Kody Hanner
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Why do we need a local food system?
We need a local food system because there are some serious gaps and flaws in the American commercial food system. We realized this hugely in 2020, but we are learning more every day!
When we all decided to become homesteaders, we thought that we were going to become islands. Which means that we thought we could do everything ourselves. What was quickly realized was that this is a Utopian concept.
Unfortunately, our supply chain is unstable, and we have a monopoly in the meat industry.
Some of our local food options are illegal
This might sound crazy, but many of our local foods are illegal. And guess what? I am not talking about chemical-filled bioengineered pseudo foods. I am talking about milk that’s fresh from the cow, meat processed at the local butcher, or even eggs that don’t have a disclaimer written on the package. Are you kidding me? These are the most basic foods, and it should be a RIGHT to be able to obtain these products!
Listen to my podcast episode about “How to Make Money on Your Homestead” for more on local food laws.
The realization that people could not do everything for themselves caused many people to give up homesteading. They were overwhelmed, believed that they had failed, or ran into too many road blocks. The truth of the matter is that this can be remedied with a local food system.
Why I Think a Local Food System Came Natural to Me
When I was growing up, my dad was an avid hunter. I’m not saying he went every weekend. I am saying that he went everyday! One of the reasons that he went hunting everyday was that we had a feral swine (wild pig) issue in Northern California where we lived. So much of his hunting was through depredation permits and he would get paid by vineyards and cattle ranchers to come in and mitigate the invasive species issues. When you’re hunting everyday that creates a lot of meat. With that meat, he would donate to families and local food banks. I think about that now and realize that we were probably making these donations before it became illegal to donate meat that wasn’t processed at a USDA facility.
What I found with that, is that it was normal for me to donate meat. If you have extra meat, you share it! You give it to friends, you have a BBQ, you have friends show up after a day of fishing with their extra catch that their family couldn’t consume. This was the basis of my childhood local food system.
When it came to our vegetables and other necessities, most of those were purchased from the grocery store. We did have summer gardens that we enjoyed for the extra tomatoes, and we always shared anything we had in abundance.
We did not preserve a lot of our food except jerky from the extra venison we had.
How We Created Our Local Food System
When we began creating our local food system, it was in 2019 before the pandemic. Luckily, before 2020, we were well on our way to a sustainable local food system. We were milking our own cow, we had a freezer full of meat, and a great community. When we came home from the NICU with our infant son, we didn’t want to go to the grocery store like everyone else. At that time, we began talk to our friends and neighbors about what we could provide for each other. We had full freezers of meat, we had neighbors with barns full of hay and grain that they couldn’t sell because no one was leaving their houses.
Everything that we currently or have previously sourced locally
- Meat – So we traded meat and milk for grain, which was our biggest catalyst in jump-starting our local food system. When food shortages happened, we began donating to our community, and our community donated milk products for our pigs. We trade for services all the time now, too!
- Vegetables – We trade work for extra fruits and vegetables. We trade tractor work for compost.
- Flour – They neighbors down the road have a commercial grain mill and grow their own wheat, which is a great source for our flour needs.
- Animal feeds (scraps and quality feed) – some neighbors will bring canning scraps for our pigs and chickens.
Putting a Local Food System Into Action
- This is a very community oriented system – go to your local church, make friends with a local farmer, check social media. You don’t have to be a farmer to have a local food system because you can trade your skills as well.
- Talk to people, make deals – start working with your community to see who has what.
- Make a list of 10 most used items in your home
- Make a list of 2-3 things you can increase production of to supply your community
- This doesn’t require you to source everything from neighbors. You can simply buy from local stores that source from local farmers. The actual definition of local food is items that come from a 100-mile radius. If you find a great source of a product out of the area, there is no police pointing out that our food isn’t local.
- How to make it work
- We as Americans eat too much – stretch meat in soups or salads.
- Adjusting your pallet – use ground pork instead of ground beef, think outside the box
- Determining what you absolutely cannot source locally and buy in bulk
- Salt is a great example
Have we become too complacent?
We have become reliant on systems. If everything shut down again tomorrow, can you feed your family?
So many people say that they miss the America we were on 9/12/2001, I miss the homesteaders we all became on 3/14/2020.
