An Enormous Cut in Oil Use... Nurture Nature & Nature Nurtures, Natural History/Natural Farming, Zero Tillage Agriculture May Be Forced Upon Us. [this article was written for a Newfoundland audience, The Osprey magazine]

Robin T. Day (cowboy4444@hotmail.com) , Little Eden Hostel and Organic Farm, 605 Gardiner Rd., RR#3 North Augusta, Ontario, K0G1R0

Preamble

Newfoundland & Labrador has little agriculture production and thus the people are very dependant on imports. The rapid depletion of liquid petroleum fuels is making agriculture ecosystems very expensive and we will either stay with the present high input, energy-dependant, farm technology and more costly foods or make the radical transition that eventually has to come.

For thousands of years humans have knocked back plant communities with axe hoe and fire to plant our chosen crops, new plant communities. We learn and modify agriculture as we forward or reverse engineer ecosystems just as we have done with our DNA and as we we would with a piece of alien technology. The changes I discuss below, chiefly zero tillage, advocate a gentler form of low-input agriculture that conserves and grows topsoil thereby conserving energy and greatly reducing nutrient loss to streams and leaching. They closely follow natural systems combining what we know of natural history and applied ecology 1. These ideas are not much discussed in popular media.

Zero tillage, ploughing etc.

Zero tillage very simply means to not disturb the soil, leaving the fallen leaves and humus, last year´s stubble and last year’s root systems in place. Tilling the soil may be extreme like mechanized poughing or as light as harrowing or using a hoe.
Out west in Canada´s Prairie Provinces zero tillage was a relatively new practice in the early 80s and they have a mechanical system, designed to conserve topsoil, and pulled by tractors to inject the spring grain into the soil. It is a large scale commercial system to grow annual grains that depends on herbicides to control weeds, but need not (see mulching etc. below, A1 A2). Zero tillage is not much copied in the rest of Canada, or so I first thought. In fact this is not true as farms which concentrate on pastures, graziers or grangers, plough rarely or not at all; low or no inputs and moderate outputs. The perennial sod generates a perennial sward for direct animal consumption or for hay and silage storage 2. So you see zero tillage is ancient using native grasslands. This is the form of agriculture most suited to our cool moist eastern Canadian region, pasture 3, meat and dairy combined with small scale intensive vegetable gardens. Iceland is far ahead of us and yet far more northerly. This type of farming can be combined with freshwater aquaculture in Newfoundland´s many ponds and lakes. These ponds, using carp, ducks, geese are so common in China and Vietnam. Farmers, as practical ecologists, are always employed and over generations can improve a land´s production or carrying capacity (Day 2007).

Ploughing, the most extreme tillage, flips soil or sod over and buries weeds where they yellow and are consumed by worms. Ploughs are very old farm tools and in many countries ploughing is a metaphor for the sex act, opening the soil for the farmers´ seed. In many parts of the world without the money for a team and plough or where agriculture is small scale and vegetable plots are like gardens a strong back and a mattock 4 is used to till. If you haven´t seen one it looks like a pick with a broad head.

Today in the western world tilling is almost exclusively done with tractors, even small 2-wheel models, and when all the energy inputs are calculated, the manufacture of the machine, oil, fuel, maintenance, etc., then we ecologists see today´s farmers putting more energy into farming than comes out in the form of food. 10 + 1 + 7 = 2 is the type of crazy short term equation we practice and we have been getting away with it for about a 100 years using cheap petroleum. I think I first learned of this in 1973 in the influential little book Diet for a Small Planet. When oil gets unaffordable (think 2008) tractors will be parked, as were many personal cars, and perhaps we return to grass-fed animal teams or steam tractors 5 using any type of biofuel, unless we get smart and maybe abandon costly ploughing altogether. More likely there will be an increased use of natural gas adapted to existing internal combustion tractors. I sound hopeful here and point to possible adaptations on farms but these things are not happening. Its very doubtful that tractors will be powered by electricity or hydrogen. High oil means farms go broke, land returns to zero tillage pasture, or sadly forest. Back to trees; what a depressing loss of pioneer labour (!), or maybe trees, including food trees, are our most logical crop. We are slow to make technological evolution. Fortunately many small organic farms (and areas in China India and Brazil) are already using a minimum of petroleum machinery and are testing various adjustments. It´s both a bottom up and a top down agriculture transition that´s needed 6.

The advantages of zero tillage are many.

1. The major one, as said, is that less petroleum is used, often none, and this is a great cost saving for the gardener or low-input farm 7. I confess my only motor is a chainsaw and I use vegetable oil as a chain lubricant. I do have a motor bike. I´m the biomotor and this motor bike is fuelled by groceries, foods I grow, including small fish from a pond (excavation cost $450).

2. Zero tillage avoids damaging roots of perennial crops like rhubarb, apple, asparagus 8, perennial onion, Jerusalem Artichoke (more correctly a sunflower tuber), Angelica celery, fruit trees and bushes. In hot countries root crops can be treated as perennials allowing continual harvest of taro, potato, sweet potato, yams, and cassava. The tropical fruit, nut, oil and beverage trees are perennial producers, as well, untilled acres, but we in the north don´t think of them that way. In the future we may rely much more on perennial vegetables and food trees and modify our northern building designs to work with the food plants 9. Compare the vines and olive trees on semi-natural Mediterranean slopes with the berry bushes and orchards of Newfoundland 10. A hazel nut, Corylus cornuta, is native here, and the larger edible species can be more widely planted. Black Walnut might mature in the Humber and Codroy Valleys. I sell seed to Nova Scotians from trees growing near my farm near Merrickville Ontario.

3. A field that does not have to accommodate the passage of a horse or oxen team or the wheels of a tractor in long furrows can be planted more intensively. This whole business of growing crops in lines with soil between originates from using draft animals and from using water channels to irrigate. Think Mesopotamia and Egypt. In garden plots linear planting makes no sense, and yet it is widely and unthinkingly copied. Why this love affair with bare ground which only aids the growth of weeds? It has led to a great loss of topsoil worldwide. I see the older better systems in mixed tropical gardens, like modern raised vegetable beds. They date back to the ice age in Papua-New Guinea-Solomon Islands (Day 2000).

4. The soil does not become compacted by wheels and thus has more air for root growth and soil organisms.

5. Worms are not killed by the plough and their tunnels remain undisturbed. Thus rain soaks into the soil more easily and the worms keep pulling organic leafy foods down their tunnels to deeper layers. Worms also follow old root channels as do new roots. Isn´t that interesting? The worm is a farmer´s first livestock. A low-input farm, especially in a warmer climate, could be based on zero tillage of fallow pasture turned and fertilized by pigs with poultry gleaning worms and seeds. Pig power replaces the plough, perhaps a maxim for the future.

6. Zero tillage means the land captures a bit more winter snow between the standing winter stubble. This is especially important in marginal dry areas like parts of the Canadian prairies where spring soil moisture allows spring germination and growth of wheat and other grains. The stubble and standing plant material also slows erosion from rain drop splatter.

7. Zero tillage or very shallow tillage means that less dormant weed seed get brought up to the surface.

There are a few disadvantages to zero tillage.

A1. Weeds can gain dominance if the crop is not planted very early and very closely, however many vegetable plants, like carrots, do not thrive with crowded. Perennial crops have the early advantage of always being there in the ground with their mature overwintering root system, so they are ahead of the weeds in development. The perennial asparagus grown through a cover crop of white clover may be a nice combination. Perennials like raspberry patches also keep the soil covered year round and so are preferred on steeper ground. The steep gardens above the town of Banos, Ecuador, would astonish Canadians. They are possible with mini-terracing and zero use of tillage machinery. On the Ecuadorian coast at the equator I saw maize grown on steep slopes where burning takes out last year´s dead weed residue, and fertilizes a bit with ash, just before planting and seasonal rains. Herbicides are applied using a backpack sprayer to control weeds that come up later with the young corn. It is a clever modern adaptation of the traditional slash and burn and laborious hand-hoeing method.

A2. If weeds remain a big problem then weeding by hand or hoe is essential (even by geese in special conditions), and some farms which do not want to rely on herbicides singe the young emerging weeds with propane torches. Alternately zero tillage can use heavy mulching with old hay, seaweed, black plastic, sphagnum moss, chopped cattail, grass clippings, shredded paper or straw as advocated by Ruth Stout (1971 ) in her book that pioneered deep mulching. She is a hero to organic farmers, though mulch may sometimes catch fire from cigarette butts. If you don´t have enough mulch you can grow it with little effort as pasture grass. Any big grass like Canary Reed Grass (Phalaris) would do, to be used as fresh or dried mulch when needed 11. A year round blanket of mulch smothers germinating weeds while the blanket slowly decays and releases nutrients. I use an even simpler system by using old carpets to supress weeds.

B. The plough can deepen the biologically active soil zone for microbes and roots when turf or sod, crop residue and weeds get ploughed deep below in what was chiefly a mineral soil devoid of much organic matter and life.

C. Ploughing and rotor-tilling increases aeration of the soil and this can be vital to plants unless special drainage has been created.

D. The plough also flips up stones, stones that take up root space and block roots from using deeper layers. Sure I advocate deep ploughing on new ground if the energy expense can be justified by the crop, but it rarely is. Learn more about the plough http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough#Disadvantages_of_the_mouldboard_plough

B and D can largely be ignored if, as in Europe, the soils have already been ploughed deeply in generations past and already picked for rocks by hand.

A Case Study

My chief aim is to live ecologically and be free of human vexation 12. I just had my 3rd small patch of mixed forest, 80 x 80 ft cleared of stumps with a backhoe tractor (cost $70) and am removing large stones with muscle using an iron pike. These are flat limestones and they make flagstone access paths around the created beds. In addition to walkways these stepping stones prevent most weed growth in the paths, they help warm the soil in spring and act as stone mulch conserving soil moisture in dry summers. When used as drystone walls, like those built all over Europe, they help make agriculture possible in windy landscapes by providing shelter and storing heat (eg. Aran Islands Scotland).

Every season has its tasks and in September I burn my dry stumps. Some had been covered with tarps to keep them drying through a record wet July (2009 Ontario). The precious ash and charcoal was raked into the beds 13. I call my wood stove my forest digester. I discard nothing. There is no garbage in a garden, another guiding maxim.

I do advocate less tillage but much more. I plant and harvest and plant again, while rotating annual vegetables, always some legumes (peas, beans, edible alfalfa, clover) for nitrogen, and mulching and adding compostables directly to the surface, or sometimes burried to avoid breeding flies. In British Columbia they call it lasagna gardening, adding layers of compostables. Cute and easy. Traditional composting is nuts, a big waste of human energy moving heavy wet earth around the farm/garden. I also use all my diluted urine and wood ash soaking to deeper soil layers. It´s just me, my compost toilet (flushed with sand), and the worms. Nurture nature and nature will nurture. Every urination, diluted 1:8, can grow another tomato plant, or not.

Forest and soil scientists like Damman (1976) and our federal and provincial governments have mapped the whole province for soil quality and growing-degree-days (general heat). Thus finding and buying good land is theoretically made easier when combined with aspect or angle to the sun. Are we making good use of this information or are we covering productive areas like the Humber Valley in urban development? You know the answer. The reality is that we farm the land we own, even if it is sub-optimal.

In Summing Up

I see see that zero tillage requires many changes in approach to existing agriculture. It may soon be forced upon us. Will you buy a $5 apple from New Zealand or Chile? We will not be able to bring in cheap food from tropical countries and California with such high oil costs though they will need the trade and work. Anyway this importing has created agricultural sweatshops. Do we want to continue this form of trade with cheap tropical labour there or brought there? Let us help our own people to farm. The education system is highly structured so why not farming? Governments (municipal too) are not showing enough leadership in this issue, as with electric transport, so gather information from your neighbours on or offline. For example in my village, Merrickville, Ontario, I see no electric motor bikes or slower electric ultralight cars, just electric wheel chairs for seniors, the handicapped and play cars for yuppy children. A relaxation of provincial vehicle registration laws is essential (Will they give up their pound of flesh?). I can see the proposed carbon taxes being applied to carbon-burning wood stoves in the near future. Are you shocked?
Former Prime Minister Trudeau told Canadians to lower their expectations but he was talking present day petroleum-capitalism economics. When we think Zen and move/farm with earth cycles we can expect to raise our expectations in different ways. No, the lion will not lie down with the lamb (and share a soy burger) but must society mirror one side of human nature, the selfish monkey, or can it make the transition to a nature nurturing philosophy and farm technology? I say yes!

Footnotes

1 It is almost pointless growing warm physiology plants in Newfoundland´s short season without some form of shelter for advanced growth or greenhouse protection, squash, cucumber, corn/maize, tomatoes and beans. We get much better results from cool physiology plants, turnip greens, cabbages including Chinese varieties, beet, carrot, onion, potato, rye, faba beans, peas, angelica celery and maybe quinoa. We can grow and preserve raddish and cabbage easily like the north Chinese, Koreans and Germans (gimchi & sauerkraut) but for cultural reasons we don´t, but we can change.

2 Silage is formed from moist, compacted, cut pasture plants and this forms preservative gas and juices when air (oxygen) is excluded with a plastic covering or bag. Sometimes a purchased formic acid spray as is used to hasten preservation. Silage is a form of pickling, like sauerkraut, which preserves grass proteins. Cattle relish it but it can be harmful to horses. Because of our moist summers it is a more certain way to store plants through the cold season. It´s an uncommon practice in the province.

3 Coastal meadows receive extra nutrients from the sea, geologically uplifted beaches, dung and shell droppings from sea birds and also sea spray and volatile organic smells, molecules carried inland by winds. Many of the grassy areas we see in Newfoundland have more sedges than actual grasses. I have seen the same inflat Brazilian sand pastures beside the river at Porto Seguro. Sedges like Carex and Cyperus often tolerate lower levels of soil nutrient.

4 Mattocks are now rare in Canada, hard to find in garden equipment stores. Buy one on a tropical holiday. Rarely are they made small enough to be swung easily by a small woman or man. I have the same complaint for hammers and saws, built for men and so awkward in the hands of learning children. Many children from the last two generations do not use simple tools properly. I watched a friend trying to push a shovel into a pile of earth using only his hands and arms. It never occured to him to step on the top of the shovel blade and use the leaning weight of his body to cut into the earth and then lever it. Another friend (computer engineer) I caught using my axe to chop branches, not on a wood stump but on a boulder! Parents don´t let their children use knives, ``Because they might cut themselves``, and yet this is how they learn. I can chop brush all day while wearing gloves and I use a low stool in the garden to save back and knee strain. Small things matter big.

5 The steam tractor is an external combustion engine and we still have a few around in working condition, big heavy antiques to be seen at central Canadian agricultural fairs. I have seen an abandoned steam engine, in need of conservation, on a boulder beach on a dairy farm at Mount Carmel, St. Mary´s Bay, and another in Colinet. There are likely a few more around Newfoundland. They were used in the past as mobile sawmills. Steam engines can be greatly improved like the very fast steam cars, in rare collections today. Canadian commedian Jay Lenno owns one. Note that steam turbine engines are still in wide use worldwide.

6 In coming years I also see us returning to a diet more reliant on our sea products including traditionally discarded species or are we too rigid in our eating habits? North Asians cook healthful kelp, even sea squirts and many fish we routinely discard. We are already consuming kelp in our diet, ice cream and many sauces, but it is hidden on the back label as agar or carrageen. Even the waste of fish makes animal feed supplements and soil fertilizer. Provincial wild places often team with trout and landlocked salmon, however, New Englander Leonidas Hubbard (Wallace 2003) starved pathetically in Labrador, 1903, for want of an omitted fish net. A fish trap made from a shirt suspended in a stream at night, with cuffs knotted, might have saved him.

7 Russians and east Europeans still build cattle barns attached to homes to aid heating the home in winter nights. This sounds smelly to us moderns but farms are going to smell anyway and it is very clever to use free bioheat.

8 Rhubarb and chives can grow far north at Hebron Labrador where they were introduced and tested by the Moravian missionaries (Day 1995-98). Hebron village died out because of the lethal influenza pandemic at the end of the first world war, 1918. Sled dogs broke into homes and ate many of the dead.
Asparagus is fine eaten fresh/raw or preserved, canned, bottled or frozen. Though difficult to transplant I find it easy to start from seed, but clumps still take years to mature in warm well drained locations, say against a south foundation. Like rhubarb it is not dependant on pollination, a plus in our variable summer weather.

9 Canadian houses are often well insulated but the designs and placement are almost entirely driven by builders/developers for eye appeal. Most homes do not even face south, but face the road. Small things can boost vegetable growth around houses. Old windows leaned against a foundation take advantage of heat from foundation and sun. A passive solar green house is not essential but can warm a house and lengthen the seasons at both ends especially if built on to an existing home. It´s like having a patch of subtropical land.

10 As a child my family had 26 apple trees and some plum, cherry and pear in Clarenville, an orchard planted by the earlier generation, Dr. Cross and family. The apples were all stupidly cut down by a neighbour while we were out of the country, about 1971, to thwart schoolboy thieves. Big big sigh! I´ve noted that our island with its wide salt water moat does not have many of the fruit miner insects that damage apples and currants in Ontario. Early settlers to North America planted apple orchards as quickly as they could. They wanted a cheap source of sugar to make hard liquor applejack by removing the surface ice from barrels of fermented cider (Pollan 2001).

11 Fred Rayment, retired from, Agriculture Canada, Brookfield Road, Mount Pearl, did most of the research in Newfoundland on growing forages, grasses and legumes like clover. I helped him one summer, maybe 1977. Here is a large body of research that goes underused. Very little agricultural/horticultural research and teaching takes place at Memorial University or in the provincial colleges. One outstanding exception was the discovery, by biologist Roger Lee (Memorial Uni. retired), of the plant valves that form fruits and tubers.

12 Self-sufficient farms supported by the landscape seems a far more stable life option compared to urban concentrations with unemployment, a fragile house of cards. I would like to see more pasture created by a leading government, with the land auctioned off to the public. I think governments/botanic gardens can also take a more active role in bringing in new varieties of plant and animal for the public. An improved variety of Partidge Berry, Vaccinium vitis-idea, has been developed in Europe.

13 Many of our plant communities, like those of the tropics, have an excess of organic matter for the purpose of agriculture. For Newfoundland, by burning away Lambkill bushes (Kalmia angustifolia) and other tough and toxic plant species and then planting and fertilizing tender pasture herbs or hardwoods (birch, alder, maple, poplar, carregana, chokcherry, and the pemican berry Amelanchier) we improve the soil, and native blueberry stands, and make the plantscape more palitable for caribou, moose, hare, sheep, goats, cattle, llama, boar, elk, bison and wild turkey and geese. Call it terraforming (Day 2007, Penney et al. 1997, 2000). Guinea pigs are easily raised in the Andes for food but we rarely eat our wild-caught rodents the beaver and muskrat. Both and squirrel too taste like the introduced hare. Russians tap birch for sugar sap. This too has never been tried in Newfoundland. We also do not tap our conifers like others tap rubber. Why?

Literature Cited

Damman A.W.H. 1976. Plant distribution in Newfoundland especially in relation to summer temperatures measured with the sucrose inversion method. Can. J. Bot. 61: 1564-1585.

Day R.T. 1995-98. Atlas of Labrador, 2 Vols. Ubiquitous publishing.

Day R.T. 2006. The very ancient origins to tropical agriculture. Sarracenia 14(1):18-20.

Day R.T. 2007. Global Warming & Biodiesel: Understanding the Changing Organic Soil or 'Duff' in the Circumboreal Forest & Circumpolar Barrens. The Osprey magazine Sept. 2007.

Wallace, D. 2003. The Lure of the Labrador Wild. Project Guttenburg.

Stout R. 1971. The Ruth Stout No Work Garden Book. Rodale Press.

Lappé F.M. 1971. Diet for a Small Planet. Ballantine Books.

Penney, B. G., McRae, K. B., and Rayment, A. F. 1997. Long-term effects of burnpruning on lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium) production. Can. J.
Plant Sci. 77: 421-425.

Penney, B. G. and McRae, K. B. 2000. Herbicidal weed control and crop-year NPK
fertilization improves lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium Ait.)
production. Can. J. Plant Sci. 80: 351 -361.

Pollan M. 2001. The Botany of Desire. Random House.