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.