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.

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.

Composting with Chickens

Chicken compost structure

I love an elegant design. But what is an elegant design? Elegant is defined as pleasingly ingenious and simple. From an engineering standpoint, an elegant design is typically a design that achieves multiple functions through simplicity rather than complexity. This is easily accomplished with biological systems with just a little thought. Think about the process happening. Is there work you are doing that something else would happily do for you? Are there organisms that could be inserted into the process that would provide benefit without any real loss?

While I have tried to achieve this with my living systems since I was a teenager, one of the best examples I found was from Paul Stamets. He explained that if you compost wood chips, you can get compost, albeit slowly. If you grow mushrooms on the wood chips first, you get mushrooms. Then the spent mushroom blocks can be composted to still get compost, and faster. The addition of the right organism in the middle of the process makes all the difference.

Such is the way with chickens and compost. Chickens are omnivores. Their natural diet is a mixture of plants and bugs, with a healthy mixture of seeds thrown in. Commercial chicken feeds are mostly grain based. They give the chickens the basic nutritional needs, but don't really give them anything extra. Allowing the chickens to process compost on the other hand, is a natural fit that achieves multiple functions.

Chicken compost structure from the inside

For our purposes, we took an existing structure that was built for compost. It was constructed out of PVC pipe and wire and measured 11' by 14' and tall enough to stand comfortably in. We moved it into a corner that was out of the way and put an existing chicken coop inside. The coop gave the chickens a place to roost and lay and gave them protection from the rain and sun. Then we built four compost bins, one cubic yard each, using the same PVC pipe and wire techniques. The doors on the front of the bins rotate down. Then, since this is Phoenix and it is hot here, I installed a mister system over the compost bins to keep the compost wet and the chickens comfortable in the summer. 

To feed the chickens, I toss compost out into the open area. I also wander around and harvest a big bucket of weeds daily for the chickens to eat. Grain is given supplementally as needed and just to make sure they have enough food. The chickens pick through the weeds and kitchen scraps and eat what they want. The rest becomes litter under their feet and they manure on it. When the litter layer builds up enough, we scoop it up and toss it in one of the bins. Then we spread out a starter layer of straw or drier weeds and start the process over again. I hope to use wood chips soon as well. 

Once the compost is in the bins, it heats up to hot compost range within a few days. Once a week, we drop the front gate to the bin, and spread the compost out a little. The chickens dive right in and hunt for bugs. After a day or so, we scoop it up, water it a little, and mound it back up in a different bin. The process produces compost remarkably rapidly. We are actually having trouble keeping the temperature down enough on the compost bins. We don't want them so hot that they are essentially burning off the carbon we are trying to capture. 

Store bought eggs mixed with
eggs from our chickens

The best part is the change in the chickens. They have a habitat that is full of vertical relief to explore, attractive to bugs, and gives them lots of room to scratch around in. They have been much happier and engaged since moving into the compost bin. Plus, the change in the eggs has been remarkable. See, the color of the yolk is a good indicator of how healthy the chicken's diet is. Pale yellow yolks indicate a poor diet, usually of mostly grains. Darker yellow to orange means the diet is significantly improved. I hear that with attention to a great diet, the egg yolks can be almost made red. I haven't gotten there yet. 

Personally, I think that this could be done on a larger scale to take advantage of large scale food waste. Restaurants could collect food waste separately and they could be collected daily, or every few days at the least. Then the food scraps could be dumped into a chicken compost facility with several hundred chickens. They will eat what appeals to them. The remnants could be mixed with wood chips, also from municipal waste, and composted. The chickens could be brought back once a week or so to further pick through the composting material, keeping bugs down and helping it compost. At the end of the product, there is great compost produced, happy chickens, healthy eggs, and a reduction of the trash stream.

Holistic Management Concepts – Solar Dollars

Maturing solar dollars in home made mineral dollars

Holistic Management is an interesting set of concepts, techniques and methodologies. While the application is typically used to make ranches profitable and regenerative, it actually has broad applicability. Many of the other concepts have great potential beyond the ranch. Of these, perhaps my favorite is the concept of solar dollars.

According to Holistic Management, there are three kinds of wealth: mineral dollars, solar dollars, and paper dollars. Paper dollars are the easiest to understand. That is the actual money we are all familiar with. Mineral dollars are resources you have, like water, soil, rock, maybe even gold if you are lucky enough to have a gold mine on your property. Some mineral dollars are renewable, like fertile soil and water, while others are not, like that gold mine. Solar dollars, though, are the product of photosynthesis. Fruits, vegetables, wood, stuff like that. You use your mineral dollars to create your solar dollars.

This seems like a pretty simple concept. So why, of all the important concepts of Holistic Management, did I pick this one to expound on? This concept is really important when it comes to the application of everything else I am talking about. See, where this concept really becomes important is in the area of resource conversion.

Harvesting solar dollars (pollarding) to create more solar
dollars and more mineral dollars

Resource conversion is the conversion of one form of dollar into another. For example, you can buy a bag of composted steer manure with your paper dollars to help build your mineral dollars in the form of soil. You can then use that investment in mineral dollars to create solar dollars in the form of fruit from your fruit trees. Then you can pollard the fruit trees, harvesting solar dollars in another form. You can then chip them and convert them to another form of solar dollars: mushrooms. When the sawdust block is finished producing mushrooms, you can compost it and create mineral dollars in the form of improved soil.

The thing is, there are hundreds of ways to create and utilize solar and mineral dollars. It is really up to you to determine what is the best way to use them on your property. The important thing to realize is that these things have value, and not just some pie-in-the-sky theoretical value. In some cases, they give you a product to sell, and in others they prevent you from having to spend your hard-earned paper dollars, and in yet others, they give you a measure of resiliency.

Take a look around at your yard. What are you doing to preserve and earn solar dollars? Are you composting? Are you maximizing the production potential of the land you have through food forests? What can you do better? Remember, there is more than one way to earn income.

Holistic Management Concepts - Animal Impact

These guys right here

As those of you who are frequent readers of my blog probably know, my hobby is engineering with biological systems. In everything I do, I do my best to be holistic. Each organism in an ecosystem has a job and the whole works as a whole when all of the necessary pieces are where they are supposed to be and doing the job they evolved to do. The problem with the modern world is that our ecosystems are so degraded that the animals are often absent completely or at the least rarely seen in natural systems. As such, it is so easy to forget that they are an integral part and are often seen as pests or otherwise harmful. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Animals are an integral part of the nutrient cycling function of a healthy ecosystem. The tricky part, though is to manage the animals. It's important to choose the right animals (or encourage the right ones to come to you) and help them have the right impact.

There is no place this axiom is more true than in a brittle ecosystem. The inconsistency of moisture in an area that has distinct rainy and non-rainy seasons means that the organic matter (typically perennial bunching grasses) cannot break down into its component nutrients when exposed to open air like it does in a non-brittle environment, one with constant exposure to moisture. But the cycling of nutrients is critical for any ecosystem to function. It is how each and every organism functions within the ecosystem. For the plant, the fungus, the bacteria, and the animal each, it is their food source.

In a brittle environment, the dead grasses still need to be removed so the plants have room to grow at the beginning of the next rainy season. As any gardener knows, the best thing for all that grass is to finely chop it, compost it in a warm, moist environment, and deposit the finished compost back on the ground where it can be worked into the soil. Being a bit of a mad scientist, I propose we automate the process. Let’s make the composting unit mobile, something that moves around  and continually collects the grasses. I think I will call this new invention a “cow.”

This is basically how a ruminant works. They are mobile organic matter collection and composting units. They provide the moisture needed to break the plant matter down and keep the food web going. Remember, those grade school science books downplayed the importance of poop in the nutrient cycling of an ecosystem. In reality so many more nutrients are cycled through dung than through dead bodies.

Ecosystems develop through an intricate process called “evolution.” Often, evolution picks some minor function, one often overlooked, and makes it an integral part of the whole. This is absolutely true with the animal impact on a grassland. Yes, the cow eats the grass, but they miss a lot. They dung and urinate all over everything and tend to not eat the contaminated vegetation. But all of the vegetation needs to be lowered to ground level.

Also, bare ground is pretty much the biggest problem in a brittle environment. As ground sits bare (nothing growing from it and no plant litter covering it), there is nothing to replenish the soil carbon content and it just bakes in the sun. Bare soil loses its carbon content eventually and forms a hydrophobic (water repelling) crust. This crust matures over time, becoming more and more effective at repelling what rain comes to it. As the environment further degrades, the soil crust forms a permanent crust, grows a sad layer of algae and gets protection in a state park from people who can’t tell the difference between a healthy ecosystem and a biological response to extreme environmental degradation.

In order to keep the grassland healthy, the soil crust needs to be broken regularly and the uneaten litter scattered over the surface, along with a healthy dose of dung and urine applied. But this process breaks down when the cattle spread out across the landscape, grazing peacefully. The hooves naturally break the crust, but not when they step gingerly. The weight of the animals crushes the dead clumps of grass and scatters the remnants across the bare soil, but not when they walk carefully between the grasses. The piles of dung help fertilize, but not when they are twenty or thirty feet apart.

See, the ecosystem doesn’t respond specifically as a single block. Each clump of grass responds to the pressures and stimuli it is subjected to. Grass is overgrazed a clump at a time. Grass is undergrazed a clump at a time. And the two can be right next to each other. When cows are allowed to live a leisurely, spread out life with plenty of room to wander and plenty of time to pick and choose what they eat, they do exactly that.

It is the natural system of predator and prey that brings the whole thing together. In the wild, the great herds of ungulates are subjected to the predation of pack hunting predators like lions and wolves. The herds bunch together for safety. But in bunching, they eat huge amounts of food and leave behind huge amounts of dung and urine. In the excitement of being bunched and worrying about predators, they aren’t careful about where they step and trample the bunches of grass and break up the soil crust.

See, it is only the original system that works completely to maintain the grassland ecosystem. The herds have to be big enough that they can eat or spoil the food, then move on before the grass starts growing back. They have to be bunched and excited to disturb the ground just right to get the benefits.

The problem is that those great herds are largely gone, as are their pack hunting predators. But if the land dies without them, what are we going to do?

It turns out that Allan Savory has worked out a way to mimic the impact of the animals and built a whole system around it. The system is called Holistic Management. It uses smaller paddock sizes to mimic the bunching and manage the time spent grazing. It even turns out that the excitement and trampling can be mimicked without the stress of predators. Ivan Aguirre, a rancher in Mexico, uses mesquite hulls, the parts filtered out after the milling of mesquite pods, as a treat. Mesquite pods are naturally sweet and the cows get so excited about their treat (a waste product, really), that they trample everything to get to the hulls.

Unfortunately, it is likely that the great herds are gone forever. However, with enough dedicated people and the will to make a difference, we have the tools to restore the grasslands of the world to some of the most productive ecosystems in the world.