Inner City Farmer

Last evening, I attended an Intro to Permaculture and Sustainability talk at Habitat Suites, an extremely green hotel just up the road from my house. The discussion was led by Dick Pierce, the head of the Austin Permaculture Guild, and it was exactly what I needed to hear right now.

While I have been working in relative isolation, there is a vibrant community of permaculture enthusiasts in Central Texas, and they are more than happy to share all the knowledge they’ve collected over the years. I can’t tell you how enjoyable it was to sit in a room full of people who shared the same enthusiasm about creating a sustainable society from the ground up. In fact, the discussion was so inspiring I am planning on attending the Guild’s 10-day permaculture design course that starts in late September.

If I am unable to attend the workshop at Esalen, any money that gets donated to this project (and I’ve already received a donation; muchas gracias!) will go towards paying my entry fee into this design course. If I only attend this course and not the one at Esalen, I will hardly be upset. In fact, it makes sense that I learn how to farm my urban plot from people who live right here in Austin, people who understand the seasons and the soil.

In a recent job interview—that’s right; you heard me correctly, unfortunately—the woman grilling me from behind her desk asked me what I would do if I could do anything. I didn’t hesitate before telling her that I would run my farm full-time, turning it into a more productive operation and, perhaps, a demonstration site. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. (Was I really supposed to say that I wanted to program computers all day long?)

This is the great conundrum of the Inner City Farm. In my effort to extricate myself from the clutches of the greater market economy, I often become completely dependent on that economy. For example, photovoltaics. I would like nothing more than to slap some solar panels on the roof of my house so that I could generate my own energy and not have to rely on Austin Energy, but solar panels are freakin’ expensive!

Here’s another example. I would love to attend the workshop on urban permaculture being held at the renowned Esalen Institute in three weeks (and featured in the flyer above). It’s right up my alley. I’m sure I would learn a ton about urban sustainability and could share that information with those who follow this blog, but like solar panels the workshop requires a hefty investment. Esalen ain’t cheap.

To keep the dream alive, I added a DONATE button to this site today. It’s over there by the cheesy ads (which, if you click on them a hundred times a day, would help me keep my chickens in feed). I figure if everyone who reads this blog donated between $10 and $20 I could attend the workshop. The fee for the workshop ranges between $535 and $1,120, depending upon your accommodations. I would be happy to sleep on the floor just like the hippies who made the place famous in the ‘60s did. If I’m able to raise the money in the next ten days or so, I promise to write about the workshop every day I’m there. If not, no biggie. There will be other conferences (In fact there’s one in Austin this fall).

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?

On Friday, Jen, creator of the Rutabaga blog (one of several blogs I’ve recently discovered and enjoy, the others being Garden Girl and Trailer Park Girl), made a comment noting the distinction between self-reliance and self-sufficiency. In case you missed it here’s what she had to say: “Self-reliance is exactly that. Relying on your skills, wits, knowledge, and savvy to get by, even when that includes banding together with other people. While self-sufficiency implies providing for every one of your needs with your very own two hands. Which is damn near impossible, if not isolating.”

Up to this point I have been all about self-sufficiency, but in my original vision of this urban farm project I was hoping to adopt something that more closely resembled self-reliance. This was my plan: while relying on some of the precepts of permaculture to turn my land into a self-sustaining forest that would feed me and my son in perpetuity, I would at the same time be expanding the habitable space on the lot using my skills at natural building. I aspire to build another house on the back side of the lot using straw bales or cob (I believe in urban infill; this land can certainly house more people), but because I’ve never built a house before I knew I needed to take it slow and practice making smaller buildings.

So I built the gazebo all by myself. Doing this I learned how to make footers and a (really basic) roof. The end result looks a little Gilligan’s Island-ish, but it’s functional. It works. It keep the rain off my earth oven and cob bench. It also gave me enough confidence working with cob that I could instruct others how to do it.

The next project I hope to embark upon is building a toolshed out of cob. It will vaguely resemble the gazebo, but it will be much larger and will have a “real” roof on it. To ensure that the reality matches my vision, I know that I’m going to have to recruit some outside help. To make that much cob, I’m going to need many extra hands, and to design and build a roof that will ensure rain never touches my tools I’m going to need the assistance of an experienced carpenter.

But, laughably, before I can even start building the toolshed I need to finish the Garage Project. After replacing its crappy old door with a cob wall, I am now trying to integrate the room into the house proper, which means I need to talk to an electrician and a plumber. These are skills I simply don’t have. And yet I’m not just going to get on the phone and call 1-800-P-L-U-M-B-E-R-S-B-U-T-T. I’m hoping to use either the Austin Time Exchange Network or Skillshare Austin, two organizations that champion the exchange of labor for labor instead of for money, to recruit some help. Or perhaps someone reading this will know someone in Austin who might be able to assist me in exchange for….?

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.