Mini-Farming

The emphasis on this blog will now shift from South America to mini-farming, which was among the major purposes in the land purchase made six years ago. The property is now nearly fully equipped to become largely self-sufficient in plant food production.

The system employed here is biointensive agriculture, which is defined in the Wikipedia entry as:

"The biointensive method is an organic agricultural system which focuses on maximum yields from the minimum area of land, while simultaneously improving the soil. The goal of the method is long term sustainability on a closed system basis. It has also been used successfully on small scale commercial farms."

The system (best to read the full entry) equates to raised bed growing of vegetable and grain crops, the extensive use of compost, companion planting and crop rotation, the use of open-pollinated seeds and production of compost crops, among other factors. The reader is advised to read and study carefully
John Jeavons, How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine ISBN 1-58008-233-5, among other respources. Spanish-speakers can download free an extensive amount of material at
http://www.growbiointensive.org/publications_main.html. 

I have a ten square meter plot of oats growing right now (it's late winter here) and am planting carrots, turnips and more lettuce next week. I have fava beans growing alongside, plus chard and lettuce. More beds will be dug next week and the greenhouse (photo soon) will be completed for planting as well.

I am also happy to report that following the two-week stay of the first Wwoof volunteer, an American couple have committed to come for as long as six months! I greatly look forward to working with these enterprising young people who are moving in the right direction with respect to the new paradigm necessary to live a wholesome and spiritual life in the stage of society into which we have entered.

I'll Be Good, I Will!I Will!

Too much time has passed since the last entry and guilt is eating away at me. What's more, today is Labor Day in the U.S.A., and I feel as if I must do some work. I have been remiss, and in the long-remembered promise of the childhood hero pictured at right: "I'll be good, I will, I will."

Caveat: Froggy the Gremlin was a notorious liar.


I am adding a link at right for those who might wish to test themselves as agricultural workers here in Argentina: http://www.wwoofargentina.com/. This link will be placed permanently om the site sidebar as well. I may include the Catacombs as a host farm at some point, but I am not quite ready to do so. Persuade me!

I am hoping against hope that the cold south wind will die down and tonight's threatened frost not occur, as all my fruit trees are in glorious blossom, the veggies growing like mad, and there is much work to be done here. In fact, the chores have kept me from the computer these past two weeks, about which I'm not complaining, mind: it's healthy!

Things out in the wider world seem to be worsening weekly, folks, and I'm redoubling my preparations for what I expect to be some hard times ahead.

Dirt

"Plain as dirt," people will say contemptuously. "Dumb as dirt."

Really?

Dirt is as important as air and water; without it, we die. And not just any dirt, either: humankind depends on arable dirt, dirt in which plants grow that can in turn support animal life.

That's my dirt to the right, dirt enriched with hundreds of pounds of dried sheep poop and kept moist so that in spite of the one-week-long nighttime freezes (in the 20s) we've been having, those broad beans are doing quite well, thank you, as of this morning, as the date stamp (European style: date first, then the month) shows.

When I left the northern hemisphere behind, I'd made up my mind to sacrifice a certain degree of comfort, convenience and city/suburban style consumer variety for good dirt. Say what you will: when the chips are down, few things compare with twenty inches of good topsoil.

I found my topsoil here in Traslasierra, far from the flaccid, overfed kine that wobble down the Wal-Mart aisles snatching at gaudily packaged snacks they can stuff in their gobs while, glassy-eyed, they gape at the flickering flat-screen, oblivious to the elitists' yoke sliding down upon their thick, wattled throats. They come in all shapes and sizes, all creeds and colors, male and female, young and old, of all political persuasions, though economically, rich and poor rarely applies: these are the poor, the near-poor and the remnants of the lower middle class, the plebs, the lumpen, the Great Unwashed, unlettered and barely able to do simple math. Naturally, neither you nor I belong to this rabble; we are above all that. Those people, after all, are dumber than dirt.

They may be, but then again, so may be the Greenwich Gang, the Hamptons Hideaway crew, shallow materialists who in spite of their money piles live lives of stunning superficiality bounded by status and a narcissistic wound that not even scads of money can scab over, never mind heal. I live far from them too, far from the Social Register listees whose identity and self-worth must be reaffirmed by looking at a hardbound telephone book in black and red, folks who drop names and brands as often as bats in a cave drop guano.

Far from leftist loonies fossilized in the amber of the Sixties, spouting the same tired slogans, their eternal whine-a-thon tempting one to borrow a pair of bovver boots from the nearest skinhead for a quick game of kick-the-cranium. The intellectual elite--left, right, center--seldom takes anything more than an academic interest in dirt, though there are exceptions, among whom I like to include (hem, hem, kaff-kaff) myself, but only because I am such a smart fellow according to my credentials. Well, all right: I believe I'm bright enough to have done a lot of reading, retained a great deal of what I've learned, and managed to assemble this montage of factual info into an integrated worldview that led me to conclude that my place in the sun was not in an academic or financial ivory tower, but down here in the dirt far, far from the madding crowd.

Dirt.

This is about dirt, and how it behooves the Paradigm Changer to seek out the best dirt s/he can find. How 'bout that! Gender-neutral language! Hope everyone likes it and my effort is appreciated. Personally, gender-neutral language and much that goes with it calls to mind the substance with which I fertilize my dirt, but I digress.

Few of us these days are qualified to gauge the value of dirt with respect to raising food; for this, omnipresent government provides us with well-educated professionals. But can we count on them to fulfill their obligations to assist us? Not in my neck of the woods, as I have learned to my chagrin. As the saying goes here: "Mucho ruido, pocas nueces," which for you poor, unfortunate Anglo monoglots means, in the words of the immortal James Brown: "Talkin' loud and sayin' nothin." I certainly hope agricultural extension agents up north honor their word more than do the gravy-train riders down here. Our local glad-handers have asked me to address a community meeting of small agricultural and artisanal entrepreneurs, and the meeting is the day after tomorrow, and I've heard nothing further. Okay. And all the promises the Peronistas have made to me about help with my own efforts... nada de nada. I suggest y'all may enjoy Sunday's post, because I'm going to treat them to some self-righteous Irish rage on Saturday.

I learned about my dirt on my own, thanks. I recommend you do so too. I will say this, however: down here in Catacombs Country, we've got some dirt you'd be thrilled to have under your fingernails. 'Nuff said?

Get down 'n dirty, boys and girls, or prepare to live like serfs without your own dirt.

If not, then I recommend you read up on dirt. If you need help in finding resources, let me know.

Get some dirt, get it soon.

Confluence

The synchronicities simply don't stop and this post gives me great pleasure to write.

Here we are at the confluence, something I have hoped for from the moment I began this web site.

You see to the right a photo of La Confluencia, both the place in Patagonia where two rivers meet and a self-sufficient community: http://www.laconfluencia.com/ This community is now part of the "Catacombs Confederation," which is to say Southern Cone Paradigm Changers working together to create a sustainable future for our posterity and a largely self-sufficient present for ourselves and those who wish to join us.

La Confluencia is near the Patagonian town El Bolsón, as is the nearly self-sufficient Traditional Catholic monastery the Seminario Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, whose hardworking monks are held in high esteem by hippie-esque "New Agers" and grizzled laborers alike.

The "padres" and seminarians at the monastery are friends; I visited them in March. The folks at La Confluencia recently contacted me because we have both built bale structures, and we quickly recognized that synergies exist that we should not allow to be ignored. We are now looking forward to a tripartite get-together with the monks to initiate cooperative ventures that will hopefully create a ripple effect in the larger community.

The folks at La Confluencia practice bio-intensive agriculture. I'd heard of it, but never known any one who practiced it until I encountered an acquaintance at the nearby Saturday morning farmers market and after chatting a good while, he agreed to come to The Catacombs in the second week of July to do a demonstration. When I returned home, there was the email from La Confluencia!

The universe appears to be trying to tell me something, and I'm all ears.

There may be a message here for you as well, because things are coming together rather nicely here in Catacomb country.

Howdaya Handle a Billion Hungry Men?

"With kid gloves," comes to mind, but it is not the likely answer.

A billion--or a thousand million, depending on your counting system--people are hungry, as defined by the U.N. World Food Program: those who have a diet of less than 1000 calories a day, one infers after searching the web for the minimum daily requirement.

OmyGod! Overpopulation!

Well, no: "According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the world already produces enough food to feed every child, woman and man and could feed 12 billion people, or double the current world population,” states the Wikipedia entry on malnutrition.

Nevertheless, a June 12th Reuters article was headlined "U.N. warns of catastrophe as hungry people top one billion."

Interestingly, on the same Blacklistednews "breaking headlines" page we find this: "Peak Soil Investment: This Quiet Land Grab is Just Beginning," an article originally published in Wall Street Pit. The article strongly promotes agricultural land--not commodities themselves--as an excellent investment opportunity, using the old "they aren't making any more of it" rationale for land investment.

Both these articles are drawn directly from Old Paradigm thinking. The former advocates bringing food to people at great distance and for great cost, rather than recognizing the reality that people should be permitted to go where the food is or can be produced on a scale adequate to feed families. The latter article views farmland itself as a commodity, something to be exploited as a capital good for industry, rather than recognize that arable land widely distributed is the basis of any healthy society. Today's societies are sick--perhaps terminally ill--, but the obvious remedy is not on any governmental drawing board.

Here's a remedy that will work for those families who still have the good fortune to acquire a bit of arable land and have capital sufficient to create a viable homestead: The Have-More Plan. I have seen many, many books on homestead self-sufficiency, and this one is my favorite. It can be viewed at this Scribd location.

It doesn't require vast acreage to produce good, healthy food, and if families were larger and learned to work together with other families in their area, hunger could be greatly reduced. Those in the West would once more be able to develop societies that were people-centered rather than profit-centered, paced in sync with the natural world rather than at war with it.

Hunger is a result of mismanagement as well as of natural disaster. Those who decide that they wish to manage their own lives rather than be at the mercy of the globalist overlords will recognize that food self-sufficiency is paramount to their game plan and will then move to secure it buy taking the appropriate steps.

Don't wait to get "handled." Don't wait for speculators and transnational corporate giants to buy up all the land worth having.