Basket Mar. 5, 2010 – New farmer gives organics a go

The collapse of flower prices, chemically tainted blood and our last farmshop have compelled a local farmer to overcome his skepticism about organic farming. Please read on.

This week:

• Brown rice
• Duck eggs
• Mustard greens
• Malabar spinach

There were two main highlights of the week for me: some initial steps into an engagement with a neighboring farmer, and a visit by health workers from around the world. And the ducks laid heaps of eggs.

New farmer-member

Les Anwyl explains the concept of sheet mulching during a visit by NGO workers from more than a dozen countries. (Photo by Daniel J. Powell.)

Gla is the thirty-something son of Uncle Oon, a neighbor two plots to the south of Fair Earth Farm. Uncle Oon’s father was an herbalist, and Oon himself has much knowledge about the medicinal and other value of local “weeds.” Gla is interested and knowledgeable himself, but such knowledge is considered backwards and silly today, and they both are bashful about talking about it. It seems the only ones interested are the weird foreigners who come to visit us, though there is one local health worker who has a thing or two to say about agrochemicals and local detox remedies.

Watching the changes on Uncle Oon’s patch next door, we’re witnessing firsthand the unraveling of farming traditions – or are we? He was one of the only people left in the area to raise animals along with plants. He had a few cows, a flock of ducks, and an unruly mob of chickens. Sure, his system wanted for some organization. A calf once got into our cornfield and enjoyed some lunch. You could track his ducks by following their footprints through the rice seedbeds. And until we acquired our own mulch-destroying chickens, his horde would daily invade the farm, scratching up newly planted corn seeds and mocking our pathetic attempts at composting and mulch. (Now that we have confined our chickens in a coop and “tractors,” Oon’s chickens are sneaking back, and we are again faced with a management puzzle.)

Uncle Oon and his cows in 2008.

The neighbors would mutter and moan under their breath about the “old redneck,” but I liked the idea that he was still raising animals. I wanted to raise some myself – and now we do! – and here was a source of knowledge. And he’s an old sweetheart, teaching Annie about feeding a calf from a bottle – too dangerous for a kid, to be sure, because they can really buck hard – and showing me the trick of sneaking duck eggs into a chicken’s nest so they can be raised by the hens. (The local ducks are notoriously bad mothers.)

And we would-be permaculturists know that sustainable farming is all about a union of plants and animals. This fact is unfortunately lost on the modern farm manager and his pin-striped advisors, but when the oil runs out and we’re back to our original dependence on solar power (i.e. photosynthesis), we’ll relearn the lesson so aptly put by the great Wendell Berry:

“Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.”

The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62

Today, Uncle Oon’s ducks are gone, and so are the cows. The ducks went a few months back, when they invaded a neighbor’s rice field and ate the ripening grain. Uncle Oon finally gave up the fight and sold the ducks to the pa lo peddler, who bought them for a pittance and sent them to their doom. Of the cows, I’m not yet sure. I just noticed their empty byre the other day, and the sight of it filled me with sadness. (I’d feel less sad if 80 percent of his lawless fowl were to disappear one day.)

It didn’t help that Uncle Oon refused to adopt a fair system of management. In the old days, when there was more space and there existed such a thing as the commons, free range was possible. These days, free range means making use of your neighbors’ property for your own advantage, and that doesn’t go over very well with the Joneses or the Kraprayoons. They’re building concrete walls around their land to protect themselves from … what? I don’t know. But I do know they don’t want a flock of chickens or ducks marauding across their grass monoculture. Uncle Oon is a dying breed in the modern chemical village.

But wait, the story isn’t over. Gla just bought three buffalo. I learned about this when he informed me with a laugh that I must buy all his buffalo dung. This I accepted without protest, knowing it to be a statement of fact. I like the small feedlot owner from whom I buy my monthly truckload of manure (20 sacks for 300 baht). He raises several dozen beef cattle in a little patch, mostly free from smell and on a diverse diet of various agro-byproducts like soy meal and copra cake. But he can’t compete with real buffalo! They’re also a dying breed, and precious hard to find in the peri-urban fringe of Chiang Mai. The least I can do to help with the conservation of the Thai water buffalo is to buy some shit now and again.

Anyway, I digress. The point was that Gla wants to become a producer for our nascent community agriculture network.  When I first met him in 2006, he was commuting into town to work nights as a guard at an auto dealership. He didn’t like the work, the pay was lousy, and he was spending too little time with his family, especially his lone daughter. He gave it up to get back into farming, motivated by the high price of chrysanthemum flowers at the time. He was the first person to help us with rice farming, and he’s been a source of knowledge and moral support ever since. He good-naturedly scoffed at the idea of organic farming (“the bugs are too stubborn, the soil too degraded”) but I was a harmless eccentric and good for a chat in the shade of the wild fig tree.

Fast forward to 2010. The price for flowers has collapsed. He’s in bad with the middlemen, for having dared to argue about crappy prices. The doctors tell him his blood is contaminated with poison from pesticides. The nut grass resists his most powerful herbicides. On the other hand, we had a great organic rice crop last year, with much higher yields than the surrounding fields for a much lower cost. Our soil gets better every year, and the plants clearly like it. We haven’t been lecturing; until the start of this project at the end of 2009, we were just quietly going about our business of recovering this degraded ecosystem by growing food. He walks through the place almost every day to open the irrigation canal gate. He’s not blind and he’s not stupid.

Then came our farmshop on Jan. 30, mostly funded by the US State Department. Les wowed the visitors with his instant vegetable gardens system, and Gla was duly impressed. (He’s still dubious about the duck tractor, but the jury will be out on that trial until harvest time. Then we’ll see. )  I bumped into him at the local “coffee shop,” and he said he was ready to give organic farming a try.

“But listen,” he told me, “You’ve got to help me sell the stuff. I’ll try to do it organically, but I’m really screwed if it doesn’t work.”

I agreed, and sweetened the deal with a bit of money for time and materials to kick start his test plot. And, of course, I’m into him for at least a year’s worth of buffalo pucks.

We followed this up with a couple visits, some help setting up a little nursery operation and the first of several mulch beds and green manure beds. We’ll keep you informed about this effort as it unfolds.

Health NGOs visit Fair Earth Farm

We were fortunate to be visited by about 45 Christian NGO workers from a dozen different countries on Mar. 3. We talked about community agriculture, and they were treated to a discussion with Les about sheet mulching and our efforts to intensify the duck system. With cucumbers, corn, melons and tomatoes coming up in the mulch gardens that we created at the January farmshop, and some progress made on the duck corner last week, it was a good chance to see things in action.

Miscellany

Under Les’ tutelage, we slightly expanded and planted out the duck system. See his blog for details.

A friend from Food for the Hungry based in Chiang Mai, Kenny, lent us a rotary paddy weeder he had built by a local metal bender. Ai Seud is rolling along with it as I write. The jury is out on the locally produced one, though it does show promise (and great improvement over the earlier locally made clunkers). We also ordered one from India, along with several other adherents to the System of Rice Intensification (SRI).

We started seed trays for a lot of future crops for the network: turnips, amaranth, Chinese kale, spinach, basil, Niger seed, etc.

I planted out five beds of grain and melons opposite the chicken coop. This is an area that still gets pretty good sun, despite the progress of the surrounding fruit trees, and soil that I’ve been working on for two years. The chickens and their insane scrabbling had confounded me for many months, but now we seem to have matters in hand. (Unless the geese do us in.)

Until this week our mulching material was about used up, which was a problem because we have several areas ready to develop for vegetables, and a lot of fruit trees to plant come the rains. The straw was all but gone, the water hyacinth in the canals used up, and we were down to a couple sacks of cow dung. That’s all turned around now, thanks to Ai Seud and nature. He facilitated the purchase of a small mountain of staw (200 baht) and arranged a pick-up of manure. The water hyacinth, for its part, is booming as usual, spreading along the canals.

We’ve finished a draft survey for potential consumers. Thanks to Muey, Tim and Les for their good feedback. Sarah and Tu will test it out on several people next week, then we’ll revise it and expand the sample. That’ll be followed by another survey with a more specific focus on individual consumer preferences and attitudes toward organic food.

Les and Tu and I all blogged in the last few days. Please have a look.

We did a lot more than that during the last busy week, including a survey of the Khamthieng Market and the purchase of a miracle tree, but this blog is long enough already.