Category: New Brunswick

Doing it the hard way

In the sixties or early seventies, the back to land movement was well known. The 1968 Whole Earth Catalog was the instruction manual dedicated to it. Helen and Scott Nearing were its inspirational grandparents. Many in my generation’s back to the land movement were vegetarians like the Nearings. Some were vegetarian by choice and others because of necessity. Because of my proclivity to cattle and farming, I studied Louis Bromfield’s book, Malabar Farm. Today there there is a new generation of people going back to the land.
In this century they are known by the label “off grid.” Few of those folks are openly vegetarians. This new generation proudly hunts and fishes for protein to supplement what they grow. Though their animals are more likely goats than cows, there are some with cows and even horses.
Many of today’s off grid folks are often in places deliberately difficult to reach. Most back to the landers in the seventies went where they could find cheap land whether it was alongside a road like my house and barn or back in the boonies where my friends in the dome lived.
During the seventies, the rural Annapolis Valley where we shopped did not have supermarkets. It had small grocery stores and cooperatives where you could get your food, your baler twine, and some beef fattener for your steer all in one shopping trip. Beaver Fruit Cooperative got most of our business. I also did some bulk orders with the folks in the dome. We had a local hardware and a Sears catalogue store which is where we ordered our appliances.
There were times in the early seventies when I thought about getting farther from the roads that connected us to the rest of the world. Reality always intruded. I thought about homesteading in Newfoundland, but my wife took one look and said I would be homesteading alone. I even found a great spot high on a hill on my land in Nova Scotia.
It is pictured at the top of the post. It was over a mile off the road which does not sound very far until you factor in the heavy clay soil and the astronomical expense of building a mile-long gravel road where gravel is in short supply. Then there would be the likely impossible task of getting power to the homestead. In those days there were no solar panels and battery systems to give you electricity off grid. Drilling water wells on our North Mountain was also problematic.
By the time we moved to New Brunswick we were well on the track for serious farming. We still gardened on a large scale, had chickens, and a milk cow. We did move to having someone butcher our annual steer for us instead of doing it ourselves. In creating our farm, we built well over a mile and a half of roads with New Brunswick’s ready supply of gravel over our rocky soils. I also convinced New Brunswick power to bring power a quarter of a mile back to the new barns that we built. We drilled a well back by the barns. It provided so much water that it was hard to measure.
So by 1976, all the elements were in place for us to move farther from the village of Tay Creek near our new barns but with no close neighbors. It wasn’t in the cards. While we had not had a great experience with the people of St. Croix Cove, the people of Tay Creek had been so welcoming that neither my wife or I would consider having the village become less accessible. It was also a great convenience to be by the road where the school bus picked up our children. It turned out we liked being part of our small farming village. We valued the connections of people dropping by to chat. I did not even mind cleaning the driveways of some residents who became close friends. When we needed them, our farming neighbors were there to help as much as they could.
In the end it seems the biggest difference between the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies and today’s off grid homesteader is that the homesteader of today is often working to isolate themselves from others. In the sixties and seventies back to landers were still interested in community. I loved the small country stores, but today’s off grid folks are much more likely to seek out the anonymity of COSTCO. The money that some make from YouTube makes it even easier to not have ties with nearby communities. We were part of communities because we needed connections and income. Even today you will find exceptions and some off grid folks are much more community oriented than others. However, when I hear the term off grid what comes to mind are people living in places that are only accessible by four wheel drive, snow mobile or ice road for at least part of the year.

Barely Clinging To The Grid

Our formerly pink house after a year of intense work

The dearth of good programming this holiday season has sent me to YouTube where I have enjoyed watching this generation’s homesteaders who would have been part of my generation’s back to the land movement in the late sixties and early seventies.
I was on the fringes of that movement back in 1971 when I bought an old farm including 140 acres, a two-hundred-fifty year old farmhouse (pictured above after a year’s hard work), with a barn and out buildings. I had just graduated from Harvard but had chosen Nova Scotia over law school. Four, also disillusioned, college friends went with me to Canada, but I was the only one to make the commitment to become a landed immigrant. My Dodge Powerwagon and Landrover came with me to Nova Scotia. They carried all that I owned including a TV and lots of spare kitchen utensils from my mother in Mt. Airy, North Carolina.
The pink house in the middle of a sheep pasture was in rough shape when I took possession. We set about tearing it down to the hand hewn beams, insulating it and attempting to bring some modern conveniences to the house. That was probably what set me apart from most in the back to land movement who leaned towards off grid domes, hauling their water, and hand tools for gardening and no modern conveniences,
Maybe it was a childhood in rural North Carolina which was still close to the land filled with small farms that made me different. My mother had been born on a millpond in 1910. I had listened to plenty of her stories of ice being stored in saw-dust insulated holes in the ground and cooking over a wood stove. When I was growing up in the fifties some of relatives still had outhouses on their farms. I also probably had camped in the woods more than most. For whatever reason, I was fine with the conveniences that electricity brought including hot water and a dishwasher. I was also happy to use a diesel tractor on our farm.
I became the electrician and plumber for the modernization of the old house. By Thanksgiving of 1971 we were ready to host some college friends who were sure that we were crazy. It was the first Thanksgiving on our own for all of us. It was pretty rough with everyone sleeping on the floor, a blanket for a bathroom door, chicken crates for kitchen cabiinets, and mayonaise jars for glasses. Still we had an electric stove and a dishwasher. Still it was a great celebration of our independence.
The next year the house was more livable but we poured our energies into gardening and farming. My dad gave me $11,000 to buy a tractor, three furrow plow, disk harrows, front end loader, manure spreader and a bush hog. I took $1,500 and bought our first herd of six or seven cows. We also started refurbishing the old baler that had come with the farm. We converted it to a PTO driven model instead of one powered by a mounted gasoline engine.
We had unlimited compost from chicken manure that had rotted for years behind some old chicken houses. I had little experience gardening besides helping my mother grow tomato plants in North Carolina. What I did have was inspiration from Helen and Scott Nearing and Malabar Farm. Gardening in Nova Scotia on the foggy North Mountain by the Bay of Fundy required a lot more expertise than in North Carolina. Still the abundance from the garden was overwhelming until my mother and her sister, both experienced canners, showed up to help us through that first harvest. We filled the freezer and the cupboards. That winter we butchered a steer we had fattened from our herd. We hung it age in our cellar before carving it up. The next summer we raised pigs, one for us and three more for neighbors. We butchered them with the help of neighbors in the fall, topped up the freezer and made crocks of salt pork. It was an amazing amount of work that made me appreciate all the fresh pork in the fall that our relatives had always given my mother and me.

That winter of 1972 was something of a lonely one. One member of the college crew married the local school teacher and moved into another old house across the dirt road. The last one of my college friends left for a warmer climate. That left me wintering on the Bay of Fundy with our two Labs, Tok and Fundy, and a handful of cats. I made friends with some back to the land folks who lived far in the woods in a dome. I ordered some supplies with them including a giant tub of honey that was still with me when we moved. Mostly what we didn’t grow came from Beaver Fruit Cooperative in Lawrencetown down in the Annapolis Valley or from itenerant peddlers who sold salt fish and winter vegetables. I say we because that was my last winter alone.
I got married in the summer of 1973 and brought my new North Carolina bride home that September just in time for an early season snow storm that took the power out for a week. We stayed warm with the fireplace and cooked over the same. It was not unusual for the powe to go out on our dirt shore road but a week long outage was rare. That next summer my wife and I continued to garden, work on the house, and farm a little. Farming was a little because I had sold the cattle and part of my land to disolve an uneasy partnership with the friend who had married the village school teacher. Well before garden season my wife and I had made the decision to move to a better farming area with more and friendlier people.
We found the perfect place for us in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. We moved there in the fall of 1974 and started the process of building a real farm with the help of some great neighbors. We built our first barn in 1975 and converted to round bales in the summer of 1975.

Annually, we put up 200 large round bales for our herd which eventually grew to 200 head of purehred Angus.

We were actually even closer to the land than we were in Nova Scotia. On our New Brunswick farm we had spring-fed water for our house. We continued to garden, added chickens, and a milk cow. However, we found a local butcher to do our annual steer. We were still on the edge of the grid. Our first winter we got twenty-three feet of snow. We saw weather as cold as minus forty with sixty mile per hour winds. We went back to mostly heating with wood, burning three to four cords per year in our much newer home which was only one hundred years old. It was cold enough that we unplugged our freezers in the shed which was attached to house so you could get wood without going outside. The first winter there I fed hay that had been put up with horses. One thing we did not do is fight snow with tiny all terrain vehicles. A couple of miles of road to keep clear required real snow removal equipment.

Our 85 HP International 786 tractor with 8 ft wide blower, Tok and me with lots of layers

When I look back on it all, I am amazed that we did it without someone getting really injured. There was no Internet or YouTube for advice. Advice either came from a book or your neighbors. I learned to be pretty self-sufficient often repairing broken equipment with my torch and welder. I added chain saw carpentry to my resume as we built the barns. We ran our cattle in the woods in the winter and managed to get through our farming years without ever having a vet come out for a sick animal. We might still be farming if interest rates hadn’t surged to 20% and drove me to working in the city with computers and eventually to a career of nearly twenty years at Apple Computer.

We were never off grid but if your farm doesn’t have any cattle fences in the back because there is no place for the cattle to go, you can justifiably say you were barely clinging to the grid.