The Jeavons Center Mini-Farm Report It’s hard to believe that it’s already July, but here we are! Activity can make time telescope or shrink, and here at The Jeavons Center a lot has happened over the past 6 months.
The Farmer-Teacher Trainer (FTT) team has seen sweeping changes: after almost four years with us, Jessi Mikow’s life path is taking her in a new direction, to find land and establish a farm of her own with her mother. We’re grateful for Jessi’s hard work and good energy, and will miss her, but we wish her well on her new adventure! Evandro Rachadel, who has been with us for two years, is returning to his home in Brazil to be with his 10-year-old daughter and work in a spiritual community which includes a farm, where he will use his considerable skill with the GROW BIOINTENSIVE (GB) method. Evandro speaks English, Spanish, and of course, Portuguese. Fortunately, two of our publications are available in Brazilian Portuguese: How to Grow More Vegetables and the GB Farmer’s Mini-Handbook so Evandro will be able to use them to help his community learn to grow more food and soil. We’ll miss you, Evandro! Melvin Castrillo is stepping back a bit from his Mini-Farm Manager role, but staying involved with the garden. Assistant Farm Manager Suraya David- Sadira, an extremely competent gardener, and is taking on more responsibility, and training our new FTT team. We have been fortunate to find four good people to refill that team:
It’s always a wrench to say goodbye to team members who leave us to pursue new endeavors, but as they say, when one door closes, another opens: as we wave farewell to Jessi and Evandro, we have the joy of getting to know and work with such an enthusiastic group of new friends. We’re grateful for Lyyla, Izzy, Susana, and Gabe's strength and good energy, and their interest in joining the FTT team. They will help make The Jeavons Center mini-farm and Ecology Action’s GB Closed-loop Sustainable Mini-Farming initiatives successful, now and in the future, here at home on Pine Mountain, and around our beautiful planet! As all this has been happening, I’ve been continuing to work on the (hopefully!) final round of edits to my second book: The Next Steps: Small Farming as a Way of Life. It’s a discussion—a conversation, really—of key topics that human-scale biological farming in harmony with nature makes possible—in contrast with largescale industrial/mechanized chemically-dependent agriculture, which isolates us from our food-and-soil web and turns nature’s healthy abundance into toxic scarcity. As I look forward to “the next steps” I also look back to see that I’m lucky to have lived the experience of seeing this contrast first-hand. In 1972 I watched the soil at our first site Palo Alto, CA, transform from mollisol clay that resembled concrete into an abundantly fertile and productive soil rich in organic matter and life that blew right past the expected yields for conventional agriculture. Something that would take 500 years in nature, GROW BIOINTENSIVE did in 9.25 years. No one thought that level of change was possible, but they were wrong. It’s not just possible, it’s easy, once you get started. If we could do it there, almost anyone can do it anywhere. And we did! When we moved here, to our “new” site near Willits, CA, we turned a steep, hardscrabble serpentine hillside rated “poor for grazing” to what is known as a climax soil ecosystem: a maximum buildup of organic matter in the soil in just under 44 years, according to an independent evaluation. We did this with ANNUAL CROPS. Normally, with perennial crops like trees and shrubs, this conversion requires at least 300 years. Technological advances can sometimes do amazing things, but they’re not always “better”. In the same way that taking a vitamin pill might help out with a deficiency in the short-term, it doesn’t replace having a diet filled with good, fresh, nutrient-rich foods, or the pleasure that eating well and healthily—and sustainably—brings to our lives. Never forget that living biology can make a world of difference compared with technology's "solutions". While TJC has seen some changes this year, we’re delighted to have been working with Victory Gardens for Peace, (including tirelessly energetic and innovative Mini-Farm Manager Matt Drewno) for fifteen years! VGFP hosts our onsite 8-Month Interns for the majority of their stay with Ecology Action, but they also come to us for a week each month, so they can experience how GB works in different climates and soils. This year, we have Janet Nina from Peru, and Eva Asher from Mexico participating in the 8MI program. They are excellent Farmer-Teacher Trainers and human beings. As we teach them, we also learn from them, and are fortunate to have such energetic and enthusiastic people joining the global GROW BIOINTENSIVE family. And in addition to our onsite interns, Matt and I also have 21 participants joining in our Online 8-month Internship Program this year; twelve from Kenya, two from Mexico, one from Peru, and five from California. These are the real “next steps”: the continuation of the work that started on hard, tired ground in Palo Alto in 1972, that has grown (literally) so that Ecology Action and our many partners around the world (read about several in this issue) have over 10 million small farmers using GB in 152 countries, on five continents, in virtually all climates and soils where food is grown. People can and do make a world of difference one mini-farm at a time! We are all one family on the Earth, and the Earth is our home! Let's make it a good home, for EVERYONE! Grow Hope Grow Abundance Grow Biointensive!
♥ top | Newsletter Home |Table of Contents| Archive
|
