Completely Self sufficient systems

[Banana01]

Where I live it is land in the mountains that grows grass, clean water year round from a river, and banana plants which in turn sustain cows, pigs, chickens, geese, ducks, horses, turkeys, mules, other avian species, rabbits, dogs, cats, and every other creature. Tropical weather plays a role. But you cannot remove man from that.

If you remove the bananas, take away the pigs, because that is how they are sustained. But bananas are a very self sustained plant, bananas and monkeys for example would be able to entirely exist seperate.

Any self sustained system relies on clean water.

 

[HollowOfWisps]

The best and most efficient systems come down to maximizing what you take (not wasting) and giving back (not taking for granted) what resources are available to you. I think a lot of systems fail because there are people out there who are in love with the idea of doing something for a cause, see all of the YouTube farmers, want to jump on the green earth bandwagon and only focus on gaining something from their animals and the land essentially living like parasites only ever taking. In reality, a self sufficient and sustaining system is only possible by viewing it as a relationship where you, the land and animals all take and give. For example, I know a couple who started off with almost 50 acres of awesome fertile land and completely depleted it over the years. They took everything from the land, but never gave back. The did not practice rotational grazing of their livestock, they didn't take time to fertilize correctly for their soil type, they didn't even utilize their goats to weed instead they kept the goats in the same 24'x24' pen, they didn't ever plant new grass, they removed trees and always planted their crops in the same fields never rotating them. They went from beautiful green rolling hills of open fields to a muddy, weeded and eroding mess. I also know another couple who had only 10 acres of hard clay soil that for their first couple of years there nothing would grow. They spent their time fertilizing accordingly, weeding, planting local grasses, rotating their garden plots, adding trees near the edges of the gulley and dumped rocks there to help with erosion. Now they have beautiful gardens, thick and lush grass growing everywhere and haven't lost any property to the gulley.

 

[My Bagurks]

I’d like to get to that point some day, but for now I’ve taken baby steps.
When I clean the coop out, I throw it in the run. Once a year I clean the run out and pile it up to compost. The following year, that pile goes on my garden to sit through winter. I don’t use any insecticide or anything so a lot of what my garden produces goes to the chickens.
So there’s at least a little bit of a cycle going.

 

[3KillerBs]

The few times I've been to NC and seen "disturbed earth" I do wonder how anything grows in that red clay!

I think we need a major change in this country to save organics from landfilling and make them into compost to help some of the tired (or just terrible) soils out there be more productive.

That clay is FERTILE stuff. It will grow just about anything.

I'm in the Sandhills -- nutrient-deficient, acidic Miocene beach remnants. The natural environment here is called a "fire dependent, impoverished ecology".

A large part of what my chickens are FOR is to improve my land with their composted bedding and poop.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

We've mainly eaten our own eggs (still working on my dad realizing my eggs are just as safe as his store ones) and have processed some males to lessen the amount of chicken we buy (We will likely always buy at least some chicken)

 

[U_Stormcrow]

I have foot tall raised beds - the nearby trees "contaminate" the beds by sending shoots off their roots from below, draining the bed of nutrients. (I don't blame them) Without the shade offered by the tree 20', 30' away thru part of the day, the top incho of soil becomes very dry, very rapidly.

"Best" soil on my property is probably the small area of loose sands where I had my septic field located - I'll let you know in a few years - I'm slowly terracing my way uphill from it to capture loose sand and worn clay as the weather washes them off the hill top.

 

[rosemarythyme]

I wish so much that we had water on this land. A few years ago we'd looked at a place where there was a pond and we had visions of ducks.

It sounds great until you have it haha. We have a pond of about 1 acre (we get wild ducks and herons) as well as the creek across the back that feeds into it. The pond is quite overgrown but we've had county biologists come out and look at it and they like it, so they said to leave it alone. The creek floods yearly to some degree, though this was the worst:

We had "dams" too thanks to beavers, but we got permission to trap them because obviously anything that restricts water flow here is going to lead to more flooding like that.

 

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

Chickens/compost/garden is a good start. Keep the nutrients cycling and keep them hyper-local.

I’ve been thinking a lot about kelp and invasive species as chicken feed…I just know there something there.

 

[U_Stormcrow]

Kelp is a good trace mineral source, and depending on variety, can be a good prtein source, too - once dried. But unless you live on the seashore and gather it off your beach, that's not really sustainable living to bring it in.

Invasives??? Yeah, well meaning, hard working, people brought kudzu in for use as a high protein feed they could grow on site. Thanks, no. If people who worked a lot harder than I plan to couldn't control it, I definitely have no chance.

 

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

I’m not on the beach, but I live a lot closer to the ocean than the corn fields of the Midwest. An insane amount of agricultural land goes to producing animal feed…with all the chemical fertilizer, runoff, erosion that go with it. If the critters could eat kelp instead, the environmental effects would be huge.

And I wouldn’t suggest planting invasives to feed livestock, but if existing infestations could be controlled with livestock, either by grazing (or hunting/fishing invasive animals) then that’d be more sustainable too.