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Small Farms Conference

Today was another tree cutting day for me. I cut about twenty trees, and adding yesterday’s work, it may be enough. Hopefully, tomorrow we will drag the the trees into the field and then I’ll split them into logs. I think an optimistic goal will be to finish my sweet home in a month. What originally was going to take two weeks, stretched to a month plus. We have a pattern around here: stuff always take much longer than we plan. Murphy’s Law boldly applies around this area. We had talks about having hot water weeks ago, and yet there is none so far. If one thing can go wrong, two things (at least) will go wrong: chainsaws going bad, drinking water leaking, tractor liquid spilling, welding being too slow and totally ineffective. Boy, I truly hope Nietzsche was right: what does not kill us, makes us stronger.

Last week I went to the small farms conference.

Generally it was neat enough, although it looked pretty amateur for a conference that has been held for fifteen years. Two things especially struck me:
1. Me and my girl, were the only young people attending. Most of the crowd was in their mid fifties. I think that in a decade or two, most of these guys will retire and small farms will become scarce.
2. The conference was very quite and slow. Its fair to say that most of the seminars and lectures had only one quarter of the seats taken. It was funny as some people lectured to as few as ten people. It seems that small farms are already becoming more and more scarce.

This show did got me thinking about future income routes. I plan to harvest hundreds of pounds of organic booty, and maybe even start raising poultry by the hundreds. Biodiesel sounded sweet enough as well, but I think Marcin is right: our main income will come from technology. Vegetables and poultry will provide us just some pocket money.

-Ronny

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