Brilliant!

Isn't this what life and civilisation are really about - in many different aspects?

I once started a food co-op in a small cowboy town in MT - one which also had a fair population of writers and artists - and our second order for bulk grains, beans, etc. was for over 3 tons.

Growing veggies was pretty tough right around there but my next stop was a bio-dynamic farm in western MT which was marketing considerable quantities of the very best veggies that I've ever eaten anywhere.

We took turns to cook and I remember puttting the water on to boil for the corn and running to the field and back to plunge it in the water as it came to the boil.

Food doesn't come better than that in the fanciest restaurants in the world - though in the US Chez Panisse comes close and in some parts of Europe this is still a norm.

In my childhood, even in suburban areas everyone had a garden and canned food. Back then the electricity was not dependable, so few froze food unless they had a backup generator.

We grew all sorts of heirloom and hybrid seeds, and figured out which ones did best. Our fertilizer came from our own ponies and horses, mixed with dirty straw removed from their stalls, or we'd use catfish caught in the nearby river by kids (no one ate catfish back then in our area). We also gave "pony puck" to our neighbors who came with wheelbarrows or pickup trucks to gather it.

My parents moved to the mountains when they retired, and they took my old horse with them so they'd have a source of fertilizer. He was a petted baby, of course.

One problem. We always became attached to the animals, and couldn't eat them ourselves. We had to stick with beef and pigs and chickens we didn't know!

When I was a few years younger my family had a small garden in our back yard, maybe a fifth of an acre or so, where we grew corn and other vegetables. It was good and sometimes fun to tend the garden itself.