A Farm for the Future

This is a pretty amazing film. I found it at the Post Carbon Institute

"Filmmaker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family's farm in Devon (U.K.) into a low-energy farm for the future. This video features excerpts from an interview with Post Carbon Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg".

One of Heinberg's quotes " Our energy dependence is equivalent to 22 billion slaves".



I`ll be looking forward to a part 2 of this in a few years time: I sure hope there is one, and that feeding people is one of the top 3 achievements: carbon neutrality and ecological health, being the other 2.

Permaculture gardens and tree farms are lovely and if one is lucky enough to have the land to feed yourself, is the best way to do that ecologically - But they can't feed the biilions on the planet, unless complete global redistribution of land, infastructure costs and somehow skill aquision is transfered to 10 - 50% of the population. I don`t see that happening before the real food-fuel crises. Permaculture takes long, laborious, minimal return, years of work and money (trees/shrubs are not cheap) to get established. While many incredible examples of permaculture design thrive, very few can feed more than a few families. Harvesting is particulary laborious. Most people could not afford to farm like this.

I believe plowing has a place in food production and but it can be reduced to once in a long while with long rotations, cover crops and diversity, with pastures brought into the rotation with grains and vegetables. This does requires power.

I think its folly to dismiss the horse. I`d suggest finding Eric and Anne Nordell`s excellent series of articles in the Small Farmers Journal on sustainable large market horse gardening. You`ll have to buy the back issues, but you can, and you won`t be disapointed!

As well there are electric tractors, conversions and new ones and I think they deserve far more attention.



On market gardens a biodiesel walk behind tractors may be an option for transition if materials are available for making the fuel locally without competeing for food or land resources (waste grease, for e.g.)

In Canada we have a lot of large beef farms too and the acreage for is vast and the hay making energy intensive, as is the grain production that goes into fattening up the steers at feedlots. I propose the government purchase these large acreages, close to towns and cities across the country and redistribute this land in 5 - 100 acre lots (depending upon the farming proposal) to farming potentates. We`ll need organic agriculture departments not threatened with closure, and mentoring with farmers and, yes, permaculture designers.

you have a 500 acre farm endowed with hedgerows and woodlot, a small scale intensive agriculture could thrive - each independent, yet interconnected. Trade becomes real goods - use of my horses to plow in exchange for grazing on the harvested market garden...or I grow you mangles and you give me the wool. What a lovely world!

But it won;t come to that until....it comes to that (when there are no more desk jobs, or waitress or call centers. We`d have to give people land, say title is earned after proving production of so much food with said amount of carbon debt.

That is what I think Rebecca Hosking should do to transform her family's farm in Devon into a low-energy farm for the future. Bring in the community of people it would take to do just that.

small scale grain; not if, but how.

When I farmed in BC on a 126 acre homestead, we had a neighbour who sharecropped several neighbourhood farms in the area. He could work magic on his old John Deere combine and was a sight for 21st century eyes taking up the road with his big antique beauty. He took on about 60 acres of our land to grow wheat, spelt and oats. It worked out beautifully with our vegetable and pasturing rotations. Having a really handy guy with an old combine and all the other equipment necessary to grow grain is a rare honour; Not always easy to find.

If you are handy and live in an area where old agricultural equipment rots in fields or goes through auctions cheap, you could find an old combine like this farmer has.

But what are the other options?

The potential for intimate relationship with food is a thing seen clearly when a year's supply of grain is grown, harvested and cleaned by hand. This intimacy approaches oppressiveness when it is done for more than one's own bread...unless of course there are many of us doin it! (and then it becomes intimate again!)
Patience, perseverance and modest needs indicate a good scythe and a fan or very windy day. Dan Jason in Grain in the Garden (PDF) has an excellent essay on how to do just that.

To be self-sufficient in grain for a large family and their animals or a csa it would be good to look at equipment that is suited for that scale.
Small scale binders, threshers or combines are certainly not a mass produced commodity item and are difficult to find and usually jaw droppingly expensive.
Asia and eastern europe have produced some of these great little machines - some days I day dream of traveling and buying small farm equipment and then I realize ..we have to build them! What a time as the present for small scale local equipment fabrication; lets get to work manufacturing and importing implements for small and 2 wheel tractors (like the BCS) or small stationary units- recycled biodiesel, or ox, or horse - what ever each of our sustainable farming communities decide - and get the workshops humming in community colleges. To get the tools that we need (while we still can) maybe a multi-community effort to import together would be useful as well.

Here are a few links to combines and threshers for two wheel tractors or stand alone.

(A combine cuts and threshes in one operation. A thresher is fed (one would use a sythe or a sickle bar mower to cut the stalks).

Cicoria mobile thresher
http://www.cicoria.it/uk/plot375.html

thresher made from converted chipper shredder


Small scale corn thresher



Ferrari has here everything to fit a 2 wheel tractor but a combine. But in an article about small scale grains they mention a number of models.

Gene Logsdon's book Raising Small Grains is still arguably the bible on whole topic of grain growing - and its just back in print! http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/smallscale_grain_raising

mechanical weeding equipment

I have been thinking about midsized farms after reading about how they are disappearing. Very large farms are surviving and there is resurgence of small farms of 5 acres or less. But the midsized farm and the old "general" farm where a practically closed loop system existed and a living made on a quarter section or so, is disappearing. It is the mid size farms which are the bread and butter of our food security. My first farm was this size and our vegetables fields was 20 acres. We utilized tractors with some very ingenious mechanical weeder regimes that I'd like to describe.

The book Steel in the Field is online at SARE, covering a wide variety of tools that weed, from finger weeders to Kongsgilde s tine cultivators, basketweeders to lely blind tine weeder. The 3 weeding tools that we used on my old farm were:


lilliston rolling cultivators



A heavy tool bar needed for these solid gangs: with several spiked spider wheels on each unit that can angle at 2 points to throw a little or a lot of soil out or into the row. They are ground driven and fabulous at uprooting perennials and useful to hill potatoes. We bought a big unit with a bunch of other farmers and divider up the cultivators because one 3 on a tool bar is ideal for small tractors in vegetable fields.


My favorite machine was an old farmall Super C that had this baby set up on the under belly hydraulics.



Made by a small company in the states the buddingh basket weeder eliminated hoeing in all the 4 row beds (carrots, onions, spinach, etc) for the first 6 weeks. It rolls like a hamster cage scuffing out small annual weeds - not so good with the perennials but they are easier to hand weed out after loosening up with the basketweeder. Ten years ago they cost 1,500 - not sure what they go for today, but it can pay for itself pretty quick if one has over 10 acres of vegetables.
They can be found at Buddingh Weeder Co

The underbelly mount tractors were made with with sweeps and shares, which are useful for 2 row crops like corn and beans. I found it more useful to have a basket weeder under the farmall and use this S-tine cultivator for the pathes and 2 row beds, the tines can be moved along the tool bar to adjust spacing.

Tools I haven't used that look interesting:

I see this tool in action in strawberry fields here in the Annapolis Valley. Buddingh makes fingerweeders that fit on a tool bar that goes under the hydraulics (like the basketweeder) that has similar action to the Ecoweeder. With this tool you need a friend and have greater precision with your weeding.

Here is a link to a slide show


I'm hoping to get over to Willsie equipment sales in Ontario one of these years. They have 10 acres of used vegetable equipment. There are some very inventive machines built over the past century and I'd be as happy as a calf in clover given a chance to wander through the old iron.

The BCS is a great machine

I had a wonderful blue Italian walk behind tractor at my old farm that tilled, pulled a wagon, a lister plow and a sickle bar mower. A grand machine that powers itself, adjustable handles so the PTO can be at front and the machine in reverse, wheels adjusted. I even used it to pull logs out of the brush.

They make diesel BCS as well, its a machine I am currently looking for, because I can make biodiesel from waste grease. I'll post about that soon.

Earth Tools has a number of implements for the BCS and sells several models.

And a video of a combine in use on a walk behind tractor. BCS sells a reaper binder for harvesting grain in Europe and Asia. Not sure if this is available in North America.

Here is another Italian walk behind tractor with implements for the small farm

electric tractor

I posted about an electric conversion of an Allis Chalmers G a while back and stumbled upon some modern electric tractors. Yes that is a solar panel mounted like a canopy. Check out the video on the company's website. They have a model that runs on tracks with 3 point hitch and PTO...and can be set up with a loader or an excavator.

Here is another site that discusses some older garden tractors and if you're interested in smaller electric equipment (tillers, chainsaws) this site has a good list of stuff.

human and self powered pumps

follow this link for an excellent collection of tradition pumps, including the self powering hydraulic ram.


















A (not as pretty) modern version that looks pretty amazing. Its the "the Super MoneyMaker Pump—yes, that's the real name—sucks up water from sources as many as 30 feet below the ground, can spray it up to 40 feet high, and can even push it through 1,000 feet of hose to cover a larger section of land. In all, the pump can irrigate two acres of land, and costs only around $100". here

Not Elephant Gas

I named my cow Cheeky Butt in part to pay homage to her fabulous but under utilized resource (she is also rather sly). I have always made compost from manure for the vegetable fields and taken harrows out to spread the paddies into the grass. But I really want to use digested slurry for compost one day after I've utilize the gas. Its one of my life goals - to can and bake for (ample) farm hands, in a summer kitchen, the outside type, where huge pots can up sauces, pickles and such. There has been much buzz about biofuel from methane over the years...but not much action in the our part of the world.
CBC has a news clip on their website of the Toronto's Zoo plan to turn their captive's manure into biofuel. They mention that the technology is "mature" particularly in Europe. Many farms and villages in India and China and elsewhere have used methane gas for centuries, from their own or their animal`s manure to cook. It is a very simple and cheap technology profile. Larger distilleries are now emerging in India and other countries with European technologies that involve specialized anaerobic digestion that may involve transgenic bacteria as perhaps the corporate industrial solution to reep profits from a grass roots technology. We have so much to learn from small scale Asian and Indigenous technologies. Scale and context have to be considered. I think Elephants belong in Sri Lanka, not Toronto, and to justify their captivity with a "green`project" is kind of like using GE Canola grown from vanishing farmland to burn in biodiesel vehicles driven around a city. I justify keeping Cheeky Butt and Aurora Curls because I believe in a good compost, but I`d feel better about our symmetry after designing a household scale digestor that works with the anaerobic bacteria that live right here in our soil.

Electric G : the silence is luscious

Last night on CBC`s As it Happens, Carolyn who operates Luscious Garage in San Fransisco was interviewed about her brisk business in converting hybrids to electric vehicles. The story was a clever juxtaposition to the big story of the US Congress `lame duck`session to dole out alms to the Corporate Auto Dinosaurs (who flew to Washington in private jets). And it amazes me daily how few luscious mechanics we have. My suggestion for stimulating the economy in one of many billion small, local, green ways, is to train folks to convert old tractors to electric. These old beauties are incredibly useful in vegetables as the seeder or weeding implements fits under the belly, or in front of the tractor, and the engine is in the rear, making precision and visibility quite lovely. Check out how to make the conversion, if you are lucky enough to have an old Allis Chalmers G sitting in your back field.