Hey Everybody,
I've been rounding up stuff I've written in the past and when I found this,
I figured somebody here might find it interesting. At one point I tried
starting an on-line newsletter about my ideas and attempts at homesteading,
but nobody read it, so it's defunct. Here is the main article from the
first issue. I do have an on-line journal that replaced the newsletter in
part, so further efforst will be publicly documented.
==>paul
A Cheap Lazy Farmer.
by
Paul S. Hetrick
Ledgewood Farm
� 1999
Part I, The Fall From Eden.
Ever since the fist person stuck a seed in the ground so that they would
know where to look for that fruit some time later people have been trying
to figure out how to increase the yield of their crops. The trouble is
increasing the yield compared to what other variable. One might increase
the total yield by planting a larger field, but eventually they either run
out of land or time to maintain these large fields. So they try to increase
the yield per acre. At some point though the benefits from adding more
fertilizer or buying new equipment and machinery or whatever do not produce
enough extra crops to pay for the extra expenses and labor. Most modern
commercial farms don't try to maximize crops anymore. They try to maximize
profit. Cash is their crop and their only fertilizer. Toss money into the
farm and hope you get more money out at the end of the year. I guess in a
capitalistic society that type of 'cash cropping' has to be done at least
to some extent, but it makes no sense for a subsistence farmer to blindly
follow guidelines that others wrote for people who measure crop efficiency
solely as cash-out/cash-input.
I have 50 acres of land. Half of it is flat and I could farm it by almost
any conventional farming method. The other half is a steep-sided hollow
covered in oak and hickory trees with some nice pines here-and-there. My
only real goals for this land are to be able to feed myself and a possible
future family and to raise enough cash to pay my property taxes and maybe
have some spending money. For me at least, increasing the yield per acre
makes little sense. What I need to try to optimize is food-out/labor-in.
The food output is to be maximized in terms of quantity, nutrition and
variety and with proper storage must provide enough food for year-round
consumption. The labor-in includes not just the labor I spend in the fields
and gardens, but also how much time I would have to work (on or off the
farm) to earn cash to buy seed and equipment. A tractor that takes more
than a thousand hours' worth of take-home pay from a 'regular' job but only
saves a few hours of time each month is not a good investment.
Suppose I could feed myself from half an acre of well-tilled ground.
However, I would need to buy, rent or hire a tractor to plow and till that
ground. To get a high enough yield to feed myself off that half-acre, I
would need to keep all of the plants at or near their best yields. That
would mean constant cultivating, weeding, watering, pest management and
other work. This is the way most home gardeners do it. Yet all that tilled
ground between the crops is just laying there waiting for weed seeds to
sprout. By mid-season many gardeners have abandoned such 'normal'
labor-intensive gardens. Many people can work at another job and earn
enough to buy their food with fewer hours of labor than it takes to grow
it. For many people, the extra effort is often enough to keep a garden from
being worth the extra quality and safety of home-grown food. What we need
is an easier way to grow food.
There are a number of alternative ways to grow crops that have answered
some of my questions about the best way to raise food. Here is a quick,
admittedly biased, review of some of them. The abbreviations used are my
own and may differ from 'official' or preferred ones.
The "Square Foot Garden" (SFG) trades off maintaining a large garden, say
weekly, with a small garden that needs almost daily care. It also reduces
the size of the garden needed by moving much of it into your house. It
starts most of the larger plants indoors and transplants them outside later
to mature. So one must maintain two growing areas, but at least the
seedbeds in the livingroom should be weed free. The nearly constant
transplanting and daily care is rather labor intensive, but much of that
counterbalanced by the small size of the actual outdoor garden area. SFG
only deals with raising vegetables for table use and does not address
animals or animal fodder. Although Square-Foot gardeners prefer organic
methods, they tolerate synthetic fertilizers and insecticides within SFG.
Square Foot Gardening relies on bringing nutrients into the
system--preferably compost but perhaps synthetic fertilizers--and
recommends using processed soil amendments such as vermiculite and thus
probably should not be considered sustainable.
"Bioinstensive Gardening" (BIG) uses well-tilled raised beds to grow crops
in sections rather than rows. It too trades land needed for labor per
plant. BIG farming does address one issue that SFG does not and that is
planting part of your growing area in "compost crops" to improve your soil.
I have not yet read any of the books on BIG, but I have read a number of
magazine and Internet articles about it. I also know several people who use
these methods for both home consumption and growing commercial crops. As
far as I know BIG methods only address vegetables for table use and not
animals or animal fodder. Its proponents intend Biointensive Gardening to
be sustainable and that at least implies using organic methods. All of the
people I know who use the BIG methods claim to be totally organic, some are
certified as such.
I have not read any of the books on "Permaculture" (PC) methods, but again
I have sought out and read magazine articles and papers on the Internet.
One thing that bothers me about the examples I have read is that there
seems to be a tendency to bring in bulldozers and other heavy equipment to
reshape the land. This is especially true for managing rainwater in arid
areas and for terracing hillsides. I'm not a "be natural or starve to
death" type, but wholesale changing of terrain is a bit too unnatural for
my tastes. It seems to me that choosing your land and crops better would be
preferable to reshaping the land so you can grow crops that may not be
suitable to the local climate. There is also the time and expense for these
drastic actions that need to be considered. Among the good points of the PC
movement are its preference for using perennials rather than annual crops
and its goal of designing the whole farm in a way that minimizes wasted
effort and energy. Its proponents intend Permaculture to be a sustainable
and organic way of farming. It also looks at the farm and all aspects of
food production as a whole--including animal and animal fodder production.
When I started reading a book on "Biodynamic" (BD) farming methods I
thought I had found somebody who echoed what I felt instinctively. One of
the first things the booked talked about was balancing and minimizing the
nutrients entering and leaving the farm. It (like PC) also talked a lot
about looking at the whole farm as one system and the need to balance
crops, fodder and livestock. The book squashed my enthusiasm when it
started talking about magic potions and other hocus-pocus. Composted manure
is one of the best things you can add to your soil. Few people doubt that.
However, according to the advocates of BD just composting manure isn't
enough. To these huge piles of rotting manure they say you have to add
minute (though expensive if you buy them from the BD folks) quantities of
potions prepared in exacting ways. We're talking about stuffing a bull's
horn with herbs and burying it on a certain phase of the moon, dig it up at
the appropriate moon-phase and stick a tiny amount of this and other
potions in the exactly proper places in the compost heap. Nobody ever gave
any meaningful explanation of why or how this helps. The only proof that it
works that the book gave compared a well manured, hand-tended Biodynamic
farm to a conventional farm down the valley. I've questioned several BD
proponents about the lack of proof that these potions have any effect and
they have all quickly gotten hostile and used "science does not have all
the answers" as their main defense. Science surely does not have all the
answers. However, scientists are quite capable of designing and conducting
an experiment to tell if something has any effect or not--even if they
cannot explain that effect. This voodoo-ish thread that runs through BD
Farming has unfortunately destroyed its proponent's credibility as far as
I'm concerned. They intend Biodynamic Farming to be a sustainable and
organic method of raising all of one's food including animals and their
fodder.
The last method of farming I want to mention before I move on to my own
thoughts is one that is not widely known, but is the closest to my own
ideas. It is "Natural Farming" (NF) and was developed in Japan by Masanobu
Fukuoka. NF is an agronomic interpretation of the Buddhist idea of "Mu" (Wu
or Wu-Wei in Chinese) or nothingness. It is "do nothing farming." No
tilling or plowing, no fertilizer--except to return the straw from the
preceding grain crop and manure, no pruning trees, simply let the crops
grow with as little intervention as possible. This method of farming truly
reduces labor to the bare minimum, ideally broadcasting seeds and
harvesting. Its proponents intend Natural Farming to be a sustainable,
organic way to farm. The book and articles I have read deal mainly with
plant production for vegetables, fruits and grains. However they do give at
least hints as to how one could extend it to include animals and their fodder.
This was just a very quick overview of these methods. I'll talk more about
each and how the compare and contrast to my own ideas in future editions of
this letter.
Part II, Engineering Eden.
Every time I watch a TV show about any of the few remaining groups of
hunter-gathers left on this earth I feel that they are living as close to
being in Eden as possible. Imagine being able to walk through a forest and
pick your day's food. Dart a monkey or net a few fish and there's your
day's meat. We do no service to these people by trying to 'civilize'
them--we are surely the serpent that destroys their Garden of Eden. I've
always envied their life.
In the back of my head I've always wanted to try living like that. The
trouble is I doubt I'll ever leave the USA to live in a tropic wilderness
that it takes to support that lifestyle without migrating over a broad
wilderness that no longer exists here. Over the years I've been forming an
idea: if I cannot find a wilderness that will support me as a
hunter-gatherer can I create one? OK, it will not be quite a wilderness.
However, I can take a plot of land and 'stack the deck' so that it will
support my food needs with little input from me.
As I walk through my land, I see lush, rich growth over almost all of it.
It is as rich as any farmer's field and all unplanted and untended. No
labor, no fertilizer, no planting, no insecticide and little or no
noticeable insect damage, just abundant growth sustaining the wildlife that
lives there. It could go on that way forever without any human 'help'. The
only trouble although there is a wide variety of edible plants growing wild
there, there is not a sufficient quantity and key dietary requirements are
missing.
'Wildflower' seed mixes have become popular over the years. You scatter a
mix of seeds that are appropriate to your region and let the flowers
establish their own mix of perennials and self-seeding annuals. Once
established these flower beds need only minimum care.
Why not do the same for edible plants? They need not be indigenous to the
region, but must come from a climate that is close enough to the local
climate that the plants are either perennial or self-seeding. Commercial
cultivars can be re-bred to go 'feral' and be self-sustaining in a wild
state. All of the plants in cultivation today had wild ancestors, some
still have wild cousins that are easy to find. They did not need plowed,
fertilized, irrigated ground when our own ancestors first found them
useful. Many truly wild plants produce edible foods that mankind has never
domesticated because they do not fit well with traditional cultivation
methods.
I call this synthesized hunter-gatherer grounds an Engineered Eden.
In an Engineered Eden the vast bulk of the labor is in planting seeds and
harvesting. There is no tilling and no weeding. Fertilization is kept to a
minimum and is mostly spreading composted manure and garden waste. As
plants naturalize to the area less and less seed will need to be bought or
harvested each year. The only tools used are common hand tools like shovels
and sickles.
An Engineered Eden is the ultimate in 'sustainable' farming because once
established many of the plants will continue to thrive; with or without any
help from any human. Once established this method is also truly organic,
but I will reserve the right to use commercial fertilizers initially as
remedial curatives for past overuse of the land. If synthetic fertilizers
are used at all though they need to be used wisely and in a manor that the
nutrients are permanently incorporated into the local biomass and not
leached away to where they become a pollutant instead.
Building an Engineered Eden entails building up the soil nutrients so that,
with recycling of all wastes including animal and human manure, the soil
maintains a self-supporting level of richness. It also means coming up with
plant varieties that are well suited to the local soil and climate.
Selecting plant varieties is a two-part program. The first is the initial
selection of commercial or wild-gathered seed stock that is believed to be
suitable. The second part is an ongoing selection process in saving seed
from one year to the next and culling stocks that survived but is
non-productive.
We have bred animals for generations to 'maximize production' but as with
crops we must ask "maximize against what?" The traditional answer to that
question has been production per animal. To meet this goal, have bred
animals to be so obese that they are no longer able to breed without
artificial insemination. We have foul that no longer sit on their eggs or
raise their own chicks so incubators and brooders are a necessity for the
very survival of some breeds. Other animals have been bread so much for
barn production that they are no longer able to even survive in a pasture.
Others cannot safely give birth without assistance due to their
artificially oversized young. All of these things, and many more, may raise
the output per animal but not only are we getting further and further away
from nature we are creating more work for ourselves.
For the small family farm that is trying to be self-sufficient what is
better a small flock of chickens that each lay one egg a day or a larger
flock half-feral bantams? Most commercial layers are almost totally unable
to take care of themselves in any way and must be feed specially-mixed,
high-protean, commercial foods. These layers are also poor fliers and must
be penned against predators. Properly selected bantam stock will look after
themselves and only require enough feed to keep them from wandering off.
Bantams are not only smaller but have had less of their life-supporting
instincts bred out of them. They are good fliers and tend to roost in trees
and other places where predation is less likely. The bantams will produce
smaller eggs and lay less often, but you can easily keep a larger flock
with less labor and expense. They say a bird in hand is worth two in the
bush, but it's so much more work tending a bird in hand! Two small eggs you
simply picked up are worth more than one large one you labored over. Add a
rooster to the flock and let a couple hens set on a nest each year and you
will not have to worry as much about replacement stock and you'll never
need incubators and brooders.
One example that I hope to start soon is rasing rabbits. Most people who
raise rabbits for their own tables do so by keeping each adult rabbit in
its own pen. These pens typically give each rabbit only a few square feet
of wire floor. The rabbits are feed high protein pelletized food and the
young are butchered at 8 to 12 weeks, an age determined by getting the most
meat out for the food in.
Years ago, I talked to a man who raised rabbits in what had been the
foundation of an old barn that had burned down. He had simply blocked off
any exits, planted a wide variety of fodder crops to augment the native
weeds and diverted some water from the neighboring springhouse to a
ground-level channel running through the remains of this barn. He kept an
eye on the rabbits to ensure that the population never grew too large for
the food available, feed them some supplemental feed in the winter and used
a .22 rifle to harvest what he needed. He knew that inbreeding might
eventually cause problems so a new buck was added on occasion. This is
basically the same as the traditional rabbit warrens that were once a
common way to raise rabbits for the table.
Now, what rabbits do you think will have the best tasting, most nutritious
meat. The ones feed the same commercial feed mix every day of their lives
or the ones that get to pick and choose from a variety of growing plants?
What meat is going to have the most sustenance to it and eight week old
bunny that has spent its whole life in a small cage or a rabbit of a more
mature age that has free run over more than a thousand square feet? What
rabbits takes the most time and money to raise?
True it will take the rabbits raised in a rabbit-warren longer to reach
harvesting size and there are some who might initially prefer the milder
flavor and softer texture of an overfed rabbit that has never run. However
the labor, expense and unnaturalness needed to be able to eat a rabbit at
eight weeks are excessive and unnecessary. I also believe that after eating
real meat from half-feral rabbits for a while the caged rabbits would taste
as anemic as they look. I know from eating both cage-raised domestic
rabbits and wild rabbits that I certainly prefer the wild ones.
Since I do not happen to have an old barn foundation I will have to fence
my rabbit warren and this will take more materials and time than building
enough cages. If built properly though, the warren will last the rest of my
lifetime and will quickly pay for itself in the labor and expense that it
saves.
This is the difference between the modern "maximize the production per
animal is the only goal" and a controlled but more natural Engineered Eden
approach.
The Engineered Eden system develops a half-wild, nearly self-sustaining
area that grows both edible plants and animals. Some parts of this approach
are a labor or cost intensives at first, but both labor and cost decrease
dramatically each year until they are almost nothing. The Engineered Eden
approach does trade off yield-per-acre for yield-per-man-hour and savings
in equipment and other costs.
The term 'Engineered' was not chosen lightly. If this idea is to work, it
will need to be approached as methodically and scientifically as any other
experimental biological system. I know it will not happen over night and I
will also be growing more conventional gardens initially for both my own
food and for seeds for the following years.
It's a long term project--one I expect to be working on for the remainder
of my life. I'm going to document it publically for several reasons. The
first is the more people I can convince to try this, in a small way, the
bigger my experiment becomes, and the more likely it is to yield productive
results. However, it is an experimental system I don't encourage people to
invest any more time, money or land into it then they can afford to have
produce nothing. The second reason for documenting it publicly at this
untested stage is the hope I will run into people who have tried similar
ideas in the past. I had not heard of Natural Farming until after my ideas
were pretty well formed, but my ideas have much in common with Natural
Farming--differing mainly in our attitude towards science and its use.
There were people who tried Natural Farming in the late 70's and early 80's
when it was first described. Many failed. I'm sure I would benefit by
talking to these people to learn what worked for them and what did not. The
third reason is that the more people who become interested in this project
the more people I'll have supporting me during the inevitable bleak periods
when my trials fall. I know not everything I try will work. There may be
seasons where little or nothing works. I may need somebody to remind me
that here, at the start of actually trying these ideas, I can see no way
the idea in general cannot work if I use diligence and intelligence.
Imagine the first year that I can feed myself well from land that I no
longer have to plant and labor over. Meals free for the picking. Once I
have established this, I will truly be a cheap lazy farmer.
