By: Herrick Kimball
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| That’s me in the spring of 2011 in the woods behind my house. I bought that old shoulder yoke as a birthday gift to myself. It’s a downright handy tool for hauling buckets of maple sap to our small backyard evaporator. My family taps a couple dozen trees each spring and boils down a few gallons of maple syrup. |
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I, Herrick Kimball, the editor of Agrarian Nation live on a 1.5 acre homestead in the rural Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. My wife, Marlene, and I have been married for 30 years and have three pretty-much-grown-up sons.
I started writing magazine articles back in 1992 while I was working as a self-employed carpenter and home remodeler. After numerous magazine articles I wrote three books for The Taunton Press ( one is still in print).
In 1999, I came up with my own plan for making a simple chicken plucking machine. It worked so doggone good that I named it the Whizbang Chicken Plucker. A couple years later I self-published the book, “Anybody Can Build A Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker
.” That book prompted me to start a part-time home business supplying chicken plucker parts to people who make their own Whizbang chicken plucker. Is that amazing, or what!?My love of agrarianism and the old agricultural writings prompted me to start collecting pre-1900 farm almanacs. After a few years I decided to publish a book of excerpts from these mostly forgotten old annuals and title the book, Agrarian Nation. But, instead, I opted to make the book available here on the internet for free in the form of this web site. You can read the story of my almanac collection and my Foreword to the book-that-became-this-web-site At This Link.
After the plucker, I went on to develop plans for the Whizbang Chicken Scalder, the Whizbang Garden Cart, the Whizbang Cider Press and Apple Grinder, and the Planet Whizbang wheel hoe.
In June of 2005 I read about blogging and started my own blog titled The Deliberate Agrarian: One Man’s Ruminations About Faith, Family & Livin’ The Good Life. I have posted hundreds of essays to that blog and it has been a lot of fun. Several essays from my first year of blogging were published in the book, Writings of a Deliberate Agrarian
. These days I publish a single, end-of-the-month “blogazine” at The Deliberate Agrarian.Someday I hope to make enough income from my books and project parts business to buy a larger section of land and work at home full time. That’s my dream. Until then, in addition to writing and selling plucker parts, I work part time as a supervisor in a furniture factory. And that’s my life.
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If you are a farmer, gardener, or modern homesteader, and you have an interest in 19th century rural culture, I hope you will make it a habit to stop by here every Monday and Friday morning to read a new excerpt from the old agrarian writings.
And if you appreciate the information and my work here, please consider making a small donation to the effort.
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Here are links to a sampling of my other web sites and internet essays that you may find of interest:
Dedicated to the proposition that anybody can make their own sweet apple cider
The tool is indispensable and the step-by-step plans are free
A collection of my online essays related to gardening
It's the most popular chicken butchering tutorial on the internet
My great, great grandmother, Josephine Jordan, kept a line-a-day diary
A 5-part series about how my family makes maple syrup
A 4-part series about Helen & Scott Nearing...and Scott's horse chow recipe
A 20-part series about my early days
It's true, and I can prove it.
A story in which my 15-year-old son amazes me
A grandmother can make all the difference
2 comments:
Hi there! I've been following you at DA for a long time, and am so happy to see you have this blog! :D Keep it up! You are certainly informing the masses!! ;)--S
Great blog I eenjoyed reading
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