Author: Myron Horst

Trying to Stay Healthy Wrapped in Plastic and Living in a Sealed Insulated Box, Starving Ourselves From a Food We Can’t See

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Note: I have learned much about all areas of life from things here on the farm the last five or six years. Things that I probably would never have learned if we did not have a pasture based farm. This article shares some things that I have observed, learned, and that have been rolling around in my mind.

In spite of the technological advancements in modern medicine and a renewed focus on eating organic and eating healthy, Americans are still having a serious problem with major illnesses – cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. Health care costs keep rising, indicating a growing health problem. We are looking at all areas of our lives to see what might be contributing to these problems. To continue doing the same things that everyone else is doing but hoping for different results for ourselves, is foolish.

When we first started our pasture based farm, I tried to find all the information that I could about raising chickens on pasture. Years ago, it was common practice for chickens to be true free-range. But when the poultry industry converted to confinement raising of chickens, there was much information lost about raising chickens on pasture. I went to the Library of Congress on several occasions and researched in old books about how to raise free range chickens. One of the things that I found in an old book was that the author had observed that chickens do best in the winter if at least part of the south side of the chicken shelter is left open all winter. He stated that chickens need plenty of fresh air and that totally closing the building to keep them warm was more detrimental to their health than the cold. I decided to try it and found that he was right. For the last eight winters, except for one year, we have left the south end of the chicken shelter open day and night all winter. I have been amazed how healthy the chickens have been through the winter months. On average, we have had few chickens die during the winter. When we have young hens that have started laying in the fall months we have had flocks that have laid 80 to 90% all winter without using artificial lighting (80-90% is the number of eggs per day that are laid per 100 hens).


This was during one of the big snows this past winter. Note how the end of the hoop shelter is wide open. The small building on the right is the nest house where the hens lay the eggs.

There were several winters that I felt sorry for the hens, with the end of their shelter open all night and temperatures below freezing. I closed up most of the south end of the shelter. One year we closed up the entire south end at night. But the hens did not do as well. In trying to help them be comfortable, a number of them got sick and died. When we had the same results the second time, I realized that my compassion was misguided. But I still did not recognize the significance of what we had observed.

Earlier this year, one of the things that stood out to me in a seminar that I listened to of Carey Reams, is that for both people and animals, 80% of our food energy comes from the air and sunlight. Only 20% comes from the food we eat. He further stated that of that 80% of energy from the air, 60% is taken in through our lungs and 40% through our skin. While I have not been able to validate that claim, it has made me do some thinking and researching about how our body uses air. We don’t see the air and the nutrients for our bodies that is in it, and so it is easy for us to overlook its importance. Air is a very important part of health and life. We can live for weeks without food, but only minutes without air. Air contains not only oxygen, but also many trace mineral elements. These trace minerals are put into the air through the action of the waves breaking in the ocean. One of the things that helped bring about Dr. Jordan Rubin’s amazing recovery from Crohn’s Disease was that he went to the ocean and lived on the beaches for a number of months. His lungs and skin absorbed minerals from the ocean air and from the sunshine.

One of the things that my mother taught me when I was a boy, was to NEVER get into an empty freezer or refrigerator. She told me that if I did, I could suffocate and die. Here recently, after finding out that the nutrients in the air are more important for our health than what I had realized, I got to thinking about how similar the modern house is to a super size refrigerator in being air tight. Is the modern house a dangerous place to live? In the interest of energy efficiency, houses have been built so that air from outside doesn’t get inside the house, and the heated or cooled air from inside does get wasted by going outside the house. When a house is built, there are multiple layers that seal the air from being exchanged. Outside is the siding. Under the siding, the house is wrapped in Tyvek. Next there is a layer of sheathing, either plywood or an insulation board, both of which seal out air. When I worked in construction, the insulation company even caulked the 2×4 walls where they met the floor and anywhere there were pieces of framing nailed together, to prevent air from getting through the cracks in the stud walls. Inside the house, the walls of each room are sealed with drywall. The only place fresh air can get inside the house is through the windows and doors. Windows and doors are being engineered to seal as effectively as possible to keep air from passing through them and we are being encouraged to replace older windows and doors with these more air tight windows and doors. What is energy efficient is not necessary in our best interest health wise.

Most people today run their air conditioner all summer and the heat all winter. The windows are seldom opened. The average person spends a significant amount of time in a sealed insulated "refrigerator" box of one form or another, living and breathing their stale exhaust with its depleted oxygen and minerals. They spend part of their day in their sealed insulated-box home. They drive to work in their comfortable "sealed box" car. Then they spend eight or more hours in the sealed insulated-box office.

We breathe a huge volume of air each day. The quality of the air we breathe is important. It is an important part of our health.

But there is more about air – the air needs of our skin. Our skin is the largest organ of our body, and yet it is easy to overlook its needs. I was listening to a recording from the 1970’s of a man talking about Iridology—the study of the iris of the eye. The different spots and coloring in the iris of the eye have been found to point to trouble spots and its location in the body. He explained how they could tell when women started to wear nylon stockings and then pantyhose because they could see trouble in those areas in the eye. What really got his attention was when women started wearing wigs as part of the fashion years ago, and it too showed up in the iris of the eye. He said that underwear used to be made with polyester or other synthetic fibers and it caused vaginal infections in women. The manufacturers quietly changed the crotch in pantyhose to cotton instead of nylon. Most underwear was also changed to cotton. I had thought that the reason that almost all underwear and t-shirts were now made out of cotton was because it did not last as long and it provided job security for the clothing manufacturers. I had several polyester t-shirts that had lasted 15 or 20 years.

All this has made us do some thinking and reevaluating of what our family wears. If a woman wears a very thin nylon screen (nylons) – which would appear to breathe – on her legs, and that shows up as a problem spot in her eyes, what about all the other synthetic fibers that we wear? Many clothes have a high amount of polyester in them so that they can be taken wrinkle free from the dryer. Almost all jackets and coats have polyester in the shell, lining, and/or insulation. Many leather shoes have synthetic materials for the insole and inside lining. Many sofas and chairs are made with synthetic fabrics and foam, so when we sit down, the back part of our body is covered with plastic which blocks out air. Our beds are made of synthetic fibers or foam, and we cover ourselves all night with polyester, either in the sheets, blankets, or comforter lining. Has breast cancer has become more prevalent in part, because most bras are made with synthetic fibers that don’t breathe properly? Are we preventing our skin from receiving the nutrients from the air by wrapping our bodies in plastic?

Some of my uncles and aunts and their families are part of a very conservative Mennonite group. They live clean lives. They don’t smoke or drink. They grow a lot of their own food. Many of them live on farms and breathe lots of fresh air, but many of the older people in their group are getting cancer and other serious diseases. One of the things they do, is dress from head to toe in polyester. They make their own clothes, and polyester lasts much longer than cotton. Is the fabric of their clothes contributing to their cancer and other diseases? I don’t know, but it makes me wonder.

Seeing what plenty of fresh air has done for our chickens and realizing the importance of plenty of fresh air for our own health has made our family do a lot of evaluating of what we wear. We do not feel like we have all the answers and we feel like we are merely looking through a keyhole into the next room. We are on a quest to find all the pieces that are needed to have true health and vitality. Eating right is very important, but it is not the whole answer. We would appreciate hearing any of the puzzles pieces that you have.

A One Room, Home School, School House

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We do not do everything just like everyone else does, as many of you have observed by now. That is true not only with our farming methods but other areas of our life as well. About a year ago I felt God directing us to build a small studio for each of our children where they could go to study, learn and write. True education is not merely having information memorized and doing your required time in a school building, but it is knowing where and how to get the information that you need when you need it. Young people need to learn to study and research for themselves and enjoy it, not expecting others to do the study and research for them and provide the answers. In my own research, I have found that many highly educated individuals today are not true scholars. They are merely repeating things that others have said. A verse in the Bible that stood out was: "And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children." (Isaiah 54:13)

The concept was to build six small rustic cabin type studios. Each of our children would have a mini school house of their own where they could go to for times of studying alone and to be alone with God. The bulk of their school time would still be in our school room in our farm house. The little school houses would be built on wheels so that it could easily be moved to any place on the farm. Each child has input into the design of their mini school house. We started by building two school houses for the two oldest, Joel and Nathan. We have four more to build.

As the name of our farm means: "The Lord will provide". In the weeks that followed, God provided the materials at incredibly cheap prices.

  • At an auction we bought 5200 linear feet of new rough sawed oak lumber for the incredibly cheap price of $50 which we used for the siding.
  • At another auction we bought 17 five gallon buckets of Sikkens log cabin stain for only $75.
  • We bought the metal roofing at half price.
  • The 2×4’s and other framing material we bought at Lowes as "cull" lumber for 75% off. Most of the lumber did not have anything wrong with it!
  • Our neighbor, without knowing what we were doing, dropped off enough windows for all of the school houses from a remodel job that he was doing.
  • We bought new doors at an auction for several dollars a piece.
  • The trailer axles were free. One was from the rear axle of a minivan that the children tore apart several years ago before we junked it.
  • We were given two small wood stoves for the two school houses that are finished, from a friend that we helped put up his greenhouse.

The total cost for each school house – about $200.


This is Nathan’s school house. The main part is 8’x8′ with a 4’x8′ porch. The porch will have a drop leaf desk attached to the railing for studying outdoors.


Nathan practicing fiddle in his school house. It is a great place to practice an instrument where others are not disturbed.


Joel, Kara, and Myron working on Joel’s school house. The building of the school houses is part of the children’s practical hands on training.


Joel’s school house is a little larger than Nathan’s. The main part is 8’x12′ with a 4’x8′ porch. Joel, age 21, is not going to college, but he is still learning and is studying college level human health and agriculture.


Joel is also using his mini school house as a recording and mixing studio.

Living Hand to Mouth?

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One day Cathy and I walked into our local Giant grocery store, and as I walked in, the thought that struck me was: we could not stock up on food for the winter at that store. It is a HUGE grocery store but every thing is sold in small quantities. The selection of food is incredible. Apples are sold by the piece, but you can’t buy a bushel of apples. You can buy one sweet potato, but not a 50lb. bag.

Bulk food
We like to purchase as much as we can in 50lb bags. We buy the whole wheat grain and grind our own flour. Wheat, when it is made into flour, loses almost all of its vitamins in 72 hours.

Even cereal can be purchased in single serving bowls for $1 each. I realized that the HUGE grocery stores give the impression that there is an abundance of food to eat, but they have forced Americans to live hand to mouth by only being able to purchase small quantities at a time. They have also forced people to buy food the most expensive way possible – in small quantities. People find themselves running to the grocery store multiple times a week.

The grocery stores also function on a hand to mouth mentality. Most fruits and vegetables are not purchased locally and stored to be sold during the winter. Instead, there is a global dependence. Much of the fruits and vegetables that are produced locally are consumed in the summer months. For the rest of the year, we depend on other countries supplying much of our fruits and vegetables. We as a country are living hand to mouth, more dependent than we would like to admit, on other people all around the world supplying our food for us when we want it.

But the good news is that all is not doom and gloom. It is possible to eat local, eat healthy, and significantly cut your food costs. The key is to buy in season, in a large quantity, and store it for the winter. It is usually much cheaper buying a 50lb bag of potatoes or a bushel of apples than buying them by the individual potato or apple in the grocery store. When you buy it locally, you can find out how it was raised. When you buy those fresh fruits and vegetables one at a time in the grocery store in the middle of winter, you have no idea what unregulated pesticide might have been sprayed on it in that distant country on the other side of the world, even if it is called organic.

There is a real satisfaction in having food stored up for the winter. I enjoy opening the freezer and seeing it full of good food for us to eat this winter, or looking at the pantry shelves full of food that we raised ourselves and canned for the winter months. Our family has opted out of the hand to mouth mentality of purchasing our food in small quantities. We do not want to go back!


One of our freezers full of sweet corn, apple cider we made at our neighbor’s house, cucumber juice, peaches, and meat.


One of Cathy’s pantry shelves with peaches, tomato sauce, pickles, apple sauce, apple butter, apple pie filling, and beets.


Yukon Gold potatoes from our garden stored for the winter in our cellar.

If you want true pasture raised chickens to eat this winter, this fall is the time to stock up. Over a year ago, we upgraded to a heavier 2mil plastic bag for packaging the chickens and turkeys. That has improved the amount of time that the poultry can be held in the freezer without freezer burn. Cathy recently got some turkey soup bones out of the freezer from almost a year ago (last Thanksgiving). She did not find any freezer burn. Our biggest chicken customer likes to eat local all winter. They plan to have 100 chickens in the freezer to last until May. While that sounds like a lot of chickens, it is only about 4-5 chickens a week until the May 2011 chicken processing. That "customer" is our family. Yes, we eat a lot more than just chicken. When you set four hard working, growing boys down at the dinner table, it had better be more than just a salad!


Another one of our freezers full of home grown food – Chicken, green beans, and raspberry jam.

School of Hard Knocks

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Our farm is more than just a farm. It is a school where each member of our family is learning important lessons in life. The phrase “school of hard knocks” is an old saying used to describe lessons learned from life’s experiences as opposed to academic or college education. It is the hard knocks or difficult times in life that teach a person important lessons if the person is willing to learn.

We encourage each of our children to develop their own farming enterprise as they get old enough to do so. Our second oldest son, Nathan, is a true shepherd at heart and at 17 years old owns about 70 sheep. He also owns most of our breeding rams.

Several years ago he bought a purebred Texel ram for $400. The Texel breed is an old breed that does very well at finishing on grass, unlike many of the popular breeds that have been selected for their finishing on grain. The ram was an impressive, muscular animal. We divided the sheep into two flocks and separated them so that they could not see each other. The one flock had Nathan’s big Dorset breed ram. I once saw him ram one of our 700 lb steers and make him go on his knees! The other flock had the new Texel ram. The rams were with the ewes and bred the ewes for several weeks.

Then one day while we were away, a totally unexpected thing happened. Both flocks broke out of their fences and got together. The two rams battled it out, as male rams do, to see who would be the head animal. When we arrived home, the new Texel ram lay dead. Four hundred dollars gone! What a loss for a 15 year old. It was not only the loss of money, but the loss of valuable genetics for improving his flock. It was a lesson in the school of hard knocks. A hard knock from another ram can kill another ram. My grandfather used to say that it seemed like if something out of the ordinary happened, it often happened to one of his best cows.

To recover his losses, Nathan purchased some Texel ewes and another Texel ram who was the son of the one who was killed. However, the new ram was not as good a ram as the first one was. This spring Nathan’s Texel ewes gave him several nice ram lambs. The nicest ram lamb was Big Burr. His mother was nicknamed Mrs. Burr because she had found a burr patch and went into it, getting herself covered with burrs. Big Burr was the biggest ram lamb and he showed promise of taking the place of his grandfather who was killed.

At the beginning of July, Nathan noticed that Big Burr was missing. He had seen him two days before, but we couldn’t find him anywhere. There was no trace. We suspected that he had been stolen and reported him to the police and animal control. We also found out that a month before a 1200 lb cow and a calf had been stolen on Park Mills Road, several miles from our farm. Another place had 35 chickens stolen, and another two pigs stolen.

About a month later, one of the boys found a two pound sledge hammer in the front pasture where Big Burr was when he disappeared. The sledge hammer was a confirmation that he had been stolen. Another hard knock and another ram gone. Another hard knock in the School of Hard Knocks for a 17 year old. Not just the loss of a ram, but the loss of the genetics as well.

When Cathy heard about the hammer being found, she stated confidently that she was praying that Big Burr would return. I was surprised. We had found the murder weapon and she was still praying for his return. Nathan had also been praying for his return.

Several days later we got a call from Animal Control and they said that they had found a ram lamb with an ear tag that said Nathan Horst on it. They had picked him up on Bill Moxley Road near Mount Airy, about a half hour from our farm. The neighbors said he had been wandering around there for about a month. We picked Big Burr up from Animal Control that evening. He was in good health, although considerably thinner and very dirty. It was amazing that he was still alive. We wish he could talk and tell us his story. Did he escape from his captors? Did they dump him alongside the road? How did he escape from being killed by a dog or coyote in the month that he was wandering around? Where did he get water?


Nathan and Big Burr the night we brought him home. Note how dirty he was.

This was the second theft we had this year where the item was amazingly returned. The other time, Cathy left her purse in a shopping cart one evening and did not realize it until she got home. She immediately went back, but the purse was gone. It had not been turned in to anyone at the store. We prayed that it would be returned. It did not have much money in it.

About a week later, a man called one evening and said that he had her purse! His daughter’s friend had picked it up and given it to his daughter, and she had given it to him. Cathy met the man and got her purse back. Everything of importance was there except for a few items that a young girl might take: the pens, TicTacs, change, finger nail clippers, and an almost expired TracFone with only a few minutes left on it.

The lesson for us in these events in our School of Hard Knocks is that we have correctly named our farm. The literal meaning of the Hebrew words Jehovah-Jireh is “the God Who sees”. God saw what happened and returned the items. What a wonderful way to live. The School of Hard Knocks helps keep life interesting.

If I Had a Million Bucks

By Nathan Horst, age 11

If I’d have a million bucks,
I’d spend it all on sheep.
You wouldn’t catch me spending it
To buy a silly Jeep.

Of course I’d have to buy some land
And put in water tanks,
And then my sheep would smile at me
And baa their humble thanks.

My ewes would then have woolly lambs
That bounce and run all day,
While their mothers ate green grass nearby
And I would watch them play.

There is no other animal
That I like more than sheep.
That’s why I’d spend a million bucks
To get some sheep to keep.

Food, Inc.

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We recently watched "Food, Inc." Many of you have already seen Food, Inc., and if you haven’t seen it yet we highly recommend it. They take you inside the chicken houses, feed lots, and poultry and beef processing plants and give a behind the scenes view of where food comes from and how it is processed. They give you an inside view of how some of the large multinational companies are bullying farmers into submission to their program. You will see why I said "I’ll NEVER raise chickens" after working on a farm when I was in college where I took care of 75,000 broiler chickens in the big factory farm "jail" chicken house.

We saw Food, Inc. the week before the latest egg salmonella scare occurred with the 500,000,000 egg recall. When I saw the processing plants with the conveyors, shackle lines, pipes, etc. that move raw meat and other food ingredients from one place to another, I was amazed that there has not been a lot more food poisoning. For example: it would be difficult, on a daily basis, to completely clean a big long belt conveyor that carries raw hamburger. There are rollers and other contact points under the conveyor that carry the conveyor belt back to the starting end of the conveyor that would be difficult to completely clean. It is a totally different situation than a small butcher shop where it is relatively easy to clean down the tables and small machines at the end of the day. Because of the difficulty of totally cleaning up the big processing plants, they have to use irradiation, ammonia, and other chemicals with names that we can hardly pronounce to control bacteria from growing in the final food product.

The chicken houses are very similar to the ones I worked in when I was in college. The chickens walk a short distance to the feeder, or a short distance to the waterer and then they plop down. There are so many birds packed together. Every day I walked through the chicken houses and picked up the dead chickens just like the lady does. What you can’t experience in the movie is the strong ammonia smell inside the chicken house from the manure nor do you experience all the manure dust that is continually in the air. My one uncle developed a bad cough from breathing all that dust in his chicken house. He finally had to sell his farm because of his health.

One of the newer changes in most chicken houses today is the windows have been closed up and the chickens never see sunlight. They are dark tunnel houses with controlled lighting so that the chickens can be stimulated to eat more. The chickens never know when it is day or night.

Chickens can be controlled very easily with light. When I worked in the factory farm chicken house, it was fun to play with the dimmer switch. When I turned the lights up the chickens got up and started eating, then when I turned the lights down the chickens sat down. I could make the whole sea of chickens move up and down at will with the lights. The poor chickens never see sunlight!

Another characteristic of confinement raised chickens, and this includes chickens raised in confinement in small chicken tractor pens on pasture is that their legs have difficulty holding them up. They plop down rather than gently sit down. This is mentioned in the movie. When I saw a chicken plop down in Food Inc. I suddenly realized it is not as much a characteristic of our chickens any more, even though we have the same breed of chicken. It is not a breed problem, it is how they are raised. Our chickens get lots of exercise and have strong healthy leg muscles that can support their body. They are not the flabby, weak muscled, couch potato, lazy chickens that people buy in the grocery stores and restaurants. We are what we eat and I wonder how much the way the meat is raised affects the person who eats it to be flabby, weak muscled, lazy, etc.


Our broiler chickens getting plenty of exercise and sunshine and a fresh "salad bar" pasture.


The laying hens eagerly going out to the pasture in the morning.

One point in Food, Inc. that was misunderstood by at least one person is that they said that there are 13 main slaughter houses in the US that process the majority of the beef. That does not mean that there are only 13 slaughter houses in the US. There are still many small butcher shops left. We get our lamb processed at Horst Meats, a small family owned USDA butcher shop that is located on their farm near Hagerstown, Maryland. Our butcher is a relative and we feel confident that we get back the same lambs that we take in. When you purchase pasture finished lamb from us you are supporting not only our farm but also a local small butcher shop that is not part of the factory food industry.

What Food, Inc. does not have time to address is where the other half of the food that the US consumes comes from. Almost half of the food consumed in the US comes from other countries. What are their processing plants like? How do they control food borne bacteria? Are the methods USDA approved? What are the working conditions of the employees like? When we eat at a restaurant, or buy food in the grocery store (organic or conventional), what practices and growing methods are we actually supporting overseas with our food dollars? Is the food really fit to eat? What is the environmental impact in those countries?

When you buy local from us at Jehovah-Jireh Farm, you can meet the farmers, you can see where your food comes from and how it was raised, and you can taste the difference.

Why We Do Not Raise and Sell Pork

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Pork is a main staple in America today and many people enjoy bacon and sausage with their eggs. However, just because "everyone else" is doing it doesn’t mean it is a good thing. With the poor health of the majority of Americans, we need to take a careful look at what "everyone else" is eating and make appropriate changes from what they are doing if we want to be healthy.

I mentioned the poor health of the majority of Americans. I say that because the number one industry in America is the care of sick people—what politicians call "health care". Americans are an unhealthy group of people propped up on prescription medications. The answer is not more doctors and more prescriptions. We believe, and most of you believe as well, that true health care reform needs to start at the food level.

The reform of our food to help others be healthy is the driving force behind why we are farming here at Jehovah-Jireh Farm. We are continually looking for ways to increase the nutritional quality of our eggs and meats.

So why don’t we raise pork? Pork is a negative energy meat that it causes your urine pH to go significantly acid. It takes six days of total abstinence from all pork before the urine pH return to normal. Pork affects one’s body pH for almost a week! Pork is also unique in that it can contaminate what it is cooked in or on, such as cookware or grills. The pork juice can not always be removed by washing the cookware and whatever is cooked in that cookware or on that grill will cause the pH of the urine to go acid! There are a number of people who could not get their pH’s to change until they got new cookware. We find that our urine pH often goes acid (5.5 pH) after we eat somewhere where pork has been cooked in the past, such as a grill, even though we are careful not to eat pork ourselves.

About a year ago Cathy’s mother had a cancerous skin spot removed. It was the same type of skin cancer that took her dad’s life. Her mom decided to go on the RBTI (Reams Biological Theory of Ionization) program.

Carey Reams developed the RBTI program years ago, and was able to help over 10,000 terminally ill patients whom the doctors had given up hope for. Many had cancer. Of the 10,000, he only lost five patients! Part of the RBTI food and mineral based program is to get the urine and saliva pH in the 6.4 range so that the body can heal.

About a month ago, Cathy’s mom went back to the doctor. He could not find any trace of the skin cancer or any of the precancerous spots that she has had for a number of years. She was ecstatic!

Several weeks ago she traveled to Alabama to attend a reunion and stayed in the home of one of Cathy’s cousins. She was served pork several times. When she got home she tested herself, and sure enough, her urine was very acid several days after she had eaten the pork.

Pork is in more things than I ever imagined. Pork is used to make gelatin. Unless the gelatin is kosher or specifically stated as being from a plant or bovine source, it is pork based. Medicine or herbal capsules are made of gelatin. That little capsule if made from pork, is working against your health. Even that small amount of pork in the capsule will cause the urine pH to go acid. Gelatin is in many products. Some are obvious, others are surprising. Jello is made from pork gelatin unless the box states that it is kosher. The Jell-O brand is kosher. Most marshmallows contain pork gelatin. Many candies have pork gelatin in them. Even the strong mints, Altoids, have gelatin in them.

Lard is another pork substance that is found in some potato chips and other foods, and will affect your pH. The Weston A. Price Foundation highly recommends lard and pasture raised pork. Their recommendations are based on copying the diets of primitive people groups, rather than from chemical tests of how the foods respond in the body. The Weston A. Price Foundation has a lot of good information. However, when it comes to pork, test it for yourself and see what happens. Use a small strip of pH paper that you can get at the health food store to test the pH of your urine. Then compare the color of the wet part of the pH paper with the color chart that comes with the pH paper to find the pH.

When a person’s pH goes acid it makes the body more susceptible to sickness, disease, and cancer. It also makes a person more irritable and have a tendency toward anger. We have noticed that in our family on numerous occasions after we have been somewhere that we ate pork or a pork ingredient. As a family we try to help each other out in avoiding pork, but we are not always successful.

Pork is not the only meat that will cause the body pH to go acid. Some of the other meats are tuna, shrimp and other shell fish (seafood), and the other meats that are listed in the Bible as unclean meats. There is a medical reason why they are listed as unclean meats. However, it is not for religious reasons that we avoid eating the "unclean" meats. We do not want to sell you a meat that will undermine your health and the health of those who eat at your table.

Instead of pork, we recommend our delicious pasture raised chicken. Cathy often takes leftover chicken and cuts it up into small pieces and adds it to our scrambled eggs or omelets. If you like bacon, get a type that specifically states that it does not have any pork in it and is nitrate free. For sausage, Cathy uses beef hamburger and seasons it to make into delicious beef sausage patties.

Simple Beef Sausage Recipe
1 pound hamburger
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp sage
1 1/2 tsp Italian seasoning
1 1/2 tsp Wright’s Liquid Smoke
Mix well and make into small patties.

An Incredible Substance – Raw Milk

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Raw milk is a much more valuable substance than what most people realize. Everything that we have fed it to has become more healthy. Our family consumes about 7 to 10 gallons of the stuff a week. The yogurt that we make with it is usually mild and not very tart. We noticed a difference in our children’s health one winter when our cow was not producing milk. The children had more sickness, colds, etc. than they had other years when our cows were producing milk.

We feed the baby chicks raw milk and it has made a significant difference in their health. The chickens grow much better and we have very few die. The milk also seems to make the chicken meat more tender. We have found that calves and lambs that we bottle feed do much better on raw milk than on milk replacer. Raw milk is one of the best protein sources for laying hens. We don’t give the hens milk very often because we do not have enough extra milk, but we have used it when a flock was not doing as well as it should, and they improved with the raw milk added to their feed.

Last summer we discovered another valuable use for raw milk. In our garden, there were a number of different types of vegetables that were low brix. We tried different types of foliar sprays that should have raised the brix. Instead, they lowered the brix. The Brix Talk discussion board did not have any solutions. I couldn’t find a solution anywhere. So I asked God to show me what to do. He brought to my mind that in the Bible the Land of Canaan (what is now Israel) was called a land flowing with milk and honey. I always assumed it meant that it was a very productive area that produced a lot of milk and honey. This time the thought that came to me was, "What if milk and honey put on the plants would make them more productive?" I did a test and sprayed some milk and honey on various plants in the garden. About an hour later I tested the brix. To my surprise and joy the brix had risen 3 brix on most of the plants. The brix of clover raised from 8 brix to 13 brix. We have used the milk and honey spray on our garden this year with excellent results.

When the brix (sugar and mineral content) of the leaf of a plant is above 12 brix, insects will leave the plant alone. The high sugar content of the plant causes alcohol to be produced in an insect when it eats the high brix plant. It gives the bug diarrhea which results in dehydration and death. We had heard that when the vegetables in a garden are high brix, the insects will leave the vegetables alone and start attacking the weeds. We found it to be true. Insects attack plants that are low quality. In poor soil the weeds are higher brix and the vegetables are low brix. When the plants have the right amount of calcium and phosphates the opposite occurs. The weeds are low brix and are attacked by the bugs and the vegetables are high brix and the bugs leave them alone. Conventional agriculture mindset is to spray anti-life chemicals on the plant to kill the bugs, and then feed the poor nutritional quality vegetables to us. The following pictures show some weeds that the insects were eating.


The bugs attacked the weeds in the corn patch. The brix of the corn leaves was 15 brix.


Japanese beetles were eating on the weed in the center of this picture which was in the potatoes. We did not have any problem with potato beetles eating the potato plants. The brix of the potato leaves was about 12 brix.

We had a problem with the Japanese beetles eating our grapevines. After we sprayed the grapevines twice with milk and honey about a week apart, the beetles left. The milk and honey mix that we use is:
3 1/2 gallons of water
1/2 gallon of raw skim milk
1 cup of honey

I put the milk and honey spray in a pump up bug sprayer and sprayed the plants. It might be possible to get the same results without using the honey. I have not experimented with that yet.

Recently I read an article in a farming magazine, The Stockman Grass Farmer, about a dairy farm in Nebraska that had raw skim milk that was a waste product from making butter and cheese. To get rid of the milk, the farmer applied it to his pastures. He found that where he applied milk it made a significant improvement. It significantly increased the microbes in the soil and the growth of the grass. Further test plots showed that the raw milk applied once, at the rate of three gallons per acre, increased the yield of the hay by 1200 pounds per acre! Their conclusion was that raw milk could be worth two to three more times more money as fertilizer!


Several weeks ago we bought another cow – a Guernsey. Why a Guernsey?

One reason is that my grandfather had a purebred Guernsey dairy herd and sold "Golden Guernsey" raw milk. My father talked about how good the golden Guernsey milk was. We found that we like it better than our Jersey milk. But the real reason that we wanted a Guernsey is that some recent research has found that there are two different types of milk protein – A1 beta casein milk protein, and A2 beta casein milk protein. The A1 beta casein is what most people who have casein intolerance are allergic to. Goat and sheep milk are A2 beta casein. There is a "controversial" claim, based on 16 years research, that the A1 beta casein which is drunk by most people in the US could be a cause of diabetes, heart disease, autism, and schizophrenia in people with immune deficiencies. It is also claimed that the A2 beta casein does not cause these problems. Research has showed that 96% of the Guernsey breed of cows have the A2 beta casein, while the Holstein (black and white) breed from which most of the milk in the US is produced, has the A1 milk protein. Obviously this is very damaging information for the dairy industry and there has been considerable attempt to suppress the information about A2 milk.

For more information read
http://www.naturalnews.com/026684_cows_diabetes_protein.html or the
book Devil in the Milk by Keith Woodford.

Another use for milk is to help a person refuse what is bad and choose what is good. In the Bible, Isaiah 7:15 says that Jesus would eat butter and honey so that He would know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. That is one of the benefits of adequate calcium in the diet. I have heard that the proper type of calcium, according to a person’s body’s need, can help an alcoholic give up alcohol, or a smoker give up cigarettes. The proper calciums can also help children calm down and be well behaved without the use of mood altering drugs.

Raw milk can also be used to cure a number of chronic diseases. The Weston A Price Foundation has a very interesting article about raw milk being used to cure a number of different diseases. http://www.realmilk.com/milkcure.html Recently we purchased the book Milk Diet as a Remedy for Chronic Disease, by Dr. Charles Sanford Porter. It is a reprint of a book that was originally printed in 1905. This book goes into great detail about how to conduct a milk fast to cure sickness.

Raw milk can also be an important survival food. It is a food that can be produced fresh every day year round and consumed without further cooking or processing. This idea came from the Bible, Isaiah 7:21-22: "And it shall come to pass in that day, that a man shall nourish a young cow, and two sheep; And it shall come to pass, for the abundance of milk that they shall give he shall eat butter: for butter and honey shall every one eat that is left in the land."

Raw milk is a valuable substance. It is unfortunate that it is illegal to buy or sell raw milk here in Maryland. Perhaps some day…

Update, August 9th:

One thing I failed to mention in last month’s article is that the milk and honey foliar spray did not work for us on green beans. It actually decreased the brix. The foliar spray that we use on our beans is:
4 gallons of water
12 tbsp molasses – we use feed grade
16 oz. Cola soda – a source of phosphoric acid
4 tsp hydrated lime
10 tbsp liquid fish
4tbsp seaweed powder
8 oz. apple cider vinegar
1 tsp sea salt

We also alternate the above foliar spray with milk and honey on our sweet corn. Our sweet corn was 26 brix this year. 24 brix or higher is in the excellent range.

We Were on Fox News Last Week

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Fox News did a special report on the Maryland State Park Curatorship program last week. Our house was one of the featured houses. The state park system has about 200 houses that were acquired as part of land acquisitions. Many of these houses are historic and the park system does not have the finances to restore and maintain all of these houses. Historic houses tend to be more expensive to maintain, and it does not cash flow for them to spend the money to restore the houses and maintain them with the rental income they would receive. The curatorship program was started in which private individuals, such as ourselves, agree to restore and maintain the house. In exchange we receive a lifetime lease. It is our retirement property. It is a win-win situation for all parties. The state park system gets the houses restored and maintained for free, there is no cost to the tax payers, and the curators get the privilege to restore and live in a historic house in a state park without having to pay rent or property taxes.

We do pay rent in that we have to pay for the restoration and maintenance on the house. However, most of the work in restoration is labor with low material costs.


The right section of our house is a log cabin, built around 1850. The section on the left was built around 1900.


This is the girl’s bedroom in the upstairs of the log cabin section of the house. We removed the old plaster and exposed the log walls.


The kitchen is in the log cabin section of the house. We are looking forward to the next stage of the renovation when we remove the plaster and expose the log walls. The ceiling has nice beams that were covered with plaster. There is a stone fireplace hidden behind the wall where the stove is.

The link to the Fox News story:
http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/maryland/maryland-families-conserve-historic-homes-in-resident-curatorship-program-070510

Link to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources Curatorship program and a list of the houses available for curatorships:
http://www.dnr.maryland.gov/land/rcs/index.asp

The Most Important Plant Food – In Your Face and You Can’t See It!

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The most important and needed plant food is everywhere. You can’t see it, but you can feel it. You can’t control it or buy it, but it is available for free everywhere. It is as light as the wind, but it makes trees weigh many tons. After I found out what the most needed plant food was, it has totally changed the way I look at plants and think about feeding them.

Over and over I ask God to teach me how to farm, and He has been teaching me some things that I find very exciting. I do not want to take the credit for what I am learning and sharing with you. I did not grow up on a farm, nor am I smart enough to discover the things I am learning on my own. God is the one who is showing me how to put together the different "pieces of the puzzle" that others have found so that I can see the bigger picture. The more I learn, the more I realize that farming is one of the most unexplored frontiers when it comes to understanding how to raise plants and animals so that they have the highest nutrient value that produces the greatest health and longevity for us as people.

At least 80% of the nutrients that a plant needs to grow comes from the air. Air is the most important and needed plant food. I first learned about this concept from Carey Reams who discovered it a number of years ago from his research. Recently I was reading in the 2005 edition of Biological Science by Scott Freeman. In the early 1600’s Jean-Baptiste van Helmont planted a five pound willow sapling in 200 pounds of soil in a container. He predicted that the soil mass would decrease by the same amount that the plant mass increased. After 5 years, the tree weighed 169 lbs, 3oz. The soil weighed 199lbs, 14oz. He concluded that since the soil had not significantly decreased, the additional 164lbs 3oz of tree had come from the water. Later research has found that conclusion to be incorrect and that most of the mass of the tree came from the air, most of it being carbon dioxide.

This past week Cathy and I celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary. We went over to beautiful West Virginia and drove through parts of the Monongahela National Forest and surrounding areas. One of the places that I wanted to show Cathy was the Dolly Sods Wilderness area. I had visited it 30 years ago as a teenager when our family vacationed in the area. Dolly Sods is a unique area. It is a high plateau with a cool climate. The tundra-like landscape is described as similar to parts of Alaska and Canada. It receives as much as 290 inches of snow each winter. 30 years ago, most of the trees were short and scrawny and appeared to be struggling for survival in the harsh climate. Many of the trees had branches only on the east side because of the strong winds from the west. Large rocks were visible everywhere.

Last week, I was surprised at the change that had occurred in 30 years’ time. Only a few of the trees had branches only on the east side. In most of Dolly Sods, the vegetation was lush and dense. The land is healing itself. As we thought about it, we realized that the healing to the soil was coming from the air. A bit of history of Dolly Sods will shed more light on the nutrients coming from the air.

The history is drawn from the wikipedia.org article on Dolly Sods.

In 1852, Dolly Sods was described as a tract of land entirely uninhabited, and so savage and inaccessible that it had rarely been penetrated even by the most adventurous. Settlers on its borders spoke of it with a sort of fear as they described it filled with bears, panthers, and impassable mountain laurel thickets that had caused hunters who had ventured too far to perish. The area was covered mostly by a dense Red Spruce and Hemlock forest. Some of the trees measured 12 feet in diameter. Years of accumulated needles from these trees created a thick soil humus seven to nine feet deep!! (Note where the deep top soil had come from, not the ground or fertilizer applied to the soil, but from the air! The nutrients that the trees took in from the air grew the spruce needles and when the needles dropped to the ground they increased the depth of the topsoil.)

In the late 1800’s, logging moved into Dolly Sods, and the huge trees were cut down. The thick soil humus dried out and sparks from railroad locomotives, logger’s fires, etc. started fires which burned the humus in the soil. Fires repeatedly swept through the area in the 1910’s until the deep seven to nine foot deep humus topsoil had burned down to rock leaving a thin layer of soil.

As I viewed Dolly Sods this past week it was another object lesson to me that plants do take in nutrients from the air and in the process can enrich the soil so that the plants can have the deep topsoil that they need for the nutrients that they get from the soil. It was also an object lesson to me that when we don’t understand how plants work, we can be very destructive like the loggers were and like chemical agriculture is today. If the loggers had understood how plants work, trees could have been harvested from Dolly Sods and the area managed in such a way that would have produced incredible amounts of lumber indefinitely. Unfortunately, ignorance is not bliss. It is very destructive.


This is a view of the north end of Dolly Sods, which is still a lot the same as it was 30 years ago. Note how short the trees are and how they have branches mostly on one side.


This is what most of Dolly Sods looks like today. The trees are getting tall and creating enough wind break that branches grow on all sides of the tree.


The mountain laurel is coming back. It was just starting to bloom last week. It is reported that there are spectacular displays of mountain laurel in bloom in late June. Note how lush it is, and the dense growth of ferns in the foreground.

How we are applying this knowledge here on the farm
In the American chestnut orchard, we have been letting the grass grow a foot or more tall and then mowing it short. The result has been a significant increase in the growth of the grass compared to the pasture outside the chestnut orchard fence. In addition, the chestnut trees have been having significant growth last year and this year. The chestnut orchard has been my classroom where I have been learning some important lessons on how to capture the energy in the air with the grass and put it into the soil to improve the health of the plants so that they can pull more nourishment out of the air.


The American/Chinese cross chestnut trees this spring have showed significant new growth. The light green is the new growth. These three year old trees, planted as nuts in the spring of 2007, added at least two to three feet of growth on each side and in height in the last two months.


We purchased a tractor and a sickle bar mower this spring to mow the pastures so we can build/deepen the topsoil with the mowed grass. Carey Reams found that grass should mowed with a sickle bar mower and not be mowed with a rotary mower if you want to keep the most nutrients from the grass. A rotary mower or bush hog chops up the grass too much, and many of the nutrients in the grass evaporate into the air again and are lost. We mowed a section of pasture last year with a sickle bar mower and left it laying on the ground. The grass grew back with much more growth than where we mowed with a rotary mower.

We have found, too, that mowing the chicken pastures on a regular basis has significantly increased the brix reading of the grass. The higher brix grass has more nutrients, protein, and omega-3’s increasing the nutrient density of our eggs, and chicken and lamb meat.

There is much more about plants getting their nutrients from the air that remains to be discovered and applied. If any of you have a piece of the puzzle, please share it with us. We would be glad to hear about it.

Little House On the Prairie

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Cathy and the children just returned from visiting Grandma in Kansas. A highlight of their trip was visiting Little House on the Prairie.

The children were surprised how small the house was.


Melody has enjoyed reading the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She drew a diagram of the cabin and what was in it so that she could remember it.


The inside of a school house that dates from the 1800’s. The school was located several miles away and moved to the site of Little House on the Prairie so that visitors could see it.