An Idea for an Organic Farm

So I made an open call to a group of my friends to see who would be interested in buying in to a sustainable farm. This is something of a dream of mine, and one I’ve talked often about, but not been able to be totally serious about until now. If the housing market holds up, I will hopefully be able to put together a grubstake to build a rather good house in the country. The catch is that I think it would be better if other families (specifically those with some young kids like mine) came along too. Quite selfishly, I want the clean living lifestyle with food security for my family without giving up the close socialisation my kids get in a city environment. While it’s still my own dream, the family is what’s important.

It struck me, after talking to one of my friends, that people just saw an idea and a price tag and didn’t really picture what I had in mind when I made my offer. Well, here it is in black and white: a concept for a self-sustaining organic farm… with high-speed internet (that’s important). I’ve been researching the technology and everything that I am going to talk about here is mature tech – not pie in the sky tech that might come out in a few years. This is stuff on the ground, now. As many of you know, a lot of our great energy-saving concepts came out of the gas crunch of the 70’s, so these things – while not going mainstream – have nonetheless seen improvement since then. Such things as methane digesters and composting toilets have come a long way. Frankly, a lot of this tech could be implemented in a low-tech low-cost way, but I rather wanted to use stuff that kept the comfort of modern living with the added bonus of being sustainable. Cost reductions are therefore possible with simplification, but only if necessary.

Also, I have been attempting to build a realistic plan by putting together possible alternative income streams other than crops. Growing Power is an inspiration in this regard, as they conceive of the working urban farm in terms of dollars per square foot and attempt to extend profit-making activities beyond simple food production. The modern organic farm concept is something of a highly diverse business venture, with chances to tap income streams all over the map. Additionally, organic farms have the odd habit of attracting cheap labour (WWOOFers et. al.) because they are a shared passion amongst we greeners. Spinoff enterprises include everything from cob and cordwood building courses (which serve to populate the property with guesthouses and outbuildings) as well as aquaponics and organic farming courses that would be a source of income outside the traditional farming model. With a good sized stand of sugarbush, spring tourism would be a possible revenue stream during the sap run. With existing contacts, a yearly Japanese maple syrup tour would be more than possible, and would represent a source of labour that incurs a negative cost: a revenue stream that creates another revenue stream.

So, I am not too concerned about the opportunities to derive profit from an organic farming operation. The issue then is to talk about what exactly the operation would work. My core theory is that of Jacobsian extension: the longer you keep stuff in your system, the more opportunities you have of making profit from it over and over again. The basis is then an attempt to create an almost closed loop system. A closed loop system is functionally impossible – sunlight is an external input that simply keeps on giving, therefore with that external energy source, there is no such thing as a closed-loop system. The key, then, is to make that sunlight input last as long as possible in your system and be a gift that keeps on giving.

LAND: Optimally, I see 100 acres of land with 30-40 acres clear and 60-70 acres in mainly maple. The clear would hopefully have only a small gradient, but the treed area could have a diverse landscape with bogs and hillocks. That’s my preference, but my ideas can be scaled to reality if need be. I would prefer it in a good growing region (6 or 7) but a high 5 will do fine. Access to local water sources preferred but not totally necessary.

HOUSE: The main expense of the operation, the house would be designed to qualify for a Passivhaus certification, meaning it would effectively pay for itself over the long run. Passivhaus design started decades ago (the inspiration came from a hyper-insulated house in Saskatchewan) and is the most strict energy-saving certification in existence. Most Passivhaus designs do not require central heating, even in the depths of a Canadian winter. They are heated primarily with human body heat and lightbulbs in the house. For additional warmth, there is radiant floor heating produced by a solar-powered geothermal heat pump. Since HVAC is almost totally eliminated, as are gas services and heaters, you actually save enough money to pay for the hyperinsulation. Passivhaus designs are being built for about $150 per square foot. Heating costs are near nil. The house would require hyperefficient appliances and solar panels, but again, these pay for themselves over the long run.

SYSTEMS:

This is where things get fun. The core of the farm is the people. The farm must supply food and utilities for the families, and take care of their waste products. Let’s start from the showers, shall we? Showers, sinks, and washing machines produce greywater. Greywater is dirty water that you can’t drink, but if you use the right soaps and detergents, plants can drink it. As a matter of fact, greywater treatment is a main feature of Earthships. It even occurs right inside the house, providing plants that clean the water as well as the air. The water is then used to flush toilets (because using drinking water for that is simply stupid). The treated greywater then gets flushed and becomes blackwater… that’s water, only with poo in it. The poo water goes to a methane digester, which produces both methane (natural gas) and natural fertiliser. Part of the input to the digester must be carbon-rich, and therefore sawdust and other biomass would occasionally be put in from foresting and farming activities. In order to back up the solar power units, the methane could be used to run not only the stove (with three families, there’s enough poo for a lot of methane for cooking), but a natural-gas powered fuel cell. One of these can make sure there is always enough current in the lines. Eventually the poo water becomes spent, and ends up as natural fertiliser on the Fukuoka-style grain fields. Eventually that grain becomes bread and beer, which continues the poo and pee cycle. Pee, by the way, should be separated from the poo by diverting toilets, because it is the perfect nutrient for an algaculture bioreactor – and also can be used directly on fields if diluted. Pee is really useful.

With people eating, there comes food scraps and other organic garbage. That stuff is great, and needs to be kept in the system as long as possible. Its first stop is to the black soldier fly buckets, where oodles of little creepy-crawlies reduce everything except cellulose. They can even eat meat and cheese and other milk products, stuff worms can’t eat. This system produces several products: heat, compost tea, compost, and black soldier fly larvae. There is a use for every one of those things. Heat is useful most of the time in Canada, so we’ll leave that be. Compost tea can be diluted and applied to the land as a very potent source of soil microbes to improve soil health. The compost is moved over to the next processing stage: vermiculture. Worms actually seem to prefer black soldier fly castings to raw foods, and they can process the cellulose that black soldier flies can’t. This process has been tested and it has been proven that not only are the two processes complimentary, the vermicomposting goes faster when the compost has been preprocessed by black soldier fly. This process produces vermicompost for the fields (a compost so rich that it should be mixed with other soil before applying to the ground), and compost tea. The black soldier fly and vermiculture units leave us with a surplus of creepy-crawlies with which to feed our tilapia in the aquaponics unit.

Aquaponics has been talked about before, but for the uninitiated, it’s a system that takes the best of aquaculture and hydroponics and puts them together. There is no cycling of water out of the system: fish poo fertilises planting trays, the nitrates are transformed into nitrites by the resident bacteria, the nitrites fertilise the plants, the plants thereby purify the water. The water can be cycled indefinitely as opposed to flowing through wastefully. The only input required is food, and worms and black soldier flies provide part of that. With an algae bioreactor, tilapia can also eat algae (for which they are adapted because of filters in their gills). Tilapia are omnivores that can truly eat anything. After all, they naturally occur with hippos because they can eat hippo poo. With constantly cycling and recycling nutrients, the only thing a person has to do for an aquaponics system is plant, maintain, and harvest. The amount of food produced by a small system is staggering… and it is tried and tested tech. The aquaponics system would require a greenhouse to be able to produce all year round. Yes, even in Canada, in minus 20 degree weather. How, you ask? Well, I have a mind to incorporate rocket stoves with thermal mass as well as a potential solaroof design. All possible, all tried and tested. With the aquaponics unit would come a flock of Muscovy ducks for pest control, meat, and eggs. Duck poo is perfectly welcome in an aquaponics system, and ‘scovies are at home on the range, capable of foraging and generally taking care of themselves. If necessary, chickens could be added to the system to add heat and carbon dioxide. An odd thing, you may think, to add to a greenhouse… but if it’s near airtight and plants consume CO2 to make sugars, you need a source of CO2 in the greenhouse. The added heat of the coop (as well as the eggs and pest control services) wouldn’t hurt.

A key to the functioning of the farm, then, would be water storage. A pond would be highly useful for not only water storage but production of biomass. Duckweed, a nigh indestructible water weed, is an exceptional converter of sunlight to protein, and can multiply on still water faster than you can say photosynthesis. Opening up a nice pond with duckweed on top would allow for green forage for the tilapia that can be frozen for storage over the winter. Another aquaponics enthusiast does this for his fish, and the nutrient composition of duckweed is superb for fish feed when supplemented with other stuff like black soldier fly (which, itself, is actually superior to most commercial fish feed). Additional water tanks for runoff collection would also be useful for dry periods.

What you see above is a reasonably brief discussion of some pretty nifty thoughts for just the central systems of the organic farm. A woodlot makes a great deal more activities possible, especially if it is maple. With a big enough woodlot, the income from sustainable forestry would also supplement the bottom line, and the use of a pyrolizer for heating in the greenhouse would produce not only heat but biochar – useful in making terra preta. On top of those things, an open expanse of clover would allow for beekeeping, a couple possible dairy cows, goats, you name it. That’s just gravy, as all the necessary calories are already being produced in the systems I’ve just talked about. Excess produce can be sold through the middle of winter. A little bit of cottage industry, and secondary products are also possible. Add in WWOOFers and farm vacationers, as well as weekend courses, the place can become quite an earning proposition.

So, that’s the basic idea. Any questions?

No Such Thing as Garbage

Calgary's budget (2009-2011 business plan) is divided into the following parts (each of these numbers is net budget taking into account both revenue streams and overall expenditures):

Asset Management & Capital Works  (public works, fleet management)
$35,858,000

Community Services & Protective Services (EMS, Fire, Parks, Community services)
$3,121,300

Corporate Services (the personnel who keep IT, customer service, and the books straight)
$115,292,000

Planning, Development & Assessment (land use planning and development)
$34,772,000

Transportation (Calgary Transit and Road infrastructure)
$278,740,000

Utilities & Environmental Protection  (garbage, recycling, and water)
$42,297,000

Calgary Police Service  (you get the idea)
$243,175,000 - 2009 budget

Corporate Administration (the people who run the city and bylaws)
$21,026,000

Right now the main budget line I'm interested in is the Utilities and Environmental Protection. In effect, I'm proposing it ceases to exist entirely. Well, perhaps not water, seeing as it generates $60M overall revenue per year, but garbage and recycling services. These services do generate some revenue, through landfill fees and recycling and the like, to the tune of $82,238,000 in 2009. This acts to offset (along with some $11 million in recoveries) the total of $128,640,000 in gross expenditures on waste disposal and recycling services.

All this to say that garbage collection is not a total loss. $82 million is hardly chump change and those revenues and more are still available to the Calgary city economy if the ideas I'm going to talk about are adopted. I simply believe that the disposal of waste is idiotic when every ounce of "stuff" that normally ends up in a landfill can be returned to the economy. The more we start thinking of garbage as an input rather than waste, the more money everyone stands to make. The idea of making effluents and byproducts into "industrial nutrients" are of course core to McDonough and Braungart's Cradle to Cradle, and dealt with in Natural Capitalism. I'd like to make a slightly more concrete recommendation that could be initiated on a five-year window to increase jobs and save $42 million from the city budget. Let's not forget that the money also implies FTEs, that's government-speak for "full-time equivalents" - people. The waste management stream of the city government employs 574 FTEs, going to 610 FTEs this year. Those people have to be taken care of, or the elimination of this budget line would have to be considered a failure.


First priority, then, is to inform the people working for Calgary's waste management that their entire section is to be spun off over the course of 5 years. Each employee should be given a five-year guide explaining exactly what changes are going to take place and what opportunities they will have in the course of these changes. During the course of the change, the population of Calgary will have to be kept informed of the new methods for garbage and recyclable collection. In effect, the effort of garbage and recyclable collection is going to be decentralised and handed over to numerous independent operators. They (and their competitors) will negotiate to the population in their area to determine the best means to effect garbage collection.

The process would have to be people-oriented, and strive to meet the highest standards of transparency in order to work. Business thrives in environments where there are controlled risks. There has to be risk to make a margin, but not so much risk that the margin is constantly in doubt. Transparency regarding the process of transition must be complete and unburdened with the rarified language of bureaucracy. The plan would move through the following phases:

1) Research
The City government will engage business planners, designers, and policymakers in formulating some basic business plans that may then be verified by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). The basic need in this phase is to formulate the regulatory framework that the new waste management system will evolve in (bylaws and instructions to the Calgary population regarding how and where to sort and set out their household garbage). It will also be good to identify several basic business plans that might survive and thrive in the new regulatory environment so that early buy-in by participants is easy and relatively painless.

2) Engagement
The City will then go to its waste management professionals and offer them a view of how the system will evolve over the next five years. With the assistance of the BDC, the City will assist early adopters in receiving financing. Calgary will purchase or provide insurance on the loans in order to make the option more attractive and less risky. The largest loans should be reserved for the group of waste managment professionals who opt in in the first year. The number of opt-ins in the first year should be artificially capped at 100 so as to avoid strong competition, and to avoid flooding the market with too many services. When a city employee opts to take a loan, and either adopt a pre-existing business plan or make his own, he will be granted an area of the city in which to start his operation that is a reasonable distance from competitors. He will not have exclusive rights to the area, but City of Calgary will agree to withdraw their competing services from that area. In the subsequent years after the first roll-out of new services, new services will be able to piggyback on the infrastructure and best practices of old and established ones. For instance, if Bob opts-in first year to collect cans in a region of town for resale to a foundry, Jane may be able to hitch a ride in his truck when she establishes her bottle-collection business in the same area. Horizontal integration of these collection services will, over time, reduce costs all around and necessitate lower and lower opportunity cost to buy in.

3) Market development
From day one, the City will be engaged in developing markets - preferably local ones - for these business activities. In participation with the BDC, composting and vermiculture units could be established, black soldier fly processing companies started, or glassworks constructed. By creating a market for lawn clippings in the form of biochar, perhaps mixed with worm castings, the City will encourage the establishment of the gasification plants that can produce that biochar. The city itself - for instance, in parks and recreation - can create a market for compost tea and worm castings for its gardening work. An office in the city could be established in order to subsidise the purchase of these products through creating easier access to carbon sequestration credits.

As the plan progresses, the initially risk-averse should slowly be able to rationalise a start in a new business. Those who would prefer to leave the industry can be given a simple golden handshake. In five years, this budget line will have been removed, but by saving $42 million, the city will be creating milions more dollars worth of jobs fuelled by waste. The economic knock-on effects are staggering to consider: all of this stuff that previously had no value and left the market will be given value again. Ingenuity and entrepreneurialism can create new industries within this market that will fuel a new period of export creation and import replacement. By turning this industry over to the private sector in a humane manner, everybody benefits.

Agrichar videos

Found a couple videos on Biochar/agrichar.

Australian Biochar
GreenPowerScience Channel

Looks good... but unless there is a better carbon-trading regimen in place internationally, I can't see biochar taking off on an industrial scale.

BioChar and Terra Preta

BioChar

This has got me excited.

The problem is that I notice there are actually too many technologies now that can take food and farm waste and convert them into something useful. I worry that there will be too much competition in future for these useful byproducts, leaving people begging for food scraps to power their pet waste recycling system. I suppose it would be useful to have edible scraps digested by Black Soldier Fly, inedibles turned into BioChar, urine cycled into an algaculture apparatus, and fecal matter run through an anaerobic digester before being added to a bioremediation system. There is no end to the possibilities, and all of these business opportunities not only sequester carbon but improve soil quality and produce food...