BY: 
Although I have been seeking self-sufficiency via food production for so very long, I want to be clear that I came to the solution seeking some other thing entirely. There’s a lesson there, I’m sure. Someone smarter tell me please.
I have had enormous gardens, greenhouses and low tunnels, rows, swales, mounds, berms, hugelkulture, food forests and perennial edibles layered in planned secession. I have filled hundreds if not a thousand jars, season after season, and dried and cellared and wined and krauted and have the crocks and All American to prove it. There are 100 fruit trees outside flowering now, with perennial wheat coming up underneath mixed in with the berries. There’s a two-year-old brand-new Little Ark grain mill bolted to the counter with a linkage to connect to my bike trainer. There’s still sourdough starter in the freezer from a decade of making a loaf a day in a wood fired oven, tuning a craft.
All along I have been learning animal husbandry and all that goes with raising animals and bringing them to the table. I’ve relished learning about the process, and have a garnered a deep connection with the land and the animals, which I greatly appreciate.
Despite all of those resources, I worked incredibly hard and still could only produce “most” of what I consumed. Indeed, not only was I bringing in outside inputs, I became aware that I was sick, and getting sicker and sicker. I began to chase my symptoms with diet and careful tracking, along with starting the process of diagnosis with my Doctor. Along the way, I tried various diets and various restrictions, and learned an immense amount about myself. I got a lot, lot better. But not well.
After eliminating almost everything from my diet, I was pointed towards Zero Carb by a kind redditor, and I decided I was so close and still having issues, I might as well give it 30 days. Here I am at just over 3 months, and I don’t think I’m going back. I LOVE the way I feel, and finally I am able to achieve true food independence at home. Without breaking my back. I should be planting and weeding right now, but….I’m not.
All of the infrastructure of my past plantings serve as an incredible underpinning to a varied diet for my livestock, and the systems make almost more sense when used this way. Which is not what I designed them for, but, apparently life is handing out lessons to guys like me. In seeking my health and working to reduce inflammation via diet, exercise, and lifestyle choices, I seem to have stumbled across not only the secret to better health and happiness, but the key to finally becoming truly food self-sufficient at home.
The answer? Stop eating the plants and feed them to the animals. I am so incredibly grateful to those that have gone before me to show me this way of eating. I am so much closer to my goals than I have ever been.
