Author: Myron Horst

Our Quest for a Better and More Humane Way to Raise Chickens on Pasture

Leave a comment

Like most others who raise chickens on pasture, when we first started farming in 2000, we followed Joel Salatin’s method of raising chickens on pasture. The Salatin method of using 10 foot by 12 foot movable pens sounded great, and the description of the chickens getting a fresh salad bar of grass each day and enjoying the fresh air and sunshine were great selling points. But it was not long into that first year that we realized that putting 75 chickens into a 10 foot by 12 foot pen with no floor was not as great or humane as we had been led to believe that it was.

The problems with the Salatin “pull pen” method
Instead of our chickens being in a large commercial confinement chicken house, they were in a small confinement chicken pen. They had much less space to move around than in a big commercial chicken house. It was confinement chicken raising on pasture. Confinement was the very thing we wanted to avoid. The birds only had about an hour after the pen was moved when they could eat fresh green grass. Within an hour, most of the grass became contaminated with chicken manure from the chickens stepping in their wet droppings and walking around on the grass. For the rest of the day the chickens had to lay in their own filth. By the time the pen was moved the next morning there was a mat of manure covering the ground. Not a very humane situation.

Because the chickens were in such tight confinement, they got very little exercise. Therefore, when the pens were moved they did not like to walk very much and it was easy to trap a chicken’s leg under the back of the pen and cripple it. It would then have to be put down because it could not walk properly. That was especially likely to occur when the pens had to be turned around at the end of the pasture.


This was our “pull pen” patterned after the Salatin method our first year of raising broilers. The rope in the front was used to pull the pen forward one pen length to a new clean section of grass – hence the name “pull pen”.

On an ideal warm sunny day, like the one in the picture above, the pull pen looked great sitting in the green pasture. But in the spring and fall when we had cold nights in the 40’s or 50’s and it rained, it was not a very humane situation. The poor chickens had to be on the cold wet ground 24/7. There was no place for them to get off the damp ground. We tried putting down some hay in the pens, but it took a lot of hay and the hay quickly got wet also. We have heard of chickens dying during a rain storm because their pen was in a low spot or a place in the pasture where the water ran through the pen.

On the flip side, when it was hot, the pen turned into an “easy bake oven”. We lost chickens because of heat stress. The pens were too far out in the pasture to run electric for fans.

The pull pens also required a lot more labor than what we had thought they would. So we looked for a better method.

Day Range Method
The next year we tried the Day Range method of raising broiler chickens. The shelter was stationary and had a slatted wood floor to keep the chickens up off the ground. The feed and water were outside on the pasture. We set up an electric fence on one side of the shelter and the chickens had full access to the grass in that paddock. That solved a lot of the problems with the Salatin pull pen method. The grass stayed much cleaner and there was much more fresh clean grass for the chickens to eat. The chickens got a lot more exercise and because of the exercise, it took a week longer for them to get to market weight. They had a floor that kept them up off of the damp cold ground and the higher roof of the shelter allowed the heat to rise away from the birds better on hot days. A number of our customers commented that the chicken meat had a better flavor and texture.


Our Day Range shelter in our early years of raising chickens on pasture.

The Day Range method had its problems too. The raised slatted floor created a breeding ground for flies and we produced an abundance of flies. Sigh!! Chickens wake up just before dawn, which is about 5:00 am in the summer. By the time we opened up their shelter at 7:00 or 8:00 am they were starved and would dash out to the feeders, fill up and then go back into the shelter to rest. They did not eat as much of the pasture as we wanted them to. The mixture of feed and manure around the feeders killed the grass and made bare spots that would last for several months. The bare spots became a problem after a number of batches of chickens had been run through the shelter. I did not feel like I was being a good steward of the soil and the pasture because the grass was being destroyed rather than being built up.

We continued to modify things in the Day Range method over the next number of years until we developed the method that we use now which we call the Jehovah-Jireh Method.

The Jehovah-Jireh Method – Let Them Run
“Jehovah-Jireh” means “The Lord will provide”. Over and over, we ask God to teach us how to farm and to give us answers to our problems. The method that we now use is one of those answers. We feel it is a much better and more humane method of raising chickens on pasture than anything else that we have seen or tried.

The shelters are large, airy, and stationary. The sides are open on all four sides. The roof has an 11 foot high peak that allows the heat in the summer to rise and escape away from the chickens. We also installed fogger nozzles on the shelters to provide a cooling mist on those really hot days. In the early spring and late fall, if it is cold and windy, we close up one end and a side of the shelter to provide a windbreak.

The floor is a bedding pack of wood chips. When the wood chips become contaminated with manure, we rototill the manure into the bedding pack and bring up drier bedding. Periodically we also add more wood chips to keep the bedding dry. It solved our fly problem. The manure and wood chips in the lower layers of the bedding pack decompose into compost which we apply to our gardens.

The feed and water are kept inside the shelters. Now, when the chickens wake up at 5:00am, they can have their breakfast right away. Then when the doors on the shelter are opened a little later in the morning, they are more ready to roam around and eat grass and look for bugs. The grass in the broiler pasture has been steadily improving in quality and is now the best pasture on the farm. We can see that difference in quality when we put the cows in that pasture. They always give more milk. The chickens now have access to a lot of fresh clean grass, even at the end of the summer.


The broiler chicken shelters in our current setup.


The broiler chickens on fresh, clean pasture.

We continue our quest to have the best, most humane, environmentally sensitive method of raising chickens that we can. At the same time, we also are continuing our quest to produce the most nutritious meats and eggs that we can for your health and ours.

Homesteading In the City

Leave a comment

Homesteading in the city is a practical, efficient, and cost effective way of providing high quality, great tasting, nutrient dense food for your household. It is a method of homesteading that many people have overlooked. Homesteading in the city does not require any land, and you don’t have to move or quit your job. It also avoids a lot of the problems with the traditional method of homesteading, plus it significantly reduces the amount of work required. First we will look at the problems with the traditional method of homesteading and then look at the advantages of homesteading in the city.

What most people promoting homesteading will not tell you is that the traditional method of homesteading is a life of poverty unless you have a source of outside income. Homesteading is a smaller version of a small farm and has little income. The great difficulty of trying to make a living from a homestead is seen in the following statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The latest statistics that the USDA has for farm income is for 2004. While those statistics are not current, what they reveal has probably not changed much. According to the statistics, 82 percent of all the farms in the U.S. had less than $100,000 in sales of farm products, while 18 percent had more than $100,000 in sales, and only 8 percent had more than $250,000 in sales. For a farm to have $100,000 in sales may sound like it is doing well, but the profit margin is very low. After all the expenses are subtracted off – farmland land rent or mortgage, fertilizer, seeds, fuel, equipment costs, animal purchases, vet bills, feed, electric, supplies, etc. there is very little left of the $100,000 to pay the farmer or homesteader for their labor. The USDA report states: “For the 82 percent of U.S. farming operations that have annual sales of $100,000 or less, off farm income typically accounts for all but a negligible amount of farm household income.” (http://www.usda.gov/documents/FARM_FAMILY_INCOME.pdf) This is an incredible and sad statistic. 82 percent of all the farmers in the U.S. make practically nothing off of farming.

The bottom line is that homesteading is not self sufficient financially. A person almost has to have off homestead income in order to have enough income to cover living expenses and medical costs.

Another problem with the traditional concept of homesteading is the economy of scale is too small. A homestead tries to raise everything it needs and has a little of this and a little of that. The homesteader can end up spending almost all their time raising their own food, preserving it, spinning, weaving, splitting firewood, developing the homestead, etc. just trying to exist. For example, it takes almost as much time to care for one beef cow as it would to take care of 50. Each type of animal, type of poultry, each species of vegetable or fruit requires a certain amount of time, equipment, and expertise. The more different kinds of things that one tries to raise, the greater the chance that other things will suffer because there is not enough time and expertise to produce the quality and quantity of food that is desired.

Homesteading in the city (or in the country) that I am recommending takes on a different approach. My mother practiced homesteading in the city and I got the concept from her, even though she never called it homesteading. Our family lived on a small 1/3 acre lot in town with 40 full grown trees on it. There was no place to have a garden. She did have a spot where she was able to have several tomato plants. Instead of growing our own food, my parents sourced some of it from local sources that they trusted. My parents bought a large 20+ cubic foot chest freezer which they kept well stocked with food. They bought a quarter of a beef each year from a farmer. Sometimes they bought a number of jugs of milk from my uncle that had a dairy farm and put them in the freezer. Another uncle planted a number of rows of sweet corn at the edge of his corn field each year. We would go to their farm for corn day and process 1200 to 1500 ears of corn, cutting the corn off the cob and putting it into freezer boxes. It was like a holiday, except we socialized by working together. My mother would go to a local orchard each year and buy three to five bushels of Red Haven peaches. We would help her can them so that we would have great tasting peaches to eat that winter. She would often buy several 20 pound boxes of blueberries when they were in season and put them in smaller containers and put them in her big freezer treasure chest.

Homesteading in the city is not about trying to grow all of your food or even to preserve all your own food. It is about buying food from local farmers and sources that you know that have a great tasting product and that is nutrient dense. It is buying food in bulk in season and freezing it or canning it for the rest of the year. Homesteading in the city is letting others do the hard work of raising the meats or fruits and vegetables, and you reap the rewards of their labor. It is about being part of community rather than being individualistic.

And since you are homesteading, don’t forget to buy “insurance” for your big freezer that is filled with all those delicious, nutritious treasures. If the power goes out you don’t want to lose all that wonderful food. The “insurance” is a generator. It does not have to be a whole house generator, and it only needs to run several hours each day to keep the freezer and your refrigerator from warming up too much. A 3000 watt generator can be purchased for a little over $300 or a 5000 watt generator for about $600 and will last for many years.


The right tools make homesteading in the city easier. We bought several of these propane burner units this year and are very pleased with them. They are similar to a turkey fryer burner, but they produce a lot more heat (170,000 BTU’s) than a turkey fryer ( 40,000 BTU’s). It is also much more fuel efficient than the propane weed burning torch that we used to use. You could use a large galvanized wash tub with this burner to can 19 quarts at a time. The burner is available from Agri Supply for only $39.95 http://www.agrisupply.com/carolina-cooker-12-in-cooker-stand-and-burner/p/49469/

In addition to keeping the heat out of the house, we feel this method is much safer than canning on a stove top. A person is not as likely to burn themselves with the hot water when taking jars out of the canner. The burner is only 12 inches high and very sturdy, which keeps the canner close to the ground. It is much easier to take the jars out as well.


You can also make your own mini walk in cooler with a window air conditioner and a Coolbot. I first saw this idea used at Cathy’s uncle and aunt’s house. He had made a closet (about two feet deep and six feet wide) into a reach in refrigerator where they could put things from the garden. He used a small 6,000 btu window air conditioner as the cooling unit. There are many times when a fruit or vegetable is available, but you don’t have time that day to freeze or can it. It needs to be refrigerated so that it can hold until you have time to get it put up. This summer when we put in a new walk in cooler for the eggs, we used a Coolbot controller and a high efficiency window air conditioner. With this setup, we use 30% less electricity than with a conventional walk in cooler refrigeration unit and it is a fraction of the cost.

The Coolbot was designed by a farmer for their CSA farm. It can be purchased here: http://www.storeitcold.com/

Here is a suggestion for a homesteading food gathering trip in the Lancaster Pa. area:
The first stop is Community of Oasis at Bird-in-Hand 60 N. Ronks Rd, Ronks Pa 17572 http://www.reallivefood.org/
Oasis has organic, grass fed, raw milk for a reasonable price. They also have a large variety of cheeses. Their drinkable yogurt is very good.  .

Next door in the same building is Lancaster Ag. There you can buy soft rock phosphate and high calcium lime for your garden or raised beds. They also carry garden blends of organic fertilizers.

Continue north on Ronks Rd. several miles to the village of Bird-in-Hand. There, just down from the corner at 2805 Old Philadelphia Pike is the Bird-in-Hand Farm Supply store. It is an Amish hardware store with prices that are considerably lower than Lowes or Home Depot. There you can buy a quality Amish made pulley style clothes line. But the real find is their food room hidden on the left side of the store. We did not find it until the second time we visited the store. There you can buy raw organic cheese for $4.35 a pound in five pound blocks. The price is a little higher for smaller sizes. They also have some of the best prices on canning supplies. You have to look carefully, most of the food is not organic, but there are some great deals on some other food items as well.

If you need some organic potatoes, continue east on Old Philadelphia Pike toward the town of Intercourse. On the left is an Amish farm with a white house that has a sign for organic potatoes. We have purchased 50 pound bags of potatoes from them several times when we ran out of potatoes. Note: most Amish farms are not organic and do not use organic practices. Just because Amish farms are selling produce along the side of the road does not mean that it is nutrient dense, health giving food.

The last stop is several miles north of Bird-in-Hand on Ronks Rd. On the right you will find Miller’s Natural Foods. It is a large health food store on an Amish farm.

One of the real joys of homesteading in the city is the satisfaction of having a bunch of good food in the freezer, or canned on the shelf. It gives you a feeling of self-sufficiency knowing that you don’t have to run to the grocery store every time they are calling for a snowstorm to make sure you don’t run out of food. It also gives you a satisfied feeling, knowing that you have stored away some really good healthy food for the winter.

Happy homesteading!

Eating Nutrient Dense Foods – The Role of Brix is Not What We Thought

Leave a comment

Testing fruits and vegetables for brix, the percent sugar, does not appear to be as reliable a method for testing their mineral density as previously thought. International Ag Labs released a report earlier this year in which they tested butternut squash samples for nutrient density from 29 different sources. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the explanation of the nutrient density standard that was used to rank the samples. However, the results show some interesting things:
The brix reading does not correlate with protein content.
The brix reading does not correlate with calcium content.
The brix reading does not seem to correlate with any other mineral content.

What this report shows is that testing the brix of fruits and vegetables produced by someone else, such as from the grocery store or from a farmer’s market, or even from your own garden, is not a reliable indicator of nutrient density. However, that does not mean that testing the brix content is worthless. In general, a higher brix squash tended to have a higher mineral content. Also, this test was an evaluation of only butternut squashes and not all fruits and vegetables.

Last summer, I started questioning the accuracy of testing fruits and vegetables for brix to find the mineral content. Our green beans were only 7 brix (between good and average on the brix chart with 10 being excellent), but the yield was incredible, and the taste was some of the best I had ever eaten and the beans were very tender. The leaves of the green bean plants were 15 brix. I did a little testing and found that doubling the moisture content cuts the brix reading in half. Cutting the moisture content in half doubles the brix reading. Therefore, knowing the moisture content (dry matter percent) is important if you are comparing the brix between two fruits or vegetables grown in two different locations.

But! Before you throw out your refractometer as a worthless test instrument, the refractometer is an important test instrument in your garden. If you can get the brix of the leaf of the plants above 12 brix, the bugs will pretty much leave the plants alone. You can test the plants to make sure that any nutritional spray, such as milk, honey and egg spray, is increasing the brix reading in the leaf. Also, if you have put down soft rock phosphate and high calcium limestone on your garden, you know that the minerals are there at a higher level, even if the brix reading of the vegetables does not test in the excellent range, especially if the leaves of the plant test 12 brix or higher.

This summer, it has been difficult to keep the brix reading of the leaf high because of all the rain and cloudy weather that we have had. It is the sun shining on the leaf that helps make the sugar in the leaf. We have had a lot more problems with Japanese beetles this year, and I believe it is because of all the rainy weather.

The squash study by International Ag Labs highlights the importance of growing our own food or purchasing it from someone we know who has put the minerals into the soil. Eating nutrient dense foods is not as easy to accomplish as we would like it to be, but it is vitally important for our health.

The results of the butternut squash study can be found at this link:
http://marketgardens.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Compiled-Butternut-Squash-Data.pdf

Newly Revealed Dangers of Eating Roundup® Tainted Food

Leave a comment

Most pastured poultry producers use conventionally grown feed (either GMO or non-GMO) for their chickens because it is half the cost of organic chicken feed. They are able to offer what appears to many as the same product at a much lower cost than what we can provide. We remain committed to using organic feed because in the end, when all the health care costs are figured in, it is probably at least half the cost of using conventionally grown chicken feed. Actually, a person’s health can’t be measured in dollars. Many terminally ill people would gladly give all they had just to have true health.

GMO grain is only part of the problem in causing health problems. Newly released research shows that trace amounts of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, are slowly and silently degrading people’s health. Farmers us glyphosate to kill cover crops, grass, and weeds so that they can plant the new crop. It is an important part of no-till farming, which is the method most conventional farmers use.

I remember, back when we first started farming, that farmers were being told that Roundup was completely harmless to people. We were told it only affected plants, and when it touched the soil it was neutralized. That was false information. I believe that most farmers are totally ignorant of what they are doing to other people’s health by their use of herbicides, pesticides, and GMO’s in the food that they are producing. In addition, for many farmers, money clouds their thinking and practice; not because they are greedy, but many of them have their backs to the wall financially and do not see it as possible financially for them to produce organic food.

New research shows that trace amounts of glyphosate is found in corn, soybeans, wheat and sugar grown on ground where Roundup was applied. These trace amounts of glyphosate inhibit enzymes in the gut and prevent the body from detoxifying other chemical residues and toxins. The result is many of the modern diseases.

The abstract of the new report in Entropy reads:

“Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, is the most popular herbicide used worldwide. The industry asserts it is minimally toxic to humans, but here we argue otherwise. Residues are found in the main foods of the Western diet, comprised primarily of sugar, corn, soy and wheat. Glyphosate’s inhibition of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes is an overlooked component of its toxicity to mammals. CYP enzymes play crucial roles in biology, one of which is to detoxify xenobiotics. Thus, glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins. Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body. Here, we show how interference with CYP enzymes acts synergistically with disruption of the biosynthesis of aromatic amino acids by gut bacteria, as well as impairment in serum sulfate transport. Consequences are most of the diseases and conditions associated with a Western diet, which include gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. We explain the documented effects of glyphosate and its ability to induce disease, and we show that glyphosate is the “textbook example” of exogenous semiotic entropy: the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins.” (Emphasis added)

You can read the full report at this link: http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416

The bottom line is: if you want to get sick, eat as much food as you can that has ingredients from conventionally produced corn, soybeans, wheat, and sugar beet sugar. Eating out for lunch or dinner is a great way to get these glyphosate contaminated foods.

Our family is committed to providing you with food that will give you health. Thank you for your support by purchasing our products and making it possible.

Terra Preta Update

Leave a comment

In the June 2009 farm newsletter we shared how we were making charcoal and experimenting with it to make Terra Preta soil in our garden. We applied about an inch and a half of charcoal and incorporated it in the top six inches of soil in a three foot wide strip across the rows of vegetables in half of our garden. Unfortunately, we did not see any improvement in growth, drought resistance, or brix improvement to the plants grown in the charcoal enriched soil in any of the years since then. I suspect that there is some other ingredient in Terra Preta soils that make them so productive.

Chestnut Orchard Update

Leave a comment

Last spring our chestnut orchard was inoculated with both a strong and a weak strain of chestnut blight to test for blight resistance. In the fall, the trees were evaluated and the trees with the least resistance were cut down and burned. Two weeks ago, members of the American Chestnut Foundation again came and evaluated the trees. They were very impressed with the blight resistance that the trees in our orchard exhibited. Over all, the trees exhibited much more blight resistance than what the trees in other orchards have exhibited. At this point, only about half of the 500 chestnut trees in our orchard have been inoculated with the blight. The rest will be inoculated next spring. Because this is a breeding orchard, only the best trees will be kept. In the end, only about 30 trees will remain of the 500 trees that were planted.


Personnel from the American Chestnut Foundation evaluating the chestnut trees for blight resistance.

Blinded By Amazing Medical Technology

Leave a comment

By Myron Horst

The incredible and amazing advancements in medical technology have blinded our eyes to what is really going on — the “health” care industry does not know how to slow the increasing prevalence of disease and major illnesses. They confidently tell us what to eat and what to do, based on peer reviewed research, to prevent certain cancers or diseases. But, as we look at the bigger picture, we see that sickness and disease are rapidly increasing and healthcare costs are skyrocketing to unsustainable levels in spite of the prevention advice of the medical community. They do not know how to slow the increasing prevalence of disease and major illnesses. If you and I continue to eat the same foods that are available in the grocery stores and restaurants, we will likely get cancer, heart disease, or one of the other diseases and illnesses that those around us are getting.

The focus of the “health” care industry is on treating sickness and disease once they occur. That is where the big money is. They have become very high tech in keeping sick people alive a year or more longer while they drain the person’s bank account. My uncle told me about a week ago that nursing homes cost almost $100,000 a year. He is in his 80’s, is living alone and is resisting going into a retirement community as long as he can. He had put his wife in a nursing home a number of years ago because he was no longer able to take care of her. Her medical care, before she passed away, cost him half of everything he had and he does not want to give the rest of what he has to the healthcare industry.

The cost of healthcare will soon become unaffordable for many people, even with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA or Obama Care) in 2010. The PPACA did slow down the projected increase in health care cost some at this point. A recent report in the Annals of Family Medicine shows that the annual cost of heath insurance for a family will equal median household income in only 20 years (2033). Those costs are totally unsustainable in the long run. http://www.annfammed.org/content/10/2/156.full.pdf+html

Self Defense

Leave a comment

By Myron Horst

We live in a time that has different challenges and problems than what our grandparents ever had to face. The following situation is something that each of us is more likely to face than ever before.

A person comes into your house and is going to kill your wife. What would you do?

  1. Shoot them
  2. Tell them to leave.
  3. Quick take pictures or video with your phone.
  4. Not know what to do, so you do nothing.
  5. Pray.
  6. Sit beside your wife while she dies and hold her hand.

Most people would do number 6, just sit there and hold her hand while she dies. Even the macho men with their closets full of guns and ammo! As much as they believe in self defense, they would not defend her because they do not recognize what is happening. It is not the type of self defense situation that they were expecting or prepared for.

It is best not to answer a hypothetical question like I asked (“what would you do?”) because you do not know all the facts. In this case, the scenario that I am thinking about is not a person with a gun, but a situation that we are more likely to face with hospice or healthcare. It is important that we are alert to what is happening and not get deceived with the code language – “making them comfortable”.

We have been observing older people under hospice care being sedated with morphine and other medications to the point where they can no longer eat or drink. The end comes quickly. When a person is heavily sedated, it is difficult to really know if they are really that close to death or if it is the medication that is preventing them from living. The following are two cases where medication would have killed the patient if the medication had not been stopped.

My sister is currently in Florida helping a friend of hers, who we will call Mary, who is terminally ill. This lady is a heavy smoker and has continued to smoke even though she is on oxygen. Because of that, Hospice dropped her and refused to care for her even though she desperately needed help.

The following are several excerpts from emails that my sister sent:
“I pointed out how we wondered what was going on with Hospice dismissing her and why God would allow that to happen to her, and that I had prayed that they would take her back. But we now know that if she had continued with Hospice, Mary would most likely no longer be here because of their overdosing of morphine, and then her own accidental overdosing of meds on top of that. When I stopped in to see her on what I thought was my way out of town a week ago, and saw what we all thought then was a major decline in her condition, I estimated she would not last a week. Her nurse said today she had thought the same thing.”

Four days later:
“Today we had a major answer to prayer when a doctor signed on to oversee Mary’s care and prescribe her meds, including morphine, when she needs it. However, in the last two weeks Mary has weaned herself down to very low dosages of morphine, only taking it as needed when she gets really short of breath. As she has come off the major dosages of morphine that hospice had prescribed and urged her to take, and the other meds she had accidentally overdosed on while on morphine have worked their way out of her system, Mary has become much more herself again: alert most of the time and clear minded.

“The really good news is that the new doc doesn’t think her death is very imminent, and she is going to work at reducing Mary’s use of morphine to as small a dose as possible so that she can be as clear-minded as possible for as long as possible. She is also going to prescribe physical therapy to help Mary regain use of her legs and be able to bear her own weight again, since it was just two weeks ago that she was able to walk to the bathroom and back again. It’s a whole different perspective now in Mary’s condo, as this doc has brought a focus on life rather than on death. Mary’s illness is still a terminal one, but I remember six years ago her doctor telling her she only had six months to live. But he was wrong, and she has done a lot of living in the six years since.”

A similar potentially fatal medication situation happened to my uncle under Hospice care. He was given a medication that prevented him from swallowing. My aunt, who is a nurse, realized what was happening and stopped giving him that medication. My uncle made her promise not to ever let them do that again. It was awful. “Making them comfortable” can be a horrible way to die.

We live in a day and age which is different than any other time in recent history. We need to be alert to what is happening so that we can protect our loved ones from those who would harm them. I am sure that Hospice is not all bad and that they are a help to many. However, for me, the term “Self Defense” has taken on a new meaning. Guns and bombs are not the only things that kill.

The best self defense in this case is to live right and to eat right so that you do not need the “health care” system at all! That is our mission here at Jehovah-Jireh Farm: to help you be as healthy as we can. We are “More than a farm — A living laboratory researching the secrets of food, health and life.” If we eat the same foods that everyone else is eating we will have the same sicknesses and diseases and need the same healthcare and hospice. If we want different results, we have to eat differently and eat better quality foods than what “everyone” else is eating. Healthier foods cost more, but the costs are small in comparison to the results of cheap GMO, low brix, low calcium, factory farm, and processed foods.

False Concepts about Physical Work

Leave a comment

By Myron Horst

One reason that I wanted a farm was so that I could teach my children how to work and to have a good work ethic. When I used to work as a finish carpenter, the company that I worked for would hire college “kids” in the summertime to do laborer work. They did not know how to work! They did not know how to sweep the floor or use a shovel. Some of the worst workers were sons of executives of a large company. These guys had never had to mow the lawn or clean the house because someone was hired to do it for them. I realized that if I could teach my children how to work, they could be successful in whatever occupation that they went into.

Training our children how to work and to think like adults has been a much more difficult job than what I ever realized it would be. As time has gone along, I have realized that there are false concepts about physical work that many believe to be true. These false concepts hinder a person from applying themselves to the job at hand like they should. They end up only getting a fraction of the work done that they could.

False concept #1 – Physical work does not require much thinking and is for people who are not as smart.
Many people mistakenly believe that physical work does not require much intelligence or thinking. We get offers from various people and children’s groups to come out to the farm and do volunteer work on the farm. The impression that they seem to have is that the poor farmer has so much work to do and anyone can do it, and that he would be so glad to have a bunch of kids come and do it for him.

We turn down those offers because it takes more time to train others how to do the job, supervise them to make sure it is being done right, and to redo things that were not done right, than do the work ourselves. An example of this is processing chickens. Our family of eight can process about 125 chickens an hour. Each person has their station in the processing line and knows what to do. When we first started processing chickens, it took five adults and our oldest son six hours to do 60 chickens. At that point a new person’s help would have been help. But now, to have one person come in and try to learn how to process chickens would drastically slow us down. Their “help” would only increase our work load.

To work efficiently and to do the job right requires constant thinking and analyzing of what is being done, even if you are talking about something else. Physical work is not dumb work or work that requires a strong back and a weak mind. This is true even of simple tasks such as gathering eggs, stacking firewood, or dusting the furniture. We have heated our home with firewood for 18 years. In spite of that, each year I have to train the boys how to stack firewood all over again. They will stack the wood with short pieces on the bottom and long pieces on the top, or stack the wood with the wood stack leaning over and in danger of it falling over. One year a small stack was so unstable that I pushed on it a little and it fell over. It was not safe for children to be around. Several months ago, I finally realized what was happening. They thought that stacking firewood was such a menial task that it did not require any thinking and they thought about other things instead of where or how they were placing a piece of wood.

Physical work, to be done right and to be done efficiently, requires a person to be constantly thinking and analyzing what they and the ones that they are working with are doing; even simple tasks such as digging with a shovel or sweeping a floor. One supervisor that I had in construction a number of years ago said that he would rather pay a carpenter $16 an hour to dig a ditch and have it done right than to pay a laborer $6 an hour to do the job. Till you add in the supervisory costs, the laborer working slower, the laborer not thinking, not understanding the bigger picture, and not doing the job right, etc., it was cheaper and there were less headaches to have the carpenter dig for an hour.

False Concept #2 – Physical work should be fun.
Another false concept about physical work is that it should be fun. I have often been asked by a person watching what I was doing if it was fun.  They thought it looked like fun. To be honest, physical work is often not fun, especially when it is hot and the work is hard. But physical work can be very rewarding and gives a feeling of satisfaction when the job is done and done well. Work can be enjoyable and it is good to try to make it enjoyable when possible. It is also important to try to make the work so that it is not frustrating. But making work fun should not be a focus. There are many times when work has to be done and you can’t call it enjoyable or fun. A child needs to learn that “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!” Not, when the work gets hard you quit.

It is a wrong concept to try to make work fun for children to get them to do it. Work is only fun for a short period of time and then it loses its enjoyment as something fun. This is particularly true of routine work and chores. Several of our boys, when they were young, would try to make filling the firewood cart “fun” by making up stories as they worked. What should have taken five minutes would take them a half hour. Instead of making work fun, it made it a drudgery because of how long it would take to get the job done. A similar thing happened with washing dishes. They would get books on “tape” from the library and listen to them while they did the dishes. It took “forever” to get the dishes done. They were trying to make a job fun. Instead, it taught them that work was not fun. It also taught them to work slow, the opposite of efficiency. When we pointed out to them what was happening, they realized the foolishness of what they were doing. We made a rule that they could not listen to stories or make up stories while they worked.

Children need to be taught to find satisfaction in the work that they do rather than look for it to be fun.

False Concept #3 – Making work for children teaches them to work.
Making work for children because there is not enough work to keep them busy does not teach children to work. Sometimes families, in an effort to keep their children busy have them do things such as vacuum the carpet everyday. Children are not dumb. They quickly realize that they are doing work that does not really need to be done. That type of work keeps them busy, but it does not teach them to see what needs to be done and do it without being told. Instead it teaches just the opposite: that “keeping busy” is the important thing instead of getting a job done quickly and efficiently.

The basic concepts in learning to work are: to see what needs to be done, to remember other jobs that also need to be done, to analyze what things are most important, to think through how to do the job the most efficiently, and to do the job quickly and with quality workmanship without getting caught up in small details that take a lot of time but don’t contribute much to the finished project. To help a son or daughter learn how to work is an important step in the passage between being a child and acting like a child to being a real man or a real woman.

“Crazy” Farmers Eat Two Breakfasts!

1 Comment

We eat two breakfasts about five days a week. After learning several years ago that we get 80% of our energy from the air and sun, we realized that we could make a greater improvement on our health by focusing on the 80% in addition to the 20% – our food. After the normal food breakfast, we gather in the living room for about 20 minutes of spirited, four-part singing around the keyboard for our air breakfast. Each of the children have learned to sing harmony – alto, tenor, or bass. We take a hymnbook and start at the beginning and sing each song whether we know it or not. It is amazing how many excellent, beautiful songs there are that are not being sung, and the old “worn out” hymns are the ones that everyone sings. The singing makes an invigorating way to start the day. Cathy and I met while singing on the Rosedale Chorale from Rosedale Bible College in Ohio. We traveled together on two chorale tours in the US and Canada totaling over 12,000 miles.

Singing or playing the harmonica is an excellent way to develop one’s lungs. Dr. Alexander Beddoe, one of Carey Reams’s students, said that one of the best ways to increase our body’s intake of oxygen is to sing or play the harmonica several times a day. He said that it is not the inhaling that is important, but the controlled release of the air that helps the lungs take the oxygen out of the air. When we sing, we take a deep breath and then slowly release the air as we sing a phrase. It is the opposite principle of the lung exercising tool that they give to patients in the hospital that focuses on creating a vacuum by sucking with the lungs and then you give a quick exhale so you can take a breath again.

The concept that people, animals, and plants receive 80% of their nutrients from the air is a revolutionary concept when it comes to how we think about feeding ourselves and feeding plants. I had verified to my own satisfaction that plants receive at least 80% of their nutrients from the air. I shared some of my finding in the article “The Most Important Plant Food – In Your Face and You Can’t See It” https://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/articles/2010/06/14/the-most-important-plant-food-in-your-face-and-you-cant-see-it/

For people, it was more difficult to verify that we receive a significant amount of our nourishment from the air and sunshine. Some time ago, I read an article and I can’t locate it now, about how the human body radiates infrared light. The article stated that the body uses about 2000 calories to produce the infrared light in a 24 hour day. If a person eats a 2000 calorie diet each day and burns 2000 calories walking, working, and other activities, and burns another 2000 calories producing infrared light; and you subtract off the unused food in the waste that is excreted, we find that there is not enough calories used from the food to provide the 4000 calories that the body burned. We get the additional energy from the air.

An excellent article that explains how air (oxygen) is combined with the atoms from our food to produce the atomic energy that our bodies run on is titled “You, Me and Energy”. It explains how air is as an important an energy source for our bodies as the food we eat.   http://www.medbio.info/Horn/Body%20Energy/body_energy.htm

If anyone has any more information on how much energy our bodies take from the air, I am interested in hearing it.

For more on the importance of air as a food, you can read my article in the newsletter archives: “Trying to Stay Healthy Wrapped in Plastic and Living in a Sealed Insulated Box, Starving Ourselves From a Food We Can’t See”
https://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/articles/2010/11/19/trying-to-stay-healthy-wrapped-in-plastic-and-living-in-a-sealed-insulated-box-starving-ourselves-from-a-food-we-cant-see/
https://www.jehovahjirehfarm.com/articles/2010/11/27/trying-to-stay-healthy-wrapped-in-plastic-and-living-in-a-sealed-insulated-box-starving-ourselves-from-a-food-we-cant-see-update/