Will Harper, late afternoon, Saturday July 21, 2040
Will and Allan turned away from Porcupine's "Industrial Row" and started walking west. They soon reached the corner of a fenced pasture field and continued along the south side.
In the field Will could see about fifteen Holstein cows, around the same number of what appeared to be milking sheep, and six big black draught horses, Percherons as near as he could tell. Several of the animals noticed them and seemed to be watching them as they walked along.
"Some nice looking stock you've got there," said Will. "Though somehow I would have expected more of it."
"Well, our beef herd is up the hill at Jack's old place, around 80 of them, including 25 cows and a bull," said Allan. "Plus about 140 head of sheep for milk, meat and wool, including the ones you see here, with all but the milkers based in a barn to the west of Jacks place. In our pork barn, over to the east of here there are 10 sows and about 80 pigs being raised for meat at any one time. In our poultry operation, in barn to the west of here, there are about 400 laying hens and 500 meat birds. And that keeps us all very well fed, with enough left over so we can invite people to feasts on a regular basis."
"At the peak of things Dad used to run about 80 head of cattle, and only ate maybe two a year," said Will, "and that was on just a hundred acres, with some pasture space rented in the summer. So you could have a lot more stock if you wanted, I'm thinking."
"We could, but granddad had that many cattle mainly to support his connection to the regular economy and to keep the bank paid off," said Allan. "We only have to produce enough to feed ourselves, and we grow lots of grain, beans, root crops and other veggies as well as the meat. The meat is important—there a very few vegans here. Plus, it turns out you can't do regenerative agriculture without running stock on the land. We're always trying to improve the soil, rather than mining it for profit."
"And the stock contributes to that," said Will. "Rather than detracting from it?"
"Sure does," answered Allan. "Most of it, except for the poultry, is grass fed. So we're not growing a lot of grain for stock feed. And remember all those composting toilets. All that humanure ends up back in the soil, as well."
Three young people and a border collie had just come out of the barn and were opening the gate on the north side of the barnyard. Allan called out, "Hey guys, mind if we join you?"
"Sure, come on over," one of them replied.
There was a style across the barnyard fence, just on the south side of the fence they'd been following. Allan stopped there. "We're going to cross the fence here, then go through that gate into the field with the stock. They are all quite tame, used to people, and if we don't bother them, they won't bother us. Just follow the dairy crew."
"OK," said Will, "This takes me back to when I was a kid on the farm."
Will followed Allan across the style and towards the gate, where the dairy crew had stopped to wait for them.
"Martha, Brad, Matt," said Allan, "this is my uncle Will. I've been showing him around the place."
"Hi guys," said Will and shook hands with all three of them.
"Sorry about your brother," said Martha. "He'll be missed here even more than you might imagine."
"I don't doubt it," said Will, and then, not wishing to dwell on it, changed the subject. "You're bringing the cows and sheep in for milking?"
"That's right," answered Martha. "Milking goes on regardless of special events. But we've had an early supper and we'll be done before the entertainment starts. You've been around stock before?"
"I grew up on a beef farm," said Will. "Though that was a few years ago."
"OK, we're going to go around behind them and drive them into the barn. Tilley here will keep them bunched up, " said Martha, gesturing at the dog. "So if you two just follow us everything should be fine."
They did just that and the animals and their keepers had disappeared into the barn in just a few minutes. The horses looked a little disappoint at the lack of attention, but soon went back to grazing.
Allan and Will closed the gate and turned toward the barn.
"Are they going to milk them by hand?" ask Will.
"No, we've got milking machines," answer Allan.
"Well that'll speed up the process and take fewer people," said Will.
"Sure does," said Allan, leading the way along the north side of the barn. "This is what many people would call a bank barn. The north side here has earth bermed up against as if it was built into a bank. The bank forms a ramp, known as a gangway, that allows access to the hayloft and granary."
"Yep, the farm I grew up on had one much like this," said Will. "although the berm there wasn't as wide as yours."
"This one didn't start out that wide—we extended it on both sides of the gangway," said Allan. "Makes an ideal location for a big root cellar, which you can see here on the east side, and on the other side is our cheese aging 'cave'. The building in the corner between the barn and the cheese cave is our dairy."
"Right. How much milk do those cows and ewes give?" asked Will.
"We get about 60 gallons a day of milk from this herd of cows and about 15 from the sheep. Enough to supply all our needs for dairy products."
"Tom was pretty keen on making cheese," said Will. "He got you started on dairying?"
"Yeah," said Allan, "But then there were some young folks who picked the project up and ran with it. You just saw some of them."
"Right," said Will. "I'm a little surprised you went with sheep instead of goats."
"Sheep's milk is the best for making cheese, and yields more cheese per litre than cows milk or goats milk," said Allan. "Dad just didn't like goats. Said they make great pets but aren't good for much else. They are hard to fence in, plus the males have an awful stink that gets into everything, including the milk, if you aren't careful. There are a few types of cheese we can't make without goats milk, but we get by just fine without them. Now many people wouldn't agree with this, but we've never had anyone join up who insisted on goats, so we don't have any."
They continued along the north side of the barn to where a fence headed north from the corner of the dairy building. and then went through the gate just north of that building. Will looked around and saw they were standing in a good spot to size up the layout of this part of the farm. A laneway with fences on both sides headed north from where they stood, and continued into the bush. On the east side of it was the pasture field they'd just left. On the west side were two fields, the first a five acre vegetable garden, and next about 10 acres of hay that appeared to have been harvested only a couple of weeks before.
To the west where two rows of structures with a lane between them. The one on the north consisted of several cylindrical steel grain bins, with a couple of sheds at the far end. To the south was the machine shed and to the west of it several long, single story sheds whose function wasn't immediately obvious to Will.
"OK, just what have we got here?" asked Will.
"Well, this laneway extends to the north, through the bush, up the hill and all the way to the yard at Jack's old place," replied Allan. "To the west of the lane is one of our vegetable gardens and a hayfield."
"That much I had guessed," said Will. "But what's in the bins and sheds?"
"The grain bins contain, not surprisingly, grain." said Allan. "The first two are for hard wheat, then one each of oats, barley, corn, flax seed and canola. There is also a granary upstairs in the barn, where we keep grains we grow in smaller quantities—soft wheat, rye, sorghum, quinoa, millet, sunflower seed and buckwheat. The shed at the far end of the row of bins is our potato storage, since we ran out of space in the root cellar. Beyond that there's our mushroom growing facility and then our compost piles."
"That's a pretty impressive list of different types of grain that you're growing," said Will. "I've heard of them all, but never actually seen many of them growing."
"There'll be an opportunity for that tomorrow, I guess" said Allan. "The reason for so many different grains is to hedge our bets when we run into poor weather and pests. We've never yet had a season where all these crops failed at once."
"What do you do about crop failures, though," asked Will. "You can't exactly order out for fast food."
"No, no one can these days," said Allan. "We have a couple of strategies beyond diversifying our crops and splitting them up among smaller fields around this thousand acres, rather than huge fields of monocultures.
"One is keeping a pretty large reserve. That's what those grain bins are for. There's enough there to get us through a couple of years, admittedly on short rations and without much variety. The other is still a work in progress, consisting of connections to other communes all over the province. If we have a major crop failure here, they send us food or we send them people, or maybe some of both."
"There are that many communes?"
"Not yet, but the number is growing." said Allan. "Like I said, it's a work in progress."
"Sounds like a good plan, though," said Will. "Anyway, I know the first building across from your grain storage is your machine shed," said Will. "But what about the next three?"
"The first one is our food processing facility," said Allan. "Dehuller for oats and barley, flour mills, oil press, sorghum press, sugar mill, honey processing, wine, beer and cider making, etc. And facilities for preserving food—drying, freezing and canning. The next building in that row is food storage and the one beyond it is miscellaneous storage. And after that are our green houses."
"OK, I can see your first pole barn, which I know contains your kitchen, and dining and meeting halls, and a second pole barn to the east of it, with some sort of structure connecting this end of them," said Will. "Is there anything more to the east?"
"Yes, that's where our dormitories are," said Allan. "And between the two pole barns is our bathhouse, laundry and grey water processing and storage."
"OK, you were talking about putting dorms in the second pole barn at one point," said Will. "I take it that's changed?"
"It has," said Allan. "For the first couple of years we had accommodation for 40 people in the south half of the second pole barn, and our woodworking shop in the north half. As we grew, we added more dormitories to the east of there, and eventually moved everyone out of the second pole barn into those dorms. That made room for our textile and paper processing facilities, which needed more space."
"OK, let's have a look at these dorms," said Will.
"No problem, and on the way you'll see our summer kitchen and how we've set up for outdoor dining tonight," said Allan.
Will followed Allan south into the wide lane between the machine shed and the pole barns. At the back of the first pole barn was the summer kitchen—a beehive of activity as the final preparations for supper were being made. A large, open sided canvas tent covered a big piece of the lane, and under it were long tables and chairs which had been moved out from the regular dining area in the hall. Most of the people who had been in the hall earlier were seated there, visiting with each other as they waited for supper.
As Will and Allan walked eastward people waved and called out to them. "I'm giving Will the two bit tour, we'll be back soon," Allan replied.
Once they got past the second pole barn, Will could see the three dormitories, and on the other side of the lane, two greenhouses and the mushroom shed. The dorms were two storey buildings which looked to be a bit over 30 feet wide and 80 feet long, the long dimension running east to west. A row of what appeared to be mulberry trees stood along the south side of each dorm and provided shade. A roofed over pathway ran along the east side of the dorm and then west to the pole barns.
"How many people do you fit in each of those?" asked Will.
"Around 60," said Allan. "Depending on how many singles versus doubles versus four bed bunkrooms for kids that there are. We've set things up so the inner partitions can be moved fairly easily to match the demand for different sizes of rooms."
"So that's over 180 people, plus however many are in the farmhouse," said Will.
"Twenty or so there," said Allan, "giving us room for somewhere over 200."
"You have that many people here?" asked Will.
"More like around 150 full time residents," said Allan, "plus a varying number on a temporary basis—on their way somewhere else, you know."
"Somewhere else?" said Will.
"Well, when we're hosting an event, like today," said Allan, "there are often people like you and Sue who stay overnight and go home the next day. Others come to take courses that we offer, for a week or two at a time. Plus we've already budded off two other communes nearby. In the time leading up to getting their dorms set up, things got pretty full here."
"I see," said Will. "That's some pretty impressive construction, anyway. Must have taken a lot in time and materials."
"Yep," said Allan. "They're the largest and most complex structures we've built. The one nearest the road was built first, in 2032 when you could still buy conventional building materials. A lot of them discounted by suppliers who were going out of business, fortunately for us. The other two were built almost entirely from our own materials."
"The first looks like stud framing, the second one looks like rammed earth," said Will. "And the nearest one is what... adobe brick?"
"You've got a pretty good eye, Uncle Will," said Allan. "Clay, sand and stone are not renewable, of course. But they do last for a long time. Straw for the adobe, and lumber for framing are renewable, but we can only produce so much at a time, so building these dorms stretched us close to the limit.
"What about roofing?" said Will. "Looks like steel on the south dorm, cedar shingles on the middle one and straw thatching on the north one."
"Right again," said Allan. "The steel is a premium material, guaranteed for 50 years. Of course the company that made it no longer exists to honour that guarantee, but it is some indication of the quality. The shingles and thatch are local materials and renewable as well as pretty long lasting"
"And how are they to heat?" asked Will. "You put in lots of insulation, I presume."
"Yep, R40 in the walls and R60 in the attics," answered Allan. "In the first one we used fibreglass batts, and the other two are insulated with straw—baled in small square bales, then taken apart into biscuits and arranged so the gaps didn't line up. We heat them with wood and it takes surprisingly little. I don't think we have time for a look inside right now, but later tonight..."
"Yeah, no problem, I can check it out at bedtime," said Will. "What about the greenhouses?"
The green houses were sunk a few feet in the ground and the back (north) walls were bermed up with soil. Obviously an attempt to reduce heating load in the winter.
"Acquiring the glass was the hard part there," said Allan. "For the first few years, most of the glass we could get went into windows for the dorms. Since then, any glass we can lay our hands on goes to the greenhouses. A matter of what we can salvage."
"Right," said Will. "But what do you use them for—they seem pretty empty at the moment."
"We grow a bunch of fresh veggies in the winter, and in the spring we start plants that need a longer season than we get here," said Allan. "Most of those are annuals, of course, but there are also some perennials that we grow in pots—move them outside in the spring and back inside in the fall. Things that we really, really want, but that need a warmer climate than we have here. We are still experimenting on what's practical."
"Such as?" asked Will.
"Tea, coffee, and other sources of caffeine, chocolate, carob, ginger, black pepper and other spices," answered Allan. "With this few greenhouse we can't grow anywhere near as much of those as we'd like, so they remain rare treats."
"That's better than anyone else around here is managing," said Will. "Imports from the tropics have completely dried up."
"Yeah, that's why we've put a lot of effort into this," said Allan. "And why we'll expand the greenhouses when we can."
"Anything more?" asked Will.
"Lots," said Allan, "But that's about it for right around here. There are five other farms in this 1000 acres that have buildings we are using for cattle, pigs, sheep and poultry. And some other buildings we are using for storage of salvaged materials and equipment. We've got some fish ponds back along the creek and aqua culture in one of the green houses. And we've got orchards, bamboo groves and coppiced willow, ash and alder that produces most of our firewood. Five more vegetable gardens and various field crops you might be interested to see. But not tonight—not that we can see without being late for supper. In fact, I think our timing is just about perfect for supper at this exact moment."
"Great," said Will. "Things are smelling good and my tummy is starting to rumble."
Coming soon, episode 15, supper and conversation.
Maintaining the lists of links that I've been putting at the end of these posts in getting cumbersome, so I have decided to just include a link to the Porcupine section of the Site Map, which features links to all the episodes I've published thus far.
