If its possible, lets for a moment forget that this megalomaniac of a president, his corrupt administration and the spineless Congress will soon pass a bill that shreds the Constitution.  Can we put aside the marriage of big government and big corporations exploiting and stealing from the U.S. population for a moment and talk about some REAL news?

That’s right… chickens!

There has been a lot of attention lately in this little city of ours in the past couple of weeks on the topic of backyard chicken flocks.  Starting off with an article in the local newspaper, followed by a popular radio show, followed by a few appearances at Farmers’ Markets, etc. by Rochester Chicken Club members, city chickens are in the spotlight in Rochester.  Whether propelled there on the wave of the “green living” trend, or just a genuine curiosity of the unusual, this author couldn’t be happier that folks in this city are talking chickens.

But the first question (followed by many others) that people have is simply:  Why chickens?

A short while ago, a local community activist, blogger, and fellow chicken club member wrote an articulate post on her blog HandCrafted Life which in many ways gets to the heart of the matter.  And rather than be redundant, here is Julie’s post “Why Chickens?”

I would like to add my thoughts though to this conversation, because despite the fact that its fun and crazy to talk about keeping chickens, there is something truly revolutionary about this phenomenon.  It is a fundamental, integral part of our culture’s understanding of the world that humans live above the ecological laws that govern life on this planet.  Keeping a backyard chicken flock undermines this suicidal worldview regardless of the extent that people realize it.

Yes, properly raised chickens provide us with a wholesome, nutritious and truly natural food source.  And having that food source come from one’s backyard is a beautiful enough reason to keep chickens.  But if one looks closer, there is something even deeper and more important than that fact.

Because there is not an ecosystem on the Earth that operates without animal influence.  And while having a monocrop lawn devoid of diversity, manicured to “perfection”, may be symbolic of so-called progress and the suburban ideal, it is also a symbol of our excessive waste and aversion to life.  Even conventional vegetable gardening practices, with their linear rows and chemical fertilizers, usually do not flow with the cycles of the natural world.

Enter chickens.  An early successional species that fits perfectly into their niche in a garden ecosystem, which often mimics an early successional landscape (meadow).  A simple ecological principle which triggers something as near magical as any other natural system.

All of a sudden you have an instant and constant source of fertilizer as manure recycles.  You have one more factor that greatly aids in keeping pests in balance.  They can till and keep grass short.  They’ll eat your leftovers.  By keeping the right amount of chickens for your family and land, you have stimulated a variety of cyclical, harmonious relationships that also provide a variety of lessons.

And lessons from nature are what our modern species needs right now a lot more than organic Pepsi and Palmolive Eco.

To have a backyard chicken flock is to withdraw support from an unsustainable food system.  It is taking one step closer to self-sufficiency.  It is embracing ecological diversity, productivity, and life itself.

But the most important reason to me is that when my children go to our backyard, their play space is not a dead “lawn”.  Instead it is living community where energy is recycled, food and entertainment are abundant, and a host of true and valuable lessons await.  A glimpse of hope of a new cultural paradigm that actually works as the rest of Nature does.

And if you get ahead of yourself by getting too many, and it gets too cumbersome or expensive to keep chickens, don’t worry.  I hear something about how the federal government now is in the business of bailing folks out.

Greenerminds contributor Outback Brad features in this recent local article about urban chickening. I finally got to meet Brad and his family recently at the South Wedge Farmer’s Market. I saw the table for the chicken group and figured he must be nearby. Hat tip to David at Daily Planet.

This is going to be a bit of a long post, so let me get quickly to the heart of my thesis. The idea I want to put forward and test is the idea that, from a resource use and allocation standpoint, every natural resource price and therefore every derived commodity price is wildly inaccurate or wrong.

This idea is supported by three arguments. First, as Karl Polanyi points out, natural resources (land) as a factor of production can only be priced as if it were a commodity, when in fact it is not a commodity. Second, costs and values associated with resource extraction are based on the idea of opportunity cost, that is the cost for the next best single use for the resource. Finally, both upstream and downstream costs are externalized and not reflected in the resource price.

Since natural resources such as fossil fuels, metals, water, timber and food drive much of the pricing in the economy, if their prices are wrong, then all prices everywhere are wrong.

The consequence of this basic error, if it is true, explains a number of phenomena, such as Matt Simmons’s assertion that even at $100 a barrel, crude oil is massively underpriced. But I will save that for a later post.

My purpose here is to float an idea and hold it up to see how resilient it is. I will admit that it is only partially formed and not well researched at this point.

(more…)

Just came across these links and wanted to save them for later: Catherine Austin Fitts on Financial Permaculture, and Greg Landua on The New Green Deal including an upcoming seminar at The Farm.

Several times at NEPC, reference was made to the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. When I got back to town I went straight to the library to get it. Sadly, it was out, but another book, The Timeless Way of Building was in, and I’m glad for this happy little accident [sic].

The Timeless Way of Building (Volume 1 in the series) lays out, methodically, the difference between a built environment that is alive and one that is dead, what makes it possible to create the living one, that is a shared pattern language, how it is possible that normal people like you and I can build these living environments, what a pattern is, how to recognize one, and how to build a shared language of patterns and combine them in specific methods of design. A Pattern Language (Volume 2 in the series) is then, one attempt to build such a language that has general applicability.

Since Permaculture is all about design and a lot about pattern, I am glad to have stumbled onto these books. Which is not to say that they weren’t explicitly recommended in my PDC, or even by Mollison in the DM- they probably were. But they are both critically important books, IMHO, for Permies everywhere.

Here’s Alexander’s definition of a pattern:

Each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution.
The Timeless Way of Building, p. 247

I believe this is what Dave Jacke was referring to when he said a pattern is a way in which conflicting forces get resolved. This is also another way of restating the Permaculture principle: “the problem is the solution.”

Further, Alexander shows how we can discover these patterns.

1. Pick a kind of a place- entrance, window, garden, tree grove, sidewalk, path, hedge, whatever
2. Look around for good and bad examples of this type of place
3. Try to isolate the property the good ones have in common. This will not be a simple property, like a color or size, but will be a relationship
4. Look at the bad examples and define what the problem is with them
5. Expand the problem with any additional information you may have about it, generalize it. What does the space need to accomplish or solve?
6. Identify specifically the ways that the good patterns resolve this problem
7. Give this pattern a specific name which will clearly identify it

This is a very specific and detailed form of “protracted and thoughtful observation,” and is quite similar to the ways both Mollison and Toby Hemenway suggest to identify guilds. Zone and Sector analysis is very good at quickly locating components in an overall site, in a general way. Alexander’s method seems to me much more definitive when you get down to the details of where to place the actual greenhouse, swales, paths, compost bin, chicken coop and so on in relation to each other and to existing components, within or across any zone/sector analysis segment.

The garden, I have to say, has not been hugely productive, at least not in the areas that I sheet mulched this year. Everything seems to be growing VEEERRRYY slowly. I have some hypotheses about what’s happening here. My soil, it turns out, though easy to work with, is probably not very rich. The sheet mulching should improve this next year and compost in years after.

Where I have had good success was in the raised beds I sheet mulched last year. I put in a polyculture seed mix of lettuces, calendula, chamomile, carrots, beets, kale and beans at the north end of one bed, and this has done really well. I’ve been cutting the lettuce for about 6 weeks now, but most of them are going to bolt or have already started, so I’m harvesting full heads now. In the other bed I started with garlic which I put in as an afterthought last year, but I have about 15 medium to small heads. The heads in the raised bed (sheet mulched) are about twice as big as the heads from the herb garden (single dug, with topsoil added and bark mulch). I’m thinking now I need to pull all the herbs out in the fall and sheet mulch the herb garden to get that some nutrients.

The broccoli is looking pretty decent, but I need to start cutting it as it is bolting rapidly. I understand you can cut and come again, that heavy mulching and water help, so I’ll see what I can do to extend the broccoli harvest.

Meanwhile I’ve started thinking more about echinacea, which does really well in this sandy soil, unlike the clay we had down in Honeoye. Originally we wanted to do echinacea there as a cash crop and I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t a good place to try that experiment.

Today was an awesome day! I was able to get hot water for my coffee this morning, then went for a little walk and found that despite it’s strip-mall and industrial park cosmetics

Chicopee has a heart of gold. I took my coffee down to the parking lot and started looking at the flora when I noticed an old road or path running behind some shrubs and decided to explore further. Some black caps, black-eyed susans, milkweeds, sumacs. Then I came around a corner and found myself in a state park. Walking further I found a swimming area which turns out to be the Chicopee reservoir. Thus, it’s a short five minute walk from that to this:

I was completely astounded by this, and spent some time there to start the day. I went back for my camera and tried to drive there, but couldn’t find a way! Walking was the most direct method. After a McSaussage I went on the the Convergence.

In the morning Ethan Roland ran a session on Scaling Up, that is how we can work on bigger projects or think about bigger projects. He put an interesting twist on “succession” asking, what do we need as designers to accelerate our inner, as well as the outer, succession. There was some discussion about building community and Ethan specifically demonstrated a design that was not accepted. He said he didn’t know why, but it seemed clearly that there was not buy-in or ownership from the community, some lack of trust by the community for the landowner based on history. This started to emerge as the main theme for me: it’s not the designs, it’s the social and hidden structures that will ultimately determine whether our designs get implemented.

Steve Gabriel made a similar point in the next session- that most designs don’t get built. This was a very instructive presentation on his experience with FLPI, their relationship with an existing Not-for-Profit, the dream vs. reality (”where the rubber hits the road,” Bill would say), and some successes. I was starting to conclude that small was good, that the way to go big is still to expand small successes, join and network the nodes of permanence as if they are components in a design, a bigger design.

After lunch we had the first two events of the Permie Olympics, which involved eyeballing elevations for a swale, then speed digging. There were I think five teams and the result was two nice swales built in a couple of hours for fun and for free.

After lunch, Phil and Sharon gave a talk on their experiences trying to get diverse, multi-cultural (”people of flavor”), urban permaculture going in NYC. I want to talk more to him about the specifics of his experiences, what worked and what didn’t. They seem now to have got a core site at a community garden in Harlem, and have had a very successful PDC where 23 of 24 finished the course. He also talked about financial issues of pricing and chasing down payment and scholarships, which I want to hear more about.

Dave Jacke then led a roundtable on issues related to certification and organization within the movement as a whole, and I found myself contributing some models that might be helpful, and questions about standards being set purposely at a very low level to generate quick growth. As Mollison says, we can’t possibly do worse than the way things are being done now. I’m wondering whether the certification wasn’t Mollison’s way of not dealing with centralized authority and structure. I’ll probably get struck by lightning for saying that. I was glad to add to the discussion, and the point was made several times during the day that the ideas generated by newbies were often very interesting and productive. We’ll see.

I got to talk to Tom and Martin a bit afterwards which was cool, the discussion leading to Bateson and patterns among other things. Some books I need to get:

• Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
• A Long Deep Furrow- Three Centuries of Farming in New England
• Luscious Landscapes
• Human Ecology, or books on this topic

After that my brain was pretty much moosh. Looking back through my notes there’s a ton of material that will be fodder for future posts. For now, my stomach needs food.

This giant greets you when you get off the Mass Pike in Chicopee, which makes me VERY glad I’m staying at the Motel 6 here!

The ride up with Kai was great. Turns out his mom is one of the few midwives still doing home births, and she was our backup for our second daughter. We have a lot in common and started brainstorming ways to get the word out. He’s getting his Certificate in August at Finger Lakes. Steve Gabriel is presenting tomorrow, so hopefully they can hook up together.

Brian managed to make it down too and we were introduced while touring Tierra de Oportunidad farm, somewhere between the goats and the Paso Fino horses. He remarked that he thought he was getting away from the farm for a few days, only to be back on the farm.

The farm itself is pretty amazing- 30 acres in the heart of a highly developed industrial city. Four acres here form the main entrance and “public facing” part of the farm, but behind this is another 26 acres of amazing veg and animals. I’ll try and post a picture of that tomorrow.

I met a bunch of folks including Tom and Philip who post at Energy Bulletin, then Eric who gave the keynote, which basically boils down to “get to work!” We need a Permaculture Platform on issues such as Energy, Transportation, Consumption, Poverty, Education and so on. We also need some plant breeding programs to do things like make air potatoes hardy in the northeast. He demonstrated the shared design process that the farm underwent to reach its current state, what the elements would be and how they would be placed. One thing that he said that continues to become more clear to me is that we do not lack for technical solutions to all these problems- they boil down to social and political problems.

Tomorrow looks like a monster day. I’m looking at sessions by Ethan Rowland (Scaling Up), Steve Gabriel (Starting a Permie Project), Kay Cafasso (Natural Building) and Dave Jacke (the Certification Issue). Eric’s also going to conduct a tour downtown to the Nuestras Raices Centro, and then there’s…

Permaculture Olympics featuring Dale Swigging, Contour Conundrum, Salad Forage Triathalon and other events. I wonder if we can field a team?

Anyway, it’s getting late and my new playlist is almost finished, so I’m going to hit it. Will check in again tomorrow.

I’m getting ready to head off tomorrow to the NE Permie Convergence in Holyoke, MA. Got a call today from a man in Springwater looking for a ride share, so I’ll have some company and meet someone new. Also got an e-mail from Brian saying he was going to head down from his internship in Ashfield, MA. I posted a link in the Permaculture section to the NE Permaculture Wiki which looks to have a fair bit of useful information and established community. I talked on the phone to one of my cohorts from the Hancock PDC this spring, and I’m jonesing for some Permie get-together.

My plan is to live-blog or pseudo-live-blog the event. I’m bringing my iPod and mic, so I may try to get a podcast going. I’m also bringing the camera, though video is out for this time. I want to start lo-tech. I also want to be present to what’s going on there, unseparated by a camera, so I may do most of the work at night in the motel.

Meanwhile, I wanted to give an update on what’s going on here at home. Monday night a friend gave me some sorrel, bronze fennel, lupine and a baby horse chestnut, and I picked up some asparagus by the side of the road and got that all transplanted. In my walks I’m seeing a lot of sumac which I’ve pretty much considered a weed, but which appears to be a fast-growing nurse plant for berries, grapes, roses, nightshades, strawberries. So I’ve transplanted a couple to an area between the spruce and red maple that faces the main street, to start to build some privacy and nurse a shrub area- honeysuckle, dicentra, cherry, blueberry I’m thinking- that will also attract birds. We found a small infestation of Japanese Beetles on the northwest side of the house in the dicentra there. Apparently, knocking them into soapy water seems the best way to get rid of small batches. They don’t appear to have any natural predators, although some web sites state that grackles, starlings and chickens will eat them. I don’t really want to get into nematodes and bT.

The hierloom tomatoes I got a couple of weeks ago have been pretty thoroughly trashed by the deer. They must be tasty because they’ve left the romas alone. I got rhubarb chard and some of the onions in the other day, and I’m going to put the tomatillos in where the munged tomatoes were. Everything seems to be growing rather slowly, which I’m trying to figure out. The lettuces are looking good, we’ve been eating a lot of salad, and I’m getting some peas now that the weather has turned cooler and wetter. The Liberty apple closest to the walnut does not look too good, but the Cortlund is doing nicely. I need to put some intervening leguminous tree and a mulberry between the walnut and the liberty to mitigate the juglone effect.

I started a water feature over the weekend to start moving water from the downspout near the herb bed over to the high point of the property where the pond will eventually go. I want a little rock-faced stream bed that will look nice whether there’s water flowing or not. I’m looking for some roofing slates to build up this water feature to flow the water from the downspout to the streambed. This all sounds romantic, but right now it’s some wet concrete slab and dug up dirt. I will post pictures when I get it working. As the Permies say: “happy little accidents and sad little failures.”

This afternoon I helped these young people:

build this herb spiral:

in less than an hour.

They totally made my day and made me feel like I’d done something worthwhile and fun for the day. I was able to forget about the idiocy of work for a bit. I was able to explain about the different micro-climates we were making, from dry at the top to moist at the bottom, hot and light on the southwest and top sides and darker and cooler on the north and east edges, how the bricks and soil form a more stable structure- they totally got it and hopefully now they can do their own spirals and teach others.