How to Grow More Vegetables
How to Grow More Vegetables on Less Land
For more than 30 years John Jeavons has been preaching the benefits of small-scale, sustainable farming. Now, on a farm just outside Willits, Jeavons operates the nonprofit Ecology Action and teaches his methods to gardeners from as far away as Siberia, Africa and Latin America.
It takes about 15,000 to 30,000 square feet of land to feed one person the average U.S. diet,” he says. “I’ve figured out how to get it down to 4,000 square feet. How? I focus on growing soil, not crops.
In 1972, John Jeavons formed Ecology Action and started farming nearly four acres in Palo Alto. Alan Chadwick, pioneer of the French intensive/biodynamic method of farming, came up from Santa Cruz to teach classes. The first edition of “How to Grow More Vegetables” was published two years later. At last, Jeavons was finding answers to the question he’d been asking farmers for years.
He took the best of Chadwick’s intensive farming techniques, including double-digging, composting and closely-spaced planting, and added a few ideas of his own. An organic farm should be a closed system, he reasoned. Off-the-farm inputs like manure, bagged compost, alfalfa meal and liquid kelp all require additional land, water and resources to produce. That, in Jeavon’s view, is hardly sustainable agriculture.
8 steps to grow more vegetables via biointensive gardening
- Double-dug, raised beds.
- Composting. A healthy compost pile is key to replenishing the soil.
- Intensive planting.
- Companion planting.
- Carbon farming.
- Calorie farming.
- Open-pollinated seeds.
- Use the whole method.
Loosening the soil to a depth of 24 inches allows roots to penetrate more deeply and creates a raised bed effect. Sounds like hard work? John Jeavons’ video “Dig It” demonstrates an Aikido-style movement that makes double-digging almost effortless.
“Ignore the spacing instructions that come with your seeds,” Jeavons says “Plant seedlings so close that when they are mature, the leaves touch. This keeps soil moist and prevents weeds from sprouting.
Green beans love strawberries, corn provides shade to cucumbers, and fast-maturing radishes grow well in between slower-growing carrots.
Corn, millet and oats, along with other seed and grain crops, make up an important part of the diet and provide plenty of high-carbon additions to the compost pile.
Growing a year’s food supply means focusing on high- calorie, space-efficient foods like potatoes and parsnips.
Special hybrids aren’t needed in healthy soil, Jeavons says. Using open-pollinated seeds like the ones offered in his Bountiful Gardens Catalog helps preserve genetic diversity.
Jeavons emphasizes that high yields come from using all Grow Biointensive components together.
So there we have a system which enables anybody to grow more vegetables on less land, as long as you do the whole thing .
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2nd in our series of articles published today about the World Vegetable Center in Arusha, Tanzania written for the Worldwatch Institute’s blog called Nourishing the Planet [http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/].
Listening to Farmers
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/
The World Vegetable Center is focusing on “building a sustainable seed system in sub-Saharan Africa.” What does that mean? According to Dr. Abdou Tenkouano, Director of the Regional Center for Africa, it requires “bringing farmers voices into the choices of materials they are using.”
The Center does this not only by breeding a variety of vegetables with different traits—including resistance to disease and longer shelf life—but also by bringing farmers from all over eastern, western, and southern Africa to the Regional Center in Arusha, Tanzania, to find out what exactly those farmers need in the field and at market. Mr. Babel Isack, a tomato farmer from Tanzania, was at the Center when I visited, advising staff about which tomato varieties would be best suited for his particular needs—including varieties that depend on fewer chemical sprays and have a longer shelf life.
The Center works with farmers not only to grow vegetables, but also to process and cook them. Often, vegetables are cooked for so long that they lose most of their nutrients. To solve that problem, Dr. Mel Oluoch, a Liason Officer with the Center’s Vegetable Breeding and Seed System Program (VBSS), works with women to improve the nutritional value of cooked foods by helping them develop shorter cooking times. “Eating is believing,” says Dr. Oluoch, who adds that when people find out how much better the food tastes—and how much less fuel and time it takes to cook—they don’t need much convincing about the alternative methods.
Dr. Oluoch also trains both urban and rural farmers on seed production. In fact, one of the women farmers we met in Kibera slum in Nairobi had been trained at the Center and is selling seeds to rural farmers, increasing her income. “The sustainability of seed,” says Dr. Oluoch, “is not yet there in Africa.” In other words, farmers don’t have access to a reliable source of seed for indigenous vegetables, such as amaranth, spider plant, cowpea, okra, moringa, and other crops. As a result, the Center is working—partly with CNFA, an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) grantee—to link farmers to input or “agro-” dealers who can help ensure a steady supply of seed.
In addition, the Center is providing how-to brochures to farmers in Swahili and other languages to help them better understand how to grow vegetables in different regions.
Stay tuned for more about our visit to the World Vegetable Center later this week.
— You can also follow Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack’s travels on our personal blog Border Jumpers [www.borderjumpers.org]
Just wanted to flag an article published today about the World Vegetable Center in Arusha, Tanzania written for the Worldwatch Institute’s blog called Nourishing the Planet [http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/].
Breeding Vegetables With Farmers in Mind
http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/breeding-vegetables-with-farmers-in-mind/
As hunger and drought spread across Africa , there’s a huge focus on increasing yields of staple crops, such as maize, wheat, cassava, and rice. And while these crops are important for food security, providing much needed calories, they don’t provide much protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium, iron, riboflavin, thiamin, niacin, other important vitamins and micronutrients—or much taste. “None of the staple crops,” says Dr. Abdou Tenkouano, the World Vegetable Center’s Regional Director for Africa, “would be palatable without vegetables.” And vegetables, he says, “are less risk prone” than staple crops that stay in the field for longer periods of time. Because vegetables typically have a shorter growing time, they can maximize often scarce water supplies and soil nutrients better than crops such as maize which need a lot of water and fertilizer.
Unfortunately no country in Africa, according to Dr. Tenkouano, has a big focus on vegetable production. But that’s where the Center steps in. Since the 1990s, the Center (which is a part of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center based in Taiwan) has been working in Africa to breed cultivars that best suit farmers’ needs.
Despite the focus on staple crops, vegetable production generates more income on and off the farm than most other agricultural enterprises, according to the Center’s website. And unlike staple crops, vegetable production is something that benefits urban and rural farmers alike (See our posts on urban farmers in Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya).
In addition, vegetable production is the most sustainable and affordable way of alleviating micronutrient deficiencies among the poor. Often referred to as “hidden hunger,” micronutrient deficiencies—including lack of Vitamin A, iron, and iodine—affect some 1 billion people worldwide. They lead to poor mental and physical development, especially among children, and cause poor performance in work and in school, further crippling communities already facing poverty and other health problems.
But by listening to farmers and including them in breeding research, the Center is helping to alleviate these problems. Watch for more blogs about our visit to the World Vegetable Center and their efforts to raise nutrition and income in Africa.
— You can also follow Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack’s travels on our personal blog Border Jumpers [www.borderjumpers.org]