The differences between small farming and micro-farming.
Essay by Lion Kuntz, March 21, 2000
The fictional character of "Crocodile Dundee" in the second movie has to
admit
that he has a small farm of 10,000 acres. By the standards of the Australian
outback, anything less than 100,000 acres is considered a hobby-farm.
In America Amish farms of 80 acres are called small farms, and on Sanet
anything less than $250,000 a year is called a small farm.
Micro-farming is, well, microscopic by comparison, being a 2 to 5 acre
spread.
Just as the mighty agribusiness corporation farm managers cannot understand
how anyone could want to survive on the income produced on a "small farm" or
"hobby farm", so also those who believe in the concept of "small farms"
cannot
conceive of a livelihood from a paltry 2 acres of land.
The real issues are these:
1) How hard do you want to work for your income?
2) How much of the finite total of the global resources that all biodiversiy
has to share are you greedy to control?
3) What your perception of your lifetime cumulative environmental
impact is (going to be)?
4) What is your definition of "enough" and "satisfaction" and
"contentment"?
5) How limber do you want to keep your mental systems, to be able to
comprehend and extract meaningful bits of information from the
data stream?
Taken in order, micro-farming basically harmonizes with these answers to the
five issues questions above:
1) How hard do you want to work for your income?
Basically industrialized society has set a goal of 40 hour work-weeks for
many
occupations. In reality, because of bad accounting principles (such as
ignoring
commuting time, work-clothes or uniforms maintenance, etc.) the actual
figure
is closer to 60 hours per week for most people. The best of all possible
world's
is when your work is something you enjoy so much that you would do it even
if
you didn't need the paycheck.
Micro-farming, by being compact, means that the area of one or two city
blocks is being cared for, and commuting is a short pleasant walk to any
place
on the micro-farm. Having compactness means that everything is monitored
and nothing is neglected for too long. 40 hour work weeks can be designed
into
manually operated systems. Without the requirement to work to support both
the farmworker (and his/her dependents) plus supporting heavy equipment
purchase-amortization-operation expenses, the work-week can be shorted by
whatever hours were previously consumed paying for the mechanized aspects
not required.
But elimination of heavy equipment circumscribes the size which can be
highly
productive and efficiently managed in 40 hour work weeks by one farmworker.
This pretty much sets the size limits and dictates a lot of the management
practices of micro-farming.
Which brings us to the next issue/question:
2) How much of the finite total of the global resources that all biodiversiy
has to share are you greedy to control?
Human beings require much more than agricultural products. Food, fiber,
industrial feed-stock inputs and other benefits of agriculture are
necessities of
life, especially highly civilized social life. But there are other
necessities, and
some of these are provided by not-fully-understood life-support systems
created out of billions of years of ecological co-evolution. Anything which
injures or ruins any one of the life-support systems can be fatal for human
life,
or at least impoverish living quality for humanity no matter how much food
there
is on the table.
"Biosphere II" was a $200,000,000 experiment in the Tucson, Arizona desert a
decade ago. Despite the best knowledge of the combined human scientific
community it was unable to sustain a population of eight humans for two
years
in a closed habitat. Long before the experiment ended the bionauts had to
have
emergency replacements of Oxygen to breathe, and their "ocean" died and
putrefied, plus their pollinators went extinct leaving their plants as the
living
dead unable to reproduce.
The Earth is "Biosphere I", and it provides pollinators and ocean
regenerators
and oxygen, free and forever. Take away pieces one at a time, and you end up
with "Bioshere II" unable to sustain Adam and Eve for long. Nobody really
knows when the critical limit of pieces taken away transforms from Bioshere
I
to the tomb of Biosphere II, but 30,000 species are being driven extinct
every
year in one of the largest epidemics of mass extinction events in the entire
history of planet Earth. Half of all species are expected to be gone in 100
years.
How much farmland do you really need to take away from the other millions of
species, in order to achieve your needs to sustain your family, and put food
on
the table of America? The answer of micro-farming is half of all farmlands
can
be turned back over to co-species habitat and/or forests removing greenhouse
carbon-dioxide greenhouse gases. The reason this is true is because micro-
farming is four to twelve times as productive as the second-best answer.
The third issue question is related:
3) What your perception of your lifetime cumulative environmental
impact is (going to be)?
Some people have completely blocked off their attention to the effects of
human
usurpation of co-species habitat, and their detrimental impacts upon it. No
information can penetrate the walls of denial they have built. It might be
helpful
if people took a voluntary lifetime environmental impact of themselves. What
is
it going to cost in terms of tons of tractor tires in landfills, in tons of
toilet paper,
in tons of pesticides which kill the pests and beneficials alike. What does
it cost
planet Earth to have you here? How much of your life is negative impact, and
is
that more or less than the creative beneficial impacts of you and your
offspring?
There might come a day when lifetime environmental impact assessments are
mandatory as global Biosphere II becomes more visible to more people.
Environmental restrictions are becoming mandatory in more places, such as
compulsory curbside separation of recyclables from the trash stream. Do you
really need to be forced by your neighbors through laws to do the right
things?
Micro-farming is resource efficient, uses few depletables (and can readily
switch to sustainably renewables as they are available). It meets the
present
standard of 3% of the people (farmers) sustain the other 97% of the
population,
because a two-acre micro-farm can achieve a balanced diet of meats, eggs,
fish, vegetables, herbs, and fruits for a 30-member CSA. This is presently
possible right now, without waiting for scientific breakthroughs.
4) What is your definition of "enough" and "satisfaction" and
"contentment"?
Micro-farming is not possible, or even thinkable to people who have not
seriously grappled with the issue questions. The words "enough",
"contentment", and "satisfaction" mean something quite different to a micro-
farmer, because they make a conscious decision that this is how much land
can be cared for without mechanized multiplication of effort, and these are
the
growth limits one must come to terms with. People willing to use airplanes
to
sow seeds or apply pesticides, or a fleet of tractors run by hired hands
have no
physical visible limits imposed upon them. They can defer or even refuse to
address the issues, and might become very irate if limits are imposed from
citizen peer-pressure of laws enacted and enforced.
Because the vital necessity of assured food supplies are at stake, society
has
been very forgiving of a multitude of environmental sins by people who farm
without limits. The reality is that if micro-farming begins demonstrating
higher-
productivity without environmental injury, two predictions can be made:
freedom-from-limits farmer's lobbyists will pour tirades of press attention
towards imaginary hazards of micro-farming (as in Dennis T. Avery, literary
hatchetman for agribusiness corporations), and the public will begin
withdrawing its leniency for agriculturally-based environmental injuries.
5) How limber do you want to keep your mental systems, to be able to
comprehend and extract meaningful bits of information from the data stream?
The world changes every day. 6,000,000,000 get up every morning and do
things and by nightfall stuff has been produced, invented, consumed, wasted,
spoiled, and moved. Every day some 30,000,000 (or more) species do the
same thing.
We now know that agriculture is responsible in substantial measure for
killing
74 of those species every day, in an escalating war on nature. This is a war
that is automatically lost by winning it.
Of all those humans being busy from sunrise to sunset, the knowledgebase is
enlarging, but the noise is increasing faster. The signal-to-noise ratio
means
that people have to be disciplined and selective in harvesting information
from
the data-stream.
Micro-farming is such a collection of molecules from the data-stream which
can be fitted into living systems of perpetually sustainable highly
productive
lifestyles. Selective harvesting of knowledgebase kernels from the
data-stream
has produced verification measured in thousands of person-lifetimes of
combinable modules of experience. People have done the things they say they
have, and published their lifetime reports on webpages, which are accessed
by
search-engines. These trustworthy independent verifications are complimented
by the scientific laboratory studies also published on the internet. The
cycle
times from problem-to-solution have been shortened, so that sometimes the
condensation of a million person-hours of experience and observations can be
focused on a problem.
Micro-farming is the product of exactly that sort of problem solving, giving
well
verified trials of molecular components under a global spectrum of
challenges.
It represents a fair and equitable income solution for millions of the
unhappily
low-wage employed, and the ecological solution for the demands that
burgeoning human population has placed on the biosphere. It is the happiest
compromise possible for the co-existence of biodiversiy and high standards
of
living for humans.
IF you are interested in micro-farming as a lifestyle or
solution to environmental usurpation of biodiversity habitat, THEN we may
have
a common interest to communicate about.
My email addresses are: LionKuntz@email.com, LionKuntz@aol.com,
LionKuntz@yahoo.com
A list of about seventy webpages I maintain can be located at
http://ww.nav.to/LifeSaviors or you can begin perusing pages at
http://homepages.msn.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors and follow links to pages
of
interest.
An essay on Farming Perpetually Sustainable for 10,000 years
is posted at URL =
http://homepages.msn.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/10000yrs.htm
An essay on Transitioning ideas toward Sustainable Micro-Farming
is posted at URL =
http://homepages.msn.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/transition.html
An essay on a concept for rapid unfoldment of Action Plan
is posted at URL =
http://homepages.msn.com/VolunteerSt/lifesaviors/lionfarm.html
Sincerely, signed __Lion Kuntz__
Santa Rosa, California, USA.
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