“I was putting more money at risk every year than the potential for profit justified. Any time that you have to come out of pocket with cash in an agricultural situation–almost any situation I can think of but in agriculture it’s particularly true because we have control of such a small portion of the factors that affect us–we can’t control the market, we can’t control the weather, we can’t control the political situation–the one thing that we can control is what we spend.”

“Modern agriculture is maybe 60 years old–I saw the first nitrogen fertilizer I remember in 1950, maybe 1951… modern agriculture all goes back to nitrogen fertilizer. During that time of modern agriculture we have degraded our soils, we have degraded our food chain, or our people, and we have degraded the financial and mental health of our producers.”

“The better job I did of conforming to what the prevaling wisdom said was good management the worse shape I got in financially. I didn’t get back into good shape financially until I realized that it’s all out there. All you have to do is tailor your management to your environment, and substite management for money.”

Image via Wikipedia

A wonderful excerpt from the series about Masanobu Fukuoka on the Agroinnovations Podcast.  Thanks to the Astromen blog for the transcription.

People would ask: So tell us, Fukuoka sensei…is this Zen farming? He would say, No, no, no, it’s got nothing to do with religion, it’s just farming. It’s just farming. It’s a timeless understanding, and if I were to call it Zen farming, then right away you would take my farming and put it into your Zen file, and then that would be a way you could say, Oh I understand it because I can compartmentalize this whole thing and call it Zen. That would be playing into the need of our human intellect to try to understand things, and by doing that, gain control somehow.

[Fukuoka] didn’t want to do that, so he said: No, no, all I’m doing here is farming. But when you’re a farmer then you’re out in nature, and you see all of these wonderful dramas and these things of beauty, and you hear the wind blowing through the trees and so forth, and the farmer has many opportunites to break through and see God directly.

To him, the religions were an unnecessary structure that people have created to try to understand. And understanding is not part of this at all. If you really wanted to set him off, you would just say, Don’t you think people can understand nature? And he would say, People can’t really, truly understand anything.

Related articles

Check out this article from the Huffington Post on the Zen of Pruning.

• Linda Buzzell: The Zen of Pruning (huffingtonpost.com)

The legal pressure continues to mount on Monsanto as two significant court cases move through the judicial system in the United States.

First is a group of organic farmers bringing suit against Monsanto in a district court in Manhattan.  See this article:

Will organic farmers see their day in court?

The article states:

The eighty-three family farmers, small and family owned seed businesses, and agricultural organizations comprising the organic plaintiff group represent over 300,000 individuals. The landmark lawsuit, filed in March 2011, challenges the validity of Monsanto’s transgenic/GMO patents and seeks court protection for innocent family farmers who may become contaminated by Monsanto seed.

Next is a law suit dating back to 2004 in Putnam County, West Virginia, where jurors are just now being selected for the trial.

Monsanto jurors must decide if Nitro residents should be tested for disease

In this suit, the plantiffs are asking “that Monsanto bear the cost of periodic medical testing to determine whether their exposure to the harmful chemicals caused any one or more of 12 different diseases, which they say are caused by exposure to dioxin.”

Apparently, the people in the law suit live in close proximity to Monsanto’s Nitro chemical plant, where Agent Orange (dioxin) has been manufactured for over 30 years.

Both shocking and predictable.  This shit storm has been brewing for a while. This clip is an excerpt from the excellent documentary movie The World According to Monsanto.

Image via Wikipedia

A reviewer on iTunes had this to say about the Agroinnovations Podcast:

Unfortunately, it seems almost every episode is tainted with devotion to the man-made global warming myth and often socialistic economic theory. There is a lot of self-defeating philosophy in that if the government control the host and guests espouse were implemented then they wouldn’t be allowed to do the agricultural innovations they promote.  This is the kind of podcast you’ll get when the host is a socialist trying to be entrepreneurial.

What do you think?  Is the Agroinnovations Podcast socialist propaganda posing as entrepreneurship?

Shipping containers have several advantages that make them well suited to agricultural modification:

• Containers are standard in their measurements, making them well suited to small scale manufacturing for modification
• Containers can be moved fairly easily using existing water, rail, and road networks.  Even as fossil fuels become scarce, moving containers over fairly short distances will probably be feasible.
• Containers can be fitted with a number of renewable, regenerative technologies that can move through a community as required

So while I agree with the basic premise of this project, I’m not sure I agree with the tactical implementation.  Why fit shipping containers with relatively expensive lighting technologies for producing vegetables?  The sun does a much better job for much cheaper; the energy yield for the vegetables is probably a thermodynamic loss.

Instead, why not modify the container to act as a mobile agro-industrial unit?  Dorn Cox of Greenstart has the jump on this, as he is currently installing open source biodiesel generators into an old Coca-Cola trailer.  The biodiesel generators are designed to process sunflower oil produced from his no-till organic sunflower crop.  Since Dorn doesn’t use the equipment year round, there’s plenty of machine down-time to warrant a technology share with neighboring farms.  The shipping container could also be fitted with additional regenerative open source technologies, like the open source Rodale crop roller.

The permacultural concept of guilds becomes useful here, as shipping containers could be dedicated modules (or guilds) for ecosystem regeneration: an aquaponics module for producing breeding fish; a mushroom lab for producing mycelium spawn; an apiculture module for building and deploying hives; and as mentioned above, a liquid fuel/no-till module for producing energy.

Centralizing shipping container modifications into an semi-industrial process will allow for rapid deployment of “seed” technologies that can be moved across the globe with the urgency that is commensurate with our current human crisis.

And check out this article, again via Treehuger, about growing shrimp in the desert.  Feeding the voracious 24-7 shrimp appetite of Las Vegas is probably not a good use for this tech, but overall the idea may make more sense than vegetable production, as the protein conversion efficiency of aquaculture is many times greater than a feedlot.

Update:

I found some good additional information after publishing this.  Apparently, lead paint is a problem in shipping containers…which may be very difficult and/or expensive to remediate.

Additionally, these things are hot and difficult to ventilate, which probably isn’t a huge problem in New Hampshire, but more problematic in Haiti or New Mexico.

Treehugger has really covered this issue over the years.  See the link below for a summary of this coverage:

http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/the-shipping-container-scene-in-2010.html

And the National Young Farmer’s Coalition has a report back from a FarmHack event on Dorn Cox’s farm in New Hampshire.

Image courtesy ddpavumba

New research is transforming our understanding of the relationships between micro-organisms, epigenetics, the human gut, and allergies. An excerpt from a new article on the website of the scientific journal Nature sums up the crux of this dynamic:

“These [micro-organisms] are flipping switches,” says Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. If these beneficial microbes fail to colonize our guts early in life, or if they succumb to a course of antibiotics, then switches don’t get flipped and the immune system can become hypersensitive, attacking harmless microbes and other substances such as pollen, pet dander or shellfish.

The greatest frontier in science is biological.  We must proceed with enthusiasm and with ethics.  A great article by my friend Cassandra Willyard.  Nice work.  Read it below.

Microbiome: Gut reaction

© Mr.Bojangles from BackyardChickens.com

Happy Thanksgiving. Hope everyone is taking the time to be thankful for family, friends, and food.

Chickens aren’t the only poultry species suitable for rotational grazing via enclosed “tractors”.  Turkeys seem to do just fine as well.  So, in the spirit of Turkey day, I thought I’d share some innovative things that other agriculturalists are doing with turkey tractors.

Have a look at the YouTube video below, courtesy of bean444444. Also, check out the forum post below to learn more about people’s experiences with turkey tractors via the Backyard Chickens Form.

Turkey Tractors

Monsanto will now have its hands full dealing with the legal firepower of a sovereign state the size of India.  Sell your Monsanto stock.

Indian Government Files Biopiracy Lawsuit Against Monsanto