Jim Dauven wrote:

Ah Don,
R.L is just ****ed that I figured out he was a troll and
put him in a kill file.

The idiot is so ass-backward stupid that he thinks kill files
work....freakin pathetic.

But as for goats, a kid is born 156 days after conception and a
Doe can conceive two weeks after giving birth. A new born
doe can conceive between 160 to 180 days after birth. In fact
goats multiply almost as fast as rabbits.

Anyone feel up to destroying this idiot's fantasies? It's simply too
****ing obvious....

ral

(George Cleveland) wrote:

Jeez, I don't see that at all. The guy is keeping his day job. He can do it
from home via a satellite link up. He just wants to know what he would need
to keep himself in food and off the treadmill of consumerism. Noble goals,
although the slant towards isolation is a bit worrying. I have no idea
what to tell him other than it probably won't take much land and if he does
it right it shouldn't involve an excessive amount of work.

Really? The post I saw was about a guy building his own off-grid
house on his own land and going totally self-sufficient.

That's the main sticking point, though. It's a matter of degrees.

One fellow might say "I want to grow my own food and be
self-sufficient" and mean nothing more than that he wanted to start a
garden to putter in on the weekends. Another might plan to go the
total route and become truly "self-sufficient".

Since this thread got cross-posted to my own group of
misc.survivalism, my interpretation of "self-sufficient" is probably
going to be radically different from someone's on rec.gardens.edible.

I don't define "self-sufficient" as "maintaining his day job and not
requiring an excessive amount of work". Whoever said that has never
processed a pound of seed into harvested grain and then into a pound
of bread.

ral

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 07:44:09 GMT, (Richard Lewis)
wrote:

(George Cleveland) wrote:

Jeez, I don't see that at all. The guy is keeping his day job. He can do it
from home via a satellite link up. He just wants to know what he would need
to keep himself in food and off the treadmill of consumerism. Noble goals,
although the slant towards isolation is a bit worrying. I have no idea
what to tell him other than it probably won't take much land and if he does
it right it shouldn't involve an excessive amount of work.

Really? The post I saw was about a guy building his own off-grid
house on his own land and going totally self-sufficient.

Here's the quote from the original post:

"My "day job" can be done remotely, via wireless Internet
connection, with flexible hours, thus leaving time and
opportunity for extensive gardening/farming, etc"

That's the main sticking point, though. It's a matter of degrees.

One fellow might say "I want to grow my own food and be
self-sufficient" and mean nothing more than that he wanted to start a
garden to putter in on the weekends. Another might plan to go the
total route and become truly "self-sufficient".

Since this thread got cross-posted to my own group of
misc.survivalism, my interpretation of "self-sufficient" is probably
going to be radically different from someone's on rec.gardens.edible.

I don't define "self-sufficient" as "maintaining his day job and not
requiring an excessive amount of work". Whoever said that has never
processed a pound of seed into harvested grain and then into a pound
of bread.

ral


g.c.

North wrote:

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 06:58:03 GMT, (Richard
Lewis) said:

Jim Dauven wrote:
snipped

But as for goats, a kid is born 156 days after conception and a
Doe can conceive two weeks after giving birth. A new born
doe can conceive between 160 to 180 days after birth. In fact
goats multiply almost as fast as rabbits.

The FAQ posted below says you are full of shit Jim.

snipped
The Goat FAQ.
snipped the biological stuff
Goats

Breeds of goats vary from as little as 20 lb mature female bodyweight
and 18 inches female withers for dwarf goats for meat production up to
250 lb and 42 inches withers height for Indian Jamnapari,

I didn't include the one or two larger breeds in my posts as
I was concentrating on goats that were primarily high
production of fabric and meat while being easy keepers but the
goats I was quoting were 60 to 150 lbs (don't see any thing
contradictory here)

snipped some more bilogical stuff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Goats are in puberty at 1/2 year of age
and can be bred if of sufficient size. Does come into estrus in 21 day
cycles normally, lasting approximately 1 to 2 days.

160 to 180 days is a 1/2 year if my calendar is correct

In temperate zones, goats breed normally from August through February.
Nearer the equator, goats come into estrus throughout the year. Thus
more than one litter per year is possible, considering the length of
pregnancy of 150 days.


Again the information in my post is right on.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Origin
snipped biological stuff



The major breeds of US goats a

Saanen originate from Switzerland (Saanen Valley),
An Australian Saanen doe holds the World record milk
production of 7,714 lbs in 365 days.
Toggenburg, brown with white facial, ear and leg stripes, another
straight nosed, horned or hornless, mostly shorthaired, erect eared
goat, as all Swiss are,

LaMancha is a new, young breed developed in California from Spanish
Murciana origin and Swiss and Nubian crossings.

(Anglo)-Nubian is a breed developed in England from native goats and
crossed with Indian and Nubian which have heavy arched

Oberhasli, a western Swiss breed, usually solid red or black, horned
or hornless, erect ears, not as tall as Saanen, very well adapted for
high altitude mountain grazing and long hours of marching;

Angora originated in the Near East. The long upper coat (mohair) is
the valuable product in the Angora in contrast to the Cashmere, where
the fine underwool is the valuable product.

Pygmy are dwarf, short legged goats from West and Central Africa and
the Caribbean. Their growth rates and milk production are relatively
respectable, although low, twinning is frequent and they are breeding
all year usually. They are adaptable to humid tropics and resistant to
trypanosoma.

The Pygmy goat is what I raise as they are (in my openion) the
most trouble free breed

snipped the rest of the stuff

The Independent

I remember visiting a commune not terribly far from Eugene that pretended
to be an Eco-friendly self-sufficient village capable of sustaining a
hundred people, but usually had no more than ten to twenty unbathed
over-the-hill hippies in insufficient housing. The dream or plan sounded
lovely if a little bit cultic in that they would literally promise "inner
wealth" in trade for all the money you could bring their marginal outfit,
& used all kinds of far-left ecological catch-phrases mixed with
Rashneeshi-like promises of perfect happiness, in a shockingly
religious-sounding rather than environmental context. The fact that they
lasted thirty years instead of vanishing like all the other Eugene
communes of the 70s sounds impressive, until one realizes their
"self-sufficiency" is actually reliance on lumberjacks & saw mills as they
sell off the trees surrounding the place. I kept in touch with a friend
who lived there some years (fellow science fiction nerd) & she was gung-ho
at the beginning, but disillusioned toward the end. I used to get a
well-produced little magazine from her which was less about country life &
shared community than it was about the cultic & political jargon &
pipedreams on how they would "soon" have achieved a hermetic balance of &
never need the outside world at all, so send money now.

It seems strange to me that "normal" people so rarely buy into the
self-sufficient cooperative idea. It's so often either antisemitic klan
types trying to get away from the mark-of-cain ******s & world-taking-over
yids, armed to the teeth & waiting for the Feds to break down the doors &
kill everyone; or else complete stoners who never outgrew the far-out-man
hippy era or wish they lived in an L-5 colony which you just know would be
a leaky rancid-smelling rustbucket losing airpressure rapidly at their
level of competence, & waiting for the Feds to rush in & arrest everyone
because of the marijuana crop hidden at the end of a labyrinth of
blackberry briars.

The latter type of eco-lefties in Oregon might actually have turned their
cooperative ranches into successful wholesale nurseries or hybrid
rhododendron farms & actually achieved something for themselves, as it
rains so perpetually that one wouldn't have even have to water the nursery
stocks. But when have you seen stoners succeed at anything. It would be
nice if regular sober middle-of-the-road folks with NEITHER the cultic
eco-jargon nor the fear/hate agenda could have rural eco-friendly dreams &
then really achieve them, but one rarely sees that; if it exists it
doesn't advertise itself as loudly. The real dream of course would be to
live harmoniously with each other universally, not to drop out with either
stockpiles of military gear or magic mushrooms.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

paghat wrote:

I remember visiting a commune not terribly far from Eugene that pretended
to be an Eco-friendly self-sufficient village capable of sustaining a
hundred people, but usually had no more than ten to twenty unbathed
over-the-hill hippies in insufficient housing. The dream or plan sounded
lovely if a little bit cultic in that they would literally promise "inner
wealth" in trade for all the money you could bring their marginal outfit,
& used all kinds of far-left ecological catch-phrases mixed with
Rashneeshi-like promises of perfect happiness, in a shockingly
religious-sounding rather than environmental context. The fact that they
lasted thirty years instead of vanishing like all the other Eugene
communes of the 70s sounds impressive, until one realizes their
"self-sufficiency" is actually reliance on lumberjacks & saw mills as they
sell off the trees surrounding the place. I kept in touch with a friend
who lived there some years (fellow science fiction nerd) & she was gung-ho
at the beginning, but disillusioned toward the end. I used to get a
well-produced little magazine from her which was less about country life &
shared community than it was about the cultic & political jargon &
pipedreams on how they would "soon" have achieved a hermetic balance of &
never need the outside world at all, so send money now.

It seems strange to me that "normal" people so rarely buy into the
self-sufficient cooperative idea. It's so often either antisemitic klan
types trying to get away from the mark-of-cain ******s & world-taking-over
yids, armed to the teeth & waiting for the Feds to break down the doors &
kill everyone; or else complete stoners who never outgrew the far-out-man
hippy era or wish they lived in an L-5 colony which you just know would be
a leaky rancid-smelling rustbucket losing airpressure rapidly at their
level of competence, & waiting for the Feds to rush in & arrest everyone
because of the marijuana crop hidden at the end of a labyrinth of
blackberry briars.

The latter type of eco-lefties in Oregon might actually have turned their
cooperative ranches into successful wholesale nurseries or hybrid
rhododendron farms & actually achieved something for themselves, as it
rains so perpetually that one wouldn't have even have to water the nursery
stocks. But when have you seen stoners succeed at anything. It would be
nice if regular sober middle-of-the-road folks with NEITHER the cultic
eco-jargon nor the fear/hate agenda could have rural eco-friendly dreams &
then really achieve them, but one rarely sees that; if it exists it
doesn't advertise itself as loudly. The real dream of course would be to
live harmoniously with each other universally, not to drop out with either
stockpiles of military gear or magic mushrooms.

You write pretty well, but you suffer from acute
logorrhea and thus write too much; far too much.

I'm reading this in misc.rural, where people frequently
inquire about living "off the grid". I think they are,
for the most part, overly taken with the American
frontier mythology. They all want to be Jim Bridger or
Kit Carson. I have no doubt that if a Wenzel propane
stove (http://tinyurl.com/ytfl) had been available in
their time, Bridger and Carson would have used them.

You wrote, "It would be nice if regular sober
middle-of-the-road folks with NEITHER the cultic
eco-jargon nor the fear/hate agenda could have rural
eco-friendly dreams & then really achieve them, but one
rarely sees that; if it exists it doesn't advertise
itself as loudly." I think it does exist, and I think
you correctly identify the issue: it doesn't advertise
itself. There was an article in yesterday's L.A. Times
(http://www.latimes.com/la-me-greenbu...,5190938.story)
about a man in South Carolina working to promote "green
burial", in which only simple caskets, or no caskets at
all, are used. Successful life simplification usually
occurs in small, unseen ways, not in a paradoxically
grandiose movement "off the grid".

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:28:30 -0800, Jim Dauven
said:



North wrote:

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 06:58:03 GMT, (Richard
Lewis) said:

Jim Dauven wrote:
snipped

But as for goats, a kid is born 156 days after conception and a
Doe can conceive two weeks after giving birth. A new born
doe can conceive between 160 to 180 days after birth. In fact
goats multiply almost as fast as rabbits.

The FAQ posted below says you are full of shit Jim.

snipped
The Goat FAQ.
snipped the biological stuff
Goats

Breeds of goats vary from as little as 20 lb mature female bodyweight
and 18 inches female withers for dwarf goats for meat production up to
250 lb and 42 inches withers height for Indian Jamnapari,

I didn't include the one or two larger breeds in my posts as
I was concentrating on goats that were primarily high
production of fabric and meat while being easy keepers but the
goats I was quoting were 60 to 150 lbs (don't see any thing
contradictory here)

snipped some more bilogical stuff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Goats are in puberty at 1/2 year of age
and can be bred if of sufficient size. Does come into estrus in 21 day
cycles normally, lasting approximately 1 to 2 days.

160 to 180 days is a 1/2 year if my calendar is correct

In temperate zones, goats breed normally from August through February.
Nearer the equator, goats come into estrus throughout the year. Thus
more than one litter per year is possible, considering the length of
pregnancy of 150 days.


Again the information in my post is right on.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Origin
snipped biological stuff



The major breeds of US goats a

Saanen originate from Switzerland (Saanen Valley),
An Australian Saanen doe holds the World record milk
production of 7,714 lbs in 365 days.
Toggenburg, brown with white facial, ear and leg stripes, another
straight nosed, horned or hornless, mostly shorthaired, erect eared
goat, as all Swiss are,

LaMancha is a new, young breed developed in California from Spanish
Murciana origin and Swiss and Nubian crossings.

(Anglo)-Nubian is a breed developed in England from native goats and
crossed with Indian and Nubian which have heavy arched

Oberhasli, a western Swiss breed, usually solid red or black, horned
or hornless, erect ears, not as tall as Saanen, very well adapted for
high altitude mountain grazing and long hours of marching;

Angora originated in the Near East. The long upper coat (mohair) is
the valuable product in the Angora in contrast to the Cashmere, where
the fine underwool is the valuable product.

Pygmy are dwarf, short legged goats from West and Central Africa and
the Caribbean. Their growth rates and milk production are relatively
respectable, although low, twinning is frequent and they are breeding
all year usually. They are adaptable to humid tropics and resistant to
trypanosoma.

The Pygmy goat is what I raise as they are (in my openion) the
most trouble free breed

snipped the rest of the stuff

The Independent

Your getting better at this ;-)

In article .net,
Jonathan Ball wrote:


You wrote, "It would be nice if regular sober
middle-of-the-road folks with NEITHER the cultic
eco-jargon nor the fear/hate agenda could have rural
eco-friendly dreams & then really achieve them, but one
rarely sees that; if it exists it doesn't advertise
itself as loudly."
I think it does exist, and I think
you correctly identify the issue: it doesn't advertise
itself. There was an article in yesterday's L.A. Times
(http://www.latimes.com/la-me-greenbu...,5190938.story)
about a man in South Carolina working to promote "green
burial", in which only simple caskets, or no caskets at
all, are used. Successful life simplification usually
occurs in small, unseen ways, not in a paradoxically
grandiose movement "off the grid".

I never understood the fancy casket thing, & if I don't before I die
decide to be burnt to ashes instead, it looks like I'm going into the
ground before sunset in a very ordinary wooden box. My stepmom was born &
raised Buddhist & her Thai family performed burials right in the ground &
kept the same casket clean & in storage between uses (it was used only for
display of the corpse during the cleansing ritual, but never wastefully
buried with a body in it), then they would dig up the bones after the meat
was retaken by the earth, & cremate only the bones. Long ago there was an
illegal cemetery in Underground Seattle in a buried part of the city where
only Asian people lived. Tey had to perform their burials secretly because
there were laws that existed exclusively to protect the mortuary industry
(the mortician was ever neighborhood's richest ******* & he'd contribute
to politician's coffers to insure the perpetuation of laws that "forced"
people to pay for burial methods that for some people are outright
offensive; whoever was religiously or ecologically opposed to being shot
full of preservatives & locked up in a metal box were out of luck. It's
weird to think that even today it's newsworthy & eccentric to propose a
perfectly rational system of burial.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/

"gregpresley" wrote in message ...
snip
With a total vegetarian diet, you will also need to think about sources
of fat. It would be a good idea to plant a nut tree - however, it might be
15-25 years before you get an impressive crop.

Some nut trees will start producing much sooner than 15 years. Nut
production for seedlings starts and really takes off, in years:

Filberts/hazelnuts: 3-6 years
Heartnuts: 5-8 years
Black walnut: 10-15 years
Chinese chestnut: 3-8 years
Northern pecans: 10-15 years

(and others)

The more expensive grafted trees can start producing much earlier than
their seedling counterparts (e.g, black walnut grafts start producing
around year 4).

Warmer climates can support an even wider range of nut trees.

Cindy
Future Tree Farm Owner

Richard Lewis wrote:

Strider wrote:
There is no good answer to the question without more info. It
generally took at least 40 acres to barely keep a familiy going here
in East TN in the 19th century (before hybrid seeds, commercial
fertilizer, and the internal combustion engine).

That's the key topic of dissent that I have raised every single time
this thread has come back around. It is impossible to raise all the
food you need on "blah acres" because, if the situation comes to be
that you have to try to do it, you will in effect be reverting to
medieval stats and not modern ones.

The rough numbers I recall for medieval farming are generally all in
the range of 10 bushel/acre (that's grain yield) -- there's obviously
some variation due to crop/grain. However, the numbers I saw looked
like more variation due to weather, etc -- there were numbers ranging
from 5-30 bushel/acre, for most everything. But I think most were 10+
bushel/acre, pretty consistantly (downgrade to 7 or 8 if you're more
paranoid...or even 5... assuming you're comparably skilled in
primitive farming as our forefathers).

Let's call a bushel 50 pounds. It isn't 50 lbs, but rather varies
with grain, but let's call it that for ease of calculations.

On the low side, a farmer might need 3,000 calories/day (more when
working hard, less when waiting for crops to grow -- When you're
working hard, it might be more like 6,000). A pound of grain is about
1500 calories (again, they range around this value), so you need about
2 pounds of grain, per day, per person.

10 bushel/acre is about 500 pounds/acre yield. Or somewhere around
250 days worth of food.

In a really bad year, you're yield may be half that. In a really good
year it might be three times that.

Let us not forget that you need to keep seed. The number I've seen
for medieval farming are to plan on planing between 10% and 25% of
what you plan to harvest. This may sound low, but remember that
you're growing open pollinated crops (not hybrids), and have to deal
with losses due to wildlife.

Speaking of wildlife, don't expect crop losses to be linear with crop
size. If these losses are spread over the yield from a large field,
rather than a small one, will make a drastic difference (i.e. expect
the animals to damage about the same amount of crop, regardless of
field size...)

Take your yield above and multiply by 0.75, and you can eat for about
that many days. The obvious advantage of low-balling your numbers is
that you should be able to produce a surplus, which is all the better.

Even then, you'll want extra room to grow "vitamins" (i.e. veggies, of
a wide variety), and will perhaps also want some room to grow meat
animals, and perhaps a milk cow or goat, or twelve...

Don't forget that it is recommended that your diet not be less than
something like 10-15% fats (though most people today, run over the 30%
recommended upper limit). That milk, butter and cheese can go a long
ways towards helping your balanced diet.

That's the key problem with anyone who cites the "half and acre" or
"one acre" bull etc.

With hybrids, it's not uncommon to get 75-150 bushel/acre corn
(actually, I think I've seen 75 for Dent, a open pollinated).
Medieval style, expect more like 10...

Though perhaps we might do a bit better, if we use what we know about
modern agriculture (despite having primitive tools).

--
Charles Scripter * Use this address to reply: cescript at progworks dot net
When encryption is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir rapelcgvba.
Note: my responses may be slow due to ISP/newsgroup issues

Richard Lewis wrote:

(dstvns) wrote:

So... How many acres of flat, farm-able land will I need?

I don't know, but I grew a years worth of garlic (fresh) and tomatoes
(canned) on about 400 square feet (0.009 acres?) of composted and
mulched soil this past year. My limitation is sun, due to so many
trees nearby. But I would definetly believe the figures that it
doesn't take a whole lot of land to live well.

You have looked at the calorie levels of that garlic and those
tomatoes, right? What you grew on 400 square feet will do nothing but
slow your starvation by a slight bit.

But if you treat these as "vitamins", and grow your _real_food_
elsewhere...

--
Charles Scripter * Use this address to reply: cescript at progworks dot net
When encryption is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir rapelcgvba.
Note: my responses may be slow due to ISP/newsgroup issues

North wrote:

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 11:28:30 -0800, Jim Dauven
said:


snipped all the the stuff

The Independent

Your getting better at this ;-)

You know you should read a little before you accept all the bull
shit that RAL puts out. (That is assuming that he and you
are not the same person.)

The Independent

"Richard Lewis" wrote in message
(George Cleveland) wrote:

Jeez, I don't see that at all. The guy is keeping his day job. He can do
it
from home via a satellite link up. He just wants to know what he would
need
to keep himself in food and off the treadmill of consumerism. Noble
goals,
although the slant towards isolation is a bit worrying

Really? The post I saw was about a guy building his own off-grid
house on his own land and going totally self-sufficient.

You are both reading into the original post something that was not there.

The "slant towards isolation" is an interpretation and was not mentioned as
is the "guy building his own off-grid house".

Andrew may or may not intend to build and he may or may not intend to seek
isolation but he certainly didn't mention doing either thing. It is still
very possible in NZ to have a house built by a reasonably traditional
builder, to be off the grid and collect one's own water off the roof to
have a septic toilet (or even a composting toilet) and still live a full and
active socially involved life.

"Noah Simoneaux" wrote in message
...

I've noticed that many gardening books ignore potatoes, since they're so
cheap
to buy in the store it just doesn't pay to grow them at home. Just try
finding
some of the better varieties for home gardeners and taste them and the
store-bought potatoes will never taste the same for you. I've done that
with
tomatoes.

I think I'd ditch those gardening books as they are don't seem to know much
about a very important subject :-))

Having just looked through some of my books I notice that a lot of them that
I use most regularly emphasise the importance of growing even a few potatoes
in even a restricted garden space. These books all seem to stress the same
point which I find of most importance: - that it is impossible to buy a
decent potato in any supermarket and finding a good spud is a very hard task
if one doesn't have a garden.

I have found one shop which does supply good potatoes (in a very large
regional hunt) and they are still in the hessian (burlap) bag that comes
from the grower. It is a matter of digging in and getting ones hands dirty
in order to get the potatoes but they ARE good potoatoes (unlike anything
that comes in a plastic bag).

(paghat) writes:

It seems strange to me that "normal" people so rarely buy into the
self-sufficient cooperative idea. It's so often either antisemitic
klan types trying to get away from the mark-of-cain ******s &
world-taking-over yids, armed to the teeth & waiting for the Feds to
break down the doors & kill everyone; or else complete stoners who
never outgrew the far-out-man hippy era or wish they lived in an L-5
[..]

....or, say, much of India.

--
mike [at] mike [dash] warren.com
URL:http://www.mike-warren.com
GPG: 0x579911BD :: 87F2 4D98 BDB0 0E90 EE2A 0CF9 1087 0884 5799 11BD