Quit your job and farm!

It's fun!

inside

wow...farming includes so many things! Every skill in book may come into play here, it's not all just planting and picking with the occasional watering and weeding in between.

I haven't really been doing it that long so I am learning these in order of incident.
Plant grafting, seed selection, transplanting, trellising, suckering, record keeping,
fencing, carpentry, plumbing, watering, feeding, putting to rest, learning lessons, being in the moment, and the ever elusive and virtuous patience. Just to name a few...

But don't let any of these stop you. This is what makes it fun and exciting.
We are just getting started here! It's an amazing journey...once you begin!

inside

wow...farming includes so many things! Every skill in book may come into play here, it's not all just planting and picking with the occasional watering and weeding in between.

I haven't really been doing it that long so I am learning these in order of incident.
Plant grafting, seed selection, transplanting, trellising, suckering, record keeping,
fencing, carpentry, plumbing, watering, feeding, putting to rest, learning lessons, being in the moment, and the ever elusive and virtuous patience. Just to name a few...

But don't let any of these stop you. This is what makes it fun and exciting.
We are just getting started here! It's an amazing journey...once you begin!

Southern homes

From Mississippi to Tennessee to North Carolina. All the way across and back through again...again and again. There is something here like gravitational pull. I look back through time towards home and find myself here, at home. Home is where your heart is. Home is where they love you. Home is where you are needed. I can be here and look back through, what I consider, the divine circumstances and defining moments of my life. The decisions and faces that lead me here and feel confident in my place...at this moment.

An Interview with Doug Jones - Organic Farmer, Pittsboro, NC

Doug, how did you start growing sustainably and why is it important to you?


I was in my junior year of college in 1971 and I was hearing about a lot of people who were moving out of the urban areas and starting farms. College at that point was losing its meaning for me and that sounded like something really meaningful to do. I was in a group of kind of spiritual seeking people. We got together once a week and chanted songs from different traditions all over the world and this woman came to our group one day and said she was starting a spiritual community on her farm one hundred miles away. I went to check it out the very next week and decided right away this is what I was looking for. I had been kind of looking around and didn’t know how to make a connection. So, that summer as soon as the semester was over, I moved there and started telling my parents that I was probably going to drop out of school. They freaked out about that and convinced me to live weekends at the farm and finish my last year of college. I figured out a way that I could get by on two or three days a week of college. So, I was off and running. I was just immediately drawn to the idea of growing food. My parents had a small, part-time farm when I was a kid and I came from a rural background where all of my Uncles had Dairy farms. So, it was kind of in my blood I suppose and I knew that was what I wanted to do.


So, the community was part of the draw for you?


It was all a package deal for me. I was feeling drawn to the land, to growing my own food, to finding something meaningful, and finding community. This place offered all of that. They had gardens and their idea was just to grow food for the community and I quickly started playing around with marketing some of what we would be growing as a member of that community because I knew that we would need income. So I started trying to sell some of the vegetables we were growing and it was all trial and error. We had some books by Rodale press to guide us somewhat. There were a few experienced gardeners around that I could occasionally get some ideas from. But mostly we just put seeds in the ground and we built a tiny greenhouse. Looking back, in some ways I kind of envy the younger farmers now. They have so many resources that I didn’t have at that time. There was no such thing as Sustainable Farming programs in colleges or anything like that. There was just a network starting to form where people were trading information with each other. At that time in the 70’s all the Back to the Land movement was happening and concentrating. NOFA (National Organic Farmers Association) was organizing then in VT and NH so I went to some of their meetings in ’71 and ‘72 and pretty much ever since then I’ve gone to at least one or two farmers’ conferences every year. Those have been a critical source of information for me. It has been a combination of trial and error, some information from books, and talking shop with other growers and farmers at these conferences.

We developed a sharing, networking, work day kind of thing like the Crop Mob that is happening here. In those early years, the mid seventies, we had a gathering once every month or two and would rotate at different farms. We would work, do projects on the farm, have a big potluck, and have a meeting for an hour or two where everybody would share what they were doing at the time on their farm. It was kind of the equivalent of a modern list serve where you post different questions about a vegetable variety or a source of a particular soil amendment and others answer on the list serve. Back then we would have to get together physically to do that kind of thing. So we would meet and talk in a big circle about what we were doing on our farms, what we were needing what we had to offer, what we were looking for in the way of machinery and tools, tips and suggestions, and all that good stuff.

The predominate paradigm that we were working under at the time was driven by the predictions we held about the modern, military, industrial civilization out there that we had been all groomed to take part in was going to just crash and fall apart. And that we were the pioneers learning a way to survive and thrive on the land. So we used to sit around and talk about how it was all going to come crashing down around us.



That sounds similar to the mentality of the young sustainable farmers and food activists today.

Yeah there is definitely a theme of that happening now. And what we thought was going to happen starting in the 70’s kind of never happened. In fact, when Reagan came in (1980) it went the other direction. Everything changed and suddenly we had a lot less people applying for internships on our farm. All of the college students were getting serious about business careers and the whole idea of cooperative actions and activism in general started evaporating. It was just a really big change I saw going on. In the late 70’s there was this huge environmental movement that was peaking in a way; anti-nuclear, we had a huge anti-power line fight. There were proposed power lines and nuclear plants for our area because we were considered the backwater area were they could put these technologies that the city people didn’t want in their backyards. So we were the far away backyard where they could put all that stuff and we got very intensely active to prevent that kind of thing.

But by 1981 or so there was so much less of that activism going on and so many fewer people. I mean there was still a movement and farming going on and it gradually continued to grow, but the young people looking for that as an exciting, meaningful way of life was decreasing. We had to go out and find interns by posting on bulletin boards at the Cornell Ag School and send letters to career offices at colleges. Our intentional community reflected these changes also. A lot of the Back to the Land homesteaders (from the 70’s) decided it was impractical for them to do what they were doing and they all got jobs in town working for the NPR station, government agencies. Others got jobs at the local food co-op, or created some other kind of work that was more lucrative than trying to sell food. Everybody started to realize that farming is at the bottom of the totem pole and it was really hard to pay your bills growing food.

I lived in this intentional community that was pretty supportive of the food growing end of things so we were able to manage paying our bills barely. We lived a really poor lifestyle. Every stitch of clothing we had came from thrift stores or hand me downs. We cut and hauled all of our own fired wood. We fixed all of our own vehicles, and fixed everything else we possibly could ourselves. We were fortunate to have the land we bought really cheap in the 70’s and the barns, outbuildings and a decent house there. We could live there putting those resources to use and keep things at the survival level.

But our community fell apart in the early 80’s, people moved into town for better paying jobs or went back to college following the trends of the Reagan years. And I kind of hung in there. In about 1987 those trends started reversing and new people started joining our community again. We started getting much more serious about farming again and developing our markets more. So the 90’s were a building phase for us again. Our community grew and our farm operation grew. In the meantime the Northeast network of farms was rapidly improving and there was a really good Organic certification program in each state developing. Suddenly the Ag schools were forced to take Organic farming more seriously. We started noticing that they were starting to have meetings at places like Cornell University. So looking at that compared to the early 80’s when they were laughing at the concept of commercial organic farming. They would say organic gardening is ok for the backyard but it is impractical to try to feed the world with organic farming. That seemed to be the general consensus with Ag schools and things. By the early 90’s young, brilliant students and their new ideas about organic farming were replacing the old, stick in the mud professors. And I remember there was this group of undergrads and graduate students at Cornell that formed the Sustainable Agriculture Research Collective to do sustainable research on their own, and all kinds of things like this started happening and building in the early 90’s.



What is it about the Piedmont area of North Carolina that made you decide to farm and live here?

I moved down here in 1999 to Blue Heron Community outside of Pittsboro North Carolina. I was attracted to the dense population of Organic farms in the area. And the farming community here is very important to me. The Sustainable Farming program was already going and I was suspecting there might be some teaching opportunities for me there. So by the fall of 2000 I started to do a little teaching at the college. I had my own field trip class and starting teaching the Organic Vegetable Production class in 2001 with Tony Kleese and have been teaching that ever since. So I knew the education was important to me. In 2006 the Piedmont Bio fuels people asked me to consult for them helping get some oilseed crops going. The more I worked with them the more I appreciated their energy and really strong commitment to seeing sustainable farming rapidly blossom in this area. I knew there was land available so I started farming here at the Bio farm in 2006. We’re growing on about two and a half acres now. We are mainly a production farm but I am gradually doing more and more research, more variety trials, and more breeding work.



What are some of your favorite varieties that you have found that grow absolutely best here and thrive in this climate?

It is sort of more what grows well in this climate than what grows well on these soils around here. That is the biggest factor that I had to learn when I moved down here. I’ll talk about a few of the more popular crops here.

With tomatoes you are looking for the ability to flower and make good fruit in hot weather. I really like the orange tomato called Persimmon and a red one called Tropic. Both are very tolerant to the tomato diseases here. I did experiment with a tomato that was developed by an amateur breeding group up north called Brandy Rose and that’s pretty nice. You have to grow Cherokee Purple here. It’s got the big name and it is a really beautiful tomato. I mean when you cut one of those in half it’s just a beautiful thing. The old art historian in me is coming out. Some of the food I grow, it’s the visuals that are important to me as much as any other quality. Combining art and farming.

There is a new lettuce that came out a couple of years ago called Malawi that is the most intensely dark red lettuce that I’ve seen. That is really useful in a salad mix especially in the winter when the light levels are low. Red lettuces tend to get much more pale and this one really hangs in there. It is very productive and just a great lettuce. There is a Cherokee that we’re pretty excited about here that looks stupendous when it’s growing in full light conditions.

My favorite peppers are the ones that I’m breeding. I am developing my own and I’ve got some really exciting material. I feel like all I need to do is get the weird stuff out. It’s called rouging out. I’ll do a couple of more generations where I’m selecting away from types that are not what I’m looking for. I’m honing it down to a uniform, genetically reliable pepper that produces the same results every year. Some are already there and some I need to work on for a couple more generations. The Marconi is a variety that I saved my own seeds of and they have become more vigorous over time.

Sen po sai, a delicate Asian collard green, is something I am very excited about. It was something developed in Japan that I have been growing for four or five years as an open pollinated variety, gradually removing all of the off-types, making it look very uniform.



What makes farming so rewarding for you still after 38 years?

I’m just a stubborn old farmer I guess. (Laughs) Well, the realm of Sustainable/Organic farming is absolutely infinite – in the amount of research that can be done. I am trending more toward research than production. They could give us twenty times the budget that currently goes into sustainable research and it would easily all be put to good use. As far as Foundation money and Federal money there are just so many things that can be worked on to improve Sustainable/Organic farming. It kind of always made me mad that the Ag Schools would put down Organic farming, but if they weren’t funding the research to make it more feasible then they couldn’t really compare the potential of it in a valid way. All we needed was for fossil fuels to go through the roof or for problems with pesticides to keep surfacing, then the more progressive people in Ag Schools started realizing that at least some of the principles in Sustainable and Organic production need to be seriously adopted in all farming if we were to survive on this earth.

So it just started becoming more obvious to mainstream agriculture that things are going to have to change down the road and for those changes to happen we could do a lot of useful research to make it possible to be profitable in Organic farming and still feed the masses. Right now there is still this kind of dichotomy; Farmers such as myself kind of set up our marketing so it’s mostly upper-middle class people buying our produce because they’re willing to pay the price that we need to charge for the low-level of mechanization and labor intensive kind of farming that we do. This is what we call a very information-intensive kind of farming and there is a lot of extra work and effort that goes into doing things organically. You have to constantly be experimenting, constantly be adopting new methods and learning as much as you can about how to do it better, wisely, with less impact on the environment, and still make a living! You know that last little bit is the tricky part. Trying to put all of those things together is the tricky part. It is infinitely challenging and fun.

Natural Pasture Raised Thanksgiving Turkey

I will be raising some Turkeys for Thanksgiving this year in a Free Range/pasture based, rotational forage system. Sustainably, naturally, and most humanely. This is a message to simply gauge interest in who and how many may be interested in purchasing one of these amazing and delicious birds for the holidays.Though it is early in the year, I am planning now and will be starting soon building fencing, roosts, shelter and getting the baby turkey poults brooding. These turkeys will be raised long, slow, and very happily!
So, if you or anyone you know think you might be interested at all and want to support a newbie sustainable farmer...Please gimme a call 662-832-8036. Email would be great too. koziusko@gmail.com

I can give you tons more info about this project which I am very excited about!

Thanks
All my best!
Mike Slaton

Permaculture Basics

Applying Permaculture:
Building a farm & homestead from scratch on marginal land.
Susana Kaye Lein, SALAMANDER SPRINGS FARM, Berea, KY

Permaculture (a permanent culture or agriculture):
Developed in the late 1970's by Australians Bill Mollison and David Homgren, permaculture is a design system for human environments-farms, housing, business and communities-that are locally-sustained. Natural ecosystems provide a model for permaculture. Energy needs are generated, saved, wisely used and recycled within the system.

The principles of permaculture are useful to organic farmers, homesteaders, urban gardeners and local businesses. Often we tend to mimic conventional methods, making the land yield by brute force and using external energy resources and protracted, tedious labor. Permaculture teaches us to develop energy-sustaining connections between our land, resources, built environments and communities.

PERMACULTURE DESIGN PRINCIPLES for food and shelter:

1) Design systems that mimic patterns & relationships found in natural systems.
a- Create diversity rather than segregated, forced simplicities.
b- Work creatively with plant succession and system changes.
c- Build soil UP and keep it covered.
d- Produce no waste- close the loop! Natural systems produce no waste:
One organisms by-products are another's food.

2) Provide and recycle energy & nutrient needs on the site or within the community.
a- Catch and store energy from renewable resources.
b- Develop and utilize local resources (nutrients, labor, materials, money, etc.)
c- Convert problems into opportunities & resources. "The problem is the solution."

3) Every situation is different. Apply principles, not formulas.
a- Learn from feedback. Self-regulating systems have positive energy feedback
b- Share what we learn from others.

4) Integrate rather than segregate. Rather than single product systems, develop mutually cooperative or symbiotic relationships between elements: Plants, gardens, pond, pasture, field, house, fences, forest, orchard, animals, barn, chicken house, greenhouse, etc.:
a- Make each element (plant, animals, structure, etc.) perform multiple functions.
b- Fulfill each need by several elements in the system.
c- Locate and link elements to provide efficient, beneficial interchanges of these functions.
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SOME GUIDELINES THAT HELP:

Distinguish "needs" from "wants". Save your money towards your goals.
Instead of buying from corporate chains, buy local or used, scavenge or create your own alternatives. Create a "free foods exchange" spot in your community; put out the word for materials you need.

Create community: Barter your skills and goods for those which you need. Ask for help and share what you learn. Create your own workshops or workdays.

If you don't know how to do something - research, start anyway and learn by doing.
Volunteering is a great way to learn skills.
Use permaculture principles for all aspects of life.
Plant trees and perennials first - for food, fuel, fiber and to mitigate effects of global warming.
Work is love made real. Do the work that you love.

"Do the best that you can in the place that you are...and be kind. - Scott Nearing


Susana is an amazing person and sustainable farmer using permaculture practices at her farm; Salamander Springs Farm in Berea, KY - www.localharvest.org/farms/M5606
I had the pleasure of meeting her and attending her permaculture workshops.
One was given at the annual Biodynamic conference; Long Hungry Creek Farm, Red Boiling Springs, TN. The other was at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association's annual Sustainable Agriculture conference.

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SUGGESTED PERMACULTURE REFERENCE BOOKS:

Introduction to Permaculture, Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay
Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability, David Holmgren
Gaia's Garden: A Homescale Guide to Permaculture, Toby Hemenway
Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Waste, Joseph Jenkins.
Seed to Seed, Suzanne Ashworth.
Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, 576 pages!, Bill Mollison.
Edible Forest Gardens: Ecological Design & Practice for Temperate Climate Permaculture
Plants for a Future: Edible and Useful Plants for a Healthier world, Ken Fern.


QUARTERLY "HOW-TO" PUBLICATIONS:

Permaculture Activist magazine, www.permacultureactivist.net
The Natural Farmer, Northeast Organic Farmers Association, www.nofa.org