permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Flowchart - The Roots of Fertility -- by Lion Kuntz, July 8, 2002.(Lion
Kuntz)
http://plenty.150m.com/IBS_Flowchart/IBS_Flowchart_01.html

The Roots of Fertility
by Lion Kuntz
July 8, 2002

In the present year of 2002 there are still being published new books on
agriculture and soil microbiology which have not fully incorporated the
knowledge obtained over the last ten years. These errors have the
possibility of doing fatal damage to large portions of the world's
biodiversity. To correct these errors I have provided a simplified
flowchart which presents the only known solution to some of the worst
present-day problems and some of the worst upcoming predicted problems.

The most basic problems are these:

Food Security in a world of Rising Populations;
Food Security in an era of Climate Changes;
Curbing wildlife habitat loss through Compaction of Agricultural Needs;
Curbing wildlife habitat loss through Elimination of Pollution;
Raising the Standard of Living in all sectors worldwide;
Reduction of armed conflicts by Elimination of need for Weapons-Grade
Nitrates;
Replacement of fossil carbon fuels with Cleaner Renewables;
Removal of justification for outdoors bio-engineering Experiments;
Improved Sanitation and increased health through Breaking Pathogen
Life-Cycles;
Improved Nutrition through Poison-Free Agriculture;
Replacement of increasingly rare, slow-growing renewables With Satisfactory
Options.

What the Roots of Fertility Flowchart is describing is a system of
microfarming which has unprecedented high-yields, perpetually sustainable
which can be deployed in both the developed and the undeveloped areas of
the world. It is based on hard-wrested knowledge which it took the human
race 12,000 years of progress to obtain, and is not instantly comprehended
even by lavishly educated people.

It has the potential to fully solve all of the above listed problems.

This article will describe the units in the flowchart and their purposes
and functions. Other articles previously published will be referenced with
their links below. Any reasonably intelligent person can grasp the concepts
described here and search their own references for proof that the
subsystems have all been proven in the real world by thousands of examples
of people stringing two or three of the units into a short food chain.

The most difficult obstacle to understanding the Roots of Fertility is the
invisibly small size of the essential dynamos who uphold all of life
through their activities. Even new books on soil science persistantly
underestimate the contributions of the microbes the books praise. Taking
the Nitrogen component from the air and turning it into amino acids,
proteins, DNA, RNA, enzymes, and vitamins, are a small group of species,
mostly rhizobium, actinomycetes and blue-green 'algae'. The cyanobacteria
(blue-green algae) not only fix nitrogen from the air, but they also can
photosynthesize Carbon-Dioxide into sugars and other carbohydrates. The
cyanobacteria, as symbiots with fungi are the root of life's food chain as
lichens in the tundras and alpine heights, and as symbiots with a floating
fern can generate 600 pounds of Nitrogen per acre in rice paddys.

Actinomycetes along with mycorrhizal fungi hold up the vast conifer forests
as the root of the foodchain there. Practically no species of plants have
to get along without a beneficial symbiot whom can provide them with
needful quantities of nitrogen supplies. Again, this contribution is
under-estimated by the same people who have a financial stake in
over-estimating the human nitrogen-fixing necessity.

For thousands of years humans have cultured microbes without being able to
see their existence. Beer, wine, hard spirits, vinegar, cheese and yeasted
breads have long enriched the human experience thanks to the sacrificed
lives of the microbes used in the processes.


Due to recent investigations in all quarters of the world it is now known
that microbes are more abundant, more diverse, and more unknown than they
were just a decade or so ago. (So many things that people thought they
understood were proven to be wrong, that we now know a lot less about a lot
more variation than we did just a short time ago.) New scientific
techniques have revealed hidden microbes everywhere, and they are now
believed to compose the greater part of the world's biomass.

What is now accepted is that many varieties of microbes have the ability to
eat rock - these are called 'lithotrophs'. If they must eat rock than they
are 'obligate', but if they have the option to find some of their needs in
rocks but can graze on other food sources than they are 'faculative'. There
is some overlap between the lithotrophs and the 'chemotrophs', and some
forms which are only at the extremes with no common ground. It is also
known that microbes can make and use some of the most potent acids ever
seen: hydrochloric (which is used to etch glass, and is also found in human
stomachs), sulfuric acid (think car battery acid) and of course, nitric
acid out of the nitrogen some of them extract from the air ( a leading
cause of monument decay, as the microbes eat the carbon-soot from pollution
and generate nitric acid to obtain other minerals from the stone
monuments). Most all natural gas deposits are now believed to come from
microbial rock-eaters in the 'deep hot biosphere'.

There is absolutely no doubt that the rock-eaters paved the way for the
rest of us to come later, but the question at hand is can they do useful
'work' for us today.


Throughout my recent documents are graphics -- thumbnails of pages giving
you a preview of the page before you click on the link to go there. This is
an example of this page's thumbnail.


The answer to that is somewhat ambiguous, because these things are new to
us, and we have been stingy with microbiology fundamental science (as
opposed to lavish on bio-tech microbes), and nobody has really been looking
for answers to that question. Based on evidence known to me, I believe that
some degree of enlistment of services can be assumed, so I begin the
flowchart with rock, flakes and grains of rock, air, water, and organic
rain. The organic rain is the 24 hours-per-day rain that falls on every
inch of earth of microbes and dandruff of particles from prior life.

Bio-activity can be hundreds of thousands of times faster than weathering
or mechanical decay of rock into useful soil. Again it is not appreciated
how many microbes there are in the plasma of water fluid film covering most
grains and surfaces most of the time. Because bacteria are all related (as
are we all related to bacteria) they share genes frequently, so that in any
community the genes useful to extract nutrients are passed around fairly
quickly across species lines. The evidence I have seen tells me that the
rate of biological mining is far beyond the imagining of even most
microbologists.

Luckily for us all we do not have to depend on microbial miners to chisel
valuable minerals out of rocks, because there is such a large quantity
fairly readily available in the global biomass and in the rootzones.

Understanding our beneficial microbes peculiarities helps us to know just
what we must do to make our favored kinds be fruitful and multiply. Just
because microbes share gene toolkits across species boundries does not mean
they do not have permanent species differences. Some differences are only
important to the microbes themselves, but some are important to our solving
the problems list at the beginning of this article.





Grow Serious Profits Market Gardening in Intensive Raised Beds
Carbon-Dioxide gas is exhaled by humans and all other animals we commonly
find. We are 'aerobic'. Most beneficial soil microbes and most plant roots
are aerobic. Sunlit plants in photosynthesis breathes in Carbon-Dioxide to
build sugars and later other carbohydrates down the line. CO2 gas dissolved
in water becomes carbonic acid and it etches rocks to some extent. The CO2
cycles in the rhizosphere (root area of the soils) have shaped evolution
and keep many forms of beings alive. Lithotrophs and Chemotrophs get their
Carbon from 'inorganic' sources, like CO2 (or liquified carbonic acid)
breathed out by aerobes, instead of predatory or scavenging Carbon from
living or deceased life particles.

The CO2 levels measured in the living soils can reach fifty times greater
than in the atmosphere, so many plants conveniently have their stomata (CO2
intake mouths) on the underside of their leaves. If there is intensively
grouped plants forming a micro-canopy and windbreak, the plants have access
to much higher levels of CO2 wafting up from the soil than row-crops
exposed on all sides with their roots baked from sunlight heating the soil.
I have measured temperatures of 147 degrees farenheit on soil banked so
that it was perpendicular to the sunlight. Reducing stress on the plants,
and facilitating their natural processes is part of the design of the
grow-bed subsystem described later.

At this point we have not yet left the soil microbes to discuss plants in
details. Oxygen is needed by the soil life, and by plant roots. Miniature
creatures, thousands of times larger than the microbes tunnel and burrow
through the rhizosphere. At the top of the microherd foodchain are
earthworms, whom we shall meet again shortly, and many other smaller
critters, most of them neutral if not beneficial. It is up to us to bias
the conditions so that the beneficials and the neutrals prosper and fill
all the niches, thereby keeping pest species from obtaining conditions for
rapid multiplication. Keeping poisonous agricultural chemicals away from
the beneficials is one method to bias conditions.

While various authors write that it takes a thousand years, or it takes a
century, to make an inch of topsoil, what the integrated biological systems
of the Roots of Fertility flowchart produce is a 'potting soil' of the very
finest quality, and they produce a foot of it every year. I have named this
system 'Ecological Synergy' to keep it from being mistaken for some other
(possibly inferior?) method, and I trademarked the name 'Ecological
Synergy(tm) to help the public tell the difference between this system and
all others.

Ecological Synergy is an 'exporter' of fertility -- that doesn't mean
sending fertilizer across national boundaries -- it means that more organic
fertilizer is produced than is needed to perpetuate the living systems, so
some is available for urban gardeners, parks, or other farming systems
which deplete their soils. This will be discussed further below.

The means of producing a surplus of fertilizer starts with a system which
imports, or grows, alfalfa. Here is a legume-with-rhizobacteria symbiont
pair which fixes nitrogen, and bio-accumulates trace minerals from fifty
feet-deep roots. The growing root hair tips generate cells rapidly which
only live for minutes before being sloughed off. Alfalfa penetrates hardpan
for improved water infiltration and reduced water runoff.

Alfalfa feeds the microherd with these sloughed root-tip cells throughout
its rootzone. In exchange the lithotrophs, chemotrophs, anaerobes and
aerobes throughout its extended rhizosphere are better able to mine the
deeper underground. Exchange between the surface and the depths occurs by
two means: the roots are sloughed (not just the tips, but entire lengths of
roots) offering a carbohydrate supply to the underground, and through
capillary rising both inside and along the outside surface of plant roots
liquified deep minerals are drawn upwards.

Alfalfa supports an incredible biodiversity on the surface that we see and
know of, but probably fosters just as diverse an ecology below ground which
we have yet to explore.

The richness of alfalfa has made it a domesticated crop since prehistory.
Today it is grown commercially in all 50 United States with all that
variety of soils and climates.





Some of the pages waiting for you.
I have provided a separate document: 'The MATH of Integrated Biological
Systems Microfarming: How Synergy Emerges from Linked Foodchains', which is
on this same website. Other pages I have elsewhere published also dramatize
the spectacular productivity available through a well-manged IBS microfarm
using alfalfa as a keystone ingredient.

One point has not yet been introduced: the enclosed raised-beds. Depending
on whether or not there are severe burrowing rodent pests, boxes with or
without bottom barriers are used for creating the growing soil in the place
where it will be used to grow plants. In many places today, and in all
places in years to come, human labor is abundant and machines are ever
increasing in costs. It is the wisest thing to invent methods which
minimize the need for labor and machines, so that farming can be secure,
perpetual, and no more grueling than any other form of occupation. I have
designed out all the wasted efforts and silly practices which have crept
into gardening and farming over the several millenia.

There are plenty of reasons for eventually going to the permanent
raised-beds, but the most fundamentally important is that it deters
careless compaction of the growing soil, so that there can grow long-term
relationships between the surface and the deep rhizosphere. Ventilation and
minerals exchanges are necessary to bias the subsurface ecology towards the
beneficial (from our perspective). I have seen 20 years of organic
treatments create a black loam layer three feet deep, where the surrounding
and original soil was sediment hardpan with virtually no organic matter
from the surface going all the way down to bedrock. Living soil holds much
larger quantities of moisture to be drought resistant and requires far less
irrigation. Living soil is 'actively capillaric', as differentiated from
'passive capillary action' of sterile soil, wicking moisture from deep
strata up to the surface of the rhizosphere.

Other reasons for building boxes to grow in, is that these boxes (or bins,
or grow-bed) will be used for several successive activities: first they are
empty; then they are used as mini-growhouses for mushroom cultivation
(optional step); then they become vermicomposting reactors (where
earthworms digest farm wastes and manures, mixed with mineral soils); and
when they are full they are grow beds with the world's most precious
fertile potting soil. As grow beds the original type of earthworms are
harvested and moved on to new beds being filled (with a surplus turning
into 'free' chicken, duck, pig or fish flesh), and deep burrowing
'nightcrawlers' are introduced to a permanent home. These worms will churn
the soil to depths of 8 feet, aerating the deep rhizosphere ecology and
exchanging soil nutrients from depths lower than plant roots can reach..

Tractors cannot plow these fields because the boxes are in the way.
Rototillers cannot function in them either. But digging is obsolete -- the
Ecological Synergy(tm) does all the digging, turning and stirring needed.
No power equipment is needed in this 'no-till' system. Small propane or
alcohol field steaming units rid the boxes of disease, and some selected
inputs for the wormbins are steamed to kill weed seeds and pathogens as
needed. A very small consumption of fuel is used compared to most forms of
intensive agriculture.

It would take me an entire book to go into minute details of all of the
benefits of using the systems I recommend. While a paper book does not
exist I have published well over 100,000,000 bytes on many websites, so
there already is a library of books waiting for your interest in exploring
more details. Some of the websites are 'free-servers', which means they put
ads on the pages at their sites; other are ad-free. Since the free-servers
give more webspace, I have to use them for the more heavily illustrated
groups of pages. I do not receive even one cent from any of the ads.

With that caveat out of the way, I would like to invite you to dig into
some of the pages I wrote, and also explore some of the great pages I have
found (and grouped links together by subject) on the internet. I have some
pages duplicated on several webhosts because there are limits of how much
data can be retrived per month from some -- if you get a notice that the
page is unavailable, try an alternate webhost.

I already mentioned above, the page 'The MATH of Integrated Biological
Systems Microfarming', which counts the numbers of chickens, earthworms,
rabbits, or farmed fish which could be obtained using different variations
of practices within the flowchart diagram.

This is the 'bottom line' from that page:
The total so far is 11,973 pounds of high-protein foods (rabbits,
mushrooms, chickens/fish) produced on feedstocks from 1.52 acres or
slightly more than 0.5 hectare on a sustainable perpetual basis, with 33
tons of fertilizer to nourish 7.29 acres of crops at 200 pounds of organic
nitrogen per acre per year (broadcast to row-crops). This is an average
daily production of 32.7 pounds of protein foods, which can perpetually
sustain a population of 16 persons at a daily consumption of 2 pounds per
day. [Apologies: a error on my part in switchgrass productivity was
incorporated in the previous version. This corrected version uses the
figures from Handbook of Energy Crops James A. Duke. 1983 at 55 tons per
acre per year (125–150 MT/ha). My gratitude to an early reader who notified
me of the error.]

Two pounds of meat per day is an unhealthy gluttony, but I divided that
total that way to show that agriculture can shrink considerably and open up
space for endangered species to co-exist with no decrease in standard of
living.

Another page I titled 'IBS_RabbitsWormsPoultry.html' has links to a variety
of pages on, well you guessed it, Rabbits with Worms, Worms with Chickens
and Ducks, and the fertilizer uses of Vermicompost.

I spent some time checking what kinds of information was available and
collected resources on Alfalfa and Biomass Agriculture, Low-Tech Mushroom
Cultivation, the Fertilizer (N-P-K) Values of Rabbit Manures and uses for
Feathers and Chicken Litter. Actually, you can find dozens of pages of
writings and dozens of pages of links to all the supporting information

Sometimes I get ahead of myself, and write about a page I mean to publish
and then do not get around to very soon. My bookstore page is like that: I
have a lot of titles and bibliography to organize before I can offer links
to Amazon.com as the fulfillment dealer. I hope to get this enterprise to
finally pay something which can go towards buying more ad-free webhosting
space, by collecting a small commission whenever someone buys one of my
book recommendations through a link from my pages.

There is some good information already in print by other authors.
Unfortunately, as I said in the beginning of this article, many of even the
very best books have not assimilated the new knowledge, and there are books
with misinformation still coming off the presses.

Rather than go into the detail here, the flowchart shows humanure and
biomass being treated to alcohol fermentation to produce fuel alcohol. As
you may know burning alcohol produces less overall pollution, and the forms
of pollution it does produce is of a less harmful type. I contributed my
thoughts to an online post-science-conference discussion on Eco-San
(Ecological Sanitation) in November-December, 2001, on solar pasteurization
and alcohol fermentation to try to influence the host nation, China, to
adopt these methods. Since China has one-fifth of the world human
population, several rare species threatened with extinction because of
pollution, and does not possess the means to provide flush toilets and
sewage treatment plants for more than a quarter of its population, my
suggestions and warning ought to be taken seriously. However, all sectors,
rich and poor, developed and undeveloped have sanitation failures which
will get increasingly worse.

Ecological Synergy(tm) farmsteads can profitably dispose of their pathogen
problems by following the instructions of online sources where I have
assembled links pages:

Worries About Manure Use on Organic Farms
ECOLOGICAL SANITATION thoughts for consideration in employing batch
processing on small-to-medium scales for pasteurization of human wastes
(feces and urine) for pathogen neutralization.
Links to alternative fuels - Alcohol Distillation - on the internet.
BIOMASS CROPS are vegetative lifeforms able to convert water, sunshine,
minerals and fertilizer ingredients to produce a greater quantity of bulk
(tops, roots or all) in a shorter time than most other crops.
Ecological Sanitation: Solar Pasturization water pre-treatment in
undeveloped areas, to hygenic post-treatments for personal sewage. Online
references and instruction links.
ECOSAN - (Health & Safety) Issues on Ecological Sanitation

If anybody is interested I have created a CD-ROM which is constantly being
updated (every few days in fact) which puts all my webpages from all the
websites in a more accessible order. Write me and make an offer (including
mailing costs) and I'll burn you a copy fresh made. I can't make any
guarantees you will like some of my opinionated articles archived from
arguments on USENET, or SANET-MG, but maybe you are the kind of person who
likes reading other's ignorant put-downs of my sincere efforts to save all
the world that can still be saved from the biotic holocaust going on
outside your windows. That ought to be worth money to somebody -- and of
course, there are links to the online sources!

The following webpages I host have 'chapters' of this 'on-line book'. In
addition I provide links on pages which take you to real on-line books
(books which have been published on paper and sold in bookstores, which
also have a full-text online version you can read through the internet).

As long as you keep in mind that obsolete concepts become more common the
further back the information was published, these recommended pages can
serve as a complete education for an Ecological Synergy microfarmer. I
deliberately made myself obsolete -- you don't need me, just the
information which other people and institutions seem unable to provide.
Once you have the information, any normally intelligent person can begin
becoming high-yield productive in their first year of doing it.



Be sure to visit other Ecological Synergy webpages:
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/writings/Table_of_Contents.html
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Bamboo/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Ag_Biomass/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Biodiversity/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Books/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/FarmPollution/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Knowledgebase/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/MushroomTek/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/ProtectedGrowing/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Rabbits/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Santa_Cruz/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Sebastopol/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/SoilLife/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/WastesRecycling/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/WOFE/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/EcoGardening/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Heros/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/NutraceuticalMushrooms/
  http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/Visual_Pages/Writings/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/My_Links_Pages/
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/writings/10000yrs.html
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/writings/666extin.html
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/writings/intro1.html
http://www20.brinkster.com/microfarm/writings/Synergy1.html

plenty.150m.com/index.html     plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Bamboo/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Ag_Biomass/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Biodiversity/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Books/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/FarmPollution/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Knowledgebase/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/MushroomTek/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/ProtectedGrowing/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Rabbits/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Santa_Cruz/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Sebastopol/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/SoilLife/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/WastesRecycling/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/WOFE/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/EcoGardening/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Heros/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/NutraceuticalMushrooms/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/Writings/
plenty.150m.com/Visual_Pages/My_Links_Pages/     http://www.efn.org/~lkuntz/
http://home.talkcity.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/index.html
http://www.efn.org/~lkuntz/links.html
http://home.talkcity.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/index.html
http://home.talkcity.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/__ALL_MY.html
http://home.talkcity.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/10000yrs.html
http://home.talkcity.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/666extin.html
http://home.talkcity.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/intro1.html
http://home.talkcity.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/MarketGarden.html