Paleo/primal village

[eveheart]

It takes enough experience/wisdom to know a good plan to begin with.

That sounds like an excuse to avoid taking action.

I prefer the "Fail Better" model:

Ever tried, ever failed.
No matter!
Try again, fail again...
Fail better!

[cherimoya_kid]

That sounds like an excuse to avoid taking action.

I prefer the "Fail Better" model:

Ever tried, ever failed.
No matter!
Try again, fail again...
Fail better!

I would feel extremely guilty if I advised a friend to try to make a living from farming right now. There are 1000 failures or "barely-hanging-on" types for every solid success. And we're talking about people who put hundreds of thousands of dollars and many years of their lives into it.

[ciervo-chaman]

I would feel extremely guilty if I advised a friend to try to make a living from farming right now. There are 1000 failures or "barely-hanging-on" types for every solid success. And we're talking about people who put hundreds of thousands of dollars and many years of their lives into it.

I'm actually starting to live on a family scale farm of about 60x60 mts. I'm not investing anything cause i dont want to loose. Just buying chickens and metal wire. I see a brillant future doing this. Time will tell. Need advice!

[RogueFarmer]

1 major point: Saladin has a healthy sense of optimism. Successful business people in any field of endeavor are optimistic, even amidst great setbacks.

The original poster is drowning in pessimism. He would have to eliminate most of his pessimism - keeping a healthy sense of skepticism - and learn how to see the bright side. Then, he can start a successful farming enterprise. When he learns to create optimism, he will see his paleoprimal village spring to life around him.

Screw you eveheart, that's you you're talking about, not me, your are simply reflecting yourself into how you seem me, in reality I am the least pessimistic, most optimistic person who posts on this entire forum.

I am drowning in pain. I am suffering from things I dare not write here. It is not only humiliating, I am experiencing more pain than I have even been able to write hardly anything or really express myself to more than just a few people, one of which who wanted to help me took his own life, really ever since the winter of 2013.

I have PTSD pretty bad, I am finally starting to feel like myself again.

[RogueFarmer]

Just to be clear, the farmers I work with are not commodity growers. I work mostly with grass farmers, and to a lesser extent organic fruit and veg growers. These are the people who are (supposedly) doing everything right. Management intensive grazing, stocking to extend the grazing season, using breeds with excellent feed-conversion ratios, using perennial polycultures and companion planting, compost and compost tea rather than synthetic fertilizers, etc. They still can't make money.

The few exceptions are the ones who manage to carve out a niche market for themselves, like using hoop houses so they can be the first to bring a particular product to market each season or focusing on novelty varieties of foods. Even then their incomes are marginal. They might net $15,000-$20,000 per year per proprietor after investing 80+ hours per week over their growing season. If they have health insurance at all it's a very high deductible plan, which means a serious illness or injury will be financially ruinous. They also have no retirement savings, and some of them can't even afford to eat the food they grow because they so desperately need the cash to pay bills. I've met more than a few farmers who grow high-end organic vegetables or raise high-end meats who are on food stamps.

Commercial farming is not an entrepreneurial venture I'd go into right now. Maybe someday when people are ready to accept food prices that are 2x or 3x what they are today, but not right now.

I am a rogue farmer. I am not an organic farmer. I am a nature farmer.

Eric what would you consult me to do? What is there out there for me? What is it everybody here is doing besides eating good food that is so worth while? What is there that I can do that is worth doing? Are we to be mere pawns who toil for pay so we can hog at the trough? I don't understand where the conceptual misunderstanding ends or beguines, but to me the majority of us humans are facing slavery, these corporations and countries are becoming slave nations and the suffering to me seems insurmountable

Tell me Eveheart, who supports you? Do you have family who loves and supports you and cares about the things that you care about? Don't judge people. Because you don't know what shit they have been through.

Sorry, back to Eric, so, how do these farmers live? 15-20k? Sounds horrible right? That's terrible they make nothing!


Except they have all their food at their house. Except they have their whole livelihood where they live. Except their lives are rich and meaningful. Except they get to be there with their children and work with them and love them and they don't have to go out into the world of lies and slavery and ruin and they don't have top send their children to the prisons they call schools like packs of dogs sent to the pound in one big cage.

Except when you have a farm, you don't need lots of money, because almost everything you need to have a really good life, is where you live.

They all make choices. How like Americans are these farmers. We have been sold lies. All the farmers I know buy lies, everyone I know buys lies.

I have never seen a farm at peace, I have never seen a farm in balance, hell I have never seen an environment that was natural or in any kind of harmony or balance but ruin.

I have read and heard and watched videos about good farms and I have done good farming myself so I know it exists.

You know one of the roads I could have, perhaps should have walked down is working for some of those people, seeking out the best farms. I mean that was part of the plan, you know but, didn't have a vacation in 7 years.



Eric, you know though perhaps you are onto something. You know what on average the least profitable thing ranchers do on their ranches is? The least profitable thing people do on ranches is farm.

[RogueFarmer]

What do you want to buy besides food? What are you missing out on in life that 15-20k a year and living a good life and growing the food that you eat can't cover?

A farm can be way more profitable than that, some farms are gangbusters profitable, are you guys even aware of what's going on in the world right now at all? Farming is big business. Organic farming is big business. If organic farming wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist except as anything more than a hobby. Bhutan and Denmark are becoming entirely organic countries. In Russia if a citizen wants to farm but has no assets the government supplies him with 4 acres to grow whatever he wishes in just about any manner he wishes. In New Zealand farmers are on average the wealthiest citizens, more so than doctors or bankers. Is this merely because New Zealand has a better climate than other countries? Only partially because it's really just hard to dispute that Kiwi farmers are a lot better at growing a lot of food without a lot of labor than most of the farmers in most of the world.

I mean did you guys know that NZ was and may still be supplying the majority of McDonnalds Hamburger meat with grass fed beef because they have the most profitable way of growing beef in the world and can thus sell it cheapest.

But then you say, "no no rogue farmer, it is clearly because of their climate that they are able to do that". I don't think so. It is not the climate in NZ that makes Kiwis better farmers, rather it was the climate in NZ that influenced NZ farmers to be better farmers. We can near or even match or surpass their production and cost efficiency right here in the states, we can do it just about as good as anyone else can if not better.

And the really important secret to America being the best country for ecological farming to blossom is that more than almost any country I believe, America is underutilized. America is a feast of a famine, the good has been ushered out of the countryside and while the property values have skyrocketed from the housing bubble, the utilization of the land has plummeted in many large regions and even on the best soils in America, rent is reasonable.


Ugh UGh I feel like this forum is so intellectually limited from what it should be. Like there is a lot more important shit than raw meat, there is a lot more truth out there that has to be learned and invented and there are a whole heck of lies that need to be expunged.

Like just think about how much important shit could be happening right now if people would get off their high horses and their white citadels and their stipulations and fears and actually started working together and healing each other.

I really am a huge optimist and I have believed all along I can overcome my pain, my trauma, but this adventure of healing, this is a struggle.

Going about this, as I have alone, I never meant to and I have been trying to form connections all along. But it's really hard. Sometimes it honestly feels like an evil spirit follows me to spiritually undermine me and those that I love.

From as long as I can remember I believed in Great Spirit and the power of the universe, I am not a christian, and though I follow the teachings of christ, I am not compelled to believe how christians ask me to believe but I'll tell you it really does become hard to believe the devil is not afoot.

[TylerDurden]

This will no doubt sound odd but I thought I should add that when I was in very ill-health years ago pre-RPD diet, pain was the only reason why I was able to eventually regain my health in the end. You see, the slow but steady inflammation from wheat and dairy over the years had resulted in my brain and body being so flooded with extra hormones that I was incapable of any will or drive whatsoever. But the agonising mental and physical pain forced me constantly seek out solutions, however  far-out, until I eventually sorted things out. Granted though, my experience may well have nothing whatsoever to do with yours.

[RogueFarmer]

This will no doubt sound odd but I thought I should add that when I was in very ill-health years ago pre-RPD diet, pain was the only reason why I was able to eventually regain my health in the end. You see, the slow but steady inflammation from wheat and dairy over the years had resulted in my brain and body being so flooded with extra hormones that I was incapable of any will or drive whatsoever. But the agonising mental and physical pain forced me constantly seek out solutions, however  far-out, until I eventually sorted things out. Granted though, my experience may well have nothing whatsoever to do with yours.

I was raised as a "free range" country child and was very healthy until I was moved to the city and besieged by what to my mind could easily be likened to biblical pestilences. My every experience dealing with civilization feels like grinding gears trying to drive a hard to shift stick shift when you don't know how to drive stick. To my mind life in the city is a life of humiliation, pollution, danger and despair. I was told I needed to be taught in schools so that I could be educated and be hired so that I could buy a house and feed myself, but this made no sense to me because my grandma had a house where we could all live cause there were 16 bedrooms by the river and there was more food than what we could eat right where we lived in the wild and 17 acres of field and valuable trees but instead we moved to the city and for the past 23 years i have seen debt and poverty and been hungry and I don't have a family that supports me or anyone to really talk about problems.

The real world is too horrible for me to be able to stomach every day of every year. I am not immune to vice but from my observation I am far less tainted by it than most. I truly believe that things are going far worse than they ever have gone before but I also believe that there is so much potential for so more good things to happen than ever before. I think my biggest problem with my relationship with humanity so far, is it is so hard to find mentors, and thus far, almost totally impossible to find collaboration. I have encountered moreover, resistance, betrayal, predation. Perhaps this is why I have always stressed my belief and in agreement with Aajonus, that humans are truly carnivores like wolves and dogs and it makes so much sense that our behavior is so similar.

Gtfo my way Cherimoya, I've got a world to save.

[RogueFarmer]

There are a few old sages, a couple young mavericks, who wrote books that I had the miraculous good fortune to read because of some very dear friends of mine I made along the way who helped to lead me down that road. I believed like many here expressed that humanity was truly bad, irredeemable, polluted, not born sinners but born into a world of endless sin. And I didn't want to be here. but I didn't go against myself because I was curious and I wanted to know what would happen next when I got out of the prison I was in. and then I saw that there was so much more and I started to see this big gigantic beautiful new zeitgeist in my head and it's an endless mural of the most beautiful place you have ever been and looks like nothing you have ever seen or imagined beyond anything that exists but a few places on earth and it's a plan and it's a puzzle and it's probably around 100 encyclopedias worth of accumulated knowledge from when I started studying dinosaurs at the library in the city 23 years ago, exploring nature wherever I was for the entirety of my life, until I started studying organic farming when I was 18 when the seed in my brain for a superior reality first sprouted. And when I was 21 I started out building this reality by myself with just 3 goats and it was laughed at by most at first but I grew or foraged all my own food except every week I bought half a pound of grass fed butter, a small bag of potatoes a small bag of onions and some garlic. Six years later and me and my girls really started rollin with it and we were really started to be making a lot of food and the dream was truly taking form in a big way. But it's really fuckin lonely when you feel like your the only one. When the people in your life appreciate you but they don't see the scars, they don't appreciate what is underneath, they do not even dare to ponder the things that truly matter! They direct their interests in trivia, politics, vice and obscure pseudo talk therapy and giving the bulk of their energy away to their employers. They couldn't see the good works I wrought, they were blind to it or perhaps they wanted to believe, but could not because they cannot peer out into the dark, for it is fearful to peer out into the darkness. They could not see the light for the darkness has clouded their eyes and their brains. Like it was etched in my mind that there would be others... Where are you guys...

[Projectile Vomit]

A couple articles to reinforce the statements I'd made earlier:

What nobody told me about small farming: I can't make a living. By Jaclyn Moyer

Don't let your children grow up to be farmers. By Bren Smith

In response to one of Geoff's earlier comments, it's true that most writers don't make much money off their books. Books often serve as advertising that attracts participants to their workshops or classes, or attracts event organizers to tap them as speakers. These can be quite profitable. We brought Michael Pollan to my university a couple years back for a 2 hour talk and to meet with students during their classes for a couple days, and he charged something in the range of $20,000-$30,000 for the event. That's not bad. String a few of those together over the course of a year and you've got a nice living. Another friend of mine, Chris Martenson of PeakProsperity.com, charges $10,000 as his base price for giving a talk at an event. That's not too bad either.

And regarding permaculture, while I think the principles of permaculture are, in theory, quite useful, in practice permaculture is largely a fraud. All of the permaculture farms I've visited are nothing more than glorified organic farms, and they rely on huge amounts of free (aka exploited) labor in the form of interns to keep them viable. All of the permaculture farms I've visited require huge labor inputs to deliver low food output, and would never survive if they had to generate revenue by selling their product on a per-pound basis without getting free labor from interns and selling Permaculture Design Certificates to subsidize their agricultural operation.

[TylerDurden]

So, it is impossible for permaculture farms to produce high yields per acre? Well, I am not that bothered re creating a small farm. My idea was mainly to eventually cancel out almost all my annual food-costs, with the animals largely more or less feeding each other,  and then (perhaps or perhaps not) gradually build up until I could sell a few very high quality,  animal and plant foods(mostly animal) to just a  couple of nearby restaurants. These would likely taste far better than even the grassfed meat variety.There is a wonderful restaurant in the area near the Viennese Dechantlacke swimming-pond, where a farming family basically fill the restaurant-menus with their produce and they even had an excellent homemade beer(probably craft beer, not bacteria-rich real ale, but still raw). The way to go is for farms to bypass the supermarkets and directly sell to the consumers while still maintaining high quality produce.

 I admit I was already considering using websites like WWOOF to get hold  of 1 or 2 labourers for free so I could go on short holidays every so often, but I genuinely intended to teach them something useful without them paying for anything.      I suppose it is currently a waste of time trying to start up a microfarm in an extremely large  large 2nd floor flat without a garden unless I am planning on breeding rodents and the like for food....    Then again, guinea-pigs are a delicacy and national dish  in Peru....!

[eveheart]

I admit I was already considering using websites like WWOOF to get hold  of 1 or 2 labourers for free so I could go on short holidays...

I had a gardening "buddy" for that. She had a garden similar to mine. When one was away, the other kept up the watering and harvesting. We also exchanged cat-sitting chores for each other. We were the best of friends, even though the only thing we had in common was our passion for gardening.

[Projectile Vomit]

So, it is impossible for permaculture farms to produce high yields per acre?

I won't go so far as to say it's impossible, but I have yet to physically visit a permaculture farm that does it. Maybe there's one somewhere out there that can pull it off.

[cherimoya_kid]

I won't go so far as to say it's impossible, but I have yet to physically visit a permaculture farm that does it. Maybe there's one somewhere out there that can pull it off.

Maybe an aquaculture operation, that is exquisitely well-designed. A dirt farm? Doubt it.

[RogueFarmer]

Maybe an aquaculture operation, that is exquisitely well-designed. A dirt farm? Doubt it.

What do you mean by dirt farm? You mean a farm made of dirt? In nature there is no such thing as dirt. Dirt just means a substance which makes clothing dirty. Dirt farms don't exist.

[RogueFarmer]

I don't know exactly what to make of the majority of these permaculture farms. I am not aware of many who are "really doing it" but they are definitely out there.

Permaculture farms can vastly out yield conventional agriculture but will almost always require far more labor, though ever enterprise requires different amounts and some require very little, but on some farms just harvesting and processing is of course a gargantuan operation. To make a profit selling food at a premium price, perhaps as much as twice the amount of time or more would be spent marketing the goods instead of time spent in farm labor.

Most of the permaculture farms I have seen aren't even glorified organic farms, they are more like homesteads full of exotics and hardy perennials that is much lower cost and much more sustainable than a typical residential dwelling. It seems like most of them don't get much farther than that, but it is by definition, a permaculture farm, and I would argue that even the worst of them offer a better way of life than can be found in almost any other profession.

I think the problem of these farms is a cultural American problem. I think we are a very incredibly spoiled nation and one that vampirizes the poor, making it difficult for those who work long hard hours their whole lives to ever get ahead, to ever really make something of themselves. I see the farms and I see spoiled shallow people generally, they are doing not what is best or what will make them more money but what they want to do. They are like giant kids in giant sandboxes and they like to do what is fashionable for their family and their neighbors. If your neighbor buys an eight wheel tractor, you want one too. If your neighbor buys horses, you want horses too. Four wheelers. Lawns and lawnmowers. White picket fences. Bigger cows, bigger corn, more poisonous poison. Organic farmers fall into the exact same trapings.


You said 15-20k a year per person? Honestly anyone doing that good and can put that much money in their pocket at the end of the year is doing damn good.

We aren't here to make a lot of money, we are here for a purpose but we forgot what it was. Either way plenty of permaculture farms make a lot of money. Joel was claiming he makes around 1000 bucks an acre a few years ago and he was charging 2000 bucks to speak. Their farm is their cash cow. What he doesn't tell you I heard is that he also has a brother who has his own family who also all help and live on the farm, though I do not know that this is true. Joel claims they can grow beef cheaper than anyone else in Virginia. Why is this? Because Polyface farm operates 5 different businesses on the same acreage their cows graze and they stock their cows more than quintuple the local average. http://www.polyfacefarms.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie8Hhe_PVIU

[cherimoya_kid]

Many VERY smart people have tried and failed. Most of us are older, more experienced, and every bit as smart as you. Prove me wrong if you can by beating the odds.

[Projectile Vomit]

Permaculture farms can vastly out yield conventional agriculture but will almost always require far more labor...

Even setting their need for labor aside, I'm not sure I buy your initial point. I have yet to visit a permaculture farm that can even approach the pound-of-food-per-acre yield that conventional agriculture delivers. Every permaculture farm I've ever visited has proven to be a very low yield system that also requires very high labor inputs, much higher than conventional agricultural systems. If you know of a permie farm that bucks this trend, I'd love it if you'd share their name or a link to their site.