029 – Round Table at LaBiondo farm

In this podcast Paul sits down to a roundtable with Karen Biando at LaBiondo Farm and kitchen on Vashon Island, WA to discuss his tour of the farm.

They begin by talking about Karen’s experience with “honor system” farm stands. Karen talks about how she has more invested in the cash box than the structure made primarily of gleaned pallets due to several thieves over the course of 9 years operating. The building also houses “Sustainable Vashons” No Trash Bash Stash: A community collection of extra plates, spoons, table cloths, and other party essentials available by donation for all major of social occasions. They later go on to talk about getting pallets from the waste stream and a few of their many uses.

Paul encourages them to consider urine diversion in their compost toilet system and they briefly discuss the farms cold smoker and solar dehydrator. The usefulness of compost and manure teas is briefly debated with Labiando Farms of the opinion that the results where worth the labor and Paul expressing doubts particularly in regards to scalability.

Paul was pleased to see that the farm has a movable wheeled milking parlor for their goats since non mobile ones often turn into anaerobic fecal mud pits in the wet season. This, in my experience, is most especially true of and relevant to the bio-region of both the Pacific Northwest generally and the Puget Sound particularly.

The podcast closes with some discussion of poultry, If winter feed is necessary for chickens in the maritime Northwests climate, price per dozen duck eggs , mortgages,second jobs , and the evils of money.

Relevant Threads

Building
Portable Milking Parlors
Manure Tea

Credit: Landon Sunrich

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