While looking at ideas for raising ducks, I discovered David Walbert’s The New Agrarian Website and blog. His content has a deep and insightful discussion about standards and stewardship.

When we decided to get ducks I could not have easily articulated my reason for wanting them. Now, I can: for breakfast this morning I fried two eggs over-easy that we had gathered only an hour before, and while I ate them I watched through the kitchen window as the ducks who laid them bathed contentedly (it seems to me) in their pool. That breakfast is what I wanted: good, rich, complex-tasting food from happy, healthy animals; a breakfast in context. I wanted to see the process of agriculture, from beginning to end; to participate in my own sustenance, but especially to know that it was made in a manner I believed to be right. It is not, on reflection, so much to ask. But that knowledge — intimate, personal, complete — is something I can’t get from a supermarket, no matter what standards my food meets, no matter how many agencies certify it with how many eco-labels. I wanted knowledge not labels; process, not product; stewardship, not standards.

Standards and Stewards | The New Agrarian.

While you are there, please read What’s a New Agrarian and this essay The Eightfold Agrarian Way

New Agrarianism, most importantly, is not about preserving a way of life or recreating the past; it is about building the future. These eight principles draw heavily on past expressions of agrarian thought, from ancient Greece to twentieth-century America, but they are not bound by them. Agrarians have few models but the past, and the past is valuable for the lessons it teaches, but each of us must live in the present and plan for the future.