Judy Alexander in Port Townsend, Washington (a city of 9,000 people about 40 miles north of Seattle) talks about how and what she’s been growing and gives us a tour. I found the rainwater/rain barrel irrigation system she and her brother rigged really interesting.
Joanne in Northeast Seattle (she gets some help from the community) converts her front lawn into a food-growing garden. She talks about and shows us the various steps in the process.
“Rob Torcellini bought a $700 greenhouse kit to grow more vegetables in his backyard. Then he added fish to get rid of a mosquito problem and before long he was a committed aquaponic gardener. Now his 10 by 12 foot greenhouse is filled with not only vegetables, but fish. And the best part is: the poo from that fish is what fertilizes his garden.”
A look at the Lundberg Family Farms’ rice growing operation in California. I had no idea that they sow rice from the air.
On the Isbell Family Rice Farm in Arkansas they grow a Japanese variety of rice called Koshihikari for export to that country.
Christian Richard, a rice farmer in Louisiana balances growing rice and raising crayfish.
This video has us meeting the Simonsens, in Nebraska, who grow sorghum. They use no-till rotational planting. They mill sorghum flour themselves and sell it direct through mail order. The grit left over from the milling gets fed to their livestock.
This video follows Greg Willerer of Detroit Dirt and Brother Nature Produce in Detroit who is trying to help build a viable food system in Detroit. As part of those efforts he’s trying to create a local compost network (he’s involved breweries, coffee houses and even the Detroit Zoo — all of whom give the project their waste).
“Milwaukee’s Growing Power, a community-based urban food center, is using plants as natural water filters for raising yellow perch. Fred Binkowski, an aquaculture specialist with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute, provides technical advice on the experimental effort.”
Note that apples don’t grow true to seed, so if you planted a seed from a Mackintosh apple you won’t get a tree that produces Mackintosh apples.
This is the best small farm biogas system video I’ve seen so far.
As with many other useful technologies, we don’t hear much about biogas in this part of the world while it’s being rolled out extensively in the developing world and is a technology that could be universally useful.
Here a small farmer, Edward, in Uganda shows us his underground biogas system. It’s actually pretty elaborate and if maintained properly, he says should last about 70 years.
Edward keeps cows and sheep but seems to just use the cow’s dung and urine for the biogas system. He says that he mixes one part dung and one part water or urine and lets this mixture drop into a digester.
From the digester the digested solids and gas are separated in an underground dome (7 feet deep and 14 feet across).
From there the gas is piped into the farm house to the stove (which looked pretty much like a normal propane stove to me) and to fuel one gas lamp (which I found produced very dim light, but before they probably had no light at night or used kerosene lamps, so for them it’s a huge improvement).
The digested solids, now good for use as fertilizer/compost, drain out into a kind of pond area.
Edward notes that the covers to all of the biogas system access points are very heavy concrete to prevent children or vandals from fiddling around with them and either falling into the dome to their deaths or letting the precious biogas escape.
As he shows us his biogas system, Edward also points out his 10,000 liter rain water collection cistern.
Note that this system only uses waste from livestock but that other systems would also use humanure.
John Njendahayo, a Ugandan engineer, explains more about this kind of domed biogas system. Cue the following video to 4:25 where he starts to talk about the system itself. He covers the sizing of the systems, the relationship of input to output and what you can run on the biogas (including a modified paraffin fridge).
The system uses dome shapes so that none of the gas gets trapped in corners as it would in a rectangular digester. He notes that the reason for burying the digesters is to keep the temperature constant for the bacteria.
Here he talks about being able to sell the compost the digester produces as fertilizer and about needing to clear the pipes of condensation and how the gas is piped into the house.
The Real Know How 