Learning the craft knowledge of farming involves learning its vocabulary - it's got jargon just like any other field. Some highlights -
Fairly obvious:
apple drops - apples that fell off the tree
side dress - add fertilizer to the side of a row of crops (I learned this one on a farm where they did use chemical fertilizer)
dry off a cow - not with towels! to stop milking her/milk her less and less frequently so that she stops producing milk
Less obvious:
thresh - to get grain out of its inedible packaging (removing husk & awns)
tillering - suckers on grass plants (like wheat!)
sucker - lateral shoots
haw & gee - left and right (or right and left?) when directing draft animals
stanchion - a restraining device for cows or sheep that lets them eat but doesn't let them move around; we use them for milking
maddock - like a hoe, but for moving mud around rather than skimming the top couple inches of loose soil
Shetland, Hereford, Aricana - breeds of sheep, cow, and chicken, respectively
peen - delicately hammering to put an edge on a soft metal tool
snath - the handle of a scythe
scorzonera, skirret - root vegetables that we will be growing next year
cardoons - related to artichokes; bred for their stems rather than flower buds; I didn't manage to get them on the seed order...yet
mawl - the heavy, relatively blunt tool used to split wood
creosote - n. burnt; the crusty black carbonaceous charred stuff that collects in a chimney when a fire isn't burning hot enough
polled - cattle without horns
Yay new words! Go forth and win at Scrabble!
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
So I think Agroecosystems Management is about the coolest thing ever. Note that I'm living pretty far removed from family and friends (both old and potential new), doing hard work in the cold for little pay, setting out to follow a career path that could leave me both poor and physically beaten, all in the name of Agroecosystems Management. Which ought to tell you something. Maybe it's that I'm crazy.
But how could you not love Agroecosystems Management? Let me be more clear: Sustainable Agroecosystems Management. Irresistable.
Being a good farmer means, in part, keeping track of the soil, water, and "biology" on the farm. It's the complexity of interactions between these that I find so seductive. Soil needs to have healthy levels of various nutrients so crops can grow; it needs a healthy soil ecosystem - a common rule of thumb holds that a billion organisms will live in a teaspoon of soil if it's managed properly; and good structure - those bacteria and fungi need oxygen and water, so the soil needs to have enough tiny spaces for those to be exchanged and absorbed. Then there's water - crops need not too much and not too little; mismanaged water can both leach valuable nutrients or just erode away the soil itself; and driving to plow or plant on wet soil squishes the structure I mentioned earlier.
Then there's the "biology" - all the different living and dead organisms and how they interact. Obviously the crops need to be healthy - they need to be planted at the right time and temperature so that they don't freeze or fail to thrive; they need to be weeded so that they get first choice of the available nutrients, water, and sunlight. They need pollinators, and those bees and flies need habitat themselves, best found at field edges or uncultivated areas.
Maintaining these healthy ecosystems means that a few crop pests - fungal, bacterial - will live in the soil. The trouble with spraying chemical fungicides and insecticides is that they often kill off more than the desired species, and removing species from an ecosystem, even a soil ecosystem, shifts and weakens it. There are several ways of dealing with crop pests while avoiding chemical sprays. You can rotate where you plant your crops so that they're not in the same place year after year. You can study how the pest affects the plant, and avoid the pest - if they only attack older plants, keep planting young ones and ignore or pull out the ones that have succumbed. If it only attacks in late summer, plant earlier in the summer and then stop harvesting. If the damage isn't too severe, you can decide to live with it. But above all: diversify - plant lots of different crops, so that you won't lose the year's work to that one pesky fungus.
So that's the boiled down and simplified version of agroecosystems management. What I love about all of this is that each piece interacts with every other piece, and if you can understand how it all fits together and be smart about management, you can build a glorious whole of a farm that produces amazing food and nurtures life. That's the theory, and the dream. I'll keep you posted on how the reality turns out.
But how could you not love Agroecosystems Management? Let me be more clear: Sustainable Agroecosystems Management. Irresistable.
Being a good farmer means, in part, keeping track of the soil, water, and "biology" on the farm. It's the complexity of interactions between these that I find so seductive. Soil needs to have healthy levels of various nutrients so crops can grow; it needs a healthy soil ecosystem - a common rule of thumb holds that a billion organisms will live in a teaspoon of soil if it's managed properly; and good structure - those bacteria and fungi need oxygen and water, so the soil needs to have enough tiny spaces for those to be exchanged and absorbed. Then there's water - crops need not too much and not too little; mismanaged water can both leach valuable nutrients or just erode away the soil itself; and driving to plow or plant on wet soil squishes the structure I mentioned earlier.
Then there's the "biology" - all the different living and dead organisms and how they interact. Obviously the crops need to be healthy - they need to be planted at the right time and temperature so that they don't freeze or fail to thrive; they need to be weeded so that they get first choice of the available nutrients, water, and sunlight. They need pollinators, and those bees and flies need habitat themselves, best found at field edges or uncultivated areas.
Maintaining these healthy ecosystems means that a few crop pests - fungal, bacterial - will live in the soil. The trouble with spraying chemical fungicides and insecticides is that they often kill off more than the desired species, and removing species from an ecosystem, even a soil ecosystem, shifts and weakens it. There are several ways of dealing with crop pests while avoiding chemical sprays. You can rotate where you plant your crops so that they're not in the same place year after year. You can study how the pest affects the plant, and avoid the pest - if they only attack older plants, keep planting young ones and ignore or pull out the ones that have succumbed. If it only attacks in late summer, plant earlier in the summer and then stop harvesting. If the damage isn't too severe, you can decide to live with it. But above all: diversify - plant lots of different crops, so that you won't lose the year's work to that one pesky fungus.
So that's the boiled down and simplified version of agroecosystems management. What I love about all of this is that each piece interacts with every other piece, and if you can understand how it all fits together and be smart about management, you can build a glorious whole of a farm that produces amazing food and nurtures life. That's the theory, and the dream. I'll keep you posted on how the reality turns out.
Why friends, they may think it's a movement, and that's what it is
I am well aware that the local-sustainable food movement is still somewhat of a fringe endeavor, with ties to the hippie culture of the 60’s but with its own character and values. It’s not about free love or gourmet food or violent demonstrations or (at least as far as I’m concerned) smoking a lot of pot, although each of those are close cousins. It grows more from the desire to strengthen both natural and human communities, and comes with a strong bias against the parts of the current establishment that have undermined these.
You can tell the food-hippies first by their diets (the number of approaches is actually a little ridiculous) – raw, fermented, local, seasonal, vegetarian, vegan, grass-fed only, grown or baked or even caught and killed yourself, total avoidance of processed food, food rescued from a dumpster or even trash can. You can also tell them by their steel water bottles or Ball jars (plastic leaches into food and water and it doesn’t biodegrade); by their satchels that they knitted themselves or made from recycled trash or that a peasant in the third world got a fair wage to make. Everybody owns at least one of those brightly colored handkerchiefs with the black or white paisley design, and they’re tied around a thick mop of dreadlocks or stuffed into pockets and substitute for disposable tissues. A crowd of food hippies will have a higher density of small tattoos and face piercings than most, although not usually to the extremes of bikers or punks. Dyed hair is pretty rare – styled haircuts scarce from their expense, their stylishness, and impracticality – you try to weed with bangs in your eyes. Somebody is always willing to pull out a guitar, and bangos, fiddles, and pennywhistles are not far behind – although it seems that men are usually the instrumentalists, while women only sing. We wear quilted vests and chunky knitted hats somebody – us or our friends – knitted for us; second-hand clothing, scarves woven in the third world, Carhartt’s. We all know about Micheal Pollen, Alice Waters, Barbara Kingsolver, as well as Joel Salatin, Wendell Berry, and Eliot Coleman – dig further and people will know Rudolf Steiner, Wes Jackson, David Schumacher. We are predominantly Caucasian, with a small but healthy rainbow of other descents.
We are earnest. Trusting. We try to be friendly as a rule, if not outgoing. It doesn’t take much probing for someone to admit to finding beauty in leaves, seeds, trees, animals, landscapes, rich soil, handcrafted anything. We’re trying to live by our ideals and have decided that certain sacrifices of personal comfort, convenience, and familiarity are worth it (deciding to Consume Less Stuff makes shopping a completely different activity, let me tell you).
I’ve also found that this ethos often comes off as holier-than-thou, which drives everyone else around crazy – when this is on purpose, it’s frustrating, but when it’s not, it’s troublesome. Yes, I think that humans need to change their consumption habits – not just with food, but also with buildings, transportation, Stuff Accumulation – but I struggle a lot with how to bring that about. Yelling at whoever is around is a tried and true method of Not Helping, but I’m still looking for a productive alternative that works for me. I recognize the parallels with religious conversion – the True Believer wants to bring everybody into The Faith, a whole new way of living and being – and we’ve seen how alienating that can be as well.
You can tell the food-hippies first by their diets (the number of approaches is actually a little ridiculous) – raw, fermented, local, seasonal, vegetarian, vegan, grass-fed only, grown or baked or even caught and killed yourself, total avoidance of processed food, food rescued from a dumpster or even trash can. You can also tell them by their steel water bottles or Ball jars (plastic leaches into food and water and it doesn’t biodegrade); by their satchels that they knitted themselves or made from recycled trash or that a peasant in the third world got a fair wage to make. Everybody owns at least one of those brightly colored handkerchiefs with the black or white paisley design, and they’re tied around a thick mop of dreadlocks or stuffed into pockets and substitute for disposable tissues. A crowd of food hippies will have a higher density of small tattoos and face piercings than most, although not usually to the extremes of bikers or punks. Dyed hair is pretty rare – styled haircuts scarce from their expense, their stylishness, and impracticality – you try to weed with bangs in your eyes. Somebody is always willing to pull out a guitar, and bangos, fiddles, and pennywhistles are not far behind – although it seems that men are usually the instrumentalists, while women only sing. We wear quilted vests and chunky knitted hats somebody – us or our friends – knitted for us; second-hand clothing, scarves woven in the third world, Carhartt’s. We all know about Micheal Pollen, Alice Waters, Barbara Kingsolver, as well as Joel Salatin, Wendell Berry, and Eliot Coleman – dig further and people will know Rudolf Steiner, Wes Jackson, David Schumacher. We are predominantly Caucasian, with a small but healthy rainbow of other descents.
We are earnest. Trusting. We try to be friendly as a rule, if not outgoing. It doesn’t take much probing for someone to admit to finding beauty in leaves, seeds, trees, animals, landscapes, rich soil, handcrafted anything. We’re trying to live by our ideals and have decided that certain sacrifices of personal comfort, convenience, and familiarity are worth it (deciding to Consume Less Stuff makes shopping a completely different activity, let me tell you).
I’ve also found that this ethos often comes off as holier-than-thou, which drives everyone else around crazy – when this is on purpose, it’s frustrating, but when it’s not, it’s troublesome. Yes, I think that humans need to change their consumption habits – not just with food, but also with buildings, transportation, Stuff Accumulation – but I struggle a lot with how to bring that about. Yelling at whoever is around is a tried and true method of Not Helping, but I’m still looking for a productive alternative that works for me. I recognize the parallels with religious conversion – the True Believer wants to bring everybody into The Faith, a whole new way of living and being – and we’ve seen how alienating that can be as well.
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