Integrated Farming

[The Future]

To discuss the mind bending efficiency and economic potential of the integrated micro farm per the example Blume delivers in Chapter 12...

[boothillfarm]

Good topic. Blume's vision of such a tightly integrated micro-farm makes my head spin just thinking about trying to coordinate all the moving parts. (The only parallel would be Joel Salatin's operations at Polyface Farms.) I guess the smart thing is just start with something, build with flexibility in mind, and add pieces as you figure them out.

I'd be curious to see how much capital is bound up as such an operation takes shape.

[Randy]

We have just started - that's the thing. If you look at it and try to do it all at once, you get stuck in the details... the first step is to build / buy a still!

The rest of the plans fall into place.... get your vehicle converted and set up feedstock sources with local farmers. Badda bing!

[The Future]

When you say we have just started - who just started what?

I think I will take David's advice and start small to scale up later. It might be blasphemy to say this here but the one component I may skip is the fermentation...

I'll work out the details when my brain can slow down a bit...I actually lost sleep considering the possibilities after I read this portion of the book....

Maybe farm / greenhouse / methane digester / earthworms will be the fit for me. Does anyone know of small scale off the shelf methane digesters? The smallest ones I see are in the range of 1 ton per week and I don't yet have pricing back from the manufacturer...

[The Future]

Does Joel detail this in his You Can Farm book? I have it in my stack of 25 "books to get to" and needless to say I haven't gotten to it yet. I am still reading ACBAG among a few other books concurrently.

The concept of zero waste is not new to me. I visited and lived at Songhai Center for 10 days in 2000 (http://www.songhai.org/songhai_en/) and they have been doing great things there. Shower water, toilet waste - > biomass - > methane, fertlizer, irrigation water - -> electricity, cooking gas, fish ponds etc...

The kicker that made Chapter 12 mind bending was the numbers, as in $. That multiple components can come in at equal or even more than you primary product is amazing. Or put another way, current convention is amazingly wasteful.

With that said, I am not 100% clear on the basis for the micro model described there. That is, he states the initial input will come from 23 acres of corn field and will be reduced later. So we have a woodlot, 23 acres of cornfield and 9000 sq feet of greenhouses plus space for the spirulina, two 32,000 gallon fish tanks, methan digestion of and the still (did I miss anything?).

That is a lot of space and a lot of operation. So in that sense, the $484,000 gross income is not that impressive in retrospect if my understanding of this is correct.

Also I appreciate that within the massive scale of production going on in the world this plan can be considered 'Micro' but for me personally, a 25 acre operation would be huge. I am keen to create a functional design on an even smaller scale - say 1-2 acres or perhaps homebased and further to verify the possibilities without the external inputs. I.e. What can be done with the 9000 sq ft greenhouses without a 23 acre cornfield to feed them extra CO2 etc.

[boothillfarm]

I think when you think of it as (cash returns on sales of alcohol/veggies/fish, etc.) divided by the (cash outlay over a couple years of learning curve) that return on assets or capital would be a very attractive use of capital.

But it takes time & experience to get there. High returns = high risk, especially when I don't know what I'm doing. It all starts with a small still, and adds up from there.

Yep, starting with 23 acres, and digesters, and hammer mills, and pumps etc, is probably a $250k operation. But a $480k gross (50% net) is still mighty stout goal to work towards. Especially with the stock market & bond markets doing nothing.

Personally, I'm visioning a still and hoop house creep feeder for livestock for the DDGS, plus greenhouses for the CO2 and my upper-midwest climate. Waste by-products can be leveraged with experience. : - )

Also, it'd be handy to get the numbers for an alcohol fueled cogenerator for heat, especially the output BTUs & fuel comsumption for imported used Japanese engines. (some use for all that EtOH.)

[The Future]

What is EtOH? And if your $250k operation is indeed a micro farm, I am renaming mine a nano farm. In fact I was just about to patent that concept when a quick google search reveal it has been used a least 7 unique times on the internet already...Also what is a creep feeder? Finally don't 4get my query on Joel Salatin...

If the outlay is roughly correct and you amortize it over 10 years, not including the interest on any loans, you would be looking at about 65% net ROI. And a lot of work. What time scale so you have to get started (small)?

[boothillfarm]

EtOH = ethanol.

Here's a pic of a creep feeder.
http://www.newfarm.org/depts/pig_page/new_farm_archives/chris_shirl...

The utility of the creep feeder is that it prevents animals from walking in and soiling their feed. This increases palatability and cuts pathogen transmission.

I missed your query on Joel Salatin. Can you repeat it? :-)

[The Future]

Does Joel detail integrated micro-farming in his You Can Farm book?

[boothillfarm]

Yes. There's lots of good stuff in You Can Farm. How to start, and what to avoid doing. For folks starting out he suggests starting with pastured poultry, since the cash flow turn-around is good. Plus everyone loves chicken.

Beef cattle are on the pasture much of the year, in tightly controlled grazing paddocks. (Taking advantage of the foliage growth and root-pulse pattern described in the other post.) The mobile hen house follows the cattle around, but after a two day delay. The hens demolish the cow pies, looking for fly larvae. Hens get 30% of their feed from the pasture and all their protein. Farmer gets premium priced eggs. Turkeys and broiler chickens can also be used.

When the beef cattle can't be pastured due to wet weather or dormant forage, they are fed hay (creep feeder) in an open shed. Ordinarily this concentration of cattle would stink to high heaven, but Salatins add wood chips, peanut hulls, pine bark shavings, anything CARBON to the bedding area to absorb and tie down all that nitrogen and nutrients coming out the business end of the beef cow and her miracle-cyclotron-of-a-rumen. This deep composting bedding keeps the cattle dry and warm.

The kicker is they add corn to the bedding as it goes on. Seems like a waste of feed, right? Cows won't go after the corn; in the spring the cows are out back onto pasture and hogs are released on the 4' thick manure pack. The corn has fermented in the back, the hogs use that shovel of a snout to whip through the bedding like an egg beater. Beats using a diesel power to turn the compost, plus the hogs have a heck of a retirement plan! Compost is then used to improve the market garden area, plus the pastures.

Salatins have a lot of woods, and they turn the hogs into the woods with controlled paddocks. Months ahead of the hogs they will plant forages (zucchini, hand-sown corn, etc.) to supplement what the hogs can forage in the forest.

Salatins manage-harvest the wood for lumber for sale and use on the farm; trimmings are used for wood chipping, or deliberately piled high to make wildlife condos to feed the foxes in the woods instead of the foxes enjoying chicken dinners.

Chickens are housed over winter in hoop houses, along with rabbit cages suspended from the ceiling. Chickens scratch through the rabbits manure and dropped feed. Deep carbonaceous bedding keeps the hoop house clean and fresh. Chickens get their protein from the bugs and critters in the bedding. Piglets can be used in that house as well to keep things stirred up. (Bigger pigs like chicken.) The hoop houses then become market garden spaces in the early spring.

Salatin's model, to me, seems not nearly as complex as ACBAG, but probably because I've spent more time on farms than distilleries with fish ponds. But we'll start with baby steps.

Our garden group will be watching the Salatin DVD. I'll post more details as they are revealed. (BTW, that link in the post above with the pic of the creep feeder, also has a good description of the manure operations.)

[boothillfarm]

As a separate reply, I'd also recommend the works of Gene Logsdon, the Ohio agrarian. His scale is smaller than Salatins, but his emphasis is also pasture and multiple crops and animals.

[The Future]

Thank you. After I finish Mollison's Permaculture, I'll jump into Salatin. I'm on a nano scale by comparision..Because I am vegan I am working on a model without animals that will be consumed. Worms and other bugs (do you know what a piggly wiggly is?) for sure (efficient). Maybe fish (for fishmeal or for sale) but even that is a longshot.

[The Future]

It is my understanding that in open air, compost will off gas methane and CO2. Does anyone know what happens to the methane if compost is buried in soil to decompose? I have read (somewhere) that the bulk of the CO2 becomes integrated into the soil structure...