Basket Feb. 5, 2010 – Same ole same ole!

Annie and our newest "livestock": two goslings named Sun and Moon.

The baskets are getting rather predictable, and we apologize. We stand by our claim that the food is healthy and basically organic, and you’re welcome to investigate our claims, but the baskets are not as interesting as they might be. We’re working on that. In the meantime, this week’s basket comes with a progress report.

This week:

• Peanuts
• Edible chrysanthemum
• Mustard greens
• Duck eggs
• Bananas
• Malabar spinach
• Winged beans

Bringing good food to good people from good farmers for good prices, and telling the story about it.

Given the chasm between the ideal of sustainable farming communities in northern Thailand and the reality of degradation and indebtedness, it’s not surprising that things aren’t exactly sailing along. That said, we’ve learned a lot and have reached out to many farmers, consumers and other interested people. And we’ve tried to tell the story of what we’ve learned and who we’ve met. That will continue and will improve.

For now, I’ll discuss a bit about the state of production of natural farm products for our nascent network.

1. 1. Production

1.1.    Fair Earth Farm

Until quite recently, the farm has been far less productive than it might have been otherwise – if you measure productivity in short-term yields of food and income. Certainly, with experienced farmers using chemical inputs, the immediate production (measured in kg and baht) could have been much higher. On the other hand, such a focus on immediate production at any cost would have degraded potential future production, as well as security and other important values (health, nature, aesthetics, and research). And the place would have attracted much less external interest if it were just one more chemical rice or flower plot. For example, we wouldn’t have these research grants to work with, and Les would be helping someone else right now. In sum, the immediate gains would have radically outweighed the longer-term ones.

The last few months have seen significant improvements, mainly thanks to Les and the incentives offered by our community supported agriculture (CSA) project, as well as the fact that we live on site now. It seems the potential of the farm to contribute to the family food budget and the CSA is much greater. Six months from now we should see even greater improvements, and this trend will hopefully increase as time goes by.

That being said, filling even just a few baskets with good and diverse food has not been an easy task. We still face many challenges to meet our objectives, especially short-term ones.

Challenges:

• The farm is fairly new and the soil is still fairly challenging.
• We have intentionally limited our near-term productive potential by eschewing all synthetic inputs, even quite reasonable ones like the rational use of complete fertilizers.
• Much of the attention/investment to date has been on infrastructure and tree crops, which will take time to yield.
• Until Les’ arrival, we had insufficient knowledge to manage the farm effectively. (e.g. livestock management, crop selection, irrigation, propagation, harvesting, etc.)
• There is little local knowledge or skills available that are applicable to natural farming approaches. The neighbors are happy to help, but the knowledge we need was their grandparents’, not theirs.
• The extension services that exist can be quite progressive, but they don’t seem to, well, extend very much, or have much relevance to locals or would-be natural farmers.
• The lead designer/manager (in other words, yours truly) has been all over the place – physically and mentally! – and has not been sufficiently effective in delegating work.
• Until recently, there have been insufficient incentives for other team members (Sarah, Ai Seud, Ah Choo) to take initiative to develop the farm. (A big advance was made with the completion of the house, which overcame Sarah’s long-standing but unspoken strike against farm work until I had built her a house!)
• We have not developed a very coherent management plan for annual crops.
• There has been a relative paucity, despite significant advances, of crops planted for sale over the coming months.

1.2. Dorn Tarn

There are many structural reasons why local farmers do not practice natural farming, but this is not the place to discuss them. Here I will discuss some of the issues we are facing in trying to achieve CSA project objectives in our neighborhood.

To recap, our initial objective was to demonstrate to local farmers the potential of markets for natural farm products, and to help the interested few to begin transitions to sustainability. However, this project’s inception coincided with a boom in the cut-flower market. Most of the vegetable production we had previously surveyed – as well as a lot of the rice fields – was quickly converted to chemical and inedible flowers. The flower market subsequently went bust, but the result of all this was that the number of potential “green corners” in the neighborhood went totally chemical.

Recognizing what in hindsight was a quite ambitious objective, a revised objective is to get a group of more progressive farmers to commit – in exchange for some development assistance to manage the transition – small pieces of their land as experimental plots, in order to learn about natural farming and see if it works for them. Over time, these could lead toward local production for the CSA or other organic markets. In the meantime, as before, we continue to look for produce grown in a more-or-less sustainable manner; to tell the truth of the situation to our consumers; to try to raise awareness of green opportunities for local farmers; and to connect with the progressive few and try to effect some positive change.

Challenges:

• Limitations of trust between locals and outsiders, despite quite good relations
• The near total absence of organically grown grain, vegetables or fruit, except for indigenous things (cha-om, etc.) that are unknown to or little valued by consumers
• The lack of diversity of even chemically grown food crops (other than rice)
• The conversion of the few remaining vegetable patches to flower plots
• Still relatively limited information about local economy, especially flowers
• Still undeveloped consumer base

1.3. Pang Daeng

Pang Daeng village is both the most difficult and the easiest at the same time. It’s difficult because it’s more remote and poorly understood, and because the problems there are quite severe. It’s easiest because of the villagers’ good partnership with the Upland Holistic Development Project (UHDP) and their positive attitude and industry. And we’re on the same wavelength about a lot of things. And we know each other fairly well and don’t have any drama between us.

Challenges:

• Their main crops are either not of much interest (feed maize) or only available once a year in such bulk quantity  (peanuts) that our limited demand would not be of much interest, or influence, to them.
• Their agroforest products are of marginal (or non-existent) interest to most consumers.
• Even if their agroforest products were saleable, we don’t know how much they could produce. There are also questions about durability.
• Transportation is a hurdle, though not an insurmountable one

The hurdles discussed above are substantial but not insurmountable. Anyway, if this business were easy, it wouldn’t really be worth doing. The next key steps, as I see them, are:

• Increase Fair Earth Farm’s productivity, as an example to other natural farmers and as a link to green consumers;
• Conduct targeted consumer surveys and then expand the consumer network through awareness raising;
• Conduct more hands-on and participatory training that links local farmers and consumers;
• Begin multi-stakeholder discussions about the fair price of food;
• Travel over hill and dale in Chiang Mai Province in search of natural farmers, natural food and good stories; and
• Improve our efforts at bringing good food to good people from good farmers at good prices, and telling the story about it.

Actually, the whole story is infinitely more complicated than this. We’ll keep working on that story and tell you what we learn.