Food Security
One Indian Farmer commits suicide every
38 minutes!!
Traditionally Indian farmers were subsistance farmers. They grew a variety of Heritage crops so
- had a bio diversity of seasonal food
- being heritage they could harvest the seed and replant with the guarantee the crop would grow again (today most seed is hybridised, meaning the first crop grows beautifully, but if you harvest the seed, it probably won't grow and if it does it will be a weak plant and not bear fruit) Heritage seed grows well year after year, so they harvested their own seed and did not buy seed from the co-op each year
- growing heritage plants allowed a variety of each species, so if one crop became diseased, seeds from the next valley were obtained and planted and losses were minimal
- Heritage seed is very hardy so needs minimal fertilisers
- One crop as they would get more money from it. But by growing only one crop, when it fails they lose everything. Usual this crop cannot be used locally, and marketing skills are naïve so often the crop goes to ruin instead of being exported
- Being hybridised they can't harvest seed so have to buy new seed every year, from the co-op, falling into more and more debt
- The new hybridised seed has minimised the variety of crop species so when disease hits one farmer it spreads very quickly
- The hybridised seed needs heavy fertilisers, which are supplied by the (guess what) the co-op
Monoculture - the growing of just one crop as this wheat field
We cannot afford monoculture (planting one type of crop) any more. We need to switch over to local and bio diversity of crops. How do we do this? Well by looking at stacking our system, looking at both space and time. What do I mean by this? Well, looking at space, your system needs to be planted in layers:
In this way one fills your space no matter how big or small, with a health variety of food in such abundance that there will be plenty to take to the local market
Addressing time, make sure that in planting a variety of food, that there is always something ripe so at any point you can walk around your system and eat. Added to that is the health aspect of eating seasonal. Only eat food that is in season, live food, not stored food as that becomes dead food.
Add to this eggs from your chickens which are used to clean up fruit and veggies that have come to an end
You will bring down your medical costs as your families will suddenly become more healthy
- First layer is the canopy, the tall trees like, avo's, walnuts and other nuts for example
- Second Layer is the deciduous fruit trees – peaches, plums, apricots, figs, nectarines, persimmon, custard apples, apples, pears, mulberries, for example but also citrus, lemon and orange, tropical – banana, pawpaw, quince, guava,almonds
- third layer is periennal, pomagrante, gooseberry, okra, herbs, lavender, rosemary, gooseberry
- fourth layer is annual intensive veggie gardening, tomatoes, green peppers, brinjal, salad greens, spinach, baby marrow, patti-pans - this is planted outside your back door where you always see and use the veggies
- Fifth layer is the root crops potato, sweet potato, carrots, beetroot, onion, parsnips, turnips, and more
- sixth layer is the ground cover – pumpkin, butternut, squash, strawberries, various other berries
- Vertical crops – climbers, grapes, kiwi, granadilla
In this way one fills your space no matter how big or small, with a health variety of food in such abundance that there will be plenty to take to the local market
Addressing time, make sure that in planting a variety of food, that there is always something ripe so at any point you can walk around your system and eat. Added to that is the health aspect of eating seasonal. Only eat food that is in season, live food, not stored food as that becomes dead food.
Add to this eggs from your chickens which are used to clean up fruit and veggies that have come to an end
You will bring down your medical costs as your families will suddenly become more healthy
The Herb Spiral is at Gibbs Business School in Johannesburg. Gibbs is the biggest business school in Africa and has its own restaurant for its students and delegates. The permaculture gardens supply the restaurant with it's need.
There are a group of young women in Jefferys Bay, who have an organisation called Kouga Urban Harvests and they will maintain you garden for you, but, with a difference they don't plant just flowers they also plant veggies, herbs and fruit and then supply you with a box of veggies a week from you garden. They do a number of gardens and the produce is shared so you always get even when the veggie is not ripe in your garden, and the excess is sold. Wonderful local and organic!!!!!! Well done girls, I salute you!!!! Google Kouga Urban Harvest a site well worth visiting
To revise, we now need to change our approach to food security, and see it in the light of
Space and Time
Space and Time
ooooOOOOoooo
LETS
LOCAL EXCHANGE TRADE SYSTEM
Permaculture money system.
LETS
As money gets tighter and tighter, more petrol increases, and all the related increases that go with a petrol hike, and then the Escom price hike, one begins to feel a little desperate. But what can be done about it. We all feel helpless and just get into a mode of blind acceptance. No doubt there are going to be many increases around goods with a base in Japan …....... and so it goes on.
This is how a group of people in a rural area of Canada felt just as desperate, when they needed to get their children to school but couldn't afford the buses, so they start the first LETS, or Local exchange and trading system. They started swoping skills and what ever else they could.
As money gets tighter and tighter, more petrol increases, and all the related increases that go with a petrol hike, and then the Escom price hike, one begins to feel a little desperate. But what can be done about it. We all feel helpless and just get into a mode of blind acceptance. No doubt there are going to be many increases around goods with a base in Japan …....... and so it goes on.
This is how a group of people in a rural area of Canada felt just as desperate, when they needed to get their children to school but couldn't afford the buses, so they start the first LETS, or Local exchange and trading system. They started swoping skills and what ever else they could.
HOW LETS WORKS
- Criteria
LETS are generally considered to have the following five fundamental criteria: - Cost of service — from the community for the community
- Consent — there is no compulsion to trade
- Disclosure — information about balances is available to all members
- Equivalence to the national currency
- No interest
Basically this is how it works – I am a hair dresser and you come to me to have your haircut, we have agreed on a some lets just say R40 for argument sake .You write me a cheque saying I Joe Soap pay Jill Hogan 40 apricots. I take it to the person running the local office and he/she debits Joe Soap 40 and credits me 40. Now I need an electrician, my fridge is not working so I phone the LETS office and ask for a registered LETS Electrician. He finds he needs parts for the fridge outside our 5 km radius so he pays cash and charges me cash for the parts, but charges me apricots for his labour. LETS minimises your monetary needs, does not eliminate them completely.
I am a little old lady with not many skills, and my debts are climbing but you are very skilled so have many credits, the board which assesses the accounts at predetermined times – quarterly, half yearly,? Will go to you and say. “Joe you have many skills so you have many credits, but Jill's debts are climbing, can she cook supper for you every night.” You are so busy that you and your family are not eating properly so you say “Yes wonderful.” I bring your food to your house every night and now your are eating wholesome food, but you say why don't you join us, so now suddenly from being a lonely little old lady I have a family.
I am a little old lady with not many skills, and my debts are climbing but you are very skilled so have many credits, the board which assesses the accounts at predetermined times – quarterly, half yearly,? Will go to you and say. “Joe you have many skills so you have many credits, but Jill's debts are climbing, can she cook supper for you every night.” You are so busy that you and your family are not eating properly so you say “Yes wonderful.” I bring your food to your house every night and now your are eating wholesome food, but you say why don't you join us, so now suddenly from being a lonely little old lady I have a family.
Productivity in a LETS system has been shown to go up by about 80%.
The skills registered can be any thing useful – washing or walking the dog, knitting, cooking, laundry, washing a motor car, baby sitting, growing seedlings, legal advice, medical care, caring, bookkeeping, plumbing, electrical work, building, cat sitting, house sitting, gardening, theraphies......... and so I can go on. A friend of mine in Bath in England makes most of her LETS credits from letting out her cat basket.
The skills registered can be any thing useful – washing or walking the dog, knitting, cooking, laundry, washing a motor car, baby sitting, growing seedlings, legal advice, medical care, caring, bookkeeping, plumbing, electrical work, building, cat sitting, house sitting, gardening, theraphies......... and so I can go on. A friend of mine in Bath in England makes most of her LETS credits from letting out her cat basket.
Interest is a big issue. We all know that interest makes the rich, richer and the poor, poorer so LETS works with credit unions and no interest. This means that if you invest your money locally it will be used locally not away from your town and often out of the country, as happens at present. For example in McGregor the community decided they would like to attract a doctor or blacksmith, the credit union will finance their setting up and then they can pay back the credit union interest free. As we are then addressing our own community needs everyone wins. The Bristol LETS system once lent their municapality a huge sum of money which was paid back in bobbins their LETS medium of exchange. In Detroit at one stage you could even buy your motor car through LETS.
"I found a whole pile of alternate money systems in USA check these two links"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_in_the_United_States
and
http://www.fourthcornerexchange.com/
One of the biggest LETS systems is right here in South Africa – Talents, in Cape Town.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_in_the_United_States
and
http://www.fourthcornerexchange.com/
One of the biggest LETS systems is right here in South Africa – Talents, in Cape Town.
If shops link into the system they would take my excess butternuts, eggs or peaches for credits and then I can buy my butter or cheese or milk on credits. The more inventive the system becomes the better. As I write this I think of more and more I can do. What could you contribute?
I feel it is now time to take our own lives into our own hands and find ways to make our lives less stressful, the toll of the way we are living is just to high.
I feel it is now time to take our own lives into our own hands and find ways to make our lives less stressful, the toll of the way we are living is just to high.
Permaculture
GARDENS and ORCHARDS. We set out to design our centre according to the Permaculture Design Principals Permaculture workshops were offered on a regular basis. And our intention was that our gardens would provide sufficient food for the centre and to always have something you can eat while walking through the garden. We are beginning to accomplish this and now at different times we harvest many fruits, berries and nuts. Daily we pick our salad needs plus greens like beans, spinach, etc. We also now have a huge variety of herbs which we harvest for eating, beauty, and teas for pest repellents and also to feed the gardens.
CHICKENS. We have hens (and a rooster) that provide us with handfuls of eggs daily. They also eat all the passed the sell by date fruit in our garden so we don't get fruit fly. They also give us manure and eat the weeds that grow in the garden
Compost Toilets
Water world wide is becoming more and more polluted and it is our belief that you cannot pee and poo in drinking water any more so all the toilets at MAT are compost toilets, which are efficient, clean and give us masses rich clean compost.
Compost Toilets
These are the two compartment toilets at Cobbits Cottage, the blue and green seats
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Little Cottage
The Single Bin method at Little Cottage
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The added joy of compost toilets is an abundance of compost. We put the compost from the toilets through a proper composting process for an added year and our garden is fence to fence rich lush soil. The composting process even alters the molecular structure of heavy metals.
FRUITS OF THE GARDEN
“Plant food forests not Lawns”
March for me is always the month of preparing for my winter crops. As I write this we are taking the compost we have built up over the year and spreading it on all our gardens. I get all the grass cuttings from my neighbours and with the material from all our compost toilets we are constantly making compost heaps. The heaps all standing for a minimum of two years before we use them.
March for me is always the month of preparing for my winter crops. As I write this we are taking the compost we have built up over the year and spreading it on all our gardens. I get all the grass cuttings from my neighbours and with the material from all our compost toilets we are constantly making compost heaps. The heaps all standing for a minimum of two years before we use them.
It has taken years of mulching, adding compost and covering in what ever way we can, to change our dry Karoo space to a lush fruit and veggie bearing garden. This year for the first time I have hadedas in my garden so it means, on this rock bank I live on, we finally have worms. Every thing we cut back we reuse. The thicker wood is stock piled for the fires in winter, the finer branches are set aside for kindling and the finest waste from the garden we put one side and Dannie arrives with his shredder once a month and turns all the garden waste into chips which we use for mulch.
Bill Mollison, the founder of Permaculture studied forests and what he discovered was that the only systems that flourished when left alone entire by man, are forests. If we leave our gardens unattended for a period of time they die, but forest left alone get better and better. This is due to the falling of leaves, trees, plants, all carrying the store of carbon. Add to this nitrogen, from the urine and faeces, of animals, birds etc. Nitrogen is needed to break down the carbon and start the feeding cycle of the plants in the forest. The trees attract the rain clouds, it rains in forests and not in deserts, and the moisture is retained in the soil by the root systems and the mulch covering, and so the system gets better and better.
So the more trees, and covering of the soil, we have in our system, the richer our harvests become. This year my 1000sqm garden has been so productive. We have had peaches, plums, apricots, almonds, quinces, grapes, lemons, strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, blueberries. We are harvesting tomatoes all our green, salad stuff, spinach, pepper dews, and much other produce. Ripening at the moment are pecans, oranges, guavas and pomegranates, add the eggs from the chickens who eat the passed the sell by date fruit, we are highly productive.
Bill Mollison, the founder of Permaculture studied forests and what he discovered was that the only systems that flourished when left alone entire by man, are forests. If we leave our gardens unattended for a period of time they die, but forest left alone get better and better. This is due to the falling of leaves, trees, plants, all carrying the store of carbon. Add to this nitrogen, from the urine and faeces, of animals, birds etc. Nitrogen is needed to break down the carbon and start the feeding cycle of the plants in the forest. The trees attract the rain clouds, it rains in forests and not in deserts, and the moisture is retained in the soil by the root systems and the mulch covering, and so the system gets better and better.
So the more trees, and covering of the soil, we have in our system, the richer our harvests become. This year my 1000sqm garden has been so productive. We have had peaches, plums, apricots, almonds, quinces, grapes, lemons, strawberries, gooseberries, blackberries, blueberries. We are harvesting tomatoes all our green, salad stuff, spinach, pepper dews, and much other produce. Ripening at the moment are pecans, oranges, guavas and pomegranates, add the eggs from the chickens who eat the passed the sell by date fruit, we are highly productive.
But it is not just about organic healthy food, is about minimising the manufacturing/trucking process. For example, take battery farming which uses about 25 plus factories to produce one egg. Free range chickens use about 5 factories to produce one egg. Free range still need fences, feed and water containers etc., even though their food is grown on site, so it is estimated they use the produce of five factories. Where as battery farms, ship in their food, so tractors are needed to plough the fields for the feed, which is trucked to the feed factories and then trucked out to the farms, all needing factories, iron and steel works etc. to accomplish this. It is estimated battery farms use a minimum of 25 factories to produce one egg, and we haven't even started on the use and repair of road systems to truck all this feed.
There are various towns in the UK who have set out a goal to produce the towns needs within it's borders. I love this idea so I am promoting planting food and not lawns, to move towards this goal. In London they have lifted the paving at various bus stops and the community has planted veggies, so you can pick you supper on the way home. Brilliant!!!!!
There are various towns in the UK who have set out a goal to produce the towns needs within it's borders. I love this idea so I am promoting planting food and not lawns, to move towards this goal. In London they have lifted the paving at various bus stops and the community has planted veggies, so you can pick you supper on the way home. Brilliant!!!!!
During the 1930's depression in America Frank D. Roosevelt, (America's only ever environmentally aware president) to relieve the unemployment, had thousands of men digging swales in Tucson. Swales are trenches dug across the slope of land, piling the soil on the downhill side so you can capture water and retain it. The swales fill with plant material, seeds and when it rains water. The depression lifted and the swales were left just as they were. 80 years later they are rows of forests.
http://www.permies.com/t/18232/permaculture/Tucson-CCC-Swales-Pics
http://www.permies.com/t/18232/permaculture/Tucson-CCC-Swales-Pics
