Wait--You're talking about POOP, right?!

Dear Friends,

Last month I joined with ten other poop-and-pee enthusiasts (crazy people) to form the founding Board of Directors for the Rich Earth Institute.

This is how I feel about it (...partly because many of the people I'm currently working with are of the age bracket featured in the video).

The Rich Earth Institute expresses its mission thusly:

The Rich Earth Institute is dedicated to advancing and promoting the use of human manure as a resource. Through research, demonstration, and education projects, we strive to illustrate the positive effect of this approach in important areas including water quality, food security, energy use, soil health, economic sustainability, carbon footprint, public health, and emergency preparedness.

The goal of the Rich Earth Institute is to change the way our society understands human manure: to stop seeing it as a waste to be disposed of, and to start recognizing it as a resource to be reclaimed. Our aim is to lead by example, creating working systems that recycle human manure (which includes both urine and feces) into sanitized fertilizer that is then reused on farms.

Pretty funky stuff, huh? Ricky definitely approves (see: conclusion of previous post).

Though the idea of recycling humanure into agricultural soils seems pretty off the wall and even downright DANGEROUS to most -if not all- of us modern beings, the practice is what has sustained human civilizations since the agricultural revolution began around ten thousand years ago. The American soil physicist F.H. King discusses details of this humanure agriculture practice in the East in his 1911 book Farmers of Forty Centuries; or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan. These days this book is published under the title "Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan." I call attention to this edit in light of a definition recently presented to me:

My mentor at Seeds of Solidarity Farm and Education Center, Deb Habib, defines Organic as follows:

"People have been gardening without pesticides or chemicals for thousands of years. This is what organic means, plus fostering a healthy garden and soil ecosystem."

Yes! Despite today's grocery labels, "conventional" agriculture has

never been the synthetically-manufactured kind, but rather the organic, the permanent. Since the first agricultural revolution, many human societies have cultivated food sources from soil rather than/in addition to previous habits of hunting, gathering, or herding. Maintaining soil fertility over seasons, years, and decades has been a vital inquiry ever since. Logically, many solutions to the soil fertility issue were thought of and practiced long before the USA-funded Green Revolution of the 1940s-1970's, yet how quickly we succumb to amnesia and believe without questioning that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are absolutely necessary to grow food!

(For more on the agricultural revolution from the institutional perspective of a Western white guy, you will find this informing and entertaining--UNLESS you are the Mongols.)

So yes, today's global population is MUCH larger than in ancient times, and many people use this fact to justify the injection of synthetic chemicals into our ecosystem or the artificial manufacturing of food genetics. This terror-inducing argument, though, is propelled by a myth of worldwide food scarcity. I promise to write another blog post on The Myth of Global Food Scarcity soon--with any hope and some pretty ridiculous school/work procrastination, that is.

And what does HUMANURE have to do with WORMS? Well, at the moment not much-- but hopefully in the near and nearer future we will incorporate vermicomposting into human waste processing to build fertile soil locally and autonomously across this region and beyond...

A big thanks for reading my post from the new Board of Directors at the Rich Earth Institute- please read more about humanure philosophy and our group's contributions to the field of nutrient recycling at our website.

Look at those chummy folks, and the tea cups! :)

Thanks for reading. Peace, Cat

Can You Dig It?

WELCOME!

I wish to dedicate this first blog post to the people who introduced me to worms, soil, and --in emerging ways-- myself. Deb Habib and Ricky Baruc met years ago while working at the New Alchemy Institute. After completing a PeaceWalk from Auschwitz to Hiroshima (with monks from the New England Peace Pagoda in Leverett, MA) they began their married life together in Orange, MA.

Together they co-founded Seeds of Solidarity Farm and Education Center at their home. The Farm consists of 5 hoop houses and a few fields over a 4-acre area of cleared forest. Ricky and Deb have built up the soil on their land through slow integration of sand, manure and organic compost. Intensive, compact farming of mixed crops --mostly vegetables-- with no tilling of the soil is the model they innovate and exemplify. Ricky educates about "the cardboard method" in farming and gardening practice to feed worm, microbial, and fungal populations while facilitating development the soil's ecology naturally. Using cardboard helps make possible the bio-mimicry practices of organic fertilization over chemical input, people power over mechanized power, and intact soil ecology over tilling.

What does this have to do with Worms?, you ask... Well Worms are the natural fertilizers of the soil we live on. They have developed and thrived through the years by transporting nutrients, bacteria, and fungus vertically through the earth, constantly laying the foundations for the ecological system of the soil. And what do Worms ask in return? Respect: that we not poison the soil with chemicals, that we not exhaust their habitats with exploitative agriculture, and that we not regularly turn their houses upside down (tilling). They've built their homes --the soil we depend upon-- with method and intention; we destroy that evolved and honed practice when we till the soil.

Deb Habib and Ricky Baruc are also co-founders of annual regional celebration, The Garlic & Arts Festival. Through the Seeds of Solidarity Education Center, they facilitate a youth education program called Seeds of Leadership (SOL Garden) for local high school students-- free to the participants. A new grant-funded initiative, Grow Food Everywhere for Health and Justice, is putting free garden beds in the homes of low-income families in the area. Deb and Ricky also regularly offer consulting, workshops, and retreats.

Words can't adequately describe the necessary innovation that Ricky and Deb live, nor capture the impact they radiate out to so many others. All I can say is that I have found them in my life for a reason, and that we are still only beginning a relationship that will last and develop through the years.

I'll leave it to Ricky (below) to close this first blog post with some profound reflection...

Peace and Love to All. Thank you for reading.

Cat

Ricky on "keepin' it local". Video clip produced by WhyHunger.