Small Family Farms are RETURNING to our Land!
Another part of our mission at Little Sprouts Farm is to share our unique model for a sustainable and profitable small family farm with anyone who wishes to duplicate what we have done. Our vision is to help launch ten thousand small farms all across America, and in fact around the globe. What we present in this series of eBooks (and printed books soon) is the documentation of our model. The information in these books allows anyone anywhere to duplicate and even improve on our success.
Whether you are just starting out, still dreaming of running your own farm, or already in business, each of these books provides valuable details and insights in an easy to follow "step 1-2-3" type format.
Series 1
Save The Children: Restoring Health through Grandpa's Farm
The series is entitled “Save the Children: Restoring Health Through Grandpa’s Farm”, The ultimate goal is to bring health to the next generation, our children, by fixing the food system. The food system can be fixed through a restoration of the small local farm that once littered America’s rural landscape in our grandparent’s day. The first step to restoring small farms is to make small farming profitable. Why profitable? Because without profit, small farms fail. Without small farms, the good food required for healing is difficult to source and ultimately the children suffer.
Save The Children ?
Children are our future. Yet, it is becoming more and more obvious that our next generation, is suffering greatly. Children today are less healthy, more consistently sick and frail, than any generation in American history. Virtually every young family in America has a child struggling with long term health issues.
These health issues, regardless of the label we put on the condition itself, can all be helped dramatically through good local fresh food full of nutrition but devoid of toxins. Most of today’s health issues are self-inflicted by our society. The push for more convenient food produced for profit instead of nutrition has left our children devoid of nutrients and constantly exposed to toxins.
Organic vegetables are common today, beyond organic is even becoming more prevalent. However, animal based food products are the key to healing. Restorative diets like GAPS, SCD, Paleo all rely on a constant source of pure healthy animal products.
The biggest challenge to parents seeking to heal their children, is sourcing these good traditional animal products. Commercial food has compromises all along the way, resulting in less benefit to the children. The path to restoration of health is restoration of Grandpa’s farm, where nature was supreme and free to provide healing through food and nutrition.
Restoring Health Through Grandpa’s Farm ?
The key to health is found on Grandpa’s farm; that picture perfect multi-species blend of plants and animals living in harmony, being managed by a watchful farmer. But today that is just a picture in a history book. The small family farm is barely existent. Where it does exist, the farm is either struggling to survive or has adopted large scale factory farming techniques which lower the value of the resulting food products.
The answer to restoring healthy food is to restore the small farm through providing a way to create a focus on quality while maintaining profitability. At the end of the day this mean, profits. The small farm must be profitable. This is hard because, scale matters. The size of the farm determines how the farm model must work to create a profit.
Small to medium sized farms are both uniquely empowered and uniquely endangered. The small farm is uniquely positioned to solve the problem of fixing America’s food system through innovation and freedom to explore. However, the small farm is also most prone to failure from lack of investment capital and limited ability to weather the storms of business.
In this book series, “Save the Children: Restoring Health Through Grandpa’s Farm” we explore a new business model that has been tried and proven on our own farm in Southern Oregon. We have spent years developing this model through trial and error so that you don’t have to. This book series shows how you can implement this model on your own land in a step by step process.
| Series 1: Book1 Grow Your Own Animal Feed: The Model |
Paperback available on Amazon ---- https://www.amazon.com/dp/1520227116
The single largest cost to raising animals is often, feed. Raising animal based food products is basically the process of turning feed into products. Importing feed from off farm (buying bags or totes of feed from a supplier) fundamentally changes the traditional farm model. When the single most consumed ingredient of a farm operation must come from outside the farm, profits follow that ingredient. As the farm buys feed, it passes the bulk of profits to the feed suppliers and grower. This makes it increasingly difficult for the farm to show a profit itself.
Many small to medium farms have feed sources on farm in pastures or woodlands. But whatever natural resources the farm has is limited, and that limits the potential profit and production from that farm to the resources. To restore rural America will require a model that increases efficiency of on farm feed production and allows farms to scale without resorting to importing feed.
This particular book discusses an innovative approach of creating animal feed on farm using drip irrigation to grow produce with low labor, low investment and high yield. These are principles developed at our farm, Little Sprouts Farm, over years of trials and learning.
This is the first and most important book of the “Grow Your Own Feed” set. In this book we explain the high level model, all the pieces and how they fit together. Think of this book as the skeleton, or the overall guide. The remaining books of the “Grow Your Own feed” part of the series go into great detail on how to implement various aspects like weed burning, nutrition, building a drip system, complete with plans and pictures.We highly recommend going through this book first, cover to cover, to understand the model and timing. Then use the other books in this set to implement each aspect of the model when it is time to do so.This book explains the concepts of creating fresh animal feed from the same soil that the animals live on, for virtually no cost and without a huge investment in infrastructure! It is based on a unique approach to organic gardening using drip irrigation and heirloom plants. This eBook has 120+ pages covering the major concepts that we developed on our own farm. Using this model you will be able to produce 50% to 75% of the feed required for your animals at virtually no cost and only a little extra labor. No more reliance on store-bought feed!
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More books coming soon!
Animal Nutrition From Your Own Garden
Raising Animals for Free Soil Fertilization and Preparation
Building a Reusable Drip Irrigation System
Fertigation
Weed Burning
Guinea Fowl for Organic Pest Control
Medium Scale Dehydrating for Feed Storage
Raising Goats for Fun and Profit
Create a Small Scale Cheese Operation
Fermenting Vegetables for Fun and Profit
Raising Heritage Chickens for Fun and Profit
Build a Predator Proof Self Propelled Poultry Coop
Raising Heritage Turkeys for Fun and Profit
Free Local Resources to Build Your Small Farm
