In Europe they still eat Leather Britches. The Swiss call them Durrebohnen. They also cook them with saltpork. I used to travel regularly to Europe and would always bring back several bags of them since this is a favorite meal of ours. Interestingly the last time I bought them in Switzerland I noticed that they were made in China!! No kidding. I guess the Swiss and other Europeans are now importing this labour intensive dried vegetable instead of making it themselves. Anyway, green beans are easy to dry in a hot attack and it is a wonderful way of preserving them. Threading them is also a fun job for kids and they look great hanging in rows while they dry. I assume your ancestors go back to Europe where this technique originated.

LEATHER BRITCHES!

That explains the title of one of my favorite old time fiddle tunes.

Fabulous sample versions here:

http://www.emusic.com/m3u/song/10586545/10551393.m3u

http://www.adrienneyoung.com/media/leather_britches.mp3

http://www.fiddlestar.com/SoundFiles/Le ... itches.mp3

Good day from Pheba from the farm:
My ancestry is Irish/English/Scots/French. I have traced back 8 generations hoping for Native American. My direct female ancestors sure look Native American. My 8th generation mother is very probably Chickasaw indian according to the census records, but since the McNairy county Tennessee courthouse burned down during the Civil War I will never know.

Grandmother always thought she was German. they changed the spelling of their Irish name. I am assuming that this was done so they could get a job. Do things ever really change?

Anyway, more from the farm:
My neighbors who wrap their big bales of hay in thick plastic are up to another oil depleting trick.
Missouri has experienced very bad drought this summer. Our area was hard hit. My neighbor farmers went to different farms and purchased corn crops for pennies on the dollar. They transferred the corn from great distances, sometimes half way across the state.

They ground the entire plant, then encased the plant in humongous plastic bags. What a waste of plastic (petroleum!)

The name on the side of the bags said "Roto-Press". So I typed in Roto-Press and silage on Google, and pulled up the web site that sells the system to produce this giant hefty bag silage.

Silage is fermented corn. Only, instead of fermenting just the kernels, you ferment the entire plant. Silage is a wonderful farm product, but traditionally has been fermented in a silo.

"Harvestore" is the name of the tall blue towers that you see on farms. Harvestores do a marvelous job of making silage.

If interested in some statistics on this system you can do the Google search like I did.

Gasoline jumped 20 cents a gallon here over the weekend, and another 10 cents a gallon this morning. $2.32 a gallon in the midwest.

More later

Phebagirl

Who sells harvestores down here pheba?

I’m thinking about leasing some acreage down the road to make silage and this sounds better than buying the equipment and plastic.

because of peak oil .. or knowing it about it
i moved back to the country to my parents farm to help out here ..
cause i know that we can sustain ourselves here

but yes peak oil is already being felt by farmers in UK at least
fertilizer
plastic sheets etc
diesel price
feed prices
have all gone up by significant amounts

we sell eggs here and soon will have to put the price of our eggs up because the cost of the feed has gone up that much. (cost push inflation for ya )

have also almost finished getting a 1950's fordson major tractor done up as it uses less fuel than our new ones

we also burn out plastic here (illega probably) but we cant do anythign else with it ! and we have such a huge amount of it .. from big bales etc

i know too that farming will be fucked frankly if oil is removed from the equation. Yes farming will still happen but the amount of food produced will drop significantly. There isn't the man power/knowledge/horses/tools anymore to do all this work manually let alone to produce enough food for everyone. I've actually done some 'old fashioned' farm work before .. stooking straw for thatching. That was back breaking and took days with a team of us to do only a few acres. And we still used a tractor to cut the actual crop lol. Today that field that tooks us days could be cut bailed and cleared in a few hours with heavy machinery. Thats the difference .. machinery of farms now is SO big. Some of these combines here use 100 gallons of diesel in a day. (thats not a typo)

edit thats not US gallons .. so its near 500 litres of fuel a day

Phebagirl:

I think you will find what you are looking for here:

http://www.thefarm.org/


They have been there a long time. They have known this was going to happen for a long time. They are not that far from you, now.

Phebagirl, sounds like you're from my old turf, had a small farm near Easly on the Missouri River south of Columbia for many years before migrating to Oregon.

We grew a few acres of produce but were ahead of the market and never made enough to make it worthwhile (late 70's and early 80's). Our big money maker believe it or not was raspberries. We had a couple of acres of Heritage raspberries that grew like weeds and produced 1000's of pounds of berries from August until late October. The nice thing about the Heritage is that we grew them in 4' wide rows, and in the winter just mowed them to the ground and threw another 6" of mulch on top, then in the Spring they'd grow back and produce berries on that new growth from August until hard freeze.

At least at that time raspberries were rare in Missouri and we got $3-$4 per pound for U-Pick, it was a great deal.

If you are in that area you might know or know of Rick Goodman who runs Rainbow Ridge, a CSA just west of Easly. He and a friend were there since the early 70's and have been gardening / farming to support themselves on that land since then. He's a great resource on organic farming with many years of experience in that area. He's active in the Columbia Farmer's Market, the break-away one.

I still miss my soil. There's a rare soil type along the river known as "wind-blown loess". After the last ice age the river bottom soil blew as dust and landed nearby. We had 20' of what was in effect topsoil on our place above the bluffs. The only rocks we ever found were knapped flint. The soil at the place here in Oregon is about 20 percent rock, but grows stuff well when you beat the rain-induced nutrient depletion.

BTW, as my old soils professor used to say, "dirt is what you wash out of your clothes, soil is what you grow plants in."

Pheba, just read several of your posts and will see if I can remember all the things that came to mind.

I've a small sheep farm in Virginia, though we did run cattle for a while as well. I've been reading Small Farmers Journal for about the past 5 years, and it is an excellent sustainable farming resource, focusing on the new push in draft horse farming. There are a lot of draft horse equipment manufacturers out there now, from sicklebar mowers, rakes, plows, harrows, manure spreaders, harvesters, and just about anything you can think of that can be drawn by horse. However, balers and the like are primarily augmented by gas engines, so you see a lot of people put up loose hay.

For fertilizer, have you considered collecting cow manure, composting it, and spreading it? Liquid gold for us in our garden.

Your mulching is right on track, I agree with all that you've stated about it.

I have fescue here too, and it hasn't bothered the sheep much, though I put them on orchard/clover hay about 3 weeks before they lamb and for about 3 weeks after. Horses are hit the hardest it seems when foaling on fescue, which can cause abortions and loss of milk production. You are right, it is extremely hard to get rid of. I've seen studies you seemed to refer to that show that endophyte slows weight gain in cattle, as their temperatures are higher in the summer when on fescue and they seek shade more often.

And yes, we barely turn a profit 1/4 of the time

Good day from Pheba From the Farm:
I have not posted much. I have been rather ill. I have lupus and when it flares I just kind of lay low for a while.
The farm is quiet right now. Haying season is finished.
We usually use an old manure spreader and spread our cow manure. This year we put it in 3 huge piles and are composting it for the next year for our biointensive gardening that we are planning.
We had 3 calves born this past week. No complications.
Our bull is sick. He hurt his foot. He is on aureomyacin pellets in corn because his head is so huge that he will not fit in the cattle chute head holder
Since we can't confine him to give him a shot we have to sneak the medicine into him.
The only time we use an antibiotic is if an animal is sick.
Our bull weighs about 1800 pounds.
He is very gentle.
His weight has really dropped and he looks real bad.
We pulled him away from the cows, and confined him by himself in a quiet field. He needs to rest and regain his strength. Being a bull with cows is very stressful to the bull. Wears them down.
His name is Plato.
I do volunteer work at our local food bank.
The food bank has a allotment to give an individual 50.00 to help with rent/medication/etc.
We had a guy come in the other day with a 1400.00 debt on his rent. He was facing eviction.
He also begged for a little gas money. He said he was running on fumes.
This was not an alcoholic loser. This was a nice clean cut guy.
He showed no signs of any kind of addiction or problem.
He just got laid off from his job.
How can he go hunt for a job without fuel for his car?
My feeling from all that I see; it has started. We are in it.
After the worst drought we have had since 1980, a lot of rain. Hooray.
Rain always makes the lupus flare, but it is worth it.
The heat was horrible.
Garden was a total failure.
Our local small town gas station makes their profit on beer and snacks.
Since gasl prices hit 2.50 a gallon the beer sales have dropped from 135 cases per week to 30 cases per week. (gas 2.59 now)
People just don't have the money left for beer after buying gasoline.
gas station owner said that he was going to have to go out of business and sell the place if gas went any higher.
Also, Wal-mart is reporting a drop in sales of non essential items.
People just don't have the money for non essentials and gasoline.
What happens when it goes a bit higher and people don'thave the money for essentials and gasoline.
Just my take on what I see happening here in the midwest of US.
We are headed for such a mess.
Pheba from the farm

Good day from Eerie from the Farm.
No, not Pheba, eerie, because that 's how I feel. This is all just so weird.
Okay, here's what's happening here.
Gasoline is about 2.69 to 2.79 per gallon.
Diesel remains at 2.59.
The small gas station in my tiny town is changing owners. There are four families involved in the shop.
One family that runs it, a nice farm couple, are bailing out. They have had enough.
Beer was their mainstay. The gasoline only makes them 2-3 cents a gallon.
Beer sales have dropped from 300 cases a month to less than 30!
People in this area just do not have a lot of discretionary spending, and the beer had to go to pay for the gasoline.
The small town near me, (population, 12 thousand) that fell apart when the factories went overseas is down right strange.
The traffic has dropped way down, and the town now has 2 new taxi-cab services.
Shops are folding up on the square downtown and the place is beginning to look very weird. Kind of like a scene from a zombie movie.
We have neighbors about 8 miles away that farm about 12 thousand acres. They are large commercial farmers.
On the west side of the road they have a gigantic irrigation lake. On the east side they have field after field of corn/soybeans/sunflowers, that utilize a gigantic irrigation spraying system.
The crops were a total failure this year.
The irrigation system was never used. My husband suspects that the irrigation system was not used because the fuel was so expensive that it was more than the profit would have been on the crops.
The farmers will receive money from the government for the crop failures. Also, most farmers have crop insurance, so they have to weigh what makes them more money, paying for fuel to irrigate the crops, or taking a total loss, and collecting insurance and federal subsidies.
The cost in fuel to pump that much water out of the grand is gigantic.
My husband says that they use diesel or electric to run the pumps.
It just keeps getting weirder.
The irrigation sprayers were idle all summer long, and we had a terrible drought this summer.
Missouri has been declared a disaster state so I guess it was more profitable to let the corn and beans just burn up.
What a waste!
There is a huge interstate highway that I pass on my way to town.
The highway intersects with another highway that goes toward recreation lakes in both directions.
The rise in oil prices have not affected the people with boats.
Boat sales reached an all time high this year, and the boat traffic on the highway on Friday and Sunday is crazy.
It just keeps getting weirder.
People in the small town are not driving at all because they are the poorest of the poor.
The rich, who can afford the boats just keep on going like the party will never end.
Potato crop was a total ruin. They burned up from the heat, and what few there were, just rotted in the ground.
We are hoping the sweet potatoes are in better shape.
Tomatoes were a total loss. They just burned up.
That's what's going on here in Missouri on the Farm.
Just keeps getting weirder.
Oh, and there is a small town auction close by.
I usually stop by to check things out.
Sales are down on all items except for furniture.
And, the furniture items are mostly "seconds" , or factory rejects from China.
Pheba

Thanks for your stories Phebagirl. I am guessing that small-town gas stations like the one you mentioned will have to start making 10 cents per gallon profit if they are to stay in business.

Also, I'm not surprised by all the continued boating. People who use the oil just for fun aren't aware of the real problem. I am convinced that when everyone 'wakes up' it will be too late, way too late.

I ranch in Northern Alberta. The growing season is getting shorter here and we have to keep an additional ton of hay per animal each year now until the grass is well started for the year. It now costs about $500.00 bucks a day for diesel for the real big tractors. The input costs for the big guys is horrendous. The only real growth in farming has been the number of farm auctions in the papers. Used to be some in the spring now they are several pages of the paper and last all year long. The world is in for not only a oil shock but also a food shock. The food shock will happen faster than the oil shock. No farmers no food. No oil no food. Before machinery took over farm families were huge. Not anymore. As the old guys leave the land the knowledge of farming is leaving with them. All accross the western plains Manitoba, Sask. Alberta used to stand thousands of grain elevators in small towns and villages by the thousands. They are all gone, we have no reserve of wheat and grains anymore. Western grain farming is always one crop away from a famine now. I read somewhere recently that China has been eating eats strategic grain reserves for the last 6 years, they are farming every inch of land, and raising so much dust that a permanent cloud of dust hangs over Asia. They are also drilling thousands of feet down to get water as their aquafiers are depleted. A lot of land here is coming out of production because you cannot make a living farming. No one will pay for food what it costs to produce it anymore. All input costs have risen thousands of times and the farmer is still getting 1930 prices for wheat. Can't go on too long like that.

Same here!

thanks for the links! I am very sorry that I will not have the money to go to the OK state fair fiddling championships, as they are going to add the mandolin and 'flat pickin banjo' this year!

Phebagirl,

I have also enjoyed very much reading your posts. You send us signals from rural America that reveal as much as many of the political or technical posts one can read on this site. You started this thread regarding your frustration at trying to get it across to your neighbors the reality of the upcoming energy crisis. Most frustrating as you mentioned was not the ignorance but the denial of people who actually had a sense of the truth but stayed stubbornly rooted in denial.

I am curious if after the latest increase in gas prices and Katrina if this denial has softened somewhat. My brother who lives in rural South Carolina has mentioned to me that many of his neighbors from the more conservative pro business pro Bush camp have dropped their former cockiness and are somewhat quieter and more defensive recently, even beginning to acknowledge that we are somehow on the wrong course.

Do you see any shift happening? Just curious