At Home in Nature

AGATE -- A new Fallowfield Art, Craft and Technology Guild is already planning five contests to assist in recruitment, with cash and other prizes. A fine arts competition using recycled materials, a culinary arts competition using pine needles, a motion picture competition for musicians, actors and other performance artists, an alpaca fiber competition for crafters and a dam designing competition for technological scientists. Contact Aaron Brachfeld at 303-335-9952 or brachfeldbrachfeld-AT-gmail-DOT-com for more information, or for an entry application. 

The FACT Guild is forming as part of the Brachfeld Corp.’s recycling efforts. “We seek to empower local artisans in ensuring that agricultural recycling efforts (which are encouraged by the laws of Colorado) are undertaken tastefully and beautifully,” explained Aaron Brachfeld, President of the Brachfeld Corp. “This way, the walls, pens, and numerous agricultural structures of participating farms and ranches may serve not only the economic and practical needs of agriculture, but serve to inspire greatness within the community. Recycling is a thing which must occur. It is undertaken for the benefit of nature and for the economy of the public which cannot afford fantastic trash bills. Agricultural industry can make better use of most trash than any other industry, transforming waste products into lower food prices, affordable medicine, inexpensive fuel, and quality clothing for the poor. We can no longer afford to throw away the greater part of our wealth and it is fitting that our community’s artists should direct this necessary effort.”

The first meeting of the Guild is scheduled for December 10 at the Brachfeld facility in Agate, Colorado, but a second meeting on December 17 will be held in the Denver area.

You can read more at http://twointents.blogspot.com/2011/11/contest-from-fallowfield-art-craft-and.html

Jethro Tull admired one of his neighbors who, not being able to afford horses or oxen or even a plow, took a shovel to the aisles of his cabbage field.A small field well tilled produces more profit than a large field poorly tilled, and organizing your land - whether it is as small as a patio or as large as several hundred acres - so that you can do your work well is important.This concept was inspirational to Henry Ford, the manufacturer, who made a new “mass production theory.”This theory was quickly applied to farming, through the development of tractors and large feed lots.

However, since Ford, a new “Assembly Line” theory has been developed by leaders such as Edward Demming.One practical application of Assembly Line Theory may be made to the keeping of animals.If animals are looked at as sources of manure for the fields (though they usually contribute more than that to the farm!), you would want to organize your fields to be as close to your pens as possible, organizing pens and fields against the same gate and against the same driveway.Instead of having large pastures and large fields which are easily worked by an expensive tractor designed to easily convey the manure from the pastures to the fields, an alternative is to have numerous small pens (with a handful of animals) and numerous small fields, easily worked by hand.

A further advantage is in disease control.If one pen gets an infection, it will not likely spread to another pen.Because manure may so easily and quickly moved from the pen to the field and turned into the aisles, pens stay cleaner: the same farmer who would need to take a wheel barrow 500 feet will have, in the course of 10 pen cleanings, traveled over 3/4 mile further than a farmer who has to only carry the manure 50 feet, saving 3-5 hours of work, long enough to clean a small pen some 6-10 times.While a farmer may need to make rounds to the animals over further distance, organizing the pens against a driveway in a line reduces this time: feed, water and other provisions are easily provided for along the line, and may even be stocked near to the area of manure production.

Tractors and other equipment are expensive, and while the costs don’t usually outweigh the benefits, the fields may be adapted to facilitate a tractor, with small pens located throughout a field and large connections between fields that can actually be cultivated as well, and if the farmer wishes to drive a truck to care for the animals, a dirt track can be maintained along the line of pens.A disadvantage to the system is that it requires many more hundreds of feet in walls and fences, and numerous more shelters, but if the farmer is using recycled materials, this results in no actual increase in cost and the line may be built easily.

A farm assembly line appears in many respects to resemble numerous microfarms, but coordinated to conserve waste.In most cases, assembly lines are very efficient with labor, so much so that robotics and other mechanization popular with mass production are less efficient than human hands.As Jethro Tull noticed, the cabbage farmer with the shovel was producing superior work and profit, but the shovel was not adapted to a large field.We see today that a city garden is more fruitful than some of the best farmland in the exurbs and rural lands.A farmer needs a large field, but organizing it to accommodate the shovel instead of the plow is smart work.

The system can be scaled back if labor is lacked, and when it is scaled up, a payrolled farm worker or a very used tractor, or an ox and plow may be acquired so that greater revenues are earned from their work than expended upon them.

Alternative crops are sometimes better.  Who would turn down 19 tons of hay per acre, if it were more nutritious than grass, 10% protein, and required almost no care except harvest? 

Think cottonwoods.  They even have high palatability. 

We are using recycled materials to construct windbreaks, animal pens, animal shelters and more!  Check it out on youtube...

 http://youtu.be/-1sV2PKEup8

In farming and ranching, despite the boasts of science and technology against the so-called inconveniences of nature, there remains a lack of confidence in these powerful tools by those whom they were made. A sick animal can be taken into the barn, given antibiotic and medicine, warmed by blankets and even electric heat, and despite these cares, might still die if the veterinarian failed to either diagnose the correct disease or if the microorganism somehow mutated in adaptation. Fields might be worked with extraordinary care employing the most advanced understandings of soil chemistry to prevent disease, but may yet be eaten by deer. A cat might break into the chick brooder. Thieves and vandals may utterly destroy a farm, and perhaps even killing the husband and wife. A thousand things can go wrong.

But usually they don’t. The agricultural insurance agencies offer excellent rates because, due to the advances of technology and science, a crop failure need never happen except under force of God. Nature, at whom our worthy ancestors brandished bloody axes, sacrificed puppies, or in other ways attempted to placate or intimidate, has largely been tamed and so, in thanksgiving a farmer or rancher no longer needs to bestow great attention to the pantheon of minor deities who once mattered so much to their fathers and mothers, but to the single God who empowered them by knowledge and insight to defend themselves and who reserved the humbling trials of total disaster for some future day.

This Thanksgiving, let us contemplate how we would encounter such total disaster. Against thieves and the ravages of war, we have an honorable fight; against disease we have the patient pursuit of medical science; against floods we may build dams and dikes; we may alter the course of rivers, move mountains and, by powers exceeding those the ancient rites we have given up, aspire to even contemplate the magnitude of our blessings from our God, and catch a glimpse of those larger fields we till but a part of and those magnificent pastures into which we, ourselves, with our cattle, are daily led.