Saturday, February 9, 2013

Resilience or death: Preparing our farms for the end of agriculture (…as we know it)


Published May 16 2012 by Energy Bulletin, Archived May 16 2012

Resilience or death: Preparing our farms for the end of agriculture (…as we know it)

by Dan Allen
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“[G]lobal food production is hitting an array of ecological constraints, while population growth and changing diets are driving up demand. …[C]urrent food production is massively subsidised through fossil fuel inputs, and…as those inputs become less available, and people become poorer due to economic contraction, food productivity and access will be undermined. …In totality, we are at the edge of an evolving systemic crisis. Peak oil and food constraints are already undermining the stability of our credit-strained integrated globalised economy. The core pillars of that economy: critical infrastructure, production flows, economies of scale, the financial and monetary system, behavioural adaptation, resource access and energy flows-are likely to begin forcing contagious failure.” – David Korowicz, In the world, at the limits to growth
“…But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. …More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels. If this sounds apocalyptic, it is.” – James Hansen, Game Over for the Climate
“The birds / are waiting to sing in the trees / that will grow in the quiet / that will come when the last / of the dire machines has passed, / burning the world, and the burning / has ceased. / And so am I.” – Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2005 VIII (in Leavings)
SUMMARY: No civilization has ever faced the agricultural challenges confronting us over the coming decades. Ever. And if we can pull it off – wherever we CAN pull it off – it will necessarily be with an agriculture of maximum resilience; an agriculture that can get knocked down and stagger back up again and again and again. So let’s do this.
REFERENCES FOR AGRICULTURAL LIMITS:
I. Energy/economic collapse:
II. Nuclear power-plant accidents and spent-fuel safety:
III. Sociopolitical troubles:
IV. Climate change:
THE FINAL DAYS OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE
Visualize, if you will, rivers of food -- rivers of industrial food flowing from the earth to our US kitchens like water. Massive upwellings of industrial food, coaxed from the abused soils of distant agricultural centers, rushing in great torrents over huge distances. And these great torrents of food now branching off at the great population centers, splitting furiously in the last tiny fraction of their journey to our industrial kitchens – just in time.
All as if by magic.
…But wait, it’s not actually magic! Looking behind the curtains, we can see that there are great, poison-belching fires of ancient sunlight burning day and night to both raise the food and keep these great food rivers flowing.
And now, turning from the roaring fossil-fires and billions of hungry mouths grown dependent on them, we glance over at the great gas tanks of ancient sunlight. …And we gasp. They’re half empty!
…Pessimist!
But the pessimism is justified when we notice, alarmingly, that the gas lines running from the tanks to feed the great fires are beginning to constrict. They are unavoidably and irreversibly constricting. The gas lines that feed the great machines are getting smaller and smaller and smaller…
And as the flow rate of ancient sunlight begins to slow, the flow of industrial food begins to slow with it.
Little by little at first.
Then faster. And faster. And faster and faster. And faster and faster and faster…
And then it stops. …Nothing.
The great rivers of industrial food run dry. Out of gas.
Industrial civilization – the destroyer of worlds – laid low.
And if you’d like a visual here, the flow rate of this great industrial river of food (or industrial anything, really) will probably look pretty much like the gray part of the figure below – the “Net Hubbert Curve.”
…And I don’t think the estimated time-line here is too far off either.
FIGURE 1: THE NET-HUBBERT CURVE – tracking the rise and fall of net energy from petroleum; used in the context of this essay as a rough predictor of industrial agricultural output. Note that a somewhat similar, rapid-collapse, ‘shark-fin’ shape can be found in the ‘food per capita’ curve of the Limits to Growth analysis at Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil.
Source: The Net Hubbert Curve: What Does It Mean?
But wait… Isn’t this net-energy decline argument for the collapse of industrial agriculture a bit too simplistic?
Well, the answer is no -- because exponentially-increasing net fossil-fuel energy is the pin that holds the whole industrial machine together. And as net-energy inputs decline, the machine simply falls apart -- the pieces scattering and losing their integrity. Industrial agriculture will simply be one of those unfortunate pieces. Gone.
Indeed, as David Korowicz writes, “The high dependence of food on fossil fuel inputs, the delocalisation of food sourcing, and lean just-in-time inventories could lead to quickly evolving food insecurity risks even in the most developed countries. At issue is not just food production, but the ability to link surpluses to deficits, collapsed purchasing power, and the ability to monetize transactions.” (Tipping Point: Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production – An Outline Review)
…So there it is. Industrial agriculture, R.I.P. ca. 1945-2025. …Or sooner.
And good riddance to the toxic destroyer, sworn enemy of the ecosphere, final cleaver of the bond between humans and the land.
MAKING OTHER PLANS
But of course, we humans HAVE known other ways to feed ourselves. We HAVE known other ways to produce food without the aid of these unholy pyres of ancient sunlight.
And so I imagine we’ll need to recall those pre-industrial ways back before too long, no? We’ll need to re-visit those authors who have illuminated key ideas and practices of an ecologically-sane agriculture that almost was: F.H. King’s ‘Farmers of Forty Centuries’; Sir Albert Howard’s ‘An Agricultural Testament’; Liberty Hyde Bailey’s ‘The Holy Earth’; J. Russell Smith’s ‘Tree Crops’; Wendell Berry’s poetry, novels, and essays; the collected works of Gene Logsdon, ‘Contrary Farmer’.
And I imagine we’ll need to refine our agricultural philosophies and methods in light of all our new (or rediscovered, really) ecological knowledge. We’ll need to seriously consult, in a very practical way, the great agricultural and ecological thinkers of our time: Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’; Mollison & Holmgren’s ‘Permaculture’; Wes Jackson’s ‘Natural Systems Agriculture’; Derrick Jensen’s ‘Listening to the Land;’ among others.
And I imagine we’ll need to identify, replicate, and refine the thousands of small, ecologically-sane farming experiments already underway in this country – little jewels, often hanging by an economic thread, buffeted by the spastic convulsions of a dying industrialism.
And maybe we should get started with all this before the industrial food cupboard is completely bare, no? …Barack? Can you even hear us?
Cut to dimly lit living room at noon, curtains drawn, soap operas pre-empted by an urgent announcement from our fearless leader: “OK, unemployed database engineers who can’t tell a seed from a Sudafed, and college-educated baristas who wouldn’t know a collard if it clocked them in the head – it’s time to grow yourselves some dinner! …Ready, set…go!”
THE FINAL DAYS OF HUMAN AGRICULTURE?
But even with the many non-industrial agricultural options theoretically open to us, there are still several well-grounded reasons to be pessimistic about the prospects for ANY form US agriculture over the remainder of this century. And here we need not visualize a great fuel-fed river running dry – but merely to look towards the nearest (or even distant) nuclear spent-fuel pools, missile silos, and the +40% CO2-enriched air around your head.
I. NUCLEAR THREATS -- On the nuclear front, our 100+ aging reactors, brimming with unimaginably toxic and combustible spent fuel are literally ticking time bombs. Increasingly-routine disruptions in the electric grid could send them popping off like corks all over the country. Fukushima, USA X 100. Check out the references at the start of this essay. In the interest of space, let me just quote nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson (www.fairewinds.com) here from a recent Radio Ecoshock podcast: “It’s impossible to predict the worst event that Mother Nature or humans, in the form of terrorists, can do to a nuclear power plant. …Nuclear power, when things go wrong…is a technology that can destroy a nation.”
…Because how DOES that cesium-137 taste with fresh, organic kale and free range eggs? Probably a bit metallicky, huh? …Wait…what’s this lump?...
II. THREATS OF WAR -- As for our deadly missiles of war sleeping lightly in their silos…well, we can all imagine how that might play out. Imagine the unimaginable! (The author shudders.) Follow Michael Klare’s work for a front-row seat on the ramped-up nastiness emerging as an armed-to-the-teeth global technological civilization begins to come apart at the seams. (The Energy Wars Heat Up). And as the economy craters and folks get testy, our 160 years of domestic semi-tranquility may indeed be drawing to a close.
…Because how DOES your garden grow when farmers all around you are being reduced to “bug splat” by unseen drones and your crops, such as they are, are harvested by hordes of starving refugees? …Just don’t forget to turn those compost piles!
III. CLIMATE THREATS -- And on the climate change front, spend a long time checking out the following paleo-climate graphs from NASA’s James Hansen. And please note the disturbingly narrow climatic range in which human agriculture has EVER worked – the paper-thin, 10,000-year Holocene period at almost exactly “2 oC” on all three of these graphs.
FIGURE 2: JAMES HANSEN’S PALEO-CLIMATE GRAPHS. Note that the Holocene – 10,000-year-long home of human agriculture – is located in only a very narrow band right around 2 oC on these graphs. The coming departure from Holocene temperatures and climatic stability poses grave challenges to human agriculture.
Source: James Hansen (NASA)
…And note that we are almost certainly moving rapidly away from this excruciatingly narrow climatic window -- as we speak, even. (Follow all the fun at Joe Romm’s climateprogress.org and James’Hansen’s Updating the Climate Science).
Indeed, on the temperature scales of graphs above, we’re headed from 2 oC (the Holocene) to where? To 4 oC? …to 5 oC? …to 6 oC? …to 7 oC? …higher? Hell, early-Cenozoic, here we come!
Biblical droughts, floods, winds, disease, sea-level rise, oh my!
How far away will we have pushed the climate system with our clumsy industrial blundering and the incipient positive-feedbacks?
…And will agriculture even work AT ALL in these brave new climatic regimes?
In response, I quote from the great probabilistic philosopher, Dirty Harry: “You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”
And having now entrusted our agricultural fate to the dubious kindness and violent, schizophrenic mood-swings of an unraveling complex system, we may indeed become just one more species scrambling for survival in the Great Anthropocene Extinction.
SO THEN WHAT DO WE DO, MR. DOOMER-HEAD?
Well…there, I did it. I said the ‘E’-word.
…So having gotten this far, let me summarize: (1) Industrial agriculture has NO chance, even short-term; (3) the transition to an ecologically-sane, post-industrial agriculture will be damn hard -- but is conceivably possible; and (3) even THAT might not be enough -- because human agriculture itself only MAYBE has a chance, long term, due to the gathering nuclear and climatic storms.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us here: (1) We embrace (and hasten?) the collapse of the industrial killing-machine; (2) we apply ourselves to the creation of a resilient, ecologically-sane, land-based agriculture with all our hearts and minds; and (3) we pray to God or gods or Gaia or the Infinite Ether for mercy, for we were as children and knew not what we did.
Sounds like a plan. …I guess.
Well, no use wallowing in self-pity at this point.
Let’s just do it.
RESILIENCE OR DEATH
But let’s be honest with ourselves here: This is gonna be damn hard. It’s gonna take more than just gumption and rah-rah, eco-farming spirit to get through this mess.
We’re going to need a very different and very special agriculture to confront the awesome challenges we’re facing here.
We are going to need an agriculture certainly far different from the absurdly fragile and destructive industrial model – but it will also necessarily be different from just about any agriculture we’ve seen for thousands of years. …Or maybe ever.
Because whatever agriculture we practice in the US in the coming decades, it will face a toxic combination of searing challenges: global economic collapse, intense socio-political destabilization, debilitating nuclear and chemical pollution, and a potentially apocalyptic destabilization of the global climate.
No human civilization has EVER faced, much less survived, this fetid cocktail of shit-storms in our 10,000 year history of growing our own food. …Ever. In fact, civilizations and populations have blinked out in the face of far weaker challenges.
But if we can pull it off – wherever we are ABLE to pull it off -- it will necessarily be with an agriculture of maximum resilience – one that can get knocked down and stagger back up again and again; one that utilizes the overlapping talents and resiliency of countless organisms as a buffer against the blows that will certainly come and come and come and come again; one that takes full and skillful advantage of EVERY food-producing strategy ever utilized by our species.
…Or it won’t be at all.
Resilience or death. That’s our choice.
The cultural selection process will be brutal in the challenging decades to come, and it will hinge almost entirely on whether a given local culture has its agricultural act together – whether its farms are tuned into the new (and constantly shifting) biophysical realities of this planet: And if they are? Advance to the next (wildly uncertain) growing season. And if they aren’t? Thanks for playing, goodbye.
May we all live in interesting times, indeed!
RESILLIENCY ATTRIBUTES
OK, so we’ll almost certainly need an agriculture of ‘maximum resilience.’ But how do we go about designing such an agriculture?
To answer that we would be wise to collectively consult Holmgren’s excellent and comprehensive permaculture design principles -- and really the entire voluminous body of permaculture literature (Chelsea Green). But in the interest of space, I’ll just cut to the chase here and say that we’ll need to adopt a slew of farming strategies – as many as possible – each with complementary resiliencies.
And why? Because when one strategy (or two or three or four) invariably gets laid low, others will be there to take up the slack – at least partially; at least to help us limp over to the next growing season.
To accomplish this, we’ll need to consider both the many kinds of food producing strategies we can employ in any given place, but also what each strategy has going for it in the resiliency sense – its resiliency attributes.
This will necessarily be tackled differently in each region, in each food-shed, and on each farm -- but as an example, here’s a partial analysis I sketched up for some strategies I’m using and/or developing on my farm in central New Jersey.
FIGURE 3: RESILIENCY ATTRIBUTES OF DIFFERENT CROP TYPES ON MY NJ FARM. Each crop type has its own resiliency pros and cons – as does each individual crop within a type, each variety within each crop, and each genetically-distinct individual within a variety. We would do well to utilize as many resiliency profiles as possible at each level to make it through the coming troubles. (For more details, see my essay An agriculture that stands a chance: perennial polyculture & the hard limits of post-carbon farming)
And I think it’s also helpful to consider which of these crop types possess the best resiliency against some of the specific agricultural stresses we can expect. In the chart below I’ve marked with an ‘X’ the two crop types on my farm with the (arguably) best resilencies to each environmental and socio-political stressor. It’s certainly not a comprehensive chart – reality is much messier than this -- but it gives a taste of the sorts of analyses I think will be crucial if we’re able to develop an agriculture that stands a chance for a given farm and region.
For example, annual vegetables have relatively little resilience against drought and floods, but due to the many types available, they offer good resilience against pests and disease – assuming you skillfully take advantage of this diversity. They also offer good resilience against a forced relocation due to their often-short fruiting/bearing times and mobile seeds. …Because it’ll be awfully hard to throw those chestnut trees on your back when the local nuclear power plant blows a gasket and you need to scram for 100 years or so.
FIGURE 4: CROP TYPES WITH THE BEST RESILIENCIES AGAINST SOME POSSIBLE AGRICULTURAL STRESSES IN CENTRAL NJ. The two crops with (arguably) the best resilience against each stress are marked with an ‘X’. Reality will undoubtedly be far messier than this, but the point here is that some crops will do better against some stresses than others. The more variety we have – the broader our resiliency profiles – the better chance we have of getting through each growing season in our increasingly-destabilized socio-political and physical climates.
RINGS OF RESILIENCE
Another factor to consider in designing this uber-resilient agriculture is the scale required by each crop type – i.e. roughly how large of an area should be devoted to each crop.
This scale will be determined by both the productivity of a given crop type in a given location, but also by the labor requirements. For example, I’d have trouble keeping up with five acres of tomatoes vines, but I can easily handle five acres of chestnut trees. The ‘Rings of Resilience’ diagram below illustrates the relative scale of some food/fiber producing strategies open to me on my farm in central NJ and a possibly-reasonable scale for each.
FIGURE 5: “THE RINGS OF RESILIENCE” – Possibly-appropriate scales for several different crop types on a central-NJ farm. Each crop type has its own suite of resilience attributes and strengths, all adding up to an agriculture that might just stand a chance in the challenging era to come. Management intensity requirements decreases outward from the center. (See David Holmgren’s discussion of ‘Principle 7: Design from patterns to details’ in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability for a somewhat similar take on this idea.)
ANNUAL CROPS: (1 acre) Annual veggies, fruits, and grains. These require labor-intensive soil disturbance (at least without access to trucked-in compost/mulch). Shallow-rooted and thus need babying or sacrifice during the ever more frequent and nasty droughts. Require labor-intensive weed management. Grass/clover strips between the veggie rows promote some biodiversity (Misty Acres Farm), but not nearly as much as the perennial strategies that follow. Grains grown in the small-scale Gene Logsdon strip fashion. Small plots of annual veggies & grain can be ridiculously productive with annual manuring (from winter animal bedding) and adequate watering during dry weeks. Very time-sensitive for planting, and requires some skill in seed harvest and saving. Will crash and burn within a few months if you’re forced to take an involuntary leave of absence. …But you can bring seeds with you.
SMALL PERENNIAL CROPS: (2 acres) Perennial cane & bush fruits, perennial vegetables (sunchokes, scorzonera, Chinese yam, groundnuts, etc.), bush nuts (ex: hazelnuts), inherently smaller-sized fruit trees (ex: paw paw), bamboos, and (perhaps someday) The Land Institute’s perennial grains. Species and varieties that don’t need babying. Requires only very infrequent labor-intensive soil disturbance. Much easier weed management. Allows better biodiversity than annuals, but still on the lower side. Fairly productive, requiring less manure & water inputs than annuals, due to more extensive root systems and more robust soil communities. More resistant to drought. Avoids need to save seed annually, as well as the time-sensitive & labor-intensive planting windows. Will persist for about 2-8 years if you need to lay low somewhere else for a spell.
GRAZED PASTURE: (4 acres) Perennial grasses & clovers grazed by ruminants (sheep, goats, and cows) – for meat, milk, wool, and some occasional hay. No difficult soil disturbance required. Relatively easy weed management (two words: include goats). But only so-so above-ground biodiversity due to simple spatial structure -- but soil can support a veritable rainforest of species if not over-grazed. Deep rooted and quite drought resistant – will go dormant, but not die, during a drought. Fairly productive and multipurpose. Will persist for ~10-15 years if you need to skip town – using goats to whip it back to pasture again quickly.
GRAZED ORCHARD: (8 acres) A diverse stand of standard-sized fruit and nut trees set far enough apart for some grazing of grasses & clovers underneath. No soil disturbance or weed management worries at all. Pick hardy species and varieties that don’t need spraying and babying. Good biodiversity -- both above and below ground. Multi-purpose for wood products when trees are pruned (by saw or wind) or need to be replaced. Grazing underneath provides free weed-management and contributes towards raising all the ruminant-based food/fiber products. Very drought resistant – although yield will suffer. Attracts edible wildlife as an added bonus. Will persist for decades if you’re otherwise indisposed. Will feed you if even if you house is torched, all your animals stolen, your veggie seeds lost, and the steely boot of oppression is on your neck.
MANAGED FOREST: (16 acres) Native-type, multi-layered, mixed-deciduous forest with a variety of large trees, understory trees, shrubs, and herbs. Managed with a attentive, humble, and loving eye for selective harvest of wood, wild-plant foraging, and hunting. A sort of slow-motion garden – steered gently over many human generations to a desired species mix, in consultation and partnership with the land itself. Depending on the species, it has good resistance to drought, fire, and many other calamities. The gold standard for both biodiversity and resilience in my region. Both a supplementary and emergency food source. Can persist for centuries if your region is scheduled for a human-timeout.
WILD LANDS: (as much as possible within a few hours walking distance) An anything-goes species mix. Whatever the land feels like growing. Nudged in a desired direction perhaps by hunting and harvest (and maybe the occasional fire), but otherwise too large to be managed. A fall-back food-source for plants and animals when all hell breaks loose. …Back to the stone age! We’ve earned it!
I should note that aquaculture – specifically food production from ponds – is one possible crop type for my farm I haven’t considered here. But that’s just because I haven’t tried it yet. …But I have a pond and an algae-filled pool, so it’s on my ‘to-do’ list. …Only 24 hours in a day. (See Gene Logsdon’s Pond Lovers)
And again, this is just stuff that I’ve been working on so far, where I live. I’m not claiming this can withstand the coming shit-storms. I have no idea. But this is my best shot – the best I can do. It’s going to evolve and expand as I learn more. We just need to do a similar process of learning, testing, and ‘resilifying’ our farms across the entire country – with whatever strategies turn out to work on each particular farm.
So let’s do it.
LESSONS FROM A NEARBY FARM
But CAN we do it?
Being brutally honest with ourselves, I suppose we need to acknowledge that this ‘future of human agriculture’ stuff is, at best, a pretty mixed bag -- scary yet tentatively promising, discouraging yet cautiously-hopeful, overwhelming yet oddly-invigorating.
The creation of a new and lasting agriculture in the face of all the trouble screamin’ down on us is a monumental task. …But we have no choice. It’s resilience or death at this point.
And this is not a task that will be accomplished via grand, general policies and green-flowery language sent down from on-high; it will be undertaken farm by farm, field by field, by millions and millions of recovering industriaholics reacquainting themselves with the land, reacquainting themselves with the countless organisms they’ve tried for so long to ignore, avoid, and kill.
It’ll be easy for these millions of new farmers to get lost in the details, uncertainty, and heartbreaks along the way – to start running down the wrong road just because it’s the only one we can see down at the moment.
So maybe to close here, we should pull back and put all this in perspective a bit.
Come over here and look at this…
I’ve spent some time lately watching ants farm some aphids on a three-foot tall dock plant growing from the foundation of my garage. As I surmise (perhaps only half-correctly), the ants brought the aphids to the plant, protected them to adulthood, and now ‘milk’ them of their sugary secretions as the aphids graze on nutrient rich fluids in the dock. It’s a scene of serene bucolic contentment, hard against the weathered boards, cinders, and garbage cans of my garage.
And on the surrounding land, I farm as well. I grow vegetables, tend an orchard, care for a growing perennial-food-crop nursery, raise chickens and sheep, and work to integrate my farm into the local human and natural communities.
But these ants are the true masters here. For while their actions are perhaps more genetically hard-wired than my farming practices, I would argue that their farming is also far, far more experienced, better adapted, more sustainable, and more resilient than mine. It’s not even close.
And I could easily ruin their little farm next to my garage. One careless swipe of a stick would do it.
But they’d be OK, I suppose. They’d maybe gather their aphids, traipse back to the nest, locate some other promising dock plant, and cobble together a new aphid-milking operation. Or maybe they’d try their hand at some other ant-related agricultural enterprise. I don’t know enough about them to say.
But seeing as how they’re already thriving amidst the ecological train-wreck of my driveway and out-buildings, I bet they’ll get by. Or at least their colony will. Or at least their species.
But I don’t know if I could say the same about my farm, about my community, about my species.
…Maybe I better go back and watch them a bit longer.
…I’ll pull up a chair for you too.
We’ve all got a lot to learn.
Editorial Notes
From the author: I'm a high school chemistry teacher in NJ. I'm also a concerned father, organic farmer, and community garden organizer.
You can contact me at danallen1968@yahoo.com.
Other posts by Dan Allen at Energy Bulletin: http://www.energybulletin.net/authors/Dan+Allen
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An agriculture that stands a chance: perennial polyculture & the hard limits of post-carbon farming


Published Dec 13 2010 by Energy Bulletin, Archived Dec 13 2010

An agriculture that stands a chance: perennial polyculture & the hard limits of post-carbon farming

by Dan Allen
“The American food system rests on an unstable foundation of massive fossil fuel inputs. It must be reinvented in the face of declining fuel stocks.”
-- Richard Heinberg and Michael Bomford, ‘The Food and Farming Transition‘ (http://www.postcarbon.org/report/41306-the-food-and-farming-transition-t...)
“The United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades. ...[W]arming temperatures associated with climate change will likely create increasingly dry conditions across much of the globe in the next 30 years, possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been observed in modern times.”
-- NCAR report, quoted by Joe Romm athttp://climateprogress.org/2010/10/20/ncar-daidrought-under-global-warmi...
“If you're looking at how daunting a task is, you're looking at the wrong side of the equation and you will find the things that will limit you and prevent you from succeeding. Put roots in the ground. Grow your food. Build your shelter. Create a Permaculture enterprise and provide real Permaculture goods and services, then link up with others that are doing complimentary things. This is the way we will create a new culture and economy.”
—Mark Shepherd, farmer (http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-11-12/mark-shepherds-106-acre...)

Summary

Our fate as a nation in the post-carbon era hinges, to a great extent, on the fate of our agriculture. Unfortunately, US agriculture faces a slew of constricting limits (energetic, climatic, material, etc.) that gravely threaten the continued viability of our current annual-monoculture-based model. An alternative agricultural model based on polycultures of perennial crops will likely be more than just a ‘good idea’ in the coming post-carbon era – it’ll be a damn NECESSITY. So grab your shovels, America -- it’s time to begin the transition to an agriculture that stands a chance.

Note on References

For those of you who are taken aback or unbelieving of the ‘doomish’ warnings I’ll be slinging about in the first part of this essay, check out the following sources for background:
  1. Food & Agriculture: search archived food & agriculture posts on www.energybulletin.net andhttp://e360.yale.edu/; see also books by Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Sharon Astyk, and Lester Brown;
  2. Energy & Economy: search www.energybulletin.net, www.theoildrum.com, andwww.chrismartenson.com; as well as Richard Heinberg’s ‘Blackout’, ‘Peak Everything’, and ‘The Party’s Over’;
  3. Climate Change: See daily updates & archived climate-science posts athttp://climateprogress.org/category/science/; explore ALL the links on James Hansen’s website at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/; search http://e360.yale.edu/; and see books on climate change by James Hansen, David Archer, Joe Romm, and Fred Pearce.

Your Food System = House of Cards

I have some bad news: If you’re not at least ‘deeply disturbed’ about the prospects for US agricultural in the 21st century, you’re not paying nearly close enough attention to the trajectory of biophysical reality in this country.
Because despite the bountiful yields of food and fiber we currently extract from our soils, trouble looms really big and really scary in the coming decades for US agriculture. And I don’t mean just ‘fewer selections of canned soup’ in the local Stop-N-Shop; I mean NO soup in the Stop-N-Shop. Maybe no Stop-N-Shop. Maybe no shopping, period. I mean hunger. Maybe famine. Here. Soon. Perhaps of ‘biblical proportions’.
Huh? Doth he exaggerate? Coming troubles in the land of the ‘heaping corn mountains’? Food shortages in the republic of super-markets and super-sized bellies? These seeming incongruities are resolved if we acknowledge the scary truth about US agriculture: it’s about as fragile in its current fossil-fuel-dependent, annual-monoculture form as a trembling house of cards.
Examined closely, our current, record-breaking, industrial-agricultural yields are dependent on a tenuous combination of EACH of the following ‘pillars’: (1) OIL & GAS: cheap fossil energy for making nitrogen-fertilizer, mining phosphate, running farm machinery, transporting food, and maintaining a functioning growth-dependent economy where credit is available, (2) LAND & SOIL: ample acreage of currently-productive soils (threatened now by erosion, salinization, sea-level rise, and incipient shortages of key nutrients), (3) WATER: ample irrigation water from snowmelt and groundwater-aquifers, and (4) CLIMATE: a climate that is still passably stable, without too many severe droughts, storms, or temperature extremes.
My doomish leanings with regard to our current industrial food system derive primarily from the following two facts: (1) The failure of ANY ONE of the above four ‘pillars’ will bring our food system to its knees. This, of course, is the result of our food system being structured (as most industrial systems are) to maximize efficiency at the expense of robustness and resiliency. In other words, our sleek, streamlined, modern food system adheres to ‘Liebig’s Law of the Minimum’ – it only works as well as its weakest link. (2) One or more of these pillars will almost certainly disintegrate at some point in the next few years or decades over a large portion of the food-producing US. Of course, this disintegration is already under way -- all four of these pillars are eroding rapidly as we speak (literally & figuratively; see references above). And all four are highly vulnerable to a rapid ‘phase change’ in the near future – this decade, perhaps.
In short, you SHOULD be disturbed by our agricultural prospects – DEEPLY disturbed. Our industrial agricultural system is about to stop working. The house of cards that provides your food is trembling…swaying…ominously, while darkening skies and a skittering armada of little dust devils presage one helluva storm about to kick up.

Portrait of the Food System as a Young Catastrophe

So with industrial agriculture about to slam head-long into a score of biophysical limits all at once, plausible scenarios for epic failure of our food system in the next few decades are numerous indeed. But before I go into recommendations for an agricultural system that might actually stand a chance in the coming era of rapidly constricting limits, I’d like to briefly outline the most likely general scenario for the failure of our current industrial food system in the US.
I think we can neatly summarize the coming demise of our current agricultural model as a lethal one-two punch from the following executioners: peak oil and climate change. As discussed above, either one of these factors BY ITSELF would spell disaster for our food security under the current industrial model. But guess what? We’re getting BOTH at the same time. Interesting times indeed! (We are truly blessed in that sense, no?)
As presented in chilling detail at the 2010 ASPO conference, we have a few years (at the most, and probably less) before fossil energy that is both cheap and abundant is permanently a thing of the past. And even before that happens, our current growth-dependent economy is very likely to implode as it becomes increasingly starved of its key growth-enabling ‘nutrient’ -- cheap fossil energy. During such an economic implosion, much of the fragile logistical and energetic infrastructure on which our current industrial food system depends would very quickly evaporate.
Because, really, how are we going to run the tractors, combines, and food-delivery trucks on their necessarily-tight industrial schedules when fossil fuel supplies suddenly become undependable or outrageously expensive? The answer: We’ll have trouble. Supply lines will break down. Crops won’t get planted here and there (or everywhere) for lack of credit or lack of fuel. And all this would then very quickly translate into localized or national shortages of cheap food – and possibly even shortages of food at any price. There will be hunger and want in many an unfortunate region in the US. People will get cranky. People will lose their manners. People will lose their lives.
And while the government/military will likely assume control of the foundering industrial-agriculture ship in short-order, given the time-sensitive nature of most agriculture manipulations, it seems highly unlikely that severe food-supply ‘discontinuities’ could be avoided unless a crack emergency plan was ready and waiting to be implemented by the present government. But as Chris Martenson and Rick Munroe have discussed recently, there does not seem to be such a plan. (http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/future-chaos-there-no-plan-b/46331)
So, with apologies to the National Beef Council: hunger, want, anger, and violence – it’s what’s for supper!

Evolution of a Food Catastrophe

Unfortunately, looking even longer term, past the initial chaotic food shortages and socio-political upheaval, the picture doesn’t get any prettier. In fact, it becomes horrifying.
Our current industrial food system in the US is just not designed to produce food with limited energetic and material inputs. Like the industrial economy as a whole, it just doesn’t DO limits. And hard, constricting limits on these inputs will not only be a hallmark of the initial economic convulsions -- they will continue indefinitely into our Greer/Kunstler-illuminated future. There will be no energetic or economic recovery of our industrial economic system – no respite from these ever-constricting limits.
So then, what sort of industrial-agricultural yield trends might we expect in grain and vegetable-producing regions of the US with vastly-restricted N/P-fertilizer inputs that will surely accompany our energetic and economic difficulties? The answer: crap. And the next year: less than crap. And the next year…etc.
And this, of course, sets up the killing blow to our now-reeling agricultural system: climate change. For we have, through our knowing corruption of the atmosphere, already earned centuries of increasingly destabilized climatic conditions across our continent. We can almost certainly expect a dramatic increase in crippling droughts, destructive/flooding storms and hurricanes, farmland-destroying sea-level rise, and killing temperature extremes of both destructive magnitude and unexpected timing. (Oh, and did I mention the oceans are dying? i.e. There goes ‘Plan B.’)
Furthermore, evidence suggests that ‘slow’ positive feedbacks (melting sea ice, ice sheet decay, methane degassing from tundra and polar oceans, etc) are ALREADY kicking in. The repercussions of these feedbacks may push the climate system towards the ultra-deadly upper-end of current climate change projections within this century -- the ones heretofore largely based on suspect fossil fuel reserves. Tipping points may well be close at hand – in fact, they may have already been passed. Every second the CO2-belching industrial experiment continues diminishes our future and edges us closer to disaster. It is a VERY scary picture indeed that is revealing itself in climate-science-land. Horrifying, in fact. (See climate references above.)
So in light of these still-evolving climate change realities then, we are forced to ask ourselves the following questions: What sort of yields will we get in corn, bean, & wheat country (and vegetable country) when beset by the crippling ‘biblical’ droughts that are expected? The answer: crap. And what sort of yields will we get in the currently-productive irrigated regions (presently watered with depleting fossil aquifers and endangered mountain snow-packs) when the water is no longer flowing? The answer: virtually none. And what sort of yields will we get when freakishly-intense storms, ill-timed ‘weird weather’ temperatures, and climate-change-induced pest outbreaks attack our vast industrial monocultures? The answer: Well…you get an agriculture that increasingly resembles Russian roulette.
Now combine all this climate-related mischief with the coming energetic, material, and economic limitations from peak oil discussed previously. What kinds of yields might one expect then? Seriously, what would you get then, as we move into the middle decades of this century? With all these increasingly-likely depredations conspiring against our fragile industrial food system, what would you get? Would you get ANYTHING? (Note: A chilling shudder around the shoulder area and a pensive gaze out the window would be appropriate here.)
And so it goes. Because the bleak future of our current industrial agricultural system --pummeled as it will be by energetic/material shortages and climatic disturbances -- is ALREADY dialed-in. The fossil-energy and climate situations described above are, at this late date, no longer ‘problems’ to be solved with technological or social cleverness, but rather ‘predicaments’ to be adapted to as they inevitably unfold and degenerate. We have dallied too long at the ball, and the carriage is already turning back into a pumpkin -- no matter how skillfully we argue that it cannot possibly do so.
So, note to country: Our current food system is ALREADY condemned. It will fail in its current form, significantly or entirely. Guaranteed. And probably pretty soon – within the next several decades. And maybe very soon – perhaps within THIS decade. As such, it must be replaced as soon as possible with an agriculture that conforms to the new biophysical realities confronting us.
Simply put, it must be replaced with an agriculture that stands a chance.

The Trouble with Annual Monocultures

But what might such a replacement agricultural system look like? And really, is agriculture even POSSIBLE under such dire biophysical limitations? To answer this, we must first examine the foundation of our current industrial system in a little more detail -- and with an ecologically-trained eye, at that. (Note: See Wes Jackson’s “New Roots for Agriculture” for a full discussion of this.)
Current industrial US agriculture is based primarily on ANNUAL crops – plants that must be planted anew every year from seed. The annual trait introduces several problems that have plagued agriculture since its inception, but which have taken on new and ominous dimensions as the ever-more-crowded industrial era draws to an end:
  1. Soil loss and degradation: Annual replanting requires soil disturbances multiple times every year, resulting in erosion, oxidation of vital soil organic matter, and leaching of nutrients. Without careful amendments, such disturbances beget a steady lessening of productivity and a decreased resilience to stress.
  2. Energy input requirements: All these soil-massaging manipulations necessitate significant energy inputs to power the fleets of tractors and combines. Of course, this energy input today is handled by fossil fuels; formerly it was accomplished through draft animal and slaves; in the future we’ll all likely need to contribute. But whatever the source, the energy requirements of annual agriculture are prodigious.
  3. Inefficient nutrient & water utilization: The relatively poorly-developed root systems of these annually-grown plants prevent efficient utilization of water and soil nutrients. Also, any potential assistance from mycorrhizal fungi are minimized (or prevented entirely) by the constant disturbances involved in annual cultivation. Furthermore, disturbed soil captures and holds significantly less water than soil that is not disturbed annually. Considerable quantities of desperately needed water and nutrients have and will increasingly continue to be lost by the relatively feeble root systems of annual crops.
In the drought-stricken, fertilizer-limited agricultural era to come, these screaming limitations of annual crops are simply a recipe for famine.
But that’s not all! Our current industrial agricultural regime is also based on MONOCULTURES of these annual plants – large fields of just a single type of crop, and usually a very genetically-similar representation of that crop at that. This genetic homogeneity presents several significant problems in the coming energy-starved, climate-destabilized era:
  1. Pest vulnerability: Monocultures are notoriously susceptible to devastating pest outbreaks. And such outbreaks will not only be intensified in a destabilized climate, our energy-limitations would prevent us from controlling them in the familiar energy-intensive manner.
  2. Inefficient nutrient & water utilization: Each plant in a monoculture competes perfectly with every other plant -- and thus rapidly depletes a single region of the soil profile of both water and the suite of nutrients favored by that crop.
  3. Increased vulnerability to weird weather: Weird or extreme weather very rarely knock out multiple types of crops in a single field. But in a monoculture, there is a good chance of losing an entire gigantic crop from just a single (increasingly common) weird-weather event – rather than just one crop out of many.
Now combine the limitations of monoculture crops with the drawbacks of annual crops, and you quickly realize that relying on an agriculture of annual monocultures to get us through the coming energetic, economic and climatic limitations is simply suicide.
We flat-out need to find a better way.

Perennial Polyculture Rising

OK, so we’ve established two things so far: (1) trouble’s a-comin’ in the form of severe energy limitations, economic collapse, material-input-limitations, and climatic destabilization, and (2) that our current agriculture based on annual monocultures is just not gonna cut it.
But knowing these uncomfortable truths brings up a host of difficult questions: Like, what then do we DO about it? Is there anything we CAN do? Because how do we “fix” an agricultural model that is almost 100% at odds with the constricting demands of biophysical reality in this country?
Well, a possible solution is already taking shape in various forms around the country – albeit at a much smaller scale and growth rate than we need. And while this new agricultural ‘movement’ has no official unifying name at the moment, all the strategies rely on POLYCULTURES of PERENNIAL crops. This strategy, of course, is the polar opposite of our current annual monoculture-based system. And, as we’ll discuss shortly, it just might work for the exact same reasons our current system will fail.
You can find these various efforts presently under names like Natural Systems Agriculture, Permaculture, Forest Gardening, Mixed-species Organic Orcharding, Holistic Pasture Management, and The Land Institute’s perennial grain program. But again, all these diverse strategies involve efforts to fashion a food system based on polycultures of perennial crops. As such, we can perhaps lump them all together under the name ‘Perennial Polyculture.’ And note that none of these strategies are really ‘new’ – they’ve just been increasingly marginalized and neglected throughout our species’ unfortunate 10,000-year infatuation with the short-term benefits of annual monocultures.

Advantages of Perennial Polyculture

OK, so why, specifically, might this ‘new’ perennial polyculture strategy work – or at least give us a fighting chance in the challenging times ahead?
First let’s look at the ‘perennial’ aspect – i.e. the ability of these crops to survive multiple years -- sometimes decades, sometimes centuries -- without replanting. The Land Institute’s Jerry Glover summed up the advantages of perennial crops nicely in a June 2010 article in the journal Science entitled “Increased Food and Ecosystem Security via Perennial Grains.” In it, he wrote: “Compared with annual counterparts, perennial crops tend to have longer growing seasons and deeper rooting depths, and they intercept, retain, and utilize more precipitation. Longer photosynthetic seasons resulting from earlier canopy development and longer green leaf duration increase seasonal light interception efficiencies, an important factor in plant productivity. Greater root mass reduces erosion risks and maintains more soil carbon compared with annual crops. Annual grain crops can lose five times as much water and 35 times as much nitrate as perennial crops. Perennial crops require fewer passes of farm equipment and less fertilizer and herbicide, important attributes in regions most needing agricultural advancement.” (http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/SEC/Publications%3E%3EScien...)
And now consider the ‘polyculture’ aspect – which we can define as the planting of a diverse mixture of crops in the same field, as well as the presence of a diverse genetic make-up within each individual crop. This multi-level diversity presents a host of advantages that mirror the disadvantages of monocultures discussed previously. Namely, polycultures would offer (1) a decreased likelihood of and vulnerability to pest outbreaks, (2) a more efficient holding and utilization of both water and soil nutrients, and (3) a decreased risk to catastrophic crop failure from weird weather events.
In short, both the ‘perennial’ and ‘polyculture’ aspects of this ‘new’ agriculture lend themselves well to the daunting biophysical challenges bearing down on us. And facing these challenges honestly, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the rapid and extensive deployment of an agriculture based on perennial polyculture is probably our only hope for reliably feeding ourselves in the decades ahead.

The Four Smiling Faces of Perennial Polyculture

OK, now that we’ve sung the praises of perennial polyculture, I think it’ll be helpful here to lay out the four main types of ‘perennial polyculture’ agriculture currently being practiced (or developed) in the US. I do this, of course, not to say that a given farm-of-the-future needs to pick just one type, but just to point out the key features of each.
As mentioned above, none of these perennial polyculture forms of agriculture are new, nor are they completely absent from our current agricultural mix in the US. But since none of them fits nicely into the current industrial model, they have been either (1) relegated to niche status by the subsidy-distorted market, (2) co-opted and debased to fit the industrial model, or, especially in the case of still-developing perennial grains, (3) denied their rightful share of national funding for research and development.
So here they are, the four smiling faces of perennial polyculture:
  1. Holistically-Managed Pasture: These are the good, old-fashioned pastures of perennial grasses and clovers for the grazing of (and fertilization by) ruminants (sheep, goats, and cows) -- but managed in a more ecologically-informed manner than has been practiced for much of our nation’s history. Such enlightened management considers both the needs of the plants and the animals, as well as the needs of the surrounding people and ecosystems. For a good, accessible introduction to this art form, see Gene Logsdon’s “All Flesh Is Grass.” See also Joel Salatin’s Virginia farm as featured in the movie ‘Food Inc.’ or any of his wonderful books. For a more hard-core version of this method of managed grazing, see books by Allan Savory and Andre Voisin. I should note here that much of the ecological devastation of modern animal ‘farming’ has been due to its debasement in conforming to the industrial model. But the raising of animals needn’t be immoral or ecologically destructive, and, if limited in scale and managed skillfully, can allow the farm to fit comfortably and beneficially within the surrounding ecosystems.

  2. Mixed Fruit & Nut Orchards: Here I refer to another seeming relic from days-gone-by – the organically-managed, low-input, mixed fruit and nut orchard. And while this tree-crop form of agriculture has been just as debased by the industrial model as livestock raising, it need not be the chemical-soaked, fertilizer-guzzling, soil-eroding, ultra-fragile abomination it is today. Why? There are multiple species of fruit and nut trees in any given region of the US that produce reasonably or even exceptionally well with zero chemical inputs. Moreover, there are varieties with each of these suitable species that perform better than others on a given year or in a given soil type. If these are identified, and planted on a sufficiently-large scale in an ecologically-informed manner, they can make a VERY significant contribution to our food supply. A good theoretical foundation for this form of agriculture can be found in the extensive permaculture literature, including “Edible Forest Gardens” by Jacke & Toensmeier. See also “Tree Crops” by J. Russell Smith (originally published in 1939, and now with an introduction by Wendell Berry). For a good real-life example of what I’m talking about, check out the recent article describing Mark Shepherd’s incredible Wisconsin farm at http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-11-12/mark-shepherds-106-acre.... I should say, on a personal note, that reading the above piece about Shepherd’s Wisconsin farm was almost a religious experience for me, and will probably (hopefully) define much of the remainder of my work here on Earth.

  3. Perennial Vegetables, Berries, and Cane-Fruits: Huh? Perennial vegetables? But most people are already familiar with at least some of these already: asparagus, rhubarb, artichokes, horseradish, and sunchokes come to mind. There are, however, many other species of perennial vegetables that might be developed into big contributors to our future food mix. Check out Eric Toensmeier’s utterly fantastic book, “Perennial Vegetables” for a number of examples suitable for different US regions. And as Toensmeier points out, the much-needed development and breeding of these vegetables can be accomplished by you and me – testing out and improving different species and varieties, and finding ways to incorporate them into our traditionally-annual veggie gardens and truck-farms. Berries and cane-fruits, of course, should be part of any vegetable operation, and many wonderful books detail their low-input rearing and uses.

  4. Perennial Grains: This is the only one of the four ‘pillars’ of perennial polyculture that is not yet ready to be deployed. It also would have, arguably, the largest impact of the four strategies, if successful. Wes Jackson’s The Land Institute (Kansas) has been working for decades on developing a mixture of perennial grains that can be planted in the same field and harvested together. Given that almost all grain production currently comes from annuals (corn, wheat, rice, soybeans), an extensive breeding program is being undertaken by The Land Institute (and others) to develop the new perennial grains that would work in such a system. This involves both perennializing annual grains and domesticating existing perennial grains. Check out ALL the literature available at their website (http://www.landinstitute.org/), which includes books, scholarly papers, and articles. Also get a hold of ALL Wes Jackson’s books, including (and especially) his seminal 1980 book “New Roots for Agriculture.” And one final note here: While The Land Institute’s perennial grain program is probably the most important scientific project on Earth, it probably gets less national funding than the stretch of highway that runs through my town. …Priorities, priorities.

We Must Do This Ourselves

All right, lets take stock of what this rather long essay has attempted to accomplish so far: (1) establish that our current annual-monoculture-based industrial agricultural system has no future and is in danger of imminent collapse, (2) outline both the inherent ecological drawbacks of annual monocultures, and the corresponding virtues of perennial polycultures, and (3) give examples of (and references for) the four promising specific applications of perennial polyculture that can be implemented in this country.
So what’s left? Well...we just need to frickin’ DO it!
Now look, I was as cautiously-hopeful (shamefully-delusional) as anyone that Obama would somehow rise above the miasma of corporate toxicity in our nation’s time of need; that he would attempt to fix an obviously-broken food system headed for disaster; that he would channel his inner Jimmy Carter and tell us the damn truth. But he hasn’t. And he won’t. And I think it’s just a flat-out waste of time and energy to pretend, at this late hour, that ANYONE up top will ever get a clue.
So sure, it’d be great if the US Government wasn’t infected by a terminal case of corporatus suicidalis. And it’d be fantastic US Department of Agriculture was guided by thinking human beings who were serious and knowledgeable about agriculture and its tenuous ecological underpinnings. And it’d be super if the US citizenry were informed enough to recognize the dangerous insanity of our food system and demand a change. But sadly, none of these are true, nor will they ever become true in time to avert the coming food catastrophe in this country.
So then what can we DO about that? We do the only thing we CAN do: we do it OURSELVES. We call up our neighbors, lace up our boots, grab some shovels from the shed, load the seedlings into the wheelbarrow, and start building a sane fricking food system all by our damn selves. We say “f*%k off” to these ‘leaders’ whose short-sightedness and greed would doom our children and grandchildren to hunger and misery, and we get down to some good work -- some work that just might make a difference. That’s what we do.
We rebuild our local food systems OURSELVES, at the individual and community level, as best as we can in whatever time we have available. THAT’S what we do.

Building Our Knowledge, Gathering Our Tools, and Honing Our Skills

Now, I suppose if I’m turning you all out into your lawns and fields to build this new food system, you might want me to supply a few specifics, huh? OK, here’s a brief outline on what we need to get going. And note that you can begin TODAY -- in whatever season you happen to be reading this. For clarity, I’ll divide the necessary tasks into three categories: building our knowledge, gathering our tools, and honing our skills.
  1. Building Our Knowldedge: Learn the basics of soils and ecology. Internalize both Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic (“A Sand County Almanac”), and Holmgren’s permaculture principles (“Permaculture: Principles and Pathways”). Read every book by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Gene Logsdon. Learn the natural histories of the perennial species of tree, shrub, vine, cane, vegetable, and grain we’ll be employing, as well as their means of propagation (Toogood’s “Plant Propagation”). Learn the art of permaculture landscape design (Mollison & Holmgren). Read-up on how to keep a couple sheep, goats, and chickens -- and maybe a cow, if you have the room.

  2. Gathering Our Tools: Get your hands on as many varieties of as many species of food-producing perennials as you can -- trees, shrubs, veggies, etc. (ex: Seehttp://empirechestnut.com/, http://www.forestag.com/, and the ‘fedco trees’ division athttp://fedcoseeds.com/, and http://millernurseries.com/). Plant them anywhere you can. These will be the genetic stock of the new perennial agriculture that you and your community will create. Construct a little plant propagation ‘lab’ in the corner of your house, garage, or lawn. Stock it with whatever you might need (see Toogood’s “Plant Propagation”). Get some good picks and shovels. Get some materials to protect your trees until they’re above deer-level (http://www.forestag.com/). Try to find other like-minded people in your community -- you’ll need both their help and their moral support. Find some good low-input breeds of sheep or goats & get a breeding pair for your back yard.

  3. Honing Our Skills: Practice propagating the various perennials you’ve collected. Start distributing them around your property and anywhere else anybody will let you plant them. Watch them closely & note which work best for you. Practice selecting and breeding for traits you want. Try to get as many people as you can to plant perennial food species in your community -- work on your techniques of ‘gentle persuasion’. Experiment with storage of your bounty -- root cellars, rodent-proof boxes. Pay attention to your animals and your pasture.
OK...Got all that? Hey, but even if you don’t have EVERYTHING yet, it doesn’t matter -- it’s OK to ‘wing it’. Just keep the trajectory moving forward. Plant a couple food trees this spring, and then even more in the fall…and then even MORE the next Spring.
And call me crazy, but all this learning, planting, observing, and community organizing actually sounds like a heap-load of fun to me. i.e. This stuff doesn’t need to be grim or oppressive – it can be a CELEBRATION if you make it so. And even if this stuff ISN’T your cup of tea, you can still help: consider letting somebody else plant stuff on your property, lend some tools or funds to a community effort, pass this message on to somebody who might be interested.
So let’s get this ball of perennial polyculture goodness rolling! Good luck!!!!!
From the author: "I'm a high school Chemistry teacher in NJ. I'm also a concerned father, organic farmer, and community garden organizer.
You can contact me at danallen1968@yahoo.com.
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Sunday, January 20, 2013

The Return of Agent Orange?

Sign the petition to stop #AgentOrange #GMOs: Within a week, the #USDA could approve #Dow’s new “Enlist” brand #corn, genetically engineered to resist massive doses of the herbicide 2,4-D http://tiny.cc/uoaxow This is suicidal.

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Thursday, January 10, 2013

My FB posts from the Permaculture Activist group

See these and much more at https://www.facebook.com/groups/PermacultureActivist/
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‎"A study in Cincinnati finds that young people prosecuted for delinquency are four times more likely than the general population to have high levels of lead in their bones." Hmmmm.

The Grime Behind the Crime

Poisoned Planet: Doubling of Ocean Mercury Levels Threatens Global Health

Lead and Crime: Assessing the Evidence

Does Lead Paint Produce More Crime Too?
"Just One Lick": The Hidden Lead That Could Sicken Your Kids_________________________________________


Fracking the Amish | OnEarth MagazineA bleak December sky hangs low over rural Lawrence County, Pennsylvania. Here, in areas populated by large Amish families, open fields roll toward the horizon uninterrupted by electrical wires and telephone poles. Stepping from a car that seems grossly out of place in this 19th century landscape, Ca...
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The FDA Is Out to Lunch | OnEarth Magazinewww.onearth.org
All of his life, Paul Schwarz had been active and healthy. When his family imagined the various ways the decorated veteran of World War II might eventually die, they never...
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Restoration Agriculture at the University of Illinois via ASAP Illinois :: Department of Natural Res
nres.illinois.edu
This spring students at the University of Illinois initiated a study of permaculture design at the Sustainable Student Farm on the South Farms of the Urbana, Illinois Campus. The study is called Restoration Agriculture, and the goal of the project is to compare the production of traditional corn and...
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Of the 1,236 documented "community gardens," recognized by various groups throughout the city [Chicago], it turned out only 160 – or 13 percent – were really growing food (according to aerial images from June of 2010). But trolling over the city, frame by frame on Google Earth, Taylor found what looked like 4,494 possible sites of urban agriculture, many of which appeared to be small residential gardens. Their total mass adds up to 264,181 square meters of urban agriculture, much of it on the city’s South and West sides and far northwest where minority and immigrant communities are located.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/01/mapping-urban-agriculture-sky/4346/

Mapping Urban Agriculture From the Skywww.theatlanticcities.com
Google Earth could help quantify urban gardens much better than advocates on the ground.
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At the international Permaculture Your Campus Conference, directors of the award-winning UMass Permaculture Initiative will give an introduction to permaculture in a campus setting and share the value that it has created for the University of Massachusetts system and local community.

Participants will learn how to develop a successful permaculture initiative for their campus and will leave with their own individualized action plan for their own campus permaculture initiative.
http://www.umasspermacultureconference.com/

Permaculture Your Campus Conference 2013www.umasspermacultureconference.com
Information about the Permaculture Your Campus Conference
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Bustan Qaraaqa
Bustan Qaraaqa project work on the farm and in the community with the Bedouin and the Farmers promoting and implementing sustainable environmental managemnt and alternative technologies
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ACRES USA Conference Report | Growing Food Security in Albertawww.foodsecurityalberta.org
At the start of December, Vance and I had the opportunity to travel to Louisville, Kentucky for the 2012 ACRES USA Conference. We’d heard about this conference from a few of our farming mentors who have gone several times and have talked about how important its become in their farm journey.
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MEGGA-watt? The Rise of The Food Garage…! | Growing Food Security in Albertawww.foodsecurityalberta.org
(A nine part blog in support of the MEGGA-watt? Project entry in The Carbon Farmer's "Face Your Footprint" contest – please vote daily until Feb 24 – http://bit.ly/Tf4a44)
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Nibbling away at the local edges of consumer culture. Try this in your town!

Massachusetts Town Bans Single-Use Water Bottles
The new law addresses the huge amount of waste created and the greenhouse gases from fossil fuel production.
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Poland bans genetically modified maize and potatoes | The Raw Storywww.rawstory.com
Poland on Wednesday imposed new bans on the cultivation of certain genetically modified strains of maize and potatoes, a day after an EU required green light for GM crops took effect.
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Farmers Told To Buy Insurance If They Don’t Want To Get Sued By Corporations
thinkprogress.org
Every year for the past 13 years, biotechnology giant Monsanto Company has sued ...
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Thursday, November 15, 2012

Peter Bane on Youtube

Peter Bane in three video talks about permaculture and garden farming.
See http://permaculturehandbook.com/ for more info.




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Saturday, November 10, 2012

Stuff harvested from Facebook,  October 10, 2012
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Saturday, September 8, 2012

3-D Printing...With Concrete!


Behrokh Khoshnevis is a professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and is the Director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Southern California (USC). He is active in CAD/CAM, robotics and mechatronics related related research projects that include the development of novel Solid Free Form, or Rapid Prototyping, processes (Contour Crafting and SIS), automated construction of civil structures, development of CAD/CAM systems for biomedical applications (eg, restorative dentistry, rehabilitation engineering, haptics devices for medical applications), autonomous mobile and modular robots for assembly applications in space, and invention of technologies in the field of oil and gas. His research in simulation has aimed at creating intelligent simulation tools that can automatically perform many simulation functions that are conventionally performed by human analysts. His textbook, "Discrete Systems Simulation", and his simulation software EZSIM benefit from some aspects of his research in simulation. He routinely conducts lectures and seminars on invention and technology development. He is a Fellow member of the Society for Computer Simulation and a Fellow member of the Institute of Industrial Engineering. He is a senior member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. His website: www-rcf.usc.edu

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