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“We still think of air as free.  But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water.  The price tag on pollution control is high.  Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.”

--President Richard M. Nixon

Asking is the worst possible way to find out what someone values.  If you really want to know what someone believes, don’t ask them, watch them.  What you spend your time doing, what you spend your money buying, what you spend your energy daydreaming about, these are the things you cherish.  These are your values.  These are your Gods.  We all claim we have a certain set of principles, a certain theology, but what we say is invariably different in some fundamental ways from what we do, and it is not what we say, but what we do which reflects what we really believe.

This is as true of groups of people as it is for individuals. 

There are frequently political clamorings for government to have to balance its budget because “We have to live within our means, why shouldn’t the federal government?”  The disconnect in this statement never quite seems to percolate through to our cultural awareness… Do individuals really have to live within their means?  Are they doing so?  And what does “live within our means” really mean?  Is it as simple as a calculation of financial ways and means, or is there more to the equation? 

After all, the American obesity epidemic really comes down to people not living within our means, consuming far more calories in Big Macs than we are expending via getting out and exercising.   There are other debts besides monetary debts, and we are collectively running up huge deficits in more ways than we can possibly keep track of.

Do Americans simply not care about social inequality, ecological devastation, obesity, and impending economic devastation?  Expressions of concern are almost universal, crossing all party and philosophical lines – Ronald Reagan bowed to public sentiment and joined “Hands Across America” – clearly, though there are serious disagreements about methods, objectives are fairly universal – we all agree with the beauty pageant contestants who clamor for their one wish, world peace.

People do care about social inequity and natural resource iniquity; they simply don’t see.  Why not?  The inescapable conclusion when observing the sociological and ecological components of the American economy is that Americans do not value balance, because our collective actions have been so thoroughly unbalanced for so long.  So why the dissonance?  How can someone driving a gas-guzzling sport utility vehicle, clearly oblivious to their economic, ecological and social budget busting, have the wisdom to say the federal government ought not spend more money than it possesses?

The best possible explanation is that a fallacy inherited from neoclassical economics dominates our collective consciousness.  The neoclassical Venn diagram for discussion of sustainability shows “Social”, “Environmental” and “Economic” components of development as top level spheres, with the union of the three being the shaded “Sustainable” area.  Where only “Social” and “Environmental” unite, you have “Bearable” conditions; where only “Social” and “Economic” unite, you have “Equitable” conditions, and where “Environmental” and “Economic” concerns unite, you have “Viable” conditions.  Thus, in the neoclassical model, the center, the united “Sustainable” area, represents a compromise between these three entities.

This model is tidy, which neoclassicists appreciate, but it is fundamentally flawed.  A more accurate picture shows that “Environment” is the top level sphere; “Society” is not a separate sphere, but a subset of “Environment”.  “Economy” is a subset of “Society”.  Talk of united concerns between any of these three aspects misses the point entirely – there are no economic concerns which do not impact society and the environment; neither are there any social concerns which do not impact the environment.

All economics are social; all economics are environmental; all social exchange is environmental.

The relevant question, then, is not whether social and environmental concerns should be part of our thinking about economic issues, but rather are we willing to accept that economics ought by order of precedence to be the lowest level concern?  Environmental and social issues take precedence because if either of those spheres collapse, they will by nature take the economy out with them. 

Witness what happens to local economies during environmental or social catastrophes – who can do business in the middle of a hurricane, wildfire, tornado or earthquake?  Who can do business in the middle of a riot?  Where is the free market during protests and counterprotests?

Acceptance of this basic tenet leads to a wholesale rejection of common wisdom on a host of contemporary concerns.  “We have to increase domestic production of oil,” for example, is a fallacy accepted by most of the philosophical spectrum in American politics.  The justifications for drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas come down to economic independence and security against instrusions of socially unacceptable foreign enemies – the hegemony of OPEC nations strikes most Americans as being more important than biodiversity or global warming.

We do not, however, have to increase domestic production of oil.  Economic growth is not our primary concern; environmental security is our primary concern, and the petrochemical industry has demonstrated quite clearly for the entirety of its existence that it is incapable of coexisting peacefully with the environment.

Pursuit of economic growth through energy consumption has lead to irreversible climate change, has polluted our water supplies, has killed off several ecospheres, has put carcinogenic hydrocarbons in the food chain and has, in short, drastically lessened the survivability of contemporary social structures based on a consumption-driven economy.

Drilling for more oil, in other words, doesn’t make us safer; it makes us immeasurably less safe, both in terms of the immediate environmental dangers inherent in climate change, etc., but also in terms of the social and economic strains which will become inevitable as the results of unsustainable consumption manifest themselves.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, in their 2008 “Living Planet Report” summarized the dangers:

“Humanity’s demand on the planet’s living resources, its Ecological Footprint, now exceeds the planet’s regenerative capacity by about 30 per cent.  This global overshoot is growing and, as a consequence, ecosystems are being run down and waste is accumulating in the air, land and water.  The resulting deforestation, water shortages, declining biodiversity and climate change are putting the well-being and development of all nations at increasing risk.”

“But we have to have oil, so it’s better if we have American oil,” the argument goes.  This is nothing more than saying we ought to only impale ourselves on hirikiri knives manufactured in Pennsylvania, because the steelworkers there should take precedence over Japanese knifemakers.  We’re just as dead regardless of where the knives (or oil) are produced.

An ecological economist looking at the initially described problem – insufficient energy exists in order to meet the demands of the economy –would ask several different questions:

• Can the energy demands be mitigated (ie, what energy conservation methods need to be tried first)?  
• What sustainable methods for delivering these energy needs can be substituted for the unsustainable method of burning fossil fuels?  
• Are there opportunities to localize energy production to the specific places where energy consumption will be occurring?  
• Can those primarily responsible for consuming the energy be made more directly invested in the creation of that energy so as to reduce impact on those who are not consumers?

“That doesn’t sound like economics to me,” say the more mathematically and statistically grounded critics.  “It sounds like philosophy or even theology.”

There is some merit to this argument; ecological economists make no secret of the need to inject values statements into economic writing.  However, they further point out that neoclassical economics may claim to be a “positive” (empirical or evidential) science, but it is inescapably “normative” (values laden), which goes a long way towards explaining how the same data set can be used to defend so vigorously diametrically opposed ideas such as laissez-faire capitalism and determinist Marxism. 

All economic theories with any sort of following have of necessity at some point demonstrated strong predictive abilities which have garnered intellectual agreement among various students and researchers; however, the diversity of theories can only be explained by means of a differentiating grid, and in the case of theoretical frameworks, that differentiation comes in the form of normative “ought” statements, not positive “is” statements.

Which leads us back to our original premise – we value that which we pursue.  Evelyn Waugh wrote in The Razor’s Edge that “anyone can be a saint on a mountaintop.”  The true test of ethical systems lay in which hard choices adherents are willing to make.  Paying a little extra for the organic fruits and vegetables raised with fair trade practices, for example, seems like a sacrifice, but it is a far more ethical decision than selecting the lower priced alternatives which really represent a subsidy for laziness and sloppiness, a subsidy paid by future generations. 

Your great-grandchildren, in other words, will be paying more for everything because you just had to have that gas-guzzling SUV, that extra Big Mac, that brand new iPhone, that vacation at Disney, and on and on.

Do we want to continue to pursue economic growth at all costs?  Or are we willing to start putting our money where our mouths are?  Because ultimately, ethical behavior will mean we must consciously decide we are going to be satisfied with less.  If we truly care about future generations, we will decide that quality of life is far more important than quantity of dollars produced.

Ultimately, we have to decide we will pursue development, but not growth.  This means investing in technologies which produce non-polluting outputs using significantly fewer resources, none of which are non-renewable, and doing so across all sectors of the economy.  “Smaller is better” needs to replace “supersize me” in every aspect of our lives.

Heck, Myrtle isn’t even our biggest chicken.  The meek shall inherit the Earth; let’s just make sure it’s worth inheriting, okay?

Happy farming!

Pigheaded for Pigweed

One of the limiting factors in turning an urban homestead into a completely self-sufficient ecological niche is the fact that most grain crops require an inordinate amount of space.  In fact, this is part of why organic cereal crops are so rare – the investment of time and space involved in raising grain crops is substantial, and most farmers who are interested in organics are also interested in saving money.  They therefore opt for less spatially intensive products, like fruits and vegetables, or eggs, or dairy.

So, those of us trying to scratch out an edible living on a half-acre in the city are left holding the empty cereal bag.

Which is why we are curious about a new possibility.  Our research on world foods has led us to an admiration of the staple of the Inca diet, a little pseudocereal called quinoa.  Foodies have long been familiar with quinoa, but it is not part of the general public’s culinary vernacular, and with good reason.  Although this is almost the perfect grain – the approximation of complete proteins in quinoa is closer than in any other starchy crop besides the potato – it is also very clearly a specialty crop.

The outer covering of the quinoa grain is heavily laced with saponins, which give it an exceedingly bitter flavor.  This is bad news for anyone who wants to eat it raw, of course, but good news for farmers who have to worry about avian intrusions.  Birds do not poach a quinoa harvest the way they do with corn or even wheat.

“But Myrtle,” you may be asking, “why would we want to eat something at which the birds turn up their prim little noses?”

Good question.  The answer?  You don’t have to eat quinoa with the saponins still attached, silly goose.  You soak it before cooking it.  Most boxed quinoa you might find at your local grocery store will come pre-soaked to remove the saponin content for you.  Those of us who are used to soaking our pinto or black beans prior to cooking will not find this extra step all that tedious.

So, well and good, we have established that there is this grain which is bird-proof and high in protein.  How do you grow it, and what do you use it for?

These are excellent questions, and unfortunately, this is where our research takes a bit of a left turn off the expected path.  Being a native of the Andes mountain range, as you might expect, Quinoa prefers weather a tad more temperate than what we experience on the Texas coastal plain.  There are some successful quinoa producers in Colorado and New Mexico, but we fear if we were to try the plant in any serious sort of way, we would have to limit ourselves to fall and winter production, and even then, the growing season might not be long enough before the return of hot weather, sometimes as early as late March, never later than mid-May.  Quinoa takes a while to reach maturity, and we just don’t have the pleasant cool weather you find in Peru or Ecuador.

However, never being prone to dispair for long, we continued to dig after hearing these discouraging words, and we found that there is a relative of quinoa called “pigweed” which was cultivated in North America until as recently as the middle of the 18th century.  In fact, in Mexico, it is still being raised as a cash-crop.

Known variously as “pigweed”, “pitseed”, “goosefoot”, “huauzontle”, or “lambsquarters”, Chenopodium berlandieri is an annual herbaceous plant widely regarded as a weed.  However, several varieties are grown for food, utilizing different characteristics of the plant, which has many characteristics of the better known Chenopodium album or, of course, its relative with which the conversation got started, Chenopodium quinoa.  Varieties of pigweed are grown for the broccoli-like seed heads; other varieties are grown for grain; still others are grown because the leaves of the plant are much like spinach.

Quinoa is almost exclusively grown at altitude, although we suspect it might thrive at lower elevations provided the other climate requirements were met.  However, we are more likely to experiment with the other Chenopodiae simply because we suspect we will have more success with them.

While scrounging for information about what grain crops we might reasonably expect to be able to grow at our altitude and in our hardiness zone, we stumbled upon another pseudocereal which, like quinoa and pigweed, is far more nutritious and versatile than the more popular wheat and corn alternatives.  Amaranth is, like the Chenopodiae, considered a weed by most American farmers.  However, in most of the rest of the world, and more particularly, in those parts of the world where drought in spite of high humidity is a very real concern, Amaranthacea Celosia is considered a wonder crop.  The leaves and flowers are edible, tasting much like spinach, and the seed is another lysine-rich close-to-complete protein food.  And in some quarters, amaranth, like lambsquarters, is called "pigweed" because it only grows where the pigs forage!

Amaranth seeds were popular with Native Americans from the plains states; in Mexico, you can still see a candy made with amaranth grain called alegría at festivals in some communities; in India, amaranth is called rajgira and is served popped and mixed with jaggery (a south Asian sugar) to form a dish called laddus, which is a staple in school cafeterias throughout the subcontinent.  And in sub-Saharan Africa, farmers are viewing amaranth as manna from heaven, because many of their traditional crops are failing with increased climate change induced variability in the local weather patterns; amaranth thrives in conditions other grain crops abhor, which goes a long way to explaining how several varieties have taken hold in the U.S. as pernicious weeds, resistant to many herbicides.

And like another crop we have come to appreciate more each year, the sunflower, amaranth plants are just plain attractive.  The bright red varieties in particular have the potential to transform even a small garden plot into a vibrant, velvety canvass.  One of the chief complaints about vegetable gardens is that they lack the aesthetic sensibilities of herbs or flowers; this does not have to be true.  The inclusion of trap crops like sunflowers and nasturtiums was our introduction to this fact; now, we learn that the floral attractions can themselves be on the menu, and we are overjoyed with the discovery.

This will be part of next year’s veggie garden revamp – in the Spring, we will plant amaranth, and in the Fall, we will plant lambsquarters.  And if we can get a good grain crop out of that mix, then we’ll see what kind of homegrown breads we can turn out; Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance -- we don’t mean to brag but can’t help ourselves -- is perhaps the best baker we know.  Her challenge will be to turn out good product with nothing but what comes from our yard.  If we were tending ten acres instead of a half of one, it would be no challenge.  But, as the inimitable (if fictional) Jimmy Duggan says, “It’s the ‘hard’ that makes it great!”

Happy farming!

Vegetables, Fractals and Herbs, Oh My!

We have been thinking about patterns a lot lately.  Reading about Masanobu Fukuoka got us interested in some other early permaculture literature, which in turn lead us to think about design and layout in urban garden spaces, and how frustrated we have been up to this point in getting our vegetable garden to fit into our schematic as easily as the herb gardens have done.

The great irony is, we laid out the herb gardens as we did because we couldn’t think of anything else to do.  They sort of follow the curve of the driveway on one side, and the curve of the path to our front door on the other side.  And the only thing vaguely monoculturish about them is the fact that rosemary is the dominant feature of the curve; however, we actually have three different varieties of rosemary, and they are interspersed with thyme, cannas, and an italian variety of oregano.

The veggies, though, have been something of a thorn in our sides.  We started with twelve raised beds, and they worked well enough at first, but there is something about intensive gardening approaches with which we just didn’t grok.  Even though we were not using any artifical means of production beyond the inclusion of a lot of elbow grease, it didn’t feel natural at all.  We had to add so much in the form of compost and chicken poop the second year to approximate the qualitative and quantitative success of the first year, that we began to wonder.  In year three, in fact, we are abandoning our fall garden almost altogether as we retool the design.

Having read all we could get our hands on about microenvironmental design, we have come to realize that we have been forcing the land to move to realize our vision, instead of the other way around.  The idiomatic expression sounds quaint, but we are fairly sure the mountain never actually goes to meet Mohammed (peace be upon him).  Mere mortals have to adjust ourselves to our surroundings, lest we end up with gardens more reminescent of slag heaps than of Eden.

In a stunning bit of serendipitous synchronicity, we recently read a blog posting by our good friend Hugh Stearns who was musing about fractal geometry in two-dimensional spaces, and reflecting on how patterns are not always visible to those who are refusing to see them.  Depth is out there, but only if your eyes are open.

We suppose, given that this is all pretty much in line with what Hugh does for a living, we ought to have consulted him first before attempting to mould our garden to our foolish desires by means of sheer will.  Two things stopped us however:  first, we have an immense quantity of stubborn self-determination in our family which bodes ill for our ever accepting advice, even good advice.  Second, there is no way on God’s green earth we could afford Hugh’s professional services.  We’re cheapskates, and he is a top tier professional; that sort of combination does not work out.  So, to the books we go.

Early in the 20th century, the agronomic forebears of the modern locavores, slow fooders, organic advocates, et al., were the progenitors of the paradigm known as “Permaculture”.  This approach focuses on systems which mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies; in other words, taking the way each individual part of your garden interacts with every other part of your garden, your home, your nieghborhood, your city, your hardiness zone, etc., and making it function as closely as possible to the ways in which those individual parts most successfully interact when found in a state of nature.  You would not, for example, want to emulate naturally occuring plants which die out in nature, you would want to find examples where they succeed, and copy them.

One of the first things the permaculturalists noticed was that monoculture – the exclusive prominence of one variety of plant – is almost non-existant in nature.  You may encounter areas where a particular species or variety is the predominant feature of an area, but you almost never find a place where it is the only feature.  As a thought experiment, imagine yourself in a wild copse where the plants are all familiar domestic garden plants, but grown randomly and with no friendly farmer about.  Compare this vision with a farm, and the most noticeable difference is likely to be that you picture the farm having row after row of corn stalks and cabbages, neatly divided, with little placards telling you what is planted where.

You would notice the difference if you walked out of a wildly overgrown meadow and into a corn field.  It’s just… different.

Polyculture, it turns out, actually produces more and healthier plants than does monoculture, but modern farming practices are monocultural because, well, just because.  Lev. 19:19 importunes against planting more than one type of crop in the same field, but if you are looking to the Torah for agricultural science, you've got deeper issues you need to deal with first.  We suppose on large scale industrial plots, the need for individual attention and the lack of any way to mechanize processes like planting and harvesting would make polyculture difficult and prohibitively expensive, but on small scales, it really just comes down to tradition.  And since we argue that all agriculture ought to be brought back down to small scales anyway... you can see where we're headed.

The earliest American farmers all worked with traditions learned from observation of nature; the “Three Sisters” or “Trinity” are almost as familiar to school children studying the pilgrims and their aboriginal benefactors as the use of fish when planting corn.  “Guild” planting is a cornerstone of permaculture – “companion planting” is another name this concept goes by.  The classic example of the “Three Sisters” references the symbiosis of corn, squash and tomatoes, which do especially well when planted in clusters.  We have also noticed tomatoes, peppers, and basil do well in the same plot, a fact that makes for convenient dinnertime harvesting on nights when italian food strikes our fancy.

Another thing the early permaculturalists noticed was that the symbiosis of different plant species reflected a similar symbiosis between types of terrain – the “edges” of systems, as it were.  A good example would be the places where ponds meet grassy slopes, or where grassy slopes meet forests.  Beans provide nitrogen needed by corn, which provides an excellent climbing surface for beans; in the same way, water feeds microbes and rhizomes which aerate soil, and vegetation falling from surrounding terrain decays in water and provides nutrition for phytoplankton, which feed the fish who are then eaten by land creatures and re-deposited in the soil to nourish the plant life there.  Polyculturalists emphasize maximizing your transitional spaces in order to recreate these kinds of cycles.

Applying this bit of wisdom to our problem will, we hope, provide the needed sledgehammer to the wall blocking our creative path vis-à-vis our veggie garden.  A fractal extension of Big Myrtle’s place to a vegetable garden in the “big open space in the middle of the back yard” would look something like a wavy rhomboid plot with taller plants on the outside stepping down to flatter plants in the middle.

This actually answers another riddle we have been grappling with, too.  We intend to plant a variety of trees, including avocados (In preparation for global warming, naturally!  Thereby hangs another tale, for a future post…), plums, and peaches.  The avocados will be a tier step down from our oak trees, the plums will be a tier step down from the avocados, and the peaches will be a tier step down from the plums.  Voila!  We will have the trellised look so valued by permaculturalists.  And if we swirl these new trees around the perimeter of the vegetable plot, we will accomplish the fractal pattern look our design guru amigo suggests, as well.

We are going to procede cautiously, however.  Taking a snapshot of the layout as it currently exists and then superimposing corrective changes certainly sounds like a good plan, but the very act of planning represents a recurrence of our original mistake.  We do not believe that “Design” should preclude the flexibility of improvisation which is necessary for the ultimate “design”.  The act of designing a patterned environment, in other words, should not be a replacement for the creation of designs in a patterened environment.

If you don’t see the distinction, don’t worry.  All such intellectual abstractions are beside the point when you pick up a shovel and a hoe and actually get to work.  Fukuoka would probably disapprove of all this moving of dirt and plants, but then, you can’t please everybody.  He did his all-natural gardening in Japan, where 100+ degree days and fire ants were utterly inconceivable, so we take his serenity with a grain of salt.

One of Fukuoka’s contributions to which we will pay more attention, however, is the idea of “fairshare”.  Even organic farming can fall prey to the trap of taking more out of the soil that it ought; in fact, there is an entire movement in agriculture called “biointensive” farming.  This is a system in which maximum yields are engineered from minimum spaces.  This is an attractive lure, particularly in urban areas, because it sounds like doing more with less.  The problem is, as we have discovered after a mere three years growing food in the nutrient-deficient soils of the Brazos Valley, you have to work the topsoil so intensively that even organic methods are not “sustainable”.

It isn’t natural, and those things which do not emulate natural processes tend to break sooner than those things which do.  To put it in the context of the Laws of Physics, entropy suggests that things move from states of lower likelihood to higher likelihood.  To tell what system of growing things is more or less likely, just look around at what naturally occurs.

It isn’t rocket science; it’s simply observation.  If something seems to work; do it.  If it seems to be too hard to get it to work, maybe it is; maybe you should try something else.  We’re off to try something else!

Happy farming!

While the Big Potato Burns...

“Wheat.  I’m dead, and they’re talking about wheat.”
--Woody Allen, Love and Death

The old joke about the difference between a recession and a depression is that if your neighbor is out of a job, it’s a recession, but if you are out of a job, that is a depression.  Catastrophes and disasters, both the natural and the man-made kind, are received with  much the same ego-centrism. 

Not a day went by during the summer of 2010 when you did not see news headlines on every major media outlet in the United States about oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, and rightly so.  It was, and still is, a big news story.  In fact, the real tragedy is that even though the impacts of this spill will last centuries, it will probably be leaving the headlines soon, now that the principle villains in this little melodrama have won the propaganda war.  Truth is the first casualty when profit battles public health.

However, numerous stories with at least as big, and frequently bigger impacts never got airplay in this country, because they happened to our global neighbors, and not to ourselves.  In Nigeria, for example, by some estimates as much as 100 million barrels of oil were spilled between 1960 and 1997, and the trend continues to this day.  In essence, the oil industry in Nigeria self-regulates, because the government is weak and incapable of enforcing much of any kind of environmental rules.  New spills are hardly ever reported, because they are now just a fact of life.  The wonder is that the Niger Delta is still habitable at all – soon, Nigeria may join Somalia as an ungovernable wasteland, and oil is directly to blame.

Elsewhere, beginning in May of 2010, and up to the time of this writing, 1,420 people have died and over 1,700 are missing in China as massive flooding and mudslides have wracked that country.  The $25 billion Three Gorges Dam project is in danger of being swept away by floods, or at the very least severely damaged by an inundation of toxic flotsam and jetsam from major flooding and erosion from upstream.  This story has received a little bit of front page play in the U.S., but not much.

Pakistan has been devastated by the worst flooding in that country in at least 80 years; the terrorist organizations which we have known for decades pose the greatest threats, to India to the East and to all-points West, are also providing the greatest amount of humanitarian aid to the several million displaced Pakistanis.  Who will those people be most sympathetic to in the future?  Westerners preaching at them about the evils of fundamentalist Islam?  Or radical Muslim leaders who actually did something for them and their families in a time of need?

The list of stories like this goes on and on.  All corners of the globe are experiencing traumatic crises either directly caused by or at least made worse by global climate change, but in this country we largely ignore these stories.  There are valid evolutionary reasons for this phenomenon; frankly, as Douglas Adams noted in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the one thing no human being could ever hope to survive is a sense of perspective.  Nevertheless, our selective reading of global news comes down to a form of triabalism which no longer serves a useful function.  It may not be comfortable to think about people vastly different from ourselves living in places we will never visit, but for our own good we need to start paying attention.

A good place to start is in a country which the West has spent the better part of the last century demonizing.  Russia has a long history of paranoia – again, with reasons paleopsychologists would have no trouble explaining, given that a list of countries who have not invaded Russia at some point in the past millineum might be shorter than a list of those who have.  And Russia’s callous abuse of their own natural resources – to the point of using tactical nuclear weapons as instruments of civil engineering – have given even the most sympathetic of westerners reasons to turn a cold shoulder when the bear gives a cry of distress.

However, we might wish to reconsider our attitudes towards Moscow after the events of this summer.  Following a heat wave of epic proportions – a heat wave predicted several years ago, by the way, due to a new “feedback loop” created by excessive peat moss consumption in a post-permafrost melt era – Russia is now experiencing runaway wildfires, which they have virtually no resources to combat.  It doesn’t help that they disbanded their national fire service a couple of years ago, choosing to decentralize – the Tea Party movement would be proud of their anti-government furor over the past decade, though some Russians are now beginning to yearn for a stronger central government again.  To understand how vast these fires are, picture a line running from Denver to Houston.  Now, burn it.

Given the magnitude of these fires, it is remarkable that so few lives have been lost.  “All” that has been burned has mostly been comprised of crop land – along with a naval research facility, several villages, and a good deal of infrastructure.  No major cities have been directly impacted yet, although that may still change, if the Russians don’t get some help soon from Mother Nature.

Still, leave aside the question of long-term global consequences (some have theorized leftover radiation from Chernobyl might be spread globally; others worry about particulate matter pollution spreading globally as often happens following volcanoes) and assume the Russians are able to put out the flames on their own.  Assume, too, that the human component, the requisite humanitarian aid to all those injured or displaced by this catastrophe, can all be handled internally by the Russian people, and that no outside assistance is required.

Why, then, would the rest of the world have any reason to care?

Putting aside all moral and ethical objections to global apathy, there are practical reasons why the global community should care about its individual parts – “we are all connected” sounds like either a commercial for an international telecommunications consortium, or else a variation on one of a thousand insipid, kumbayatic campfire songs at an “Up With People” day care facility.  However, “we are all connected” is, in every conceivable way, an apt description of the 21st century economy.

We should care what happens in Russia because what happens there, much like what happens anywhere else on the planet, has the inherent potential to complicate all our lives, even to extremes unforeseen and unforeseeable.

In the case of the burning Russian Steppes, the chief danger (outside of the long-term consequences which we are glossing over at present) lay in the destruction of wheat crops.  On July 23rd, before the widespread fires began destroying even more of the nation’s wheat and barley fields, Russian Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik announced that low rainfall and high temperatures had damaged 32% of all Russian grain crops.  There is no telling how much will eventually be salvaged, but is difficult to conceive of even half of the usual Russian crop being available, and that is only considering part of the equation – the distribution network is also going to be affected by these fires, with railroads, highways, trucks, fuel depots, communications centers, grain silos, all being reduced to ashes.  Even if the grain matures, there may not be any way to harvest it and ship it to market.

Agricultural economics has always been an interesting shell game, with devastating losses for some producers resulting in a bonanza for other producers, and surely there are some Kansas wheat farmers who are going to feel like they won the lottery this fall and next winter, but any discussion of the implications of wheat yields should not stop just with producers.  Consumers world wide will be affected, and the consequences will quickly spiral farther than any rational analysis of cause and effect can follow.

Easy to see consequences will include higher prices for bread and cereal; these are things with which even American Idol fans can relate.  Harder to see will be the effects of 3rd world hunger exacerbated by higher prices for smaller quantities of grain.  More children than would have otherwise gone hungry will starve, but this is a tragedy against which our sense have been innured.  “Surely you’re not saying we have the resources to save the poor from their lot?”  Yes, even Christian sensibilities can handle the idea that a child somewhere will go hungry.  That, after all, is a big part of why remote controls were invented – we got tired of hearing Sally Struthers asking why no one will think of the children.

But what of the child whose father reacts the way Mr. Myrtle Personell would react, were his children to be going hungry through no fault of his own?  There are 6 billion people in this world, most of whom, we imagine, would not be averse to taking up arms if it meant life or death for our children.  It sounds like a grand thing to do, fighting for your family, but the problem is that even though this biological impulse is almost universal, it never really does any good.  You kill other human beings, and now their children go hungry just like yours.  Misery may love company, but it does not have much time for real solutions. 

We sympathize greatly with the people of Palestine, for example, because expecting people caged up like animals and then deprived of every necessity to react with anything other than all available means – which, in their condition, are almost exclusively violent means – is just… and there is no other word for it… stupid.  Of course they react violently.  They are being slowly starved to death.  The fact that firing unguided rockets into your enemy’s cities does nothing but alienate your potential benefactors elsewhere in the world does not displace your fundamental need to do something for your starving children.  We would react the same misguided way.

Now picture dozens of other nations being slowly starved to death because they cannot afford to buy wheat.  Picture some of those nations being places where the United States has reasons of national security to not want rioting in the streets – say, Egypt, because such violence would threaten our historical ally Israel, or Indonesia, because they are a key (and often underreported) component of our fight against al Qaida, or Japan, because a colapse in the Japanese economy would bring down global credit, and with it, cause a descent into another Great Depression, or a host of other places like South Africa, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, the Congo, Saudi Arabia, and on and on, where we get vital natural resources and precious minerals we cannot do without.  If social unrest due to famine were to occur in any of these places, our troops would have to be dispatched; we would have no choice.  It would be a matter of our vital national interest; our men and women in uniform would go in harms way because somebody who needs to feed their children and cannot took up arms in a foolish attempt to secure grain, and instead started a war.

That is why we should care about what happens in Russia, even if we choose not to care because they are our fellow human beings.

For the time being, we can afford to just wait and see what happens on the steppes.  European nations are pouring aid into Russia, and we suspect that the fires will eventually burn out, as summer gives way to fall, and somehow a global food crisis will be averted this time, or at least mitigated to the point that it does not cause World War III.  But at some point, someone is going to have to come up with a way to make a sense of urgency a viral quality.  Global Warming is now a four decade old concept, and there are still people in positions of authority who deny that it is a fact.

Myrtle knows better, and she’s a chicken.  She’s also a chicken who, after watching the evening news, really wants a shot of vodka.  We sympathize, sister, we really do.

Happy farming!

In Praise of Pomegranates

Few foods have as many mystical qualities as the pomegranate; often found in Christian art, the pomegranate figures prominently in many representations of the Madonna and child.  Judaism holds the pomegranate dear, as well – the old wives' tale is that pomegranate seeds number 613, one for each commandment found in the Torah.  Legend in the Islamic world says that each pomegranate contains one seed which has come down from Paradise.

And in Buddhist teaching, the three blessed fruits are citrus, peaches, and pomegranates; the demoness Hariti, who devoured children, was transformed when the Buddha gave her a pomegranate; she then became a guardian goddess who in her various incarnations is invoked by infertile women.  This mirrors medieval European Christianity, wherein the headboard of a marriage bed was frequently carved with pomegranate flowers to ensure fertility.

The pomegranate has a fairly long agricultural history, probably first being cultivated in what is now Iran and Afghanistan.  Military conquest led to the pomegranate’s westward migration; Herodotus, in fact, mentions golden  pomegranates adorning the spears of soldiers in the Persian phalanx during the Graeco-Persian wars.  There were undoubtedly numerous oral traditions surrounding the fruit prior to recorded history; we have only the faintest traces of these prehistoric accounts – the Persian myths reference the warrior Isfandiyar who gained invincibility by means of eating a magical pomegranate.

And the most famous reference of all is the capture of the flower goddess Persephone by the death god Hades, who tricked her into eating the seeds of a pomegranate fruit, ensuring that she must remain with him for one month for each seed she had eaten, and thus was winter born.

However, as popular as this fruit has traditionally been, it seems to have dropped off the map in the West.  Still widely grown in Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, few other places in the Western world treat the pomegranate as anything other than a novelty food.  Southern California, so perfect a climate for growing practically anything, is home to a burgeoning trade in pomegranates; very few other places in the United States boast more than a few scattered trees grown by hobbyists.  Commercial orchards just don’t grow them.

That may soon be changing.  Pomegranate juice is on the minds of many nutritionists and dieticians, particularly as people look for ways to combat high cholesterol and other ailments related to the chronic American problems of poor nutrition and obesity.  The medicinal qualities of the pomegranate have long been known; it is not a coincidence that the British Medical Association features the pomegranate in their coat of arms.

Overwhelmingly, the scientific community is lining up behind this fruit.  As summarized by Penugonda and Basu of Oklahoma State University in their 2009 paper “Pomegranate Juice:  A Fruit Juice”:

Pomegranate juice is a polyphenol-rich fruit juice with high antioxidant capacity. In limited studies in human and murine models, pomegranate juice has been shown to exert significant antiatherogenic, antioxidant, antihypertensive, and anti-inflammatory effects. Pomegranate juice significantly reduced atherosclerotic lesion areas in immune-deficient mice and intima media thickness in cardiac patients on medications. It also decreased lipid peroxidation in patients with type 2 diabetes, and systolic blood pressure and serum angiotensin converting enzyme activity in hypertensive patients. Thus, the potential cardioprotective benefits of pomegranate juice deserve further clinical investigation, and evidence to date suggests it may be prudent to include this fruit juice in a heart-healthy diet.

Miguel, Dandlen et al. pointed out in their 2004 paper “The Effect of Two Methods of Pomegranate (Punica granatum L) Juice Extraction on Quality During Storage at 4°C” that pomegranates are rich in precisely the kinds of polyphenol compounds which are best suited to fight a whole range of human ailments:

“Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that the composition of phenol-rich food retards the progression of arteriosclerosis and reduces the incidence of heart diseases by preventing the oxidative stress, that is, lipid peroxidation in arterial macrophages and in lipoproteins.More recently, some authors reported that anthocyanins decreased cadmium accumulation in liver and kidney, the concentration of bilirubin and urea in blood serum, and aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase activities.  Pomegranate juice is an important source of phenolic compounds, with anthocyanins being one of the most important, especially the 3-glucosides and 3, 5-diglucosides of delphinidin, cyanidin, and pelargonidin.”

With all of this going for it, why has the pomegranate not supplanted the Dorito as America’s snack food of choice?

For a few obvious reasons, and some not so obvious.

For starters, Americans have grown increasingly disenchanted with fruit generally over the past several generations.  A quick review of the most popular breakfast foods reveals that berries and grapefruit, formerly staples in most households, have been displaced by pop-tarts and microwaveable sausage biscuits.  Even the most health conscious consumers all too often forego fruit first thing in the morning, opting instead for a granola bar or a container of yogurt.

Then, too, among fruit choices, the pomegranate is perhaps one of the most labor intensive once it reaches your kitchen table.  Grapefruit?  Slice it in half, and then dig in.  Oranges?  Peel them and go.  Grapes?  Wash them, then pop them in your mouth.  Apples?  Peaches?  Pears?  Munch away, peel and all.

But pomegranates require a bit more work.  First, you have to break open the outer leathery layer and find some way to peel it off.  Then you have to soak the insides and allow the arils (the edible portion which includes the seeds) to sink to the bottom of the bowl, while the pulp floats to the top.  Finally, you take the arils and either eat them raw, or mix them into whatever concoction you are making with them.  That’s a lot of steps for people who now eat breakfast “on the run” instead of at the family dining table.

Finally, there is the question of taste.  Raw pomegranate arils, especially of the golden varieties like Wonderful, are fairly sweet, in addition to being tart.  However, as anyone who has drunk pure pomegranate juice can attest, there is a definite bitter component to the flavor, making consumers who are used to downing high-fructose corn syrup by the bucketfuls in the rest of their dietary lives somewhat averse to even trying pomegranates.  Like cranberries, pomegranates have been relegated to the “fruit juice cocktail” category for many would-be imbibers.

This is a shame, but it is not an irreversible state of affairs.  The pomegranate has a glorious history, and, we believe, limitless potential for an equally glorious future.  Renewed interest in healthy whole foods diets, coupled with changing conditions brought about by global warming and the increasing unpredictability of water supplies make this plant a perfect fit for 21st century production needs.  We have noticed a surge bordering on a tidal wave of increased interest in pomegranates at local garden centers over the past couple of years; we suspect there will be even more interest as our local climate shifts further from sub-tropical and more towards temperate or even semi-arid conditions over the next several decades.

The conditions of the fertile crescent, the birthplace of civilization and of the pomegranate, are becoming more commonplace in parts of the world currently unfamiliar with the foods of a bygone time and place. 

M. Pekmezci and M. Erkan of Akdeniz University in Turkey note that “The pomegranate requires a long hot Summer for fruit to mature, can withstand low temperatures in the Winter and is drought and salt-tolerant.”  If this does not describe the ideal fruit crop for farmers facing uncertain weather, we don’t know what would be. 

We at Myrtle’s are just getting a jump start; we suspect a lot of other growers will be joining us in planting pomegranates.

Happy farming!

First Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza

Details (and an actual logo, hopefully, if our resident artist is up to it...) to follow soon, but we have tentatively scheduled the first annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza tour of backyard chicken facilities for the first weekend in December!

We currently have three definite spots on the tour, and numerous others who are probables.  The idea will be to visit with each backyard chicken family, see how their birds are sited and cared for, and enjoy refreshments (with a heavy egg theme, naturally!)

This event will be in lieu of a monthly tour of a local farm on the part of the Brazos Locavores, which is a truly fine organization which promotes local foods.  The Locavores actually have a wide variety of programs on their horizon which will be geared towards encouraging home production over the next few years, not just of eggs, but also of anything else you can grow in your backyard.  At some point, they will be working in a tour of local gardens (though perhaps not in the same year as a tour of chicken coops, but as you know, we at Myrtle's place think you ought to have both anyway, right?) and maybe even a workshop or two.

Any and all backyard bird owners are more than welcome!  And anyone who is on the verge of bird (Leslie?  Y'all got your birds yet?) is encouraged to get involved, too!

We are very excited about this, and will post a lot more as time draws near.

Happy farming!

Down(sizing) on the Farm

We say something so frequently around our place that it would be a motto, if only it didn’t sound so much more like the barking of a drill sergeant:  “Don’t tell me can’t!”  We do not believe in “can’t”.

Our primary income at present is a regular ol’ day job with a largish company which, among other things, provides for our health insurance.  In keeping with a national trend, our coverage is dependent upon undergoing biometric screening, and again as part of the zeitgeist, we will receive discounts on our premiums should we reach certain metrical goals, such as a body mass index (BMI) rated below 30, which is the standard definition of obesity.

We have heard numerous complaints about all the scores which will be used, including blood pressure below 130/90 (which is borderline hypertensive!), or about blood sugar levels, or about being nicotine free, but none of the complaints has been as loud as the complaints about the use of BMI to determine who gets a discount and who doesn’t.

A colleague recently exclaimed over lunch “Have you ever even seen what your ‘so-called ideal weight’ is?  Nobody can reach that!  It can’t be done!”

Hmmmm…..

Now, Myrtle Maintenance Personnel have been fighting our bulging waistlines for quite some time, just like most Americans.  And we have had infrequent successes coupled with a staggering number of setbacks, just like most other moms and dads throughout this great land of ours.  Our track record, in short, is no better than anyone else’s.

But don’t you tell us it can’t be done.

In fact, a very brief review of the relevant statistics will show that not only can it be done, it was being done by practically everybody until just very, very recently.

The Centers for Disease Control reviewed state health department statistics compiled every year since 1985, and while it took some time for all 50 states to get on board, everyone is now taking this issue seriously enough to study it.  The findings are staggering:

“In 1990, among states participating in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 10 states had a prevalence of obesity less than 10% and no states had prevalence equal to or greater than 15%.  By 1998, no state had prevalence less than 10%, seven states had a prevalence of obesity between 20-24%, and no state had prevalence equal to or greater than 25%.   In 2008, only one state (Colorado) had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty-two states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; six of these states (Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%.”

In just 20 years, we have gone from having a relatively small proportion of our population destined for hip and knee replacements, coronary bypass surgery, and early death from complications due to hypertension and diabetes, to having anywhere from 20-30% of our population disabled by our own corpulence.

There is a tremendous desire, when reviewing these statistics, to get on a soap box or a high horse, and flay the sorry hides of all those lazy, disgusting overeating underachievers.  The problem, of course, is that we and practically everyone we know would have to be included in that group, which would make for a highly ineffective bout of hypocritical preaching, not to mention making us extremely unpopular at parties.

A spate of recent studies, too, suggest that there is more going on than meets the eye.  For starters, obesity can rightly be described as epidemic, for a variety of reasons.  The most obvious is purely statistical – the fact that between 1/4th and 1/3rd of our population is clinically obese qualifies this condition as epidemic.  More than that, though, the disease is catching.  If you are related to someone who is chronically overweight, you are more likely to be overweight yourself.

Worse still, if you know someone who is overweight, you are more likely to be overweight yourself.  And the capo di tutti capi is this:  if someone you know knows someone who is overweight, you are more likely to be overweight yourself.

Clearly, there is more to obesity than simply a breakdown in the willpower of individual fat and lazy slobs.  Oh, sure, there are people who are obese because they don’t have any gumption… but come on, get real.  Are you really going to sit there on your bean bag chair munching your Cheetos and tell us that the reason close to 1/3rd of our nation is obese is because they don’t try very hard?  That stretches credulity.

We at Myrtle’s suspect that there are several factors involved, and a loss of will is not one of them.  However, an improved sense of determination can be part of the solution.  What needs to change?  We really believe the answer lay in thinking about what things have changed in the 25 years since everything started going haywire.

• Supersize me.  Portion sizes are much, much bigger now than at any point in human history.  The average American consumes over 800 more calories per day than they did in the 1970s.  That is too much.  We need to reduce portion sizes.
• Sleep.  A recent study suggests that a person who has not received enough nighttime rest will eat a Big Mac's worth of extra calories the following day above and beyond their already too calorie rich standard, just to try to give themselves an energy boost.
• Get up and move.  As our economy has shifted from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, “going to work” has meant, more often than not, going to a cubicle and sitting down all day.  We don't walk nearly as much as we used to just in the course of everyday living.
• Get the good stuff.  The nutritional value of practically everything we eat is less now than it used to be.  This is the natural consequence of soil depletion – fewer nutrients in our soils means fewer nutrients in our fruits and vegetables – which we are not eating enough of as it is.
  
• You want some food with that high fructose corn syrup?  Check out the ingredient list of everything in your kitchen.  No, wait, don't.  It will just scare you.  Getting the good stuff should include getting organic whole foods, not just for the increased nutritional content, but also to keep yourself from consuming the addictive sugars which agribusiness has been stuffing down our throats.

One pound of human flesh represents roughly 3,500 calories, give or take.  This is not exactly a precise kind of science, but if you visualize a pound that way, it gives you a great place to start in figuring out how to get rid of all those extra pounds – you need to run a calorie deficit of about 500 calories per day throughout the week to lose a pound a week.  That means eating less and exercising more.

It's that simple.  It's just a math problem, and not even a hard one, at that.

The trick is putting it into practice.  We have been lackadaisical about that around these parts, just like everybody else.  Not any longer – somebody told us can't.  We don't take kindly to those words.  We don't take kindly to them at all.

Our exercise will come in the form of digging and digging.  And then digging some more.  Our diet will consist of locally and organically grown fruits and vegetables, supplemented by oily fishes and lean meats.  All of these good whole foods will be served in small portion sizes, and washed down with copious quantities of distilled water.  And a year from now, Myrtle Maintenance Personnel will each have a BMI in the 25-27% range.  We have spoken; it will happen.

Happy dieting!  And happy farming!  (For us, these concepts go hand in hand.)

Pressing the Point.... or "Whining about Wine"

The primary drawback with wine is the dreaded tannin-induced headache.  This risk is doubly noxious when it comes to wines made from fruit other than grapes.  A 2004 paper entitled The Effect of Two Methods of Pomegranate (Punica granatum L) Juice Extraction on Quality During Storage at 4ºC makes note of the fact that the chief reason tannins exist in fruit juices is the damage to cellular tissue when fruit is squeezed as part of the extraction process.  With pomegranates in particular, this leads to a bitter taste; in spite of having high citric acid content as well as a host of interesting sugars, this is the overwhelming sensation most people experience when drinking pomegranate juice.

Juicers invariably represent the cheapest, easiest way to get at the goods – the most obvious examples in the typical kitchen include orange juice squeezers, which really amount to just a catch-all device with a protrusion on which the sliced orange is crushed; alternatively, think of the humble garlic press, which crushes garlic and excretes it through a grate or grill.  In each case, manual force pulverizes and pulps the produce until the finished portion is in the desired form.

The superior method in terms of juice quality is the use of a centrifugal juice extractor.  Naturally, being the superior method, it is also the more expensive method.  Most centrifuges are fairly straightforward in their construction; however, a high powered motor necessary to create the extreme forces involved in this extraction method carries a higher price tag than does the crank or handle on a device which relies more on good old fashioned elbow grease for the requisite force.

We are not close enough yet to bringing in the kind of volume from our fruit crops which would justify the extra expense, but we are seriously thinking about it.  A good quality extractor is on the long-term list, because if we can reduce the bitter taste of pure pomegranate juice, that would be pure gold for us.

Additionally, we have always scoffed at purists in the vintner world.  The questions we ask when discussing a fine wine are never the same as the questions asked by aficionados; we want to know “Does it taste good?”  “Does it go with spicy food?”  “Does it go with chocolate?”  Whether or not it was blended, has a good nose, is dry or sweet, we could care less about any of that.

Disdain for fruit wines, in fact, reminds us of all the conventional wisdom in the National Football League about Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams:  “A black man will never win as a quarterback in this league.”  Horse-hockey.  A winner is a winner; Mr. Williams has his Super Bowl ring; the scoffers have their sour grapes.  And good wine is good wine, regardless of whether it was made with pinot grapes from a vineyard in Provence, or from concord grapes growing wild in Massachusetts, or from blackberries growing on our backyard fence.

Our challenge, obviously, is not going to be getting it correct.  Our challenge will be to get it right.  Propriety can take a flying leap; we just want our guests to be as pleased with their beverage as they always are with their cobbler.

All that having been said, we now come to the difficult admission:  the reason conventional wisdom about wine is so difficult to shake is because it is founded upon thousands of years of experimentation and endeavor.  Traditional wines are categorized the way they are precisely because for so long, the traditional methods have worked.

Most novitiates know only the difference between "white" and "red", and might be familiar with the aversion of wine enthusiasts for the more plebeian "rosé".  What makes a pinot grigio different from a pinot noir, or what Miles meant by "If anybody orders any (expletive) merlot, I'm leaving!" is a mystery to most consumers; the truth is, however, that these distinctions all come from much research and experience which has led to a host of subtle rules-of-the-road for producers and consumers.

However, we believe that as with most things in life, wine can be vastly improved by steady application of principles borrowed from other disciplines.  The best jazz musicians all borrowed from blues; the best novelists all allude to classical Greek comedies and tragedies; the best wines all taste like something the consumer can't quite remember, but they know it makes them feel good.  Maybe it is the lavender overtones of a particular burgundy which reminds one of homemade lime sherbet their grandmother made.  Maybe the pungent anise of a chardonnay made from grapes grown next to a basil field brings to mind the pleasant memories of a stern father relaxing at the end of the day, putting down his accounting ledger, and smoking a pipe.

We don't know what other people's favorite memories are, we just know that we at Myrtle's place like sweet fruit drinks, including sweet fruit wines.  Messina Hof Port is perhaps the best tasting beverage we have ever consumed.  We don't aim to be better than Messina Hof; we just aim to be better than other home grown beverages.

And part of that will involve experimentation.  If the big problem with two of our basic crops, pomegranates and wild grapes, is that the natural sweetness of the fruit does not translate to sweet juice, then we will attack that problem first.  Given that our trees are probably 2-3 years out from production, we have some time, but it's never too early to start thinking about experimentation.

So.  We're on the lookout for inexpensive centrifugal fruit juicers.  We'll report excitedly when we find (and, more importantly, figure out how to pay for) one.  Until then,

Happy farming!

It's a Dirty Job, But Somebody's Gotta Do It

Bulding Soils for Better Crops, Fred Magdoff’s and Harold Van Es’s homage to organic matter and its importance to soil health, references several case studies where the addition of readily available cheap or even free soil nutrient sources, such as leaves or wood chips from curbside trash pickup, must eventually be reduced once soil has reached an optimum percentage of organic material – somewhere between 3.5-5% – because further input of rotting material would lead to nutrient leaching after harvest.

At Myrtle’s place, we are used to asking ourselves “Why?”  And we are not at all pleased when we are told “You can’t do that!”

Now, we typically apply these irreverent and anti-authoritarian qualities towards those who suggest ridiculously conformist ideas, like “You can’t grow vegetables without fertilizer and pesticide.”  However, even people who know what they are talking about occasionally say something that makes us go, “What?”

Nutrient leaching is a concept that we simply refuse to accept.  It is real enough, of course; that’s not what we are saying.  Nutrient leaching is the runoff of things like nitrates or phosphorous from your topsoil, and it has serious consequences for groundwater supplies.  We are in no way suggesting that these very real issues are not a concern.

Rather, we don’t believe that high nutrient values in post-harvest soil necessarily have to result in those nutrients running off, at least not in the context of the small farm or garden plot.

Every good thing has its point of diminishing returns, of course, but to date we have seen no literature which suggests it is even possible to reach the level of organic matter in your soil which plants simply cannot take advantage of.  For anyone who has ever gone a week without turning their compost, you can relate to what we are saying.  Having to pull weeds from the compost before turning it shows just exactly how lovey-dovey the relationship is between growing things on the one hand and dead and decaying things on the other.

We are going to experiment this fall with a garden plot design whose intent is to maximize organic matter.  As we have described on numerous occasions, soil in the Brazos Valley is equivalent to the wet clay any potter would be proud to slap on a wheel.  In addition, however, it is also sadly lacking in what Magdoff and Van Es describe as “living, dead and very dead” materials.  Weeds do very well here; everything else has traditionally required a lot of external inputs.

We aim to break that mold on a large scale by doing what we have been doing all along, only in a more concerted way.  We have often talked about the deep bedding method we use with our chickens, wherein we lay down about three feet of composting leaves in the chicken coop.  The chickens then poop on the leaves, and turn the leaves over as they scratch for bugs.  This stirs the compost tea in such a way as to reduce the manure smell to negligible levels, in addition to creating the perfect external input for the garden.

We can’t really add any more chicken poop to the mixture, having maxed out how many chickens we can have in our coop, but we can do something about where the organic mixture gets off to once it’s in the garden.  Runoff from topsoil requires two key elements:  somewhere to run off from, and somewhere to run off to.  The from is still the same – the places in the garden where we apply the compost.  The to, however, is something we can control.

We are going to kill two birds with one stone; we have a lot of useless clay, compacted to the point of almost being adobe brick, which we are removing from the fish pond.  We need some way to stop topsoil from running off from the vegetable plots.

Put two and two together, and you come up with a low berm surrounding the vegetable garden, composed of solid clay.  Any soil eroding from raised mounds or rows in the vegetable garden will simply fill a furrow between the sides of the roughly rectangular berm, and will be a great place to plant the next season’s row of vegetables.  In fact, if we play our cards right, this may be a way to improve the soil tilth when we eventually move to reduce tillage – meaning we may not have to turn over the soil so often, or resort to using a roto-tiller.  Since our garden plot will eventually be comprised almost entirely of the detritus of rotted leaves and chicken poop mixed into the slimy, sludgy soil, the aeration should improve dramatically over what you get with solid Brazos Valley clay.

This would not be a good idea for a large plot, nor for a plot where the prevailing soil type is not compacted clay, like it is here in College Station, because runoff is not the only source of groundwater contamination.  Seepage is another means for high nitrogen or phosphorous content of topsoil to pollute the groundwater supply, and if you were working in a rocky or sandy topsoil, the seepage would be unacceptably high; excess nutrients would therefore be almost as bad a thing as insufficient nutrients in such soils.

In the Brazos Valley, however, if we can minimize the amount of water retention, we can minimize the amount of seepage.  This secondary source of contamination we hope to contain through aggressive planting of sunflowers on the perimeter of the garden.  This solves multiple problems, first as a trap crop keeping birds from harvesting our vegetables, and second as a means of soaking up water and nutrients from deeper in the soils.  Studies in the plains states have indicated that sunflowers do a good job of drying out soils to a surprising depth of 8-10 feet, which is more than sufficient, given how close to the surface our bedrock lay, to prevent excessive seepage from our topsoil.

Since we have a fairly small plot, we will be able to test the soil within the berm, the soil surrounding the berm, and also the mineral content of the nearest source of groundwater (the fish pond!) and get a pretty good idea of whether our theory is correct.

What we expect is that without having the open irrigation so prevalent in large scale operations, where there is simply no preventing rain water from running off the crop land and into the surrounding ecosphere, we should be able to get organic matter percentages in our soil of 10% or more and still have no appreciable impact on the surrounding water supplies.  If this turns out to be true, we suspect that our produce yields should increase geometrically, with no negative consequences to the environment. 

Magdoff and Van Es actually make numerous references to small market produce plots when discussing methods for adding organic matter and for reducing tillage; they point out that some of the unique qualities of this type of business preclude the preferred methods of improving soil, notably the use of cover crops.

This makes perfect sense; if the “growing season” is actually a year-long term, the way it is in most of Texas, then a vegetable gardener is likely to have no true “fallow” season as it is understood by large scale farmers from anywhere else in the country.  However, by essentially containerizing a roughly 1200 square foot vegetable plot, we believe we will be giving ourselves a shot at making the perfect soil.

Fingers and wingtips are crossed!  Shovels are at the ready!

Happy farming!

Insidious Insects? Or Pleasant Pollinators?

Our chickens love bugs.  Crickets, grasshoppers, dragonflies, wasps, spiders, junebugs, roaches, beetles, butterflies, if it creeps or crawls, they will joyfully scoop it up and do a victory lap around the coop, whether the other chickens notice them or not.

Like most people, the very word “bug” has always conjured up for us an image of nasty creepy crawlies, and the idea of the chickens eating said critters cheers us greatly.  However, bugs are more complicated than that, and their relationship to a healthy garden is also much more sophisticated than a cursory and prejudicial review might indicate.

We have mentioned before that we intend to install an apiary some time soon; we have a wild honey bee hive on the property at present, and we would like to move the bees from their present home to a box where we can get at their honey; we’d ideally like to have a couple of boxes, and go into small-scale commercial production of the golden stuff.  It doesn’t hurt that bees pollinate fruits and vegetables, either.

However, in researching bees and their role as pollinators, we have discovered that the equation is not so simple – there are important limitations on what bees can and cannot do for a gardener, and there are subtle relationships between various plants and insects which must be respected.  Some bugs, like honey bees, are vital, but do not do everything we always thought they did.  Other bugs, like bluebottle flies, are annoying as all get-out, but do some helpful things we never thought they could.

Anecdotally, one of the more remarkable prejudices we have personally been forced to face down comes from literature.  When reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, we remember thinking it highly unlikely that the story of an American missionary being unable to grow familiar garden vegetables in Africa due to a lack of pollinating vectors could possibly be true.  Sure, African bees would be unfamiliar with American veggies, but a flower is a flower, right?

Wrong.

As it turns out, the relationships between insects and plants are intensely affected by geometric, chemical, and photochromatic concerns, all of which should be kept in mind by gardeners who, all too often, reach for the can of Raid any time the buzz of six-legged ‘interlopers’ is heard.

As an example, the most popular plant in the American backyard vegetable plot is the tomato.  If you grow any vegetables at all, this is likely to be the first one you plant.  And we are all familiar with the bright yellow tomato flower.  You may assume that if you have honey bees, you will have no problem with tomato pollination, but you would be wrong. 

Tomatoes must be “buzz pollinated”, meaning that in addition to having a bug land on the flower, the bug must generate sufficient vibration from the flapping of its wings to dislodge the pollen; honey bees are incapable of this degree of vibration.  Bumblebees, however, do the job quite well.  As do bluebottle flies!  If you don’t have bumblebees, the odds are your tomato crop is successful only if you have enough flies; something to think about at your next picnic.

Red clover is another popular plant with which honey bees can’t do a thing.  The flower is too deep for them to reach the nectar, and as a consequence, they never get the pollen stuck to their legs, and so never take it to the next plant.  Some bees (again, the bumblebee being prominent) have longer tongues, and can pollinate red clover.  Some moths and butterflies, too, love this cover crop.

There is a whole field of research devoted to maximizing the ability of vectors to pollinate certain crops in certain conditions.  There are even researchers who are investigating the proper means of covering a greenhouse where certain species of bee (who navigate via their vision of ultraviolet light, with which glass or plexiglass greenhouse walls usually interferes) must be contained.

The more holistic the researchers, however, the more successful they seem to be.  Beneficial insects and pest species really ought not be considered separately; the whole ecosphere needs to be taken under advisement when thinking about how to best manage your garden.  Book 7 of the handbook series from the  Sustainable Agriculture Network – National Outreach Arm of USDA is entitled Manage Insects on your Farm:  A Guide to Ecological Strategies, and it offers this advice:

• Select and grow a diversity of crops that are healthy, have natural defenses against pests, and/or are unattractive or unpalatable to the pests on your farm.  Choose varieties with resistance or tolerance to those pests.  Build your soil to produce healthy crops that can withstand pest pressure.  Use crop rotation and avoid large areas of monoculture.
• Stress the pests… Interrupt their life cycles, remove alternative food sources, confuse them.
• Enhance the populations of beneficial insects that attack pests.  Introduce beneficial insects or attract them by providing food or shelter.  Avoid harming beneficial insects by timing field operations carefully.  Wherever possible, avoid the use of agrichemicals that will kill the beneficials as well as pests.

These are the fundamental building block steps to achieving balanced management.  Pests should not be eradicated, they should be gently led away from those places in which you do not wish them to be.  Control is always an illusion; the best we can hope for is to take advantage of predictability. 

If you know, for example, that you want more bumblebees in your yard because you have a large crop of tomatillo plants which flower like crazy, but have not yet produced fruit, the answer is fairly obvious:  plant red clover.  The bees love the clover, but they will also eventually notice your tomatillos.

If you want to reduce the population of Colorado potato bugs who are munching on your tomatoes, attract some beneficial bugs like the Assassin beetle by planting a cover crop of hairy vetch, crimson clover, or rye.

Improving the quality of your soil, too, reduces the need to worry about whether your plants are being attacked by any sort of pest.  From Manage Insects… again:

“Healthier soils produce crops that are less damaged by pests.  Some soil-management practices boost plant-defense mechanisms, making plants more resistant and/or less attractive to pests.  Other practices – or the favorable conditions they produce – restrict the severity of pest damage by decreasing pest numbers or building beneficials.”

Further, even where pests persist, healthy plants are not likely to be taken down by them:

“Practices that promote soil health constitute one of the fundamental pillars of ecological pest management.  When stress is alleviated, a plant can better express its inherent abilities to resist pests.  Ecological pest management emphasizes preventative strategies that enhance the ‘immunity’ of the agroecosystem.  Farmers should be cautious of using reactive management practices that may hinder the crop’s immunity.  Healthier soils also harbor more diverse and active populations of the soil organisms that compete with, antagonize, and ultimately curb soil-borne pests.  Some of those organisms – such as springtails – serve as alternate food for beneficials when pests are scarce, thus maintaining viable populations of beneficials in the field.  You can favor beneficial organisms by using crop rotations, cover crops, animal manures and composts to supply them with additional food.”

For most of human history, the prevailing motif has been the casual acceptance of the idea that “Man vs. Nature” is an unending battle which we have no choice but to enjoin.  That paradigm is a roadmap to extinction, not just for all the species left in our wake, but also for ourselves.

We cannot haphazardly poison half the planet just to try (and fail!) to rid the other half of particularly pestilential potato bugs.  True wisdom in pest control lay in the question “What is the least amount of force which will work?”  In that regard, gardening is a lot like parenting.

Sometimes your garden even talks back.  And, as with your children, it might be a good idea sometimes to listen, instead of complaining about their “backtalk”.  Your kids are smarter than you give them credit for.  So are your bugs.

Happy farming!