Sustainable Personal Agriculture and Energy Blog
Blogspace connected to special organized resources regarding personal agriculture
(small farms, gardens), personal energy (small-scale wind, solar, hydro), and other associated content.

I’ve been, through circumstance and conflict, unable to be at the farm throughout the summer. June’s conferences were followed by July’s consulting and speaking, which were followed by a fabulous August trip overseas with my adult kids, wife, and mother.

Now, finally, at the end of August, I get to go back to see what my wife, three of my kids, and sundry friends have done over the summer. There’s a garden, and some painting, some drywalled spaces, and some brush clearing, and some other stuff that’s been done — and some living through blackfly days, and days of too much rain.

There’s the garden with onions, and cabbage, and potatoes, and lettuce, and much more. For the first time in my life I’ll truly eat what was grown on my land. There’s the small barn, with treasures to explore, that has not yet been fully cleared out, but whose ancient piles of manure have begun to be spread.

Most of what I’ve missed is the learning of the land — understanding what is sodden and what is dry, how the pond responds to rains, how the stream fills and declines, with what kind of weather, and at what kind of pace. Understanding how the wind blows, and from where. Understanding how the sun moves, so that we can plant the fruit trees appropriately. Understanding how the season of summer moves, so I can schedule next summer appropriately.

This year I’ll have snapshots, and snapshots only, of what the farm’s days are like. I hope to have more, a continuous experience of weather and temperature and bugs and wind and growth, in the months and years ahead.

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Spent a few hours this afternoon exploring small tractors. I’m afraid there’s not a lot of commercial options out there for electric tractors, that have the clearance and power I want, at a price I can afford. The best systems out there are unique — conversions from old Allis-Chalmers “G” from diesel to electric, or otherwise going deep into the electric conversion route.

Since I’m not there at the farm, I can’t act as if I am. I can’t be the tinkerer, or the one who spends a week or three committing to some conversion. The “electric tractor” route — in terms of commercial, purchasable units — rarely come with big wheels, or with high clearance. And all the extra tools — the sodbusters, or the plows, or the other tools — all add cost.

If I want a tool for turning soil, plowing, or otherwise moving heavy stuff, for now I need to explore a small standard, gas-powered tractor. I’ve found one possibility on kijiji.com, Canada’s version of craigslist, and am currently exploring it. Tough to do, since I can’t be up there to actually *look* at the thing…. and it’s hard to be feeling sanguine about spending large amounts of money based on internet pictures.

That said, this looks promising. A plow for snow; a “hillmaker” plow attachment, a sodbusting rototilling attachment, and it runs. Belongs to an 86-year-old farmer, and his kid is selling it. Been garaged, but at least a couple owners. I have no idea what the other provenance might be, or how many miles it has left. 16 HP B&S engine — basic gas, and easily replacable on the frame, if need be.

Still thinking, but I’m concluding that there’s no way I can do electric just yet. Need to get the farm rolling, and then hope that I can either do my own conversion, or build something electic. I’ll know *lots* more after I’ve actually used a small tractor.

Just got off the phone with my wife and my daughter, who had a two-hour sojourn around the periphery of our property, almost getting lost, almost spraining ankles, almost trampled by a buck bolting out of the trees 15 feet away from them, and finally finding their way back to the house.

Part of the fascinating stuff for me (a thousand miles away, writing from within DC) is how diverse the property is — a lot of wet, soggy ground, built of moss digesting downed trees — but also the new-growth forest on the edges (harvested by the wood industry), old-growth forest (within the boundaries of our property), hayfields, marsh, stream-border, and pond boundaries. We have a wide variety of ecosystems to explore, and to live with (and within) and develop.

One of the (many) challenges is determining what degree of “development” is appropriate — which chunks to think of as “crop” and which to think of as “archive.”

That is, a great proportion of the 95 acres will necessarily be left alone — left to its own devices, left to follow its own course. But another part (around half) is already hayfields, and thus ready for crops and/or development of some kind, over time.

There are boundary areas — wetlands, the land around the beaver dam, the edges of the pond, the edges of the forest — which will be ideal, no doubt, for some particular kinds of “crops.” I put that in quotes because it may be seed cast to see if it grows; may include plants replanted in hope of fecundity; may include small plots committed to some possible organic crop (bok choi? watercress?) uniquely suited to these micro-ecosystems.

So much to learn; so much to explore. The possibilities are many and varied; the challenge is trying to find ways to “monetize” the diversity of the landscape we’ve been blessed with, in ways that will pay for the cost of the farm.

If I was a bigbuck commercial entrepreneur, focusing on the commercial sector (in my non-farming hours), it might be different, but being a smallbuck nonprofit scholarly-sector “entrepreneur of social value,” our challenge is to be not only creative, but practical, about finding ways to make the farm pay for its own mortgage. Not a gigantic challenge, but one which will take creativity and thoughtfulness to implement.

We have a small, manmade pond on our land — probably the size of basketball court — which will need some tending. Aeration (since there’s no ingress) seems likely, and I’m thinking of a low-effort wind pump system to do that. But other questions, like stocking with fish, decreasing algae, and determining depth and muckiness, are all part of the mix. The main collection page for Pondwork is beginning to gather some resources. Got suggestions for high-quality material? Add a comment!

Though “garage wind” has its appeal, so does “pro wind” — we have to, as a society, develop an economic incentive for developing systems that the average Jo can put up in her backyard, to grab the power of the wind whenever it’s blowing. I’ll be focusing mostly on systems that can be purchased in Canada on the main Pro Wind collection page, but also on technical information publicly available (like those from Sandia Labs, and other publicly-funded research centers). Got some recommendations for this section? Please add a comment and suggest them.

There seems to be a growing movement regarding what I call “garage wind” developers. They tend to be very open about their activities, experimenting with VAWT (Vertical Axis Wind Turbines), homebrewed turbines and propellers, and other similar projects. I am especially intrigued with those that use cast-off materials — old truck alternators as the power generation, bicycle wheels as the frame for the blades, etc. In the Garage Wind section of the main site, I’m collecting references to successful and reproducable projects, some of which I hope to experiment with. Got recommendations? Put them in a comment, please!

Opensource content, pre-copyright, on precisely what we need: the insights from the smallfarmer, pre-cheap fuel. With Peak Oil arriving, we need to rediscover what a small power source (horse, ox, electric tractor) can do with a small piece of land. With cheap farm energy (diesel, oil) arriving in the early 1900s, we shifted to larger and larger machines for dealing with larger swathes of farmland, changing our practices and shifting our perspective of what the land was good for.

But these pre-1923 resources are fabulously perfect, since they were published between the era of mass cheap printing of “educational material,” and before the era of cheap energy forever changed the family farm.

Got some recommendations of publicly available high-quality resources? Put ‘em in a comment!

I’ve only just begun looking for resources in this arena on the main site: what sorts of equipment, knowledge, and energy systems might be required for building a still (for alcohol as a fuel, or for apple brandy), and for boiling down sugarmaple sap into syrup (or apples, or cherries). Any suggestions for resources? Put ‘em in a comment!

I’ve got a handful of interesting Electric Tractor links over at the main site. Info and links to The Electric Ox, an article on Solar/Electric Mowers and Tractors from MotherEarthNews, etc. Do you know of others? Please leave me a comment, with a URL to explore.

I’m operating on the presumption that resources — Web pages, video, audio, Google Booksearch, and more — are best when humanly categorized. For my purposes, I want to know where I stashed and implicitly recommended something I need — what shelf it’s in, or better (since digital) which shelves, since something can belong to Nova Scotia, as well as Modern Machinery.