Sustainable Peoples

Sustainable Peoples Blog 9- The Future Through the Past
Concepcion HQ
6/11/08
7:10pm

The last few days have been a whirlwind, and today was no different. Marcela and I spent the day in a town called Jumbel, outside of Temuco in the south of Chile. We made the trip down, not for the beautifully frigid southern winter, but to visit with the managers of an internationally influenced sustainable farm.

Now, if you are anything like me, you’ll hear the phrase “Sustainable Farm” and your “crunchy granola, Subaru Forrester driving, north face wearing neuveau hippie “ alarm goes off, bigtime. It is far to easy to go to a place like this and think, hmm, this is about as foreign to me as regular farming… don’t all farms just have fields and pens and cows? I wanted to be careful to bring back information and lessons that would be more interesting than “you too can compost, in your own back yard!” That wouldn’t help anyone.

We arrived early, thanks to a short bus ride. I have to add that the bus ride was a bit odd, because it just sort of stopped in the middle of nowhere and let us off. We took it on faith and waited at a remote, deserted intersection to be met by our contact from the farm. I wasn’t really sure which I was expecting more… that the devil would show up and offer to swap me my soul for guitar skills, or for Jim Morrison to plod out from over a hill and reveal to me the secret to my own journey. Pop culture references aside, a few minutes later we were gathered up and taken about 1000 yards away to the farm.

This farm looked, at first glance, much like any other. It was smallish (maybe a hundred acres), and had a couple of houses and outbuildings on it- along with a long, low greenhouse, and a sort of planting style that looked decidedly “handmade” if you will excuse the metaphor. That is to say, the rows had not been cut with mechanized precision.

A few moments later, the reason for the lack of precision lurched by- it was a team of cows, lashed together at the horns on a long post that formed a yoke. They were pulling a hand operated plow through the earth- something I’d only ever seen happen in westerns.

The tour or the farm revealed everything you might expect from a fully sustainable, organic farm. Hand started seedlings whose lives began in little trays made from recycled egg cartons (which would then be composted). A greenhouse with the seedling plants, vast piles of compost in various stages of decay, worm boxes, bee boxes, planters made from inside-out recycled tires, and a couple of farm houses build in the traditional style out of wood and adobe (which I might add, after an exterior layer of plaster and paint, is probably one of the nicest looking, cheapest building materials I could imagine).

What makes this farm special though, as is true with most things in life, are the things that you don’t see at first glance. The first lesson that I came away with was one of soil conservation. Keeping dirt on your land seems simple enough, but in a place with lots of hills, or where soil takes a long time to form, it is an important part of planning any construction. Proper planning allows you to make use of almost all of the water that falls naturally on your property, and conserves what water you have to add by yourself. This farm uses a series of techniques, including digging irrigation channels, adding a gradual terrace shape to their hillsides and, as a last resort, cutting “V” shapes into hillsides too deep to otherwise cultivate. The V’s channel water, even on a steep grade, to the base of a tree they have planted, so you can basically have self-watering trees where trees would not otherwise be able to grow.

These water and soil conservation techniques seem like a great idea for a farm, but what really struck home for me, having grown up in semi-arid southern California, is how much water flows through a single family home lot and into the storm drain. That water was drawn from a fresh, potable water source in most cases, and anything that escapes into the storm drain just heads out to dilute to ocean. In Southern California, that doesn’t just mean wasted water in a place that goes though what seem like yearly droughts. If you’ve ever driven up Interstate 5 between Los Angeles and Buttonwillow, then you’ve been over the “Grapevine” and have probably seen the whacking huge set of pipes that take water up and over the mountains down to the LA basin. This is where a great deal of our water comes from, which means that water that makes that journey has an additional price tag. That means that every gallon that seeps into drains on our lawns and driveways also carries away with it the expense and emissions of the energy it took to pump it from where it began to our tap or spigot.

That may have been a little bit of a tangent, but it was something that struck me as I watched these little pine trees water themselves with what would otherwise be waste. The people of the United States like to pride themselves at being the best. We call ourselves the most advanced, the most developed, and consider ourselves to be at the apex of technology and skill. As I walked across this humble farm in rural Chile, I saw the touted efficiencies of my parents’ “water conserving landscaping” back in so-cal be put to shame by technology thousands of years old that had been adapted and improved for use in a modern context.

So that was just one little corner of the lessons to be learned here. There were starter-pots made of old tires, a food dehydrator that concentrated energy from the sun to do it’s job, and more kinds of naturally made fertilizer than I can count. One especially interesting gadget was a set of outdoor oven and stoves that were made of steel barrels, bricks and earth.

If that last little bit of technology sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In blog #8, “Ovens, Chickens, Greenhouses and Hope”, I talked at length about these cheap, sustainable technologies that were changing le lives of the poorest Chileans. Well, this is where they came from. FOSIS consulted with the very same sustainable farm when prototyping the ovens and greenhouses that they would help their beneficiaries build. Whether they new it or not, the Chilean government was forging a path forward by looking to the past. The ovens they build were very old designs, adapted for modern materials. They weren’t anachronistic replicas, meant to bring on a sense of nostalgia- they were new solutions that took the best of where we had been and melted it together with where we were to develop solutions for where we need to go. It was then that the real purpose of a farm like this struck me. It isn’t a place where they relish doing things the good old-fashioned way. This was a laboratory, a R&D facility, sort of a “Skunkworks” with pigs instead. I was glad to see the Chilean government looking to this organization for new solutions.

Maybe the piece of the puzzle that I should take away from this place is a new focus on where to look for solutions. Thoroughly modern western society seems to look most often to clean, stainless steel, carbon fiber, silicon wafer type technology to solve a given problem. Don’t get me wrong, I love what computers have given humanity. But maybe there are lots of problems we face, especially those that have to do with how we interact with good old terra firma, that would be better solved by looking for technologies that are a little less refined and a little more down to earth.

Oh, one more note- I’m trying this new “image heavy” formt for the blog. let me know what you think- and if you want to see lots more images, Just click the “Photo Gallery” link on the top left of this page and you can follow along with more pictures from the farm and all the other places we’ve gone.