Natural Farming

h.h. · Aug 8, 2011

A cut and past from the tea thread where I was getting little too far off subject...

Originally Posted by h.h.
Still you can't take out more than you take in. I said closed loop meaning if nothing goes out, nothing needs to come in. While monocropping is the greater culprit with just about everything going out it's not exclusive.
My definition of "fertilizer" includes anything that directly adds nutes, such as manure.
I guess I could include the whole universe in my concept except we have left relatively little in space while truckload after truckload of nutrition is removed daily from the soil and shipped to the infertile cities. We maintain the balance with chemical ferts. Only when we stop exporting off our land and balance out the nutrition load will we start to entertain the thought of easing our dependence.
Only when the cities have turned to compost.
===================================================

hh, you are confused. just because you don't add does not mean nothing is added. you are confusing nature and fertilizing. in nature farming, fertilizer is at an absolute minimum, for instance fukuoka throwing chicken poop here and there in his rice field.

it used to be that farming improved land year by year. There is enough fertility to support "infertile cities". __________________

Forgive me. I had to drive to the city and back yesterday putting my mind in a weird place.
I'll read Fukoka next week and try to grasp his rational.
If you're adding small amounts of poop you're still adding fertilizer. The chickens have to be feed. Sure they will eat the bugs flying in but then the bugs have to be feed as well. You are just not a completely closed system. If I bring in feed, I'm borrowing energy from another's land and paying it back to the cities. We both lose as they flush it out into the ocean or concentrate it underground.. Ultimately it needs replacement at the supply side.

h.h. · Aug 8, 2011

Plant Intelligence...
Using pumpkins as a living mulch, I purposely planted them in the wrong areas for my hot zone. They didn't want to be there so they climbed an 8' fence and reestablished themselves before dying off in the original planting. They found their spot. Shades of Carlos Castaneda or dreams of Cinderella?

mad librettist · Aug 8, 2011

h.h. said:
A cut and past from the tea thread where I was getting little too far off subject...

Forgive me. I had to drive to the city and back yesterday putting my mind in a weird place.
I'll read Fukoka next week and try to grasp his rational.
If you're adding small amounts of poop you're still adding fertilizer. The chickens have to be feed. Sure they will eat the bugs flying in but then the bugs have to be feed as well. You are just not a completely closed system. If I bring in feed, I'm borrowing energy from another's land and paying it back to the cities. We both lose as they flush it out into the ocean or concentrate it underground.. Ultimately it needs replacement at the supply side.

fukuoka's chicken ate from the land. his biggest outside input was clover seed.

at first, they went into the rice field, but then a road got built that screwed that up so he threw chicken poop here and there. don't remember reading anything about buying feed for the chickens.

1)if a system is powered by the sun it is not closed
2)natural farming makes your land a "fertility magnet". agro-chem farming does the opposite, thus the "you have to add something because you take it away" paradigm. in a natural system there is no reason to assume decreasing fertility because animals are supported by the system, and you are, in fact powered by the sun and not a closed system

jaykush · Aug 8, 2011

dude, once again. there is no way ANY FARM should be a closed loop. drop it, that is just a horrible mindset, there is no way you can exclude everything from your farm. unless you kill it all. which seems to be how people do things now days, and is why people might not understand how natural farming works. that part i get, now the closed loop systems, thats silly nonsense.

once again in a natural farm there are MANY inputs that eventually becomes a "fertilizer source". inputs that the farmer does not need to control. it can come from an animal source or environmental source. the more diverse the farm, the more diverse the input sources.

like i said in the other thread, no one is disputing that when you take a tomato off the farm, your taking fertility. and when you take a couple hundred lbs away your taking even more fertility away. traditionally people would go add tons of manure or tons of chemical fertilizers. its just in a natural system you have more going in than coming out. and like mad said, because of this the soil builds and gets better over time.

that being said, i use winter squash and pumpkins as a ground cover as well.

h.h. · Aug 8, 2011

Jay,
While I was disputing your 1 comment on the tea thread, that is not my intention here. What you did, thank you very much, was send me off on another tangent.

Perhaps I should modify the term to a semi closed loop. For certain the sun, the air, as well as the insects and birds bring their input, yet it doesn't match what is put out. Bringing in clover seed is still importing energy. (I'll call everything energy because in many ways it's all the same thing.Oil, fire, nutrients, photons...) You're taking food and water that has been transformed into seed away from somewhere else which in turn is transformed into food, energy, on a one way journey. The infertile areas waste these resources. They become unavailable. In order to work, natural farming must engulf the cities. "Overgrow" should pertain to each and every one of us with all manner of food crop. It's our obligation not to be a dead end.

mad librettist · Aug 8, 2011

stuck in the N-P-K paradigm, nothing I can do to change that. get to reading.

I believe the expression "living off the fat of the land" applies here.

further, the city is humanity's best hope for saving the environment. not saying our cities can't make food, but people sticking with people works.

jaykush · Aug 8, 2011

yet it doesn't match what is put out.

says who?

In order to work, natural farming must engulf the cities.

! couldn't agree with you more. but first it must engulf the farm system we already have.

as for the rest i totally get what your going for, there is no possible way for things to stay 100% fertile when getting rid of or selling "material" without inputting "material". and the consequences of that are robbing peter to pay paul, but such is life on the planet earth, this has been going on for millions of years. forests become deserts, deserts become forest, nutrients and minerals are transported all over the planet from various means.

xmobotx · Aug 8, 2011

I believe the concept of a closed farm is mired more in the ideaology of self-sustenance farming than in agribiz

ley rotations w/ a milk cow and perhaps some meat animals food produced for the animals within the farm and for the people residing possibly composting toilet w/ output returning to the field

Arguably, there will always be introductions in terms of seeds/energy making the term "closed" a relative term meant to conflict w/ the idea of buying feed at the store and possibly trading w/ like minded for products one might not raise but mostly in direct opposition to the idea of trucking products all over coupled w/ buying multiple inputs for the agri/feed and food

I also do not see how even a small farm could be completely "closed" but I use the term "closed" when considering that most of the inputs will be derived withn the farm

mad librettist · Aug 8, 2011

yes, and if our farming system worked with nature, not against her, we could support ourselves using only what the sun provides every day.

rearranging carbon. that's all life is.

sunnydog · Aug 8, 2011

Biosphere failed miserably.... :tumbleweed:

bonsai · Aug 8, 2011

mad librettist said:
at first, they went into the rice field, but then a road got built that screwed that up so he threw chicken poop here and there. don't remember reading anything about buying feed for the chickens.

Exactly correct. Read it last week, great book.
For anyone wondering what we're talking about, the book is The One Straw Revolution.

xmobotx · Aug 8, 2011

am fighting said sun currently - need more shade

wilbur · Aug 8, 2011

g'day h.h.
have a look at this site: www.ecosanres.org for ways to close the fertilizer cycle.
current estimates until the world runs out of potash and phosphate is about twenty five years unless more is found. (there's heaps of potash in afghanistan but there's a war too.) it is a measure of our complacency that this information is not generally known.
we carry on about dwindling oil ... and why not? after all, how are we going to buy a big mac when the closest fraqnchise is two miles away. that's a long walk.
but we never think how much fertilizer it takes to produce the big mac.
Ahh. ignorance is bliss.

Microbeman · Aug 8, 2011

The deal is to input intelligently, then one can take off enough crops so that one acre can easily feed....well lots of people...really lots. The intelligence is given to us to learn in the form of large forests and grasslands and swamps that output tremendous amounts of produce every season with extremely low inputs of organic matter. Just think about one giant sequoia growing in a failry thin crust soil. It probably creates as much or more matter than a good sized corn field, every year and how much matter drops to the forest floor? Not much realitive to production. Same thing with wild grasslands. Why? Nature has been holding the secret forever. We just need to open our eyes and minds. Go with her instead of fight her. What's in those soils? Magic? Nematodes, Fungi, protozoa, bacteria, archaea?

PS. Monocropping is not always bad. Certain plants do that of their own accord; certain plants grow well in certain conditions.

h.h. · Aug 10, 2011

Thanks for all the responses.I started to go down the list, complimenting or debating each answer, but I decided that I thought each and every answer was excellent and correct in it's own right. Besides, I didn't want to make this about my opinion.
I see a lot of influence by Fukuoka. I've started to skim through "1 Straw". I didn't want to make this about him though he definitely deserves his spot as a spokesman and I will offer up a quote.

Unless people become natural people, there can be neither natural farming nor natural food.

Fukuoka, Masanobu; Frances Moore Lappe; Wendell Berry; Larry Korn (2010-09-08). The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming (New York Review Books Classics) (p. 150). NYRB Classics. Kindle Edition.

mad librettist · Aug 10, 2011

to me the true beauty in fukuoka's ideas is the concept that a farm is not essentially a means of production of goods, but a means of caring for human lives.

imagine if agri-business all over the world stopped to ask "how well are we caring for life"?

C21H30O2 · Aug 10, 2011

My personal philosophy is to import as little as possible and make what you do import long lasting and sustainable. That means rock dusts, compost and seeds. That's about it. Nitrogen is in the air, don't need to import that. Everything else is in rocks, add some compost for humus and your good to go.

cheap, effective, sustainable.

wilbur · Aug 10, 2011

"to me the true beauty in fukuoka's ideas is the concept that a farm is not essentially a means of production of goods, but a means of caring for human lives."

mad librettist: thanks for the quote. that is a profound idea! it infers the crux of the issue is that the human condition subsists on FEAR rather than compassion for all things ... that human interactivity is merely like in a market place where goods and services are exchanged on the basis of self interest.

but what use is philosophy ... ?

habeeb · Aug 10, 2011

bonsai said:
Exactly correct. Read it last week, great book.
For anyone wondering what we're talking about, the book is The One Straw Revolution.

thanks, I was wondering what the hell is going on

what about water in this whole situation?

some of my ideals: simplicity, reduction

mad librettist · Aug 10, 2011

properly managed farmland is going to act as a sink for water, whereas a factory farm is going to be putting off lots of runoff loaded with ferts.

one can observe even on a small scale in containers the effect of a living mulch, for instance. less water is consumed for the same temps and ventilation.

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