Any good village will have a robust, low-maintenance agricultural operation. I always dream of the near-future time for us here – of orchards dripping with fruit, trees dribbling with nuts, open source combine and tractor making easy time of formerly full-time food-getting activity – and other people being able to replicate entire food operations readily from stock. Berries and tubers all over, hay feeding not only goats but the tractor with pyrolysis oil burned in a steam engine – edible landscape, tubers in raised beds that you can pluck in mid-winter, eggs laid lavishly by chickens all over, goats lactating profusely to feed an entire village. Everywhere you look, there is beauty, and it is also food – on demand.
It takes a long term plan and management to deliver the above. Fukuoka is my hero on this topic, with highly-recommended One Straw Revolution – the book that opened up some of my perspectives on the possibilities of ecologically-integrated agriculture. You can download the book from Soil and Health Library– if you don’t know this library, I recommend this goldmine highly. Personally, I think that people could feed themselves readily with 15 minutes per day in agriculture activity – once a perennial edible landscape is set up. This is not a statement we will take lightly, but one that we will explore rigorously as part of our work here. Yes, 15 minutes for people to care for their future harvests – the rest of time being harvest and use, which ‘normal’ people do anyway when they harvest food at a supermarket or when they cook.
We’re looking for a full-time farm manager. The duties are to make the above a reality. More specifically, the duties and possibilities are:
- Building a gene bank of edible and useful plants, plus all of the five kingdoms, for purposes of ready replication of edible eco-landscape, integrated with the built environment. Possibilities here include incubation of new orchards, nursery stock sales, passive u-pick operations, permaculture workshops, and edible landscaping enterprises.
- More specifically, this duty is to identify and collect selected plants and other 5 kingdom species, and grow them out as part of not only a living, but productive, gene bank.
- Animal husbandry – chickens, goats, bees, bats, worms are some of the main low-impact animals
- Edible forest and landscape development, integrating the five kingdoms
- Herb and wild species cultivation
- Staple field crops, as necessary. Beans are a good idea for people, and so are winter feed crops for animals
- Raised beds via organoponic and chinampa techniques
- Keeping records and a map of all facility plantout
- Providing education experiences, and documenting work carefully online
The above will work in conjunction with open source agricultural equipment. This allows either subsistence operations or seizing the power of production for external markets. The latter has potential of addressing geopolitical issues directly. Moreover, food storage and processing of all sorts will be developed at Factor e Farm, with a goal of demonstrating 100% local, healthy diet possibilities.
In summary, we’re looking for someone to manage our farm and turn it into a perennial Garden of Eden. Vision is high, pay is that which the manager earns from the land’s bounty – and we are open to discussion and options. Email us if you are interested.
I am definitely interested in creating/importing a knowledge base of plants, wild and domestic. Knowledge base containing edible, production, medicinal and other properties (this presumably accompanies the gene bank).
I am looking now for publicly available resources, and ways to combine those with newly collected data.