Waste

I wanted to spend a little time in this new year discussing the topic of waste. Not the waste that you throw into your garbage can nor the normal practices of waste of our modern society, I wanted to talk about waste of land. Rosie and I are working on using the entirety of our property and even with the large number of things we are doing we are really only using about 1/3 of what we have but we have plans in the works for every square inch of our property. In our neighborhood there are a lot of 1 and 2 acre parcels that consist of: A house (1/6 - 1/4 acre), a horse they don't ride (1/8 acre pen) and a whole lot of nothing else (1/2-1 acre). In general people are using about 1/3 - 1/2 of what they own and the rest is being used to keep the thistle and weed population at its current healthy level. Do these people really need 2/3 acres of drive way? Would they not be happier with a mortgage payment much lower than what they have now and a smaller property?

In some cases people have the need to own an animal such as a horse but local laws require such an animal to be housed on a property no smaller than one acre, now the animal does not have to have access to the acre there just has to be an acre some where in the vicinity so a 1/8 acre pen on an acre of land is just fine according to the law. These laws need to be changed, they do nothing for animal welfare and serve only to limit the lifestyle choices of the citizens of the local areas.

In other cases people see a larger plot of land as a status symbol and their need to own acreage stems from a misplaced idea that your possessions dictate the quality of person you are, nothing could be further from the truth. Owning 10 acres of useless land does not make you 40 times better or more important than a person who owns a 1/4 acre of urban homestead. These people have been sadly deluded by our system of copious consumerism.

So you may be asking what my point is, other than to point out how un-cool some people are. If you are interested in our own homestead you can feed a small family on 1/4 acre of land. You can feed several families on 1 acre of land and you can feed a silly number of people on 10 acres of land. Take what you have and use it, use all of it and if you find yourself in our shoes and are still trying to use all you have then open up your land to your friends and family. We are lending out plots of land to our people to use as they wish, grow a garden, raise a goat, build a beehive, compost, grow hops for brewing, start a fish pond, what ever you want to do. We have more space than we can currently use and it would be very wrong for us to keep our land fallow rather than let others develop it into something beautiful.

What do we get out of this? Well other than the obvious benefit of helping people take control of their own food source we will have extra hands on site for the bigger projects. It takes more than two people to build the dairy, and more than two people to drink the milk, eat the cheese, and nom the yogurt that comes from our dairy. Help us build the dairy and you will help us eat the cheese. If your family comes out to plant a field of grain then we can all help to grind the wheat to bake the best bread anyone has ever eaten. Community is more than where you live, it is shared labor and shared triumph, none of our families will starve while we have food on our homestead.

So the offer stands open, if you dream what we dream and want what we want come and do what we do. Share our labors and we will share our land, teach, learn, plant, harvest, raise and slaughter. We have space and if you wish you had a garden or a small farm come share yours with us and we in turn will share ours with you, there is no sense in wasting what we have.