Off-site projects

I'm SO EXCITED!!  I've got two really cool projects coming together.

Indigenous Food forest

I'm working with a member of a local tribe (who is an expert in ethnobotany) to create a food forest next summer in a half-acre park in our town, which will feature a large population of the medicinal and food plants that are important to the indigenous people of our area!  We'll hold educational events and work parties, but basically, it's a small enough project that we can do ourselves, which will at the very least beautify the park, encourage respect for and partnership with our indigenous community, and help foster a sense of food security.
Here's a view from within the park.

 Here's a view from the top, when it was flooded.

Regenerative farming experiment

Some friends have an acre they're not using, and it's a prime spot to test out regenerative farming practices in the PNW.  Here's what I put in the proposal that I'm almost ready to send to the soil conservation district to get funding:

Why do this experiment

Every farmer that I have spoken to says that regenerative practices won’t work here in the Pacific Northwest because of how wet our weather is. This baffles me, because one of the major effects of regenerative practices is improved soil aggregation, which in turn speeds up water infiltration and improves water retention while reducing erosion and sogginess.

Until farmers see the results of regenerative farming practices for themselves, they will continue to think regenerative farming won’t work here, and they’ll be forced to use chemicals and biocides to make a living, eroding their topsoil and polluting waterways, and keeping them locked in a financial relationship with chemicals and government subsidies.

Many small scale farms use these practices successfully, and that’s great, but that proof doesn’t really translate to large-scale farming with acres of cash crops that need to be harvested by machine without getting stray plant material in the harvest. Though I’m using a small test location, I’ll be trying to mimic the conditions necessary to allow for machine harvesting.

Caveat: I haven’t found many grain crop farmers to speak to, so my information might be wrong. I get a sense that farmers think only corn or vegetables work here.