 Monday, May 20, 2002
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Arthur Noll has a lot of real experience in living off the land. As we move towards fossil fuel depletion, we might benefit from his thoughts.
Living Without Fossil Fuels
Arthur Noll
I'm living in a city now, to my dismay, but I've lived many years in the country on farms and have done a lot of experiments and thinking about methods of getting food.
By far the most reliable method I found for getting food with the least effort was to herd goats out free. No fences to build, they did the work of harvesting the grass and leaves, I just had to wander out with them and watch them eat for two or three hours a day, then do the milking and butchering.
The downside, of course, was that this took a considerable amount of land, and this slowly was whittled away. We had neighbors who had long ago stopped trying to use their land to grow food, and found my efforts cute, but as time went by and the world became more frightening, they decided they wanted to try and use their land for conventional farming again, and I felt squeezed out.
The option of migrating to warmer climates for dealing with winter was also not available, and while I did a lot of thinking and experimenting with making hay, it is a tremendous amount of work with hand tools, and I couldn't do it alone, but always ended up with the tractor and machinery.
But as far as actually getting food, compared to efforts of tilling the soil, herding the goats had far more potential in my mind.
The work to get the soil ready, deal with weeds, insects, birds, deer, maintain soil fertility, has defeated me over and over in my life. The last factor is a huge one, I cannot see how to keep fertility over huge biological zones and till the soil. All the "organic" efforts I saw and tried to do myself always consisted of taking fertility from one piece of land and putting it on another, and eventually impoverishing both. I could see this so clearly, when trying to keep hay land fertile, and people came to the farm, wanting to fill up their pickup trucks with manure for gardens, and how much manure I could use myself on a tilled patch of ground. And in spite of all the effort, I never produced a faction of the calories, tilling the ground, as I did by wandering about with a one legged stool, a crook, drop spindle, and watching the goats eat.
I'd have died as a farmer. As indeed, the abandoned farmland I used had been failure for other farmers, too. (This was in central Maine) As a herder, I can see the possibility of sustainable living in a desert, which indeed has been done. Farming all too often brings slow but eventual destruction to the land, I don't see it as something to put much hope in. On flood plains and deltas, beside the ocean, where it is easy to get back the nutrients that wash out, then farming can be sustainable, but in upland areas, farmers should stay out. People are constantly trying to go back to the land and farm, and over and over they find out why the farms failed in the first place.
I am in Sacramento at the moment. A horrible place, a true desert of houses and cars, and yet easy to see it could be heaven for herding animals. In the valley for the winter, in the mountains for the summer. People just can't seem to help overdoing things.
Arthur Noll's Harmony
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