F.A. Farm

I just composed a long post for the Transition Whatcom site and there might be some interesting tidbits for you folks. I will just post it here. The bits and pieces should be self-explanatory.

If you let your squash mature, you won’t need the brown sugar or even the butter to make it taste good. Don’t worry so much about getting your dry beans in. The pods shed water. I got some of my kidneys in already and will get the cannelinis and other varieties in when I can. Steve Solomon is a very good source, but he is also big enough to admit when he makes a mistake, as he does in later editions of Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. Saying that organic mulch acts as a wick to dry out the soil is one such mistake. I use both kinds of mulches and organic mulch keeps the soil moist and cool, while also adding organic matter as it breaks down. It all depends on how much mulch material I have on hand and if I can get to it. [I put in over 3000 hours a year into sustainable farming, so everything has to be efficient.] Yes, clay traps water, but has the same effect as a perched water table or plow sole. Solomon is quite right about giving plants more room so they can go farther for water and have more space generally. His latest book, Gardening When It Counts has some very nice drawings of root structures. Watering deeply is the best when doing irrigation, of course, and you might consider this when thinking about drip irrigation. I still use an impact sprinkler, with mobile hoses and a 10-day cycle, but we have our own well, so I am not paying exorbitant city rates for water. Our water is not chlorinated either, so you might want to consider this when doing irrigation, as you are adding salts as you water. [Oh, and if you are making sauerkraut, the chlorine kills the lactic acid fermentation.] A little bit of reading on the archaeological history of Sumer, Babylon and the like will give you a good scare. The Egyptian method of piping in wooden troughs was actually quite brilliant. I am now doing soaker hoses for my tomatoes and it works quite well. They have a lower carbon footprint than drip since they are made out of recycled materials, are less costly, and don’t plug up. Raised beds are a good idea for early crops as they effectively raise the ambient temperature 1 degree for every inch they rise. I use them for early salad mix. [By the way, I think greenhouses are overrated – huge energy hogs and the food lacks the quality taste that vegetables have when they are grown out in the wind and sunshine.]

Per the slugs and other pests, integrated pest management (IPM) is a useful tool. For example, if you worry about late blight, dig new potatoes in June and July. They will still store all winter and you get them out of the ground before the Phytophthora infestans raises its ugly head in early August. If the Irish hadn’t depended so heavily on the Lumper variety, which isn’t edible until October, more people would have survived the potato famine. Also, perhaps we should rethink our approach to pest control. As Eliot Coleman pointed out when he was here in Bellingham two years ago, there is some research that points to healthy soil repelling invaders. This works well with the postmodern paradigm of “feed the soil and the plants will do their best.” I still have arguments with one of the local good ole boys, now a realtor, who insists on a plant orientation, rather than a soil orientation. Per the kale comment, perhaps you should give kale another chance. Try sauteeing some onions until they are translucent, then pop in your rough-chopped kale. Turn down the heat and let steam for only a minute. I use a cast-iron pan, which holds heat well, so I just pop in the kale and turn the heat off and let it sit. It is really quite delicious cooked with a minimum of steaming.

Finally, per the food value of crops and the space they take up, I keep good records and I can tell you how many calories I grew last year and so far this year. If you want to actually measure energy input and output, you need a metric that crosses all platforms. You can use joules, BTU’s, KWH’s or kilocalories – they are all comparable with each other. I use kilocalories, which are listed on the sides of store-bought food anyway. [Disclaimer: Nutritionists have been calling kilocalories “calories” for years, so don’t get confused. They really mean kilocalories. Some authors will mention this and call them “large calories.”] When calculating caloric values, I use a single site for caloric values, www.caloriecount.about.com, so I am consistent with my methodology. So, for example, let’s say you get 1 pound of dry kidney beans per 4 feet of row and your rows are 2.5 feet apart. You are getting 1 pound for 10 square feet of space, which is the equivalent of 4,356 pounds per acre (43,560 sq. ft. in an acre). Since kidney beans have a caloric value of 1513 calories per pound, you are at 6.59 million calories per acre. This compares well with wheat, at 3-4 million calories per acre, and potatoes, at 6-8 million calories per acre. In point of fact, dry beans are an important component of food self-suffiency. If you add their soil-building value as legumes, they become one of the important tools of sustainable agriculture. I suspect the soil-building value of the lentils grown in the Palouse, for example, is much more beneficial to the farmers over there than their cash value.

This brings me to my last point. If you think with the modern business paradigm and the grand narrative, you will always find it cheaper to buy your beans from the co-op than growing your own. This misses the point entirely. I can state with certainty that I am many times more efficient than modern industrial agriculture because I actually produced 2 calories last year for every one I used (measured in fossil fuels for my tillers and my human labor). This year I am on track to produce 5 for 1. This would make me 50 times more efficient than food produced with tractor use and mechanical sorting, processing, etc (10 calories used to produce 1 calorie of food – the usual metric). Buying on price keeps you locked into the old modern business paradigm. The co-op is still locked into this model and they would rather buy certified organic from California than buy locally from people like myself who don’t get certified because of political reasons. If you are serious about transitioning out of fossil fuels, you should be buying from local producers. This is more inconvenient and may even cost more sometimes, but the cheap prices of food now give you a false sense of how much labor it really takes to produce food. All of us sustainable farmers are having a difficult time making a living. Meanwhile, people are getting cheap food that is made out of petroleum. If you want to do more than pay lip service to local farmers, you have to actually go out to the farms and buy from them. Farmers markets and the co-op are just baby steps on what has to be done. I call what I am doing postmodern agriculture because I have deconstructed the grand narrative of modern agriculture and found it wanting. Part of postmodern agriculture out here at F.A. Farm is teaching people how to grow food sustainably. I don't do internships because I think they are exploitative. However, if you want to work for food, you get a good deal and you can learn a lot while you have your hands in the soil.

I just ordered some new buttons from Jim the Button Man. After my "Move the Center" and "Don't Bankrupt Ferndale" campaigns, I am upping the ante with my newest effort - "Them Dirty Hippies Was Right!" [The bad grammar is intentional.] Think of the hippie credo - peace, love, look for a spiritual path, be tolerant of others' religions and cultures, get out of your car and walk softly on the earth, grow your own food, stop making weapons, stop imposing the US system on the rest of the world, take some responsibility for making things better, legalize marijuana, and generally have a positive outlook on life. My next button will probably be, "If YOU would have listened to US forty years ago, WE wouldn't be in this mess." However, my significant other says this is too wordy.

Here in Washington, there are efforts to get produce to consumers via sailboats across Puget Sound and using pedicabs to get from the dock to the farmers market. I am thinking on similar lines for my CSA program. We are only 12.5 miles from downtown Bellingham, the big college town that drives the markets here in Whatcom County. My proposal is to give bicyclists a $100 discount if they promise to cycle out to pick up their box each week. Since my season is 20 weeks, this is a discount of $5 per box. There are two salutary effects that I see right now.

My price for a share in 2010 will be $500, as in 2009. Early payment discounts will be $425 in January, $450 in February, $475 in March and then full price of $500 on April 1st and later. For this price, you get a minimum of $500 of produce during the 20-week season, June through October. With a bicycle discount of $100, the comparable price in January would be $325, for example. So, this is a big discount and should be educational in promoting the advantages of doing a little legwork to save money. It gets people thinking along the right track.

The second salutary effect is more subtle. At some point people will realize that I am not making money at this price. The next progression in their thinking should be to consider that I am not making a living at ANY price for my CSA program. From my perspective, I am doing this for political/social/community reasons, so it is irrelevant if I lose an extra $100 per CSA share. Just as we promote backyard gardening so people know how much work it takes to grow food sustainably, so a direct-discounted cashflow advantage should educate people to the real costs of farming sustainably.

I will roll this idea around in my brain for awhile and see how the rough edges get smoothed out.

Colin Campbell is a British petroleum geologist who founded the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) and many people use their research and newsletters for understanding the Peak Oil problem (including myself). In 2002, Campbell put out what he called The Oil Depletion Protocol, a relatively short document, but hard to understand. Richard Heinberg, currently the established "guru" on the problem, set out to explain the protocol, amplify it and bring it to a wider audience by writing The Oil Depletion Protocol in 2006. It is a relatively short book, but well-written and full of useful numbers.

For example, page 23 of The Oil Depletion Protocol lists several authors and their dates of the onset of peak oil. These numbers range from the years 2005 to 2030. Page 117 has a startling statistic, "Nitrogen fertilizer, made from natural gas, accounts for 47 percent of total energy usage for corn farming in the American Midwest." There is also an accompanying table listing a nine-state weighted average for total energy requirements to produce corn in 2001, including seed, fertilizer, fuel for hauling, and irrigation. This figure is 49,573 BTU/bushel. Since a bushel of corn weighs 56 pounds, this is 885.23 BTU/pound. Since a BTU = .252 kilocalories, there were 223 kilocalories needed to produce one pound of corn in the American Midwest in 2001. This figure is likely higher now, as one of the features of chemical fertilizers is that more chemicals are needed each year to maintain the same level of production. [Sidebar: Using organic fertilizers requires less fertilizer each year as the soil is built up to sustainable levels. Part of this process is crop rotations and green manures.]

It should be noted that this number of kilocalories (or "calories" as we usually refer to them - some researchers use the term "large" calories - it is the number on the side of your cereal box) is just for getting the corn to the elevator. Once the corn is processed and made into high-fructose corn syrup, cornflakes, or cattle feed, the calorie load becomes much higher because more energy is needed to make the field corn into a value-added product. [Sidebar: If you think of meat as a value-added product, a lot of the marketing and cultural mythos becomes easier to understand - especially the class stratification aspects.]

Anyway, back to Heinberg's book. The Oil Depletion Protocol is quite an easy read, as Heinberg's writing style is quite lucid. He also hits the main points quite well. The book is certainly disturbing, however, as any sober assessment of the facts about peak oil becomes more disturbing the more research you do. The main advantage of the book is unintentional. Implementing the Protocol would require a huge sea change in human consciousness and a retreat from the growth model. This is unlikely and possibly impossible, as it would require the US and all other developed countries to go back to a pre-1850's lifestyle. So, going along with our present dependence on fossil fuels is impossible because of the laws of physics. Changing enough to actually get off our addiction to oil is impossible because we have too many people on the planet to support without our oil addiction. This is also unlikely given the past history of human cultures around the globe. Even the developing countries like India and China, who should know better, want to develop their industries and infrastructure as much as they can. In short, the Protocol is a nice idea, but not doable. It shows us instead how unrealistic the present governmental structure really is, in all the countries around the globe. In other words, the indirect lesson of The Oil Depletion Protocol is that we have to do it ourselves, on a local level.

Back when I was a fruit tramp (i.e. migrant worker), September and October were busy months. The Golden Delicious apples started around September 10th and then we moved right into the Red Delicious after the Goldens. After the Reds were done, there were Romes and Winesaps, as well as pickup work at orchards that had juicer apples. It was the dessert at the end of a long season and all of us had money in our pockets. I usually took a week hike up in the Pasayten Wilderness after apple harvest, but there was also a Barter Faire somewhere in Okanagan County (north central Washington). When I did my hike each year, I always took all my winter gear. Sometimes I used it; sometimes I hiked in shorts and runners and carried all my gear. It was quite a nice time up in the high country. I kind of miss those carefree days of youth.

Now, I have all my prunes in and some of my apples. The Asian pears are still on the trees, but the European pears are picked. I have been canning tomatoes and dill pickles. I have two batches of sauerkraut in jars and there are enough onions and potatoes for winter in the canning room. The wheat and spelt is harvested, but I haven't finished threshing the spelt yet. Some barley is cut and threshed, but most of it will just sit in the field as winter cover. Some cover crops are up and my fall carrots, rutabagas and parsnips look great. However, I am still swamped. I need to get my favas done, but if I don't, I already have enough for seed and the rest can just sit and be tilled under next year. I am publicizing my "halfsies" program locally, but no takers so far. This program consists of people coming out to the farm and picking favas or dried beans and keeping half of what they picked. That way, I get my crop picked and they get food for their labor. The educational value of this program is that they realize they cannot make even minimum wage picking these items, so they have to think outside the money economy box, as well as appreciate what the sustainable farmer is doing for them. I have potatoes in the ground that need to come out and I am trying to do the same with the potatoes. Most of the potatoes will likely just stay in the ground and recycle the nutrients. Since I rotate my crops every year, this is not a problem and I will likely have squash or corn next year where the potatoes are now.

The winter rains have already started, on a sporadic basis, and there is plenty of soil moisture. I have already coiled up most of my irrigation hose. A word about my irrigation. I use regular 5/8" garden hose and I drag the hose up and down the north south paths, then connect to a hose that runs east and west in whatever bloc I am watering. I use an impact sprinkler on a tripod and a 10-day cycle. This works well and does not stress our well. For my tomatoes, I put down some soaker hoses and watered as needed. This worked well in preventing late blight and did not incur the cost of a drip irrigation system. I think I will buy a few more soaker hoses next year and increase their use. The advantage to using a mobile hose system is that you can start with a few hoses and bypass the upfront capital costs of laying down PVC pipe. I suppose the environmental impacts and embedded calories of garden hose and PVC pipe are comparable per foot, but an irrigation system that is mobile uses less materials. Another advantage is that it can be changed at will. There is some time involved in changing water, but this takes only 5-15 minutes per set. All in all, my mobile hose system works quite well for my scale.

Well, I guess I should do some work.