Greendustrial

Start a 1-Acre, Self-Sufficient Homestead

Expert advice on how to establish self-sufficient food production, including guidance on crop rotations, raising livestock and grazing management.

By John Seymour

1) Don’t wait until you’ve acquired your little patch of heaven to start. Finding land is expensive and time consuming. Start where you are, even if it’s just herbs in the window sill or a patio garden. Grow where you’re planted. 🌿

2) Living in the country is cool. Driving 45 minutes to get anywhere is not. Don’t limit your search to rural areas. Empty and abandoned land in urban areas can be a good deal AND you won’t bleed out before the ambulance reaches you. A less dramatic example: forgetting the butter doesn’t mean an hour + round trip.

3) About butter…yeah, you’ll be buying it. It’s incredibly cost prohibitive to to raise large livestock on a small scale. Maybe goats? No matter what size, remember animals are a 24/7/365 responsibility.

4) You would be a god among insects if you grew a 1/10 acre of wheat, harvested it, milled it and baked your own bread. Next level for sure. Just consider: 5 lbs of organic red winter wheat for planting costs $11.75. A FIFTY pound bag of unbleached flour is $18.25. Consider trade offs for time and growing space for every thing you plant.

5) Self-sufficiency isn’t about isolation. You can’t do it alone, no matter how cute the diagrams look. Sharing knowledge and harvests increases your knowledge and builds community. Isn’t the whole point to make something better?

um guys?

Deep Winter Greenhouse Paradox Farm, University of Minnesota

Knitting bedrolls from ‘plarn’ for the homeless

Just imagine a world full of beautiful stained glass windows which also generate electricity…

Sorry for the doom and gloom today, but these have literally been the articles that I’ve come across today  =[

A quote from the New York Times article, ‘What You Can Do About Climate Change’, which highlights keys to reducing our personal carbon footprints. Recent research has revealed that meat (especially beef) and dairy have a larger global footprint than all of the cars, trucks, trains, planes and boats in the world. Meat and dairy count for 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

(Graphic: CNN)

Related:

‘Eating less meat is essential to curb climate change’ (The Guardian)

‘Why beef is the new SUV’ (CNN)

‘The carnivore’s dilemma: meat a bad diet choice for the planet’ (Business in Vancouver)

‘The climate change issue global leaders aren’t talking about’ (National Journal) 

With the New Year marking the official start to implementation of the sustainable development goals (SDGs), we must commit to decisive steps to transform the lives of girls, who are so often left behind, says child rights organisation Plan International.

The world’s governments have committed to use the next 15 years to make sweeping development gains to end hunger, achieve gender equality, ensure sustainable use of the planet’s resources and end preventable deaths.

But girls continue to be among the most excluded and discriminated against. Special efforts are needed to ensure they realise their rights within the SDG framework and the world fulfils its promise to ‘leave no one behind.’

“Despite the progress made in recent decades, girls’ rights remains an unfinished business. Never before has there been so promising a moment to push for global change for girls. Nations have 15 years to transform millions of girls’ lives, and the work must start now,” said Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of Plan International.

Education is a key human right. But at least 1 in 5 adolescent girls around the world is denied her right to an education by the daily realities of poverty, conflict and discrimination. Every day, girls are taken out of school and forced into work or marriage where they risk isolation and abuse.

This shows the evolution of the UNFCCC’s Nairobi Work Programme (NWP), of which I am a focal point for my company. The program is a technical and climate adaptation communication arm of the UNFCCC. Sidebar: The UNFCCC is the coordinating board for the COPs, most recently the COP21 in Paris. The Kyoto Protocol was developed under the UNFCCC.

Exciting news!

Plastic microbeads used in soaps, body washes and other personal-care products will be phased out starting in 2017 under legislation approved by Congress and sent to the president.

August 1st 2015

The children are learning a propagation technique called cloning. Instead of growing from seeds, the practice of cultivation they are most familiar with, we thought it was an appropriate time to demonstrate a shortcut. We have several rosemary bushes on our property but one is larger, more aromatic, and more flavorful than all the rest. We explained to the children that the primary reason for this is because this particular Rosemary bush has superior genetics and “cloning” is a method of gathering and multiplying this bush into many others without the need for seeds. Because the natural rooting hormone is stronger in the lower branches we started by cutting them and placing them into a cup of water. Then we shave a bit of the bark off the ends, dip into a rooting hormone, and place the cuttings into the moist media. Once covered and placed under the light if only took a week to see the roots growing. Once we have roots on all the cuttings we now have clones… Genetically identical plants as the bush the clones were cut from. Now the children understand that successful growing is a byproduct of the propagation of superior genetics.

We hope this post finds you well.

Respectfully,

Unconsumption will be taking a few days off thanks to the long Thanksgiving weekend (in the U.S.), so we’ll give thanks right now to all you readers! And if you find yourself with a little free time, here’s a very cool weekend read:

If you’ve tried to open any iDevice—iPad, iPhone, iMac, any of them—within the last four years, you’ve come face-to-face with Apple’s very small, five-pointed Do Not Enter sign. It’s an overt declaration that your phone, or your computer, or your tablet is not really yours to tamper with, a public statement that you are not qualified to fix your own things.

If you’re reading this on your iPhone or have one nearby, look at either side of the charging port and you’ll seem them: two tiny, star-shaped screw heads that, outside of an obscure wheelchair manufacturer, do not otherwise exist in the wild.

There is a solution to this “pentalobe” screw, however. A screwdriver engineered by iFixit, a California startup that has been simultaneously antagonizing Apple and making sure that, as electronics get more and more complicated, the layperson will still be able to learn how to fix them. (Other companies have since begun offering pentalobe screwdrivers.)

I spent a few days with iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens and professional repair experts at the Electronics Reuse Conference in New Orleans earlier this month to learn more about how your right to open, tinker with, and repair devices that you own is under attack from the very companies that make them.

The rest is here: How to Fix Everything | Motherboard