Obtain a yield

1. Tomatoes, squash, eggplant, apple butter. People may not care for most of your home canning, but they will eat your apple butter.

2. Duck eggs and chicken eggs resting on a foraged bench. 

3. Greens being harvested for fresh consumption, for poultry, and for dehydration for later use by both humans and poultry. 

4. A persistent weed, Japanese knotweed, being collected for food, fodder, mulch, compost, trellising poles, bee hotels, and kindling.

These are subsistence yields. Stony Run Farm is really just a suburban-style lot in a country setting, but we do ask it to convert sunshine and compost for us into veggies. We try to stay within our fertility budget -- if we were to sell crops, we'd have to buy something to fertilize with. Commerce has the long term disadvantage that it leaks energy at every station of rach product -- speeding up entropy for all. We're idealists, but we've made an effort to participate as little as we reasonably might, and we feel good about our choice.

It’s the same as the people that teach poetry and the people that teach all of the arts in Japan, where it’s based on this idea that you come to the place where there’s no qualities and no thought and you’re one with everything, and if you’re studying pottery, of course it makes you a better person, it’s a good thing… with natural farming you become a better more joyful person, but you’re also providing for your own livelihood, you’re growing what you need to eat and you’re in partnership with other forms of life.

 -- Larry Korn

(To be continued)