Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (20 page)

Besides making sure you have the varieties you want that will grow in your conditions, saving seeds saves you money and contributes to the overall ecosystem in your garden. There have been major changes in the climate everywhere. Here in Virginia, winter and spring were unusually warm in 2012. As I write this, spring in 2013 is quite the opposite — cold and wet. Nature knows what is going to happen before we humans do. (We should pay more attention.) I wonder if the seeds know from one season to the next what to prepare for, just as animals know if they need to grow an extra thick winter coat or not. If so, the seeds that you save from your garden will be much better prepared for what’s to come than seeds grown hundreds of miles away, or more. Whether you count your growing area in square feet or in acres, seed saving should be high on your list of priorities when you grow a sustainable diet.

10

Including Animals

A
SUSTAINABLE DIET
includes food that is grown on your farm or in your region and some of that might be animal products. Some land is better suited to pasture than to crop production. Including animals in your plan will expand the ecological footprint of your diet, since the land that grows the food that the animal eats needs to be considered. You can plan a diet of only plants, but you would be hard pressed to fill all your nutritional needs without taking supplements, which are not part of a sustainable diet. If that plan, which would involve a smaller area to grow your food, doesn’t supply your needs, it is not a complete plan and needs to be expanded anyway.

In
Chapter 3
I mentioned that if your diet only consisted of plants that you grew, in as small an area as possible, you would have to pay careful attention to getting enough calories, protein, and calcium. If you only ate plant foods, and even if you got enough calories, protein, and calcium from them, not only could some nutrients be out of balance, but the one nutrient that would still be missing would be vitamin B
₁₂
. Our bodies can store B
₁₂
, so if you had plenty of it in your diet for years, you would have extra that would carry over for quite some time, even years, if you stopped ingesting it. Eventually, though, you would run out. We happen to be at the top of the food chain and our bodies are adapted to a
vast array of food choices. If we add just a little bit of foods from animal sources to our diet, we can fix these deficiencies.

In researching this nutritional information I discovered that the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) that I have long been familiar with have undergone some changes. The RDA is now part of the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs), which includes a set of four reference values: (1) RDA is the average daily dietary intake of a nutrient that is sufficient to meet the requirement of nearly all (97–98%) healthy persons; (2) Estimated Average Requirement (EAR) is the amount of a nutrient that is estimated to meet the requirement of half of all healthy individuals in the population; (3)Adequate Intake (AI) is based on observed intakes of the nutrient by a group of healthy persons and is only established when an RDA cannot be determined; and (4) Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) is the highest daily intake of a nutrient that is likely to pose no risks of toxicity for almost all individuals. The EAR for vitamin B
₁₂
for males and females age 14 and older is 2 mcg and that’s what I’ll be using for my calculations. The requirement is higher for pregnant and lactating women. The updated (1997) RDA for B
₁₂
is 2.4 mcg for age 14 and older.

Eggs were the first food I looked at for their B
₁₂
content. I found that the amount of B
₁₂
in eggs has dropped considerably from USDA’s 1999 Standard Reference Release 13 that I found in
Nutrition Almanac
, to USDA’s 2012 Release 25 that is available online.
¹
I also consulted
Bowes & Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used
which has the 2008 Standard Reference Release 21. Food from animals that are on pasture has more nutrients than food from animals raised in conventional confinement systems. USDA’s information is taken from conventionally raised animals, so I decided to go with the earlier B
₁₂
value which is 1.75 times the current (2013) available value. If you are interested in a sustainable diet, you would be eating eggs from chickens that have access to pasture.
Mother Earth News
magazine has taken an interest in the nutritional value of eggs and has found that eggs from hens raised on pasture may contain significantly more vitamin A, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E, and beta carotene,
²
but they didn’t test for B
₁₂
. There is a 1974 British study
³
that shows the B
₁₂
content of free-range eggs to be 1.7 times that of eggs from factory farms.

I could meet my need for vitamin B
₁₂
with 2.6 large chicken eggs a day. Those eggs would also supply about 10 percent of my calorie requirement, 35 percent of my protein, and 7 percent of my calcium. If, instead, I consumed only 1 egg plus 1½ cups of whole cow’s milk a day, I would meet my need for B
₁₂
and provide 15 percent of the calories, 40 percent of the protein and 45 percent of the calcium I need. Adding the milk really increases the calcium. Cow’s milk has more than five times the B
₁₂
that goat’s milk has. That’s a puzzle to me, since there is not such a difference with the other nutrients. To get the same amount of vitamin B
₁₂
, I would need 2 eggs and 2.8 cups of goat’s milk. If you are not a milk drinker, you could use milk instead of water to make hot cereal with your cornmeal or make yogurt and cheese with it. You might prefer to eat duck eggs, rather than chicken eggs. One duck egg provides 190 percent of the B
₁₂
requirement for an adult. Duck eggs are larger than chicken eggs, but comparing the same weight of duck to chicken eggs, duck eggs contain 3.7 times the vitamin B
₁₂
of chicken eggs.

Rather than eggs and milk, you could get your B
₁₂
from fish. Three ounces of light tuna canned in water would be enough. However, in a sustainable diet, locally harvested fish would be on the menu, not canned tuna. Three ounces of catfish would meet the B
₁₂
requirement and the same serving of trout has almost double that. I don’t know much about fishing, so I won’t be addressing that in this book. If fishing is a part of your life, or could be, include that in your diet plan. If you are getting your food from the water, you would want to work toward making sure the water is free of contaminants.

In a sustainable diet, when you are eating eggs and drinking milk, or eating cheese and yogurt, you also have to consider everything involved in bringing you those foods. These things are produced for you by the females. In order to have females, just as many males will be hatched or born. Those young males will become part of your diet, as will the females once they are past production. Otherwise, what would happen to them? They could just live out their days somewhere, I suppose, and that would leave an even bigger ecological footprint. I don’t like to use the word slaughter, because that sounds like a vicious act. I don’t like the word process either, because that sounds too industrial; but at some
point, those animals will be killed to provide food for your table. When that happens, think of having shared your life with them, and now their energy will become yours. That energy is not going away. With that in mind, say a prayer of thanks before doing the deed and continue with respect for what you will receive. If you are buying your meat, rather than growing it yourself, buy it from someone who has the same values. When you grow and eat a sustainable diet, you become part of the food system. At the top of the food chain, there is nothing that is going to eat you, but maybe you could arrange to be buried in the woods at the end of your days to complete the cycle.

Chickens

Having a few hens in the backyard is usually the next step in homesteading after putting in a garden. A shelter can be cobbled together from almost anything, although some of the chicken house designs I’ve seen are quite elaborate (and expensive). Times have changed since I got my first hens and keeping chickens has become quite the thing. Local ordinances might have rules about what kind of chicken shelter you have, how many hens you can keep, etc. If your locality doesn’t allow chickens, there is probably a group of eager citizens rallying to change that.

You can expect a hen to lay about 200 eggs a year — more in the first half of the year and less in the second half. I never put a light in my chicken house to push the hens to lay more, preferring nature to take its course. It seems that as the days begin to get the least bit longer, the number of eggs increase. Two hens would provide you with enough eggs to average an egg a day with a few extra for the year — it just wouldn’t be an egg a day each day. Sometimes during the year you would be eating lots, and sometimes little or none. If you are concerned about B
₁₂
, that’s okay. Since your body can store this vitamin for a long time, you don’t need to ingest it every day. Those extra eggs you eat in the spring will provide the B
₁₂
you need later. Even if the hens are taking a vacation from giving you eggs, they will always need to eat. You can let them out in your yard to harvest what they can from the grass and insects, adding nutrition to their diet and yours.

Letting the hens out on grass is necessary with a sustainable diet, but controlling them is not as easy as one might assume. They can fly over a four-foot fence. If the area is large enough, however, they won’t. At one time, I had all my hens in portable pens, inspired by reading
Chicken Tractor
by Andy Lee and Patricia Foreman. I moved the pens around the pasture to a fresh spot each day. If you do that in your yard, be prepared to have some low spots where the chickens have dug holes — even after just one day. Also, be prepared for chicken poop to be in your yard (and on your shoes). About Thanksgiving, my hens would all be moved to the chicken house with a yard enclosed by a six foot high fence. They’d go back out to the chicken tractors in March when things started to green up. We have fewer hens now, and I like them to not be so confined, so I don’t use chicken tractors anymore, but they are a great way to manage chickens in limited space.

Now, our hens are sheltered by the chicken house all year, but they have more room to roam, even in the winter. In the process of doing other fencing projects, it turned out the fences we put up allowed the chickens to be free to wander everywhere but the yard and garden. That’s something to keep in mind when making your permaculture plan. I’ll talk more about fencing in
Chapter 12
.

I buy old farm books when I find them. They provide great information on how things were when every farm was small and diversified. I have to sort out the good information from the not-so-good — such as using creosote on the chicken roosts to prevent lice. (In case you don’t know, creosote is a banned product now.) One book
⁴
told of the necessity to raise growing pullets (young hens) on pasture, in addition to feeding grain. It was suggested that one acre could pasture 600 pullets (about 74 ft
²
per pullet), reducing the cost of raising them by five to ten percent. According to Joel Salatin in
Pastured Poultry Profits
,
⁵
it is possible to reduce grain consumption by 30 percent when the chickens are on pasture, with no drop in egg production. When you buy chicks or hens, it makes a difference where they’ve been before you get them. You want ones that have been raised on grass, or have had parents raised on grass. With no other choices you could order from a hatchery, and I suppose everyone should do that once in their lives. It’s an adventure to
get a box of chicks in the mail. Locally, you could find poultry advertised on Craigslist, the local newspaper or swap news, or inquire at your feed store. They always know who’s doing what.

Getting the chickens out in the grass allows them to eat the grass, weed seeds, and bugs; which is healthier for the chickens, the grass, and for you when you eat the eggs. I find my chickens love to dig around in piles of leaves and along the fences. They are known to keep down the tick population. For good egg production, foraging like that isn’t enough. If I grew enough grains here, I could feed them that, but that’s not the case. I buy organic corn, wheat, and oats and grind my own feed. The mix I feed my chickens is 60 percent corn, 20 percent wheat, and 20 percent oats. I have been doing this since 2000 when I became concerned about genetically modified ingredients, especially soy, in the chicken feed. I keep ground oyster shells available to them for extra calcium. (You can buy ground oyster shells for this purpose; I don’t grind them up myself.) Although, since they are out scratching in the ground, most likely they are picking up calcium there. You can also supply calcium in their diet by feeding eggshells — crushing them first so that the chickens don’t get the idea that they can just eat eggs. I feel that by having my hens free-range during the day, they are balancing out their diet on their own, picking up needed grit, vitamin D (from the sun), and other things that hens kept in confinement need to have provided in their feed. I could put out less feed and keep more hens to get the same number of eggs, which is easier to think about now that I’m not selling eggs. Sometimes farmers who grow grain will sell it to you out of their bins, right at the farm. Make sure to ask about their growing methods and seed source.