Harnessing sun power to the max by layering and diversifying within your biome; or get more by growing stuff in top of other stuff, but only stuff that already wants to grow where you are

Was that title too wordy?


Hey folks! I've been teasing this talking point for a while now, and my house is clean, baby Ivy is upstairs sleeping like a champ, so I really have no excuses.  I may need fact checkers on this, I am going from my memory. Here we go.

So I was recently confronted with an interesting argument while having a friendly disagreement with a friend of mine.  It initially began as a discussion of the massive fossil fuel dependency that our current U.S. agricultural system relies upon (I think it was 13 percent of our total national dependence goes to chemical and fertilizer production). His argument was that percentage was tiny in comparison to shipping and transportation (I seem to remember a whopping 54%, again, fact checkers please).  I would think that ground shipping of human food products, animal feed, brewing products, corn for plastics, cotton for clothes.....etc, combined with the amount of cheap grain we send overseas by ship and air, not to mention the food products that are shipped sometimes dozens of times from facility to facility for further processing (look at the back of a kid's cereal box sometime), that this would also constitute fuel consumption by the agricultural industry, I am sure this is all lumped into the "transportation" category which looks a lot like commuter consumption to the casual reader.

My friend's argument pivoted to "How else are we going to feed 9 billion people, this is the way we have to farm or the population will starve.  This is how it has to be done."

Hold on, big breath in Ace Ventura-style.

Okay, there are roughly 540 million people suffering from true starvation conditions across the globe at this moment.  Compare this to the 1.6 billion people who are currently overweight or obese, and suffering from any number of related diseases from this excess.  The US produces roughly 6400 calories per person from the acreage which is currently in production. Where does all of that food go? Oh, yeah, our cows eat it.  Hundreds of thousands of acres produce animal feed....corn/soybeans. That produces a massive net loss of calories. Cows are not even supposed to eat corn, they are grazers, for grass.

My friend was still stuck. "No, you have to use fertilizer, you have to, it is the most efficient way of supplying food to large number of people". I don't think I was going to be winning over anybody today.  That's okay though! We didn't start screaming at each other, nobody left in a huff.  We are still friends. Yelling at someone who has different views and experiences is insanity, stop it, even if you agree with everything that I am saying, your Thanksgivings will thank you.

So, let's say that all acreage is used for human consumption.  The war was won, everyone is a vegetarian, the new national hairstyle is dreadlocks. (My wife is vegetarian and I have a very plant-based diet, no angry emails please?)  The way we grow is still super inefficient.  We could be using far less farmland and still be producing the same amount of food/products.  "Witchcraft!", you cry. (it's 1 in the morning, the dog started barking, pipe down).  I'm not communing with my Wiccan familiars, I promise.  There are real, proven methods for increasing output and using smaller acreage, and you still don't have to use any chemicals or fertilizer.

The method involves, once again observing the best farm on earth, the forest.  The idea is planting commercial crops in layers.  If you walk along a forest path you may notice plants of varying heights.  In the undergrowth you may find edible fungi. Then you have shorter plants comprising the forest floor.  These are interspersed with bushes and shrubs.  Then you have the mid sized trees and finally the largest growth, the cedar, maple, pine...whatever is native in your neck of the woods.  This is all dotted with vines of creeping plants using the larger growth as a trellis.  There are many layers of growth occurring very naturally all around you.  The trick, then, is to observe how you can utilize this natural growing behavior, and plant production crops accordingly.

A green plant is a complex machine for turning sun energy and atmosphere into food energy or calories. If you can, imagine a farm field as a collection of solar cells . The more surface area absorbing energy from the sun through photosynthesis, the more energy will be stored and converted. In this case, the conversion produces tasty things.  (Real quick so I can say it in a way that will make me geek out....A giant ball of nuclear explosions in space sprays our planet with energy and radiation, and our planet figured out a way to turn those explosions into radishes and flowers.  Isn't life fun!). So...if you maximize the surface area, you are maximizing potential for growth.

The easiest way for me to visualize this was given to me through Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture.  He states that a monocrop field where corn (and only corn) is grown is like a flat piece of paper.  If you plant in a layered polyculture (many types of plants in the same area), this would be like taking a lot of other pieces of paper, folding them into pyramids, and placing them on top of the original piece, thus drastically increasing the amount of surface area and potential energy absorption. The EHP is currently planted with, I think, Three (3) layers.  I recently had a brief chat with a Mr. Jesse McDougall of Studio Hills Farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont.  He and his wife are working on Seven (7) layers of planting! Wow!, that's neat huh? Jesse is a much more experienced farmer and writer than I.  I want to be him when I grow up.

So there you have it folks.  Less land producing more food.  Let's hope that its local and chemical-free! I hope it was as interesting and informative for you to read as it was meandering and difficult for me to write!  As always, feel free to send me any questions, comments, or skeptical concerns.  I will do my very best to respond quickly and courteously.  Thank you for following along with the project.  Have a wonderful day!

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better soil, better beer, better health, better world
-EHP