Whole Systems Agriculture
Living The Agrarian Dream through a Whole Systems Approach to Hand-Scaled Gardening
Complex Natural Systems Model
October, 2004
The theoretical model for our little farm is a living organism of one kind or another. This model includes the subsystems that make up the whole organism, as well as the supersystems into which the organism belongs. Examples of supersystems include biotic communities or human societies. In whole systems agriculture, we are most concerned with how things are organized. The words organism, order, and organization all have the same root meaning.
Whole systems agriculture looks to the new sciences of the 20th Century for guidance and inspiration and the practitioner learns about this organization by observing an orderly universe and applying these observations to her work. The new sciences include relativity, quantum theory, chaos theory and general systems theory.
In following the whole systems model, one of the main goals is self-organization; getting the farm system to do much of the management and work that might otherwise have to be done by the farmer. We attempt to realize the goal expressed by Masanobu Fukuoka of being “know-nothing, do-nothing farmers”. Readers interested in pursuing the theories behind all this may do well to do some Googling. However, detailed academic knowledge is certainly not a requirement for success; in fact, much academic and conventional agricultural knowledge may actually get in the way since most of it is built on the old sciences rather than the new sciences, describing a quite different, and apparently contradictory, reality.
Just as a skunk needs no understanding of ecology to live well in a woodland, a whole systems gardener needs only know a little about systems to have a great garden. Systems are always with us whether we like them or not–want them or not–or know anything about them or not; no matter how we might try, there is no way out. The whole systems gardener serves her garden just as the hands serve the human being. By knowing she is not an end in herself, she endlessly becomes herself.
Permanent Raised Intensive Beds And
Depressed Alleys
October, 2004
Since beds and alleys are complimentary they will be discussed together.
During the oil shocks of the 1970s, lots of people began to take an interest in growing food at home and it was easy for me to put together a night class for adults. We put up lights in the school garden and started experimenting with “French Intensive” beds of about the same dimensions I use now but without the wide alleys. Alan Chadwick and John Jeavons had introduced the French Intensive idea to California and it was getting lots of attention in the gardening press at that time. They started in Palo Alto. Work continues today at Ecology Action in Willits, and if I am putting things together correctly, also at the University of California at Santa Cruz. At that time Mr. Jeavons published a book, “How to Grow More Vegetables” with the subtitle, “than you ever thought possible on less land than you ever imagined”. It has gone through several editions and has sold a half-million copies. Any gardener or small farmer interested in growing on intensive beds would do well to obtain his book. It is filled with excellent line drawings and the information on individual food crops is very detailed and not available elsewhere. You may order the book directly from Ecology Action (USA phone: 707.459.0150).
I first became acquainted with raised intensive beds when I was student greenhouse and nursery manager of the horticulture unit at the state college in San Luis Obispo, California. In the floricultural industry, crops such as carnations and chrysanthemums were grown in greenhouses on permanently constructed concrete beds filled with potting soil. (This was in 1959 and these crops, for the most part, are now being grown in South America where labor is much cheaper and rules governing environmental degradation and worker safety are much more lax, if there are any at all.) Today, wherever flowers are grown whether in the field or in the greenhouse, raised beds are the standard–the regular way it’s done.
Here’s a cross-sectional drawing of our beds and alleys as we now have most of them configured:
Fifteen feet is allowed for a bed and alley–roughly 7 ½ or 8 feet for the bed, including the shoulders, and the difference for the alley. I’ve found that the best configuration for the drip lines is 1 foot apart, but drip irrigation may not be needed at all if just vegetables are grown, particularly where it rains in the summer. Drip lines are essential with floral crops because the weight of residual overhead water on the foliage results in many flowers getting knocked over.
We shoveled up all our beds by hand, the equivalent of twenty 150-foot beds, as we experimented with their configuration over a period of years. An immediate advantage of building the beds is that the gardener doubles-up on the best existing surface soil on the main crop-growing areas of the beds. One can see an immediate advantage to this by observing a piece of land where the soil has been lightly pushed around in the course of grading. The grass is much taller and greener where the soil has been filled. It’s short and pale on the cuts. Most food crop plants will make satisfactory growth on poor soils ruined by plowing. Because of this, food crops can be expected to do extra well where the best soil has been doubled up on the beds. This has been our experience.
The bed shoulders are important transitional areas between the enriched soil on the beds and the more raw soil in the alleys. In ecological terms these represent “ecotones” the transitional areas between ecosystems and, on a smaller scale, between plant communities such as woodlands and grasslands. Biologists consider these as rich areas where a lot more “happens” than happens in either community alone; indeed, perhaps even more than happens in both the communities combined. In the garden or farm there is endless room for experimentation of good uses for the shoulders. In the early summer, we are able to extend the cool season a bit by spacing corn plants or sunflowers, say 4 or 5 feet apart to act as nurses that protect the main crop on the bed. Last year this worked well for keeping summer Swiss chard sweet and tender. Quick crops such as radishes and beets are an excellent choice for growing on the shoulders since they are removed before they would get in the way of harvesting the main crop. This year on our east-west running beds we are experimenting to find the limit on summer potato growth by planting them on the north shoulder in the shade of other plants.
Many people who enjoy gardening by the rules will say that one must never step on the beds for fear of compacting the soil. This is not correct. In fact, if beds are not pressed down with repeated trampling during construction, failure is nearly certain. Capillary water will not move through loose soil and earth, and seeds and fresh transplants will quickly dry. This “rule” has fostered construction of beds narrower than they really should be for efficient use of space and for the protection from hazards such as sun and wind that plants enjoy by close association. It has also fostered the construction of inefficiently short beds, say only 25 to 30 feet long, adding substantially to the number of management units on the hand-scale farm.
Stepping into the beds for planting, weeding, and harvesting, particularly with just one foot is not a problem. Good soil has pore spaces and earthworm passages–alternately filled with air and water. It is the sopping wet mulch and soil that should not be stepped upon. Forcing out the air and water (called “puddling” by professionals), might cause the mulch to compact to such an extent as to support weed growth. To resolve this problem, I divide my 150-foot long beds with narrow strips of old carpeting spaced every 25 feet as foot crossings in order to avoid indiscriminate trampling.
Every shoulder, depending on the compass orientation of the bed, has a particular “aspect”, that is north, south, east or west, which can greatly affect plant growth. South facing shoulders will be much warmer than north facing ones and west shoulders will be warmer than east facing ones. When all the plants of a particular kind are planted with a similar or neutral aspect, as is the case with more conventional kinds of agriculture, there is little opportunity for the farmer to learn much about the reasons for success or failure; there needs to be some sort of comparison. Without such comparisons, not just with aspect but with other variables as well, such as planting times and proximity to other plants that may compete with or benefit the crop plant in question, the reasons for greater or lesser degrees of success are mostly matters of conjecture.
We are experimenting with planting single rows of alfalfa and clover near the base of the shoulders and encouraging its more or less permanent establishment. These, of course, are innoculated with appropriate cultures of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and a hoped for additional benefit is to permanently establish these microorganisms throughout the garden as well. These legumes will scatter their seeds into the alleys where they establish themselves in a somewhat spotty fashion even without summer irrigation and provide a continuing source of nitrogen-rich mulching material. The small seeds of these legumes are unlikely to push their way up through the thick mulch on the beds where they could compete with the crop plants. An interesting characteristic of alfalfa and clover seeds is that they remain viable over a very long period of time. A small percentage will not sprout even under the most favorable conditions after sowing or self-sowing but remain viable to sprout in the years to come. This is just what the whole systems gardener interested in self-organization is looking for. She lets the system do her work.
When people visit our little farm and notice the very wide alleys, they at first seem puzzled by the apparent waste of so much space so some explaining is in order here.
It’s likely that if our water well delivered enough to keep the whole garden going during our hot, dry summers I might have spaced the beds closer together. But having discovered the convenience and benefits of these wide alleys I’d never go back to tight spacing no matter how much water might become available. Let’s remind ourselves that these are intensive beds, intensive in inputs, intensive in labor, and abundant in their yields, all of which make access very important. At the very least the alleys need to be wide enough to accommodate a hand drawn wagon or cart. Mulch needs to be carted in, along with flats of baby plants from the nursery for transplanting. After planting, they need hand watering for a week or more while their little roots get out into the surrounding soil. The plantings need regular inspections and almost always there will be some weeds that need to be pulled.
Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that a 7.5 x 150 foot bed is planted entirely to potatoes, which yield as much as one pound per square foot, and access is only by narrow footpaths. The small scale farmer, not having use of a tractor drawn potato digger, would then be faced with the task of hauling out a thousand pounds of potatoes in buckets or crates by hand. They invented wheels for jobs like this–it would be most imprudent to work with hands and feet alone.
In organic gardening circles, people say that a given size of garden needs an equal amount of land to support it with composting or mulching materials. I would say the latter is a minimum. On our own two-acre farm there is roughly one half-acre in beds, another half-acre in alleys to support the beds with mulch (should our supply of delivered grass clippings fail due to energy shortages) and a third half-acre in lawn and trees that can also be used as a source of mulch materials. The remaining uncropped half-acre is in buildings, driveway, access road, nursery, and outdoor storage. Thus, there is a 2:1 ratio of supportive, mulch growing land to land that is directly productive.
The reader may wonder if it might not be easier to farm the whole acre-and-a-half more extensively and not have to trouble one’s self with cutting and moving mulch. I would say that the main reason intensive beds are more favorable is that mulch, water, and labor are more efficiently applied to a half-acre of intensive beds than an acre-and-a-half of extensively planted land. Weeds alone might make reasonably good mulch so the gardener is able to make good use of weeds on 2/3 of her land rather than have to fight them. Even when mulch is contaminated with lots of weed seed, few come through if the mulch is deep enough and properly applied. Transplanting into a fresh layer of mulch gives crop plants a one or two month jump on weeds. Where they do come through, hand pulling is easy in the loose, highly organic soil that develops under the mulch. We rarely use hoes or any sort of tools for weeding our beds.
A purpose of tillage not mentioned in the “No-Tillage” section is to clear the land of previous crop residues that would interfere with the planting of the crop that follows. Alleys serve this purpose and allow the farmer to do a better and faster job of it. There are occasions where we have replanted a new crop on the very day the old crop was removed, although we are mostly in not that much of a rush. In managing these residues, the killed crop and attendant dead weeds are mowed and the rough residues tossed into the alleys. Hand pulling and hand digging of anything green is sometimes in order to prevent regrowth. Fresh mulch is applied (sometimes a single mulching will serve for two crops) and the new crop planted in. Conventional practices usually take weeks or months of preparation but in this way the process can be cut to a matter of days.
The alleys are also used to grow crops for mulching, or for just improving the poorer alley soil. I’ve used wheat or ryegrass with a legume such as white clover or alfalfa for this but there are lots of other possibilities–more on this in the next section. Birdseed, which usually contains lots of millet, makes a very heavy crop and the price is considerably less than buying conventional cover crop seed commercially. Here in our Mediterranean climate we only grow in the alleys during the cool of the year for water conservation purposes. Next fall we’re planning to seed all our alleys with large-seeded winter grain–wheat, barley, oats–whether heavily mulched or not. These large, high-energy, dense seeds are able to push their way through quite a deep layer of mulch while the smaller seeds of many weedy species will be suppressed. We keep our alleys mowed to facilitate foot traffic, and wheat and barley hold up particularly well under mowing.
After enjoying working in a garden with spacious alleys I’d never go back to squeezing between closely-spaced beds or rows.
WHOLE SYSTEMS VERSUS
BIOINTENSIVE
Tony, of Auckland, New Zealand, asked me to make a comparison between whole systems agriculture and biointensive growing. I have broken it down here by various practices and characteristics.
Open vs. Closed System Models. The measure of a living system’s vitality is in the degree to which that system exchanges energy, matter and information with its environment. The vitality of a human being, for example, might be measured by assessing the degree to which that human being exchanges oxygen, carbon and information with the world. In the early years of life a human being is a very open system that exchanges much with the world. As a person ages, transactions slow down. When exchanges stop, a human being becomes, by definition, a closed system and is considered dead.
Whole systems agriculture is modeled on vital, open, living systems. These systems are high in input, high in internal activity and high in output. Most of the schools of sustainable agriculture, including the biointensive school, also claim to model themselves on living systems but at the same time they hold up the ideal of reducing inputs. I would submit that they are doing little more than trying to invent perpetual motion machines because high outputs require high inputs. This is inherent in the Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy. The input-output equation must balance. There’s no free lunch. In the whole systems method, lunch starts with mulch gathered from wherever one might find it. Many will not need to go beyond walking distance of their gardens to get it.
To be sure, fossil fuel inputs need to be reduced and in time eliminated. But if yields are to be maintained, what will replace them? Mulch replaces tillage, fertilizer and chemicals. It smothers weeds and greatly reduces the amount of water needed to grow crops. To some extent it even replaces information because the whole systems farm, fed with mulch, “knows” just what to do. It makes food out of grass and sticks and leaves—theoretically anyway—on pretty much a pound for pound basis. The same elements that go into the garden in mulch can be removed in food in accordance with equations familiar to high school chemistry students.
A major thrust of the biointensive school is to strive for a closed system with respect to the elements of life just as most of the other schools of sustainable agriculture do. Closed systems are, by definition, dead systems. The Whole Systems school strives to emulate vital, robust living systems. To do this the garden organism needs abundant food and in this respect is no different from human beings or any other sorts of living beings.
Intensive Beds. Both practices make use intensive beds but whole systems beds are longer, wider, with sloping shoulders, and raised with soil thrown up from neighboring alleys. Growing on intensive beds has a long history and is not unique to either whole systems or biointensive methodology.
Tillage. Whole systems embraces non-tillage which is in sharp contrast to periodic double-digging (initially to a depth of 3 feet) and sifting of surface soil outlined for biointensive practice. Tillage of all kinds destroys soil organic matter by admitting air which literally burns up soil organic matter. Organic matter has been shown to increase when no-tillage practices are adopted even without off-site additions of organic material. Tillage may give good immediate results because burned up organic matter releases plant nutrients but in the long run it pauperizes the land. Additionally, tillage destroys soil structure (the way soil particles and organic matter aggregate together) and destroys the earthworm passages that allow air and water to move easily through the soil.
Organic and Chemical Practices. Biointensive practice is strictly organic. In whole systems practice it is at the option of the practitioner. She can, for example, use some manufactured fertilizer in the early years and transition to organic when the land is better and her skills are sharper. Glyphosate, generic RoundUp, can be used in a similar way. Much depends on land quality at the start, the convictions and proclivities of the farmer and the amount of labor and money she is willing to invest.
Use of Transplants. Both systems use transplants almost exclusively. Transplants get the jump on weeds and reduce the time a crop occupies the ground before harvesting which may result in increased overall production in the course of a season. It is much easier to manage germinating seeds in a nursery than in the field and the amount of seed used to produce a given crop is greatly reduced.
Detail of Methodology. How to Grow More Vegetables, the classic textbook of the biointensive method, presents the methodology in (what I believe to be tedious) detail. There is a strong suggestion that the practice of these details is a requirement if one is to truly follow the method. I paint with a much broader brush, giving few details, leaving many options to the gardener who can best adjust details to time, place, circumstance, cost and personal skills and preferences.
Mulch vs. Compost. The whole systems method is mulch based with much of the mulch coming from off-site if easily available. In biointensive practice, fertility is maintained by composting on-site materials and plant materials grown on the beds expressly for composting. Composting is lots of work. Organic material must be removed from the beds, composted, and then returned; but we merely throw spent bed growth in the alleys where it is soon crushed by foot and wheel traffic. By importing organic material from off-site, fertility is increased over time. In closed systems, nutrients are cycled around and around, and in time one will run up against Liebig’s Law of the Minimum—that is production will be limited by the least available plant nutrient. This will be the result of nutrients leaving the site by leaching or by being carried away in the bodies or in the waste products of the eaters.
Sources of Income. Ecology Action, the parent of GROW BIOINTENSIVE, is supported by the sale of publications, seeds, tuitions for seminars and workshops, donations, bequests, grants, volunteer labor and perhaps more. Our work here in Madera is supported almost completely by sales at farmers markets which, I believe, is a testament to the efficacy of our model and our method. We’ve held our own for more than 10 years in a climate generally hostile to small-scale farmers.
Acclaim. Ecology Action has justifiably received wide acclaim for its work—particularly for its work in Third World countries while we here in Madera have scarcely received any recognition at all.
Availability of Information. It’s my goal to make all basic information about the whole systems model and method available on our website without charge. If one wants to study the biointensive method, she must buy books ([or, perhaps go to the library) or pay tuition.
Science and Mysticism. The theoretical model for whole systems agriculture was given to science in the 1940s by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in his General Systems Theory. (Click here for a brief biography on Bertalanffy.) The foundations of biodynamic agriculture were laid out in a number of lectures some two decades earlier by Rudolph Steiner, an occult mystic philosopher. (Click here for a brief biography on Steiner.) I think it fair to say, then, that whole systems agriculture is rooted in science, and biodynamic agriculture is rooted in mysticism. The How To Grow More Vegetables book has a section on moon planting and there are other references that seem to confirm the mystical origins of biointensive growing.
Pushing vs. Pulling System Throughput. The Whole Systems way is to plant a half-flat of this and two flats, and so on, so that a smorgasbord of plants are ready to set out at any particular time. Production is driven by input. The biointensive way is to plan the beds on paper, count back on a calendar to determine planting times so that everything will be ready to set out at once. Production is pulled through the system by desired output. The latter is a path beset with peril and complexity, and contrary to Occam’s Law of Parsimony which states, in effect, that the simplest way is best. Also, when everything is planned in advance, no opportunity for self-organization, serendipity, or inspiration can present itself and the outcome can never be any better than what was planned for. An axiom if mine is to “give chance a chance”. Systems thinkers celebrate the unexpected outcomes of self-organization—at least when they work out well. I’m thinking particularly here of various combinations of plants in the bed which has worked to our advantage, i.e., using sunflowers to shade beets in the heat of summer.
Claims Regarding Sustainability. The two approaches are similar in that each claims that about 1/10 acre [2.5 acres = 1 hectare] or 4000 square feet of intensive bed will support one person with a complete caloric ration of vegetable foods. I specify two harvests per year off the same ground which may also be similar to the biointensive metric, but from here claims sharply diverge. The biointensive goal is for these beds to produce continuously, for an indefinite period of time—perhaps “millions of years”—without adding any nutrients from off-bed land other than what might have been required to get the production cycle going in the first place. A key concept is to recycle all nutrients including those nutrients contained in human manure when legal and safety barriers can be overcome.
Although I certainly have nothing against recycling, I think it is overly optimistic to expect the beds to produce continuously without outside inputs. Nutrients are lost by leaching and when produce is sold the nutrients don’t come back. The chemical weathering of larger rock particles in the soil into soluble nutrients is a very slow process which would require a much larger land base than just the rock and subsoil beneath the beds—my estimate being 1 to 10 acres of pastoral type land [without the animals] per person off which she gathers at least 2 kilocalories of mulching material for each kilocalorie of food she harvests. [Kilocalories would correspond to pounds or kilograms if water and mineral content are held constant.] In this way whatever minerals are made available from the subsoil beneath the beds and whatever minerals are returned to the beds by recycling are just “gravy” and don’t even enter into the sustainable equation of 2 gathered to 1 harvested. Better safe than sorry when it comes to making plans that could make the difference between life or death as we prepare for a post-petroleum future and better to build into our plans a margin of safety.
And when it comes to defining sustainability, I’d be more comfortable measuring it in generations rather than in thousands or millions of years.
This horticultural model would produce 10 times more food for humanity than the pastoral model with animals which I think would enjoy a similar chance at long-term sustainability. Here, 10 to 100 acres would be required for the support of each human being—perhaps much more with poorer lands. A wider range of vegetation can be gathered for mulching material than grazing animals can gather for food. Cattle, for example, don’t do well on woody browse or poisonous plants such as milk thistle or hemlock. Bark, as another example, is high in potassium and other minerals too. It makes good mulch but few domestic animals will show much interest in it. On the other hand, animals can gather food over steeper and poorer land than humans can manage so, on these lands herding may be a better way to go.
Good wishes, all. And thank you Tony for suggesting this comparison.
Emilia Hazelip
Where Fukuoka focused most of his attention on orchards and the rice/barley crop rotation, Emilia Hazelip focused on creating and maintaining market gardens of vegetables and herbs. Born in Spain, Emilia immigrated to California and began gardening seriously in the late ’60s. Much of her early work drew on Ruth Stout’s deep mulch method.
“Following the reading of Ruth Stout’s books Gardening Without Work and How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, I began covering beds with a variety of materials. Since then I have made raised beds in all my gardens, although the difference in volume came only from the soil taken off the path and put on the bed… no double-digging at all. The foundation of my research is the work of Masanobu Fukuoka, whose book The One Straw Revolution changed my life in 1977 when it was published in English. In Fukuoka’s natural agriculture no machines are used, nor greenhouses, nor all those things we normally have to do when working in a difficult climate. To me what seemed most important was to be able to obtain crops without ‘exploiting’ the soil, even if a compromise is made regarding machines.”
Emilia drew on many sources as she continued to develop gardens. The work of permaculturist Marc Bonfils with self-fertile cereal production, and the microbiological research of Alan Smith and Elaine Ingham are frequently mentioned. Emilia read widely, applied what she read in her gardens, and through patient observation and experiment was able to develop a deep understanding of how to produce abundant food in difficult climates while maintaining the “wild” nature of the soil and the many creatures that live there.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Emilia was able to master and communicate the techniques needed to apply Fukuoka’s method in raising vegetables and herbs in temperate and Mediterranean climates. This section is dedicated to preserving, and perhaps building upon, that knowledge.
We have only just begun to assemble and post her published work here. We will continue to do so as quickly as possible, and will include excerpts and summaries of the information she shared through private and public emails. We are also hoping to post oral histories of people who knew and studied with her.
The best place to start learning about what Emilia learned and taught is to begin with her “mantra”, a short document explaining the biological processes at work in growing plants.
“The Fundamental Reality that Underlies Fukuoka’s Principles”
“The Fundamental Reality that Underlies Fukuoka’s
Principles”
By Emilia Hazelip
a Fukuoka Farming Website exclusive
Soil is created by living plants working with microorganisms, and by the plants’ residues and the microorganisms’ corpses after their death.
Soil is drained of nutrients by cultivation, NOT by plants.
Tilling and cultivation of any sort diminishes the natural fertility of the soil in three ways:
· Mechanical grinding of the soil particles reduces their size and smooths them. This greatly reduces the size and number of micro-cavities between the particles, which are the habitats of balanced bacteria breathing out gases essential to mineral absorption and plants’ health.
· Tilling kills vital microorganisms in the soil by exposing them to excessive oxygen in the air.
· And tilling exposes the organic matter in the rhizosphere (soil around the roots) to the atmospheric gases, precipitating the combustion of the humus turning it into soluable mineralized nutrients . This provides a quick fertilizer for the plants, but at the cost of destroying permanently the texture and tilth of the organic, humic, rich soil, which accellerates erosion as well as contamination of the watertable with nitrates.
Minerals and trace elements, although present in soil, may not be accessible to plants due to the absence of the micoorganisms (killed by tilling, pollution, or the use of herbicides or pesticides) that participate in the plant’s mineral nutritional process. Just as microflora in our own digestive systems are needed so that our bodies can absorb and use the nutrients of the ingested food, microorganisms in the soil perform the same function for plants.
In crops, if the edible parts of a plant are harvested and the rest left to return to the soil, the organic mass left by the decaying plants will be superior to the volume of nutrients taken from the soil.
A plant gets up to 95% of all the nutrients it needs from the sky (gases and sunlight), NOT the soil. Of the 5% taken from the soil, half of it is the essential nutrient nitrogen, which, if the plant is grown in combination with a legume, can also come from the air.
ONLY 2 1/2% of the total nutrition of a plant IS COMING EXCLUSIVELY FROM THE SOIL in the form of soluable minerals and trace elements.
“That is the fundamental reality that underlies and supports Fukuoka’s principles of No tilling, No fertilizer, No weeding, and No pesticides or herbicides. Natural agriculture refutes and disproves the foundation of current agronomical logic, and because it does it is seen as heresy by most of the agronomic community. Fukuoka proposes, and supports with evidence, the first fundamental agronomic reform since agriculture was invented.”
– Emilia Hazelip
by Emilia Hazelip
Reproduced from Prodder, translated from French by Linda Hull
(Permaculture Magazine – www.permaculture.co.uk)Emilia Hazelip, who introduced the concept of permaculture to France over a decade ago, is constantly evolving her work and has been developing a food growing method which she calls ‘Synergistic Agriculture’.
Emilia Hazelip’s work is strongly influenced by Masanobu Fukuoka’s system of ‘natural agriculture’, by permaculture and Marc Boufils’s agronomical research, as well as by her own experimental work growing food crops with minimal inputs in the south of France and in other Mediterranean countries.
The first surprise when you enter Emilia’s kitchen garden is seeing vegetables growing in a quite disorderly fashion on oblong mounds of earth 1.2 meters (5ft) wide by 8 meters (26ft) long. The rule is to make space for the feet and space for the plants, because putting feet where plants are to grow leads to soil compaction and where there is no air in the soil nothing will grow. The cultivated areas are well demarcated, their elevated form giving a notable increase in surface area for production. Moreover, they are all covered with mulch – covering the soil to preserve the organic material, preventing erosion and compaction by rain, diminishing evaporation in summer and maintaining a soil microclimate which reduces the adverse effects of temperature extremes. Protecting the soil in this way removes the need to aerate it each year. Emilia claims that there is no need to fertilize the soil because it is left to maintain itself: ‘soil autofertility’. Instead of pulling out all the plants and leaving the ground bare over winter to suffer the effects of erosion, some plants and all roots are left in the soil, their decomposition assuring a continuous reserve of organic matter in the soil.
This also has other benefits. Leeks, for example, are cut down to the white part, then left two to three weeks to produce a second crop. Afterwards roots are left in the soil where they regenerate making seed for the following year.
In this experimental garden, the gourd is neighbor to the tomato seedling which itself is found beside beans or peppers. Because thought is given to companion planting and guilds, diversity helps plants to defend themselves better against diseases and pests. This combination of plants also supports the soil’s autofertility.
You can see, here and there, flowers and weeds, or rather what are called here ‘spontaneous plants’. You don’t pull these out (not all, anyway) because, being indigenous, they attract insects and other organisms in the soil which are beneficial. For all these reasons, it is better to combine the greatest diversity of plants, even those which we think of as useless.
Emilia says it’s necessary to allow a certain number of pests (or so-called pests) to live in the garden because they sometimes work as the gardener’s helpers. If, for example, you eradicate the colonies of greenfly, the ladybirds which feed on them will no longer come and will not be there to regulate the greenfly population or to fight off the next new invasion of insects.
However, the problem of slugs is still not resolved. The ducks, which have a small pond in the middle of the garden, turned out to be inefficient (they’re asleep when the slugs are in full swing!). Emilia is looking for other predators to intervene in the biological struggle. She’s going to reintroduce the hedgehog and, with the co-operation of a local agricultural researcher, experiment with the efficiency of the scarab, a small beetle which is a natural predator of the slug.
Finally a synergistic garden is an ecosystem that is consciously designed to allow all the dynamic life forms present in a wild soil to remain present while still growing crops (on whatever scale). It is that simple. But that’s not the view commonly held in the sphere of science or in the politics of agribusiness which rule France. Emilia exclaims passionately: “The living world is not understood by the technician, and since it is not understood, it is not studied for its diversity. People always want to apply mechanical laws to it…”
We have inherited an agriculture which has always disturbed the soil in order to prepare the next crop. The ancient agriculture of the Incas, the Mayas and the Orient also prepared the fields in such a way. Culturally, this activity has been honored and sung by poets. Ecologically, pedologically, it is a catastrophe.
A natural, non-traumatized soil presents a subtle balance of thousands of diverse specific organisms. From friendly bacteria to fungi, the presence of all these invisible subtle lives allows complex interactions – the ‘Synergistic Effect’. Among the dynamic processes in the soil, I think that the ethylene-oxygen cycle is a good example of this wondrous world.
How can we give back to the soil something to compensate, and return it to natural uncultivated health? We cannot recreate that quality while we keep on destabilizing the rhizosphere. The only way is to learn a type of agriculture that will reconcile the maintenance of soil ‘wildness’ and the production of crops. This has been my endeavor for over 20 years. I call the system I have evolved ‘Synergistic Agriculture’, utilizing the self-fertility of the wild soil as fertilizer. This agriculture can be practiced on any scale and all the machinery used in the U.S.A. and Canada for no-till agriculture can be used for Synergistic Agriculture.THE BACKGROUND
The foundation of my research is the work of Masanobu Fukuoka, whose book The One Straw Revolution changed my life in 1977 when it was published in English. In Fukuoka’s natural agriculture no machines are used, nor greenhouses, nor all those things we normally have to do when working in a difficult climate. To me what seemed most important was to be able to obtain crops without ‘exploiting’ the soil, even if a compromise is made regarding machines. Before encountering Fukuoka’s work, I had been working near Chadwick, in Santa Cruz, California in the late ’60s. Following the reading (also in the ’60s) of Ruth Stout’s books Gardening Without Work and How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, I began covering beds with a variety of materials.
Since then I have made raised beds in all my gardens, although the difference in volume came only from the soil taken off the path and put on the bed… no double-digging at all.
In 1985, during the first permaculture design course with Sego Jackson in the Pyrenees, Marc Bonfils gave a presentation on self-fertile cereal production. Since then Marc has been teaching about the agronomical reasons behind this new method of agriculture. Nowadays, microbiologists like Alan Smith and Elaine Ingham are also providing much needed evidence of the well found need to stop altering the soil’s stability and stressing it to exhaustion by plowing.
I cannot call this agriculture ‘do-nothing’ agriculture since, on the contrary, there is much to do to establish a succession of cultures where what you are leaving behind is as important as what you are harvesting. A detailed plan indicating the plant mixtures and successions, paying attention to the kind of root residue the soil is receiving combined constantly with nitrogen-fixing plants of the legumes variety, is a must.SOIL & PLANT SYNERGY
Although to start the system the soil can be dug over thoroughly, once we start the garden we must be sure not to disturb the soil deeper than the sowing depth, and only then where it is sown. What consumes organic matter in the soil is the chemical reaction that follows when atmospheric gases are put in intimate contact with the soil while plowing. Although by mineralizing humus, a quick instant fertilizer has been produced, the price you pay for this is much too high. Plants’ growth and health also depend on other substances like ethylene gas which enhances the assimilation of iron. Plants will be healthy if all the digestive flora in the soil are present. Soil and plants are a single organism.
Plants are the ‘antenna’ of the soil, capturing light and creating solid, organic, vegetable matter from the space above, since 95% of needed nutrients come from gases and light. In other words, the plant is only taking 21/2% of its needs from the soil in the form of minerals and trace elements. The remaining 21/2% of nutrients is nitrogen, which can be obtained in a symbiotic way by combining with nitrogen-fixing plants, mainly from the legumes family, like beans, chickpeas, favabeans, lentils and peas.
Harvesting is as important as the rest of the process. The soil is a living mass of interacting beings, and they all eat just like everything alive on this planet. Their foodchains are a wonder of intricate relationships covering the mineral, the vegetal, and the animal/insect/bacteria worlds.
When we disturb the soil by plowing it, despite our best intentions we are creating stress in it. The moment we stop doing this we can organize our garden or farm in such a way that the soil functions as if ‘in the wild’. A maximum of what has grown in it is left either by its roots (for an above the ground crop) or by following a rootcrop by another crop which will leave generous amounts of roots in the soil, such as Swiss chard.
These residues, together with a biodegradable mulch, amount to surface composting, leaving more organic matter in the soil than the crop has removed. From the moment we stop mineralizing the humus, litter accumulates on the soil as well as in a myriad of microsites within it, hosting happy bacteria cycling between ethylene and oxygen, releasing biological gas essential to the wellbeing of all types of roots.
The less we disturb the soil, the more diversity and intensity of interactions will take place in its mass, so the healthier the plants and the fewer problems there will be for us. It is time for us to acknowledge that the soil needs to be itself while we produce our crops. We must respect this organism enough to let it function in its natural way although ‘domesticated’ by our technical care. The organisms in the soil are like the bloodstream of the human body which carries nutrients and participates in the assimilation of the minerals that are present.
Above the ground leaves act like photovoltaic cells, capturing light and producing energy. The only bridge doing this fantastic job is plants; it has always struck me as odd, that, although in the wild, plants are the first link in the food chains and are responsible for the creation of ‘soil’, in agriculture, on the other hand, they are accused of destroying the soil. Typical of Homo occidentalis, the crops have been made a scapegoat for the negative effects of plowing!
The soil should never be opened up and forcefed, not even with the best made compost ever. Leave only to the soil what is grown in it. As for the rest put it above the soil, as mulch. And let all the soil occupants absorb it into its mass.
I truly believe that as long as we have not found peace with the soil, we won’t find peace above the ground. That as long as we justify the exploitation of an organism, other exploitations will follow and we will remain parasites, consuming more than participating and spiralling into entropy until we commit mass suicide.The Four Principles Of Synergistic Agriculture
1. Keep the soil undisturbed and uncompacted.
2. Use the soil’s self-fertility as fertilizer.
3. Integrate the litter zone with the agricultural soil profile.
4. Establish a partnership with beneficials to protect crops.Raised beds are only needed where crops are harvested continually. For areas where produce is harvested once only, a good layer of mulch will he enough to protect the soil from compaction.
The following examples apply to raised beds in regions with a temperate climate, where nighttime temperatures in the winter do not fall below -10 degrees C. For gardens in more extreme latitudes, or at high altitudes, a quite different strategy is needed. Equally for climates that are frost-free in winter an alternative planting and cropping succession plan will apply.
In my experience the positive or negative results that I have had with sowing dates have happened as a result of studying the development of plants throughout the season, in relation to weather etc. (I’ve long since given up following the lunar/cosmic calendar, there being insufficient evidence of results to justify the time and complication of applying it.) Perhaps certain influences come from our attitude rather than from further afield… and besides a happy, self-fertile soil does influence germination and the growth of plants.
RAISED BED GARDENING WITH JACKIEFRENCH
Corn grows well with cucumbers, but the cucumbers become prone to powdery mildew. Pumpkin grown with corn keeps down weeds – this was a traditional Mexican form of companion planting. The shapes of pumpkin and corn together appear to confuse pests and interfere with the budworm moth’s flight path.
A high bird population and having flowering parsnips or other flowering umbelliferae around the crop to attract wasp, hoverfly, spider and other predators is the best prevention. The more spiders you have the fewer caterpillars will eat your corn. We had enormous problems with heliothis caterpillars here till I began letting large numbers of parsnips flower.
Corn is a very heavy feeder. It is also shallow rooted, which means that it can be grown even on poor soil, if you are prepared to feed it as it grows. Mulch corn as soon as it is as thick as your little finger to control weeds. This is essential – if you don’t mulch you’ll have to weed, as corn won’t stand any competition. If possible keep it mulched up to leaf level for best results – but most people won’t have this much mulch. Give it a sprinkle of fertiliser or homemade liquid manure – or even urine diluted with 10 parts water – every week until the tassels start to form. Then don’t feed it any more.How to start
Raised veg gardens have fewer weeds and heat up faster. So:
1. Find a spot that has at least four hours sunlight a day
2. Build up walls at least 30cm high- or far higher of you don’t want to bend down. Bricks, stones, concrete blocks or wooden sleepers are all good for this, and the garden centre may have some prefab ‘garden walls’ too.
3. Don’t bother weeding and DON’T put down newspaper, which just makes an impermeable barrier between soil and garden. Just buy- or make- enough compost to put at least a 30cm layer your garden bed. (If it’s a very high one, partially fill it with ordinary garden soil first, unless you feel extravagant)
4. Plant immediately, water, feed and pick
What to plant
If you are just starting, dash down to the garden centre and pick up some punnets of veg seedlings. Whatever you find there will probably be okay to plant now in your area. I’d stick to ‘never fail’ crops to begin with- a few rows of silver beet, half a dozen tomatoes, three zucchini plants and two bush pumpkins, the sort that grow in neat zucchini like plants and don’t take over the garden. Plant them all about 60cm apart.
More advanced planting
For this you probably need information on what each veg actually likes, plus what can go wrong. If you’re lucky you’ll have an Aunt Ethel or a Grandma, well versed in garden lore to show you how.
Otherwise dash down to the library and borrow an all purpose garden book( ie Yates Garden Guide, though veg isn’t its strong point, or the Best of Jackie French)
One of the great joys of growing your own is that you can grow the sort of veg your rarely find in supermarkets too- purple king beans or tiny white eggplant(which of course were the reason eggplant got called that in the first place), zucchini in half a dozen shapes and colours (my favourite are pale green and perfectly round) or spaghetti squash, yellow capsicums, long skinny snake beans or ribbed Armenian cucumbers, or even multicoloured corn, or gourds in a dozen different shapes to pile into bowls as ornaments or gifts.
How to feed your garden
1. Keep it mulched- you can buy excellent lucerne based mulches now at the garden centre. Mulch slowly feeds veg, as well as keeping weeds down and moisture in.
2. Buy any good organic garden tucker ie Dynamic Lifter, Charlie Carp and use according to directions ie a scatter a bit once a month while plants are growing strongly, and water in well.
Weeding
If you mulch you won’t have to weed. If you don’t mulch, don’t blame me if you get back ache.
A Trellis Garden
Letting your garden clamber up a trellis saves space, and makes feeding and watering easier. I grow climbing beans, cucumbers, snow peas and pumpkins up trellises, and a rare yellow climbing pear tomato too.
My trellis is made of builder’s mesh tied onto to steel ‘star pickets’, but even a wire fence can be used as a trellis, as long as it gets enough sun. (Trellises are also great for growing grapes, passionfruit and kiwi fruit, plus a few roses- to me a bare fence is a wasted one).