Life gets in the way...

So, I posted a grand plan to write everyday, and failed in short order.

OOPS, forgot that I had a JOB and KIDS with needs, and a farm to run and a marriage to maintain, and friends, and... oh, and that we are at that 7.5 year point in our home when everything we fixed when we moved in BREAKS! 

That said, things have moved...slowly...forward.  So, here is an update.

 

The pottager is filled and doing well.  (Thanks Mark for help weeding!)

 

The other side of the pottager (which was supposed to be trees and perennial food plants has been reworked into an annual food garden because the trees failed to thrive in this spot.   Maybe later when we have built better soil.

 

The herb garden is rocking.  have basil, rosemary, several different thymes, sage, stevia, chives, dill, oregano, lemon balm, cilantro,lavender, and lemon balm.

 

Sunflower wall, pumpkins, and a border of marigolds are jumping up with all the warm rain.

 

We expanded the garden below the sunflowers.  It now has lots of trees, and perennial food plants like strawberries.

 

The animal barn has been converted into a picnic area.   Still working on tables, benches, lighting. and drainage....(this month of rain has taught us a lot about our land.)

 

The Hopkin Boys helped me move a few stones to finish the edge of the driveway.  Gravel is next.

 

The barn is still there, standing like the large pink elephant in the middle of the room.  At this point the planning of "Save the barn" part 2 is underway.  (if you are interested, follow our progress on this site, or if you want to help, send me a message ... roberts.ecofarm  at gmail  dot com.)

More to come soon.  

Enjoyed having the Hopkin clan use us as a base.  We got a lot out of it, hope you did too. 

Lucky to have a job...

In the 8.5 hours I was at work today,  people came in, resumes in hand, asking for applications for part time, minimum wage jobs.  Same happened yesterday (I know because I printed the applications before I left, and they were all gone when I got to work today)  So, 6 apps x 7 days = 42 apps per week at our store.  We live in an isolated county with a population of around 30,000.  200 people applying for work at one store in a month seems like a lot in such a small population...where is the "recovery"?

So, we cleaned up a corner of the yard today before work... Hart Nut Trees planted 2 years ago were being  overcome in weeds, and we rescued them today.  Good family effort.

Canned 7 quarts of Portuguese Kale Soup.  Its a winter fav, and having it 20 min ready is great.   Still looking for ways to store kale and swiss chard for the winter...  Ideas welcomed.

No bills today!!! still trying to figure who gets paid...

Feeling lucky to have a job, and work for a co that thinks I have value (not enough to live on, but some...)

Sustainability and Economics – an eco-farmer’s thoughts

I get questioned about the economic viability of my little farm on a fairly regular basis. Usually the question comes in a rather dismissive form. “You can’t really hope to make a living doing that, can you?” Or, “It wouldn’t work if your wife didn’t work full time.” These questions bother me because they are hard to answer in a way that people understand. I’m going to try again. Feedback is welcome.


First, a short look at what I mean by sustainability.

In nature, everything is tied to a place (a spot of dirt or a range of travel). Everything needed for the life of the creature comes from that place. Resources are taken in, held for a while in a living creature, then they are returned to that place to be used by myriad other creatures. Individually and collectively they are expressions of that place and the resources held there. This cycle is very fractal in nature. It repeats at every level of magnification, from the microscopic creatures of the soil to the gigantic, ancient oak, to the vast herds of bison, it is the same process. They are all expressions of their place.

Resources are not lost, just tied up for a while in one creature or another. The system is infinitely sustainable without input beyond sunlight and water cycling through. This is the sustainability I am working toward on my farm. It is at the root of my obsession with all things local.



Economics and Sustainability

Natural sustainability limits growth. Places become more complex, denser in life, more diverse as more and more creatures find niches in the resource pool of a place, but they limit growth. The resource pool doesn’t really expand. So if resources are tied up in one creature they are not available for another creature. This creates equilibrium, balance. As an eco-farmer this defines the economics of my place. I can increase diversity, make better uses of the resources at hand, find more niches to fill, but I can’t push growth beyond the limits of my resource pool and I can’t upset the balance of life in my place without crashing the system.

Making a living

Unfortunately, I live in a world where another model of sustainability and economics holds sway. This model is based on unending growth. It strips resources from one place and feeds them into a growth machine somewhere else. Business expands, more tons of corn are harvested from this field, more pounds of beef are produced at this feedlot, than ever before. The measure of economic sustainability is “can you keep growing at the desired rate?” If you can’t, your operation is not viable.

This model and nature’s model are incompatible. So, what’s a poor farmer to do?

Here’s what I’m finding.

The more we move our farm toward nature’s model, meeting our basic needs from the resources here, and returning those resources back to the local pool, the less tied to the current economic system we become. If our food, water, and energy come from this place, we need very little cash to purchase it from elsewhere. We do have our deal with the devil (I mean the bank) to pay for our land. It’s a small amount, and we may reach a point where we generate enough income to pay that and our other financial needs. But, natural sustainability trumps income generation. We will push ourselves to be the best farmers we can, but we will not crash the system to make more money. If we can’t make enough farming the way we know we should, we will have to have some kind of outside income to meet the demands of our artificial economy.

New Years EVE

EVE

This was going to be a post about seed orders and plans for the new year.  But, we are just taking this moment to welcome a new member to our farm.  This is EVE.  (new year's eve).  She is a Dexter/Jersey cross.  We will raise her as a family milk cow.  We hope to find a family who REALLY wants a milk/beef cow on their small holding.  We will raise her by hand, share milking for the first 6 months at least, and teaching her to lead, be handled, etc.  The kids are totally excited.  If she was a boy she would be destine for the freezer.

Responding to some comments

I've enjoyed the comments that have been left on my last several posts.  They have made me think.  I've responded to some on the post, but a couple needed more attention.

PioneerPreppy and CrazyLegobrothers both asked if space wasn't part of my sustainability problem.  Can I be sustainable on 5 acres?  If I can't then the outlook for the global population is truly grim.  That is a question I'm still trying to answer. 

So, to the PioneerPreppy, I've been working with a human range of about 20 square miles.  I certainly don't need that much space devoted to feeding myself, but IF I can draw my resources from that area I know I can return them (I can walk 20 miles in a day...)  and I know I will feel the impact of any mistake in 'management'.  I've no science to back this up, just knowledge of how far I can travel, and how much land I can really get to know.  Certainly more than one human can live in that range.  How that works is a question for the future.

CrazyLegobrothers, I run into a problem with grain.  The 4 of us use about 2 lbs of wheat per day as bread, pasta, crackers, etc.  Where I live good conventional farmers produce a bit more than 50 bushels of wheat per acre.  Organic produces come in at about 90% of that.  Neither one is sustainable.  Neither builds, or even maintains soil or fertility without importing lots of resources.  (that doesn't even touch the energy required to produce and harvest monocrops on a large scale...)  My family would need about 12 bushels of wheat (and some rice, oats, and corn) to continue living as we do.  I suspect, due to inefficiencies of small scale production, weed pressure, etc, that I'd need about 1/2 acre of small grains each year.  I could easily fit that into my 5 acres, but it would take my pasture production from being a soil building process to being a soil maintaining process.  On a 5 year rotation (4 in perennial pasture, one in grain) I would lose all the humus I had built.  Break even isn't a good plan for long term sustainability.  No margin for bad years.  I will get into more detail about this aspect of soil building in my next post.  That doesn't account for the energy needs to till the field multiple times each year, manage the weeds, harvest, etc.

Wendy,  I love the forest garden aspect of permaculture.  There are a lot of great ideas and great potential in following a permaculture philosophy.  But I haven't seen anyone in a temperate climate doing it without some big plowed field somewhere out on the fringes where they get their grain.  You can't grow that much annual monocrop and be sustainable.  As for the jungle being manipulated, I agree.  Every creature manipulates their environment to enhance their own survival.  Most do this passively, by eating selectively, spreading seeds, etc.  Some, beavers for example, do this actively.  It is all a kind of 'agriculture'.  That is what gives me hope in my quest for a non-destructive method of food production and of living.

Soil

A friend recently told me that my blog was getting a bit didactic. (He really said I should stop trying to bludgeon people into changing and go back to describing what I’m doing. People will follow. ) He’s probably right. But, I’ve hit a place in my thinking and doing where I’m stuck. I can keep doing what I know, probably even get better at it, but it will never fix the fundamental problem with the system. Not even at the level of my little farm and my little family. Sustainability will continue to elude me. So, I’ll be continuing my didactic posts for a while, using them to explore my own thinking and maybe illuminate some possible next steps.

There is a kind of magic in being a farmer. You choose a bit of ground, prepare it, plant a seed, and like magic, a new plant grows. You do your best to provide everything the plant will need and to protect it from harsh conditions and invaders. But what happens underground as the seed grows into a plant and the plant grows to maturity is a bit of black box magic. Yes, we know what happens. The seed sprouts. The roots spread out through the soil and the plant reaches for the sky. The plant draws what it needs from the soil, and through photosynthesis, turns the chemical bits into the sugars and proteins it needs to grow. But beyond that, most of us don’t really know what happens. We know to make sure there is plenty of NPK, and water, and that the temperature is right before we plant. We know that weeds compete and bugs destroy, and that it is our job to prevent these things from harming our chosen plants. But we, except for a few farmers with advanced degrees in chemistry, botany, and microbiology, don’t know how the magic really happens in that black box we call soil. Without knowing what is happening we can’t really predict what effect our actions have. There are four main players in this magic, the soil, the plants, the animals, and us. Understanding the role each plays in a sustainable system will help us develop a more sustainable form of agriculture.

First the soil –

Here’s what I, a farmer without advanced degrees in chemistry, botany, biology, microbiology, or anything relevant, have been able to glean about what’s happening in the soil.

Soil is not DIRT. It is a complex, living, little understood poly-organism. From a farmer point of view, soil is primarily a storage facility for plant nutrients. That’s the part I’ve been trying to understand, how soil works as a fertility storage/production/ exchange medium.

Soil has three components, chemical, organic, and microbial. All of these parts have to be working in balance to produce plants and replenish the soil in a sustainable way.

First the chemistry has to be right. From a plants (famers) p.o.v. soil is a mega warehouse of the building blocks of life. These building blocks are either held in the soil for plants to use, or are snatched by the plants as they flow through the soil matrix. From a sustainability standpoint, holding the components of life within the soil matrix for future use is key. This happens through chemistry. There are two basic chemical components involved in this process, colloids and cations. Colloids have a negative charge, and cations have a positive charge. Colloids are mostly clay particles or humus (a stable organic particle… more on that later.) Cations are mineral ions that have acquired a positive electrical charge. These mineral ions – calcium, magnesium, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, sulfur, copper, zinc, etc., are bound to negative sites on the colloid. That holds them in the soil. (If they are not bound to a colloid they are in solution and wash through the soil matrix quickly.) Each mineral ion fills a percentage of the sites on the colloid. This is the base saturation for that mineral. The nutrient holding capacity of a soil is determined by the number of colloids in that particular soil type. The base saturation determines soil fertility. The ratio of various mineral ions on the colloid determines how what nutrients are available for the plants to use. If the balance is wrong, particularly the balance between calcium and magnesium (these two combined need to occupy about 80% of the sited on the colloid, with calcium occupying 60 to 70% and magnesium occupying 10 to 20 %) the other mineral ions become bound too tightly to the colloid and are not available to the plant.

Humus is the other major colloid in the soil. Humus is an organic particle created by the decomposition of ligneous organic matter. Lignin is the fibrous part of mature plants. It is mostly carbon. It is broken down slowly in the soil by soil microbes. Humus does not include undigested plant remains, woody bits, etc. It also doesn’t include green vegetative material. This material is very low in lignin and will be completely digested by soil microbes rather than turned into humus. Soil microbes live in the humus. The less humus in the soil, the fewer soil microbes. Without humus and the microbes all the nutrients required by the plants would have to be added yearly as soluble fertilizer and the soil would become hard, compacted and prone to erosion.

When humus is exposed to the air it oxidizes rapidly. The nitrogen turns into nitrogen gas and the carbon oxides into carbon dioxide gas. This destroys the humus colloid, releasing the remaining minerals to be washed away. Loss of humus means loss of soil structure, loss of nutrients, loss of microbes and the ability to process organic matter, loss of water holding capacity, more compaction, and more erosion.

A sustainable method of agriculture would have to create chemically balanced soil and build humus. Otherwise we are just mining the soil and quickly becoming dependent on fertility imported from elsewhere.

Agriculture and a new mind

What would agriculture look like if was governed by the same fundamental rules that govern the rest of the living things on this planet?
• The process of growing food would build topsoil.
• Everything needed to produce food would come from that place – nutrients, water, energy, etc.
• Everything would be returned to that place – all the “waste” from producing the food, and all the “waste” from consuming the food would be returned in a way that it continued the soil building/life building process.
It seems pretty simple, until you test current agriculture/food production/waste management systems against these rules. Then it’s not so simple.

My neighbor farms. I farm. When I look out the window I can see bits of both as well as the wooded hillside on the other side of the neighbor’s field. For my part of the world this pretty much sums up the current agricultural practices.

Neighbor farms about 1000 acres. He grows corn and soy beans in rotation. He produces about 150 tons of corn per acre (that’s 150000 tons of corn) or about 47 tons of soybeans per acre (47000 tons of soy). Right now his farm looks like this…


acres of desolation



My farm is 5 acres. We have about 3 ½ acres in production. Each year we produce about 6400 lbs of milk, 1000 dozen eggs, 825 lbs of meat, and 780 lbs of salad greens, and enough fruit and vegetables for our family and to give away to our friends. We produce no grain. Right now our farm looks like this…

 

NOW THE TEST…

                                       Our Farm %    Neighbor Farm %

Build topsoil                        90 %                        2%

Own Nutrients                    80%                          0

Own Water                        70%                         100%

Own Energy                       20%                          0

Production Waste               90%                         90%

Utilization Waste                50%                           0

So, my farm's sustainable and the neighbor’s farm is not? Could be, but 10% of the things I do don’t build topsoil (that means they destroy topsoil…) and 20% of our nutrients are imported from somewhere else, and 30% of our water and 80% of our energy are also imported, and 60% of the resources tied up in waste walk away every year. We are MORE sustainable than a conventional farm, but still losing ground.

There are things I know I can do to improve what I am doing, especially in the water, energy, and waste areas. (Exploring those will take more than one post…) What I'm doing kind of works here.  I'll be exploring why and how addaptable some of these ideas might be.  Also, there are a bunch of things I haven't got figured out for my little farm.  I'll be exploring them too.

Here’s another thing…

Right now the American diet is more than 70% grain based. We produce no grain, ZERO. That means that we are not touching 70% of what we currently eat. You’d get a bit hungry if I cut your diet by 70%.

I can’t find a way to make annual grain production fit any kind of naturally sustainable model. That means we need to change what we eat. Radically!

Next post - Farming that builds soil.
Another post- Diet for a dying planet.

Learning to fly – part 2

For the past 30 years or so I’ve been looking for an ecologically sustainable way to live. I’ve explored Organic Farming, Permaculture, Biodynamic Methods, Indigenous Lifestyles, Holistic Living, and farming/gardening in various places around the world. I’ve read about, poked at, tried, and experimented with these methods on various scales in different parts of the world, and talked with people from all over who have done the same. So far I’ve found a boat load of great techniques for doing less damage and no model of sustainability.

There is a feeling among people searching for a way to survive what we are doing to the planet that if we all would just adopt (vegetarianism, or permaculture, or organics, or green living, or Gaia worship, becoming hunter-gatherers, or whatever) that everything will be OK. There is another group that thinks that if we can just overthrow our oppressors (the government, the corporations, the CEO’s, civilization, technology, etc.), if we can crash the system we will be able to rise from the ashes and live better.

They are all wrong.

Our lives are an expression of a set of fundamental rules/default ways of acting. They get cluttered up with culture, beliefs, education, etc., but we act in ways that stay true to those fundamental rules. Acting differently takes great conscious effort. Gravity is one of those rules we accept at a fundamental level. Even before Newton and company started defining the “Law of Gravity”, we didn’t act in opposition to it. We may not have understood the math, or the mechanics of gravity (not sure we do now…) but we didn’t willingly fling ourselves from high places, and we when we did that with other things or people we expected them to crash to the ground, not float off into space. We don’t think about gravity. We have no committees to explore how we live in a more gravity acknowledging way. We just live in ways that accept gravity as a constant. We also live in ways that produce the results we now see. The fundamental rules exist below the surface of conscious thought and shape our every action are what has given rise to the problems we now blame on technology, civilization, over population, greedy corporations, etc. They are not the cause. They are just expressions of the rules we live by.

I’ll not attempt to list all the fundamental rules that shape us. I won’t even pretend to know them all. But there are a few I keep running into as I explore sustainable ways of living.

One big one is -

WE ARE SEPARATE FROM NATURE. We may have started life there, as part of nature, but we have moved beyond that now. This means we are not subject to the “laws of nature”. Laws like natural selection, death, resource limitations, natural population controls, etc. You see this in the way we fight to extend life, the way we don’t even consider the relationship between food and population growth (a population will increase to the limits of its food supply. EVERY TIME. Increase food, the population increases. This rush to grow more because the population is going to expand only results in the population expanding…) as we try to solve the overpopulation problem. We see this in our linier thinking about the food chain, in the way we deal with waste, etc. It permeates our language, our religions, and science. And it is FALSE. It is fundamental to how we live right now, and it is completely false.

Another big one is –

GROWTH IS THE ONLY REAL MEASURE OF SUCCESS. This only applies to human endeavors. When we see unending growth anywhere else we recognize it as unsustainable, life threatening, dangerous, etc. We call it cancer, disease, system breakdown. We try to eliminate it, slow it, and prevent it, to restore equilibrium and balance. But in the human realm (separate from Nature…) it is the thing we strive for; more business, more dollars, more stuff, bigger house, better car, more growth.

These two fundamental rules are why we keep doing the same stupid things over and over. They are why we instantly set out to rebuild civilization when it crashes and make the exact same mistakes that caused the crash in the first place. They are why, despite years of effort and billions of dollars, we have not solved even one of the problems of civilization. We haven’t conquered disease, eliminated hunger, or controlled the population growth.

All other living things on this planet live by a different set of rules, and they only run into major problems when some catastrophic event occurs (like a giant meteor crashing into the planet), or when we muck up the system.

The difference between how we live and how the rest of the living things on the planet live is simple. They live locally. They draw everything they need for their life from their local resource pool, and return everything to that pool. Growth is limited by the local resources. Equilibrium is the measure of success.
For example, a tree draws all it needs from its local and sheds its leaves, bark, branches and eventually it whole self in that place, returning everything. Same with a mouse (its local range is bigger than the tree, but it lives, poops, eats, dies in that range. Taking in resources for a while and then returning them. There is only a finite amount of mouse food available, so there are only a finite number of mice in the area. Same with the tree. There is only a finite amount of tree food and water available to the tree. That limits how many trees can exist in that space. This is how all the living things on the planet live. The size of the local range varies, the pool of resources varies, but the rule doesn’t change. There is no organization to prevent any living thing from expanding outside it’s local range. Such an organization is not needed. Those creatures are quickly eliminated. Drawing resources from outside the local pool changes the population, and that results in less food, or more predation, and balance is restored.

WE DO NOT LIVE THIS WAY. We take resources from one place to fuel growth in another place. We ship the waste from living, and from production to yet another place. All these actions break the balance. The result of living this way is what you see around you, environmental destruction, pollution, over population, hunger, disease.

We can’t hope to find a sustainable way of living without changing the fundamental rules we live by.

"If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all."
— Daniel Quinn (The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit)

This is why permaculture, or organics, or even crashing the system and becoming hunter/gatherers won’t work. If we still operate by the same flawed rules, we will just produce the same flawed results.

Next post – Agriculture and a new mind.

Learning To Fly

In the comments to my last post I found some interesting thoughts from Leon. He said, “I more and more think that our weird desire "to feed the world" is actually part of the problem.” And I have to agree. “Feeding the world” is and always has been a nice front for economic/political expansion and control. I feel no need to “feed the world”, but I know I must find a way to feed myself, my family, and help feed my community that doesn’t destroy the place I depend on for life. If I find a way that works here, I also feel obligated to share that with others around the world so that they might adapt it to their own place. That way the world feeds itself.
In her book The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, Lierre Keith says, “Agriculture (as we have been practicing it for the past 10000 years) is the most destructive thing humans have done to the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. The truth is that agriculture requires the wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems.”

Allan Savory once said that Organic Agriculture was responsible for the downfall of more civilizations than all the wars combined.

Agriculture, as we have been doing it for the past 10000 years is built on the idea that we MUST produce more. Having more keeps us safe. It gives us power. It has become our one measure of success and worth. (Imagine a CEO saying, “Let’s just produce as much this year as we did last year…” That business would be thought of as stagnant, and if the trend continued… failing. Even though that level of production might provide a comfortable living for all the people involved and keep the business functioning indefinitely, WITHOUT CONSTANT GROWTH WE ARE FAILURES!) Continual growth requires continual increases in resources. Initially we found those resources by eliminating other things that were using them. (Take a good look at a farm field. The only thing that lives there is what the farmer wants there, the crop. Everything else has been displaced or killed.) We quickly used up those resources. So we started taking resources from elsewhere. First we expanded so we had more area to use. Then we conquered, so we could make others produce for us. Then we pushed back in time to take resources that were removed from the system millions of years ago (coal, oil, natural gas…), Now we are out of places to find more resources to continue our growth so we alter what we grow so it will produce more from less. We modify the very structure of life to get more production.
Along the way we have hit limits. When that happens civilization crashes. Those who survive, regroup and try again. They try harder and smarter, develop new methods and new technologies, and get bigger. They crash again and again. The Anasazi, the Maya, the Mesopotamians, the Romans, etc… Every time we rise from the dust of the crash and learn to reach farther, dig deeper, make more from what we take.
We BELIEVE a story where this works. It defines our style of civilization. Kind of like those folks who didn’t believe in gravity. Or, more like the folks who believed they were exempt from or above the limits of gravity. They spent their lives in the sure knowledge that if they walked off a cliff they would not fall. Right up to the day they walked off the edge. CRASH! We are not walking, we are running full tilt, and we will crash yet again. We’ve been doing this for the last 10000 years, running at the edge of the cliff as fast as we can with as much as we can and believing we can fly. We crash and die. Somewhere else someone picks up the bits and does it again, bigger and better. Civilization! CRASH! AGAIN! CRASH! AGAIN! THIS TIME WE’VE GATHERED THE WHOLE GLOBE, EVERY LIVING PERSON, AND EVERY LIVING CREATURE (BY DEFAULT…) WE ARE RUNNING FULL TILT TOWARD THE EDGE….

Time to learn to fly…

Flight only happens when you understand gravity and the rest of the laws that, by limiting, make flight possible.

Let’s learn to fly… or better yet, lets learn to farm in a way that doesn’t lead yet again to a massive crash.

Joel Salatin – So right and yet so VERY, VERY WRONG

I’m finally catching up on my reading. The other day I picked up the September issue of one of my magazines, Acres USA, and found Joel Salatin had written the feature article.

I like reading Joel’s books and articles. He has tons of great ideas, and I usually find something I can adapt to our little farm. His Polyface Farm, and his work as an advocate for ‘eco-agriculture’ are inspiring. So I was excited to see what Joel had written for ACRES. Wow, was I disappointed. He’s gotten so much right, how could he be so wrong about feeding the world.

Doing it right.

At Polyface farm (and many other small eco-farms around the world including mine) farming is based on well managed animals on perennial pasture. Those animals, or products from those animals go to feed people locally. Almost all the resources (minerals , water, energy, etc.) stay on the farm and support more diverse life. The small amounts that leave the farm stay in the local area, and can be easily returned to the local resource pool to support life in that area. Well managed, multi-species rotational grazing builds topsoil faster than any other method, so the farm becomes more productive over time without needing imported resources. This kind of farming can produce food for people in that area forever. It can also be adapted to almost any climate. There are a few issues that still need some fine tuning, but it’s pretty close to a perfect system. This is the content I expected to find in Joel’s article.

What I found was an article about how unfair the comparisons between eco-ag and conventional ag have been, how under-funded eco-ag research has been, and how we are as good as conventional ag because we have developed techniques and products that produce the same kind of harvest results. All of this is true, but it leaves out one important thing. Feeding the world, at least feeding the people of the world the type of food they now eat, requires a lot of grain. Grain is an annual and it requires a different production system than multi-species pasture farming. Nothing about annual grain production builds soil, even using organic fertilizer inputs. To grow grain efficiently, you have to eliminate the other things living in that space. All other plants have to be eliminated. Eliminating those plants removes the structure that holds the soil together. It breaks the symbiotic relationships that exist between microbes and plants that create humus. The animals, insects, microbes etc. that lived on those plants, on the plant waste, or on the waste of other creatures living in that space are also eliminated. They either die or go away because there is no longer a food source in that place or we kill them because they use the grain as a food source. This further depletes the resource pool in that area. This kind of farming quickly requires inputs from elsewhere. This depletes the resource pool in another place and doesn’t replenish the resources on the farm. There are a few places in the world where soil type, precipitation, and temperature combine in a way that might make it possible to grow annual grains in rotation with long term perennial pasture and animals. These places are very small niches around the globe, and even there the best you can hope is to maintain the topsoil, not build it.

Joel says, “The advertisers in Acres U.S.A. and kindred publications have already solved the pathogen, erosion and fertility problems that the chemical Neanderthals (to use the late iconic Charles Walters’ term) are still scratching their heads about.” I’ve looked at the products advertised in Acres and other publications. They are great. They let you grow your annual grains and do less harm to the environment. But they don’t solve the fundamental problem. Growing annuals destroys the system that builds soil and maintains the local resource pool. Using these products is a way to slow one kind of environmental damage and to produce better quality food, but it isn’t ecologically sustainable.

Joel is right, eco-agriculture can feed the world. But to do that we will have to radically change what we eat, more animal protein and fat, more perennial fruits, and little or no grain. We will also have to change how food and waste are distributed. Ecologically sustainable food is local food. It maintains a local, diverse population, and all the “waste” from the production and use of that food is returned to the local resource pool to continue to grow food. It is a closed loop. That’s the only way eco-agriculture can feed the world.