Amongst the many-hundred hosts with the Canadian chapter of World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, or WWOOF-Canada, all of them grow food using some sort of ecological knowledge and techniques considering they are self-defined as "organic." For this summer I looked to visit and learn from places with diversified cropping systems: both annual and perennial gardening, raised beds and orchards, inter-cropping and rotation; companion planting. Basically anyone who was trying to guide by permaculture principles: farms which were closed-loop and with animals-crop interactions; I saw one garden which had evolved into a self-seeding system.
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Here are some examples of interesting agroecosystems I saw in 2009.
Bloomfield Bicycle Company, Bloomfield, Prince Edward County (10km from Sandbanks P.P.)
This area is considered the third “banana belt” of Ontario, since it hosts a climate conducive to wineries and pitted-fruits much like Niagara and Peelee/Leamington regions. I was staying with a couple who own a 1 acre property in a small town: they run a bike shop, and don’t have enough time to maintain their overgrown garden. That growing space was one of the most interesting mini-farms I have ever seen: raised beds 1-2 metres long/wide each held 5 to 10 plant species; crops like Kale which are normally annual were perennial here; other herbs and lettuce greens were allowed to propagate / re-seed on their own, the only intervention required was thinning them out (eating / giving away to neighbours). The edges of the yard hosted an excess of Black Walnut trees, grape vines, and rasp/goose-berry patches. A meadow amongst the berries hosted a spiders-web of a pumpkin patch. There was also a green-house which was used to raise peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, carrots, onions, and other veggies before they get transplanted in amongst the herbs and greens. The compost heap was chest height and over 2 metres wide, and warm only a few inches deep. Long story short, this 1/3-of-an-acre garden produces about 50% of the fresh produce consumed by the couple of their visitors/wwoofers for 6+ months of the year, using about 50 people-hours a week of maintenance (but not necessarily needing that amount of work; it could have been as productive with only 20 people-hours total, truthfully). It is an example of very sustainable, diverse, dense, and resilient food production that can take place in any decent-sized household yard. Hence a useful lesson when talking about food and urban regions, and more-dense of suburbs specifically – unlike the below two case studies which deal more with ex-urban/greenbelt agriculture on slightly larger scale.
Wheelbarrow Organic Farm, Blackwater/Sunderland
A 10 acre property about a 10 minute drive or half hour bike-ride outside of Uxbridge, on a busy Durham region road, adjacent to giant corn field, a quarry, a 15 acre cedar forest and a swampy conservation area. Wheelbarrow is an organic “market garden” growing over 65 vegetable, herb, and edible flower and berry species, with another 20 species of fruit/nut trees and other perennials not yet productive. It also was home to 19 pigs last summer, of which four sows were kept alive over the '09/2010 winter; and a couple of dozen turkeys and chickens, although they kept getting eaten by foxes so this farm won’t raise new generations of poultry. 29-year-old Tony is urban-raised but has been getting his hands dirty full-time for 6 growing-seasons now, and Wheelbarrow is his own self-directed project, now into its third season. He shares the (rather conventional sub/ex-urban) house and the properties’ mortgage payments with his father, who works a white-collar job in Newmarket. Tony sold the plant produce in 2009 through a CSA (20 families visit him weekly to pick up their veggies, and once a week he drove into Toronto delivering to 20 other houses), some through a market garden, and meat and eggs through his CSA. 2010 his plans are expanded and slightly different according to his website.
His production model is based on crop rotation (intra- and inter-season plant species succession), interplanting of some annual crops (for fertilization and integrated pest management)(examples include undersowing with closer, or patches of flowers to confused pests) interplanting of perennial crops (picture a forest ecosystem, where every plant “niche” is filled with something that is human food, medicine, fuel, fibre... or supports those uses). He uses his pigs to do work for him: they are free-range within electric fencing, and eat all plants, and turn over and “fertilize” soil, within fenced-in areas; ever month or two he moves them to new locales and plants in the old locations. It’s called a “pig tractor” (I also saw a “chicken-tractor” on another farm this summer). Still speaking of pigs, he also feeds them weeds, leftover crops (ex. when lettuce “bolts” or “goes to seed” and gets bitter-tasting); this year he started growing grains for them on the “back 5” (the main market garden area only uses 3 or so acres); standard commercial-industrial feed only constitutes about 20% of their diet. Most farmers have that at 100%, hence a huge portion of the world grain production actually goes into meat production – a pattern widely described as unjust and unsustainable.
So this farm is quite a great model for small-scale, “beyond organic” (since it is based on ecologically patterns that most conventional organic farmers don’t use or know about), and localized farming. It is an example of a farm which employs more than one-person-with-a-tractor, which means it has economic benefits to the GTA as well. The only farm machine is a push roto-tillar, so the carbon footprint is small.
Simpler Thyme Organic Farm, halfway between Guelph and Hamilton
Half of the 50 acre property is a deciduous forest which is only touched for some timber harvesting and maple syrup production. Of the other half, there are three different types of food producing systems: the Market Garden, perennial Forest Gardens, and a pasture with cows and goats. In the former two plant-based ecosystems, the farmers managed these spaces using ecological or “organic techniques, including: minimized or non-use of outside inputs (no fertilizer, little energy, water conservation, little use of machinery); using space efficiently (interplanting); Integrated Pest-Management (thus no “pesticides”); on-site nutrient supply cycling (crop rotation, “green manures,” i.e. no excess nutrients to potentially pollute nearby waterways).
The Market Garden: this field has many different crops in it, and is managed using mostly people with bare hands or hand-held tools. All the veggie production happens on “raised beds,” which keep soil from getting compacted, keep roots aerated, and allow more dense of planting. On average, the beds are 25 metres long, a metre wide, 0.5-1.0 metres deep; usually each bed has one veggie specie at a time, but sometimes more.
Of all the landscape types on the farm, the market garden has the most edible plant species, and maybe highest level of plant diversity period!
It consists of all sorts of different quote-un-quote “vegetables,” and other useful plants too.
Some flowers and herbs, for example, are located strategically to deter, distract and confuse pests.
About the weeds, some of them are edible too. The ones that aren’t still serve a purpose: they create biomass and can be mulched; they can shade the ground and prevent evaporation of water from exposed soil. The list goes on.
Many different plant species, different heights. They all have slightly different sunlight, water, and nutrient needs... one can always find opportunities for symbiotic relationships.
One process going on in this landscape is “crop rotation,” which can be thought about as a type of human-made succession. “Succession” is a term to describe of the process of, say, a field becoming a forest over time: it refers to recognizable patterns where one specie will often follow another. In this kind of polyculture, plant placement can induce seasonal changes in texture and nutrient content of soil, light/shade, local air and soil moisture, species cohabitation or competition relationships, diseases/ pests; conditions created by one plant can favour another. Crop rotation is all about looking for these opportunities.
This farm has an 8-year crop rotation system which was informed by the work of Eliot Coleman, a farmer/author who lives in Maine(USA).
This rotation system is one of many types of rotation systems used around the world; Simpler Thyme likes Coleman’s model because of climate, types of food being grown (vegetables; there do exist crop rotation guidelines for grains and other “cash crops”), and this farm uses this system because it aligns with alot of things they’ve discovered for themselves. But they play with these guidelines a bit.
The process / dynamic of succession is applied to other scales too: what is growing in a space doesn’t just change annually but can change within the window of one single year, or over the course of decades too.
So that was sustainable food-growing on small, diverse scale. These are relevant case studies to this paper for a few reasons: since I am suggesting that we “re-people” the countryside for sustainability reasons, I had to give a reason why. Well, food production is one of those: these types of growing systems, according to David Blume, can produce “8 times the yield that the USDA claims are possible per square foot.” Blume is not alone in pointing out that small-holding agriculture in the global south actually tends to produce more food per acre than cash-crop / monoculture agriculture. The only reason industrial farming is encouraged, it is argued, is the profit motive: more food produced by fewer people is seen as economic; it allows more of a countries’ population to get industrial or service jobs in the city.
Wendell Berry is a commentator who claims to straddle a border-land of sorts: he is both a staunch conservationist who wants to save natural biodiversity and 'wild' landscapes, and he is also an agrarian who farms according to his ecological understandings. He foresee's the future of agriculture in the first world as involving a 're-peopling' of the countryside in a way. Smaller farms that have more human TLC, a farm economy powered by muscle and sunshine not machines, chemicals, and petroleum. People running human-scale uber-diverse farms that keep soil covered and let it build up; maintain and enhance where-possible the biodiversity of both domesticated and natural species across whole landscapes, and on individual farms.
He sees many "light-industries" popping up in the countryside too: food processing / value-adding businesses.
{Berry, Wendell "Conservationist and Agrarian" in 'Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature' compiled by Imhoff and Baumgartner, 2006 Watershed Media.}
Diversity at all scales and in all it's modes and mediums is a key to resilience; diversity of variety and genetics within a species or genre, or uniformity, can mean the difference between health and disease of/in a population. Diverse of types of agroecosystems (fields crops, pasture, woodlots, annual or perrenial polycultures, orchards, greenhouses, aquacultures, nurseries and mother-gardens... the more types of systems in a landscape the more productive it will be in normal or stressful circumstances (example droughts, pest outbreaks, etc.) The more types of economic activities going in rural communities (farming, forestry, fisheries, constructions, energy production, food processing/preserving and marketing to cities) rather than there being few types of jobs, and money draining away - the more financially/economically sustainable said communities are. The more diversity of species (and age diversity within communities), the more variation in a landscape and niches in an ecosystem, more more productive it is. Find more rather than fewer plant species and genres in a space, and you've probably find more animal, bird, reptile, fungi, etc. species in that landscape. This is not a hard and true rule of landscape ecology mind you... but a general trend. One must remember that anomalies exist in natural living systems, and agro-ecosystems must be designed to work within local constraints / use local opportunities.
Berry repeats the words of a J. Russell Smith "fit the farming to the farm;" design your anthropocentric agroecosystems to be place-based, and adapted to a landscapes soil, hydrology, climate, and currently existing ecology. Berry distinguishes between "agrarian farms" (which are instructed by ecological knowledge) and industrial farms - which are designed accorinding to non-rooted economic theories which encourage high-input/subsidized/cost-externalized/unsustainable monocultures. Farm which are designed for fast money and high person-to-acre ratios may look good on paper; it may seem to be "progress" to 'need only 2%' of a populace growing food, but it can only take place with trade-offs.
What we humans need to adopt, and adapt to, is an worldview and which embraces "permanence," and planning systems which designed to be sustainable/able-to-be-sustained. Cities which get all their food and water and materials locally; farms which can sell their food and wood and fibres and oils locally; even get extra nutrients/organic materials, not to mention labour, from cities. Interdepedence on a local, accountable, human scale not an "economy of scale" and a multi-thousand-km-supply line. A farm that isn't designed to "plug in" to monstanto and john deer, but instead is 'rooted' in local ecology.
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