The sky over the Fair Earth fields in 2008, our second year of organic rice growing. (Photo by Dan Powell.)
“Eating is a political act.”
-Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma
The name ‘Fair Earth’ symbolizes the importance of justice and ecology in sustainable food systems. We are interested in alternatives to the world’s industrial food system, which is characterized by both injustice and ecological degradation. A range of crises – peak oil, climate change, health care, etc. – intersects in the same place: food. In order to learn, teach, write, experiment, debate and act, we created Fair Earth Farm in 2007 in northern Thailand.
Growing food
Annie in the mud in early August 2009, planting rice seedlings. (Photo by Sarah Rutherford.)
Fair Earth Farm is about growing food. Aesthetics are important. So is a space for learning and exchange. Also important is the recovery of local ecology. But the essence of the farm is about growing food in a natural way. Inspired by permaculture practices, or low-input biodiverse ways of farming, we want to learn how much food you can grow on a single acre (.5 ha/3 rai) in northern Thailand. We grow more than 150 different kinds of edible plants, including some of the key staple crops from around the world: rice, maize, sorghum, taro and cassava. On about a third of the farm’s total area in 2008, we grew the equivalent of enough rice for our family’s subsistence for three years. The other crops and animals supplement the staple diet with diverse nutrients and flavors. With some work, there should be a significant amount of food surplus to sell locally over the years ahead.
Principles
Our approach to farming is governed by four key principles: fertility, diversity, exploration and profit.
Fertility can be understood in many ways: the bringing to life of a degraded ecosystem; a place rich in plant nutrients in soil and biomass; the production of good and many crops; and a creative place, open to new ideas and approaches.
Diversity refers here to the variety of animals, plants and soil microorganisms coexisting on the farm; to the many and complex relationships among these plants and animals; to a variety of approaches to farming; and to diversity and tolerance of ideas and opinions.
Exploration is the ongoing attempt to learn as we do things; to investigate, to try many new things; and the possession of a relatively high tolerance for risk and failure as experiments inevitably go awry.
Profit is an excess of income over expenditures, which is the fuel that will ensure our economic independence, prove the economic viability of natural farming and sustain the other three principles and the people who depend on the farm.
Ay, Justin and Jeff help uproot rice seedlings for transplanting, Aug. 2009. (Photo by Dan Powell.)
These principles keep each other in balance. You can think of them like competing interests or factions on a board of directors. For instance, the profit faction might argue in favor of clearing the land for monoculture of a locally popular plant, like chrysanthemum. The diversity faction would obviously take offense at the idea of monoculture, as would the fertility group, which knows that monoculture requires chemical control of pests, which leads to decline of soil fertility. And the exploration guys would be bored with the idea of monoculture. On the other hand, the diversity faction might be satisfied with planting indigenous forest trees, but ‘fertility’ is concerned with production (of food) and ‘profit’ wants to make some money. These four principles balance the objectives of farming in line with nature.
Production system
Shao Bai and her rice-field playground. (Photo by Jeff Rutherford.)
One way to understand our approach to food production is to stand in the middle of the farm along the small irrigation canal and face east toward the rice paddy. The food system is formed by concentric rings, with grain (the paddy) as the core. The main field is currently devoted to rice, but over time we plan for dry-season production to diversify into other grain and legume crops, like grain amaranth, sorghum and soybeans. This center ring is the carbon ring, the carbohydrate ring, the main staple ring. The next ring out is the fish canal, and that one is about protein: fish and duck eggs. The next ring provides the diversity of vitamins and minerals necessary for a complete diet: the vegetable beds, aquatic plants and trellises of climbing melons and beans. Beyond that, in the outer ring, is the agroforest/mixed orchard/homegarden zone, which further diversifies the diet, contributes to income, as well as providing medicinal plants and building material. This area also includes trees and flowering plants grown to attract pollinators, birds and other animals.
Projects (in progress)
- Rice trials (testing three different progressive ways to grow rice naturally)
- Palm palisade (a productive, edible and impenetrable alternative to concrete walls and barbed wire fences)
- No-till farming (growing food with a minimum of effort and cost)
- Complex agroforestry (mimicking the forest by intercropping indigenous – and edible – forest plants with tropical farm crops)
- Aquaponics (the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a re-circulating environment)
- Green living (recycling, gray water systems, passive solar, vermiculture, composting, livestock) – under construction (literally)
- Community supported agriculture (plans to set up a direct marketing scheme that uses the farm to link small natural farmers with conscious urban consumers in Chiang Mai Province)
- Famine-proof forests (afforestation approaches that include root crops from forest and field [yams, taro, etc] that can build food security for conflict zones, especially in Burma
- Climate-ready farming (biodiverse permaculture approaches that increase resilience of soil and landscape for adaptation to climate change)
