F.A. Farm

Wheat can produce 3-4 million calories per acre and potatoes can produce 6-8 million calories per acre. But what about apples? I've harvested one Gravenstein tree and will do the next one today. I got 288 pounds of fruit off the first tree and my orchard is on a grid of 200 trees per acre. That means this tree produced the equivalent of 57,600 pounds per acre. At 236 calories per pound for raw apples (Source: www.caloriecount.about.com), this equals 13,593,600 calories per acre for an apple tree producing less than 300 pounds per tree. This is 3.4 times the calorie production for wheat and 1.7 times the value of potatoes (using 4 million calories per acre for wheat and 8 million for potatoes - the upper end of the spread).

Now let's consider commercial apple production. Back when I was a migrant worker in the 70's, most of the apple orchards I worked at were on a 200 tree per acre grid and a common yield was half a bin per tree. A bin is 25 boxes and a box is 40 pounds, so a bin = 1000 pounds of apples. Many times I picked a whole bin per tree, so averaging a half bin per tree is a robust average. At half a bin, or 500 pounds per tree and with 200 trees per acre, the calorie value of commercial apple production jumps to 100,000 pounds per acre, or 23.6 million calories per acre. This is nearly 3 times the calorie yield of the most optimistic calorie value for potatoes and almost 6 times the most optimistic calorie value for wheat! Obviously, apples are a good deal for farmers (like me) who want to get the maximum calories per acre, while still maintaining diversity of crops. And this does not even address the health aspects of eating apples.

When we purchased our little farm in 2004, one of the first things we did was put down more apple and pear trees. I was a migrant worker for 8 years, from 1974 to 1982, and I went back and picked apples again in 1993. I have always liked apples and I have quite firm ideas on pruning, thinning and harvesting. We have mostly semi-dwarf trees and a mix of 16 varieties of apples, 10 varieties of pears (including Asian pears), 2 varieties of plums and 4 kinds of cherries. Our orchard space is only 1/4 of an acre and most of the trees are still quite young, as there were only 7 fruit trees on the place when we started. I have Mason bees for pollination, but I also plant specific crops, like borage, that are good feedstock for bees. Thus, we attract plenty of native bees and we have no problem with pollination.

As we prepare for peak oil and the next economic shock, it is imperative that homeowners (and even renters!) grow some of their own food. Since apples can produce so many calories per acre, it is to everyone's advantage to plant more apple trees. Planting trees is an investment in the future and it takes 4-5 years for production to come on, but once the apples start producing, the amount of high-quality food produced is astonishing. Apples do take some management, but the labor costs are quite low compared to vegetables. If there is a perfect food, from both a farming and a consumer perspective, it is an apple. Johnny Appleseed was no dummy - even though he focused on cider production, his great idea led to many beneficial results for eating apples.

This year I am doing a squash experiment at another farm a couple of miles away. Because squashes have imperfect flowers (i.e. each blossom only displays the organs of one sex - male or female), they rely on insect pollination to produce fruit. This means isolation from other varieties of the same species if you want to save seed. For example, you can grow Butternut squash (Cucurbita moschata) right next to Buttercup (Cucurbita maxima) if you like, but not Buttercup next to Hubbard (another Cucurbita maxima). The isolation distance is usually given as a quarter-mile, but since we have only 5 acres, there is no quarter-mile distance, even on the diagonal from the northeast corner to the southwest corner. I usually plant only one variety of each species, but I still come up with interesting results.

In 2006, I had a Blue Hubbard planted right next to my Butternut and I got a smaller Hubbard that was the same shade of brown as the Butternut. This doesn't make sense as a cross, UNLESS the two species actually crossed - similar to a donkey and a horse crossing to produce a mule. Perhaps it was not a hybrid, but just a color mutation in the Blue Hubbard gene pool. I kept the seeds and finally got a chance to grow them out in an isolated environment this year, at another farm. So far, they look like pale blue Hubbards, but they are still immature, so the final color is still anybody's guess, as is the texture and taste of the squash meat inside.

Since they are at another farm, I don't see them every day and I have been a bit lax on getting over there each week - it has been more like once a month. However, they are doing fine and we went over to weed and water them yesterday (Sunday). Their intrinsic squash hardiness got me thinking along the same lines I used to pursue in grad school. Why domesticate squash early? [Per Heather Pringle (Science 1998, 282:1446), the coastal Ecuadorians were growing Cucurbita moschata 10,000 years ago, and the early Mexicans cultivated Cucurbita pepo (the species of pie pumpkins and summer squashes) as early as 9975 years ago.] The answers were bloody obvious. Squash can do a lot with little moisure and they outcompete weeds via their vining characteristics. We have a lot of smartweed around here and my squashes were holding their own, something my wheat cannot do. While I was weeding, I had a sudden appreciation for the smarts of the native peoples who planted squash early on. In the transition from hunting/gathering to agriculture, the seasonal round (following the seasons around the landscapes for different foods - different times and places for the Camas roots and salmon, for example) could still be maintained IF the domesticates were hardy and relatively pest-free. Squash fits the bill in all respects. It would be quite easy to plant early and wait until the plants were well-established, then just do maintenance weeding once a month, as the group passed through the area on the seasonal round. The squashes could be planted specifically in the areas where fall hunting or foraging camps would be used, so that the mature fruits could be protected from any rodents. Perhaps this was not really a problem. I only lose one or two fruits in the fall myself, and we don't have a dog or any other animal that patrols the garden other than natural predators.

There are many theories of how agriculture got started, but the interaction of random mutation and human agency is most likely. A hardy Cucurbit that has a lot of calories (153 calories per pound for squash is a good average among varieties) and stores well would be most welcome during the winter. The ease of growing these squashes would certainly endear the plants to native people and the archaeological evidence indicates they were among the first domesticates. I like squash and I grow plenty. It is easy, yields well, stores well, is quite nutritious and tastes delicious. It also has a long history.

Regular readers of my blog know that I am very concerned with my carbon footprint, as measured in calories of energy used to produce calories of food. Last year I produced 2.2 million calories of food from 1.1 million calories of human sweat plus gas for my tillers. I have been tracking my realtime energy use on my spreadsheets this year and I have just crossed over into positive territory. So far, I have purchased 24 gallons of gas for my tillers, although I haven't used it all. I use the figure of 31,000 calories per gallon of gas to calculate calories of tiller gas used. I calculate my human calories at 125 calories per hour for 3000 hours per year and divide those 3000 hours into 8 months, 5 of which have already been counted (mid-March through mid-August). I track my yield as the produce comes in from the field and this year I am also tracking my grain. Each vegetable, fruit, or grain crop has a calorie value per pound or per pint (e.g. raspberries). The upshot is that I have now produced 984,092 calories for 980,111 calories of input by mid-August. This means my ratio is 1.004, or simply 1 calorie of output for every 1 calorie of input.

Of course there are flaws in my methodology, which are intentional for the most part. For example, my potato acreage for each variety I have started harvesting is already listed, so as I dig more potatoes, the ratio goes up. However, it was just simpler to keep track of square footage in this manner. What this means, though, is that my ratio goes up dramatically as the fall harvest progresses. The bottom line is the ratio at the end of the season. I am shooting for a target ratio of 5.00 this year and my realtime projections are 4.33 at this point. In other words, I am on track to produce between 4-5 times as much food in energy value as I consume in energy to produce that food. In the larger picture, this is what I need to do to produce enough food to feed 4 other people besides myself. The macro vision is a nation of farmers, where 20% of the adult population are fulltime farmers. This kind of spreadsheet analysis is how we get to that vision.

The August 17th issue of the Seattle Times had quite an interesting article on the problem of giving away organic produce. Imagine that! You can't even give it away! No wonder I cannot sell all I grow!

As you may or may not know, Seattle has a community garden program called P-Patch. Neighborhoods have to have a certain number of community gardens per resident population. One neighborhood, the Delridge area in southwest Seattle, formed a cooperative to educate residents about adding fresh produce to their diets. Like many low-income areas in US cities, you can find all kinds of convenience stores and fast-food joints, but it is difficult to find grocery stores, much less fresh food. If you want cigarettes and Mad Dog 20-20, no problem. If you want to buy a carrot, get out of here you commie! This year, the Delridge Produce Cooperative received $15,000 from the City of Seattle and started a four-week demonstration project, giving out FREE organic produce from the Delridge P-Patch in four locations. Yet people wouldn't take it. To quote the article, "Passers-by waved off offers of peaches, apples and homegrown squash." Now, imagine that. You can't even give away fresh organic produce - even those items to which people are accustomed! We're not talking tetragonia or aronia, here - we're talking apples, potatoes, cherries, zucchinis, tomatoes and plums which were displayed in the accompanying photo.

Why? I don't know, nor do I even have a theory. However, here is a story for you from the past. Back in 1969 I went on the road for the first time and discovered underground newspapers out on the west coast. I sold the Helix in Seattle and when I got back to Minneapolis, I started selling them on the street. I started with the Helix, the Willamette Bridge (from Portland), the L.A. Free Press and later added the Chicago Seed, the Berkely Barb, and two Minneapolis papers as they started up, the Minneapolis Flag and Hundred Flowers. ("Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend." - Mao) That winter I got a table assignment at the West Bank Student Union at the University of Minnesota and sold my papers while sitting down. This limited my performance art somewhat [You may not realize there is quite a bit of performing to selling papers on the street.], but it kept me out of the weather.

Now, one day I decided to see how people would react to free money. [I got the idea from a friend of mine.] I taped a few nickels, dimes and quarters to a blank sheet of paper and wrote in big letters, FREE MONEY - TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. I put it up on a bulletin board a little distance away in the hallway where I could observe people's reactions. Pretty soon there were lots of people stopping to look, but no one took any of the money. Was it just the squarehead uptight Minnesotan suspicion at work? Don't know. Eventually a janitor came by and took it down. !!! That is assuredly the squarehead uptight Minnesotan suspicion at work!

Anyways, trying to give something away that is good for you is not a foreign concept to me, but it still amazes me when people spurn the good and true and free and independent things in life, relying instead on the corporate-branded, TV-inspired, insipid nonsense. Oh, well.

Yesterday I had an epiphany. I like weeding. Now, you may think, "Well, he's finally cracked. I knew he would someday." Nonetheless, it is true. I discovered I like to get down and yank out the nightshade and pigweed and ragweed and thistles. Nightshade, ragweed and thistles - Oh My! (Sorry, Dorothy.) I have always looked on weeds as colleagues - sort of like competing for benchspace in the lab. Now I think of them as comrades who are giving up their lives so I can eat. They are vigorous subsoil miners and tilthers. [I am cribbing a term from Eliot Coleman here, but I bet he wouldn't mind.] When I grab a weed and lay it on top of the soil, I am also bringing up minerals and other nutrients so it can work its way back down to the plant root zone. Vertical recycling and integration, as it were. There is also a certain pleasure, as well as mulch value, to see the nice windrows of weeds piled up on the edge of the garden, or pitchforked into the compost pile, or just laid down between the rows.

Besides the farming value of pulling weeds, there is also a personal physiological value. I can just get down and root around in the soil and get as grubby as I want. It is kind of like playing football in high school. I was a starter on defense and rarely played offense, so I could just run around and knock people down. I loved it! In my forties, I tried slam dancing and it was fun, but I didn't have the aerobic capacity anymore. Now I can just pull up masses of weeds until I am tired. It is a good tired, sort of how you feel at the end of a long day picking apples or banging nails. There is a certain mental and spiritual value to working until you are exhausted. All the existential nonsense drains away and the sunset is rich in tones of color. It seems to me that in the coming years, more Americans will discover the physiological benefits of having to work in the soil for a living. Root Hog or Die (an old frontier saying first published in Davey Crockett's autobiography) is actually a good program for the future. The postmodern is actually premodern - What was old is now new  - Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose (the more things change, the more they are the same).

I just finished Jeff Rubin's Why Your world Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (2009). Rubin is a Canadian economist who was one of the first to predict soaring oil prices in 2000. Rather than working in academia, his expertise comes from being head economist for CIBC World Markets for 20 years. [CIBC World Markets is the investment banking arm of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.] His book is remarkably free of jargon, but it does require close reading in some parts. Since I am gathering as much info about peak oil as I can stomach, I naturally gravitated toward his book. Rubin's main thesis is that our current recession was caused by the runup in oil prices, which was in turn caused by the increasing depletion of worldwide oil reserves and the lack of significant new discoveries to replace them. The corollary is that once our current recession dissipates and the developed-world economies start to grow again, more oil will be used and prices will rise. As prices rise to a  tipping point (always a moving target), worldwide economies will then drop into another recession. This growth and bust cycle will be more volatile than in the past.

However, Why Your world Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller is not a gloom and doom book. Rubin sees opportunities in not being able to get as many commodities from globalized world markets. Blue-collar jobs will come back to the US and Canada, for example, once the cost of shipping commodities from China becomes prohibitively expensive. Local produce will be able to compete with grapes from Chile and people will be forced to eat more food in season. Here's an example of his reasoning:

"Peak oil may soon give us peak food. Back at your local market, there will still be food on the shelves, of course. But it is more likely to have come from nearby, and it is certain to be more expensive. When energy prices are high, the cost of the labor and the fuel to grow food, as well as the cost of shipping and retailing it, will be higher and will rise with every dollar increase in the price of a barrel of oil (p.225)."

And here is my favorite line in the whole book, "Suddenly the price you pay for those boutique blue potatoes at the farmers' market is looking like a bargain (p.226)."

One of the concepts I have been stressing for the last three years is that industrial produce and organic produce each have their own levels and industrial produce has been able to lower prices because of globalization, which is itself dependent on cheap oil. Organics have been higher for quite some time because their price level is based on more human labor than industrial agriculture. Once the price level of industrial produce rises to the level of organics, the choice to the consumer will be simple. Let's see - I can buy potatoes that have very little flavor, are mass-produced using chemical fertilizers and herbicides, and are pumped up with water to a huge size. OR I can buy local potatoes that have tremendous taste, are freshly dug, grown sustainably with a reverance for the soil and have much more nutrients per pound FOR THE SAME PRICE. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. The challenge to the organic/sustainable farmer is to not try and hold the higher relative price point. That's why, for example, I lowered my prices an average of 10.4% this year. I expect I will lower them again next year. As I get more efficient with my sustainable practices, I can afford to charge less and grow more. This is a far cry from the volume required in "Get big or get out," and is based instead on flexibility WITHIN my small-scale efficiencies. [As I have mentioned before, there are both large-scale and small-scale efficiencies.]

So, Rubin and I have arrived at the same place through different routes. To wit, globalization is finished and your world will get a lot smaller. This is not a bad thing and you and I will be better off for it.

Last week we had blisteringly hot temperatures. Seattle set a record of 103 degrees and it was 94 in Ferndale. Yet, this past week my garden just exploded with produce (and weeds too, of course). I have made a real effort to keep up with my watering this year and to be consistent in my application. This translates into consistent and sufficient soil moisture. I always have good soil fertility, since I work hard at building up my soil. Putting together the three variables of fertility, moisture and heat, it is no wonder I got such rapid growth. Plants are opportunists and if the prepwork has been done for them, they can put on rapid growth. This can translate into huge amounts of green beans, for instance. My CSA customers got $32.60 in produce for a $25 box yesterday, I dropped off a huge box of food at the food bank yesterday, and I will have more food to take to the food bank on Saturday, the next open date.

This brings me to the larger question of what intensive agriculture needs. There are three primary variables: fertility, water and labor. Fertility is important because we are taking so many nutrients out of the soil when we crop intensively, so we must put them back. A more nuanced view is to be proactive, rather than reactive, which is where the idea of building up the soil comes from, rather than just feeding the plants (sustainable vs. industrial). Water is important because intensive agriculture uses a lot of water. This can be taken to extremes, of course, such as the Washington apple industry, which pumps up the apples with so much water they have a huge size, but the same amount of nutrition as a smaller apple. Labor is important, as there is a lot of care involved in intensive agriculture. Industrial agriculture "cheats" by using petroleum laid down by algae 65 million years ago in lieu of human labor. However, this situation is changing back due to peak oil. Soon the era of cheap oil will be over, and thus the era of cheap food. Water is also a problem, so management of ground water will become even more important. I am putting my faith in small farmers like myself, who manage their own wells, rather than bureaucracies like city water departments or irrigation regulatory boards.

Another interesting note is that Egypt had the Nile River to provide both water and fertility. Labor was provided by slaves and they grew enough grain to keep the Roman Empire going. The Aztecs before the Conquest had chinampas (raised beds in lake/marsh areas) to feed a large population. The lakes and marsh bottom muck provided a ready source of both fertility and water. Like the Egyptians, the Aztecs had slaves for the labor element. This should be a warning to us in the peak oil scenarios that are bandied about everywhere these days. Much more human labor is going to be necessary to grow food. Slavery won't work this time around, so unless we get a large segment of the population growing food, we are toast. I project a necessary 25% of the adult population working as full-time farmers.