The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon December 13th, 2010

Just a note: Eric stepped on the overpriced device that allows us to have a slow and primitive but still wireless connection out here in middle-of-nowhere-land this morning. It is still working, miraculously (it doesn’t look like it should be working), but I expect to lose internet access basically at any moment. So if this blog disappears, it isn’t that I don’t care, it is that my husband is a klutz. Since I’m a much bigger klutz, and have broken even more important things over the years, I can’t really whine about it. But just FYI, I’m not sure how much internet access I’ll have until replacement device is procured.

The larger idea of the Anyway Project is to make our lives work more smoothly. Most of us stand with feet in several worlds – our domestic and professional ones, our adaptations to a world with less and our day to day life in a world with too much (in some cases). Making the intersections between these spaces functional, bringing the edges together and connecting them smoothly is the center of my project, and in that regard, I feel like the last month has been a slow beginning. I spent a lot of the last month wrapping up chaos already in progress, but now I am hopeful that the winter will allow some sustained progress.

The six weeks between late October and mid-December are hectic ones – I travelled twice, once by myself, once as a family, and soloed with the farm while Eric and the boys went to visit Grandma. We had three birthdays complete with visting family, parties, etc… Halloween, Thanksgiving and Chanukah, hosted more than 20 guests for stays varying from 1 day to a full week, I wound up my fall teaching and Eric hit the end of his term, with all the grading and etc… Starting the project November 1 was probably doomed to msotly being a wrap up, but I came in with ambitions, some of which were even accomplished.

My overarching goals are these:

1. Use what we have better. I find that often we’re so focused on the next project that we don’t necessarily get a firm grip on the current one. There are a host of small things awaiting my time and attention that would simply make life a lot happier if they got that time.

2. Make use more adaptable to the way our present crisis is actually occurring – we have reason to worry about Eric losing his job or being furloughed, and I don’t want to have to worry about it, so we need to cut our expenses. I need to bring the farm back into profitability and find a better balance between writing and agriculture, one that serves our household optimally, since there are only so many hours in the day.

3. Make the pace of our life a bit more relaxing. I’m about to go on a three-day-per-week writing schedule so I can concentrate on other things, and am taking a couple of months off from teaching.

4. Spend more time directly with people – both local folks and in-person teaching. I love the connections I get to make with people I would never have met but for the internet, but I feel like that comes at the cost, sometimes, of time spent with the people who are nearby! I’d like to do more of my teaching here, as well.

So how are we doing on this? Well, as I said, November was a bit hectic, so I didn’t complete everything I’d like to do. I’ll post both my November results and my plans for December here:

Domestic Infrastructure:

November: I got the food storage moved out of the closet and am almost finished setting it up in the guest room. It doesn’t look too bad, either. I didn’t get to the office, and the firewood is not all stacked, so that’s only 1 out of 3 – and I’m not totally done with 1.

December: Ok, stack the firewood, get the door on my future office and move in to the office. Go through the house room by room and begin cleaning out and de-cluttering. Also, do my big annual spice order – I’m out of way too many things. Given that I only have two weeks left in the month, that’s probably as much as I can accomplish.

Household Economy

November/December: We’ve been tracking expenses, but November was an atypical month, with some big projects, so I want to continue this through December, and see how much we can cut (we’re probably the only people on the planet who spend *less* in December than the rest of the year ). I have a budget set, but I have some ideas that I could cut even further, but I want to watch how this actually works for a month or two.

Resource Consumption

November: We have continued to cut our electrical usage back as intended, although our gas mileage went up because of a long planned annual visit to my Moms. We used wood extremely conservatively and have turned on the furnace only when we were away (just enough to keep the pipes from freezing) and when we had guests sleeping in the cold bedrooms. Generally, despite the early December cold spell, we’re further ahead than we usually are at this season in heating fuel.

December: Time to compensate for that trip and all the fall travel by staying home and enjoying the winter peaceful season. I expect electrical use to decline as well, as I try to stick to my new work schedule, writing only three days a week.

Cottage Industry and Subsistence:

November: This one was a total failure. I got none of my November goals done – I started the farm year plan, but failed to get my seeds for stratification in, started but didn’t finish my tax research (the boring ones are tougher ), and didn’t find out about my kitchen certification either. Bad, bad blogiste!

December: Exactly the same list as last month, plus some other business details. Blah. This is my punishment for not doing stuff . I also need to make up the farm and garden calendar, which at least is kind of fun, and order bottles for product sales. On the fun end, we also need to order our seeds, fruit trees and beekeeping equipment. Woot!

Family and Community

November: We committed to trying to do two outside events every month and work generally on strengthening community ties. We actually did this, but most of it was due to the many, many guests who visited and to previously planned events. Now I’ve actually got to do it purposefully.

December: I’m planning two fun things for the next month – first, a neighborhood open-house for New Years, and second, a winter apprentice weekend. Last year, we had 10 people come to my house for a weekend of goat milking, talking, eating, knitting, and learning about everything from woodstove cooking and maintenence to herb gardening and plant uses. I’m plotting another weekend for mid-January – I’ll announce it this week. I really love being able to meet internet folks in person!

Also on my agenda in the “family” department, Eric and I have been talking for years about the possibility of adopting more children through social services, and we’ve decided to go forward at least as far as the class and possibly the homestudy (on the theory that my house might never be clean enough to pass a homestudy again ) over the next few months. Scheduling the time commitment and childcare will be challenging, but we want to do this. I’m not sure what the longer term outcome will be, but both of us are thinking that our family might not be complete.

Outside Work:

November: I failed miserably at reducing my work schedule – but I’m ready to start again.

December: Trying that three day per week thing again. Must. Make. Workload. Fit.

Time and Happiness:

I didn’t really set goals for this in the past month, just assumed they would be a natural outcome of getting things under control. They are, I suspect, but I’d also like to make more time for music at home. So more regular music practice and singing time with the kids and husband is on my weekly agenda.

Ok, so how did you do?

Sharon

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Sharon December 9th, 2010

And here is is!

• ASPO
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Sharon December 9th, 2010

In the book I co-wrote with Aaron Newton _A Nation of Farmers_, Aaron and I called for 100 million new farmers in America.  We picked this nice round number simply because in pre-modern societies, and in societies under great stress (say wartime) about 1/3 of populations needs to be involved in food production.  We point out that we use the word “farmer” comprehensively to include everyone who participates by growing or raising animals, so our call was for not 100 million of any one thing, but millions of backyard gardeners, and millions of people growing in containers, and millions of small farmers and a couple million larger farmers…

But that does leave the question open – what the heck are the other 200 million Americans going to do (actually, more like 210)?  Don’t they have a role in our food system too?  Aren’t we mean to have left all of them out?  Well, you’ve got to give us a little bit of a break – some are infants and toddlers or too ill to really get involved, but there’s still a lot of people left out.  Our suggestion was that we also needed 200 million home cooks – because, after all, who is going to cook all this fresh produce?  In a society where most foods people eat are processed, who does the cooking?

But we’ve got an additional plan for anyone out there who feels that simply by calling on you to cook from scratch and grow food, we didn’t give you enough jobs, or for those who don’t want to be farmers, but who still feel they have a role to play.  This is very clearly articulated in an article by Jeff Nield who points out that most of us are still eating some pre-made, processed foods,  rather than making everything from scratch and thus, there’s a big gap in our market for food processors using local ingredients.  Nield is speaking about larger scale processors, and he argues that it doesn’t make sense for those companies to focus solely on local markets:

If diversity is a key to success for small- and medium-scale farmers, it would make sense that the same principal is equally important to a processing industry that relies on those farms for raw materials.

“It brings a great opportunity, of course, when you talk about being able to source unique and different foodstuffs within different regions within the province, but the problem of course then is scale, right, because those companies have a difficult time moving up and exporting and serving larger markets,” Eto points out.

Which begs the question, is it possible, or even desirable, to bring a local, processed product to market solely to supply the local market? Probably not. This approach may work for perishable staples like dairy, meat and eggs, but the average person can only eat so much jam, salad dressing and potato chips. With shelf staples like these, the obvious business case is to capture the largest market share, beyond any defined local boundary.

But with the current consumer shift towards local food, any product with a locally sourced ingredient list would presumably have an automatic market that would at least try the product once, says Walker. The hard part is getting these products out there in the first place.

This may not be true for factory-scale production, but it is true for the kind of small producer that many of us could be – and this is a useful reminder that if other people are willing to pay for someone to transform food from its natural state to a more complex one, here are jobs for many of us.  We need a lot more small scale producers, particularly producers that build on local agriculture, making good use of the things that grow well in your climate.

It is unlikely that we will entirely shift away from a people who like to be able to pick something up on the way home to a people who cook everything straight from the rutabaga, as it were.  That’s ok – most places in the world have a bustling local economy made up of small scale food producers, snack stands,  street food, etc…  most of it delicious.  This can be a viable way to make a living – and a viable way to serve a clear and identified need in your community. 

This hampered by the lack of commercial kitchens. In most states, home kitchens are insufficient for the production of most food products.   Moderate scale production things like jam, bread, casseroles, sandwiches, healthy snack foods, etc… is marred by the fact that most of us can’t get a place to make them.  So one of the things we desperately need is a larger amount of public infrastructure for small producers.  And many of us could enable this process – your church, school, community center may already have a commercial kitchen, and leasing it out might be a fairly simple process.  Otherwise, you might get it certified.

 In most states, there are also quite a lot of people violating these laws regularly – and it may be both remunerative and effective for you to consider violating these laws.  Right now, there are restaurants being run out of people’s living rooms, immigrants producing their traditional foods in uncertified kitchens, and Amish women selling pie out of their kitchens.  The lack of inspection does raise risks of food borne illness – of course, so does the lack of inspection in your office kitchen, the lack of inspection in your mother’s kitchen…   Such covert enterprises may be worthwhile, or not.

Some states, like mine, allow home kitchens to be inspected and certified for small-scale food production, below a certain amount of sales – if this is not the case in your state, you might lobby for such a change.  Or we might all lobby for the right of small scale producers to produce low-risk foods at home – it is awfully hard to poison someone with most baked goods, for example – you have to work at it.

There are also oppportunities to be had in distribution – being the person who drives your neighbor’s eggs and produce into the place you work to sell is one possibility.  A less commercial oen, but with considerable benefits is what the couple we stayed with in Charlottesvillle, VA are doing – their home is the site for their cow-share pickup and has in the past been the site of their CSA pickup.  They derive strong community benefits from being the site of food distribution, and they often get extra produce or dairy products if a member doesn’t come to pick up their share.

I know that you were worried that you wouldn’t have enough to do in the post-peak world, particularly if you decided not to be a farmer.  Now, I can reassure you – there are plenty of jobs to be done, and many of them allow you to get your hands into the food system as small scale processers and distributors.  Cool, eh?

Sharon

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