Amber Waves of... Rice?

And Other Sustainability Projects

In 2012 we've made a lot of progress in working towards self-sustainability.  This year we've done several trial and error tests to see what is a good use of our resources.

It's easy to come into a project like this and assume that if we raise all our own food that we'll be saving money.  Sometimes it's the contrary.  The most obvious example of this is if we were to raise our own beans.  Beans are a HUGE staple here.  A lot of Hondurans feel that it's not a real meal if there aren't beans on the table.  We go through about 400 lbs of beans a year with just our two kid's homes!  Now, we have three options for acquiring beans: buy them from the grocery store, buy them locally, or grow our own.  In this case buying them locally is by far the best use of our resources.   We can buy a 100 lb sack of beans from local farmers for about $25, instead of all the time and land use for us to grow them or instead of paying 3x that price from the city.

There are some projects that we go into totally unsure if it will be a big saver or a one shot project.  Take chickens as an example here.   We bought some special egg-laying hens and found that we can get our eggs for about 1/3 of the cost compared to the stores.  We're looking forward to getting more of these chickens (1 dozen eggs a day doesn't go very far when there's about 30 people living here).  After that chicken-egg success story, we bought some chickens to raise for meat.  This time we found that after we bought all the feed, etc. for these chickens that it was financially a wash, but took from our time and energy.  So, now our plan is to buy chicken from the from the grocery store and collect eggs at home. 

Thanks to many donators through last year's Gift Catalog, we now have a small herd of cows that will start giving milk around the end of this year.  We will raise up the calves for future food.  Cows for milk and meat are big savers for us.  We already make our own yogurt, but now that we'll have so much more milk, we're excited to experiment with making cheese too.  This video is from several months ago when we bought some new cows.

We are getting ready for our fourth coffee harvest since living in Urraco.  This is one agricultural project that really helps us out financially and we  hope to sell our coffee on a much larger scale in the future.  Every year our harvest has grown, but to increase our production even more, we are going to plant another 2 acres of coffee.  This should, over the course of the next three years, increase our production to nearly 1,500 pounds.  Next year we want to roll out some specialty coffee based on local, traditional roasting methods.  These locally influenced flavors are delicious, so if you're a coffee fan, you'll want to keep posted. 

Our newest adventure in agriculture was growing rice.  This area of the mountains is perfect for growing field rice (i.e. not grown in water).  We were hoping this would be a great way to save money, because we estimate we'll go through about 1500 lbs of rice a year here.  So we grew our own rice and drove it a couple hours to a processing plant to get the hulls removed.  At that plant we learned that we can buy rice directly from them for half the price as the grocery store.  So, will we be growing more rice of our own?  Probably not, but if we had never done it once, we never would have learned where to buy it to save us the big bucks.  

That's how the process works.  We're trying new things all the time.  It's been a great learning experience and we're making progress towards supporting ourselves.  So, project by project, tree by tree, sheep by sheep, we're learning what things will get us closer to self-sustainability.