Lessons from Dalpura

I've spent the last week at Dalpura Farm, south of Melbourne, learning about silviculture - the design and management of forest systems with a goal of harvesting forest products for human use.

I am fascinated by the notion of forests as a resource base - forests play a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity, nutrients, and stability in an ecosystem. If managed carefully, they can also be a sustainable source of food, medicine, timber, fuel, forage for animals...the list of their functions goes on!

The thrilling part is that we as human beings can interact with and even enhance these forests, either by designing agroforestry systems (selecting useful species and maintaining them in a farm environment) or managing existing wild forests (by thinning, pruning, and clearing).

This curiosity led me to visit some well-known examples of agroforestry - farms that incorporate forests in to their production systems.

At Dalpura, I had the pleasure of working alongside two wonderful characters.

On the left meet David Griffiths of Geometree, a farm planner and tree specialist, who leads the forestry aspect of Dalpura. And on the right, sidekick Matthew "Matty" Fahey, a woodworker of Wood Mage, and an arborist and farmer who lives at and manages the complex workings of Dalpura Farm.

We spent the week thinning a block of eucalypt and acacia trees planted for timber; it's been a fascinating visit. Here are a few things I've learned.

1) Eucalyptus can be beautiful!


Those of us from California are accustomed to turning our noses down at the weedy "blue gums" that grow like mad monocultures on our hills. But if managed appropriately in the right environment, eucalypts grow straight and true, and can produce beautiful, rot resistant hardwood used for furniture, fencing, and framing in less than 30 years.


This is a kitchen that Matty built with Red Ironbark (eucalyptus tricarpa). Beautiful! Who'd a thunk?


2) Select species carefully - you can not force a tree to grow straight by pruning.

Just because you can harvest beautiful timber from a tree in the wild does not mean that it will translate well to a farm crop.

For example, while the red ironbark is a beautiful timber, generally it is not a straight-growing species. In the wild, you might be able to harvest 1 out of every 500 trees for straight timber. And you can not prune a tree to force it to grow straight. So if you plant a block of red ironbark on a farm, you will still probably only get 1 in 500 to grow straight, which is not a good success rate for a farm crop!

Here's what's left at Dalpura of the red ironbark experimental plot.


A clearcut agroforestry plot is a pretty depressing sight.

3) Forestry is not necessarily regenerative.

Planting trees is generally thought of as a good thing, a no brainer way to improve any piece of land. But just because you plant trees does not mean you are building soil, or increasing the fertility of the land. In fact, at one of the farms in the area that I visited, the erosion in the agroforestry plot was deplorable.


Here's a picture of me (I shouldn't be smiling! it's not funny!) acting as a measuring stick against the sunken piece of land under a forest at the Bambra Agroforestry Farm. The soil was totally bare, with no ground cover – not at all what you would see in a healthy forest system. The lack of topsoil has caused massive erosion in multiple places on the forest floor.

In addition, often vast swaths of native forests are chopped down to plant timber monocultures.

In this photo you can see a monocrop of pinus radiata which is widely used as a framing timber in Australian building industry. Diverse and healthy forests must be cleared to make way for this monocrop. There's nothing regenerative about that.

4) Scale matters.

In huge monocultures, agroforestry can be destructive. But small forest systems designed into farms can provide timber and firewood for farm use, lend shelter and windbreaks for livestock , all while creativing habitat for native birds and wildlife.

We visited the sheep farm of the founder of the Otway Agroforestry Network, which exists to promote agroforestry to farmers to see a great example of a well-functioning system.

This forest strip was healthy and well-maintained. The trees were pruned straight so they would be valuable as timber, and the sheep happily flocked towards the protection the trees provided.

I'm eager to experiment with incorporating timber systems into farmland back home, applying these general lessons to a different climate with different species. Should be a fun challenge!

This weekend I'm heading to the Food Forest in South Australia with friends Michelle and Rob from Canada, then back to Melbourne for a 10 hour ferry ride to Tasmania! I head on to Fairweather Farm to help friend Trevor and family renovate their organic tomato farm in to a showcase of water harvesting, soil building, polycultural, regenerative agriculture.

More soon!

Closing the Loop

In a world where less than 1% of the planet’s fresh water is available for human consumption, it is curious to notice how people in overdeveloped countries choose to utilize precious water resources.

I often wonder what our grandchildren’s children will think of industrialized cultures; it is hope that inspires me to imagine them laughing. “Can you believe it?” they’ll say, holding their bellies and bursting with amusement at the ridiculousness of their elders. “They used our precious fresh water to flush their SHIT away!”

Over 884 million people globally lack access to safe water supplies – that is approximately one in eight people living on the planet whose water has been contaminated, generally by human excrement. In fact, over 5,000 people die worldwide everyday from drinking or bathing in water containing contaminants. [i] And we in the U.S. use over 5 million gallons daily just flushing away our waste.

From a health and a resource perspective, it’s hard to imagine a more inefficient system than a water flushing toilet. It contaminates water, and wastes our “waste.”

Anyhow, I digress. This blog posting was inspired by thechore of the day at the Permaculture Research Institute.

It was time to empty the composting toilet system, and I eagerly participated, curious to see how human “waste” could be utilized as a resource – quite a feat for our fecophobic world.

Here’s a quick rundown on how the composting toilet works.

The composting toilet system at the farm is simple; a normal looking bathroom, with two normal looking toilets. Just like any toilet, you pull your pants down, and empty your delivery into the hole that is attached to a chamber below.

(In industrialized cultures, that’s where your relationship with your poo ends – instead of taking responsibility for your shit, you simply flip a button and send it downstream, confident that someone else will take care of it, somewhere…).

Once the delivery is executed (whether yellow or brown), you add a scoop or two of sawdust, a carbon-based material that aids the decomposition process and helps balance out the nitrogen so that (smelly) ammonia isn’t released.

And people keep pooing away in to the chamber below, until it’s full. Then it sits for a few weeks, and meanwhile you switch to using the other toilet. If used properly with the right amount of carbon added, it won’t smell and won’t attract flies.

Simple as that.

When we went in yesterday to empty the chamber, my curiosity had mingled with a bit of dread. But I was determined; I had my gloves on and my nose plugged, prepared to feel the morning’s oatmeal churn…



Alas! I was shocked (dare I say thrilled?) to see that in less than four weeks, the excrement of fourty people into a chamber had turned into a rich, humus-looking, stinkless mass - unidentifiable as human waste.



(Fellow toilet cleaner Dave, pictured below, agrees).


Granted, it had not yet heated up to the process of destroying all of the potentially dangerous pathogens found in human excrement. That requires a heat of 50-55 degrees Celsius for several hours, easy to accomplish in any hot compost pile. Once the humanure has been decontaminated through a composting process, it is essentially a carbon sponge that can act as a substrate to grow beneficial microorganisms for the soil – a valuable resource for any backyard garden.

Though I am generally in favor of decentralized systems, where we can personally observe how our actions impact our local environment, I’m not necessarily saying that everyone must process their own waste on a household scale.

In fact, there are plenty of examples of sane ways to process effluent on a local scale, such as the Ecological Wastewater Treatment Plant in Arcata, California. The facility utilizes the microorganisms on a plant's roots to break down pollutants in the water.


Or the Living Machine concept developed by John Todd which also filters sewage solids out of water using plants and their associated bacteria.


Marin County (home sweet home!) is even in the process of piloting a very progressive compost toilet program.

These are all potential models for a semi-centralized, but ecologically sound, waste processing system.

Nonetheless, it’s pretty empowering to know that we can safely and effectively process our own waste, conserve our water for more precious uses, and convert “waste” from a problem to a solution.

And to pick up from my last posting...I feel one step closer to my steak dinner now that I know my poo fertilized the soil that grew the grass that Red ate!


Team Humanure: Mission Accomplished!



[i] http://www.water.org/

For more titillating reading on the topic, you can download (for free!) the entire PDF of the Humanure Handbook. A good book to have on hand in the bathroom. :)

Meet Red

10:45pm

This is Red.



9:30pm

This is Red.


6:00pm

This is Red.



This is Red’s mama, Poppy.



And his papa, Billy.



3:00pm

And this is Red, a one year old bull, on the afternoon of his transformation - from living, breathing being to food on our plate.



He spent his last day with the goats in the home pasture, while the rest of the herd was sent out to pasture so they would not be traumatized by witnessing his death.

Red was slaughtered in the loving hands of his caretaker and master; it was not very dramatic. He was roped in the pasture, and after a quick prayer quickly sliced through the adam’s apple, and held down by three (strong) men while his muscles spasmed. He bled to death. It was quick and painless, and Red was surrounded by people who knew him in life and honored the passing of his spirit.

We spent several hours cutting up the carcass into separate cuts of meat. It was amazing to see a T-bone, top side, and flank steak miraculously peel away from the carcass under the hands of an experienced butcher. Everything was cut up, labeled, and packaged to freeze, from the liver to the tongue to the legs - if not for human consumption, then for the dogs (they eat well around here).

When we finished, all that was left were the entrails, which were wheelbarrowed over to the chicken tractor. Three days later, Red’s guts are now full of flies and maggots which the chickens are quickly consuming. While the stench of rotting guts is unbearable (if you happen to walk past that section of the farm), it is comforting to know that every last inch of Red is being put to use, or recycled back in to the system. Not a cell of his body is "waste."

Witnessing little Red’s slaughter and butchering was powerful, especially after having taken care of him for a few days, since my farm duties include taking the cows out to pasture each day.

But the moment when I suddenly felt overcome with emotion occurred around midnight after the slaughter was cleaned up, and our bellies were full of the most delicious steak I have ever had.

Geoff and I took Bluey (the cattle dog) out to the field, and we brought back the herd of nine cows, one less than usual. I was nervous that they would smell the death on us, but they were responsive and docile, peacefully walking back to the paddock where they are kept at night. They passed the site of the slaughter, and kept plodding on.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

The herd had almost reached the shoot to the home paddock, and then as if on cue, all nine of them pivoted simultaneously, and slowly turned around to stare at the site of the slaughter a few hundred meters away. Billy the bull, patriarch, and Red’s papa, began to wail.

And then I witnessed a site I never imagined – a herd of cows mourning. They lined up single file and walked to the site of the slaughter, circled around, and moaned and brayed.


Never have I felt more connected to, and thankful for, the food that I eat. As I stood there in the darkness, quiet and in awe at the herd's expression of loss, I was overcome with gratitude for the cow that filled my belly, the grass that fed the cow, the soil that fed the grass, the microbes that fed the soil…

Zaytuna Farm

Welcome to Zaytuna Farm, home of Geoff and Nadia Lawton and the Permaculture Research Institute in a subtropical village known as The Channons, New South Wales.

In Arabic, Zaytuna means olive; the farm is named after Al Zaytuna Mosque, a famous mosque in Tunis where many Moslem scholars have been trained.. Geoff and Nadia are practicing Moslems, and the farm is run with a strict set of rules that adhere to their religion.

Since I arrived almost a week ago, I have joined a crew of about 20 volunteers, students, and interns who help maintain the farm and education center. We hail from all corners of the globe: Mexico, Holland, Jordan, Canada, Japan, the U.S., France, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Australia are all represented.

The place hums with activity, community, and hard work.

On any given day I could be:

Planting, mulching, weeding, watering or harvesting the main crop.

Propagating a huge selection of trees for agroforestry.

Laying down irrigation.

Chopping and dropping in the food forest, a complex human-designed, perennial food producing system that mimics a natural forest.

Feeding or harvesting the products (milk, eggs, meat) of chickens, goats, and cows.

Building infrastructure, such as tent platforms, a straw bale building, or a water harvesting swale.

Life is busy on the farm. Some of us get started at 5:30 am with Geoff, and there is learning to be had until around 10 pm when we wind down and head to bed.

I won't post many pictures because the internet access is limited. And sorry the blog has slowed down as I've settled in to life on the farm!

More news soon…forthcoming postings on titillating subjects such as what cows eat for breakfast, fascinating realizations about California weeds, and my top ten favorite Ozzie words.

Bubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble!

My idea of heaven is making potions - mixing plant ingredients together to make healing elixirs is one of my favorite activities.

Today we made a few fertility potions - for soil fertily, that is.

Over the last two days I pruned part of the orchard and food forest, mowed the alfalfa field (YES!!! tractors are soooooo fun), and gathered all of the materials to make a beautiful pile o' compost.

Check out the ingredients of our monster compost pile, all harvested as waste and surplus from the farm: arrowroot, banana stalk, alfalfa, wood chips, sugar cane, leftover mashed grain from beer brewing, chicken bedding, cow manure, tagasaste, and pigeon pea.

We chipped the big stuff and made a pile about a meter and a half wide and tall... the photo doesn't do it justice, it was massive!



The afternoon saw the debut of Peter's new compost tea machine, a system designed by Australian soil biologist Paul Taylor. We placed an air pump on top of a 55 gallon drum, with a "tea bag" in the middle that contained 12 cups of rich compost. Fill the drum with water and a cup each of liquid kelp, fish emulsion, and humic acid, flip on the pump to aerate it for 24 hours...and voila! An extremely nutritious boost for the soil.

Tomorrow we'll pull the trailer with this rig out, attach a pump and a hose to the bottom, and use the tea as a foliar spray and soil amendment throughout the farm.

Here's a link to some wonderful how-to information on compost tea and liquid fertilizers from Mark Krawczyk, a friend and designer in Vermont. He recommends you can also use potions of nettle, comfrey, and horse tail as additives to your fertilizer to boost soil health. These mineral rich plants are also hugely medicinal in the human body as well.

Coincidence? I think not!

Colonizing Rock Dust

Lantana (lantana camara) is an extremely invasive plant in Australia that takes over vast areas and decreases biodiversity, stifling out other forms of life.

While it is seen by many as a highly noxious weed, apparently it has one hugely rewarding quality - its roots are a universal host of mycorrhizal fungi, which form a hugely symbiotic relationship between a plant's roots and the fungus. The mycorrhiza in the soil provide the fungus with relatively constant and direct access to carbohydrates supplied by the plant, and in exchange the fungus makes minerals and nutrients available to the plant's roots. Mycorrhizal fungi are a hugely important component of any healthy soil, especially in forests, but are often missing from our depleted soils.

According to Darren Doherty, you can encourage the growth of fungus in rock dust, so today I did a bit of an experiment. I screened out some rock dust from a pile of gravel, poured it into a plastic bottle, wet it down, put holes in it, and buried it top down underneath a stand of lantana.



In about 3 months, Peter will pull the bottle out, add water to it, and, and spray it in his food forest to increase the funghal activity there...

For more interesting reading on soil health, check out the Soil Doctor and the work of Dr. Elaine Ingham and the Soil Food Web info. Good stuff!

OK, time to head north to Robyn Francis's Djanbung Gardens in Nimbin to work on her place for a few days before a design course...stay tuned for the happenings on her small 5 acre farm!

Water for Every Farm

Welcome to Richmond, New South Wales: the former “granary” of Sydney, and home of University of Western Sydney’s Hawkesbury College, the oldest agricultural college in the country. I spent the last three days here with 80 Australian farmers from around the country learning regenerative farming methods designed to increase a farm’s fertility through innovative water harvesting and topsoil building techniques.

The farmers discussed the effects of prolonged drought, unpredictable commodity markets, and the impact of industrial agriculture on their mid sized family farms. All too often farmers get boxed in to the downward spiral of increasing dependency on fertilizers and pesticides, watch their land become depleted, and become desperate to find a viable way to work themselves out of the hole of debt. In fact Australia, along with other countries like India, has a very high rate of farmer suicide in rural areas.

Anyhow, I digress, and this was a fairly hopeful bunch. Farmers in Australia are supported by Farm Ready, a progressive program supported by the national gov’t that subsidizes primary producers to attend workshops and trainings that build farmers’capacity to adapt to climate change and drought. We should have something like this in the 2012 Farm Bill, don’t you think?

Together the class dug into the nitty gritty of keyline design, an integrated farm planning methodology developed by PA Yeomans in the 1950s. Yeomans recognized that Australia’s salinated groundwater combined with highly undependable rainfall made farmers vulnerable to water shortage. He also recognized that farmers were losing topsoil at an alarming rate, and that soil, carbon, and water have a closely interconnected relationship - for one, the more carbon you have in the soil the more moisture it can retain. The guy was just a wee bit ahead of his time!


We visited several farms designed by Yeomans, and it was amazing to see pastoral irrigation systems that passively provide water to hundreds of acres through a simple system of dams, channels, locks, gravity, and keyline pattern plowing. Many elements of Yeomans design methods are brilliantly applicable to the dry California hills...I can't wait to come home and find some farmers to worth with!

In the meantime, I've made my way to Allyn River Farm, north of Sydney. I'm working with a farmer named Peter who is developing a 17 acre farm (he has a little tractor and a Yeoman's plow too!). Tomorrow we'll do some surveying and earth moving to dig a few swales...