weft speed: just fast enough

James Boswell    (via voiceofnature)

This seems like the fruit tree version of the rhyme for planting more seeds than you need. You know:

“One for the robin, one for the crow, one to let rot, and one to grow.”

(via continent-of-wild-endeavor)

Reasonable advice though, always overplant, always grow more than you think you’ll need. Nature and life will do

Humanity’s First Open-Source CNC Farming Machine

Gifts for Gardeners

#47: A Kitchen Sprouter

Sprouts and microgreens are easy to grow on a kitchen counter, even in the dead of winter.

A fresh crop of sprouts every couple of days is like a little garden, with the added benefit of being extremely nutritious!

Yes I have read what they say. I know this is a wildly unpopular opinion, but… I disagree with them on a lot of things, and I say that as a vegan who is building a permaculture food forest on my homestead.

There’s a lot of critiques leveled at Monsanto and GMOs that actually have more to do with the system that they exist in. Monsanto is just one biotech company of many, it’s not even the largest one. GMOs haven’t been found to be any more dangerous than any other traditionally bred plant. GMOs are actually way more studied than other plants, due to companies wanting to make sure that the plant will do what they want it to do, and to get through the rigorous patent system. Obviously the patent system is FUBAR, but Monsanto didn’t invent it. Plants have been patented in the USA since hybrids were first developed, almost a hundred years ago. Monocropping can be done with traditional/heirloom plants, I know organic farmers who monocrop (monocropping means you can use tractors, and other kinds of technology, it means food is cheaper and therefore more widely available to the populace - permies will praise polycultures but don’t mention that shit has to be hand-harvested, thereby making it unaffordable to the poor, or the fact that many official permie places don’t pay their laborers). These are all incredibly complex systems.

The biggest problem with organic production is that there aren’t a lot of good sources of organic nitrogen. Manure is wet and heavy, it’s expensive to ship. It can also burn the crap out of your crops. Chilean nitrogen is mined, with all the devastating environmental consequences associated with mining. As much as I love and use clover and other legumes, it only gets you so far. Organic farming has lower yields due to this issue with nitrogen, which means you actually need more land to feed the same amount of people. Traditionally, humans have handled this by chopping down more forests, to create more farmland. We’re still doing this all over the world, like the Amazon.

This may not sound like a big deal, except that globally, we’re running out of arable land, we’re running out of topsoil, due to erosion and desertification and of course we’re running out of forests. If we relied on animal manure for all of our nitrogen, we’d have to chop down every last forest for them to have enough room to graze. We’re running out of freshwater, as we pump water out of aquifers that took thousands of years to slowly accumulate, and then we dump it on crops, because flooding a field with water requires less expense and effort to the farm than laying out microdrip irrigation which gets clogged all the time.

The problem with conventional sources of nitrogen and other fertilizers is that they end up negatively impacting the health of soil and water ecosystems, which is the opposite of what we need to be doing with our soils.

If you look into the Monsanto court cases (I have, b/c I‘m a nerd try to be informed.. court cases make for long boring reading), you’ll find that in every single case that Monsanto sued a farmer, the farmer broke their contract. When you purchase GMOs, which again you can do so through multiple companies, you must actually sign a legal contract, stating that you won’t collect seeds for the next year. They made this contract b/c everyone went apeshit when they were considering putting the so-called terminator gene in their plants that would’ve left the seeds sterile (so no one would try to collect them). That didn’t go over so well, so they didn’t do it, and instead relied upon a contract. Well, in the court cases, the farmers saved the seeds. This is actually not very bright, because GMOs are hybrids, so they won’t breed true anyway. That is, the next generation won’t be quite like the previous generation. And in farming, seeds are actually not your biggest cost, so it’s not like this was some sort of stroke of business genius here. The farmers could’ve just bought their seeds from someone else if they didn’t want to sign the contract, they could’ve opted for non-GMO seeds. But they didn’t, b/c they wanted the characteristics that those particular seeds had. They were after the genetics.

Some people also get upset at Monsanto and Dow for having manufactured chemicals during war, but they were chemical manufacturers, and the US government forced companies to do so. All US chemical companies that existed within a certain era have been forced to produce all kinds of crazy shit for the US gov’t for military use.

Most current GMOs are commodity crops. They’re the feed that is fed to animals, they’re the biofuels that are added to gasoline, they’re the oils that we use in our cooking, they’re the cotton that makes our clothing. It’s also the high fructose corn syrup that is stupidly added to our food, especially low quality food, to make it more palatable, to hide the other shitty processed ingredients.

So if someone tells you these complex issues can be solved with one solution or one easy quick fix, like say, permaculture or organic agriculture, at best they’re misrepresenting the issues. These are massive issues that go beyond the soil. They’re about complex systems. They’re about money. They’re about the pressures that the ever-growing human population is putting on the earth, as the earth heats up, the oceans acidify, and most governments seem unable to plan beyond the next election cycle. To me, Shiva and Roy, neither of whom actually have a background in ag, (Shiva’s PhD in Physics - quantum theory, Roy trained as an architect before becoming an author) are not the best sources of information out there on complex agricultural issues. 

I could go on for ages, about trade protectionist policies and sugar lobbies and why the Iowa presidential primaries mean we grow more corn than we’ll ever need, but I’ll go ahead and stop here. 

From a sustainable agriculture perspective: I think the monocropping/tilling methodology is a technical problem to be solved, and I think GM crops – which are overwhelmingly foods like potatoes, cereals, and fibre crops – are designed for an unsustainable and environmentally-destructive kind of agriculture.

I actually think the solution will be drones, so I’m not advocating we all go back to hand-harvesting. I know firsthand how exhausting it is to get all your calories that way.

I think when I first started writing and researching about this issue I was a lot more cautious: I was very concerned with genetic drift, and even advocated growing GM crops in biospheres; I’ve sort of realised it’s too late for that.

Now I focus more on the patenting biological life, as it’s a problem in both agricultural and pharmaceutical research that is exacerbated by the newer software-like agreements and contracts but on these organisms. It’s much more expansive than a hybrid patent ever was, because it covers the lineage of the organisms in perpetuity, instead of just forbidding cloning.

By the way, as much as I like Vandana Shiva’s work with her seed bank Navdanya, she’s also misrepresenting herself as a Quantum physicist: her degree was in philosophy of science.

Arundhati Roy is generally opposed to big business, global capitalism, and big development (NGOs etc.); she also works with food sovereignty, which is not possible when a person has to buy a license on their crops. Her objections are better understood in that context, and I also find myself leaning towards similar kinds of criticisms.

This discussion so far has been framed from a particularly Western point of view. Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy are both writing from an Indian point of view, and their activism is grounded in advocacy for the Indian farmers who have had their livelihoods destroyed by the broken promises of the Green Revolution. 

For many of us, the dream of retiring to the countryside to have a smallholding or food forest is really just that: a lovely, bourgeois, privileged dream. For Indian farmers their smallholdings are their lives. Using cows for their milk and manure and labour is so important to their way of farming that cows are sacred. Beginning in the 70s, the drive to get Indians to “modernise” their farming techniques and to farm not food, but these commodity crops, mostly for export, has led to unbelievable suffering and hardship: the flight of the rural poor to the slums of big cities, environmental destruction and depletion, and the crippling debt that has led to what could be described as an epidemic of farmer suicides.

GMOs are not needed to feed the world. The UN recommends small, localised food production systems are what will feed the world’s burgeoning population. In Russia, around 50% of their food is from small producers. In a smallholding it should come naturally to accommodate animals (and thus their manure) directly into the farming methods used, perhaps in a silvopasture-type system. Mark Shepard, for example, manages to do this on a broad scale, and Masanobu Fukuoka didn’t even need animal inputs with his no-till system of farming grains. It’s also worth noting that by some estimates one third of food grown in the Western world is wasted. 

As for the rest of these commodity crops… GMO cotton? Cotton is a wildly inappropriate crop for so many places with it’s massive water needs. Perhaps we also need to look at why we need so many clothes, why they need to be changed every year, and why we buy so many that are so poorly made that they will be thrown away after a single season’s wear. Perhaps also we need to look at why cotton is such a major commodity for fibre when crops such as hemp or bamboo are far more useful and biome-appropriate. GMO corn? Really the only GMO corn consumed directly by humans is in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, which most agree has contributed directly to the USA being the sickest and fattest nation on earth. The vast majority of corn grown in the US is for animal feed. Perhaps we need to look at what is fundamentally wrong with our (Western) culture when rainforests the world over are been cleared so we can feast so cheaply on meat raised on corn, soy and palm kernel. We have a culture that celebrates gluttony and where TV shows like Man Vs Food can exist without critique or condemnation. (As an aside, I bought some Australian steak last month because it was so cheap. I got halfway through before I had to stop: it tasted rank, rotten, wrong. After checking the expiry date I came to the conclusion that it had to be because it was grain-fed meat. The dog was happy, but I will never again eat any meat that is not grass-fed or free-range. It’s really only slightly more expensive, but eating meat is a luxury, and should be treated as such.)

I agree with a lot of what you say, even though it may not seem like it from my initial comments. Consumerism is a HUGE part of this. Biotechs create products for their market - farmers. Farmers grow things for their market - consumers. In the US at least, last I checked roughly 1/3 of corn went to animal feed. That’s actually why I’m vegan, it’s my attempt at consuming fewer resources. My diet for the last 10+ years has been based off of beans and rice.

Again from a US perspective (which I took as I’m in the US, know about the US, and was talking to another person from the US, but acknowledge there’s many other perspectives), part of the reason why we grow so much animal feed in these massive monocropped farms, is because when there isn’t enough animal feed, say there’s a bad harvest one year, farmers will slaughter their cattle because feed prices make it unaffordable to their business to keep them. Initially this means meat prices will then be low, as the market is suddenly flooded with meat, and consumers rejoice. But because it takes a few years to build your herd up again, prices will then rise.

And when prices rise, consumers get pissed. And when they get pissed AND it’s election season, guess who they’re going to take it out on? 

So here in the US, in the early 1970s politicians starting setting up a whole series of bloated legislation to cover the asses of farmers in case of years of bad harvests, so that politicians wouldn’t ever again take the brunt of consumer rage. It’s also around when a Japanese scientist, Yoshiyuki Takasaki, first figured out how to make high fructose corn syrup, suddenly corn seemed like the greatest thing to grow ever (animal feed! sweetener! gov’t will cover your ass!). It’s also why many politicians are serious about food security, because when food prices suddenly skyrocket, you can have riots. I remember reading that right before the Arab Spring, bread prices in region had shot up (IIRC, Egypt in particular). I’ve also read that due to their major extended drought, many farmers in Syria gave up and went to the city, but since they didn’t have a lot of skills to function in a city and there were so many of them, crime and violence increased as people did anything they could to survive, then Assad stepped in to squash this and everything spiralled downwards from there.

Re: Bt cotton - here’s two studies as food for thought. They’re usually behind paywalls but I disagree with paywalls:

Impact of Bt cotton on pesticide poisoning in smallholder agriculture: A panel data analysis (PDF - India)

Widespread adoption of Bt cotton and insecticide decrease promotes biocontrol services (PDF - China)

India has a lot of huge problems in their ag related to lack of infrastructure. They don’t have good ways of transporting products from the farm to the market, there’s a lot of middlemen who up the price every step of the way. The farmers don’t see any profit from the price increases. They also don’t have sufficient cooled or refrigerated places for their produce (this also relates back to infrastructure, as these places can require electricity), so countless tons of produce just go bad. These are costs that hurt the farmer, b/c they still went to the time, effort, and inputs (water, fertilizer, labor), to grow the plants. It doesn’t matter who you’re buying your seeds from or even if you’re organic or not if half your produce rots on the way to market - which it will in subtropical-to-tropical climates with crappy transportation - this is a problem in developing countries all across the world. Farmers the world over take out loans in the beginning of the growing season to buy things like seeds and fertilizer and equipment, and it’s a gamble - will they manage to grow and sell enough to cover these loans? If they do, and then some, they’ll be alright this season. If they don’t they get into debt, and when your corrupt legal/banking system doesn’t have protection from lenders who charge insane rates, rates you’ll never be able to pay off from your meager income even on good years, the farmers and their families are totally screwed. When you hear about farmers killing themselves, it’s due to this poverty compounded by economic penalty, where the men can’t support their families and see no way out from their predicament. 

India is also heavily dependent upon monsoons for water, because while the Green Revolution brought in a little bit of irrigation, it’s not enough, and it doesn’t help anyway when there’s no water. They don’t have sufficient infrastructure to help capture the water when it does show up, either.

How are things handled in New Zealand? How is ag policy handled there? Are there lots of government protections or subsidies for farmers? Is NZ able to grow all their own food year round? Have there ever been any food riots there, esp any then causing changes in policy? I don’t even know what your major ag exports are, or who you export to - perhaps Australia? What’s hunger like there? Do a lot of people garden, produce their own? I’ve never had the chance to discuss these things with someone from your part of the world! 

In the end, I don’t think fear is a good place to deal with complex problems that require multi-faceted solutions. Fear clouds the mind, it tends to move one from nuanced gray to black and white. With all the issues looming on the horizon, I think we need to be pragmatic, keep all options on the table, and evaluate what will work best where. An ever growing human population, an increasingly rich and therefore more resource intensive human population, on an increasingly stressed earth. There’s no perfect solutions to any of this, although I hold out hope that 3D printing will put the means of production into the hands of the populace, and when people are creating only what they want out of materials they can choose, perhaps we’ll see a lot less waste this way. Maybe I just watched too much Star Trek TNG when I was younger. 

I’m also hopeful b/c I see so many people all over the world actually talking about these issues now, talking about creating new communities, to handle these problems at the local level, since different locations have different problems, and they see the government as not providing solutions so they’re stepping up. People communicating and sharing with others, to find out what has been effective or useful where they live, to help others in similar situations. With the internet, social media, and ubiquity of cell phones, it’s easier to organize (and swap seeds!) than ever before.

Gifts for Gardeners

#53: Local Moths or Butterflies

Looking back on it, the best gift I ever got for my partner was an order of moth eggs from Worldwide Butterflies in the UK.

One of our Death’s Head Hawkmoths (Acherontia atropos) is pictured above: it was a joy to see them hatch, grow, pupate, and mature all in our kitchen. I also had fond memories of doing this in elementary school in Canada, raising Painted Lady butterflies we released in the Spring.

It’s a small thing, but it’s nice to have some small part in raising and encouraging the creatures that make up the local biome: you learn what they eat, how they pupate, and how long the different phases of their lives last up close and personal.

Dinner And Slippers: Why You Should Eat Rabbit Meat

Article: York Underwood // Photo: Karolina Fund

December 22, 2015

Birgit Kositzke started farming rabbits here in Iceland in 2011. She’s owns a hutch, with over 400 rabbits, in Syðri Kárastaðir (5 kilometres north of Hvammstangi). She provides rabbit meat to restaurants around Iceland and the meat is available for purchase at Matarbúrið, a new butcher and deli in Grandi–Reykjavík’s currently trendy area.

Birgit, originally from Germany, runs the entire hutch on her own. She cares for the rabbits from birth until slaughter–doing so with care and attention.

Rabbits are far more eco-friendly than sheep or cattle; they require less energy to raise, and produce less waste. Fur is very fashionable in Reykjavík and synthetic and acrylic fur is made from coal, limestone and petroleum–not very green. By using the rabbits for meat and clothing, almost nothing goes to waste.

In Iceland, vegetables come at a high-energy cost to begin with. I don’t have the numbers, and feel free to correct me, but rabbit meat might be more environmentally friendly than most vegetables in Iceland, when comparing calorie to carbon footprint.

$300 Underground Greenhouse Grows Food Year Round; An Extraordinary Walipini 

From vertical farms to solar-powered “farms from a box,” we’ve seen how farming technology has grown leaps and bounds in recent years. But for those who prefer something a little more rustic, growing food from a hole in the ground is as low-tech as you can get.

A walipini, meaning “place of warmth” from the Amaraya Indian language, is an underground greenhouse with a transparent (usually plastic) covering that stays warm by passively soaking up the sun’s heat and absorbing the earth’s thermal energy.

This underground greenhouse collects the sun’s rays and earth’s heat to grow food Photo credit: schweibenalp.ch

Fruits and vegetables can be grown year-round, making it ideal for communities in colder locations that can’t usually grow their own fresh and local produce during certain parts of the year.

The farming method isn’t exactly new. Walipinis have been used in South and Central America for decades, including one that can grow bananas at 14,000 feet in the Andes.

The technique was notably adopted by The Benson Institute, a worldwide food security program of the Mormon church. According to The Plaid Zebra, the Benson Institute and its team of volunteers built a community-sized 74-feet-by-20-feet walipini in La Paz, Bolivia for around a mere $300.

Urine is an excellent high-nitrogen compost accelerator/activator: pee away, and pee often!

Behavioral Science Terms:

ANTHROPOCENTRISM

The belief (often inherent and subconscious) that humans are the most significant species on earth; that humans and human experience is best, more important, of higher value, and more moral than that of animals; assessment of reality through a human-centric lens.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM

The act of attributing human experience (e.g., mental state, emotions, conscious choice, logical thought) to non-human animals.

BIOPHILIA

The inherent human tendency to want to connect in an empathetic manner with non-human living things.

SENTIENCE

“The ability of a living thing to feel, perceive, and experience subjectively.” (Source) This can include but is not limited to nor does not necessarily contain: emotions, self-awareness, logical and procedural reasoning, conscious thought.

SAPIENCE

In humans, often defined as “wisdom, or the ability (…) to act with appropriate judgement, (…) may be considered an additional faculty, apart from intelligence, with its own properties.” (Source).

In animals, the conference of ‘personhood’ to a nonhuman; accompanied by the implicit assumption of anthropocentric worldview; experiences of the non-human animal assumed to be analogous to those of humans under the same stimuli.

Training / Behavior Modification Terms:

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING = Developing an association between initially neutral stimuli and biologically important stimuli (google Pavlov’s dogs). E.g. Dogs salivating in anticipation of food.

OPERANT CONDITIONING = An animal’s behavior operates on the environment to produce a good, bad, or neutral result. Animal learns from successes and failures. E.g. Positive and negative reinforcement.

HABITUATION = Getting used to a stimulus that once elicited a greater response by the animal.E.g. A horse becoming less fearful of traffic noises after it has been turned out in a field next to a road.

SENSITIZATION = Becoming more responsive to a once neutral stimulus. E.g. A horse becoming fearful of traffic after a negative experience with it.

POSITIVE (X): Adding something to increase or decrease a behavior.

NEGATIVE (X): Removing something to increase or decrease a behavior. 

POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT = A stimulus is added to reward a desired behavior. Encourages that behavior to happen more frequently. This is the basis of clicker training. E.g. dog sits on command, receives a treat.  

NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT = A stimulus is removed to reward a desired behavior. Encourages that behavior to happen more frequently. Often used in terms of  scary thing going way or an unpleasant stimulus stopping.  E.g. squeezing a horse forward, stop squeezing once it is moving OR backing away from an animal that is allowing you to be close even though it is uncomfortable.

POSITIVE PUNISHMENT = A stimulus is added as a consequence for a behavior. Encourages the behavior to happen less frequently. Often used to “discipline” animals for “doing something wrong.” E.g. using the whip on a horse as a punishment for bucking.

NEGATIVE PUNISHMENT = A stimulus is removed as a consequence for a behavior. Encourages the behavior to happen less frequently. Is not necessarily “bad” - often represents “natural consequences”. E.g. removing yourself from play when a dog is being too rough. 

Fingerless gloves by nbGlovesAndMittens on Etsy

Todays Butterfly of the Day - Orange Butterfly Fingerless Glovesby Kimberly Porter

My copy of Handwoven magazine finally arrived. Interweave Press mailed my mermaid scarf back to me a couple of weeks ago, just in time for fall weather. After Handwoven’s temporary copyright on my work expires in a year, I plan to publish a longer pattern guide. I am willing to answer questions about the design and weaving process. I will post a question compilation guide in a week or two. I am also answering questions in Rigid Heddle Adventure on Facebook.