Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Ken Hargesheimer <minifarms2@yahoo.com>]

I believe in permaculture but if producing your own food is your goal, go for organic, no-till in permanent beds.

 

I have always wondered about the motive of people teaching the permaculture courses:  the system or the profitable charges for the courses.  The same with holistic range management:  $1,000 per person for a weekend course. 

 

Last year there was a composting course sponsored by the TX Organic Gardening and Farming Association.  $245 per person. 

 

Ken Hargesheimer

 

Ken Hargesheimer

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Today's Topics:

1. National Animal ID System (Terry Boyne)
2. Long Emergency in food (TradingPostPaul)
3. Re: Long Emergency in food (Carrie Shepard)
4. Re: Long Emergency in food (TradingPostPaul)
5. relocalizing food production & distribution (TradingPostPaul)
6. The Small Scale Integrated Farmstead - A Model for
Sustainable Agriculture (TradingPostPaul)
7. Re: Long Emergency in food (Robert Norsen)
8. Re: The Small Scale Integrated Farmstead - A Model for
Sustainable Agriculture (Robert Norsen)
9. Re: Raw milk bill in Ohio (OT?) (Gwen Giffen)
10. Re: Long Emergency in food (Laura McKenzie)
11. Re: relocalizing food production & distribution (Marty Kraft)
12. Permaculture Training in Western Virginia (P Corcoran)
13. Re: Permaculture Training in Western Virginia (TradingPostPaul)


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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 10:45:44 -0600
From: "Terry Boyne"
Subject: [Livingontheland] National Animal ID System
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <20060510164545.3B43F8402A@ws1-5.us4.outblaze.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

I don't know if any of you have heard of the National Animal ID system that the USDA is trying to push off on us, but time is running short to make your voice heard on the subject.

If you raise or own any stock animals - even one, including but not limited to: chickens, cattle, sheep, goats, mules, horses, llamas, alpacas, doves, pigeons, ducks, geese, pigs; or if you buy your meat from those who do, either directly or via a co-op, this is going to affect you.

To learn more see the following web site. http://nonais.org/

This is government control of our right to farm under the guise of food safety and homeland security.

Terry


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Message: 2
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 11:45:29 -0600
From: "TradingPostPaul"
Subject: [Livingontheland] Long Emergency in food
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <200605101145290892.1593D021@mail.gilanet.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"


We made it to see Kunstler (Long Emergency book) a couple nights ago in Abq. who mentioned the need for relocalizing the food supply and how remote the possibility is for that. Interesting, but the thing that stuck with me was a comment from a local woman who's an organic certifier in NM. She told us privately that her fear is too many farmers or growers will be forced out before collapse, and those of us left will be buried under the avalanche of the clueless demanding we feed them.

It seems hopeless but maybe the only hope is getting a lot more neighbors and families to start learning to grow and use what they grow. My conviction is humus-intensive, natural growing with intelligent techniques is the only way to make home or market growing practical and profitable, and the mega-farms are dinosaurs about to face extinction in a world of fossil fuels priced way out of reach. So we learn Living On The Land or else.

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it.
- Aldo Leopold in Round River, 1933




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Message: 3
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 13:14:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: Carrie Shepard
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Long Emergency in food
To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

Message-ID: <20060510201428.20194.qmail@web51911.mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

I've had some conversations with a few people this week who when asked if the people in their circles of acquaintanceship were talking at all about the similarities to the great depression and today's economic situation with rising metals $ and a falling dollar. The combined answers I got were "they're only talking about sports, bigger houses, bigger cars, daycare, or stuff that really isn't important -- latest local newscasts for example."

I've this feeling that those who know how to live are getting ready to get swamped with people seeking help. I've given three garden tours the past two weeks, taught kefir making and soapmaking this week, last week I taught drop spindling and knitting to some moms and children. I suppose I hope that the motto of "each one teach one" will go a long way towards helping those who come our way.
Carrie



<<<< Interesting, but the thing that stuck with me was a comment from a local woman who's an organic certifier in NM. She told us privately that her fear is too many farmers or growers will be forced out before collapse, and those of us left will be buried under the avalanche of the clueless demanding we feed them. >>>




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Message: 4
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 23:11:32 -0600
From: "TradingPostPaul"
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Long Emergency in food
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <200605102311320706.1807E8BB@mail.gilanet.com>
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I hope you're right and we do get swamped with people wanting help to learn. Unemployment and inflation are rising and the fake numbers are bad enough already. Gas costs and distribution costs will have to be passed on. Welfare is gradually being cut to the bone. Student tuition rising everywhere at state colleges. Utilities keep going up. I think simple pressure on the pocketbook is going to do more to wake up people than all the talk about peak oil.

paul tradingpost@gilanet.com

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
--Henry David Thoreau

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 5/10/2006 at 1:14 PM Carrie Shepard wrote:

>I've had some conversations with a few people this week who when asked if
>the people in their circles of acquaintanceship were talking at all about
>the similarities to the great depression and today's economic situation
>with rising metals $ and a falling dollar. The combined answers I got
>were "they're only talking about sports, bigger houses, bigger cars,
>daycare, or stuff that really isn't important -- latest local newscasts
>for example."
>
> I've this feeling that those who know how to live are getting ready to
>get swamped with people seeking help. I've given three garden tours the
>past two weeks, taught kefir making and soapmaking this week, last week I
>taught drop spindling and knitting to some moms and children. I suppose I
>hope that the motto of "each one teach one" will go a long way towards
>helping those who come our way.
> Carrie
>
>
>
><<<< Interesting, but the thing that stuck with me was a comment from a
>local woman who's an organic certifier in NM. She told us privately that
>her fear is too many farmers or growers will be forced out before
>collapse, and those of us left will be buried under the avalanche of the
>clueless demanding we feed them. >>>
>




------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 23:34:56 -0600
From: "TradingPostPaul"
Subject: [Livingontheland] relocalizing food production & distribution
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <200605102334560900.181D55E6@mail.gilanet.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"


This artice came up on another list, on relocalizing food production & distribution:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/05/no_bar_code.html

paul, tradingpost@riseup.net
---------------
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
- Wendell Berry



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Message: 6
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 23:41:18 -0600
From: "TradingPostPaul"
Subject: [Livingontheland] The Small Scale Integrated Farmstead - A
Model for Sustainable Agriculture
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID: <200605102341180021.182326BB@mail.gilanet.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"



The Small Scale Integrated Farmstead - A Model for Sustainable Agriculture
by Karl North, Northland Sheep Dairy, Marathon, NY
http://www.geocities.com/northsheep/ssif.html

As more people begin to adopt the idea of sustainability as a way of thinking about farming and about the future of our civilization, we who are directly concerned with organic farming need to develop and refine our idea of sustainability in order to say clearly what direction we think farming must take in the future. To this end I offer these thoughts on a general model in the hope of advancing or at least provoking the necessary debate.

As benchmarks of sustainability I'll discuss the need for several types of integration, most notably animal husbandry with plant growing as an essential step away from monoculture, and the integration of the farm with its local consumer market. And I'll argue that small scale is essential to sustainability for reasons that are not only agricultural, but ecological, economic, social, and even political. Any general model for organic farming must also be a model for success in an extremely difficult economic environment. Ever since the rise of urban civilization, rural people everywhere have been subject in varying degrees to what Wendell Berry calls a colonial economy. The colonial economy subverts and eventually destroys the economy of local self-sufficiency, replacing it everywhere with an exploitation based on export of cheap raw materials and cheap labor, and import of expensive manufactures. This process, far from being an exclusively Third World disease, is actually more
advanced in Nebraska than in Namibia. In the belief that the small scale integrated farmstead (SSIF) is the best defense against that colonialism, I will be describing it as a series of strategies for outwitting or bypassing the colonial economy. The way of farming described here takes as its point of departure the old general farm, a system that has been maturing for ten thousand years.

At the outset I should reveal a bias with respect to some basic values in which I think the larger culture has become deficient:

1. Our extreme materialism has eclipsed other values. We need to value people more than things and quality more than quantity.

2. Our extreme individualism has destroyed faith in the success of serious cooperation among equals. The success of corporate imperialism has shrunk the population of self-employed individuals and families until most people know how to cooperate in their working lives only as cogs in an employee hierarchy.

3. Our tendency to analytically reduce the world to separate things grossly distorts reality. We need to stress wholes and relations among things, so as to treat things as primarily parts of whole systems.

4. Our lingering puritan heritage combines with the increasingly sheltered and synthetic environ-ment of urban childhood to keep most people literally out of touch with their true physical nature and the nature of the ecosystem. We need to loosen up to move to the natural rhythms we begin to hear in ourselves and in the great dance of the natural world around us.

***********

Respect for Nature's Models

One of Wendell Berry's themes that most appeals to me is respect for nature's models. He argues that the experiments at domestication that we call agriculture are best limited to careful refinements on these models. Building viability through diversity is a lesson from nature that farmers have taken to heart for ages, although it has been under attack in the last few decades by the apostles of industrial farming. Monoculture was more labor-efficient, so the argument went, and labor was becoming scarce on the farm. But the ecological problems of monoculture combined with the financial insecurity of putting all one's eggs in one basket has addicted a generation of farmers to the crutch of production credit financing, and its long-run viability is doubtful. The rural manpower problem is a fact of life, but it is due partly to pressure from the colonial economy on farmers to expand beyond the financial and manpower limits of the farm family. If the scale of the farm operation can
be reduced, there will be time to develop a diversity of products, along with some of the processing and direct marketing that returns their full value to the farmer.

The farm's products must be carefully chosen to fit tight summer schedules or to spread the work over the seasons. At Northland Sheep Dairy for example, we limit vegetable production for market since it would overburden a summer season already filled with haying, milking, and cheese-making. Instead we gain diversity by making the most of all the sheep products, processing milk, meat, wool and skins into finished retail items. Lambing is scheduled for Spring, and the peak marketing effort for Fall. We retail the orchard harvest as cider along with the sheep products in the Fall farmers' market.

Since much of monoculture and indoor animal husbandry has so deviated from nature's model as to appear unsustainable, I feel we must push in the other direction. At our farm all fields are in perennial swards of mixed grasses, legumes and other plants chosen for diversity and for permanence in our soil and climate, rather than for maximum yield. In this way we not only reduce animal housing and forage storage costs, but also much of the cost of the constant harvesting, plowdown, and reseeding attendant to alfalfa and corn, which are the conventional monoculture forages in our area. Alfalfa can be very profitable in the right environment, but experts are gradually admitting what good farmers always knew: that ordinary native grasses like orchard grass, harvested/grazed at the right stage of growth, compare well with the alfalfa in protein and other nutrients. In fact, orchard grass and other grasses that remain green and vegetative under snow cover retain these high nutrient l
evels in winter like vegetables in a freezer, so they can be harvested by the animals themselves year-round. Sheep, for example, will thrive grazing through up to a foot of snow when there is good pasture underneath.

In the end, a mix of near-permanent forage is better for the soil (following nature's idea of. constant cover), better for the plants (less disease than alfalfa or corn), and better for the animals that feed on it. After all, the animals did not evolve on a forage of monoculture.

After years of studying his cows' forage preferences, the British dairyman Newman Turner concluded that "unlike humans whose palates are so perverted that we cannot rely on taste to decide what is good for us," ruminants, especially the more rustic varieties, are still the best judge of their right diet. His cows' top choices in forage plants, in order of preference: Sheep's Parsley, Plaintain, Chicory, Salad Burnet, Kidney Vetch, Trefoil, and Alsike Clover. He found that when he expanded cows' forage diet from the usual two or three high yielding (but less sought after) grasses and 1egumes to include a sufficient quantity and diversity of the preferred species, the remarkable gain in the health of his dairy herd outweighed in economic value any loss in pasture or hay yield.

Similarly, on our sheep dairy we have been hesitant to do much plowdown renovation of forage fields where long abandon has allowed a species diversity to creep in that would be diffi-cult to match with a new seeding. Instead we have overseeded existing sod with the lower yielding but relatively permanent Trefoil and Puna Chicory. And when the legumes and the native clovers, favored by lime, manure, and management have beefed up (sheeped up, rather) the soil quality, higher yielding timothy and orchard grass have spread in of their own accord from neighbors' fields to replace the poorer native' grasses.

Animal housing has been overdone, at great cost to the farmer. It may be more convenient at times to keep our sheep and draft animals inside, but it is healthier for them outside. Draft animals, for example, kept in a stable are always ready to use, but only on pasture will they get the variety of forage, the exercise, and that daily good roll in the dirt that their health requires. All our barns are open-sided and the pasture gate is always open in winter. The sheep often like to go out when they have finished their hay, and the mules and horses have always preferred to be out even in ice storms.

Taking one's cue from nature's models should not be confused with a laissez-faire approach. Managing a forage field to maximize quality and growth, and also preserve the desired mix of plant species, is a difficult art; the farmer must keep a sharp eye on what is happening out in the fields.

Symbiosis of Plant and Animal Systems

Wendell Berry says, "Put Nature to work, she works for a minimum wage." Nature has long ago proven that using plants and animals to feed each other is the most fertile, sustainable system going. Now Francis Moore Lapp?, Peter Singer and many others have eloquently denounced our overly carnivorous diet for the waste, the extravagance, and (from a Third World standpoint) the imperial exploitation that it provokes. And I join with these vegetarians in their critique of the largely feedlot agriculture that has developed to nourish our carnivorous excesses. But I feel that we need to do better than the vegetarian alternative in developing a model for a sustainable agriculture. That need may not yet be apparent in North America where we have enjoyed the luxuries of cheap land, cheap energy and low population pressure on the land.

In much of Western Europe and the Far East high population density forces farming toward the upper limit of the land's capacity to provide food, so I look to these regions for models of efficiency. Chemical monoculture has of course made deep inroads in these areas of the world, but high land prices and high transport and other energy costs have exposed its underlying inefficiency and have allowed the small diversified farm sector a competitive edge. In the last fifty years, while in North America the small diversified farm and all its support system have declined and are considered outdated, many West European and Japanese farmers have become expert at producing high yields on small acreages for local markets. Their methods, knowledge, and appropriate technology have advanced apace and are now state-of-the-art, but one of the keys to their success is still the integration of livestock to maximize fertility. European prosperity obscures the fact that the first function of liv
estock in the long view is manure, not food, production. But in regions that face the added constraint of a generally lower living standard, either as it affects the consumer considering the high cost of meat, or as it affects the farmer considering the high cost of fertilizer, the primary function of livestock is clear.The Chinese hoard their manure; they traffic in it. Even in Japan urban landlords give rent rebates to tenants with large families because of their higher yield of very marketable nightsoil.


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