NUB farmer
 

This year I started "farming" for the first time in my life.

I wanted more control over our food quality/supply and needed more chores to teach the kids a good work-ethic.

We've got chickens, pigs & rabbits as well as a garden. Hope to get a couple of calves soon too.

Not much but it's a start.

It's an adventure.

Wife & kids had to capture the pigs when they got out and 2 chickens thought it would be a good idea to introduce themselves to our Welsh Corgi. May they rest in pieces....

Anyone else take the plunge recently?

Re: NUB farmer
 

Good on you brother!

I havent taken the plunge, but hope to some time later this year.

Got any pictures? :)

Re: NUB farmer
 

No livestock this year, but next.

Been gardening for a long while.

Good luck, I believe you made a wise decision.

Re: NUB farmer
 

goats and chickens.
starting the garden soon.
Yeoman farmers, the lot of us!

Re: NUB farmer
 

Turkeys, broilers, laying hens and sheep right now. Next up...a dairy goat and a Boer goat cross. The dairy goat for milk -- the Boer goat to eat (and to keep the dairy goat company for now, as goats do best -- and cause less trouble -- when they are content and have a buddy). These guys, combined with my garden and herbs keep me fed in the summer -- in fact, all summer long, I don't have to buy one bit of food that I don't grow. My 2009 project will be to extend my growing season with cold frames and a mini-greenhouse (former chicken hoophouse covered with plastic) and to can, freeze and dehydrate a whole lot more than I did in 2008.

(Sorry for the giant photos...I'm still a newbie here and don't know how to make them any smaller.)

Re: NUB farmer
 

What is NUB?

Re: NUB farmer
 

Some of that text talk I think for Newbie as in new to this.....

Congrats to all in this thread for taking the steps to produce what you eat.

Re: NUB farmer
 

Thanks,

Yes, I've got pix but been too busy in meat-space to mess with them so they could load.

I'll try to post some in the next week or so...

RE living in town: Forgiveness is easier to get than permission. Look into NewZealand Rabbits. If the Man comes to talk to you, they're "pets". That's easy for me to say though because I'm outside of the city limits.

My advice would be to DO SOMETHING NOW.

Re: NUB farmer
 

Absolutely love your signature line!

Re: NUB farmer
 

Here's the pics as promised...

I'm a big believer in recycling....

The rabbit hutch is made from an old futon bed we salvaged from a dumpster and the chicken tractor is made from a free craigslist swingset. Unfortunately, neither of these items were totally free to build. Man material cost add up quickly.:36_1_25:

On doing it: I thought about it for far too long. This spring I decided it was time to get off my duff and learn by doing. No regrets yet. Just start small. A small success is much better than a colossal failure.

Belle, Thank you. It is a paraphrase of something I read here on GIM and I liked it.

Re: NUB farmer
 

My second year gardening too. Love it.
Wishing I was outside city limits. By-Laws "won't allow" me to have chickens/pigs etc in town.

Re: NUB farmer
 

My farming is limited to gardening my backyard garden plot. I'm amazed at how unpredictable crop success can be.

- The year before last, my onions did great; last year's were a disaster; and this year's onions are coming along very nicely.

- Half of my snowbird snow pea plants are a stunted (half size and I have no idea why) and the other half are doing fine. My sugarsnaps are chest high on the vine and blooming.

- This year's tomatoes have been a bust. The seedlings were doing great until two weeks ago when the leaves began to brown and curl up. At first I thought it was sun scald; but I think not -- they had been hardened off a full week. I've cut off the damaged growth and treated the plants with a fungicide but have yet to see any more new growth. Three tomato seedling plants that I gave to my neighbors are doing fine in their garden (thank God!) and two of them already have yellow blooms. Go figure.

- Oh, and the bell and cubanella peppers I have growing in pots are blooming already even though we haven't had much warm weather. Best surprise of all!

I've been at this gardening thing for 6 years now and still feel NUB.

Re: NUB farmer
 

This is my 5th year gardening & lovin it.

As for animals....chickens & rabbits are the way I want to go.
Lookin like end of this year or the begining of 2010

Fingers crossed !!!!!!

Re: NUB farmer
 

We have been gardening off and on for a few years,although everything this year is in pots as we were hoping to sell the house and be gone from here...

In previous years we had chooks,and our own eggs,a WONDERFUL thing indeed.

When we get up to our land,we will have raised beds and finally get to plant our dwarf fruit trees that have been struggling along in large pots.

We hope to have more chooks up there as well as some other livestock,starting small of course.

Probably a few pigs and maybe goats to help clear the land.

Re: NUB farmer
 

We just finished seeding here. Got a little over 5000 acres in the ground.

Barley, wheat, canola, lentils and some hemp.

Damn cold spring it took over 3 weeks for a lot of crops just to come out of the ground. Some are still coming out.

A little rain would help now.

Re: NUB farmer
 

Ted Turner...is that you?

Re: NUB farmer
 

I've been raising feeder calves for a little over a year now. I have two now, another has been in the freezer since fall. One small calf died from a protozoan infection. I have learned a lot. I am currently looking for a breeding pair of Dexter cattle.

I've been gardening for many years. I have had chickens off and on and also raised pigs. Homegrown is the best tasting food. A person truly appreciates what they have raised on their own.

Re: NUB farmer
 

5000 acres is nothing these days. East of here 10,000 acres is the norm.

I know two larger farmers, one is running 70,000 acres and the other was at 105,000 acres last time i heard.

Economics of scale.

Re: NUB farmer
 

The swingset was a great idea to use as a base for your tractor. Love it!

Re: NUB farmer
 

Where is this? 105,000 acres?
I can't hardly believe it.

Turner Farms, at over 7,300 acres (nearly 12 square miles) one of the largest farms in the Great Plains, was sold to Innovative Livestock Services, Inc. and partners on March 21, 2007.

Re: NUB farmer
 

My First Post Ever. Just Finally got registered a month ago. I farm full time a bit of oil field maintance. Speaking of farm size.. This almost made me sick the other day!


http://www.economist.com/subscriptio...paign=168-XLMT





OUTSOURCING'S THIRD WAVE
May 21st 2009


Rich food importers are acquiring vast tracts of poor countries'
farmland. Is this beneficial foreign investment or neocolonialism?

EARLY this year, the king of Saudi Arabia held a ceremony to receive a
batch of rice, part of the first crop to be produced under something
called the King Abdullah initiative for Saudi agricultural investment
abroad. It had been grown in Ethiopia, where a group of Saudi investors
is spending $100m to raise wheat, barley and rice on land leased to
them by the government. The investors are exempt from tax in the first
few years and may export the entire crop back home. Meanwhile, the
World Food Programme (WFP) is spending almost the same amount as the
investors ($116m) providing 230,000 tonnes of food aid between 2007 and
2011 to the 4.6m Ethiopians it thinks are threatened by hunger and
malnutrition.

The Saudi programme is an example of a powerful but contentious trend
sweeping the poor world: countries that export capital but import food
are outsourcing farm production to countries that need capital but have
land to spare. Instead of buying food on world markets, governments and
politically influential companies buy or lease farmland abroad, grow
the crops there and ship them back.

Supporters of such deals argue they provide new seeds, techniques and
money for agriculture, the basis of poor countries' economies, which
has suffered from disastrous underinvestment for decades. Opponents
call the projects "land grabs", claim the farms will be insulated from
host countries and argue that poor farmers will be pushed off land they
have farmed for generations. What is unquestionable is that the
projects are large, risky and controversial. In Madagascar they
contributed to the overthrow of a government.

Investment in foreign farms is not new. After the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991 foreign investors rushed to snap up former
state-owned and collective farms. Before that there were famous--indeed
notorious--examples of European attempts to set up flagship farms in
ex-colonies, such as Britain's ill-fated attempt in the 1940s to turn
tracts of southern Tanzania into a limitless peanut prairie (the
southern Tanganyika groundnut scheme). The phrase "banana republics"
originally referred to servile dictatorships running countries whose
economies were dominated by foreign-owned fruit plantations.

But several things about the current fashion are new. One is its scale.
A big land deal used to be around 100,000 hectares (240,000 acres). Now
the largest ones are many times that. In Sudan alone, South Korea has
signed deals for 690,000 hectares, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for
400,000 hectares and Egypt has secured a similar deal to grow wheat. An
official in Sudan says his country will set aside for Arab governments
roughly a fifth of the cultivated land in Africa's largest country
(traditionally known as the breadbasket of the Arab world).

It is not just Gulf states that are buying up farms. China secured the
right to grow palm oil for biofuel on 2.8m hectares of Congo, which
would be the world's largest palm-oil plantation. It is negotiating to
grow biofuels on 2m hectares in Zambia, a country where Chinese farms
are said to produce a quarter of the eggs sold in the capital, Lusaka.
According to one estimate, 1m Chinese farm labourers will be working in
Africa this year, a number one African leader called "catastrophic".

In total, says the International Food Policy Research Institute
(IFPRI), a think-tank in Washington, DC, between 15m and 20m hectares
of farmland in poor countries have been subject to transactions or
talks involving foreigners since 2006. That is the size of France's
agricultural land and a fifth of all the farmland of the European
Union. Putting a conservative figure on the land's value, IFPRI
calculates that these deals are worth $20 billion-30 billion--at least
ten times as much as an emergency package for agriculture recently
announced by the World Bank and 15 times more than the American
administration's new fund for food security.

If you assume that the land, when developed, will yield roughly two
tonnes of grain per hectare (which would be twice the African average
but less than that of Europe, America and rich Asia), it would produce
30m-40m tonnes of cereals a year. That is a significant share of the
world's cereals trade of roughly 220m tonnes a year and would be more
than enough to meet the appetite for grain imports in the Middle East.
What is happening, argues Richard Ferguson, an analyst for Nomura
Securities, is outsourcing's third great wave, following that of
manufacturing in the 1980s and information technology in the 1990s.

Several other features of the process are also new. Unlike older
projects, the current ones mostly focus on staples or biofuels--wheat,
maize, rice, jatropha. The Egyptian and South Korean projects in Sudan
are both for wheat. Libya has leased 100,000 hectares of Mali for rice.
By contrast, farming ventures used to be about cash crops (coffee, tea,
sugar or bananas).

In the past, foreign farming investment was usually private: private
investors bought land from private owners. That process has continued,
particularly the snapping up of privatised land in the former Soviet
Union. Last year a Swedish company called Alpcot Agro bought 128,000
hectares of Russia; South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries paid $6.5m
for a majority stake in Khorol Zerno, a company that owns 10,000
hectares of eastern Siberia; Morgan Stanley, an American bank, bought
40,000 hectares of Ukraine in March. And Pava, the first Russian grain
processor to be floated, plans to sell 40% of its landowning division
to investors in the Gulf, giving them access to 500,000 hectares.
Thanks to rising land values and (until recently) rising commodity
prices, farming has been one of the few sectors to remain attractive
during the credit crunch.

THE GREAT GOVERNMENT GRAB
But the majority of the new deals have been government-to-government.
The acquirers are foreign regimes or companies closely tied to them,
such as sovereign-wealth funds. The sellers are host governments
dispensing land they nominally own. Cambodia leased land to Kuwaiti
investors last August after mutual prime-ministerial visits. Last year
the Sudanese and Qatari governments set up a joint venture to invest in
Sudan; the Kuwaiti and Sudanese ministers of finance signed what they
called a "giant" strategic partnership for the same purpose. Saudi
officials have visited Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan,
the Philippines, South Africa, Sudan, Turkey, Ukraine and Vietnam to
talk about land acquisitions. The balance between the state and private
sectors is heavily skewed in favour of the state.

That makes the current round of land acquisitions different in kind,
as well as scale. When private investors put money into cash crops,
they tended to boost world trade and international economic activity.
At least in theory, they encourage farmers to switch from growing
subsistence rice to harvesting rubber for cash; from growing rubber to
working in a tyre factory; and from making tyres to making cars. But
now, governments are investing in staple crops in a protectionist
impulse to circumvent world markets. Why are they doing this and what
are the effects?

"Food security is not just an issue for Abu Dhabi or the United Arab
Emirates," says Eissa Mohamed Al Suwaidi of the Abu Dhabi Fund for
Development. "Recently, it has become a hot issue everywhere." He is
confirming what everyone knows: the land deals are responses to
food-market turmoil.

Between the start of 2007 and the middle of 2008, THE ECONOMIST index
of food prices rose 78%; soyabeans and rice both soared more than 130%.
Meanwhile, food stocks slumped. In the five largest grain exporters,
the ratio of stocks to consumption-plus-exports fell to 11% in 2009,
below its ten-year average of over 15%.

It was not just the price rises that rattled food importers. Some of
them, especially Arab ones, are oil exporters and their revenues were
booming. They could afford higher prices. What they could not afford,
though, was the spate of trade bans that grain exporters large and
small imposed to keep food prices from rising at home. Ukraine and
India banned wheat exports for a while; Argentina increased export
taxes sharply. Actions like these raised fears in the Gulf that one day
importers might not be able to secure enough supplies at any price.
They persuaded many food-importing countries that they could no longer
rely on world food markets for basic supplies.

PANIC BUYING
What to do instead? The obvious answer was: invest in domestic farming
and build up your own stocks. Countries that could, did so. Spending on
rural infrastructure is the third largest item in China's 4 trillion
yuan ($585 billion) economic-stimulus plan. European leaders said high
prices showed the protectionist common agricultural policy needed to be
preserved.

But the richest oil exporters did not have that option. Saudi Arabia
made itself self-sufficient in wheat by lavishing untold quantities of
money to create grain fields in the desert. In 2008, however, it
abandoned its self-sufficiency programme when it discovered that
farmers were burning their way through water--which comes from a
non-replenishable aquifer below the Arabian sands--at a catastrophic
rate. But if Saudi Arabia was growing more food than it should, and if
it did not trust world markets, the only solution was to find farmland
abroad. Other Gulf states followed suit. So did China and South Korea,
countries not usually associated with water shortages but where
agricultural expansion has been draining dry breadbasket areas like the
North China Plain.

Water shortages have provided the hidden impulse behind many land
deals. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestle, claims: "The
purchases weren't about land, but water. For with the land comes the
right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially
a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the
deal." He calls it "the great water grab".

For the countries seeking land (or water), the attractions are clear.
But what of those selling or leasing their resources? They are keen
enough, even sending road shows to the Gulf. Sudan is letting investors
export 70% of the crop, even though it is the recipient of the largest
food-aid operation in the world. Pakistan is offering half a million
hectares of land and promising Gulf investors that if they sign up, it
will hire a security force of 100,000 to protect the assets. For poor
countries land deals offer a chance to reverse decades of
underinvestment in agriculture.

In developing countries as a whole, the average growth in cereal yields
has fallen from 3-6% a year in the 1960s to 1-2% a year now, says the
World Bank. This reflects, among other things, a decline in public
investment. In the 14 countries that depend most on farming, public
spending on agriculture almost halved as a share of total public
spending between 1980 and 2004. Foreign aid to farming also halved in
real terms over the same period. Farming has done worst of all in
Africa, where most of the largest land deals are taking place. There,
agricultural output per farmworker was the lowest in the world during
1980-2004, growing by less than 1% a year, compared with over 3% a year
in East Asia and the Middle East.

The investors promise a lot: new seeds, new marketing, better jobs,
schools, clinics and roads. An official at Sudan's agriculture ministry
said investment in farming in his country by Arab states would rise
almost tenfold from $700m in 2007 to a forecast $7.5 billion in 2010.
That would be half of all investment in the country, he said. In 2007,
agricultural investment had been a mere 3% of the total.

China has set up 11 research stations in Africa to boost yields of
staple crops. That is needed: sub-Saharan Africa spends much less than
India on agricultural R&D. Even without new seed varieties or fancy
drip-feed irrigation, investment should help farmers. One of the
biggest constraints on African farming is the inability to borrow money
for fertilisers. If new landlords just helped farmers get credit, it
would make a big difference.

Yet a certain wariness ought to be maintained. Farming in Africa is
hard. It breaks backs and the naive ambitions of outsiders. To judge by
the scale of projects so far, the new investors seem to be pinning
their hopes on creating technologically sophisticated large farms.
These have worked well in Europe and the Americas. Paul Collier of
Oxford University says Africa needs them too: "African peasant farming
has fallen further and further behind the advancing commercial
productivity frontier."

But alas, the record of large farms in Africa has been poor. Those that
have done best are now moving away from staple crops to higher-value
things such as flowers and fruit. Mechanised farming schemes that grow
staples have often ended with abandoned machinery rusting in the
returning bush. Moreover, large farmers are often well-connected and
spend more time lobbying for special favours than doing the hard work.

Politics of a different sort poses more immediate problems. In
Madagascar this year popular hostility to a deal that would have leased
1.3m hectares--half the island's arable land--to Daewoo Logistics, a
South Korean company, fanned the flames of opposition and contributed
to the president's overthrow. In Zambia, the main opposition leader has
come out against China's proposed 2m-hectare biofuels project--and
China has threatened to pull out of Zambia if he ever came to power.
The chairman of Cambodia's parliamentary foreign-affairs committee
complains that no one has any idea what terms are being offered to
Kuwait to lease rice paddies.

The head of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf,
dubs some projects "neocolonialist". Bowing before the wind, a Chinese
agriculture-ministry official insists his country is not seeking to buy
land abroad, though he adds that "if there are requests, we would like
to assist." (On one estimate, China has signed 30 agricultural
co-operation deals covering over 2m hectares since 2007.)

Objections to the projects are not simply Luddite. The deals produce
losers as well as winners. Host governments usually claim that the land
they are offering for sale or lease is vacant or owned by the state.
That is not always true. "Empty" land often supports herders who graze
animals on it. Land may be formally owned by the state but contain
people who have farmed it for generations. Their customary rights are
recognised locally, but often not accepted in law, or in the terms of a
foreign-investment deal.

So the deals frequently set one group against another in host countries
and the question is how those conflicts get resolved. "If you want
people to invest in your country, you have to make concessions," says
the spokesman for Kenya's president. (He was referring to a deal in
which Qatar offered to build a new port in exchange for growing crops
in the Tana river delta, something opposed by local farmers and
conservationists.) The trouble is that the concessions are frequently
one-sided. Customary owners are thrown off land they think of as
theirs. Smallholders have their arms twisted to sign away their rights
for a pittance.

This is worrying in itself. And it leads to so much local opposition
that some deals cannot be implemented. The Saudi Binladin Group put on
hold a $4.3 billion project to grow rice on 500,000 hectares of
Indonesia. China postponed a 1.2m hectare deal in the Philippines.

FARMS CONTROL
Joachim von Braun, the head of IFPRI, argues that the best way to
resolve the conflicts and create "a win-win" is for foreign investors
to sign a code of conduct to improve the terms of the deals for locals.
Various international bodies have been working on their versions of
such a code, including the African Union, which is due to ratify one at
a summit in July.

Good practice would mean respecting customary rights; sharing benefits
among locals (ie, not just bringing in your own workers), increasing
transparency (current deals are shrouded in secrecy) and abiding by
national trade policies (which means not exporting if the host country
is suffering a famine). These sound well and good. But Sudan and
Ethiopia have famines now: should they be declining to sign land deals
altogether? Many of the worst abuses are committed by the foreign
investors' local partners: will they be restrained by some
international code?

There are plenty of reasons for scepticism about these deals. If they
manage to reverse the long decline of farming in poor countries, they
will have justified themselves. But like any big farming venture, they
will take years to reveal their full impact. For the moment, the right
response is to defer judgment and keep a watchful, hopeful but wary eye
on their progress.

Re: NUB farmer
 

Sorry i believe the forum rules are against posting private information, nevertheless it's mostly lease land not owned.

Can you begin to imagine the pressure involved farming that much land?

Most everyone i talk to can't stand the guy but no one will turn away his business.

Good whiskey and a driver helps, i would imagine.

Re: NUB farmer
 

Just started with Rabbits this year. I recommend them to anyone, super easy to raise once you get the hang of it and have a good system worked out.

I have 5 bunnies and it take about 3 minutes a day to take care for them.
Californian meat rabbits are a good breed in addition to New Zealands.

Re: NUB farmer
 

Pembroke or Cardigan Corgi?

My wife has a Pem, and he's a neat little dog. Corgis definitely have a "big dog" attitude.

Re: NUB farmer
 

The Corgi is a Pembroke.

RE Outsourcing's Third Wave: A group from New Zealand has bought up "mucho grande" acres of land in my county. The locals HATE them. I have not had any interaction and I don't know what they are doing with the cattle they raise.

RE recycling: the company I work for sometimes discards damaged/wore out wheel barrels. This week, I got a nice one that had some parts missing somehow. I scavenged the needed axle and hangar parts from an old wheel barrel I had at home. My 13yo son helped with the project. I only had to buy 4 bolts and an inner tube :) Total cost: $5+/- The old wheel barrel was turned into a pig water trough/wallow. Total cost: free

Re: NUB farmer
 

I'm at 3000 and i'm a little guy in my area.

And this isnt scrub ranchland.

Re: NUB farmer
 

Geez, and I thought over 100 acres was alot! I couldn't imagine having that much land!

Also, I just read a great thread on somethingawful.com's pet island forums about raising rabbits for meat. Interesting read. There are also pics of how to dress them. Lots of great info. Not for the faint of heart.....

Re: NUB farmer
 

Great pics...

OT .... mike brown says rabbit meat isn't good for you... thoughts?

www.mikebrownsolutions.com

Re: NUB farmer
 

I didn't see anything on his front page that discusses rabbit meat, but he is perhaps talking about 'rabbit starvation'?
this happens in survival situations where a person has access only to rabbit meat, and can eat as much as their belly can hold and think they are doing fine on the food front, but still starve because rabbit meat is so lean that they don't get the necessary fat content in their diet.
if you are eating other food, along with the rabbits, where you get necessary fats, it isn't a problem. I haven't heard of any other health problems from rabbit meat, myself....

Re: NUB farmer
 

something about how the rabbit processes its "cud" :questionm <shrug>

Re: NUB farmer
 

Not sure about "cud" but a rabbit does eat its own poo to further digest and extract more minerals from it.

I've never heard of rabbit meat being bad for you other that the "rabbit starvation" if it's the only thing you eat, and the spotted liver disease.

According to the USDA, rabbit meat is higher in protean, lower in fat, lower in cholesterol, and lower in moisture that any other meat.
edit: forgot to add, rabbit meat has also been used as a food source since the Roman times.

On a totally different note, I also have a pem Corgi named Bonnie

Re: NUB farmer
 

Cute little girl!

Re: NUB farmer
 

Thanks, she takes after her mother. :s9: