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Self-Sufficiency Acreage Requirement? (getting fuel)
"David I. Raines" wrote in message ink.net... Jim Dauven wrote: [...] Have you looked into no-till farming? It's working very well for us on a smallish scale, just to feed ourselves. -dir I have planned on using no-till farming with horse drawn equipment. First I would run the disk harrow behind a two horse team. That's two acres an hour for 5 hours. Change horses (you cannot/should not run a horse more than 5 hours) because the need time for foraging. Then run disk harrow for another five hours. That way you can disk up 20 acres a day. The next day run the spring tooth harrow for the same about of time. (It actually may go faster as the spring tooth harrow doesn't have the resistance to pulling that the disk harrow does). Last run the grain drill for the planting of wheat, oats, barley, rapeseed etc. These plants are winter planting so you plant them in late september and let them germinate in the fall rain so they will get good start for the spring. That way the plant matures while the moisture from the spring rains is still in the ground. If you are raising cattle and you keep your cattle in a corral in the winter you can use a manure spreader to spread manure on the grain crops in the spring just as ground if thawing This will provide additional nitrogen for the growing grain plants. (The object of this is to get the grain as healthy as possible for increased yield) Also the rape oil is important here because after fertilization of the grain heads if you spray the grain with rapeseed oil that will kill many of the pests like grass hoppers as rapeseed oil is toxic and does really dry out. I don't have a horse drawn spray rig yet but it is one of the things that will have to be constructed. Crops that you will irrigate, Corn, potatoes, beans, peas, onions, alfalfa, etc you plant in the spring. One trick you can do is seed alfalfa over the grain crop that you planted the fall before. The grain will grow faster than the alfalfa but the alfalfa will still grow and the plant root nodules will fix nitrogen into the soil for the grain. You do the same no till harrow work but then you use a cultivator to make up the rows. After planting you can then lay the soaker tubes for a water supply. Again after these crops have fertilized then a mist of rapeseed oil will help in pest control. I have herd that a mist of rapeseed oil will also control pests on fruit and berries. So you can see why I am very interested in the rapeseed plant in a TEOTWAWKI scenario. The Independent The Independent A man with a good supply of horses (6) should be able to plant 180 to 200 acres of grain crops in the fall and an additional up the rows for the planting for crops Why do you need to grow so much stuff? We can live on a quarter acre apiece and that includes veggies, grain, oilseeds, bush/cane/vine fruits, legumes, sugar plants, and fiber plants. A simple planting stick is all you need, and something sharp to cut the weeds off at the base. Seems to me that you only have to have the tractor and horses in order to grow enough crops to 'feed' both of them. As for raising large animals, that's an incredible amount of work. I would rather eat veggies and kick back. Why feed animals 10# of food to get 2# back? And ALL that water and care and shelter and fencing and herding and on and on and on. I don't think you can do the above, Jim, without a pretty good size work force of people that are not equal partners. That tend the animals and eat turnips, so to speak. An underclass. Americans couldn't eat animal products at every meal now, if their food supply wasn't subsidized by cheap labor, here and abroad. You do know what subsidies are, don't you? They're money we paid to the government so that we wouldn't have to pay it to the farmer. After the government takes there share for the administration of the farm programs...we'd be better off if we'd just bit the bullet and paid higher prices for the food. |
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