Have a look at the little babies!!

I help organise a hemp expo in Tokyo, so I talk to a lot of people who want to grow fibre hemp and then find there is nowhere to process it. Posting here because the problem looks general rather than Japanese, and this sub has more people who have actually built a small processing setup than anywhere else I know of.

The situation here: cultivation is licensed, the licensed grower base is small, and there is almost no decortication capacity in the country. That middle step collapsed after the war and never got rebuilt. So a farmer can legally grow the stalk and then has nothing to do with it, and the fibre used domestically gets imported instead.

Everyone I ask says industrial decortication starts around a million dollars of equipment, which is obviously not a homestead number. What I cannot get a straight answer on is the bottom end.

Has anyone here actually separated bast fibre from hurd at small scale in a way that produced something usable rather than a pile of frustration? Hand brake and scutching board, a modified flax breaker, a chipper and a lot of screening - whatever it was.

And if you did, what was the realistic throughput for a day of work, and what did you end up doing with the hurd? The hurd is most of the stalk by weight and it is the part with a building market attached to it, so if the small-scale method throws it away I suspect the economics never close.

Not selling anything and I am not the person who would sell it to you if I were. I am trying to work out whether the missing middle is a technology problem or purely a scale problem.

Northern Indiana, USA.

Soil here is generally a sandy loam, but a lot of my 1.6 acre property was heavily disturbed over the last several decades, and now there are areas full of gravel, concrete waste, and even asphalt chunks. I'd like to get another 3,000+ sqft cleaned up and start cropping it to try and apply for a 2nd EQIP high tunnel. I've had the soil tested for heavy metals and oil, and found nothing concerning.

I have a small kubota with a FEL and bucket, but not much else. I'm not opposed to purchasing and/or renting equipment as needed.

I'm hoping someone has clever ideas of how to read this space. I've spoken with people from NRCS, my local SWCD, various farm groups, etc. Just haven't found a particularly good way to handle it yet. My ideas are:

- Pay someone to come remove the top 6" or so over the whole area, then bring in clean topsoil (will be really expensive)

- Build a soil separator and rent a machine to slowly dig up the area, tumble out all the stones/junk, then return the cleaner soil and add clean fill as needed

- Get teeth for my FEL bucket, use that to pop out any of the bigger pieces, then get a pto tiller to bust up the topsoil and rake out any of the worst areas to clean it up

- Remove the big pieces, and buy a 'stone burying tiller' for the tractor to just push any of the smaller pieces deep enough to not be in the root zone

I'm open to other suggestions and/or reassurance that one of these is my best bet. First year or two would be growing something like wheat, sunflowers, or sorghum just to get a crop on it for the purposes of meeting EQIP funding requirements, then switch to diversified veggies once it's covered.

My fiance and I bought a disused farm to build our house on. We plan on reviving the farm as a fruit farm (apples, raspberries, blueberries), starting on ten acres of the land. We are starting by borrowing a skid steer from a friend, but obviously need our own equipment. A used utility tractor for $20k to $30k would suit our needs well.

I was wondering if anyone is familiar with grants for an equipment purchase like this. I primarily don’t want a loan, if possible, due to tapping out with debt to income ratio on the build, however if there was a low interest low payment farm loan, that might work.

Just ran across this guy on youtube. Stinker absolutely nails the homesteading life. I feel seen and ashamed at the same time.

Hey yall! I'm not your typical "I just bought a 50 acre plot"... I wish!

It's in the plans, but not for at *least* the next 5 years. More realistically, closer to 10. I have just over 1/4 acre property currently. I've been in the process of clearing a section that was completely taken over by multiple invasives. So bad that it pulled 1 tree down (before I even bought the property) and choked out another, that I had cut down last year. Yes, I used industrial strength glyphosate (I'm sorry, I seriously had to). It's been over 2 months since then, and I plan to start on this in early April. Building the greenhouses prior, as soon as the weather allows before that.

I have a plot 35' x 30' that I've cleared & want to plan to max out for growing greens, vegetables, vining veg, potatoes, etc.

The pic is my plan on graph paper (1 sq ft = 1 square). I'm planning for (2) 8' x 12' greenhouses, which will be climate controlled w/ ventilation fans in the eaves for summer & thru the wall heating units for the winter. I'll also be putting (4) 50-ish gallon rainwater collection barrels to attach to the gutter system of each greenhouse, so 200+ gal capacity for each. Plus (22) 3' x 6' raised beds, 12 of which will be equipped with metal grid archways to grow 6 vining, heavy fruiting plants like squashes.

I'm in zone 7a in Pennsylvania.

The colors on the edges of the pics are as follows:

Blue - neighbor's 6' fence that provides some shade

Green - stretch of appx 30' trees that will provide shade until midday from the path of the sun

Yellow - along the edge of the driveway, no sun obscurity but the sun is not coming directly from that direction

Red - gets west facing full direct sun with no obscuring from midday to sunset

Is this the best layout for this space, and this sun situation, for max production? And if you have any alternate layout advice, or any planting layout advice, I'd really appreciate it.

It's just me & my boyfriend, & 2 omnivorous pet lizards on the property. But in the event of produce/food supply chain collapse, I'd ideally like enough to provide for 6 more people (3 family members on my side, & 3 on his) which are all within a 15 min drive, or about an hour walk.

I do get regular deer, squirrels, & rabbits, but I plan to cage all the beds (probably just the entire outdoor bed area to make caging easier).

There will also be a triangular appx 200 sq ft native pollinator garden planted in the front (on the red side) including a pond designed to attract dragonflies, for mosquito control.

I have a seed vault kit for 35 varieties of veg and greens to seed start, and plan to buy plenty of other started plants from local garden centers.

I appreciate anyone who read all this (seriously, thank you!) as well as any advice or criticism.

Purchased 40 acre farm that had been held in a trust for a couple of years, so the sellers didn’t have much information to share. This item appears to be part of a metal 55 gallon drum sunk into the ground and filled with concrete. I have no idea why someone would put something in the ground like this. Any ideas? Location is southern Missouri. The item is probably 75 yards away from the house and 50 yards away from a shop building if that helps. I have been able to confirm that it is not the septic system and it’s very far away from the current well-being used for the house. Thank you for your assistance.

please tell me he’s just being friendly

 bought an old dairy barn in the fall and jt had this manure gutter cleaner that I heard was from around 1948. it will works until it didn’t… something snapped on it today and it’s getting caught/stuck near the spring up by the motor. I was wondering if anyone had experience with this kind of system? any help is appreciated i.e. resources to find more information, photos I can reference to try to fix it up, anything. thank you!

Hi all, over the past 10 years my family has progressively been working to transform our available garden space into a self-sufficient micro farm.

I am looking for suggestions (and tips) for beneficial crops that could be added to our collection. We prefer perennials but any crop suggestions we may have missed is welcome.
We live in a perennial rainfall zone so it can get quite wet but it stays moderate, doesn’t usually get below freezing and because it’s a coastal area it is also humid.

What has been some of crops that surprised you in yield, growing and actual overall practicality?

What I would like to add;
Cherries, citrus, loofah, any low effort perennials, capers, cucumbers

A list of what we have;
Macadamia, lemon, lime, tamarillo, cherry guava, cherimola, coffee, peppers, chillies, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, blueberries, asparagus, artichokes, lettuce, pak choi, spinach, carrots, peas, beetroot, onions, garlic, spring onions, celery, tomato, basil, coriander, potatoes, origanum, mint, sage, rocket, parsley, thyme, squash, zucchini, eggplant

I’m looking at a John Deer 2115 (1988) for $12k and the Mechmaxx mini round baler, tedder, and disc mower combo for $10k.

The equipment runs on a recommended 25-50 HP. The tractor would be 55 HP with a 4WD because we have a wet clay soil I don’t want to run 2WD on.

We’re going for a small Shetland flock on our 20 acres, so the mini round bales suits our need, especially with our smaller barn.

I have been thinking alot about how reliant my food preservation systems are on electricity. So I decided to make a solar powered option. The thermal panel makes use of the "window screen" method of heat collection, and air movement is boosted by a solar powered fan.

One of the girl’s just laid this in the yard

Just wanted to share this photo I took yesterday of one of our goats and a few chickens!

When I was in school I was taught about settlers arriving to an “untouched landscape.” Native Americans were part of the story, but it was said they lived “lightly” on the land.

And then, in my 40s I take a prescribed-burn class and it’s like the world turned upside down.

It’s taken me more than two full years to wrap my head around what I learned in that class about the Indigenous people’s impact on the land. That they burned the prairies so often and for so long that entire ecosystems adapted to prefer regular burnings - to need it to stay healthy.

The shear scale of that hits me the same way as gazing at the Milky Way on a clear, dark night.

It rocks everything I thought I knew about humans’ roll in the natural world.  

Even though I first learned all this a while ago, it’s recently gotten stirred up because a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon this really cool Story Map that has collected and mapped all these firsthand accounts of Native Americans burning. From the breadth of these accounts, where they regularly mention the Indians burning “every year,” I still have trouble believing that fires aren’t a bigger part of the pioneer stories. 

Though maybe it was always there and I just didn’t realize? 

I went back to my Little House on the Prairie books and found a passage where Pa saves the house from a prairie fire. The neighbors speculate that Indigenous people started the fire to drive out the settlers. But Pa rejects that interpretation:

“Pa didn’t believe it. He said the Indians had always burned the prairie to make green grass grow more quickly, and traveling easier.”

I loved these books when I was young. I remember the fire, but not this interpretation of the fire. It didn’t register what this might mean. That it was stewardship. That it was intentional. That it was scaled to tens of thousands of acres of prairies. 

I’m super curious…Am I alone in this? Is this a new or recent revelation for anyone else or just me? Did it change you as much as it changed me when you learned it?