Harvesting fruit on stilts

A way to grow larger trees in less need of pruning and with more robust root stock, without having to worry about going up and down a ladder.

More info about contemporary farmers using them (for pruning, mostly) here. Search drywall stilts for 15" - 40" tall. How to make them taller? 

You can take two pair of stiltis, cut the foot off one set and the top off the other. put them together and you can make a pair of 80" stiltls out of the two pair. There a two crews here that use em just that way, I just don't want to fall from that high up. In other words, where you are used to unsrewing the bolt to let them out is actully the top part of the second section which has the same tubes under them. Hard to explain with a keyboard, but if you think about it, you'll figure it out.

Or, here is a link to a 48"-64" pair of drywall stilts, "Aluminum Dura". 

Notes from PV, Greg Judy

From this thread at permies.

Greg Judy We were doing everything wrong in the early 90’s and I was going bankrupt. I loved the land, I loved the animals, and I thought there had to be some way for me to do what I love to do. I was down to my last $8, in a terrible ordeal that was taking all my income (a divorce). I started running animals on other people’s land! I began to build a nest egg. There are people who want you to graze their land. I was doing Management Intensive Grazing—grazing the plants when they are tender and green. We were taught to hit the plant when it’s the size of your finger. We can’t let the grass go to seed! It worked great until the drought in July. We had to ship cattle every summer. What do people do who own their cows? They feed hay. I met a guy in Africa doing “mob grazing” Alan Savory calls it holistic high intensity grazing. (He’s not fond of the mob term.) We are talking about healing the land with animals. We’ve got to get the animals back on the land. This (pic) is land that I drove by (idle) my whole life. I first leased it when I was 37 years old. “Your first purpose in life should not be to own the land, but to control the land.” I went to the county courthouse, I found the owner, he was in Texas. We got a 10 year lease. After a year, the guy came up, saw what were doing, tore up the lease and said “you have a lifetime lease.” He saved my life. He gave me back the lease money. Picture of cattle with green plants up to their shoulders. Folks say “it looks like you let your grass get a little tall.” He says yeah, that’s a beautiful thing. Think how many tons of carbon are in there. We’ve taken a lovely animal that can live on solar energy (the cow) and turned her into a fossil fuel machine. Plant diagram: we just want them to take the tips of the leaves. That’s the candy, where the energy is highest in the plant. Where to start? Focus on animal performance first: you cannot save the world until you save yourself! If you are out of business, you won’t be doing much grazing. Yes, there are all sorts of marvelous things that can happen, but if you mistreat your animals for just a few days, she will not give you a calf next year. Full Recovery Period. Grazing immature plants will slow the regrowth. The boot stage is right when you can see the bulge of where the seed head is going to come out. That’s the perfect time to graze it. Only take the top third. When the cows can hit a field like this (picture of grass with seed heads) they are doing well. Picture: same field, trampled grass. Note: we didn’t take it all. Feed Soil and your livestock. You’ve got to monitor daily grazing patterns. You’ll see fresh trampled litter on the soil. You need to look for proper gut fill on the left side of the animal in front of the hip bone. Picture: cows with poor gut fill - you can see a shadow in front of the left hip on each cow. If you can fit a coffee cup in that hollow for more than one day, she will stop making good milk. Q: can you see this on other animals? Yes, you can see it on sheep. Goats. I don’t want to talk about goats. (laughter) If you can throw water through a fence, it won’t hold a goat. You need to stand on the left side of the fence opening when you move the cows to a new spot, so you can watch that left side as they go by. Picture: cow with the “death triangle.” Triangle formed by the spine, the last rib and the bottom of that non filled gut hollow. Stay away from cows with long legs. If you can open up a newspaper under that animal, don’t buy her. You want short legs, belly dragging on the grass. Minature cattle. Yeah, be careful, as long as you can market them. Those little guys, they can look at grass and stay fat, but they will kill you if you take them to the market. (Sounds like people don't buy them.) If you’re selling commodity, be careful. For your own family to eat, sure, they're great. Picture: “proper gut fill” Black and white cattle. Consider getting light colored animals if you are in a place that gets hot. If you’re in Montana, Minnesota, sure, have the black animals. I know that black is hot right now, but. . . . Make changes slowly: less stress on the livestock and on yourself. This way your mistakes will not cost as much. Ian came in to see what we were doing. I was still working in town. We had herds on three farms in a five mile circle. Ian said “what you’re doing is not sustainable.” You are moving cattle twice a day and working all day in town. You’re either going to burn out, drop dead, or your wife is going to divorce you. You’ve got to combine those herds of cattle. Put an ad in the local paper that you’re going to have a cattle drive, with a bonfire and music. Charge people $250/head to help you move cattle! (laughter) OK, they didn’t do that. But he said, make this change slowly. He didn’t follow that instruction. He combined all the herds that very day. You know what I did that night? I went horseback riding with my wife. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of ONE HERD. What level of density? Start at lower stocking densities and work up. To calculate this, you need to know the weight of your herd. Monitor cow health. Check out the coat. Picture of a cow’s neck with lovely shiny fur, natural part at the ridge, lush thick fur and hardly any flies. If you would rub your hand on her, it would come back oily. The other cows have hundreds of flies on them. She is making a lot of oil and it drives away flies. Planned daily moves. Keep it simple, start with one move per day. The higher the stocking density, the more mob moves required per day, but as you begin, it can be less frequent. The more frequent you move them, the faster you will build soil. Stupid professor: mob grazing doesn’t work - we put them in at 1 million pounds/acre and the paddock was destroyed the next day. THE NEXT DAY? Observe the mob. do they act satisfied, limited bawling, proper rumen fill, limited health issues. Once they get into a new place, they should settle in and put their head down and graze. If they’re walking around, you need to figure out why. Check your water. If you’re going to sell grass finished beef, just please finish the animals. Picture of “Finished beef.” He looks so darn full, it looks like his britches are going to pop. When we walks, he should waddle. Look at those wrinkles at the base of the tail and all up the neck. Things to look for. grazed area extending past the hot wire (too long) bare soil (too much) spot grazing (too little) trailing (too long) Picture: pasture looks like mowed lawn and they’ve reached under the hot wire. You’ve left them there too long! Trails: he will give new strips of pasture daily, he doesn’t “back fence” The cows will keep walking back to the water tank. This will work up to three days. Four days of this and you’re getting a trail—bare soil. If he had “us” (pretending we’re cattle) in pasture, it would be like 750,000 to a million lb density. (This room is PACKED!) He’d have us here maybe 5-10 minutes. It’s not the density, it’s the time on the land. However, you come back to that spot four weeks later and you will the difference in the color. The protein is higher in the lower portion of the plant. Don’t feed that to your animals. Reading the Pasture After Grazing. There should be enough forage left in the paddock for one more day of grazing without removing the ground litter. Q: I’m on an old Christmas tree farm with no soil. We had a property like that. We left it fallow for six months and it grew up, but looked awful. The land owner bought 200 bales of hay (round bales). We unrolled them all on one day. Then, we strip grazed it. We lost maybe 30% to trampling, but it was winter time—it didn’t rot, it was too cold. Weeds mine deep into the subsoil. If you can get an animal to eat it, that’s not a weed, that’s forage. Q: Do you take out any poisonous weeds? No. It is my belief that cattle will not intentionally kill themselves. You do that. Don’t make them stay too long. (because then they might eat the poisonous stuff) If you are not happy with your graze, move them, don’t make them clean it up. The high energy plants are gone, the animals will lose condition. They will go back and regraze the good stuff. The "not good" plants are now at an advantage. Just move them. Let’s say you have a patch of weeds or oak sprouts. Mob them in there at a million pounds/acre and take an hour break. Your abused spot will look like a feedlot! Then move them into a nice paddock. We’ve doubled our stocking rate in the past 6 years. That’s like someone giving us a whole new farm. Dr. Laura Ingram is working with us, we’re going to try some soil amendments, some compost tea. We’ll be able to double the stocking rate again. We’ll have such a high brix rate the cattle will be so fat! You want the right ratio of bacteria to fungi in your soil. Every farm has a layer of hardpan—ours is at 8-9 inches. That was how deep the plow could reach (in the past). To break through, we’ve got to get rid of the anaerobic microbes at the hard pan. Stay tuned to greenpasturesfarm.net No, we’re not going to do any subsoiling. We don’t have a tractor. No, I can’t say exactly what we’re doing. We started out with 4.5 acres/animal unit. Now we are at 1.8 acres/animal unit. An animal unit is 1000lbs. 5 200lb sheep, 1 1000lb cow. We have about 250 cattle and 250 sheep, maybe 6 hogs and an egg mobile. Come back tomorrow to talk about multi-species work. Are we keeping our bulls in with the mob? Yes. And, we don’t buy bulls any more. As the animals change weight, is that changing your stocking density? Yes. You have to keep watching the pasture. I can’t give you a recipe. It rains. And then, it doesn’t rain. Watch the plants! You have to let the plants recover before you put any animals back. In spring, that might be 30 days. In July, it might be 120 days. With grass fed beef, you don’t want to slaughter the animal too young. You need a lot of fat on that animal. How much of the toughness of grass fed beef comes from after butchering. Doesn't aging help? Yes, but not more than 10-13 days. A lot of toughness is genetic. What about being in Southern California? Same thing, you just have to adjust the stocking rate. 170K PSI high tensile wire is our perimeter fence. We work with 20-40 acre paddocks, using polywire on a reel. You need to get geared reels with a 3:1 ratio. Your grass gets away from you in the spring. Don’t freak out, bank it, don’t hay it. (Sell your tractor.) Leave out several paddocks in your grazing rotation. Use them as a savings account for later in the season. Bank a third of the farm—don’t touch it. When you’ve got the drought in August, head over to your bank account. Yeah, it’s not as delicious as the spring pasture, but it’s better for them than hay. Picture: mature paddock grazed in a July drought. She looks good, she’s nursing a calf. Hay: sell your baler. There are people who love baling hay. Let them bale hay. Have a couple of weeks of hay ready for emergencies. In Missouri, if we get an ice storm with 3” of ice, there is no grazing that can happen. Now you feed hay. You’re bringing carbon onto your farm. Monitor your plants in a drought. If you’ve grazed a spot and you come back and your plants aren’t growing, get rid of a few cows. Don’t name your cows. Act fast, and you won’t lose as much. Limit your number of herds: multiple herds will limit your recovery times. Mob them together and keep them moving. Q: how few will work? A: We had a guy doing a great job with one milk cow, he had her on a 90 foot rope and kept moving the stake. Larger herds have greater impact. Even better would be the stampede effect, but that takes predators. Mistakes to avoid: taking too much of the plant, neglecting animal performance, Slick hair coat: in the summer, your cows need to go short haired, to keep cool. Picture of shiny coated cattle. Teddy noticed the cows that slicked off first in the spring are the ones that bred back every year. Are your cattle licking at the water? They should lower their head and take deep gulps. If cows have runny stools they need more water. Picture: cattle tank with hot wire over it and a swimming pool chlorinating tablet suspended a foot under water. He builds a device with a closed bottle on top, string holding the juice bottle with slits cut in it in the middle, brick on the bottom. One ounce tablet treats 200 gallons of water. If you have a 50 gallon tank, break that tablet into quarters. When it rains a lot, spread the herd out, move them more frequently. He puts a mat in front of the water tank, cut from the side wall of a tractor tire, where the front hooves hit the ground. That mat weighs 100lb. Yeah, that hot wire will keep the bull from messing with the tank. It’s got to have 10,000 volts, though. He’s got a portable 60 gallon tank with a Jobe megaflow. It works with pressurized water. For gravity flow get the Gallagher float. Pic: cows working for a living. They are grazing in the snow. Pic: mature high energy plants. Look at the diversity there, folks. No, we don’t seed anything. There’s never been a seeding in history that has paid for itself. Mother nature does it best. When you get the litter on the ground, you will bring up the earthworms. If you are cutting down forest and you’re in a hurry ok maybe you could seed. Look at what’s growing on the road bank and plant that. Plant diversity. More is better. Free choice minerals. There are 8 boxes on each side each with a different mineral. The cows lift up that black cover and they stick their nose in to what they want. Over time, that mineral builds up in the soil and we don’t need to give as much mineral. Sheep don’t need minerals like cows do. They like broad leaved plants. The only mineral we give them is salt. Pic of cow pat - this one is a little runny. Next pick - folks, this one’s good enough to put in a cereal bowl, put some milk on it and eat it. (laughter) Learn to spread cow pats. If it looks like this one, that’s a healthy animal. Pic: tree swallow house with swallows on it. These love to eat flies. Not barn swallows, tree swallows. They’re like miniature purple martins. 6 foot pole, set them 100 feet apart. Bird box is made of cedar from the farm. Check out treeswallowblog.com Any other fly control? No, we don’t medicate them, we don’t deworm them. If we did that we’d kill the dung beetles. If you can get the liquid out of the manure pat within 48 hours, those flies won’t hatch. Yes, we do give salt. We feed loose salt, the block leads to fighting. We are in a mineral deficient area. Those old timers plowing downhill, they stripped all the minerals out of the land. 80% of the cost of running a cow is encountered in the non-growing season. It’s so important to have stuff for them to eat in the winter other than hay. How much will you let them “suffer” in winter? Our cows go into the winter at a condition of 7, and, I don’t think he finished that statement. We don’t remove the calves from our cows. One year we decided to stop doing that. We had to lose some cows who couldn’t deal with this. All of our current cows can manage this on their own. People ask “what percentage of your farm do you stockpile?” I stockpile my whole farm. If you are grazing correctly, things should work out. Increase your stocking density, not the stocking rate! If you are in California, in a drought, you might need to go two years in between grazing a particular spot. I live in western washington and it’s so wet I can’t get them out in the winter. You need to use stockers, 400lb calves. You need a lighter animal. Sell him when he gets big. You’re selling grass. You’re not married to that animal. sell it. OK, this is cool. We got 10 years for free. Creating Open Savannah. pic of cows with some trees around and over them. He ran cattle through the forest, turned it into savannah. The cows pulled down the lower branches, now there’s grass growing between the trees. Pic: lovely flowing creek. Cattle don’t destroy creeks, unless you keep them on it for too long. Pic: brand new earth moving tire as a watering tank. It hold 800 gallons. We lay it down, pour some concrete in there. Pic: we let the cattle in to the pond, ran a hot wire about 2 feet in to keep them from going well into the pond. Pic: dung beetle castles. don’t worm your cattle, you kill the dung beetles. Pic: trampled grass left behind. For every grass blade you trample on the ground, you get two back. It’s not wasted. Learn to love to feed the soil. Pic: 4 weeks later. New growth coming up over the trampled grass. Pic: 4 wheeler with a stack of tread-in fence poles. The best are O-Brian. We sharpen them to a pencil point with a grinder. They go right into the soil with no effort. Don’t throw them at anyone. How do you make a living on the farm? You’ve got to have grass adapted genetics. Do you provide shade? Yes, if it’s over 90 degrees, we provide shade. My good grass genetic animals will eat in the heat. The higher the humidity, the more you will need shade. 100% humidity and cattle can die. What for shade? Trees. Build a temporary lane to some trees. Litter holds water. Never have bare soil. It has a 90% evaporation rate and it sheds rainwater. Earthworms are nature’s plows. One earthworm can produce 1.2 million worms in its 7 year lifespan. 25 earthworms per sq ft = one ton per acre. Worm castings have a pH of 7.

Notes from PV, Joel Salatin on Fields of Farmers

From this thread on permies.

9:45 Diego starts: “go for it!” drop the excuses There’s people out there doing what people say is impossible. 9:58 Joel Salatin “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly, first.” The fact is, we don’t do anything well at first. When the task is daunting, look in the mirror, hike up your diaper, and say “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly, first.” The only difference between success and failure is that the guy who got back up one more time is the success. You tend to think of the advantages that some other successful person had. Every place has its assets and its liabilities. Until you have two salaries from your farm enterprise, it is not a business and it is not sustainable. He did a sustainability conference for Nike in Beaverton. The avg Nike employee is 32. Average farmer is almost 60. In the next 15 yrs, 50% of American farmland is going to change hands. When you’re over 50, you quit being innovative! People become risk averse as they age. In the past, elders leveraged their experience on the youthful energy of the youngers. “The average American farmer is aging, alone.” Joel is thrilled that he has 4 generations on his farm. His mom is 90 and very active. His grandkids are 6, 8 and 10. People who want to farm rarely say “I want to get rich!” Yo, if you want something that lasts generations, money is part of that. I believe we have thousands and thousands of young people who want to get into farming, but don’t think you can make a (white collar) living farming. We had more than 500 queries for 10 spots in our internship program. Other farms say the same thing. Here’s the thing: when young people can’t get in, old people can’t get out. 9/24/1982 is when Joel left his office job. Nobody thought that was a good idea. They all told him he was crazy. There is not a piece of property in the world that is fully developed. (Farm property) The radical environmentalist strategy is to extract people from the landscape. The assumption is that whatever is there, is the best there can be. Could it be that I’ve been endowed with these gifts to come along as a masseuse, to massage the land, to make loving changes to make things better? “The earth is on a weight gain program!” (turning sunlight into biomass via photosynthesis) You ask any of the speakers here “what’s next?” and they will have a huge list of what they’d like to do on their land. There’s no end to it. So many potential projects. Think of an old barn. They’re just about falling down all over New England. They are dark, wet and drafty and have killed more animals and rotted more lumber and wasted more paint than you can think of. Met a guy in Canada with a 150 yr old barn. He cleaned it up, mounted some spotlights in the beams, put up white painted plywood sheets on the walls and now he holds a juried art show every fall and he sells just about all his food product to the thousands of people who come to the show. Think of one of those historical recreations of an 18th century farm. So many people on the property! But in California, second generation farmers aren’t allowed to build a second home on the farm property because “you can’t have people on a farm!” Modern farmers always think that they need to get more land to bring in more people. There is so much that can be done on the land you have. The average cattle farmer in our area brings in $250/acre. At Polyface Farms, we bring in $8000/acre. FSMA: Michael Taylor from Monsanto is administrating this. Trust me, he doesn’t like compost piles. He doesn’t like pastured chickens. They’re trying to criminalize co-production of vegetables and animals. They’re making mesclun farmers in California sign an affidavit that nobody can bring a child under 5 onto the farm! (diapers) Shoot, you get 20 families on a property and suddenly there’s work there for a full time mechanic, accountant, babysitter. It starts with believing that there is more that I can do with this piece of land. The development needs to be primarily portable. The more you can make portable infrastructure, the more flexibility you will have. When you have this, you don’t have to own the land. Our average intern has 10 opportunities to choose from when they’re done with us. In New York State, 3.1 million acres of farmland has been abandoned in the past 15 years. Greg Judy lives in a place where the agriculture economy is depressed—he operates on a lot of leased land. The equity is in management and customers, not in stationary infrastructure and land. If you know how to make aesthetically, aromatically, sensually appealing landscapes, you will never lack for land. If there’s one thing that permaculture can do, it makes beautiful landscapes. (There’s this tension in permaculture with the “let it all hang out - whatever, man” versus order). Think about the way things look. There is a place for order in the world. You want the visitors to think “wow, I want that on my land!” We may move into a two tier system, where wealthy people own the land and other people manage the land. This is how it is in Europe, lots of places. Prince Charles has 1300 acres. It’s managed in multiple 99 year tenurages. When we bought our 550 acre farm in 1961, it was $90/acre, feeder calves cost $30/hundred weight. Now it’s $8000 and $150. The ratio is all messed up now. The land preservation movement is trying to freeze things in a 1950 pastoral pattern. People with farmland have to sue in order to build a bottling facility, to have a day camp for kids, to do so many things. “I’m not supposed to write books in my farm house, because that’s manufacturing a product!!” You can’t make a living producing commodity products. It’s got to be value added. Just go for it, don’t ask permission. Leverage your resources. If you’re not putting 2000 hours a year on your tractor, you should rent one, not own one. If you rotate the use of your hoop house, you create pathogen cul-de-sacs. Everything on your farm needs to have multiple functions. The next piece of this is marketing. Farmers are notoriously poor marketers. Most farmers don’t like people! I don’t anyone who gets an agriculture degree from a land grant college who takes a class in marketing. 80% of all marketers are last borns. If you want an engineer, get a first born. The middle borns are entrepreneurs. (That’s me—don’t have a baby book.) Another reason farmers are poor marketers, they’re so invested in the product, it’s too stressful. The thought of rejection is too painful—we don’t want to do the marketing. OK. You don’t have to do it. You need to get the person who can do that. 11:01am “I don’t want you to have to treat farming like an addiction that has to fed with an in-town job!” Your farm has to support a community. This is not a place for scarcity, it is a place of abundance. The earth is not a reluctant partner. She is a loving partner who is ready to bequeath upon us abundance if we take care of her." And. . . apparently cutting and pasting from Notebook leads to messed up quotes, dashes and apostrophes. I may come back and try to edit this. Sorry if it's hard to read.

Notes from PV, Joel Salatin on Stacking Fiefdoms

From this thread on Permies. Joel Salatin How small can a farm be? Pretty darn small—land is not the limiting factor. You need to provide two salaries for a successful farm. How to get there? Gather data. How much time does it take to cover a row with reemay? How long to dig 2 lbs of potatoes? You need to do time/motion studies. How many cow-days is your grass at today? How many square yards did you give the herd today? If you see that you gave them 10% too much room today, you have to know how much to give them tomorrow. How do we bring people onto our team that can shore up our weaknesses? The first workers we turn to are typically our kids. More is caught than taught. Kids pick up what you’re excited about. You gotta transfer the passion! You transfer the passion with excitement and a smile, not whining. Don’t tell me how it’s wrong, tell me how you fixed it. On our farm, from day 1 we made it competitive and fun. Turn weeding a row of beans into a game. If the kid wins, you need a cool prize! Never give time oriented tasks. Only give task instructions - otherwise you are teaching your kids to dawdle. (Don’t tell your kid to practice piano for 30 minutes—tell them to get this song ready to play.) No allowance. Some tasks you do to be a member of the family. Here are things you will get paid for. Incentivize project completion. We will get a drink after we finish two more holes. “What is with your son? He won’t let my son get a drink of water until they finish their fort?” Praise, praise, praise. This is a dad thing more than a mom thing. If you want a partner when they’re 16, you let them be less than perfect when they’re younger. You are trying to inculcate a loyal partner. Let the children develop their own enterprises. I got my first chickens at age 10—that was my thing. From 14-18 yrs I was at the Saturday market every week to sell my product. Keep records. The kid needs to know what his stuff is. His daughter started a baking business. His son started raising meat rabbits. Both kids had $20K of their own by age 20. OK, what if it’s not kids. We don’t want employees. We don’t want “wages.” “I hate wages—it’s a setup for tension between workers and bosses. I like salaries, commissions. Then his son got married—now there’s a daughter in law. Sheri found that she had to look at Polyface and figure out who’s doing what and try to figure out where she fits in. What do we need that I can do? At that point we had these urban drop off points, buying clubs. (My rule is that you need to pull in $2000 per market to make it worthwhile to go to a farmer's market.) We carved out a delivery by the pound system to really quantify the costs of delivery. By having the delivery costs separate, we’re not subsidizing the delivered goods with the on-farm sales. You don’t apologize for the costs, you educate your customers. As soon as the restaurant business built up enough, we could create a one afternoon a week three hour part time job and give that to somebody who wanted it. Sheri loves marketing. (Wow! There are people who love to do things that you hate! They can’t wait to get up in the morning and make some cold calls!!) The important thing here is: you don’t have to do it all. All you have to do is design the system so that you attract the people who can take on the tasks that don’t fit in your sweet spot (which is the intersection of what we’re good at, what we love and what we know). If you can’t track your margins on every single enterprise, you won’t know what parts of your farm are earning you money! Sheri took on the metropolitan marketing clubs. She took them from 30 families to over 5000 families from 2007 to 2014. She gets 3% of every sale from the buying clubs. At this point she has a really nice passive income stream. Our main delivery guy, he’s got a base salary and a benchmark for sales. Once he gets past that, he earns a hefty commission. He is highly incentivized to take care of customers. They now have another woman who is doing the restaurant sales (another home schooler) on commission only. There are multiple other producers who use Hannah now for restaurant sales. She works hard on Tuesday, calling all the chefs, then supervises the load-up on Thursdays. As it continued to grow, they split off the Washington DC restaurant sales to yet another woman. (Do-able because the careful book keeping allows such splitting.) We have an intern program. They start out in a sort of boot camp. At the midpoint, they have a sit down—what would you like to do? We put on them the onus to create their salary. It is so liberating to not feel like we have to create jobs for people. We put the monkey on their back, we say—bring us a proposal. I sure would like to eat communally, a M-F evening meal. How can we do that? We were dropping hints here and there. I also like having a garden. My son Daniel, not so much—he’d rather raise animals and buy green beans. Hmmm, if I want this, how do we get this done? About 6 years ago an intern called and said “Is that chef/gardener position still available?” He was not an employee, he billed for what he did, gave invoices for his production. What has developed are “memorandums of understanding.” The time, Polyface’s obligation, the partner’s obligation and a non-litigation clause. We are renting nine farms in the area, some with housing on them. We have young people who are “contracting” with Polyface this way to use this land. We’ve created various benchmarks, depending on how comfortable the young person is with risk. (Story of the suffocated chicks—awkward!!) The more shared risk, the better, for Joel. Having all these people doing all these things is hugely liberating for me. Now, I’m a germination tray, helping people germinate new ideas. A woman is now marketing school tours of Polyface farms. All sort of tours. Polyface gets a royalty, but she gets the rest of the money. Then, she decided she wanted to go to culinary school. Fortunately, a different intern took up the tour task. By having it be a totally independent enterprise, it’s really easy to just bequeath the role to another person. When our shitake mushroom guy left, nobody has been interested in taking that up. That’s ok. We’re still harvesting and someday someone else will take it up. Gardener: the gardener pays us in so many pounds of product. Then, they put down everything they want to grow and how much they want to be paid for it. We trust they will have decent prices. Then we agree on a tier of marketing. The Polyface kitchen is the first market for the veggies. It completely changes the arrangement when she submits invoices for what she produces (versus just pulling a salary). The second market is the farm store, the third market is the restaurant business. Last year Heather moved up to Maine. The farm she was at didn’t generate enough money to pay a full salary. Well, we are working on developing our own chickens (getting frustrated with the hatchery chicks). (We spent three days with a state vet fighting animal abuse charges because a lady drove by one of our farms and saw the cows bunched up at 4pm ready to move.) Heather said she’s like to hatch out chicks. We’re trying to figure out if we can we market the cockerels as meat birds. (Brown meat, orange fat, they are good.) We really don’t want to feed the male chicks to the pigs, but if we have to, we will. Our MOA with Heather specifies a price per pullet chick and cockerel chick. We’re hopeful this will work out. So, look around and think: what sorts of things outside your farm can be internalized? Joel’s thinking they’re about to the point where the Polyface business (a $2million operation) can support it’s own mechanic/shop. An intern has started a new business called “Farm Fix.” He’s remodeled the shop, and now, for the first time Joel can break something and just take it to the shop and say “Fix It!” This young man is also going to do some egg mobiles, cattle and pigs on his rental farm. I’m not trying to grow my own wealth, or my own estate. My deepest pleasure comes from watching these young people germinate their own ideas. If I were defining what is to be done, the dynamics would be completely different. We find this incredibly encouraging and empowering, to have people come in, not as employees, but as independent operators in fiefdoms. They can trade amongst themselves. When you have a customer base, the easiest thing to do is to add a new product to sell to your existing customer base. It’s easier to find 100 people to spend $1000 than to find 1000 people to spend $100. Don’t tell me you can’t find a 4 acre spot for veggies on a 1000 acre wheat farm. You could start a cider business on an existing apple orchard, without owning a tree. We almost had a woodworker—we’ve got a saw mill that isn’t used enough. There are so many development possibilities out there. How you structure the enterprise is key to success and comfort with trying new things. Fiefdoms of autonomy and authority. The MOA takes the compliance issues out of the equation. My dream is that all of this 50% of American farmland that’s going to be changing hands, instead of being conglomerated, it will feed an explosion of entrepreneurial visionary young people who will take it, love it and nurture it.

Notes from Toby Hemenway's talk at Permaculture Voices

From this thread on permies.

Me again! So, are you sad that you didn't get to go to the Permaculture Voices conference? Did you go but you can't remember what was said? Well, I am an obsessive note taker (most of the time) and I took notes at most of the talks I attended. I will share them here with you! Please note that this is in no way a transcription. These are my notes, taken in real time, on the fly, whilst trying to look at the slides and follow along. I find that note taking helps me synthesize information. None of this should be construed as an accurate quotation, even when I put it in quotes. (For example, I'm pretty sure not a single speaker used the utterance "Yo.") Much of the time, I am trying to summarize and it's entirely possible that I've gotten some things wrong. My third notes document is Toby Hemenway. The topic this time was "Why Agriculture Can Never Be Sustainable" --------------------------------- Toby Hemenway We were given a tour of Little Bighorn by a ranger and the story that he painted was that the battle of Little Bighorn was a profound change for the nation. Typically you hear there were no survivors, but of course there were, they were just Native Americans. In the 1870’s gold was discovered in the Black Hills, right in the middle of the Great Sioux Reservation and Unceded Indian Territory, and the influx of white and african american gold diggers was unstoppable. There was a great village of 7000 native americans and Custer mistook the dust and smoke for the people breaking camp (leaving). He attacked, thinking it was his only chance to move. All the soldiers were killed, and the Native Americans won the battle, but lost the war, when huge resources were brought in to retaliate. Those Native Americans were “the free-est people of all” living in massive open spaces with incredible abundance of life (herds of 2 million bison were not unusual). It goes back to the ancient split between the hunter/gatherers and the agriculturalists. For the farmer, the wild is the bad place. For the domesticated, the wild people are the scariest thing. They don’t need anything from a government. “When I look at my dog, she is so much wilder than I am.” Agriculture is the domestication of people more than animals. How did agriculture start? Well, first we settled places of abundance, then folks bred in abundance, then resources were used up and we had to develop agriculture. Or, hunter/gatherers were doing OK and then there was a climate change and we had to develop agriculture. Agriculture is grounded in fear and insecurity. It is a mindset of scarcity. We’ve had controlled use of fire for 800,000 years. People have been plant tending for ages (the native Californians were really big on this). There are ancient irrigation systems that predate “agriculture.” At least 30K-50K years ago. About 50K years our brains evolved to where we had more frontal cortex. “The Revolution of Symbols” The first complex art is about 40K years old. Early native americans were horticultural, not agricultural. Foraging or Hunter/Gatherer Peoples Horticultural Peoples - a lot of wild tending Agricultural Peoples - we are transforming landscapes Interesting: the Eurasians could move huge distances east and west and keep using their staple crops. The other staple crops (bananas, yams, potatoes) were developed on north/south continental masses and you couldn’t move so far because the climate changes. Also, the grain agriculture encourages massive plantings, gives you a highly storable surplus but requires technology to use it and store it. You end up needing structures to store it, people to police it, a lord to parcel it out, accountants to measure it, laws to regulate who gets it and when, punishments for those who disobey the law. Grain agriculture contains the seeds of the police state. Farming inexorably increases population. Grains are carb rich and easily converted into calories, and that’s what really amps up fertility. Cooked food (porridge) allows earlier weaning, which means more pregnancies. The average birth interval in hunter/gatherer societies is 3-4 years (nursing a toddler while eating a low carb diet decreases fertility). The birth interval of people on a grain diet can be less than yearly. Agricultural people are less healthy. Upon taking up agriculture, the lifespan drops a quarter or so. (The lifespan comes up much later, with sanitation and other things.) There are more degenerative diseases in agricultural people. There are more epidemics (many really bad germs jump from domesticated animals to humans). People are shorter - 3-4” shorter typically (again, this didn’t reverse until much much later). Famine is actually more common in agricultural societies. There were big famines less than every 10 years in the 14th-18th centuries. Farming uses mass quantities of land. It used mass quantities of labor until the fossil fuel age arrived. Foragers need 3 hours to gather a week’s worth of food. Farmers need 2-3 days for their food, plus more time for the rent, etc. Agriculture is portable, and this leads to conquest. Instead of knowing that nature is enough to provide, nature became the enemy. Agriculture creates the tame/wild dichotomy. We are told we don’t belong in the wilderness. That sort of thinking inexorably leads to smaller amounts of “wild.” (Ed: Permaculture says we need to be there, on the land, tending it.) Agriculture destroys functional ecosystems and the feedback from degraded ecosystems is too slow to notice (and these days we make up for the losses with chemical fertilizers). A civilization based on agriculture: makes nature the enemy, destroys ecosystems, is based in scarcity, is more work, fosters hierarchy, (etc, missed some) Toby says: a civilization disconnected from nature goes insane! Toby questions: is sustainable agriculture an oxymoron? What about sustainable horticulture? What if it’s not just a transition between foraging and farming? The mound builders in Ohio, the Jomon of Japan tended oaks, chestnuts, beeches, buckeyes, various wild fish. The northwest coast people in america - tended camas, tended salmon. In ancient Oaxaca, they grew maize in amazing polycultures. The kumeyaay and Owens Valley Paiute. The Amazon is starting to look like a massive tended food forest - many more food plants near the rivers than chance would provide. The continental US was not the forest primeval, it was a tended food forest with chestnut, white oak, beechnuts, crabapples, cherries. . . Permaculture is a new horticultural society. Food from a garden, not a farm, using a hoe, not a plow, small scale, mixed crops, encouraging succession (development of shrubs and trees). With permaculture, the ecosystems still function. (Story about a food forest in the jungle in South America). Horticultural societies tend to have less hierarchy. They have more earth spirits and fewer sky gods. Seeing people as part of the ecosystem versus the stewards or dominators of the planet. Surplus: this is difficult to define for us, because we live in a culture of scarcity. When you look at nature, you see abundance, not scarcity. Life creates conditions conductive to life. Permaculture says: catch and store energy and materials. (Story about a new center on basically beach in the Bahamas. Couldn’t let backwater hit the ground, because it would just leach into the ocean. So, they made concrete pools, filled with sand/gravel, and sent the sewage into it. Amazing pictures of the resulting oasis that grew in just a couple of years. There’s no smell, it’s full of birds and butterflies and this is where people hang out—the sewage treatment lagoons!) Permaculture says: make the least effort for the greatest effect, so that a no-place becomes our place. (Story about the painted intersection in Portland. There are now 34 of these in Portland. There is now an “intersection repair” ordinance in Portland. Cityrepair.org is where you can learn more.) Toby says: you should revise the self-sufficient dream. So many say “I want to grow all my own food on my own property.” This is sort of uniquely American, from our pioneer ancestors. Whoa dudes, where’s the sharing here? How about this: “I want to meet my food needs sustainably.” This is more about community self-reliance. Permaculture talks about zones. Closer to farther. If you live in a city/town, the zones for food are different. Zone 1 would be your own garden, Zone 2 is your neighbors, your CSA, your community garden, Zone 3 is the farmer’s market, Zone 4 would be the independent groceries with a regional focus and finally zone 5 would be the big chain supermarkets (when you sneak into Costco and hope your friends don’t see you). Food sovereignty laws: Citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase and consume local foods of their choosing. (like, raw milk) We need to rebuild the informal economy. Can we create a pattern literate, local control of money flow? In Seattle, there’s a big public food forest going into parkland in Beacon Hill. In Portland, the architect who started the City Repair project has a food forest in front of his office on a busy street. Let’s think about peasant foods: dishes specific to a region or culture made with accessible and inexpensive ingredients. What are our indigenous foods? Let’s have community seed-saving workshops, community tool-lending libraries, education that works (permaculture for kids!) How do we do this? Permaculture is strategy. Strategies for the transition: —observe and assess: what is the land and resource base, where are the skills and technologies, who are the allies, what will the obstacles be, start with the low hanging fruit, identify the people who are making the policy. This is how you get things done. Get people onboard. Putting it all together (the permaculture flower). Many people come in to permaculture via food, but it applies to the whole flower: shelter, waste, security, culture, education, law, finance, food, energy, water. Permaculture is a decision making tool that can apply to anything. This is why I love permaculture. When I think about the profound freedoms that we lost when we came to agriculture, it breaks my heart. In permaculture we start where we are. Permaculture offers a road map from where were are now to a place more directly connected to spirit, where we know that it is the earth and the plants and the animals and the sun that support us. What permaculture offers is a tool kit where we can see a world of abundance. We belong here and we have enough.

Practical vs. Vocational Education

An important distinction came up yesterday when talking with David about education. He was advocating the value of a liberal arts education at a four-year university vs. vocational education at a community college. His example of a vocational degree -- studying to be a radiologist -- made me realize that when I speak of bring back vocational tech, I am interested in vocational training for what it teaches us about the material world and the tools at our disposal for interacting with it. But I am not interested in vocational tech in the narrow sense of being trained for a particular role in a particular industry with particular tools, and that's often what it is.

The value of an education in practical skills -- as opposed to vocational skills -- is the transferrable nature of what you learn. As an example, rather than learning how to assemble cabinets, you could learn about the essential properties of wood, and concepts and techniques in woodworking. When we reduce the value of a practical education to be training for a specific job, we are doing a disservice to the individual and society. Frankly, job training should happen on the job.

I believe we should all be competent or at least have the opportunity to be competent observing, understanding, and problem-solving in the material world. Vocational tech can teach this -- welding and fabrication skills gleaned in getting an A.S. in Aeronautical Technology, for example -- but it does not necessarily do so. A radiologist likely learns only how to use one technology in one place. This does not contribute nearly as much to the human capital of a society as a set of foundational skills would, in that this person is far less likely to take what they've learned and innovate with it.

David pointed out that we can't all learn everything. Excel and computer programming are also practical skills, no? But I wonder if we can. We take years and years to study history, and learn very little of it. What we should do is learn a small bit of history, intensively. We should learn how to study and think about historical events. We should bother very little with attempting a survey of human history. We have the rest of our lives to go more deeply into subjects that interest us. The best we can expect from an early-in-life foundation is to be on a good basic footing with most of them, and know where to start when we want to learn more.

We live in an information-rich age. Information is a click away, or a book away. What most needs to be fostered is critical thinking, and we can do this in any field, with any subject, at any time. We should do it at all times, whether that means critically analyzing an engineering problem to see it in a new light, critically re-assessing an employee hiring process, or critically considering the role of a cattle in a diversified small farm operation.

I suspect we could learn everything, if we reduced most subjects to their essence. We could study the world through the lens of time and human behavior (history), through the lens of the material world (practical skills and materials), the virtual world (computers and networks), the biological world, and so on. A broad survey and intro to techniques for each, followed by focused application in an in-depth project. I believe this would be an educational approach that would provide a solid start to life-long learning, self-directed learning, and societal innovation and growth.

Mind the Bollocks! This Herd's Got Balls.

When I am a farmer responsible for animals of my own, I will try to the best of my ability to give them the life they'd prefer to live if they were wild. Putting beef and dairy cows on pasture is the most important move towards this, a move away from the unnatural crowding and containment of feedlots and the unnatural feed that goes with it. Keeping my own breeding bull would be another step in this direction; allowing the bull to live with the herd a further step still. There is one more practice, however, which is not widely questioned but deserves to be. Castration.

We castrated a couple weeks ago, I it shook me more than I expected. Granted, I have a new baby boy, so I may be particularly sensitive at the moment. Still, the truth is I found castration more disconcerting than slaughter. There is something honest about slaughter -- predators kill, and as farmers we fulfill the role of predators, a role which has an analog in nature -- but castration, on the other hand, is mutilation. No farmer wants to call it that, but that's what it is. Predators may mutilate their prey, but only because they're not perfect hunters. Can we aspire to be more perfect farmers?

In Biodynamic terms, a bull which is castrated cannot fully express his bullness. He becomes a steer. Maybe he can fully express his steerness, but it seems to me a steer is just a bull with no balls, which, by definition, is a bull not fully expressed.

This morning, with work cancelled due to flooding, I jumped down a research rabbit hole and spent hours investigating dual-purpose cattle breeds or the possibility of raising dairy boys for beef, and in the process I discovered that raising young bulls to slaughter is not only possible, but eminently justifiable. It's not even a fringe idea. They do it in Europe.

I'll back up a step. I was researching dual-purpose breeds and dairy beef because I am designing a herd as the core part of a farm that will provide both meat and dairy for 25 members. The subscription would run for 40 weeks, providing a quarter cow per member (2 lbs. beef per week), a half-gallon or gallon of milk, and 1 lb. of cheese weekly. I wanted to figure out if it would be better to raise separate beef and milk herds, or a single dual-purpose herd. Either way, I was designing the ultimate integrated herd.

Three objectives for the efficient biodynamic herd

1. Balance milk production with meat production for 25 members
2. Keep the herd in as "natural" a state as possible
3. Avoid castrating

Mind the bollocks

"Bollocks" /ˈbɒləks/ is a word of Anglo-Saxon origin, meaning "testicles".

Apparently, there is little to no difference in flavor if bulls, or bullocks as they're technically called between 12-24 months of age, are slaughtered when a little bit younger than usual. This is 24 months at the oldest, though most experts advise between 16-20 months. Not only does the meat taste the same -- if a bit leaner -- but bulls put on weight 15% faster than steers. They convert feed more efficiently. On the management side, you'd think a bunch of bulls penned together would be dangerous to each other or the farm, but apparently behavior problems are minimal if young bulls are kept apart from the cows and their pens aren't too small.

You don't want the young bulls with the cows once they approach sexual maturity, anyway, or they might mate with their moms. So, then I got curious -- what do young bulls do in a "natural" environment? I looked into their wild relatives.

As it turns out, a feral herd of once-domesticated cattle live on the grounds of Chillingham Castle, in England. The young bulls live with the herd of cows and calves until they approach sexual maturity, at which point they split off into small bands of two or three young bulls. The herd will occasionally tolerate an older male among them year-round. The American bison behave in a very similar way. The takeaway from this is that it is perfectly natural to isolate young bulls from the herd, as long as they have the company of each other.

This is beginning to seem like a win-win.

As for the dual-purpose breeds, I think the primary argument for using a milk breed and raising the calves for meat is that you don't have to milk as many cows. Dual-purpose breeds, producing less, would take longer to milk. That said, I only need 3-4 milk cows for the dairy needs of 25 members, and I'll need 7 heads of beef per year to produce a quarter cow per member as well as a couple of quarters for the farmers. That means we'll keep 3-4 cows in addition to the milk cows to produce the requisite beef. They don't have to be a milk breed.

So, here's my idea for an efficient, Biodynamic herd

First of all, I want Jersey's (or Guernsey's or Brown Swiss) for milk, but, recall, I only need 3-4 milking cows, which includes at least one at any given time that's not lactating.

My other 3-4 cows will be Angus or another beef breed that puts weight on quick on pasture.

I will keep a Jersey bull with the herd, and he will sire calves with all 7 cows. 3-4 of them will be pure Jersey calves, and the others will be Jersey-Angus. Angsey. They will have the ol' hybrid vigor, and probably put on weight quite a bit better than pure Jersey. However, they will have the Jersey's propensity for marbling, which is another apparent win-win: Jersey's rank higher than any other breed for the quality of the marbling in their meat. They just don't produce very big cows.

My goal, however, is good meat. The quarter cows don't have to be huge.

The efficiency in this herd comes from the fact that I only need one breeding bull, a Jersey, rather than a Jersey and Angus bull. That saves me 3 acres, and I can keep the whole herd together as one, except for the bullocks, but I'll get to that in a moment. This compromises some on efficiency because we will be managing two herds for some of each year, but if we had separate beef and dairy herds, too, that would give us a total of three.

And an extra boon: Jersey's are small, Angus are big, which means we can keep the bull as long as he lives because he won't get too heavy for the Angus girls.

The herd as a whole will be about 30 animals -- 7 mama cows, 7 calves, 7 yearlings, 7 beef (or replacement heifers), and 1 bull. This amounts to a little over 20 Animal Units (1 A.U. = 1000 lbs.), which will require about 40 acres of pasture.

As for the bullocks 

I will remove the boys from the herd at 12-15 months of age, before they exhibit any serious sexual behavior. They will be walked away in pairs to a separate pasture area of about 8 acres which is fenced with heavy, bull-proof fencing material. There they will live, going around in their separate rotation in their little band of 3-4 young dudes until the fateful day they meet their maker, balls and all.

* I have worked with a farmer who kept his breeding bull with his herd year-round. Many would advise against this on the grounds that it's better to keep him apart except for a month each year, to ensure calves are born in spring. This farmer's calves are born when they are born, and everything works fine. For my purposes, I think I would keep the breeding bull apart, with the bullocks while they're around, and by himself when they're not. This is not ideal, but in a system where I'm not castrating, it's essential that the bullocks be slaughtered at a precise time, and if they're going to keep them together, we need to make sure they are born at the same time and slaughtered at the time. We also need to compromise with reality here -- a slaughter unit can only come to the farm so often, and you want them to do more than one animal when they're there.

Paleo Permaculture reply on land use and grain cropping systems

Comment I posted in regards to paleo permaculture, on a blog post at robbwolf.com:

As a farmer, I need to point out a couple missing inputs in this equation. Don't get me wrong, I found your article because I'm very interested in the idea of paleo permaculture, but for rigor's sake:

(1) The square footage per bird you give does not include the growing of grains for feed or the land necessary to let them range freely. While wildly variable, a standardized metric for free-ranging birds might be 12 per acre, which comes out to 3,600 square feet per bird. Growing the feed you need for 12 laying birds might take 1/3 of an acre, which is 1,200 square feet per bird of grains, corn, and legumes, and about twice that if you get rid of the corn and use predominantly cereals (wheat or barley). It would take the same space and poundage of feed for 100 broilers, which means you could eat about 2 per week.

(2) You neglect fertility requirements. Vegetables and intensive staple crops like corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes require far more in the way of compost and minerals than extensive crops like grains do. Wheat is the hungriest cereal, but even it requires less fertility than "garden" crops, and barley, rye, and oats require far less than wheat.

(3) Grains have traditionally had their role on integrated subsistence farms. We can graze most grain crops at least once (with animals) when they're young and flush and still get a good yield. Animals can clean up the crop residues, and munch undersown clovers after the crop's been harvested. Straw is a useful farm material as mulch, animal bedding, or even for building or roofing.

I think a paleo permaculture homestead -- or even farm -- is a very cool idea, but it does not necessarily lead to a smaller footprint on the land. What is true is that you do away with the processing difficulties around grains, and when it comes to being a homesteader, that processing time is no joke, nor are those tools cheap which make it easier.

I think the ideal paleo approach would involve cows or other grazers, because you don't need to grow feed. Moreover, pasture is the perfect rotation with intensive garden land -- 4 years in pasture, 4 years in garden. But that, again, requires a lot of land, about 2 acres per full-grown cow. You get about 300 lbs. of consumable meat per cow when all is said and done, which should be more than enough for one person, but you need a big freezer to keep it in.

I hope this furthers the discussion. These numbers are all very rough because in reality they vary by climate, soil type, water access and so on, but they are pretty solid middle-of-the-road figures.