Island views

Those of you who have read this blog regularly know that I am very concerned about a probable food crisis and about food security (see my previous posts about population and agriculture, and about GM food and the upcoming food crisis).
Being a practical man, I look for practical solutions and in this case, this means working toward self sufficiency in food. This is one of the reasons why we produce most of our vegetables and are looking into grain production (see the post about Growing grain).
One key area of food self sufficiency is the ability to store food for longer periods of time, so summer surpluses are available in the winter, when the gardens and orchards do not produce much.
Over the past year, we have tried various methods of preserving food. Freezing is the easiest option, but it is not entirely satisfactory because to store any serious amount of food this way requires an initial investment and a lot of energy, but mostly because power cuts (which are likely to become more frequent) make it unreliable. Canning and bottling (which we will look at in further posts) are better options and we have successfully bottled some of our tomatoes and courgette surpluses this year, and have made vast amount of apple chutney and pasteurised apple juice last year, but the process requires large amount of energy, as the food has to be pasteurised, and in most cases, cooked, before storage.
You will also know from our previous post that we have also tried successfully lactic fermentation of vegetable, a traditional method of preserving food (think of sauerkraut, but also of Kim chi, the Korean national dish). Lactic fermentation gives excellent results and we will certainly keep using it, but today’s post is about our latest experiment in food preservation, the solar dehydrator.
We have been drying herbs from the garden for a few years, but hadn’t really found a satisfactory way to do this, in the sense that we had to use a dehumidifier for days in the attic before the herbs were dry enough for long term storage. So this year I decided to try something different. For 106 euros, I got an electric dehydrator, which works fine but still uses at least 250 w of electricity.
The idea of a solar dehydrator came up almost by accident. I had seen a very large solar dehydrator used for commercial dried herb production in a farm in the South of France, but hadn’t really thought of doing a scaled down version until I looked on the Internet and found out that it had already been done.
As we had a woofer with good carpentry skills here at the time, it ended up being one of his project. It took him a day to build the box, and another day to build the solar heater. This is what the result looks like:

On top is a drying box with drawers make of Insect screen (stretched on a wooden frame). The drying box has a large rectangular hole at the bottom in which the top of the solar heater fits neatly, held in place with 6 bolts. On top of the box is another hole for the solar powered fan (you can see the little solar panel on top of the roof of the box).

The solar heater is a wooden box containing a sheet of corrugated iron, painted black, with a sheet of clear plastic to cover it.

The air circulates through the solar heater, which has a series of large round holes at the bottom (not clearly visible on the photograph), and comes out at the top into the drying box (through another series of large round holes), pretty hot. The small solar powered fan on top of the box sucks the hot air from the solar heater through the drying box.

We used:

2 sheets of 1/2 exterior ply (for the box, and also for the bottom of the solar heater)
2 lengths of 7×1 larch (for the solar heater) you could also use red deal / pine or even just treated timber)
1 sheet of clear plastic (recycled from an old roof)
1 sheet of corrugated (roofing) iron, 3 m long. Cut what you need for the roof of the box and use the rest for the solar heater
1/2 tube of silicone mastic (to make the solar heater airtight)
1 length 2×2 (framing for the box)
1 length of 2×1 (for the drawers inside the box)
3 meter of Insect screen, 600 mm wide (for the inside drawers)
1 small solar powered fan (a Google search will get you one for less that 50 euros, although if I was to do it again, I’d probably spend a bit more and get a slightly more powerful one)
1 roll of draught proofing strip (to make the door airtight)

Total cost around 100 euros, same as the electric dryier, but surely more eco-friendly!

Ciara didn’t believe that the thing would work, but after we dried a kilo of fresh mint in less than two (sunny) days in September, she had to admit that this is a lot more efficient than a dehumidifier in the attic. Later on, we also used it to dry chilli peppers, as, thanks to Frank and Christina diligence, we have a bumper crop of those this year.
The monster is now put away in a shed for the winter, but Theo is looking forward to selling loads of dried herbs in his farm shop next summer

Christophe

One of the highlights on my recent woofing holidays in West Cork was the biodiversity day organised by the Irish Natural Forestry Foundation at the Manch Estate.
As Tim, my woofing host, was one of the speakers, I had had a close look at the schedule in advance and had decided that it was well worth traveling from Bantry to Dunmanway to attend as much of the day as possible. Indeed the talk on orchard and agroforesty in Ireland, given by Paul of Woodkerne Nursery, was inspiring and very informative, and while the hedgerow walk turned out to be a very wet outing, the event was a great way to meet like minded people.
But the highlight of the day was to be Tim’s population talk.

The human species has surely been the most successful in the Earth’s history. From a small beginning in Africa, approximately 200,000 years ago, migrations have led modern humans to populate the whole world.
As we all know, early humans were hunter gatherers, a lifestyle which implies a low population density, and indeed, in our early days, the human population was very small. Estimates vary, but it is almost certain that up to 10 000 years ago, humans beings on this planets were never more than one million, and probably a lot less. However, around 10,000 years ago, after the last ice age, things began to change and people began to settle down and domesticate plants and animals in the Middle East (and later on in America). The rise of agriculture, and the domestication of animals produced the most important transformation in human culture, and literally, changed the face of the Earth. Agriculture spread rapidly, and with its food supplies now more secure, the human population started to grow. Some other species did very well too. Thanks to their association with humans, sheep, horses or chicken are now more numerous than ever. The potato has successfully colonised Europe from its native America, and the apple tree has colonised North America. Wheat, corn and soya may look very unlikely competitors for tall trees, but thanks to humans, they are now doing far better than any tree species. Other species didn’t fare too well. 10 000 years ago, there were far more bears than humans in Britain. The list of species that have become extinct in modern times is rather depressing reading.
Around the time of Christ, the world population had grown to around 300 million people. By by the year 1800, the billion mark was reached.
However, it is really in the last century that human population growth has been truly phenomenal. In 1927, world population passed two billion. Sixty years later, in 1987, the world population was five billion, and in May 2009, the Earth’s population is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be nearly 6.8 billions people. The world’s population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040, although this is in fact unlikely to happen.

Agriculture is what has allowed mankind to grow to this phenomenal size and has made us a force of nature.
It is generally assumed that global warming started in the 19th century with the burning of fossil fuel. But in fact, it probably can be tracked much further back, to the rise of agriculture, as suggested by William Ruddiman. For agriculture leads to deforestation, and as we all know, trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Agriculture also made possible this phenomenal rise in human numbers, which eventually put so much pressure on natural resources that it lead to the burning of fossil fuels. If it hadn’t been for population pressure on timber resources, we would probably never have taken to burning coal. Let’s face it, that stuff stinks when burnt and getting it out of the ground is a very messy, unpleasant and dangerous job, even when compared to cutting trees. If it hadn’t been for the fact that we no longer had enough trees to cut, we probably would never have bothered.
With coal came the steam engine, and with it, further advances in food security, as we could now reliably transport food over greater distances. We had found yet another way to ward off hunger. Then came oil, an even better fuel for transport, and as it turned out, for agriculture.
The mechanisation of agriculture allowed more land to be cultivated using less labour while using less land to feed draft animals.
From 1950 to 1984, as the Green Revolution, which supported the latest population explosion, transformed agriculture around the world, grain production increased by 250%. The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (made mostly from natural gas), pesticides (made mostly from oil), not to mention hydrocarbon-fueled irrigation and further mechanisation of labour.
But, as we all know, oil is running out.
Furthermore, as Dale Pfeiffer puts it in his book “Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture”: ” Modern industrial agriculture is unsustainable. It has been pushed to the limit and is in danger of collapse. We have already appropriated all of the prime agricultural land on this planet… Even without considering energy depletion, our agriculture system is ready to collapse.”

Tim present the examples of of two remote islands in the South Pacific, taken form Jared Diamond’s remarkable book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive“, to illustrate how the ability to manage their own population is a key element in the success or failure of societies.
Both islands have in common extreme isolation, with no other major island within less than several days sailing. Because of this, they had to be totally self sufficient in food, and immigration was never an option. Both islands where also colonised by Polynesians, who were farmers and fishermen.
The first of these two islands is a success story. It is called Tikopia and it’s barely more than 2 square miles in size. Tikopians practice an intensive system of agriculture similar in principle to forest gardening. Their agricultural practices are strongly and consciously tied to the population density and all Tikopians are fully aware of the need to keep the island population level at around 1200. They use various means, including contraception, abortion, infanticide, and suicide to keep their population within this sustainable limit. When European came along in the 19th century and banned some of these practices, the population increased with disastrous results. Tikopians have now brought their population under control again, at a very slightly lower level than before Europeans arrived.
The second island is far better known. It is Easter island, one of the most isolated islands in the world (the nearest habitable land, Pitcairn, is 1300 miles to the west, a 2 weeks sea journey on a Polynesian canoe and only Tristan da Cunha, in the Southern Atlantic is more remote, but Tristan da Cunha has been inhabited only since the 19th century). At over sixty three square miles, Easter is a lot bigger than Tikopia, and therefore could support a much larger population. From the small group of settlers who navigated in canoes, most likely around the 9th century, the population of Easter island grew to several thousands, perhaps as much as thirty thousand, in the 16th century. Such a huge population on such a small piece of land put huge pressure on natural resources. All land bird species and sea bird colonies became extinct. The original subtropical moist broad leaf forests was entirely cut down and all of Easter island’s unique tree species also became extinct. With no more wood to build the canoes they needed to use for fishing, no more birds (other than the chicken they had brought with them) to provide them with protein, and an ecosystem in ruin, the population of Easter island collapsed catastrophically, and by the time the European arrived, it was down to less than three thousand.

The current level of human population on planet Earth is clearly unsustainable and has already led to massive environmental damage. As resources necessary to sustain such numbers, such as oil, clean water and arable land, become increasingly depleted, this will inevitably lead to a massive reduction in the number of humans living on this planet.
How is this reduction in human population going to happen?
Although this is still a daily occurrence in Africa and some part of Asia, in the Western world, where practically nobody starved to death since World War II, famine looks unlikely. But a quick look at history should suffice to convince most westerners that they just have been lucky so far. The list of famines on Wikipedia makes though provoking (and sobering) reading.
Famines will also bring increased insecurity, because hungry people, having absolutely nothing to lose, will do anything. Resources wars and food riots have already started, piracy is on the increase. Already, neighbours are killing one another over drinking water in part of India. Already, scores of desperate Africans are taking to sea in overcrowded boats, risking their lives to flee to Europe, while Mexicans face being shot to get to the US.
But the worse is no doubt still to come.

Indeed, as Tim puts it, the four horsemen of Apocalypse (Pestilence, War, Famine and Death) are likely to be busy in the 21st century.

As Ian, the organiser of the event, simply put it, Tim’s talk “connect the dots”.
Of course, all of us are aware that human population has exploded since the 19th century. Of course, most of us are aware that fossil fuel production is peaking now. Of course most of us are dimly aware that our food production and distribution system is largely dependent on cheap fossil fuels. But most of us fail to connect the dots and see that the inevitable consequences of Peak oil is going to be famine on a scale never seen in human history, and a dramatic reduction in human numbers.

Christophe

I have sinced done a bit more research on the subject of food security. For those with an interest in the subject, here’s some further reading, which should leave little doubt that we are heading for a massive food crisis.

• George Monbiot on the challenge of feeding seven or eight billion people while oil supplies are falling
• Food future, by the Soil Association
• Looming food crisis, an article in the Guardian

In 1925, Clare Island had over 130 acres under grain crops, mostly oats (which a few people actually still grow here), but also rye, and even a bit of barley and wheat.
Our old friend Bernie (one of the few people on the island still growing oats for his animals) also remembers growing barley. More modestly, I had run a grain growing trials with triticale (a modern hybrid of rye and wheat) for 3 years, until the experiment came to an abrupt end when the whole crop failed, because it wasn’t sown properly, the winter before last.
I firmly believe, however, that being able to grow one’s own grain, both for animal and for human consumption, is going to become more important in years to come, as the upcoming food crisis puts more pressure on the grain supplies worldwide.
So when a mail from Michael Miklis, coordinator of the Biodynamic Agricultural Association of Ireland, popped up in my inbox last month about a grain workshop in Kilkenny, I immediatly started to work out how I could attend it. But the trip would have involved two overnight stays and two full days’ traveling, the dates didn’t really fit in my schedule, so I instead invited Michael to come and do a workshop on Clare Island. Much to my delight, he accepted the invitation and, as luck would have it, the day that suited us both happened to be a fruit in the Biodyanmic planting calendar, surely a good omen!
Although we couldn’t get anyone from the mainland interested enough to face the hassle of coming to the island on a Sunday, Michael came along on the 4th of April, bringing with him two varieties of oats and two varieties of barley for us to plant, as well as some biodynamic preparations. We sowed about 45 sqm, mostly oats, talked about sustainable farming through biodynamics, stirred and sprayed cow horn-manure (also refered to as “500″, see the picture below), and looked at options for threshing a and dehusking on a small scale.

Both the oats and the barley have now come up (inside a fence to protect them from the ducks’ voracious appetite, see picture below) and we are looking forward to harvesting them in July.

We are now looking at options for planting a much larger area with grain next year (as well as ways of implementing Michael suggestion for improving our compost heaps), but this will be for another day.
Christophe