6/09/10 - 4th Day - Morning. Greetings y'all. I know the quality of the above picture isn't very good, but there isn't any electric light in the office, and the flash on the Pre isn't the best. Anyway, I hope you can see the wheat we harvested and hauled yesterday. This isn't all of it - some of it is stored in another shed we have up by the chickens. I have had several communications from folks asking "what do you do with all that wheat?"First, let me say that I cannot emphasize enough the benefits that come from making arrangements to receive your staple goods and animal feed (that which you cannot grow yourself) directly from the farmer. Bulk wheat that is cleaned and bagged from a seed/feed mill around here would go for about $11 a bushel or more (a bushel is 60 lbs. of wheat). If you bought it from someone selling "organic" wheat for storage (in buckets), you would likely pay between $25 and $54 a bushel online. We paid $2.50 a bushel for this wheat because we were willing to go out to the farm and do most of the work. The farmer just had to drive the harvester/thresher. I'm not saying you can get bulk wheat for that price, but you should be able to get it right now (as they are harvesting) for less than $5 a bushel pretty much anywhere where wheat is harvested. That works out to a bit more than .08 a pound! We actually paid less than .04 a lb. So what do we use it for? Everything. We will use this for animal feed for the pigs, sheep, milk cows, chickens, etc. We will, when we can, mix it with other feeds to provide a good balanced diet, but since almost all of our animals free-range at some level, this should be a great feed supplement at very, very little cost. We also will use it for making our own bread. Once it is thoroughly dried, we will package a bunch of it for long-term storage in buckets. This not only provides a huge store of a basic staple that can be life-saving in the long-run after a disaster, but it provides this basic staple for our everyday use as well. The point is that I encourage you to go out on a limb and try to meet local farmers who can help you, and who might be amenable to selling you part of their crop directly from the field. I find it interesting that some of the local folks might think we are "quaint", "weird", or "crazy", but they almost all are willing to help in some way.
One thing our family needs to focus on, though, is storage. I will be looking for some good grain storage ideas - including looking to buy or attain some used silos if I can find any.
Well, speaking of quaint, weird, and crazy - our brother Chris contacted me several months ago to tell me that he was talking to a guy in Santa Anna who was going to be opening an antique/junk store. He told Chris he had access to an old icebox (the old kind that you actually put blocks of ice into) that he would be willing to sell. Now, I have found these things at antique stores, but they are very, very expensive. The antique store in Coleman has a very small one for almost $900. That isn't in my budget. Anyway, the other day we went to go see this one in Santa Anna, and boy was it nice! It was an old "commecial" model, and we even got to learn the history of it. Apparently it was the ice box used in an old grocery that stood in Santa Anna next to the bank back in the pre-1930's. When electricity came to the area in the late 30's and early 40's it was converted to an electric ice-box. When the store closed down, it was shuffled off into one of the many empty storefronts in Santa Anna for storage, and eventually the guy who owned it before me bought it and tried (albeit poorly) to refurbish it. Turns out it was in really good condition and it needed very little work at all. It took 6 of the men from our community to get it moved to my kitchen, but we did it, and it is now in full use! Oh, and I bought it cheap! For now we will use bagged ice in it, but starting soon (Lord willing) we will begin making our own ice blocks for it, and eventually, if the Lord wills, and we can get an icehouse built, we will make blocks of ice during the winter for use throughout the year in this ice box.
Underneath the icebox you can see a "catchwater" bowl. Well, Sugar (our yellow blackmouth cur dog) has figured a few things out. 1. It is like air-conditioning under the icebox. She spends the whole day under there. 2. The drip water is really cold, so she has adopted it for her water. It was funny - as I was working yesterday I came home and I heard sugar bark. It was very hot, so she never came out from under the icebox. She just barked from under there. Right. Good dog.
Y'all be cool, like Sugar,
Michael Bunker
6 comments:
Michael,
Back in '99, with y2k on the horizon, we filled up eight 55-gallon drums with wheat from a local farmer. He was glad to sell it to us and it was incredibly cheap. We kept the drums sealed in a shaded area outdoors. It kept perfectly for years as we fed it to our egg-layers, along with shelled corn, which we've also purchased in bulk for cheap direct from a local farmer. In both cases, we could have eaten these staple foods if we needed to. It was a good feeling to have a supply on hand. Your post is a reminder that I should restock my supply.
It's possible for me to get sturdy 55-gallon drums (plastic and metal) for free not far from where I live at a juice factory. I found this out after buying a bunch of them for $8 each from a guy that had a small business loading up his big pull-behind trailer with the free barrels and selling them in quantity to people who wanted them. Seems to me that we bought a load of 100 from the guy, but only kept a dozen for ourselves. The others went to prepping friends & neighbors.
When I was developing my Whizbang chicken plucker, I used one of those barrels to make the tub. I use one every spring for storing maple sap when we make syrup in the back yard. After ten years, the drums that I still have are in good shape.
I've been told that Craig's List is a good source for finding these big containers.
55-gallon drums are like little silos. :-)
OAT: I really like your ice box.
Best wishes,
Herrick Kimball
I kicked myself after the last post as I was going to ask about storage for the wheat, and how you were going to keep vermin out of it. Icebox...very nice! I did not think it got that cold there, to be able to sustain icemaking. It sure does here! I think some of the best portions of the off-off grid book dealt with water and how folks did things like ice. I imagine the Humanure book I got would blow the old-timers minds a bit tho. Do you want a paper copy of it?
I am interested in the info about Richard's place, and why he wants to sell. We need to contact Elder Sifford. I thought he was going to contact us, but I will remind Daniel about emailing him about future plans :) Oh, and I have a bit of wine for you; I just need to get paid (!!!) so I can afford to ship it :)
Herrick, First: Great to hear from you!
Ok, my Y2K story. A friend and I wanted to get hold of a lot of wheat for Y2K prep, so we got hold of a guy outside of Fort Worth who could buy it directly from a farmer (it would have been cheaper to go direct, but what did we know back then?). We had literally buy a tractor trailerload, but we got it cheap. It was bucketed for us in 6 gallon buckets for long-term storage. We figured out how much we had in them (costwise) and were able to sell all that we did not want to keep for ourselves. I kept about 50 buckets or so. After that, I made it a practice of giving 6 gallon buckets of wheat to whomever we met when they first started the Agrarian life. Thanks for the idea on the 50 gallon drums. Once we get this all dried properly we will likely do some of that, though I am very interested in buying some old/used silos. They have tons of them around here that people have in their yards but never use. Relics of a bygone era. I just put an ad on Craigslist to see if anyone wanted us to haul them off!
Michelle,
It does get cold enough here for a total of about 20 or so days, to do some serious ice making. In all reality, if it only got down in the low teens ONE night a year, and we were properly prepared, we conceivably could make enough ice to fill a good-sized icehouse. But, like I said, it gets down that cold fairly often, or at least often enough for us to make a lot of ice. So long as the "grid" holds up, we can make ice blocks, etc. in the freezer (once we get our solar trailer up and running again).
Richard is selling his place because (and this is only what I heard, so take it for what it is) he thinks the economy is going to crash and he would rather be on a boat or in a foreign land. Like I said, we aren't really like-minded on a lot of stuff.
I will get some info from Richard about his farm. Talking to Chris W. last night he said it was about 60+ acres and that 35 of it was currently in cultivation. It is totally off-grid.
Yes, contact David!
Michael
Beautiful ice-box..really beautiful wheat harvest!
We have been buying what we considered to be 'bulk' wheat through breadbeckers here in florida. They sell a 6 gallon bucket of organic, amish grown wheat for $30- and some odd dollars. 1 bucket will last us about 4-6 months at 6 loaves a week and it comes packaged for long term storage. I never would have guessed that your weather was cold enough for ice,or storing wheat. Here , the humidity will destroy about anything. My 60 pound potatoe harvest was mush in no time and I imagine the wheat would absorb so much moisture as to be a very short term deal. What we have learned is that wheat needs to have as much air removed from the storage bucket/drum as you can. Ours are vacuum packed and has a little oxygen absorber added to keep it good. Seems to last a great while. Even inside the house and without worrying about 'cellaring' it under the house. We have plans for an ice house when we get to WV next month. The saw mill will provide plenty of the needed saw-dust for the model we have read about.
It is wonderful to see the blessing of God in a brothers life. Great encouragement. Love and peace to yours , and to the Church at Santa Anna.
Bob M.
Glad to see your harvest! That is a fantastic price for good wheat!
What methods do you use in storing the wheat to keep any weevils and such out of it. DE, dry ice?
Ryan
Ryan, We have used almost every method at some time in the past, but we have found that the cheap and easy methods work as well as the more expensive ones. With this wheat, we will allow it to dry properly, then we will bag it in very large ziplocs (3-5 gallon), throw in a light dusting of diatomaceous earth, and seal up the buckets. A good prayer is the last step, and then it is all in God's hands.
When things like ziplocs and DE are not available, you dry it as well as possible and then use it in a good rotation system and plant wheat every other year or so. In the long run and in a survival situation, if a weevil infestation is quite small, they'll never hurt anyone and probably add some good protein.
Michael
Post a Comment