The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon February 24th, 2009

My last post on this subject focused on little livestock for people in cities, apartments and small lots (and people on 500 acre farms who want to keep bees, chickens and guinea pigs).  Today’s post is on livestock for slightly (or vastly) larger spaces. 

You probably know what your choices are already – the common ones are horses (which provide draft power, transportation, pleasure, great manure, offspring), donkeys (traction, transport, guardianship, manure, offspring), mules (even better traction, manure, transport), Water buffalo (milk, tillage, livestock, manure), cows (milk, meat, manure, leather, offspring), goats (milk, meat, fiber, manure, packing,  offspring), sheep (wool, milk, meat, sheepskin,  manure, offspring), llamas (fiber, guardianship, packing, manure, offspring), alpacas (fiber, manure, offspring), turkeys (feathers, meat, the occasional eggs, offspring, manure), geese (manure, tillage, weeding, eggs, meat, feathers/down, property alarm/watch animal and offspring) and pigs (meat, offspring, manure, tillage).  I’m going to leave out buffalo, fallow deer, ostrich, emu and other fairly wild critters, on the assumption that if you want to raise these, you’ve already done your research.  Today will focus on common domestic livestock.

No animal does only one thing – and so no animal should be gotten for only one purpose.  Or rather, you may want sheep because of the wool, but you need to have a plan for how to deal with the other useful outputs – and whether you make a profit or get back your costs will probably depend on this.  Particularly if you are going to butcher animals, it honors them to make the best possible use of everything you get from them.  The old “everything but the squeal” model of pig butchering is pretty much what you want in your animals – so even you are thinking of milk when you get your goats, you need a plan for manure handling, one for what you will do with the kids, etc…

The other important thing when managing large animals (which can be thousands of pounds heavier than you, and even if they aren’t, often with a good head of steam can run you down) is that you work hard to make sure that they mostly get to be animals in the way they are designed to be.  That is, try and get them to do more or less what they want to do, or if you have to do something that will displease them, plan for it and have help, whether a good herding dog, a few extra pairs of hands, or the right equipment.

What animals you have will depend on a whole host of things – the time you can devote to them, the size of the animal, your physical abilities, your land base, whether there are potential males nearby for breeding, temperature, water availability and landscape, and your taste in creatures.  That last should not be underestimated – my friend who owns the sheep that graze our pastures each year says that there are sheep people and goat people.  She is a sheep people.  I am clearly a goat people.  I’m perfectly happy to help with her sheep, and eventually I may even own a few.  But I know my limits – the grand passion for sheep does not reside in me.  When a person walks towards a sheep, they walk away, generally (unless, of course, that person is carrying a bucket of feed ).  When a person walks towards a goat, they generally head over, to see if you are concealing a bucket of feed somewhere, maybe in your shirt.  Or maybe the shirt tastes good.  Or you might scratch their heads.

Now there are exceptions to this – all animals have personalities.  There are cuddly sheep, smart turkeys, malleable mules and presumably bad tempered water buffalo.  Uncut males of all species are generally more volatile than females, and the young of all species more energetic and excitable.  But generally, creatures have their characteristics, and you can broadly speak of them, if not by species, by breed within species. 

How much land do you need for any given creature?  Well, not much if you are going to buy or cut all their feed – enough for them to be comfortable.  But if you mostly want your animals to find their own food (usually the most time and money efficient way), it varies a lot.  How good is your pasture?  How well an animal will do on a pasture depends on the animal – horses generally can tolerate lower quality pasture than dairy animals, for example.  It will depend on rainfall – around here, a cow can be supported on about an acre.  In dryer places, it might be 20.

Small multi-purpose farms are generally well suited to multi-purpose, often older or heritage breeds of animals.  These were bred when polyculture farms were normative, and while they may not lay eggs as well as the most highly bred layers, or milk as well as the best bred milkers, they often are a good combination animal – they might not produce quite a fine a meat as a Dorset or as fine a fleece as a Merino, but for our climate, Romneys give a pretty good optimization of fleece, meat and suitability to the environment.  In a different place, with different priorities, it might be wiser to choose otherwise.

One factor to take into account is cost – I’m sure I’ll hear cries of horror from alpaca farmers, but I don’t think you should spend many thousands of dollars for any livestock – livestock, like clothing, has its trends.  This creature or that one is the next hot thing, and people will get rich breeding them.  And for a short while that’s true – and then they breed enough that the bottom drops out and they become ordinary livestock again.  I’m not convinced that the current trendy livestock (alpacas) are worth anything like the cost of them.  On the other hand, if they or something else is perfect for you, maybe it is worth the risk.

So what’s the right animal for you?  Well, if you have a small patch of land, there are very small versions of these critters – some geese that lay, live mostly on grass and provide meat for your family might be the best choice, particularly if you live in a tough neighborhood and need an alarm system.  There are miniature sheep, and very small goats.  I would say that you should probably not get into milking unless you really like the way it organizes your life – I love milking, but for someone with more desire to roam, it could be tough.

If you have the land, your choices are limitless – you can have as many livestock as you want and need.  I do recommend that people track their costs, though.  Keeping records of food, vet and other costs can be very helpful in determining whether you have a barn full of large pets or actual homestead helpers.

The more you think about animals in integrated ways on your land, the more you will like them – that is, putting animals where you want them, using their instincts and needs to meet your needs is what tends to make them profitable and helpful.  So, for example, putting your pigs on ground you plan to garden on next year will get the land rooted up and manured.  But be careful about overstated claims about what animals can do – sure, geese can weed your garden.  But some of the greens you grow may look an awful lot like greens.  Yes, you can have draft horses on 10 acres – but you may find that most of your draft work is growing food to well, feed your horses.  Not a problem if you love them and have other reasons for keeping them.  But think it through.

Our own journey to large livestock has been slow – we started the farm with chickens, moved on to ducks and then geese and turkeys, and only just last year added the sheep (which are not ours) the guard donkey, and the goats.  We’re still mulling over whether we will want more livestock – or if we will be content with our goats. 

My own suggestion is start slow, make sure housing and fences are in place, and know what you are getting into – get to know your creature, read about it, talk to people who raise them and learn as much as you can before you are confronted with a real live creature, considerably bigger than a bread box.

 Sharon

• Uncategorized
• Comments(19)

Sharon February 24th, 2009

Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil to start.  One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter.  I’ve got my own candidate for the worst soil ever – the stuff in the beds around my house.

Oh, texturally, it is among the best I’ve got – sandy loam, warms up nicely, isn’t too wet like much of the rest of my soil.  It had some nice enough foundation plantings, and I mostly ignored it for the first few years I was here.  But a couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to make use of this growing space, and then I discovered that my soil, was, well…dead.

By dead, I mean there wasn’t a living thing in it.  Not a beetle or a spider, and especially not an earthworm.  It was weird.  I knew that some previous owners of our house were umm… shiny green lawn people, and I don’t know if that has something to do with it, but this stuff was “Its dead, Jim” dead. 

So we embarked on a campaign of soil improvement.  Any kind of soil improvement has two parts.  First, there’s getting your soil up to speed.  In some cases, this might not be much – maybe some ashes from your stove or a little lime to even out some acidity, or maybe a little rock powder for trace minerals, or a light dressing of the rabbit poop your rabbits make sure you get anyway.  If your soil is basically in good shape – you’ve had a soil test and you know that it is high in organic matter and sufficient in macro and micronutrients (check out Aaron’s soil fertility basics if these concepts aren’t familiar).

But what if it isn’t?  What if you’ve got dead soil, like mine, or rock hard clay, or soil (also like mine) that has been leached and has too much water in it?  Again, there are two projects here – the first is the short term building of soil so that you can get to gardening.  The second is the long term maintenence of soil health, and the addition of more organic matter, so that eventually, your soil can hold enough organic matter to save the world – or at least sequester as much carbon as possible.  Plus, things will grow better.  Win-win.

My favorite way to build soil on something that is completely unworkable is the lasagna method, which is pretty much sheet mulching with some dirt or compost on it.   This makes raised beds, which is good if what you have is either wet or rock hard, or if you are, say putting your dirt on gravel or something toxic.  It might be tough in a dry, hot climate though – raised beds dry out and warm up in the spring earlier, and keeping them wet might be tough.  In that case, you might consider digging into the ground, creating sunken beds with the same mixture.

If you need to amend soil, you’ll have the choice of synthetic or natural soil amendments.  Generally speaking, you’ll want the natural ones.  I’m not a complete organic purist – I think there are times when artificial fertilizer use is justified.  But there’s a price to be paid for its use, and care is needed – otherwise you can end up contaminating your water supply, wasting your money and depleting your soil overall.  I don’t generally use synthetic fertilizers, and if I were to use them, I’d use them only on untilled soil with plenty of organic matter added, in small and precise quantities. 

You can buy an organic fertilizer mix, or you can make your own.  I generally use a mix of alfalfa or soybean meal, rock phosphate, and wood ashes, along with greensand and kelp, as well as occasionally special additions to deal with soil types or plant special needs.  But I don’t know about you, but I can’t mine rock phosphate from my property, nor do I produce enough alfalfa to fertilize my garden.  So this is not a long-term sustainable project.  I use these amendments sparingly, where they are needed to bring soils up to basic fertility. 

Then, we try to keep it there.  That means cover cropping a portion of our garden every year, integrating dynamic accumulator plants into our plantings (these are plants that bring up nutrients from the subsoil), undercropping with nitrogen fixers (these plants fix nitrogen from the air), mulching (we try to grow as much of our own mulch as possible in place – another good use for undercropping – a nice planting of buckwheat under tomatoes, or white clover under garlic can provide a living mulch and then the next planting cycle’s mulching materials), and the heavy application of organic material – that is, compost and composted animal manures.

Every time we take something off of the soil, we are removing nutrients from our soil, and depleting, to some degree, the organic material available to them.  High levels of organic material are essential for soil life and health – so faced with dead soil, the first thing I did was put my turkey poults in a chicken tractor on top of the border for a few days.  The easiest way to move the poop to the garden beds is sometimes to move the poop makers there .  Now since this was raw manure, I made sure there was plenty of bedding, and I wasn’t planting food plants there right away.  Had I needed to use it immediately, I would have switched to already composted manure, and gotten out the wheelbarrow.

Next, I planted the foundation plantings to annual alfalfa, since it was already summer, and warm.  Cover crops generally have a couple of seasons – they are spring, summer or fall sown.  You sow the fall crops to overwinter – to hold soil in place, and add organic material.  Winter rye, hairy vetch, fava beans (in some climates) are all common winter sown cover crops.  Spring sown crops are generally cut down in summer, and either stay in place all season (things like red clover), providing multiple doses of fertility and green material, or they are cut down (oats, say) to provide organic material for the fall garden.  Summer crops (buckwheat, annual alfalfa) can go in after the peas or the early lettuce, and grow fast and fill the space until fall.  For a site you don’t plan to get to for a year or two, perennial crops can do a lot to regenerate soil.

Cover cropping is very place specific – the best crops are specific to your climate, seasons and locality, so talk to your cooperative extension.  They are a powerful tool for building fertility, adding organic matter and improving soil, and one that is worth getting to know. 

My goal in the long term is for these beds to provide a warm, dry, moderately fertile site for mediterranean herbs and a few flowering perennials.  That is, I wasn’t trying to produce fertility for growing heavy feeders, like greens or corn.  So after the alfalfa, I added some greensand and kelp, a light layer of compost, and planted into the mulch I’d already established.  In went lavender, oregano, several marjorams and thymes, a rosemary that probably didn’t survive the winter this year, and some plants that like or tolerate similar conditions of slightly dry soil, lots of sun and only moderate fertility – catmint, echinops and malva.  And they’ve thrived. 

Many perennial plants make wonderful fertility enhancers to annual gardens - whether perennial nitrogen fixing shrubs, whose leaf litter and root nodes enhance the trees and perennial plantings around them, comfrey and stinging nettle which can be cut for mulch or compost, small trees integrated into garden sites to provide leaf mulch, or perennial living mulches.  This is one of those things that has potentially enormous long term yields, and has really only begun to be explored in a deep way.

The best soils for sequestering organic matter will be those that are in perennial plantings, that have constant inputs of organic matter – these include forests that are enriched yearly by leaf drops, permanent pastures which are manured by grazing animals (Peter Bane, editor in chief of Permaculture Activist magazine found that Joel Salatin’s grazed pastures sequester as much carbon as a similarly sized forest after decades of grazing), and perennial gardens that are carefully managed to provide their own needs.

I maintain fertility in the perennial planting I established in these beds by the occasional dumping of animal bedding on the ground, permanent mulch, wood ashes from our stove, and a strewing of kelp.  I’ve also grown an annual crop of chamomile, a good dynamic accumulator, and left everything but the flowerheads in place.  I give the whole thing an occasional boost of nitrogen by dumping dilute urine over it – urine is safe and diluted 1-7 (1-10 if you don’t drink enough), it provides a real boost to plants. 

More demanding annual feeders get composted chicken or goat manure, plant compost, weed and manure teas.  Other plants might also get living mulches, and I rotate plants as wisely and carefully as I can, following the heavy feeders with nitrogen fixers or light feeders undersown with nitrogen fixing cover crops.  My whole garden gets rotating quantities of worm casting to supplement the soil and improve its texture. 

Meanwhile, in maintaining, we try to put back what we take off.  Crop residues are left in place, either chopped down and incorporated into the permanent mulch or they are burned in our woodstove (for heavy, dense stalks) and returned as ash.  Some of the nitrogen is returned in the form of urine.  We mulch as much as possible with our own mulches – grass clippings, leaves and plants grown for compost or as mulch plants.  We try not to steal too much from any one other place – but we gratefuly take things people discard, like leaves from yards when we venture into suburbia, or horse manure from our horse-keeping neighbors.

Animal manures have a very powerful role in gardening – in a perfect world, we’d compost all human manures until they were thoroughly pathogen free, and restore the soil with what we take off.  But whether this is safe is debatable, and anyone who shares food will not want to risk a lawsuit.  So composted animals manures are a powerful tool for maintaining fertility – one of the reasons that polycultures of animals and plants are generally more effective than either alone.  We use composted human manures only on decorative and tree plantings.

Two particular ways of maintaining fertility deserve mention here – fungal soil support, by mycorrhizae (tiny fungus  that colonize the soil) and terra preta.  Mycorrhizae have a symbiotic relationship with the roots of many plants, and can enhance the ability to plants to uptake nutrients and deal with water stress among other things.  Many soils are fungi deficient, and an application of mycorrhizae can improve your plants ability to absorb the nutrients in your soil.

Terra Preta is a fascinating subject – and one still uncertain.  Terra Preta involves adding plant based charcoal (ie, not the briquets at the grocery store) to your soil.  What this does is still a matter of speculation – it isn’t clear, for example, whether the charcoal itself or the organic processes it enables are actually what creates the rich soil involved.  Nor is it clear that all soils respond equally well to terra preta inputs – for example a study found that boreal forest soils did not seem to respond to biochar applications.  That said, however, there have been some fascinating results – biochar supplemented soils seem to stimulate nitrogen fixing in legumes, for example, and while charcoal supplemented soils enable plants to take up more minerals, the soils deplete more slowly.  I’d encourage everyone to consider experimenting with biochar as a way of improving your soils. 

We’re not a closed circle by any means – we still take advantage, as long as they are available and we can afford them, of valuable amendments.  But the idea is to lose as little as possible, while getting the best possible balance between improved soil, the health of the world, and a system in which you need to bring in a little less from offsite each year.

 Sharon

• agriculture , garden design
• Comments(9)

Sharon February 21st, 2009

This post seems to be mostly a melange of randomness - look for something better organized on Monday.

First of all, if it seems like I’m not posting quite so much lately, you are probably right.  While I was writing the three books, I don’t think I realized just how tiring and stressful it was to be working on one book while writing proposals or editing another.  And it is only in the last couple of weeks that I’ve suddenly realized that I’m tired – not just regular tired, but tired of writing and analysis, tired of organizing my ideas in my head or looking at life as a series of potential essays, tired of the computer.

The first few weeks after finishing Independence Days were just a madhouse of catching up on all the things I’d put off because I simply couldn’t think about them.  It took until nearly mid-February for things to really settle down, and right now, a slightly slower pace and less dense writing really suits me.  In fact, at the moment, I don’t really want to be writing anything but the blog – and that, perhaps a little less often.

It has been chronically hard for me to balance the question of how to both live my life and write about it.  I’m not sure what balance between agriculture and writing, home life and work life are going to emerge for me – and the economy may well take a hand in this, if Eric’s job isn’t secure.  But for the first time in a long time, the question is open to me – I loved writing my books, I loved having the chance to do them, but now, I feel like I finally have the chance not to be driven entirely by events, but by what I choose and what I want.  I doubt it will last – events may decide for me, but I’m trying to just relax and enjoy things.

 For now, I don’t want to write any books.  I want to plan my garden, play with my kids, read some novels, write a little, watch events and wait – I’m not sure I’m even yet at the point of wanting to plan for the future.  Instead, I just want to breathe a little.  So expect a little less content here, until I find my balance.

Second, have you been to your dump lately?  I know not everyone has one, and I’ve been grouchy about mine lately.  They’ve reduced the kinds of recycling they are taking, and I’ve been bugging Eric to sign us up for trash pickup, which comes up our road anyway, and recycles more varieties.  I’m a bit sick of hauling our recycling into town to drop in our friends’ bins. 

But we’re still doing the dump, and may I sing its praises, just this once.  Eric took the trash out, and came back with the best haul of cool stuff from the dump ever.  In this haul was a set of six beautiful and large blue speckle mugs (to replace the cracked and handle-less ones), some bowls, and – get this – a *complete* Encyclopedia Britannica, Macro and Micro, from the 1990s with yearly updates to 2002.  In perfect condition. 

 Ok, I’ve changed my mind – I love the dump.  The heck with trash pickup – I don’t want any fewer excuses to go there.  Now I just need to see if anyone is unloading bookcases .

 Finally, the Garden Design Class will wind up this week, and the Adapting in Place Class will start next Tuesday.  Of all the classes I’ve done, the AIP class was the most fascinating, exciting, troubling and wonderful.  It deals with one of the big questions – how do we deal with our shifting situation where we are, with what we have.  I think that events are moving fast, and many of us have assumed we had more time to make changes – now, a lot of us are confronted with the fact that we’re not going to move to a farm or to the walkable paradise, we’re not going to build the perfect superinsulated straw bale house . 

Adapting in place will run online for four weeks in March, with most of the material posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Aaron Newton and I will run the class together, bringing his expertise together with mine and helping people set up a plan for how to live well with what they have, where they are (or in a familiar location).  We do have a few spaces.  Cost of the class is $150 – all the scholarship spots are filled, but we’ll be posting plenty of material for free on our respective blogs.  If you’d like to participate, send me an email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com.

Have a good weekend,

 Sharon 

• Classes , books
• Comments(26)

Sharon February 19th, 2009

This is a slightly revised version of an older post, but one that matters to me so much that I think it is worth republishing for the design class.

It can get confusing, when we speak of our gardens or our farms.   When we talk about “farmers” who are we actually talking about? What’s “agriculture”, and what’s “gardening?” Where does “homesteading” “smallholding” “horticulture” and “subsistence farming” fall in the mess?

I think (and yes, all the real farmers yell at me, and I don’t entirely blame them), that “farmer” should be the umbrella term for remunerative food production. That is, I think you are a farmer if you grow food for sale, for barter or as a significant portion of your own personal economy – that is, I think we call them “subsistence farmers” for a reason.

My criteria for this is simple – we don’t live in isolation – the word “farmer” should mean something across national and cultural boundaries. That is, a “farmer” in India, and a “farmer” in Canada should be able to recognize one another as fellow creatures with a shared profession, and art. As we are speaking now, the word “farmer” as it is used in the rich world erases the vast majority of world farmers out of the language, and that shouldn’t be acceptable to us. As important, it gives us a mistaken sense of what agriculture actually is- even what agriculture was. In the 1940s, a large amount of victory garden literature spoke of “garden farms” – that is, home gardens that operated, like farms, to both supply the subsistence needs of the family and to serve the large public interest by freeing up food to be sent overseas.That is, it isn’t that long even in North American history that a “farmer” has been a guy with a thousand acres. And in the rest of the world, it may never work that way:

http://www.ifpri.org/events/seminars/2005/smallfarms/sfproc/Appendix_InformationBrief.pdf.As

You’ll note from the first paragraph, even the experts have a hard time with the naming problem – and so they just call them “farmers.” (My computer does not permit me to use PDFs, and for some reason I can’t copy text from the html format, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to look back).

That is, the World Bank and the UN FAO have essentially deemed as farmers anyone who calls themselves a farmer, sells food, or subsists primarily on their own food. The distinction they make is “small farmer” vs. “large farmer” – but all of them are farmers.Right now, the majority of the world’s farms are small farms. The average farm size in Africa and Asia is 1.6 hectares (for those who are accustomed to acreage measurements, a hectare is about 2.5 acres – thus, the average farm size in Africa and Asia would be a bit under 4 acres). This means that there are a whole lot of farms much smaller than 4 acres.

95% of all farms in many parts of the former Soviet Unions are under 1 hectare, and that they provide the majority of all agricultural production, a total of 52% of all food eaten in the region.The US, as of the last Ag Census, contained 66,ooo+ small farms under 2 hectares.  About half of the world’s food already comes from small farms.

Add to that Helena Norberg-Hodge’s observation that *2 Billion* people live almost entirely on subsistence agriculture that is low input and largely organic (because they can’t afford not to be), and we can see that agricultural norms are simply different than what we Americans and Canadians think of.

The claim that large farmer are essential to produce grain turns out also to be false – in India, 40% of all food grains are produced by small farmers in parcels under 2 hectares, and not totally dissimilar data is found in other developing nations. It may well be more efficient to produce grain in more centralized areas, by some definitions (the distinction here between efficiency of land and efficiency of labor would apply in some cases), but for those who immediately leap to the conclusion that we’d never have any grain if we didn’t have big farms, this is a useful observation.

But aren’t all small farmers poor? In a 2004 analysis for the _Handbook of Agricultural Economics_, Eastwood, Lipton and Newell observe that in developing nations, small farmers tend to be disproportionately taxed, while in developed nations, they tend not to receive the benefits of agricultural subsidies. That is, small farmers tend to get the worst of both worlds, with both poor and rich nations tending to disadvantage them economically.

That’s not to say that the economic disadvantages of agriculture as we do it now (which apply to most North American and European farmers except during ethanol booms) don’t make farming a difficult choice – but it does suggest that just as agricultural policy has driven farmers in the US out of business for decades, agricultural policy is also working in many cases to impoverish farmers in the poor world. FAO agriculture economists Binswanger, Deinenger and Feder, for example, conclude that generally speaking larger farms in the poor world are dramatically less efficient than smaller, family farms, but that policies favor them so strongly as to elide much of this difference. That is, in both the rich and the poor world, we work very hard to keep our small farmers poor. It is interesting to try and imagine what a systematic set of agricultural policies that supported small scale, diversified agriculture would do to the present equation of poverty and size.

Interestingly, it seems that in both south Asia and the former Soviet Union, the trend that economic development generally creates towards larger farms seems not to be the case – that is, the Handbook of Agricultural Economics cited above notes that as of 2004, neither Russia nor south Asia seems to be following the pattern of getting bigger as they get richer. In Russia, the authors speculate, it may be because of the powerful impact of the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, where consumers now associate small farms with food security. In Asia and parts of Latin America (Brazil and Argentina have steadily increased farm size, while smaller nations have declined, implying that averages are not as much to the point here as the articulation of two seperate trends), where farm sizes actually seem to have declined in the later part of the 20th century.

So what should we take from all this data? First, that small farms are normal, and that the majority of the world’s farmers are small farmers of less than 5 acres. That is, it is hard to claim that someone farming a comparatively small piece of land is not a farmer, if they constitute a majority – in fact, perhaps it would be more accurate to call many large scale farmers (as some prefer) “agribusinessmen” and leave the term farmer to the majority.

In addition, in many, many nations there are substantial numbers of farms that are pretty much the same size as a suburban lot. The people who farm them are farmers. The average Bangladeshi farms half a hectare. In Barbados, the average piece of land is 1.6 hectares. In China, 0.67 hectares, in India 1.34 hectares. Lebanon 1.2, Japan, 1.2, Egypt 0.95. And of course, averages mean that many, many of these farms are quite a bit tinier.So it must be that farming isn’t about land size.

Even in the US this can be true – in her glorious book _The Earth Knows My Name:Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic America_, Patricia Klindienst notes that there is no clear boundary between those who call themselves “farmers” and those who call themselves “gardeners” – some of the gardens are bigger than the farms, in fact. That is, even in America, there are thousands of small farms, being worked by thousands of small farmers, and size doesn’t seem to be the defining factor.

So perhaps what matters is what you are doing on your land, not how big it is. How should we narrow this one down – the tax purposes model is, I think, insufficient to offer us an overarching definition that crosses borders from the rich world to the poor (I once read that in at least one US state, one way to be a farm for tax purposes is to own a cow – period, and in that state (which one I’ve forgotten) there are a number of people keeping cows in their garages, buying their hay, and accepting a tax write off, but this may be purely anecdotal).

One obvious way to distinguish between farmers and gardeners would be by economic remuneration – that is, if you sell farm products, you are a farmer. But this model effectively removes from the language thebillions of subsistence farmers who sell little or nothing off their land. These people live their lives as farmers, with all the benefits and disadvantages that applies – we cannot erase them from the language. In most cases, they are taxed in their countries as farmers.

Such subsistence farmers exist in the rich world as well – there are not a huge number of subsistence farmers these days, but they do exist, and I know a few. They grow their own food, cut their own wood, hunt, and work off the farm or sell enough to pay the land taxes. One of my neighbors, Paul, is a subsistence farmer, living from his half acre garden, two deer a year, a couple of wild turkeys and enough work as a substitute teacher to pay for taxes and beer. He jokes that he works as a teacher 5 days a month, and grows and hunts food the other 25, but when the government asks him what he does, he’s a teacher.

We cannot say that having a non-agricultural job is a criteria for ceasing to call someone a farmer either – according to the USDA, 71% of all US farmers of all sizes have either an off season, or off farm income, or a household member who provides an off farm income. In _Ending Hunger In Our Lifetime_ ed Runge, Senauer et al notes that this is true of many poor world farmers as well – not quite 80% also do seasonal or off farm work, or have a household member who does so. The numbers are oddly similar.

In fact, Peter Rosset in _Food is Different_ tracks the ways that farmers subsidize consumers and their own agricultural practices, and notes that in general, farmers subsidize cheap food more than governments do – that is, because farming is not merely a job but a culture and a way of life, farmers will do almost anything to keep their land – including sending family members off the land to allow those who farm to growing corn or rice or beans at low prices. See:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-keep-farming-until-money-runs-out.html

A farmer is not someone who never does any work off the farm, then. She is not someone (btw, “he” is a “she” – the majority of the world’s farmers are women – and many poor nations have long traditions of agriculture and land ownership in women’s hands) who owns a lot of land, or necessarily sells much or any food in the market place.So what does distinguish farmers from gardeners? Not much.

Perhaps, then, we should think about the distinction linguistically. “Gardener” derives from a the french, and means “an enclosed space” – that is, its linguistic focus is on limitations. A “garden” linguistically speaking, is seperated from the space around it by cultivation.

“Farm” and “farmer” on the other hand come from the same root as “to form” and imply creation. The oldest English forms of the word, going back to Beowulf and the Domesday book, also meant “a banquet or feast” – that is, farms and farmers are linguistically tied to bountifulness, to eating, to abudance and plenty, and also to the power of creation – by implication to the power that created “terra firma” – that is, the linguistic implication is that farming is acting in G-d’s image, creating plenty.

My own take, is that as valuable as the word “gardener” is, the kind of agriculture we’re trying to create is more appropriately described as “farming” than as gardening – that is, a truly sustainable agriculture happens not in boundaries, but across them. Is a permaculture garden a bounded space, or do its lines blur into the trees and wildlands around it? Is an agriculture designed to create mixed use pasture for wildlife and farmed animals about its fences, or about what can pass through them? Is a family living in part on what they grow and what they forage and harvest from untended spaces in their town or city tending a garden, or farming their community?

It isn’t that gardening isn’t a good word, it is that I think farming is a better one.All of the other terms offer some kind of subset of the above. It isn’t that I have any objection to someone calling themselves a smallholder, a gardener, a homesteader or an edible landscaper, it is merely that there exists an umbrella term that serves, not just because it is accurate, but because it describes so well what we must become.

Sharon

• agriculture , garden design
• Comments(17)

Sharon February 19th, 2009

What can I do with my shade?  That is the question for a lot of us – we know that the trees on our property – or our neighbor’s – improve our lives and provide necessary habitat, carbon sequestration, shade.  And yet – there’s also that question – what can I grow there?

Well, trees for one.  If you heat or cook with wood, whether inside the house or if you can build an earth oven or a rocket stove for cooking, you can make some use of fallen wood, or careful and wise coppicing (assuming they are your trees) and pruning.  You can plant more trees at the edge of your woodlands that grow fruit, nuts or produce syrups (sugar maple or birch).  You can grow high quality wood for carving or making furniture. 

You can have the satisfaction of a yard that produces copious food for wildlife, even if it doesn’t produce a lot of food for you.  You can accept that tiny wooded oases are sometimes the best we can do in a world where forests are increasingly lost. 

Still, you don’t have to give up on all food production, or even the hope of a little income from your land, just because you’ve got shade.

Now it really depends on what kind of shade you’ve got.  Dappled shade, or shade part of the day offers more options than deep shade.  In light shade, you can often grow fruiting plants, especially currants and gooseberries and strawberries.  They may not produce quite as well as in sun, but if the shade is light enough, they’ll do fine. 

 You can also make use of seasonal shade – spring bulbs, or early harvested crops can be grown under trees that leaf out late.  Many greens can handle intermittent light shade, particularly if they get 3-4 hours of morning sun.  They may even do better with it in warm climates, where hot afternoon sun can be a killer.  Perennial greens like sorrel and Good King Henry seem to do ok in light shade.

Wild leeks (ramps) and chickweed are two incredibly nutrious and delicious plants that like fairly deep shade.  So do many medicinals – goldenseal and ginseng are perhaps the most obvious woodland herbs, but many herbs tolerate at least some shade, the exceptions of course being the mediterraneans – basil, oregano, thyme, etc… which like sun.  But meadowsweet, marshmallow, mints and a host of other medicinal herbs do extremely well in light to medium shade.

And then there are mushrooms – if you want to produce maximum nutrition and taste in shady spots, the place to go is to fungi.  In many cases, growing mushrooms will also improve your soil, nurturing the complex web of fungi and bacteria that keep soil healthy.  My favorite resource for fungus is www.fungiperfecti.com.

There’s a chronic balancing act in our exercise of growing food – it is urgently important that we take places where humans live, and use them wisely, to preserve wild places.  At the same time, sometimes the only wild places for miles are the ones we create in our yards and on our farms.  Our shade should never been seen simply as “the place where I can’t grow food.”

Sharon

• garden design
• Comments(10)