How We Can Help Nature Build Resiliency On Our Properties
A spiders web does not only indicate the presence of life in your soil, it can also be used as a model of web building and interconectedness.
Nature does not work in straight lines, but rather uses convoluted, interconnected webs to ensure a resilient system. This means that if something in the web fails, others will take up the slack. The permaculture principles observe this, and are a great modality for adding this resiliency to our own systems.
When designing a farm plan, think about the interconectedness of all the components stacking enterprises to build reliliancy. Waste for one is a valuable reource for another.
When we sit down to design our farms, we need to look at the needs and yields of all of the individual parts of the farm system. We have been trained by the post industrial, cheap energy driven paradigm to think linearly as our consumable commodities move in, straight as an arrow lines, from source to sink.
Vast amounts of single use consumer products are produced (source), shipped round the world, only to end up in landfill somewhere (sink).
Let me explain this. We produce a commodity (from sources like natural resources), use it for a bit and then when we no longer have need for it (often without thinking twice), send it to a landfill (sink) as waste. Waste is a system depleting, human construct and in nature there is no waste, hence this efficiency factor builds increasingly abundant, resilient and complex relationships within these webs. In a healthy and complex ecosystem, what is waste for one is ALWAYS a resource for many others and thus the web construction begins. This system goes into an upward spiral and becomes increasingly stronger and healthier gaining more and more resources. There is simply NO garbage!
Closing loops. Here chickens in a garden feed on bugs, compost and food scraps and in return provide us with fertilizer for growing new vegitables, eggs and meat.
Let us explore this in yet a little more detail. We start with a garden. We can nurture this garden with soft rainwater that we have perhaps intercepted and captured off a rooftop, instead of quickly diverting it off the property as runoff. We fertilize this garden with compost. The compost contains food scraps from the garden, bedding and manure from our farm such as chickens, horses etc. This “waste product” now becomes a valuable resource as it provides food for the microbes that rely on it for their existence. In exchange, these microbes build our soils water holding sponges as they feed on these materials, cycling all the valuable nutrients back into the soil and giving it back in a plant available form, nourishing your veggies and the other foods we grow for ourselves and our animals. This starts a closed circle, not the straight line chain, as in our industrial system of linear, resource consumption. It holds onto resources, reincorporating them to increasingly shore up and build the system, instead of permanently losing them to an off farm sink.
Sheep and goats can be used to enhance your systems complexity and resiliancy. They are adept at grazing difficult terrain and will often eat plants that are not palatable to the horses and help to break parasite cycles. Not only does this reduce mowing and weed management, they inturn can provide an extra income stream by supplying offspring, fiber, meat and dairy . Not to mention thay can be great companionship and enlessly entertaining.
To further flesh out this idea, let’s perhaps now add chickens to this farm web. They love your food scraps (your waste), go through your manure and compost eating grubs, bugs etc, scratch, loosen and fertilize your soils, eat pests and parasites, helping to break their lifecycles in your yard, and in exchange produce eggs, meat and endless entertainment. Hopefully now you can see how a thriving web is taking shape. The more complex your ecosystem (web connections) the stronger it becomes. You can see how this approach begins to build nutrient cycling, reduce parasite pressures and so much more. As complexity is built, should a piece fail, the system is resilient to collapse as there is a web to fill in, providing checks and balances, unlike the destruction caused by the removal of a link in a linear chain.
The more circular systems, complexity and biodiversity you build, the more resiliant your frm ecosystem leading to healthy happy livestock.
Although we do not live in a perfect world and are committed to some extent to produce waste for the landfill, what can you think of to cycle back into your system to help build it? If you start to see everything through the lense of what its needs and yields are, you can easily start to build this complexity. Everything can be connected and has multiple uses in your system making it stronger and to thrive.
