North Country Farmer

The Michigan DNR with the help of the factory pork lobby is outlawing the ownership of several breeds of pigs that northern pastured pork farmers use. Baker’s Green Acres Farm has vowed to fight this tyranny and stand up to the enemies who will implement the same “laws” in YOUR state if they succeed in Michigan. Please consider helping them out with some money for the legal team. Also, please post their story all over the web and help bring attention to this new assault on our freedom.

Starting on Friday Mach 16th at 10pm eastern, I will be hosting a weekly live radio show on Blog Talk Radio called Christian Farm and Homestead. In the first episode I will be talking with my guest Jim Bartlett of Bartlett Farm about his family’s farm, what inspired him to move his family to rural ND, the lessons they have learned and the progress they have made on the land. I have some great guests lined up for future shows as well as plans for some shows where we’ll just take lots of your calls and discuss anything agrarian. There is a player in the sidebar of this blog where you can isten or you can go to the show’s page on Blog Talk Radio. If you can’t catch the live show you can subscribe to the RSS feed and get the podcast to listen latter. See the following links…

Christian Farm and Homestead Page
Link to First Episode Page
RSS Feed for the Show

Listen Friday March 16, 2012 at 10pm eastern

Now readers of North Country Farmer are aware that the Middle Ages were a time of Christian, decentralized and agrarian plenty where the common yeoman had more political and economic freedom than modern man does. Several years ago when looking through some “christian” homeschool history textbooks that were found at a garage sale, I came across this little “fact” about why the “Dark Ages” were so bad.

The urban (city) culture had been replaced by the rural (country) culture of the Middle Ages…About 95% of the population of western Europe lived in the country. This population shift from the cities to the country combined with the general lack of trade resulted in a poor, backward society dependent on agriculture for survival.

Just goes to prove that school at home isn’t anything special if you use the same faulty presuppositions that they use at the government re-education camps. It just goes to prove that slapping the word “christian” on a history book doesn’t mean it has a Christian worldview. Has it ever crossed their minds that the heathen call the time period “the dark ages” because it was christian? Has it ever occurred to these foolish people that mankind’s corporate calling IS agriculture? Furthermore, how exactly is an urban culture any LESS dependent on agriculture? If this is today’s “christian scholarship”, we are in some real trouble! Civilization exists because we have 6 inches of topsoil and it sometimes rains…just don’t tell the idiots writing christian curriculum. They might call you a backward throw back to the “dark ages”!

Came across this little gem from Robert Lewis Dabney today.

“I urge, third, that the forms of industry promoted by the powerful corporations tend to to undermine the domestic and personal independence of the yeomanry. The associated means of production supplant the individual, the products of the older and more independent forms of industry retreat before those of the corporations. The time was when manufactures were literally “domestic,” the occupations of people in their homes. The producing yeoman was a “free-holder,” a person whose vital significance to British liberty our times have almost forgotten. He dwelt and labored under his own roof-tree. He was his own man, the free-holder of the homestead where his productions were created by the skill and labor of himself and his family and servants. Now all this is changed. The wheel and the loom are no longer heard in the home. Vast factories, owned by corporations, for whose governors the cant of the age has already found their appropriate name as “kings of industry,” now undersell the home products everywhere. The axe and hoe which the husbandman wields, once made at the country forge, the shoe upon his mule’s feet, the plough with which he turns the soil, the very helve of his implement, all come from the factory. The housewife’s industry in brewing her own yeast can hardly survive, but is supplanted by some “incorporated” “baking powder,” in which chemical adulteration may have full play. Thus the centralization of capital leads at once to the centralization and degradation of the population. The free-holding yeoman citizen is sunk into the multitudinous mass of the proletariat, dependent upon the corporation for his work, his wages, his cottage, his kitchen garden, and privilege of buying the provisions for his family. In place of the freeman’s domestic independence, he now has the corrupting and doubtful resource of the “labor union” and the “strike.” His wife and children are dragged from the retirement of a true home into the foul and degrading publicity of the festering manufacturing village…Thus conditions of social organization are again produced more incompatible than feudalism with republican institutions.”

R. L. Dabney
Philosophy Regarding Private Corporations

HT (Peter Bringe)

Brother Adam (Karl Kehrle) was born in Germany in 1898. Due to health problems he was sent by his mother at age 11 to Buckfast Abbey where he would become a monk, and eventually the most important bee breeder of the 20th century. Being a skinny boy who the Abbot didn’t think would do well working on the reconstruction of Buckfast, he was sent to be the Beekeeper’s assistant. Brother Adam had a natural gift for working with honey bees and in 1919 he was put in charge of the Abbie’s Apiary. When Brother Adam took control of the operation things were not well. The Abbey had already been hit with tracheal mites killing 30 of the 46 bee colonies. Eventually only 16 would remain and these were populated with A. m. carnica and ligustica. All the native bees had died. He had found a feral colony of bees that seemed resistant and moved them to isolated valley of Dartmoor which became a mating station for selective breeding. With no other bees within range, Brother Adam could maintain their genetic integrity and develop desirable traits His goal was to breed a bee that was hardy and disease-resistant while also being an excellent honey producer that could be the replacement for the old black English bee. His search for genetics would take him all over the world. He would travel some 100,000 miles before he was done, going to France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Sicily, Germany, Algeria, Israël, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Cyprus, Greece, Crete, Slovenia and the Ligurian Alps. He would also go to Turkey and the Aegean islands, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal and Egypt. He would spend his lifetime developing the Buckfast Bee with each cross taking up to 10 years to stabilize. Brother Adam retired from beekeeping after 70 years of breeding work and later died in his 99th year, leaving us a wealth of knowledge, several books and the wonderfully productive Buckfast Bee.

Characteristics of the Buckfast Bee

Good honey producer
Prolific queens (lay many eggs)
Overwinters well
Frugal – Low amount of brood during fall (uses less honey stores during winter)
Packs brood nest with honey for good wintering
Curtails egg laying during dearths
Brood rearing ceases during late fall
Extremely gentle, with low sting instinct
Low swarm instinct
Highly Tracheal Mite Tolerant
Low incidence of chalkbrood and wax moths due to good housecleaning techniques
Very hygenic
Build-up rapidly once started
Produces little propolis/brace comb
Does well in cold/wet spring

John Taylor was born December 19, 1753 in Caroline county Virginia. He was a great grandson of the first of his line to settle in the colony. When he was three years old his father died and he was raised by an uncle. He served in the Continental Army during the War for Independence. One of the finest farmers in Virginia, he also served in the Legislature on three occasions and was sent by his neighbors three separate times to complete three unexpired terms in the United States Senate. According to historians, they would have sent him for longer stays had Taylor been willing. Like many of the republics elder statesmen Taylor was much happier on his farm than in the capital. He was also a communicate member of the Episcopal Church and served in their councils as well as being one of the chief founders of the Agricultural Societies. Taylor is well know as an Anti-Federalist, a strong critic of central banks, an antagonist to the Money Power, supporter of the militia instead of standing armies and a firm believer in the central importance of agriculture to independence and freedom. What many don’t know is that he was deeply concerned with what we would now call “sustainable agriculture” and land stewardship. What Wendell Berry, Joel Salatin and others are saying now, John Taylor was saying in the late 1700′s and early 1800′s. His greatest work in the area of agriculture was his book Arator, which should be in the library of every agrarian. Arator is book not only about the political aspects of the Money Power’s war against decentralized agrarianism. It is also a book about the folly of American farmer and his destruction of the soil and Taylor’s thoughts on how to reverse the trends. In his essay #2 The Present State of Agriculture, Taylor sounds like today’s leading agrarian voices…

A patient must know that he is sick, before he will take a physick. A collection of a very few facts, to ascertain the ill health of agriculture, is necessary to invigorate our efforts towards a cure. One, apparent to the most superficial observer, is, that our land has diminished in fertility. Arts improve the work of nature–when they injure it, they are not arts but barbarous customs. It is the office of agriculture as, as an art, not to impoverish, but to fertilize the soil, and make it more useful than in its natural state. Such is the effect of every species of agriculture, which can aspire to the character of an art. It’s object being to furnish man with articles of the first necessity, whatever defeats that object, is a crime of the first magnitude. Had men the power to obscure or brighten the light of the sun, by obscuring it, they would imitate the morality of diminishing the fertility of the earth. Is not one as criminal as the other? Yes it is a fact, that lands in their natural state, are more valuable, than those which have undergone our habit of agriculture…

It should not surprise us, I suppose, that you will never learn about this great man in school (public or private) or hear him quoted by the so called “conservatives of our day. Taylor was opposed to much of what the establishment type conservatives love and to much a lover of liberty for mainline liberals to stomach. I encourage you to get a hold of some of his writings, especially Arator. Make your children read them as well. True agrarianism is our birthright in this country and its time we start reminding folks of this inconvenient truth.

Vertical Gardening
Derek Fell
Rodale Press
Paperback 372 pg

Rodale Press was kind enough to send me a copy of Derek Fell’s Vertical Gardening book a few weeks ago. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing more vertical gardening here on the farm, so I was excited to get started reading this one. Derek Fell grew his first vertical garden in England when he was just 6 years old during the 2nd World War. Food was scarce and his family lived in town. His first garden was a little strip of dirt between a wall and an ally, he planted peas and grew them on a homemade trellis. Fell would grow up to be well respected man in the garden world and eventually settled down in Pennsylvania on Cedaridge Farm where he has been experimenting with vertical gardening for many years. Vertical gardening is an information packed book with 200 photos. The book covers every aspect of vertical growing including many ideas for building trellises and how to incorporate them into raised beds, no-dig heavy mulch systems, and traditional tilled garden plots as well as growing up walls on houses and outbuildings. Fell covers the best variates of vegetables for vertical gardening as well as the best non-climbing plants to plant at the base of the climbers, producing more food per square foot. Some of his raised beds are only 2ft wide with the main crop growing 6ft up making them extremely efficient. This book doesn’t only cover vegetable gardening. There are many pages that cover vertical gardening for ornamental flowers as well as very informative section on fruit and fruit trees. The book also covers container gardening, the use of arbors and arches, controling weeds and pests, composting and pruning. In was impressed with this book, enough so that we are planning to implement much of the information this year in our garden. Whether you are an urban gardener or a rural homesteader, there is plenty of useful information in this book and it is definitely worth the money.

UPDATED, See Below

Days after appearing on the National Geographic TV Show Doomsday Prepper, David Sarti from Tennessee, has been declared Mentally Defective and his guns have been seized by the state. This all stems from a visit to his heart doctor. David tells his story in the You Tube clip below.

UPDATE—————————————–

Early reports of gun confiscation were false. David removed the guns before they could take them but he cannot legally own firearms anymore. There is a petition you can sign HERE, asking the Gov to expunge the record. He has an updated video that is posted below.

The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table: Recipes, Portraits, and History of the World’s Most Beautiful Fruit
Amy Goldman
Bloomsbury USA
Hardcover, 272 pages

I recently had the pleasure of reading The Heirloom Tomato by Amy Goldman. This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen. The photography, done by Victor Schrager, is absolutely breathtaking. This book is not only a how-to guide for growing tomatoes but also a collection of recipes and, most importantly, a reference book on the history and particulars of many heirloom tomato varieties. The reference portion of the book covers size, shape, weight, color, soluble solids, flavor, texture, uses, habit, leaf type, yields, maturity and origin; making it the most complete guide to tomatoes that I have ever seen. Goldman did some very good research and uncovered some interesting facts and dispelled some commonly held beliefs on the history of certain varieties. Her findings on the origin of the Brandywine were very interesting. Her search for information on the Sudduth’s Brandywine ended in finding the the 93 year old Dorris Sudduth Hill who provided the original seed to Quisenberry. I believe this is the definitive resource for people interested in the history and genealogy of great heirloom tomatoes. The recipe portion of the book is full of great ideas as well. I look forward to trying some of them here this summer. All said, if you love tomatoes and are passionate about heirloom preservation and gardening you will benefit greatly from this book.