RE: [compost_tea] How Healthy and Self-Sufficient Can a Garden Get?

From: Robert Monie <bobm20001_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2004 08:07:31 -0800 (PST)

Hi Tim, John and Everybody
 
In my question about how sustainable agriculture can become (i.e., how much of a closed system you can get), I did not mean to single out Fukuoka, because similar goals can be found, for example, in Mollison's Permaculture, Ruth Stout's No Work Garden (based on mulching over thick hay), Robert Hart's Forest Farming and many other approaches.
 
Steve Groff in his large, commercially successful Pennsylvania farm (http://www.cedarmeadowfarm.com) has used thick beds of hairy vetch and rye to vastly decrease the amount of imported fertlizer and pesticide necessary. He uses a rolling device to flatten out the green manure, rather than trying to kill it with an herbicide. Readers familiar with traditional Asian farming will recognize this as the "press down" method so often used in Japan and China. The no-till movement in the US (of which Steve Groff is one of the leaders) has the potential to become a very low input system approaching closed loops if it can keep the thick beds of mulch growing in sufficient quantity. Adding nitrogen fixing trees and shrubs (for example false indigo or any of the Elaaeagnus varieties) might move self-sufficiecy up even more, but perhaps at a price: productivity might decline because of the shade cast by these relatively large nitrogen fixers.
 
To me, the ideal garden or farm would try for the perfect balance between a closed-loop system that grew everything needed (including compost fertlizer) "on site" and high productivity. Fukuoka does indeed claim to have achieved this balance on his citrus and rice farm in Ehime, Japan back in the 1960s and 70s, when he was selling to the Tokyo health food markets. Two year ago, I thought that a follow-up on Fukuoka-style farms would make a great thesis or even dissertation. I wrote to over two dozen agriculture and horticulture departments in universities throught the US, including many of those Fukuoka visited on his American tour to see if any had demonstration or experimental Fukuoka natural farms. Many wrote back that they had organic demonstration gardens, but not one said they had a Fukuoka-style closed-loop garden. Japanese friends reported that Fukuoka is still alive and still giving talks (as much about religion and philosophy as about farming), but his old farm i
 s
 over-ridden with weeds, and his son has a new, rather conventional farm (tractors, fertilizers, spray) running on the adjoining property that makes no attempt to be closed-loop or follow the elder Fukuoka's methods. No one seems to know why the son abandoned his father's methods for sure, but some speculate that the natural farming approach was not as productive as conventional farming.
 
I still believe an examination of closed-loop Fukuoka-style farms would make a great research paper (to say nothing of a great farming method to practice), but I am unable to find any Fukuoka farms in the US to visit. My Japanese friends say that urban dwellers in Japan go to the mountains on weekends to grow a little rice or greens Fukuoka's way and have a great experience communing with nature, but then go back to buying from organic farms or conventional farms. (Anthropologist Pamela Asquith develops this theme in an entertaining book "Japanese Images of Nature.") Even in Japan, seekers of sustainability are apparently unable to find Fukuoka-style natural farms productive enough to sell significant quantities of produce to the public. One exception seems to be the natural farmer Yoshikazu Kawagushi (Anyone know much about him and his methods?).
 
Anyone knowing of successful closed-loop Fukuoka farms in the US, especially those that welcome visitors and like to share their knowledge, please send me names and addresses. I will make a point of contacting them all and visiting some. Unlike hydroponics, organic farming or permiculture, Fukuoka-stye farming appears to have no publication, magazine or journal devoted to its practice, and definitely no presence on the "market" (in the form of seeds or plants for sale).
 
Let us suppose that Fukuoka (Ruth Stout, Bill Mollison, Robert Hart, Pat Whitefield, John Jeavons, Dave Duhon, David Holmgren, or anybody else) did achieve a closed-loop system in the 1960s and 70s on his (her) own farm--would the intelligent use of freshly prepared aerobic compost tea have increased the productivity or made the farm even healthier? So, we are full circle back to the original question: how sustainable can gardening and farming become (and what is the role of compost tea in that syle of gardening--is it a stop-gap, a further improvement, or an essential part?)
 
Bob M.
 
 
John Dunbar <jdunbar_at_dunbarco.com> wrote:
>>>>my understanding is Fukuoka attained exactly what he set out to do....a self sustaining, highly diverse landscape that serves needs beyond just food production.
 
He did achieve this according to his books. But, he did recommend that you locate your "farmette" near an outside source of compostable materials. I too thought that what he did with his nitrogen fixing trees and shrubs was unique. He would often bury them and then plant his citrus trees on top.
 
I believe you will always need a source for compostable materials outside of your growing area. But given the small size of farms that Fukuoka recommended, this should easily be a part of any farm or large lot in the U.S.
 
John Dunbar
Texas
 
 
I believe Fukuoka has gone way beyond theory. Maybe his followers have not been able to attain the results (has this been proven, are we certain???) but my understanding is Fukuoka attained exactly what he set out to do....a self sustaining, highly diverse landscape that serves needs beyond just food production.
 
Tim
 ---Original Message-----
From: Robert Monie [mailto:bobm20001_at_yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 11:59 AM
To: compost_tea_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: [compost_tea] How Healthy and Self-Sufficient Can a Garden Get?


Hi Everybody,
 
Certainly everyone on this list believes that gardening/farming has become too chemicalized, destroying the soil web that nature took millennia to evolve. Not using chemical fertilizers and herbicides and trying to provide mulch and green cover crops to restore the natural balance are steps few would argue with.
 
But I wonder theoretically how healthy can agricultural systems (gardens, farms) become and how nearly can they approximate closed system, perpetual motion webs? This question has been asked by scientists working in the Biosphere and NASA CLESS programs, which require growing environments essentially sealed off from Earth's normal atmosphere, but it seems more interesting when applied to systems on the surface of the Earth (like yours and mine). John Jeavons, for example speculated that one could acheive a relatively closed system by allocating substantial amounts of land for compost and using just that compost to fertilize the crop section. Masanobu Fukuoka in his famous "One Straw Revolution" went even futher to claim that a self-sustaining system could be made by seeding crops directly into a thick perpetual or self-seeding ground cover of short white clover, aided by nitrogen fixing trees and shrubs (mimosa or acacia, for example).
 
I'm not sure any followers of Jeavons or Fukuoka have achieved the self-sufficiency these authors proposed, but the ideal remains an interesting one, and a fit subject for both back-yard tinkerers and serious scientific experimentors.
 
My bottom-line questions are 1) could a natural garden be acheived in which the balance of microbial life and plant health were so good that compost tea would not be necessary except rarely and briefy in extraordinary circumstances, and 2) how sustainable and self-sufficient can a growing system be? Were the hopes of Jeavons and Fukuoka unrealistic or are they theoretically attainable.
 
I hope this question is not too far from the concerns of this list. I use and apporve of aerobic compost tea myself. We often talk about the chemically bad systems that we have to try to improve. For a moment, at least, we might look at the other extreme and ask, how good can an unchemicalized system get?
 
Bob Monie


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Received on Sat Jan 03 2004 - 11:30:25 EST

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