Rethinking Lifestyle

Farmers that do not use tillage are called zero tillers. They typically use herbicides to control their weeds. Organic farmers choose not to use herbicides but use tillage instead to control their weeds.

David Rourke, a farmer in Minto, Manitoba, has declared that he is trying to not use herbicides or tillage to farm. He is even saying that he isn’t going to use fossil fuels to farm. His farm is not small. David seeds 6,000 acres every spring.

So how is he going to do that? David wrote a book called A Road to Fossil Fuel Free Farming describing how he intends to plant, maintain, and harvest a crop with no herbicides, no purchased fertilizers, no tillage, and no fossil fuels. On top of that seemingly unattainable goal, he has further goals of increasing his profits by 400%, increasing his carbon sequestration by 200%, and increasing the quality of the products he produces.

To begin with, David is going to adopt the five principles of regenerative agriculture. Try to maintain a living root system in your soil for as long as possible each year, include a lot of diversity in your crops, minimize soil disturbance, keep the soil surface covered with plant material as much as possible and incorporate grazing animals into your entire system.

The principles of regenerative agriculture have been proven to work in other places and other farms. I just finished reading a major reference book by Richard Perkins from Sweden called Regenerative Agriculture: A practical whole systems guide to making small farms work.

To attain his goal of increasing his profits, David is not going to buy many of the expensive inputs other farmers use to grow their crops while maintaining or improving his yields. To maintain his yields David intends to produce his own green ammonia fertilizer. This is a nitrogen source for plants made entirely using renewable energy and water and nitrogen from the air. To attain his goal of carbon sequestration, David is going to practise zero tillage and incorporate perennial crops that are grazed by animals. But how is he going to attain the goal of no fossil fuels?

Diesel engines that power most of our farm equipment can very readily run on straight vegetable oil. In the days before the internal combustion engine, we used draft animals to power our farms and required about 25% of the land for hay and grazing to power those draft animals. We have become much more efficient today, requiring only 5-10% of our land to grow enough canola or soybeans to power our diesel machinery to perform all the jobs the farm requires each year. There is no need to convert the canola or soybeans to biodiesel. It is enough to simply crush the seeds and extract the oil. This can be done on the farm with existing small-scale equipment.

David has always been a dreamer and an innovator, but a dreamer that has a history of actually carrying out his dreams. He says that we have all the technology we need to make this kind of farm function well. No need to invent anything. The biggest limitation, he says, is the nut behind the wheel.