Integrated Agriculture

I recently read this article about integrated agriculture being practiced on small farms in Vietnam. The program they use is so fascinating; I find myself thinking about it often. In a nutshell, it is living & farming without waste. For example, grass that grows along the edge of a rice field is fed to cows. The cow manure is not thrown away, it is used to raise earthworms and even to power a methane gas cook stove. The earthworms are used to feed the chickens, and all the manure from all animals eventually goes back to be used as fertilizer in the fields & gardens. Kitchen & garden scraps are used for chicken feed and compost. These are just some of the examples. It is rather like the system that Mother Nature uses. She doesn't ship in supplies from other continents. Nor does she ship garbage out to the dump; every element of life has a purpose and can be used for something.

Now every time I throw something in the garbage, I look at it and think how it could be useful in some way. (Regrettably, life on an island in Alaska is largely without recycling options.) We already save all paper & cardboard to use as fire starter in our wood stove. Glass bottles & jars are useful for storing food & other items, but there comes a point when enough is enough and I have to throw some away! Plastic containers can also have a place, but I don't like them as well and usually just toss them. (I should probably avoid altogether buying food in plastic containers, but then my options are so limited.) Food scraps should of course go to compost, but I am still searching for the perfect barrel to make my own rotating composter (my attempt last winter to save food scraps in a bucket was a miserable failure, too much rain). What other useful things do we throw away? Old clothes & scraps of fabric too small to use also end up in the garbage can. In the old days, they saved pieces of cotton & string to make candle wicks. Cotton & other natural fibers can also go in the compost pile or the burn box.

What about the things that grow in our yard or nearby forests? Do we take advantage of the bounty of nature, or do we ignore the treasures right under our noses and rely on packaged salad mixes from the store? I took the advice of my sister-in-law and went out to harvest some of the dandelion greens that grow in my yard. They make a very healthful addition to salads. You can also make dandelion fritters & dandelion lemonade. We've also been eating the fiddlehead ferns that grow abundantly in our yard, very tasty! While I was outside yesterday gathering greens, I saw the hot air from the dryer exhaust escaping to the great outdoors. It made me feel momentarily guilty, first of all because I haven't installed my clothesline yet. Secondly, I thought, there must be some way to harness that wasted energy of the hot air from the dryer! If farmers in Vietnam can use the methane gas from cow manure to power their cookstove, what's my excuse?

Come back to my blog soon to see my next entry: how I used "garbage" around my house to make a mattress for my toddler!