Sheer Total Utter Neglect Farming

Don't be enslaved to your farm. Or your kids. To the extent possible, put it on auto-pilot.

Yes. It's work. But a farm should serve the farmer. Not the other way around.

We spend our lives bringing water to the cattle. Why would you do this?

News flash: Cows have legs. Leave them a path to the water and they'll find it, then they'll go back where their food (pasture) is, no matter how far away you put it. Amazing. It's almost like animals can remember where their food and water is.

Sometimes, after 10 years or so, after generations of farming, people might start to figure this out.

The only thing that needs to be fenced off is the areas where you don't want them to be.

Yes, that's a whole different mentality, and it eliminates the irrigation ditches, piping, positive head pressure, ponds, catchments, and 99% of the earthworks. In some places, you can drop in a dam and you're done forever.

If it's thirsty, it can walk half a mile for a drink. If it's hungry, it can walk a half a mile back. What did you think animals did before we got here? Look for the water fountain down the hall and then give up if it's not there?

In Africa, animals called humans (if that's what you want to call them) walk miles every day to find a source of water. Then walk back with a big tub of water on their head or on their back. Why?

In Africa, it's dangerous to live close to water. Safer to send the kids 8 miles to fetch it every day.

The animals follow the dude who knows where the food is. Instead of loading the herd into a truck, Greg Judy just walks them miles down the road to the next farm to get their food. The neighbors set up chairs to watch the herd go by.

One farmer put the milking stand outside her kitchen window so her cow brings the milk to her kitchen every morning. Duh! The cow wants to be milked and it wants to get fed. So it will show up exactly where you put and come when you call her.

We're the masters of nature. Some people want a bear skin rug for their house, and don't mind if the bear is still inside it. (Of course, I wouldn't try this with a bear I didn't know.)

Sheer, total, utter neglect is a nature-based "Darwinian" philosophy. The strong survive, even when and where they're not supposed to.

To have a commie-proof farm that allows you to live off the land with zero cost and zero effort and doesn't enslave you to it like society wants you enslaved to your kids, it just takes some know-how.

Shouldn't the goal be to eliminate and reverse the cost of kids, the importing of cheap, $20 imported rubber and plastic shoes and create high-paying jobs for 7 year-old American kids making their own shoes at home?

If you can do it with chickens, you can do it with kids. Chickens and pigs do a better job than the tractors do, but without the cost and compaction of the soil. When that's too much work, you just do a chicken tractor without the chicken tractor and let the dog patrol the farm instead of putting up fences and chicken coops.

Heck, pigs make better farmers than most people do. And they work on automatic pilot and work for slops.

But sometimes a little knowledge is dangerous and unscientific. If you want a zero-management food forest (or ten), then stop reading the books and let (as Jeff Goldblum puts it) life find a way.

You'll get cold-hardy nut trees in places they "can't" grow. And given the chance, their offspring will thrive, thanks to their parents superior genetics adapting to the climate.

90% + of the seeds and saplings were going to die before maturity anyway. Just drop your saplings and see what happens. You might end up with something worth grafting, cloning, and breeding.

But not until you have proven genetics. Something that thrives without your help.

In addition, by blind faith and sowing seeds the way Jesus talks about, you can pretty much grow all season, all climates. (Epecially with the bare-minimum greenhouse of an overturned bucket.)

In most climates, given nothing more than a plastic tub over the top, life will continue to grow all winter, even under a layer of snow, even while you're uprooting some of your onion crop to toss into your soup.

In fact, because pigs simply don't give a damn, they go around planting seeds everywhere they roam. If you let them wander, they're one of nature's best compost turners, adding beneficial disturbance if you let them, and planting crops you wouldn't think to plant.

Just feed them the kind of foods you might want to eat and let them roam around. That's it.

That's how nature plants things. At best, agriculture is merely mimmicking what nature does on its own.

Once you arrive at genetics that work in your area, now the farmer's real work begins, scaling up the success by rubber-stamping the successful genetics everywhere.

But not until you have something proven to work. Like raising cattle for free on land you don't own.

When you're over-spending on pesticides to perserve inferior genetics, you're working too hard and increasing the cost of food.

Sheer, total, utter neglect is like the Roman gladiator method. Make it really hard to survive, then reward the survivors.

I've been breeding pet rodents this way. In the most brutal possible conditions. The survivors are kid-proof and gentle as lambs.