Relocalization – Page 4 – Into the Woods

Family heirloom bean seeds

My older sister and I have often lamented that the heirloom seeds that were used for so many years on my mother’s family farm have been lost. But my sister recently discovered that a cousin has been growing green beans from family seed for many years. That cousin sent me some of those seeds. They’ll definitely be used in my garden next year.

My mother grew up on a good-size family farm in the Yadkin Valley, a place that had been in the family at least since the days of my mother’s grandfather, which is as far back as living memories go (my mother will soon be 88). Most of the farmland has been split up and sold off, but a few acres remain in the family.

This farm — which I well remember from my childhood — was highly self-sufficient. It even had its own blacksmith shop. Most of the food was grown and preserved for the winter on the farm. Preserved foods were canned, dried, and fermented. Fermented foods included pickles and sauerkraut. The farm produced its own milk, butter, and ham. There were draft animals for farming (I can remember the mules), though of course tractors came into use later on. The farm could make its own corn meal, but wheat flour was one of the few staples that had to be bought, along with pinto beans. Flour and beans were bought in 50-pound sacks. The farm even made wine and moonshine. I believe the winemaking and distilling had shut down by the time I was a child, though there was a kitchen closet with the scent of wine that I was never permitted to open when I was a child.

My mother’s father took pride in providing for a generous and well-stocked kitchen. And my grandmother’s cooking is still the family standard that I and my siblings and cousins aim for.

Asheville and thereabouts

I made a three-day trip to Asheville this week. This photo is from the Blue Ridge Parkway near Mount Mitchell

Warren Wilson college is an unusual college that requires work credits for its students. The college has a rustic campus that includes a 300-acre working farm.

Greenhouse on the Warren Wilson farm

The Warren Wilson blacksmith shop

A brick silo on the Warren Wilson farm

The running of the cows. The students are moving the cows from one pasture to another, using the main road.

A late rose in a friend’s garden at Black Mountain

Know your farmer? Not if she can help it…

There is no creature in the U.S. Congress more vile, more black-hearted, more ignorant, and more determined to horse-whip us all back to the Dark Ages than Virginia Foxx. I am ashamed to say that she represents my district, the 5th District of North Carolina.

She’s always up to no good, in service of corporate greed and pandering to the fears and prejudices of the ignorati. Her most recent deed was to introduce an amendment that would shut down a U.S. Department of Agriculture web site known as the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative. Though the web site has no real budget to take away, its purpose is to lend a little support to small farmers and local markets. Foxx thinks that’s a bad idea, you see, because she doesn’t want any competition for corporatized, industrialized agriculture. There’s nothing that free-marketers hate more than any attempt by groups of citizens to band together to supply their own needs. Consider, as an example, the right-wing North Carolina legislature’s recent approval of a new statute that would prevent rural communities from setting up their own broadband systems. When groups of citizens dare to “compete with the private sector,” these libertarian types elected with corporate money just pass a law against it.

Tom Philpott blogs about this at Mother Jones.

Foxx is from up near Wilkes County, which is one of the largest producers of factory chickens in the United States. It’s this proximity to factory chicken farms, apparently, which qualified Foxx to sit on the agriculture committee, including a poultry subcommittee.

Here’s a link to the web site Foxx wants to shut down. Foxx does not approve of its mission: Support local farmers, strengthen rural communities, promote healthy eating, protect natural resources.

Where corporate chicken comes from

Population growth? Run for your life…

Sometimes I have survivor’s guilt. I got in my Jeep, I drove and drove and drove, and I escaped the corporate life. Not only that, but many people struggling to get closer to the troughs in the corporate feedlots tried to eat my lunch back then, but I beat them back. It was self-defense, but my hands are stained.

I even cleverly managed to keep Wall Street from tricking me out of the secret stash I’d hoarded while in the feedlots. With that stash I built my little refuge in the woods. I had gotten too old to fight anymore. I am as far as I can afford to be from everything that is corporate, where the top dogs rake it in and leave the rest of us to fight over the scraps.

The U.S. Census bureau released numbers yesterday for population growth in North Carolina for the 10 years between the 2000 census and the 2010 census. The population of the Raleigh area grew by a horrifying 43.5 percent. Stokes County’s population grew by 6 percent.

Why do I use the word horrifying? Everything looks different when you’re no longer a poor hunk of pork getting the life rendered out of you in today’s pressure-cooker economy. Once upon a time when I was of working age, I too had to go somewhere where the money was, and I went to San Francisco. But that was then, and this is now. When you finally get to step off the corporate treadmill, you want to be as far from the corporate feedlots and kitchens as you can possibly get.

I have not been to Raleigh in decades, but I have been to Charlotte. What 43.5 percent growth has done to Raleigh can only be worse than what 32.2 percent growth has done to Charlotte. Charlotte is hideously ugly. It has no focus, no center, no charm, no style. It has sprawl, traffic jams, and people who, having gone where the growth is, are always in a hurry. Charlotte seems unaware of what has happened to it. The story in today’s Charlotte Observer is self-congratulatory and cheers this population growth, taking for granted that it’s a good thing. But to my eyes, what growth has done to America’s regional inland cities is as horrifying, ugly, and unhealthy as what steam-driven industrialization did to 19th-century England.

As I see it, the dog-eat-dog dynamic of today’s working environment is only going to get worse. There’s a story going around the blogosphere. It’s about David Koch, one of the billionaire oilmen who have financed the tea parties and the “think tanks” that produce the right-wing propaganda that Fox News disseminates. The story has many variations, but it goes like this:

David Koch and a tea partier are sitting at a table. On the table is a plate with a dozen cookies. Koch grabs 11 cookies, then looks at the tea partier and says, “Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.”

Recent polls indicate that working Americans support Wisconsin’s unions more than they support Wisconsin’s union-busting governor, who takes money — and phone calls — from David Koch.

Maybe Americans are finally starting to figure out who it is who is eating their lunch (and their cookies). And does anyone (other than those who live in the fog of Fox News lies) think that corporate America cares any more about workers in general than it cares about unionized workers like teachers and firemen? The effectiveness of the propaganda on Fox News is really quite terrifying. It can cause Red State Americans of very modest means, and who would be hard up but for Social Security and Medicare, to vilify government and not only vote for, but also cheer for, the interests of the rich.

For those of you who are still working, I hope you’ve found one of those rare safe spots in this globalized Brave New World that Wall Street is creating.

And I hope that someday you too will be able to find a place where the growth is not.

The preparedness dilemma

I can guess what this retired Stokes County farm tool was doing in 1935.

What is the right amount of preparedness? The official position of the American government is that every family should have at least a three-day supply of food, water, and necessities. The assumption is that, in a regional disaster, help can be expected to come within three days. But that didn’t work too well, did it, for the people of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina? Some churches ask their members to maintain a year’s supply of food and essentials.

When we ask ourselves just how much preparedness is enough preparedness, we also must ask ourselves how prepared we can be without creating waste. Food won’t store forever. Do those people who store a year’s worth of supplies have a system for rotating and using those supplies? If they don’t, then it’s all wasted. If they do rotate their supplies, then they’re always eating food that’s old and will soon go bad. And of course preparedness is not only about food. Some “preppers,” as they’re often called, also seem to think that they need huge stocks of guns, ammunition, gasoline, and so on. Is that a good investment?

The December 20 & 27, 2010, issue of The New Yorker contains an article titled “The Efficiency Dilemma: If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?” The article is here, subscription required. The article describes a problem that befuddles economists and environmentalists. That’s the fact that the benefits of increased efficiency generally don’t lead to less consumption. An example is refrigeration. The efficiency of refrigerators has increased many times over since the electricity-guzzling refrigerators of the 1950s, and yet the total per-capita cost of refrigeration has risen steeply since the 1950s, because we refrigerate more things. The article quotes James McWilliams, the author of Just Food, on an American habit of which I am very guilty:

“Refrigeration and packaging convey to the consumer a sense that what we buy will last longer than it does. Thus, we buy enough stuff to fill our capacious Sub-Zeros and, before we know it, a third of it is past its due date and we toss it.”

Yep. And my own freezer needs cleaning out even as we speak. The article quotes Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland, on a disturbing statistic: Since the 1970s, per-capita food waste in the United States has increased by half, and we now throw away 40 percent of our food!

What this means for a preparedness strategy is that, unless our strategy is prudent, we are just generating more waste.

I marvel sometimes at the survivalists who gather at www.SurvivalBlog.com. These folks, right-wingers who see themselves as libertarians, think that stashing food is not enough. They also believe in having lots and lots of guns (including assault weapons), reinforced bunkers, elaborate surveillance equipment including night vision scopes and trip wires, big generators with a lot of stored fuel, etc. I can’t help but ask myself: Is that a good investment?

An old friend of mine, Jonathan Rauch, published a book in 1993 titled Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. In the book, Rauch talks about the mindsets of certain people who think they have a direct channel to the truth. “Fundamentalism,” Rauch writes, “is the strong disinclination to take seriously the possibility that you might be wrong.”

If we have a well-considered model of the world, we can make some educated guesses about the future. But no one can know for sure what the future will bring. Shouldn’t we hedge our bets, then, and do what we can to prepare for possible hard times without creating yet more waste? If “the end of the world as we know it,” or TEOTWAWKI, as it is called at SurvivalBlog, never happens, then what good were those huge arsenals of guns, those huge stashes of ammunition, those costly concrete bunkers, those perimeter-surveillance systems? They were a huge waste. They cost a fortune. They did not improve anyone’s quality of life, now or in the future. Those tripwires and No Trespassing signs weakened, rather than strengthened, a community.

Before buying those arsenals and building those bunkers, did those people ask themselves: What if I’m wrong?

So how much preparedness is enough, and how do we hedge our bets? We all have to make our own calls, based on our own situation and our own guesses about what we think the future will be like. I can speak only for myself.

My own view is that, though horrendous events such as a meteor strike or a total economic collapse could happen, the odds are against it. What I think is highly probable, though, is that hard times are not yet over and that Americans are going to have to adapt to a reduced or static standard of living. I also believe that Americans consume too much and waste too much. I will do what I can to prepare for what I think is highly probable. But I am nowhere near rich enough to prepare for all the kinds of bad things that could happen but for which the probabilities are too low to even estimate. This outlook is what shapes my view of the right level of preparedness.

So I ask myself, before I spend money on, say, a 400-foot deer fence around my little orchard and garden and henhouse, “Is this the right thing to do, no matter what happens?” In the case of the deer fence, I decided that it was the right thing to do, because even if I won the lottery I still would want to produce as much of my own food as possible, and around here that requires deer protection. Every expenditure for preparedness is an exercise in cost-benefit, priorities, and risk assessment. I’d like to have a generator, for example, but I see that as less important than, say, a good tiller. I bought the tiller. The generator must wait.

How much food should we store? We must all decide for ourselves. But the more of our own food we can produce, the less we have to store, and so I’m emphasizing production rather than storage. Even so, I have several milk crates full of canned foods in my storage closet, and the expiration date on much of it is coming up in 2011. I don’t really use much canned food, so one of the chores I must do soon is sort through that food and give most of it away before it expires. I’ve also got to clean my freezer and be smarter about how I use the freezer from now on.

How many guns do we need? My answer to that is about the same as one of my grandfather’s: a .22 rifle and a shotgun. A deer hunter would need more. An arsenal of automatic weapons, to my lights, would be a hobby at best and a paranoid obsession at worst. Nor can I imagine justifying the cost of such a hobby.

Again and again, as I reflect on the question of preparedness and sustainability, I think of 1935. Those were hard times in America. Industrialization had not yet reached the point at which many Americans don’t want to even cook for themselves and thus outsource their cooking to corporations by buying processed foods or eating at chain restaurants. Suburbanization had not yet happened. Outside the cities, most Americans still produced most of their own food. Communities were strong. Neighbors helped each other out rather than putting up No Trespassing signs and hoarding machine guns. As they said a few years after 1935, during World War II, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

Maybe this is a sentimental, unarmed (or lightly armed) Norman Rockwell view of hard times. But it certainly is more appealing than a Road Warrior view of hard times — guns and raids and slaughter. It’s also a level of preparedness that most of us can afford — those of us with jobs, at least. And even if 2011 turns out to be morning in America, a preparedness that emphasizes producing more for ourselves and doing more for ourselves while buying less is a good investment, good times or bad.

Water independence and water security

The gauge shows the 3.5 inches that fell last night.

To me, few things are as disturbing as a drought. And few things make me feel more secure than the sound of water rushing in my little stream. I can hear the water now through the upstairs open window that faces the woods. The remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole just put an end to the drought that developed in North Carolina during a hot and dry September. A total of 6.2 inches has fallen here in the past few days. Areas to the east, closer to the Atlantic, had much more rain. Wilmington, on the coast, had almost 21 inches of rain from Nicole.

For those of us who want to turn our backs on the corporatized, consumerist lifestyle, few things are more important than water independence and water security. My goal is to live to be at least 100 years old. If I succeed at that, that’s almost 40 more years that Acorn Abbey will need to sustain me through global warming and economic and political changes that I’m probably not going to like. One of my daily reads is James Rawles’ SurvivalBlog.com. Rawles is a very intelligent and knowledgeable man, and his daily links are often very useful. But Rawles’ blog has a strong right-wing tilt. He still believes, because of right-wing ideology, that government, rather than out-of-control corporations and the corporate takeover of our government, is the problem. He’s very big on guns and defending one’s retreat as though it’s a fortress, though, to his credit, he also completely understands the necessity of sustainability. He sells his services as a consultant for people who are looking for retreats. He prefers the western United States, because of the sparseness of the population, weaker local government, and the prevailing winds carrying fallout if a big East Coast city was nuked.

I believe that’s all wrong, that some people’s ideology and too much Ayn Rand has led them to think that rugged individualism, hoarding, and lots of guns are the best defense against what may go wrong in the future. But the western states (with the exception of Idaho and a few other areas) are some of the most water-stressed parts of the country, and the water situation is going to get worse. Given a choice between guns and water, I’ll take the water.

Before I finally made the decision to move back to North Carolina from California, one of the things I attempted to check was long-range projections for average rainfall in the face of global warming. I could find very little data in 2005, when I bought my land, though there seemed to be a consensus that hurricane-season storms off the Atlantic would be more common and more violent. Just this year, though, a research organization named Tetra Tech released a report combining projections from several different global warming models. They show this area of North Carolina gaining several inches of rainfall per year, on average. That is reassuring. One of the graphs from this report is at the bottom of this post.

In my attempts to model the future, it is silly to suppose that guns and hoards of food will get me through the next 40 years, should I be so lucky as to live that long. As I see it, sustainability is the key. Sustainability without rainfall and water is unimaginable. And though independence is a good thing, I also think it’s obvious that fortresses inhabited by rugged individualists with lots of guns are unsustainable.

What is sustainable, then? I think the answer to that is obvious, because that’s how it used to be done before we all became consumers in an economy in which people depend on corporations for everything. Farming communities are sustainable. To the right-wing mind, “community” is a dirty word that will always provoke a sneer. Even a very large farm is not likely to be completely self-sustaining. There are bound to be some things that one can’t produce and that one must trade for. When I was a child, I could hardly believe it when my mother used to tell me that, when she was a child, there was no such thing as a grocery store. A few times a year, she said, they’d buy flour, sugar and beans in 50-pound sacks. Everything else they grew. Those sacks, by the way, were often cotton muslin prints that could be made into clothing. I have a photo of my mother around age 16 in which I’m pretty sure the dress she’s wearing was made from a flour sack.

So, to me, picking a place for a retreat is not about totally getting away from people. It’s about getting into an area sparsely populated with the right kind of people. Those people are people who have tractors and fields and barns and pastures. Those people now go to the grocery store, for sure. But they have the option of going back to farming, and many of them still have the skills.

Acorn Abbey is a little less than 250 miles from the Atlantic. The North Carolina coastline sort of hangs out into the Atlantic. If you flew exactly east from Acorn Abbey, in about 250 miles you would come to the Atlantic around Duck, North Carolina. If you flew exactly south from Acorn Abbey, in about 250 miles you would come to the Atlantic around Charleston, South Carolina. This is good. Stokes County is far enough inland to be protected from the winds of a powerful hurricane. But the rain can get here in only a few hours.

Acorn Abbey’s water comes from a well. I have a small stream only a hundred feet downhill from the house, but that stream stops running in dry weather. The nearest stream that runs all year is about a hundred feet below my property line. The Dan River is two miles away. I could have done worse. But if there is one thing I could fix about Acorn Abbey, it would be this: I’d contrive to have some sort of reservoir of rain water that could be used to irrigate the garden. With limits, my well can do this. But the idea of using ground water for irrigation offends against my sense of sustainability. If there is a cost-effective way of impounding some rain water for summer irrigation, I will think of it.

This storm came straight off the Atlantic rather than from the Gulf.

Tetra Tech Inc. / National Resources Defense Council

What can we learn from small newspapers?

My local newspaper, the Stokes News

While big newspapers are foundering and shrinking, small local newspapers are holding their own, or even thriving. Is there a useful economic lesson in this for relocalization?

Oceans of ink have been spilled in attempts to analyze why larger newspapers are dying. It boils down to two things: both readers and advertising are leaving the larger newspapers at a fast rate.

Since local newspapers are holding on, then clearly local newspapers are holding on both to readers and advertisers. I understand that my local newspaper, the Stokes News, is doing well and making money. Let’s take a look at the Stokes News and see if we can make some guesses about why.

On the front of this week’s issue are profiles of the race for county sheriff. Each candidate gets about 20 column inches — a lot of space. There is a story on a new campaign to market Stokes County as a country-music destination. That story is 42 column inches long — huge. Inside is a lot of community news, including columnists from different communities who write about who is sick and who is visiting whom. The cooking column, “Cat’s Kitchen” by Cathy Long, is far more solid and enlightened than the quirky-trendy food writing I see in the larger Winston-Salem Journal. And besides those quirky trends are stale by the time they arrive in Winston-Salem. The Stokes News has a huge sports section, with detailed coverage of high school sports and lots of stuff on hunting, fishing, and golfing.

In short, the Stokes News contains hyper-local information that people want, and there isn’t anywhere else to get that information in one place.

Let’s take a look at the advertising. Inside the paper are ads for local merchants and services. For example, lawn mower ads from local hardware stores. Even small businesses like pet-grooming and handyman services can afford the small ads.

But I’m sure the real money-makers are the preprinted inserts. These include inserts from three grocery store chains: Lowe’s, Food Lion, and Ingles. There’s also an insert for CVS pharmacies, and Wal-Mart. Those are the stores that capture most of the routine weekly spending by people in Stokes County (though you have to go outside Stokes County to find a Wal-Mart).

People spend a big chunk of their money close to home, at places within driving distance. That, I believe, is the key to why small newspapers are doing well.

With a population of about 44,000 people and a per capita income of about $18,000, total Stokes County household income is something over $800 million a year. That’s a lot of money, enough to support a lot of businesses, and much of that money is spent close to home.

Corporations are capturing most of that money — grocery and drug store chains, Wal-Mart, etc. How long did it take corporations to figure out how to capture so much local income?

The number of family farms in the United States peaked in 1935. I think it’s safe to say that corporations didn’t get a big percentage of local income in 1935. But probably the year of the turning point was 1945, the end of World War II. That was when the trends began that turned the United States from an agrarian economy to what it is today — corporatized and suburbanized. In less than 65 years, corporations ultimately responsible to Wall Street have come to soak up most of the spending of people even in small, rural counties such as Stokes County.

Relocalization is about reversing that process. If more of that $800 million a year stayed in Stokes County, just think of the jobs it would produce. Many of those jobs, to be sure, would be agrarian jobs similar to what people here did in 1935. Do people still want to do those kinds of jobs? I don’t know. But one thing is clear, as local newspapers prove: There’s a lot of money in local economies, so much money that Wall Street wants it. Grocery stores get the biggest chunk of it.

Local folks who figure out how to reverse those postwar trends and sell (particularly food) into the local market will find that the money is there. And every dollar that stays inside the county makes the county better off.

The methods of 100 years ago

Here is a link to a scanned copy of Henley’s Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes and Processes. The book, which is in PDF format, is more than 800 pages long and covers just about everything a self-sufficient American in 1914 might need to know — farming, shelter, tools, homemade cosmetics and medicines, preserving food, and so on. The PDF file is more than 100 megabytes. Everything is arranged in alphabetical order.

The awful 14th century

Pieter Bruegel, the Triumph of Death

I have written previously about the dark and miserable era that followed the fall of Rome, starting in the 5th Century. Here’s another: Europe in the 14th Century.

In 1978, the historian Barbara Tuchman, who won a Pulitzer for her history of World War I, published a book that also became a best-seller: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. This book caused quite a stir when it was first published, and I had long meant to read it. I finally did, after I found a copy of it in a junk store in Madison for 75 cents.

Centuries before, the ideal of chivalry had provided a little light in the darkness of the Middle Ages. But by the 14th Century, chivalry had fallen into decadence. The nobility lived as parasites off the labor of the peasantry and gave nothing to speak of in return. War and extravagant consumption, it seems, were all the nobility lived for. Wars went on and on from their own inertia, though no one even remembered what they were fighting for.

The church too, in centuries past, had preserved a tiny light of order and learning in the darkness of the Middle Ages, but by the 14th Century the church was as decadent and corrupt and parasitic as the nobility. Everything was for sale: the sacraments, annulments, dispensations, pardons, offices, emoluments. The church also was torn by schism. There were two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon. Torture and Inquisition were highly refined and ruthlessly practiced.

The peasantry was miserably poor, lived in filthy hovels, was racked with disease and saddled with crushing taxes. Up to two-thirds of their children did not live to be adults. Several times during the century, there were peasant revolts. But always those revolts were put down as quickly as the nobles could rally enough men on horseback to cut the peasants down.

And if that wasn’t enough, there was the Black Death, which killed up to 60 percent of Europe’s population. There were no longer enough people to till the fields, further increasing the misery for those who survived the plague.

By 1415, French chivalry was in ruins, with thousands of nobles dead in the mud at the Battle of Agincourt. Those ruins of the fortresses and abbeys of the Middle Ages that we see today: Much of that was not the result of centuries of gradual decay. Rather, it was destruction caused by the wars, raiding and pillaging of the 14th Century.

A saint was born out of this ruin: Joan of Arc.

Why is this relevant to a relocalization blog? Because human nature doesn’t change. We would do well to not forget how thin is the veneer of civilizaton, or how fragile the rule of law. No matter what the cost of war, we humans never seem to learn. Elites, glorifying war, have the same tendency to become ever richer and to make ever greater wagers to increase their wealth and power. Again and again we find that the times of greatest luxury for elites are the times of greatest hardship for those who actually do the work.

To quote Barbara Tuchman:

“Chivalry, the dominant political idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between the ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.”

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Barbara W. Tuchman. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1978. 720 pages.

Family dairies, R.I.P.

Small, family-run dairy operations used to be very common all across North Carolina’s Piedmont and the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. They are gone. I doubt that very many of them survived much later than the 1950s. Like all small family farms, the dairy farms had to deal with competition from the larger, more industrialized operations. There also were health regulations to deal with. If I remember correctly from what a dairy farmer told me many years ago, to sell top-grade milk required that the milk be chilled to a low temperature — 34 or 35 degrees, as I recall — within minutes of coming from the cow. Small operations couldn’t support the cost of this refrigeration equipment.

This old dairy, on Mountain Road near Danbury in Stokes County, was typical. The building in which the milking was done was usually made of concrete blocks. This was because the building was constantly being hosed down and washed.

The smaller room to the right, with the sink, is the clean room where vessels were washed and where the milk was brought. The larger room to the left with the cow-sized door is the milking room.

The sink was for washing the milk cans and other vessels.