Inner City Farmer

Yesterday evening, I was walking the dog around the block when I ran into a neighbor, Adam, who was pushing his daughter Ada in a stroller. We got to talking about a bush on the side of the road that had recently flowered but only for a couple days. All its purple petals lay on the ground, their color rapidly fading, as we spoke.

Adam made his keen interest in horticulture immediately apparent. He pointed out a plant at the edge of the dry creek bed (taro, I think it was) and informed me that it was edible. Which got me talking about the pond I hope to create in my backyard someday and the plants I hope to grow in it. Which made him think of Tony, who lived just down the road from where we were standing and who I just had to meet.

Like Adam, Tony was my kind of guy. He spoke the same language I do, peppering his sentences with references to “synergy” and “feedback loops” and “aquaculture.” He seemed especially well versed on the last, and I made it known that I wanted to hear more. He promptly led me to his backyard where he showed me his aquaculture system (some of which can be seen in the picture above). In its heyday vegetables—mostly salad greens—grew in the three bins, which held gravel and nutrient-rich water that came from an aquarium full of fish. After the vegetables purified the water, it returned to the fish tank. It was a perfect closed-loop system that grew both veggies and fish… until it got so ridiculously hot and shut down. The same thing happened to the aquaculture project at the Rhizome Collective.

The whole explanation of how it works only took a couple minutes, but it was enough to get me hooked. I now know what Project #91 is.

We are in a severe drought.

Several weeks ago, I set up a rain barrel to catch what little rain falls on my roof.

Now that’s using my head for something other than a place to stick a baseball cap.

When I first discovered natural building, I kept hearing the name Ianto. At the Natural Building Colloquium in Kerrville, Texas last fall, it seemed every other conversation started or ended with Ianto-this and Ianto-that. “Who was this guy?” I asked myself. Unfortunately, out of all the celebrated natural builders who attended the Colloquium Ianto Evans was the only who couldn’t make it. My interest was piqued, however, and as soon as I got home I ordered his book The Hand-Sculpted House, which I credit for my desire to remodel my entire homestead using cob.

There’s another name that keeps appearing in my life, and it’s Masanobu Fukuoka. While reading books and articles about different philosophies of gardening, I keep seeing references to this man. Curious to find out more about him, I checked out his book The One-Straw Revolution from the library. For anyone with an interest in permaculture and organic gardening, it should be required reading.

Here’s Fukuoka’s life story and philosophy of farming in brief: As a 25 year old in Japan, he was working as a plant pathologist for the Plant Inspection Division of the Yokohama Customs Bureau when he had an exhaustion-induced epiphany that modern agriculture was FUBAR. He promptly quit his job and returned to his family’s farm where he practiced “do-nothing farming,” which didn’t require plowing, fertilizing, adding insecticides, or even making compost. His philosophy of farming mirrored his philosophy of life, that human beings, full of ego and arrogance, are prone to meddling where they shouldn’t, that if left to its own devices the natural order will be just fine, thank you very much.

As basic as this idea is, it was revolutionary at the time. It was also effective. Fukuoka’s farm produced just as much rice as ones of equal size that used modern practices, and it did so with only a fraction of the inputs and labor. He let nature do all the work and provide all the nutrients, and he used the time he freed up to write books and further develop his philosophy. “There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song,” he writes in The One-Straw Revolution.

In the 1970s the world finally discovered this man and anointed him one of the pioneers of the organic farming movement along with Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale. But Fukuoka was never in it for the fame. He wrote several books and lectured on occasion but slowly dropped out of the public light. At 95, he is still alive today, living somewhere in Tokyo, but he no longer farms and even his fan website has no direct contact with him. Who is Masanobu Fukuoka?

People are always asking where I get the clay that I use to make cob.

The answer: From a pit I dug in my backyard.

The cost: Free.

The long-term goal: To transform the pit into a pond, complete with a “creek” circling my oak tree and, ideally, some fish and ducks to inhabit it.

Our garden is just not producing like I hoped it would. The heat wave we’ve been enduring has stunned most of the plants into a catatonic state. I can almost hear them shrieking in pain. Interestingly, all the edible “weeds” I planted and rarely water, like the row of Lamb’s Quarters, are doing great. Which is just one more reason I need to start building my soil and creating a true food forest out of predominately native plants and trees.

Luckily, we still have a freezer full of meat, roughly 25 pounds of sausage from the wild hog I “harvested” last fall. (Sadly, we finished the last of the venison several days ago.) I know, I know—it’s at this point in the conversation where I lose half my audience. For many, permaculture and veganism go hand in hand. In fact, a couple weeks ago a woman on the permaculture listserv out of the Bay Area that I belong to started a lively discussion on this very subject. Her stance was that, basically, if you didn’t practice both you were going straight to hell. I was happy that several members chided her for being so exclusionary.

I understand her position. Yes, we could feed the world’s population many times over if we stopped eating animals and stuck to a vegetarian diet. Yes, the way many animals are raised and slaughtered in today’s industrial food system is cruel and unsanitary. Yes, we don’t need animal manure to fertilize our soil—we can do just as good a job growing nitrogen-fixing plants like beans and peas or planting a “green manure” like clover and tilling it into the soil.

I hear all these points and they’re valid, but I also agreed with the member who responded by saying, in effect, “Permaculture is a fairly exclusionary practice as it is. Do we really want to make it more so by alienating those who eat meat?” This same member went on to tell a story about an eco-village that disbanded because of this very issue, as if practicing permaculture alone wasn’t enough.

I would never argue that veganism is bad in any way, but I would like to leave you with some food for thought (pun obviously intended). We, as a species, survived for thousands of years living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Such a way of life made us not only appreciate animals, but in many cases revere them almost like deities. It was when we discovered agriculture that many of our greatest problems were born. We started buying and selling land. We began trading goods. We started treating animals like chattel. We began fighting over property. Hey, I’m just saying.