Media
_
Forest Agricultural Enterprises first series of video distillations.
Perennial Agriculture can be designed as a plug in replacement for the current corn soybean market and CAFO method of meat production. All while producing and Energy Surplus.
Video 1: Midwest to East Coast Resilient Perennial Plug in replacement for corn and soybean bean based commodities.
-Infrastructure replacement is similar in topology.
-Processing equipment exists
-Markets exist for the oil, protein and carbohydrates of these permanent crops
Video 2
How about energy?
Superior in Biomass Energy of these Systems
-Hazelnut and chestnut coppice and shells
-Distributed chp systems
Video 3
Integrated dairy and grazing models for distributed beef and milk production.
-Alley crop for feeds and pastures.
Video 4: Working Model In Depth
-Lessons from NFF
-
Articles from Mark Shepard
-Growing Staple Food Crops in Permaculture Systems
Humanity is rapidly entering into a phase of existence where dramatic changes will occur whether we want them to or not, and where dramatic changes NEED to occur in order to avoid more catastrophies than are already occurring. The human population is in the process of geometrically hurtling past 7 billion souls, and even the United Nations realizes that this is cause for concern. (and cause for more meetings between people in cities wearing suits and ties) In fact they report the need to double the worlds food supply within the next 35 years.
Citing the higher total calories and nutrients produced per acre in small-scale, organic and “sustainiable systems”, The UN recommends a global move toward such production methods in order to meet future food needs. http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/gaef3242.doc.htm
This is only part of the solution and one which the majority of Permaculturists are addressing in their “Work”. Home-scale, urban and suburban Food Forests, community gardens, SPIN farming are all essential parts of the whole food picture, but despite the higher nutrient and caloric values per acre, they come up hungry.
While Permaculturists by the thousands install sheet-mulched mandala gardens with visions of feeding themselves and the world,
set up plastic hoop houses to grow greens or connect gutters to rain barrels to grow a few fish, they still all sit down to lunch and dine on the most unsustainable staple food crops ever devised by humankind: the annual grains and legumes. Rice, Wheat, Beans, Lentils, Corn, and so on…
The Techno-Mechanical Savior Complex crowd likewise. After a day of building photovoltaic panels with a thin film of grape juice or building skyscrapers of hydroponic lettuce and algae, they too sit down to a meal of corn-fattened angus and Genetically engineered, glow-in-the-dark vitamin enhanced rice pilaf.
All of these staple foods are annual crops, which require the destruction of an ecosystem through slashing, burning, tilling or herbicide in order to expose bare soil to receive their seeds. After the crops are harvested, the soil lays barren (or minimally occupied by a “cover crop”) until the next cropping season. There is land in the USA that once was old-growth forest that was clearcut nearly 400 yrs ago and has NEVER been allowed to grow back. It’s still trying to today, but the farmer, the plow and Roundup® won’t let it happen. There are formerly intact ecosystems in China that have been tilled for 4,000yrs. Literature abounds recording the destructive path of annual agriculture and the collapse of civilizations that depended on annual plants for their staple food crops. Every culture that has depended on annual plants as the main source of its carbohydrates, proteins and oils, (its staple foods) has catastrophically collapsed. All except for one… Only time will tell with this one…
Permaculturists as well as the majority of humanity are currently dependent on the carbohydrates, proteins and oils produced on large-scale farms. You can prove this to yourself quite easily starting today. Simply stop eating any grains, legumes, noodles, bread, tofu, tempe, corn-syrup sweeteners or meat that is fed a ration of grain. You will find that most of you will begin to go hungry quite quickly. I personally recommend quitting the consumption of annual staple foods cold-turkey, and switching to staples from trees, shrubs and other woody perennials, but that is a discussion for another day.
How can we produce staple foods for humanity without destroying the ecological systems that we depend on and leaving deserts in our wake ? Can we produce staple food crops while RESTORING ecosystems and ecosystem functions? Can we do this on such a scale as to actually FEED the world? Can we actually INCREASE the world’s food supply?
These are the challenges and the questions that have motivated me for sixteen years now since I first heard Bill Mollison in the Global Gardener video. His message was simple… “Much of the design is taken from Nature”, he said with an Australian accent nearly incomprehensible to my American ears. “The goal is to create systems that are ecologically sound and economically profitable. It can be as simple or as sophisticated as you like!”
His simple message fell like an acorn onto moist, fertile soil, and meeting the challenge of growing staple food crops in Permacutlure systems has been the focus of my life’s “Work” since that day.
Carbohydrates, Proteins and Oils… Our staple food crops are, for the most part, seeds. (Root crops are a close second.)
A high percentage of all annual grain crops are used to feed livestock, which are not even evolved to eat solely grains. The other major use for annual grains is for “industrial ingredients”.
Most of us in the industrialized world, wouldn’t even recognize the original seed in the food we eat. The corn in your cheetos has probably been mechanically ground, chemically treated (to extract additional “industrial ingredients”) and re-constituted to meet the standards of the modern food processing industry. It’s then coated with corn sugar and salt to meet the statistically proven desires of the modern palate. The wheat berry has been separated from the germ, oils often extracted, the hull buffed away, then the starchy flour mixed into your bread, cupcakes and breakfast cereals.
These two facts are actually a boon to Permaculture farmers. For this article the word “farmer” is used to describe those who raise staple food crops in bulk for sale to others. The definition of “Farmer” for the sake of this article does not include the market gardener despite their use of the term “farm” and “farmer”. This is not intended to slight or offend, merely to make a distinction between the growing of our vitamins and minerals (vegetable crops) and our FOOD: Our staple food crops.
Using Nature as our teacher, we can design systems that support the most terrestrial animal life of any other ecological system; the savannah while providing humanity with FOOD.
The savannah biome takes various forms around the world with different species complexes for different regions. The savanna is the perfect wild example showing the Permaculture design principles of stacking, taking advantage of edges, polucyltures, functional relationship between elements, nutrient cycling, and more. We can produce seeds, the raw ingredients for industrial food, from perennial plants in perennial ecologies and we can do so for a lower dollar cost per pound over time.
One of the simplest ways to categorize what qualifies as a savannah system, is the presence of grass beneath and around trees. If there are trees and shrubs in existence, but the tree canopy has not closed in enough to shade out the grass, the system is savannah-like in function and form. Green grass means that there is photosynthesis all the way down to ground level, and with enough time, the tallest tree species will eventually exceed 100ft.
Green leaves in multiple layers up to 100feet thick are one of the reasons why savannas and short-rotation woody crops have been shown to capture from 3 to 7 times the energy per acre as an annual crop field. With 100 feet of green, the total site yield can potentially leave corn and beans in the dust where they belong.
Although there are many savannah types and sub-types in the world and imitating them would be simple enough, let’s start with one as an example. This being primarily an American readership, I’ll use the savannah type with the most extensive range of any in North America. The Oak Savannah. I tip my hat to the many ecologists dead and alive who have, through the years, catalogued the species in the North American Savannahs. Their efforts help us to institutionally remember the incredible abundance that once was North America. They have provided us with the template to restore that richness while feeding the world.
After studying many different texts on the ecology of Oak Savannahs in North America, several key species jumped out at me. They all occur in all of the major Oak savanna types and neatly stack together. These species are somewhat like a Rosetta stone for North American Staple food Production. In order of height these key species are:
Fagacae: Oak, Chestnut, Beech: Nut producing tall trees
Malus: Apples: Originally Native Crabapples
Corylus: Hazelnut: Pre-European dominant shrub
Prunus: Plums, cherries, peaches: Tree forms as well as shrub form
Rubus: Raspberries, Blackberries: Cane-fruit
Ribes: Currant, Gooseberry: Shade-tolerant, fruit bearing
Vitis: Grapes: Sun-loving climbing vine
Fungus
Forage
Animals!
Now scratch your head for a minute and look at that list again and think of the possibilities… 100ft of photosynthesis. Potentially 3-7 times the energy capture per acre as an annual field, and most significantly, it’s all perennial. Plant it once and you’re done. Forever. Any questions? No plowing ever again. It’s three dimensional. It’s diverse. It takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, adds carbon to the soil in the form of roots, leaves and wood. It provides habitat to wildlife, wild pollinators. It recycles nutrients, and attracts birds like you cannot imagine. Chestnuts, apples, hazelnuts, plums, cherries, peaches, raspberries, blackberries, currants, gooseberries, grapes, mushrooms and animals…. Sounds like a healthy farm to me!
But how does this relate to staple food production and how do we get there?
One doesn’t convert a cornfield to a 100ft thick 3-dimensional solar panel overnight. One doesn’t colonize a rock and turn it into paradise all of a sudden (especially in cold, temperate climates), and since we’re talking about large-scale, broadoacre systems intentionally designed to export FOOD to those of you in the suburbs and cities, there needs to be a transition from annual cropping to perennial polyculture, and several of the practices that accomplish this, fall under the definition of Agroforestry. Using the Agroforestry techniques of Alleycropping and Silvopasture, we can redesign America’s farms and convert them from corn and soybean wastelands into perennial polycultures in as little as 10 years. Although these intentionally designed food savannahs would grow and yield more abundantly on the richest of soils, they are able to thrive on poorer sites. Sites that are currently too steep or rocky to grow annual grains. This is where very large gains in food productivity planet-wide can occur, when land not currently growing staple food crops is planted to a staple food crop savannah.
Let’s go through the layers one by one and address the various species involved.
Fagacae: Oaks, Chesntut, Beech.
Oak is the most widespread savannah species on the continent. There is no region in North America on sites wet or dry, where some kind of oak can’t survive. They bear high-oil, high protein nuts and some oaks can reach over 100ft tall. They bear irregularly which is problematic for staple food production. Wild acorns are a huge, underutilized resource in North America. There are several startup food processing companies that are beginning to use acorns as an ingredient and it’s popularity for a livestock feed is increasing. Harvesting wild acorns is troublesome to many because it is another example of humans moving into another wild area and stealing food being used by others. However, there are nearly 100 million acres of former tilled farmland that have been put into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and planted to oaks. These represent an extremely large source of acorns that are not taken from the wild, but are grown on farms that formerly grew some kind of annual food crop. If the farmer doesn’t have a market for acorns and when the CRP program is cut by the government, and corn prices increase, they will bulldoze the trees and plant corn.
Beech is the tree with the smallest range of the three Fagacae, ranging north into Eastern Maritime Canada, south through the Appalachians, and West to the west coast of Lake Michigan. It too
Produces a high oil high protein nut. It unfortunately also bears periodically which is problematic as a staple crop. There are very few records of Beech being planted in former agricultural land, so stealing beechnuts from the cute starving chipmunks looks like our only option to harvest them as staple foods. Where are you beechnut farmers?
Chestnut lands right in the middle as far as having the largest range of the Fagacae. The American Chestnut is the most cold-hardy, but is susceptible to Chestnut Blight. Chinese Chestnut is functionally immune to the blight, but nowhere near as cold hardy as the American. Hybridized chestnuts, open pollinated crosses between American and Chinese Chestnuts are an unknown… Some are cold hardy, some are not. Some are blight resistant and others not.
Chestnut is unique among the Fagacae in that it produces a high carbohydrate, low oil nut. More similar to corn, than to other tree nuts. It also is unique among the Fagace in that it bears regular crops annually. In case one might wonder about the sustainability of a system such as this, one need not look any further than the Castagna dei cento cavalli, one of the top 100 oldest living organisms on the planet. It is also the tree that still holds the record of the greatest girth of any tree ever recorded… Ever! Step aside you itty-bitty Redwoods. This particular chestnut tree has been growing out of the bare rock on the eastern flank of Mt Etna in Sicily for over 4,000 yrs. Chestnuts represent corn that grows on trees and that can do so every single year for millennia!
Apples and Cherries: the Mid-story trees.
Does anybody need me to explain much about apples and cherries? High sugar, juicy fruit with yeast on the skin. Great for eating, dehydrating or fermenting into alcoholic beverages or vinegars for food preservation. The alcohol can be distilled for motor fuel.
Hazelnuts: There are two types of Hazelnuts native to North America, the American hazelnut and the Beaked Hazelnut. The beaked hazelnut has a smaller native range, but tends to be found further north and on wetter sites. The American hazelnut exists in the wild from 8000 ft in the rocky mountains, to east Texas and up into Manitoba. It is an incredibly rugged shrub and can tolerate fire, grazing and abusive 4 wheelers. The hazelnut found in most stores is the European Hazelnut grown only in the Pacific Northwest of the US and in BC. It is nowhere near as cold hardy as the American hazelnut and it is susceptible to Eastern Filbert Blight, a disease to which the American hazels are adapted. A great deal of work has been done with crossing European hazels with American hazels as well as selection of wild individual American hazels that produce high yields and a fledgling Hybrid Hazelnut industry exists in the upper Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states. The hazelnut is significant as a staple food crop, in that it is nutritionally similar to a soybean except that it has 3 times the oil. In addition to a food crop, hazelnut is an outstanding biomass crop. Annually, 50% of the per-acre yield by weight is nut shells, which burns as hot as coal and can be used in pellet burners for heat or gasifiers for energy production.
Raspberries, Blackberries, Grapes, Currants: All of these are significant economic species. They are used on an industrial scale everything from juices to wine, jellies, fillings, or dehydrated for addition into cookies, cakes, granola bars and energy bars.
The only above listed species that currently are “niche” marketed products are the acorns and beech nuts. All of the other crops are currently INDUSTRIES. Container loads of product are regularly shipped around the world. Not that this is the food system that most Permaculturists would want, but it is what currently exists it is what currently feeds us today whether we like it or not. The industrial food system can be the tool used to create the ecological systems of the future.
Livestock! The savannahs of the world teem with animals. Prior to human arrival, the North American savannahs literally seethed with mammals! 9 Species of ground sloth, 3 species of giant armadillo, several mammoth and mastadon species, 2 giraffe species, and of course, those minor grazers, bison, and elk and deer and moose and caribou and sheep and antelope and…
Likewise we can re-create this animal abundance on Permaculture farms. Livestock are amazing ecological tools when put in their proper place and managed properly. Cattle, hogs, turkeys, sheep, geese, and chickens can all follow one another rotationally through a designed agricultural savannah and never have to take a single morsel of food from the human food supply. (ie, they eat no grains) These natural bio-digesters take grasses, forbes and browse that is inedible to human digestive systems, and turn them into milk, eggs, meat, hides, bristles, glue, wool, and more. They help the woody crops by reducing nutrient and moisture competition with grasses and they fertilize the system with their manure and urine. They inoculate the soil with fertility enhancing microbes.
Poultry help to reduce insect pests first by eating bugs, and second, by scratching apart cattle and hog dung to get at fly larvae. Poultry also happen to be the organisms adapted to eating the seeds of annual plants. The hard seeds from annual weeds that spring up in the wake of the larger grazers, are combined in the gizzard with rock fragments and snail shells where they are ground up by mechanical action. Fowl can be used as soil remineralizers when given hard rock minerals as grit. They take it from the feed trough and poop it out all ground up fine and mixed with digestive enzymes.
Animals in this system provide weed control, pest control and they eat vegetation indigestible to humans. Meat eating takes on an ecologically beneficial role in this case by freeing up more grains for human consumption and providing income to the Permaculture farmer in the process of establishing their perennial farm ecosystem.
If humans don’t harvest all of the yields from this system, the livestock can serve that role. All of the above mentioned livestock will gladly eat all of the fruits and nuts and berries as a supplement to their forage-based diet.
In case you hadn’t noticed yet, perhaps I’ll point out that this whole system can be managed with no fossil fuel inputs!
Lets go over a basic system design in conclusion and tie it all back into staple food crops.
Tall Tree: Chestnut – Corn substitute. A staple carbohydrate.
Medium Tree: Apples/cherries - Food, Juice, vinegar, alcohol
Shrub: Hazelnut- A staple food crop. Protein & Oil, Shell.
Smallfruits: vitimans, antioxidants, juice, alcohol
Fungus: wood and leaves become protein… Magic!
Livestock: Milk, meat, eggs… staple foods.
The above ecological system is not a theory. It is not a nifty idea for one to blog about. The above ecological system has persisted on this planet for a zillion or so years. As Permaculturists we are supposed to observe nature, imitate natural patterns and interact with nature to create human habitats that are ecologically sound and economically profitable. The Oak Savannah biome covered hundreds of millions of acres across North America since the last ice age. Until we have planted an equal number of acres of Agricultural Oak Savannah mimic’s, there’s really no need to “discover” or “create” new and productive plant guilds. What we need now is boots on the ground. We need thousands of YOU, MILLIONS of US planting Agricultural Savanna mimic’s all across the country. If we plant them on land that is currently NOT producing staple food crops, every calorie and every nutrient that comes from that system is a positive gain for the human food system. This is one way that we can dramatically increase the human food supply and produce staple foods in Permacutlure systems.
Published in The Permaculture Activist #49
New Forest Farm, Viola, WI. USA. (see PC Activist #40)
A long time ago, in what seemed like a galaxy far, far away, (1993 Permaculture Design
Course at Jerome Osentowski's CRMPI, Basalt, CO. USA) a group of idealistic
Permaculture students hurt their brains as they wrestled with a long-held Permaculture
myth... As they ate their bowls of Certified Organic rice and beans, they attempted to
figure out how their teachers could teach (and apparently believe) that with
Permaculture, we no longer need farms as they exist today. "How could this be?", they
thought... 85% of all Americans (indeed all HUMANS) reside in cities with populations in
excess of 250,000 souls. Even with every square inch of urban and suburban space
dedicated to intensive Permaculture systems, (and this is a LONG way off) there is not
enough sunlight falling to the earth in these places to provide the total calories needed
to
sustain the masses of humanity that live there. Sure, there would be adequate quantities
of fruits, berries and greens, roots and shoots and fungi, but what about staple foods?
What about Calories? Protein?...in short, the equivalent of millions of acres of rice,
beans, corn, wheat, oats, millet, barley, and the others. The calories that sustain the
human race come predominantly from annual crops. Primarily the grasses.
Add to that the fact that an annual grain field is bare, black earth for 8 months out of
the
year, and the fact that billions of tons of the worlds best topsoil erodes each year from
these fields, that the majority of the worlds toxic pesticides and herbicides that pollute
surface and groundwater are applied to annual croplands and that in the USA, annual
agriculture is responsible for nearly 17% of the country's CO2 emissions and you have
some idealists with cranial vapor-lock. What is a Permaculture Activist to do?
They took it to the farm. An unlikely partnership consisting of residents of 3 different
nations (Canada, Italy and USA) formed and decided to create a Permaculture Farm. Not
a "Perennial Grain Pipedream", or a fabulous non-profit fundraising mechanism, but a
REAL farm... Where the land is managed in order to produce foods, fibers, medicines
and livelihood for its managers. One aspect of "livelihood" happens to be sufficient cash-
flow to meet cash needs and enough to invest in the basic productivity of the enterprise.
For the squeamish I apologize if I use a dirty word, but the farm must produce a profit!
If a
Permaculture farm isn't profitable and depends on organized begging to sustain it, no
other farmers will adopt the techniques. Roundup ready soybeans have been so rapidly
accepted into the American mainstream because it takes fewer passes across a field to
grow them... which translates into lower fuel, labor and equipment repair bills which
translates into more cash staying at home and keeping the family farm operating for a
few more years...
Permaculture NEEDS farms and farms NEED Permaculture. In order for this marriage to
take place, the techniques must translate into increased profit on the farm.
SO... In 1994 Xylem, Phloem and Pith (as they then called themselves) bought a 106
acre farm in Southwest Wisconsin, USA. Run-down pasture land was the least expensive
land at the time...land that was too hilly and rocky to plow, land that had no trees so
wealthy hunters or timberland investors weren't interested in it. Land with soil so poor
and eroded that it wouldn't even support decent grazing. It was land that NEEDED the
restorative medicine of Permaculture.
First order of business was trees... Plants with the longest maturity horizon needed to
be
planted FIRST if they were ever to be any use to the current manager... Around 20 acres
of "forest" trees were planted...Black walnut, Red and White Oak (for nuts and high value
timber), Black Locust for Nitrogen and poles. Shade tolerant Sugar Maple (syrup and
lumber) were interplanted with fast-growing hybrid poplar. White Pine, Black cherry,
White Ash and many many other species were planted for lumber, firewood and, of
course, diversified wildlife habitat. Reforestation trees are rather inexpensive.
Seedlings
yanked from the ditches on the sides of roads are free and seeds collected in parks and
from sidewalks are plentiful enough to reforest nations.
A multi-species windbreak was planted behind the house which was being owner-built
one dollar at a time primarily with locally milled lumber. The "front line" (windward
side)
of the windbreak consisted of Hybrid poplar followed by a double row of White Spruce
interplanted with hundreds of highbush blueberries. To the leeward of the spruce/
blueberries came a double row of Pine-nuts... Korean Stone Pine and Limber Pine being
the survivors. To the leeward again of the Pines was planted a Juglans species
polyculture... Butternut (J.cinera) , Japanese Walnut (J. ailantifolia) and Buartnut (J.
cinera X ailantifolia) were interplanted with wild plum, black raspberry, silky dogwood
and grapes were trellised on the walnuts. Whoever claimed that Walnut cannot be used
in polycultures never bothered to observe the variety of useful plants that grow in
association quite happily with them... So far blueberries, grapes and raspberries are
being harvested in household quantities from this system. The trees are big enough to be
capturing snow drifts which helps to store water in the soil for the trees to use during
the
periodically droughty summers. The trees are not quite big enough to prevent the wind
from spinning the AIR 303 Wind generator, part of the household power supply.
The next major series of plantings took place little by little over seven years... 1000
apple
rootstocks were planted in polyculture systems over a period of 3 years. (Apple comfrey,
daffodil, iris, rugosa rose, hazelnut, currant, grape and a variety of medicinal herbs)
The
apple rootstock are still in the process of being grafted to heirloom varieties and those
with known pest and disease resistance.
FINALLY, the Staple food crop trees could be planted... Badgersett Research Co. (see
PC Activist #40 and www.badgersett.com) Hybrid Chestnuts and Hazelnuts are grown as
replacements for corn and soybeans respectively. Many of these trees were planted in
Silvopasture systems, where cattle, swine and poultry free-range. Others were planted
into alleycropping systems where Organic Produce was grown between rows of trees in
order to cash-flow the farm. Throughout the years between 3 and 12 acres of produce
has been grown, primarily cucumbers, zucchini, peppers and winter squash. Being
Permaculturists, we, of course, despised the "black-desert" of bare-soil annual
agriculture and began to plant more and more asparagus. As of this writing the
asparagus has been planted between the rows of over 2 1/2 acres of chestnuts.
12 acres of Hazelnuts were planted into an "Oak Savanna analogue" with white oaks
planted on 60' centers, hazels close planted in rows alternating 10 and 15ft wide and a
host of prairie flowers growing among the hazels.
After a mere 8 seasons, the project is bearing remarkable fruit (besides annual
produce)... for the past 2 years there have been "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" at
local holiday fairs. Hazels have been in production for several years, but have not yet
overwhelmed our ability to eat them all! Within 3 or 4 years yields should approach
20,000lbs of hazels. Asparagus has been very very good to New Forest Farm! As
members of the Organic Valley Cooperative (www.organicvalley.com) we have access to
wholesale organic produce markets nationwide. (look for my acorn squash on your co-
op's shelves this winter!)
Since the project began, the farm has been profitable every year except for one. Last
year several produce plots were taken out of annual production and planted to chestnuts
and drought required that we buy a huge watering tank to keep the newly planted trees
alive. 10,000lbs of water being pulled up and down hill caused our 60yr old bubble-gum
and duct-tape tractor to need major repairs. All of this added up to a HUGE financial loss
of a couple hundred bucks.
The house, always a work in progress, has progressed slowly but surely, one dollar at a
time. From day one it has been off the utility grid. The electrical system began with a
small 20Watt PV panel a car battery and a flourescent light. Over the years it has been
added to. It now has 3 different kinds of PV panels, 12 deep-cycle batteries and it powers
lights, water pump, 12Volt refrigerator a 12Volt chest freezer, and, of course, tunes!
Roofwater is collected and stored and used for watering livestock, washing and
irrigating.
New Forest Farm does not have a website. We have an Earthsite.
Since this is supposed to be a brief update and I'm finding it impossible to keep it
that
way, I'll write a sudden ending.
To contact or visit Mark and Jen Shepard (Erik and Daniel too!) you can call them at
608-627-TREE or e-mail at forestag@mwt.net
Forest Agricultural Enterprises first series of video distillations.
Perennial Agriculture can be designed as a plug in replacement for the current corn soybean market and CAFO method of meat production. All while producing and Energy Surplus.
Video 1: Midwest to East Coast Resilient Perennial Plug in replacement for corn and soybean bean based commodities.
-Infrastructure replacement is similar in topology.
-Processing equipment exists
-Markets exist for the oil, protein and carbohydrates of these permanent crops
Video 2
How about energy?
Superior in Biomass Energy of these Systems
-Hazelnut and chestnut coppice and shells
-Distributed chp systems
Video 3
Integrated dairy and grazing models for distributed beef and milk production.
-Alley crop for feeds and pastures.
Video 4: Working Model In Depth
-Lessons from NFF
-
Articles from Mark Shepard
-Growing Staple Food Crops in Permaculture Systems
Humanity is rapidly entering into a phase of existence where dramatic changes will occur whether we want them to or not, and where dramatic changes NEED to occur in order to avoid more catastrophies than are already occurring. The human population is in the process of geometrically hurtling past 7 billion souls, and even the United Nations realizes that this is cause for concern. (and cause for more meetings between people in cities wearing suits and ties) In fact they report the need to double the worlds food supply within the next 35 years.
Citing the higher total calories and nutrients produced per acre in small-scale, organic and “sustainiable systems”, The UN recommends a global move toward such production methods in order to meet future food needs. http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2009/gaef3242.doc.htm
This is only part of the solution and one which the majority of Permaculturists are addressing in their “Work”. Home-scale, urban and suburban Food Forests, community gardens, SPIN farming are all essential parts of the whole food picture, but despite the higher nutrient and caloric values per acre, they come up hungry.
While Permaculturists by the thousands install sheet-mulched mandala gardens with visions of feeding themselves and the world,
set up plastic hoop houses to grow greens or connect gutters to rain barrels to grow a few fish, they still all sit down to lunch and dine on the most unsustainable staple food crops ever devised by humankind: the annual grains and legumes. Rice, Wheat, Beans, Lentils, Corn, and so on…
The Techno-Mechanical Savior Complex crowd likewise. After a day of building photovoltaic panels with a thin film of grape juice or building skyscrapers of hydroponic lettuce and algae, they too sit down to a meal of corn-fattened angus and Genetically engineered, glow-in-the-dark vitamin enhanced rice pilaf.
All of these staple foods are annual crops, which require the destruction of an ecosystem through slashing, burning, tilling or herbicide in order to expose bare soil to receive their seeds. After the crops are harvested, the soil lays barren (or minimally occupied by a “cover crop”) until the next cropping season. There is land in the USA that once was old-growth forest that was clearcut nearly 400 yrs ago and has NEVER been allowed to grow back. It’s still trying to today, but the farmer, the plow and Roundup® won’t let it happen. There are formerly intact ecosystems in China that have been tilled for 4,000yrs. Literature abounds recording the destructive path of annual agriculture and the collapse of civilizations that depended on annual plants for their staple food crops. Every culture that has depended on annual plants as the main source of its carbohydrates, proteins and oils, (its staple foods) has catastrophically collapsed. All except for one… Only time will tell with this one…
Permaculturists as well as the majority of humanity are currently dependent on the carbohydrates, proteins and oils produced on large-scale farms. You can prove this to yourself quite easily starting today. Simply stop eating any grains, legumes, noodles, bread, tofu, tempe, corn-syrup sweeteners or meat that is fed a ration of grain. You will find that most of you will begin to go hungry quite quickly. I personally recommend quitting the consumption of annual staple foods cold-turkey, and switching to staples from trees, shrubs and other woody perennials, but that is a discussion for another day.
How can we produce staple foods for humanity without destroying the ecological systems that we depend on and leaving deserts in our wake ? Can we produce staple food crops while RESTORING ecosystems and ecosystem functions? Can we do this on such a scale as to actually FEED the world? Can we actually INCREASE the world’s food supply?
These are the challenges and the questions that have motivated me for sixteen years now since I first heard Bill Mollison in the Global Gardener video. His message was simple… “Much of the design is taken from Nature”, he said with an Australian accent nearly incomprehensible to my American ears. “The goal is to create systems that are ecologically sound and economically profitable. It can be as simple or as sophisticated as you like!”
His simple message fell like an acorn onto moist, fertile soil, and meeting the challenge of growing staple food crops in Permacutlure systems has been the focus of my life’s “Work” since that day.
Carbohydrates, Proteins and Oils… Our staple food crops are, for the most part, seeds. (Root crops are a close second.)
A high percentage of all annual grain crops are used to feed livestock, which are not even evolved to eat solely grains. The other major use for annual grains is for “industrial ingredients”.
Most of us in the industrialized world, wouldn’t even recognize the original seed in the food we eat. The corn in your cheetos has probably been mechanically ground, chemically treated (to extract additional “industrial ingredients”) and re-constituted to meet the standards of the modern food processing industry. It’s then coated with corn sugar and salt to meet the statistically proven desires of the modern palate. The wheat berry has been separated from the germ, oils often extracted, the hull buffed away, then the starchy flour mixed into your bread, cupcakes and breakfast cereals.
These two facts are actually a boon to Permaculture farmers. For this article the word “farmer” is used to describe those who raise staple food crops in bulk for sale to others. The definition of “Farmer” for the sake of this article does not include the market gardener despite their use of the term “farm” and “farmer”. This is not intended to slight or offend, merely to make a distinction between the growing of our vitamins and minerals (vegetable crops) and our FOOD: Our staple food crops.
Using Nature as our teacher, we can design systems that support the most terrestrial animal life of any other ecological system; the savannah while providing humanity with FOOD.
The savannah biome takes various forms around the world with different species complexes for different regions. The savanna is the perfect wild example showing the Permaculture design principles of stacking, taking advantage of edges, polucyltures, functional relationship between elements, nutrient cycling, and more. We can produce seeds, the raw ingredients for industrial food, from perennial plants in perennial ecologies and we can do so for a lower dollar cost per pound over time.
One of the simplest ways to categorize what qualifies as a savannah system, is the presence of grass beneath and around trees. If there are trees and shrubs in existence, but the tree canopy has not closed in enough to shade out the grass, the system is savannah-like in function and form. Green grass means that there is photosynthesis all the way down to ground level, and with enough time, the tallest tree species will eventually exceed 100ft.
Green leaves in multiple layers up to 100feet thick are one of the reasons why savannas and short-rotation woody crops have been shown to capture from 3 to 7 times the energy per acre as an annual crop field. With 100 feet of green, the total site yield can potentially leave corn and beans in the dust where they belong.
Although there are many savannah types and sub-types in the world and imitating them would be simple enough, let’s start with one as an example. This being primarily an American readership, I’ll use the savannah type with the most extensive range of any in North America. The Oak Savannah. I tip my hat to the many ecologists dead and alive who have, through the years, catalogued the species in the North American Savannahs. Their efforts help us to institutionally remember the incredible abundance that once was North America. They have provided us with the template to restore that richness while feeding the world.
After studying many different texts on the ecology of Oak Savannahs in North America, several key species jumped out at me. They all occur in all of the major Oak savanna types and neatly stack together. These species are somewhat like a Rosetta stone for North American Staple food Production. In order of height these key species are:
Fagacae: Oak, Chestnut, Beech: Nut producing tall trees
Malus: Apples: Originally Native Crabapples
Corylus: Hazelnut: Pre-European dominant shrub
Prunus: Plums, cherries, peaches: Tree forms as well as shrub form
Rubus: Raspberries, Blackberries: Cane-fruit
Ribes: Currant, Gooseberry: Shade-tolerant, fruit bearing
Vitis: Grapes: Sun-loving climbing vine
Fungus
Forage
Animals!
Now scratch your head for a minute and look at that list again and think of the possibilities… 100ft of photosynthesis. Potentially 3-7 times the energy capture per acre as an annual field, and most significantly, it’s all perennial. Plant it once and you’re done. Forever. Any questions? No plowing ever again. It’s three dimensional. It’s diverse. It takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, adds carbon to the soil in the form of roots, leaves and wood. It provides habitat to wildlife, wild pollinators. It recycles nutrients, and attracts birds like you cannot imagine. Chestnuts, apples, hazelnuts, plums, cherries, peaches, raspberries, blackberries, currants, gooseberries, grapes, mushrooms and animals…. Sounds like a healthy farm to me!
But how does this relate to staple food production and how do we get there?
One doesn’t convert a cornfield to a 100ft thick 3-dimensional solar panel overnight. One doesn’t colonize a rock and turn it into paradise all of a sudden (especially in cold, temperate climates), and since we’re talking about large-scale, broadoacre systems intentionally designed to export FOOD to those of you in the suburbs and cities, there needs to be a transition from annual cropping to perennial polyculture, and several of the practices that accomplish this, fall under the definition of Agroforestry. Using the Agroforestry techniques of Alleycropping and Silvopasture, we can redesign America’s farms and convert them from corn and soybean wastelands into perennial polycultures in as little as 10 years. Although these intentionally designed food savannahs would grow and yield more abundantly on the richest of soils, they are able to thrive on poorer sites. Sites that are currently too steep or rocky to grow annual grains. This is where very large gains in food productivity planet-wide can occur, when land not currently growing staple food crops is planted to a staple food crop savannah.
Let’s go through the layers one by one and address the various species involved.
Fagacae: Oaks, Chesntut, Beech.
Oak is the most widespread savannah species on the continent. There is no region in North America on sites wet or dry, where some kind of oak can’t survive. They bear high-oil, high protein nuts and some oaks can reach over 100ft tall. They bear irregularly which is problematic for staple food production. Wild acorns are a huge, underutilized resource in North America. There are several startup food processing companies that are beginning to use acorns as an ingredient and it’s popularity for a livestock feed is increasing. Harvesting wild acorns is troublesome to many because it is another example of humans moving into another wild area and stealing food being used by others. However, there are nearly 100 million acres of former tilled farmland that have been put into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and planted to oaks. These represent an extremely large source of acorns that are not taken from the wild, but are grown on farms that formerly grew some kind of annual food crop. If the farmer doesn’t have a market for acorns and when the CRP program is cut by the government, and corn prices increase, they will bulldoze the trees and plant corn.
Beech is the tree with the smallest range of the three Fagacae, ranging north into Eastern Maritime Canada, south through the Appalachians, and West to the west coast of Lake Michigan. It too
Produces a high oil high protein nut. It unfortunately also bears periodically which is problematic as a staple crop. There are very few records of Beech being planted in former agricultural land, so stealing beechnuts from the cute starving chipmunks looks like our only option to harvest them as staple foods. Where are you beechnut farmers?
Chestnut lands right in the middle as far as having the largest range of the Fagacae. The American Chestnut is the most cold-hardy, but is susceptible to Chestnut Blight. Chinese Chestnut is functionally immune to the blight, but nowhere near as cold hardy as the American. Hybridized chestnuts, open pollinated crosses between American and Chinese Chestnuts are an unknown… Some are cold hardy, some are not. Some are blight resistant and others not.
Chestnut is unique among the Fagacae in that it produces a high carbohydrate, low oil nut. More similar to corn, than to other tree nuts. It also is unique among the Fagace in that it bears regular crops annually. In case one might wonder about the sustainability of a system such as this, one need not look any further than the Castagna dei cento cavalli, one of the top 100 oldest living organisms on the planet. It is also the tree that still holds the record of the greatest girth of any tree ever recorded… Ever! Step aside you itty-bitty Redwoods. This particular chestnut tree has been growing out of the bare rock on the eastern flank of Mt Etna in Sicily for over 4,000 yrs. Chestnuts represent corn that grows on trees and that can do so every single year for millennia!
Apples and Cherries: the Mid-story trees.
Does anybody need me to explain much about apples and cherries? High sugar, juicy fruit with yeast on the skin. Great for eating, dehydrating or fermenting into alcoholic beverages or vinegars for food preservation. The alcohol can be distilled for motor fuel.
Hazelnuts: There are two types of Hazelnuts native to North America, the American hazelnut and the Beaked Hazelnut. The beaked hazelnut has a smaller native range, but tends to be found further north and on wetter sites. The American hazelnut exists in the wild from 8000 ft in the rocky mountains, to east Texas and up into Manitoba. It is an incredibly rugged shrub and can tolerate fire, grazing and abusive 4 wheelers. The hazelnut found in most stores is the European Hazelnut grown only in the Pacific Northwest of the US and in BC. It is nowhere near as cold hardy as the American hazelnut and it is susceptible to Eastern Filbert Blight, a disease to which the American hazels are adapted. A great deal of work has been done with crossing European hazels with American hazels as well as selection of wild individual American hazels that produce high yields and a fledgling Hybrid Hazelnut industry exists in the upper Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states. The hazelnut is significant as a staple food crop, in that it is nutritionally similar to a soybean except that it has 3 times the oil. In addition to a food crop, hazelnut is an outstanding biomass crop. Annually, 50% of the per-acre yield by weight is nut shells, which burns as hot as coal and can be used in pellet burners for heat or gasifiers for energy production.
Raspberries, Blackberries, Grapes, Currants: All of these are significant economic species. They are used on an industrial scale everything from juices to wine, jellies, fillings, or dehydrated for addition into cookies, cakes, granola bars and energy bars.
The only above listed species that currently are “niche” marketed products are the acorns and beech nuts. All of the other crops are currently INDUSTRIES. Container loads of product are regularly shipped around the world. Not that this is the food system that most Permaculturists would want, but it is what currently exists it is what currently feeds us today whether we like it or not. The industrial food system can be the tool used to create the ecological systems of the future.
Livestock! The savannahs of the world teem with animals. Prior to human arrival, the North American savannahs literally seethed with mammals! 9 Species of ground sloth, 3 species of giant armadillo, several mammoth and mastadon species, 2 giraffe species, and of course, those minor grazers, bison, and elk and deer and moose and caribou and sheep and antelope and…
Likewise we can re-create this animal abundance on Permaculture farms. Livestock are amazing ecological tools when put in their proper place and managed properly. Cattle, hogs, turkeys, sheep, geese, and chickens can all follow one another rotationally through a designed agricultural savannah and never have to take a single morsel of food from the human food supply. (ie, they eat no grains) These natural bio-digesters take grasses, forbes and browse that is inedible to human digestive systems, and turn them into milk, eggs, meat, hides, bristles, glue, wool, and more. They help the woody crops by reducing nutrient and moisture competition with grasses and they fertilize the system with their manure and urine. They inoculate the soil with fertility enhancing microbes.
Poultry help to reduce insect pests first by eating bugs, and second, by scratching apart cattle and hog dung to get at fly larvae. Poultry also happen to be the organisms adapted to eating the seeds of annual plants. The hard seeds from annual weeds that spring up in the wake of the larger grazers, are combined in the gizzard with rock fragments and snail shells where they are ground up by mechanical action. Fowl can be used as soil remineralizers when given hard rock minerals as grit. They take it from the feed trough and poop it out all ground up fine and mixed with digestive enzymes.
Animals in this system provide weed control, pest control and they eat vegetation indigestible to humans. Meat eating takes on an ecologically beneficial role in this case by freeing up more grains for human consumption and providing income to the Permaculture farmer in the process of establishing their perennial farm ecosystem.
If humans don’t harvest all of the yields from this system, the livestock can serve that role. All of the above mentioned livestock will gladly eat all of the fruits and nuts and berries as a supplement to their forage-based diet.
In case you hadn’t noticed yet, perhaps I’ll point out that this whole system can be managed with no fossil fuel inputs!
Lets go over a basic system design in conclusion and tie it all back into staple food crops.
Tall Tree: Chestnut – Corn substitute. A staple carbohydrate.
Medium Tree: Apples/cherries - Food, Juice, vinegar, alcohol
Shrub: Hazelnut- A staple food crop. Protein & Oil, Shell.
Smallfruits: vitimans, antioxidants, juice, alcohol
Fungus: wood and leaves become protein… Magic!
Livestock: Milk, meat, eggs… staple foods.
The above ecological system is not a theory. It is not a nifty idea for one to blog about. The above ecological system has persisted on this planet for a zillion or so years. As Permaculturists we are supposed to observe nature, imitate natural patterns and interact with nature to create human habitats that are ecologically sound and economically profitable. The Oak Savannah biome covered hundreds of millions of acres across North America since the last ice age. Until we have planted an equal number of acres of Agricultural Oak Savannah mimic’s, there’s really no need to “discover” or “create” new and productive plant guilds. What we need now is boots on the ground. We need thousands of YOU, MILLIONS of US planting Agricultural Savanna mimic’s all across the country. If we plant them on land that is currently NOT producing staple food crops, every calorie and every nutrient that comes from that system is a positive gain for the human food system. This is one way that we can dramatically increase the human food supply and produce staple foods in Permacutlure systems.
Published in The Permaculture Activist #49
New Forest Farm, Viola, WI. USA. (see PC Activist #40)
A long time ago, in what seemed like a galaxy far, far away, (1993 Permaculture Design
Course at Jerome Osentowski's CRMPI, Basalt, CO. USA) a group of idealistic
Permaculture students hurt their brains as they wrestled with a long-held Permaculture
myth... As they ate their bowls of Certified Organic rice and beans, they attempted to
figure out how their teachers could teach (and apparently believe) that with
Permaculture, we no longer need farms as they exist today. "How could this be?", they
thought... 85% of all Americans (indeed all HUMANS) reside in cities with populations in
excess of 250,000 souls. Even with every square inch of urban and suburban space
dedicated to intensive Permaculture systems, (and this is a LONG way off) there is not
enough sunlight falling to the earth in these places to provide the total calories needed
to
sustain the masses of humanity that live there. Sure, there would be adequate quantities
of fruits, berries and greens, roots and shoots and fungi, but what about staple foods?
What about Calories? Protein?...in short, the equivalent of millions of acres of rice,
beans, corn, wheat, oats, millet, barley, and the others. The calories that sustain the
human race come predominantly from annual crops. Primarily the grasses.
Add to that the fact that an annual grain field is bare, black earth for 8 months out of
the
year, and the fact that billions of tons of the worlds best topsoil erodes each year from
these fields, that the majority of the worlds toxic pesticides and herbicides that pollute
surface and groundwater are applied to annual croplands and that in the USA, annual
agriculture is responsible for nearly 17% of the country's CO2 emissions and you have
some idealists with cranial vapor-lock. What is a Permaculture Activist to do?
They took it to the farm. An unlikely partnership consisting of residents of 3 different
nations (Canada, Italy and USA) formed and decided to create a Permaculture Farm. Not
a "Perennial Grain Pipedream", or a fabulous non-profit fundraising mechanism, but a
REAL farm... Where the land is managed in order to produce foods, fibers, medicines
and livelihood for its managers. One aspect of "livelihood" happens to be sufficient cash-
flow to meet cash needs and enough to invest in the basic productivity of the enterprise.
For the squeamish I apologize if I use a dirty word, but the farm must produce a profit!
If a
Permaculture farm isn't profitable and depends on organized begging to sustain it, no
other farmers will adopt the techniques. Roundup ready soybeans have been so rapidly
accepted into the American mainstream because it takes fewer passes across a field to
grow them... which translates into lower fuel, labor and equipment repair bills which
translates into more cash staying at home and keeping the family farm operating for a
few more years...
Permaculture NEEDS farms and farms NEED Permaculture. In order for this marriage to
take place, the techniques must translate into increased profit on the farm.
SO... In 1994 Xylem, Phloem and Pith (as they then called themselves) bought a 106
acre farm in Southwest Wisconsin, USA. Run-down pasture land was the least expensive
land at the time...land that was too hilly and rocky to plow, land that had no trees so
wealthy hunters or timberland investors weren't interested in it. Land with soil so poor
and eroded that it wouldn't even support decent grazing. It was land that NEEDED the
restorative medicine of Permaculture.
First order of business was trees... Plants with the longest maturity horizon needed to
be
planted FIRST if they were ever to be any use to the current manager... Around 20 acres
of "forest" trees were planted...Black walnut, Red and White Oak (for nuts and high value
timber), Black Locust for Nitrogen and poles. Shade tolerant Sugar Maple (syrup and
lumber) were interplanted with fast-growing hybrid poplar. White Pine, Black cherry,
White Ash and many many other species were planted for lumber, firewood and, of
course, diversified wildlife habitat. Reforestation trees are rather inexpensive.
Seedlings
yanked from the ditches on the sides of roads are free and seeds collected in parks and
from sidewalks are plentiful enough to reforest nations.
A multi-species windbreak was planted behind the house which was being owner-built
one dollar at a time primarily with locally milled lumber. The "front line" (windward
side)
of the windbreak consisted of Hybrid poplar followed by a double row of White Spruce
interplanted with hundreds of highbush blueberries. To the leeward of the spruce/
blueberries came a double row of Pine-nuts... Korean Stone Pine and Limber Pine being
the survivors. To the leeward again of the Pines was planted a Juglans species
polyculture... Butternut (J.cinera) , Japanese Walnut (J. ailantifolia) and Buartnut (J.
cinera X ailantifolia) were interplanted with wild plum, black raspberry, silky dogwood
and grapes were trellised on the walnuts. Whoever claimed that Walnut cannot be used
in polycultures never bothered to observe the variety of useful plants that grow in
association quite happily with them... So far blueberries, grapes and raspberries are
being harvested in household quantities from this system. The trees are big enough to be
capturing snow drifts which helps to store water in the soil for the trees to use during
the
periodically droughty summers. The trees are not quite big enough to prevent the wind
from spinning the AIR 303 Wind generator, part of the household power supply.
The next major series of plantings took place little by little over seven years... 1000
apple
rootstocks were planted in polyculture systems over a period of 3 years. (Apple comfrey,
daffodil, iris, rugosa rose, hazelnut, currant, grape and a variety of medicinal herbs)
The
apple rootstock are still in the process of being grafted to heirloom varieties and those
with known pest and disease resistance.
FINALLY, the Staple food crop trees could be planted... Badgersett Research Co. (see
PC Activist #40 and www.badgersett.com) Hybrid Chestnuts and Hazelnuts are grown as
replacements for corn and soybeans respectively. Many of these trees were planted in
Silvopasture systems, where cattle, swine and poultry free-range. Others were planted
into alleycropping systems where Organic Produce was grown between rows of trees in
order to cash-flow the farm. Throughout the years between 3 and 12 acres of produce
has been grown, primarily cucumbers, zucchini, peppers and winter squash. Being
Permaculturists, we, of course, despised the "black-desert" of bare-soil annual
agriculture and began to plant more and more asparagus. As of this writing the
asparagus has been planted between the rows of over 2 1/2 acres of chestnuts.
12 acres of Hazelnuts were planted into an "Oak Savanna analogue" with white oaks
planted on 60' centers, hazels close planted in rows alternating 10 and 15ft wide and a
host of prairie flowers growing among the hazels.
After a mere 8 seasons, the project is bearing remarkable fruit (besides annual
produce)... for the past 2 years there have been "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" at
local holiday fairs. Hazels have been in production for several years, but have not yet
overwhelmed our ability to eat them all! Within 3 or 4 years yields should approach
20,000lbs of hazels. Asparagus has been very very good to New Forest Farm! As
members of the Organic Valley Cooperative (www.organicvalley.com) we have access to
wholesale organic produce markets nationwide. (look for my acorn squash on your co-
op's shelves this winter!)
Since the project began, the farm has been profitable every year except for one. Last
year several produce plots were taken out of annual production and planted to chestnuts
and drought required that we buy a huge watering tank to keep the newly planted trees
alive. 10,000lbs of water being pulled up and down hill caused our 60yr old bubble-gum
and duct-tape tractor to need major repairs. All of this added up to a HUGE financial loss
of a couple hundred bucks.
The house, always a work in progress, has progressed slowly but surely, one dollar at a
time. From day one it has been off the utility grid. The electrical system began with a
small 20Watt PV panel a car battery and a flourescent light. Over the years it has been
added to. It now has 3 different kinds of PV panels, 12 deep-cycle batteries and it powers
lights, water pump, 12Volt refrigerator a 12Volt chest freezer, and, of course, tunes!
Roofwater is collected and stored and used for watering livestock, washing and
irrigating.
New Forest Farm does not have a website. We have an Earthsite.
Since this is supposed to be a brief update and I'm finding it impossible to keep it
that
way, I'll write a sudden ending.
To contact or visit Mark and Jen Shepard (Erik and Daniel too!) you can call them at
608-627-TREE or e-mail at forestag@mwt.net
