So why did I choose Hops? The popular route of the college educated, mid-life, 2nd career, radical lifestyle change seems to be the homesteader who rushes to the farmers market at 6am with a cart load of French banquet radishes and red Russian kale frantically setting up colorful chalkboard labels and wondering who managed to grow the earliest heirloom tomatoes. Let me be clear, I think locally grown organic produce is wonderful. It is a revolution sweeping 1st world countries that is making people take a hard look at what they eat, how their food is grown, and a lot of environmental concerns which are prominent today. It was my starting point at the very infancy of this project however; that seemed like a lot of work.
I began looking for an easier way to farm, simple as that. I had no farming experience, and no background in a farming family. I now count this as a blessing in disguise as it allowed me to go into researching with a totally open mind. I began looking at easy, small acreage farming methods and niche markets. I first hit on ducks and duck eggs. Duck eggs are higher in fat, larger than chicken eggs, and great when used in pastries, the down can be collected (humanely, none of that ripping down out of the birds please...I'm looking at you, China) during natural molting and sold for jackets and quilts. Ducks are great foragers/pest eaters, can be herded, are highly disease and cold resistant, don't scratch or fight like chickens, and baby ducks....like, cmon.
So, ducks, great. I thought I would open a duck farm. I knew nothing about ducks. Research continued. How many ducks can I raise humanely on one acre? Could I grow anything else to sell? My reading brought me to a small snippet from a book entitled "One-Straw Revolution" which stated that 10 ducks per quarter acre was sufficient to clear pests, allow enough room and forage to feed the ducks and allow them to live naturally, and supplied the soil with sufficient manure to facilitate more decomposition and soil improvement. I had never thought of soil before. It was just dirt, right? What makes up soil? What is soil?
I remember my father planting tulip bulbs in the fall when I was a child. He scraped away the mulch from the flower bed, broke up the dirt, made a small hole, and popped in a bulb. I remember planting seeds in my mother's vegetable patch when I was in my middle school years. I was told to carefully read the directions on the back of the seed packets, space the seeds just so, at the correct depth, covering with dirt, then religiously weeding for the next 3 months hoping nothing ate our hard work. This was the way to plant something. I never questioned these observations. This was simply the way it was done.
On one of my weekly visits to the local library here in Elgin, I had so many questions bouncing around in my head about how things grow. I didn't have to go very far into the building before I saw the Fresh Picks display featuring Kristin Ohlson's "The Soil Will Save Us". A seven day rental which I annhilited in a few hours (think mind a wood chipper). This led me back to that book which supplied the little blurb on ducks I had mentioned earlier. I bought Masanobu Fuokua's (spelling?) "One-Straw Revolution" and similarly read this one. Lights were coming on, I was making connections and it was terrifying. Words like "agri-business" and "GMO" (not to be confused with hybridization) were all suddenly holding new meaning. Soil erosion, use of chemicals in our food, poverty, social inequality, water purity, ocean acidity, the death of the Great Barrier Reef, desertification of once-fertile farm lands, the plight of the modern farmer, political strife, the rise of Monsanto,
all of it comes down to how we treat what is beneath our feet and how we get our food. There it was, all right in front of me, and I was hopeless. I felt like I was taking crazy pills, again.
Hope returned through "Restoration Agriculture" by Mark Shepard. I had heard about "permaculture" before and I was always very hesitant to delve into reading extensively on the subject. It seemed like a lot of authors had differing views on permaculture and it's methods. Some viewed it as a sort of spirituality, and my years as a firefighter couldn't quite come to terms with listening to some hippy tell me about my garden's mother spirit. However; Mr. Shepard is a farmer. He has the experience of putting permaculture into practice and making it work. Improving soil, growing sustainably, eliminating erosion, producing more calories per acre than monocropping (term used for fields of a single crop like corn or soybeans), growing without any chemicals or fertilizers, and reducing farming costs, labor across the board ...all that good stuff, oh, and also making a considerably higher profit-per-acre than his corn and soybean neighbors. Bingo, I had a model.
Now, what do I do with it. It was the message that was important. More people needed to understand the importance of proper land use, and the global benefits which could come from changing the way we farm.
Craft brewing is super popular. I have two friends that have been brewing at home for quite some time now. These are people that, in no other way, would have cared about barley or oats or hops. This is a massive market that is always in demand for the newest ingredient or method, and right now there is a hop shortage. Humiliated Lupulus is a perennial that might very well fit perfectly in a permaculture system. (Takes off sunglasses, "Mother of God...")
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Elgin Hops Project is born.
Thank you for reading, please follow along to see if this crazy experiment will work. Feel free to steal my methods if they do, it will make the whole world a better place to live.
-EHP
