Archive for category: Education and Knowledge

Steve Erickson, second from right, and group in pasture

Creating on-farm fertility

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By Jenny Lux

Chaos Springs at Waihi run regular workshops about soil health, composting, and creating on-farm fertility. Jenny Lux reports on a recent workshop.  

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Chaos Springs workshops 

I have been an avid follower of Chaos Springs since I first went there in 2014 on a field trip as a student doing an evening class in Level 3 organic primary production. Recently I did a cheeky entry into one of their competitions for a free place in a workshop and I won!

So on a sunny spring Friday in October I attended the Creating On-Farm Fertility workshop taught by Steve and Jenny Erickson. This proved to be equally useful and stimulating to me, a market gardener, as it was to the many pastoral farmers, orchardists and general public attending, who all had a common interest in living off the land in some way.

ABOVE: Jenny Erickson (left) and Steve Erickson by the vege garden, looking at the health and quality of the soil. Behind Jenny is a huge lemon verbena.

The biological engine

It all comes back to what Steve calls the โ€˜biological engineโ€™ and getting that really humming. Itโ€™s an analogy that suits a mechanic like Steve, who is the man behind the innovative Cyclone multi-task sprayer. This machine allows you to combine compost, minerals and fertilisers in a liquid format for a single application onto land, and can handle particles up to 15mm โ€“ an amazing tool!

Steve (centre) with workshop group and the Cyclone at right
Steve Erickson (centre) with barrels of comfrey extract

The day began with a couple hours of lectures, and a sumptuous morning tea, followed by a BYO packed lunch and a farm tour. We started looking at the plant extract facility, then onto the commercial composting area (with a demo of the Cyclone), and a walk through some paddocks to dig holes and observe soil structure and visible biological activity. We finished at Jennyโ€™s biodynamic home garden, where you could see and also feel the energy of plants growing in balance.

This Chaos Springs workshop attracted a lot of practitioners with many years of knowledge, so there was a really rich exchange of ideas and advice. My only criticism was that it didnโ€™t really seem long enough!

If you are managing any piece of land, I would highly recommend attending one of the Chaos Springs workshops. There is an on-farm composting workshop coming up on 29 November.

https://www.chaossprings.co.nz/events

Jenny Lux, immediate past co-chair of Soil & Health, is an organic market gardener at Rotorua.

ABOVE: Jenny Erickson with her ashwagandha plant inside her glasshouse.
ABOVE: Steve Erickson of Chaos Springs (second from right) speaks of his journey in pasture management over the last 22 years, from a fairly degraded base of ragwort-infested conventional dairy pasture on clay, to a currently thriving mixed sward on a darker clay-loam that provides optimal nutrition for his animals and is maintained only twice a year with a biological liquid spray, all made on farm.

When Micromanaging is Goodย 

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Microbes are a big name in organic agriculture โ€“ in fact, they are the reason for everything. Iโ€™m not exaggerating here: the first life forms thought to have existed were โ€“ you guessed it โ€“ of such tiny proportions that you and I would have thought nothing of them.  Story and photos by Paige Murray. 

Paige Murray

Iโ€™m sure you know the basics, but to be clear, โ€˜microbeโ€™ is the broad term to describe organisms of microscopic size โ€“ too small for us humans to see, thus we give them far less credit than they deserve. In this case, Iโ€™m referring to the microbes colonising our soils and helping our plants to grow big, strong and healthy. Microbes are like colostrum for babies: without them, our plants would be sickly, weak and lacking a whole heap of important nutrients.

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Paige lives in a tiny house on the outskirts of Lincoln, and loves to get her hands dirty in all ways homesteading. A childhood of growing up on and around farms was the perfect way to understand that agriculture got us, as a human race, to where we are todayโ€ฆ and it will shape who we become tomorrow. 

The past five years saw Paige working on an organic market garden. It was here that she learnt (in spite of what all her agricultural science lecturers told her) that organics can be economically viable, and is a pretty good way to grow and produce alongside nature, rather than fighting her. 

What is Syntropic Agroforestry?

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Story and photos by Andy Jeffs  

I have been exploring syntropic agroforestry over the past three years, and in this article Iโ€™ve outlined the foundational concepts.  

My practical application and experiences of syntropic agroforestry are limited but there is a lot of information available, and some great practitioners up and down the country offering workshops and courses. 

Natural succession | Illustration adapted from Syntropic Farming Guidebook by Roger Gietzen 

  

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Andy Jeffs lives with his wife Erica in Hawke’s Bay. He manages a BioGro certified organic blueberry orchard at True Earth. He enjoys growing food at home using principles that regenerate the earth.