Apprentices

Hello boppers,
So - just finished the Soils week for the apprentices. It's always a great week - all they do for 2 years is working on farms having fairly little theoretical input, and they're always very eager to come for an intensive week of lectures, art and soil experiments. I was thinking, perhaps I will experiment with offering them to come and do the 2nd year of our training as a follow-up after their apprenticeship. It will depend a bit on which farm they were if they have enough knowledge and experience equivalent to what you did in the first year of the FT training, but I think we'll give it a go. It will also help to boost the numbers somewhat in the second year and it will be nice to have some new people in the group... I welcome your thoughts on this!

Phew! Day off today, of sorts. Vision&Strategy meeting (in Carson). Long day, lots of talk, but some strong support for BD. I sympathise Katharina, my officeboy/student hands are raw and bloody after 2 weeks feeding&bedding pigs, cows, chickens and sheep (and boy do I sleep well). Having spent Tuesday (killing n gutting) & Wednesday (moving n bedding) 'doing chickens' I am considering becoming an exclusive red meat carnivore (with eggs). The whole chicken thing feels a bit too much. Sheep are great, especially if you want to know where the hole in your fence is. So far at least 20 man hours have been taken up finding, herding and reallocating escaped sheep. The lambs are cute. I have strung up a hammock in the barn and it is a joy to watch little groups of lambs building up team bravado, running up and down the middle walkway as one, only to chaotically disperse as they encounter a silage bail and a milky teat calls. You'll be unsurprised to know it has been raining. The pigs can't go out, the cows can't go out, so they fight. No preps can be sprayed and no ploughing can be done. Roll on spring. I cant wait for the apple trees to blossom.

And dont forget to use your imagination when shopping, Tesco now has better coverage than Vodafone, go somewhere else.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/mar/28/tesco.supermarkets

camp, camp, camphill!

hi all,
just some quick news, as i'm deadly tired, like every evening. having a nice time here, everybody very welcoming and lovely. still struggling to remember some peoples names, so i haven't started on the cow's yet. work is quite nice, strange semi-masochistic pleasure in blistering my overly tender student hands. all the people i have worked with so far (a lot, teams here are massive) are lovely, but sometimes the concentrated craziness and intensity can be quite exhausting, which is the main reason for my tiredness, i haven't really been working all that hard yet. easter was nice, very contemplative and actually quite a nice change from ignoring it to having gatherings every day. right, feel greeted from snowy scotland,
kat
(p.s. i've just been told very earnestly not to publish anything about the community, so that's why i'm not mentioning any names of people or places here.)

Don't forget the bees!!!!

Hello volks,

Feeling a bit less cynical today. Been chopping wood (with chopping machine), sorting rotting veg, cutting raspberries.

Here are some links for your reading, concerning what I see as perhaps the most siginificant activities of our species at the present time...

The lady who swallowed a fly (GM)

10 Reasons Why Organic Can Feed the World  and 10 reasons GM won't

The Doomsday Seed Vault

Bee colony collapse and GM

Bees and GM II

Bats dying

Angels don't play this HAARP

Also, could someone please post or send me (ormrATmail2eris.com) the list of emails that was up in the classsroom? When I went to write them down it was gone. Keep posting

Adam

Edit 29.3: Added a couple more links... discuss in comments if you wish.
Haven't been sent the email list yet.

I am here somewhere!

Dear fellow students, 

I am very curious to all your stories and happy to have read some of them.  I can only encourage you to write often so I can get a feel of each of your experiences.

I arrived a few days ago in Belo Horizonte, Brasil.  Not really knowing where or what or how I find myself in a safe dominio where the parents of Cristiane live.  My portuguese is far from usable still but we did visit some interesting places related to food produce and the poor cheese quality in this country.  So we bought gear to make our own cheese and I hope I can do better here.  One goat spotted a long the road and that made my day, alright!!!

Soon we are going south to visit my farm 'A boa terra' but till then I am watching farming programs with my father in law on early mornings.  Get the picture?!!

I will not mention the hot weather or the beauty of nature in this part of the world.  I will talk about red soil later.  

Goatman stof wishes you all well

Just in case you forgot

It's that time of year again...

Warning: Crucifixion is bad for health

For further investigation of Judaeo-Christian pathology, I suggest viewing Alexandro Jorodowsky's masterpiece 'Holy Mountain'.

You should all check out the BDNow! discussion list. Even I find the people on there crazy...

So two coach rides two ferries and a car journey later I am finally in Sweden. No work yet just some walk and moongazing. Happy equinox all... will write more later.

A.

HELLO

Hello, now it is my first turn to wright something on the blog....
my english gets worse and this after less than a week... how shall it be in september????

So, I didn't start my placement jet, but I m so excited, WE HAVE SNOW!!!!!!!
it started snowing yesterday but nothing was left and now again since this afternoon and you can' t see the grass in our garden anymore!

So have fun and good work! I m enjoying the brake ;-)
Michaela

Flowers...

Sowing sowing sowing - knocking in a few posts for the sweet peas, transplanting the yarrow (did you know that's a cut flower too?), sowing the dahlias... The land is still too wet to rotavate some more beds but fortunately I had prepared a few in advance.

The excursion to Alanus Hochschule was very interesting: from a college very remeniscent of Emerson College with 160 students just 8 years ago they have changed into a fully accredited art university where you can (but don't have to) include anthrposophy as part of your training. So 3/4 of the students don't do anything anthroposophically and 1/4 does... Now they have 450 students, all between 18 and 25 years old, and they are set to grow to 800 in the next couple of years. What an example for the future!

First Day

Knackered....6 months in a classroom doesn't really prepare you to bed cows, feed chickens, bed pigs, feed pigs, move pigs to Spring Hill, pick up pigs from Kidbrooke, drop off pigs at Tablehurst. Go lambing. Where did I leave the tractor? I'm sure there were 8 calves in there before lunch. Is that ewe about to lamb or is she sitting on it? And nothing compares to an escaped pig for entertainment, adrenalin, frustration, anger and sympathy all at once! Retire exhausted.

Thank you Arjen

As I sit here pondering which essay I should delight in starting this evening, as the prospect of 6 months of beautiful early mornings and a month of bedding down with the sheep lays ahead I reflect upon the last 6 months. There is one person who looms large in my thoughts. Arjen.

Thank you Arjen for all the time, organisation, negotiation and effort that went into putting together a most rewarding period of study. It had its highs and, therefore, its lows but most of all it was great fun. The diversity of people you brought in was refreshing and inspiring. Your own enthusiasm and willingness to listen never waned and I personally found very motivating.

I start work on a farm tomorrow, not confident in my skill set as a farmer, but confident that after 6 months of classroom I have a basic understanding of the farm organism and enough foundation knowledge that I can be an asset rather than a liability. Most of the time.

Good luck to everyone and I look forward to hearing from all of you.

Thanks Arjen for helping me on this journey.

Interesting documentary's to watch!!

Origin of Aids, Influence of Freud on 20th century thinking, Peak oil, ZEITGEIST, English being bored in Spain, NGO?, CIA plans and history, ...

Have Fun, dear students on placement

and don't forget Goatman!

So how did you afford to buy up half of Hampshire?

Here's some info on FATS, Jody's firearms simulator company he sold up before moving to the UK to embark on his Laverstock journey:

http://www.answers.com/topic/firearms-training-systems?cat=biz-fin

S

Biodynamic Man

The UK WWOOF site currently has a video about a Biodynamic WWOOF host. I can't view it but that might just be a Mac thing. The history bit tells about how Sue Coppard started it in 1971 on Tablehurst (then part of Emerson).

http://www.wwoof.org/wwoof_uk/home.html