Zero Carb Keto
Urban Homesteading, Energy from Waste
I have been thinking more deliberately now about urban homesteading! Yesterday I set up some appointments to look at a few properties in a small town that have about quarter acre lots. It is not a ton of land, but it is enough to raise some poultry at least.
I am a little worried because since I have reintroduced eggs, my keratosis pilars (bumpy skin) has flared up pretty badly on my legs. I wonder if it is because they feed the chickens grain? I was reading that some homesteaders feed their poultry a grain-free combination of seeds and millet (but millet is a grain!). My hopes was to raise ducks (or geese) that could mostly just forage from my land, and I could supplement with seeds. I was just reading that millet can be goitrogenic:
https://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/beware-of-millet/
It really makes you wonder about the best food for poultry! Maybe it is not only humans and ruminants that should be grain-free, but poultry too?
I wonder if I could find any grain-free eggs to see if that improves my keratosis pilaris. If I cannot eat eggs, that puts a big damper on my urban homesteading plan. I would either have to resort to raising poultry just for their meat (which hopefully would not aggravate my KP?), turn to eating plant matter (which causes a world of problems for my gut), go back to eating purchased meat (such as the canned grassfed beef), but then I would not be self-sufficient. The other option is to do a rural ranch and raise sheep, and slaughter and butcher them myself. In the rural scenario, I would need to get a horse, pony, donkey, good bicycle, or some other kind of self-sufficient transportation. That is a bit more complicated. In the urban scenario, I can just walk to town (which is the lifestyle I have had my whole adult life and prefer).
In other news, related to my zero waste mission, I was reading and watching videos about the "energy from waste" process, which is incinerating trash for fuel. Here is the wikipedia posting on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy
Apparently, our closest big city has one of these facilities and the steam created from the process to power the entire downtown loop. But what happens to all the ash created (which is 15-25% of the original weight)? And the hazardous materials in the scrubbers? Apparently, the "cleaner" ash can be used to make cinder blocks or for roads. The "fly" ash however is a hazardous material, containing lead and dioxins. This is landfilled in a way to try and prevent leaching into the groundwater and aquifer system. The whole thing sounds pretty unhealthy and dangerous to me. I think it is better to just not produce any waste that cannot just be composted! The native people on every continent managed that for tens of thousands of years, so we know it is perfectly feasible!
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