Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Here's one of my favorite essays for living on the land. Harvey Ussery has
several useful - and inspirational - pieces in his section Achieving Food
Independence

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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Bringing It All Together
http://www.themodernhomestead.us/article/Achieving-Food-Independence-Togethe
r.html

The key to efficient and sustainable food production on the homestead is
establishing integrated patterns, bringing into play synergies not
available as long as we treat the homestead as a collection of disparate,
atomistic parts. The traditional homestead was characterized by diversity
and integration of its parts. Monoculture, putting all the eggs in one
basket, was alien to the organization of the traditional homestead and
small farm. There is nothing particularly mysterious about the goal—we
are simply trying to maintain the complex, diverse, interwoven,
inderdependent web of life in the homestead as elsewhere in the natural
world. Remember that if we rip particular strands out of that web, we
inherit their work.

An example is the production of orchard fruit and chickens. In the
traditional homestead, the poultry flock free-ranged, meaning they ate
insects which could damage the orchard, as well as dropped fruit which
otherwise could be a vector for disease. At the same time, the poops from
the poultry were “digested” by the orchard ground cover and their
fertility made available to the orchard trees. The orchard was more disease
and insect free. The birds were healthier, and better (and more cheaply!)
fed without additional inputs from the homesteader. Contrast current
practices, in which the flock and the orchard have been separated. Multiple
toxic sprays in the orchard to prevent insects and disease are both
necessary and routine, as is annual fertilization with chemical fertilizers
inimical to soil life. At the same time, our laying and broiler chickens
are crowded in huge numbers into buildings requiring enormous inputs of
energy for heating, cooling, and ventilation. Antibiotics are included with
feed from hatch to slaughter in order to prop up highly stressed
populations otherwise in danger of immediate collapse. Feed which is the
opposite of the live food a natural flock would forage for themselves has
to be trucked in from distant sources. And what to do with all those
poops?! Even in the best of circumstances they are an ongoing source of
pollution of groundwater, rivers, and bays. Even when used as fertilizer,
the surrounding farms can only use so much before accumulating unhealthy
levels of nutrients like phosphorus, and the manure has to be trucked
greater and greater distances to be spread on crop land. And we haven’t
even begun to talk of arsenic in the feed and its residues, the release of
antibiotics via the droppings into the environment, pesticide residues in
fruits, etc. Indeed, we have made most peculiar choices here in trying to
take over the work of natural systems—and we’re doing a pretty sorry
job of it.

Your own homestead is an opportunity to heal the many breaches, to take up
the work of nurturing wholeness, striving for balance, closing natural
cycles. Each homesteader will find his own ways of doing so, but here are a
few illustrative examples.

I’ve mentioned that I now use a good-size vermicomposting operation in
lieu of classic compost making. In addition to the abundant worm castings
for garden fertility, however, I also anticipate being able to make regular
“harvests” of worms from the bins to feed my poultry, boosting their
access to live food of a quality I cannot purchase, and helping make my
homestead more independent of outside inputs.

I use chicken flocks to till in cover crops or take off a weed cover in
preparation for planting, even for tilling in an established sod—a
laborious job if I do it, even with a power tiller—when developing new
garden ground. I simply place a pasture shelter and a water supply on the
area, surround it with an electric net fence, and leave the birds in place
until their chore is done. Not only do I get the work done without heavy
labor, the birds are gathering a good deal of nutrient-dense nutrition on
their own. I have found as well that the birds help “sanitize” the area
for weed seeds and slugs, and I am less troubled with both throughout the
entire season. At the same time, of course, they are boosting the
populations of soil microbes with their droppings, leading to gains in
fertility.

Top of page

In my area, squash bugs are one of the most difficult insect competitors of
all to control. But I have found a solution both 100 percent effective and
100 percent organic—guinea power! I plant my winter squashes and monitor
daily as they grow and start to vine. At about the time of the first
flowers, I see the first squash bug. I set up an electronet around the
squash patch, put in a few guineas (only a few are needed, maybe a trio, no
more than five)—and that first squash bug I saw turns out to be the last.

I know a successful small farmer—Joel Salatin, who led the way
re-introducing farm-size poultry flocks to pasture in this country—whose
success has been greatly dependent on finding the sorts of synergies I’m
talking about. In the huge loafing shed for his over-winter herd of breeder
cows, the cows eat hay (only—he feeds no grains) all winter as the poops
and spilled hay accumulate in a manure pack four feet thick. A great
fertility source, but inhibited from proper decomposition by anaerobic
conditions in the pack, until aerated by a tractor equipped with a frontend
loader and— But wait! Joel is a bit smarter than that: Throughout the
winter, from time to time he scatters whole kernel corn over the
accumulating pack. In early spring, when it’s time to spread compost onto
the fields, he turns in his “pigaerators.” You should see those
200-pound pigs going after the fermented corn buried in the pack—a
feeding frenzy which turns and aerates every cubic foot. Labor-saving
bacon—that’s what I call using your head.

Another strategy on the Salatin place is following pastured beef cattle
with laying hens. All of us who have been on cow pastures have seen the
lush, intensely green clumps of grass around cowpies, in contrast to the
shorter, paler surrounding sward. Those clumps are the result of what Joel
calls the “repugnance zone” the cattle allow around their own manure.
That is, they have the instinctual wisdom to know that the manure is a
potential vector for pathogens, and avoid it. In Joel’s system, the
cattle graze sections of the pasture intensively, controlled by
single-strand electric fence, and are followed by a large flock of laying
hens centered on the Eggmobile, a mobile henhouse which is moved by
tractor. The chooks scratch apart the cowpies for the fly maggots growing
in them—a significant protein boost for them—in the process scattering
the poops over a wider area, dispersing their fertility to the entire
sward, as well as exposing any pathogens to sunlight and air, nature’s
antibiotics. Both species benefit from the services of the other, and the
farmer realizes higher production for less labor.
Becoming Native to Your Place

I opened this article by pointing out some of the failings of our
contemporary food system, some of the reasons that might encourage us to
strive to become more self-sufficient for our food needs. But my own
reasons for embracing the homestead life are not primarily negative, and I
assume that will be true for you as well, if you try to shape your little
piece of Eden into a more bountiful source of food for you and your family.
It has been observed that “you are what you eat,” but I’m
increasingly certain as well that “you are where you eat.” If you work
with your piece of ground with a reverent and nurturing and grateful mind,
you will become more attuned to the spirit of your homestead and its place
in the world. In the words of Wes Jackson, you will become more “native
to your place.” Good luck!