The time has finally come! We have been gathering
information since our arrival. Now we feel we can properly introduce you all. This
is your official tour of the Asian Rural Institute.
Life here at ARI is all about food. It is centered around
the idea we call foodlife; food is
necessary for life, life is necessary for food—the two cannot be separated. So almost
every aspect of ARI contributes to a sustainable food production system. This
means that life here at ARI is very cyclical.
So we'll begin the introduction with what seems like the end
of things, but is also the beginning.
Compost and Soil
All crops and vegetables at ARI are grown organically; we
don’t use chemical fertilizers. ARI has been growing for forty years. In order to keep the soil rich and
fertile for tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, we have to be very intentional about how we use our soil and what goes into it.
Every morning, someone (often it’s Doug) takes a wheelbarrow
full of pig-poop and dumps it into the compost bins. Composting is a big deal.
There are four separate compost bins.
We compost everything from weeds, to kitchen waste, to meal
waste, to animal waste (just excrement), to food processing waste (such as rice
husk, soy bean husk, left over tofu, etc.). Here is a close up of some freshly
dumped goodies.
Once the compost is fully decomposed (black, soft, and
delicious!) it is added to garden beds and used to make soil blocks for seedlings.
In this way we return much of the nutrients that we take from the soil by
farming it.
The farm soil is mildly contaminated with radiation from
last year’s power plant mishap at Fukushima. We have to measure the Becquerel
count of many plants before putting them in the compost. Though soil fertility
is important, we cannot risk putting radioactive plant matter back into our
compost and thus, back into our soil. Some food they have been checking in the
past year has had too much radiation to eat, though the situation is gradually
getting better. Those plants die off at the end of the year’s cycle and are
taken off campus.
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| A close up of newest compost deposit (weeds, okara, pig waste). |
One way we are trying to remove the radiation in the soil is
by planting lots of sunflowers, rape seed, and soy beans. These plants absorb
and store much of the radiation from the soil, but still leave their seeds
respectively clean for use. Recently the farm bought a soy bean press that will
allow us to press soy beans for oil. We are also planning to offer these
services to local farms in our community.
Seed and Growth
Many crops are planted, managed, and harvested here on the
ARI campus. To get a full list, see our Spare Lessons tab. The crops and
vegetables are managed in one of two ways: Foodlife Work, and daily work.
Foodlife Work is done two hours a day. One hour before
breakfast, and one hour before dinner. Eveyone, whether you are on staff, an office worker, volunteer, director, or participant, works during food life time, but
the work is managed and directed by the participants themselves. This is an
example of one way ARI teaches through “learning by doing.”
There are four Foodlife groups. Each has their own expansive
vegetable garden, and is in charge of one of the live stock areas: two chicken groups, one pig group, and the fish
and ducks group. In these two hours we accomplish most of the basic work that
ultimately provides food for everyone here at ARI.
Daily Work is done after breakfast and after lunch. The
participants usually attend classes during this time, while volunteers (like
us) and farm staff manage the office, the kitchen, and the rented fields off
campus where we produce our larger crops like onions, soy beans, sweet potato,
and rice. Mostly the work is weeding, sowing, tilling, weeding again, watering,
thinning, and much more weeding. We like to joke that we use volunteers, not
herbicides. Though sometimes for the big jobs, like clearing a corn field or
harvesting the rice, we declare a community work day; everyone goes out into
the field and works together to accomplish the task.
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| weeding millet in one of our big rice fields |
Livestock and Feedback Systems
Having livestock on the farm is an important part of making
this food system sustainable. The livestock are able to consume many of the
plant waste that we get from the gardens and the kitchen. Also, the waste of
the livestock contributes in many ways to the health of our soil, crops, and
vegetables.
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| Jenny feeding the fish at John Pond |
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| Our alarm clock... |
Also to feed our live stock we seek out reusable food-waste
within our local community. We receive left over rice and bread from local
elementary schools. We receive lots of left over byproducts of rice and soy processing
like rice bran, rice husk, rice power, and okara (a bi-product of making tofu).
We use different combinations of all of these to make different kinds of feed for
all our livestock.
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| Rice bran used to make special composts and livestock feed. |
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| Chart for a feed called Finisher fed to animals near harvesting weight. |
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| Bio-gas. Yum! |
The waste of the livestock is essential in keeping our soil
healthy and fertile. All pig manure goes straight to composting. Chicken manure
is mixed and composted with rice husks and used to make a special organic
fertilizer called
bokashi. The liquid
runoff from the pig pens goes into a system of holding tanks where it ferments
and slowly transfer’s itself into a green liquid we call
biogas. It is a very potent source of nutrients that makes our
vegetables big and delicious. We use the left over eggshells and fish bones
from the kitchen to make a concentrated calcium solution that we use for our vegetables when they are looking weak.
Here are the holding tanks for methane gas which we collect
from some of the more solid pig waste. The system hasn’t been working well this
summer, but when it does function, the gas is used in the kitchen to cook with!
There are lots of flies here around the feed mixing room,
the pig pens, and the compost. Many spiders build their homes here to make use
of the flies but we also use the flies here. Beds are made out of okara and
rice for flies to lay their eggs in. Then we add the maggots to the fish food. This great source of protein is just another way we
make use of the ecosystem around us instead of relying upon industrial products
to run our farm.
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| Concentrated calcium solutions |
Harvest, Storage, and Cooking
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| red chili peppers drying |
Everything that is harvested is weighed and recorded. The
kitchen receives a lot of the fresh, seasonal vegetables. Otherwise they are
properly prepared for storage or processed into jams, purées, and sauces. Red
chili sauce and black berry jam are our favorites!
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| onions from June harvest |
Everyone rotates in their Foodlife Work on a complicated
schedule that eventually lands them in the kitchen. So we all share in the
preparation of meals. Jenny works in the kitchen every day for her Daily Work,
and once a week she leads the preparation of the entire lunch time meal.
Eating
For us humans, eating seems like the great end-all of these
processes. True, one reason we have gone to all of this trouble of building and
maintaining a sustainable agricultural system is so that we can eat. But all of
our work is much bigger than our three meals.
Even given the large amount of farm work we do, we rely upon
the health of our ecosystem completely. We are aware of this dependence and so
in everything we do, we do it carefully, considering the consequences. We are
aware of the small part we play in this much larger ecosystem. We sacrifice our
life (through labor/work/time) to make life on this farm possible, then we
sacrifice that life (by eating it) so that our life may continue. So receiving
the very food we need to live from this ecosystem is a very sacred moment here
at ARI. At this time we give thanks to God, who has thus far allowed the health
and existence of the ecosystem we work within and rely upon.
We eat three meals a day. Everyone eats together. Once the
tables are set, the leader of the meal introduces everything there
is to eat. We have lots of rice at all three meals and almost always there is
soup. Curries are common. Vegetables can vary but always come in abundance. And our
pork, chicken, and fish make frequent appearances, but are seldom central to
the meal.
Once the meal is introduced, any newcomers are asked to
introduce themselves so that no one feels separate from the community.
Then a person is selected at
random from those present. This person chooses from ten songs of prayer posted
on the wall. Everyone joins in the singing of the song, then all wait in
silence as the person prays over the meal. After the Amen, everyone echo’s the
traditional Japanese saying before a meal, itadakimasu
which means literally, “I humbly receive.” It is meant to give thanks to the
meal and acknowledge all the living organisms that are giving their energy as
well as the labor used to produce the meal.
Back to the Beginning
When the meal is over, we scrape
our plates into the Cooked Food Waste bucket, which is taken to the pigs or the
compost. Whoever is on the dishwashing rotation for the day, gets up to clean
the kitchen. The rest of us return to our work. We use the energy that we
obtain from our food to do the work it takes to prepare more food. The cycle
continues here at the Asian Rural Institute.
This is all a very brief overview
of just a few systems at work here at ARI. Please leave us comments or
questions about anything you’d like to hear about in more detail. All you
agriculture buffs give us a homework assignment! The more questions you ask the
more we’ll have to learn!
The shrines cost money to visit so we
gave them a pass and headed up into the mountains where we spent
Saturday morning hiking and swimming in very chilly waterfalls. We
then discovered that leech bites take a long time to stop bleeding.
Sunday morning we woke up and had a
large breakfast prepared by Ken, the owner of the small lodge where
we stayed. Eggs, toast, and oatmeal! Then we walked down into town
and explored a neat place along the river where there are many
statues of Buddha known as the Bakejizo, stone ghost statues.
Apparently if you walk one way counting them and then count them as
you pass by again, there will be a different number every time. We
did not count them, just admired them.
