Fresh inspiration

As I've whined too much already, it's hard to garden from Limbo. Everything is either tentative or hypothetical. I'm not ordering any seeds this year as I have such a large stockpile and a lack of motivation to try new stuff. Most of my winter garden reading attempts have tended more toward frustration than inspiration.

But I've found a wonderful exception: The Permaculture Home Garden by Linda Woodrow. It's a bit hard to come by here, since it's out of Australia. I'm not sure why it isn't more widely available. I got mine from a third-party seller on Amazon.com for about $35.

I love some of the ideas that permaculture strives for, but you almost have to be an expert botanist to pull off some of the techniques. They're often heavy on cool concepts, but light on detailed examples. Other techniques require loads of labor or money or resources up front (teams of workers, earth movers, materials, etc.) that aren't always feasible.

Where Woodrow's book shines is that she's come up with a system that implements the concepts of permaculture in a way that:
- works on a home scale
- doesn't require a huge up-front investment (probably comparable to starting a traditional garden from scratch)
- incorporates lots of familiar annual vegetables, fruit & nut trees, and chickens (these are a few of my favorite things)
- can be adapted to use a worm farm if chooks aren't a good fit for your site
- can produce an amazing quantity of food from a relatively small space
- is small enough to fit in most suburban yards, but that is modular enough to scale up quite well
- is aesthetically pleasing enough to work almost anywhere

The basic unit of the system is a circle. These are combined to form a larger building block she calls a "mandala". A mandala has a circular bed in the middle, surrounded by six more circles. These circular mandalas can even be made into a sort of "super mandala" if you're feeling really ambitious or want to make a living from it. (My inner geek loves the "fractalness" of it all.)

Each circular keyhole garden is 2 meters across, and after adding in paths, a full-sized mandala is about 15 meters across - or 20 meters if you extend out to the eventual drip lines of the small fruit & nut trees. I think not being in Australia, I wouldn't plant trees all the way around the circle. We don't get nearly as much sun. But trees around the southern edges might work. Then again I'm all about the trees, so I might push the limits myself.

Woodrow uses a clever adaptation of the chicken tractor to make a "chook dome" - a circular chicken pen 2 meters across (and about 2 meters high at the apex) that covers up one circle. The pen moves from circle to circle through the season with the chickens taking on the tasks of tilling, fertilizing, pest control and waste management.

But if you don't have room for a 15m mandala, there's no reason you couldn't break it into 2m circles and rearranging them to fit your space. And there's no reason you couldn't have less than 7 circles. You'd lose some of the benefits, but it seems modular enough that it'd still work pretty well.

So no matter where we end up or even if we stay put, I can while away the hours soaking up the details of her system, making minor adjustments to account for the climate differences, and being able to plop it all down as is in almost any location. Not to mention scouring the internet for people who have tried this system to see how it worked, what changes they made (like the geodesic chook dome)

I still can't necessarily start doing it, but it's enough to get me through the rest of winter with my sanity intact.

It's probably a little iffy to recommend a gardening book that uses unconventional techniques that you've never tried which were designed for a different climate (and a different hemisphere) that you haven't even finished yet.

But I don't care. I highly recommend this book. I've danced with many of these concepts before. I've just never seen them put together into a system that is so elegant (in every sense of the word).

One last note - as I was reading the book I was entertaining my brain by always converting metric to non-metric, north-facing to south-facing, east to west, etc. Well, until I realized halfway through the book that while Australia is a long way off, the sun does still rise in the east and set in the west there. The Southern Hemisphere doesn't rotate the other way around. Duh...

(Oh, and Linda has a blog that I will be devouring perusing shortly.)

A few images from others who have tried some of this stuff:





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Willie Smits: A 20-year tale of hope: How we re-grew a rainforest

This is pretty cool....

Eat the Weeds (crosspost from H&H)

Okay, I thought the stuff below was interesting, so I'm posting it both here and over at Hen & Harvest. Yes, Hen & Harvest is back to life. I'm taking on more responsibility over there - which, for those of you who know me in real life, probably seems a bit preposterous. At any rate, I'll be partnering with Shasta from Seeking Simplicity to hopefully get that ball really rolling again. You can read more about that here.

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I often walk around our yard or pastures looking at weeds and wondering what they are. Identifying plants from a book is pretty hard, and I don't have an expert handy to ID them for me.

Well now I've got the next best thing. Apparently "Green Deane" at EatTheWeeds.com has been putting these videos out for a year now, but this is the first I've heard about them. There are 63 videos and counting, all about identifying edible wild plants.

Each video covers where and when to find a given weed, which parts are edible, how to use them, if there are look-alikes, and anything else he thinks is interesting, like how they got their name or what their history is.

I'm not necessarily after a meal when I'm wandering outside, so the plant identification is the interesting part to me. But even so, it'd be pretty sweet to walk out to get the mail and come back with a salad.

The videos get better over time - I guess if you do anything 60+ times you gain some new skills - but just to get you started, here is Episode 01:


For what it's worth, his web site, while not the prettiest thing on the web, is a treasure trove of articles and information. So if you have a slow connection or you're already a plant ID expert, there's still a lot of great stuff to be had.

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Another easy one...

Here's a secret: The Easiest Challenge Ever is a gateway drug. By paying attention to these little everyday things, you might start to become aware of other stuff you can change.

But even so, easy stuff is easy. And I don't know about you, but just everyday life has been challenging at my house lately, so easy is all I can handle at the moment.

*** UPDATED ***

Never mind about the rest of this post. Mr. Obama chose Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture, despite the grassroots efforts to prevent it. We may now return to our cynicism and toothpaste. :-(

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Sometimes even the easy stuff can still make a difference. Occasionally slacktivism actually works. I don't know for certain that this next item can make a difference, but this is from an email I got this morning from one of my favorite mailing lists:

Michael Dimock, president of Roots of Change, just called me and said "how do we get more people to sign this petition! I just talked with Michael Pollan and a member of Obama's transition team, and if we get 50K people to sign this in the next few days, Obama will take it into account when appointing the next Secretary of Agriculture!"

These people have put a lot of time into trying to find the right candidate(s) for Secretary of Agriculture. They've been kicking around names for a while, adding people, crossing them off. etc. They've done a lot of homework.

So here's the petition: http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/

And while you're in the neighborhood, here's another: http://fooddeclaration.org/

Okay, next time I'll try to come up with something more challenging.

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The (Cherry) Pits

I've talked here before about my difficulty in choosing the "best" winter heating fuel. We have a "biomass" stove, designed to burn wood pellets, corn, or other small, "pellety" fuels. Not that there have been many other options available up until now, but our appliance can hypothetically burn oats, sunflower seeds, grass pellets, and various other things.

I struggled with the ethical dilemma of burning corn for the same reasons I think ethanol is a flawed option. Namely, that you're pitting food and fuel against each other, which can only drive up prices. Not good in a world of seven billion people who all need to eat.

But it does burn hot and clean, and I can get it unbagged, in bulk, from very local sources - so I could "heat local." I could even theoretically grow enough myself to get me through a winter, which I keep hoping to try. Storage is a pain, because it attracts rodents and other critters, but once we got the chickens, at least we had a crack clean-up crew.

The other option, wood pellets, has its own pluses and minuses. Currently most of the wood pellets made come from sawdust - a byproduct of other industries. The downside is the sawdust has to be dried, formed into pellets, bagged, and shipped. It's usually been shipped a long way, but I can pick up the pellets within about 5 miles of my house.

From a practical standpoint, they both have their good and bad points as well. The ash from the corn is much easier to clean up. It's kind of sandy, and cools quickly, as opposed to the fine, fluffy ash from the pellets that stays hot for an hour after the fire is out. But the corn tends to form "clinkers" when burned - hard, black chunks of pure carbon that adhere to the stirring mechanism and have to be busted out from time to time.

Last year we settled on a mix of corn and pellets. It was kind of the best of both worlds. The ash was easier to deal with, there were no clinkers, and we could get some of the benefit of the lower cost and higher temperature of the corn, balanced with the easier and less ethically muddy pellets.

This fall, I was surprised to find my local supplier offering a third option: cherry pits. Like pellets, they are essentially a waste product. Like pellets, they have to be bagged and shipped. But unlike pellets, they are not manufactured. They also come from a much closer source: Michigan.

So I decided to give them a shot this year. I'm hedging my bets, with a fuel supply of two-thirds pellets to one-third cherry pits.

The cherry pits are less dense than the pellets, so a 40 lb bag is bulkier. This resulted in comically (and precariously) tall stack of bags in the back of the pickup truck. Their lower density means you can't pack as many into the stove's hopper, at least by weight.


I'm told they burn hotter and faster than pellets. They were priced the same. They have a lovely sound rustling together that reminds me of... something. A rain stick. And the exhaust (I can't really call it smoke) smells like cherry wood burning instead of roasted grain.

I'll have to report back after we've had some really cold weather to give a full report, but I have to say I like the concept. It's got a bit of a permaculture feel to it. I have high hopes.

I know I should end with some twist on a bowl of cherries and the pits. But I won't.

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Black Magic

[Note: This is a draft of an article I'm working on. Constructive criticism welcome. Or payment for publication. :) Images will be added later, if I can get permission to use 'em. And yes, I know that all of the footnotes are numbered "1". I'll fix it eventually... Thanks for reading!]

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B l a c k | Can a lost civilization teach us to double crop yields
M a g i c | and produce carbon-negative energy at the same time?

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In 1542, Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana described large cities, extensive roads, and fertile croplands in the heart of the Amazon Basin. These claims were long thought to be exaggerations at best. Later explorers found no traces of these complex societies. Nor did historians or archaeologists.

However, those notions are beginning to change. Orellana may well have led the first (and last) party of Europeans through a highly advanced civilization that thrived in the Amazon for centuries - a civilization whose existence was thought to be impossible. After all, even with modern farming techniques, crop yields cannot be sustained on the poor native soils. A rainforest soaks up every last drop of rain. Remove the rainforest, and the soil nutrients leach away in no time. The slash-and-burn techniques used by today's farmers in the Amazon produce a layer of ash that may only achieve a few years' worth of crop growth before all usable soil nutrients have eroded away. How could a large pre-Columbian civilization thrive where modern agriculture cannot?

Archaeologists in the Moxos Plains of Bolivia have started to unravel this 500-year old mystery. The Moxos Plains are a flat, savanna-like region on the edge of the Amazon rain forest. The plains are subject to seasonal flooding, and covered with relatively sparse vegetation. However, the landscape is dotted with "forest islands" - thousands of raised areas with highly fertile soil, covered with lush vegetation. The landscape is also criss-crossed with unnaturally straight lines and rectangular patterns, for miles on end.

The forest islands were thought to be the result of some sort of volcanic or other geological activity. But every forest island has thick, rich soil known as terra preta, or "dark earth". And everywhere there's dark earth, there are also pottery shards, human bone fragments, charcoal, and other evidence of human life. Intricately detailed artifacts have been discovered which rival the Incan and Mayan cultures' artistry.

Evidence now suggests that the forest islands themselves were man-made earthworks. The straight lines were an extensive web of causeways connecting the islands, and canals, with fish weirs. The rectangular patterns were agricultural plots, raised to protect them from seasonal flooding. As researchers have started to map the terra preta soil throughout the Amazon basin, they're finding a strong correlation between the rich soil and the places where Orellana reported seeing villages.

Perhaps the most valuable discovery has been the rich soil itself. It appears that this vast and complex culture did not just take advantage of terra preta -- they created it. This lost civilization, apparently destroyed in a matter of decades by smallpox, influenza, and measles, has left us something valuable indeed -- a technique for creating soil with incredible properties.

Incredible - an overused word sometimes. But consider this: The terra preta soil can result in increases in crop yields of double, triple, or in one case, 880 percent¹ over the native soil; the technique for creating terra preta soil can extract significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, and store it in the soil for millenia; as long as an eight-inch layer of terra preta is left on the surface, it can apparently regenerate itself to a depth of 24 inches over a period of two decades¹; and at least one plot of terra preta soil has been continuously cropped for over 40 consecutive years.¹

In fact, several companies are trying to take the process even further. One company, Eprida, believes that through a process called pyrolysis, it can produce bio-oil, hydrogen-based gas, and highly fertile soil, from crop residue, on a small scale, in a way that returns micro-nutrients to the soil and removes carbon from the atmosphere.

Their prototype power plant, which is the size of a semi trailer, burns peanut shells. The heat produced is used to create steam, which is mixed with the smoke from the burning process itself. When the steam and smoke combine, a hydrogen-based gas is captured, which can then be used as a fuel, similar to natural gas. Alternately, all or part of the gaseous smoke/steam mix can be distilled into a liquid fuel. And of course, the charred material created becomes a soil amendment.

Eprida will target small farmers, since a farm can easily provide all the inputs and use all the outputs of the process.

The researchers at Eprida actually had no knowledge of terra preta when they began researching sustainable ways to produce energy from crop residue -- but the hints were there. Danny Day, Eprida's CEO, tells the following story:

One of my employees, Nate, was instructed to bring a 55 gallon drum of charcoal from an area where we had produced and piled it up two years earlier. He came back and asked what did I want to do with the plants.

I said, "What plants?"

"The plants growing on the charcoal," he replied.

I said, "Nate, I need clean charcoal with no plants in them. Just move them out of the way and get clean charcoal with no plants or root material in it."

He quickly went away.

The next day I was puzzled and asked Nate what kind of plants were growing in the charcoal.

He said, "Oh grass, weeds... " He paused. "And turnips."

"Turnips? What kind of turnips"

He smiled as he held up his hands about a foot apart and said, "Big turnips."

I said, "Wow. That’s incredible. Go get me one."

"I can’t," he replied.

"Why not," I asked.

"You told me to move them."

"Where did they go?"

Nate replied, "Charlie, Philip, David and I took them home."

"How much did you get?"

"We each got a big garbage bag full!"

"What did they taste like?"

"They were good!"

Scientists and researchers are just now starting to unlock the mysteries of terra preta. The key ingredient, it seems, is charcoal - or more specifically, activated carbon. A single gram of activated carbon can have a surface area of 500 to 1,500 square meters (or about the equivalent of one to three basketball courts)¹. This char material in the soil has several beneficial effects, including about a 20% increase in water retention, increased mineral retention, increased mineral availability to plant roots, and increased microbial activity. It has been shown to be particularly beneficial to arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which form a symbiotic relationship with plant root fibers, allowing for greater nutrient uptake by plants. There is speculation that the mycorrhizal fungi may play a part in terra preta's ability to seemingly regenerate itself.

Biochar (sometimes called agrichar) is charcoal made from crop residue, such as corn cobs or spent sugar canes. The research into the benefits and the ultimate potential of biochar as a soil additive are being conducted around the world, in tropical, temperate, humid, and arid climates. It has been studied by such respected institutions as Cornell University, the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and the US Department of Energy. It has been reported on in journals and publications such as Nature, Scientific American, and Discover Magazine.

It's important to remember that biochar doesn't necessarily add nutrients so much as retain nutrients, and make existing nutrients more available. The most significant crop yield increases were found when mineral fertilizers were added to poor soil in conjunction with the biochar. However, it does appear that the more char material added, the bigger the beneficial effects. The effective saturation point is not yet known. It's also important to note that the benefits may be lost when certain modern agricultural techniques are used. Mycorrhizal fungi and other soil organisms are sensitive to many agricultural chemicals, and the yields may not be as dramatic with heavily tilled soil.

More char material in the soil may mean less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The carbon sequestration potential of biochar is enormous. By one estimate, biochar-amended soil can contain at least two-and-a-half times the carbon of typical soil. In the Amazon's poor soil, terra preta soil has eighteen times more carbon.¹ Unlike most soil-based carbon (organic matter), the charred matter is essentially permanently sequestered.

How much carbon can be sequestered in this manner? The limits have not yet been determined, but one estimate amounts to 150 metric tons per hectare, or, put another way, over 42,000 tons of carbon per square mile. Bruno Glaser, a researcher with the University of Bayreuth, Germany, believes that by the end of this century, terra preta schemes in combination with biofuels could store up over one billion tons of carbon - more than the total of all carbon emitted by fossil fuels today.¹

Of course, the danger of this kind of discovery, if it turns out to hold up well under further scientific scrutiny, is irresponsible implementation. Clearcutting forests to sequester carbon doesn't seem like a practical tradeoff. And creating excessive air pollution through low-tech charring of plant material might create more problems than it solves.

However, there is so much promise, so much potential, and so many global problems that could be helped with this knowledge, that extensive trials are certainly warranted. Terra preta could provide us with:

• A way to slow, or even halt deforestation of the Amazon basin
  
• A way to dramatically increase crop yields, even while moving away from chemically-dependent agriculture
  
• A way to mitigate soil depletion problems around the globe
• A way to retain more moisture in soils, reducing the need for irrigation
• A way to reduce nutrient leaching into waterways, which in turn can reduce the "dead zone" problems such as the one found near the Mississippi delta
  
• A way to create energy sustainably, even on a back yard scale
• A way to permanently and dramatically reduce carbon concentration in the earth's atmosphere
• A way to do all of these things, with apparently time-tested, stone-age technologies.

There's even a small chance that particulate from creating char could temporarily re-strengthen the global dimming effect, which might slow global warming.

Too good to be true? It's hard to say. But with all of these potential benefits, it's hard not to be hopeful. Especially since, with a little thought and creativity, it seems like much of this could be done on a homestead scale.

Sure it would be hard for a back yard hobbyist to capture, store, and use hydrogen gas. And anything involving fire and smoke would need to be thought through. The ideal situation might be an "appliance" of some sort that could filter pollutants, or even make use of the gases the way Eprida's prototype apparently does.

Even without such complexities, if the pollution question can be addressed, the potential is huge. Could it be that anyone with the motivation could dramatically improve their soil and sequester carbon in their own back yard? After all, char material can be made using little more than a steel drum with some holes in it.

There are plenty of things to do with the heat generated during the charring process. Why not use it to heat your water? Or cook your food? (Ever heard of a pit barbecue?) The heat could be used to warm a greenhouse in winter, or possibly even supplement home heating.

Maybe this was how it all started. Maybe the ancient inhabitants of the Amazon were just trying to cook their dinners or warm their water, only to stumble on one of Mother Nature's best kept secrets. Perhaps the constant rains made open fires impractical. Maybe the lack of abundant stone made pit fires the only logical choice. Or was it just that local fish tasted best when slow-cooked?

Whatever the case, it seems they discovered something akin to magic. Now that we've unearthed this deep, dark secret, are we smart enough to use it responsibly?

Chestnuts of (permaculture) wisdom

Growing up in New England, Mark Shepard's influences included his father, who planted a wide variety of fruit trees and berry bushes in the back yard, and "some grouchy old guy" down the road - who turned out to be none other than Scott Nearing (The Good Life).

Now, after a lifetime of studying and growing plants, some permaculture training, authoring a book or two, helping to establish Midwest Permaculture, and living the life he believes in, some fortunate series of events led him to the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association conference, which I attended last weekend. [I've written about my thoughts on the conference in general over here.]

Mark has probably told these stories and given these speeches hundreds of times before, but he brings so much energy and humor and brightness to the material that makes it downright infectious. He went through so many ideas that made me say, "wow," that I haven't come close to remembering everything, nor have I had time to look up the things I do remember so I can see how it all works. I hope I'm getting the details right, or at least close.

One of his main themes was what he calls the savanna model. The natural habitat in much of North America was once oak savanna - a mix of grassland and woodland. He said because the savanna takes advantage of three dimensions, vegetation high, low, and everywhere in between, you can get sixty vertical feet of photosynthesis, pull water and nutrients up from much deeper in the soil, and over time, build up some of the richest soil on earth. The savanna model can support more total biomass than almost any other system - seven times more biomass than a cornfield. In addition to large amounts of vegetation, African savannas can support very large fauna, just as the North American savanna used to. He quizzed us on what large animals used to roam these parts, and we all replied "bison." No, he said, bison were merely the medium to small fauna. The large fauna were things like the mastadons and woolly mammoths.

So that was the kind of potential for biomass this part of the country could support, if we adopted the savanna model. How? By using the concept of stacking to grow more plants and animals in less space, even while improving the ecosystem. The savanna model can be immitated in a highly productive way by growing more woody plants and trees that bear useful products, interspersed with grazing animals on pasture or more perennial food crops like asparagus. The beauty of this approach is that it reduces to almost zero the amount of tilling, seed starting, planting, and cultivating. And once established, labor decreases and output increases over time.

He discussed the fact that every civilization that took the majority of its carbohydrates, fats, and calories from annual crops eventually failed. Soil erosion, soil depletion, and energy costs for annual crops do not scale up well. At least not unless you have a cheap, abundant energy source, like fossil fuels, to prop the system up with.

At that point, he asked for a show of hands of how many people were familiar with the concept of Peak Oil. Even among that eco-savvy crowd, only handful out of several hundred raised their hands. He showed a couple graphs that would probably be familiar to anybody who has looked into Peak Oil, but didn't delve into it much further.

Turning back to the topic at hand, he said that the most useful Oak savanna crops fall into the following families:

• Fagacae: Oaks, chestnuts, beeches
• Malus: Apples
  
• Prunus: Plums, cherries, peaches, apricots, and other stone fruits
  
• Corylus: Hazelnuts
  
• Vitis: Grapes
  
• Rubus: Blackberries & raspberries
  
• Ribes: Currants & gooseberries

All grow well together, so they can be planted in various combinations, as needed. For example, imagine a chestnut tree, with a grapevine climbing up it, flanked by an apple tree on one side and a peach tree on the other, with a bramble of blackberries and gooseberries underneath. This could be done on a suburban lot. It could even be surrouunded by daffodils to deter mice from chewing the bark, and to make it look pretty.

Now imagine the same arrangement, expanded into rows running north-south, with animals rotationally grazed on the pasture between the rows. (This kind of arrangement is sometimes called "alley cropping.") Think of the food potential and diversity for just a single acre!

The way he pays for these large plantings of trees is to buy twice or even three times as many trees as he needs at wholesale prices, and then he sells the extras at retail prices, which amounts to free trees for him.

He went into more detail on a couple of trees that caught my attention. The first was the chestnut tree. [Because of chestnut blight, only Chinese chestnuts can be grown in most of the U.S. at this time.] Chestnuts are nutritionally similar to corn, but take no plowing or chemicals or fertilizers or pesticides to produce. The crop almost literally falls from the sky, where it can be easily harvested for human consumption, or fed to livestock. And at the end of the chestnut tree's life, it provides straight-grained, rot-resistant lumber.

The second tree of interest was the hazelnut. Hazelnuts are nutritionally similar to soy, but with three times the oil content. Their hulls burn with the properties of anthricite coal. And every ten years, the trees can be coppiced - cut down to the ground and used for lumber - after which the stump resprouts to grow a whole new tree.

Even the lowly apple tree, he pointed out, could produce 25% more ethanol per acre than a cornfield, without nearly as much processing, or for that matter, farming. Another interesting comment he made was that if you mix hard cider and hazelnut oil, and wait a while, you get biodiesel. No fancy chemistry needed.

One of the core ideas of permaculture is that waste product from one system should ideally become the input of another system. Another key concept is to minimize work by keeping the things that need the most attention closest to the living space. He gave an elaborately detailed example from his morning routine.

He takes his kitchen scraps from the night before out toward his chicken coop. There, the meat scraps are separated from the vegetative material by a fully automated no-maintenance system - a system so advanced, it also deters mice, rats, foxes, coyotes, and racoons. The system consists of the family dogs and cats racing each other to the kitchen scrap pail, with first prize being the meat scraps. While the meat sorting system is functioning, he has time to use the facilities - a composting toilet, of course. Once the animal products have been removed from the kitchen scraps, they get dumped on the downhill slope behind the chicken coop. Off the back of the coop, above ground, is a bat box. The bats help minimize insect problems. Also on the back of the chicken coop, above ground, is a rabbit hutch, with an open mesh floor. The rabbit droppings fall onto the same slope as the table scraps. Rainwater collected from the roof of the coop is used to provide drinking water for both the rabbits and the chickens. After he feeds the chickens and lets them out of the coop, they dig through the table scraps for tasty morsels, and scratch the remaining scraps and the rabbit manure and any bat guano. Downhill from the chicken coop is a compost pit, dug into the ground. Chicken scratching plus gravity helps the scraps and manure gradually move downhill until they end up in the pit. The chickens will literally burrow through the compost looking for worms, while at the same time aerating the pile to keep the composting process moving along. After feeding the chickens and rabbits, and collecting eggs from the coop, he feeds his cattle and hogs, who have access to feed troughs attached to the coop. The animals funnel in from adjacent teardrop-shaped pastures. From there, he picks veggies from the garden, and mushrooms from a nearby shiataake-innoculated log. By the time he steps back in the house, he's fed his dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits, cattle, and hogs, he's harvested the garden, and he's got the makings of a nice breakfast omelette, as he says, "all because I had to poop."

The Circle of Life, it seems, is more of an elaborate, three-dimensional, interwoven tapestry - and a beautiful tapestry at that - even if it does involve a surprising diversity of poop.

The OEFFA Conference

Last weekend, my family and I attended the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association's annual conference. Below is a report on our experiences.

Overall Impressions

OEFFA (pronounced oh-fah) has been putting on this conference for 28 years, and it shows. The organizers really have their act together: Creative childcare - free if you volunteer some of your time to help out; Member-provided local and organic meals - with fully compostable plates and utensils; A "Kids' Conference" for older kids - they built bird shelters and sold them to members to raise funds to pay for next year's kids' conference; Lunch tables organized by geography the first day (so you can find people near you), and organized by topic the second day (so you can find like-minded people); Audio recordings available for purchase of every single workshop, since there were generally nine different workshops at any given time, so you could never attend everything you might be interested in... I could go on, but in any case, my hat's off to the people who put the conference together.

Keynote Speaker #1: Sally Fallon

Sally Fallon is the author of Nourishing Traditions and the founder of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I will admit that I'm not a big Sally Fallon fan. She goes a bit far with her claims sometimes, and can come off more like an old-time snake oil salesman. My family drinks raw milk when we have it available, so I'm okay with the concept. But when you imply that raw milk makes kids smarter and better looking and more creative and more artistic, and that it cures asthma and cancer and autism and ... well, let's just say I have reasons to be skeptical. I also agree with her that modern nutrition science has a pretty mediocre success rate on telling us what's good for us and what's not, but again, I don't believe that following her advice will virtually eliminate the need for health care, as she implies. (And the anti-soy thing seems pretty far out there, but we'll just leave that aside for now.)

That said, she did have a lot of good ideas and messages. Her key point was that farms can be much more profitable by selling value-added products - i.e. yogurt instead of milk, apple cider instead of apples, prosciutto instead of ham, etc. The idea is that the increased value more than outweighs the work involved, and that high quality, local specialties can increase demand even further. This would help farmers a lot more than what she referred to as the "plantation model," where power and profit are centralized, and regulations begin to favor centralization, at the expense of individual farmers.

Keynote Speaker #2: Mark Shepard

Mark Shepard is a permaculture expert from Midwest Permaculture, whose 100-acre New Forest Farm embodies many permaculture principles. He gave two workshops as well as a keynote speech to close out the conference. I wish I'd been able to attend the first of his workshops, because the second one and the speech were both fantastic. He can rattle off so many ideas and concepts in such a short space of time, I was glad I went into it with some previous knowledge of permaculture.

[There was so much fascinating information, in fact, that I've decided to spin this section off into a separate article.]

Workshops

Maximizing Pasture: Management Principles

This presentation was made by Extension educator Rory Lewandowski, with assistance from author Gene Logsdon (Contrary Farmer, All Flesh is Grass). Rory led the discussion, with lots of great advice on rotational grazing, and how to get the most out of your pasture. Gene chimed in from time to time, and true to his writing, he was occasionally contrary - but in a good-natured way, with some hint of mischeif in his eyes. The dynamic was that of a bright young talent being checked by decades of old-fashioned farm wisdom. We learned a lot from both of them, and we'll be making adjustments in our pastures accordingly.

Gene Logsdon was very approachable, and just as amiable and intelligent in person as he seems in his writing. I asked him if it felt good that the Extension services are now advocating the things he's been writing about for years, and he agreed that it was a good thing. Then again, he said he learns so much from experience every year even now, that he gets embarrased by some of his older writings. (I did lobby for him to republish, or revise his old "Small Scale Grain Raising" book. He said it had been discussed, but that his publisher figured that an audience of about 500 people probably wasn't enough to justify it...) Gene was surprised to learn that you could download "Small Scale Grain Raising" for free. "Hey, that's illegal, you know!" he said with a grin on his face. (Oops!) But after discussing it, and telling him where we got it ("Oh right, those guys"), he concluded that either his copyright had lapsed or he didn't have a royalty contract on it. He seemed a bit amused by the whole thing. He asked me some questions about our goats, asked me if we'd tasted the meat - not yet - to which he responded, "I haven't met anyone yet who has!"

Forage and Pasture Species and Their Use in Organic and Sustainable Farming

My wife attended this two-part workshop, put on by Earnest Weaver, a dairy and forage specialist. This workshop gave us even more ideas for improving our grazing areas. They covered the different feed properties of orchardgrass, fescues, ryegrasses, clovers, timothy, alfalfa, lespedeza... I'll spare you the details because you'd probably get bored, but for us, it was very valuable indeed.

Building a Solar Oven

Annie and Jay Warmke of Blue Rock Station Sustainable Living Center gave a presentation on making and using solar ovens. While Annie discussed her experiences cooking with various home-made ovens, Jay built one out of a Bud Light box, a pizza box, some duct tape, some aluminum foil, a clear sheet of plastic, some newspaper, and a coat hanger. They said that the cheap cardboard version works just as well as some of the commercial versions.

The advantages of solar cooking are that it doesn't use any fuel, and that it's nearly impossible to burn anything. You put the food in early in the day, and walk away. When you're ready for dinner, the food will be cooked. Annie told us that she's baked bread, cooked caseroles, cooked vegetables, canned tomatoes, and a wide range of other cuisines. She recommended against most meat cooking, other than small pieces, or in reheating.

Solar and Wind Electricity (Hands-On)

This workshop was put on by Tom Rapini and his son Ryan. They gave an overview of solar and wind power systems, with some examples of large and small systems, grid-tied and off-grid systems, solar water heating, AC vs. DC, rated power vs. peak power on appliances, the different types of sine wave inverters, and a variety of other related topics. They showed us how to create a simple circuit with a battery to light a lightbulb. Then replacing the battery with a solar cell. He explained the difference between parallel and serial connections (higher voltage vs. higher current). From there, we built a small solar battery charger to charge the batteries we'd used earlier in the workshop.

Designing Your "Nourishing Traditions" Farm

This actually had very little direct connection to the book "Nourishing Traditions" or author Sally Fallon. Mark Shepard was the presenter, and he certainly discussed the idea of value added products and producing on-farm income, but there were few if any tie-ins to the book. That wasn't a problem to me. This was an excellent workshop. The contents of it have been included in a separate post on Mark Shepard.

Organic Grain Production in Ohio: From Seed to Feed

John Easterly and Doug David of Gerber & Sons presented information on small-scale organic grain farming. Even small scale was way too large for us, but we still learned a bit about what's out there, who's doing it and how.

Summary

Of all the sessions we went to, there was only one dud, and I won't bother discussing it here. Both keynote speakers had some great ideas. The lunch arrangements were fantastic. The child care was a huge help, and even the vendors were pretty much all relevent and interesting. There were booksellers, a hatchery (with baby chicks and ducklings - a big hit with the kids), an organic feed vendor, an Organic Valley booth, vermiculture, permaculture, agroforestry, book signings by Sally Fallon and Gene Logsdon (we were unsuccessful in our attempt to pilfer the only copy of Gene's yet-to-be-released novel), walk-behind tractors and their myriad of implements... only one or two vendors seemed out of place, and maybe only in my eyes. The speakers were usually available for questions long after the workshops were done. And recordings of every session were available at the end of the conference, or can be ordered online.

All in all, I was incredibly impressed with just about every aspect of the conference.

Geeks like me

I was happy to find a group called The Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association last year. They were the group that organized a couple of the farm tours we went on last year.

But I was downright ecstatic when I got the flyer for their annual conference this year. Why? Because it's like somebody went out and custom designed a conference just for me.

Think of all the goofy topics I ramble on about for four thousand words at a time. Then imagine all the goofier topics I read library books on but never get around to writing about.

With that in your mind, read this list of workshops at the conference:

• Farmers' Markets
  
• Tree Grafting
• Strawbale Design
  
• The Oiling of America
• Mead: Making the Drink of the Gods
  
• Organic Grain Production
• Building a Solar Oven
  
• Dairy Nutrition and Holistic Medicine
  
• Low-input Sustainable Apple Orcharding
• Season Extension for Home Gardeners
• Experiences with Compost in Organic Vegetables
• Organic No-Till Row Crops
• So Easy to Preserve
  
• Forage and Pasture Species and Their Uses in Organic & Sustainable Farming
  
• Wind and Solar Power
  
• Net Metering with Energy Co-ops
  
• Design Your Nourising Traditions Farm
  
• A Campaign for Raw Milk
  
• Maximizing Pasture
• Pastured Poultry
  
• Agriculture in Nature's Image
• and a bunch of others...
  

Throw in local, organic meals, Waldorf pre-school sponsored child care, permaculture expert Mark Shepard, Nourishing Traditions author Sally Fallon, and a copy of the Good Earth Guide to Organic & Ecological Farms & Gardens in Ohio, which is a directory of all member farms, cross-referenced by county, by family name, by farm name, by products... and, well... they had me at, "Hello."

So next weekend we're going to go geek out on sustainability and natural agriculture. At least now we know we're not the only crazy people around here...

--
Update: As though I wasn't unnaturally enthusiastic about this already, I just discovered that my all-time favorite agricuture writer (maybe even my all-time favorite author), Contrary Farmer Gene Logsdon will be speaking at the conference! I'm telling you, they've been reading my thoughts.

My Crazy Scheme, Part 4: Change the World?

If you've been reading the first three parts of this series, you might be thinking, "Change the world, eh? I don't get it."

So maybe my initial claims were just a tad bit grandiose. But I ask that you hear me out anyway.

If things go well with the plans described in the second and third installments of this series, we'll be producing a good bit of very good food for ourselves. Combine that with the tiny fruit trees and berry bushes already in the ground, and a few more years of experience, and we may eventually be able to generate a decent amount of surplus without a lot of extra effort. (Though I don't ever envision a surplus of grain.) In addition to a wide array of vegetables, we can hopefully turn out an excess of apples, peaches, blackberries, currants, blueberries, gooseberries, serviceberries, (the cherries didn't make it), herbs, eggs, perhaps meat, and maybe even some processed things like dairy products, preserves, or baked goods. All while living a lifestyle we enjoy.

At this point, you think I'm about to say the words, "Farmer's Market," don't you? Or maybe "Community Supported Agriculture". You're close, but not quite. Closer to CSA than Farmer's Market. But not exactly right.

What I'd love to pull off is a very small, very localized subscription-based arrangement. Print up flyers and distribute to all the houses within a mile or two of ours (and maybe a few at the office too). You pay us a fixed amount, and we bring you whatever's ripe or fresh throughout the season, once a week, or maybe every other week. Maybe eggs and greens in the spring. Maybe berries and tomatoes and peppers and eggs in the summer. Maybe sweet corn and onions and apples and eggs in the fall. Maybe meat and squash and dried goods and root veggies in the winter.

The reason I think this can work is that we live in a rural area, but its heart seems to be in the suburbs. Many of our neighbors don't garden or raise livestock (outside of horses here and there). They just have very big lawns. They wanted "the country life", but it meant something different to them than it does to us. But even in that different vision, maybe there's a place for farm-fresh fruits and vegetables and eggs. Especially if they're better than what they get in the store.

I see several benefits to the subscription model. First, you can share the risk a little bit. In a good year, you get a little more for your money. In a bad year, you get a little less. Second, there's less impulse buying and more complete distribution of produce. If I'm sitting at a Farmer's Market booth, any given person walking by may or may not buy Brussels sprouts or parsnips. They may not know what to do with them. They may think they don't like them. They may not know what they are. In a subscription model, they get what we have. Maybe it'll encourage them to get out a cookbook and try something new. Maybe they'll give them to their grandma. Maybe they'll throw them in the trash. They bought them, so hopefully they'll be compelled to find a use for them.

While I'd hope to generate a little income from this type of arrangement, I don't envision it as a business. I'm not looking for fifty customers. More like five. The primary goal in my mind is not to pay the mortgage. The goal is to solve all of those problems in Part 1, in our little neighborhood.

Build community. What better way to get to know the neighbors and establish goodwill than by giving them food. A weekly face-to-face with a basket of goodies seems like a great way to start a friendly relationship. And as Elliot Coleman is fond of saying, they'll know the first name of the person who grew their food. [And maybe I can even infiltrate their conservative minds with my crazy ideas. After all, you can't spell "conservative" without "conserve."]

Reduce resource usage. We'd be reducing food miles from the US average of 1500 miles from field to table, down to one or two. It'll encourage local eating and seasonal eating without having to put a label on it or even have awareness of it. It'll eliminate the use of some tiny fraction of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, groundwater, and fossil fuels. Sure we'd be taking a few bucks out of Walmart's pocket. I think they can handle it.

Cut out the middle man. I don't mean the produce distributors or retailers, though I guess that's true too. I mean the cash system. I'd happily forgo subscritpion fees for some plumbing, electrical, or mechanical help. Or trade for unused materials like cinder blocks, storm windows, hay, straw, animal manure, or any number of other things that could be used for projects around our property. Or labor. If you want to put in a few hours at harvest time, you can have the pick of the crop, and a discount to boot. Barter is almost always mutually beneficial, especially if you don't worry too much about scorekeeping.

By not treating it as a business, I eliminate the focus on dollars and cents. If I were a good businessman, barter would mess up the bottom line. If I were a good businessman, I'd be tempted to worry about financial return on investment, maximizing production, tax loopholes, hourly wages, and all sorts of other stuff that led agriculture to where it is now. As Mr. Einstein said, "The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation."

If I were a good businessman, I wouldn't ever consider giving my customers seed packets, or baby chicks, or book recommendations, or gardening tips. That would lead to lost customers, or worse yet, competitors. To me, losing a customer because they followed in our footsteps would be the about greatest compliment I could imagine. And if they branch off into nut trees or wool spinning or honeybees or whatever, all the better. Remember my concentric circle analogy? That would create another set of beneficial concentric circles around somebody else's house.

And that, my friends, is the only way I know to change the world.


Will my Crazy Scheme work exactly as envisioned? Will it fail miserably? Will it turn into some sort of black market pyramid scheme leading to Federal indictments and tabloid headlines?

I guess you'll just have to keep reading this blog to find out...

My Crazy Scheme, Part 3: Magnification

Last time I outlined my ideas for increasing our ability to feed ourselves from our own property. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is.

Making money in agriculture in today's world is nearly impossible. Land is too expensive, anything you might grow is already too plentiful, and the industrial model of agriculture is too efficient. Profit margins for farms, large or small, often hover between non-existant and negative. The deck is stacked against the farmer or rancher, in favor of the processors and distributors. Subsidies are designed to maximize farm production at all costs, even if it means supply is so abundant that market prices are well below production costs. (Even if it means a whole host of other negative things.) "Get big or get out" has been the mantra of agriculture since the 1950's.

But there is one wildcard in that stacked deck. It's often referred to as direct use economy. How can you justify owning a dairy goat when milk is $1.99 a gallon? Well, with one dairy goat, you might get 1/2 gallon a day. Seven bucks a week. But wait, let's compare apples to apples. Organic milk is more like $3.50 for a half gallon. Now we're talking about more like $25 a week. Raw milk isn't even available in most places. And no matter the price, milk from the store can never be as fresh or as local. I don't know how to price that.

At any rate, it appears that the surest way to make money from agriculture is not by selling what you produce, but by using what you produce (and producing what you use). Prices go up and down, markets go up and down, economies go up and down. Plants and animals just grow. They grow at the same rate regardless of prices or markets or economics. Have your grocery bills been creeping up, little by little? I'm hoping ours will shrink significantly, even as our food quality and nutrition increases, and our carbon footprint decreases.

There's a rapidly expanding movement to eat more locally produced foods. Phrases like "100 mile diet," "eat local," and "localvores" are turning up more and more. Michael Pollan's excellent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma might be the most fascinating and enlightening treatment of the subject I've seen so far.

So what's more local than your back yard?

It turns out, on further inspection, that this is not an entirely rhetorical question. Localization of food can be taken one step farther. (One step closer?) How? With heirloom varieties and breeds. First, because you can take your own seeds from plants, removing one more small link in the long chain of food production and fuel consumption. But secondly, because heirloom varieties were often developed to suit local geography and climate. If it was developed in your area, it's likely to be very well adapted to your area. Have you ever noticed how many of the old varieties and breeds have geographic names? Rhode Island Red. Kentucky Wonder. Jersey Prince. Long Island Improved. California Improved.

We're in USDA Hardiness Zone 5b. That's based only on how cold it gets in the winter. Other areas in Zone 5 include parts of Nevada, Nova Scotia, North Dakota, and New Mexico. I don't think we have the same soil type, daylight hours, humidity, rainfall, summer highs or frost free dates for as any of those places. Instead of one-size-fits-all Better Boy tomatoes, you can have an incredible array of things that won't just grow, but thrive, with very little help from you.

If you breed your own plants and animals, and selectively breed for those specimens that thrive in your local conditions, you can get some pretty significant improvements in just a few years. Things like: better production, better disease resistance, better germination... these are not trivial things.

So for the vegetable garden, I'd like to try an heirloom seed collection from Baker Creek Seeds, as well as the following varieties:

• Buckeye chickens
• Early Ohio potatoes
• Ohio Blue Clarage corn
• ...and similar, as research and resources allow

Click on the links for further descriptions and you'll see why. For several consecutive seasons, I'd like to expand and refine and adjust and adapt and see where it takes us.

The other thing that struck me while reading The Omnivore's Dilemma was the incredible preponderance of Zea Mays in our food chain. Known to you and me as corn, this single species is involved in tens of thousands of food items. Quoting from The Omnivore's Dilemma now:

Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you'll find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xantham gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the balogna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in the produce on a day when there's ostensibley no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

And you know what my first thought was, after I picked up my jaw and popped my eyes back in? Irish potato famine. Maybe it's my newfound doom-and-gloom influences, but being so dependent on a single, solitary crop seems like a bit of a bad idea to me...

In my next (and final) installment, I'll tell you about where I hope we can go with all this.

My Crazy Scheme, Part 1: Big Hairy Deal

Ok, so as the TV blares on about spiffy HDTV sets, and sparkling jewelry, and stylish cars as the perfect Christmas gifts, and everything seems to be structured around buy more, sell more, everybody wins, ain't it cool economic growth, I see some major issues lurking in the misty background.

[Here's where you stick your fingers in your ears and say, "La-La-La! I'm not listening!"]

Now I'm not claiming I'm squeaky clean, nor better than anybody else on this front. But I'm becoming more aware that it's physically impossible for this to go on indefinitely. Which generation foots the bill for this party?

So, after thinking and reading a lot, I have come up with a Crazy Scheme to Save the World.

Or, at least, a Crazy Scheme. But first, I want to outline the problems I wish to solve.

Patience. All will be revealed.

Meanwhile, pardon me whilst I wax philosophic, in Part One of my four(?/!) part tome.

Problem #1: We All Need to Eat.

I'm stating the obvious here. Food is a requirement of life. Food used to mean pick an apple from a tree, or pull a carrot from the soil, and eat it. Now food means grow a kabillion tons of corn and soy, feed it to machines, turn it into a hundred different substances, combine them in various ways for lifelike texture, add in a dozen other components from hither and yon to make it taste just like homemade, or better, add in a little more chemistry to make it last a long time, wrap it, pack it, and ship it worldwide so it's on every grocery store shelf in every city. Then buy it and eat it.

But I feel that there are a myriad of ethical problems around most of our food supply. From unconscionable treatment of animals (and humans for that matter), to overuse of antibiotics, pesticides, and herbicides, growing health problems, soil depletion, groundwater depletion, chemical exposure to workers, a subsidy system that is a mess, huge dependence on fossil fuels (and thus huge dependence on numerous political quagmires, not to mention pollution and climate change)... Shall I go on?

I don't think we can (or should attempt to) continue down this path forever.

Problem #2: No Man is an Island.

Most of us tend to be lacking in community. We give a friendly wave to the neighbor in the driveway. Maybe we exchange Christmas cards with one or two people on the block. But as a culture, we've become adept at creating cocoons around ourselves. We each have our own personal home theater systems in our family rooms, our own play structures in our back yards, our own sets of tools and books, our own traditions, even individual bedrooms and bathrooms in many cases. As Mia described so well a while back, it's often very hard to connect with the people who are geographically closest to you.

We drive in our glass bubbles of anonymity, raging against some other anonymous @&#%! driver who made us hit the brake pedal, and encountering thousands of others every day with whom we share not even the slightest hint of connection or recognition.

[A quick aside... I want to have a button on my steering wheel that is the opposite of the horn. When I push the button, I want blue lights to turn on - a highway equivalent of saying, "Oops! Sorry!" But back to the universal anonymity problem...]

We don't care about people we don't know, and we don't know anybody. There's no accountability.

Once upon a time it might have been, "Hey Jimmy! Nice catch last weekend. Your mom over her cold yet?" But now it's, "Hey kid, get outta my yard!" or "No, you can't walk to the Kwik-E-Mart. I'll drive you."

We need other people... Even people we don't like or agree with. It takes a village and all that. Especially if there's a crisis. 9/11. Katrina. Sometimes people pull together. Sometimes they don't. Who knows why. But the odds of pulling together seem higher if we can call each other by name.

Problem #3: Money sucks

There are a lucky few who don't have a mortgage, or who don't have bills to worry about. I haven't run across very many. Everybody loves money. Everybody hates money.

We perform services or we produce goods, and we get money. We use that money to buy the necessitites of life. (And then some.) We take somebody else's goods or services in exchange for that money, to buy what we need (and want). Money is a useful mechanism, but sometimes it's inefficient. Sometimes too much is lost in that exchange rate from my labor to money and then from money to your labor. Money isn't fair or equitable, and it doesn't have morals. Money doesn't care whether you make your mortgage or not. But it sure can cause stress and grief and headaches.

Problem #4: Limitations

Are we reaching the limit on how much cheap petroleum we can pump? Have we maxed out industrial grain production? Are we depleting aquifers? Or topsoil? Are the oceans being overfished? Have we put too much carbon into the atmosphere?

Has the world's population gotten big enough, or efficient enough at using things up, that we're actually going to start running out of certain resources? It's hard to know what to beleive. We've never used up anything before, except maybe dodo's. We're in uncharted waters.

Ok, enough problems. On to some actions...

Sustainability, in brief

"There's no away to throw to."

— Harden's First Law

"We can never do merely one thing."
— Harden's Second Law

"We have not inherited the world from our forefathers -- we have borrowed it from our children."
— Kashmiri proverb

"The chief cause of problems is solutions."
— Sevareid's Law

"At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago."
— Frances Hodges Burnett

"Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm."
— Aldo Leopold

"We must learn what sustainability means in practice if we are to apply it to our daily lives and restore the health and vitality of our planet".
— Sir David Attenborough

"The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation."
— Albert Einstein

"The future will be green, or not at all."
— Sir Jonathon Porritt