, if you are new at this it is hard to tell. If you had two cows, they would be jumping on each other. I only knew one other person who kept a family cow and he sold it about the time I got mine. There was a man whose business it was to go to farms to artificially inseminate (AI) cows, but he retired about that same time. In the end, Tommy, the dairy farmer down the road, offered to come when I needed him to do the AI. I would call and he’d promise to get over that morning, but sometimes things happened and it would be after dark when he came. It didn’t always take and he would need to come back on the next cycle. Tommy never seemed to mind, something for which I am forever grateful. We always had a nice chat when he came, catching up and talking about things on our farms — our very tiny one and his very large one.
If I had known someone with a bull, I could have hauled the cow to the bull, or vice versa, if I had wanted to have a bull in the pasture. Actually, there was someone who offered to bring his bull over for a month to make sure our cow was bred. However, this bull had quite a spread of horns and, not being familiar with bulls, I wasn’t sure I wanted the responsibility of having that animal at our place. As far as hauling the cow, she was too big for the back of the pickup, so I would have had to find someone with a trailer to do that. When keeping large farm animals, it is also important to find a veterinarian who will come to the farm. It is easier to keep a milk animal if there are others doing the same. A community will evolve to provide for your needs.
Water is a consideration. Cows drink a lot of water and, if there was a winter storm threatening, I would fill six five-gallon buckets of water in case the power went out. Our water comes from a well and has an electric pump. With the cow and calf, those six buckets would last only one day. There is no faucet in the barn, so all the water was run out there with a hose. From December through February, the water was carried out in buckets, since the hose would be frozen. If I was to have a cow again I would seriously consider having running water in the barn and make sure we had adequate water storage in case of power outages, which seem to happen more frequently now, and not only with winter storms.
Besides milk and meat, cows can provide draft power. Rather than being taken for meat at a young age, the bull calves become oxen. An ox is a castrated male trained to do work and can be from any bovine breed. Beyond their working days they will become food for the table. It takes a lot of training when they are young, but once trained they can be easily managed by the right person — the drover. Our place is small enough that we don’t need draft power and we don’t have enough pasture for draft animals, but we have raised a drover. Luke became acquainted with oxen when he was five and, now that he’s grown, has his own teams. The skill of training these animals for work is being kept alive by people like him and those in places that depend on draft power around the world. Interesting things have been happening in Cuba. Cuba was dependent on the European Socialist Bloc and the Soviet Union for many things, including tractors and agricultural chemicals. When that support system fell apart in 1989, Cuba had to find other means to keep its agricultural systems going. Those systems changed to include organic urban agriculture initiatives and increased use of draft power on farms.8 Steers had to be taken out of the food system to train as draft animals, more drovers had to be trained, and pasture land needed to be increased on farms that had previously been managed with tractors.
Ideally, the milk and meat in a sustainable diet would be produced on pasture only. It is healthier for the animals and for the people drinking the milk. More and more, dairies are going to organic and grass-fed systems. Traditionally, whey (from cheese making) and skim milk (from butter making) was fed to chickens as the animal protein that they needed. Dairy animals and chickens go well together on a farm. A three ounce serving of ground grass-fed beef is about 80 percent of a day’s requirement of vitamin B12. The same size serving of goat meat is 50 percent of the requirement.
If you have dairy animals and make cheese and butter, you might want to consider a pig. Whey and skim milk are excellent foods for pigs. Homesteads have long depended on pigs for a variety of things. Besides meat, there was fat to be rendered into lard for cooking and for soap making. Traditionally, the meat was preserved by salting and smoking. We had pigs at our place one year when one of our children raised them for a 4-H project. We found that they ate a lot of corn. At first we bought pig feed, and then switched to whole corn. We were new at this and weren’t set up to provide any homegrown food on a regular basis. We could have just let the pigs run in the woods and eat acorns, but back in the day when people did that they would still pen their hogs and fatten them on corn for a few weeks before they butchered them.
We started with two feeder pigs (weaned piglets) and we put them in the pen we had earlier used to keep the goats in, since the goats had a fenced pasture by that time. That pen had a tall metal gate, the kind you might find on a chain link fence. It was something we had acquired for free. The gate hinges were of the lift off variety, with barrel sleeves that drop onto pins on the gate post. The gate worked quite well for the goats. One day, our children threw some food scraps from dinner into the pen, and they landed right in front of the gate. In their enthusiasm to get the scraps, the pigs rooted a little too hard and lifted the gate right up and off those pins, setting themselves free. We all got our exercise that evening getting them back in. We put a block of wood in place above one of the pins, so that couldn’t happen again. We also made a food trough that we could easily put food scraps in from outside the fence. It is good to start out small with homestead projects until you really know what you are getting into. That was the only year we raised pigs. In recent years we did some more fencing, and I had that episode in mind when we decided to fence the barnyard.
Luke was born the summer we had the pigs. I was also milking the goats then. For the first week after he was born, and occasionally after that, the pigs received the goat milk. The last month or so, they had outgrown their pen and we let them into the pasture. When the come-to-the-farm butcher was cutting up the meat from the first pig to package it, he was so impressed at the quality of the meat that he bought the other pig himself. He caters events with barbeque and was happy to get such good pork.
Besides dairy and pasture, root crops, especially Jerusalem artichokes, are great feed for pigs. Let into the root patch, they can do the harvesting themselves. Winter squash and other garden vegetables make good pig food. A person growing for the markets will find the pigs willing to chow down on all the leftover and cull produce available. A three ounce serving of pork contains about 40 percent of your B12 requirement for a day.
We had rabbits for about six years — another 4-H project. We found directions for making a wire rabbit cage in Integral Urban House. Out of print for many years, I am glad it is available again. I like that rabbit cage design because it has a hay manger between two cages. We followed the suggestion in the book to have the rabbit cages overhanging the chicken yard. The chickens scratched through their droppings, making finished compost on the spot. Alternatively, you could locate worm bins under the rabbits to catch the droppings, and feed the worms to the chickens. Having the rabbit/chicken set-up is a good one, but I would prefer to have the rabbits on the ground, which presents a quite a different set of management decisions. The Salatins at Polyface Farm9 in Swoope, Virginia, have been doing that for many years. If you are breeding rabbits, you would need a buck and one or more does, with separate cages for each, plus one or more cages for the weaned young ones to grow to butchering age, which is two months. A doe will give birth a month after breeding. The average size litter is eight bunnies.
Rabbit food you buy consists of pellets made predominately from alfalfa. If you were to raise all the food for your rabbits, it would take 9 pounds of alfalfa hay and 60 pounds of fresh greens (garden debris, weeds, produce scraps) to produce one four-pound (live weight) fryer.10 Your rabbits would have to be accustomed to eating that much, since about 15.4 pounds of pellets will get the same results. Even if you don’t grow everything, you can supplement pellets with alfalfa and greens from your garden. Alfalfa is a suggested food for all the animals. It could take the place of red clover in your garden rotation (see Chapter 8 — Garden of Ideas), possibly staying in for an extra year, before the next crop replaces it. The average yield of alfalfa hay in the US for 100 ft2 is 14.9 pounds.11 Feeding the alfalfa to your livestock means that you wouldn’t have it to put in the compost pile, but now the animals are part of the cycle and their manure would go to the compost, which would go back to feed the alfalfa, as well as the rest of the garden. A three ounce serving of rabbit meat contains three times the daily requirement of vitamin B12.
One advantage of raising rabbits and chickens is that taking the meat for the table can be done one animal at a time, as needed, without canning or freezing. Even if you butchered a litter of rabbits at a time, you could fit them all in the freezer space of your refrigerator — a big consideration when living with minimal fossil fuel. Manage your rabbit herd so the next litter is not ready for the freezer until there is room for it. A sustainable diet is plant-based, but not plant-only. Using animal products to round out your nutritional requirements also means using the animals to harvest plants in as sustainable a manner as possible. Land can be kept in permanent pasture as long as it is not overgrazed by stocking too many animals there.
I mentioned that goats can clear land of brush for you. If you don’t need land cleared, recognize their brush-eating preference and harvest it for them. When we had bamboo that needed to be cleared, everything I cut from the bamboo poles went to the goats. They considered it a treat. I tried to do that in winter or early spring before the pasture was growing again. The bamboo poles were kept for garden projects. Pigs also can be used to clear land. Let out on enough pasture, they won’t do too much damage; but penned in a smaller space, with maybe some stumps, they will root them up. Properly fenced, they could rotate through garden space after Jerusalem artichokes, carrots, beets, or mangels grown for them, leaving the area cleared and fertilized. Properly fenced is the key for that.
There are certainly more nutritional requirements to consider than just calories, protein, calcium, and vitamin B12. Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon is a good reference for learning more. I’ve shown you some ways to include animals in your food production circle. Often things can be added to a system that will enhance the whole system, and rather than overloading it will make the best use of all the available resources. Enhancement is the goal.