posted 11 years ago
Thank you for your kind words, Giselle. The problem is that our place and project wasn't conceived as a permaculture... anything. Just a place where we ourselves have our spiritual lives, maybe have yoga retreats once the infrastructure is in place, and since it's convenient and cheap, and even "in" to be self-sufficient, why not, let's do everything organic and sustainable. But that's about it. One monk takes care of the cows, one of the altar duties, one of the cooking, one of the gardening/agriculture, etc.
Technically, I'm the altar guy, but I also cook and do gardening. I don't know if it's my bad luck, or I really don't understand as much as I learn of permaculture, but so far I tried to make so many rocket stoves, and none of them worked. In the youtube videos anybody just makes a tube shaped like an L or a J, and voila, you could melt metal in that flame. I tried to make the solar dehydrator in Paul's video, the third model, and the "topdraft" is just stagnant top hot air, and the vent at the bottom doesn't create any suction. I began a little bit of rotating pastures two years ago, but we only made 4 experimental paddocks, the locals wouldn't get the system into their heads, nobody else believed in it or cared about it, I am always so busy and stretched thin and also couldn't follow up and keep it happening, so in people's minds that also got filed as a waste of money and failure.
So, that's to give you some background. There is a permaculture project here in the country, maybe more, and the people who live there are committed to it; if something doesn't work, they get together and make it work. Here it's just me with my "half-baked youtube knowledge".
I would love to have an expert come here, have a look, and say a few authoritative things, especially of the kind that affects the wallet, like: "Oh you want to terrace here, or the erosion will cause you to spend money on grass seed every year", or "You want to make a pond up there, so you won't have to buy more solar panels in the summer just to run the pump for irrigation". But these people cost money. So, my only hope is win their trust with small projects and small successes. I did create a series of swales on a hillside where we have a lot of fruit trees, but my vision was to carpet the hillside with a local clover-like legume, grow leguminous flower bushes between fruit trees to give more nitrogen, attract pollinators and birds, etc, but the person in chief, so to speak, only wants to see nicely spaced fruit trees growing out of a green carpet.
Anyway, I don't want it to sound too much like a sob story, but it's hard. That's why with this pasture management, I really need to come up with a business plan, so to speak, where I can confidently tell them a time-frame or a deadline by which they can expect a certain result. Maybe calculate how much we'll spend in minerals for the cows, explain it's a once only thing because the nutrients will get recycled perpetually. Calculate how much we'll spend in barbed wire or electric wire. I don't even know. What I still don't know, by the way, is how big a paddock should be, or rather, how much area a cow should be given. My guess is that at first I'll have to either start with bigger paddock or rotate them very fast, because the quality of the soil is poor, but later there will by much more and better grass out of the same area. But what size are we talking about? Everybody always tells me "it depends".
For example, the bull is confined to a big electric pasture, which is grazed to the ground, so we cut two sacks worth of grass from another area and feed him. I guess I could measure the area that got chopped to fill those two sacks and multiply it by the number of cows?
I guess I should finish watching the videos R Scott suggested before I panic.
Thanks again, though, everybody!
Writing from Madhuvan, a yoga retreat/organic farm on the West Coast of Costa Rica.