Planning or redesigning your property
How often have you heard of people who
bought a hills property as a result of a spring drive.... Ah the green
paddocks and frolicking lambs, the fresh air and wonderful views. And how
long did they last when it came to weed management, hay making, livestock
husbandry, icy winds and trying to convince things to grow in thin old
soils?
Before buying or designing a piece of land we
must be brutally honest with ourselves and answer the questions 'What
activities in life give us most satisfaction? Can we sensibly commute from
here? What are our medium to long term goals?' If you still come up with
managing a piece of land at the top of the list then issues of landuse,
size and location must be answered. We listed: close to a good school and
public transport to Adelaide, reasonable for commuting and of all things
in SA (Annemarie is Dutch) close to a river!
The big wine companies have specified exactly
what soil profile, what slope, what altitude, what frost risk and what
water requirements (both quantity and quality) fit their purposes for growing
premium wine grapes. For someone growing olives they can afford to be less
fussy; frosts can be more severe, water can go above 1500 parts per million
salt and wind speeds higher. So if your dream is to grow particular crops
choose a place that will suit them as well as you.
Many properties offer a range of micro environments:
the mid slope of the sides of a valley is often frost-free, rocks store
lots of heat, soils are often thin, well drained and leached high in the
landscape whilst deep alluvial soils and waterlogging are found low in
the landscape, olives do better on the northern slopes in the colder parts
of the Hills and Flooded Gums like the deep soils and ready moisture near
creek lines.
To someone experienced in reading landscapes
the property is almost yelling out what its different bits are capable
of; Redgums signalling a shallowish watertable, Pink Gums warning of low
fertility soil. David Holmgren, one of the originators of Permaculture,
can walk a property which has some remnant native vegetation and give stunningly
accurate forcasts of soils, water, frost and property potential.
For lesser mortals the the digging of a soil
profile pit with a backhoe or a soil core, a soil test to tell you about
pH and fertility and flow and quality tests on water supplies are essential,
even if that only means opening up a tap full bore and measuring how long
it takes to fill a 20 litre bucket with your mains water (which is usually
about 500-700ppm salt).
Having chosen a property it is now time to establish
boundary windbreaks and think about a house site. Unless you are mainly
on your land for the view it is almost always better to nestle your home
out of the wind and the most devastating fire path, at the Key Point, where
the slope changes from concave to convex. Here you'll usually find reasonable
soil depth, frost drainage and access to water.
The house should be north-facing and hopefully
run on solar power but certainly using a solar water heater and home
grown wood for energy. If building an environmentally responsible house
there is now very little excuse for not installing a composting toilet
and a reedbed to enable grey water reuse. Quite a number of these systems
have been approved by the Department of Human Services (previously
called The Health Commission) and they promise savings of up to 200,000
litres of clean water in toilet flushing annually as well as providing
a few barrow loads of excellent compost (your very own compost!) and top
quality irrigation water (polished by your reedbed) from basin, shower
and sink outfalls.
An eco- home does not need to be expensive and
there are a number of architects who specialise in designing and retrofitting
such houses.
Now for the real challenge. A detailed scale map
or a big aerial photo needs to be arranged so you can exactly mark soil
types, cliffs, creeks, existing improvements etc (onto a transparent plastic
overlay) and then you are able to plan, fantasize and make the most dreadful
mistakes on another plastic overlay. These designs are then discussed with
other members of the family, friends and experts using measurable areas
and other data, and altered many times until you are ready to drive the
first post or lay out an orchard in the right place.
Fences and water mains are the skeleton of the
property and can make your life a dream or turn it into a nightmare as
erosion takes grip, your own animals eat your trees or you are simply driven
crazy by opening and closing gates. Force yourself to explain the fence
and water systems to someone who is happy to question the illogical. (Annemarie
has popped many of my over-enthusiastic planning bubbles).
Putting the flesh on the skeleton is where the
artistry of farming is exhibited and given that permaculture designs are
based on energy and enviromental priorities they can look very different
from conventional farm plans which are usually driven by principles of
yield and income maximisation.
Perhaps a quick walk through 'The Food
Forest" would help explain: People spend more time in the house than any
other place on the property so it becomes the hub or centre of activity
and we put lots of effort into making it efficient, comfortable, beautiful
and handy to services and fresh foods. Moving from the verandah we pass
the lemon tree, a herb patch (fresh ingredients for cooking) and a vine-covered
sandpit, cross a lawn with slippery dip and rough cricket pitch and enter
the perennial garden, winding our way between herbs, rhubab and asparagus
until we pass under the vine shading the stone western wall of the chook
house from which the hens go out to work in the surrounding market garden
beds of lettuces and capsicums. Next to the chook house is the nursery,
the spray of its watering system cooling the chooks as well as the nursery
plants on hot days.
We progress into the orchard, shutting the gate
behind us because we've entered a part of the property protected from foxes
and cats by an electric fence. Here we have many types of stone, pome and
citrus fruit including 60 apple cultivars as we're looking for some which
adapt well to our particular conditons. Two hundred metres further and
we enter the nut grove with walnuts and the tough pistachio trees which
require almost no attention after their initial form pruning. Finally there's
a zone of native scrub which really does look after itself.
So there's a steady lessening of energy and attention
required by crops as you move further from the house, very unlike a farm
I worked on in Canada where the house was just downwind of the piggery
and you had to use a car or take a cut lunch just to go to the shed.
The spatial planning of a farm should be complemented
by the concious design of energy flows and interactions. On our farm one
area is controlled by geese who graze the grassy weeds, alpacas who rather
like wireweed, chooks who take care of codlin moth and Bettongs who eat
sour sob bulbs. (We harvest the fruit).
In some of the countries around the Mediterranean,
there were places where human designed forests emerged much more productive
than native forests and much more stable than monocultural tree cropping
or annual agriculture. The Cork-Pork forests of Portugal where pigs
grew fat on the acorns which dropped from oaks cultivated for their cork
bark survived as a system for a millennium.
Chinese pigs gorged themselves on mulberries
and silkworms converted the leaves of the same tree into the Worlds most
valuable thread. The forests were fertilised and weeded by the pigs.
Today, the same ground is used for growing annual
crops, crops reliant on large inputs of fertiliser, sprays, fuels and machinery.
But even with all these non-renewable inputs, the system is losing
overall fertility and some people are nibbling at models for returning
the ground to perennial systems; systems which are stable enough to promise
the ecological sustainability which remains the ultimate precursor to our
survival.
In the late Seventies, Bill Mollison and David
Holmgren synthesised the set of design principles for the sustainable occupation
of The Planet by humans known as Permaculture, the philosophy promises
the production of high quality food without the use of significant quantities
of non renewable resources or biocides.
A common use for land in Permaculture designs
is as food forests and some of these latter day (and theoretically designed)
forests are now a decade old and starting to yield their secrets. These
are also surviving examples of traditional Mediterranean systems which
are relevant to Australia but only a few big thinkers, like David Holmgren,
have made the connections to date.
David tells of a family who have occupied a 7ha
farm in the Po Valley in Northern Italy for four generations. With
essentially organic production techniques, the little property supports
the 8 adults and assorted children who manage a polyculture including grapes,
walnuts, wheat, soybeans, native forest, lucerne and livestock.
They achieve yields comparable with their neighbours
who require some 20ha of land per viable family unit and who consume vastly
more non renewable resources per ha. The Permaculture inspired food
forests have tended to have very large numbers of species, many times the
number of species endemic to a particular area. This is in part a
reaction to the staggering by simplified current commercial farming systems
(eg on the Adelaide Plains we have only one significant commercial tree
crop, almonds; and yet there at least thirty fruit and nut species which
we know will grow well).
It also reflects the freedom of Permaculture designers
from cultural and scientific conventional wisdom. This freedom, bravery
or ignorance led us to jewels such as pecans, sapotes, persimmons, cherry
guavas, Tahitian limes, white mulberries and pistachio nuts.
However, it is clear that these botanic zoos generally
shake down to a much smaller number of species which are well adapted to
the local environment, suit the people who are managing them and the equipment
available and enjoy viable markets for their products (if the property
has been setup to general surpluses).
Many of the food foresters with moderate surpluses
over their household needs undergo a bitter realisation that they can give
the products away but it is so time consuming to sell small quantities
of food for profit that they may as well not do it.
Food co-operatives have helped to solve that problem
for the more creative operators.
Many people started with the idea of self reliance
but found that they were very good at growing particular crops and have
expanded production to the point of commercial viability. It is them
and the people who designed their properties for substantial surpluses
who can answer the question of whether such properties can be commercially
viable.
Taking the property which my wife Annemarie and
I run near Gawler in SA as an example one must emphasise the importance
of planning of development through time as well as spatial and species
design. It was vital that we keep off-farm income rolling in
while we capitalised and planted the property up.
It was important to grow chooks and annuals to
provide cash flow early in the development of the place. It was necessary
to qualify for primary producer status to obtain tax refunds to be spent
on further development of the block. We needed to establish a nursery
to cheaply propagate and hold trees. Both of us undertook training
in permaculture design so we had a vague idea what we were doing.
Our site was 15 hectares of deep river silt of
neutral pH with rainfall of 450mm so water use was a major preoccupation.
We needed to choose some major species which the potential to tap into
a shallow aquifer 15m down.
We came up with pistachios, carobs, nut pines
and pecans as well as about 100 native species so it was time to look at
the potential profitability of the key crops before deciding on a mix that
would deliver ecological and economic viability. The gross margins
(amount per hectare) of income left after paying all the annual costs for
pistachios was $10,000 which looked the best. Pecans were next but
I was worried about productivity and variety choice for the Adelaide Plains
so carobs got the second berth with gross margins between $2,000 and $10,000.
Nut pines presented major doubts in terms of processing and profitability.
So we built an ecologically diverse design, including 160 fruit, nut and
vegetable cultivars and 140 native species around the main crops.
These key species, pistachios, carobs and pecans,
all had to be low input, deep rooted, moderately profitable and amenable
to manual or mechanical harvesting.
In addition to income from those corps, there
will be the superimposed gross margins of free range goose production,
ecotourism, education and ultimately the sale of native animals to others
establishing sanctuaries.
This multiple yield phenomena also occurs in the
more intensively managed parts of the property where two or three vegetable
crops are harvested from a given part of the market garden annually and
chickens utilise the crop wastes. The garden around our house is
superficially a cottage garden but also provides herbs and edible flowers
for sale. The house and vegetable areas can be regarded as clearings
in a complex food forest.
Reduced Inputs
The management of our crops is organic, which
can provide price premia of 30-100%, but which more importantly means that
we dont have to pay for or apply any insecticides, we minimise the need
for weed and orchard floor management operations by using grazing animals
and we use a copper spray only once every two or three years to control
fungi and lichens on fruit and nut trees. Our soil is deficient in
copper so that input is doubly useful.
In the fruit and nut areas our fertiliser, in
the past, consisted of composted deep litter manure from a local chicken
farm. Currently we use certified organic compost from local sale
yards. On the garden areas, the foraging chickens dispose of all pests,
control weed seeds and fertilise the ground. Particular nutrient
deficiencies are dealt with on a case by case basis, for instance the nut
trees have received a mix of zinc oxide and gypsum.
Given that only high value products leave the
farm, the loss of nutrients and organic carbon is minimised.
Our products are sold mostly locally so
transport costs are minimal and because produce is sold fresh, no cold
or Controlled Atmosphere storage is required. We use the same containers
for many months simply picking up empties when we deliver goods to local
restaurants, green grocers or families.
We have one significantly higher input than conventional
growers ..... time. Much time is spent observing, shifting animals
from one patch to another, maintaining relationships with customers and
looking after complex range of crops and animals. If one enjoys the
work and feels that it is important that a sustainable land use model is
developed, one could consider accepting a lower hourly rate of pay than
people whose main drive comes from maximising production, income and wealth
in a world that is buckling under the effects of consumerism.
Marketing
Our marketing is by word of mouth and we pitch
out prices between wholesale and retail. We supply restaurants, organic
shops and some families, as well as selling directly to people who visit
the farm for field walks and short courses.
Other growers use subscription farming, food cooperatives,
have farm shops or attend local farmers markets. Some simply use
the wholesale fruit market.
Commercial Viability
Regarding a property as an investment which can
return interest, we can divide that return into an increase in capital
value or net profit (tax write offs are generally caught by the increase
in capital value or equity).
In our case, we are steadily increasing our equity
in a property which has increased in value five fold since we bought it.
Like most people who own property within 50km of a capital city (which
accounts for some of Australias best land, we rely on off-farm income to
achieve our goals.
While the Government continues with the level
playing field concept which forces our primary producers to accept the
Worlds lower prices for goods (whether dumped and subsidised or resulting
from exploitation of the environment or workers) there is an enormous disadvantage
to growers who elect to produce food an environmentally responsible way.
So we should be making urban Australians aware of the need for paradigm
and policy change.
It is time for the 95% of Australians who live
in towns to start taking some responsibility for the stewardship of the
country in which they live rather than whining about poorly educated farmers
who thrash the environment (to earn a miserable income because of economic
policies approved by the Australian public who mainly live in cities).
Returning from that aside the revenue statement
for a food forest typically will have less expenditure and less income
than a conventional property as optimum yields and food quality are sought
rather than maximum yields, however the net profit or loss may be very
similar.
Certainly in the survey of organic and conventional
farms done by Els Wynon of La Trobe University, there was no spectacular
difference. I am not aware of any such survey in the area of horticulture.
Some food foresters are extremely successful commercial
producers such as Brian Mason at Forest Range - whilst others are more
interested in ecological enrichment and self sufficing.
Looking at our development budget we are at the
point where the income is about to equal the expenditure. Form here
on the tree crops will steadily increase in production and will get some
gross margin figures from a semi-mature food forest system. Meanwhile
we will eat well, stay warm, meet wonderful people, raise sane children
and do out bit for the future of the planet.
Graham Brookman |
