H.A.R.P. Right Sized Livestock for a Plus Sized Impact
YOU HAVE ENTERED THE HOUSE THAT DARROWBY BUILT!
My name is Brian and I raise hard working Black Mouth Cur dogs, Hawaiian Stone Eating Goats, Olde English Babydoll Sheep and TRUE, RUSTIC Kunekune homestead pigs.... on a small-acreage, wooded, Ozark farmstead; using a homespun recipe of measured sustainability and hillbilly tradition.
In a world of Post-Industrial survive-stock . . .
you might say that I suffer from a lifetime of passion for the utilitarian animals and livestock breeds that have emerged from people, times and places of extreme poverty.
But anymore, I'm just consumed by a weakness for some of the toughest little livestock on the planet.
Little livestock you say? Absolutely! But this is no hobby Farm. Today's working families are smaller and so are their working farms. Smaller livestock just makes sense; easier to manage, more economical to feed and house, less ecological impact.
Now in my 18th year of selecting for performance and production from these well worn and ever adapting heritage breeds of yesterday and tomorrow . . every day is still a real world RESEARCH PROJECT, some two decades and half a country away from where my journey began.
Welcome to my virtual barnyard.
Above; My experience over the years of keeping Spanish Goats has taught me that heritage breeds are less about what you can squeeze out of them and more about how little you must put in.
Below; The Black Mouth Cur, as with many heritage breeds, can be easily adapted through selection to satisfy a multitude of uses.
HERITAGE BREEDS
...are traditional livestock breeds that were raised by our forefathers. These are the breeds of a bygone era, before industrial agriculture became a mainstream practice. These breeds were carefully selected and bred over time to develop traits that made them well-adapted to the local environment and they thrived under farming practices and cultural conditions that are very different from those found in modern agriculture.
Traditional, historic breeds retain essential attributes for survival and self-sufficiency – fertility, foraging ability, longevity, maternal instincts, ability to mate naturally, and resistance to diseases and parasites.
A landrace is a domesticated, locally adapted, traditional variety of a species of animal or plant that has developed over time, through adaptation to its natural and cultural environment of agriculture and pastoralism, and due to isolation from other populations of the species.
Wikipedia › wiki › Landrace