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.

Why Small-Scale Regenerative Agriculture is so Important

For the last several months, I have been throwing down a whole lot of information. Thank you, loyal readers, for sticking with me. I am going somewhere with this. There are a great number of techniques that can be used to repair our degrading ecosystem, and do so while providing a comfortable living for those doing the repairs. But people need to understand how this all needs to work. We live in a society that is separated to a great extent from nature. In order to fix what needs to be fixed, we need to first bring people back to nature, to help them understand it and learn how to heal it.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. As I mention regularly, this is an engineering blog. I do my best to use engineering problem solving techniques. And the first and foremost among those is this: if you wish to solve a problem, you first have to define the problem. So, what is the problem we are facing? And I don’t mean global warming, degrading farm land, or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those are symptoms. What is the problem? Let me offer my viewpoint on this.

The problem, as I see it, is an ultimate flaw with the changes made during the Industrial Revolution. Bear with me here. See, prior to the Industrial Revolution, some 90% of humanity lived a pastoral existence on small family farms. When the Industrial Revolution hit, it needed two things to function and grow: it needed workers, and it needed consumers. It is basic supply and demand. So farmers were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to leave their land and move to the cities. They were promised a better life and more prosperity. For the most part, that prosperity was finally realized during the 50s with an expansion of the middle class.

But it proved to be short-lived. As an economy grows, it builds wealth, actually creates it. For the last 15 years, those gains have largely gone to the elite and the middle class has seen no appreciable increase in earnings. Prices have continued to rise, though, so the difference between the two has caused a contraction of the middle class, with millions of people watching their standard of living decrease with little hope of reversing the slide. 

There is also a more insidious problem. The Industrial Revolution taught us that we could be separated from the land and that even our food production could be automated. The consequences have been disastrous. Ultimately, humans are biological beings and are intimately connected to the environment we live in in ways we are just beginning to understand. Land needs to be managed or the biological processes that keep it alive degrade. 

Industrial agriculture is a great example. If you take farmland with excellent soil containing lots of soil carbon and add synthetic fertilizers, the production goes through the roof. Profits increase wildly. But the reason it becomes so productive is that the synthetic fertilizers increase soil biological activity and they use all that stored soil carbon as a foodsource, burning through it in as little as a few years, or maybe a few decades at the outside. It is a perfect example of short term profit at the expense of long term viability.

So here we are. The profits that can be extracted have been. The rich are richer than they have ever been in the history of the world. They are trying harder and harder to find ways to increase profits. Wages have stagnated to the point that large swathes of humanity are barely making it paycheck-to-paycheck. Our environment is forfeit. We are looking at the looming threat of technological unemployment as more companies try to further cut expenses by automating as many tasks as possible. The outlook is bleak.

Or is it? Maybe this is exactly what we needed right now. See, momentum is the biggest obstacle to change. As long as everything is going along great, people won’t make changes. Comfort is hard to compete with. But discomfort and uncertainty, well, that has people craving change. Heck, a presidential candidate used it as his campaign slogan a couple of years back. The trick is for people to get to a very difficult realization: that they are on their own. As long as you rely on those in power for your livelihood, you are subject their whims and have little control. But when you decide to take control of your own life, that’s where the magic happens.

The question is, how? We live in an urban, and largely suburban, landscape. We like our connected, technological lifestyle. Who wants to give that up to move back to the country and pursue a homestead lifestyle? Well, lots of people, actually, but I am talking to the rest of us here. How can we live our modern lifestyle and still pursue some measure of self-sufficiency. Personally, I think that small-scale regenerative agriculture is the key here.

Small-scale regenerative agriculture is the perfect solution for the predicament we have ourselves in. It solves the problems on pretty much every level. There have been a number of significant advances since the last time we were an agrarian society. And I don’t mean in the technology of the tractors currently tearing up vast swaths of farmland. Things like organic farming (if you think this one is ancient, you probably don’t understand it), aquaponics, and mycoculture have all come a long, long way in the last 200 years or so. Technology can be employed in ways never dreamed of even 30 years ago. With careful layout and design, more food than ever can be grown in a smaller space all while regenerating the environment.

So what can small scale regenerative agriculture do to solve the problems at hand today? Let’s tackle them one by one and see.

Climate Change/Environmental Degradation

This one is probably the easiest to justify. Regenerative agriculture is, by definition, regenerative. This means reducing monoculture, increasing environmental diversity, and building soil. The simple process of building soil means adding carbon to the soil, a process also called Carbon Farming. With enough practitioners of this practice, significant amounts of carbon could be sequestered into the soils of the earth. Plus, the restoration of life to soil helps mitigate pollution and further increases environmental diversity, which will breathe life into ecosystems beyond the farming operation.

Stagnating Wages

In a household budget, there are two sides to the flow of money: income and expenses. Most people are struggling through increases in expenses while their wages have virtually stagnated for decades. It can be very frustrating to find more and more ways to cut expenses just to make ends meet. Introducing solar dollars to the household budget can breathe new life into the flow of money. With new methods and technologies, this can happen with only minimal additional effort on the part of the homeowner, but can result in a much tastier and healthier diet.

Technological Unemployment

As most are aware, machines are going to be taking all the jobs. I have heard projections as high as 60% of jobs will be lost over the next 20 years to automation. Personally, I think this move is highly shortsighted. While there will be a huge savings in production costs, that doesn’t really help if everyone is unemployed and can’t afford to buy gadgets at the new low cost. Regardless of how bad this move will allow companies to shoot themselves in the foot, it is coming. So, what can be done about it?

Simply put, people are going to have to become more self-sufficient. They will need to stop relying on employers for their livelihood. This used to be the way nearly everyone lived before the Industrial Revolution and they did so by living primarily off of solar dollars. Sustainable agriculture allows a return to this paradigm, allowing individuals to reduce or eliminate reliance on employers.

Urban Malaise

I read a comment recently that I thought was spot-on: You don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism. Maybe it is capitalism. Maybe it is our lack of connection to the natural world. Maybe it is a lack of meaning in our lives. Maybe it is knowing that we spend our days toiling away to build value for someone else. Maybe it is pollution. Whatever the cause, a general feeling of malaise, discontent, unhappiness, and restlessness are prevalent in our society. Small-scale regenerative agriculture hits pretty much all of those causes head-on. You are building value for yourself on your own land. You are working with and regenerating nature. I don’t think it is that hard to understand why gardeners are a happy lot.

Nutrition

As the nutrients are increasingly extracted from farmland, our food loses its nutritional value. We become disconnected from the nutrient cycle. By regenerating our own land and building nutrient-rich soil, we increase the nutrient content of the foods we eat. And by doing that small-scale, we reconnect ourselves to our own nutrient cycle.

Health

Gardening is a great way to keep active. There is definitely work involved. This can help with fitness and flexibility. Reconnecting our bodies to the natural nutrient cycle will also help as our bodies will be getting all the nutrient-rich foods they need.

The best part of all this is that we don’t need to drop our modern lifestyle to realize all these benefits. Technology can play a big part in reducing the labor on gardening while still improving output. Universal availability of the internet means you can still ply your trade or profession by working part time online throughout the week to bring in additional income. We really can have the best of both worlds.

So, tell me, what did I miss? Are there other ways small-scale urban agriculture can change the world?

Phoenix ASH & Regrowth

For the last several months, I have been hinting at this grand project I have been working on. I have felt it more important thus far to lay the foundation to talk about some of the concepts being implemented onsite. But I think I am in pretty good shape right now in terms of concepts being out there, and before I jump into my next series of posts, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the project I am currently working on.

The site is called Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. It is a half acre site in the Sunnyslope area a little north of downtown Phoenix. The project is an attempt to achieve as high a level of self-sufficiency as possible while simultaneously repairing the ecosystem onsite. The project site will also serve as a demonstration site to help promote these ideas and make significant improvements on a wide variety of fronts including food production, nutrition, flood prevention, urban heat island effect, air pollution, economic resiliency, erosion control, biodiversity, and much more. To achieve this, nearly everything we do onsite is to achieve one of  two goals: 1) Restore soil carbon, and 2) Promote biodiversity. While this may sound a little overly simplistic, these two things, when working in conjunction, cause a cascade of healthy biological functions that achieve everything else.

Let me take a moment to describe how this cascade works. Increasing the amount of carbon in the soil does two things primarily. The first is that it increases absorption of rainwater. This increases biological activity and helps mitigate flooding. The second is that it increases the fertility of the soil. As I have explained previously, carbon in the soil feeds the soil biome and increases the fertility of the soil and the availability of nutrients in the soil. By increasing the available moisture in the soil and fertility of the soil, plant growth is encouraged. Remember, as a gardener, my job is not to take care of the plants. My job is to take care of the soil and the soil takes care of the plants.

Once we have widespread growth of plants, we move to the next level. As I have already mentioned, the driver of ecosystem processes is the cycling of living matter from one organism to the next. This is where diversity comes in. Different organisms make use of different food sources and bring different benefits to the system. Rather than trying to dig through the science of biological systems, most of which doesn’t really exist yet (don’t even get me started on the faults with reductionist thinking employed by modern science), it is best to let the ecosystem find its own healthy equilibrium. We do that by including everything in the whole. There really are no weeds. The only caveat is that they must provide more benefit than they detract. So a pine tree was removed from the site because all it provided was shade. Oleanders were removed because they are highly toxic. And there are a couple of weeds we remove because of toxicity. Otherwise, everything is welcome.

Once the plants are growing, each one is valued for the benefits it brings. Edibles are harvested for human consumption. Grass and forbs are used for forage for the animals. Dead leaves and grass are harvested for compost. Trees are pollarded to provide wood to build more soil. At each level, the plant material runs through its cycle and is returned to the soil, increasing soil carbon and helping plant growth and diversity.

So let me talk for a moment about the various methods we employ onsite to achieve all of this:

Holistic Management

Holistic Management, as taught by the Savory Institute, is more of a guiding principle. Everything we do is viewed through the lens of Holistic Management and its principles. It is through Holistic Management that we can make the best decisions for how to weave the myriad methods together into one cohesive structure. The site also serves as the Arizona Savory Hub (ASH) and the first urban demonstration site for the Savory Institute. We are very excited to demonstrate that Holistic Range Management, which is typically managed on large tracts of land in rural areas, can be applied in an urban setting.

Permaculture

Permaculture is another guiding principle. The permaculture core principles are also core values and guide what we do and how we rebuild a complete ecosystem onsite.

Animal Impact

Animal Impact, as described in Holistic Management is an important part of how nutrients are cycled through plants and back into soil. Right now, we just have chickens and are using them to process forage and create compost. However, long term plans include goats and sheep, and maybe even miniature cows or rabbits. Each animal will have its own impact on the ecosystem, improving diversity and nutrient cycling.

Organic Gardening

Organic gardening, in its ideal form, builds soil carbon, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. By not using chemistry to manage a biological system, the biological system is allowed to flourish, encouraging diversity and growing topsoil. Everything we do onsite at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth is organic.

Composting

While some of the organic matter is either processed in place (as in animal impact) or allowed to lie where it falls, much of the organic matter produced onsite is processed through the composting facility onsite. This turns decaying organic matter into high quality topsoil more rapidly so it can be spread back out where it is needed most. In addition, we use the chickens (Animal Impact) to process the compost. This allows the chickens to feed off of whatever they deem edible in the compost, including insects that are attracted to the rotting material. It also allows their droppings to be immediately incorporated into the compost. This helps the compost get hot and complete its cycle quickly. And when it is time for the compost to be turned? The chickens help with that, too.

Rainwater Harvesting

At just 9” of rain a year, Phoenix is a desert. But with careful planning and a little infrastructure, the rain can be stretched really far. To do, this, we use two primary strategies at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. The first is rainwater barrels. There are two rainwater barrels on each of the three buildings onsite. The two smaller buildings have smaller, flattened barrels that sit up against the building. These each hold a little over 500 gallons. On the largest building, there are two larger barrels, each holding about 2600 gallons. The smaller tanks are perhaps a little undersized for the areas they catch, and the larger tanks are a bit oversized. However, with a little planning and some plumbing, we are able to drain the smaller tanks into the larger as they fill up, assuring that no rain is lost. This water is used to water the gardens.

The second type of rainwater harvesting comes from offsite flow, or water that is flowing onto the property. The property has a wash flowing through it. While this was a major problem for previous owners, it is seen as an advantage at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. With a little regrading, the site was turned into a series of retention basins. As each retention basin fills, it overtops into the basin below it. By doing this, all, or nearly all, of the offsite flow can be captured and stored in the ground. This has the added benefit of reducing downstream flooding. The best part is that the first basins built are already growing lots of vegetation and thus building soil carbon. The change in water infiltration is already visible, with no water standing in these basins a mere 24 hours after a big rain. The newer basins, which haven’t had much of a chance to grow vegetation yet, take 3 or 4 days to drain, even though they get less water.

Nitrogen Producing Trees

In desert ecosystems, and in particular degraded desert ecosystems, there is often a lack of nitrogen in the soil. This can be a limiting factor for the growth of plants and thus the ecosystem as a whole. Nitrogen producing trees, such as palo verde, acacia, and mesquite can make a big difference in this area. Not only do they fix nitrogen from the air and make it into a usable form, but many are well adapted to dry climates with poor soil. They are drought tolerant and fast growing.

Pollarding/Coppicing

As the trees grow, they produce a great amount of biomass. Every two years, the trees at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth are pollarded, and a few select trees are coppiced. The branches and twigs that are cut off are used for a variety of purposes. They are used as feedstock for growing mushrooms, some are used to produce biochar. The bulk are chipped to either produce mulch for various areas around the site or as a bulk carbon source in the compost bins. The biomass produced by pollarding and coppicing becomes a large portion of the biomass we use to feed the soil.

In addition, trees typically have a root structure that mimics the size and extent of the canopy above. When the tree is trimmed back, the tree abandons roots and pulls back, adding as much carbon down in the soil as is harvested from above.

Hugelkultur

Some of the branches that are either trimmed out or are the result of random pruning throughout the year are used to create new garden beds. This use of hugelkultur adds a long-lasting source of carbon to the soil and provides a lasting source of food for the soil biome where it is needed most.

Biochar

Woody debris that is too big for the chipper, unusable for mushroom feedstock, or otherwise scrap material is processed into biochar. The biochar is added to the compost. Once there, it collects nutrients through the processing process. Then it is added to the soil with the rest of the compost where it is used to improve soil quality in perpetuity.

Mycoculture/Mycoremediation

Growing mushrooms is difficult in the desert, but it can be managed. Mushrooms are used in the intermediary process between wood chips and soil creation and provide an additional product. We are also working to find ways to use mushrooms to improve degraded areas of the site. This is a technology that has a lot of potential and we are working on finding a way around the challenges to best make it work.

Aquaponics

Phoenix ASH & Rebirth is located in a very brittle environment and the bulk of the site is being managed with this in mind. However, many of our common vegetables require quite a bit more water, thus necessitating a non-brittle microclimate. In this interest, we are looking for technologies that help use the water resources available onsite to their maximum utility. Aquaponics has some great potential in this respect, being particularly efficient with both water and nutrients. However, as a soil-less technology, it doesn’t fit as well with the goals of the site. We are exploring other options to improve the technology to be more organic.

As you can see, we have a whole lot going on for just a half acre. But combined, these techniques work closely together to make some significant changes in a degraded environment. Please help me in spreading the word. If we can turn a half acre in downtown Phoenix into a productive food forest and organic farm, it can be done anywhere. We just have to have a way to get these concepts out there and teach people to implement them. This world is fixable, and it can be done using the techniques provided to us by nature. Let’s get on this.

The Importance of Snails in Aquaponics

The two kinds of snails in my garden. Malaysian trumpet snail
on the left, Rams horn snail on the right.

I was at an aquarium store once buying a couple of fish and saw some great snails. They weren't the big flashy kinds, like apple snails or nerite snails, but rather little Malaysian trumpet snails. I could tell they were trying to get rid of them, so I asked for a few. The saleswoman referred to them as "parasitic snails." That got my curiosity up, so asked in what way they were parasitic. She kept talking about how hard they were to get rid of and what a problem they were. "But," I asked, "you called them parasitic. What organism do they infect and what harm do they do." She just found the question confusing." It was after another few moments of conversation that I found out that she didn't know the difference between "nuisance" and "parasitic." But I did get her to toss a big handful in with the fish, where I promptly introduced them to my garden.

In soil gardening, worms are particularly useful. They perform a number of benefits to the soil. In an aquaponics system, snails can be just as useful to the water ecosystem as worms are to the soil, if not more so. They perform a number of beneficial functions in the tank. First and foremost, they are the clean up crew. If you overfeed your fish, your snails will gobble up all that extra food in short order. If a fish dies and you don't notice, the snails will jump on it and gobble up the remains in just a few days, lessening the impact to the water chemistry. They also act as an extra food source for the fish, particularly if you have tilapia. The tilapia will eat the little ones whole and will eventually figure out how to pick the shells apart on the big ones to pluck out the juicy bits.

In fact, because of these two facts, snails end up being a useful indicator of how accurately you are feeding your fish, which can be particularly useful if you feed them sinking food pellets. If you are overfeeding your fish, the snails will latch onto the ready food supply and increase in numbers rapidly, multiplying in just a couple of weeks. If you are underfeeding your fish, the fish will turn to the snails as a source of food, and the snail population will plummet. They are even a good indicator of water quality. If you have a water quality problem, perhaps caused by a big rotten fish, low oxygen levels, or some other problem, the snails will attempt to escape the water. So if you come check on your tank and there is a big line of snails right at the water's edge, you know you have something to fix.

Another useful function is the role they play in cycling minerals, particularly calcium. If your water supply is hard, like mine is, there are lots of calcium salts in the water. In aquaponics, this can be particularly tricky. Water is added, bringing with it more salt for every gallon. But the water leaves the garden via evaporation, leaving the calcium behind. The snails make their shells by pulling the calcium out of the water. When they die, or are eaten, that little calcium pellet falls to the bottom of the tank. If you run your tank for several years, the snail shells build up. If calcium is short, the living snails will get their calcium from the dead snail shells. If there is plenty, they just pile up. I love scooping the old shells out and adding them to my garden soil. They act as a slow release calcium supply in the soil.

The question is, what kind of snails do you want? First of all, don't get the ornamental snails. A lot of those are considered beneficial in the hobby aquarium because they don't reproduce rapidly. That's actually a problem in aquaponics. You want lots of snails. There are two main kinds of snails, Malaysian trumpet snails and rams horn snails. The trumpet snails have a long curl to their shells and are shaped like an elongated cone. The rams horn snails curl outwards and don't form any kind of a trumpet shape. There are a couple of other kinds of pond snails out there as well that have an intermediate cone shape.

The Malaysian trumpet snails can be useful in their own way. The shell shape helps them burrow through sediments, where they prefer to live and eat. In their burrowing, the perform much the same function as the earthworms do in soil, they aerate the sediment and help eliminate anaerobic patches which can become smelly. However, their shell is too hard for the tilapia to eat. They can still be useful, though. As they overpopulate, just scoop them up and toss them in the soil. They are pretty tough, but they can't move around outside the water and only survive a couple of days. Or, if, like me, you have a pet turtle, you can just use them as supplemental turtle food. I have a little 3 stripe mud turtle. His beak has no trouble crushing the hard shell of the trumpet snail and he considers the long shape to be perfectly bite sized.

The rams horn snails are the preferred snail in aquaponics. I have had a few of the medium conical snails and they work well, too, but don't thrive and reproduce as well as the rams horn snails. The primary food source of the rams horn snails is algae, extra food, and whatever other organic debris ends up in the tank. They can get up to a half inch in diameter, though that is rare. The few I have gotten that big always earn the name "Monstro the Snail" from me. Usually they are much smaller, maybe a quarter of an inch in diameter.

So I hope you consider adding snails to your aquaponics garden. I know I love what they do for mine.

Biochar

Soil in the rain forest is some of the poorest on earth. Plants absorb the nutrients they need through their roots, relying heavily on the plants being soluble in water. A rain forest, true to its name, rains almost constantly. That rain picks up the nutrients in the soil and washes them away. The various living organisms try to hold on to those nutrients by locking them away in their bodies, but eventually those nutrients are returned to the soil. The soil cannot hold on to them. So when explorers discovered lenses of dark, black, fertile soil in the interior of the Amazon Basin, it came as a big surprise.

The soils came to be called terra preta soils and have been the subject of much study. Due to the high concentration of pottery sherds, bones, charcoal, and other indicators of human life, it was obvious that the soils were made by a previous civilization. But it was initially unclear why the soils retained such a high degree of fertility, with fertility possibly even increasing over time instead of degrading as would be expected. It turned out that the cause was the concentration of charcoal in the soil that was doing it.

The study of this soil led to the discovery of biochar, a form of charcoal produced by pyrolysis, creating the charcoal at high temperatures and in a relatively low oxygen environment. The physical and chemical structure of biochar acts a lot like the carbon commonly used in water and air filters. It is extremely porous, leading to a high surface area, one that is really good at cation exchange. For the lay person, that means it bonds with a wide variety of compounds, holding them in place. In a carbon filter, this means it bonds with soluble lead, arsenic, and chlorine, things you want removed from the water so it is safe to drink. In soil, this capability is more applicable to nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Biochar in soil can hold on to the very nutrients that plants need to survive and thrive.

The benefits don't stop there, though. Because of biochar's porosity, it is also very good at retaining water. Interestingly, the open structure of biochar seems to be an ideal support for microbial life. Beneficial bacteria and fungi thrive in the environment created by biochar. The nutrients bound to the biochar are easily accessible to the microorganisms crawling all over the surface, where they can become a part of the life cycle of the soil, eventually to end up in plants.

So what does it mean for food production? Biochar has a huge potential in agriculture. One of the great frustrations of modern agriculture is that soil fertility is falling. To combat that, soils are heavily treated with synthetic fertilizers. Those fertilizers wash away readily in the rain, meaning that more need to be added. But it also causes a problem downstream. All that fertilizer in the water causes an algae bloom. That algae bloom is followed by the algae dying. As the algae in the water column starts to rot, it steals oxygen from the water, killing fish, crustaceans, and anything else, creating a dead zone. The annual dead zone on the Gulf of Mexico reached 6400 square miles in 2015. All that fertilizer used to make that dead zone was purchased by farmers, each one hoping that that fertilizer would go to their plants.

So what if something could be added to the soil that helped all that fertilizer stay in place? What if that amendment also increased water retention, thereby increasing drought tolerance? What if it also increased beneficial microbial activity, the very activity that supports plant growth? And where does it come from? We really like having trees in our cities, and we like them to be well trimmed. Those trimmings typically head for the landfill. What if we diverted that waste product instead and made our soils better? That biochar could be added to farmland, and just like in the Amazon Basin, that fertility could be realized for hundreds of years. Biochar can take hundreds or even thousands of years to degrade in a natural environment, and it improves the soil that whole time.

But what about more modern, higher tech growing methods? Could biochar be used as media for hydroponics or aquaponics? I have seen a lot of discussion of the possibility online, but very little actual data on whether it works or not. I think that an analysis of what biochar does and how it would apply to hydroponics and aquaponics might be in order.

Again, biochar absorbs nutrients and holds on to them. It will do this with huge amounts of nutrients. Now, biological activity can access those nutrients (remember the "exchange" part of cation exchange) and help feed them to the plants. But that means two things for aquaponics and hydroponics. The first is that the biochar is going to absorb a LOT of nutrients until it is filled up. In land-based agriculture, the biochar is typically "charged" or pre-filled with nutrients before being added to the soil. In hydro- and aquaponics, that doesn't necessarily have to happen, but the grower needs to know that the biochar will take its fill before the plants can get it, and that process can take some time, perhaps weeks or months.

The second thing to recognize is that it is the biological activity that exchanges all those cations. Fungi is particularly active in that process, but bacteria are also important. Without that living system, the biochar will just act as a nutrient sink that will have to be filled before a regular nutrient profile can be maintained.

Biochar in a properly alive media would have a stabilizing force on the nutrient load of the media. Once it is full, the bacteria and fungi can access it if nutrients drop too low and it will absorb when nutrient loads are too high. Adding it while a tank is cycling might help lessen the stress on the fish, but the grower might want to refrain from adding plants until the nitrate level starts to climb, indicating that the biochar filter is full. Also, adding it as a supplement to the media rather than as a media in itself would be a good idea, perhaps 20% or less.

As for me, I do aquaponics with soil. The soil I create is a vibrant, living community that holds its own nutrients pretty well and should have no trouble accessing nutrients held in the biochar. I am working on expanding and creating new aquaponics beds and will be trying biochar as a supplement to the soil in the system, probably at around 20% of total volume. I will report back on how that worked when I have more information.

Primary vs. Secondary Decomposing Mushrooms

Shaggy manes, a great example of secondary decomposers

There are many different kinds of mushrooms out there, classified by their source of food. Parasitic mushrooms attack living organisms. Mycorrhizal mushrooms form a symbiotic relationship with plants, trading nutrients for sugar. But when it comes to the world of mushroom cultivation, the real species of interest are the saprophytes, the mushrooms that decompose dead tissue. But even those come in several different varieties. There are primary, secondary, and tertiary decomposers. Tertiary decomposers are mushrooms that live in soil, scraping out a living on the little scraps of nutrition they can find here and there. Very few are of culinary significance. Primary and secondary decomposers, on the other hand, are the species that compose the majority of our culinary mushrooms.

When a tree falls in the forest, it is the primary decomposers that move in and start the process of turning the body of the tree back into soil. Think about the trunk of a tree. While the tree is alive, there isn't much living inside the tree, besides the tree, of course. Plus, it is made of solid wood (weird how that works, eh?) and most living creatures can't penetrate through to get to the energy stored in the wood. Fungal species are quite adept at it, though, and among the mushrooms, there is still lots of competition for any new food source. Once the primary decomposer detects an available food source, it throws all its energy towards occupying it. Growth is very rapid and it grows a huge amount of tissue in a fairly dense concentration.

Once it has colonized what it can grab, the primary decomposer produces a flush of mushrooms, then proceeds to decompose as much of the food source as it can.

Chunk of wood that has been fully decomposed by white rot
fungus, still looks like wood

However, primary decomposers are not particularly complete in how much they decompose. Most are either brown rot fungus, which means they decompose the cellulose and leave the lignin behind, or white rot fungus, which means they decompose the lignin and leave the cellulose behind. Either way, the wood still looks pretty much like wood when the fungus is done with it. It is just a whole lot softer and lighter.

The secondary decomposer moves in and picks up where the primary decomposer left off. It certainly feeds on the cellulose and/or lignin that is left over, but it also decomposes the other compounds present in the tree.

The biggest difference between the two is the type of environment they prefer to grow in. The primary decomposer is adapted to the inside of a freshly fallen log. They prefer an environment with little to no competition. They produce ideally on pasteurized sawdust, straw, or something similar. Secondary decomposers are a little different. In nature, once the primary decomposers have finished, insects, soil bacteria, and all kinds of other organisms have started invading. It provides a richer micro-ecosystem. This is the preferred habitat of the secondary decomposers. Some won't even produce mushrooms in sterile substrate. Several even prefer a well-composted substrate that still has some woody/fibrous components to it.

The same piece of wood as above, just squeezed to show
how soft it is. It is ready for a secondary decomposer

As for how to tell the difference, just look at the growing requirements. If the mushroom will fruit off of just sawdust, vertical or horizontal surface, it is probably a primary decomposer. If it requires a casing layer and only fruits from a horizontal surface, it is probably a secondary decomposer. Examples of primary decomposers are shiitake (Lentinula edodes), oyster (both Pleurotus and Hypsizygus species), reishi (Grifola frondosa), and pioppino/black poplar (Agrocybe aegerita). Examples of secondary decomposers are button/portobello (Agaricus brunescens), king stropharia (Stropharia rugoso-anulata), and shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus).

Considering my current projects, what are the implications of this information? Well, the main thing is that when mixing mushrooms and gardening, the information about what habitat the mushrooms like is very important. So when you are doing it in aquaponics, like I am, there need to be some minor adjustments to how you do it. For example, if you are doing traditional aquaponics, using media, primary decomposers are going to be your best bet. But rather than sawdust/woodchip blocks, which is the usual preferred method, partially buried logs would be best. The worms would gobble up the blocks too soon, whereas they would do no appreciable damage to the logs.

On the other hand, if you are doing aquaponics with soil, both primary and secondary decomposers can be used. The primary decomposers will still do better in logs, but the active soil in an aquaponics system can be really beneficial for secondary decomposer mushrooms. Plus, they would add additional filtration for the water.

A little over a year ago I created a woodchip bed in my aquaponics system using king stropharia mushrooms. The results were better than expected. They obviously thrived in that environment. I intend to keep experimenting as often as I can manage. I think there are great combinations out there yet to be discovered.

Harnessing the Power of Living Soil

A king stropharia mushroom growing among the carrots
in my garden system.

Viewing the world as an engineer, as I do, I tend to look at revelations and discoveries from the viewpoint of how they can be utilized to help solve real problems. Living soil is no exception. As I mentioned in my last post, living soil is excellent at balancing the chemistry and managing nutrient loads. But what can this insight be used for? How can it be used to make our lives better? A couple of years ago, I decided to combine aquaponic system design with the power of living soil. The success of the system has been a little surprising to me, even with my high hopes. The soil has proven to be very adept at balancing an aquatic system as well as its own and doing a great job of processing and retaining nutrients for the plants. Allow me to share two stories of things I have observed my system doing:

Story 1

Garden System Version 1.0

When I first built my system, I used a small aquaponics system with hydroton (expanded clay pellets) media and a 55 gallon sump tank. This was outside in June in Phoenix, Arizona, and the temperature was hot. I had to add about ten to twenty gallons of water a day to keep the levels up. Unfortunately, as water is lost in the system, the minerals are conserved. Tap water in my area comes out of the tap with a pH of 8.0. After a few weeks of concentration, my water was hovering around a pH of 8.6. At that range, the fish aren’t happy and the plants lose their ability to absorb a number of nutrients. I kept adding various acids in an attempt to get the pH down, but the fish didn’t like that process either and it never stayed down for more than a few days before I was adding more.

Finally, I managed to scrape together enough money and time to build my large garden bed. It is 4 feet by 8 feet and I filled it with a mixture of coconut fiber, wood (mostly spent mushroom logs), perlite, and compost. Then I added a generous number of worms before planting it. Immediately the soil sprung to life and began doing what soil is supposed to do. Within a matter of days the water dropped to a pH of 7.0. Over the next several months of intense heat and intense water loss and mineral concentration, it balanced out and eventually reached equilibrium at a pH of 7.6. This is actually a pretty good level for both the fish and the plants and it held that pH for almost a year without any assistance. The living soil in the garden, with plenty to eat, did its job and balanced the chemistry of the whole system, water included.

Story 2

My poor, sickly basil

Last spring, as the plants grew, I started noticing a nutrient deficiency. While most of the plants were clearly suffering from it, it was obvious that certain plants, like squash and basil, had it the worst. As new leaves grew, they would come out white, completely devoid of the necessary chlorophyll. I looked up the nutrient deficiency on my charts, as each deficiency has its own symptoms, and discovered it was definitely an iron deficiency and possibly a magnesium deficiency on top of that. So I added some chelated iron to fix the iron issue and some Epsom salts to fix the magnesium problem. I added a tablespoon or so of each every 2-3 weeks. After about a month of treatment, the white leaves stopped appearing and the plants resumed vigorous growth.

I continued the treatments for a month or so after the plants recovered, just to make sure they were going to be okay, and then I stopped adding the supplements. Not long after that, the weather warmed up. I had some nearby plants that were in containers, but outside my closed system. Rather than try to remember to water them twice a day, I hooked up a side line. Every time my system watered itself, a drip line also watered the container plants from the fish tank. An added benefit of this was that it prevented the buildup of mineral salts in my tank water. However, it also meant that all those great dissolved nutrients in the water were also lost. Now, more than six months have passed and there have been no return of the symptoms of nutrient deficiency. Since the soil is all the same but the water is all different, that means that the living soil snatched up all the nutrients it could get while they were plentiful and have been feeding them to the plants as needed.

I really think that the utility of living soil is one that is worth exploring further and including in more and more projects.

Water Spinach

I like to fill every possible niche in my ecosystem. Whenever I see a hole, I start looking for the right organism to fill it. So when I started a garden with a big tank of water, I immediately started looking for plants that would grow in water. I started by pointedly ignoring watercress (blech!), then moved onto water chestnuts. I found some and grew them for a year and a half before I went to harvest them and found they had all rotted away. But I digress.

Really, the holy grail for me is edible greens that will grow through the summer here in Phoenix, AZ. I love greens and would prefer to eat a lot of them. The problem is, most greens, like spinach and all of the various lettuces, go immediately to seed as soon as it gets over 80 degrees. Kales tend to be bitter in the heat. Chard actually does pretty well, but I would like a little variety.

My search for edible plants to grow in the water led me to one that meets both goals. Water spinach is the American name for a semi-aquatic, vining plant native to southeast Asia. The scientific name is Ipomoea aquatica. Known as ong choy in China and kangkong (LOVE that one) in the Philippines, it has many names. It isn't actually related to spinach, though. Ipomoea is the family that also contains morning glory and sweet potatoes. 

Water spinach has hollow stems that allow the plant to float on top of the water. An aggressive grower, it will spread across the top of whatever water you give it, forming a dense mat. It then shoots a thick canopy of leaves up above the water and a dense mat of roots down into the water up to two feet deep. In ideal conditions, which seem to be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, full sun, and lots of non-stagnant water filled with abundant nitrogen from fish, it grows at an amazing rate. I have seen individual vines grow over a foot a day. I have harvested three pounds of leaves, leaving the plant looking picked completely clean, only for it to look like nothing at all happened four days later. It is far and away my most productive plant and I probably eat an average of 1/2-1 pound off of it a week, mostly as the greens for my morning smoothie.

While the flavor tastes quite like spinach, it is a little stronger, somewhere between spinach and kale. The texture isn't crispy like spinach nor tough like kale, though. It is more tender, like lettuce. About the last foot of the vine can also be eaten as well. The older vines are tough and somewhat woody, but the tender new growth is quite tasty when lightly stir-fried. Nutritionally, I haven't been able to find too much information, but it seems to be very similar to spinach. 

One of my favorite parts is that it is also a favorite edible of my tilapia. Any leaves that dip down into the water are quickly nibbled off. They also eat the roots, having a particular fondness for them. I once caught a tilapia fingerling and brought it inside so I could watch it grow. On a whim, I pulled off some water spinach roots and brought them in. The fingerling rushed to the roots and took a bite, Then it swam around erratically in what I can only describe as a happy dance, then rushed back and took several more bites. I accidentally killed my water spinach last year about this time and started some new from seed this summer. The new plant is almost as big as the old one was, but it still doesn't have any noticeable roots. The fish in my tank keep them well trimmed. I figure it is only a matter of time before the plant develops enough of a mat that it will get ahead of the fish. In the meantime, it doesn't seem to be suffering at all. 

There are a couple of precautions I would give. First, in its native habitat, the hollow stems are often a host for an intestinal parasite. The parasite isn't native to the United States, but be careful where you get your shoots. Or just start from seed. It is also considered an invasive and has become a problem in parts of Florida and Louisiana. So be careful where you grow it. As for my system, I really think that it is both an incredible boon and a bit of a nuisance. It grows in my main tank, and as such, gets first crack at the available nitrogen. I suspect the rest of my plants just get the little bit that is left after the water spinach is done. Also, while the floating mat provides great shelter for baby fish and shade in the heat of the summer, it also blocks access to oxygen exchange, necessitating an air pump if you have more than a few fish. 

Overall, though, I highly recommend water spinach for any sort of aquaponics or similar system. It feeds the fish and gives a steady supply of fresh greens for you all summer long.

Onward Into Aquaponics

I know this blog has been silent for many months. It is certainly not because there is little going on here in Mad Bioneer world. Life has been full of changes and I have been working very hard on some very interesting projects that have come together very, very well. The picture shows my current setup, which I now have fully assembled and functional. Over the next several posts I will explain my intermediate steps, of which there have been plenty, and how I got to where I am, including my successes and failures.

But first of all, I want to start with the hypothesis I was testing. After all, that is where all good science starts. As I have mentioned before, I am not a big fan of hydroponics. My passion is the understanding of each of the roles that living organisms play in the overall health and functionality of a living system and making sure that those roles are filled by something in my system. Any system that removes all of the life except the plant and requires the operator (and expensive machinery) to do their work is pretty much the opposite of what I want to do.

However, with some great conversations with the very knowledgeable guys at Home Grown Hydroponics in Tempe, AZ, I have come to understand that that is just one version of hydroponics. As I dug farther into this on my way to eventually designing and building my very own aquaculture greenhouse, I settled on some version of aquaponics. For those of you not familiar, this is a system where a fish tank is connected up to some grow beds. The water from the tank is regularly pumped through the grow beds, where the plants filter the fish waste out of the water. It filters the water for the fish and fertilizes the plants all in one ingenious system.

However, being at my core a soils guy, I was just not content to toss the soil out the window. After all, that is where the magic happens. I have said it before and I have said it again: A gardener doesn't take care of his plants. He takes care of his soil. The soil takes care of the plants. So I wanted to see if I could manage an aquaponics system using soil instead of media.

I did some amount of digging and most of what I found used media with aquaponics, not soil. The one book I had not only discouraged its use, but actually said some stunningly inaccurate things about the role soil plays in a plant's health. But aside from saying that the soil essentially is just holding the plant up, the only reason it gave for not using soil is that it will color the water, making it harder to check on your fish. I can tell you from experience that this is true, but that the colored water is in no way harmful to the fish. While it would be neat to watch my fish closely every day, I have other ways of determining how healthy they are.

So here I am, with a fully functional test system that incorporates not only soil into aquaponics, but also hugelkultur. And, boy oh boy am I having fun. Stay tuned, as I will be going into great detail about how I got here. It will probably be way more detail than you wanted, but hey, I find that everyone else leaves out all the details I want, so I may as well be different.