Tokyo Babylon

Every time you read about terra preta, glomalin, permaculture, EM farming and similar ideas, it is almost always, either implicitly or explicitly, placed in a countryside setting. While this is true I don’t think it’s where the cultural and economic revolution will happen.

You see to my thinking the cities are where the people are and what these techniques can bring to urban dwellers are things that many urban people would be in the market for. Cities are increasingly expensive places to live for the urban poor, where a passing knowledge of “square foot” or “biointensive” gardening can make the difference between making ends meet and not.

Turning over earth on an extensive farm to lay down a layer of char in one of the deeper soil layers is probably going to require a new machine to do it. Working over a small garden in a city is going to be the work of an afternoon with a shovel. Taken to it’s logical extreme you could have terra preta in a plant pot. You could have garden centres providing seed that’s been predusted with mychorrizal fungi, packed with a block of char and sold as a package deal with worm farms, or some other customizable add on.

I’m hoping to be one of the first people to make money from bringing the countryside into the city. I was flabbergasted to learn that there are many people in Tokyo who leave the city on the weekends to engage in recreational farmin. They leave because there’s no land to farm in Tokyo. I would say that this is true at ground level, but look to the roofs and there’s a whole barren world up there waiting to be colonised by people who would give their eye teeth to have their own patch of green.

Give them systems to increase what they can get out of their own little park and systems that reduce maintenance and you could have a runaway business idea.

ZERI went to the aid of coffee farmers in Colombia. The problems of farmers the world over are pretty similar.

Most of them grow commodity products. The money they can obtain each year depends on the harvest. If several nations have a bad year then the price goes up and vice versa. However one thing remains the same, everyone is competing against the lowest cost producer. When you grow a commodity you don’t set the price, you take whatever price you can get. It’s what some people have called a ‘race to the bottom’.

Then there is the problem of growing in a monoculture, where only one crop is produced. A lot of farmers who produce things tea, coffee, rubber trees, palm oil etc only grow one product, so they are taking whatever price they can get with the added bonus of having all their eggs in the one basket. For such farmers life is increasingly precarious.

Then there is the fact that while they are in engaged in a race to the bottom, their income decreasing year on year, the price of agricultural chemicals keeps rising.

Coffee farmers in Colombia found themselves in exactly this situation. In a good year they could just about break even, while in a bad year they were destitute. They were being ground down, excuse the pun, by global markets, monoculture production and the massive agrochemicals industry.

Then ZERI came to help out.

ZERI’s team of experts looked at the situation from multiple perspectives and came up with a number of recommendations.

You have to get away from growing a commodity. You have to move away from a monoculture. You have to go cold turkey to get rid of your chemical dependency. You have to get more out of each field and develop a business model where you are not betting your life on one product.

In the field this meant moving to shade grown coffee, where the shade trees were banana trees. To control bugs without the need for chemicals they planted herbs of various sorts (to repel nasty bugs and provide habitat for beneficial insects). The former coffee farmer were now growing organic coffee, organic bananas and organic herbs. Now organic means recycling farm resources as much as you can and to that end ZERI suggested that they use a system derived from the idea of the Five Kingdoms so as to harness natural processes to the task of turning waste in additional marketable goods.

This is how ZERI themselves put it..

1. Waste of a species is always a nutrient or an energy source for a species belonging to another kingdom. The waste of one industry should be used as a value-added input for another industry. If one species is fed its own waste, it will degenerate.

2. A toxin produced by one species is always a nutrient or an energy source for a species belonging to another kingdom. The toxin of one species can be used as input for species of another kingdom.

3. A virus threatening the life of a living species has no chance of survival in species belonging to at least 2 other kingdoms.

4. The more local, the more diverse, the more productive, the more resilient. The more diverse and local the systems are, the more efficient and resilient their operations will be.

5. When species from all 5 kingdoms live and work together, they will integrate and separate all matter at ambient temperature and pressure.

The five kingdoms are bacteria, plant, algae, animal and fungi.

Thus looking at the waste from a coffee farm there was a lot that was not being utilised to create additional value for the farmer.

ZERI recommended that material pruned from the bushes should be formed into long piles as a shiitake mushroom growing medium. Animals cant eat woody material whereas fungi are masters at it. However when mushrooms have finished with the growing medium, when it would become waste in another system, the material has in essence been partly digested so that animals can eat it. So it is fed to animals.

The animals eat the fodder put on marketable weight and produce milk, anything that cant be used comes out as waste, but is not treated as such. Urine is liquid organic fertiliser. Shit is channeled into a biodigester where oxygen hating bacteria separate it into gas, solids and liquids. The gas is methane, a potent greenhouse gas, but also a valuable heating fuel, to heat the mushroom sheds. The solids having had the ammonia removed from it by the bacteria comes out the end of the tube as a soil amendment, or as plant food for a fish pond where the fish feed on the floating plants. The liquid drips out the bottom as an organic fertiliser. The other option is to grow spirulinae algae which is used in the cosmetics industry or as a fodder additive for cattle.

So you’ve connected your coffee farm to an animal rearing farm, you’ve both gone organic, decommoditized, and both produced additional income streams to lower your dependency on global prices.

My own research showed that although coffee is supposed to self fertilize that the addition of African Bees greatly increased yields.

What would you get if you implemented an EM farming approach on such a farm?

What would you get if the soil had char added to it? Perhaps from a plant whose main purpose was as a nitrogen fixer? I think of Kudzu here (the plant that ate the south), it’s edible for both humans and animals it’s a nitrogen fixer and it grows like nobody’s business (up banana tree trunks perhaps). Americans call it an invasive weed but you can make lots of products out of Kudzu, but the Americans don’t. Use it in the char furnace developed in the Phillipines, perhaps fused with a Stirling engine and you’d get electricity, heat for drying, processing and cooking and more char than you’d know what to do with.

What are the fungi/plant companion planting combinations?

Weeds would be a problem. However the answer to that might come from Permaculture methodology. Permaculture advocates creating designed plant communities that are self sustaining and multifunctional with no open spaces for weeds to take advantage of. Weeds can’t get in because their niche is already full.

All of this makes me think I should take up farming. Design it right and the system takes care of itself. It’s fully organic and you can start adding components like muskovy ducks for insect control and honey bees for increased production in an environment where the chemicals wont kill them.

The result of putting it altogether should be an increase in biodiversity; a reduction in laborious monotonous fieldwork with a consequent expansion in the variety of work; increased financial security; zero emissions of pollutants into soil, water or air with increasing amenity, better food and happier more self reliant people.