The Woke Farmers
6th edition; 16.02.23
We’ve had a few comments recently on the YouTube Channel where people say that we are woke. It made us chuckle quite heartily.
The idea of being “woke” is pretty subjective, in my experience, said by the same people who say things like “snowflake”. It seams to me though, that the people who say “woke” and “snowflake” are quite fragile because they can’t tolerate the differences between themselves and others… Tolerance is a form of strength, and those that lack it are worse off because they spend far too much time brooding over small things when life is calling.
Either way, apparently me and Jackie are woke. We now think of our selves as the woke farmers. It’s because people don’t like the way that Jackie spoke about our animals, we were sad when Higgy the pig died so she spoke about that in a video. It boils down to the fact that we recognise that animals have personalities while we also keep livestock.
For many it is either one way or the other; the animal has a personality and by extension it also has feelings, therefore to be kept as stock is inhumane; or on the other side of the coin, the personality of the animal must not be recognised because to enslave the animal contradicts our humanity… I’m being hyperbolic of course, but it does break down like this. Some people take it to the extreme and others are more fluid in their beliefs. Many will profess a care for animal welfare, but routinely buy meat from the shelf, knowing at the back of their minds that the animal truly was abused in a cage from birth to death to make the meat “better”.
On our little farm we try to do it the “woke” way. Well, a better term would be the holistic way. We firmly believe that animals have personalities, so if we follow our values, then they deserve dignity. Dignity, though, is nuanced. To understand the nuance of anything, you have to take a big step back and consider the big picture. For example when we slaughter, butcher, pack up and freeze our extra cockerels from the flock, does this contradict the dignity of the animal? In a way perhaps, but by keeping the animals we have taken on the responsibility to maintain a natural social balance within the flock…
This is the holistic perspective. Chickens are a fruitful animal, a single hen could raise dozens of chicks in her lifetime. If not for the various balancing forces within nature, nature would long ago have self destructed due to the overpopulation of chickens (or many other examples). They would have pecked and scratched at every plant that they could find and their numbers would be multiplying by an unsustainable rate.
But in the natural world - and even in our unnatural human domain - sickness and predators cull the surplus of chickens and ensure a balance between the factors of nature. The plants and grubs have enough room to grow, but the chickens and other grazers play a part in keeping these lifeforms in check, in turn it is the predators and sickness that prevent the chickens from colonising the whole world and killing everything green. Ever seen a large scale poultry farm? Even a “free range” commercial farm may just be a desolate muddy field without a single weed, filled with a horde of automaton hens perpetually searching for something to scratch and peck…
Of course when you take the eggs from a hen you are interrupting the cycle of life, in a way replacing some of the natural factors that regulate the population of chickens, but still approximately half of your hatchlings will be cockerels… It’s the fact that we recognise the personality of chickens that makes us respect their dignity and also butcher them. If the ratio of hens to cockerels is too high then the social dynamic of the flock is threatened. Cockerels can fight each other, kill each other, and even become aggressive towards humans if they are forced to compete too much for the hens. In this way it can be seen as respecting the dignity of a flock to cull a certain amount of the cockerels.
We get the impression that the chickens - the flock in general - is happier when the ratio between cockerels and Hens is leaning heavily in favour of the hens. That being said, we’ve heard of cockerels living happily together when there are no hens. Perhaps in the future we can set up a separate, mobile living space just for cockerels, which will follow in the path of the pigs who are grazed across large parts of the property. One of our central goals here is to re-wild parts of our land and we see chickens as a valuable asset in that plan. They can help to regulate pests when run carefully through the garden and break down biomass into wonderful compost by scratching and manuring.
It’s a wonderful idea, but we’ll see if we can make it a practical reality; we’d have to pay for extra feed to keep that many birds, whereas if we go the other route and butcher them, then they make free food for us (not to mention that their population would continue to grow as we hatch new laying hens). It’s a long term objective because we’re always happy to see a new source of manure getting scratched into the soil, and these cockerels may also help reduce parasites such as ticks and also worms from the scat of deer and wild pig.
In the coming years though we see chickens as a source of food for us because it fits in well with our plans to produce copious amounts of compost. During experiments from the second half of last year, we tested the deep mulch compost system that we first heard of from Justin Rhodes. We were able to make a really nice amount of compost from a relatively small flock of less than ten birds. This year we’d like to gradually scale up this project so that we can continue to improve the soil quality in the garden. That means more birds, more compost, and more meat.
Recently, we visited two other places where people are trying to live more sustainably. On one of them, they were experimenting with building materials that they could source more locally, even from their own property. They built small houses from timber frames, and then filled in the walls with straw, reinforced by old mattress frames, rendering the outside with cob. It was a very solid structure and definitely an inspiration to us. We’ll be looking for a good location to extract clay from on our own land. They also built a small house from earth bags, which is something that I have been curious about for a while.
These people had gathered a lot of experience making compost. They had a gigantic ten cubic meter cylindrical cage filled with compost and a coiled pipe. The compost produced enough heat so that they could run the water through the pipe and get forty degrees Celsius from the tap! It even lasts a full year! We’ve had a talk and decided to have a go at making one our selves next spring, when we have to strim away all the fresh growth around the house ahead of fire season. The compost within included a cubic meter of manure, ten percent. We can source that from a local who owns a horse that produces a bucket of manure per day.
They had a big solar dehydrator, which kept the produce in a dark space, to retain more of the nutritional value. We will also dedicate some time this spring to building something similar. Last year we laid down our tomatoes and mushrooms on a rack on the roof, but this system looks better. More on that in the spring… There were also some incredible ancient water collection and distribution systems that were carved from the granite bedrock many centuries ago. This land was situated on the side of a hill which was not terraced, so the water channels were a bit different than the ones that we have here; sloping diagonally down the hillside and even splitting in different directions, offering complete control on where the water is diverted to.
There was a human made cave - dug manually into the bedrock - extending back by several meters. These caves are sometimes called “water mines” in English. The water percolates through the porous rock and collects in the cavern. It was protected from the sun by a little hatch, and when opened, the water was crystal clear within. At the end of the day we settled down for a delicious lunch, a vegetable roast with freshly made hummus, and then they were kind enough to gift us some local seeds for our own garden.
A few days later we drove to a neighbours place that was just ten minutes from us, but much more isolated, nestled away at the end of a dead end road in a secluded valley. It was an abandoned hamlet, with an appearance as though the people simply walked out of their houses, never to return. I asked the guy how many people could have lived there in the past, he said around twenty… Now the whole place is occupied by a young Portuguese family of four with an admirable dedication to the land.
They have devoted so much energy to restoring the gardens around their house and have spent the last nine years rejuvenating the soil, rebuilding several dilapidated houses and sheds, all while raising two small children! Simply amazing and it gives us hope that we’ll pull through and in nine years have something similar to show for ourselves.
Again, they gave us heirloom seeds, planted in this area since time immemorial. It really makes me think - when I see seeds in the shop - about how it is so easy to just buy them and plant them, when so many generations protected their seeds with their lives, knowing that the seeds were a form of salvation. No seeds meant no food. I know how privileged I am to live in a world where there are so many more possibilities than before, but at the same time I see that the old ways deserve respect. These seeds are dying out and all the work of our ancestors is being forsaken. I think that the best way to live our modern lives is to embrace them without abandoning thousands of years of intergenerational learning by simply throwing the old ways out of the window. If everyone - or at least most people - kept a small garden or even a little raised bed on the balcony with the old seeds, then it might be enough.
If you’re interested in protecting endangered seeds, try googling local seed banks and talking to the people near you who are working to keep the seeds alive.
We bought three new kiwi plants and got them in the ground on the terrace directly behind the house. That terrace faces south so it gets a huge amount of sun all year. The kiwis will be trellised into a kind of green roof that will keep the area cool in summer and hopefully the house too. These trees were kindly funded by viewers of the youtube channel - so thank you so much if you happen to be reading this. We are always happy to put gifts from our viewers to good use. If you would like to help us plant more trees of many varieties, you can simply reply to this email or use the link in the description of our videos.
As always thank you for reading. A new video is in the pipeline for this Saturday 18.02.23 at 11:00 CET. Our video on the eucalyptus problem in Portugal is delayed because one of our camera lenses broke… We’ve found a second hand one and it should get here relatively soon, and then we can continue producing the video.
Tolerance, accepting the opinions of other's, think about what you hear, admit you can be wrong. These thoughts are like a mantra to me.
I like very much to read your newsletter. Make me think and seeing the evolution of your habitat, in our country is really enjoyable. Seeds... I'm going to search for it.
I have really enjoyed reading this piece, it must be wonderful to have so many great projects and the time ahead of you to see them mature. As for being called 'woke'... from the little I know of you from your Youtube channel and your newsletter, you strike me as being very balanced in your approach to farming. When you give an animal a name, as you did with your pig, you cross an emotional line from which you can't retreat. And what's wrong with being sensitive? Empathy is what makes us human. It's a great privilege but also a burden - too little of it and we become monsters, too much and it becomes difficult to survive. I live in the French countryside, surrounded by very traditionnal dairy farmers. Even they tell me that they always feel sad when they sell their calves for slaughter, yet it's an essential part of the cycle of dairy farming that has gone on for centuries.