Hi Leon, I enjoyed your honest and intimate sharing. Sorry to hear about the animals. We also have our fair share of deaths and now we either eat or cook the dead animals for the other animals (dogs, cat, chickens, ducks). Our neighbour passes us her dead chickens and the animals gobble them up after we cook it. We had a water buffalo die on us and that was the toughest. Often the most mistakes and deaths happen when we first introduce the animal to our place. But we are fortunate that some of the animals were successful and numbers have multiplied and yielded us lots (goats, ducks, chickens). I guess it is also about differentiating between whether the death is due to an error that can be fixed, or is the animal just fundamentally not suited for the conditons (climate, vegetation, feed, etc) at the farm.
I totally get what you mean about being possessed when you are handling a machine. I was going to write something on that. I refuse to get a chain saw so i have been using a good pruning saw (try Bahco) and an axe. Might get a 2 person saw in future (like David).
There is so much i resonate with and want to comment on but the essay is very long! Maybe next time you can split them up into separate posts under the topics you have listed because they are all interesting by themselves.
Two person saws are so much fun! Can't wait for the timber trees to grow larger so we can use it more often!
And once the system is down for good, I suspect there will be plenty of people in the village who'd want to borrow it. Chainsaws and other motorized tools become useless artifacts of past ages very easily when material conditions change on a global scale. Even if you'd manage to produce bioethanol on a small scale, you'd still need industrial lubricants, which are all hydrocarbons.
The part about brushcutters/chainsaws really resonated with me as well - the kind of craze people fall into is something I've often witnessed and remarked upon, and it's one of the main reasons why I try my best to avoid using them. So far it has worked - in my entire life (which includes 10 years of subsistence farming) I've never used a chainsaw or a brushcutter/weed whacker.
But I still have to figure out the best low tech way to mill lumber, which is a shit ton of work without machines.
Thanks Thomas! I’d like to hear more about your success with the goats! Yeah sorry about the length, I already edited it down so much and eventually get I just had to get it out.
When you cook the already dead animals like the chickens I’m imaging plucking/skinning is much harder after rigor mortis has set in?? This has always put me off, I did butcher one of the sheep because I’d spotted it just as it had died, but imagine doing it hours later would be much more difficult?
So sorry to hear about the water buffalo, that’s a huge loss and must have been so sad
The content is great though. I just thought splitting them into a few posts would make commenting easier. There so much i want to ask or say. :)
We started with 10 plus goats 3 years ago and have 36 now. We have sold many and have more than covered the capital cost. But their success is also because we are beside the electric towers and they eat there. The goats go there around noon and return by themselves in the evenings. I dont feed them so cost is minimal. Over here, i have not seen examples of sheep herds that thrive on solely forage. But i have seen it for many goat herds with the small local goat breed. Not sure what it is like over there.
For the dead animals, we only skin or de-feather when we eat them, so they must have been just dead and not in rigor mortis. If we are cooking to feed the animals, we dont skin or de feather. Just throw them in the pot and boil. Dead goat kids, goat skin, goat heads, dead chicken, dead fish. Even if slightly rotting it will be all gone, eaten by chickens, ducks, and dogs.
With so many coconuts and the low prices, have you fed them to the chickens? If you dont want to grate them, the chickens will peck them clean.
Hi Thomas, you make goats sound easy! Haha. I keep getting told that they’re so finicky, they die if they nibble on some rusty wire, that they’re either healthy or dead - no in between. So maybe it’s time to once again ignore all advice I keep getting given and just give it a try. I imagine they won’t cause any more damage than Sunflower and Edna currently do, and hopefully naturally they’ll want to flock with them and get shown their shelter and good feed spots. Our neighbor currently has a flock of goats and before that they had sheep, all grazing on a big lot though, 11Ha. But a lot also keep their animals in shelters permanently and the humans bring their food, which to me, is pretty funny, talk about creating a lot of work for yourself.
Thanks for the info about the dead animals! Ok makes sense and much easier than the work I was imagining.
Yes on the feeding coconuts to chickens, you just have to open them and they will clean it up really well. I do do this occasionally but I should be doing it much more often. They also get all our excess bananas and food scraps.
I’ll PM you on your farm FB page, I’ll see if I can find it again, I use an alias so just check your spam for message from H.F.
Amazing work- I loved reading every bit of this. I can relate to feeling flattened even so long after that epic La Niña flooding cycle recently. All I focused on was keeping my goats alive for about six months there. Hope you continue writing whenever you feel inspired (and not to churn out "content" on a schedule to feed the algorithm).
Thank you Elizabeth, our cow only realized she liked mulberries after I pruned them and she kept nibbling off all the fresh shoots. I had to fence them off, I thought she’d eventually kill them! Definitely need some sacrificial ones just for her, the rest for us...
Taking on a ton of animals--I've been there. And honeybees from foreign parts of the world are one heartache after another. When one of our goats died, my husband said, "Well, at least you didn't kill thousands of lives like I did with the honeybees." We tried to raise everything "naturally" but sometimes medicine is a good thing. Farming is a constant set of new questions and compromises. It's too bad most of us don't have a great grandfather with tons of old wisdom standing at our shoulders. And it's not like there's always so much cash lying around for tons of vet bills. You pretty much are on your own. HUGE learning curve for sure. Hoping you savor the random moments of bliss that at least make it seem sort of worthwhile. LOL.
What a lovely update – very heartfelt, and so honest! Your thoughts and experiences definitely resonated (and I laughed out loud several times)!
This year, we also feel like we are finally starting to find our own rhythm, and have plenty of time for other things to do. There seems to be something about that five-year mark, right? Still a shit ton of work, but less stress somehow. I definitely get where you’re coming from here.
Sorry to hear about your animals, but, believe it or not, it has been similar here. Our chicken flock didn’t grow this year, it got a bit smaller. We lost quite a few mature chickens, and, in total, we have only four (!) surviving chicks. The constant humidity and clouds of mosquitoes made life difficult for everyone I guess. I actually think that if next year will be drier, it will be a better and easier year for our chickens.
Really sorry to hear about your bees, too. Our wild bees have all migrated over the rainy season, and will hopefully come back in the next few months.
Another thing we can identify with very well is the constant threat of getting raided by the feral cow & sheep gang – but with us it’s the chickens. Our chicken fence is in desperate need of some repairs, and the chickens find (or make) a new hole every few days, faster than we can fix them. Or they just climb the trees and fly out. One constant job is to move mulch back around the base of our banana clumps, because the chicken spread it all out again. It’s definitely getting a lot harder to keep them away from the vegetable beds once they know how many insects are under the mulch and how much watercress grows everywhere. (We will have to build little bamboo fences again to avert the worst damage, and so far we have a few small plastic water bottles – less than half full – that we throw into their direction when they come too close to the house. We call it the chicken artillery.)
We won’t allow complete free-range for the same reasons – they’d love to stay around (and in) the house if nobody scares them off.
“Sometimes I think if we’d had a much smaller property then maybe we would be going great guns with everything and succeeding in some measurable way” – I definitely think the same thing – but in the other direction: If we just had a larger property, things would be so much easier! Classic case of the grass being greener elsewhere, it seems?
And I think I went through something similar: the same enthusiasm you had for trying different animals (with rather limited overall success) was for me trying different exotic fruit trees from all corners of the world (also, with rather limited success). Worth a try though, both of our approaches. If we throw a bunch of species at a wall (figuratively!), at least some of them will stick, and we emerge quite a bit smarter than before.
But shit, dude, 2 tons of fucking coconuts and only 60 bucks? Ship them to us, we’ll pay you double that!
“It’s difficult to make money from taking care of the land and its wildlife. It’s hard to make a profit in working on a small scale, doing things yourself and taking your time.” – THIS!!!! So fucking difficult, especially in the first decade.
“We may continue to muddle along, making do. That’s ok. Mediocrity is my middle name, I’m ok with that. The goal is a simple, happy life more connected to the land.” – Amen, brother.
I definitely feel with you in terms of insect population collapse. Really damn scary – same for the pumpkins. Do you hand-pollinate the flowers?
(But don’t worry about that abiu, they usually always give tons of flowers but very little fruit in the first few years of flowering. Rest assured that in a few short years you will harvest more than you can eat. Eaten in large quantities, by the way, abiu will stain your teeth dark brown, but you can scrape it off with a bamboo stick.)
Living through biodiversity collapse is heart-shattering. And seeing that none of the neighbors care (and often even exacerbate the situation) doesn’t exactly make things better.
Oh, and thanks for the shoutout(s), by the way!
Amazing read, really. Very detailed, very real, very informative.
Thank you for laboring to tell some of the stories from your home place. So very different from the landscape where I think about parasites and deworming drugs, invasives and the possibility of becoming native in a displaced time. I'll have more to reflect once I've given your words a more thorough reading. For now, know that your stories have landed here, on the other side. Your words of praise have landed here as well. With care, Adam
What a great read!! It’s refreshing to read about gardening/farming in the tropics! I feel your pain with animals dying! We don’t lose many but in wet years, ticks and worms are such a problem that we have had to treat them to save the animal. I hate using chemicals but it’s not much fun having animals die either. I look forward reading more about your coffee and vanilla adventures. Two thing’s I don’t have growing …… yet.
Thank you! Yes I agree about treating the animal in order to save it too. We hesitated too long. For big investment animal like the cow I’d treat if she was looking poorly. And I should have done it with the sheep too… live and learn.
Good luck with the miso making, we’re really getting into it now…
Hi Leon, I enjoyed your honest and intimate sharing. Sorry to hear about the animals. We also have our fair share of deaths and now we either eat or cook the dead animals for the other animals (dogs, cat, chickens, ducks). Our neighbour passes us her dead chickens and the animals gobble them up after we cook it. We had a water buffalo die on us and that was the toughest. Often the most mistakes and deaths happen when we first introduce the animal to our place. But we are fortunate that some of the animals were successful and numbers have multiplied and yielded us lots (goats, ducks, chickens). I guess it is also about differentiating between whether the death is due to an error that can be fixed, or is the animal just fundamentally not suited for the conditons (climate, vegetation, feed, etc) at the farm.
I totally get what you mean about being possessed when you are handling a machine. I was going to write something on that. I refuse to get a chain saw so i have been using a good pruning saw (try Bahco) and an axe. Might get a 2 person saw in future (like David).
There is so much i resonate with and want to comment on but the essay is very long! Maybe next time you can split them up into separate posts under the topics you have listed because they are all interesting by themselves.
Two person saws are so much fun! Can't wait for the timber trees to grow larger so we can use it more often!
And once the system is down for good, I suspect there will be plenty of people in the village who'd want to borrow it. Chainsaws and other motorized tools become useless artifacts of past ages very easily when material conditions change on a global scale. Even if you'd manage to produce bioethanol on a small scale, you'd still need industrial lubricants, which are all hydrocarbons.
The part about brushcutters/chainsaws really resonated with me as well - the kind of craze people fall into is something I've often witnessed and remarked upon, and it's one of the main reasons why I try my best to avoid using them. So far it has worked - in my entire life (which includes 10 years of subsistence farming) I've never used a chainsaw or a brushcutter/weed whacker.
But I still have to figure out the best low tech way to mill lumber, which is a shit ton of work without machines.
Thanks Thomas! I’d like to hear more about your success with the goats! Yeah sorry about the length, I already edited it down so much and eventually get I just had to get it out.
When you cook the already dead animals like the chickens I’m imaging plucking/skinning is much harder after rigor mortis has set in?? This has always put me off, I did butcher one of the sheep because I’d spotted it just as it had died, but imagine doing it hours later would be much more difficult?
So sorry to hear about the water buffalo, that’s a huge loss and must have been so sad
The content is great though. I just thought splitting them into a few posts would make commenting easier. There so much i want to ask or say. :)
We started with 10 plus goats 3 years ago and have 36 now. We have sold many and have more than covered the capital cost. But their success is also because we are beside the electric towers and they eat there. The goats go there around noon and return by themselves in the evenings. I dont feed them so cost is minimal. Over here, i have not seen examples of sheep herds that thrive on solely forage. But i have seen it for many goat herds with the small local goat breed. Not sure what it is like over there.
For the dead animals, we only skin or de-feather when we eat them, so they must have been just dead and not in rigor mortis. If we are cooking to feed the animals, we dont skin or de feather. Just throw them in the pot and boil. Dead goat kids, goat skin, goat heads, dead chicken, dead fish. Even if slightly rotting it will be all gone, eaten by chickens, ducks, and dogs.
With so many coconuts and the low prices, have you fed them to the chickens? If you dont want to grate them, the chickens will peck them clean.
Hi Thomas, you make goats sound easy! Haha. I keep getting told that they’re so finicky, they die if they nibble on some rusty wire, that they’re either healthy or dead - no in between. So maybe it’s time to once again ignore all advice I keep getting given and just give it a try. I imagine they won’t cause any more damage than Sunflower and Edna currently do, and hopefully naturally they’ll want to flock with them and get shown their shelter and good feed spots. Our neighbor currently has a flock of goats and before that they had sheep, all grazing on a big lot though, 11Ha. But a lot also keep their animals in shelters permanently and the humans bring their food, which to me, is pretty funny, talk about creating a lot of work for yourself.
Thanks for the info about the dead animals! Ok makes sense and much easier than the work I was imagining.
Yes on the feeding coconuts to chickens, you just have to open them and they will clean it up really well. I do do this occasionally but I should be doing it much more often. They also get all our excess bananas and food scraps.
I’ll PM you on your farm FB page, I’ll see if I can find it again, I use an alias so just check your spam for message from H.F.
Amazing work- I loved reading every bit of this. I can relate to feeling flattened even so long after that epic La Niña flooding cycle recently. All I focused on was keeping my goats alive for about six months there. Hope you continue writing whenever you feel inspired (and not to churn out "content" on a schedule to feed the algorithm).
Thank you for your kind words Shane, your work over at https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com/ has been a massive influence and continues to be!
Wow Leon, thank you for your beautiful writing. I'm still reading.
I decided to let things just do their thing here.
Although a runaway bull was grazing here for awhile. I did ask it to leave the little mulberry tree alone.
The birds seem quieter here too, in Maine. The insects as well.
We are still here ❤️
Thank you Elizabeth, our cow only realized she liked mulberries after I pruned them and she kept nibbling off all the fresh shoots. I had to fence them off, I thought she’d eventually kill them! Definitely need some sacrificial ones just for her, the rest for us...
Best wishes to you !
Best wishes to you!
Taking on a ton of animals--I've been there. And honeybees from foreign parts of the world are one heartache after another. When one of our goats died, my husband said, "Well, at least you didn't kill thousands of lives like I did with the honeybees." We tried to raise everything "naturally" but sometimes medicine is a good thing. Farming is a constant set of new questions and compromises. It's too bad most of us don't have a great grandfather with tons of old wisdom standing at our shoulders. And it's not like there's always so much cash lying around for tons of vet bills. You pretty much are on your own. HUGE learning curve for sure. Hoping you savor the random moments of bliss that at least make it seem sort of worthwhile. LOL.
This is amazing. Thanks! 🙏
Thank you Ken!
There is so much here. Beautiful, hard and all the things in between.
I am glad there are fairies.
Thank you Kirsten! Your work and books have been a massive influence and I hope my daughters will one day also delve into their pages!
Thank you Leon for your kind words. I am so delighted that you have found inspiration in the pages of my work.
What a lovely update – very heartfelt, and so honest! Your thoughts and experiences definitely resonated (and I laughed out loud several times)!
This year, we also feel like we are finally starting to find our own rhythm, and have plenty of time for other things to do. There seems to be something about that five-year mark, right? Still a shit ton of work, but less stress somehow. I definitely get where you’re coming from here.
Sorry to hear about your animals, but, believe it or not, it has been similar here. Our chicken flock didn’t grow this year, it got a bit smaller. We lost quite a few mature chickens, and, in total, we have only four (!) surviving chicks. The constant humidity and clouds of mosquitoes made life difficult for everyone I guess. I actually think that if next year will be drier, it will be a better and easier year for our chickens.
Really sorry to hear about your bees, too. Our wild bees have all migrated over the rainy season, and will hopefully come back in the next few months.
Another thing we can identify with very well is the constant threat of getting raided by the feral cow & sheep gang – but with us it’s the chickens. Our chicken fence is in desperate need of some repairs, and the chickens find (or make) a new hole every few days, faster than we can fix them. Or they just climb the trees and fly out. One constant job is to move mulch back around the base of our banana clumps, because the chicken spread it all out again. It’s definitely getting a lot harder to keep them away from the vegetable beds once they know how many insects are under the mulch and how much watercress grows everywhere. (We will have to build little bamboo fences again to avert the worst damage, and so far we have a few small plastic water bottles – less than half full – that we throw into their direction when they come too close to the house. We call it the chicken artillery.)
We won’t allow complete free-range for the same reasons – they’d love to stay around (and in) the house if nobody scares them off.
“Sometimes I think if we’d had a much smaller property then maybe we would be going great guns with everything and succeeding in some measurable way” – I definitely think the same thing – but in the other direction: If we just had a larger property, things would be so much easier! Classic case of the grass being greener elsewhere, it seems?
And I think I went through something similar: the same enthusiasm you had for trying different animals (with rather limited overall success) was for me trying different exotic fruit trees from all corners of the world (also, with rather limited success). Worth a try though, both of our approaches. If we throw a bunch of species at a wall (figuratively!), at least some of them will stick, and we emerge quite a bit smarter than before.
But shit, dude, 2 tons of fucking coconuts and only 60 bucks? Ship them to us, we’ll pay you double that!
“It’s difficult to make money from taking care of the land and its wildlife. It’s hard to make a profit in working on a small scale, doing things yourself and taking your time.” – THIS!!!! So fucking difficult, especially in the first decade.
“We may continue to muddle along, making do. That’s ok. Mediocrity is my middle name, I’m ok with that. The goal is a simple, happy life more connected to the land.” – Amen, brother.
I definitely feel with you in terms of insect population collapse. Really damn scary – same for the pumpkins. Do you hand-pollinate the flowers?
(But don’t worry about that abiu, they usually always give tons of flowers but very little fruit in the first few years of flowering. Rest assured that in a few short years you will harvest more than you can eat. Eaten in large quantities, by the way, abiu will stain your teeth dark brown, but you can scrape it off with a bamboo stick.)
Living through biodiversity collapse is heart-shattering. And seeing that none of the neighbors care (and often even exacerbate the situation) doesn’t exactly make things better.
Oh, and thanks for the shoutout(s), by the way!
Amazing read, really. Very detailed, very real, very informative.
Thanks David, as always! Our friendship over the last few years has been a massive help on keeping my sanity.
Leon,
Thank you for laboring to tell some of the stories from your home place. So very different from the landscape where I think about parasites and deworming drugs, invasives and the possibility of becoming native in a displaced time. I'll have more to reflect once I've given your words a more thorough reading. For now, know that your stories have landed here, on the other side. Your words of praise have landed here as well. With care, Adam
Thank you Adam, your work there on the other side of this world has given me so much to think about.
What a great read!! It’s refreshing to read about gardening/farming in the tropics! I feel your pain with animals dying! We don’t lose many but in wet years, ticks and worms are such a problem that we have had to treat them to save the animal. I hate using chemicals but it’s not much fun having animals die either. I look forward reading more about your coffee and vanilla adventures. Two thing’s I don’t have growing …… yet.
Thank you! Yes I agree about treating the animal in order to save it too. We hesitated too long. For big investment animal like the cow I’d treat if she was looking poorly. And I should have done it with the sheep too… live and learn.
Good luck with the miso making, we’re really getting into it now…