I’ve been thinking about what we’re intending to do, farmishly, and I think that a lot of my drive has to do with eating. We spend a lot of effort (both in income-generating paid-work hours and in sourcing) to get good-quality food. Good food is important, because we make ourselves out of what we put in our mouths, and I don’t want to have a useless finger made out of cheezy-poofs. Or children made out of misery-bacon, which I suspect cannot avoid making them more prone to whining.
All joking aside, I think that the more energy and intention we put into our food, the healthier it will be. We’ve mastered the first step towards intentional eating, which is cooking good food for ourselves. The next step would be sourcing food grown by someone that puts a little bit more than the standard industrial practice into their food production, and we’re working on that. Third, growing for ourselves as much as is reasonable, which is where we are planning to go.
The fourth is something that is pulling at me a little, right now. I am planning to experiment with letting the plants decide where they grow, like Fukuoka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka) does. He spreads a mixture of food-plant seed in various different places, and lets plants come up in glorious profusion. I bet that adding plant intentionality will make for healthier food, because the intrinsic wisdom of the seed would know better than me where a plant would grow best. With animals, this would look like shifting pastures frequently, and planting things that the animals like so they can choose their own food. We’re going to sort out some basic systems, first, but I hope to be playing around in this arena soon.
It might be fantastic… or we might end up learning to eat scotch broom. Good thing we’re not planning to have a market garden. Vegetable anarchy!