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The sound of birds chirping, rustling trees and the rushing sound of water only enhance the beauty of this place. A paradise for naturalists and those looking for something different from the beaches and regular tourist spots in South Goa, this sanctuary is home to a wide range of flora and fauna, including Giant Squirrel, Great Pied Hornbills, Grey Headed Bulbul, Slender Loris, and an exciting range of mammals, butterflies, and birds.
Arambol beach is a beach stuck in time. A throwback to the 'Generation of Love', this beach has a distinct Bohemian vibe that puts it on the list of places to visit in North Goa. It is ideal for those who prefer spending a quiet night in, listening to the waves or taking a moonlit stroll on the beach.
This rocky beach is sparsely populated by locals and tourists alike, making it ideal for those wishing to spend some romantic moments with their significant other. You can even shop for knick-knacks and junk jewellery from the small shops lining the beach or have a delicious healthy meal at one of the many quaint, organic cafes around Arambol. Do you wish to relax and chill during your Goa Holiday?
Calangute is just the place for you! With a plethora of water sports offered by this beautiful destination, all your adventure cravings will be fed. And oh, how can you forget to try the famous Goan delicacies and freshly brewed beer? With quaint shacks, towering palm trees swaying by the wind and the sea breeze, Calangute is the perfect place to relax and chill. Wish to swim along beautiful fishes and explore the underwater life? Make your wish come true at this beautiful beach.
For the adventure junkie in you, there is a list of water sports you can indulge in at this alluring beach. Goan delicacies, ayurvedic spas, small food stalls, shacks and a great shopping experience are just a few things that make Baga beach worth visiting.
Home to vibrant resorts and a glorious beach, Candolim packs in a lot of surprises. Soothe and relax your body, mind, and soul with Ayurvedic massages from the experts. Thrilling water sport activities, soft sandy beaches and a chance to spot some alluring dolphins are some things this place will surprise you with! With its bewitching shoreline and shimmering white sands strewn with sea shells, Benaulim oozes the Goan ideal of 'sussegado'.
From a quiet dip in the ocean, a picnic on the beach or a beverage at a beach bar, you can do it all here. Compared to other beaches in South Goa,Benaulim and its neighbouring beach, Colva, have a buzzing nightlife scene; so this beach needs to be on your Goa itinerary if you wish to let your hair down and dance all night in South Goa. Goa is basically a blend of culture, colour, zest and heritage. Goancuisine plays a very important role in depicting that. Goan food is one of the major crowd pullers in the state.
Due to the Portuguese colonialism in the past and the existing communities of Konkani, Hindus and Catholics, Goan food is basically an influence from all these communities. Goa has an assorted platter and some of the cuisne that one should try are mentioned below.
Goa is blessed with a long coastline, which brings in an opportunity for fishing and an abundant supply of fish. This means fish curry features prominently on most menus in Goa. Fish curry isn't a blanket term or a one size fits all solution to cooking.
With ample seafood like prawns, sharks, lobsters, crabs, pomfret, snapper, barramundi, clams, mackerels, mussels, and oysters come ample curries that are just as lip-smacking as the next. The common thread tying them all together is their use of fiery chilli, soothing creamy coconut, piquant spices like triphala and souring agents like kokum. The combination of fish curry and rice essentially forms the staple food of Goa and can be called the traditional Goan meal.
Add on a side of fried fish and prepare to be transported to culinary heaven. Goa loves its pork and beef. Chicken isn't always the first choice of meat unless its Chicken Cafreal.
Originating from Africa, this dish has been brought to Goa by the Portuguese. This is spicy chicken made from coriander, lime, green chillies, peppercorns and mint.
Cooking this in the traditional Goan way gives it an additional smoky taste which provides a completely out-of-the-world experience.
Traditionally served during Christmas, Bebinca is one of the most enjoyed desserts of Goa. It is a multi-layered cake made with eggs, fresh coconut milk, sugar and pure ghee.
Eaten hot or cold, this confection is laden with calories and love, as making it is no easy feat. While the run of the mill sightseeing included in most Goa tour packages will introduce you to the most popular places in Goa, you can add a few experiences to your Goa holiday package to maximize its value. While on your Goa holiday, indulge in some scrumptious seafood and sip on a chilled beverage as you rub shoulders with people from all over the world, at the shacks at Anjuna beach.
Take a stroll through the streets of Anjuna and Chapora and shop for some pretty souvenirs at the night markets or go to a beach party and dance until dawn at Anjuna beach. Take a walk on the white sandy beach and unwind during your Goa holidays. Learn the art of scuba diving and swim alongside the beautiful creatures of the sea.
Indulge in water sports like jet skiing, motorboat ride, banana boat ride, river cruise and dolphin rides to feed the adrenaline junkie in you. Calm your body and soul by taking an ayurvedic spa. Laze around at the beach, soak up the sun at Baga beach. This is the perfect activity for every Goa holiday. Your vacation to Goa doesn't have to be just about fun in the sun.
Seek some blessings at St. Cajetan Church in Velha Goa. Know more about the old tales and stories by interacting with the locals. Check out some awe-inspired Italian paintings and the Corinthian columns at this domed church during your Goa trip.
Visit this ancient peaceful temple in Goa during your Goa holiday to seek blessings. Hire a boat and take in the serene views around the temple. You will be surprised to listen to different birds chirping around this locality. Go on a retail therapy and shop for some fancy handicrafts and souvenirs during your Goa holiday. Every Wednesday, Anjuna plays Still Water Formula Pdf host to the most famous flea market in Goa. What started off as a way to let hippies sell their stuff and earn some money to sustain themselves has now become a platform for cool, chic brands to peddle their wares.
There is also a lot of food and entertainment on offer, too. This is the quintessential Goa experience that will be the highlight of your Goa holiday. This bustling night market sees a lot of tourists every weekend. Shop for all kinds of souvenirs here to take home from your Goa holiday. This market is open from October to May and here, you will find some really great jewellery and other curios and even furniture.
If you want to test your bargaining skills during your Goa holiday, this would be the place to start. This market is a big hit with locals as well as tourists who want fresh produce ranging from vibrant vegetables and fruits to fresh seafood like lobster and prawns.
It also has many vendors selling everything from spices and condiments to clothes and flip flops. Definitely a must visit on your Goa holiday. It also has some pretty great restaurants and is decorated with murals by Mario Miranda. Is it safe to travel to Goa?
While Goa has lifted its mandatory Covid testing and quarantine policy for all incoming visitors, it is still recommended that you get tested before you travel and adhere to social distancing norms at all times. Also, don't forget to wear a mask.
When is the best time to visit Goa? The weather in Goa is perfect during the months of November to February. The climate during this time is neither too hot nor too cold, making it the ideal visiting time for tourists.
What is the distance from Mumbai to Goa? Goa is approximately kms from Mumbai. Which is the best Casino in Goa? Deltin Royale is the most preferred casino by visitors and it can be called one of the best casinos in Goa.
Which are the famous churches in Goa? Francis of Assisi, St. Cajetan Church are some of the well-known churches in Goa. Is Goa safe for female travellers? Yes, Goa is quite safe for everyone.
How many days are enough for a Goa trip? One can enjoy the complete experience of Goa on a trip that ranges from days. When does the carnival take place in Goa? The Goa Carnival usually takes place in mid-February and is one of the most enjoyed events in Goa. What are the best things to buy in Goa? Cashew nuts, Spices, handicraft, and Cashew Feni are some of the things one can buy in the local Goa market. Which are the famous festivals celebrated in Goa?
John, the Baptist. Stroll through the beaches and explore the wild in the cultural island with your better half. Maldives is an all-in-one experience. A 2nd referee will come to the ring to make the three count quantity and declare Taker the winner and new champion. On Smackdown, Vickie and facet could have the 1st referee interior the ring, and he will declare that facet exchange into disqualified for the outdoors interference and hand him the WHC.
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Former FSU, Giants receiver charged with murder. Singer opens up about drug abuse: 'I had a problem'. That's enough to feed five to ten people, yet it takes only one or two people a few days of work to hand-sow and harvest the crop. Natural farming has spread throughout Japan and is being used on about 1 million acres in China. People from around the world now visit Fukuoka's farm to learn both farming techniques and philosophies. The allure of this system is that the same piece of ground can be used without being used up, and yields can be consistently good.
Instead of pouring money and energy into the farm in the form of petroleum-based inputs, most of the investment is made up front-in the farm's design. Instead of working harder, he whittled away unnecessary agricultural practices one by one, asking what he could stop doing rather than what he could do.
Forsaking reliance on human cleverness, he joined in alliance with nature's wisdom. As he says in his book, One Straw Revolution, "This method completely contradicts modern agricultural techniques. It throws scientific and traditional farming know-how right out the window. With this kind of farming, which uses no machines, no prepared fertilizer, and no chemicals, it is possible to attain a harvest equal to or greater than that of the average Japanese farm.
The proof is ripening right before your eyes. Australian ecologist Bill Mollison, like Wes Jackson, advocates keeping some crops on the land for many years, to bring farming as close as it can come to nature's efficiency. For years, Mollison has worked on perfecting a system whereby small-scale farmers would set up a low-maintenance garden, a woodland, and an animal and fish farm and then become self-sufficient-fed, clothed, and powered by local resources that are literally right at hand.
Designing with nature's wisdom is at the core of this farming philosophy, which is called permaculture, for permanent agriculture. In permaculture, you ask not what you can wring from the land, but what the land has to offer.
You roll with the weaknesses and the strengths of your acreage, and in this spirit of cooperation, says Mollison, the land yields generously without depletion and without inordinate amounts of body work from you. The most laborious part of permaculture is designing the system to be self-supporting.
The idea is to lay out crops so that those you visit most frequently are close by your dwelling Mollison calls it edible landscaping and those that require less vigilance are set out in concentric circles farther from the house. Everywhere, there are plants in two-or three-canopy schemes, that is, shrubs shaded by small trees, which are shaded by larger trees. Animals graze beneath all three canopies.
Dips and furrows in the land are used to cache rainwater and to irrigate automatically. Wherever possible, permaculturists invite external forces such as wind or flooding to actually help do the work. They build windmills, for instance, or plant crops on floodplains, where they can enjoy a yearly pulse of alluvial sediment. Choosing synergistic planting arrangements-using "companion plants" to complement and bring out the best in one another-is key to a successful agriscape.
To maximize these beneficial unions, the permaculturist creates a lot of edge-transition zones between two habitats that are notoriously full of life and interaction. Mollison is also fond of using interactions between animals in place of high-energy inputs or machinery.
The chickens roost on the benches at night, enjoying the warmth left over from the day's solar radiation. They add to the heat with their own bodies, helping the plants survive the frosty dawns. In the morning, when the greenhouse becomes too hot, the chickens move into the forest for grazing. As they search for nuts and acorns shed by the planted trees, they comb the ground like rakes, aerating and manuring the soil while snatching up tree pests.
Humans eat the eggs and eventually the flesh of these chickens, but in the meantime, they enjoy their services as cultivators, pest controllers, greenhouse heaters, and self-fed fertilizers. Mollison learned this ballet of efficiency firsthand when he worked in the forests of Australia in the late sixties.
As a researcher, he was trained to describe the biological world and leave it at that. But Mollison took the next step that is crucial in biomimicry: He saw lessons for streamlined living emerging from the forest and vowed to apply them to a new kind of agriculture.
Today in Australia many farms are now working according to the permaculture principles he has popularized, and an international permaculture institute, with branches throughout the world, is training people to disseminate the technique. By mirroring nature's most stable and productive communities, and then living right in the middle of them, Mollison believes, human communities can begin to participate in their beauty, harmony, and Earth-sheltering productivity.
New Alchemy Farm on Cape CodAnother example of ecoculture sprouting in place of agriculture can be found on Cape Cod, at the offices of two of the country's most innovative bioneers, John and Nancy Todd. They formed the New Alchemy Institute in to design living spaces and food producing systems that would use nature as a model.
The forest-in-succession was the conceptual guide for their totally self-sustained farm. It then rises through the shrub layer to the canopy formed by the trees that produce fruit, nuts, timber, and fodder crops.
Following this plan we are hoping to maintain the farm in a dynamic state of ongoing productivity while it continues to evolve ecologically in the direction of a forest," Todd writes in his book, From Ecocities to Living Machines.
Like Mollison's permaculture, New Alchemy's farm is designed so that every living component has a multiple functionshading and fertilizing, for instance, as well as yielding an edible harvest. Wherever possible, the work of machines and, by extension, humans is replaced by the work of biological organisms or systems.
One of the Todds' inspirations was Javan farms in Indonesia, where unconventional to us, anyway agriculture has thrived for centuries.
The Javanese farm is nature in miniature, and it shows the restorative processes of planned succession. In early phases, annual crops and fish ponds might dominate the landscape, but as the landscape grows and matures, a third dimension develops as tree crops and livestock come into their own. The key is to mirror the natural tendency of succession which, over time, creates ecosystems that are effective and stable utilizers of space, energy, and biotic elements.
The tropical forests here are paradises-cornucopias of irrepressible vegetation and edible foods ripening under a natural heat lamp and mister. It's therefore all the more ironic, and perhaps telling, that jungles like this have made such poor sites for growing conventional crops. It makes sense if you realize that the same force that creates the jungle-deluges of rain-can also leach nutrients from unprotected jungle soil after clearing, when there are no plants around to soak up water. Crop harvests also remove even more nutrients from the site.
After a few years of this nutrient extortion, the soil quickly tires. Natural clearings in the jungle meet an entirely different fate. They are quickly revegetated by a parade of species that take over one after another, sinking roots, spreading canopies, shedding leaves, and restoring fertility to the site. Nutrients in the system are kept in play in the green growing biomass -nutrients "on the stump. Ewel, a botany professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, hypothesized that if you could simulate a natural regrowth of jungle using domestic crops as stand-ins for the wild species, you could achieve the same fertility-building phenomenon and actually improve the system rather than deplete it.
The trick is to start with crops that mimic the first successional stage grasses and legumes , and then add crops that mimic the next stage perennial shrubs , all the way up to the larger trees-nut crops, for instance. To test their hypothesis, Jack Ewel and colleague Corey Berish cleared two plots in Costa Rica, letting them naturally reseed to jungle. In one of the plots, every time a jungle plant sprouted, they would dig it up and replace it with a human food crop that had the same physical form.
Annual for annual, herbaceous perennial for herbaceous perennial, tree for tree, vine for vine-it was as if nature were guiding the hands of the agronomists. The parade of volunteers to the natural system Heliconia species, cucurbitaceous vines, Ipomoea species, legume vines, shrubs, grasses, and small trees were replaced by plantain, squash varieties, yam, and by the second or third year fast-growing nut, fruit, and timber trees such as Brazil nuts, peach, palm, and rosewood.
This domestic jungle of crops looked and behaved like the real jungle in the plot next door. Both plots had similar fine root surface area and identical soil fertility. The researchers also put in two control plots: a bare soil plot and a plot planted in a rotating monoculture-maize and beans followed by cassava, followed by a timber crop. While the bare soil and the rotating monoculture lost their nutrients very rapidly, the "domestic jungle" remained fertile.
Several years before Ewel's paper came out, British permaculturalist Robert Hart also published some concrete recommendations for cropping systems that would mimic the jungle ecosystem. They included cassava, banana, coconut, cacao, rubber, and lumber crops such as Cordia species and Swietenia species. At the end of its succession, Hart's cropping system would be a three-tiered canopy, mimicking the structure of the jungle as well as its nutrient cycling, natural pest control, and water-purging function.
The trick to keeping the soil fertile, says Hart, is to choose perennial crops with lots of leaves and roots, so they can protect the soil from hard rains, store nutrients in biomass, and put organic matter back into the soil when they shed. Hart also found it important to use plants that form symbiotic associations, as well as deep-rooted plants that pumped nutrients from different depths of the soil. In this way, the ground was kept continually covered, yields were provided throughout the year, and each set of new crops prepared the soil physically and even chemically for the next stage.
Once the succession progressed to tree crops, farmers could selectively harvest timber and burn the perennials every few years to start the cycle again. Besides supporting local farmers, this sustained usefulness may also help to slow the relentless clearing of primary jungle. Sir Alfred Howard, whom many credit with the invention of organic agriculture, talked about farming to fit the land in his book, An Agricultural Testament, as did J.
Smith wanted to see eastern hillsides replanted with tree crops, which seemed to suit the hills better than the erosion-causing row crops planted after the great green wall of New World forest was torn down.
Smith looked to the eastern deciduous forest as a model of diversity and stability. He described the great number of niches provided by the various tree-canopy levels as well as shrubby and herbaceous understories. Thanks to the diversity, he wrote, pests are kept under control and birds and browsing animals are given many places to make a living.
Fine fibrous roots of woody understory plants act like a prairie's sod to hold soil and retain nutrients. Fallen leaves and debris are slowly and steadily recycled into new plant life, preventing leaching and downslope loss of critical nutrients. The organic litter also encourages the growth of mycorrhiza-fungi that form associations with roots and further extend their water-searching power. Every now and then, wind or disease or lightning takes out a tree, creating a gap where succession and renewal can begin again.
Early agriculture on these soils, practiced by Native Americans, was also successional in nature. The tribes practiced small-patch agriculture, raising beans, squash, corn, and tobacco on twenty-to two-hundred-acre plots. After eight to ten years, the native farmers would move on and allow the land to lie fallow. In the twenty-year hiatus before the farmers returned, succession would resume and fertility would be restored. This shifting method required tribes to be nomadic, but it mimicked the natural forest dynamism by creating small patches that were allowed to revert to forest.
In his book, Smith bemoaned the loss of soils and productivity that occurred when white settlers began to farm more permanently on these sites, deforesting hillsides and planting row crops. The farming didn't fit the land, he claimed. Instead, he proposed planting structural analogues-nut-and fruitbearing trees as the only fitting crops for forest-growing land. One scheme that bore out his dream was a farm of honey locust trees which bore seed crops with an understory of Chinese bush clover a perennial legume suitable for grazing and haying.
This system yielded crops and supported animals, all with minimal labor, low management costs, and good weed control. He reported returns of 4, pounds of hay per acre per year, 2, pounds of honey locust nuts per acre per year on average, with a peak of 8, pounds of nuts per acre in eight-year-old trees.
The features that made the hardwood forest sustainable in the wild were repeated here: a tree crop in the overstory, a stable understory to protect the soil and retain nutrients, a biological nitrogen source, and a grazing or browsing animal component. Unfortunately, Smith's recommendations fell largely on deaf ears when his report was first issued. The fact that his work has been republished by Island Press recently, with a foreword by Wendell Berry, is a hopeful sign that the idea of nature-based farming is sprouting once again.
The Desert SouthwestWhere prairies and forests fear to tread, the model for farming is an unlikely one-the scrubby, spiny desert of the American Southwest. Across the Sonoran, the Chihuahua, and Speed Of The Boat In Still Water Is 15 Kilometre Per Hour Free the Mojave, rainfall is erratic and strongly seasonal, and soils may vary every few feet.
These uneven conditions lead to a patchiness of vegetation-plants cluster in fertile alluvial fans, while on more barren stretches, they space themselves out to get all the water they can. Besides dividing up the space, they also divide up the season.
Many species bloom and set seed only when water is available, becoming dormant as the summer blisters on. These strategies, which allow plants to take advantage of ephemeral resources and to endure long dry spells, were mirrored in the farming methods of original peoples who flourished here for thousands of years. The Papago and Cocopa peoples continue to live here, gathering their foods from both wild plants and cultivated desert plants and legumes, all of which are native to the place, thus adapted to making the most of limited resources.
Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan made readers aware of their agricultural practices in his book Gathering the Desert. To the extent possible, writes Nabhan, the Papago synchronize their agriculture with the local seasonal clock. Planting, for instance, is timed to the emergence of desert annuals-right before or after nourishing rains. By planting only on flood-watered alluvial fans, they avoid having to intensively irrigate, which in that climate of excessive evaporation would leave poisoning salt in the upper registers of the soils.
Besides annuals, the Papago also sow succulents, grasses, and woody plants for food and fiber. Interspersed with the crops are wild mesquite trees, left in the fields because they can fix nitrogen and gather deeply stored soil nutrients.
Long before agronomists knew why this companion planting worked, the Papago were practicing it, having taken their cue from the "genius of the place. Like Mollison's permaculture, Rodale's "regenerative agriculture" uses biological structuring to increase the efficiency of nutrient and energy flows so that low-energy inputs are leveraged into high productivity.
Succession is also used strategically. Crops are carefully chosen to change the soil flora and fauna in a way that anticipates the needs of the next crop. For instance, practitioners may plant a crop that causes the weed community to shift toward species that are not a problem for the next crop. Or they might emphasize nitrogen and soil-carbon buildup in one part of the rotation cycle to increase the productivity of subsequent crops. Finally, researchers at Rodale have spent some time, as Jackson has, looking for perennial replacements for annuals such as wheat, rice, oats, barley.
Letting the Cows Out in the MidwestCrop growers are not the only ones caught in the box canyon of industrial farming. For years now, dairy farmers in the upper Midwest have been cutting hay with machines instead of letting the cows graze it. They've been tractoring the fifty-pound bales into their artificially lighted and heated suction-milking barns. Now all that is changing.
Dairy farmers are opening the doors to both their minds and their barns in a nature-based movement called "grass farming. They report that they enjoy the work of bringing the cows to their food rather than the other way around. Grass farmers also find that their cows are healthier and their bills are slimmer.
Manure in the fields means they can pare back their fertilizer bills, and because they hay with machinery only twice, they also save money on fuel and machine wear. After a few years, many of the farmers are shifting to an even more natural cycle.
Instead of milking their cattle year-round, they "dry them off" during the winter, so they can calve all at once in April and be ready to go back to the grass in the spring. This dry-off allows the grass farmers to do what had been unthinkable in the old system-take a vacation. The term grass farming signals a change in how the farmers see themselves.
No one is a complete expert on managing grass pasture for their herds. Beyond this, they turn to one another for advice, and have formed a long-distance support community.
To grow good pasture, grass farmers face many of the same challenges that prairie restorers face. They begin with an alfalfa field, then sow in about four species of grass. As the years wind on, wild plants infiltrate, some that the farmers have never seen before.
As Rittmann says, they are watching succession on their lands and comparing notes, learning what the land might have looked like before the plow.
They are also using new ways to assess the health of their pasture, and here's where the farmer becomes a naturalist. One man was at first puzzled and then absolutely thrilled to hear a strange crackling noise in his fields-the sound of hundreds of thousands of earthworm holes opening back up after a rain.
Another farmer said it took three years of grass farming before he finally heard birdsong returning to his pastures. Now he counts and catalogs the bird diversity around his pastures as a way of assessing their health.
Other grass farmers look to cowpies-a cowpie in a healthy microfauna and microflora should break down in three weeks' time in midsummer. If it's around any longer, the farmers tell Rittmann, they start to worry. It's just farming,' they tell me. The spread of the grass-farming idea should be studied carefully for clues. Just how does an idea "take" in the imagination of a group that is culturally and economically entrenched in a certain way of doing things?
How will The Land Institute sell its idea to farmers who are already treading water as fast as they can just to keep up? How do you spring the mind free from its fears?
Wes Jackson is well aware of all the things our minds have to overcome. For starters, he describes the mind shaped by reductionist science, the American experience, evolution, and affluence.
How, then, will the Breadbasket become a domestic prairie? So far, Unfortunately, many of those acres were planted in exotic grasses that are of limited use to wildlife and offer "focused" farmers who abandoned their livestock no way to make an income. Perennial polycultures on those same lands would offer farmers an income in addition to holding down their soils.
They could collect their income in one of three ways. They could hay the domestic prairies, harvest the seed for human consumption, or, if they have livestock, simply graze them. This way, the income would come back to the farmer, instead of being shipped off to the manufacturers of pesticides and fertilizers.
The time is right for this sort of transition, Piper feels, because the CRP is due to sunset soon, and it may not be renewed. In a survey conducted by the Ohio Soil and Water Conservation Association, 63 percent of farmers said they were planning, for economic reasons, to plow up their CRP lands if subsidies dry up. Perhaps, if they hear about The Land Institute's work, they can hold out for a whole new idea-that of healing the soil while growing food. To a culture accustomed to causing damage, that sounds sweet to the ear.
But perennial polycultures won't take over the whole farm landscape, predicts Piper. There are some noneroding bottomlands that are perfectly suitable for planting in row crops-under an organic regime, of course. On these lands, Natural Systems Agriculture makes more ecological sense. Ultimately, the strongest persuader is likely to be changing economic conditions. When the way farmers or anyone else, for that matter have been doing things becomes economically uncomfortable, they will be eager to try something new.
This may happen when fossil fuels begin to run out, making farm inputs such as gasoline, fertilizer, and pesticide prohibitively expensive. When that time comes, we'll do what any species does under the pressure of change. We'll start shopping around for alternatives and adopt the most creative one, jumping to the next evolutionary level. At The Land, they call this next level "the sunshine future. Because of its chemical diversity, the farm would naturally protect itself from most pests, tamping down populations before they reach epidemic levels.
Weeds would be managed by the chemical interaction of plants and by shading. Nutrients would be held in the soil instead of leaching out. Pesticide and fertilizer use would be minimal, maintenance light, and plantings infrequent. A farmer could start over with a new crop of perennials every three to five years, but would do so by choice, not by necessity.
Livestock would also require less babying. Beef cattle are now being bred with buffalo, for instance, to produce animals with tougher hides, like barns on their backs. These beefalo could be left outside in winter, obviating the need for lumber to build protective structures.
Throughout the year, they could be moved from one polyculture to another in a rhythm that does not jeopardize flowering and seed set. Their wastes would contribute to the crumb structure of the soil, which, along with root action, allows the sod to wick moisture in and allocate it slowly. More water-holding capacity would mean less call for irrigation.
It might even encourage springs to reopen as underground reserves are recharged. Until we are farming in the sunshine future, Jackson has written, groups like The Land Institute are, in the Buddhist sense, "making a path and walking on it. The following is an attempt at an itinerary. Consulting the Genius of the Place: ResearchWes Jackson compares the typical agricultural researcher to the proverbial drunkard who is looking for his lost keys under the streetlight.
When asked why he is looking here when the keys were lost up the street, he replies that the light is better here. In like fashion, our research institutions have searched for agricultural advances where the money is-in the glare of industrial farming.
Taxpayers foot the bill in the form of appropriations to USDA research and in the form of 20 percent investment credits to new private research facilities. What are we paying for? Right now, the bulk of research helps to shore up the system of farming that is already in place.
Most disease dollars, for instance, are spent on diseases that afflict only crops grown in continuous culture, a system we know is anathema to soil fertility. Instead of investigating markets for alternative crops those that can be grown in rotation , our economists continue to invent new markets for the big inputhungry four: wheat, corn, rye, and soybeans. And, of course, a lot of money goes toward breeding crops that will withstand chemicals. Instead of pledging allegiance to a method of farming that we know destroys land and people, shouldn't we be tackling the problems of getting crops to grow the way we want them to grow-in polyculture and rotations, for instance?
Shouldn't we be taking nature's advice and giving farmers the tools they need to farm sustainably, rather than giving chemical companies bigger needles to poison us with? The Land Institute had been striving to keep arable land arable for twenty years now, with negligible federal assistance.
It was time, they decided, to knock on government's door and bring research spending in line with society's hopes for the future. Wes Jackson had been waiting for just the right moment. When The Land staff members had scored five articles in prestigious scientific journals, he put on his meeting clothes and went to Kansas congressman Pat Roberts, who was the Agriculture Committee chair at the time. Jackson laid out a plan for several sites around the country that would be centers for Natural Systems Agriculture.
This network would take this agricultural Kitty Hawk and put it through fifteen to twenty-five years of wind-tunnel tests in different climatic regimes.
Look here, said Jackson to Roberts, isn't the marriage of ecology and agriculture the sort of research that government should support? The congressman answered with a question. After many more visits and yeoman phone work from a man who would rather be threshing gamagrass, the committee told Jackson: "We'll look into it. Nor had statements like the KSU mission statement, which admits, "A new agricultural research paradigm is needed. Setting Up the Books: EnergeticsAfter we all sat down, Jackson started rhapsodizing about his latest passion.
He's been telling everyone who will listen that accounting is going to be the most exciting profession of the new century. We laugh, and then he explains that ecologists are a breed of accountant. One of the ecologist's primary tools for measuring and describing the sustainability of ecosystems is to draw a circle around the system, tote up all the inputs and outputs, and then analyze the energy cycles inside the circle. Again and again, in terms of energetics, natural systems miraculously "pencil out"-they remain viable without drawing down their resources.
If we are to switch to a more natural agriculture, says Jackson, our systems must also pencil out, in at least two ways: 1 Economically, they must sustain farmers and their communities, and 2 ecologically, they must pay their own energy bills and not draw down the resources of the local landscape or the planet.
The surest path to sustainable farming, says Jackson, is to make sure the lion's share of rewards runs to the farmer and the landscape. Marty Strange, codirector of the Center for Rural Affairs, puts it this way: "To be sustainable, agriculture must be organized economically and financially so that those who use the land will benefit from using it well and so that society will hold them accountable for their failure to do so.
It may mean pricing food commodities to reflect their true costs. It may mean eliminating some of the tax breaks that encourage the substitution of capital for labor and essentially subsidize irrational farm expansion and overproduction.
In their place, says Strange, we should design policies that give a hand to farmers who are more likely to treat the land well-those on owner-operated, family-held, and internally financed farms.
To stay viable, these farms must ultimately break the unhealthy coupling they now have with the petroleum and chemical industries. Whenever you break the cycle of dependency, you inevitably hear the anguished moans of the addict in withdrawal.
Without large farms and fossilfuel amendments, will we still be able to feed ourselves? Will we be able to feed the world? Piper's answer to the first question is yes. Consider that we have had a grain surplus every year since the thirties in this country, and that eighty percent of our grain is not fed to people but to livestock.
Piper feels there's obviously some slack to be taken up here. As for feeding the world, he says, "Maybe the better goal would be to enable the world to feed itself. The point is that the sanctity of seeking higher yields-the agronomic equivalent of the search for gold-makes it virtual heresy to drop down to more realistic yields, to what the land will support over time.
The Land realized that in order to defend the yields of perennial polyculture against those of conventional monocultures, it would have to somehow level the playing field.
Piper puts it this way: "If we said to a wheat field, 'Sponsor your own fertility, grow without pesticides or diesel fuel for traction,' then what would the yields be? Once you take away the crutches of industrial farming, would it be more economical to grow perennial polycultures or conventional crops?
Cutting down on maintenance, fertilizer, and pesticides is bound to save money, perhaps enough to make this form of farming as competitive as its fueldependent cousin. But now we need the data to prove it. There were studies on organic pesticidefree farms, but none on organic farms that also grew their crops without fertilizer and without diesel fuel. After twenty years, a lack of published data had come to look more like a red cape than a stop sign to this group.
So in , they pawed at the ground a few times and began the Sunshine Farm project: one hundred and fifty acres, conventional crops, tractors that use vegetable oil for fuel, photovoltaic panels for electricity, draft horses for some field operations, longhorn cattle for manure and meat, hens that turn compost then turn a profit with eggs , and broilers that forage in alfalfa.
In all, a demonstration farm where biological and solar energy are expected to pay the bills. Over coffee, he stokes up his computer and shows me a giant database. We literally measure the size, weight, and amount of everything-every fencepost, every galvanized gate, every foot of chicken wire, every plastic pail. We figure out how much energy it takes society to make that product, and then we record it in kilocalories. A trip to the store for tenpenny nails takes fuel, labor, and the energy society expended to manufacture the nails-all debits against the farm.
In turn, everything the farm producesall crops, livestock, biofuels, and so on-is recorded as an asset. The trick is to balance the budget so the farm is not a drain on the planet. Bender's energy estimations come from an enormous literature search. When you are with him, he frequently dashes to his wall of filing cabinets to grab one of the hundreds of articles he has gathered, with titles like "The Embodied Energy Content of Polyethylene Pipe. Keeping the ecological books this way will tell us whether a farm can run on sunlight and keep its books balanced-that is, pay all its own bills without going into debt to the larger environment.
Can it do all this and grow crops that will reimburse society for the energy embedded in material off-farm purchases? Answers like these will tell us what agriculture really costs, and perhaps, says Bender, suggest a more accurate, long-term cost for what we eat.
The creases in his face, if you counted them, might tell you something about the drought cycles in this part of the world. With impeccable cowboy manners, he touches his hat, apologizes for interrupting, then consults with Bender, not about the chickens or the crops but about the kilowatt meter that monitors the solar-panel array.
This is not your ordinary farm operation, I conclude, at least not yet. Right livelihood might be voluntary today, but The Land Institute predicts that someday it will be mandatory. When fossil fuel runs out or becomes too expensive, people will have to do sunshine farming. In the meantime, Jackson hopes the Sunshine Farm will not be an isolated experiment. He writes, "Until we have the physical manifestation of sustainable livelihoods demonstrated in enough places, we are going to continue the folly.
So the good examples, whether they are the good examples among organic farmers, or the good examples among research efforts, or just the good examples of ordinary right livelihood, give us a standard. If we want to weave the ecological paradigm into our research and our economy, we need to bring people back to farm country. Nature teaches us that ecosystems are made up of habitat specialists-local experts who know how to work the system.
One hundred and fifty years of farming the American plains has also resulted in an accumulation of local knowledge. People have learned how to time plantings, how to read the weather, and what to expect from soils, insects, diseases, and each other. The problem is that with the rapid depopulation of the countryside, this knowledge has been disappearing. At this point, only 1 percent of the U. Half of all farmland is owned by nonfarmers; only seven companies run 50 percent of the farms.
As Wendell Berry observes, no one bemoans the fact that a farm Grange is closing for lack of members; in fact, we are more scandalized by the loss of indigenous rain forest cultures than we are by the loss of American rural cultures. Jackson notes that this loss of farmers is not the first but the second wave of loss.
Native Americans were the repository of a much longer cultural history, but we've already moved them off the land. Now we're on to our second wave of "surplus" people. If Natural Systems Agriculture is to be successful, insists Jackson, we need a homecoming of people willing to "become native to their place," tuning their senses to local conditions, and farming the land in a way that will last.
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