Building an Urban Homestead

For the last 5 years, I have been testing a new method of intensive gardening. At a mere 40 square feet of growing area and less than a foot deep, it produced a surprising amount of food. During the prime growing season, it produced up to 60% of the food I ate.What's more, it did so with very few inputs from me, including time. Through a combination of either biological processes or mechanical devices, I was able to automate just about everything but planting and harvest. The only thing that was missing was an ability to try it out on a larger scale.

In February, I got that ball rolling. I rented a new house in Tempe, AZ. It sits on a sixth of an acre. The landscape is grass and the owners are eager to keep it that way. They were fine with me planting fruit trees and I plan on being here long enough to make it worth my investment. As for my garden, there is a lovely spot in the back yard that is perfect for it. It takes up about three quarters of the back yard, in fact. It is about 1000 square feet and after laying it out, it looks like I should be able to fit in about 500 square feet of growing area. Everything will be in raised beds, so I needed to build them such that I will be able to disassemble them and haul the garden beds away when I am finished.

After finally settling on a design, I was finally able to start construction in late summer. There were a lot of details to work out and a busy life made for slow progress. However, I finally got the system fully constructed and connected in early November and planted it on November 10th. As of right now, everything I planted is coming up and looking really healthy. In Tempe, Arizona here, it is the season for cold weather crops. I have planted alfalfa (for the chickens), Romanesco broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, turnips, spinach, chard, beets, several varieties of lettuce, carrots, sugar snap peas, onions, garlic, chives, strawberries, several varieties of flowers and herbs, and more.

So let me talk you through a little about what is going on here. First let me talk about space. The planted area is made of 3 sections of garden structure, each of which is 3' wide and 8' long. The coop (I purchased that one, I didn't build it) is 6' by 2.5'. The bench between the garden and the coop is 2' by 4'. The tank in the background is 3' by 4'. The sump tank in the foreground is 3' by 4'. So adding all that together, my whole system currently has a footprint of about 120 square feet. Once I get the whole thing built out, it will take up a space of about 1000 square feet, which includes pathways. This first phase had to include all the necessary infrastructure so that the rest is just an expansion of what is already here.

In the interest of being space efficient, I have gone for as holistic an approach as possible. Anywhere something can do double duty or more, it has been worked into the system. There are several goals here:

1) Produce as much food as possible in a portion of my urban back yard. I am looking to provide the bulk of the food my family needs as well as enough to provide additional income by selling the extra at a local farmer's market. Obviously what I have built so far won't give me extra to sell, though it very well might provide most of my family's dietary needs

2) Provide environmental benefit. This comes in the form of sequestered carbon, increased diversity and habitat for local wildlife, rainwater harvesting, composting of all organic matter from the household, water efficiency, and better air quality.

3) Do all this while making it aesthetically pleasing. This is meant to be a demonstration garden, with people coming over to view it and get ideas for how to do their own garden. I want average people to look at what I have built and say "yeah, I want that in my back yard too."

Let me conclude here with a quick list of what is going on in these pictures and I will go into further detail in upcoming posts. I would like to note, though, that once everything is up and running, the garden above will require surprisingly little maintenance. The only thing that will require daily maintenance is the chickens, and that is because they are not fully integrated into the overall system, just partially integrated. Still, I can fill their food container and leave them for a week or so at a time if need be. Here is a brief (though not exhaustive) list of what is going on in my garden:

• Garden is watered from two tanks, a sump tank and an upper tank. Water is pumped from the sump tank to the upper tank where it drains through the garden and ends up back in the sump tank
• Upper tank contains tilapia, which produce meat for household use
• Lower tank produces guppies and duckweed, which provide food for the tilapia
• Tilapia waste fertilizes the water for the garden
• The garden soil and plants clean the water for the tilapia
• The garden soil is made almost entirely from organic matter, meaning that it sequesters carbon in the form of stable soil carbon that is constantly maintained, refreshed, and used for the benefit of food production
• The garden interfaces with food forest plantings around the yard, with nutrient-rich water used to water fruit trees and herbs and tree trimmings contributing to the garden soil
• Plants provide a near constant stream of fresh herbs and produce for my family
• Interplantings of flowers and other beneficial plants provide food and habitat for beneficial insects, completely eliminating the need for pesticides of any kind
• Diversity of planting encourages a wide variety of insect and other animal life, creating habitat for local wildlife without reducing the amount of food I am able to provide for my family
• The garden soil (no, it is not an aquaponic system) buffers, maintains, and balances the water chemistry and nutrient load for the whole system
• In-line composting system captures and processes fish solid waste as well as quickly processing plant waste into rich soil, completely eliminating the need for fertilizers of any kind
• Gutter above dumps rainwater directly into sump tank, where it is incorporated into the system
• Float valve keeps sump tank topped off, meaning I don't need to add water manually as it is used up
• Pump is on a timer, providing the optimal flood and drain timing needed to keep the soil moist, keep the nutrients cycling, and keeping the soil aerated so it doesn't become anaerobic
• Chickens live underneath the garden and upper tank, keeping them sheltered and keeping their feed dry no matter what the weather
• Chicken water is in-line with the drainage from the garden, keeping their water full and flushed so it doesn't get fouled from chicken waste
• Chicken waste in the water is used as fertilizer for the garden as it dissolves in the water and flushes through the system
• Recessed compost bin in the chicken area gives them a handy location to drop kitchen scraps where it will slowly decompose in place, allowing the chickens a place to dig through and find insects, and allowing me a central location to empty and clean it up as it gets full
• Sump tank overflow is through the chicken water, cleansing the soil, processing chicken waste and watering the chicken compost bin while ensuring that guppies and duckweed growing in the sump tank aren't lost
• Secondary chicken water is under the upper tank and is fed by an irrigation line from the upper tank
• Alfalfa and greens, as well as kitchen scraps, are used to feed the chickens, producing as much of their feed locally as possible and reducing their need for crumble while providing excellent nutrient density for the eggs they produce

Let me know if there is some particular aspect of this garden that you are interested in hearing more about.

Building a Local Food Movement

Experimental prototype of my garden. Imagine the productivity
of the upper part with the lower part being more architecturally
pleasing. It could be built in stonework, brick, wood, gabions,
etc. It also works well with water features.

I have heard a lot of talk over the last several years about the need to completely overhaul our food system. In particular, the current model of industrial food, produced unsustainably and unhealthily, then shipped long distances to the final customer with no real transparency in how the food was produced is a fatally flawed system. We need a new model of local, regeneratively produced organic food made from a distributed system. There is great interest in changing to that model. In fact, I saw a TEDx talk by Kimbal Musk saying that solving this very problem could be the next boom, possibly even equivalent to the internet boom of the 1990s. The question is, what would that look like? How do you beat an entrenched system with trillions of dollars behind it. Perhaps more importantly, how do you get there? There is considerable infrastructure that would be needed to make that happen.

The first thing to pay attention to is supply and demand. Right now the demand is higher than ever. Awareness of the flaws in the current system is high and people want a solution. They want a solution that helps their health, the health of their children, and the health of the planet. The tricky part is how to deliver the supply. Right now the producers are just not there, or are few enough that they don’t really stand out in the market and aren’t finding their customers. There are so many more producers needed, though. Where are we going to get them? And how are we going to encourage them to get started? I think that the answer to all this is in a complex of businesses operating in its own form of a circular economy. Each business works within the usual business model of that type of business, but changes its practices somewhat to be a part of the bigger whole. Allow me to explain, but first, let me suggest a piece of technology that will make the whole thing possible.

We are in a golden age of technology. Technological advances are automating processes that could never before be automated. The automation that has happened so far has largely been damaging to the ecosystem as machinery and chemicals are used to replace the functioning of natural systems. Technology needs to be used smarter to replace human labor and support and accelerate natural ecosystem functioning. I have seen strides recently showing that machines are advancing to the point where they can do some of the selective harvesting that could previously only be done by human labor. I have been working on the other side of the equation, though, making a system that automates the care of the plants and accelerates ecosystem processes, making a garden that is low effort but still highly productive. I will talk more about that later when I have filed  the patent. For now let’s just assume that the technology will exist that will allow individual homeowners to make use of their back yards to produce huge amounts of organic, healthy food that has been produced very, very locally. Let’s also assume that this technology is effective enough that a garden only needs to be looked at and maintained once a week or less, something I have already achieved.

As I said before, the creation of a complex of businesses who act as their own circular economy could achieve the creation of local food production in urban areas. The core businesses in this model would be a landscaping business, a mushroom growing business, a professional office (containing at least a civil engineer, a landscape architect, and software engineers, though other professions could fit here as well), and a cafe/coffee shop/market.

The first to the plate is the landscaping business. At the start of the venture, these guys would operate like a regular landscaping business, with one small, but key modification. As they trimmed trees, they would separate the trimmings into a couple of categories and trim to specific sizes. I will get more into that in a minute. As the business grows and we begin to build gardens for people, the landscapers would be the team that builds and maintains those gardens. The landscaping team takes the trimmings that can’t be used elsewhere in the process and makes compost and biochar that could be used elsewhere. They could even seek out other innovative work. For example, here in Arizona, tamarisk trees are highly invasive along waterways. The landscaping team could seek out contracts to harvest this and use the wood as a part of the overall process.

The second business that would be needed would be a professional firm. Landscape architecture would be the first and most important profession needed. Most aquaponic and hydroponic setups that are being built today are pretty industrial looking, being composed of lots of white PVC and wires and other such functional parts. This is fine for hobbyists who tend to prefer this sort of look, but if this venture is going to expand into the back yards of average middle class people, it is going to need to be much more aesthetically pleasing. Also, specific functionality would be needed for the technology to function correctly and that needs to be properly designed. Likewise, engineers might be needed for certain aspects of the design, especially as the systems improve in connectivity. I envision gardens with sensors measuring moisture levels, water levels, pH, Nitrogen levels, and more. These sensors could be connected up via Arduino or Raspberry Pi controllers and not only run the system, but also connect to the internet so malfunctions can be detected from afar and corrected quickly. Software engineers would be needed to write and maintain this software and could also create the interface that homeowners would use to plan out their gardens. The software would compile the needs of the various clients and give those numbers to the landscaping team so they could start the required number of plants in the greenhouse, getting them ready to go out at planting time. There are other opportunities here, like using the knowledge gained from experience repairing and building ecosystems to improve or even change wholesale the practices of civil engineering and maybe even architecture.

The third business to the table would be a mushroom growing business. One of the principles that is important for this to work is the understanding that nature is so efficient that other forms of production can be added at various levels. For example, the woody debris collected from the landscaping business could be chipped and composted to make a rich soil. Or it could be used to grow mushrooms, then composted to make a rich soil. The end result is the same, but a new level of production is added in the middle. Growing mushrooms for sale is just the tip of the iceberg, though. A company called Ecovative is making innovative products using mushrooms, like an all-natural substitute for Styrofoam. It is a packing material grown on agricultural waste in any shape that is needed. It isn’t limited to packing material, though. It can be molded into any sort of shape. It could be used to insulate homes. Others are using mushrooms for other materials, like leather. A mushroom grower could also produce mushroom spawn for farmers so they could use mushrooms to process their own waste back into soil and give themselves an additional income. Even the garden system could benefit. A plug-and-play system could be developed and marketed to the DIY crowd to build in their own back yard. These could be packaged in an Ecovative-inspired packing material. With the addition of a couple of key additives, the packing material could be broken up and used as a major component of the starter soil for the new system.

The fourth business for this to work would be a combination café and market. As more and more homes buy into the system, there will be more locally available produce. With the team of landscapers helping, excess produce that the homeowner doesn't need could be sold as local, organic produce. A whole market could develop around the gathering and delivery of produce to the local market. As people see the advantage of using this to offset costs of production and even make a modest second income, they are incentivised to put more land into production and encourage friends to participate. As demand is better understood, homes could look up market conditions when planning out their gardens. Items that are more in demand could be grown in greater quantity. Urban gleaning could even take hold, with local harvesters collecting wild foods from public lands and selling them to the market. The café would act as a gathering place and hangout for customers and those interested in the movement. As more native foods are grown, the café could use them in its dishes to develop demand and even hold classes to teach people how to cook with them. The menu could change daily based on what is available and seasonal. With a couple of classrooms added on the perimeter, the space could be used for open classes and community space. The architecture could be integrated with living systems and the diners and customers could be surrounded by greenery. Mycobacterium vaccae could be integrated into the soil and the air could be filtered through the soil. This could give cleaner air and help give customers and employees a sense of peace, making it a nice place to hang out. Coffee grounds from the coffee shop portion of the café could be delivered back to the mushroom growing portion for further use and food waste could go back to the landscapers for composting. The mushroom growing business could provide mushroom kits for sale in the market so people could grow their own at home.

While those business form the core of this complex, there is plenty of room for other enterprises to fit in. For example, if the building had a garden on the roof, it could be an ideal place for a combined elderly/child daycare facility. The interaction between the age groups would be good for both and the interaction with gardens would also help the growth of the children and the mental health of the seniors. An artisan space would be welcome. Pottery could be made to create refillable mushroom kits. The list goes on and is only limited by the imagination and drive of those involved.

The only thing stopping this getting started right now is partners and funding. There is SO much work to be done to make this happen, but I believe that the market is ripe for this right now. I just need to find the right people to make this happen. Anyone know how to get in touch with Kimbal Musk? I think an idea like this might be just what he is looking for.

Driving Social Change

Rancho La Inmaculada in 1977. This is the "before" picture.

As I have mentioned before, I have been reading a lot lately about sustainability, particularly what a sustainable society would look like. There always seems to be a piece missing, though. How do we get there? Change doesn’t start at the top. It has always started at the bottom, with a groundswell of people who decide that the current way isn’t good enough and have an idea of how to make it better. The top is populated with the people who got their money or power (or both) from the current way of doing things. They have no reason to change and every reason to prevent change. The onus for change falls on the disaffected masses who know the life they have been given isn’t good enough. Right now, millennials are making up the bulk of the workforce and they are feeling the brunt of the economic crunch right now. This means that the responsibility for this change will fall to the millennials.

There is a problem with that, though. If you are familiar with my blog, you will know that I am a firm believer in the fact that the only way to fix this mess we are in, and to fix nearly every aspect of it, is to bring people back to the land and get them involved in regenerative agriculture. The problem there is that, as a group, millennials aren’t buying land. They just can’t afford the big house in the suburbs. So how do we get them onto the land and working it in such a way that they build soil and produce food? Let me propose two ideas, one for rural areas and one for urban areas.

First, let me start with the rural solution. To be fair, I think this solution will work best in the American west where land tends to be drier and more sparsely populated. The problem out here is that the land is brittle and requires animal impact to regenerate. But the great herds of hoofed animals are long gone. The grasses of the prairies need that animal impact grow and build soil. As the grasses suffer, so does the soil. The remaining soil organisms live off the carbon stored in the soil for many years, but in doing so, they consume it. As the soil loses its carbon, it loses its ability to capture and retain moisture. It becomes more erosive. The grassland turns into a desert.

The tricky part is that plopping some cows on the desert and letting them graze doesn’t help. It makes it worse, in fact. Taking the cows off the land and letting it rest doesn’t work either. It also makes the problem worse. It is only through either using the natural processes that created the grasslands or closely mimicking the impact of those natural processes that the desert can be returned to grassland. Holistic Management is one process for mimicking the natural processes, but there is considerable debate about whether it works or if there would be something better. For this reason, I think that it would be best to base the solution on results rather than method. Under this program, the method that promotes the best results would quickly rise to the top.

Rancho La Inmaculada in 2013. This is the "after" picture.

So here is what I propose: In the American west, the vast majority of rural land is owned by the government and it is turning to desert as it is being subjected to either overgrazing or too much rest. I propose that we institute a new version of the Homestead Act. Sell the land, at market value, to families willing to work the land. Tie the land payment to soil carbon. Before the land is sold, a baseline measurement is taken, just a simple soil test. Every year, before the year’s land payment, retest the soil. If the percentage of soil carbon has gone up from the previous year by some baseline amount, say a half percent or one percent, no payment is due. This provides a considerable financial incentive to improving the soil carbon, which is a pretty good baseline for ecosystem regeneration.

Now let me talk about a different solution for urban areas. I think that most people would agree that neither tall grass prairie nor herds of hoofed mammals would be particularly desirable in urban and suburban areas. It would be possible to have a goat lawn mowing service, but the logistics would be difficult. No, I think that a food forest and urban regenerative agriculture would be a better solution. If done correctly, the increase in plant cover would help with the urban heat island effect and air pollution. People capturing rainwater for personal use would decrease flooding problems that are common in urban areas. A diversity of food producing plants would help urban wildlife, like birds and beneficial insects. Plus, there is a huge demand for locally produced, organic produce.

For this solution, I would propose a private solution rather than a governmental one. If someone were to create a market to collect and sell locally produced, organic produce, they would be in a position to work with homeowners to buy produce from them and sell it in their market. This would create a demand and encourage people to grow their own food. Heck, even harvesting all the fruit from trees that go to waste and selling that would create a significant market.

For the actual program, I would think that such a market would struggle first with supply. The demand is already there. Where would they get the produce they need to sell? In a changing market, companies need to diversify services, maybe even creating their own circular economy that is internal to the company. For example, I worked with a developer many years ago who had teamed up with a mining company. The city they were operating in had many lots that were ideally located and in high demand, but couldn’t be developed because they were too rocky. It was too pricey to get the rock removed prior to construction. This developer would work out the design and then send in the mining equipment. First they would collect all the boulders and sell those to landscaping companies, even charging for placement onsite where they were needed. Then they would grind down and remove the rock that was in the way for development. They would sell this as aggregate for road beds or other uses. This used an existing business model and had its own profit sources. Then they would move in the builders and build the buildings and whatever else was needed for the site. It was a pretty brilliant business model.

I would propose a combination of a market selling local, organic produce and a home remodeling, real estate, and mortgage company. The realtors could find homes for sale that were in need of work and buy them at low prices. While they are fixing them up, they plant the beginnings of a food forest and do whatever else would be necessary to get food production set up. Then they sell the homes, at market prices, to families looking to start a new life.

I am a big believer that when someone owns their own property, it is theirs to do with as they please, and indeed most people would find a way to do just that. Again, as in the rural example, incentives for proper behavior would need to be brought to bear. If you sell the houses for below market value, there would be people who would buy it cheap, tear out the food production methods, and sell it at market value. So it would need to be sold at market value. The selection process would be a bit different, though. Instead of looking at credit and income, buyers could be selected on the basis of gardening knowledge, personal situation, and willingness to participate. Rather than going through a banking institution, the company could carry the mortgage and write some interesting terms. First of all, there would be the interest rate. As long as the homeowner agrees to participate in the local, organic produce program and sell (not give, mind you, all produce is sold at a rate based on the market) a minimum of a certain amount of produce monthly, the interest on the mortgage is either significantly reduced or eliminated altogether from the payments due on the home. The proceeds of the produce could either be applied to the mortgage or given as cash to the homeowner. This would give the homeowner significant leeway regarding how they want to handle their finances. They could up production and offset their entire mortgage payment with produce. They could give themselves a second income, they could even seek to pay off their mortgage early.

Right now we are in a tough spot, environmentally and economically. Most methods being suggested today tell people what they have to give up in order to make the changes we need. I really don’t think this is necessary. With some creative thinking and problem solving, I believe that there are ways to help people get pointed in the right direction towards making a real difference while still making the world a better place.

Solving the Big Problems

This right here. We need to find a way to sustain this.

A couple of years ago I joined the Sustainability Committee of the local chapter of the American Public Works Association (APWA). I have been interested in sustainability and following it for some time, but joining this group made me really look deep at what it means for a society to be sustainable, what makes us unsustainable, what the core problems are, and how we might solve them. Naturally, my perspective is that the only way to really be sustainable is to make full use of ecological cycles. With this perspective, I started to notice some interesting patterns. If you look critically at our current society, with an understanding of what actually helps things, you notice that in many cases, our problems pair up nicely and sort of solve each other. By looking at it in this way, the solutions become pretty thoroughly evident, even if the application of those solutions is a little trickier. What do I mean? Allow me to explain.

Problem #1: Industrial agriculture is damaging our soil to the point that we currently rely on heavy inputs of damaging chemicals just to produce any food at all, and we are looking at losing the ability to produce food at all in the next 60 years, according to some estimates. Problem #2: Improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) over the next 20 years promise to automate enough jobs that some people anticipate up to 60% unemployment in that time frame. The problem with industrial agriculture is that we rely increasingly on monocultures so that we can efficiently harvest larger and larger areas with fewer and fewer people. The needs of automation are fundamentally incompatible with the needs of a natural system, which relies on diversity for health. At the same time, the best plan anyone has come up with for preventing disaster in the wake of massive technological unemployment is a Universal Basic Income (UBI). A UBI basically pays people just to exist so they will have money to live and use to buy products from industry that no longer pays them to produce those products. What if we put these people to work? Let’s put them back on the land to have them repair the land while producing the food we are going to need to feed a growing population.

Let’s try the next pair: Problem #3: The grasslands of the world are rapidly turning into desert, causing increasing droughts and floods, releasing carbon previously stored in the soil into the atmosphere, and causing world-wide erosion problems. Problem #4: A growing population needs ever more space to live. We are actively cutting down forests to build more houses. Plus, (bringing in problem #2 from above) technological unemployment will leave urban and suburban populations unemployed and people who have nothing to do tend to cause problems. Holistic Management helps with the solution for this one. The natural grassland ecosystems all over the world rely heavily on impact from massive herds of hoofed herbivores reacting to pack hunting predators over huge areas of land, at the least thousands of square miles. And they need us pesky humans to butt out and not get involved. The problem is, something as simple as a fence or a road can disturb those interactions, effectively managing them. Time and experience has shown that every unintentional management technique, and even most of the intentional ones, break the cycle and cause desertification. Livestock is capable of providing the animal impact needed if managed properly. By breaking up the land into manageable blocks and reengaging humans with livestock, we can restore the proper impact and repair deserts back into grasslands. But there are hundreds of millions of square miles that need to be fixed in this manner. Maybe we need to offer people a better life on the land than the one they have in cities.

On to the third pair: Problem #5: The current economic system is the biggest threat to any real change. People will always stick with what they know and cling to the little bit of security they have. Problem #6: The current system is unsustainable and is beginning to crush under its own weight. Well, this one is easy. The two pretty much cancel each other out. The trick is to let the old system fail while gently sliding a new system into place to minimize the impact on individual families.

Here is the fourth pair: Problem #7: Animals raised for meat are predominantly raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) lots, creating a concentrated source of animal waste, which pollutes the land and waterways, releasing a huge amount of carbon dioxide and methane, which are both greenhouse gasses. Problem #8: Land degradation due to industrial agriculture has led to increased need for synthetic fertilizers, which are typically manufactured from fossil resources and applied to the land at a cost to the farmer. These fertilizers don’t bond very well to the soils and are prone to running off and polluting the rivers and the oceans they feed into. The problem here is not having the fertilizer necessary, but rather a problem of location. We have all the resources we need to solve both problems, but they don’t work well with industrial agriculture. If we put the animals back on the land, the fertilizer they produce will be distributed evenly exactly where it is needed and will have a regenerative effect on the land.

The fifth grouping is actually a trio: Problem #9: For the last 30 years, the wages of lower and middle class workers have stagnated, leading to a reduced standard of living for the majority of the population. Problem #10: Urban areas have a number of environmental challenges. Concentrated burning of fossil fuels lead to an increase in air pollution. The increase of paved areas causes increased runoff, which increases flooding, as well as increased absorption of the sun’s energy, causing Urban Heat Island Effect. Problem #11: Food security is increasingly a worry in populated areas. Food is shipped from far off and grown on land that is rapidly degrading and doused with toxic chemicals. The solution for these two is truly local food, produced right in the cities. Have you ever had that one neighbor who is always trying to give away extra zucchini or tomatoes? How would life be different if there those people were living every couple of houses? Maybe we could set up a new system that allows them to sell that produce at a local market and earn additional income. With advances in food production methods, such as garden/mechanical hybrids such as hydroponics, aquaponics, and automated systems such as FarmBot, people could produce fruits and veggies enough to feed their families with extra to sell, all on a quarter acre suburban lot. With advances in technology, they can do that without even having to spend that much additional effort. As systems get put in place to encourage this sort of behavior, like friendly zoning and markets for additional produce, people will put more area into production. Roofs become prime real estate for growing produce. Denver even requires green roofs on new buildings. Imagine that area producing food. Yard area not in production for annual vegetable crops can be planted in a food forest and allowed to be natural. With hard spaces minimized, rainwater captured, additions of photosynthesizing plants, and food production abounding, every one of these problems gets significantly minimized.

Let’s look at one last pair: Problem #12: As the soils that produce our food degrade, they have fewer nutrients to put into our food. By some estimates, our food has 60-70% fewer nutrients today than it had a hundred years ago. The impact on our health is undeniable, but hard to accurately estimate. Increases in mental disorders, cancer, allergies, and possibly even obesity could all be related to reduced nutrition in our food supply, and also likely even increased amounts of toxic agricultural chemicals. Problem #13: Municipalities are spending ever more money on maintenance and construction due to increased flooding and erosion. The problem is, drainage solutions are being designed in an attempt to solve a soils problem. As natural cycles that build soil organic matter are disturbed or broken entirely, the soil loses its organic matter and thus its ability to absorb water. As rains hit, more water runs off and faster, taking soil with it. When that water hits roads, it closes the road, first because of the running water, then because of the sediment it drops as the floodwaters recede. City and county governments spend tens of thousands of dollars either cleaning up after every single rain storm or tens of millions of dollars designing catchment structures to mitigate the problem. That money could instead be allocated to help people engage with the land in regenerative practices. By growing vegetation in a way that regenerates soils, the water would better infiltrate the soil, the soil would be less erosive, and the plants would bring more nutrients up from the deep soil, increasing the nutrition of any food crops grown there. The best part is that with an investment of three hundred thousand dollars, a family can be set up to manage 200 acres and be financed for a couple of years until they become profitable on their own. For the cost of a regional detention basin, which can run in excess of $12 million, you can do that for  8000 acres. With careful placement of these homesteads along critical washes, this solution can be used to permanently solve drainage problems at several stream crossings rather than just one while providing employment and economic growth.

Of the big problems, the only one that doesn’t have a convenient pairing with its solution, or at least a common solution that solves the two together is the increasing levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the air. But the rest of these solutions hit this problem as well. As a society, we tend to look primarily at the source of all that carbon in the atmosphere, such as our energy consumption. But it runs like a budget. When your household is overdrawn, you can work on curtailing your rampant expenditure of money all you want, but until you begin to pay down the debt, the problem will never get any better. Soil is our best and least used carbon sink. Until we start storing all that carbon safely in the soil, we’ll never truly get a handle on climate change.

The problem with our current system is that we are actively using things up. Put differently, we are extracting the wealth with little regard to what is left behind. We are extracting it from the land, from the soil, from the biosphere of the world, and from our fellow human beings. There is a whole lot of momentum behind this system. It is the only one we know. More importantly, the people who are currently doing very well for themselves off of this system of exploitation and destruction are actively throwing a portion of those profits at the effort of making sure it doesn’t change. That makes actual, lasting change very difficult. The only real way to do that is to show regular people that there really is a better way to live. There is a way to live that will give more satisfaction, put money in their pocket (or at least allow them to spend less of what they have), and give their children better nutrition so they can grow strong and healthy.

It is possible to do all this through one seemingly simple, but very important medium: soil. Soil is the basis of all terrestrial life and the single most important substance for human life on earth. As Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself. Or, as I always, say, my job as a gardener is not to take care of my plants. I take care of the soil and the soil takes care of the plants. The soil is alive. It plays a very active role in the cycling of nutrients and keeping plants healthy. Those plants, in turn, perform nearly every function we need performed. They make the oxygen we breathe, pull carbon dioxide out of the air, shade and cool the ground, turn the sun’s energy into something usable, produce the food we eat, produce the food our food eats, make medicines, make the materials we build our homes out of, and the list goes on. All that depends on healthy soil. While some of those functions can be performed without healthy soil, as they are now, they function at a much lower efficiency. By simply focusing on the soil, we can improve so many things.

Growing up, my father always told me that Mother Nature takes thousands of years to produce one inch of healthy topsoil. I know he meant it to point out that it is a precious resource and we should treat it as one, I guess I always took it as a challenge. By carefully applying a range of techniques I have covered previously on this blog, you can make that inch of topsoil in anywhere from a couple of years to just a couple of months, depending on the scale of your operation and your dedication to the task. I will note that hydroponics and aquaponics do not actually produce soil, though the remnants of the plants can be used to do so. Instead, I focus on these techniques because they offer options for urban dwellers that might not necessarily be available otherwise.

More importantly, careful use of the set of these techniques that is appropriate to each individual’s situation can help them personally while helping the world at large. There is nothing quite so effective for solving big problems as showing people how meeting their rational self-interests can make a significant difference on the big problems.

Moving Towards a Sustainable Culture

In the South, they say eating greens on New Year's Day
will bring you wealth in the new year. I say do it every day.

Happy New Year, everyone! 2017 was an interesting year for me. In June, I left my job to pursue intellectual property, but I will talk more about that in the coming months. I still need to finish and file the patent. But I also did a lot of reading, research, and ruminations on the subject of sustainability. Through that process, several things became very clear to me. One of those is that, despite the fact that there are more people passionate about sustainability than ever, the availability of information on what they can do to make a difference is pretty slim. It is even harder to find ways to make a difference while making your life better, not worse. The dominant narrative is that of what we all need to give up.

We have reached a point where mere sustainability isn't enough. We don't want to sustain what we have. We need to be regenerative. They tell us things to do, but most of them are either not regenerative or make such a tiny impact that they are all but inconsequential. Recycling your trash? That's sustainable, but not regenerative. Reducing carbon emissions? Sustainable, but we need to sequester them if we want to be regenerative. Turning off the water while brushing your teeth? Well, that's a good idea, but just about inconsequential in the bigger picture.

I also noticed that there are some really great books out there on sustainability, but all the ones I have found so far fall into one or both of two traps. The first is that they are written by academics for academics. I am an engineer by profession and an avowed autodidact. I had trouble slogging through a couple of the books. The second is that they have a wonderful vision for what a sustainable society would look like, but offer no real plan on how to get there. They often offer some vague governmental policy changes as the impetus to move us in the right direction. Personally, I think this is the wrong way to go. All change starts at the bottom, with the people. The status quo is maintained by the people who made vast sums of money on the status quo and have no interest in changing it. The people in charge have an economic base that is sustained by keeping things as they are and will always be resistant to changing it. So the real question is how do we get average, middle class people to truly adopt a sustainable lifestyle?

The important thing to remember is that a person who is prospering on the current system will resist changing it. What about the people who aren't prospering? What about the millions of Millennials who are in their 30s and still can't afford to buy a home? What about all the people who have seen their wages stagnate while prices rise, watching as their standard of living slowly erodes? What about the estimated 60% of people who will see their jobs evaporate to automation in the next 20 years? One of the constants of the human condition is that we are always looking for a way to improve our lot. We need to find a way to use the regenerative and productive aspects of nature to improve the lives of people who are struggling. If you bring prosperity to those who have found it elusive, others will want a part of that.

The thing is, nature is regenerative. Every single natural system knows how to regenerate itself from damage to return to health and prosperity. If they didn't they'd have never survived all of the natural disasters that every single environment is subjected to somewhat frequently. These environments do this while providing bounty for all who live in them and they do it because every organism has a role to play. If you haven't already seen it, I strongly recommend checking out the video on how wolves change rivers for a beautiful example on how all of the organisms interact in an ecosystem. And this video only shows the interactions among animals and some plants. When diversity is increased and the full contribution of plants, fungi, and microorganisms in the soil is understood, the results can be mind-blowing.

How, then, are ecosystems degrading across the entire world simultaneously? It's quite simple, really. They are being managed incorrectly by people. It doesn't have to be this way, though. There are numerous examples from tropical areas of food forests that have been managed by the people who live in them for thousands of years. The problem is, to the uneducated, the food forest and the forest are indistinguishable and we tend to label people living in these food forests as "savages" and the areas they live in as "third world countries."

So here we are, living largely in urban and suburban sprawl. A friend once told me that suburbia is the most unsustainable thing ever and asked me how we'd change it. That's easy. Let me offer an analogy. When white people came to North America the bison herds were massive. Some estimates put them at 60 million strong. Most people think that it was over hunting, with millions of animals killed every year, that decimated their population. I read recently that this likely had little effect on the population. In a herd of 60 million, a couple of million lost every year aren't going to even offset the birth rate. It was habitat loss that did it. They depended on the grasses of the prairies for their food source. By fencing and burning that food source, then tilling it up to grow our own grains, we deprived them of their livelihoods and the great herds dwindled and disappeared.

That is exactly how we are going to get rid of suburbia. It is only through the loss of the habitat that supports the suburban sprawl that we are going to get rid of it. The problem is, nobody wants that. Well, nobody with a heart anyway. Do we really want hundreds of millions of people to lose everything and die or move on? I don't. I really think there is a better way, and suburbia may be just the place to start it.

Let me ask you a question, for those of you who grew up in suburbia. You remember that crazy lady down the street with the big garden? Remember how she kept knocking on your door to try to give you zucchini? Why was she giving it away? Simple, she had more than she could eat. Let that sink in a minute. She. Had. More. Than. She. Could. Eat. And she grew it in her yard, in suburbia. She was likely using some version of conventional or organic agriculture, with crops in the ground grown with loving care and fertile soil. That, there, is our new model. You want to reduce your footprint? Make it as big as your yard.

Now, granted, she spent an ungodly number of hours a week out in that garden, and she did it because there was no place she'd rather be. The problem is, not everyone wants to be like her. We have this amazing technological life. We have culture and theater and reality TV that we'd so much rather be participating in than mucking around in the dirt. So how do you transition from that one person in every neighborhood to nearly everyone? Technology.

Yeah, I know. Technology is bad. We all know that's what ruined the environment in the first place. I learned an important lesson from Allan Savory on this point. A resource and the management of that resource are two very different things. To be fair, he'd probably bristle at the thought of my applying his maxim to technology, as he does tend to view technology as bad. But I really think that technology applies as another resource that can be part of the solution if managed properly.

Over the last several decades, there have been many new innovations in the realm of growing food and repairing ecosystems that have a huge amount of potential. These include the understanding of tropical food forests and the development of temperate food forests, mushroom growing, biochar, and garden/mechanical hybrids (like hydroponics and aquaponics). We have developed effective frameworks for managing natural systems like Holistic Management and Permaculture. These are all really great innovations, but I really think that we are just scratching the surface. There is another leap in understanding that we need to take before we can really make the magic happen.

Most technology is used as a replacement. I don't want to water my garden, so I install an irrigation system. I don't like paying workers on my assembly line, so I install robots to assemble the cars I sell. Often the thing being replaced is human labor or natural systems. Industrial agriculture has taken this replacement model to new heights and the destruction has been vast, with the UN estimating that we have a mere 60 years of agriculture left. I don't think we should get rid of the technology any more than I think we should get rid of the cows. Instead, we should manage it differently.

Before I jump into what that would look like, let me throw another concept in the mix: systems thinking. Put simply, systems thinking is the process of understanding a whole system by examining all of the connections between functional parts of the whole. Ecology is, by necessity heavy in systems thinking. The problem is that science is typically not strong in systems thinking. The scientific method is typically a reductionist process where variables are removed as much as possible so specific tests can be performed. Any more than 2-3 variables and the results are questionable. So while the data and understanding gathered by science is incredibly valuable, it is important to use science as a starting place, not as the whole process. Science tends to be reductionist. If we are going to build something, we need a constructionist method. Engineering, which uses the information gathered by science, is constructionist. Holistic Management and Permaculture are both also constructionist methods.

The thing I have found in learning about all of the advanced techniques of growing things is that very few people are combining them. Those that are are typically combining only one or two of the items. I think that widespread use of these techniques, combined with technology would be a way to really create something truly regenerative. The important step, though, is that the technology needs to be viewed differently. The natural systems are complex and interrelated in ways that we don't fully understand, so these processes get first priority. If nature CAN do it, something natural SHOULD do it.

What role, then, should technology serve? Technology should be used to pick up the tasks that humans would normally do. This is obvious. After all, this is what technology normally does. But more importantly, technology should be used to support, intensify, and accelerate those natural processes. After all, technology cannot ever be truly regenerative. Only nature can do that.

I believe that if we use technology to support and accelerate natural processes, in turn using the result to build urban ecosystems, we can turn suburbia into a ridiculously productive wonderland. And I believe that those who pioneer this process will bring themselves enough prosperity that others will take notice and want to participate. The benefits of this are multi-fold and include things like carbon sequestration, restoring healthy water cycles, reductions in air pollution, increase in habitat for urban wildlife, a booming local food community, and so much more. I will talk more about what this might look like and how we get there over the next several blog posts. And yes, the intellectual property I am working will be a big part of that. Just be patient with me. I'll tell you all about it as soon as I can.