Yesterday I went to see the movie “There is a problem with cow nr. 80” (1). A French movie, by Dirk Barrez, about the insanity of the liberalization of agricultural markets causing millions of small farmers around the world to stop their livelihood because they cannot face the foreign competition. In short: big farmers are taking over, Monsanto and Round Up are coming in, destroying soil and human health, and finally people move to cities hoping on a better chance there. The film was shown as part of the AlimenTERRA festival in order to debate this issue with a larger public. Conclusion of the debate: each country should have the right to protect their farmers. Unfortunately I was too tired of listening to the movie that I couldn’t speak properly French anymore. So I put something on this blog instead.

RebelFarmer is concerned with keeping rural communities on the countryside. Communities that can earn a living not only with agriculture, but moreover with the management of natural resources in general: safeguarding biodiversity, producing renewable energy, gathering and processing forest by-products, soil and water conservation, landscape maintenance etc. etc. If they would be properly paid for doing that, a whole lot of people would not have to find their luck in cities. But they aren’t.

Ofcourse we need more campaigns to promote family scaled ecofarmers to produce for local consumers. Ecofarmers are one of the few rural businesses that get a little bit money, as part of the premium price, to take care of the environment. But with all the campaigns in the world, you would not be able to convince all consumers to pay this premium price. There will remain many people that oppose to organic farming. And many will say they can’t afford to pay the premium price.  However, if you ask people if they would allow the government to take measures in order to have a sustainable countryside and agriculture, without Monsanto and RoundUp, I am optimistic about reaching a majority saying yes.

Current EU hectare payments (“direct payments”) are unequally sponsoring intensive-large scale farms. Although the EU needs to “decouple” its agricultural support from the distorting effects on the world market, they still cause overproduction in Europe and dumping practices in developing countries that try to build up their own agricultural sector. About 30% of the total EU budget, more than 30 billion Euro, goes to European hectare payments each year until 2013 (In 2009: 42,8 billion). What else can we do with this money? Just to mention a few possibilities:

Improve soil
Agricultural soils in Europe have dangerously low humus contents and are eroding (4). Although some scientists still believe that agricultural production on sterile substrate with mineral fertilization is the future, many recent studies show that a good soil is a far more easy, less risky and cheaper solution to fertilize plants. Massive mulching and composting to improve humus content of agricultural soils is therefor necessary. But farmers are not willing to apply this obvious method, because it makes the production process more expensive, and the negative results of the present tillage practices will only show up later. Why not give farmers the ability to buy more compost and apply non-tillage techniques?

Terracing and maintaining dry walls
Terraces are in decay everywhere in Europe, they are overgrown with bushes and walls are falling down. It causes loss of biodiversity and a well-appreciated cultural heritage in general, fire risks in Mediterranean countries and increased risk on floods in the Alps region. Farmers don’t have interest in terraces at this moment. But saving terraces with new techniques, and making them more accessible, would create an enormous future availability of new high quality farm land. 

Ponds and wetlands on agricultural lands
They are badly needed for amphibians and birds. But ofcourse take space or cause water damage to crops. Why not compensate farmers to maintain such nature areas?

Natural plot borders
They are needed for young birds to flee too when the grass is mowed, for wild flora to grow, for insects (who eat bugs who eat crops!), and finally for filtering run off water. Why not compensate for each meter “nature”?

Hedgerows
These old suppliers of biomass and handicraft material are standing in the way for modern farmers, and take space. But they are needed for many bird species and mammals (many of them eating mice!).

Old breeds and varieties
Besides they are nice or taste nice, we need their genes for later crossing. Even GMO projects need them. Gene banks turned out not to be able to guarantee the saving of all the stocked genes.

Consumer groups
Why not paying some people to organise local marketing, for a better balance between of local offer and demand?

Farm experiments and research
Farmers themselves have a seriously underestimated intuition and ideas on what could be good for their land, crops and animals. They should get much more the ability to initiate and participate in agricultural research.

The EU does move already in that direction; things like “second pillar” subsidies and “agri-environment” measures”, and “cross compliance”, on which I will not elaborate here. But they do not currently result in something significant, let alone stopping polluting agriculture and rural exodus. EU citizens find a lively and sustainable countryside extremely important (4). So let’s give the EU another push by demanding that the direct hectare payments should be transformed within the ten year coming into measure payments to help farmers maintain soil fertility and biodiversity, two of the most precious resources of our planet guaranteeing the productivity of the future!

Links:
1. “Vache numero 80 a un problem”

2. Explanation about the EU Agricultural Budget

3. European Soil Bureau

4. Research on European citizens support for agriculture and rural development

Today I called Stoyan, the chef cook of the Kovatsj Farm Restaurant, situated in the Strandzha Nature Park, Bulgaria, to ask about some "Scheisse". He has about 200 buffaloes on his farm. The first thing he did when I visited him earlier this year to ask if he could roast a lamb for the tourists of our Shepherd Tour, he let us taste his fresh buffalo milk cheese to proof his culinary qualities.  Now I asked his cooperation in a composting project and inquired about the availability of the buffalo dung.

What is so interesting about composting?

Well, suppose compost was all around and plenty available, it can give you a marvelous highly productive substrate for making an organic vegetable garden anywhere you want, even on the worst soils and in the smallest places. See for example the lively discussions about so-called raised bed agriculture on one of the more than  600.000 google links: www.raisedbedgardeningtips.com.

Another interesting thing about compost is that is gives back humus content to the arable lands that is alarmingly decreasing everywhere in the world. The carbon molecule strings of humus are little wonders in maintaining water for the soil and offering a favorable living place for micro-organisms that help the plants in getting their food. Unfortunately, by tilling the land, and exposing it to water and wind, the humus content is mineralised, which makes the land even more sensitive to erosion. Besides erosion, this humus depletion contributes significantly to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere!

But the most intriguing about compost is the following. While it is expected that the costs of the fabrication of nitrogen in artificial fertilizer will rise enormously because of the high amount of energy that is needed, and given the fact that with the current use rate of phosphates its sources are depleted this century, we have to seriously ask ourselves if we have to return to compost as main nutrition for agricultural plants.

Now the secret: where to get those enormous amounts of compost?

Ofcourse we are pooing ourselves a lot. But unfortunately we do not really have influence on what people drop in the sewers. So in fact, besides the occasional emptying of car batteries, the sludge is polluted with medicines and hormones, impossible to remove, we really don’ t want to have in the food cycle. All the sludge in the world would even not be enough to maintain soil fertility.

The problem is that we need digesters that are able to eat things, that we cannot eat ourselves. Traditionally: cattle. Here we have a bit more control: we can use the compost of organic cattle, like Stoyan’s buffaloes. But unfortunately this is still not enough! And we don’ t want to have more cattle in the world. Burping cows are one of the largest contributors to the greenhouse effect.

Now I found something else. A lot of trees standing in the way and wood digesting bacteria!

The Strandhza Nature Park in Bulgaria has a lot of forest but also about 8000 ha of pastures. These meadows were once used by more than 100.000 sheep in a transhumance culture that flourished until the WWII. And before that by natural grazing animals. Since thousands of years the ecosystem adapted to this grazing regime, and as a result a type of flora developed, unique for Bulgaria, and Europe. But like elsewhere in Europe, intensive agriculture took over and the pastures are gradually overgrown by pioneer shrubs and forest.

In Eastern Europe, it is estimated that about 30% of the traditional agricultural land lay fallow. Nobody is interested to plant something, or to use the grass because the farming in isolated areas, on mountainous land turned to be not profitable for the small farmers and for the old collectives that are left on their own after the collapse of the communist system.

Our Shepherd Tour, walking with the shepherd in Bulgaria, an attempt to pay the shepherd by means of tourism, had a lot of difficulties to make progress because so many trees and sharp bushes stood in the way. Our shepherd casually notified me after one week walking that 4 of the 110 sheep, that we started off with, were missing. I suspect that some of them unfortunately could not escape from the raspberry bushes …

Taking biomass from abandoned lands in Europe is not worth the trouble for cattle breeding alone. But it seems that it is useful for other things: tourism, rare flora, sheep and dog genes, vultures and….compost!  

The pioneer in using woody biomass for making compost was Jean Pain, a forester in the south of France in the 60’s and 70’s. He had similar problems with abandoned land. In his case the dry bushes caught easily fire and destroyed 100’s of hectares of forest each year.
He discovered a method to digest wood chips by cutting them in little slices and put them in a huge pile. An old documentary describing the process has been put on you tube, a must see for compost freaks!
Jean Pain Method documentary part 1

Essentially it is not composting, but digesting. Composting transforms biomass mostly into CO2. Compost is the residue. Digesting can ideally transform 30% of the carbon content into biogas. And you end up with the same amount of compost. With a pile of 40 ton wood chips he produced sufficient methane gas for his household and to drive his 2CV for 18 months.

I say ideally, because with the legendary, open air  “Jean Pain Method”, considerable amounts of methane might escape into the atmosphere, something that we also nowadays try to avoid. So now there is a smart company who has built a concrete tank around the pile, connected some water tubes and computers, patented it and sells the technology as “BEKON Dry Fermentation”.

I will take the fancy brochure of this company to Stoyan and the mayors of the municipalities in Strandzha Nature Park, to impress them with the high tech opportunities for these deprived areas. But probably we will end up by building an old fashion compost pile with RebelFarmer volunteers next year. And hopefully we can borrow the tractor of the collective to get those nasty bushes out!

Nature Farming links
-EU Soil Thematic Strategy (2003): Nature and extent of soil erosion in Europe
-European Environment Agency (2004): High Value Nature Farmland, characteristics, trends and policy challenges
-Seminar presentations (2004): Abandoned lands in the new members states and candidate countries of the EU and the EU Common Agricultural Policy

Composting links
- The Cornell Institute Composting Homepage
- The Science and Engineering of Composting
- The Practical Handbook of Compost Engineering
- The Digestion Archives

Biogas links
- www.builditsolar.com
- www.sare.org