Is that a cover crop in your garden, or are you just happy to see me?

We have written before about the importance of soil quality.  We are of an accord with a local horticulture personality who recently argued that Texas gardeners deserve some kind of medal for their heroic battles with nutrient poor soils; we are equally certain that if we are ever famous for anything, it will be for our advocacy of the universal benefit to be derived from spreading chicken-poop compost on anything you want to grow in the ground.

However, chicken poop and rotting leaves are not the only means of enriching one’s topsoil.  As part of our never ending quest to maximize our efficiency, we have begun researching the most effective possible cover crops for our little patch of heaven, and several candidates display the kinds of qualities we are looking for.

A good cover crop is like anything else – it is only “good” if it does what you want it to do.  We want cover crops to be a lot like everything else we put effort into.  They should do more than one thing.

• A cover crop should be a “green manure”.  A good cover crop ought to affix nutrients, particularly nitrogen, to the soil both to enhance the following crop, and also to prevent nitrate runoff, which is one of the more egregious forms of water pollution from agriculture and home lawn care.
• A cover crop ought to be aesthetically pleasing; a hay field may look attractive to the farmer who knows what he is looking at, but it may look like nothing but tall weeds to his neighbors, or more importantly in an urban setting, to the city code enforcement office.
• A cover crop ought to have some sort of production value – either as food, as herb or supplement, or even as animal feed.
• A cover crop ought to be a “companion plant”, adding proven value to other crops in your garden much like in the “3 Sisters” farming method.
• A cover crop ought to choke out the kinds of weeds which tend to persist from season to season so that, even if they reemerge later to compete with your follow crop, their success rate will be greatly diminished.
• A cover crop ought to blend with the general theme of your garden, providing a kind of segue from one area to the next.  Permaculturalists frequently talk about production values being highest “at the edges”; a cover crop is a way to transition from one edge to the next – from pasture to vineyard or orchard, for example.

We have found several potential covers which we will be testing over the next several planting seasons which fit these criteria to a Texas ‘T’.  Some are commonly used throughout Texas already; others, we hope to be part of making popular, if only for novelty’s sake.

Red clover is something we have been interested in growing for quite some time.  This is actually a fairly common cover crop throughout the northern tier of states, because it is not especially adapted to our hotter climate.  In fact, it is only advisable to grow in Texas in the fall and winter months.  Most cooperatives will stock crimson clover, but not the red, which we believe is a shame. 

Red clover is not all that different from crimson or other clovers in terms of its ability to affix nitrogen – pretty much any clover you plant will be excellent in this regard – however, the red variety has a tremendous advantage over many of its counterparts in its multifunctionality.  As an herbal supplement, red clover is used in the treatment of cancer, showing tremendous potential as a complementary tool in making traditional cancer protocols more effective.  Drinking an effusion of red clover tea has also been shown to be effective in a number of gynecological regimens, not only for breast cancer treatment, but also for cramping and as an aid in reducing the severity of symptoms resulting from uterine fibroids.  While the best evidence is anecdotal, there is reason to believe red clover even has benefit for some women with fertility problems, as well.

A summer crop we will be experimenting with next year is buckwheat.  Since we have decided to experiment with quinoa and amaranth, we are planning to call this the "year of going grainy"; buckwheat is perhaps most famous as a pancake ingredient, but it is also a useful cover crop.  It has a short growing season, is relatively drought and heat tolerant, and has a propensity to choke out the nutsedges and other noxious weeds which have free reign in most Texas gardens from late June through the end of the summer growing season – a season, we might point out, in which precious little is usually actually growing in a Texas garden.

In fact, in late July, it is a rare thing to find a Texas garden with much more than a few brave pepper plants, maybe a pumpkin vine or two, and a patch of okra.  For a gardener trying to maximize yields, a lot of the spring planting results in dead vines or stalks by the early part of July, and by then it is just too hot to plant anything else.  Buckwheat, however, is our hopeful answer.  If it works, it will solve a serious riddle for us – namely, what to do while waiting for the blast furnace to cool off enough to put our fall salsa plants back into production.

Winter rye is a fairly common cover, particularly for cattle ranchers, because it makes a pretty decent hay crop.  It is also fairly common for cotton or other cash crop farmers in Texas because, especially in areas where winter wheat is not a possibility, winter rye is the best fast-growing plant to choke out competitive weeds between the fall harvest and an early spring planting of a crop like corn or sorghum. 

In our garden, we are not going to use rye very often, but when we do, it will be partly with an eye to weed and pest control, and partly with an eye to having greens available for our chickens in the middle of the winter.  Kale, spinach and cabbage are all in production in the middle of January, but frankly we’d like to save that for ourselves – we appreciate all our hens do for us, but there just isn’t much to be harvested in the dark of winter, and we’d like to put as much of it on our own plates as we can.  Giving rye to the girls is one way to accomplish that.

Finally, we come to a novelty cover crop which we only recently discovered.  During the northern hemisphere winter, an inordinate percentage of our national tomato consumption comes from Florida; this has presented some interesting soil quality challenges in the Sunshine State, which have lately been answered by the use of a unique cover crop native to South America that goes by a variety of names:  “Cow Itch”, “Velvet Bean” or Mucuna pruriens.  The plant is a trailing bean vine, and like most beans, is enormously successful at affixing nitrogen in the soil; it is for this reason that Florida tomato farmers make extensive use of Mucuna pruriens in their year-round production schemes.

The seed-pods are unusual for beans, basically looking like small fuzzy pouches; the fuzz consists of fairly long, wiry hairs which poke fairly sharply, and cause extreme irritation.  Joke shop afficionados will recognize this irritation – the hairs are actually used as a key ingredient in manufactured itching powder formulations.

The beans are relatively small and look for all the world like black beans – turtle beans, as some folk know them.  We have not yet sampled them to see what they taste like, but we are fairly hopeful that, if the taste is not too overwhelming (and no anecdotal evidence so far uncovered has suggested that it will be) we will be able to use them in similar fashion. 

Black beans, for the uninitiated, form the basis for most bean-based recipes in the form of Tex-Mex associated with Austin, our de facto home.  We may be refugees living in College Station, but a corner table at Kerbey Lane or Mother’s Café is really where we would prefer to be, and if you order nachos in either location, they will come with black beans.

A more traditional use for Mucuna pruriens in its native habitat is as a hot beverage; several tribes in the Amazon basin roast the beans much like we roast either coffee or yaupon, and then brew a hot beverage with the ground up beans.

There is no caffeine in Mucuna pruriens, however.  The beverage is imbibed for an entirely different reason.  Mucuna pruriens is shockingly high in L-Dopa; consumption of velvet beans results in a dopamine “high” which elevates mood, as dopamine is the essential building block of that neurotransmitter miracle known as “happiness”, and it also has, um, other elevating effects.  We’ve never really been fans of raw oysters, and now we’ve discovered that we don’t need to be.  Of all purported aphrodisiacs in the literature, Mucuna pruriens is one of the few which has documented clinical studies to back it up; oysters won’t grow in the yard, but velvet beans will.

Of course, rest assured that we will only be growing it to keep the tomatoes happy.  Myrtle’s place is a family establishment, after all.

Happy farming!

There's a Certain Freedom in Being Completely Screwed...

Public debt is a hot button these days.  Most people have the impression that they personally have to balance their budgets, and are mystified that our government does not.  This of course is a gross oversimplification and, frankly, an expression of economic illiteracy, but it is fairly universal.  And it is understandable, given that debt this large cannot be paid back without serious pain.  However, it needs to be placed in context.

The United States ranks 47th in the world in terms of size of our public debt as a percentage of our gross domestic product (GDP), with our national debt standing at 52.9% of what we produce as a nation every year.  Our debt is large, but our production is monumentally huge, globally speaking, so we do okay – there is room for improvement, certainly, but we are not in the same ballpark as some other countries noted as fiscal basketcases.

Greece is the example most often noted lately, because they have undertaken extreme austerity measures to get their debt under control – their national debt currently amounts to 113.4% of their GDP.  This is high enough to rank them as the 7th most debt-laden economy in the world, and their austerity measures to correct this debt have led to riots and full-scale social upheaval.

The worst debt-offender is Zimbabwe, a nation which has struggled under the radar with a quasi-socialist dictatorship (emphasis on dictator, as philosophy really has nothing to do with Mr. Mugabe’s stranglehold on power -- he plays "Robin Hood" as a sometimes brilliant advertising campaign), and is now paying – or not paying, as the case may be – for their fiscal mismanagement to the tune of a debt equalling 282.6% of their GDP.

Numbers 2 and 6 on the list might surprise most observers, however, whose economic news comes from the front page of USA Today.  The 2nd biggest share of debt belongs to Japan, a nation most Americans think of as an economic powerhouse.  Number 6 is Italy, a nation in constant turmoil economically and politically, though not in our consciousness as a “troubled” nation in any real sense.  They have enormous personal savings in place, which offsets their national debt; personal responsibility, in other words, stabilizes their nationally irresponsible spending habits.

In fact, most of the list of debtor standouts are not countries undergoing any kind of major upheaval:  Iceland at number 9, Belgium 11, France 15, Portugal 17, Canada 18, Austria 21, England/Great Britain 22, Netherlands 27, Norway 29, Brazil 30, Ireland 36, United Arab Emirates 42, and Spain 45 are all nations with significantly more debt than the United States, none of which are under any kind of eminent collapse threat, at least as compared to their fellow nations.  They are all feeling the pinch, but not in danger of going under.

Interestingly, having mentioned Zimbabwe and post-Soviet communism, China is number 109; Venezuela is number 106; Cuba is number 75.  There are not a lot of communist or even communist leaning countries left in the world, but there are enough to spot a trend – although it is counterintuitive, they do not have large public debt burdens.  They all have better debt/GDP ratios than the United States.  They are also not nations where we would wish to live.  We would like to emphasize that we only included Venezuela in this list for the sake of argument; Hugo Chavez is belligerent, but he's no philosopher.

Maybe the size of a nation’s public debt vis-à-vis their GDP is not all that significant a measurement.  Fiscal conservatives rule the roost in nations which are mostly stagnant and bland, with no real growth, little standard of living, and no leadership on the important environmental or social issues of the coming century.  Maybe, just maybe, we ought to focus more on what that money is being spent on, and less and less on whether it is being spent at all.

The same is true for individual families.  We at Big Myrtle’s place are too cheap to spend a lot of money on frills and thrills, so we don’t own iPhones or drive a Prius, nor have we been to Disneyworld or even out of state for that matter in recent memory, but we conversely don’t believe that not going into debt is of itself a legitimate business plan.  Some time in the next couple of years we intend to borrow money, for example, to put up solar panels and convert our house from a grid drain to a grid provider.

This weekend we are going to track down cheap alternatives to new gutters for the roof, so as to collect water in the “gently used” rain barrels we recently had donated by friendly neighbors (Thanks, Brooke and Kathleen!), and while we would dearly love to get the gutters for free also, we recognize that we will probably have to pay for them.

It turns out the strongest measure of the strength of an economy may well be how much collectively the households in a nation spend.  The United States is measured as the world’s largest economy by GDP, and that is equalled by our rank in terms of household consumption.  At $10,010,111,000,000 in 2008, we spent a little more than three times as much as Japan who came in number two with $2,838,964,000,000.  For those of you trying to count the zeroes, U.S. Americans spend roughly $10 trillion a year; the Japanese spend roughly $3 trillion a year.

Equally telling, we spend as households roughly 71% of GDP; #2 Japan spends 58% of GDP; #3 Germany spends 56% of GDP; #4 Great Britain spends 64% of GDP; #5 France spends 57% of GDP.

Our economy, in other words, is driven by the sale of items, and items are only sold when there are people buying them.

The question, then, is not “should we spend” but rather “what should we spend on”?  Our vote at Myrtle’s place is for sustainable infrastructure, like solar panels, clotheslines, water collection systems, alternative fuel vehicles like an EV or a high-mileage hybrid, gardening equipment, insulation for your attic, etc.  And maybe some books.  Anything but a Snuggie.  Because lets face it, we should all really prefer a recession to collective materialistic dweebitude.  However, we assure you that personal spending can attain sufficiently impressive numbers to bolster our global standing while spending purely on goods and services which will make our planet a better place to live.

Our own purchasing decisions will be based largely on the production system we have placed on our “big board”.  We have a category for “On Order” items which must be either purchased or otherwise acquired, “Germinating” for things we have planted or started working on, “In Production” for currently fruiting plants and/or projects currently providing payoff, and “Dormant” for perennial plants or projects which are currently not “In Production” but which will be again.  While our board is not limited to just plants or chickens, we find gardening to be a good metaphor for everything else in our inventory of projects.  And our motto is to “Water what will grow,” a slogan we stole shamelessly from Rev. Dan De Leon from Friends Congregational Church, whose wit and wisdom make him a valuable Friend of Myrtle. 

We do track our debts, including mortgage, car payments, student loans, and a couple of other bills, and we do everything we can to avoid adding to this list.  Credit cards are an absolute no-no at our house, for example.  But our conversations about money are not debt-oriented – our focus is on productivity.  We suggest that this ought to be part of the larger sphere discussions about money, as well.  It will be all well and good if we get our national spending problems under control only to discover that we lack the requisite will to spend money on those things which will do the most good for our future sustainability in the coming decades of climate change and global workforce greying.  We’ll be doing our part; we hope you join us.

Happy farming!

No Coffee, No Cry

Coffee won’t grow in the Brazos Valley.  In spite of the fact that this is self-evident, we checked.  We had to do so – life without coffee is inconceivable, yet once we came to the conclusion that locally produced foods are superior in every possible way to foods shipped in from parts unknown, we felt obligated to see what we could replace on our grocery list with, as one of our more colorful friends puts it, “food shot in the yard”.

Coffee grows at high altitudes.  College Station may be high attitude, but it is severely lacking in altitude.  So, locally produced coffee is, sadly, an impossibility.  What might replace our morning cuppa joe, were we ever to make the environmentally responsible switch?

We moved on to investigate the possibility of growing tea in College Station, less enthusiastically on Mr. Myrtle Maintenance’s part, as Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is perfectly happy with tea, but her partner in this enterprise is somewhat grumpier without the higher doses of caffeine.

No good on tea, either.  The climate is actually very good for growing the Carmella sinensis plant, in terms of soil quality, temperature, and quantity of sunlight.  However, it requires about 50 inches of rain a year.  So, if we were willing to utilize every drop of our irrigation systems on growing a few tea shrubs, we could do it; everything else would fall by the wayside, though.  We have Oxford aspirations for our children, but we lack the fanaticism necessary for this degree of anglophilia; tea is a non-starter.  We may grow black currants, and we definitely still love biscuits and preserves, but ix-nay on the ea-tay.

What in the world is an aspiring locavore to do?  Stimulating beverages are something we are used to thinking of as simply growing on trees, but our national heritage is fraught with tales of woe related to the dependency we have formed on imported caffeine.  The Boston Tea Party is perhaps the most famous example of Americans gone mad over our enslavement to “the good stuff” and the economic power wielded by those who control its importation.

The blockade of the South during the Civil War led to trials and tribulations in the Confederacy, as well.  Numerous diarists wrote home from the front lines of the insufficiency of coffee; soldiers brewed a mish-mash of acorns and chicory, hoping that a hot and bitter beverage would fool their taste buds, even if it couldn’t fool their central nervous systems.  Americans lacking coffee or tea have despaired many times over the course of our nation’s history.

At Myrtle’s place, though, we don’t know the meaning of the word ‘quit’.  (That may have something to do with the fact that we burned the ‘Q’ section of the dictionary during last winter’s freak snowstorm, but we digress…)

Given the near universal acclaim for caffeinated beverages like coffee, tea, cola, and “energy drinks” like Red Bull, etc., we started with the assumption that other cultures must surely have encountered some caffeine-rich plant which could then be converted to potable form via brewing, distilling, or some other means, which we would be able to duplicate in our back yard.

This turned out to be a perfectly reasonable assumption.  Many plants produce caffeine, not just the coffee or tea trees.  We knew, for example, that cacao, which produces the bean from which chocolate is manufactured, also has smaller amounts of caffeine.  Other plants also make use of this chemical, because it is a natural pesticide, and even slightly herbicidal.  The presence of caffeine protects, particularly young plants but also fruiting plants, from insects and from the encroachment of other trees.  It repels bugs and retards the growth of neighboring plants.

Two South American plants besides coffee and cacao which produce caffeine are Guarana (Paullinia cupana), which is a climbing plant in the maple family, native to the Amazon basin and especially common in Brazil, and also Yerba maté (Ilex paraguariensis), a species of holly native to Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Paraguay, and southern Brazil.

Both of these plants are used by locals to make strong beverages; Guarana, in particular, is used in a variety of commercially available beverages, and is even the basis of numerous soft drinks which take considerable market share away from Coca-Cola and Pepsi in Brazil.

However, it was the Yerba which caught our attention.  Ilex paraguariensis?  We are much more familiar with another Ilex species, Ilex vomitoria, also known as Yaupon Holly.  Our land was overrun with the stuff when we bought it – the yaupon grew so thickly here that you couldn’t even tell there was a house on our property until we had cut it back.

Yaupon grows to about 10-12 feet tall, and for four or five months a year has bright red berries on it.  We had heard a rumor that Native American tribes had long ago made a beverage from yaupon which caused them to vomit.  In fact, that is how the latin name for the plant originated – Ilex vomitoria.

Juxtaposing the yerba story with the yaupon story, we decided maybe the yaupon related beverage required a little more investigation.

It turns out that a concoction known in English as “Black Drink” was, in fact, brewed from Ilex vomitoria in early America by a variety of peoples.  The leaves and twigs were harvested just prior to preparation – freshness evidently being vital – and then roasted, prior to grinding and brewing.  Colonists imitated the Native Americans and brewed this beverage as a replacement for coffee or tea, and called it “cassine” or “cassina”.

Caddo, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and other tribes consumed this beverage in the belief that it purged the drinker of anger and deceit.  This made it a particularly attractive social beverage, as these qualities would obviously be detrimental in group environments – for evidence, try running a modern committee meeting without coffee or tea.

Because the consumption of the beverage was so often a social event, it naturally led to drinking vast quantities of the beverage, often in ritual manner, with special songs being sung as the large tureen was passed from person to person.  As part of these rituals, many tribes included a final act of purging themselves by vomiting.  This was not a biochemical necessity, it was a religious act, and not every tribe shared in this unfortunate ritual.  The Ais peoples of Florida, in fact, were often observed by European settlers to drink the stuff on a regular basis without ever suffering gastric distress.  To further illustrate the significance of the beverage, the ritual name Asi Yahola or Black Drink Singer is corrupted into English as Osceola.

Armed with all of these clues as to the potability of this beverage, sans the risk of (ahem!) unwanted emissions, the next question becomes whether this might be an acceptable substitute for coffee.  Clearly, early European settlers were willing to settle for Black Drink in the absense of coffee or tea, but just as clearly, they preferred to go back to the imported stuff as quickly as possible.

Chemically, we know yaupon has roughly six times as much caffeine as coffee.  This goes a long way to explaining the lack of groundcover underneath our yaupon stands; there are plenty of young tree shoots, but no grasses – not even very many weeds – underneath the Ilex vomitoria.  Naturally, this means the drink will be fairly bitter.  Too bitter to drink?  And could the bitterness be cut by the inclusion of some sweet herb or other?

There’s only one way to find out.  We made it ourselves.

The traditional way for at least the last 10,000 years in the Gulf Coast region has been to parch the leaves and twigs of yaupon in a ceramic container, so we did the same thing.  We then boiled the crushed leaves and twigs in our coffee pot, and strained them in our french press to make sure no extraneous leaves or twigs made it to the cup.

The resulting beverage had roughly the consistency of a very dark tea -- it even smelled a lot like a good orange pekoe, though the color was closer to that of a dark roasted arabica coffee bean.

The telling question, though, is naturally the question of taste.  What did it taste like?  It tasted like raisin-flavored tea.  There is no other way to describe it; it tasted like sweet raisins squeezed into a nice hot cup of tea.  The caffeine buzz was fairly intense, so much so that when our daughter asked to try it, we only gave her a small portion, which she drank with a heavy dose of sugar, and a qualified thumbs up.  She still prefers Earl Grey, but our parched yaupon tea will do in a pinch, she says.

We still prefer coffee, we must admit.  But we are mystified why this beverage is not at least as popular as many of the other forms of caffeine currently available on the market.  It actually tastes quite good, and it comes from a tree which grows like a weed throughout most of the Gulf region.  We chopped down a lot of yaupon to make room for vegetables and herbs; we aren't cutting down any more, though.  They put the "tea" in "Tea Shoppe".

Happy farming!

Small Farm Good, Big Farm Bad (Have we mentioned this before...?)

Non-renewable resources are, by definition, irreplaceable.  Once you have used them, they are not renewed.  The logical conclusion, therefore, is that you should not use them, but should instead opt for other resources.

In some cases, such as with fossil fuels, this is self-evident, and the solutions, though taking some effort, are obvious.  We need to take advantage of natural processes which will last as long as the planet does -- put solar panels on every home in the country, for example, and set up wind turbines, geothermal heating and cooling systems, and so on, instead of relying on oil and coal, the supplies of which are finite.

However, there are some other non-renewable resources we don’t usually think about as being non-renewable, and the solution to their overuse is not so obvious.  The best example is groundwater.

Agricultural water usage accounts for 80% of the fresh water consumption in the United States; 60% of that consumption comes from groundwater sources, with the other 40% coming from well water pumped out of aquifers.  The Ogallala Aquifer, for instance, which supports a good portion of the central and southwestern U.S., is being depleted at an annual rate anywhere from 130-160% of the rate of replenishment, meaning only about 2/3rd of what is taken out in a given year is returned via rainfall.

As industrial agricultural production becomes more intense due to population concerns, there is little reason to believe this rate of depletion will do anything but increase.  The models are not clear on how much longer the Ogallala will be able to provide water, but obviously you cannot take out more than is put in indefinitely – at some point, it will be empty.  When it is empty, the environment in which it sits dry and idle has a name:  “desert”.  That is a dry and dusty sounding moniker to hang on the breadbasket of the country.

This raises a serious question:  what do you use instead of water to water your crops?  What renewable alternative is there?

Even in areas where the primary water source is not a limited resource such as an aquifer, water use – and increasingly, water reuse – is a life-or-death question, because degradation of our water supplies due to chemical leaching from pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer runoff, in addition to runoff from industrial sites, stormwater pollution from urban centers, and phosphate pollution from untreated greywater make what water is available less attractive as an agricultural resource.

The solution to these and other tricky problems lay in rephrasing the question. 

Rather than assuming we have to find ways to support the industrial agricultural model in a scenario in which resources are limited and collateral damage is unavoidable, a dramatic change in paradigm will make the whole class of worries disappear.  Rather than attempting large scale watering of industrial monoculture – ie, miles and miles of corn fields, wheat fields, etc. – we ought to decentralize, and instead focus on renewable and reusable water supplies for polycultural small plots. 

Places like small backyard gardens, for starters, are easier to supply with clean agricultural water.  But not just extensive backyard gardens – microfarms like Millican Farms, which require more water than does Myrtle’s place can almost as easily be watered in a renewable fashion.  It just takes a little planning and a little will and a lot of elbow grease.  At Millican Farms, they use a pond to irrigate greenhouses; the tomatoes are delicious, year round.

One of the chief criticisms of the permaculture movement and its related sustainable agriculture movements is that systems of no-till polyculture make industrial agricultural methods impossible and obviate mechanization.  We argue that this is not a weakness, but is, instead, one of the principle advantages of permaculture.  The chief disadvantage lay not in the inability of permaculture to generate yields sufficient to feed the world, but rather in the lack of will to provide consumers worldwide with the resources necessary to feed themselves.  Instead of using a tractor and a combine in Nebraska to feed a peasant in Thailand, why not use a shovel and a hoe in Thailand to help that peasant grow his own food?

The “Green Revolution” of the last half-century has, in fact, produced massive gains in crop yields, but far from eliminating starvation, as is often claimed as the brass ring to be grabbed by agritechnology, these incredible – one might even say ridiculous – increases in productivity as measured by quantity have been matched by stunning and monumental declines in quality, such that people whose primary problem used to be getting enough calories are now faced with an overabundance of empty calories.  By some estimates, the typical decline in nutritional value of produce over the last 50 years is on the order of 25-50 percent.

We are draining our water supplies in order to produce food no one should be forced to eat, and we are supporting a global economy in which people who should be given start-up loans to go to work are instead forced to sit idly accepting handouts of food whose quality could be surpassed by a hunter-gatherer’s diet.

Industrial agriculture is an evolutionary dead-end.

Small scale, local, organic production, on the other hand, produces crops generally acknowledged to be more flavorful, healthier, and easier on the environment.  And – more to the point – there is nowhere in the world where this type of production cannot be implemented.  There is no need for industrial agriculture; subsidized exports of wheat and other foodstuffs are an albatross around our necks, doing no good for the rest of the world, lining the pockets of a few corporate big wigs, and depleting our natural resources in the process.

The “starving peasants of Bangladesh” would be better served by the establishment of local cooperatives in Bengali communities, learning to grow sustainable crops there, than they are by the massive exploitation of lands in Kansas and Iowa to produce foods lacking the nutritional value of “home grown”, and contributing nothing to the Bengali economy.

Critics might argue that watering a hundred small farms would deplete just as much water as the process of watering one very large farm, but that is because the critics know nothing about the methods of permaculture, nor about the innovations inherent in small-scale sustainable production.  No-till practices by their very nature require heavy use of mulches which are almost always a form of “compost in place”, and which increase the moisture-retention abilities of topsoil by orders of magnitude.

Further, small-scale productions are much better adapted to water conservation methods like rainwater collection or greywater reclamation, and they have greater incentive to invest in these alternative procedures, given their relative size.

Then, too, small farms are more likely to practice polyculture, rather than monocropping.  As the coffee farmers of Central and South America have rediscovered in the last decade or so, “shade-grown” coffee, which is part of a multi-species ecosystem, rather than a single-crop field, requires far less water.  Yes, polyculture eliminates the ability to use mechanical harvesting methods, making it more labor intensive and therefore more expensive at market, but the reduction in water costs, fertilizer costs, pesticide and herbicide costs, transportation and fossil fuel costs, and improved quality and nutritional value and the associated reduction in future health care costs more than offset the labor costs. 

Ultimately, the accretion of risks involved in taking essentially natural processes and attempting to manufacture “improvements” is simply too great to bear.  The misuse of water resources by industrial agriculture is only one of its many malfeasances. 

Engineered solutions to biological problems are rife with unknown and unknowable risks.  The best possible example lay in supplemental nutrition for cattle – some time in the late 1970s, the practice of feeding meat and bone meal to cattle resulted in the evolution of a strain of protein molecules – not even an actual organism, just protein strands – into a prion capable of causing a new variant of Creutzfeld-Jakobs disease (nvCJD) known as Bovine Spongeiform Encephalopathy (BSE), aka “Mad Cow Disease”.

The assurances given to ranchers, and passed along to the general public, that bone meal was perfectly fine for cattle, were based on the best available scientific data, which was actually fairly considerable.  These were not careless scientists and bureaucrats who made the horribly tragic mistake of feeding animal products to herbivores – this was a well thought out plan, backed up by considerable data. 

It was also completely wrong.

This particular tragedy probably could not have been predicted; however, the fact of some sort of tragic consequences definitely could have been predicted.  A diet for a whole class of animals which evolved for very specific reasons cannot and could not be engineered, no matter how clever the researchers, to be so thoroughly and completely different from the diet naturally preferred by those animals without there being a swath of unforeseen consequences.

Feed lot biochemistry is just one area where we have been thumbing our noses at Mother Nature.  As Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “When we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back in the front door with a pitchfork.”  For many thousands of years now we have been planting fields with just one crop, depleting the nutrients in the soil and then moving on to new fields.  We have been taking water out of natural reservoirs, drying them up, and then moving on.  We have been burning down, bulldozing, turning under, planting something alien for a few years, and then moving on.

Maybe we shouldn’t keep moving on.  The original farmers were just tribes who found a place where what they wanted to eat seemed to be growing fairly well, and they stayed and protected those naturally occurring stands of wheat and figs, until they learned all they could about tending them and caring for them and propagating them.

We joke that we never want to move again – we want to be buried in the yard.  We haven't done the research, but if the product of the cremation process is at all compatible with the making of biochar, why the heck not?  We'll reside at Myrtle's forever.

Happy farming!