PORTABLE INFRASTRUCTURE
I appreciated all the good comments regarding my post about access on a homestead and how it is one of the most overlooked aspects of efficient stewardship development.
Perhaps the second is portable infrastructure. And by the way, folks, POLYFACE DESIGNS, the long-awaited book by former apprentice and engineer C'hris Slattery and me to diagram all of our portable infrastructure, is in a truck on the road somewhere between Minnesota and Virginia. We expect the books to arrive tomorrow so we can ship the pre-orders. As soon as we get them in hand, we will terminate the deep pre-order savings, so if you want one and haven't gotten in on it, today or tomorrow is probably the end.
Every homestead carries a tension between permanent and portable infrastructure. I think much of this is because we see in magazines and books the cute iconic farmstead structures and want to duplicate them on our own places. The problem is the pictures never show them at the height of their use, when those pretty yards were mud or dust; nor can the pictures capture the noxious odors and compromised health of animals in lockdown.
When I was in Tennessee at the one room schoolhouse this past weekend, this tension raised its head over a planned "barnyard." The only people who love the sound and idea of "barnyard" are folks who have never actually been in one. They aren't pretty, functional, or animal friendly. While I admit that barnyards can be places of activity and certainly offer up some fond memories, the overwhelming fact is that they are generally stinky, dusty, muddy places.
Obviously if you have a bunch of first graders doing chores and interacting with animals, they can't be traipsing over a quarter mile of pasture t get to the portable animal units. Sometimes in fact you do want animals sequestered nearby: chickens to eat kitchen scraps and garden waste; ditto a couple of pigs. And if you have a teaching center on an acre or so but you want a menagerie, how do you keep them close without turning everything into an offensive barnyard? The fact is that grass or pasture settings require long rest periods; otherwise it's a dirt hole.
The answer? Deep bedding, or what I call a carbonaceous diaper. A simple pavilion style protection over bedding at least 12 inches and preferably 24 inches deep offers a hygienic compost option for constant housing. The ongoing decomposition sanitizes the housing area and the carbon eliminates odors and absorbs manure and urine. You can eat lunch with the animals.
But then we get to the next conundrum: aesthetic expectations. "I want one that looks like that," declares the new homesteader. You know those iconic little red barns and outbuildings on homesteads? They're completely dysfunctional. As soon as you go with a carbonaceous diaper, it builds up over sill plates and side boards and rots out everything. That means functional stationary animal housing structures cannot look like iconic Americana buildings. They were completely dysfunctional.
Fortunately, the kind of structure I'm describing is much cheaper and easier to build than those iconic wooden-walled hip-roofed red barnyard structures. Sure, build those for event spaces, indoor miniature golf, apprentice housing and on-farm stores. I'm not suggesting they don't have a function; they do . . . for anything but animals. Oh, the POLYFACE DESIGNS book has diagrams and specs for such a structure; sometimes non-portable is desirable.
The sticky spot in this truth is that it requires carbon. Lots and lots of carbon. But if there's one thing I've had consulting success in, it's this concept. Everyone with a smelly barnyard or stationary chicken house that adopts the carbonaceous diaper is happy toting some carbon in exchange for happy children ("it doesn't stink any more"), happy animals and happy visitors.
Have you struggled with this stationary vs. portable issue?