Getting a Farm Going

[swaghauler]

Keep in mind that if you are not gardening (I highly espouse the Ruth Stout method), that there are three important steps to growing food by the acre (or hectare if you prefer). For visualization, remember that an Acre is the size of a FOOTBALL FIELD (around 100m X 50m wide) and a Hectare is 2.47 times the acre in size (10,000 total meters). This is a big space. The three steps to prepping a field are...

1) INITIAL MULCHING AND NUTRIENT ADD: This is normally done in the fall after the harvest. If you have ever seen a cornfield or wheat field that was harvested, you will see stubs of stalks that are bent over and left to rot. This is INTENTIONAL. Those stalks are putting nutrients back into the soil. This is often leavened with grass cuttings and dead leaves. It is best to let these rot on top of the field ALL WINTER. IF you "breaking in" a new field, you should let this debris molder on top of the field for at least a week. The wetter the better as it promotes rot.

2) EARLY SPRING TURNING: Your field has moldered all winter and you have a good debris cover going. Now it's time to turn over those nutrients that will feed your crops long-term. A MouldBoard Plow or Chisel Plow will cut deep ruts and roll that mulch down into the ground where your crops will feed on it all summer long. Once the field is turned, in comes the "boost nutrients" to be laid on the field for up to a week before the initial planting. These nutrients include Nitrogen and the rapid growth food for your crops. In my neck of the woods that would be cow manure turned into a liquid mixture resembling a thick soup. This goes on top and is allowed to soak in. It's what gives you that "Fresh country air" aroma every spring. After a week, this too gets turned over to ensure the soil is now fully capable of being Furrow Plowed.

Please note that there are several alternatives to using modern fertilizers and these methods are STILL being used today. Some common methods to "season" a field including using a "fish slurry" made up of parts of any fish you ate that were left. These parts (including bones) are ground into a "meal" and added to the ashes from a fire to produce a Potassium-rich compound for poor soils. This is then applied as a "slurry" just like manure is. This is the technique the American Indians showed the Colonists at Plymouth to help them fend off starvation.

Another technique is using human feces and urine. To make this safe, they are burned in a container and their ASHES are added to ash from the fire to prevent the spread of disease. This should also be done with Pig, Chicken, and any other Poultry's wastes. Cow, Horse, Rabbit, or Goat waste can be used as-is. These should all be turned into a slurry to stretch the amount of soil that can be fertilized.

Indeed, URINE (and to a lesser extent feces) is a powerful resource. You can use it to fertilize fields, make explosives or smokeless propellants, and even drugs. It would be a VALUABLE RESOURCE that everyone was expected to provide in a place like Krakow. Putting feces into a sealed plastic container known as a "digestor" will allow you to harvest METHANE gas for cooking or welding. Put in some feces, add a small packet of the microbes found in the product known as RID (used to clean septic tanks and found almost everywhere in the US) and just add water. I'm told you can get a liter of Methane from a liter of treated Digester water. This also has NO IMPACT on your ability to use the feces to fertilize fields later.

3) FURROW PLOWING, DISKING, AND PLANTING: Once the field is "seasoned," you can plow the furrows for planting. We used a 3-Furrow Plow but there are a variety of these plows available. IF you are planting a crop that needs looser soil like lettuce, you will also be using a Disc Plow to break up the soil into a finer grain like sand. Heartier plants like Potatoes or Corn do NOT need the soil to be that fine (which is good because topsoil erosion occurs more frequently in disced soil). This is also the stage where you will Contour Plow so wind won't blow away your topsoil. How you plant will depend on WHAT you plant, as different crops need different spacing (hence my Yields Chart). Once the fields are sown though, you can take a breather before the next step (maintenance of the crops) begins.

That's just a quick overview of how to prep a field for farming.