The same class of Satanic globalists that use fake pandemics, toxic jabs and unjustified wars to cull the population and wreak havoc everywhere have long perverted our food system to achieve those same goals.
It's genuinely heartening to read about people who are actually doing something to enhance their communities by making them more self-sufficient and, in the process, healthier! So thanks for that and the best of luck with your new co-op.
As a lover of all things natural fiber, I can say that alpaca bred specifically for fiber is lovely to knit and crochet with, making for very soft, warm garments. It's only drawback is it lacks the stretch of wool - something that can be overcome by taking that into consideration when choosing patterns and/or blending it with a nice merino wool to retain softness while enhancing stretch. A 50/50 blend of those two fibers is my favourite knitting and wearing experience!
The term breeders use to describe that stretch-ability is crimp. The huacaya breed produces fiber with much more crimp than the suri breed and some huacaya lines have more crimp in their fiber than others. Some huacaya breeders breed for lots of crimp in the fiber. Maybe try another source?
I did and enjoyed that too thanks! That's very interesting about the different breeds with different crimp. I will definitely look into that. I used to use a local alpaca producer's yarn but they took to sending it to a mill that needed to blend it with 30% wool and the one they used was so scratchy no none would wear the resulting garments!
Alpaca fleece is generally considered to have a better "hand" (softer feel) than wool, even at a greater micron than wool. Under a microscope one can see tiny barbs along the edge of wool fiber. Alpaca doesn't have those, which is why it has a better hand. Wool also has lanolin, which some people are allergic to. Alpaca has no lanolin.
Yes that's right. I owned a yarn store for a while and would often get customers with wool allergies and suggest they try alpaca. They were typically thrilled with the non-scratchy results.
Thank-you for writing this. So many people are unaware of how much work must be untaken before harvesting any type of healthy food for human consumption. We also have a School Co-Op and the kids with their parents provide labor; especially during the heaviest harvesting seasons.
Spring harvest isn't very far away...It comes fast once planting is completed.
Find it interesting about so many states now planning to use human fecal matter for fertilizer and am curious about how they'll change it in ways to make it healthy for soil while removing the stench. I don't mind animals...But, can't imagine running around the pastures, garden and fields in bare feet stepping in human waste.
Those biosolids, from municipal waste are a looming disaster. I just watched a video about a family farm that started using it because the EPA said it was ok. Now, their cows were dying, and the government came in and shut down their whole farm indefinitely, as the PFSAs were too high. They call them forever chemicals, so their whole farm is gone forever. I knew there were heavy metals and pharmaceuticals in the biosolids, but whoa!
Now humanure, that is another thing! You only have to make sure that noone contributing is on chemo or other drugs. Its really wonderful, and urine with 4 parts water is a wonderful fertilizer as well.
I used to milk 7 days a week. What shut me down at 75 was wrestling 10-12 bales of hay by myself. All the men around here have bad backs. I'm 5'4" and have bad knees!
I'll keep my ears and eyes open. What kind of radius do they have to live within?
Industrial factory farming turned me away from eating animal foods. I still cannot bear the thought of how they are treated and slaughtered. Reading your work and seeing your beautifully cared for animals brings me hope that we can all begin to respect life and treat all living beings with dignity. This sentiment goes to the living beings we know as plants too. The purposeful destruction and poisoning of this beautiful earth is heartbreaking... thanks Kyle for sharing your knowledge
Very inspiring, Kyle. I would like to add that verdolaga, or purslaine is bery high in omega 3 fatty acids. Its easy to grow, it seeds itself incessantly in my garden, and makes a nice addition to any salad. I wonder if your animals would like it. I throw tons in the compost.
Love to hear this story, how you will make your little valley less dependent on their meat, poultry and milk from the big producers. When I was in college in Santa Cruz, I befriended à hippie household up in the mountains of Santa Cruz. They had goats and I got fresh goat milk delivered every week. It was the amazing.
I have a food sensitivity to casein, a milk protein found in cow’s milk. That milk protein doesn’t exist in goat or sheep milk (or so I am told) so I eat goat cheese and sheep milk cheese, and goat milk yogurt.
I still have hippie friends who live in the hills north of SC.
I have some issues with milk proteins as well, even goat and sheep milk. Most of those proteins are separated out by the process of being made into butter or cheese. I have no problems with those products.
So are the milk proteins different in sheep and goat cheese? I use products made from goat or sheep milk, like the cheese or yogurt, not the milk directly. I also use grass fed cow milk butter with no issues.
Cows, goats and sheep milk all have several kinds of proteins, primarily different types of caseins and whey proteins. The protein structure is larger in cows, smaller in goats and sheep. Some have less trouble with the smaller proteins in goat and sheep dairy products.
The watery material produced by separating milk into curds and whey (the first step in cheese making) is whey. The fatty curds are used to make most types of cheese. Hence, doing that removes most of the whey protein from cheese. Much of the casein also gets separated out in that process.
Churning butter is even more efficient at separating the fat from the proteins.
Yogurt and kefir retain all the proteins, but those fermentation processes break down some of the proteins making them more digestible for some folks.
I've started buying beef and poultry from a regenerative farm near me. They've networked with one In Cali and I just received my first order of potatoes from there. 🙂
Thanks for sharing. And sorry about that bobcat incident. All the best!! 🎉🎉
A friend handed me a copy of Nourishing Traditions in 2002 or 3. Then I got Nourishing Fats, then Weston A Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration when it got republished. All are amazing.
Pure Luck Farm & Dairy in Dripping Springs (not far from Austin) makes wonderful goat chesse and does a good business.
They list their phone# and email. My friend is friends with them, but I have only tasted their cheese, which is Christmas-present quality. https://www.purelucktexas.com/
Love what you are doing there Kyle. Unfortunately, in many communities, the public still just doesn't get it. In mine (less than 1000 people), people are too busy putting exhaust systems on their ridiculous 75,000$ pickup trucks, polishing their Harleys, getting another tattoo, going through the drive thru, and buying their case of cheap GMO beer.
I am one of just a handful of people who garden, can, freeze, dehydrate, and everything else I can do. Most people will just say, "I don't see how anything going on in the world is affecting my life" when mentioning (for decades) what is coming.
What is going to happen in many of our communities, is when the excrement really does hit the fan, all of a sudden people will care. When it costs 500$ to fill up their stupid pickup and they have to choose between gas or food it will almost be too late. (Especially in zones where the growing season is around 3 months long and maybe a bit longer in a good year).
That being said, people *will* wake up. It's going to be people like us who can lead these willfully ignorant people back to reality. I'm not looking forward to it (and my inclination is to tell them all to pound sand), but I know it's the right thing to do. I often have to tell myself that it's not for these idiots that have ignored everything over the years, it's for the little children who will one day be in charge of things.
Most of the public has been effectively brainwashed for decades now and we have to make ourselves remember that. Some of us were spared from most of that brainwashing and it will be up to us in the end.
That's mostly AI bullhooey. For starters, Moringa is a tropical plant and will not grow where the Amish are (PA and near where I grew up in Kansas). I grow it here but it often freezes back or even gets killed if its a cold enough winter. The nutrition facts about it and the fact that chickens like it are accurate.
The information about comfrey is accurate, but I don't recall any Amish growing it for chickens.
Azolla is a good option, but again, I doubt if any Amish use it. It only grows during the warmest months of summer.
Tree collards go dormant in winter.
Amaranth is about the only good recommendation, but even it goes dormant in winter..
If I understood the narrator correctly, he did imply that the choice of the 5 different plants was because of their availability at different times of the year for uninterrupted feeding. But that still does not address the problem of growing the Moringa tree as you said.
I also wish I lived close enough to milk and make cheese. I miss my herd…Nubian-Alpine crosses made incredible milk. I ate chèvre 3x/day when I first started making it and the raw feta was out of this world. Nothing in the stores could hold a candle to anything we made.
Thanks for the marvelous descriptions! Here in south Phoenix we are starting a time bank to help us all survive
The land is not owned by the Arivaca CoOp. It's held in a trust by a guy who runs a large ngo. They lost the funding that was being used to run the former community garden and asked if we wanted to start our own non-profit to keep it going. That was when I got involved and helped found this CoOp and began steering it into this new direction. Not sure what the trust will think of this new direction.
The future of the trust seems a bit shaky. The guy in charge of the trust may not be long in this world and we know nothing about his kids. Ideally, we would like to purchase a different parcel of land in a better location.
Kyle I love reading your explanations of how our beautiful earth provides us everything we need. We recently switched to grass fed butter (Costco 🙄) and I was curious about its color … you explained it! Oddly, the organic pasture raised eggs from the same place have disappointingly pale yolks. Any ideas what the failure point(s) could be there? Maybe corn dumped in the “pasture”? Huh … maybe?
Right now the whole "pastured" promotion campaign is a bit scammy. There are no real guidelines or regulations. An egg farmer can call their eggs pastured when the birds might only be on pasture for a few minutes per day, at best. Maybe never. Or the pasture might be under several feet of snow for 6 months of the year. The same goes for butter. Some unscrupulous egg producers have begun to add calendula flower petals to the feed to make the eggs yolks yellow. Diary farmers have similar tricks.
Your best bet is to get those products at your local farmers market directly from farmers who are happy to have you visit their farm to see how they produce those foods.
Another sterling example of self preservation and independence. Interesting read all around.
Thank you Crixcyon.
It's genuinely heartening to read about people who are actually doing something to enhance their communities by making them more self-sufficient and, in the process, healthier! So thanks for that and the best of luck with your new co-op.
As a lover of all things natural fiber, I can say that alpaca bred specifically for fiber is lovely to knit and crochet with, making for very soft, warm garments. It's only drawback is it lacks the stretch of wool - something that can be overcome by taking that into consideration when choosing patterns and/or blending it with a nice merino wool to retain softness while enhancing stretch. A 50/50 blend of those two fibers is my favourite knitting and wearing experience!
Thank you BB
The term breeders use to describe that stretch-ability is crimp. The huacaya breed produces fiber with much more crimp than the suri breed and some huacaya lines have more crimp in their fiber than others. Some huacaya breeders breed for lots of crimp in the fiber. Maybe try another source?
Did you see this?
https://secularheretic.substack.com/p/fashionistas-vs-fashion-guerillas
I did and enjoyed that too thanks! That's very interesting about the different breeds with different crimp. I will definitely look into that. I used to use a local alpaca producer's yarn but they took to sending it to a mill that needed to blend it with 30% wool and the one they used was so scratchy no none would wear the resulting garments!
Alpaca fleece is generally considered to have a better "hand" (softer feel) than wool, even at a greater micron than wool. Under a microscope one can see tiny barbs along the edge of wool fiber. Alpaca doesn't have those, which is why it has a better hand. Wool also has lanolin, which some people are allergic to. Alpaca has no lanolin.
Yes that's right. I owned a yarn store for a while and would often get customers with wool allergies and suggest they try alpaca. They were typically thrilled with the non-scratchy results.
Thank-you for writing this. So many people are unaware of how much work must be untaken before harvesting any type of healthy food for human consumption. We also have a School Co-Op and the kids with their parents provide labor; especially during the heaviest harvesting seasons.
Spring harvest isn't very far away...It comes fast once planting is completed.
Find it interesting about so many states now planning to use human fecal matter for fertilizer and am curious about how they'll change it in ways to make it healthy for soil while removing the stench. I don't mind animals...But, can't imagine running around the pastures, garden and fields in bare feet stepping in human waste.
You are welcome BC3.
If your talking about sewage sludge, there is a backlash happening against that.
Those biosolids, from municipal waste are a looming disaster. I just watched a video about a family farm that started using it because the EPA said it was ok. Now, their cows were dying, and the government came in and shut down their whole farm indefinitely, as the PFSAs were too high. They call them forever chemicals, so their whole farm is gone forever. I knew there were heavy metals and pharmaceuticals in the biosolids, but whoa!
Now humanure, that is another thing! You only have to make sure that noone contributing is on chemo or other drugs. Its really wonderful, and urine with 4 parts water is a wonderful fertilizer as well.
I read that they also plan to use the "remains" of human beings too.
Soylent Green.
Enough to make people vomit just thinking about it. VOMIT EMOJI'S HERE!!!
Yes. 🤮🤮🤮
I used to milk 7 days a week. What shut me down at 75 was wrestling 10-12 bales of hay by myself. All the men around here have bad backs. I'm 5'4" and have bad knees!
I'll keep my ears and eyes open. What kind of radius do they have to live within?
Whatever they feel comfortable driving. Of course they'll get a generous share of the production.
Very encouraging. If I lived closer to you than Tucson, I would happily milk the goats. I miss having my own herd, which I sold several years ago.
Yes, that would be a bit much to do 7 days a week. Let me know if you can think of anyone else who might be able to do that.
Industrial factory farming turned me away from eating animal foods. I still cannot bear the thought of how they are treated and slaughtered. Reading your work and seeing your beautifully cared for animals brings me hope that we can all begin to respect life and treat all living beings with dignity. This sentiment goes to the living beings we know as plants too. The purposeful destruction and poisoning of this beautiful earth is heartbreaking... thanks Kyle for sharing your knowledge
You are welcome Karafree.
It seems there are many hard things to think about these days. I find solace in immersing myself in projects like this CoOp.
Very inspiring, Kyle. I would like to add that verdolaga, or purslaine is bery high in omega 3 fatty acids. Its easy to grow, it seeds itself incessantly in my garden, and makes a nice addition to any salad. I wonder if your animals would like it. I throw tons in the compost.
Great plant. It grows wild around here during the monsoon season. The goats love it. The chickens love it. I love it.
I've tried to introduce the more domesticated variety here that gets considerably larger, but it doesn't self seed like the wild version.
Love to hear this story, how you will make your little valley less dependent on their meat, poultry and milk from the big producers. When I was in college in Santa Cruz, I befriended à hippie household up in the mountains of Santa Cruz. They had goats and I got fresh goat milk delivered every week. It was the amazing.
I have a food sensitivity to casein, a milk protein found in cow’s milk. That milk protein doesn’t exist in goat or sheep milk (or so I am told) so I eat goat cheese and sheep milk cheese, and goat milk yogurt.
That's the plan.
I still have hippie friends who live in the hills north of SC.
I have some issues with milk proteins as well, even goat and sheep milk. Most of those proteins are separated out by the process of being made into butter or cheese. I have no problems with those products.
So are the milk proteins different in sheep and goat cheese? I use products made from goat or sheep milk, like the cheese or yogurt, not the milk directly. I also use grass fed cow milk butter with no issues.
Cows, goats and sheep milk all have several kinds of proteins, primarily different types of caseins and whey proteins. The protein structure is larger in cows, smaller in goats and sheep. Some have less trouble with the smaller proteins in goat and sheep dairy products.
The watery material produced by separating milk into curds and whey (the first step in cheese making) is whey. The fatty curds are used to make most types of cheese. Hence, doing that removes most of the whey protein from cheese. Much of the casein also gets separated out in that process.
Churning butter is even more efficient at separating the fat from the proteins.
Yogurt and kefir retain all the proteins, but those fermentation processes break down some of the proteins making them more digestible for some folks.
Hey Lupita, I went to UCSC too. Was such a grand town back in the day!
I went to Cabrillo College in the early 70’s. Not UCSC.
So very interesting and necessary!
I've started buying beef and poultry from a regenerative farm near me. They've networked with one In Cali and I just received my first order of potatoes from there. 🙂
Thanks for sharing. And sorry about that bobcat incident. All the best!! 🎉🎉
Good too hear!
Thanks for the tip-of-the-hat to Sally Morrell, WAPF founder & President. I’ve been a member for a decade and attended 5 conferences. 👍
A friend handed me a copy of Nourishing Traditions in 2002 or 3. Then I got Nourishing Fats, then Weston A Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration when it got republished. All are amazing.
Pure Luck Farm & Dairy in Dripping Springs (not far from Austin) makes wonderful goat chesse and does a good business.
They list their phone# and email. My friend is friends with them, but I have only tasted their cheese, which is Christmas-present quality. https://www.purelucktexas.com/
Love what you are doing there Kyle. Unfortunately, in many communities, the public still just doesn't get it. In mine (less than 1000 people), people are too busy putting exhaust systems on their ridiculous 75,000$ pickup trucks, polishing their Harleys, getting another tattoo, going through the drive thru, and buying their case of cheap GMO beer.
I am one of just a handful of people who garden, can, freeze, dehydrate, and everything else I can do. Most people will just say, "I don't see how anything going on in the world is affecting my life" when mentioning (for decades) what is coming.
What is going to happen in many of our communities, is when the excrement really does hit the fan, all of a sudden people will care. When it costs 500$ to fill up their stupid pickup and they have to choose between gas or food it will almost be too late. (Especially in zones where the growing season is around 3 months long and maybe a bit longer in a good year).
That being said, people *will* wake up. It's going to be people like us who can lead these willfully ignorant people back to reality. I'm not looking forward to it (and my inclination is to tell them all to pound sand), but I know it's the right thing to do. I often have to tell myself that it's not for these idiots that have ignored everything over the years, it's for the little children who will one day be in charge of things.
Most of the public has been effectively brainwashed for decades now and we have to make ourselves remember that. Some of us were spared from most of that brainwashing and it will be up to us in the end.
I agree, things will need to get very bad before most people get it.
I recently came across this 21 min. video about the Amish growing cost free chicken feed;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBybPrgnRk0
That's mostly AI bullhooey. For starters, Moringa is a tropical plant and will not grow where the Amish are (PA and near where I grew up in Kansas). I grow it here but it often freezes back or even gets killed if its a cold enough winter. The nutrition facts about it and the fact that chickens like it are accurate.
The information about comfrey is accurate, but I don't recall any Amish growing it for chickens.
Azolla is a good option, but again, I doubt if any Amish use it. It only grows during the warmest months of summer.
Tree collards go dormant in winter.
Amaranth is about the only good recommendation, but even it goes dormant in winter..
If I understood the narrator correctly, he did imply that the choice of the 5 different plants was because of their availability at different times of the year for uninterrupted feeding. But that still does not address the problem of growing the Moringa tree as you said.
Those are all summer crops.
I also wish I lived close enough to milk and make cheese. I miss my herd…Nubian-Alpine crosses made incredible milk. I ate chèvre 3x/day when I first started making it and the raw feta was out of this world. Nothing in the stores could hold a candle to anything we made.
Thanks for the marvelous descriptions! Here in south Phoenix we are starting a time bank to help us all survive
Have you been reading Reinette Senum's recent posts about time banks?
Also, I wanted to know how many acres is your coop land and if it is held by the conglomerate. Thank you!
20 acres total. About 2 acres under irrigation.
The land is not owned by the Arivaca CoOp. It's held in a trust by a guy who runs a large ngo. They lost the funding that was being used to run the former community garden and asked if we wanted to start our own non-profit to keep it going. That was when I got involved and helped found this CoOp and began steering it into this new direction. Not sure what the trust will think of this new direction.
The future of the trust seems a bit shaky. The guy in charge of the trust may not be long in this world and we know nothing about his kids. Ideally, we would like to purchase a different parcel of land in a better location.
Kyle I love reading your explanations of how our beautiful earth provides us everything we need. We recently switched to grass fed butter (Costco 🙄) and I was curious about its color … you explained it! Oddly, the organic pasture raised eggs from the same place have disappointingly pale yolks. Any ideas what the failure point(s) could be there? Maybe corn dumped in the “pasture”? Huh … maybe?
Right now the whole "pastured" promotion campaign is a bit scammy. There are no real guidelines or regulations. An egg farmer can call their eggs pastured when the birds might only be on pasture for a few minutes per day, at best. Maybe never. Or the pasture might be under several feet of snow for 6 months of the year. The same goes for butter. Some unscrupulous egg producers have begun to add calendula flower petals to the feed to make the eggs yolks yellow. Diary farmers have similar tricks.
Your best bet is to get those products at your local farmers market directly from farmers who are happy to have you visit their farm to see how they produce those foods.