Dry Creek Chronicles

Laundry gets done around here on Mondays and Thursdays. Just before lunch on Thursday Maggie called me into the laundry room and showed me that water was leaking onto the floor from the washer. I did what I often do these days under such circumstances: I called Chris and asked him to take a look at it. With the help of the internet, he did just that. It didn’t take us long to find instructions on how to remove the washer cabinet (far from obvious) so he could take a look inside.

As I looked for that information, I found other pages that claimed that when our particular model leaked water, it was inevitably due to a failed water pump. That sounded ominous, but when Chris removed the pump it turned out to be a relatively simple-looking plastic mechanism (the motor that drives the pump is separate). We called around and found an appliance dealer that had the pump in stock. I gathered up a couple of other errands and drove into town; fifty dollars later I was on my way home with a new pump, and a few minutes after arriving Chris had installed it and Thursday laundry had resumed.

This story is barely worth relating, except for one small piece I left out, namely that when I saw water on the floor I had that old sinking feeling that I needed to call a repairman. It took a minute to shake that off and realize that we were in do-it-yourself mode these days, for a number of good reasons. One of those reasons I was reminded of as I left the appliance dealer and walked past a row of new washers—labeled $800, $900, $1000, and up. In days gone by I would have just resigned myself to one more operating expense, to working a little longer in order to earn the money to pay someone to do some work for me, or even longer still in order to replace the broken machine. Instead, I have the satisfaction of knowing that our perfectly serviceable washer will continue to do its job for us, all because we were willing to spend a little time figuring out what had gone wrong and what we could do to fix it.

Chris often gets calls like that one these days, not because he is a mechanical genius but because he is at that level of skill and experience where it is reasonable to give him the job of figuring out what has gone wrong with something we own. A couple of weeks ago it was our Odyssey minivan, the one vehicle we depend on around here. It suddenly started making a horrible engine noise, at which point I of course had that old sinking feeling that I needed to take it in for repairs. But instead I gave Chris the go-ahead, a bit nervously, to poke around and see if he could find the source of the problem.

After an hour, he came to report that the manifold had developed a crack. Since a manifold is basically a large, carefully shaped piece of cast iron that is bolted onto a part of the engine, I asked him if he thought he could replace it. He said he would try, and so we went online and ordered one ($120). It arrived a few days later, and after a couple of hours of working and improvising he had to admit defeat—removing a couple of the bolts were simply beyond the capacity of the tools and devices he had available. So I arranged to take the part in to town and have the Honda dealer install it ($65).

Which they did, but after a couple of hours driving it began to make the same noise again, gradually louder. Chris took a look and found that the bolts had come loose. He tightened them, but that only yielded another hour of driving before the loud noise returned. He did it a couple more times, each time with less effect. Finally I took it back to the dealer, who spent some time looking at it (at no charge) before deciding that the brass nuts that had come with the part were causing the problem; once they replaced them with standard nuts ($2.41) everything stayed tight. So our van, at ten years old and 230,000 miles, continues to do the job we need it to do for us.

Twice I’ve written that doing it yourself is an important part of simplifying one’s life, once in 2005 and again in 2007. But those were more conclusions reached than experiences lived. We’re living the experiences now, and though I’m glad that they more or less confirm the conclusions I’m also intrigued that they also point up how deeply (and subtly) we were entrenched in an urban mindset.

For example, since college I’ve been a foodie of the Roadfood sort, in diligent search of excellence in homestyle and regional cooking; eating a dinner at, say, Ridgewood Barbecue was a true pleasure and a highlight of the season. And I can still appreciate it for the excellent meal that it is—but when Chris and I ate there a month or so ago I found that my pleasure was tempered by thoughts of how expensive the meal was, and how it wasn’t all that much better than the food we eat at home regularly, and how I left the table stuffed rather than with the satisfaction that homegrown, home-prepared food brings.

Debbie and Maggie are responsible for the dramatic improvement in our eating, due in no small part to their willingness to substitute time and effort to prepare food for us that is far superior to what we used to spend cash money on. Maggie often delights us by taking an interest in perfecting a homemade version of something we used to enjoy in its store-bought incarnation. After long learning and experimentation, her made-from-scratch breads (including even things like hamburger buns) have spoiled us completely for eating even high-quality commercial versions; rarely do we crave a white flour fix, and if we ever give in to such a craving it always disappoints. Lately Maggie has determined to make the perfect diner-style lemon meringue pie, the meringue piled high with toasty brown peaks and no weeping; after a few tries she’s very close, and now I can’t imagine spending money on the slice a restaurant might serve me.

Whether it be washer repair or car repair or feeding a family, our efforts to do it ourselves have not only met a true superficial need, i.e. the need to conserve cash, but have led to a deeper involvement with the details of everyday life. The workings of our washer and our car, the effects of food on our bodies and the pleasures we derive from it, are no longer the mysteries they once were. As we are forced to develop a deeper knowledge of how our lives work, we end up with a much greater degree of control, an ability to choose more intelligently, and a satisfaction in knowing we have chosen well.

For someone who claims to have no interest in politics, I know far too much about what is going on in this year’s presidential election. Some of it I can blame on the stream-of-consciousness nature of my daily diet of information; everybody’s a pundit these days, and if the topic of the day is presidential politics then whatever you read is likely to contain repeated passing references to it. I do look forward to the day when the architects of cyberspace take Google’s idea of safe search a step further and create a mechanism that would allow me to filter out, however imperfectly, information on a specific topic. (And when that day comes I hope I have the strength to use those filters liberally.)

But some of what I know about the election comes from deliberately reading the news that streams by, and even some occasional further research. As much as I think that politics is an irrelevant and often wicked distraction, it does provide an endless stream of episodes where people respond to unusual circumstances in an unguarded manner—and by “people” I mean not only the folks who initiate the news but also those who publicly discuss, argue about, and sit in judgment on them. Nothing has taught me more about how people think than watching a political season unfold.

A second reason that I want to know the basic lay of the current political landscape is that some of the writers and thinkers I admire greatly spend a lot of their time writing about politics, and being superficially informed on the topic makes it easier to read them. Strangely enough, being more than superficially informed is not particularly helpful, because I don’t read these folks to learn about the politics of the day, but mostly to learn about the behavior and thinking of people engaged in those politics.

One good example of this sort of writer is Peggy Noonan. I do not identify with Noonan’s politics, which seems to be a gentle and considerate sort of Reaganism. But I identify strongly with Noonan’s public persona, which is that of a thoughtful citizen who is always pondering the implications of her politics for everyday living, reconciling those implications with her understanding of how life is to be lived, and then reshaping her politics so as to reduce the friction between theory and practice. I read Peggy Noonan faithfully because I learn a lot when I watch her think through something publicly.

Yesterday Peggy Noonan was blindsided by the new rules of the game (”mugged by the nature of modern media” is how she put it), and she amended her latest column for the Wall Street Journal to address the situation. As you read about what happened, you may wonder exactly what the big deal is. At most this was a small skirmish that took place far from the thick of the battle; someone scored a few ponts when he embarrassed a not especially influential pundit by making public some ill-considered and easily misunderstood words about her friends.

What instructs me here is not the incident but the way Noonan responded to it. In this day of highly strategic public posturing, she must have been tempted to choose a public stance for the sake of its effect; perhaps ignoring it, or going for the distracting effect of attacking the trend toward making the private conversations of others public, or twisting her own words into something other than what she meant, or abjectly apologizing. Instead, she takes the riskier route of trying to explain to her readers what actually happened, counting on her formidable writing skills to adequately convey how someone who thinks what she thinks and sees what she sees could end up saying the words she said when she thought the world wasn’t listening. I thought she did a good job of taking exactly the blame she needed to take, no more and no less, while not falling into defensiveness or excuse-making.

Why is it important to me how Noonan handled herself here? Because for me she is a role model when it comes to writing as a thoughtful observer. I trust Peggy Noonan not because of her rigorous argumentation, but because over the years she has demonstrated to me that her own thinking is learned, detailed, thorough, sober, compassionate, and most especially honest. Her thinking on certain matters has changed in ways that can’t have endeared her to those in her circle, and yet she has been bold enough to continue thinking those thoughts in public. Her conclusions carry a lot of weight with me simply because they are her conclusions. Because of that, I know they are carefully crafted, well tested, and sincerely held. Whenever I learn that Peggy Noonan believes something, I will give serious consideration to believing that same thing myself, precisely because someone I admire and trust believes that thing.

It is this approach I think we should use to replace our foolish Enlightened faith in the persuasive power of the truth. As I wrote there:

I suspect that our faith in the persuasive power of the truth is just one more unjustified assumption that was imposed on us by Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that they would find salvation through knowledge, that man would always tend towards the good because of enlightened self-interest, that bad behavior was the result of ignorance and could be easily eliminated through proper education. The philosophes believed that in a standoff between truth and wickedness, truth would always prevail. Romans 1:18 tells a different story.

Truth is to be valued along with goodness and beauty. But we need to understand what truth can and cannot do. And we need to stop wondering why those who have heard the truth fail to live according to it.

Truth doesn’t persuade. What does? I think it is seeing someone already persuaded, getting a glimpse of the rubber meeting the road, pondering the example of a life lived in accordance with the truth in question. Dave Black mentions the distinction in a recent blog entry (scroll down to Friday, August 29, 2:15pm).

I have discovered through the years that there are two types of knowledge. The first is knowing WHAT. That is, before we can pursue a biblical ecclesiology, we need to assemble facts together. These facts come from the Scriptures, not from any man-made traditions. As we search the Word of God, we are confronted with the truth, with basic facts about church life. Of course, many evangelicals have never even taken this first step. They remain steeped in their traditions because they have never considered what the New Testament has to say about the church.

The second kind of knowledge is knowing HOW. That is, even if we know (or think we know) what the Bible teaches about church life, there remains the enormous task of actually en-fleshing this knowledge in our daily lives and in our congregations. This is a completely different kind of knowledge than just knowing the facts. This knowledge cannot be gleaned directly from the Scriptures. We gain this knowledge through the leading of God’s Holy Spirit, who enables us to move ahead by showing us the concrete steps we should take and, just as importantly, how and when we should take them. This takes a lot of discernment, and this discernment can only come from God, just as truth comes from God. […]

“The map is not the terrain,” is how a military instructor at West Point might put it. And so it is in the Christian life. Change — all change — begins with the renewing of our minds as we study the pure Word of God and begin to wean ourselves from worldly or non-biblical traditions. But then, as we move from intellectual comprehension to practical implementation, we must also move from map to terrain, as it were. We are now “on the spot,” “boots on the ground.” We are forced to make judgment calls. We have to decide such questions as where, when, by whom, and how fast (or slow)? There are no set answers to any of these questions! At least I haven’t found any. Certainly, if the church is to be the church, all of us must move from the map to the terrain. But therein lies the rub. And that is precisely where so many of us struggle. My hope is that as the Lord Jesus leads you along this wonderful but sometimes frightening journey, He will keep you challenged and occupied with healthy, positive, and happy thoughts and deeds.

The power I find in the writings of Peggy Noonan and Dave Black lies not in any carefully crafted argument but in the honest account of a life lived thoughtfully, an example for the world to examine and ponder.

We milk two dairy cows, Puzzle and Dory, who bless us with two calves each year. Last year’s calves were both bulls, so we castrated them, named them T-Bone and Ribeye, and raised them with an eye to taking them to the slaughterhouse this fall.

Originally we were going to wait until the very last moment, which around here is just prior to the start of deer season; after that the slaughterhouse is booked solid for months processing that year’s deer harvest. But it’s been very dry this summer and the pasture, while adequate, is looking pretty sparse. So we decided to go ahead and have T-Bone and Ribeye slaughtered now, figuring that any additional pounds they could put on weren’t worth the grass they’d be sharing with their mothers. Today was the day to deliver them.

Meanwhile, their mothers have been spending some time visiting with our friend Jimmy Ellis and his dairy herd. Last year we bought a Jersey bull in mid-August, kept him around long enough to have him breed the dairy cows, and then sent him to stay with Jimmy so that his own cows could be bred. That bull is now a year older and a lot more ornery, so we decided to send our cows to Jimmy so they could be bred, then send the increasingly dangerous bull off to auction.

We hoped that the bull would do his job promptly, so as not to burden Jimmy with boarding our cows any longer than needed. The cows, of course, have not cooperated, for any number of reasons we are learning about. We still aren’t very good at telling when a cow has come into heat. And even if we notice, there is only a twelve-hour window in which she can be bred successfully. Summer heat and being underfed can throw off a cow’s fertility cycle. And so on.

We thought that at least while boarding our cows Jimmy would get the benefit of their milk, which he could sell along with his own milk to the dairy. But it turns out that they both have high somatic cell counts due to mastitis (although not the kind that renders the milk undrinkable). So he has fed the milk from one of our cows to his calves, and kept the milk from the other separate so we could come by and pick it up every day to drink ourselves. In all this he has definitely shown himself to be a good friend.

Today before taking the calves to the slaughterhouse Maggie and I drove the three miles to Jimmy’s place to pick up the morning milk. When we arrived he told us that he wasn’t sure, not having seen it himself, but all indications were that Dory had been bred the night before (cows had been mounting her the evening before, with the bull knocking them off each time). That was welcome news, and we told Jimmy we would be by to fetch Dory on the way back from taking T-Bone and Ribeye to the slaughterhouse.

Back home, we dropped off the milk and went down to the field, where Chris had already hooked up the cattle trailer (also borrowed from friends). Chris and Maggie fetched T-Bone and Ribeye, eventually persuaded them to step up into the trailer, and we headed to the slaughterhouse. I suppose it tells you something about where we live when I say that it was a short drive, a couple of miles up Gum Lick Road and then a short left on Chicken Gizzard road. The steers were pretty calm, and seemed to appreciate the breeze that drove the pesky flies away from them.

Just as we were waiting to turn onto Chicken Gizzard road, we watched a truck pass that was pulling a trailer with two huge black bulls in it. Sure enough it turned into the slaughterhouse just before us, so we pulled to the back of the parking lot and watched as the owner helped the driver back her trailer up to the cattle chute and get them unloaded. It didn’t take but a couple of minutes, and after she pulled her truck away it was our turn.

I’m getting better at maneuvering a trailer, so it wasn’t too embarrassingly long before we were ready to unload. As Chris and Maggie proceeded with the job we were envious of the previous customer and her lively bulls, who had bounded off the trailer and through the chutes; our steers were so gentled that it took a lot of persuasion to get them moving at all, and even more to separate them so they could go across the scale one at a time. But it happened, and we got the final tally—the smaller weighed 612 pounds, the larger 738 pounds. Less than we were hoping for, but we still don’t know what percentage of that will turn into meat for us.

We like this slaughterhouse and have used it a few times in the past; it is fairly new, very clean, professional enough, and very close to the house. The biggest downside is that the guy running it is always in a hurry and can be abrupt, i.e. not especially interested in a thorough discussion of how you want your year’s supply of meat prepared. As Chris and Maggie waited to tell the owner that Debbie would be calling later in the afternoon with details of how to process the cows, they listened in surprise as he had a long and involved consultation with the customer before us about possibilities for cutting up her own animals. We decided that maybe it was worth sending a woman in person to work out the details, but it turns out that he may have just been in a good mood; when Debbie did finally call this afternoon, he was plenty nice and not abrupt at all.

Then it was on to the Ellis place, where we parked the trailer in a convenient spot and went off to fetch Dory. The bull accompanied Dory and the rest to the gate, and bellowed in a melancholy way as he watched her leave. We lingered a bit so we could get a quick tour of the new house that Jimmy son’s Wes had built on the property, simple and inexpensive and very much of interest to Chris who is already scouting out homesites on our own property. Then it was back home, and after a couple of weeks off from milking the kids are back into that routine again, happily so.

In case you’re curious, the Curiosities sidebar is produced by this Wordpress widget. Whenever I make an addition to my del.icio.us bookmarks, the title and description are added to the sidebar.

Unfortunately, the widget does not provide an elegant way to subscribe to the RSS feed for those del.icio.us bookmarks. So I’ve added a less than elegant but still servicable link that will do the job. If you would like to have the Curiosities entries show up in your RSS reader, just subscribe to this link.

In a recent Farm Update post I mentioned that we are currently selling eggs at a loss. Reader Jo asks, reasonably enough, “Why?” It does sound like an odd thing to do. Rather than give a short answer, I’ll try to identify all the different considerations that have led us to do this.

First, when I say that we are selling our eggs at a loss, I mean that the feed which we give to our laying flock costs us more than we would make if we sold all the eggs they lay at our current price. Earlier in the summer our hens were laying 30 eggs per day, or 2 1/2 dozen per day, or 17 1/2 dozen per week. If we sold them all, at $1 per dozen that would yield us $17.50. Meanwhile, the feed they eat now costs us about $35 per week, or about $2 per dozen eggs.

Also, those are theoretical eggs. Over the summer production has dropped to as low as 9 dozen per week, but has rebounded recently and is now around 14 dozen per week. Feed consumption varies day by day, but overall seems to be pretty steady. So at any given time we have been spending from $2.50 to $4 per dozen eggs to buy feed.

And last winter there was a stretch where the hens laid nothing at all. The cost of the feed that kept them alive then would need to be amortized over a year or so to give us a more accurate picture of what those eggs are costing us. But at least we know they are costing us even more.

So far this doesn’t sound too promising as a business proposition. But we need to keep in mind that it isn’t a business proposition, but just a snapshot of one aspect of our ongoing effort to learn by doing. We didn’t get here by sitting down and deciding to keep a certain number of hens that would eat a certain amount of feed in order to produce a certain number of eggs at a certain price to obtain a certain profit.

Three years ago when we moved here we inherited a chicken coop and a ragtag flock that produced the occasional egg. We fed and watered and sheltered those few, and by the next spring we were accustomed enough to having chickens free-ranging our yard that we decided to order ten laying hens along with the broilers we planned to raise in tractors. Our son Matthew, who has always been drawn to birds, took those chickens under his wing and learned the things that needed learning to get them organized as a laying flock.

It took nearly eight months, but sometime late in the year the new hens began to lay steadily and prolifically, and we had our first real supply of eggs. For awhile we had only enough for our own needs, with the occasional dozen to give to friends. Somehow that flock grew to about thirty hens (neither my records nor my memory tell me how; both last year and this we have had hens hatch their own chicks, but not in enough quantities to account for the growth), and very early this spring we were getting 30 or so eggs per day.

We decided to order an additional ten female chicks this spring, thinking that we need to keep a steady supply of new hens coming in to replace hens that eventually stop laying. Those will not be laying for another few months, but they are eating, and they are taking up room in the coop. In fact, as presently organized the coop is full and there aren’t enough laying boxes for when the new hens start laying; this will push us to think in more detail about what we need to do to organize the coop for maximum use, and whether we actually want to do that.

The upshot is that right now our laying flock is an awkward in-between size, too large if all we want to do is supply our own needs, too small to produce enough eggs to supply any sort of commercial customer base. But that’s the size it is right now, and it isn’t much of a headache to keep it there for awhile. Which gives us an opportunity to experiment with various interesting ways to deal with an excess supply of eggs.

The first thing we did was decide who we wanted to supply with weekly free eggs; that list ended up as our elderly next-door neighbor (one dozen), Jerome Lange (two to three dozen, depending), and one of our pastors (1 1/2 dozen). Next, we asked a couple of nearby neighbors if they wanted to buy any from us, and they both did—but at what price? Well, the going price for eggs around here has been $1 for roughly forever, so that is what we told them. That accounted for another three dozen. And one of those neighbors told some Amish neighbors that we had eggs for sale, so a couple stopped by to ask if they could have some, and that accounted for another three dozen. Which is about all we could supply, given that we like to eat a lot of eggs ourselves.

So: we supply neighbors with roughly ten dozen eggs per week, six of which we are paid $1 for. We keep between four and six dozen for ourselves. We collect the eggs into used egg cartons and keep them in the basement, and we have a weekly schedule where either one of the kids takes the eggs to a neighbor or the neighbor stops by.

From a strictly business point of view, this is a disaster. We are spending $35 a week, plus the labor we invest, and we are making $6 per week, i.e. it is costing us $29 per week to keep this operation going. But what else are we getting for our $29?

• Four to six dozen eggs.

• We are learning to keep chickens at a ‘real’ scale, i.e. forty hens rather than just a couple.

• We are learning to produce at a ‘real’ scale, i.e. we have people depending on us to supply them with eggs regularly, and we depend on them ourselves.

• We are learning a little bit about how to manage direct sales to neighbors (not quite the same as wholesaling or direct sales to non-neighbors).

• We are establishing stronger relationships with some of our neighbors.

• We are serving our neighbors, the paying ones with a good inexpensive product and the others with a loving gift.

• We can base our decision as to how to proceed on our own practical experience, rather than speculation or someone else’s advice.

On that last point, here are some of the options before us:

• We could continue on as we are doing.

• We could raise our costs to something approaching what it costs us to produce a dozen eggs, say $3.50.

• We could raise the cost further, to pay us something for our time and trouble, say $5.

• We could scale back our flock to produce just enough eggs for ourselves, which would be costing us between $2 and $4 per dozen (or more) depending on the time of year.

• We could scale it slightly larger, so that we could give eggs to friends that would be costing us $2 -$4 per dozen (or more).

• We could try to reduce our costs by raising some or all of our own chicken feed.

Here’s what we think of those options at the moment:

• Continuing on is not a good idea in the long term—the benefits, especially the ones that involve learning, will diminish with time—but there’s nothing urgent about changing things.

• We can’t ask our neighbors to pay $3.50 for a dozen eggs, especially when they are selling for just over a dollar at the grocery store. We could conceivably ask non-neighbors to pay that, given that they are not industrially produced, but at $3.50 we only break even and wouldn’t be much interested in giving a product at cost to people we don’t know.

• We certainly can’t ask our neighbors to pay $5.00, and I’m not sure I could bring myself to ask that much from anyone else, since it would require me to persuade them that our eggs are worth four times as much as industrially produced eggs, something I’m not convinced of myself.

• We could very well scale back our flock to supply only our own needs, although it might also require that we cut back on our own egg consumption, given how much the eggs are costing us.

• We’d like to always produce a surplus of whatever we raise, so as to be able to give some of it away. But this works better when production cost is mostly labor, as with vegetables, rather than when the cost is mostly inputs, as with eggs.

• This is a path we hope to follow in nearly every area of homesteading, namely reducing input costs to zero by producing your own inputs in a sustainable manner.

As tediously detailed as this post is, it only covers some of the concerns that go into deciding about eggs. Other concerns will be raised when I talk about how we are deciding about meat in a post soon to come. And still others will be raised when I talk at some point about the unavoidable need to produce cash income.

Andrew Park hits one out of the park with a great article in Slate magazine, The Chick-fil-A Church. Please read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

Most Sunday mornings at Buckhead Church in downtown Atlanta, one person is conspicuously absent: the senior pastor, Andy Stanley. A nationally known evangelist, Stanley is usually 20 minutes away at North Point Community Church, the suburban megachurch he has led for 13 years. To the 6,000 or so faithful at Buckhead, he appears only on video, his digital image projected in front of the congregation in life-sized 3-D. The preacher is a hologram. […]

Six thousand people watching a sermon via video.

The Leadership Network, a Christian nonprofit that follows these multisite churches, says there will be 30,000 of them within a few years. Already, the most ambitious pastors are predicting that, thanks to video, they’ll have branded outlets nationwide and more than 100,000 followers—twice as large as the country’s biggest megachurch today. Gigachurches are the way that next-generation celebrity evangelists are building their empires. […]

Branded outlets. Gigachurches.

In a blog post, one of Stanley’s lieutenants compared the job of running a video venue to operating a franchise of another Christian-led business: Chick-fil-A. “Just like that Chick-fil-A owner/operator, I’m here in Nashville to open up our franchise and run it right,” wrote Eddie Johnson. “I believe in my company and what they are trying to ’sell.’ ” … He stands by his analogy. Most residents of Nashville, Tenn.—he estimates around 71 percent—don’t attend church regularly. If it takes a name-brand preacher to put butts in seats, so be it. […]

Whatever it takes to fill the seats.

But church-planting, as it’s known, can be arduous and time-consuming, and there’s no guarantee it will reproduce the home church’s success, especially without the same charismatic leader at the top. With video, you just need seats and a screen to replicate the original. While only a handful of churches can afford Buckhead’s $250,000 high-def system, it costs relatively little to project a DVD of the home church’s sermon from last week. Or churchgoers can head to the movie theater: National CineMedia rents multiplex screens that otherwise would be dark on Sunday mornings to churches. […]

Arduous and time-consuming? Forget that.

This spring, Saddleback opened the first three of 10 planned video venues in and around its Orange County, Calif., home. “We’re not reaching out because we need to be bigger, we’re reaching out because more people need Jesus,” the church’s Web site says. […]

More people need Jesus? Or more people want Rick Warren?

And my absolute favorite observation:

And for Christians looking to create community on a more intimate level, video venues do present an alternative to the suburban megaflock. While some people find it strange at first to worship in front of a big screen, they frequently come to view it as no different than attending a service that is totally live, supporters say.

I’d view it as no different, too.

A Mennonite family we know had to take one of their children to the hospital recently. He had stepped on a wire (barefoot, I assume, since that is how Mennonites spend the warm months), and his foot had become badly infected. A week later I asked how he was doing, and was told that the doctors still hadn’t figured out what was causing the infection. My heart sank at that; last year we spent three days at the hospital with newborn Peter and incurred $13,000 in costs, only to hear that they were unable to figure out what was wrong with him but that whatever it was he seemed to be over it. The Mennonite boy is home now, after twelve days in the hospital; they never figured out what was wrong, but he is doing better now. I have no idea what that episode will cost the family, which on principle does not carry insurance.

If anyone ever develops an agrarian economics, it will be either Wendell Berry or someone who builds on the important foundational work he continues to do. His latest essay on Faustian economics is now available to read at the Harper’s website, and I recommend it highly. One thing he mentions is how in today’s predatory economy the so-called free market is only free for some:

Some of us would-be humans have thought too that we should not be free at anybody else’s expense. And yet in the phrase “free market,” the word “free” has come to mean unlimited economic power for some, with the necessary consequence of economic powerlessness for others.

Several years ago, after I had spoken at a meeting, two earnest and obviously troubled young veterinarians approached me with a question: How could they practice veterinary medicine without serious economic damage to the farmers who were their clients? Underlying their question was the fact that for a long time veterinary help for a sheep or a pig has been likely to cost more than the animal is worth.

And even if the cost is less, it may be a matter of throwing good money after bad, preserving an animal which will never thrive. In his writings on raising meat animals, Gene Logsdon suggests the most prudent course is usually not to intervene at all. He mentions a rancher who simply put his animals out to pasture in the spring and rounded them up in the fall, figuring that any that were lost over the summer were being culled by nature.

I had to answer that, in my opinion, so long as their practice relied heavily on selling patented drugs, they had no choice, since the market for medicinal drugs was entirely controlled by the drug companies, whereas most farmers had no control at all over the market for agricultural products.

My questioners were asking in effect if a predatory economy can have a beneficent result. The answer too often is No. And that is because there is an absolute discontinuity between the economy of the seller of medicines and the economy of the buyer, as there is in the health industry as a whole. The drug industry is interested in the survival of patients, we have to suppose, because surviving patients will continue to consume drugs.

I would only disagree with the final sentence. I do not think that the drug industry is interested at all in the survival of its patients; if it could find a way to make good money from drugs that killed people or animals, it would do that as well. What the medical industry is interested in is convincing potential customers that the work done by its products and procedures is vital, whatever that happens to be. During our three days in the hospital with Peter there was never a single question raised, by us or the practitioners, about whether a particular procedure was needed. In fact, one particular procedure was clearly not needed, as a nurse happened to say when the doctor who ordered it was out of the room; but it was performed anyway, and charged for afterwards.

Berry contrasts this with an example of what he calls community economics:

Now let us consider a contrary example. Recently, at another meeting, I talked for some time with an elderly, and some would say an old-fashioned, farmer from Nebraska. Unable to farm any longer himself, he had rented his land to a younger farmer on the basis of what he called “crop share” instead of a price paid or owed in advance. Thus, as the old farmer said of his renter, “If he has a good year, I have a good year. If he has a bad year, I have a bad one.”

This is what I would call community economics. It is a sharing of fate. It assures an economic continuity and a common interest between the two partners to the trade. This is as far as possible from the economy in which the young veterinarians were caught, in which the powerful are limitlessly “free” to trade, to the disadvantage, and ultimately the ruin, of the powerless.

In our own situation, the members of the medical establishment were the powerful and we were the powerless. Can we imagine an alternative scenario where both of us shared a common interest and a common fate? Say, paying for treatments of conditions identified (if the patient elects to take them), but not for the identification process itself?

• We’ve been enjoying a wonderful stretch of cooler weather—lows 60 or below, highs in the mid-80s—but it continues to be extremely dry in this part of Kentucky. I doubt that we’ve gotten more than a few inches total of rain since early June. (I suppose I could go add it up, since we keep track.)

• The dryness hasn’t killed our garden, but it has required a lot of watering, something we aren’t set up well to do. Right now we have drip tape on the tomatoes, a critical crop, and we’re keeping an eye on the squash, which was nurtured through the early stages with hand-watering but now seems to be managing OK with the occasional rain we’ve received.

• Our crops are late, partly by design and partly by accident. We’ve only just had a few things ready for sale—cherry tomatoes, garlic, some extra onions. But we should have various tomatoes (romas, New Girl, Carolina Gold) from now through the end of the growing season, and the winter squash (acorn, ambercup, delicata, blue hubbard) should be ready in a few weeks.

• Sliced tomatoes now make a regular appearance at lunch and supper. We eat a lot and never get tired of them.

• Our freezers were nearly full, and we had seventy-five chickens scheduled for slaughter within a week or two, so we started talking about getting another freezer; we already had one 10 cu ft chest freezer, a 20 cu ft upright, and the freezers of our two refrigerators. We had pretty much settled on a new 20 cu ft chest model, when Debbie discovered that our fifteen-year-old upright was no longer maintaining its temperature. So one new 20 cu ft chest freezer became two. One was delivered today, and the second will come at the end of next week. The second will have to go in the basement.

• We raise some broilers to eat, some to sell, and some to give away. The original plan was to keep fifty of this year’s seventy-five, give fifteen to one of our pastors (the other raises his own chickens), and sell or give away the other ten. But now we find that we still have twenty-five chickens in the freezer; we ate fewer than we expected, and we slaughtered some unneeded roosters this spring. So we will only be keeping twenty-five broilers, and sell or give away another twenty-five. (And some of those will go to our other pastor, who we learned does not like to slaughter his own flock.)

• We welcomed home our pigs from the slaughterhouse with a delicious grilled pork chop supper. Earlier that day I took the four hams and four slabs of bacon to a different slaughterhouse where they also cure and smoke meat (I would have liked to had the pigs slaughtered there as well, but it is about fifty miles from here, too long a drive to subject the animals to.) Tonight we will be having pork roast with homemade sauerkraut.

• We sold one-half of one of our pigs to a neighbor, about sixty pounds of pork. They will also be buying one of the two cows we will have slaughtered this fall.

• Since both of our calves this year were girls, we will be looking for one or two male calves this fall to raise for next year’s beef. But we don’t want to overwinter a full-sized cow like we did last year (lots of hay eaten without any weight gain), so those calves would be slaughtered at twelve months or so, after a summer of fattening on pasture. Next year we need to find our male calves in the late spring (if we need them).

• After three years at this, the most important thing we’ve learned to this point is that we’ve barely begun to learn all that we need to know in order to be successful homesteaders. But God is merciful, and it turns out that even the little we’ve learned so far has been enough to feed us well and transform our everyday lives for the better.

Last spring we began our first experience with pigs, when a neighbor stopped by in April and asked if we were interested in some piglets. We took two, and kept them in the pasture with the cows. Our field dog Samson took to them right away, and for months they were constant companions. We fed them, hog feed and table scraps and extra milk, but otherwise didn’t pay much attention to them.

We had vaguely expected them to go to the slaughterhouse sometime in the fall, but about a month ago we noticed that they were big—really big, bigger than Samson the Great Pyrenees. Then a couple of weeks they got out of the pasture, through a cattle panel that had come loose. Then they got out again. When they got out the third time, it occurred to us that they may have gotten a taste for getting out, and so the kids went around the pasture perimeter reinforcing the fence panels. Sad to say, not only had the pigs gotten a taste for getting out, they had gotten a sense of their own strength and were now testing the fence regularly. Worse, they were clearly strong enough to push and bend their way through a cattle panel, no matter how well attached.

The good news was that the pigs weren’t interested in roaming far, and always made their way back for evening feeding. But we were worried about them doing damage to someone else’s garden or property on one of their jaunts, so when they got out last night we decided it was time for them to meet their final reward.

This morning Debbie called the slaughterhouse and found out that they could take the pigs right away, so we scrambled to borrow a trailer for transporting them. Loading them ended up being fairly easy; they hadn’t been fed that morning, and were eager to get at the feed Chris used to lure them up the ramp into the trailer. And the ten-mile ride was uneventful; the trailer floor was covered with sweet feed from when it had been last used to haul cows, so they contentedly munched on that all the while. Unloading into the chute at the slaughterhouse was just about as easy.

The pigs were six months old and weighed in at 230 and 232 pounds. This was good news to me, not only because it was a respectable weight, but it is the weight at which Europeans usually slaughter “entire” (i.e. uncastrated) boars so as to avoid the risk of boar taint, an unpleasant flavor that can permeate the meat of a sexually mature hog (the American average slaughter weight is 260-270 pounds, i.e. the pigs tend to be older). I decided after some research not to castrate our own pigs, and I’m still a bit anxious about possibly having doomed a couple of hundred pounds of pork to inedibility. You can be sure that when I pick up the meat on Monday, the first thing I will do is thaw a pack of pork chops and anxiously throw them on the grill.

We expect to end up with meat weighing half the live weight, 230 pounds of it. We asked for the bacon and hams to be kept whole so that we can take it elsewhere to be smoked and cured. And we’re looking around to see if anyone in the neighborhood might be interested in buying a portion of the harvest, since 230 pounds would probably feed us (and take up valuable freezer space) for a couple of years.

We will almost certainly raise one or two pigs again next year. The taste of these will decide whether we castrate them or not. And we will probably try to figure out how to keep them in the woods rather than on pasture.

If you are concerned about the rapidly growing national debt and its likely effects on life down the road, you may want to check out the new documentary I.O.U.S.A., which is being given a one-night showing in theaters nationwide on August 21, in hopes of generating enough interest to merit theatrical distribution. Here’s their blurb:

Wake up, America! We’re on the brink of a financial meltdown.

I.O.U.S.A. boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. As the Baby Boomer generation prepares to retire, will there even be any Social Security benefits left to collect? Burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs, and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions.

Throughout history, the American government has found it nearly impossible to spend only what has been raised through taxes. Wielding candid interviews with both average American taxpayers and government officials, Sundance veteran Patrick Creadon (Wordplay) helps demystify the nation’s financial practices and policies. The film follows U.S. Comptroller General David Walker as he crisscrosses the country explaining America’s unsustainable fiscal policies to its citizens.

With surgical precision, Creadon interweaves archival footage and economic data to paint a vivid and alarming profile of America’s current economic situation. The ultimate power of I.O.U.S.A. is that the film moves beyond doomsday rhetoric to proffer potential financial scenarios and propose solutions about how we can recreate a fiscally sound nation for future generations.

Pointedly topical and consummately nonpartisan, I.O.U.S.A. drives home the message that the only time for America’s financial future is now!

The critically-acclaimed documentary film I.O.U.S.A. was concieved of, co-written and executive produced by Agora Financial’s Addison Wiggin. In July 2008, the film was acquired by The Peter G. Peterson Foundation. It will be featured in a Live Premier with Warren Buffet, Pete Peterson and David Walker in 400 theatres around the nation on August 21st, 2008. To find out more visit the film’s official site or click here to locate a theater near you.

And, if you’re interested, here is the trailer: