Asterix

This is a delightful article written by an old idealist who did go back to the land and resurrected productivity on a scruffy piece of abandoned land.  Like many both in the sixties and before him, he became the champion of this patch of land and worked with it to make it perform.  He saw what it was as wild country and brought it back to full fertility.

I personally think that every child needs to participate in that experience and to some degree throughout theirs lives. 

I think a true farmer understands this.  Our intervention alters the ecology to optimize production of human food stuffs.  Those who have followed my posts know that it has become possible to do much more.  Principally the advent of the biochar protocol will be the most revolutionary advance in human husbandry since we learned to turn soil and throw in seeds.

The biochar is not itself a nutrient but it holds available nutrients in place. It is quickly discovered that artificial fertilizers soon become redundant as plant waste and other wastes are returned to the soils.  The biochar prevents escape.

The power of the individual is that he can perfect his husbandry of a patch of soil somewhere.  I want you to think about that though.  When you stand in a field, you are standing on the shoulders of many generations of men and women who cared for that particular field.  Often little was needed but when called upon they responded.  They found ways to make it fertile and well enough drained to produce a crop.

Our human task is to care for every field and to restore to hands on human management huge tracts of good land that will respond to our attention.

I particularly welcome reports of this nature.

I also think introducing Asterix is a great idea to remind us what it means to be a yeoman farmer.  Curiously, I grew up on a nineteenth century farm and am quite comfortable with that life way.  In fact, I do know what to do if I were dumped in the midst of a forest with and axe, a whetstone, and few other supplies with a handful of other Scottish pioneers to lend a hand.  At least this chap had a rototiller. 

Small is beautiful (and radical) 

3 FEB 2010 9:41 AM

BY ELIOT COLEMAN

http://www.grist.org/article/small-is-beautiful-and-radical

When a friend told me of two of the proposed discussion topics for a major agricultural conference—“What is so radical about radical agriculture?” and “Is small the only beautiful?”—I told him that that I thought both questions had the same answer.  Let me see if I can explain. 

The radical idea behind by organic agriculture is a change in focus.  The new focus is on the quality of the crops grown and their suitability for human nutrition.  That is a change from the more common focus on growing as much quantity as possible and using whatever chemical techniques contribute to increasing that quantity.

None of the non-chemical techniques associated with organic farming are radical or new.  Compost, crop rotations, green manures and so forth are age-old agricultural practices.  What is radical is the belief that these time-proven “natural” techniques produce food that is more nourishing for people and livestock than food grown with chemicals.  What is radical is successfully pursuing that “unscientific” belief against the counter-propaganda and huge commercial power of the agrochemical industry.

The initiators of this new focus were a few perceptive old farmers from the 1930s and ‘40s who had not been taken in by commercial pressures and saw clearly the flaws of chemical agriculture.  The popularizers of the new focus were the young idealists of the 1960s and 70s who were attracted to the idea of food production based on non-industrial systems, even though most of them had no previous connection to agriculture.

The effect of those new young minds entering agriculture defined the early days of organic farming in the US and thus also provides a context for the second question—“Is small the only beautiful?”  Small became beautiful because of the passion of the new generation of idealistic young farmers.  I was like most of them.  I had no farming background, no farmland, and very little money.  None of us would have been able to buy 500 acres in the Imperial Valley even if we had wanted to. So we ended up on a few acres of inexpensive, abandoned land because of economic reality rather than by conscious choice, and we started farming with compost and rototillers.  The flavorful produce we sold, plus our passionate belief in quality, established the connection between the words “small” and “beautiful” in the public mind.

Once our combined efforts succeeded in making “organic” popular, the real farmers, the large-scale professional farmers, became interested.  (We always knew we weren’t considered “real” farmers.)  For most of them, growing organically was a market decision as opposed to the deep passion for soil quality and food quality that had inspired us hippies.  Since the age old farming techniques had not been abandoned because they couldn’t work but because chemicals were promising miracles that they couldn’t deliver, the transition to organic farming was not difficult for the large farmers and they began selling “organic” produce.  But the “small is more beautiful” idea remains in the public mind, because the organic-buying public intuits that the large-scale farmers may have changed their agronomy but not their thinking; that their minds are still logically focused on how much they can produce rather than on how well it will nourish their customers.  I don’t think the public objects to scale (America is the land of large farms) but rather objects to organics by the numbers.  They don’t see the old-time hippie passion for quality produce or any innovative new soil fertility improvement ideas coming from the large farms.  They just see coloring between the lines according to the minimum standards that USDA certification requires.

From the point of view of this old hippie who carved his farm out of spruce and fir forest on the rocky Maine coast and had to learn everything about farming as he went along, I envy people who are able to farm on large expanses of flat naturally fertile soil and who have generations of farming experience behind them.  Because of the poor quality of the land on which I started 40 years ago it took the first ten years of removing rocks, and stumps, and creating fertility to give us the marvelous soil and ability to grow exceptional food that we have achieved and continue to maintain.  I often think of how much further all that effort could have gone had I grown up on a “real” farm but then I realize that if I had, it would have required an equal effort to change from the “quantity first” focus that has so characterized American agriculture to the new “quality first” focus established by the organic pioneers.

 
So if we go back to the two questions about what is “radical” and what is “beautiful” they come down to the same thing—the passion for quality food and sustainable systems that the new young farmers brought to American agriculture.  There is no reason that large farms, whatever path they may have been on, cannot learn to meet those standards if they understand that it is not the scale of the farm but the attitude of the farmer that the public is interested in.  I think if the large farmers used all their experience and natural advantages to try to lead food production along ever more nutritious and sustainable lines, they would have the respect that so many of them obviously feel they deserve.

But there is one other connection between the word “radical” and small farms that I need to mention.  The small organic farm greatly discomforts the corporate/industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet.  Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.  Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.  It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces.

An observer today cannot help noticing the continuation of a trend that started at the beginning of the industrial revolution, a trend away from autonomy and independence for human beings and towards manipulation, consolidation, and control by large corporate entities.  The early destruction of small farms in the 18th century drove the dispossessed peasants into the cities and a bleak existence in the “dark, satanic mills” as William Blake so aptly termed them.  The propaganda in favor of becoming larger, more industrial and more centralized is so subtly pervasive and so effective that the majority of people have little idea of what has been regimented into their lives.  Massive industrial conglomerates that look upon people as anonymous passive serfs, obedient cogs in a mechanistic world, now control far too many aspects of human existence.  Circuses and bread, bread and circuses are presented as diversions for the masses today as they were for the masses of Rome.  But it is worth noting that according to the historians, it was the Roman consolidation of land into ever-larger farms that ended up destroying Roman agriculture, and resulted in the lack of bread that led to Rome’s eventual demise.

So I’d like to suggest a foe of Rome’s power as the perfect figurehead for the small family farmer holding out indomitably against the economic forces trying to subjugate the whole planet.  Our hero’s name is ASTERIX, and he is an immensely popular French comic book character.  In France there is a natural connection between the persona of Asterix and the fight against all things corporate.

Asterix and his buddy Obelix live with other members of their self-reliant community in a fictional Gallic village in northwest Brittany.  Asterix and Obelix hunt wild boar together and Obelix makes “menhirs”, those prehistoric stone monuments that are scattered all over Brittany.  The year is 50 BC.  Rome has conquered all of Gaul.  Well, not quite all because this one little village of indomitable individuals is still resisting - still holding out against all the soldiers that an ever more frustrated Caesar sends against them in a vain attempt to complete his conquest.  The village cannot be defeated because of the super-human strength the villagers get from a magic herbal potion produced by the resident village druid. 

The Asterix characters are the ideal metaphorical mascots for the small family farm:

·                 First, Rome, to whose power the villagers refuse to submit obviously represents the bigger-is-better, all conquering corporate/ industrial mentality.

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·                 Second, just like these villagers, made invincible by their druid’s magic potion, we small farmers cannot be defeated because we too have a homemade magic potion. It is called compost and is the secret to the soil fertility that sustains us. Who can possibly defeat people who know that the world’s best fertilizer can be produced in quantity for free on their own farm from what grows thereabouts?

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·                 Third, like the menhirs that Obelix makes, we too create ageless monuments. They are our small farms, because, in the words of British farmer George Henderson, we leave the land far better than we found it.

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·    And, best of all, we have ASTERIX himself, small and tough, possessed of a confidence in his own ability. Asterix perfectly embodies the small family farmer, independent and unconquerable on the land.

Vanada Shiva on Agricultural use of Oil

This is an excellent article that largely reflects many of my positions and feels as strongly about the importance of soil as I do.

The rise of industrial agriculture was a result of the low esteem and poor working conditions given farm labor that drove them from the farm and into the cities. That disappearing work force was replaced by mechanization which worked best with the various forms of monoculture. The resulting problem is the removal of flexibility and soil degradation.

A man squeezing his living out of a ten thousand acre field is not keen to pick up a hoe.

This has to and must change in a way that makes occasional labor readily available so that superior methods may be deployed. Recall that millions made a living on the tropical soils of the Amazon without metal and likely cropping less than a hectare per family. They are shown to have made a very healthy living.

I have posted on the idea of the integrated modern urban high-rise farm commune as a mechanism able to provide economic advantage to families living in close support of a farm operation. The modern world is making this concept feasible and will completely change the way the majority of humanity lives and works, while ending the disfunctionality of the historic urban solution.

Farm based fuels will be easy to produce. In particular wetland cattails are a huge source of starch (30 dry tons per acre) that can be converted to ethanol and cattle fodder.

The industrialization of agriculture will not end as much as diversify into many forms of specialist tools to handle the expanding variety of crops and animals. The human back is very limited and needs augmenting.

The advent of biochar will halt and reverse the current degradation been visited on modern farm fields by the simple medium of sequestering nutrients until used. Normal rooting and no till practices will then quickly replenish humus in the soils.

Soil Not Oil: Why We Need to Kick Petroleum Out of Our Farms

By Vandana Shiva, South End Press. Posted December 3, 2008.
Biodiverse farms offer us more food, better food, higher incomes for farmers and a defense from climate disasters.

The following is an excerpt from Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis by Vandana Shiva (South End Press, 2008).

The industrialized, globalized food system is based on oil. It is under threat because of the inevitability of "peak oil." It is also under threat because it is more vulnerable than traditional agriculture to climate change, to which it has contributed. Industrial agriculture is based on monocultures. Monocultures are highly vulnerable to changes in climate, and to diseases and pests.

In 1970 and 1971, America's vast corn belt was attacked by a mysterious disease, later identified as ''race T" of the fungus Helminthosporium maydis, causing the southern corn leaf blight, as the epidemic was called. It left ravaged cornfields with withered plants, broken stalks, and malformed or completely rotten cobs. The strength and speed of the blight was a result of the uniformity of the hybrid corn, most of which had been derived from a single Texas male sterile line. The genetic makeup of the new hybrid corn, which was responsible for its rapid and large-scale breeding by seed companies, was also responsible for its vulnerability to disease. At least 80 percent of the hybrid corn in America in 1970 contained the Texas male sterile cytoplasm. As a University of Iowa pathologist wrote, "Such an extensive, homogenous acreage is like a tinder-dry prairie waiting for a spark to ignite it."

Industrial agriculture is dependent on chemical fertilizers. Chemically fertilized soils are low in organic matter. Organic matter helps conserve the soil and soil moisture, providing insurance against drought. Soils lacking organic matter are more vulnerable to drought and to climate change. Industrial agriculture is also more dependent on intensive irrigation. Since climate change is leading to the melting of glaciers that feed rivers, and in many regions of the world to the decline in precipitation and increased intensity of drought, the vulnerability of industrial agriculture will only increase. Finally, since the globalized food system is based on long-distance supply chains, it is vulnerable to breakdown in the context of extreme events of flooding, cyclones, and hurricanes. While aggravating climate change, fossil fuel-dependent industrialized, globalized agriculture is least able to adapt to the change.

We need an alternative. Biodiverse, organic farms and localized food systems offer us security in times of climate insecurity, while producing more food, producing better food, and creating more livelihoods. The industrialized, globalized food system is based on oil; biodiverse, organic, and local food systems are based on living soil. The industrialized system is based on creating waste and pollution; a living agriculture is based on no waste. The industrialized system is based on monocultures; sustainable systems are based on diversity.

Living Soil

Every step in building a living agriculture sustained by a living soil is a step toward both mitigating and adapting to climate change. Over the past 20 years, I have built Navdanya, India's biodiversity and organic-farming movement. We are increasingly realizing there is a convergence between the objectives of conserving biodiversity, reducing climate-change impact, and alleviating poverty.

Biodiverse, local, organic systems reduce water use and risks of crop failure due to climate change. Increasing the biodiversity of farming systems can reduce vulnerability to drought. Millet, which is far more nutritious than rice and wheat, uses only 200 to 300 millimeters of water, compared with the 2,500 millimeters needed for Green Revolution rice farming. India could grow four times the amount food it does now if it were to cultivate millet more widely. However, global trade is pushing agriculture toward GM monocultures of corn, soy, canola, and cotton, worsening the climate crisis.

Biodiversity offers resilience to recover from climate disasters. After the Orissa supercyclone of 1998, and the tsunami of 2004, Navdanya distributed seeds of saline-resistant rice varieties as "Seeds of Hope" to rejuvenate agriculture in lands that were salinated as a result of flooding from the sea. We are now creating seed banks of drought-resistant, flood-resistant, and saline-resistant seed varieties to respond to such extreme climate events. Climate chaos creates uncertainty. Diversity offers a cushion against both climate extremes and climate uncertainty. We need to move from the myopic obsession with monocultures and centralization to diversity and decentralization.

Diversity and decentralization are the dual principles needed to build economies beyond oil and to deal with the climate vulnerability that is the legacy of the age of oil. In addition to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience, biodiverse organic farming also produces more food and higher incomes. As David Pimentel has pointed out: "Organic farming approaches for maize and beans in the US not only use an average of 30% less fossil energy but also conserve more water in the soil, induce less erosion, maintain soil quality, and conserve more biological resources than conventional farming does."

After Hurricane Mitch struck Central America in 1998, farmers who practiced biodiverse organic farming found they had suffered less damage than those who practiced chemical agriculture. The ecologically farmed plots had on average more topsoil, greater soil moisture, and less erosion, and the farmers experienced less severe economic losses.

Fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture moves carbon from the soil to the atmosphere. Ecological agriculture takes carbon from the atmosphere and puts it back in the soil. If 10,000 medium-sized US farms converted to organic farming, the emissions reduction would be equivalent to removing over 1 million cars from the road. If all US croplands became organic it would increase soil-carbon storage by 367 million tons and would cut nitrogen oxide emissions dramatically. Organic agriculture contributes directly and indirectly to reducing CO2 emissions and mitigating the negative consequences of climate change.

Navdanya's work over the past 20 years has shown that we can grow more food and provide higher incomes to farmers without destroying the environment and killing peasants. We can lower the costs of production while increasing output. We have done this successfully on thousands of farms and have created a fair, just, and sustainable economy. The epidemic of farmer suicides in India is concentrated in regions where chemical intensification has increased costs of production. Farmers in these regions have become dependent on non-renewable seeds, and monoculture cash-crops are facing a decline in prices due to globalization. This is affecting farmers' incomes, leading to debt and suicides. High costs of production are the most significant reason for rural indebtedness.

Biodiverse organic farming creates a debt-free, suicide-free, productive alternative to industrialized corporate agriculture and brings about a number of benefits. It leads to increased farm productivity and farm incomes, while lowering costs of production. Pesticide-free and chemical-free production and processing bring safe and healthy food to consumers. We must protect the environment, farmers' livelihoods, public health, and people's right to food.

We do not need to go the Monsanto way. We can go the Navdanya way. We do not need to end up in food dictatorship and food slavery. We can create our food freedom. Biodiverse, organic, and local food systems help mitigate climate change by lowering greenhouse gas emissions and increasing absorption of CO2 by plants and by the soil.

Organic farming is based on the recycling of organic matter; industrial agriculture is based on chemical fertilizers that emit nitrous oxides. Industrial agriculture dispossesses small farmers and converts small farms to large holdings that need mechanization, which further contributes to CO2 emissions. Small, biodiverse, organic farms, especially in third world countries, can be totally fossil fuel-free. The energy for farming operations comes from animals.

Soil fertility is built by recycling organic matter to feed soil organisms. This reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Biodiverse systems are also more resilient to droughts and floods because they have a higher water-holding capacity, making them more adaptable to the effects of climate change. Navdanya's study on climate change and organic farming has indicated that organic farming increases carbon absorption by up to 55 percent and water-holding capacity by 10 percent.

The environmental advantages of small-scale, biodiverse organic farms do not come at the expense of food security. Biodiverse organic farms produce more food and higher incomes than industrial monocultures. Mitigating climate change, conserving biodiversity, and increasing food security go hand in hand.

The conventional measures of productivity focus on labor as the major input (and the direct labor on the farm at that) and externalize many energy and resource inputs. This biased productivity pushes farmers off the land and replaces them with chemicals and machines, which in turn contribute to greenhouse gases and climate change. Further, industrial agriculture focuses on producing a single crop that can be globally traded as a commodity. The focus on "yield" of individual commodities creates what I have called a "monoculture of the mind." The promotion of so-called high-yielding varieties leads to the displacement of biodiversity. It also destroys the ecological functions of biodiversity. The loss of diverse outputs is never taken into account by the one-dimensional calculus of productivity.

When the benefits of biodiversity are taken into account, biodiverse systems have higher output than monocultures. And organic farming is more beneficial for the farmers and the earth than chemical farming. When agro-forestry is included in farming systems, carbon absorption and carbon return increase dramatically. Date palm and neem increase the carbon density in the soil by 175 and 185 percent, respectively.

Studies carried out by the USDA's National Agroforestry Center suggest that soil carbon can be increased by 6.6 tons per hectare per year over a 15-year rotation and wood by 12.22 tons per hectare per year. Since both soil and biomass sequester carbon, this amounts to removing 18.87 tons of carbon per hectare per year from the atmosphere.

Soil and vegetation are our biggest carbon sinks. Industrial agriculture destroys both. By disrupting the cycle of returning organic matter to the soil, chemical agriculture depletes the soil carbon. Mechanization forces the cutting down of trees and hedgerows.

Organic manure is food for the community of living beings that depend on the soil. The alternatives to chemical fertilizers are many: green manures such as sesbania aculeata (dhencha), gliricidia, and sun hemp; legume crops such as pulses, which fix nitrogen through legume-rhizobium symbiosis; earthworms; cow dung; and composts. Farmyard manure encourages the buildup of earthworms by increasing their food supply. Soils treated with farmyard manure have from two to two and a half times as many earthworms as untreated soils. Earthworms contribute to soil fertility by maintaining soil structure, aeration, and drainage. They break down organic matter and incorporate it into the soil.

The work of earthworms in soil formation was Darwin's major concern in his later years. Of worms he wrote, "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of creatures." The little earthworm working invisibly in the soil is the tractor, the fertilizer factory, and the dam combined. Worm-worked soils are more water-stable than unworked soils, and worm-inhabited soils have considerably more organic carbon and nitrogen than the original soil. Their continuous movement forms channels that help in soil aeration. It is estimated that they increase the air volume of soil by up to 30 percent.

Soils with earthworms drain four to ten times faster than those without, and their water-holding capacity is higher by 20 percent. Earthworm castings, which can amount to 4 to 36 tons per acre per year, contain five times more nitrogen, seven times more phosphorus, three times more exchangeable magnesium, 11 times more potash, and one and a half times more calcium than soil. Their work on the soil promotes the microbial activity essential to the fertility of most soils.

At the Navdanya farm in Doon Valley, we have been feeding the soil organisms. They in turn feed us. We have been building soil and rejuvenating its life. The clay component on our farm is 41 percent higher than those of neighboring chemical farms, which indicates a higher water-holding capacity. There is 124 percent more organic-matter content in the soil on our farm than in soil samples from chemical farms. The nitrogen concentration is 85 percent higher, the phosphorus content 10 percent higher, and the available potassium 25 percent higher.

Our farm is also much richer in soil organisms such as mycorrhiza, which are fungi that bring nutrients to plants. Mycorrhizal association makes food material from the soil available to the plant. Our crops have no diseases, our soils are resilient to drought, and our food is delicious, as any visitors to our farm can vouch. Our farm is fossil fuel-free. Oxen plow the land and fertilize it.

By banning fossil fuels on our farm we have gained real energy-the energy of the mycorrhiza and the earthworm, of the plants and animals, all nourished by the energy of the sun.