DEVELOPING THE PIG FIELD - INTEGRATED FOREST FARMING...

Prototype pig feeder bed - sleepers and angle-iron

DEVELOPING THE PIG FIELD
Lots going on here at the moment, including our plans to develop the pig field for food for the pigs and for the Treflach Farm pie business. The pig field is about three acres and we are thinking in terms of four strips for veg: beans, tatties, turnips and leeks. The plan is to keep the pigs off the veg to begin with using electric fence then let them onto what’s left of the veg strips at the end of the season so they can routle up the ground ready for next season. As well as that, we are planning some pig feeder beds which will effectively be mini-forest gardens with fruit or nut trees and perennial planting so that the pigs can either eat whatever falls on the ground or grows out through the gaps. Everything has to be pretty robust to survive pig assault so we will use up a stock of old sleepers for the beds.

They need to stand up to the scratchings of enormous boars and sows too

 INTEGRATED FOREST FARMING
Watching life here on the farm over the last year, I’ve realised how the animals are an important part of the whole system. For example, the woodland that's grazed some of the time is more diverse and also pleasant than the woodland that isn't grazed nearby. The more their behaviour can be controlled, integrated and utilised within the farm the less energy and expense required. The key idea being that the forest is a sustainable system and that a few carefully controlled animals fit into that very well. The more the whole farm develops in the pattern of the forest, the more the farm becomes sustainable ie: no waste, reduced inputs, increased diversity, increased types and quantities of yields, drought/flood/pest resistance, with space for paths, clearings and human settlement.

The pig field, about three acres of some of the best land on the farm

Lovely fences and gates

I NEVER THOUGHT I COULD FEEL SO MUCH AFFECTION FOR FENCES AND GATES...

Ha ha... cows' trampling thwarted by gate

Gate equally beautiful from the opposite direction

Our plot here has just been fenced off which is brilliant as now the cows can’t wander through it, trashing stuff and trampling the ground into a quagmire – it’s still very, very wet underfoot here, thick clayey goo that you can barely walk through. But now we can start channeling some of the water, doing some planting and carry on putting our low-impact ideas into practice. Reading about the march of the landless people in India and about the poor harvest around the world has reminded me how lucky we are to have access to this plot. It’s about a third of an acre so a very useful size when taken as an addition to the farm’s orchard and veg garden.

Lovely new gate leading from our plot into the orchard

DEALING WITH WASTE AND KEEPING WARM
We’ve made a good start all ready to dealing with the waste we produce and by getting a massive wood-burning stove fitted. It’s been really interesting to see just how much of different kinds of waste we do produce, plastic, metal, paper & cardboard, grey water from washing etc and of course the good old pee and poo. The real shocker is the plastic... I remember a book from the seventies, “The Waste Makers” by Vance Packard – we’ve been aware of the global waste problem for decades but it’s just got worse and worse since then. No doubt you’ve noticed how everything you buy is packaged at least once and no doubt you’ve read about the vast floating mass of plastic that has gathered in the North Pacific, reportedly the size of Texas. At the moment we’re using our own plastic waste for insulation by stuffing milk cartons with it and packing them beneath the caravan. I’m not quite sure what we do with the stuff after that but by then we’ll hopefully have reduced the amount of plastic we bring on here, reduction has got to be the general answer. Where does the plastic come from anyway?...largely from fossil fuel materials and fossil fuel energy. And there’s lots of other things to do with it like the plastic bottle greenhouse we made at Cwm Harry.
COMPOSTING TOILET
The first thing we did when we got onto the land was to fit the caravan with a composting toilet. It’s easy and simple, smells less than the old WC and will provide valuable compost for the heavy clay soil. In fact, the nitrogen in your pee is so useful in helping other things to breakdown that it seesm amazing that we ever flushed it down the drain. (Don’t worry if you’re visiting, it’ll be going into land for fruit bushes and small trees not for veg.)
KEEPING WARM
I had hoped to make a rocket stove thermal mass heater instead of the wood stove which would have burned the wood much hotter and without the toxins released from smouldering logs but we’re always short of time... feeble excuse, feeble excuse... Anyway, we’ll rig the stove, which is a monster, like something out of the Queen Mary, so that it burns hot and has plenty of thermal mass in and around it. Fuel for the stove comes from trees that have blown down on the farm, plenty of those so far - though we're using chainsaws and a tractor powered log splitter to harvest them... nothing's ever just totally simple is it?

Good news at Lammas re building control

from the Lammas newsletter:

It seems that there may be a solution emerging in the stand-off between Tir-Y-Gafel residents and Pembrokeshire County Council Building Control department.

Following much work from both sides, on Monday 23rd January at Haverfordwest Magistrates Court the Council agreed that Paul and Hoppi Wimbush (of plot 6) were now fully compliant with Building Regulations and all charges against them were dropped.

Schedules of works for the other two plots with legal charges against them (Simon Dale and Jasmine Saville of plot 7, Katy Taggart and Leander Wolstenholme of plot 2) have been agreed and should residents adhere to the timescales (aiming for resolution of all outstanding issues by May 2012) then the Council has indicated that charges against these two families will also be dropped.

It was recognised in Court by the Council that the Lammas project is pioneering new ground and that special consideration was required in how Building Regulations were applied to low-impact development given the use of raw natural materials and innovative solutions being adopted by such projects.

Great! common sense at last...

Walking the low-impact talk - Access to land

ANOTHER NEW CHAPTER!
From November Ruth and I will be exploring low-impact life for real, living in a yurt and caravan combination based at Treflach Farm. Ian Steele, farmer at Treflach, has been very friendly and helpful while we have been running Permacuture courses at the farm over the last year so I'm looking forward to working with Ian and all the others there. It's an amazing three years plus since I started making my yurt in the garden at Debi's house near Brighton (making the thing turned into an epic Icelandic Saga all of its own, check out some of the many posts about it here, here, here, here and here), so it will be truly wonderful to be using it at last. There's lots of stuff we want to explore, like putting the yurt inside a polytunnel so we can get some solar gain and put lots of insulation on the outside of the yurt without it getting soaked. I want to try out Lucia stoves and a rocket stove/thermal mass combination rather than the usual log-burning variety and we'll be growing some food of course. I'd like to try using a fan to take warm air from the top of the polytunnel down into a thermal mass store under the yurt .... and lots more .... will be getting in touch with some of the great eco-boffin types I've met for advice on developing all that stuff.
ACCESS TO LAND
We have the sort of arrangement which I hope will help many other people gain access to some land in this transitional phase, swapping some work on the farm in return for living space - so I feel it's all an important as well as fascinating process. Farms will inevitably have to use more human labour as we are all forced sooner or later to make the transition away from oil dependency. I feel Treflach will be an excellent place to be as the farm is already confronting transition issues and adopting Permaculture principles. I think access to land is the key for peoples' future security, in cities as well as out in the countryside, and learning to live a simple land based life as much as possible, regenerating local Earth capital and abundance instead of being a consumer-unit cog in a global Earth-destructive corporatocracy. I hope some of the solutions we develop in the farm will help people everywhere.

A Permaculture year with Sector39

From November I'm moving on from Steve's flat in Llanrhaedr-Ym-Mochnant to live and work from Treflach Farm. I've had a fascinating time since August 2010 working with Steve helping to develop Permaculture courses and projects and learning all the time about Permaculture and sustainable living. Steve is exceptionally well informed and thoughtful, passionate about his work and has been a wonderful inspiration for me and the many students we have had on the courses and people we have worked with on projects such as the Cwm Harry community garden. I'm very keen to keep working with Steve, Sector39 is an excellent team now, the last course ran like clockwork and was a wonderful experience for me just as much as the students - one of them was kind enough to say that it was the best and most informative educational experience of his life. But it's becoming more and more important to me personally to adopt sustainable, low-impact living principles in my everyday life so I am moving to live and work from Treflach Farm, more about all that here.  Interesting that the world situation is heating up so much just as I make the move... will we tackle the real issues before they tackle us?