Inner City Farmer

Yesterday I introduced the Self-Sufficiency Meter, which is a rough gauge of our level of autonomy here on the Inner City Farm. I aspire to reach 100 percent but fully realize that it’s not a very realistic goal. 100 percent self-sufficiency would mean that we use zero electricity from the grid and zero water from the municipal supply, that we grow and raise all our food, that everything we use gets recycled in some manner, that we never throw anything away, that we never buy anything from a store, and that we never pay for services provided by someone else. No, not very realistic at all. And yet I still aspire.

I estimated that we were at 29 percent self-sufficiency yesterday, and, to be honest, that was just a number that popped into my head. There are ways to compute exactly how much of the earth’s resources you’re using and how much carbon your lifestyle is producing. If you’re into crunching numbers, read Jim Merkel’s book Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth. He provides countless charts and graphs that analyze how many children you have and how often you use your car and how much land you live on and then they spit out a number that reflects your level of consumption. Nice, but a little geeky for me. I’d rather guesstimate.

That’s how I came up with 29 percent. So what does that number mean? Well, right now we’re getting about half our food from the grocery store and the farmer’s market and half from our garden and hunting. The broccoli has been harvested and eaten (as far as the amount of food you get for the space required to grow it, I wouldn’t recommend growing it). The spinach is on its last legs. The arugula has been the centerpiece of most of my meals this week, but it just flowered so it’s pretty much done too. The carrots are looking good and we should be eating them within the next several weeks. The chickens are still producing between two and three eggs a day, and when we’re not bartering the eggs for vegetables from Chad and Lindsay we’re eating omelets and fried-egg sandwiches.

I’m also happy to say that roughly 95% of the meat we’ve been eating I’ve shot myself. This lifestyle would be much easier if I was a vegetarian, but I’m not. I crave meat and believe humans were meant to eat it (we have incisors for a reason), and there is a huge surplus if you’re willing to do the dirty work of actually finding it and “harvesting” it yourself. I’m lucky to have a friend that has a large ranch full of deer and wild hogs. Without any natural predators to keep their numbers in check these animals have seen their populations explode in recent years.

While commercial pork producers do unbelievable damage to the environment by raising too many animals in too little space, wild hogs are everywhere you look and very few people are hunting them. The population of feral hogs is estimated to be four million, two million of which are in Texas, and you don’t even need a hunting license to shoot one, and yet very few people do. Many ranchers shoot these animals and leave the corpses to rot in their fields because they believe that the meat tastes bad. Well, I shot one in December, and, let me tell you, it’s some of the best tasting meat I’ve ever had. I have about thirty pounds of sausage in my freezer, and I wish I had more.

As you can see, we’re doing pretty well when it comes to food, but we have a long way to go when it comes to energy and water consumption. I aspire to build a guest house on the back end of my lot that would get all its energy and water from the sun and the sky, but I’ve got a lot more to learn about natural building before I’m going to be able to start that project.

I’m going to give ourselves another percentage point on the meter today because I’m going to be eating an arugula salad for lunch and because I have yet to use my van and because I’m about to go water the loquat tree I recently planted with last night’s bathwater. Every little thing counts.

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 30%