F.A. Farm

I finally finished threshing and winnowing my barley yesterday (January 30th). Why so tardy? Simply because I have a lot of things to do and I see no problem with storing it on the stalk. I also had to finish my spelt first. I got 44.38 pounds for 630 square feet, so that calculates out to 63.9 bushels per acre. The North Dakota average for malting barley is 54 bushels an acre, so the variety I used, 2-row Hayes Awnless, yielded quite well - even with my primitive growing, threshing and winnowing. For the threshing, I used my electric chipper/shredder. For the winnowing, I used a box fan on a chair and poured the grain & chaff into another container in front of the fan. It is likely I wasted around 5% of the grain.

This barley is a 2-row variety, which is higher in protein than a 4-row barley. The 2-row barley is used more by microbrewers and produces a heavier beer. The 4-row barley is good for lagers and the sludge that usually passes for beer in America. I hope to malt some and make some beer this spring, but right now I am putting a little in my homemade bread. It adds a nutty, sweet taste. My bread is made without sugar in the first place, so a little natural sweetening is not too much.

Barley is an easy-to-grow crop and can be planted early. The old saying is, "Plant your barley in the mud and your wheat in the dust." It is also a very good cover crop and produces very nice straw. This year I have a new 4-row barley I will try, as well as my own 2-row seed. I am looking forward to April planting.

The frogs are out. It is time to start onions, leeks and shallots. A sunny window facing south is just fine. If you also have a cable bed, so much the better. I have good luck with small pots that fit into a tin can (like a 28 oz. tomato can). The pot fits down into the can but not enough to touch the bottom. Excess water drains out and evaporates into the soil above it. My transplant mix is very simple - 1 part sphagnum moss, 1 part homemade compost, 2 parts soil. All of these are screened with a 1/2-inch screen. You can just buy a little screening and drap it over a five gallon bucket or a wheelbarrow. If you don't like using a small amount of sphagnum moss, you can go with perlite or some other water-absorbing substance. A web search will give you all kinds of transplant mixes you can make yourself. I make up 20 gallons at a time and mix it on the floor of the barn with a hoe. I also add 2 quarts of organic fertilizer (which I make myself) and 2 cups lime for a 20-gallon batch. Alliums don't mind being crowded, so you can leave them together until you plant or you can prick them out into individual cells as they get bigger. I also put down some shallots last fall and covered them with hay over the winter. We shall see how they do. I have also had good luck sowing leek seeds in a raised bed and covering them with hay. They come up right through the hay. This takes longer, though, and doesn't fit in with my row plan. However, for backyard gardeners, this is another alternative.

Broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower should be started around February 15th up here in the northwest corner of the US. Get those seed orders in. It would be in your interest to order extra. Most seed will carry over 1-4 years, depending on the species. You can always rotate your seed if you buy extra every year.

On January 7th, I had about 110 big round bales dropped on either side of the south driveway, close to where I am breaking new sod. I got them free because the farmer is leasing new land, they have been on the land and waterlogged for two years now, and he just wanted them out of his hair. This seemed like a golden opportunity for me - sheet mulching and compost. I already made compost out of an earlier set of 6 dumptruck loads of hay dropped in 2007 and after two years of composting, the area under the compost pile produced outstanding tomatoes. This project is much bigger and after 12 days, I and one other person have managed to pull apart about half of them. We only work 2 1/2 hours each day and we are both tuckered. He's 67 and I am almost 60, so it is hard for us old geezers to manhandle these huge bales more than a couple of hours each day. After this work and lunch, I usually take a nap.

Biomass is critical to building up the soil. It is good to work a nitrogen source into the hay if possible, and I spread as much coffee grounds on the hay as I can get. However, just as Ruth Stout use to maintain back in the 1970's, "Hay will break down just fine - it just takes longer." As for the weed seeds that are in hay, I don't worry about them. The advantage of getting free biomass far outweighs the incipient weed seeds. I am certainly not going to turn down free hay. Another fun point is that a lot of the hay has already started to decompose, so it will break down fast in the winter rains.

This hay is being put down quite thick to kill the grass between where I am now gardening and the driveway. This will reduce the amount of lawn I have to mow and build up a low spot that has standing water during our wet winters. There are many advantages to sheet mulching and for a little amount of labor in the offseason (Or what laughingly passes for an off season!) I get a great benefit in soil fertility and tilth.

It's time to prune your apples, pears and prunes. Here are 20 short YouTube video segments on pruning. It is a little difficult to keep track, but you can just run down the list. I went over to a friend's place on January 16th and pruned her trees and she did a video - you can only post short segments on YouTube. This is raw footage, so it is good for a few laughs as well as giving you some advice on pruning. It is a little difficult to see sometimes because of the gray skies and the dark trees all around. I also do custom pruning but I prefer to teach the homeowner. [Disclaimer: I am quite opionated in this video (as usual).] There are also plenty of other pruning videos on YouTube, so you can do a lot of investigation online.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r10SjaUD-aw

Our farm is in a rural farming county in NW Washington, but a lot of the farmland near us has been taken up by McMansions. There are a few beef south of us and a seed potato producer half a mile away. He uses the usual huge tractors, herbicides and chemical fertilizers, as well as irrigation. This farmer is trying to do the best he can, but he is locked into a mechanical/chemical paradigm. He rotates his crops, alternating potatoes with either corn or wheat. Nevertheless he is paving the soil and you can see much more standing water in his fields than mine over the course of a wet winter. He is renting, so perhaps he doesn't care. This is far different from my attempts to build up my soil and increase fertility, biomass, and microbial action. By increasing the organic matter in the soil, I can lock up more soil moisture and I am hoping to irrigate less this year, especially since I am widening the distance between my rows - going from a 30" center to 36". This will also allow me to use my BCS 26" wide tiller to cultivate between rows, rather than the one-speed slow tiller I have been using.

Two different styles of farming - one chemical, the other organic. Yet we are both on the same continuum. We are both producing food, whether it is seed potatoes and forage, or produce to sell directly to the customer. We are both creating new wealth from the soil and we both can be measured through a simple calculation of inputs and outputs. Yet there is a big difference in outlook. My neighbor is using the soil as a factory and carefully calculating how much diesel, manpower, seed, fertilizer and herbicides he can put into his "factory" to pay for his inputs and hopefully give him a profit. What I am doing is looking at the soil as a series of nested ecosystems and feeding the soil to build it up for future generations. I turn a small profit but that is not the main driver. My calculations are how much labor I can put into the system without making mistakes from sheer exhaustion and how I can get by using minimal fossil fuel inputs. The paradigm of feeding the soil instead of feeding the plants is a big difference, yet we are on the same continuum. How do we differentiate? After all, the game is stacked in favor of my neighbor. There is a huge cultural input emphasizing "big is better" and "tractors are cool." All the marketing, all the retailing and all the subsidies favor a farmer who can utilize cheap petroleum products to farm a lot of acres. In order to change the narrative, I have to differentiate between my way of farming and his. Trying to make an absolute distinction is not only negative in estranging my neighbor and 90% of the American populace, but it also flies in the face of a continuum based on new wealth generation. Differentiating on the basis of two distinct continuums, in other words, is bound to fail.

However, let's look at some soil and microbial processes for a clue. When I don't use chemical fertilizers and follow proper organic practices, I work towards balance in the nested ecosystems. The little wheel I work with helps nudge the big wheel all around us. The result is that my plants are healthier and have fewer pest problems. I had late blight in my tomatoes in 2008 (partly my fault with watering), yet I still had a good year overall because I have a diversity of crops that compensate for the individual crop failure. I get some aphids and flea beetles, but they don't take much. My slugs are controllable by some tillage in the wintertime. This exposes their eggs to the cold and to the predators. During the summer, they are easy to pick. The point here is that by being totally organic (even beyond organic because I have a low carbon footprint), I let my ecosystem defend itself through a balance of prey and predators. If I use even one chemical spray, I might imperil the balance I have in the little wheel - sort of like putting the lead weights on the wrong side of my truck tire when the wheel is balanced. This argues for  a clear distinction between halfway organic measures and being on either the chemical side or the organic side of the continuum. In short, there is a tipping point between the two poles of the continuum. You can lower your chemical use, such as the no-till farmers in the Palouse are doing. [I discussed this in one of my earlier blogs.] However, you are still on the chemical side of the continuum. If you make the transition to organic, however, you have passed the tipping point and crossed the Rubicon, so to speak.

-------------------------------------------/-----------------------------------------------
 chemical                       tipping point                             organic

You can get problems as you approach the tipping point. From the chemical side, you get an increased incidence of pests if you just stop using so much chemicals, or even don't increase chemical use each year. This is a treadmill that drives mainstream farmers out of business as surely as the higher price of oil and the lower price of commodities. In other words, you have to pass the tipping point. You have to actually cross the Rubicon and commit to using NO chemical fertilizers AND use different cropping techniques. The value of the feed the soil paradigm, once you have crossed the Rubicon, is that you have a different way of looking and modeling the problem, so you can devise solutions that are adapted to your own soil and climate. As an example, I have a slug problem, so doing a little bit of winter tillage helps keep down their reproductive success. This solution is not applicable to a farmer in Michigan, for instance, because slugs are not a problem there. Another example is that I have a nice silt loam soil, with clay underneath. I can till deeper and not worry about depleting my groundwater reserves as much as a farmer on sandy soil in Ohio.

Approaching the tipping point from the organic side is also problematic. I often hear people say, "I am mostly organic, but I use a little chemical spray if I need to." This approach runs the risk of unintended consequences that are negative. Not only do you give up your beneficial unintended consequences (i.e. being in balance gives you beneficial unintended consequences), you also may kill some beneficial predators along with the pest. Sprays in general are a macro effect, when what we want are individualistic micro effects (the garter snake eats the slugs one at a time rather than killing ALL the slugs with a dose of some chemical). Not to put too fine a point on it, but you get "plus" aspects of a total ecosystems approach. Running down to zero means you lose something on the plus side. Going even further into the "minus" aspect by using a chemical that degrades the ecosystem means you lose doubly. One might even say that you lose benefits exponentially by using even one chemical spray in an otherwise balanced ecosystem.

The bottom line is the commitment to go organic. This means solving your problems using an ecosystem approach rather than focusing on one pest or chemical imbalance and forgetting how it affects the rest of the system. The paradigm itself, feed the soil instead of feeding the plants, is the key.

One of my readers asked this question. "How do you suggest working on sustainability if you own no land, and cannot work in primary production?"

The basic mantra of sustainability is Reduce, Reuse and Recycle (in that order). It is important to stop consuming so much and ramp down energy usage. Reusing what we already have is next in importance. There are already plenty of buildings. Do we really need to artificially inflate the construction industry by continuing to build new buildings? As Howard Odum has pointed out, there is a lot of stored/embodied energy lying about in cars, buildings, tools, etc. that are already built and that could be reused. Finally recycling has a lower entropy than mining new ore to make things.

Sustainability then, can be a goal to work towards in gardening on vacant lots, reclaiming nonfunctioning buildings and tools, and recycling the massive amounts of waste all around us. If a person already has a fulltime job, there are always weekend projects. The main change may be to start thinking along sustainability lines and then look around for what you can do. Each person is the best judge of what they can contribute.

Here is my take on new wealth, or capital creation. Capital is a term of art for humans. It doesn’t apply to animals. For instance, a squirrel has storage in nuts, but no capital. This is because capital implies investment. Capital comes from a natural resource that is changed by human effort into a form that can be invested. You can grow food to be converted into value-added breakfast cereal, or cut down trees that can be milled into lumber for houses. Of course, consumption of the original capital, like eating the produce or burning the wood to cook the produce, is also an investment because it provides energy to the human. The point is that capital applies to humans, just like culture applies to humans. [Even though some anthropologists now apply culture to chimps, bonobos and even macaques, it can easily be shoehorned into a numbers game – 3 behaviors for macaques, 10-100 behaviors for chimps, 600-1000 behaviors for humans. But I digress.]

Once a human “touches” the resulting new product to make another product, it is no longer new wealth. It no longer has a sole input in nature. It is a human product that is now being used by a human to make another human product. This is where zero-sum economics works very well. The interactions are human and thus can have a measureable price placed on them. Now all of a sudden we can talk price, since it is easy to measure the human effort needed to make the secondary product. Up until a human “touches” a product, it has no price. We can talk about values, but they are in the realm of aesthetics rather than economics. Here is the strongest argument in favor of modern economics and its reliance on dismissing so-called “externalities.” In other words, value is not price. Many people still place no value on leaving nature the way it is. They only think about carbon sequestration in old growth forests, for instance, instead of the intrinsic value of having trees. If you are only concerned about price and not value, you can easily dismiss the “externalities.”

Another point that might be useful is to think about what wage labor really is. Many people, including myself, have dismissed Marx as a product of his time and as a philosopher, but no economist. However, Marx’s real contribution was the theory of surplus labor, which he did not invent but did popularize. New value is created by production and the owner of the factory/workplace skims this off and gives a pittance back to the laborer. This is also an example of leverage. Note that the concept of surplus value is not a concept of surplus capital. We have no surplus capital. It is all being used, thus zero-sum economics. We can destroy it, through emissions for example, and we can create it by converting a natural resource into a human product. Extractive industries, like drilling for fossil fuels, mining, and timber, use up natural resources and don’t put anything back even remotely equivalent to the destruction they cause in extraction. [Putting a 12-inch sapling on a steep slope to compensate for the 100-foot redwood you just cut down is not equivalence in any sense of the word.]

Farming is an extractive industry when you take more out of the soil than you put back. The question is, “How do we measure it so we know the input/output ratio?” Thus the use of calories. As an example, let’s consider making sauerkraut out of cabbage. If the sauerkraut maker increases the energy value of cabbage by his/her input AND the output is higher than the input, it will be sustainable. I find that unlikely. Sauerkraut has value as a food and as a cultural item, but it is not sustainable. Even the sauerkraut industry is dependent on petrol and cheap prices from the farmer. I get $1.00 a pound for my cabbage and there are 5-6 pounds of cabbage in each quart of sauerkraut I make. High-quality sauerkraut in the supermarket retails for about $6.00 a quart. There is a significant amount of shredding involved in making sauerkraut, so if my raw material cost is nearly equal the retail price, there is no compensation for the time and energy used in shredding the cabbage, nor the time for daily skimming and packing the kraut. If on the other hand, the sauerkraut maker does not pay a fair price for the cabbage (say 25 cents per pound), then the farmer is forced to use petroleum energy, economies of scale, and maybe even exploit his/her workers to sell cabbage at a low price.

The same goes for the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. If they start with sustainably produced inputs and their work is completed with mostly manual and animal labor and with any additional energy collected efficiently from current sunlight, they certainly could be sustainable IF their inputs are lower than their outputs. I find this unlikely. The upshot is that value-added products are value-added because they are measured in cultural or economic terms. I like sauerkraut, so I make my own. I add value because I like sauerkraut. Nevertheless, I am adding more energy into making the kraut without adding extra calories. The process of making kraut is entropic. Likewise with every other secondary industry. There is an awful lot of energy use involved in value-added products. The real value of value-added products is getting the farmer to take his/her own commodities and turn them into retail products. Farmers do not get a fair commodity price, so the hope is to get them to add value, thus increasing their original margin through a small amount of increased processing. This still does not address the energy usage however.

The upshot is that virtually EVERYTHING we do is unsustainable. This includes so-called “sustainable” organic farming using tractors. You can measure it easily by using calories and keeping track of how many gallons of gas/diesel you use, add in your human labor, and compare it to your output. As I continue to say over and over again, we are in a transition between the modern and the postmodern business models. What we are using now may not be usable in the postcarbon world, so it is to our advantage to work on sustainability right now.

Farming and extractive industries (which includes industrial ag) are primary industries, manufacturing goods and providing services are secondary industries, and using money to make money (like banking and derivatives) are tertiary industries. Only primary industries create capital, since they use natural resources. Everything else manipulates capital already in the system and draws it down (entropy). Even the human capital that increases the value and the price is based on food energy and draws down the energy already in the system. One of the great fallacies of economics is that we cannot escape the zero-sum that works so well in the secondary and tertiary industries. The win-win situation exists, but you have to be willing to do the sweatin’ and gruntin’ under the merciless sun. This means a primary industry that is sustainable.

Green economics is the same as the “raw materials economics” of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. They were both keen on a nation of farmers. I suggest 20% farmers as our first target. Here’s what Ben Franklin said in “Positions To Be Examined,” dated April 4, 1769.

12. Finally, there seem to be but three Ways for a Nation to acquire Wealth. The first is by War as the Romans did in plundering their conquered Neighbours. This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating. The third by Agriculture the only honest Way; wherein Man receives a real Increase of the Seed thrown into the Ground, in a kind of continual Miracle wrought by the Hand of God in his Favour, as a Reward for his innocent Life, and virtuous Industry.

For the last couple of weeks, I have been blogging back and forth on an energy subject discussion on the Transition Whatcom site. Someone else started the thread and the responses have been quite thought-provoking. If you want to look at the whole discussion, you can go to: http://transitionwhatcom.ning.com/forum/topics/the-economics-of-scarcity?page=1&commentId=2723460%3AComment%3A12383&x=1#2723460Comment12383 Today, I posted a response about Howard Odum, who is a seminal figure in bringing ecological principles to economics. He was a prime influence on Herman Daly, whose ideas on steady-state economics are becoming more and more relevant as mainstream economic ideas continue to swirl around the toilet bowl. Of course, I relate this to my own input/output ideas of measuring sustainable agriculture. Here is the latest post.

The link to Odum has another aspect. Robert Costanza was a Ph.D. student of Odum's at Florida State and did his dissertation on quantifying and modeling energy flows using input/output analysis. Sort of like using a metric (calories) to quantify results in a sustainable model and then comparing fossil fuel agriculture vs. human labor agriculture, isn't it?

Costanza ended up collaborating with Herman Daly for 30 years. Daly's mentor for his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt was Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, whose specialty was teaching thermodynamics to economists. Costanza and Daly started the International Society for Ecological Economics and the journal Ecological Economics. Thus there is a strong foundation in physics (specifically thermodynamics) underpinning steady-state economics. This contrasts markedly with modern economics and its two base paradigms of 1) the rational human and 2) the efficient market. Let's see - physics paradigms vs. philosophy paradigms. I'll take physics.

Let me suggest a two-step process in using capital. First, there is the creation of capital, such as with farming, extraction of oil, felling timber, etc. The next step is zero-sum economics, where the capital is already in the system and you have to get access to it from someone else. Everyone is familiar with zero-sum - we are slammed with it every day. However, if you want to focus on creation of capital as an alternative that you can actually control, the only capital creation that is sustainable is farming - even then there has been a mainstream pattern in the last 60 years of using extracted resources to grow food. However, if I can keep my inputs lower than my outputs, I create sustainable capital. I can use this for whatever reason I choose, and I have been doing so for political purposes for some time. In other words, we can grow a lot of food - as long as it's sustainable (inputs lower than outputs) - and give or sell this food to people who buy into our political views. Don't get me wrong, this is much more nuanced than you might think. I certainly don't require someone to be a "commie pinko" in order to buy potatoes, nor am I advocating such a childish marketing scheme.

However, since you, the producer of new food capital, are voting with your dollar every day either for the mainstream or for viable alternatives, you can also vote with your newly-created food capital. You can just give your food away to the local Food Bank and you are voting for feeding hungry people without a value judgment. You don't have to say anything to anybody. All you have to do is just give the food away to people who need it. Pretty simple, really. Just grow more food and give it away. There is already a program that advocates growing an extra row of vegetables for the hungry. Let's ramp this up a bit. A revolution is not going to happen in the USA and we have all known that for 40 years. However, it is revolutionary to work every day on something positive to feed people.