Smith Family Farms
Over the past year or so, we have become very concerned about where our food comes from. After reading, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Food, Inc., several other books and watching the documentaries Food, Inc. and King Corn it has become apparent to me that our country’s food supply is dangerous and we are all in deep doo doo as they say. So, after getting up a good head of steam worrying about these things, I decided it was time to act and what better way to do that than by taking care of our family’s food needs in a more healthy and sustainable way and then using our example to impact others. So, we started out with buying grass fed beef from Hunter Cattle in Brooklet, Georgia. We then started buying local organic produce from a farm here in Savannah. Next we planted our own garden this year. This one will be a multi year experiment to see how much of our own food we can grow. Our first crops are tomatoes, carrots, basil, peppers, and swiss chard. Not sure how all of those will grow here in Savannah, but I thought we’d start there and add and subtract as experience teaches us.
The next phase of our food transformation is the addition of backyard chickens. Our friends down the street have had their own chickens for a year or so now and after seeing how well the experiment went for them, the wife and I talked it over and decided what the hay. So last weekend, with help from a friend, I built a chicken ark using the Catawba Converticoop plans (pictures to follow) and we now have six baby chicks living in our back yard. We are going to baby sit these three week old chicks for about a month and then swap them out for layers. The kids are fascinated by the whole thing, having spent hours now sitting outside watching the baby chicks free range around our yard. I can’t wait until we have some fresh eggs to eat. We will have moved one step further down the road to controlling our own destiny. For me, this whole thing is ultimately aimed towards the sort of self sufficiency that Americans enjoyed in the early part of the last century. I’m tired of being so dependent on what others who have no concern for mine or my family’s welfare decide to do.
