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SANTA MARGARITA, Calif. - For all the talk about sustainable agriculture, most small farms are not self-sustaining in a very basic sense: they can't make ends meet financially without relying on income from jobs off the farm. But increasingly farmers are eking more money out of the land in ways beyond the traditional route of planting crops and raising livestock. Some have opened bed-and-breakfasts, often known as farm stays, that draw guests eager to get a taste of rural living. Others operate corn mazes - now jazzed up with modern fillips like maps on cellphones - that often turn into seasonal amusements, with rope courses and zip lines. Ranchers open their land to hunters or bring in guests to ride horses, dude ranch style. Known as agritourism, such activities are becoming an important economic boost for many farmers.

Texas Hobbit House: A Small, Handmade Treasure posted by Robyn Lawrence Jul 23, 2011 10:03 am filed under: green home decor, healthy home, inspiration, materials & architecture, earthen home, green home, hand-built home, handmade home, healthy home, inspiration, small home Add to FavoritesTell a FriendSharePrint DiggRedditCare2StumbleUponmore 90 comments Of all the houses I visited during my tenure as Natural Home editor-in-chief, the first one holds a special place in my heart. I visited Gary Zuker's hand-built cob cottage-built for $40,000-in 1999. Natural Home named it our "house of the decade" in 2009, and the house continues to capture the imagination of everyone who sees it. Gary, a University of Texas computer engineer, had no carpentry experience when he set out to build a small, inexpensive weekend getaway and eventual retirement home on 2 acres of wooded land, just up the hill from Lake Travis outside of Austin, Texas. Austin's resident sustainable-building guru Pliny Fisk, co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, helped him build a home out of modified cob known as Leichtlehmbau, a lightweight mixture of straw and clay. "Anybody can do this," Gary realized. "It's simple." After poring over drawings of medieval straw-clay cottages in ancient texts at the university's historical library, Gary pulled together a straw-clay recipe based on historical documents and modern-day innovations. "Real cob is mostly earth with straw as a binder," he explains. "Leichtlehmbau, a German term for light straw-clay, is a legitimate extension of it. You add more straw and use only clay to cut down on the amount of earth and increase insulation." Gary bought 250 bales of straw at $1.50 a bale from nearby farmers. He had 6 cubic yards of blue clay, which a gravel company was hauling out of a local pit, delivered for $25. He found more than 100 recipes for exterior plaster used to seal the clay and straw, including ev

"But if the community gardens, CSAs, farm-to-school programs and sustainable family farms in the Food Movement are so great why isn't everyone doing it? The simple answer is, because the rules and institutions governing our food system -- Wall Street, the U.S. Farm Bill, the World Trade Organization and the USDA -- all favor the global monopolies controlling the world's seeds, food processing, distribution and retail. This should come as no surprise, the "revolving door" between government and corporate food monopolies is alive and well, and goes back decades. But it means it's unlikely that the Food Movement's alternatives will ever become the norm rather than the alternative fringe -- unless the Food Movement can change the rules and institutions controlling our food. To do that, the Food Movement needs politicizing."