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What Do We Know About Water?
Overnight we received a decent amount of rain – about 24mm – which was a relief to all of us at the farm. We’ve been waiting for rain for a couple of our crops in particular and it had been weighing on us, with stress issues coming up that were difficult to keep on top of.
Now that this miraculous stuff fell from the sky overnight, it had me thinking about water. What do we really know about water?
What do we think we know about water?
A couple weeks ago I was listening to a podcast while in the field whose guest was challenging the idea that there are only three states of water. There’s the ones we know…solid, liquid, and gas. But is there a fourth?
While it might sound absurd at face value, it sounds absurd because it goes against something we believe to be true. There are people thinking really hard about water. And there are properties of water that these 3 states don’t fully explain.
Challenges like this are important and a good reminder that we are intellectual babies staring into the vast voids of knowledgeless-ness we have about the universe and about our own planet, about nature, and the interactions that define the world we live in. It is easy to fall into a mode of thinking in which everything around us is certain.
A quick look at science history (one of my favourite things) tells us we should always be ready for a scientific bombshell that completely changes how we think, and that it may involve something we take for granted.
The predominant understanding of how plants work goes something like they need some sort of chemical fertilizer…you know, Nitrogen and stuff…which is an idea from the 1800’s. Despite many advances since, how plants function has still a long way to go in terms of widespread understanding, and humanity remains stuck in the 1800’s. There were no high-powered microscopes, which came a hundred years later, and nobody knew what DNA looked like until Photo 51 was taken in 1952.
We now know that fungus and bacteria are integral parts of plants, the way micro-organisms live inside our human guts, and that the symbiosis between these things is crucial to understanding how they work. We can show more and more that nature is far more interconnected than we could have ever imagined, and the idea that plants require chemical fertilizers to grow will be relegated to a bygone era (hopefully sooner than later).
We didn’t understand the earth revolved around the sun until Copernicus in the 1500’s, and we didn’t know there were even other galaxies in the universe until just 99 years ago when Edwin Hubble figured it out in 1924, and today, we’re a flying solar-powered helicopter on Mars, which just made its 51st flight.
So…what do we think we know about water?
Maybe there’s more to learn.
Stay curious!
Graham
if you’d like to listen to the theoretical discussion of water, a key ingredient of Blueberry Juice, a link to that podcast is here…and if you enjoy reading this blog, it’d be really great if you might share some with someone you know would enjoy -
Staying Curious
When we are curious we begin to see things differently.
One of the most important things about working with nature is simply staying curious about it.
The last two weeks during rather extreme weather for our region I have been outside a lot, watching nature change from “just getting out of bed” to “sprinting at full speed.” An early heatwave and low precipitation have caused all sorts of issues for what is otherwise usually a season for “cool season vegetables.”
It’s hard not to have climate anxiety these days. Nature sends signals, and the signals are everywhere. They may not be words or beeps on a phone. It feels like most of the world isn’t interested in picking up on what nature is sending out.
But we live in a world where most, at least in North America, are extremely disconnected from nature and the very world we are not only a part of, but of which we come from.
I really don’t want to be too down about the weather situation, or about the climate, or these sorts of things.
All I need to do is walk back to the garden and take a look. Everywhere there are things happening! There are tiny bugs on the soil. There are spiders and frogs everywhere. There are ink caps popping up. There are all sorts of plants. The flycatchers came back yesterday.
As exciting as those things can be, what’s most noticeable is what isn’t working. Maybe a patch of bare ground with hard clay, and little growing there. The question I ask myself is; what action can I take to send a signal to nature that this is a good place for something to thrive?
Humans are great at being destructive. But this is zero-sum thinking. To heal the earth, we can choose another option: the synergistic returns of pursuing the designs of nature. It’s a hard option to choose if we see nature as inconvenient or messy.
If you’re up for it, go take a close look at something today.
Staying curious is a great way to engage with the natural world around us and makes us care a little more for all the things that live within it. Humans are but one species on this planet. We should get to know our many millions of friends a little bit better. -
Leaf Mulch and the Water Cycle
This past week we planted 800 Peppers (bell and hot) into leaf mulch.
It’s been hot this entire spring. We’ll be getting close to an extra 30 frost-free days this season from our anticipated average. The heat dome sits over Alberta as we speak and there is no rain in sight for the area of our farm in central Canada. Climate change is already here, and resilient systems are the best way to protect against these wild swings and weather trends. There is nothing more resilient on planet earth than nature.
Under the leaf mulch, its cool and damp. The soil is soft and rich. You can scoop up a handful and look at it…and you can see many tiny little things moving around in it. Spiders scurry away if you remove the mulch layer. Frogs like to hide underneath the mulch as well, staying cool and keeping their skin moist. From the invisible to the almost-invisible to the frog, there’s a lot of life going on.
It is very exciting to see all these different critters as we transplant, and its a very good sign of a healthy and biodiverse system.
(That’s a Gray Treefrog)
It’s very easy to see and smell and feel that there is a whole system of life going on under the mulch. We all need water to live. And we all need to stay cool.
Exposing this valuable resource – soil – to the elements is one of modern agriculture’s biggest problems: actively changing the water cycle. Precious water evaporates into the atmosphere and leaves the soil dry and cracked, devoid of the rich life we want to see our plants growing in. By stripping the systems nature has built to retain water from the landscape, we run great risk of putting ourselves at a cascading set of problems: the soil dries out and stresses or kills soil life, plants become stressed, and stressed plants are highly susceptible to pests, diseases or will not produce high-quality fruit.
During a prolonged period in which no natural rain will fall, our goal is to to preserve the rainwater that does fall. Mulch is an easy way to achieve that, while helping all the diversity that lives underneath the parts of the plants that we can see.
Looking forward to our little section of peppers filling in and looking like they’re growing from the forest floor. -
The Coyote and the Farmer
Recently I have taken up the hobby of wildlife photography.
I was out practicing and crawling around to try and get a photo of some ducks when I got treated to an incredibly lucky moment….with a coyote. He looked right at me. I looked right back. We stared at each other.The experience of tranquility and peace and intimacy with nature in this moment left a mark on me, and I’ve gone out every day since. And I’ve looked at this photograph every day since as well.
I can’t help but think and feel when I look at this photo that this is everything humans are not. A coyote in a forest, emerging from spring. That humans are but one species on this earth, and we as individuals have but one singular consciousness, but that many billions or trillions of individual consciousnesses are existing right now on this planet, and humans act and behave and govern as though we are above the reality that we are but one part of nature.
When I think about agriculture, I think of all the things that are missing from modern conventional agriculture….which is to say, everything that is in this photo. The trees, the grass, the log. The mixture of spaces and species. And the coyote, too.
Some crazy how, everything in this photo functions without chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides or fungicides. It is beyond my comprehension why we believe so many things to be external threats, unsightly, unorganized or messy.
Nature is more powerful and more biologically productive than even the best and most advanced synthetic chemically-induced and cultivated-by-machinery crops we have today. It does it all with zero inputs.
We would do well to observe, listen and learn the lessons that nature has already figured out, and is already playing out, right in front of our eyes. If we choose to look for it, we will find it. If we choose to be brave and embrace nature, agriculture can lead the world out of our self-induced ecological and climate crises.
Diversity is strength. And we are destroying it, intentionally.
We live in a closed system. We would do well to learn how it functions before we go about killing all the things we decide we don’t like. -
Calculating Future Cost
How much will it cost?
We often see things in reductive monetary terms. Either it costs too much and we can’t make a profit, or its a very cheap no-brainer.
Where I’m from, one of the easiest places to see this dynamic is with things like road infrastructure. The project will cost $1 billion, the road will last for this long, it will move this many more cars, and it will provide some magic number of what’s called “economic value” (whatever that means), that makes the project “worth it” or “necessary.”
There are many things that are simply not on the table when considering what something will “cost.”
What is the cost to the same city to provide space for a million cars, that could’ve been used for tax revenue, parks, housing or businesses? What is the future cost of a city not investing in rails or cycling, and stratifying accessibility by income? What is the cost of the carbon we are burning and putting in the atmosphere? What is the cost to the city if we only have neighbourhoods accessible by big, heavy, expensive, individualistic transportation options?
What does it mean for our community?
Each year in agriculture, Nitrogen use goes up. What’s the cost?
Likewise each year in agriculture the amount of chemicals applied goes up. What’s the cost?
Dollars-per-pound-Nitrogen is probably not a useful metric when considering the effects of these fertilizers on our water sources and our soil (especially since these two things are necessary to grow crops). There is a cost to the effect of less nutritious food, and there is a cost to the reductive and widespread belief that Nitrogen is just something you need to add to grow things.
Dollars-per-litre of chemical is probably not a useful metric when considering these chemicals cannot be target-specific, that they kill everything, good or bad, the pest that is eating the monocrop or the honeybee that is coming to pollinate it.
There are major significant costs to all our reductive activities.
We can make better decisions if we decide other things that aren’t money are not worth the cost. Of course the irony is, we will all be richer…with nutritious food, with clean air, clean water, functional and productive ecosystems, and bustling cities that don’t have all their eggs in one mass production basket. -
How Do We Make Decisions?
Is it that we consider a profit, a loss, how easy it is to get from A to B, how we can drive there, park there or what there is for us to consume and entertain us there?
Or is it that we consider a whole and all its pieces, a community, the non-linear, the things we don’t see or imagine have any consequence?
The costs to our modern culture are far greater than just $$$. -
The Word “Atmosphere”
While lying in bed I found myself wondering about the word “atmosphere.” Of course these sorts of things are likely to have a Greek origin…But was the first part of the word”atmo” or “atmos?” Of course the second part of the word, “sphere,” has been added to the English language. What did that first part of the word mean?
photo by Graham Hnatiuk 2022 This bothered me so much I got out of bed to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Turns out “atmos” means “vapour” or “steam.” Okay, fair enough. Maybe my mind wasn’t blown by the etymology of the word itself. What made me stay up reading was the succinctness of the summary of what Earth’s atmosphere is: its properties, and how it works…not only the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, but the biological forces that contribute to it (emphasis mine):
The atmosphere of Earth is composed of nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), argon (0.9%), carbon dioxide(0.04%) and trace gases.[2] Most organisms use oxygen for respiration; lightning and bacteria perform nitrogen fixation to produce ammonia that is used to make nucleotides and amino acids; plants, algae, and cyanobacteria use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis….The current composition of the atmosphere of the Earth is the product of billions of years of biochemical modification of the paleoatmosphere by living organisms.
I found it profoundly refreshing to read such a condensed little paragraph that contained the physical, historical and biological reality of the makeup of our atmosphere. Maybe because the backdrop to that paragraph is a cacophony of nonsense in the media about whether or not climate change is real and inaction from governments around the world.
If we are to overcome climate change or change our food systems or agricultural systems or land management practices, it may help us to start with what things we are actually dealing with. To overcome these problems and change our ways, we need a significantly better level of basic “ecological” or “planetary” literacy.
At least it would help us ask better questions!
Like…why do we think Nitrogen fertilizer is so important for plants to grow if it makes up 78% of the atmosphere?
If a change in CO2 concentration from 350ppm to 423ppm in just ~30 years out of the Earth’s 4+ billion year history is enough to supercharge the oceans with enough energy to last for centuries, why are we burning more fossil carbon than ever to produce even more Nitrogen fertilizer for crops? Is this our best idea?
If nature has evolved organisms that do things like change the bond structure of atmospheric Nitrogen in a symbiotic relationship with plants, what other organisms are helping plants, and what organisms do plants help, and how does it all work?
We humans have a reductive problem….we demand everything be simple.
The part that has always bothered me most about modern agricultural practices focusing on applying chemicals to get a desired yield is that it completely ignores the complex biology of plants and their symbiosis with literally everything around them that contributes to the health of the plant.
It also ignores the (unbelievably fascinating) history of the billions of years of evolution that has resulted in the world as it exists now. The first photosynthetic organisms were dumping their garbage (Oxygen) into the atmosphere (they’re still dumping their garbage in the atmosphere!) The problem is that Oxygen is highly reactive and toxic. It took far far longer than humans have existed for organisms to evolve a way to deal with the immutable properties of Oxygen.
To ignore this global symbiosis and the miracle of engineering that is life and DNA creates a massive problem. Humans have become the single greatest biochemical modifiers of the atmosphere since the advent of using fossil carbon as an industrial energy source for everything from producing electricity to synthesizing Nitrogen fertilizers to powering personal vehicles.
And since humans are reductive, we like to make it about one thing, which is CO2. But a parallel truth is that we are also destroying unfathomable amounts of biological systems and reducing them to single-organism tracts of lands. Another truth is we are slow to change. Yet another truth, is we have never changed faster….if we are able to negatively alter the atmosphere in less than 100 years, we can fix our mistakes.
The other side of the coin of our current age of massive disinformation, is that we all have a Star-Trek-like device in our pockets with access to more information our species has ever had access to. You can even voice-activate your little pocket supercomputer we call a “phone,” just like in Star Trek. You can read about the composition and evolutionary history of our planet’s atmosphere (at 1am if you so want). You can learn about Rhizophagy or Mother Trees. You can find amazing photographs of mychorrizae intertwining with plant roots. The invention of the NPK model of plant health from the 19th century which still drives the majority of our reductive understanding of plant health today.
Our global ecosystem is a story of nutrient cycling…whether its a water cycle, a Carbon cycle or a Nitrogen cycle. Every organism has its place and niche, its function and services. “Carbon capture technology” that hasn’t yet been invented by tech bros working for oil barons will not fix our tapestry of issues, especially since nature figured it out 2+ billion years ago. Photosynthesis was first described in the 18th century. We’re a little late to this party.
We live in a closed system. A terrarium floating through the vacuum of space wobbling on an axis and falling around the sun at 29.78 kilometres per second. Full of life in all its beauty and complexity.
It’s all we’ve got.“It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.
“Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things that took 5bn years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread.
“My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral. Everybody else was shaking bottles of champagne, and it was quite a sense of accomplishment. And I didn’t feel that way at all. I was not celebrating. I was, I don’t know, shaking my fists at the gods.”
William Shatner, 2022 -
Soil Temperature Measurements I
It occurred to me that I had never taken a soil temperature reading, so I’m going to start and see what we find. We use these row covers quite extensively, but I’ve never measured just how much they increase the temperature – and specifically soil temperature – underneath. We have also never applied mulch in this way before, and with no sunlight hitting bare soil, we expect the soil temperatures to be a little bit lower.
Whether or not it makes a great deal of difference if row covers are put out prior to seeding or transplanting, or if the soil is covered or uncovered, is what I’m trying to find out.
It would just help to be aware for my own specific context approximately what soil temperatures can be expected in different times of season and different types of bed configurations we use in our system (bare soil, mulch, row covers, or a full canopy).
Last season we had a lot of difficulty with cold soils affecting germination rates. As a response we are instead putting row covers out first for a number of days prior to seeding to warm the soil up.
There were two initial temperatures taken for our first baseline. From one of the beds underneath the cloth in this photo, and another from a bed with no soil cover at all, receiving direct sunlight.
Temperatures were taken around 1pm. The air temperature was 10C. The top 5cm of bare soil was at 14C, while under the mulch it was just 5.5C. That’s quite a difference, however beyond 5cm was nearly identical at around 4C +/- 0.5C.
We will leave these covers on for at least 7 days and take a new reading (and probably put out more covers). -
Mulch for Soil Protection
This season we have really doubled down for mulch, which all of our long-season crops will have. Our goal is to keep as much soil covered as possible for as long as possible. We want to have a soil rich in life, provide a food source for decomposers and keep everything from drying out. Additionally it will help us a lot with weed control.
As the sun melts the snow, it sure does feel good knowing that our soil is not exposed to the elements and keeping all our tiny soil critters vital to intensive vegetable production protected.We’ll see how the beds perform over the season and see what we can do to improve the methods.
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Major Shifts
Our farm received at least 10cm of snow over the last 24 hours, and in 5 days the temperature is projected to swing up to 16-18C. Winter will soon feel like it is finally over.
Spring is always an exciting time!
After a long period of snowy frozen days it is novel (at least in our cold climates it is) to feel things change. This is the one season where we can be acutely aware that we are on a planet that lives and breathes just as we do.
It is amazing to witness a natural system designed to hibernate come alive.
Take the springtime to be present with nature during this major shift.
Graham
thank you for reading
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About Graham
Graham is an ecologist-farmer from Canada working on educating about the wonders and beauty of the natural world, and how we can design biodiverse food production systems.
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