Agriculture

Sustainable Farming/Agriculture:

In connecting with the Millenium Development goals (MDG), Beacon AHEAD has experience in the following areas of Sustainable Farming/Agriculture:

1.  Producing Bio-Char

“Bio-Char”, or charcoal, is one of the most beneficial things that we can add to soil.  Bio-char is full of tiny holes and it sucks in moisture and nutrients easily.  In addition, bio-char provides a wonderful structure in the soil for healthy microbes and fungus on plant roots.  By adding bio-char to a field, extremely rich and well-watered soil can result.

Bio-char can easily be produced by heating dry organic fuel.  If too much air and time are available, then bio-char itself would also burn up and turn to ash.  So producing bio-char is simply a matter of heating wood or other fuels, without much air, and at a high enough temperature, for enough time.

Bio-char can be produced in cookstoves:

Beacon AHEAD developed this stove that is made from waste materials.  This stove is a top-lit up-draft (TLUD) cookstove, which restricts airflow and burns very hot.  This is one of the cleanest burning cookstoves, and it produces bio-char with each batch of fuel. Read more about cookstoves on our HEALTH page.

The benefits and impact of bio-char are as follows:
  1. Provides an excellent habitat for soil microbes to live in, due to bio-chars porous and granular structure. These soil microbes are essential for healthy plant roots.
  2. Encourages important fungal growth in soil, which has numerous benefits.
  3. Holds nutrients and fertilizers in the soil, so that leaching due to rain, etc. is greatly reduced.
  4. Pulls moisture into the soil, so that more rainwater is pulled below surface of the soil, and less irrigation is required.

Studies of bio-char have revealed several important aspects to understand:

  • Bio-char should be pre-conditioned with water, nutrients, microbes, fungus, etc. before use in soil.
    • Conditioning the bio-char can easily be done by mixing the bio-char into compost and leaving it for some time, or by soaking the bio-char with water and nutrients, such as urine or “compost tea”.
    • If bio-char is not conditioned, then it tends to absorb nutrients from the soil, and then there would be no increase in productivity from that soil in the first year or two. Some unconditioned bio-chars also have high pH, so that’s another reason to condition the bio-char before adding it to soil.
  • Bio-char can help bring healthy microbe and fungal populations back to soils in weeks, rather than months or years.
    • Healthy soil life is immensely important and not thoroughly understood.

2. Produce Vermi-Compost:

Organic waste, from crops, toilets, and food preparation, can be quickly and efficiently composted with earth worms.  Worms produce the best natural fertilizer: vermi-compost is often called ‘Black Gold’.  The benefits of worm-composting are as follows:

  1. Produces an environmentally-friendly, rich fertilizer for little to no cost.
  2. Quickly converts waste into a valuable product.
  3. Breaks down waste into compost with little or no smell, due to the worms natural movement aerating the pile of waste. In addition, the worms produce a natural deodorizer on their skin.
  4. Provides safe and effective sewage treatment, as an important part of toilets and sewage treatment plants. See Health:Toilets.
  5. Creates an excellent soil amendment, when combined with Bio-Char, above.

 Vermi-compost is used:

  • for improving soil in farms and orchards
  • in potted plant soil
  • in home gardens
  • for generating income, through the compost or included with potted plants.

3. Workshops for Scythe use:

Scythes are used for cutting plants and crops close to the ground.  Scythes have a curved sharp blade on a long handle.  The handle is held in two hands, while one is standing up.  The whole torso is rotated, so that the scythe swings in a big arc and skims across the ground.  The scythe blade slices through the bottoms of rice, wheat, straw, grass, hay, and most standing crops.  The scythe can also be used to cut weeds, small shrubs, etc. 

The benefits of scythes are as follows:

  1. Ergonomic: Compared to cutting crops with sickles, scythes are used standing up, with relatively effortless strokes.
  2. Faster: each stroke of the scythe cuts more than 10 or 20 times the amount cut by the sickle stroke. So a field that would take one person five days to harvest with a sickle, would take about half a day for a person with a sharp scythe.
  3. Affordable: the scythe can pay for itself within one harvest.
  4. Inexpensive: compared to tractors and harvesting machinery. Scythes are especially cost-effective for small farms.

Scythes are great for:

  • Mowing and weeding wet fields that machinery cannot drive on.
  • Cutting crops very close to the ground, so that burning the straw that might remain standing in the field is not necessary.
    • This burning of straw produces a lot of air pollution, and should be avoided.
    • We teach people to use straw and clay-rich soil to build with cob. Homes, ovens, etc. can be built from cob with easy and fun training.
  • Cost-effective and environmentally-friendly harvesting of rice, wheat, hay, etc.

Our one-day Scythe workshops include:

  • Introduction to the scythe and its parts.
  • How to hold the scythe comfortably.
  • How to turn the body and keep the scythe close to the ground, without digging the blade tip into the soil.
  • How to peen and sharpen the blade’s cutting edge, for optimum cutting efficiency.

4. Train people to build Domes and Tunnels:

Domes and Tunnels are simple and strong structures.  They can be used to make affordable shade structures or greenhouses.  Domes are round, as in half of a ball or sphere.  Tunnels are half of a cylinder, like a train tunnel.

There are many benefits in building Domes and Tunnels:

  1. They can be built quickly.
  2. The structures can be made from many different materials, such as bamboo, wooden sticks, metal tubes, or plastic pipe.
  3. They can cover a large areas with light-weight structures.
  4. Some domes and tunnels can, if desired, be quickly raised, lowered and moved many times.

We focus on training people to build appropriate size structures for their farms and gardens, so that:

  • They can build and maintain the dome or tunnel themselves.
  • They can afford the structure, and quickly get a benefit from it.
  • They can build domes and tunnels for others, and get goodwill or even some income.

One of the training workshops that we really enjoy is building domes and tunnels.  These simple structures are useful in many ways:

  1. Create shade, for plants or outdoor seating.
  2. Keep insects away from plants.
  3. Keep plants warm at night, i.e. simple greenhouses.  

We teach people how to design and build their own domes and tunnels, through several simple steps:

  • Selecting and cutting poles (bamboo, PVC pipes – UV protected is best, etc.)
  • Learning about methods of connecting the poles
  • Connecting the poles
  • Cross-bracing and stiffening the structure
  • Attaching shade cloth, mesh, or plastic sheets.

NOTE – These workshops are a great foundation for the skills needed to build water distillations tents to purify water for drinking.  Click here to read more about creating clean drinking water with distillation tents.

5. Train people in No-Till techniques:

Recent studies into farming without ploughing or tilling the soil have been discovering new and age-old techniques for improving soil quality and reducing erosion.  Ploughing soil kills a lot of its essential microbial and fungal life, and can enable significant erosion of the top soil.  Simpler techniques, that can work with Nature instead of against it, can provide better crop yields at lower cost, by eliminating the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and by reducing the need for irrigation water.

We focus on teaching some basic and easy No-Till principles:

  1. Use organic mulch, such as compost and/or straw, to kill weeds, to retain soil moisture and to keep the soil cooler.
  2. Plant with clay seed balls, instead of tilling and sowing seeds.
    • The clay around the seeds prevents rodents and birds from eating the seed.
    • Scattering seed balls is easier than plowing and planting.
    • The micro-organisms and macro-organisms that are essential to plant roots will thrive in the soil if the fields are not ploughed.
  3. Grow nitrogen fixing crops, etc. to improve soil quality naturally.
    • Cut these crops, with a Scythe (see above), for example, and let them keep the soil shaded (as a mulch), so it stays cool and moist, which is also beneficial for the life in the soil.
  4. Attract beneficial insects.
  5. Rotate and mix crops to:
    • Loosen soil if necesasary, with deep-growing root vegetables, such as carrots.
    • Reduce weeds and harmful insects.
  6. Manage rainwater: Dig swales, build small stone walls or dams, and bury organic waste in ditches, to reduce erosion and capture rainwater into the ground, in fields and in hills above the fields.

6. Train people in Permaculture Techniques:

Beacon AHEAD Institute conducts simple permaculture training sessions for farmers and vegetable gardeners.  Permaculture is a holistic design approach to growing food.  The aim is to minimize effort, improve the environment and soil, and maximize benefits such as food, water, shelter, etc.

We show ways to design better systems, through the following simple components:

  • Gather and store rain water using swales (long, level ditches), mulches and bio-char.
  • Compost plant waste, create simple aquaponic systems, and incorporate natural nutrients into the soil in the easy ways.
  • Stack plants vertically in space and overlapping in time, to get more yield from the same space.

In the training workshops, people learn how to see their farm or garden as a collection of interconnected systems, that can work well together.  For example, the waste from one system can be a wonderful input for another system.

By combining design thinking with very important food growing, we can get more food and other benefits, with less effort and lower costs.

Bringing Back Life into the Soil

Microbial and fungal life in soil are incredibly important for growing food. The microbes and fungus in the soil are the bridge between natural nutrients and plant roots. In addition, tiny creatures such as earthworms help to break down organic matter into smaller pieces, and they aerate and loosen the soil as they burrow. Keeping soil covered with plants, straw or mulch is important for keeping these organisms cool and moist. Not ploughing or tilling the soil also helps these organisms to survive.

We train farmers and gardeners to work with Nature: to use natural predator insects instead of pesticides, to make compost with biochar instead of buying chemical fertilizers, to keep the soil covered and shaded, etc. As a result, farmers work less hard, spend less money, and produce more nutritious food.

We are interested in researching and developing no-till, organic farming methods to:

  • Improve soil health;
  • Reverse soil erosion and degradation; and
  • Eliminate the need for chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.