October 10th 2024
Hello beautiful people,
The year is 2030, you walk down the aisles of the supermarket.
You go into the meat section to get your quota for the week. You pull a packet of grey mass out of the fridge. “Grain fed beef – now with crickets for extra protein!”. Your stomach churns in disgust, but at least your doing your part to fight climate change. Your family is nutritionally drained. But the good news is your carbon footprint is below the weekly limit so you’re also allowed some almond milk. Life is good.
You know that the foundation of freedom is food security.
But what’s the best way for you to get that?
If you had to start producing your own food, if you had to invest your resources into one food source that would feed you and your family, what would you choose?
You have limited time, money, and skills.
You need a food source to do three things:
- Meet all your nutritional needs so that you can physically thrive
- Busy easy for you to maintain, you’re busy enough as it is
- Be weather-resistant, imagine starving because it rained too much or too little.
What would you choose?
Potatoes? Tomatoes? Rhubarb?
While these are all excellent choices for a garden, you would find it very difficult to meet all your nutritional needs growing vegetables in your garden.
It’s probably clear to you by now that the solution cannot be grown, it must be reared (unless you’re a good hunter). You need livestock.
But what type?
Chickens are accessible and easy to maintain. Many people start with chickens, and that’s better than nothing. But what do they eat? Grain, which you’ll need to get from somewhere else. How easy are they to maintain? Super easy unless they get killed by a fox. So while they’re a good source of eggs and meat, and an excellent addition to a food production system, they’re not resilient enough to rely on completely.
Pigs aren’t a bad option. They’re easy to feed, eat anything and everything, and are very nutritious. They’re also very resilient as I found out when I had to chase one down. Good luck leaving them in more than one place for longer than a week though. At the rate that pigs turn soil over, you won’t come back to very much land.
I think you know where this is going…
The best solution for food security is this magical animal.

A passage from The 12 Month Farm Method:
“Ruminants like cows play a crucial role in food security. Their ability to convert grass into nutrient-dense beef and dairy products cannot be overstated. Cows offer “food security on the hoof,” essentially a cow is a walking freezer, but without the need for electricity! As long as your well has water and your grass is growing you’ll have cows and you won’t starve in a food emergency. One cow can provide nutrient dense calories, in the form of beef, for a family for several months. A small herd of beef cows is therefore years’ worth of food security for your family and community. ”
Now to be fair, cows are not the only solution. Ruminants as a whole are a great foundation for a food production system. These are animals that are able to turn grass into highly nutritious and bio-available food. They’re hardy, and in the UK, are not a target for predators. They also help you fertilise your soil and so have a compounding effect on your farm.
At One Tree Farm, cows are the foundation of our food production, they provide us with the highest quality beef and milk, and improve our soil. Our regenerative grazing system is built around them. We’ve never lost one to bad weather, which we can’t say about the chickens sadly. All we have to do in return is top them up with water and hay, and they do the rest.
Hopefully you found this useful and inspiring (get a cow).
Until next time.
To your freedom and independence,
Rob
Wild Minds Community
Check out my related post about why your light environment is important