As of Oct. 16th, 2007 the drought affecting the South shows no signs of easing. The rainfall total for the first half of the month is a mere .03 of an inch. We have reduced our planting to seed maintenance plots, growing just enough to keep our seed fresh for the next planting season. Not only can we not grow enough food to feed ourselves, but also we have little to sell to the public, thus reducing our cash flow to a bare minimum. Our water supply has dwindled to an alarmingly low level, and we have run out of land-based options for reversing the decline. With reluctance, we made the decision to pull the emergency lever and put our backup plan into action.

We bill ourselves as a sustainability teaching farm, promoting the idea that we have a lot of the answers to the sustainability challenges facing small farmers and homesteaders. Just as calm seas never make good sailors, ideal weather conditions never make good farmers. The best tool steel is forged with the greatest heat. And so it is with us. We can only effectively teach what we have experienced and learned from working through the vicissitudes of weather related climate anomalies. This demands a willingness to break from conventional and traditional ways of thinking and doing. It requires a flexibility and a commitment to change not readily found in our society.

For years we have been experimenting with and building rainwater collection systems that would help us amplify rainfall amounts on targeted areas. It involves removing water from the general area and selectively placing it in areas we had prioritized, i.e. fruit trees, garden plots, berry patches, our core reforestation area, etc. We have recycled both black water and gray water; in short, we have not wasted a drop! Up until this summer it has worked quite well, and we have continued to add reserve storage volume to our system. The question we are seeking to answer is how well would this system work under the worst-case scenario? Our answer has come this year, and although it has worked well in the early stages of this exceptional drought, the system is nonetheless inadequate under the current conditions.

The drought has also caused secondary effects, which we are attempting to address. Chief among these is, as the land dries out and the vegetation wilts and shrivels, wildlife is increasing drawn to the moist ground and green plants where we are still cultivating. To protect the soil moisture, we rely heavily on mulch. This oasis-like condition we have created has not gone unnoticed. Survival, ours included, is the foremost priority of all the living creatures using this local bioregion. Skunks, possums, raccoons, rats, and deer raid the gardens nightly. Fences, traps and selective killing are not entirely sufficient to protect the oasis from desperate, hungry animals.

For the second time in my life, drought has shown me how vulnerable even a most resourceful and thoughtful farmer really is to local famine. For now we can still find imported food for sale, and we can renew our water supply with a gasoline driven water pump. This is a very tenuous backup plan we are relying on given that oil prices hit $88 a barrel today, and our economy is on the brink of a recession. War with Iran, which the administration seems intent on initiating, could send the whole economy (including our backup plan) into the tank. Never was it a more appropriate time to heed the advice; Teacher-educate yourself!

-leaf

.Next blog posting -10/24/'07

A young woodworker whom I’ve taken under my mentoring wing recently asked me, “What positive benefits can you get from a drought?” That was a good question as we stood and gazed out over our drought stricken farm with the brown grasses, yellowed leafed trees, and puddle sized irrigation ponds. Having resisted the tendency of my melancholy personality to feel victimized and overwhelmed by the worst drought since the dustbowl days, I actually had an informed answer for him.

A drought is an insidious beast, slowly, almost imperceptibly squeezing the life out of the land. In its early stages it may go unnoticed by all but the most observant. It isn’t dramatic like a flood, hurricane, tornado, or blizzard, where reporters quickly flock to the scene of devastation, set up their cameras and spew hyperbole at the viewing public. In fact, even the weather reporters are usually behind the curve as they inanely chat about the wonderful, rain free weather in the seven-day forecast. By the time the general public is aware that the natural rain cycle has gone awry, the drought is usually quite advanced.

As small scale organic, and mostly unmechanized farmers, we are so intimately linked to the land and its plants that we sensed we were in moisture trouble long before it became news. As the drought intensified, we shifted our attention away from other projects and focused on our water collection system. We upgraded and tweaked our system to where a drop of runoff from any roof surface on the farm is captured in a holding tank (barrel, cistern, or clay lined pond) for future use. We had a good system before this drought, and now we have an excellent system. As the irrigation ponds dropped lower and lower, we followed the pond’s waterline drop with pick and shovel. Every new bit of bottom that was exposed was quickly dug out to make more future storage room. Before the drought, our ponds had some shallow areas where rocks had prevented us from further mechanized digging. However, by using hand methods, we not only eliminated the shallows, but added irregular features as we dug around the embedded rocks. This created better habitat structure while eliminating high evaporation and warm water temperature areas that encourage excessive algae growth. We took the soil and muck excavated from the ponds and used it to further berm the basement of our house, thus making it cooler in summer and warmer in winter.

The drought also gave us a great opportunity to destroy noxious weeds and plants that became established after the land was overgrazed and under cared for by the former occupant. Unable to grow vigorously, they were easily dug out and then destroyed by laying them exposed to the intense sunlight.

The title of this blog explains the activity option available to those who go to sea. We hope the body of this blog informs you the reader of the activity options of those that till the land.

NEWS from the Farm

The latest rain event (a cold frontal system) evaporated as it approached East Tennessee. When the frontal system had passed to the east of us, we had a mere .02 inches in our rain gage. (.01 at the official site at the airport) This morning (10/10) we moved our gasoline powered water pump out of the barn and down to the bankside of the Tennessee River slough that ends 185 feet from our property line. We are filling our main pond at the rate of 1.5 inches per hour. We have two feet and many tens of thousands of gallons of water to go to before it will be full. However, already we are seeing an increase in aquatic activity (dragonflies and damselflies) as the water slowly rises.

~ Leaf

At age 62, I have witnessed a lot of dry, rainfree periods, and even a few droughts that were rather severe. However, this year I learned a new term from the National Weather Service for dry weather. It is called exceptional drought, and this catagory is the next step up from extreme drought. Unfortunately for our farm, we are located in the heart of the exceptional drought area. As if this wasn't bad enough, we also got hit hard by the Easter weekend hard freeze that burned the emergent foliage of our shade and fruit trees to a crisp. For weeks, black leafed trees stood death-like around us. It was an unnerving experience, and the first such experience we had ever witnessed.

The dry weather did not catch us by surprise however. For years we have been observing erratic weather patterns that were become more the norm than the exception. Because we believe that extreme climate change is occurring, we have been taking steps to cushion the effects of extreme weather on our farming operations. This involved the construction of a farm-wide rain water collection system that included the digging of three rainwater storage ponds. Two of those ponds were dug this past March. They were all at full pool after a major rain in early May.

While most of the trees recovered from the hard freeze, the rainfall fell far short of normal. To date we are 13 inches below the normal rainfall amount for the year. In Septemebr, we were fortunate to get brushed by the rain remnants of hurricane Humberto. The two and a half inches we received from that storm refilled our irrigation cisterns, but only slightly raised our pond levels. Long, wide cracks in the ground swallowed up any rainfall that might have created runoff to the ponds.

Our plantings this year have been limited to a few staple crops that could be watered from our cisterns and ponds. Throughout the summer, our planted area grew smaller as we would harvested a crop and not replant. As the soil dried out, it would require more water to maintain growth in the remaining plants being tended. We were constantly revising our watering potential and reserves downward, and shrinking the cultivated footprint of our farm. We are now down to a few small plots.

This drought situation could have been the death knell for our fledgling farm, not just because of the financial impact of having few products to sell, but also due to the stress of being swept along by events beyond our ability to alter. As the drought tightened its' death grip this summer, our family made a firm commitment to be consciously kind to one another, and to not let our frustration and feelings of helplessness undermine our strong family vision.

We are constantly being challenged to stay flexible and available to new ideas and information. This in order to shift and adapt tactics and strategies so as to help our farm survive and emerge downstream, biologically intact. It would appear that the days of old school conventional farming techniques yielding predictable and successful results seems to have slipped away.

-Leaf