Rabbits: Livestock of Agorism, Volunteerism, and Anarchism
I never really saw myself as being part of a "movement." I just want to live and let live. Like many people in this country and around the world, I'm seeing the "let live" part isn't coming to fruition for me. There are powers that continue to grow, to claim more and more control over the masses. The rights of individuals are being trampled. It's time we do SOMETHING about it. No, I'm not calling for attacks, not demanding revolution, so put down the petrol bomb and let's discuss some peaceful solutions that won't get you thrown in jail! This may be a new approach for some, Rabbits: Livestock of Agorism, Volunteerism, and Anarchism
"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners." - Edward Abbey
The Bunny Barter System
Taxes suck, we all know that. Whether you scream “TAXATION IS THEFT!!!” from the rooftops or just quietly try to pay as little as possible, seeing that percentage pulled per paycheck is never fun. A legal way to pay fewer taxes is to make less money. Now, before you close your browser window in a huff, telling me where to cram my opinion, hear me out. What is money? Can you eat money? Can you wear money? Can you build a house out of money?
The answer is no.Money is nothing more than a medium with which we trade a quantity ofproductive time for goods and services. Those goods and services are wroughtwith a quantity of productive time as well. So, if you can trade yourproductive time straight up for a good or service made by a seller’s productivetime, there is no need for money. It takes productive time to harvestmaterials, make clothes, grow food, and build homes… it doesn’t take money.Granted, money makes it easier to trade productive time. The use of cash, creditcards, checks and debit cards requires reporting. Reporting equals tax liability.But what does this have to do with rabbits?
Livestock requires productive time to be produced, true, butthey have their own productive time that continues to add up while you are offworking other lines of production. That’s the magic of livestock, they don’trequire you to participate in their conversion of grass into meat. You justfeed them and check on them and harvest them when they’re ready. Rabbits are theperfect livestock. I go into details in the post why rabbits.
Sure, you can eat the rabbits you raise, they are delicious,and that will save you a good sum of money, but we want to make a biggereconomic impact. You can sell yourbunnies for money; list them for sale as pets, breeders for others growingtheir own food, as pet food and for human consumption. I talk more about themarkets in my BunnyBusiness post. Our goal is to avoid money though, so we need to be on thelookout for opportunities to trade the rabbits for things that we need.
A good gauge for far trade is trading full retail for fullretail. I sell rabbits for $25 for males and $35 for females at 5-8 weeks old. Breedersare more expensive, pet food is cheaper, and depending on volume I givediscounts. But for this example, $30 a rabbit is a good rate. Let’s say yourfriend is making lovely front porch benches for $180 apiece. He agrees that 6rabbits would be a nice addition to his farmette. BOOM! No money changes hands,he got some bunnies and you got a fancy, new bench! This allows both you andthe seller of another good or service to avoid the use of money. Granted, not everyone wants a bunny… so youwill have to add to your rabbit goods repertoire. I talk about other livestockand how to integrate them in a backyard setting here.
Fueling Agorism and Anarchism
A MAJOR means of manipulation wrought upon the populace is fuel supply. I’m not talking just gas at the pump. True, America consumed an average of 391.71 MILLION gallons of fuel a DAY in 2017, that’s not including the electricity used (10 million megawatt hours daily). You’re probably asking, “How the HELL are rabbits going to lower my power bill?!” Well friendo, I’m glad you asked…
First off, rabbits are “on the hoof” meat storage. They are small enough that a single rabbit canbe dispatched, dressed, and grilled without having to be stored and refrigerated.If you ever found yourself in a grid down environment, you could “store meat”in a live food storage solution… it’s like a pantry that regenerates food!
Sure, rabbits are delicious, and I’m a farmer at heart, but I’malso an alternative fuel junky! Which really means I’m a pyro that had to put amore age appropriate and socially acceptable spin on my hobbies. Rabbits were asolution to a biomass feedstock problem I had.
“Gasification is a process that converts organic- or fossilfuel-based carbonaceous materials into carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbondioxide. This is achieved by reacting the material at high temperatures,without combustion, with a controlled amount of oxygen and/or steam.”- Wikipedia
I was using stratified gasification in my backyard. To putit in layman’s terms, I was lighting a little bit of biomass on fire, heatingand releasing the hydrocarbons from the surrounding biomass and harvesting thefuel rich smoke. After cooling, filtering and condensing the fuel rich smoke,or producer gas as it’s called, I then used it in an internal combustion engineattached to a generator. The feedstock biomass for a gasifier is generally woodchips or pellets. It seemed counter intuitive to use electricity to makepellets to be used as feed stock to make electricity… so, I looked to nature tosee what was making pellets already. Deer, goats and elk were too big for mybackyard, rabbits were not. My best gasification set up was running an engineon rabbit poop at a rate of 11 pounds of rabbit manure used in the same time andproduction of power as a gallon of gasoline.
As my herd of rabbits grew from 5 to five hundred, then on to1600, my focus turned to producing rabbit and finding markets, however, the pooremained. Sixteen hundred rabbits will produce just under 400 pounds of manurea day! That’s a lot of dookie! In those quantities my experimental scale gasificationsystem wouldn’t handle it. I moved on to anaerobic digestion for methane production.
In anaerobic digestion, you starve the bacteria of oxygenthat are eating the manure. They then produce methane. Methane can be used inany engine designed to run on propane. There are also some solid-stateelectricity units that don’t require an engine.
So, what do you do with all the left-over castings from the AD system? You SELL IT! Rabbit manure as it exists normally is a great fertilizer, but after it gets broken down further through anaerobic digestion composting, it’s a fine ground cool nitrogen source for gardens! You can use the compost in your own garden, thus producing more barter friendly food products.
This is NOT a call to arms, it's a beconing to the farm. Food is a serious solution to our current prediciment. The more people we have producing and trading good, healthy meat and produce, the more independent we will be. The less we need the factory poisons sold in supermarkets, the more empowered the individual will be. And the more we trade with each other, the less money we'll need.
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