TribeBlog

Earlier this year I wrote an editorial style post here on our weblog titled “Off Topic: Real Food,” (about the downfalls of the industrialized food system and why we should all be supporting self-sufficient community initiatives, including urban agriculture) which was met with enthusiastic comments, so I figured I would take an opportunity to elaborate on those goals and give an update on what we’ve been up to. I’ll apologize in advance for the length, I like to talk about this stuff and we at Onetribe think these things are very important

First and foremost, I am proud to announce that myself and another local business owner (Laurie Lay of All Star Market & Deli) have formally started a 501(c)3 non-profit entity called “Re:New Richmond.” I’ll post up a screenshot of the site itself and a link once it’s live, but here’s the organization logo and top of the site design

Our goals are to raise awareness of sustainable living initiatives in our urban areas, and support healthy self-sufficient communities. This includes supporting local individuals and businesses that create or sell locally produced goods, in addition to community building projects including community green spaces and edible gardens, as well as educational programs at local schools.

Our first two projects are ambitious but certainly doable. We are currently working with the city of Richmond on securing a contract to steward a city owned plot of land in the Woodland Heights neightborhood. This plot, once finished, will serve as a public green space including a childrens area with a green stage/tiny amphitheater and butterfly garden, polyculture gardens consisting of perennial plants, flowers, fruiting trees and bushes, herb gardens, and a portion of the area will be converted to community vegetable garden plots for rent for a very small annual fee, so that community members may grow vegetables, flowers and herbs for their households. We will be doing low impact development to minimize any disturbance to existing native trees, and building a rainwater collection system to outfit a community member’s shed adjacent to the plot to provide irrigation.

Our other current project consists of the transformation and re-utilization of a beautiful several thousand square foot greenhouse on the grounds of a local elementary school.

The greenhouse was built about 5 years ago by Goodwill in cooperation with the city Parks & Recreation department to serve as a team building and educational facility for teaching mentally disabled Goodwill participants job skills. I don’t know how long that project lasted but the greenhouse has been underutilized and/or not utilized at all for a few years. As you can see from the photos it was in rough shape when we first gained access.

In just a few weeks of after work until sunset evenings, Laurie and I have made significant progress on cleaning up the inside and getting it ready for this growing season.

The previous crops in the greenhouse had been planted and grown through black weed-block canvas (which we’ve been pulling up to expose the soil below – in the above photo the right side has been exposed, the left is still covered), spot fertilized by artificial means, and irrigated with potable water. It seems like things were growing pretty well, but there are more natural, more inexpensive ways to grow stronger plants and healthier food.

There is a ton of biomass available for composting – several cubic yards of dead weeds and grass, and we plan to utilize every last bit of it. The goals for processes in the greenhouse include intensive vermi-composting (composting + worms = worm castings – you’re basically growing nutrient packed dirt) both for mixing into the existing soil to regenerate it, as well as to actually heat the greenhouse so we can grow year round. Evenly distributed bins of compost giving off heat (it can reach 100+ degrees inside a compost pile) can keep an enclosed space warm enough to grow through all four seasons. We are also building an intensive rainwater collection system capable of saving as much of the water that falls on the greenhouse as possible, allowing us to irrigate all of our crops while conserving potable water. The greenhouse is planned to be a zero-input (no outside water, no outside fertilizer except for natural compostable waste goods), highly productive polyculture environment.

The end result will be the following:

• Educational garden for the students of the elementary school
• Possible impact on healthful school lunch initiatives
• A place to start vegetable seedlings and perennial plants for our current and future community garden projects, as well as a means to provide the community at large with healthy seed and plants for their own gardens
• A controlled environment for seed saving to continue passing on heirloom and rare varieties of fruits and vegetables to seed banks for the enjoyment of future generations
• A sustainable model for urban growing which can be scaled up or down for any given site
• A place to educate the public about indoor and outdoor natural growing practices and sustainable living
• An opportunity to grow produce, flowers and herbs for non-profit purposes, including donation to other entities such as the local food bank, community organizations holding events, and for farmers market style sales to support Re:New Richmond itself

Other projects that we have considered for Re:New include community gardens in other areas, classes and informational sessions on growing and buying fresh and local produce, providing resources to put consumers directly in touch with farmers and farms that are involved or wish to be involved in farm to table initiatives, including CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) programs, and extensive nutritional education and self-sufficiency work with children and others in lower income areas.

We are involved in many facets of sustainable living beyond farming and are either directly involved in or support:

• support buy local initiatives
• public transportation and bike lane installation
• sustainable housing programs, particularly affordable projects aimed at giving lower income individuals and families, students and those of public service occupations (teachers, for example) access to healthy housing in fulfilling communities
• public programs that favor the addition of more public green spaces to our urban areas, and the conservation of first class farm lands, wet lands and other areas in need of stewardship that should not be developed upon

Onetribe is of course, by association, involved in many of these things I have spoken about thus far in this post. Our employees help with research and ideas for non-profit initiatives, volunteer their time, and the company financially supports this and other non-profit initiatives. In talking with customers and seeing the reactions to our previous weblog posts about environmental and sustainability issues and our interactions with people on other online sites, we have noticed great enthusiasm and thought it would be a good idea to see how far we could take the idea of publicly supported community initiatives. We have decided that we will start taking donations for Re:New Richmond (upon launch of the Re:New informational website) with our orders to be directly donated in the buyer’s name to the organization. In the USA this is a tax deductable donation and everyone who donates will be sent a receipt by Re:New Richmond. The process will be a simple self-contained portion of the billing section of the Onetribe LLC website’s checkout, a screenshot is featured below.

The donation module will be turned on once the non-profit’s information site is fully active. The donation will by default be set to $0.00 and there is no obligation whatsoever to donate anything at all. The drop down will include a couple of pre-set totals, and the text entry field gives an optional way to donate any other total.

We absolutely understand that some people do not share our interests or are more concerned with other things in their lives. With the current state of the world’s economic system we also certainly understand the fact that many people simply don’t have any extra funds sitting around. Leave leave it blank and act like it never happened, you won’t hurt our feelings Regardless, we are doing everything we can to foster new ideas and teach and learn every day, and if I have the ability to lend a hand even further than my own efforts by enabling other people that may be interested in such things to support grassroots initiatives, that is something I am interested in doing.

At the Onetribe headquarters the strawberry patch we planted last spring is doing great, and if you stop by during late spring or summer expect to be offered some nice juicy organic strawberries during your visit!

We also have a cart full of seedling pods that we just planted this past week for our peppers, tomatoes and several kinds of herbs and flowers. These will go into our own personal gardens, some of the planters at the Onetribe studio and into the greenhouse. Everything we are planting is an heirloom variety of 40-100+ year old saved seed from a few different seed banks here in Virginia, including Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello seed bank. They are open pollinated, naturally produced seeds saved for generations by families both here in the USA as well as families from abroad that have brought their own country’s seed with them as they immigrated. Heirloom seed is an important way to maintain genetic diversity of plants that may otherwise become extinct, particularly as more and more industrialized foods are genetically modified or scientifically bred. Aside from that, they just taste really freaking amazing!

Please tell us about your own garden or sustainable living efforts! Pots on the back porch? Planters at work? Community garden in your neighborhood? Do you save rainwater? Do you visit a local farmer’s market to support local growers instead? Let us know, leave a comment!

Last year I posted photographs of our gardens at Onetribe and my house and I hinted at my interest in whole foods and agriculture, but I didn’t go into much detail. Faced with some gift certificates to bookstores and a little extra cash over the holidays, I bombarded myself with new books to immerse my late night hours and weekends with. I have a huge interest in the idea that humans should be capable of sustaining themselves individually and as communities without the need for industrialized farming, which ruins the land and produces far inferior “food,” even after pumping it full of growth hormones and genetically altering its seed. Industrialized agriculture aims to modify nature to suit human need, which creates an imbalance we are unable to control. Genetically modifying seed for higher yield creates weaker, less nutritionally productive plants. Spraying pesticides and fertilizers on land not only disrupts the food chain, killing off animals and insects beneficial to the natural selection and growth of plants, but it overlooks the root of the problem of industrialized farming to begin with – it is not sustainable because it is a one way system in which nutrients are leeched from the land year after year without replenishment. Large farming conglomerates are constantly having to fix this imbalance with chemicals, creating an even larger problem each time it happens. The “food” grown today and flown all over the world out of season for consumption whenever we “feel like it” is nutritionally deficient to the tune of 30% to 50% of what it would contain if it was grown naturally on a normal time scale with no pesticides or fertilizers, and utilizes millions of tons of fossil fuels a year to produce petrochemicals sprayed on fields and fuels for machinery and shipment. We are, quite literally, eating oil in the end.

In my travels to Indonesia I have spent time doing research on Masanobu Fukuoka’s methods for natural no-till, no-flood cultivation of indigenous rice versus the government subsidized back-breaking growth of till, flood, pesticide and fertilizer ridden crop after crop growth of non-indigenous hybridized less nutritious rice. The difference in the health of the plants and the first few yields is amazing. The farmers around the experimental patty my friends Charlie and Wayan are growing in are jealous and wary of the fact that the naturally grown crop looked far worse for longer and ended up exploding into a much higher yield per plant than the industrially cultivated variety. The sad thing is that the wealthier land owners which own the land that the Balinese farm for rice take the money they make from the sale of the inferior rice and turn around and buy the traditional, much more nutritious indigenous rice with it to feed their families while the farmers are forced to feed their families with the industrialized, less nutritious crop. I am returning to Indonesia this year most likely in March to work on Onetribe stuff with our artists there and to continue my research with Charlie and Wayan on sustainable agriculture.

I have a big problem with the current state of the “organic” and “green” industries right now. They are almost exclusively geared toward high end products. I feel that the way to really make a difference is to start from the ground up, to make these products and healthy, whole, natural food affordable and available to the people that need it most, the poor, the malnourished, along with education about why they should not be eating all of the genetically modified corn-sugar ridden junk from fast food restaurants and stacked in the freezer section of the grocery store. There is so much food in the world that if it was re-organized to be grown locally and sustainably, there would not be a hungry mouth on this planet. But health is evidently not a basic human right. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are great and all, but if we are forced to make money for basic nourishment, there is something wrong with the system. The problem is that it IS a system, and this is what urbanized, sustainable growing and community based efforts aim to dismantle.

I recently gained access and blessing to start to utilize many acres of farmland about 60 miles SE of Richmond, VA as a test bed for several theories on natural growing and polyculture, which is the concept of growing several crops together, along with beneficial grasses and other plants to help naturally control and deter pests and disease, similar to the way a prairie works in the natural world. The reason prairies thrive, with their wildflowers, wild legumes and other edible grasses and such, is that the diversity creates a buffer against pests and disease (strength in numbers) because no one thing is going to effect every plant on the prairie in the way it does a monocultured crop (like an entire field of lettuce, for example). Farmers have found it necessary to spray pesticides and fertilizers on food crops since the switch to monocultured farming simply because nature can no longer do it by itself with success. The land I plan on using has been used for generations to rotate cotton, soy and corn. Recently they have switched to no-till farming, which is great (tilling does more harm than good by disturbing the natural decomposition process of the ground, disrupting oxygen channels necessary for root growth, and aiding in soil erosion by water and wind) but they are still using genetically modified, pesticide resistant seed (very, very common. chances are the “food” you eat is this way) so they can spray the entire field without killing the crop. I am working on taking soil and water table samples to see how this has residually effected the health of the soil, and then working a portion of the land as a polyculture farm to see if I can naturally heal the soil without the use of any synthetic additives. This has been proven to work, but through my efforts I hope to start to teach the local farming community about different ways to gain the same or higher yields while increasing the productivity of the soil over the years and breaking the cycle of nutritional imbalance in the soil, and thus the food. The measure of productivity in food is as close to 100% utilization of the natural elements available, including the sun, and letting the plants replenish the soil themselves as they have evolved to do. It’s quite simple really in the end, and if you think about it, there’s no way rain forests could exist, or prairies or any other kind of high growth environment if it was not a completely closed system. It would drain itself of nutrients in years and become a barren desert.

My eventual plan (and a portion of Onetribe’s charitable effort) is to really find a way to start people thinking on a more community-centric level, eating local, in season foods wherever and whenever possible, especially those of lesser income and circumstance. This keeps people healthy, creates community dialogue and growth and disrupts the multi-billion dollar junk food farming industry that has been built around us. Humans can only eat so much food at any given time, so the only way to effectively grow a business based on living commodities is to modify either humans or the commodities so that we either are able to consume or need to consume more of that commodity for the business to produce more profits. It’s a lot easier to take control of and be secretive about modifying and producing “food” crops than it is to modify humans, so that’s exactly how it’s been gone about. And that’s a sad state of affairs, that we think we need to rely on this. Break away, be your own human. Don’t let them modify your food (and modify your health and that of your family and friends) for their profits.

First, let me just put it out there that today I have been adding unique products to the site throughout the day and I have a few more that will go up this afternoon or tomorrow depending on how much longer I feel like sitting in front of this dreaded little electronic box. It’s worth taking a look at just to see if there is anything in your size because they are all one offs. Some raw antler faced moose antler plugs, Pink Ivory wood plugs with Peony carvings in them, 9/16″ Labradorite plugs with gemstones set in the faces, 3″ diameter 00g Ebony spirals, 3″ Labradorite concave tunnels, and maybe some other goodies. Here’s the direct link to the Unique section of our site.

We have been getting our dig on and our dirt on here at the studio and at my house. We have built several large wood planters outside our building and on our loading dock patio that we have planted various fruits and vegetables in. The planters are 5 to 8 feet in length and 1 to 3 feet in width and contain squash, beans, strawberries and many other goodies that we are basically growing in an urban/industrial area, so it should give the building a nice touch in addition to providing employees and customers with stuff to grub down on. If you are a customer or find yourself in the area mid-summer, stop by to check out the garden and we’ll probably have some extra stuff to send you home with

I have also been working on a vegetable garden behind my house. I figured every self respecting pre-civil war house deserves an old time vegetable garden so I turned over and organically fertilized (sort of a misleading term, what I really did was churn composted matter and lime into it) a considerable amount of my back yard yesterday evening over the course of about four hours to prepare it for the army of edibles I have planned. Several different kinds of chili peppers, sweet banana peppers, more tomatoes than anyone really needs, pumpkins, beans, dill, thyme, coriander, oregano, lavender and a bunch of other stuff.

We had a garden when I was young for several years and although it was my fathers idea and he “directed” how it went, it was pretty much my garden. I worked it, I groomed it, planted, harvested, and prepared it for the next year’s crop before winter. I learned a lot about responsibility and patience and spent a lot of time in the garden willingly working because it is something I immensely enjoy. This was years before anyone ever cared about “organic” gardening or common sense gardening but this is exactly what we did. Plant the plants and let nature grow and nurture them. No fertilizers, pesticides, minimal watering. We didn’t till with an electronic machine because it creates a hard pan of material underneath the turned material that becomes very difficult for plants to root through, and tillers usually do not dig very deeply anyway. I was taught to go through manually turned material by hand and how to easily sift out the root structures to break up the sod, and what is left is lush, fine dirt. The added bonus of removing this organic matter is that you can plant faster because you do not need to wait for everything to die and then decompose. If you plant without removing it you run the risk of your plants rooting into a big mass of organic matter that just gets in the way, and much of that organic matter can continue to try and regrow. If it succeeds it can choke out your seedlings, and even if it doesn’t it is still using precious minerals and moisture in the process. I was also taught to pay attention to how far apart my plants are planted and to pay attention to root system growth when harvesting to judge how water and minerals are spread through the soil. To plant in hills and allow plants to spread out and grow wider and deeper to extend their reach and the amount of “food” available for each plant, which results in healthier, more nutritious fruit/veg, stronger plants and can virtually negate the need for non-natural waterings.

The nutritional value of industrially produced foods has plummeted anywhere from 10 to 50 percent depending on the vitamin or nutrient in question over the past 50 years. That means that all of those irradiated, waxed, pesticide filled, over fertilized energy hogging fossil fuel wasting non-native fruits and vegetables we see at the grocery store are not nearly as healthy for us as we’d like to believe. This coupled with the fact that it is very, very hard nowadays to find even simple foods that don’t contain processed sugars or unnecessary chemicals, means that as a society we are living and eating like shit, even if we are eating lots of supposedly healthy items. The best way to insure your own health is to have a hand in it, and growing and producing your own food, or at the very least, cooking your own food with basic ingredients puts you way ahead of the health game. I am all about organic and natural living, but it is also a billion dollar industry, industry is of course about money, and a lot of times it comes down to money vs ethics. Take yourself out of that equation. Many fruits, vegetables and herbs (buy seedlings or seeds from reputable companies) can be grown even in pots on your porch in the middle of the city. I purposefully chose a place to live with a yard where I can plant things, flower beds where I can harvest herbs and flowers for cuttings, and a small rear porch where I can grow potted items as well. Going through all that effort isn’t necessary but you can even start by growing in a window. Anything you can do to take the load off the world’s resources, produce locally, and be an active part of your own health, do it. As far as I’m concerned it’s our responsibility. It all tastes better with a little effort mixed in anyway!