Happy Holidays with Humanure!

Aaron (pictured below) and I cleaned out two composting toilets on the farm. We have a total of six composting toilets on the farm, soon to be eight. The average American uses about 80 gallons of water a day just flushing the toilet. We figure why call it waste when it can be put to good use as humanure. We don’t use any humanure on our vegetable crops. Instead we spread it on our pasture where our animals graze. We could use it on food crops if we followed the USDA guidelines for composting humanure… in case you were wondering.

One of the toilets we emptied today belongs to one of the families that lives on the farm. This was the first time it had been emptied in a year, since their duplex was built. The compost in there was pretty well finished and not very putrid at all. The design for those is a toilet near an outside wall where the waste falls onto a slope that goes out of the building into a chamber on the ground. That one took a year for a family of four to fill.

The other one we did today was in our education building. This was the first composting toilet on the property and consistently the most disgusting to empty. As you can see, the design does not make it really easy to empty. It’s a large compartment so there is a lot of crap to shovel when it’s full. It also gets a little spongy or squishy. The drier stuff on the top actually floats on the sludgy liquid stuff below. So as you shovel it gets more and more liquid and sludge-like. The smell in this one is horrible and nasty. Only a gas mask would be effective in filtering out the brutal odor of this one. We earned a Manure Movers of America shirt today.

If you’re interested in making better use of your own poop check out The Humanure Handbook.

ECHO Summary

It’s the holidays and things are getting a little crazy, but I want to bring you, my faithful reader, a report from the ECHO Agricultural Conference in Ft. Myers, FL. First, it was my first time to Florida and it proved that stereotypes all come from some kernel of truth. The weather was ridiculously warm and humid for December and there were numerous AARP members in convertibles.

ECHO is primarily a demonstration farm that trains people for agricultural missions. Many of the organizations that work with ECHO and that were at the conference come at agricultural work overseas from a conservative evangelical perspective. While I believe strongly in holistic ministry that includes the physical, spiritual, political and social aspects of life, I tend to come at it from a more social justice perspective. The farm itself is impressive with so many plants, methods and demonstrations packed into such a small space. ECHO is geared towards tropical agriculture because this is where both most of the world’s poverty and most missionaries are located.

Over the week we had lots of conversations between sessions, over meals and in cars. There’s no way to cover all the territory adequately. So, I’ll try to give you my highlights.

Cross Cultural Communication
This class was probably the most at odds with my own theology (to put it diplomatically). The speaker tried to tackle issues related to worldview, culture, religion and agriculture in one hour. I took an entire semester on this topic in seminary and still have a lot to understand. The speaker claimed that the underlying problem in other countries is one of worldview. It became clear that “they” had an incorrect worldview while the correct worldview was a combination of the scientific and biblical worldview. He also lumped all religions other than Christianity into the category of animism, claiming several times that Islam was essentially animistic. The statement was made several times that the problem was with other culture’s view of nature as something we can’t control. The solution was the biblical worldview, which was to subdue the earth, meaning control and manipulate it. This was a very disturbing workshop to me. I hope to explore this more in an upcoming post on why I think there is no such thing as a biblical worldview.

Third Culture Kids
This was probably the most practical and helpful workshop as a parent. I think there is something helpful in our globalized world about kids who are not at home in any particular culture, but have a real sense of the diversity and unity of humanity across cultures.

Sand Dams
The Mennonite Central Committee has a project in which dams are created in African countries. Initially the dams fill with water during the rainy season. Then the eventually fill with sand as the water settles. This sand is then composed of about 40% water. The water captured in the sand does not evaporate and is easily accessible to local communities. An amazing innovative project. It challenged some of my assumptions and ways of thinking, turning over some of my expectations about water access and solutions.

Natural Medicine
Ralph Wiegand gave an excellent talk on the use of natural medicine, defined as the combining of modern and traditional medicine. In particular he has worked on the use of artemesia tea as a complete treatment for malaria. In contrast to the workshop on cross cultural communication Wiegand gave great weight and value to traditional knowledge.

Nutritional Garden
A graduate from ECHO has developed a Nutritional Kitchen Garden at a hospital in Central African Republic where they teach nutrition, farm experimentation and agricultural knowledge and skills. Definitely one of the best presentations at the conference.

Compost and Soil Biology
I went to a workshop on compost and one on soil biology in the same afternoon. I’m no expert, but I do know some about both of these topics. You may recall the controversy about Soil Foodweb, Inc. in our class on compost tea at the farm. The leader for both of these workshops is sold on a lot of the claims made by Dr. Elaine Ingham and Soil Foodweb folks. Unfortunately I felt like composting was made overly complicated and discouraged people from doing it. They were more technical about the percent Nitrogen and ratio of bacteria to fungi. There are important rules of thumb for good composting, but they don’t need to be so technical in my opinion.

The Soil Food web folks also tout the benefits of Effective Microorganisms (EM). Basically these are anaerobic bacteria, what they called facultative anaerobes, that are beneficial to help compost when it becomes anaerobic. The example given was a poultry barn where the bedding has become anaerobic with that pungent ammonia smell. EM could be used to reverse those negative effects supposedly. It seems to me that the answer to bad management practices is not another product to fix it. That’s the way industrial agriculture solves problems (e.g. antibiotics, irradiation, etc.). Isn’t the answer instead to use better management practices to deal with the waste or bedding and manage composting more closely. I asked how EM were created or manufactured and was told that it’s proprietary. That should always be your first clue that something is bunk. If the answers to our agricultural and ecological problems are not open source they aren’t really answers. They’re just new ways to make money off of disasters (What Naomi Klein calls Disaster Capitalism).

It was a thought provoking and educational trip. I definitely enjoyed their farm and all they had going on. It is important to be in dialogue with people we don’t agree with, particularly those working in the same field, literally and figuratively.

The Gospel of Compost Tea

In our recent class on compost tea we looked at the benefits and the mystery of this microbial brew. Many claims are made about the benefits of compost tea. A while back our executive director had heard so much about it that he decided to look into it himself. He went to the library and did a thorough literature review to see which claims had merit and which were not backed by any evidence. What he found was that there was strong evidence for suppression and control of soil-borne and foliar fungal diseases, both when added to the soil and sprayed on the foliage of plants.

The Compost Tea Brewing Manual (which I have not read) makes claims about compost tea “adding biology” to the soil. Some people use compost tea by broadcasting it on a field to jump start the biology in the soil. Using the numbers in the book, it is clear that this claim is ridiculous. The amount of microbes in the compost tea is so miniscule that it is silly to claim it can boost the biology in an entire field. You’re better off using a broad range of holistic practices to improve your soil health and fertility overall. This is a slow process and anyone that tells you they can jump start is likely a card carrying member of the agricultural Amway. Run the other direction.

This same manual gives recipes for compost tea targeted at bacteria or fungal problems. This is where the gospel of compost tea rises to the surface. This way of thinking applies a modern scientific approach to agriculture while trying to use a holistic method. It’s new wine in old wineskins and you know what happens there right?

The whole point of compost tea is NOT that you are targeting a specific problem. In fact it should be a preventative measure applied before you have a problem. It can help with specific problems, but the benefit is the well-rounded additions to the soil that come from brewing up a mysterious batch of good bugs and microbes. The good microbes will out compete the bad ones, some of them actually parasitize the bad microbes. The brew also creates some compounds that have anti-microbial (antibiotic) properties.

Don’t we do the same thing in the church, for many of the same reasons? We target specific problems and think if we just apply the right complex of programming we will emerge victorious. Meanwhile, the whole system is deteriorating around us because we have not cared for the health of the soil and paid attention to the important things. The gospel of compost tea tells us that we should be brewing up people who look like Jesus, whose hearts beat for the things his does. Then those problems will resolve themselves. Healthy soil is made up of people who are being transformed into the likeness of Christ.

In the same way that the large scale of agricultural forces farmers to practice agriculture in ways that are fundamentally opposed to nature, mega churches and the large-scale thinking that goes on in churches forces people into practicing their faith in ways that are fundamentally opposed to the kingdom of God. The beauty is that we can take our decomposing methods and programs and pile them together until we get some good finished compost. Then we can brew up some sweet tea out of our old crappy ways.

photo from flickr user badalley.

The Agricultural Amway

In a recent class on compost tea some skepticism was expressed about people touting the benefits of compost tea in order to sell products. This led one skeptic to muse about ways they could market a product that would carefully insure that your compost tea was brewed at ambient temperature (in other words, do nothing and make you pay for it). I was also amazed to hear that compost tea is sold in bottles on the shelves of organic gardening stores. The benefits of compost tea come from the microbial organisms living in it. Bottling compost tea for any length at all destroys one of the primary benefits of the brew.

The list could go on of agricultural and gardening products that make all kinds of claims about controlling pests and weeds and make your tomatoes as big as your head, of which there is very little evidence to support such claims.

This is the agricultural Amway. Companies often try to get one or two farmers to buy into the benefits of their product and then they make those farmers into dealers of the product. You can see where this is going can’t you? I don’t how much this functions exactly like a pyramid scheme, but it’s the same idea. The guys on top get some people to buy into the idea and the more people they sell on it the more the guys at the top make. All the while nothing is really happening. No product is actually benefitting anyone and an entire market is created out of thin air.

This is exactly what has driven our species to the brink… promises that can never be fulfilled or kept. Ammonium nitrate can only get you so far before it destroys the very thing it promises to save.

I’m brewing up another post about compost tea that looks at what makes compost tea beneficial, but also confounds our modern ways of looking at agriculture.

Farm and Food Session 7

This session was a panel on Climate Change and Agriculture. The panel included:

Malcom Beck, author and founder of Garden-ville
Leighton Steward, author of Fire, Ice and Paradise
Andy Wilson from Public Citizen

Another good session on a very controversial topic. Malcom Beck, the king of compost, may be my new hero. I’m becoming somewhat obsessed with compost, as you can tell. He pointed out that carbon is one of the important things that plants need. The difference between organic fertilizers and conventional is the higher carbon content in organic fertilizers. Leighton Steward in his presentation said that CO2 is not a pollutant. I agree that it is important to recognize the role that CO2 naturally plays in the ecosystem. The goal certainly should not be to get rid of CO2. The question is the role of CO2 in the ecosystem, how much is acceptable in the atmosphere and where this CO2 might be coming from.

Leighton Steward had an excellent presentation with lots of colorful graphs and statistics. His basic thesis is one you may have heard before, that CO2 is a lagging indicator. CO2 levels rise only after temperatures rise and sometimes hundreds of years later. The indicator that he says does track with the changes in temperature is solar radiation.

Andy Wilson from Public Citizen did respond that there was significant debate in the scientific community on this issue. He also pointed out that the majority of climatologists working on climate change that were published have reached consensus about human activity as a cause of climate change. The majority of his time was spent on impending legislation and changes regulating CO2 emissions and the impact of things like cap and trade on both agribusiness and small sustainable farmers.

Here are some of my overall thoughts on a very complicated topic.

I’ll be honest, I generally stay out of the debate on climate change because I don’t base what I believe we should be doing on whether or not climate change is anthropogenic (caused by human activity). I know that there is another side to the debate that would have rebuttals for Leighton Steward’s claims. It’s a good debate when it is based more on science. Unfortunately it seems too often to devolve into politics on both sides. One side says the IPCC scientists are not real scientists, but politically motivated and manipulated. The other side makes the same claim about some of the scientists who discount human activity as a cause of climate change. If it’s possible to keep the debate scientific it’s a good conversation. At this point it seems impossible to keep politics out of the conversation.

I also feel manipulated anytime someone throws too many statistics, charts and graphs at me. Data is never objective. First of all the collection of the data always happens by human beings who use a process to decided what’s important and what’s not. That is the way it has to be, but is important to recognize that it is the case. After the data is gathered selectively it has to also be interpreted. What does this collection of numbers mean? Time and again you see different people look at the same set of data and make wildly different conclusions depending on their assumptions or interpretation of what the data says. So, someone’s charts, graphs and stats sometimes tells me more about their assumptions than any objective facts.

I do agree that CO2 is not a pollutant. However, doesn’t it matter what kind of CO2 or where it comes from? Isn’t there a difference between the CO2 that mammals exhale and the CO2 coming from factories, cars, etc.? I would be interested to hear more about comparing CO2 from different sources and used in different ways. My hunch is that the concentration of CO2 in factory farms, factories and urban centers would be different than the CO2 occurring naturally in the ecosystem.

At one point Mr. Wilson said that the goal was for sustainable agriculture to compete with industrial agriculture and that cap and trade (if done right) has the potential to do that. Is that the goal of sustainable agriculture? What would we sacrifice to “compete” with Big Ag? It seems counterproductive to me for that to be the goal. Part of the reason we have industrial agriculture is because the Secretary of Agriculture in the 70s said “Get big or get out!” What happens if we say the same to small-scale sustainable farms?

One of my favorite statistics was that Texas is #7 in the world in greenhouse gas emissions… in the WORLD! That’s just crazy!

Thoughts?