[Music]
all right hello everybody my name is
Sean I have a biointensive farm here in
Warren County been doing it for three
years which I think he said that during
the introduction but you have the pretty
much to talk today is gonna be on
agriculture particularly this can be
more on the small skill in but you know
we’re talking about bridges so there
will be some talk about large scale or
agriculture as well so so yeah let’s
gonna start with the question how
important is agriculture and as you can
tell from this depiction you know it’s
very important we wouldn’t be here
wouldn’t have civilization without
agriculture for sure but certainly
wouldn’t have your arts or humanities
your sciences probably not written
language currency all that without
agriculture so the next question I’m
going to present is what happens if all
that if the underpinnings of agriculture
are you know compromised and there is a
good example of that and it is the
island of Cuba after the Cuban Missile
Crisis they had it bar goes put on them
and in into the 90s the once the Soviet
bloc collapsed that really put a huge
damper on Cuba just all around
economically but definitely
agriculturally and from the agricultural
aspect you know there was no fuel no
chemical fertilizers no chemical
pesticides anything like new tractors
parts for new tractors all that stuff
was very hard to acquire and in just
they were getting a lot of their food
imported from the soviet bloc up to
eighty percent of their food
was coming from the Soviet bloc so so
what do they do about it so we’re gonna
Ponte goes you can look it up on the
internet it’s very interesting but
pretty much what they did is they move
to organic farming very large-scale
organic farming in an urban setting and
and I’ll be going over some of those
techniques a little bit later as to what
they actually did because I actually do
a lot of that on my farm as well but uh
so yeah they have over 7,000 of them now
and it’s the largest program you know
sustainable urban agricultural program
in the world from what I understand and
this is pretty remarkable as well eight
percent of their land is providing 90
percent of their fruits and vegetables
in Havana so that’s that’s ridiculous
and this is another thing which is
because it’s subsidized but their
organic produce is actually cheaper than
the conventional produce and a lot of
that comes from the subsidization as
well but they also grow it and it’s
right there like there’s no packaging
their transport I mean it’s just all
right there you come and get it so say
I’m gonna segue into kind of how I do my
growing I follow this kind of loosely
and a lot of these same concepts are
used in Cuba as well but uh the the type
of Agriculture that I use is called bio
intensive growing and it’s pioneer I get
a guy named John Jevons in California
he’s got he’s got a huge farm out in
California and what’s so nice or what’s
so awesome about this way of producing
is you can get a lot of production in a
small amount of area so you can get two
to four times more production per unit
of area so I mean that’s pretty
remarkable and the next one you know 70
you can get up to
he claims he gets up to 66 to 90% less
water consumption
per pound and you can replenish the soil
very quickly because you’re using
techniques of composting pretty much
everything that you grow and you also
grow crops for the sake of only
composting so not necessarily all
economically beneficial crops so and the
inner planting which I’ll go over a
little bit later what that is is pretty
much your planting other crops with
other crops and certain ones have
certain benefits to one another so and
he uses a closed system approach I try
to use that as much as I can but I bring
in external inputs such as compost and
manure and he’s open pollinated
varieties so you can do seed collections
which I don’t do the seed collection but
so yeah these are a couple of farms that
are on the internet they’re pretty
prominent prominent that you use these
techniques I would recommend checking
some of these guys out I mean they have
some pretty cool stuff up there see
here’s one picture of the farm what’s so
unique about this type of growing is
that there’s a lot of innovation and a
lot of what I call hacky a lot of
different techniques used in a
small-scale growing now currently I do
use this I use the bad system as opposed
to rows and if you can look from the
depiction to the far left that is a bed
that’s got five rows of carrots and
compared to your conventional row
planting you’re you’re really planting a
lot of stuff in a smaller area so about
two and a half to three times less areas
needed to grow if you’re using these
beds and the other cool thing is the
hexagonal planting pattern is something
that is used to pack in even more plants
into a small area and as you can tell
there’s a few pictures of how the
hexagon is used in nature and I don’t
know why there’s a nut up there because
that’s not in nature but
but yeah you can say yeah here’s here’s
an example of depiction right here say
if you’re just doing the straight line
planting if you had seven rows 10 plants
per row you’re going to get 70 plants if
you look at this stagger planting or
this hexagonal planting pattern you’re
getting up to
I think it’s 22% more plants in an area
and there’s added benefits to that as
well when you plant your plants closer
together you get sort of a canopy that
forms and get kind of a microclimate
that forms up under your plants this
helps to suppress weed growth and it
helps to also retain your water so
that’s how you can use 66 percent less
water doing these growing tech inks and
so yeah here’s companion planting pretty
much this is an example this is one that
I used very early on I don’t do this
type of intricate planning anymore if
you look in the middle I’ve got Tomatoes
planted and all on the outside I’ve got
nasturtiums and basil and marigolds
planted and what all of these plants do
is they have added benefits of keeping
nematodes away attracting pollinators
keeping other pests away and this is a
technique that I use is called weed
occult ation and what this does is
pretty simple you put a tarp on the
ground and here’s what’s so awesome
about it and say if you water it before
you put the tarp on the ground and what
the tarp does is it stimulates the
germination of weed seeds and once they
emerge there’s no life for them so they
die and what you’re trying to do with
this method is to create sort of a stale
seed bed so you can plant your crops in
it and worry about you don’t have to
worry about weeds as much so this is
another another technique too once you
pull up the tarp you can come through
with what they call a flame wheter and
put the flame weed or does is it just
you’re literally burning the weeds so
and you’re also
burning some of the seeds that are very
at the very top maybe eighth of an inch
of soil so this is the big like if I
were to say what is the tool that has
revolutionized small-scale growing the
most and I would say it’s the broad fork
the reason why is pretty much in
conventional agriculture you we have
been working the land so long that you
get this formation of a hard pan and
what the broad fork does is the broad
fork actually breaks through this hard
pan and if you can see through this
example right here the hard pan is on
the left looks like it’s about I don’t
know six centimeters that’s a really bad
hard pan and the one to the right the
hard pans have been broken so you’re
getting a whole lot more root growth and
here is me this is not easy work working
the broad fork but this is me working
the broad fork and breaking the hard pan
getting ready for uh you know getting
ready for the next rotation so this is
another picture yeah it’s pretty it’s a
beast no why it’s pretty heavy I got
that fabricated here by a welder so and
precision Cedars
so these I’ve got two of them here the
one on the right is an earth way the one
on the left is is a Jiang cedar and
these Cedars are used pretty much evenly
spaced your seeds you don’t have to go
and you know individually put them in
the ground they make things a whole lot
more efficient for sure and BCS tractor
which is I don’t have one of these but I
definitely want one
they are two-wheel tractors that work
essentially like a four-wheel tractor
they have a PTO on the back so you can
hook up tillers hairos even snow blowers
I mean log splitters all sorts of stuff
and I don’t know that I thought this was
kind of interesting I don’t have one of
these but this is one of those hacks
that I was talking about so there is a
that with a lot of these small small
scale growers have been doing has been
doing these conversions from washing
machines to a salad spinner pretty much
you just set it up to where its own spin
cycle and you you know they put the
food-safe baskets in there and from what
I understand this particular one you can
buy is actually gap certified so you can
use this on a farm if you have your gap
certification in its compliance the
greens harvester was so interesting
about this thing really is that you can
get a lot of cutting done in a very
short amount of time is it cutting
greens that takes a long time so I don’t
have one of these I really really want
one of these things but essentially you
just hook up like a drill to it and it
it has a little someone’s like those
things that drive your car and the
automatic car washers and it slings them
up there and there’s a blade on the
front it’s two blades that cut it and it
puts catches it all in a bag so and this
I felt like I had to put this in here
talking about the cool by the way a cool
by it works is you can have
refrigeration very very cheap by not
having to buy a commercial compressor
for your refrigeration you can just use
a regular air conditioner from lowe’s
wherever you want to go and you hook up
one of these cool bot units to it and
essentially what it does is it takes
over the temperature functioning of the
of the air conditioning unit so you can
cool it down to whatever temperature
want so the Raspberry Pi I actually
brought this in today to take so y’all
can see how small this thing is but
what’s so interesting really about this
thing is that up at the very top you
have
you can barely see it’s called GPIO
header that’s the the part of the unit
that actually can interact with the
world so you can receive inputs and
outputs from it so you can automate a
greenhouse with it you know you can
automate your sprinkler systems with it
and these chips cost about $20 and
they’re literally about the size of a
beeper so they can do a lot of things
you can actually run Linux on it you can
do multitude of other things but there
are a few examples I’ve seen on the
Internet of green houses that have been
fully automated using Raspberry Pi units
and I feel like I couldn’t do this talk
without at least mentioning this this
isn’t really a feasible way of doing
your large-scale growing but if you have
facebook you’ve probably seen the farm
bot it is a fully automated gardening
system it plants the seeds waters the
seeds pulls the weeds you know it’s
pretty amazing and very expensive but
they but the nice thing about this is
that it is open source you can go on the
internet and it’s extensible so you can
make it as long or as big as you want to
which leads us into large-scale growing
some of the techniques that they’re
using there so cover cropping that’s
become very popular this helps to reduce
erosion and also to put nitrogen back in
the soil and this is a crimson clover
it’s a nitrogen fixating cover crop so
has a unique ability to put nitrogen in
the soil while you’re growing and the
no-till omit that method is being used
more and more I’d say more so in the
Midwest but pretty much swayed no-till
works is you don’t tear up the tear up
the soil you you grow and you like let’s
say you’re doing a cover crop right here
with this roller crimper as roller
crimper goes through the little chevron
pattern crimper crimper right there will
crimp it all off right there at the
ground level and you can come right
through and you can do
plant the next thing and that you’re
using the cover crop as a mulch to
prevent weeds then the flail mower it’s
the way the flail mower works is it just
pretty much takes all of the plant
material and just just cuts the crap out
of it just turns it into just I mean
it’s literally like if you can look at
the picture you can tell that it’s
cutting some pretty tall grass all the
way down now GM plants they seem to be
kind of the big bad wolf these days but
um this is a picture of a genetically
modified tobacco plant that has a
bioluminescence gene put into it this is
one of the first GM plants that I can
remember learning about when I was in
school one of the things that need to be
done I think with the GM planting is the
refuge cropping you don’t see this as
much pretty much what you do is you put
regular regular crop in and the other
part being your GM plants and it allows
insects to go into the refuge crop and
survive while the ones that are being
affected by BT don’t so when they
reproduce you’re going to still get less
resistant moths or in this example say
Golden Rice this is probably the big one
I would say in terms of something that’s
really unique about GM plants so Golden
Rice could be when I’m considered the
iodized salt of the 21st century so what
it does is it they have it’s genetically
modified to produce vitamin A and in
these certain countries right here as
you can tell they don’t have they have
clinical problems with vitamin A so this
causes vision problems here are some of
the problems that agriculture is facing
you know 80% of consumptive water is
used in agriculture 25 percent of global
emissions is produced in agriculture you
have superbugs many other things
as well and possible problems that could
be solved so some of these techniques
that whenever you could solve the water
consumption agricultural runoff weed and
pest problems without the use of so much
of these chemicals that we use now
without turn the land up as much as we
do so and this is my favorite picture
from the farm me with my sunflowers so
thank you guys so much for listening
[Applause]
[Music]
all right hello everybody my name is
Sean I have a biointensive farm here in
Warren County been doing it for three
years which I think he said that during
the introduction but you have the pretty
much to talk today is gonna be on
agriculture particularly this can be
more on the small skill in but you know
we’re talking about bridges so there
will be some talk about large scale or
agriculture as well so so yeah let’s
gonna start with the question how
important is agriculture and as you can
tell from this depiction you know it’s
very important we wouldn’t be here
wouldn’t have civilization without
agriculture for sure but certainly
wouldn’t have your arts or humanities
your sciences probably not written
language currency all that without
agriculture so the next question I’m
going to present is what happens if all
that if the underpinnings of agriculture
are you know compromised and there is a
good example of that and it is the
island of Cuba after the Cuban Missile
Crisis they had it bar goes put on them
and in into the 90s the once the Soviet
bloc collapsed that really put a huge
damper on Cuba just all around
economically but definitely
agriculturally and from the agricultural
aspect you know there was no fuel no
chemical fertilizers no chemical
pesticides anything like new tractors
parts for new tractors all that stuff
was very hard to acquire and in just
they were getting a lot of their food
imported from the soviet bloc up to
eighty percent of their food
was coming from the Soviet bloc so so
what do they do about it so we’re gonna
Ponte goes you can look it up on the
internet it’s very interesting but
pretty much what they did is they move
to organic farming very large-scale
organic farming in an urban setting and
and I’ll be going over some of those
techniques a little bit later as to what
they actually did because I actually do
a lot of that on my farm as well but uh
so yeah they have over 7,000 of them now
and it’s the largest program you know
sustainable urban agricultural program
in the world from what I understand and
this is pretty remarkable as well eight
percent of their land is providing 90
percent of their fruits and vegetables
in Havana so that’s that’s ridiculous
and this is another thing which is
because it’s subsidized but their
organic produce is actually cheaper than
the conventional produce and a lot of
that comes from the subsidization as
well but they also grow it and it’s
right there like there’s no packaging
their transport I mean it’s just all
right there you come and get it so say
I’m gonna segue into kind of how I do my
growing I follow this kind of loosely
and a lot of these same concepts are
used in Cuba as well but uh the the type
of Agriculture that I use is called bio
intensive growing and it’s pioneer I get
a guy named John Jevons in California
he’s got he’s got a huge farm out in
California and what’s so nice or what’s
so awesome about this way of producing
is you can get a lot of production in a
small amount of area so you can get two
to four times more production per unit
of area so I mean that’s pretty
remarkable and the next one you know 70
you can get up to
he claims he gets up to 66 to 90% less
water consumption
per pound and you can replenish the soil
very quickly because you’re using
techniques of composting pretty much
everything that you grow and you also
grow crops for the sake of only
composting so not necessarily all
economically beneficial crops so and the
inner planting which I’ll go over a
little bit later what that is is pretty
much your planting other crops with
other crops and certain ones have
certain benefits to one another so and
he uses a closed system approach I try
to use that as much as I can but I bring
in external inputs such as compost and
manure and he’s open pollinated
varieties so you can do seed collections
which I don’t do the seed collection but
so yeah these are a couple of farms that
are on the internet they’re pretty
prominent prominent that you use these
techniques I would recommend checking
some of these guys out I mean they have
some pretty cool stuff up there see
here’s one picture of the farm what’s so
unique about this type of growing is
that there’s a lot of innovation and a
lot of what I call hacky a lot of
different techniques used in a
small-scale growing now currently I do
use this I use the bad system as opposed
to rows and if you can look from the
depiction to the far left that is a bed
that’s got five rows of carrots and
compared to your conventional row
planting you’re you’re really planting a
lot of stuff in a smaller area so about
two and a half to three times less areas
needed to grow if you’re using these
beds and the other cool thing is the
hexagonal planting pattern is something
that is used to pack in even more plants
into a small area and as you can tell
there’s a few pictures of how the
hexagon is used in nature and I don’t
know why there’s a nut up there because
that’s not in nature but
but yeah you can say yeah here’s here’s
an example of depiction right here say
if you’re just doing the straight line
planting if you had seven rows 10 plants
per row you’re going to get 70 plants if
you look at this stagger planting or
this hexagonal planting pattern you’re
getting up to
I think it’s 22% more plants in an area
and there’s added benefits to that as
well when you plant your plants closer
together you get sort of a canopy that
forms and get kind of a microclimate
that forms up under your plants this
helps to suppress weed growth and it
helps to also retain your water so
that’s how you can use 66 percent less
water doing these growing tech inks and
so yeah here’s companion planting pretty
much this is an example this is one that
I used very early on I don’t do this
type of intricate planning anymore if
you look in the middle I’ve got Tomatoes
planted and all on the outside I’ve got
nasturtiums and basil and marigolds
planted and what all of these plants do
is they have added benefits of keeping
nematodes away attracting pollinators
keeping other pests away and this is a
technique that I use is called weed
occult ation and what this does is
pretty simple you put a tarp on the
ground and here’s what’s so awesome
about it and say if you water it before
you put the tarp on the ground and what
the tarp does is it stimulates the
germination of weed seeds and once they
emerge there’s no life for them so they
die and what you’re trying to do with
this method is to create sort of a stale
seed bed so you can plant your crops in
it and worry about you don’t have to
worry about weeds as much so this is
another another technique too once you
pull up the tarp you can come through
with what they call a flame wheter and
put the flame weed or does is it just
you’re literally burning the weeds so
and you’re also
burning some of the seeds that are very
at the very top maybe eighth of an inch
of soil so this is the big like if I
were to say what is the tool that has
revolutionized small-scale growing the
most and I would say it’s the broad fork
the reason why is pretty much in
conventional agriculture you we have
been working the land so long that you
get this formation of a hard pan and
what the broad fork does is the broad
fork actually breaks through this hard
pan and if you can see through this
example right here the hard pan is on
the left looks like it’s about I don’t
know six centimeters that’s a really bad
hard pan and the one to the right the
hard pans have been broken so you’re
getting a whole lot more root growth and
here is me this is not easy work working
the broad fork but this is me working
the broad fork and breaking the hard pan
getting ready for uh you know getting
ready for the next rotation so this is
another picture yeah it’s pretty it’s a
beast no why it’s pretty heavy I got
that fabricated here by a welder so and
precision Cedars
so these I’ve got two of them here the
one on the right is an earth way the one
on the left is is a Jiang cedar and
these Cedars are used pretty much evenly
spaced your seeds you don’t have to go
and you know individually put them in
the ground they make things a whole lot
more efficient for sure and BCS tractor
which is I don’t have one of these but I
definitely want one
they are two-wheel tractors that work
essentially like a four-wheel tractor
they have a PTO on the back so you can
hook up tillers hairos even snow blowers
I mean log splitters all sorts of stuff
and I don’t know that I thought this was
kind of interesting I don’t have one of
these but this is one of those hacks
that I was talking about so there is a
that with a lot of these small small
scale growers have been doing has been
doing these conversions from washing
machines to a salad spinner pretty much
you just set it up to where its own spin
cycle and you you know they put the
food-safe baskets in there and from what
I understand this particular one you can
buy is actually gap certified so you can
use this on a farm if you have your gap
certification in its compliance the
greens harvester was so interesting
about this thing really is that you can
get a lot of cutting done in a very
short amount of time is it cutting
greens that takes a long time so I don’t
have one of these I really really want
one of these things but essentially you
just hook up like a drill to it and it
it has a little someone’s like those
things that drive your car and the
automatic car washers and it slings them
up there and there’s a blade on the
front it’s two blades that cut it and it
puts catches it all in a bag so and this
I felt like I had to put this in here
talking about the cool by the way a cool
by it works is you can have
refrigeration very very cheap by not
having to buy a commercial compressor
for your refrigeration you can just use
a regular air conditioner from lowe’s
wherever you want to go and you hook up
one of these cool bot units to it and
essentially what it does is it takes
over the temperature functioning of the
of the air conditioning unit so you can
cool it down to whatever temperature
want so the Raspberry Pi I actually
brought this in today to take so y’all
can see how small this thing is but
what’s so interesting really about this
thing is that up at the very top you
have
you can barely see it’s called GPIO
header that’s the the part of the unit
that actually can interact with the
world so you can receive inputs and
outputs from it so you can automate a
greenhouse with it you know you can
automate your sprinkler systems with it
and these chips cost about $20 and
they’re literally about the size of a
beeper so they can do a lot of things
you can actually run Linux on it you can
do multitude of other things but there
are a few examples I’ve seen on the
Internet of green houses that have been
fully automated using Raspberry Pi units
and I feel like I couldn’t do this talk
without at least mentioning this this
isn’t really a feasible way of doing
your large-scale growing but if you have
facebook you’ve probably seen the farm
bot it is a fully automated gardening
system it plants the seeds waters the
seeds pulls the weeds you know it’s
pretty amazing and very expensive but
they but the nice thing about this is
that it is open source you can go on the
internet and it’s extensible so you can
make it as long or as big as you want to
which leads us into large-scale growing
some of the techniques that they’re
using there so cover cropping that’s
become very popular this helps to reduce
erosion and also to put nitrogen back in
the soil and this is a crimson clover
it’s a nitrogen fixating cover crop so
has a unique ability to put nitrogen in
the soil while you’re growing and the
no-till omit that method is being used
more and more I’d say more so in the
Midwest but pretty much swayed no-till
works is you don’t tear up the tear up
the soil you you grow and you like let’s
say you’re doing a cover crop right here
with this roller crimper as roller
crimper goes through the little chevron
pattern crimper crimper right there will
crimp it all off right there at the
ground level and you can come right
through and you can do
plant the next thing and that you’re
using the cover crop as a mulch to
prevent weeds then the flail mower it’s
the way the flail mower works is it just
pretty much takes all of the plant
material and just just cuts the crap out
of it just turns it into just I mean
it’s literally like if you can look at
the picture you can tell that it’s
cutting some pretty tall grass all the
way down now GM plants they seem to be
kind of the big bad wolf these days but
um this is a picture of a genetically
modified tobacco plant that has a
bioluminescence gene put into it this is
one of the first GM plants that I can
remember learning about when I was in
school one of the things that need to be
done I think with the GM planting is the
refuge cropping you don’t see this as
much pretty much what you do is you put
regular regular crop in and the other
part being your GM plants and it allows
insects to go into the refuge crop and
survive while the ones that are being
affected by BT don’t so when they
reproduce you’re going to still get less
resistant moths or in this example say
Golden Rice this is probably the big one
I would say in terms of something that’s
really unique about GM plants so Golden
Rice could be when I’m considered the
iodized salt of the 21st century so what
it does is it they have it’s genetically
modified to produce vitamin A and in
these certain countries right here as
you can tell they don’t have they have
clinical problems with vitamin A so this
causes vision problems here are some of
the problems that agriculture is facing
you know 80% of consumptive water is
used in agriculture 25 percent of global
emissions is produced in agriculture you
have superbugs many other things
as well and possible problems that could
be solved so some of these techniques
that whenever you could solve the water
consumption agricultural runoff weed and
pest problems without the use of so much
of these chemicals that we use now
without turn the land up as much as we
do so and this is my favorite picture
from the farm me with my sunflowers so
thank you guys so much for listening
[Applause]
[Music]
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