 Food prices are going up. A six of the world's wheat is impacted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine And we just experienced a worldwide pandemic and on and on and on when it comes down to it Could you grow all your own food if you had to? This is the Lotech podcast Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Lotech technology Institute your host for podcast number 52 on August 5th 2022 coming to you at a Lotech Institute's recording room and Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thanks for joining us today We'll be talking with Bill Robichard who's been self-provisioning for two years We'll also have Institute updates and you'll forget to follow us on Twitter Our handle is at low underscore techno like us on Facebook find us on Instagram and subscribe to us on YouTube and check out our website lowtechinstitute.org There you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research Also some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts So unless you hear me doing the ad someone else is making money on that advertising While all our podcast videos and other information are given freely They take resources to make and if you're in a position to help support the work and be part of this community Please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as three dollars a month through our patreon page patreon.com Slash low tech Institute if you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website lowtechinstitute.org Today I'm joined by Bill Robichard president of the Saola Foundation for animal mountain conservation We met at the Wisconsin Garden Expo last spring He lives in Wisconsin's driftless area and has been growing and gathering his own food since the pandemic started Hi, Bill. Thanks for for joining me and when I say growing and provisioning your own food since the pandemic started I mean You were probably doing gardening and other things before that right but tell us what you've been doing since the pandemic started and What why did you start? Doing what you're doing All right. Well, it kind of well first of all, thanks for having me Scott. It's great to be here with you Yeah, I live on our I rent a farmhouse on a fair bit of land north of Barnabal, Wisconsin and Yeah, I've got pretty big vegetable gardens my deer hunt. I do quite a bit of trout fishing too much sometimes forging, you know morels and so forth and It was actually before the pandemic it was January of 2020 I'd been over to visit my girlfriend in Switzerland And I was flying home just kind of widely thinking about What was waiting at home on my canning shelves? And in my freezer, you know, and what I was living eating And the thought just crossed my mind. I wonder how long I could go it off going to the grocery store just down through what I have And I decided to try it And I'm still at it two and a half years later, so that was January of 2020 and I haven't been grocery shopping the last time I Korean and I we went grocery shopping for Christmas Eve dinner in Switzerland on December 24th 2019 And I haven't been grocery shopping then I have been to grocery stores to buy tea and coffee And twice to get provisions For Thanksgiving dinners extra stuff that I didn't grow sure but pretty much then since other than that I've just been figuring it out And so I imagine before this so you'd already been doing some stuff. What? What's the biggest change that you've had to Take on board just since doing this or what's the yeah, if there was one big one you could put your finger on Well I've had to do a bit more planning, you know I can't just pop it at the grocery store and grab something and bring you home to cook it takes a bit more forethought but what I've have learned is It's not that difficult And I think I'm handling handicapped because right now my Partner is in Switzerland most of the time and I'm here doing this alone is a lot more challenging I think than if you were two people and three people because when you're Planting all the food, you know cultivating it harvesting it Preserving it processing it cooking it and doing the dishes that can make for some long days, you know, you're not doing it full time And I do want to make clear I'm not I'm not being like a fundamentalist about this I have not changed the pattern which I go to cafes and restaurants and grab a meal And yeah, when I go out trout fishing I'll stop the quick trip and get a bag of chips and an orange juice, you know in the car while I'm trout fishing but I have not gone grocery shopping to assemble a meal in two and a half years and what I have learned is so I There's I'm lucky to have Neighbors on my road a couple of guys they have three dairy cows that they hand milk I get dairy from them And I do I have bought some flour. There's a local mill near where I live in Ridgway, Wisconsin I can get flour from And then other I have a nephew who lives in Italy. He produces his own olive oil From my nephew I can make butter from the dairy And stuff like my daughter who loves to cook when she comes to visit me You know, she'll go shopping and leave extra stuff behind I have bought sugar because I make my own kombucha Honey I trade for from a neighbor with maple syrup or I guess use maple syrup So what I found Scott is if I have a half a dozen laying hens And what I found is if you have dairy Eggs and flour You can make in a vegetable garden. You can make one hell of a lot of good food quiches pies crepes Sure If you have those things there's an awful lot you can do with it. So What's been fun is That's kind of challenged me to learn to make my own stuff. So last night I made My own cream cheese for the first time. Oh, I gotta make cream cheese last night very simple Because I have a recipe I learned how to smoke my trout that I catch and I have a recipe for smoke trout Dip that requires cream cheese. So then I learned how to make cream cheese So it's this wonderful kind of rippling effect. You know, I keep learning how to make more and more things But I'm not really an expert in all of this Just had fun figuring it out Yeah, and you chronicle a lot of this on your blog which you can find at Let's see bird in the bush net Which I'll link to in the show notes And is has that been going on before you started the self-provisioning or was that In conjunction with it to share what you're doing No, but I did it like I was on the plane and I I do a fair bit of writing I was writing before this when I was on the plane if I wonder how long I can go without Going to a grocery store And then the second thought was hey, I think I'll start writing about it so the blog was a consequence of the decision to to Try not going to grocery store and then just chronically re-experienced by I put up a couple of posts a month. Yeah, what's going on and how I'm doing And one thing that you pointed out on there that I found really Useful and that I've kind of been incorporating into how I talk about this sort of stuff is that you say Nobody is self-sufficient Which I think a lot of people who dream of growing all their own food or Having their own little format or somehow, you know, uh self-provisioning they think about being self-sufficient and you say that that's kind of a A misnomer or a misunderstanding. So is that something you could unpack a little bit for? Sure, then that's what's been that's one of the most beautiful parts of the experience is By doing this I've not learned that I'm more self-sufficient. I've actually come face to face how I am not Self-sufficient in any way. I'm completely dependent on The earth my compost pile the sun, you know, my neighbors for bartering what it does is it's it's deep in my it's deep in my understanding of dependence on other things that Self-sufficiency doesn't exist and I'm even more if you want to think you're self-sufficient Just say well, I'll just take my paycheck and go to the grocery store and buy a meal and boom You're no no that's actually gives more of a sense of self-sufficiency than what I'm doing because I mean, I'm so dependent on The soil in my garden and the sun and my hens and my neighbors to trade for things You know we barter back and forth things that I don't have that I need and they have It's actually deep in the sense of of interconnection You know through the world and you're delivering things. I mean you look at my compost pile actually Um, I'm starting a writing project to just You know writing one little passage about Everything that's in my compost pile because that's a that's a chronicle of my life. For example The leftovers from the memorial party we held for my late brother two years ago went into the compost pile You know the richness that's in that compost pile that's then going into the garden is a beautiful beautiful thing um so that's the and that's That's a really helpful. I think a useful thing for us to remember because humans You know encoded in our dna is to be a cooperative group living species I mean we're flocking birds. We're not eagles. We're crows And I think the more that we're aware of that and understand of that and that move in that in community In any way we could find it the better. We're going to feel emotionally Yeah, no, we're definitely looking back evolutionarily and and and through human history We are definitely a gregarious species. We're one of the primates that You know groups together and yeah, there's conflicts sometimes within the group But the groups that are more cohesive tend to do better than than the individuals um, and I just you know, and I think in our You know not to get out of soapbox. I think in the United States of America, that's a bit of an uphill climb because our You know our heroic model is Clint Eastwood riding his pony alone in the high planes Rugged individualism right self-sufficient. Yeah all that stuff and I was even thinking this morning in the context of you look at the distribution of farms and farming communities in the United States versus Europe and Asia in nearly every culture I know in Europe and in Asia Everybody lives together in a village and in the morning they go out to their fields Everybody has their fields surrounding the village, but the community comes back together at night and they interact as a community Otherwise But in the u.s. You have one farmhouse here on a 40 and another farmhouse there You know 120 and another isolated farmhouse here on their 240 It's a very different model where it's all these isolated farmhouses Not living in community and that's just you know sort of an historic Axe living or what you want to call it about the u.s. Who's settled so we it's I think the importance of community may not be as intuitively apparent to Awesome this country as it is in other cultures. So you have to pay a little bit more attention to it Yeah, I think Americans are self selecting for those that well for those that came here voluntarily they chose to pack up and leave You know, they're kind of self selecting for being Maybe I don't know adventure seeking is the good way owners. Yeah But they you know, they they're willing to do that and and that ethos I think has passed down pretty strongly in our culture That's one of the things that I try and always focus on is Especially to be palatable to Americans I talk about things that we do at my organization of being Good household or community scale sorts of solutions because we don't talk about national scale solutions because It's kind of outside of our lane number one, but number two. I feel like Americans Have less buy-in of of large national projects than than we do with something that you can see and feel and and and get Involved within your community. So a community biodigester to make cooking gas would be a lot more palatable to a lot of Americans than say a national, you know, some sort of national infrastructure like a Large improvement of the train system or something like that, which I think would also be useful But it's just not right. It's not something that everyone wants to agree to invest in Since you started, uh, so it's been over two years now If you were to start all over again, is there anything you would do differently, um, or some things you would maybe Get rid of or maybe maybe take on board earlier Um I wouldn't do it alone One thing. Yeah Now nothing jumps out. I that's good. Um One of the best things I got was from you with your talk at garden next to the pot of preserve eggs Oh, you're putting them in lime water because my hands shut down because I'm really dependent on eggs I leave out a lot of eggs and use a lot of cooking and my hands, you know, pretty much shut down in november And they don't start up again till February Something like that. So your technique for submerging eggs in lime water and preserving them. I've started saving excess eggs So I just want to put a shout out for that um, little technique And it's not mine. It's a historic technique. I just yeah, yeah, I learned it from you Yeah, and I'm now teaching with other people. So there you go. This is a linear community. Yeah, right An ancestral community But uh, no nothing else really jumps out Um, as I said, I the jury is not on I'm still figuring this out But it has been kind of a loads of nosy christians experience. I keep expecting to run out of food And I just never do part of this. It was amazing when I Started out eating through my cupboards The food that I found on the back of my cupboards that I could still eat that I'd forgotten about, you know bags of pasta And you know cans of beans and bags of whole wheat flour I went a long time just eating through stuff in my cupboard that I forgot I had right, you know Our experience similarly to you just through happenstance. We decided to simulate, you know What would happen if fossil fuels no longer existed and could we grow our own food? And we started also Coincidentally in january 2020 before we knew that there's a pandemic coming Um, so, you know, we did do a little bit of I guess it's a last-minute shopping And then we kind of shut down and didn't go to the grocery store and we went to full year You know other than, you know at the time we had a one-year-old Child so we did get milk because we're not going to compromise his, you know, we didn't have access to cows next door um and really yeah, our experience was similar to yours we ate through a lot of our stuff and Um, it you know, we kept kept finding new things to eat But unlike you like I said, we didn't have cows next door. So we didn't have a source of cooking fat. We couldn't have butter Once we ran out and cooking oil that was our big That was our big Achilles heel something to cook some sort of fat to cook in because venison fat is not really palatable So you're lucky to have the cows cows nearby. Yeah And enough you in Italy. So yeah I One occurred to me that I I am learning to do and you're right one if I was doing it over I I do not advise it starting it in the middle of january without a shopping trip to kick you off I just came home got off the plane early january. So Let's see what I can live off of at the absolute Minimum time of the year for foraging or hunting or fishing or anything. I wouldn't recommend that the second one I I'm really paying attention now to Efficiency of gardening where what's the maximum amount of food I can get that I like to eat with minimum labor So like a lot of us. I love perennials raspberries rhubarb asparagus, you know or kind of asparagus is number one Don't have to do anything to it and I get really good food early in the year. You know rhubarb is another one And so I now I garden kind of strategically with What what food output number one can I get with a minimum of labor of food that I really like And also one that doesn't put time pressure on me to really catch it at the harvest at the right time Kind of like, you know, if you don't catch broccoli within a couple few days and it starts to turn yellow and bitter You've lost it or tomatoes or like that or beans, you know, they get tough So I've really started to I plant more and more stuff That's a bit more forgiving, especially stuff that has a long harvest window My top of the lift and also easy to preserve the minimum labor to preserve it So I'm looking at what's the most food I can get for a minimum labor Top of my list right now are, you know, hard-shelling beans I just plant them, grow them on a trussel And they just hang there nothing eats them mice don't seem to bother them So I think last year I didn't harvest my beans till like january And then all I have to do is I brought them all in, you know, all dried in the pods And I shelled them by the fire and I just put them in a jar Done and I make fantastic bean soups and stews throughout the year So shelling beans are one roots like parsnips, beets, carrots, they tend to have Number and they also will last a long time into the winter I mean, I can leave the parsnips in the ground till March. I've harvested carrots in February And they don't take much preservation They just throw them in the fridge in the last long time So I am tending to pivot More towards things like that Then planning things that have a very narrow harvest window and take a fair bit of work to preserve I mean, there's a bit of labor to preserve tomatoes or any of that stuff Sure For the beans that you just throw in the jar That doesn't mean I deprive myself of, you know, fresh tomatoes or beans with cucumbers, but Right So, but I, if you look at my garden now, there's a lot more of those Winter root vegetables planted and beans on the trellis shelling beans That's, I've been noticing that Also, and this year especially, it's like, oh, I have lots growing in the garden But none of it's for right now So it looks like there's a lot going on, but it's not like we're bringing in baskets full of things every day I did bring in, for example, right now in my garage I have a wheelbarrow that has a giant tarp full of dried field peas or soup peas That I have to run through my little drum thresher to get all the peas out But I have, you know, it's been dried outside And I got the rest of it dried under a tarp before it rained today But you know, I have like two bales of peas to go through to thresh But yeah, it's all for the winter really But yeah, some tomatoes, some cucumbers, but not as heavily as As one might think with a big garden Another thing I'll put out is I've been, you know, just for fun and for food I do a fair bit of trout fishing And I've been meeting other trout fishing and having conversations with them because there's this thing going on where, you know, the moral high ground is held by catch and release trout fishing And I could sense this when I really started getting the trout fishing when I moved back to Wisconsin several years ago And it's sort of like we're a bit of a moral pariah if you keep, you know, a few trout to take home to dinner And I just, so I've been starting to have a conversation with some other trout fishing about this It's number one that the trout resource in the DRIPLUS area is extraordinary Some of these trout have 5,000 trout per stream mile They only had 300 or 400 in the 1970s that All the habitat restoration the DNR has done and trout have limited as a huge beneficial effect when they figured some things out And the other thing I would say, you know Who's holding the moral high ground as if somebody catches and releases 20 trout and then goes home And cooks for dinner a piece of salmon phoned in a thousand miles away on a fossil fueled airplane Or me who keeps two or three trout out of 5,000 trout per mile and takes them home and puts them in a fine plan And for me what I also really value about what I'm doing is For me, you know going to the stream catching the trout getting in my net That's only part of the experience of fishing, hunting and foraging I love giving gratitude to the trout with a lot of grief for killing it And honoring it by taking home and eating it and sharing it with my family and friends or smoking them That whole thing is part of the experience of fishing for me or hunting or gardening it'd be kind of like Catching release trout fishing was like, okay. I'm gonna grow some tomatoes and just Go out and look at them on the vine and see how pretty they are And you know never do never do anything with it. I just I just don't get it so so it's something I and I'm Starting to talk to guys in the dnr about because the some of the trout fishing regulations are really really restrictive and some streams because it's driven by the kind of Catch and release fly fishermen from urban centers and trout unlimited and just water for like Catch and release museum fishing And I don't really think that's to the good of either our connection with nature Well, and I think I mean not that everybody has to do it But if you want to catch and release fine, but if you don't want to catch and release You should be allowed to take some trout home for dinner in a stream that is 3 000 or 5 000 trout right well, I feel like You know, I also hunt deer and Because the generation of people who where everybody hunted are are kind of fading There's a lot more deer out right now than there have been the deer populations are extremely high Which causes not only crop damage and all that sort of thing, which is you know Less concerning for me than you know, say car fatalities and and you know Painful deaths for the deer and things like that They become and also because we don't have wolves or other predators that you know Keep the populations check These are resources that Are slightly running out of out of control a little bit and if we had some sort of situation where people had to grow or eat a lot more of their food It's kind of useful that we have built up these stocks of of wild food and game that You know are otherwise ignored. It's just whether or not we have the Skills and knowledge to unlock that that food in our in our environment anymore because we have become so Like you say used to just uh, you know catch and release fishing and then going to the store to buy To buy something. I'm already dressed and clean and ready for the table right Yeah In my experience as I said, I didn't I didn't Start this as some sort of crusade, you know, I'm going to prove a point by not going to grocery store It was just it really was just on a whim. Well, what are I long I can go without going to the grocery store And but what I found in the course of doing it is I realized going to the grocery store was just kind of a habit I didn't really have to do it. It's just like I'm driving home from somewhere and I'm hungry and I don't know what's at home for dinner. It's not going to go to the grocery store Buy some stuff and throw something together It was really what I've been surprised that I never could have predicted It would be so easy to go two and a half years without growing grocery shopping Now that said, you know, if somebody living in an apartment in, you know, Madison or Jamesville would have a much tougher time Sure, I am gifted. I have a big yard with lots of garden space I have those five hens which are pumping out eggs. I do deer hunt. I do fish But I mean Everybody could do a little bit more everybody can, you know, put a lot of herbs on the windowsill. Yeah Yeah, that's what we can grow in container gardens. They're just on a You know, straw. You know, so I think we could all we could all do a bit more and I think We will feel better about it. There is something deeply satisfying About eating on a plate something that you produced and procured yourself in partnership with nature, you know, with the soil That's a deeply satisfying experience and that's why I think that's why I continue to do it It's not a hard I'm not like struggling and white and not going to I'm not going to go to the grocery store for You know another 173 days to prove a great No, it's just kind of fun now. I don't I'll do it because I enjoy it And so with Well, kind of a two-part question So, you know, we've seen gas prices go up and come back down and food costs go up and down and the wheat shortage may be starting to be Come unstuck but still not great with the harvest happening right now in in ukraine and russia Water shortages out west perennially in the u.s um, what are your specifically your? plans for the near to long-term future with with your food um, and also How would you feel about a lot of people trying to do something like this is it would it be sustainable on a larger scale? Or would we just have People starting to bump into one another when they're trying to self provision Oh, like I think I meant I don't think much about the future in those terms I don't know I I just I always hope I'll figure it out because I can't really predict the future I my experience is the more people who do this the easier it will become for everybody Because I'm really blessed. So here's an example Um that I just started writing about for my next blog post which is provisionally titled god bless the neighbors It'll probably be up the next day or two On friday or saturday last week I got I have these wonderful neighbors along my road one of them called me up said hey You know that wild blackberry patch on the edge of our restored fur. I said, yeah Boy, it's just drippin with blackberries. You want to come and pick some? Ah, sure. I went up and I picked like three pounds of wild blackberries um, and then They no longer garden because they're you know got a little bit older their health isn't so good and I just You know mary comes down and she just goes through my garden picks whatever she wants On monday. I got home uh midday And there were two pints of blueberries on my front porch with a nice note from another neighbor Hey bill thought you might like some fresh blueberries. You just picked at 11 this morning And these are people in december. I always trade them maple syrup for a christmas tree You let me cut cut a christmas tree on their property and I came and maple syrup and swiss chocolate So suddenly I have access to berries because my raspberries and my strawberries did crap this year I do buy strawberries from an Amish guy near Mifarge, but he didn't have a good strawberry here But the more people do this that's what I've done. I we have this little community along my road Another neighbor I trade maple syrup for tomato plants every year. They have a little green house They grow my tomato plants and give them to me and I plant them every year This would be much harder if I didn't have these neighbors, right? I think it'll The more people are willing to try this the more fun it becomes and the easier it becomes because then you have a community And this is one thing I've seen It's part of my Work trying to save this animal with saula, which lives only in drowsy vietnam I've spent a lot of time up in the rural Laos villages and the mountains of Laos vietnam And I've seen A Laos villager cannot live alone One person living in a tropical forest in the village Cannot produce enough food to feed themselves You have to be in a village and you have to be married, you know, it's lots a lot of it's an economic relationship with one partner doing Whatever one fishing while the other ones, you know Winnowing the rice or whatever So all of this is much easier to do in community So yeah, I think more people do it it'll be easier for all of us I've been trying to come up with an alternative to the idea of self-sufficiency and I haven't come up with something that rolls quite out the tip of the tongue with something like locally dependent or something like that Kind of gives the idea, but it's not as as poetic as I'd like it to be No, you're right. We need a new word like intersufficiency or something that's really um, because anybody thinks they're self-sufficient is I mean pretty I don't do anything I put yeah, okay. I do maintain the soil a bit. I throw compost on it, but I put seeds in the ground in spring Uh-huh I might water a bit, but then it's pretty much up my My higher power is photosynthesis and the sun and the microbes in the soil Yeah, they're the ones are so I yeah, I go out and I see my you know tall bean plants and my huge tomatoes Oh, look what I grew No, I didn't the sun grew those and the soil did Yeah, I just put the seeds in the ground, you know, I'm the minor player in this yeah in this this agricultural partnership I often feel like I'm just trying to nudge Nudge things in the way that I'd like them to go and hopefully they go that way Up in the garden. I can't exactly I can't force anything to do anything. It doesn't want to Exactly, especially when yeah, sometimes you really want it to grow but You know, uh, I have some sort of wilt attacking my tomatoes and you know, I Nothing I can do Well, maybe later in the year, I'll trade you tomatoes for whatever didn't work in my garden this year There you go. Well, and I have weeks my my my herb garden did crap I just I have this suspended animation herb garden. I don't maybe just because it was such a dry year So I'll trade you tomatoes if you have like some time and rosemary Squirrel swap Sounds good. So, um, I think before we run out of time here Via zoom we should probably start to wrap up but just as a reminder The the blog was bird in the bush net and your foundation is solar foundation, which I'll spell S a o l a foundation.org So you can find out more about bill's professional work and also his his home Uh provisioning or local local local dependence or whatever you whatever we've got to figure out Yeah interdependence But yeah, so thanks so much for chatting with me today bill. Okay. Thanks very much for having me scott. Yeah, sure Thanks bill. Well, thanks again to bill for taking the time out to chat with me today. Um, and He's lucky like he says to live out Where he's able to do a lot of self-provisioning But I think for everybody it kind of comes down to where can you be locally dependent rather than completely self-sufficient because being completely self-sufficient is it's not really a I don't think a goal worth attaining much better to have a community to work together with so thanks again to bill for that and Now we'll talk about real briefly a couple instant updates We have posted a new workshop That will be coming up in august We will be turning uh flax into linen I just harvested the flax. It's drying in a greenhouse right now And then we will be turning that into linen fiber And then spinning it into linen thread with master spin and hawn kennon You can find out details about that on our website lowtechinstitute.org and sign up Still have plenty of space in that class You can also sign up to our listserv where you will find out about other classes coming out this fall Like we should be doing one on solar hot water heaters and also one on thatching so Check that out lowtechinstitute.org That's it for this week The lowtech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute The show is hosted and co-produced by me Scott Johnson and co-produced and edited by Hina Suzuki This episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute recording room Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere We hope you enjoyed the free podcast If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do Please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up Thank you to our forester and land steward level members Maryland Scarpon and the Hambuses for their support The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting You can find more information about the Low Technology Institute membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org Find us also on social media and reach me directly. I'm scott at lowtechinstitute.org Our intro music was strange enough off the album leftovers by Julizna That song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the creative commons attribution and chairlike license Meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit Thanks and take care