Friday morning I left for Lopez Island in the San Juans with a dozen of my classmates, for a week of hands-on resilience and sustainability-ness. We’re coming in as consultants to help design an energy descent / sustainability plan for the island, but this undertaking is phenomenally amorphous beyond that esoteric terminology.

We’ve read the Transition Handbook, local energy plans and surveys and Skyped with numerous local experts on agriculture, waste, water, electricity, energy and transportation. But what deliverable we’re aiming to create, or the process to achieve these outcomes, is unclear. It seems like every idea of low-hanging fruit and quick wins we come up with has already been explored and either implemented or abandoned after cost-benefit analysis of a professional degree beyond the scope or abilities of our class.

I’ve decided to take this program by the horns, and shoot for some guerrilla sustainability initiatives, using this opportunity to proliferate every small scale sustainable living project I’ve ever read about. I’m already dreaming visions of humanure, mixed with industrial compost and biogas generation, along with a hothouse year-round agriculture industry to boost local food production and create off-season employment. They’re launching a GMO free county ballot initiative in San Juan as well, which could play into the local sustainable agriculture movement. It would be great to launch a revenue-generating business that could create community resilience while also bolstering the island’s economy. Apparently there are some richy-rich folks willing to support some local development.

Olympia, Seattle and BFFLs!

Before heading to Lopez, I got to see my Oberlin besties. My freshman year roommate lives on 3 ½ acres of redneck wetlands, with four cars out front and two rusting out in the swampy back acreage, construction tarp in the shower and a space-heater in the living room. We had a bonfire and burned a prodigious amount of trees that had been felled in recent storms, after eating an amazing brown rice vegetable stew.

Soul nourishing, transformative experiences. There’s something about seeing people you’ve known since you were 18 that is so life-affirming. We haven’t changed in the last 10 years except to get way better, 28 is going to be a great year for us, Saturn Returns! Time to position myself for a launch into the blindingly bright future…

Electricity, Farming and Clusters…

Today I got to visit an amazing spread of sustainable organic farms. We kicked the morning off learning about all things Rudolf Steiner with a 75-year-old biodynamic farmer/philosophy Ph.D, Henning Sehmsdorf at S&S Homestead Farm. He says that “the concept of sustainability requires a different way of thinking – the best farm tool is between your ears.” He’s walking the walk, with a curriculum-based internship based on reading and discussion.

They eat F.L.O.S.S. – fresh local organic sustainable and seasonal – pretty good acronym. They also offer an everything CSA for $32/week, which seems like a pretty great deal. Here he is comparing soil quality between conventional agriculture and biodynamics, with the difference being 100s of times more microbes in the dark rich soil.

He keeps intricate records of every piece of fruit vegetables eggs dairy and water produced and consumed on his farm, and the spreadsheets are available on his extensive website. He’s almost completed his 50 year plan (year 43 and counting!) for the land, including an intricate rainwater catchment system, solar on all the buildings, and fully nutrient-rich fields. And true to the old country, it’s all paid for in cash not with mortgages and loans.

After touring his vegetable garden and discussing food versus fuel and variable nutrient content between conventional, organic and biodynamic food, we had one of the sadder lunches of my first world life, eating our grocery store peanut-butter sandwiches while watching his wife make butter and cheese from that day’s milk.

Having survived our repast, I was all ready to join my electricity group (I mean there was groaning, but who said I’m a trooper?) when fate smiled upon me, in the form of Patrick. He muttered “I wish I was going to your meeting” and that was all it took – I switched us out before anyone could say boo about it, and was off for one of the most exciting afternoons of my young (ish) life!

Oh sustainable agriculture, you take so many forms, but are always sexy. We met with three more of the most articulate, interesting and innovative farmers/people I’ve ever met. Chicken or the egg – did farming make them so, or did they flock to farming like flies to honey?

First we visited Horse Drawn Farm where they use – shockingly – draft horses and oxen to do their farm work. They also have a 24/7 honor system vegetable stand (that actually just had to install security cameras because of the scourge that is humanity, but that’s only after years and years of successful unmanned sales), along with keeping pigs, sheep, chickens, and a zillion other things. Hence his dire and repeated warnings about young idealist farmers – “people come out here thinking they’re gonna farm, and two or three years later they’re gone, because it’s harder work than you ever think you’ll do in your life. If you want to go square dancing on Saturday night, or visit friends during the growing season, this isn’t for you.” It was like he was pouring molten lava into my soul and eviscerating my dream. Sometimes it’s important to get exorcised, though.

Thank God that wasn’t our last stop! Eric at Crowfoot Farm was much more positive about his life’s work, saying that farming is hard but it’s no mystery –farmers just want you to be repelled so they can keep it to themselves. Then again, he runs a berry u-pick with his wife that’s open two days a week during summer, and does direct sales as well, so it’s pretty night and day compared to Horse Drawn. That said, I realized that the everything CSA model is probably not the style of farming I’m interested in undertaking, and that it would be nice to have some days off every year in my theoretical homesteading future. We got to help trim back the raspberry bushes and mulch the branches, and I got to use an indoor toilet in a heated house, so yeah it was pretty luxurious.

We ended at Sweet Grass Farm talking to Scott (where are all the wives? There was a dearth of vaginas for sure) about raising wagyu beef. He had a background in orchards and vegetable gardening, as well as timber and woodworking tool development, and holds multiple patents (really, who are these farmers? Is it something in the well-water or what?). He didn’t want to have his nose back in the dirt planting ‘widgets’ as he called vegetables, and eventually settled on raising high quality beef cattle. However the overhead on cattle is extremely high, with a five year layout of capital before you see a return (meaning the cow has to grow up gestate and then make a baby before you ever see a penny), plus all the feed and care these animals need. That said, he’s grown his herd from 8 to 80 in a decade, and seems to enjoy the work, even if it starts at 5am.

Scott slaughters his animals on-site using a USDA-certified mobile slaughter unit, the first of its kind that has been imitated around the globe. Seeing the concrete slab where these animals drop was weirdly comforting – he doesn’t ever want his animals slaughtered by a $9/hour laborer who doesn’t care about their last moments on this earth. It reminded me of Temple Grandin’s humane slaughtering techniques, only less autistic.

Scott’s next dream is to build a modular scalable greenhouse that runs off the waste heat from his industrial compost, to provide off-season vegetables to the island when no one else can grow. He would also be willing to open-source his project once he works the kinks out, because he doesn’t need any more patents. Which was amazing to hear because all week the ag group has been trying to dream up a way to do overwintering economic development on Lopez, with a focus on local organic food production. So we’ll see what happens with that idea, but writing Scott a pilot project grant seems way more interesting to me than working on getting solar installs for the high-school, or any of the other projects coming down the electricity pipeline. Them’s the breaks though, and I can’t change my group, so I’ve decided to hunker down and stop creating drag for my little dysfunctional family, and just support however I can, while secretly building my homestead in the sky, where we have square-dancing every Saturday, and never worry about money problems.

Other awesomeness – today I ate a salmon bowl with carrot/beet/ginger juice on the porch for lunch, looking out over the sound. Also, we’re staying with some awesome natural building homesteading lesbians in a house they built themselves out of straw bale, and everyone on this island seems to have just bought a puppy. So it’s definitely some version of my ideal life, but I don’t know whether I’m idolizing it – I’m pretty sure I would go stir crazy in a month, but it would be a very relaxing crazy, and let’s face it, I’m crazy either way, so maybe that’s not a bad thing?

Some of us at the freecycle tent at the dump, having some needed down time…

Sufficient ramblings for the present, hasta la pasta as my future brother says!

P.S. Someone lives in this bus, seriously, this is like Mary Poppins…