There is a saying here, that if one wishes to learn how to swear, one needs to buy a goat. They are the definition of a menace. But they do give a lot back.
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I think I’m about as stubborn as them, not sure who would win if I was to butt heads with one!
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You and me both my friend, but l bow my head to those spawns of satan 
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Here. I will correct my spelling to “Banty” chickens. As from Bantam chickens.
And an appropriate info link:
S.U.
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That was interesting. I would like some egg layers but it has never been worth my trouble to try and keep them from predators. We have every sort here, with the swamp at the back of my property. Fox, coyotes, bob cats, badgers being the main ones occasional bald eagle and many hawks. I will explore the quail and bantam chickens since I can build a complete enclosure outside the greenhouse and since the are not opposed to being caged, can be moved into the greenhouse in the winter. Kind of excited about this. A meat source doesn’t matter. I haven’t eaten any in over thirty years.
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Yes all true on this article about the banty’s.
One thing have enough of them free ranging and the four legged preadtor are not a problem. They will alarms and fly high up into trees.
Do get picked off by hawks and owls though. Why shotguns are the all-around best go-to.
Been twice I’ve has 2-3 shot down hawks and their kills bagged and tagged frozen in the food freezer in case a neighbor sicc’s the Police on me.
State law we are still allowed to protect “livestock” from predatation. Hawks, yes. Coyotes yes, Racoons, yes. Eagles no. Then it’s bye-bye chicken. Still they will get a don’t-come-back BOOM-BOOMing send off from me.
The benefit of free ranging even with the losses is virtually no more ground bugs!
Couple of 3-4 free ranging Guinea Fowl are your tick solvers TomH.
Great guardian noise makers alarm-ers too. Very territorial possessive.
Steve Unruh
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Yes. I’m going to build some infrastructure and pull the trigger on this. Most of the tick issues we have had are from me and the mutt doing our two mile morning saunter through the landscape.
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Take over a coup pretty fast.
Quite tastey as well…
Fun birds to watch always up to something.
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guineas get lost -easily- They wander 10ft and they are lost. However, if you are getting that many ticks, I would probably just release a flock of them and claim they are wild. or a different neighbors. lol
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Thank you for all the great information. I am going to look through it. 
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A hell of a machine that does not allow me to calmly deal with gasification … 
This is a hay mower with a width of 2.5m. As long as it runs on electricity. Later I will convert it to work from a hydraulic motor.
From 12 seconds you can see the finished turbine with hoses under the blue bucket for the wood gas generator.
As soon as I test the mower, I will immediately move on to testing the turbine.
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8,000,000,000 people cannot grow food for sale using this method. For the simple reason that then there will be no one to sell it to justify the cost of the necessary equipment. And if the entire population of the planet wants to grow their own food for themselves, then there are other ways to do this.
We can assume that only a part of modern people will want to deal with their land. What part: 5% or 10% of all living? Let’s say 5%, i.e. one family feeds 20 urban families. 10,000,000,000 people is 2,500,000,000 families with 4 people in each family so that the population is stable. 5% - that’s only 125,000,000 families will be engaged in the cultivation of clean food, and will never be poor. The question is not only to feed urban people with clean food, but also to more evenly distribute the income from the sale of this food, in contrast to large agricultural firms, which inevitably use chemicals in the fields, and the flow of money flowing into the hands of only a few.
And Ovsinsky’s methodology is not suitable for large firms - too many hired people are needed to work on foreign land, and this is not interesting to most people today. And it is not profitable for large agricultural firms.
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There is another way to look and say that same thing.
what is the value of labour, the value of the food and cost of it ( cost is not value )
How does a person in a less developed country make a living farming if he cannot compete?
The ability for our current systems to feed cloth and house humanity have reached at point where we can come up with all kinds of ways to do it and its all easily within reach. Its not cost effective to pay a man a living wage as farmer.
In fact I will go further and say there are labour shortages everyplace but no one can live off these jobs.
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Where is our Abundance?
This issue can be considered on various levels: political, economic, etc. But we will look for an answer to it in the technological plane.
There is even a lot of practical material on this topic, so many thoughts will be expressed very concisely, sometimes to the point of feeling categorical. If necessary, you can develop them in the comments or in additional materials.
People today, for the most part, are forced to take care of their daily bread every day. Even those who believe that they have already completely solved the issue of food, still have to constantly maintain their income level in order to maintain their standard of living. At the same time, everything produced around, no matter what you look at, tends to become more expensive and deteriorate in its quality, instead of decreasing in value and constantly improving.
Let’s start with the main thing – bread. It’s not for nothing that he’s considered the head of everything.
Bread has become expensive to grow nowadays: you need to invest too much money in the land to get it in sufficient quantities. And there are other food products that people need every day, and the situation with them in terms of investments in cultivation is no better.
And the more high–tech a product is, the more people put their labor into creating it, the more the cost of all these people’s food becomes in the price of this product.
Another reason for any high cost is that there are few producers and many consumers.
At the same time, every spring you can see a real abundance and riot of greenery in nature: the grass is rushing, there are a lot of foliage, trees and shrubs grow strongly by themselves. No one sowed, fertilized, or cultivated them. For example, creeping wheatgrass is a perennial herbaceous plant from the Cereal family, at the same time one of the best forage plants and a difficult-to-eradicate weed for cultivated plants.
But how did it happen that in nature everything grows without expenses, and without money at all, and a person, with his highest intelligence among all living things, with a huge amount of various equipment, on the contrary, has to get everything by the sweat of his brow???
The answer lies in the chosen farming technology. And, of course, in the tools for this technology.
Let’s first consider the technology of constant need.
Most farmers, having a sufficient amount of equipment, use plowing to a fairly large depth (from 25 cm) as the basis of their agricultural techniques. In this case, the capillary connection with the lower layers of the soil is destroyed, where moisture accumulates. The seeds are sown to a depth of 5 cm. Thus, the seeds are located in a loose layer of the earth, cut off from capillary moisture, and are forced to wait for rain to germinate. Regular rains are desirable, capable of soaking at least 5 cm of soil to the seeds, and maintaining this moisture until the roots reach the horizon untouched by the plow. If it is achieved at all. In addition, to a depth of 25 cm, the insignificant organic matter that remains after harvesting is plowed, if the farmers themselves did not burn it before plowing. The lack of organic matter and moisture leads to the death of the soil microbiota and to enormous costs associated with the annual application of chemical fertilizers and the inevitable use of all kinds of pesticides (herbicides – destroying weeds; insecticides – destroying insect pests; fungicides - destroying pathogenic fungi; zoozides – destroying warm–blooded animals). In addition, a plow with a blade carries weed seeds to the surface layer, where they rapidly germinate. The urgent need to give crops at least some moisture accumulated over the winter forces the farmer to sow too early, without waiting for the germination of weeds, which in the initial phase would have been easily cut off by the cultivator. Therefore, crops germinate simultaneously with weeds, which leads to the need for herbicides, as well as the need to buy seeds of specially modified plants resistant to selected herbicides.
That’s actually the whole basis of modern crop cultivation technology. It is she who is, to one degree or another, the real reason for a whole bunch of expenses and a reason for the constant headache of the modern farmer, which we will only briefly list.:
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Wage labor
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Fertilizers
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Plant protection
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Seeds
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Risks due to bad weather
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Fuel and lubricants
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Purchase of huge equipment
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Repair of machinery
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Product sales
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Harvest storage
All together, this leads to the fact that it is currently impossible to purchase even a basic list of clean products from any farmer. This means that the farmer’s family is forced to eat a completely different kind of food, which is intended for this purpose by the Chief Designer of the Earth. Also, high costs, even with relatively high incomes of this technology, lead to low efficiency of the farmer’s work, which affects the exodus of young people from rural areas.
The few rural residents who cultivate their land today, in fact, use the same technology of plowing and chemistry. Only in smaller areas, with the predominant use of manual labor. And without the opportunity to grow grain and oilseed crops for themselves – due to the lack of inexpensive harvesting equipment of small size. Tillers, minitractors and other varieties, just like those of farmers, do not allow the natural mechanisms of the soil to work and lead to even lower profitability of this type of human activity and low attractiveness for young people. Villages are dying out not because people are tired of the fresh air, birdsong and the scents of flowers, but from hard and inefficient work.
And expensive chemicals are being poured into the soil not from the extreme generosity or obsession of farmers and villagers with this chemistry, but for completely different reasons.…
Now let’s move on to the technology of ever-increasing abundance.
To preserve and multiply the soil microbiota, it is necessary to preserve and multiply the moisture in the soil, as well as provide an organic top layer of 5 cm. A mulcher tuned to a given depth is excellent for mixing, and as organic matter you can use, along with whole crop residues: green fertilizers – siderates; manure and droppings, if there is a need for milk, meat and eggs in parallel with crop production (and it is better if animals and birds themselves evenly fertilize the selected area); foliage and branches of nearby trees and shrubs, including fruit trees.
In this case, the seeds fall on the surface of an untouched structured soil with capillary moisture, and 5 cm of loose soil with organic matter covers them from above. It is easy to maintain a smooth boundary between the structural and loose parts of the soil using a cultivator and an the anchor coulter of the seeder. After harvesting, you need to mix the top layer of earth with crushed organic matter again using a mulcher. Thus, there is no need for the main characteristic of any tractor – the traction force developed on the tractor hook. For this reason, the tractor does not have a suspension, and during harvesting, it is also completely unable to replace a combine harvester, and therefore for small farms (from 1 ha to 20 ha, if we count 1 ha per family), to increase comfort and increase work efficiency, it is better to use one, but more versatile machine. with a normal car suspension, with a hydraulic system and easily replaceable attachments. Very important: including replacement equipment for harvesting all grown crops, including threshing of cereals and oilseeds! At the same time, it is desirable that anyone can use these tools: from a teenager to an elderly person, because a person should think, and a machine should work!
Additionally, in the rows of trees and shrubs that fertilize the soil with their foliage and branches, it is advisable to arrange decks with bees. It is also better to sow the seeds of a future crop, having previously saturated them, if desired, with information about the person for whom the harvest from these seeds is intended. It is also possible to provide on the same site everything necessary for processing the crop, of course, again, if desired, by the urban family for which the crop is grown. Without intermediate storage and delivery time. For the sake of maximum preservation of the nutrients of the resulting crop. And as one of the options for practical ecotourism.
This technology is a synthesis and development of the experience of Ivan Ovsinsky (“The New System of Agriculture”, 1909), Edward Faulkner (“The Madness of the Plowman”, 1959) and Anastasia’s ideas, described in the series of books by Vladimir Megre “Ringing Cedars of Russia”. All the nuances and detailed explanations are given in the books of these three Great Agronomists.
This technology is inconvenient for farmers, including due to the need to maintain a wide variety of self-propelled harvesting machines for each type of crop. In addition, the stereotyping of our thinking sometimes greatly hinders our perception of something very new and unusual: it is difficult to fill a cup that is already full.
For the specified configuration, site sizes and the list of cultivated crops, such versatile equipment is not mass-produced, and rural residents, as a rule, do not have enough free time, resources and efforts for its independent development and manufacture.
In addition, for one family living on their own land, it is highly desirable that the same universal technique be useful in other tasks: to clean the road to the highway in winter and patch the asphalt in summer, to trim branches along protective forest belts and garden rows, to prepare animal feed for the winter, as well as firewood for the whole year – for a home Mini-thermal power plant that provides light, gas and heat, it is more affordable than the centralization of these benefits suggests. An example of such a universal machine: UAZ Husbandman https://www.drive2.ru/r/uaz/452/664499474046920478/ .
Even the German post-war Unimog looks more like a tractor than is necessary for a universal rural machine. The experience of Ovsinsky and Faulkner was not widespread at that time. However, it is still nonsense for many today. And the tractor is not needed with the new tillage system: it is too expensive, too much load on the spine, trailed combines for tractors are no longer produced (yes, they were too clumsy with the tractor in their time in small areas), even as a dump truck, the tractor cannot be used without a separate very large unit – the carriage (trailer).
Therefore, only a city dweller can provide our abundance.
We will not seriously consider various “aliens” in this matter 
They are not local people on Earth, and therefore our mother earth is not native to them, and therefore they do not know how to take care of her.
But why a city dweller?
1. Motivation. Living in a city, without one’s own vegetable garden, without an orchard, without a free place to walk barefoot on the grass, in silence or to the sound of birds singing, without the opportunity to inhale the aromas of flowers, without one’s cellar with supplies – it is precisely this kind of life that strongly motivates a city dweller to at least have food on his family’s table it should be clean, smelling, healthy, and at the same time not empty the family budget. And good motivation is a great Power!
2. A empty cup. Strangely enough, the lack of any stereotypes among urban residents about farming methods in general and animal husbandry in particular allows them to fully realize the positive experience of practicing agronomists from the books mentioned above.
3. High-speed Internet connection. Having a strong motivation and understanding of clean farming methods makes it much easier to search for information about existing farms that already use this farming system (or at least a significant part of these methods) in the city. For example, Anatoly Shugurov, Penza region. Pavel Abramov “Black bread”. Or even select the necessary equipment for this farming system, the ultimate goal of which is the highest quality of food. Which, by the way, is very easy to determine not by an eco-bio certificate, but by… the absence of a plow and sprayer from the manufacturer of this food. And only then by the smell and taste of the products themselves.
4. Social connections. A city dweller lives so crowded that he has a very wide range of connections. Parents of other children in kindergarten, school, clubs and sections, colleagues at work, neighbors at the entrance, etc. And among these people, it is easy to find like-minded people who are looking for a solution to the issue of clean food for their families.
5. Free finance. A city dweller still has them. This allows him, together with other like-minded people, to either support farmers who grow clean products using the above methods, or to support with their donations the development of a new universal technique for such methods by one family, or to develop, assemble and move to their own land with ready-made technology and their own equipment to provide like-minded people with guaranteed clean food.
6. Machines, materials, and parts. Having found on the Internet at least ideas about what kind of agricultural machinery and attachments for it should be for the chosen technology of growing clean food, an urban dweller, under the influence of high motivation and acquired knowledge, can greatly help in the material realization of these necessary agricultural tools because industry is still concentrated primarily in cities. Home-made machinery is used, and homemade CNC machines are being built, in Russia even girls are already in the workshops they inherited from the older generation. For example, the YouTube channel: Lucia. Reboot. https://www.youtube.com/@LuciaRELOAD.
7. Time to prepare for the move. If any of the urban residents want to move to their land already prepared, then they have all the opportunities for this preparation, so that they can immediately start producing clean food in demand on the spot, and as income increases, they can vigorously build a comfortable house and equip the area around it.
A brief summary:
Plots of 1 hectare, a hedge, driveways in the area between the plots, a pond in the center of each plot, a garden with shrubs and Anastasia’s beehives are arranged in strips so that the strips of free land between them can be processed with an agricultural mower, an area for turning vehicles around inside the plot along the side strips free from the garden and shrubs. 1 hectare per urban family. One family with the help of its agricultural vehicles will be able to process up to 20 such plots. All the free space of the paths is to mow and trim branches to feed the branch animals, or chop into mulch to fertilize the plots. Animals and birds behind the electric fence in those areas where steam is. Feed and water should be brought to this fence. Canopies are periodically moved around this area by UAZ. Then mix the results of digestion with a mulcher and soil.
You can create an artel for this business: someone grows crops, someone processes and stores them at home or on the same plots where they were grown, someone carries this crop to the city.
There are only conditions for the artel:
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Everyone must first indicate the share of the total revenue that they need. And it needs to be approved unanimously.
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Everyone should be able to replace the other in his field. That is, the logistician should replace both the processor and the grower of the crop.
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Each in the artels must know all the customers to whom orders are delivered. So that it doesn’t turn out that whoever has the money in their hands is the boss in the artel.
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Very well thought out and stated Marat. What is not taken into account is the fact that the people that have been in control of this world have never actually not operated it as an disguised feudal system. It has certainly been put into various costumes and much Make Up has been used to cover it up but as the old saying goes, you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig. Hard to know any real history concerning the time of Czarist Russia because all history has been reconfigured to promote a given agenda, and perhaps artels were possible in some villages but direct trade has always been obstructed anytime it springs up. Very few people I have ever talked to understand what happened to the hippie movement in the US, For a very brief time, less than a decade, this same idea of artisans producing goods and services bartered or exchanged untaxed and unhampered by any oversight, gained a tiny bit of traction. It was never viable anyway. I was part of it and as always there were 20 percent that truly produced, 30 per cent that could be induced to work and 50 per cent that wanted to be part of something as long as it only involve getting high and pretending to know what the gibberish they were sprouting actually meant. The 20 percent were increasingly isolated and gave up on making any real change in society. For many years later they could still be found in little homesteads, staying as invisible as possible. The rest took the path of least resistance, and were led off, zombie like, by disco balls and designer drugs. All possible because human nature is no mystery. We are allowed to believe we are on most levels free but nothing could be farther from the truth. If one thing has been focused on by the power that be, it’s how best to manipulate you. Not meaning to be Debbie Downer, and progressively more humans are starting to get a glimmer of truth but it will take an actual crisis of faith to bring any real numbers to the light. Unfortunately man learns best through dealing with his own pain.
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Very well thought out and written Maret.
Quite the system and plans for those who live in temperate climates with actually deep soils. Those places do exist on at most 3-5% of the surface landmasses.
Each climate/soil types areas have developed a best base surplus nutritional crop.
Wheat for the dry maturing kernel ripening for long term strorage and later usage.
Oats and rye grains better for cooler shorter season regions.
When these all failed in the sudden climate down turn over a 1000 years ago then those who survived the famines switched to dairy based. The animals overwintered on fast growing maturing harvested grass hays, and later root crops. Surprised me to learn that that grass hay storge was developed after the Romans.
It was wet-foot shorter climate eastern Europe and lowlands Western Europe that developed cool season root crops and cabbages.
Then hundreds of years later, these supplanted much with new world discoveries of corn-maize and potatoes.
A problem then though. Dried long storage grains, rice and corn could be used as exchange media, to the central power control people.
The soft crops of beets, parsnips, cabbages only store for percentage of a year at best. Too bulky and perishable to be used as a control tool.
TomH. well pointed out that only a small percentage of your city/urban in poverty will ever be willing to get down and dirty in the soils and animals excrements unless forced into it.
That was Pot Pal’s plan.
And even in the modern era those been raised into husbandry like the Amish, Mennonites and others like remaining native reindeer peoples the bleed out of their raised youth to the bright lights, and excitements of the cities allures continually weakens their cultures. The Romes of the world calling to them.
Unfortunately human natures say some few will aways develop the feeling that they know better for All. That the All should then free them from daily get dirty hands toils. Supporting them in their magnificences, they say is their just due.
Then the raised-up, called-on, Priest’s. And the inner driven Artists.
These ALL want to be supported to be provided to easy eats; and their families provided for; with their valuable time freed to be creators of their intangibles.
So they drive for systems of supporters for their outlooks.
5000 years of decently recorded histories says we cannot seem to evolve past the few who always develop in every generation, wanting to control the many.
Base foods that can be raised and grown for controls (civilization advancements) will always be their Most important lever.
Energy commanded, demanded and divvied out as the second most important control lever…
Ambitions as their hands on the levers; levering for fears induced complineces.
Mine, and others, for our cultures best hope to escape the They/Them is to occupy the worst, most undesirable to others, bits of lands. Hills. Mountains. Deserts. And swamps.
Learning then to embrace the “suckage” of these harsher; much more difficult places, and live on what you can grow and raise in these places.
Yet even far remote still having to produce excesses, and exchange into Cesar’s insisted coinage to keep the wolves of taxes from devouring you. Fail this and your own land will be taken away that you live on.
They/Them insisting your sons must also march to their drums. Your daughter’s pressed into servicing them in other ways.
Steve Unruh
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