‘You don’t have a snail problem, you’ve got a duck deficiency’. Bill Mollison.
One of the things I like about permaculture is its very positive approach. Problems can become an asset if we can think outside the square and successfully apply creative thinking.
Sitting by the canal the other day, Jeff and I were visited by a neighbour. Jeff had pulled out a large pond snail (Pomacea canaliculata) and our visitor became very excited, telling us about how delicious these creatures were, how they are great to eat with beer and are a medicine and aphrodisiac. Also, the main part eaten is the ‘head’ or foot and the remaining body parts are fantastic duck food; ducks fed on snail bits lay more eggs of better quality.
These aquatic snails are a serious pest of rice seedlings and are listed in the top 100 I.A.S. (that’s Invasive Alien Species in case you’re not up on your acronyms!). They are estimated to cost the world’s rice growers 250 Billion US dollars a year in lost production. Pesticide usage to control snails in 1998 was about 2.4 million dollars worth. This doesn’t take into account the damage to ecosystems or even the effect of the pesticide on the crops; Niclosamide 250EC is known to inhibit the growth of small rice seedlings.
(source: Golden Apple Snails: Global invasion and Management Ravindra C. Joshi, Phillipine Rice Research Institute)
Mollisonian Permaculture Principle #2:
The problem is the solution: everything works both ways, it is only how we see things that make them advantageous or not….everything is a positive resource, it is up to us to work out how we may use it as such.
In far north queensland, our number one Invasive Alien is the Cane Toad (Bufo marinus). They are poisonous and are responsible for the near extinction of countless native species of frogs, birds, reptiles and carnivorous marsupials. One of my friends runs a tree nursery. She collects the cane toads and converts them into fertiliser (they basically just ferment in a big vat of water). Her nursery has the healthiest, cleanest tree seedlings I have ever seen, free from any pest or disease. I surmise the cane toad poison, bufotoxin, survives the process and is an effective pesticide and maybe even fungicide. I probably wouldn’t want to use it on food plants, but for forestry seedlings it’s perfect.
There are countless examples like this; carp in Australian waterways is made into pet food, fertiliser and fish bait.
Camphor laurel, (Cinnamomum camphora) is a noxious weed of northern NSW which dominates the landscape but can be turned into high value timber products. Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassippes) in Thailand is made into furniture, mulch, fish and animal food.
When we take the chemical approach to a problem like the pond snail we end up using more resources and destroying others as well as missing an opportunity. As Fukuoka has said, ‘Throw Mother Nature out the window and she’ll come back through the door with a pitchfork!’
When we look at a system, the outputs and yields are resources if they can be used productively, or they will become pollutants or pests if not used in a constructive way by some other part of the system. The essence is to make useful links between elements. These opportunities are abundant in a diverse polyculture system, but almost absent in a monoculture.
The potential uses of pond snails are many and varied. It has long been thought of as a delicacy for human consumption. It is already used as duck, fish, prawn and chicken food, liquid fertiliser, rat and bug bait.
Jeff tells me that they can be easily collected with the use of cassava leaves for bait. Other sources of attractants list papaya, jackfruit and taro amongst others. It just becomes a question of management, innovation and attitude. It requires no mental effort to follow convention and use biocides, but how much more interesting, rewarding and ethical to come up with creative solutions. None of this is rocket science, it’s all commonsense.
As Mollison says:
‘What is novel and often overlooked is that any system of total commonsense design for human communities is revolutionary’.
