This is about using ley farming rotational grazing techniques on
micro-farms. An overview so far.
Ley farming is the lost half of organic growing. It was used
alongside scientific composting in an integrated system developed by
Friend Sykes, Newman Turner and others with Sir Albert Howard, as
well as George Stapledon, in the 1930s to 50s. These were the
pioneers of organic growing. Ley farming was based on previous work a
hundred years ago by Robert Elliot of Clifton Park ("The Clifton Park
System of Farming", see the Small Farms Library at Journey to
Forever).
In the 60s, after the pioneers died, organic farming was shunted
aside by the chemical interests and industrialised farming, and ley
farming was forgotten. The most important texts on it are in our
Small Farms Library, with more coming, and this has led to a recent
revival in ley farming.
"Sow a piece of land with a good pasture mixture and then divide it
in two with a fence. Graze one half heavily and repeatedly with
cattle, mow the other half as necessary and leave the mowings there
in place to decay back into the soil. On the grazed half, you've
removed the crop (several times) and taken away a large yield of milk
and beef. On the other half you've removed nothing. Plough up both
halves and plant a grain crop, or any crop. Which half has the bigger
and better yield? The grazed half, by far. "Ley Farming" explains why
"grass is the most important crop" and how to manage grass leys. Leys
are temporary pastures in a rotation, and provide more than enough
fertility for the succeeding crops: working together, grass and
grazing animals turn the land into a huge living compost pile."
The rotating grassland produces dairy products and beef or mutton,
and the effect of the cow manure on the grass and the soil builds up
enough soil fertility to grow succeeding crops for three or four
years. After usually three years the enriched grass turf is disced
into the land to fertilise the grain and other crops to follow, three
or four years later that field goes back under grass with cattle or
sheep. It's a sustainable, largely self-sufficient organic system,
with low input, high output and high quality produce. Here's more
about it:
http://snipurl.com/q4xq
Re: [Biofuel] seeding a forage pasture
Here's the ley farming section at the Small Farms Library:
http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library.html#ley
Small Farms Library - Ley Farming
IMO ley farming is THE sustainable farming system, it's complete, and
it's very flexible. List member Andres Yver, working at his new ley
farm in Argentina, described it as the cheap and easy way of farming.
I started working on this 23 years ago, and soon came to focus on
small-farm applications. I said in my previous post in this
occasional thread, "About the best the small-scale folks can do is to
follow the traditional Chinese-style farming methods of the East.
It's basically gardening more than farming, they tend to each
individual plant, there's no mass-production, production rates are
very high and it's sustainable. It's one weakness perhaps is in
gearing animals to the land. That's what we're doing here, integrated
Chinese-style small-scale farming using organic methods and livestock
grazing systems. It fits very well with our work with biofuels and
energy, a model for sustainable food and fuel farms of the future."
And:
"We have to deal with city farmers on one hand, gardeners basically,
often with very little or no land, and on the other hand with
farmers, who go about things in a quite different way, and there's
not very much common ground between the two. Or rather there's a
no-man's-land, at the peripheries of the cities and towns where
rising land values break up the farms into small parcels awaiting
development, where you find people like smallholders and
homesteaders, or folks with 600 sq meters of land like us, or 300 sq
yards of back garden like you Robert.
"Nobody pays any attention to these people but they grow a large
amount of food, maybe as much as the city farmers do (15%+ of the
world's supply). Gardening techniques don't always suit them very
well and neither do farming techniques. For instance, try to find
some half-useful information on how to grow wheat in a 20-metre
raised bed. You can't even find a sowing rate that isn't geared to
large fields and big machines, there's nothing that takes account of
the extra care you can take with small areas. We're hoping to change
that."
That's here:
http://snipurl.com/q4yh
Re: [Biofuel] More Gardening News
But how do you fit a livestock grazing system for full-sized farms
into a Chinese-style postage-stamp farm?
The first question is the animals - do the grazing animals in a ley
farming system have to be ruminants?
From a previous discussion last August:
"I don't think it's confined to ruminants, I reckon grazing should be
biodiverse, like the grasses are and the soil bugs. Maybe the more
biodiverse it is the fewer ruminants you need in the mix... I wish I
could find the reference, I've got it somewhere (on paper!), but it
seems Europe's main grazing animal is the vole. Voles eat more grass
than anything else does. They have to be playing an important overall
role but they sure aren't ruminants. I never managed to get hold of
any vole dung to experiment with and there's not a lot of literature
on the role of the vole and how long the pasture will last yer."
I was planning to use poultry, especially chickens, and geese and
muscovies if we could get them.
This helped answer the next problem - three-year ley rotations take
too long for a small farm, and much too long for a micro-farm like
this one and many others. Poultry can be much faster.
This is the system I'm using, from my previous post. We have five
small terraces here, three on one side and two on the other below the
house, with the mountain forest above us. The terrace below the house
is the vegetable garden, and we're using the others for grass
rotations.
>Since we've divided the top field in two, there are six fields in
>the rotation. We'll start cropping them after the first crop of
>grass - even by July-August, after the second nitrogen flush, we
>should have had good grazing, the land will be quite well manured
>and there'll be enough green stuff to disc in along with another
>composting, it should be ready to raise a crop while the chickens
>graze somewhere else. Probably three of the six fields will be under
>grass and three under crops most of the time.
>
>There are only a dozen chickens in the basic breeding flock, but
>we're hatching eggs now and we'll keep on hatching them until we've
>got as many birds as the grass can carry. Later we'll slaughter the
>extras for the pot and bring it down to a dozen again for the
>winter. Maybe we'll get 40 or so meat chickens out of it, not sure
>(we had about a dozen last year). Whatever, you can't do that with
>cows.
>
>Trouble is we need much more grass than the chickens can eat, or
>they destroy the pasture. You have to keep moving them on. Geese
>will solve the problem of the extra grass and we're after getting
>some goslings, again a "summer crop", we'll slaughter them in the
>autumn.
>
>There's reason to think this can be an easy and sustainable way of
>getting large amounts of meat, eggs, and crops from a small piece of
>land. There's probably room for pigs too, and/or maybe a couple of
>sheep. Possibly you could achieve much the same by cropping the land
>and raising the birds or whatever in sheds or cages, but I'm sure
>you get better production and better results generally when the
>livestock is geared to the land directly. I'm also sure it's more
>effective than simple green-manuring.
>
>I think it won't take long to build high levels of soil fertility
>and good soil depth in these fields.
Chickens as small super-fast cows.
These fields are all clay-panned, especially the top field, the
biggest one. It was either waterlogged or flooded. Nonetheless we had
two chicken runs on about half of it for the first nine months. Last
April 1 we moved the chickens to another terrace and subsoiled the
top field and composted it, and then let whatever wanted to grow.
That fixed the flooding problem, the field could take a typhoon or a
24-hour downpour without flooding at all, no surface water, it just
soaked it all up. You can fix a clay pan with "weeds" too, I've done
that before and it works just as well, but it takes much longer.
In autumn we disced in the grasses and weeds with more compost and
sowed a grass mixture on most of it, except for three one-metre beds
about 30 metres long where we sowed winter grains - wheat, rye, and
three kinds of barley, all old varieties.
In spring we started preparing the other fields for grass.
Another problem is an inevitable shortfall of manure to make the
amount of compost required - lots!
More from the previous post:
>Full-scale ley farming uses regular composting as well, and speeding
>up the ley like this means using much more compost. That means
>importing compost materials and organic wastes from off-farm, or
>there just won't be enough, or certainly not at first.
>
>Full-sized farms don't need to do that, they're more or less
>self-contained, or they can be, and a lot of organic growers resist
>the idea. IMHO they're too sensitive to the chemical farmers' jeer
>that all organic growers do is transfer soil fertility from one
>place to another, so they don't want to import anything from
>off-farm, it should be self-sufficient.
>
>Actually they wouldn't be transferring soil fertility from anywhere.
>Organic wastes are not soil fertility, they're a product of soil
>fertility, and left to the waste stream they're probably destined
>for no useful end or worse. There's double utility in using imported
>wastes as inputs, it diverts them from a wasteful waste stream, and
>indeed it's your duty if you can do it, Reduce, Recycle, Reuse. Then
>the wastes are used as the raw materials to manufacture real soil
>fertility on-site, often where there wasn't much before, if any.
>
>This means you can get more out of a smaller piece of land by
>putting more into it. It's less of an option (or need) for farmers
>in rural hinterlands, increasingly an option the closer you get to
>populated areas and the amount and variety of the waste stream
>increases, while the average land parcel shrinks.
>
>Of course the ideal solution is for the wastes to be returned to the
>same soil that produced them, and that's the logical conclusion of
>the food miles and of the fuel miles issue, along with Peak Oil.
>Meanwhile the wastes are there and it just keeps on coming. A lot of
>cities wouldn't be able to handle their waste streams without the
>city farmers. So we bring in manure and collect fallen leaves and so
>on, and also firewood (though we produce a lot here too), same as we
>import WVO to make biodiesel, though we can produce a lot of energy
>on-site as well (and grow oilseed crops if we want to).
We get chicken manure from a chicken farmer we know who raises meat
birds on deep litter in sheds. Not an organic operation but he's a
careful guy and the manure is not bad quality.
We also get cowdung from a 40-animal grass-fed beef operation, where
the farmer mucks out every day and stores it well, under shelter,
good manure instead of the usual slush. He uses his front-end loader
to scoop half a ton out of the middle of the pile and dump it in our
K-truck, easy.
Our composting operation got badly sidetracked in the winter, the
worst winter since the Japanese invented weather or whatever -
instead of the usual two or three cold weeks of snow, we were under
heavy snow for more than three months. It killed quite a lot of
people in Japan. It didn't kill us, we can handle it in this old
farmhouse, but it made everything much more difficult and slowed us
right down, and composting was a casualty. Not that you can't make
compost in the snow, you can and we do, but we just didn't have
enough time to keep up with it.
Now we're catching up fast, and I don't think we missed anything
vital because there wasn't enough compost when we needed it in
spring, despite a few Plan Bs. We'll build another double compost box
out of container pallets this week, that'll bring the capacity to six
cubic metres or three tons. There's about a ton of compost finishing
in the other boxes now, we've just used about a ton, and we'll make
another ton as soon as the new box is ready. That for 600 sq metres
of land, including the vegetable garden.
Yet another problem is grass seeds. A good Clifton Park type
grassland mixture has maybe 24 varieties (including dandelion!).
Where can you get the seeds? We found some seedsmen and there's some
information at our website, but no such seeds are available in Japan,
other than the usual Italian rye grass and red and white clover.
Maybe that would work too, but Aleks Kac found a good seeds company
in Slovenia, and sent us seeds for 11 different types of grasses and
clovers, a good range covering the main types, just what we need, and
it's that mixture we've been using since autumn. We'll find out which
of them do best here and concentrate on those.
The two fields we've sown are growing fast now, we'll certainly have
too much grass. Two more will be sown soon and the last one later in
the season, we'll let the birds graze it bare first, then seed it and
mulch it.
We managed to get hold of 10 goose eggs, now hatching in a hatchery
in Kyoto run by an old woman whose family has been running the
business for generations. She said she hasn't seen goose eggs for a
*long* time, though Japanese geese used to be common. They'll hatch
on May 18, and we won't count them till then. Anyway I've forgotten
how much grass geese eat, it's been a while.
It's no problem as long as there's too much grass rather than not
enough. We'll make hay and silage with the rest and see what we can
do with that. I'll tripod the hay, another useful lost art (I've done
it before, in England). For the silage, we'll use 55-gal 200 litre
plastic drums with lids, quite common here. You shred the fresh grass
and tramp it down in the drum until it's full and overflowing, then
you put the lid on and put a rock on top to squash it down. Some
Japanese farmers do this to feed their cow. The Japanese make a lot
of fermented foods, and in my very humble opinion some of them are
quite hard to tell from silage, sometimes my nose tells me I'd be
better off with silage. I'll trust their silage-making though.
A power shredder is a useful tool on a small farm like this, we're
always using our trusty biodiesel-powered shredder, rescued as a pile
of junk from behind the local Kubota. It's shredded tons of compost
material, leaves and rice straw for mulch and chicken bedding, small
branches for mulching newly composted fruit trees and for the hugel
beds we've built (see previous post), and I wouldn't be without it.
The final problem was the disc harrow, essential for no-till ley
farming. But, no disc harrows in Japan, and anyway disc harrows and
tractors are much too big for these little fields. From previous:
>I taught myself some blacksmithing using an old traditional Japanese
>shichi-rin charcoal cooker as a forge and a bit of steel girder as
>an anvil and flattened the rotavator blades, straightening out the
>inward curve at the end. It worked okay and I managed to get the
>tempering right, nice tough steel. Then I sharpened the blades. Now
>it's a powered disc harrow, the blades are whirling knives, and it
>works really well, taking a few passes each way to chop up
>whatever's on the surface with the top 2-3 inches of soil, leaving
>the surface covered with mulch.
>
>I think this machine solves the main problem with small-scale or
>micro-scale ley farming grazing rotations. Disc harrows and tractors
>are too big and cumbersome anyway, all of our five fields are too
>small even for our little 15hp tractor. But you can take a Yanmar or
>Kubota diesel rotavator anywhere, and they're pretty ubiquitous. Any
>local blacksmith can do that job too, I'm sure much better than I
>did.
There's a part of the vegetable garden terrace that we don't use, an
area that could make five 6-metre growing beds, at the end of the
garden next to the clan shrine and its sacred tree. It has soil
underneath, then clay, but someone dumped a lot of rocks and stones
and broken bricks and stuff there, and there's only a few inches of
soil on top. We sowed red and white clover there last year, chopped
it in in autumn and sowed a grass mixture for overwintering. That's
where we want to have our pumpkin bed now.
In other problem places like that we're using potatoes. I described
building "hugel" beds for potatoes in my previous post, out of sticks
and leaves and chicken dung. They're doing well, the potatoes are all
up and they look good. We did something similar at the edge of the
vegetable garden where the rough grass on the banks invades the
terrace. We put a one-metre strip of potatoes on top of leaves and
chicken manure there, with more leaves on top, which we'll keep
adding to. We'll get good potatoes, and good soil for following crops
where there wasn't any before.
I'm wondering to what extent boiled potatoes (with the peels) might
substitute for grain feed for poultry.
We could have used potatoes with the pumpkin bed too, but then we
wouldn't have any pumpkins (five or six different kinds). Pumpkins
are useful poultry feed. (Pumpkin seeds are a good source of vegoil,
better yield than soy, cottonseed or hemp.)
Midori has pumpkin seeds and other seeds sprouting outside in a glass
aquarium tank that she's rigged like a small greenhouse and they'll
be ready soon. We have a week or so to get the bed ready. Yesterday
she spread a cubic metre of compost over the bed, grass and all, and
about the same of chicken manure. My job's to chop it in. Then it'll
get some compost tea to help it on its way and a mulch on top.
Rotavators/rototillers don't chop the stuff into the surface like a
disc harrow, they bury it instead, leaving the soil surface bare.
Rotavators also help to create a clay pan, which is what we're trying
to fix. Definitely a job for the newly devised exclusive Journey to
Forever "No-Dig For Victory" high-speed micro-ley farming
whatever-it's-called, cutavator or rotodisker, I'm still thinking
about it.
But when I went to start it I found the two outer knives on the right
were gone, bolts and all, buried somewhere, and several others were
loose. The old spring washers had given up. And all the blades were
very blunt. So I got some new washers and found two bolts that
fitted, found some worn out old blades too (there are always plenty
of those about and they're still fine for making cutting blades), and
fired up the forge.
The forge is a big shichirin charcoal burner. Shichirins are usually
much smaller. Shichirin means 0.07 US cents' worth of charcoal, not
much even when there were still such things as rin coins to spend,
and you could cook a meal with it. It's an efficient traditional
design, shichirins have been exported to West Africa to help with the
firewood and indoor woodsmoke problems. We'll produce designs and
templates soon for shichirins made with locally available refractory
materials so they can be made anywhere.
We also have these two much bigger ones, the one I use as a forge,
about 2ft high, which we found in the back shed here, and a slightly
smaller one I found in a dump. These are complicated, cunningly made
with three walls, the inner two removable. They breathe very well and
burn for a long time. Everybody still uses shichirins in Japan, you
get them on your table in good restaurants, but these big ones are
rare, they're not made now, and nobody we know seems to know anything
about them.
I rigged a squirrel cage blower that fits the two air intakes, and I
used that last time, though the first time it got much too hot and
melted a rotavator blade. I didn't use the blower this time. I
started the fire with some kindling in the bottom, half-filled it
with charcoal, put in two blades, topped up with charcoal and came
back half an hour later.
I took out a red-hot blade, hammered it flat and put it back in the
coals, and did the same to the other one. A couple of minutes later
they were both red-hot again so I dumped them in the bucket of water.
No need for the blower. Then we put some soup bones in a dutch oven
and set it to boil. Last time I used the forge Midori baked some
sweet potatoes in it 18 hours later. Very cheap on fuel!
It took about an hour to sharpen the 16 blades. I think it'll need
doing once or twice a year, not too much hassle.
I put the blades back, bolted on firmly with their new washers, but
some biodiesel in the tank, cranked the old Yanmar diesel and it
started first time, as usual. I took it up to the top field first,
where we still haven't sown the rice bed. It's alongside the three
winter grain beds. I chopped in the grass and a dressing of chicken
manure a couple of weeks ago, and we finally got some good rice seed
from some homesteading friends, three old varieties, but I've been
dawdling a bit until we had some compost too. We'd spread a quarter
of a box of compost on all four grain beds a couple of days before,
so I chopped it into the future rice bed. What a difference with a
full set of sharp blades! Six passes did a thorough job.
We'll plant the rice this week. It's more or less according to the
SRI system that's causing such ripples in the rice-growing world.
From previous:
>Anyway, if you want to grow some rice, you might have a read of this:
>http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/
>SRI Homepage/System of Rice Intensification
>Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD)
>
>SRI FAQ:
>http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/qanda.pdf
>Questions And Answers About The System Of Rice Intensification (SRI)
>For Raising The Productivity Of Land, Labor And Water
>(230kb pdf)
>
>This is the English translation of the research report on SRI
>published by Father Henri de Laulanié, the Jesuit priest who
>developed the system in Madagascar, very interesting read:
>http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/Laulanie.pdf
>
>I was working on similar lines at about the same time in Hong Kong,
>with the farmers who grew Hong Kong's last rice harvests. I was
>using compost, raised beds and no flooding, but I left Hong Kong
>before I got very far. I only discovered Laulanié's work a few years
>ago.
No flooding, lots of compost, and widely spaced single plants. We'll
plant more densely, 80 to the square metre at first, same as the
other grains.
It was getting dark by the time I reached the new pumpkin bed, but I
managed four passes with the cutavator, and that was enough. Then it
started raining, just what we wanted, and it rained most of today too.
We'll mulch the pumpkin bed heavily with straw and after the pumpkin
harvest we'll just keep composting it and mulching it. We should be
able to grow anything there.
There's lots of garlic and onion types heading for harvest in the
garden, all the herbs are back now, the tomatoes are in, so are the
aubergines and green peppers, peas, carrots, beans, corn, swiss
chard, lots of greens, cape gooseberries coming up where they were
last year, we're eating asparagus, and Midori planted two heavily
composted beds with sweet potato cuttings today, and sowed lettuce
seeds and a bunch of other things. We'll do much better with
vegetables this year.
The spring nitrogen flush has hit the soil and everything is rushing
up out of the ground, but we're keeping up with it.
I'm sure there are lots of different ways of handling small-scale
grazing rotations like this. There's a lot we still have to figure
out that we can only know by doing it, and making mistakes no doubt.
We've tried to build in good margins for Plan Bs so we can learn from
the mistakes rather than their wiping us out.
The grain beds, for instance, should have been planted a month
earlier, in September, and the same for the grass. The grain was
doing okay, but it took a lot of damage from a herd of about 15 deer
before we managed to get an effective fence rigged. Then, just as it
was recovering at the beginning of spring, two old neighbours digging
bamboo shoots at the bank there left the fence open, and that night
the deer pretty much wrecked the grain beds. Aarghh! We'll still get
a crop, and we'll do what we can to help it along. It won't be enough
for both us and the poultry, or not even enough for either, but it
probably wouldn't have been anyway. The next rotation will mean more
grain though, and better grown.
I'd said that by autumn we'll have the proof we need that it's worth
doing things this way with a small piece of land. We had the first
real indication of it two days ago, before we spread the compost
dressing on the grain beds. There's an invisible line across the beds
about eight metres from the end nearest the house. On the house side
of the line the plants are noticeably bigger and stronger, on the far
side they're okay but not as good. That line is where the fence of
the old chicken run was before we subsoiled the field. It was
waterlogged and in poor shape when they were there, but it's made an
obvious difference just the same.
The effect is even more noticeable on the rest of the field, where
the new grass is growing. A second chicken run covered about a third
of that area, and the grass there is about twice the size of the
grass in the rest of the field, with a clear line between the two.
We moved the chickens away from this field more than a year ago, and
there weren't very many of them, only eight or nine I think. And this
isn't what we were trying to do then. Nonetheless, we removed a lot
of soil nutrients in the form of eggs and chickens, yet the soil
there is more fertile now than where we didn't remove anything,
despite two compost applications in the meantime.
Ley farming doesn't require ruminants, birds will also do the job.
Best wishes
Keith
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