Dear friends,
Phil and Ah Chu grind up soybeans for this week's bottles of soymilk. (Photo by Dan Powell.)
Soymilk! That should be a welcome new addition to the baskets. And there are some fresh veggies from Loong Chan, a potential new grower-member of the CSA. And here’s a tip: squeeze some lime on the fresh papayas. You’ll be amazed!
This week (depending on the basket):
- Soymilk
- Long eggplant
- Mustard greens
- Papaya
- Malabar spinach
(See Les’ blog on innovative ways to grow stuff like this.)
The soymilk recipe is Sarah’s, derived from a cool uncle in Kru Pratum’s network. Kru Pratum is one of our organic inspirations; more about her another time. (The trick, by the way, is to add brown rice.) P’ Pam and Ah Chu cooked it up, with help from the rice-reaping/beer-drinking gang. The bi-product, the “cake,” is digesting in duck bellies as I write. The chickens will get some for dinner, as will the worms in the new vermiculture bin, and so will the fish, of course.
Note on soy: This is one step on the road toward organic soymilk in your baskets, but we’re not there yet. These beans were not produced organically. The next batch will come from organic beans purchased from one of the organic networks, or at least from
Annie stirs the vat of soymilk. (Photo by Dan Powell.)
JJ organic market. This dry season we’ll be growing organic soy in the paddy and elsewhere. One of the most common rotations in the valleys of northern Thailand — among both organic and conventional growers — is rice-soybeans. The soy plant — a leguminous, nitrogen-fixing plant — is meant to be good for the soil.
Kru Pratum spreads the soybean pods and other bi-products on a grassy shelf between her paddies. Then she adds a handful of millipedes. She says these help accelerate the breakdown of the biomass. One nice bi-product of this process are straw mushrooms, which she collects and eats. Then after a while, the partly decomposed matter is coupled with buffalo manure and made into compost, which is then spread over the rice fields.
If demand for the soymilk is strong – and from the reaction of the rice gang hovering around the pot and cadging samples, I’m thinking it will be – then we’ll convince some of the grower-members to plant some, too.
Bundles of cut rice lie drying in the fields of Fair Earth Farm, thanks to the good labor of many friends. (Photo by Dan Powell.)
Harvest time!
Big thanks to the rice harvest mob! We finished reaping the field yesterday, with the help of Ai Seud (of course), Dan, Justin, Laura, Les, Dawn, Phil and Rick. Didn’t that feel great!?! Your enthusiasm and laughter turned work into play – which is exactly what we’re after!
This rice will lie drying in the fields for a couple more days before being threshed, bagged, tagged and weighed. The first section we harvested, which was threshed on Nov. 27, yielded pretty well. Extrapolating from the yields of a 100 sq meter test plot, we grew the equivalent of 640 kg. of unmilled rice per rai (64 tang), or 4 tons per hectare. That’s close to double the average yield of Thailand, but well below Kru Pratum’s 1 ton per rai.
At that rate, we’re looking at a yield of 4 times our family’s yearly rice consumption! So there’ll be plenty of surplus for the CSA, don’t worry.
Loong Charn, potential CSA grower-member
Non recently interviewed one of the neighbors about his veggie patch up the canal a ways. The Thai-language write-up is here.
Tucked away in a little shaggy green corner between the concrete-lined irrigation canal and the overgrown ditch that drains the rice paddies, Loong Chan tends tidy patches of vegetables.
“I just like it here,” he said, asked why he’s growing veggies when everyone around him is growing chrysanthemum for the cut-flower market in town. “I like looking after these plants.”
Loong Chan, a prospective member of the CSA. (Photo by Nonny.)
Loong (uncle) Chan is a prospective farmer-member of our CSA, one of the last people in the immediate area who is actually still growing food. In a little half-rai piece of public land that he rents for 600 baht a year from the local irrigation committee, he grows a range of local vegetables and herbs: peanuts, chili, mustard, sweet leaf, eggplants, tomato, corn and fruit like papaya and coconut. He works hard at his farming, and his garden shows it.
Raised in a nearby district, Loong Chan married into the neighborhood and started farming his in-laws’ land. Today, at 63, his kids are grown up and he earns his living doing odd jobs and selling the surplus vegetables he grows. His average monthly income of 5,000 baht isn’t much, but he isn’t in debt and he can get enough to eat from his garden and the extended family’s rice fields.
As the CSA team explores the neighborhood, looking for the remnant green corners of the land, and looking for natural food for our buyer-members, people like Loong Chan are prospective partners. But many questions remain about the ways he grows his food. At this point, we don’t have anything to go by other than his word and our observations and intuition. Starting with the first, here’s what he said:
The only chemical inputs he uses are some urea pellets mixed with “organic” fertilizer (pui insee). Loong Chan argued that the land was long abused by the former tenant and would not produce any crop without the use of the magic white pellets. He said that organic farming with animal manure or compost has potential, but that it would take at least five years to improve the soil enough to grow vegetables. “The stomach isn’t like the legs,” he said. “It can’t wait.”
His vegetables suffer some from aphids and other insects, but not enough to require the use of pesticides. He is constantly walking through the garden, he said, and it’s enough to snip off the infected leaves. On the other hand, a small bottle of pesticide and rusty spray pack sitting in a corner of his hut did not inspire confidence. “Oh, that’s for ants,” he said.
Maybe. Maybe not. It is true that his fields are diverse. He practices integrated farming in the sense that he alternates beds with different kinds of plants, and he rotates crops. He doesn’t grow the same crop in the same bed over and over again. That’s a big improvement over his neighbors. He also uses biological pest applications like indigenous micro-organisms (IMO) and an extract of boraphet (Tinospora cordifolia). And he doesn’t have much money, so it might be true that he’s loathe to spend the extra baht on bug killer for his plants. He insists, anyway, that he doesn’t spray pesticides on his vegetables.
But… on the other hand, pesticide use in this neighborhood is habitual now. And it’s common “knowledge” that you can’t grow veggies without spraying. The story goes something like this: we’ve destroyed the environment and Mother Nature is taking revenge. The bugs are “stubborn” now (malaeng man duh); they’re resistant to a lot of the insecticides, so certainly the bio-sprays like neem won’t work. We’re fallen angels, and there’s nothing to do but blast away. Pity, that.
There’s another problem with sourcing veggies from Loong Chan. While he has an irrigation canal passing right in front of his land (dry now during rice-harvest time), he usually uses water drawn from the drainage canal in the back. That’s the canal that takes the paddy runoff, draining into the nearby Ping River. In the green old days, such a system was all logical and safe. But now the farmers grow chemical-intensive flowers, and some of that presumably runs off into the canal. The canal is full of fish, floating with water hyacinth and lined with plants – but do we really want that water sprayed on our food?
There’s still much to learn about how Loong grows his plants, and that’s a big part of this project. We’re just thinking out loud now, but it’d be fun to get him to work with us on some trial plots. Compare the outcome from Les’ mulch beds and Fair Earth compost with the same old-same old. See if we can convince him that organic conversion doesn’t really take five years. Stay tuned.
