Village economies using Agro-Ecology
Imagine a world where food is plentiful, all fuels are renewable, where growing of food and fuel helps restore the soil fertility, where farmers especially small farmers earn a comfortable wage, where the groundwater is continually recharged, where rainfall is sufficient to grow crops without irrigation , where the ambient temperature is comfortable, for humans, plants and animals, where immense amounts of carbon are sequestered We have the technology to do this today.
These practices can give a solid economic base (as well as 100 other prolife benefits) to individual farmers as well as entire villages. These practices include growing food as well as biofuels on wastelands, turning them into lush agricultural land in the process. It is based on practices used in India for the past 10,000 years. The underlying bases of these practices have been scientifically documented by a soil scientist in the U.S. named Elaine Ingham. There is a farm in Telangana, India using these practices, that of Narsanna Koppula with Aranya Agricultural Alternatives. Aranya’s Farm – Aranya Agricultural Alternatives
Willie Smits has used these practices to restore a rainforest in Borneo where decrease in ambient temperature, and increase in rainfall have been documented.
We are in the process of compiling a list in another document at least 20 more examples of these practices working throughout the world. There are hundreds and possibly thousands of these examples.
The below proposal is for a demonstration farm which shows how to apply these practices especially to wastelands today. It can give a solid economic base (as well as 100 other prolife variables) to individual farmers as well as entire villages based on farming. The demonstration farm shows how farmers can make a comfortable living by farming including creating a lot of other jobs. It demonstrates how to solve WASH (water, sanitation, hygiene) problems. Hence it could give solid grounding to the Indian economy, using Indian resources to solve India’s problems without relying on export markets.
This proposal is based on knowledge held for 10,000 years of Indian agriculture and validated scientifically by Elaine Ingham. The soil does not need outside inputs to grow crops for food or even crops needed for energy (biogas, biodiesel, enthanol — alcohol). If almost any 20 crops are grown together, 50% of them being legumes, they, together with the soil microbes they support, will create the sustainable ongoing nutrition necessary for growing plants, as long as the soil is not exposed to the sun (brown or green mulch covers the soil.)
This is the basis for regenerating depleted soils with tiny inputs, and recharging ground water. By designing plant growing patterns in harmony with these principles, sustainable, agriculture will be successful.
In the western world the economic model for manufacturing includes a single corporation (or person) owning all land and manufacturing something like an automobile or airplane. In Northern Italy, no one individual or corporation could afford to do this so they formed a cooperative where one organization made the ball bearings and another made the casing, etc, so that together they made the whole product. Lots of different cooperatives doing manufacturing in this way made that section of Italy very prosperous. We propose to do something similar to establish a viable village economy.
The parts might include:
1) Lots of farms where biofuels and or food would be grown.
2) Manufacturing of biogas toilets (maybe a women’s enterprise). The main problem with toilets in India is that people do not clean them. While cleanliness is very important to the Indian people, whatever is outside of their home they do clean. We propose a solution similar to how public toilets are maintained. There are keepers of the toilets who clean them. People would pay 2 rupees to use the toilet and a tax of 100 rupees (or more) if they are found not using the toilet. We believe this in conjunction with many jobs that would allow payment of the 2 rupees.
3) Manufacturing of sand filters for drinking water, another possible women’s enterprise.
4) Manufacturing of lamps using biogas and biodiesel. These could be purchased.
5) Cookers using the biogas or biodiesel could also be produced in the village, but could also easily be purchased.
6) Village based oil extractors for the biodiesel.
7) Ethanol producing facilities. The major pitfall that I see of ethanol production, is that if the villagers syphoned it off for consumption, it could damage the village more than the benefits of ethanol for machinery or electricity from generators. Because of this in the beginning we would recommend sticking with biodiesel and biogas. In the U.S. regulations are that gasoline (or some other corrosive) be added to the ethanol during production so that it cannot be consumed.
I am opposed to growing biofuels in the way of industrial agriculture because it takes water and a lot of chemicals and uses prime land which takes away from food production. If the total costs require many times the energy you get back it is not worth it. So we have to evaluate the value of growing fuel for energy by knowing the hidden energy costs to all production.
Since coming to India I have learned of systems which have been practiced here for thousands of years which can regenerate wastelands, grow only with rain water and not add any fertilizer, chemical or organic. These practices, though used for thousands of years in traditional Indian agriculture, seem to have been abandoned in India’s desire to embrace modern methods (the green revolution). Applying these systems is a revolutionary concept at a time when most people believe you need chemicals or at least large amounts of organic material to grow food. The forests are our model for growing without outside nutrients. These practices make growing biofuels possible, especially in a system like the one described where the soil is regenerated, and the ground water recharged. This is a proposal to integrate growing biofuels with a food forest on a village scale. There is a lot of documentation that small farmers using small tracts can produce much higher yields per acre, and hence feed the world, one such being the results of small farmers in Cuba to feed her population after the loss of Russia oil.
In our proposal we suggest starting with biogas systems to include human manure, animal manures, azola or another plant that grows well in water in the local environment, many fast growing trees and plants for mulch, and any residuals from the harvest. (The system requires that the plant residues from the harvest are neither burned nor taken off the land where they are grown. A working system requires keeping the crop residues on the land as mulch.) The biogas produced can be used to power cooking and lighting for the farmer as well as any farm equipment. This could be expanded to oil crops and if the problems with ethanol can be worked out, crops to produce ethanol. Ethanol could be used for motor cycles without any changes. In fact ethanol burns cleaner and hence allows longer engine life with good speed than gasoline allows.
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The goal of this project is to take wastelands or depleted agriculture lands and regenerate them without irrigation or fertilizing (chemical or organic). The regeneration is accomplished by the proliferation of the microbes in the soil from growing food, and biofuels. Results include:
1) Recharging the ground water by doing earth works (making swales, ponds, check dams) to harvest rainwater as well as growing deep rooted legumes to hold the water.
2) Growing field crops in a 360 day cropping system including deep rooted legumes to hold the water throughout the year.
3) Lots of diverse plantings of fruit and nut trees, we might choose one nut or fruit crop as a major variety in each acre, still putting in many other fruit and nut crops in between this major crop.
4) We will also plant what I call bore well trees such as neem, tamarind, amla and jamon. These trees pump the water from the lower soil depths assisting capillary action to bring the water to the level where the plants can use it. The microbes in the soil share that water among the various plants.
5) Crops for renewable energy, including biodiesel, ethanol and biogas, keeping to diverse plantings (no monoculture). We will choose the plants that do well in dry land situations tailored to the amount of rain fall in the area of the planting and the trees which grow well in that area (or we believe could grow well in that area.)
6) Crops for timber,
7) Vegetables
8) Grains and legumes
9) Medicinal herbs,
10) Fodder.
11) Sequestering a considerable amount of carbon, and
12) Giving dry land farmers a liveable income.
This is a food forest combined with an energy farm. We are calling this a food/energy farm or agroecology. These systems have worked with as little as 100 ml of water per year (although there is a narrow band of plants which will do well in these very low water systems). There are indications that when 20 acres or more are grown, these techniques will actually increase the rainfall in the area. In fact the government of India wants people to plant trees as a way to bring back the rainfall.
A diversity of plants along with a diversity of microbes can feed themselves. It is the natural function of the plants to feed the soil, and in turn the microbes feed the plants. When the right plants are combined and when the microbes in the soil are protected from the sun and compaction there is no need for any fertilizer application, year in and out and no need for pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. Anyone who doubts this need only look at forests. Most times when 20 plants are combined 40-50% of them nitrogen fixing we can create this sustainable and even regenerative plant combination.
See Hands on Permaculture1.org web site for a cropping system that has done this successfully for hundreds of years. Hit cropping system on the top of the page and scroll down below the existing print and you will see the cropping system.
The closest farm that we know of that accomplishes this is Narsanna Koppula’s Aranya farm. http://permacultureindia.org/permaculture-farms. This previously poor, very rocky land, with no irrigation demonstrates these agroecology practices will work. There are thousands of these farms growing throughout India, farmers who have not embraced “modern” agriculture. We are sorry we do not know their locations. This food forest or Mr. Koppula has produced good crops year in and year out for 17 years without adding outside fertilizers. Some methods not used by Mr. Koppula of the genre described in the book Secrets of the Soil by Christopher Bird and Peter Tomkins will allow good production in the first year by rapidly increasing the microbial activity. Elaine Ingham has also been applying her similar methods to thousands of acre of dead Midwestern U.S. soil revitalizing these soils. As the traditional Indian farmers knew, it is the microbial activity that allows healthy and abundant food production.
We are looking for some wasteland for a demonstration farm. Specifically we are looking for:
1) Long term access to this wasteland for demonstration purposes.
2) This can be alkaline soil, low rainfall wasteland. Eventually we would like to do a project on land infiltrated with salt water, but we do not want this to be the first project.
3) Needs to be at most 10 km from a place to stay.
4) The ideal situation would be where the owner(s) pays for the Improvements and workers needed to develop the site. Also we would need an on sight manager that we could train. Since we use mainly seeds these costs could be as low as 150,000 rupees an acre for the first year. These costs include earth moving for water retaining structures, seeds, and labor.
5) We may or may not have to dig a bore well. If we do, this would increase the expenses by that amount. We will dig pits to accumulate water to allow us to grow a nursery and use pitcher pots to water trees over the summer in their first years as Mr. Koppula did.
6) Net monetary yields would be around 50,000 rupees per acre the first year, 100,000 rupees the second year, going up to 2 lakhs per acre by the third year. (These are conservative estimates.) This would depend on local scale marketing the crops, not wholesaling. Costs would level out at 50,000 rupees per year after the first year.
Benefits would include:
a) Recharging the ground water.
b) Field crops for consumption
c) Vegetables
d) Fruits and nuts,
e) Medicinal herbs.
f) Timber
g) Firewood. (As cooking can now be done with biogas, this is not so important.)
h) Crops for renewable energy, including biodiesel, ethanol and biogas,
i Sequestering carbon.
j) Bringing wastelands into productive land
k) Model for dry land farmers to earn a good income as well as grow their own food and energy
l) Model for how to recharge ground water and increase rain water to villages and districts in india without large amounts of money inputs.
m) Model for reversing desertification one farmer or village at a time.
n) Since this is such a revolutionary concept to so many people, a model plot would need to be funded, for demonstration and training purposes.
o) It would be advisable in future to plan a model farm in every district in India as well as to set up trainings for farmers at these farms.
We would especially like to see these projects done at the rural village level with the intention of keeping the energy produced for use at the village level.
sincerely, charlotte anthony
At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you. Whatever you can do or dream you can do begin it now. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. Goethe
Charlotte +91 9505215498
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At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you. Whatever you can do or dream you can do begin it now. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. Goethe
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller
We have been doing so much with so little for so long that we can do anything with nothing.