sastyk
Posts by this author
January 11, 2010
I've never had so much trouble writing a book before. Depletion and Abundance was hard, but it was so thrilling that someone wanted me to write a book that I could barely see straight from excitement. A Nation of Farmers was a project I had been passionate about for a long time, and the…
January 11, 2010
I'm back after four days of teaching a workshop at my house. It was awesome. It was exhausting. It was fascinating. We milked goats (note, very small adorable goats sell themselves. It is not necessary to talk them up, just to frisk people trying to hide goats under their jackets on the way…
January 6, 2010
For four days this week, 10 women are coming to my house to play apprentice. We're going to milk goats, make sauerkraut, knit socks, talk about depletion and climate change, make teas and syrups, cook on a woodstove and figure out where to go from here and basically have a four day slumber party…
January 5, 2010
Today is the first day of Aaron's and my new "Finding Your Place" Course (for anyone who would still like to join, we've got two remaining spots and since the class is asynchronously online, you won't miss anything by starting today or tomorrow - email me at Jewishfarmer@gmail.com). I've been…
January 4, 2010
Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
A…
January 4, 2010
I've always meant to write a post with this title, but somehow never got around to it. Then I saw The-always-amazing-Zuska's latest about the way that Erma Bombeck's name is being used to derogate people as being unserious and tied somehow to domestic life. Somehow I hadn't realized that "Bombeck…
January 3, 2010
A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article about the problem of manure handling on large farms. . From the title "Down on the Farm, an Endless Cycle of Waste," which completely misses the point that manure is not "waste" to the end, the article failed to ask any of the really pertinent…
January 3, 2010
Longtime readers will know I'm a deep admirer of _The Automatic Earth_ where Stoneleigh and Ilargi do economic analysis. I think Stoneleigh has outdone herself this time, with a primer on resilience, cycles and where we're headed. Definitely worth a read - probably two reads.
I particularly like…
January 1, 2010
In the comments thread to my previous post, Greenpa, who apparently gets a kick from watching She Who Cruncheth over at The Crunchy Chicken and me competing, suggested that I ought to try to top her "latest post." In the interim, La Crunch put up a fascinating post about bull semen and the genetic…
December 31, 2009
What is your blogiste doing instead of writing posts and working on her new book these days? She is frantically trying to make her home a suitable place for the workshop she's running in it in a few days. That means moving furniture that might get moved and discovering things horrible beyond…
December 30, 2009
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:…
December 30, 2009
Today is "Year in Review" day in which I post my predictions and my evaluation of last year's, but first, here's a meme I stole from the fabulous Dr. Isis in which I list the first blog post of 12 months, plus the first sentence of each blog post. I figure they'll make something really strange,…
December 29, 2009
From time to time my co-author on _A Nation of Farmers_ and I teach classes on practical topics about adapting to lower energy life, food storage and preservation, garden and farm design, etc... The classes are offered online and are asynchronous (ie, you don't have to be online at any particular…
Once You've Got the Chickens, You'll Hardly Notice the Yaks: Re-Inventing the Diversified Small Farm
December 29, 2009
Over at ye olde blogge, on one of my Independence Days updates, a reader commented on something that I'd posted. I'd mentioned that we are having trouble with goat parasites - most specifically, meningeal worm. Meningeal worm is a parasite is hosted by snails and transmitted by the feces of white…
December 28, 2009
Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they've…
December 27, 2009
As I've mentioned, we raise our own dairy goats and milk them, and we drink the milk raw, or rather, unpasteurized. Since I wrote my last piece about the goats, I've had several people email me asking for advice about their dairy choices - one person living locally wanted me to sell her raw milk,…
December 27, 2009
I'm in the process of composing my annual predictions for 2010, and as those of you who were around for my last set will know, let's just say that my number of hits won't be as high as the previous year (the previous year was weirdly correct, this one more normally imperfect). This is not a…
December 24, 2009
I spend much of my life making the case for changing one's life (and not just one's life - for supporting political and social change that is associated with it) in fairly radical ways, very quickly. I spend a lot of my time writing, and periodically I get on a train or a bus or something and go…
December 23, 2009
I was just laboring over a post designed to explain the relationship between energy returned over energy invested and the importance of the *rate* of that return for our expectations about future resources, when I found out that Dr. Tom Konrad had already done this - yay! I think this is a useful…
December 22, 2009
Ok, I did try and do a real blog post today, but it just isn't happening. We had wonderful guests this morning, and it is bloody cold, and I really need to clean the rabbit cages and then I just want to hang out and bake things that smell like cinnamon - writing is way down on the list.
So today…
December 21, 2009
Ok, Christmas is getting close, so is Kwanzaa and you are already late with your Chanukah presents. You've got one more present to buy, and it is for someone really tough. Something wonderful. Or something they don't have - which might be a challenge. What should you get them?
How about a…
December 20, 2009
Dear Sharon: Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. But I really need to know if there is. My Mom has been telling me about something called global warming, and I'm worried about Santa, because he lives up at the North Pole, and if it melts, he'll be in trouble. My Mom said some grownups…
December 18, 2009
When I decided to switch over to science blogs, I told Eric that he had to go with me. We've talked for years about doing a project together, but have always worried that a book or something would kill our extremely happy marriage, that we'd end up fighting over grammar (he's much more of a…
December 18, 2009
Just went downstairs to see a sign, made by Simon. It says:
Simon's Bar: Drinks, Uno, Tick-Tack-Toe (sp), Math Drills and Dreidel.
Yeah, that'll make money. And no, I didn't ask what they will be drinking.
Sharon
December 18, 2009
You've got to give our Secretary of State credit - she knows how to make an entrance. Show up at the door with 100 billion and people can't look away. Of course, she didn't promise 100 billion from the US, but to raise it collectively with some unspecified other folk by 2020, but still, it is an…
December 18, 2009
A while back I argued that there's a rule - when the US spends a whole lot more and uses a whole lot more than everyone else, what we usually get back isn't just less than everyone else gets for the same buck, it is dramatically worse. I called it my rule of 10 times the price = 10 times crappier…
December 17, 2009
Note: Another new reader asked if I could say a little more about the goats. Here's more.
If you were to come to visit right now, you wouldn't see The Milk Truck until you started to get out of your car. But the moment you opened your door, the little vacuum cleaners would stick their heads in,…
December 17, 2009
The second night of Chanukah, my sons got clothes from their great aunt, which they received politely but unenthusiastically. As we were heading to bed that night, after a late night at our synagogue's annual Chanukah party, six year old Isaiah asked me "Mommy, will tomorrow night be another…
December 16, 2009
Note: Tonight is the sixth night of Chanukah, the night we remember Judith hacking off Holofernes' head by eating cheese (yes, there is a reasoning behind that strange statement), and I really had planned to write a post about that. But it is also Isaiah's sixth birthday and deep in the grading…
December 16, 2009
Not long ago I was out at a dinner of climate activists, at the beginning of a conference I was at, and as we were climbing into the car of one of the program leaders, there was talk about whose car was messier. This is a competition I always win - I mentioned to them that not only do I have…