Lepanto Farms

As I mentioned over on the “About” page, this whole crazy life change from suburbia to farm happened because, frankly, I:

a) read too much

b) care too much about what I read

c) and did I mention I read too much?

I don’t remember now which book was first, but this one is the oldest, so I’ll start my semi-regular library shelf visit here.

Farmers of Forty Centuries is based upon an agriculturally focused visit to areas of Asia in the early 1900’s by F.H. King.  Published posthumously by his wife with the subtitle “Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan” in 1911, the book is now available as a reprint and online.

The author describes the idea of the book by contrasting the land usage in the United States, “as yet… a nation of but few people widely scattered over a broad virgin land with more than twenty acres to the support of every man, woman, and child, while the people to be considered are toiling in fields tilled more than three thousand years and who have scarcely more than two acres per capita…” [p1]  Not only did the U.S. have vastly more land, it was generally previously uncultivated land (which was assumed to be more fertile than land that had been farmed for a while).  And yet, the author noted, American farmers were constantly forced to give up farms that had been, in the course of only a few generations, rendered unprofitable due to overfarming.  Forty acres was becoming insufficient to support a family, there was no more space to expand westward to fresh farmland, and demand for more and better fertilizers was increasing.  How did this happen, when the farmers in Asia had been successfully farming the same tiny fields for thousands of years?

The answer emerged in a thousand little details.  At times, the author goes on for several pages about calculations on the benefits of night soils (i.e. collected chamber pot contents) to the surrounding countryside, the profit of secondary crops like woven straw mats or shoes, or the exact chemical breakdown of ashes used as a field enhancement, and these extended patches of jargon detract somewhat from an otherwise engrossing book.  Still, these details matter.  For the strictly scientific, the book contains plenty of data.

King’s eye, however, for those thousand little details is incredible.  More than just a professional interest in agriculture, King showed a deep curiosity about everything around him.  The book is enlivened by frequent photos of turn of the century China, Japan, and Korea: paddy field workers in traditional rain gear, temples, foot-powered irrigation pumps, eroded hills, Japan’s agricultural research stations, ox-driven grain mills, farmyards, and, everywhere, the farmers, shopkeepers, and every day people themselves.  He obviously admired the cultures of the region, and easily admitted that a great part of the success of these Asian farmers was a willingness to put in whatever extra labor that was necessary to acheive a greater output at harvest, a willingness that American farmers were not trained to, having large amounts of outside inputs of fertilizer and fresh farmland easily available, but lacking manpower.  King predicted that these outside inputs would ruin farmers sooner or later.

To grossly sum up a complicated system, King discovered and described in glorious detail a traditional farming cycle that wasted absolutely nothing.  When the canals were dredged, the mud was spread on the fields.  When the irrigation ditches grew algae, it was composted and spread on the fields.  All manure, including human, was carefully cured in the sun in engineered piles, pulverized, and spread on the fields.  (Although Europe used human waste on farm fields, we didn’t manage to figure out how to do it safely through extended composting.  Thus, all vegetables were generally boiled for hours before eating.)  Chaff, ashes, vegetable scraps; nothing was thrown out, but everything was returned to reinforce the fertility of the field.  Waste from the cities was carried to the farms to feed the fields, which produced vegetables to take back to the cities.  In short, it was the precise opposite of a “disposable” culture with deadends at the useless trash heap.  Instead, the farmers of China, Japan, and Korea viewed everything in light of its part in a long-term cycle.

Throughout the book, King pointed out that the form of agriculture that technology had made possible for American and European farmers, with increased shipping of food and the bringing in of mineral fertilizers, could not be sustained indefinitely.  Little did he know, vast new opportunities were coming in the form of manufactured pesticides and fertilizers and increased mechanization.  Rather than embracing the wisdom of farming cultures that had enhanced their soil fertility over the centuries, the west fell for an increase in dependency on off-farm inputs, both chemical and mechanical, with the corresponding problems of debt, decreasing soil fertility, and disappearing farms.

Many of the ideas that seemed new to King, or at least were practiced to an extraordinary level he was not familiar with, would not seem at all odd to gardeners and farmers interested in sustainability.  While our neighbors (and the Health Department) would probably not appreciate the family’s toilet contents baking in the sun next to the driveway, we can be inspired by the success of efficiency and careful consideration of the worth of so much of what we consider to be disposable.

Think about that, the next time you pass all those hundreds of bags of grass clippings at the curb for the trash pick up every week.  How much lost soil fertility does that represent, headed to the dump to become a problem to be buried?  How will we recover the fertility that we have thrown out?