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THE FUTURE?  AT THE POOR FARM

THE FUTURE? AT THE POOR FARM

By: Bunker Mentality

Most every July for the past 13 years, self-sufficient minded people have been making their annual pilgrimage to the Poorfarm in Gentryville, Indiana over the July 4th weekend. Here, Robert and Yvonne Hardy have built their home, farm and lifestyle. They raised kids, saw grandchildren arrive, and the world change.  Here they have made their own fuel, both for body and truck. 

 
They grow and process their own food, both animal and vegetable. Lots of food. 3 big gardens worth, many fruit trees and vines, 2 ponds of fish, and an Aquaponics set up in a green house.
 
Robert built his own house, 2 stories, the way he wanted.  Metal siding on the roof, asphalt shingles on the sides.  He used the materials in the best way he could, not according to convention. Metal siding will last many years on the roof (my barn roof is 65 years old and still water tight), and shingles go 50 years plus as siding, not the 10 - 15 years when installed like most people do, facing toward the sun.
 
The Hardy's built their own summer kitchen/butcher shop. It has two deep sinks, stoves, meat saws, refers and a walk-in freezer, all bought at auctions. They can (and do) process anything there from grapes into wine, a cow into packaged meats, or veggies into cans. Saurkraut, turnip kraut, and all kinds of pickles. They even developed a Catfish sausage recipe for a university.  Food drying, too. Food anything. There is lots of storage there for appliances and supplies. The floor, walls and roof are covered in billboard tarp signs, the same stuff Ernie makes Ron Paul signs out of. It wears for years (10+ so far) reflects light and cleans up beautifully. Who puts it to a better use?


Robert bought a portable band saw sawmill and began to saw wood to order. Next, he created a new pallet system for steel coils. He added shingle mills, a roof, then walls, a second saw. He grew a whole business.  Robert made tools, or "holders", to cut corners on 4 beams at once and easier ways to square off beams. He built a mobile dust collector, since a band saw mill moves down the log. Most of the equipment runs on his cooking oil mixture. Scraps from the sawmill heat the house, shop and cooking oil filtering system. Really big tree trunks too large to cut are coaxed apart with gunpowder, and then sawn. Robert even gets landscapers and tree trimmers to deliver wood for free to him. Is that a great system and a good neighbor, or what?

Three big gardens grace the Poorfarm. The smallest is big. The largest? Huge. He uses a tractor to cultivate it. It will feed an army. Every kind of vegetable grows there I know, and a bunch I don't, including the only Jerusalem artichoke patch I have seen. They do it all. Not just for themselves, but for friends and family. Enough food is grown to provide for all family members year round, plenty for friends, and neighbors, too. No chemicals or poisons are used, as the Hardy's are organic farmers.

He likes to tinker and build things. A kraut mill.  An apple cider mill and press.  An air cannon to shoot balls in the air. A meat smoker from an old coke cooler; a pond weed cutter (that actually works);  a mobile hoist for logs, and another mobile hoist for raising up beef cows in the butcher shop;  plus sculptures of the human family tree from Eve to the Robert Hardy family.  A pond/tank aerator from a 1970s Ford smog pump;  A fish tank from a pickup truck bed liner, and grow beds from plastic pipe and gutters. Real recycling, not "feel good" recycling.

The Hardy's outdoor shower costs nothing to run, and provides hot showers for hundreds of campers during the yearly Countryside Reunion. The shower is made from a garden hose connected to a copper coil immersed in a fifty five gallon drum full of hot water. The coil connects to 2 recycled shower heads in two big shower stalls made from used and home cut wood, lined with old billboard tarps. A small fire under the drum, fed with sawmill scraps, heats the water. No boiling, no burns. Simple. Elegant. Smart.



 Robert is building a Minto wheel to use waste heat from his scrap furnace and make electricity. A Minto wheel is a heat engine that turns very slowly by gravity, due to a fluid boiling up and condensing to a liquid which offsets the weight and turns a wheel.   See this link if you want more on Minto wheels   ( http://my.voyager.net/~jrrandall/MintoWheel.html)


Robert makes his own fuel. Simply. Cheaply.  People who own restaurants bring him used cooking oil (that's right, they deliver it) and he screens it, warms it with waste heat from an outdoor furnace burning his own sawmill scraps. When it is warm, he runs it through 3 filters, each progressively finer, and it is done. Once in a while, if the mood hits, Robert will skim off the glycerin, which floats on the oil, for soap making. No screwing around with chemicals. In the summer he runs 30% diesel and 70% oil. In the winter he runs 50-50 diesel-oil. He could run 100% oil, but that would require playing mad scientist and mixing chemicals and refining the oil, or he could use 2 tanks, one with pure cooking oil and a pre-heater, and a second with a starting mix of diesel and cooking oil, then remember to switch back a couple minute before shutting down the engine, but that would take more time, effort, and money than he would gain. People in diesel cars and trucks often get a free fill up.

The Hardy's wanted a green house, a big one, so they built it. At the north end is an insulated mechanical room. It starts with a wood boiler burning scraps from the saw mill. Some of the heat from the boiler is stored in a large insulated water tank. A large fan blows heat into the growing area. The fan motor also turns an old auto smog pump to add extra oxygen to fish water. The heat tank has an exchanger that heats the fish water, two fish tanks of concrete eight feet square, four feet deep, full of tilapia.



The fish in the greenhouse produce year round, and are part of the whole aquaponics system. One hydroponics system in the greenhouse floods the grow tanks by timer. Those beds self-drain and the water is pumped back to the fish. Another hydroponics system uses floating foam to grow food in water tanks built from recycled truck beds. Shrimp will be grown under the floating plants soon. A third system uses a continuous flow through grow media. Most grow media used is just gravel. All of the water is pumped back to the fish tanks, after being purified by the plants and bacteria of fish waste like ammonia. (Ammonia is converted by bacteria into nitrites and nitrates which feed the plants). Plants are grown in all sorts of containers, such as rain gutters, wooden troughs lined with billboard tarp material, and PVC pipe,  often stacked six feet high. This is not theory, but a working system in use, growing food over two winters now. Tropical plants are kept in the green house, too, as are lemons and limes.



Robert and Yvonne have opened their life and home to thousands of people over the years by hosting the Countryside Reunion. Many have learned the self-sufficient life style there, or at the very least how to be more self-reliant. Many friendships have developed, and most people go year after year. Hundreds of people stay, most in tents, a few in RV's, and a couple in hotels. Many people who attend talk and put on demonstrations of what they do at home. Some bring tools or gadgets they have built.

This year, Robert showed us how to make charcoal simply and how to build a sawdust stove. The stove was a 6 gallon metal can with a 2' hole in the bottom. A pipe was put form the top down through the hole. Dry sawdust was packed, and then the top was covered with some dirt. He put a sheet of newsprint in, lit it, and the fire burned for twelve hours. Simple. Elegant. Cheap.

Perry and Beverly Riley showed us how to keep bees chemical and poison free. They use small cell size, screen bottom with 3' spacing, high ventilation, eight frame hives, and landing boards. Most of the techniques are just how bees were raised years ago.
 
 
 


The Riley's have no problems with Varroa mite, Foulbrood, or other bee problems. They have a less than 10% winter loss ratio. They do this in an area of all GMO corn fields. 
 
 
Dan Cassidy of Cassidy Fish Farm talked for an hour about raising fish; how to balance pond fish ratios, about feeding, and aeration. He even managed to sell me one hundred tilapia!


Chicken Plucking Machine
 
Each year demos are put on by participants on many subjects, such as spinning and weaving, carpet making, cheese making, chicken plucking machines, solar ovens, directional solar lens cooking (death ray), rope making, turtle skinning, a prom dress and wallets of duct tape, chlorine-free swim pools, writing, music, flint knapping, cooking, wine making and cider pressing, food drying, cake baking, hair cutting, chain saw art, fish farming, and lots more.  Many people cook lots of food for all to enjoy.



At the Poorfarm we have learned how to make our own soap and laundry soap. Laundry soap that costs pennies a gallon and cleans your clothes and smells good, not like New Jersey. This homemade laundry soap will not harm people with asthma, allergies, or chemical sensitivities. This soap is a life saver to me. I can't breathe around all of those horrible stinks. I cannot even walk down the laundry isle in a grocery store.

The Poorfarm of the Hardy's is one possible future in an uncertain world. The kind of place I want to see.
 
 
Yvonne and Robert Hardy (picture to the left)

 
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