Survey on watermills

I have started the social research bit of my watermills renovation thesis. If you have a watermill and have a few minutes to answer some questions, have a look here.

Of course mostly I have to go and ask people this stuff directly, which takes hours, days. Weeks in fact: to locate the owners, find out what time/where they are. Introduce the issue, me, the survey, what, why. for whom and so on... As I made so many changes to the survey (Monica being the master editor) I didn't have time to translate into Portuguese, so I have to explain each question with my fairly basic grasp of the language. It has seemed to work, albeit with several promptings in some cases.

This couple in the picture are in their 70s, still working away on the land, and running one of the remaining grinding mills in the region. What quality of flour! What simplicity of technology!

Such interesting results. Most owners are over 65 years old, live on the land, have let their watermills go to ruin because there's no longer a market for milled corn or wheat. Nor much of local production of these products, except to fatten the pigs. In fact, we usually ended up talking about the demise of local agriculture, how there are so few subsidies or support from the state. Agriculture in general is, they think, at the bottom of the Government's priority list.

Most people hadn't heard of climate change - at least in terms of dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions; urgent need to reduce emissions or global climate will go haywire and all that. Instead they were familiar with local changes over the course of their lifetime, "it used to be much colder in winters", or, "now there's a changable climate - it's sunny in winter, can be pouring in July" and so on.

I also had a bunch of questions on peak oil. Despite the huge oil price rises last year, almost none of those interviewed had heard that global oil production could soon fail to meet global demand, leading to price instablity, economic and social chaos, etc.

This seems odd, given the potential severity of the situation. Probably the highest profile report so far on this was by Robert Hirsch, for the US Department of Energy (DoE) back in 2005 or so. The DoE apparantly shelved his report when it first came out because of his fairly alarming conclusions. His report can be seen here.

Further, the impact of peak oil on agricluture and food production is seriously disturbing. Surely any rural community should be worried, and getting ready for less fuel-hungry food systems. Richard Heinberg, probably the best known author and speaker on peak oil, describes our current food supply predicament in his usual eloquent and concise manner in this article.

But all this was a kind of background context to the watermill questions. It forms part of my thesis introduction into watermill renovation, so I thought I should add it to my survey. Anyway, upshot of survey is:

• almsot all interviewed showed interest in mill renovation
• didn't know you could generate electricity or hot water from the mills
• would be interested in knowing more about the options
• don't have much money to invest
• would be interested in partial investment if Govt / EU / whatever funds could help
• are interested in using mills as part of a new eco-tourism watermill trail (cheap shelter, cleared river access routes for mountain biking or walking).

More later

Skateboarding in Afghanistan

Great post here on new skateboarding training project in Afghanistan.

Transition in the Minho

Last Saturday we hosted a small gathering around our new table. It was organised by José Morais, a local landscape gardener entrepreneur / permaculture pioneer from the neighbouring town of Valença. We’ve been sharing ideas for months; he has plans to open a permaculture training centre and is part of a regional network that includes North Portugal and Galician permaculture projects and practitioners.

We had agreed to meet this day to widen our discussion on possibilities for an abandoned bit of local mountain (Mount Faro) and to see who else might be interested. He said he’d invite a few fellow visionaries. Many came, including:

José, the catalyst. Well tied into to local Government, business and the media.

Hugo, Portuguese chartered accountant, business consultant and advisor on EU grants and funding streams;

Miriem and Boghi, from Equador and Galicia (respectively), recently relocated from the city to forge a new life in the country, building a home with natural materials, teaching yoga and exploring new ways to live from the land;

Henrique, local businessman and entrepreneur, running a furniture shop and involved in a variety of interesting sustainable land-development initiatives;

Eurelio, Henrique’s friend, also in business, along to find out more about our discussion;

Juan, from just over the water in Galicia, works with steam turbines, should really be a professor of economics and social transformation;

David, Galician landscape gardening business manager;

Peter, Dutch and living in Portugal for almost 20 years, working in the local transport/metro company in Porto. Also enormously well read on straw bale construction and micro-renewables;

Donald and Eleanor, from Scotland and Phillipines, here for over 17 years, a former vet and teacher respectively. Living in a bit of rural paradise in a forest near Valença, virtually self sufficient, with hoards of animals, eco-buildings and innovative projects on the go;

Louis and Illiana, from nearby Camninha (Portuguese side of the river), mechanic and crafts/leather-worker extraordinaire, accompanied by their charming daughter;

Me, from Scotland in Portugal since last August with wife and kids, starting eco-renovation of ruin,. Former humanitarian aid worker, now finalising post-graduate studies in renewable energy and natural building systems.

Our Agenda

We decided to discuss:

- Abandoned land and resources

- Local development

- Local food production

And also to present on, and discuss where relevant:

Ø Ecological / sustainable construction

Ø Renewable energies (I was supposed to present on the watermill thing)

Ø Biological agriculture

Broader Context

Discussion launched into local agriculture and food supply. It’s clear that the majority of people working the land in this area are now well past retirement age. Food, in general, comes from far away. The Government has, we are told, not actively supported local agriculture. This area is known for growing wine - not producing food, despite its near-ideal location: ample rainfall, plenty of sun, fertile soils, few frosts past February. Agriculture, I kept hearing, is a forgottern sector. What is produced en masse is monoculture plantations in the South: cork, fruit, wheat, olives. I'm not sure of the statistics of how much food is imported versus exported, this would be useful to know.

That said, all my neighbours seem to have their own little plots. I doubt everyone does, but a passion for locally grown tasty food is still alive, and the necessary knowledge to generate healthy yields are still here.

Use of pesiticides and fertilisers in both the vineyards and kitchen gardens is widespread, but really because they are seen as cheap and effective. People do like to point out when something you are sampling has “nothing” added (ie, don’t worry it’s not covered in toxic dust).

The building industry

In terms of local construction, there has been a clear victory for the cement marketing board across the region. Everything is built with cement: walls, floors, almost all roofs. Builders claim this to be cheaper, and more “resistant”. Well, I guess it’s not going to rot, but everything inside the house may well rot first, as these cement-lined homes cannot easily dispel water vapours and other gases generated within a home.

Houses designed like this will need to rely heavily on a ventilation system to reduce indoor condensation. Imagine mid winter, when the rain doth fall and the steamy showers and soups are many, this is when people usually shut the windows.

Insulation is now mandatory for new buildings by local building regulations, and the cheapest and most common is a blue polystyrene product, about as far from natural as it’s possible to get. I’m not sure what went into the production of this stuff, but it’s probably off-gassing various toxins, and without doubt caused pollution somewhere in its manufacture.

In short, the construction industry here, like everywhere else, is reliant on heavily polluting man-made materials. Materials that could be replaced with local, renewable products which perform just as well, if not better. All that’s needed is to reduce the environmental impact of all construction materials, return to traditional techniques of working with lime, earthen plasters, locally grown wood, stone and other natural materials.

We discussed straw bale construction (as Miriem, Boghi and ourselves are planning on using this system, and the Galician straw bale network has been involved in several others). Straw is unknown in these parts as a wall-fabric, especially load-bearing (where the roof is actually supported by the straw-bale walls, rather than a timber frame). When I see how many layers of different materials conventional building has to add to a wall to achieve the thermal performance of a straw bale, it seems bizarre.

Surely it’s more expensive to buy all those different products (bricks, insulation, more bricks, cement mortars, non-permeable plastic lining, timber frame wall for plasterboard, plasterboard, internal plaster, paint). Straw, on the other hand, requires nothing more than an earth plaster made from clay from a few hundred meters away, some sand, some local fibres, and water. You can use either lime or clay-earth render on the outside – known to be highly weather resistant, once dry (or cured in the case of lime). Miriem and Boghi will use lime. We’ll probably go for earth. We will monitor outcomes.

We were being distracted by talk of straw. There is so much more to ecological building than straw, but we decided to take it up another time. We had an agenda to stick to, insisted José, brandishing his “talking stick” (you had to wait your turn).

New Economics

Things got interesting again when Juan talked about the collapse of our current economic system, how it is doomed to collapse due to its very design, how the current economic crisis is only the beginning. How society based on constant growth and debt cannot be sustained. How alternatives are needed, and our need to create something new, based local resources and systems that do less damage to the biosphere. (More on this subject later).

José reminded us that we could be a network of self-supporting projects, that provide examples of alternative models, that offer regional initiatives like Agenda 21 some capacity to do something.

Agenda 21 in the Minho is the officially adopted forum for discussing “sustainable community” issues. Pamphlets are printed, priorities highlighted, but it would appear that little meaningful actions are taken, if our measure is, say, to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2020, or to reduce pollution in local rivers. We discussed this, and wondered if their problem was capacity to implement, after all few of the people attending these meeting have the time, money or resources to really implement something substantial, in the right direction. Our objective then, is to join these meetings and offer suggestions.

Boghi and Miriem, who are already “doing” this shift, suggested that we need to just get on with our projects first. After all, our projects already consume our entire energy, time and resources. And we should make sure they are done well so they are positive examples. Otherwise we’ll be all theory and no action. We agreed, but also agreed that others need to be informed too.

Abandoned Lands

There are many rural areas out there – valleys and mountains once inhabited, now empty or in dilapidation, sometimes under pressure from over-eager tree-felling policies (José spoke of an ancient woodland that recently fell victim to such devastation). Another problem is fires in summer that rage over dried out undergrowth and dead trees, areas which used to be kept clear by local communities collecting firewood and their herds of goats eating away the small plants before they dry out and become fire hazards. .

Something must be done, we agreed, but how – we ask José who certainly has a vision for a grand plan. How? When we are few and the scale of such projects so enormous? How do we mobilise the people to embark on these kind of initiatives on a largely voluntary basis?

Someone pointed out that most young people these days are motivated by cool phones, consumer gadgets, better cars and jobs in cities that will pay for these consumer lifestyles. Others countered that this may be a trend, but it’s not true of everyone. There’s increasing interest in something more meaningful and… real (at least I think that’s what was said, my Porto-Galego is still a bit rough).

Davide, said there’s more people doing this type of thing now than you think. Should they be brought together then? What happens if we all remain independent, unaware of each other?

Nothing wrong with that, essentially. We all get on with our things. However, if we all want to achieve a broader shift, if we all believe our current system is heading for a fall then we need to get prepared. Create something different.

Informed as we are, at least partially, of the converging energy and climate crises, then we need to mobilise. After all, together we are stronger than by acting alone. Revolutionary talk, almost. Except we’re not challenging any political party. On the contrary, we talked of helping local communities and councils, schools, students and businesses of having a chance to see another perspective.

We realised, after some debate, that a first step is one of raised awareness of the external crises and pressures. After all, what motivates us to seek alternatives. Is everything fine? Can we continue to consume what is left of the planet’s natural resources in a world of never-ending limits?

No! there are limits: limits to fresh drinking water, to greenhouse gas concentrations before we cook our planet; limits to how depleted our over-exploited soils can become before they blow away in the wind; limits to oil and gas supplies, to fish stocks and natural habitats for species above ground and under water. Limits to growth in general.

Gradually we agreed that others need to hear these stories. This can be our first move. Ge the info “out there”.

My story

I looked up at some point and saw a copy of Rob Hopkins’ Transition Towns Handbook I’d brought along.. It reminded me of Davie Phillips, a good friend, who back in 2004 showed me the film The End of Suburbia, one of the first about Peak Oil.

I was shocked – it took me weeks, if not months to process the fact that our entire modern world is completely dependent on oil and other fossil fuels.

I had just started working in the Maldives with the UN on post-tsunami recovery projects, advising the Government there on how to deal with the thousands of displaced people (my line of wok for the past decade and half or so). I started seeing things in a whole new light. I saw communities of islanders now firmly addicted to oil like the rest of us – for their energy (every island has a diesel generator), most food was imported, most of it made with fossil fuels. Their transport, most of their drinking water, their entire way of life reliant on an ever-increasing flow of that black gold.

I looked at our collective efforts to help people rebuild after disaster and realised we were just reinforcing that very vulnerability. Instead of building some form of local self-sufficiency. And why? Because local Government, the UN, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and other organisations didn’t know about the potential peaking of world oil production.

This led me to return to school to learn more about it all, about what alternatives might be out there. So into the Green of Wales I went to the Centre for Alternative Technology to do a Masters in Energy and Environment Studies. A privileged position to be in indeed – to be able to afford time off work to learn and read and debate, an opportunity I feel I have a responsibility to do something with.

Actually I’m convinced now that the most vulnerable folks to the combined climate and energy crises are those in developing countries, and one day I want to find a way to share my new found knowledge with them. Towards this end I helped set up RESET while in Wales (but that will have to wait for another time to explain further).

To Portugal…

For now we’re in Portugal, in the river valleys of the mighty Minho, engaging in this fine community we have chosen to call home.

Here, like the sparkling Maldivian islands, there’s limited awareness of a rapidly approaching decline in cheap oil and gas. Like everyone, we consume and enjoy as if these “good times” will go on forever in a collective belief that the life-blood of modern civilisation – oil – will continue to flow to meet rising global demand.

One of our biggest concerns should be food production. Oft-quoted research says that it now takes 10 calories of energy to create 1 calorie of food. When you add-up the various inputs it makes sense: first we plough the fields using diesel-fed tractors, then add fertilizers which are produced with natural gas. Then we add herbicides and pesticides, made from oil-based products. We harvest these foods with even bigger machines, also running on diesel fuel. Then ship them around the world and process them in energy-hungry factories, and move them around further with still more fuel. Our food is virtually made from oil.

Most of our world’s biggest fields are so exhausted, depleted of the complex life forms that provide soil nutrition indefinitely, that we are forced to continue this cycle. This system also causes enormous damage to local rivers and oceans. “Dead zones” are now appearing in oceans near industrialised agriculture areas where everything is dead. These are linked to agricultural fertilisers and pesticides. So even if we weren’t running out of the raw material to continue this madness, it will destroy more and more of our land, river and oceans.

In terms of peak oil there is a compelling array of ‘experts’ on the other side – assuring us that alternatives are just around the corner, that new oilfields are ready for the picking as soon as the oil price rises a bit. And maybe they’re right. Though as I read and learn more on the subject I suspect they are running a high stake risk – largely based on un-verifiable data from a handful of the world’s largest producers. This map shows how many countries have already past peak, and when.

Davie Phillips, Rob Hopkins, Vandana Shiva, Richard Heinberg and many others have decided it’s time to start a process of transition to a society based on locally produced food, energy and economics. To create communities more resilient to these global energy shocks. We can learn from the Transition Town Movement and other initiatives around the world who have already started down this road. No point re-inventing the wheel after all.

The nice thing is that this transition can actually lead to more fulfilling and pleasant lives. Why pay to go the gym or expensive organic foods – asks Indian activist and campaigner Vandana Shiva – when you can get both by working your own garden? Why not save money and the planet by localising our heating and power sources. It’s all possible but it takes enormous collective effort...

In conclusion

So under our bamboo shade in late April we agreed that we need to get existing materials and media out there, in the local language, expose more people to these issues. They can do with this information what they will, of course. But at least they’ll have the choice: continue on our current trajectory or get together to design our local form of transição – for our own bit of future security.

It was clear from the meeting that we had people from around the river Minho region. A bio-region you could say (defined by our common river valley, the Minho) and anyone else in the surrounding areas that wants to be involved. There’s certainly interest and motivation to create something dynamic and practical, that moves us in the right direction. Let’s see where it goes.

Notes on above

Much of this is my own musing, and doesn’t entirely reflect the discussion. These aren’t minutes after all. I’ve also decided not to rant on about climate change and how vital and desperate that whole situation is. There is so much known about this now, and so much information available, but there isn’t space here. Suffice to say that Transition is about tackling both crises, about creating a low carbon society – one that produces far less cabon emissions because it is dependent on local, renewable sources for food, energy and transport.

Some good links for more information:

Cultivate

The Oil Drum

Transition Culture

Wake Up Freak Out

New Economics Foundation

Portugal Permaculture Network

All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas (UK)

Books:

The Party’s Over

Peak Everything

Twighlight in the Desert

Heat

Six Degrees

Films (will finish links later!)

Power of Community

End of Suburbia

The end of the line

Farm for the future

Flow

Age of Stupid

Crude Impact

Reports

Climate Safety

Zero Carbon Britain (Now we need Zero Carbon Portugal)

RESET / AGPROGRO

The Hirsh Report

WEO World Energy Outlook 2008

Ozzy BBQ and clay

AJ visited on his way round the world, and like every Ozzy I've ever met is obssessed with grilling food on an open fire, a BBQ. So when AJ saw our emerging kitchen he insisted his first job be to build one of these.

First, a bit of background, here's how the "transit camp" has come into being:

Last year, when first arrived it looked like this:

And then when we got started in March this year, with Ruth and Paulo, like this:









Most of the walls were falling apart, so that took a fair bit of work to put them back together again. Local dude, Vitor, is a virtuosso with a tractor and a piece of chain: the rocks obeyed.


Then stone mason João and his apprentice came to show us how to rebuild the main walls (though he does like his cement for "strength"). My friend Jon Aguilar, West Coast Americano stone builder would be shocked and always insists that dry stone is the Way. I agree Jon, I agree! Still, João is a scream and we have a good crack.









here's João in front of the collapsed wall. That's the planned back wall, or shelving zone of kitchen.



Then came the yurt (as per earlier posts

Paulo's groovy boogey / strip-tease moment while my mum potters around in semi-nakedness in background. Shock-horror. Best thing about yurt is the keystone thing in the middle:

Then we realised we needed a table

Former paratrooper Machado knows how to deal with these granite posts that seem to grow out of the ground in this region.











All this time the kitchen was a sad ground floor affair, where we'd get soaked under a pitiful tarpualin when it rained. Rain + kitchen without a roof = misery. We needed a roof to build the kitchen under, so enter carpenter and local story teller, Merush


A kitchen needs shelves, Natalie helped with these.

Manuel from the local granite works gave us loads of off-cuts for free (as long as we sampled his various intoxicating beverages).

Enter AJ: to help finish off the kitchen sink.

He was so stoked that we managed with nothing more than a chainsaw and a level, he insisted on a picture of what we had to work with. Old sink donated by Merush !


And of course - the real test, the spirit level:Needless to say we were seriously impressed with our skills /luck




Still, AJ pointed out, we lacked the most important element of all:
The Ozzy BBQ, so it was back to Manuel's granite yard / spirits emporium to load 1 tonne slabs into van, wheel barrow and onto a new site we'd prepared.


International work force or what !

This orange looking stuff is our first venture into non-cement grout or mortar. I need to actually read the books I've got on earth plasters and mortars, but I know it can be done, so we thought we'd give it a try. We go to the local forest here where someone's dumped a bunch of earth from a building site. It's red, and clay-rich. For this mix we used:

- a couple of barrel loads of this clay/earth mix
- half a bucket of cement (Machado needs to move gradually into the world of natural building
materials)
- half a bucket of lime
- 2 buckets of sand
- Water to "taste"

We didn't really have any idea what we were doing, but this invention turned out amazingly well. It took a while to dry, didn't crack, seemed to stay quite elastic for a while, then went really hard. I reckon we could do without the cement, but we'll need to try different blends to find out.

Next we fired the puppy up (AJ was particularly keen on this bit)


We're trying out a few different systems here. Not in picture is the grill thingy, but I like this idea of using a metal plate (for mushies and eggs, etc.). Though this one warped. Need a chunky piece of iron instead. Now thinking using the space to build a rocket stove-oven-grill combo that Paulo has a design for. Don't worry AJ, we'll be sure to leave a bit of open grillage for you :)

Couple of shots here of our new chunk of metal we found - with hole already made for pans, and space for frying eggs. Think we'll incorporate it into one of those fuel efficient wood stoves. More on that soon...

Old watermill - reliable electricity - it works!

Last week Nikita and I visited Chris Geake and his family in the Green of Central Portugal, somewhere North of Coimbra in picturesque rolling hills and woodlands.

Chris is the first person I have yet come accross to have installed a micro-hydro electric system in an old watermill. I had to visit.

Like most old watermills in Portugal, there is a water channel running a hundred meters or so from a diversion weir on the main river. The channel carries around 100 litres per second (though we didn't measure it while I was there).

Also like most watermills here drop (head) between the water channel and the space where the horizontal wheel would have been (or where a hydro-turbine could be) is only about 1.6m, which is really low, too low for most hydro engineers to get very excited about.

But this is the challenge: finding a system that can generate enough power, or mechanical energy, to make the investment worthwhile.

Chris has shown that is is possible, viable and worth the investment. His enthusiam, vision and determination really help too. Here's what he has done:

- made contact with Powerpal's UK distributor. The Powerpal is a wonderfully simple system first designed in Canada by geologist David Seymour who says he was motivated "out of a desire to help bring some electricity to remote parts of the world where the residents considered even a few hundred watts of AC power quite a luxury". He has established a relationship with a workshop in Vietnam where the turbines are assembled.

- Powerpal UK's engineer agreed to come out to help with design and power connection and together with Chris he put it together.

As you can see from the photos, the installation of the turbine is really simple: just build a little channel that feeds into a trough, where the turbine sites. It works on "suction head": a flume below the turbine is set at least 20cm into the water at the bottom of the chamber, so there is a vacuum. The flume is slightly wider at the bottom, so there is a tremendous draw or pull on the water coming through the turbine. The spinning turbine provides rotational force to the generator which send power to the batteries, in a seperate building some 30 m away.

- The powerpal they selected is a 500w capacity system. That means it can generate up to 500 watt hours in one hour. Or 0.5 Kwh. Chris reckons he gets about 10Kwh a day, which is about 300 Kwh per month, potentially 3,600 per year (about the same as a small house might use in a year). As there are times when rainfall is lower, the amount of flow is less, so this cannot be expected year round, but still it's enough to run everything he has in the house, including a washing machine, fridge, low energy lights, etc.

- Their house is not connected to the grid, so instead of paying thousands to the national power company (EDP) to get linked up, they invested a few grand in batteries, invertor and all the other gear needed to provide 220 v power that most application need.

- If he were connected to the grid, and if he wanted to sell that power to EDP, on the new micro-generation tariff (for micro renewable energy systems) he could get 0.18 euros / kwh. So his 3,600 Kwh per year would be equivalent to around 650 euros a year. "Beer money" you might say, but it all adds up.

- Chris has pointed out that he could install a second unit beside the first, thus doubling his output, but as he doesn't really need all that much more, why bother?

- One option for such cases is to use the power to create heat - not in the usual way that dump loads work (heating up water with an element like a kettle does: 1kw in gives 1 kw out, probably less given some losses) but by running heat pump, which requires around 1kw of electrical energy to delivery approx. 3.6 kw of heat. This assumes a radiator or underfloor heating system is in place. In Chris's case, they have plenty of wood avaialble and a wood burning stove, and it probably isn't really worthwhile but for others, it could be more interesting. Knowing how much work it is to source, chop, dry, store and move wood all year for the winter fires, I could be interested, but that's another story.

- Using water from the river doesn't come without problems however. By its nature, it's full of leaves and other debris, as well as living things like fish and eels. These can get drawn down the channel and caught in the turbine blades - only very occassionaly the living things - the leaves and bits of wood are the problem. Without a good screen, he has to spend a fair bit of time clearing the debris from the turbine blades, although most of them, he says, just get flung through it.

He has set up a clever bit of wood that diverts surface floaters, but is keen to talk to someone who can design an angled screed which sits vertically beside the intake, like the one in the picture, with small enough holes to prevent debris coming through, large enough to allow sufficient flow, angled enough so leaves and stuff don't get stuck in the holes and create blockages. Ideas are welcome.


They have a lovely place, were so hospitable and friendly we felt as if we'd known them for years. They're heading back to their UK homeland later in the year (Chris is a firefighter - an honourable profession for sure) so their place will be up for short rents for those wanting to check out the system, have a break in a very peaceful part of the world beside a beautiful river, full with fish, turtles, otters and other characters.

More info on their blog here

More photos of their place here

Letter from Havana (2)

Here is Paulo's last email from his Cuban teaching and research visit. Paulo's being there teaching a permaculture design course to local farmers and regional agriculture ministry people, together with a local NGO.

Aqui é o último e-mail de Paulo do seu ensino e pesquisa em cubana. Paulo foi lá para ensinanar ums curso de permacultura para os agricultores locais e regionais e também do ministério de agricultura, juntamente com uma ONG local.
It is a long message, and I do not have time - or the capacity - to translate it all so it remains in English. It is a good insight into life in rural Cuba, the challenges of agriculture and life in an island exposed to hefty climate events and an ongoing economic crisis.

Trata-se de uma mensagem longa, e eu não tenho tempo - ou a capacidade - para traduzir tudo para que ele permanece em Inglês. É uma boa perspectiva para a vida no meio rural Cuba, os desafios da agricultura e da vida em uma ilha expostos ao clima pesado e eventos em curso uma crise económica.

If you don't have time to read the article, these photos also tell the story, with captions:
Se não tem tempo para ler o artigo, essas fotos também contam a história, com as legendas:

Paulo's photos

---------------------------------------------------------------
Greetings once again from Havana, the city where more than half of china town's restaraunts specialise in pizza. There are many things here that I struggle to make sense of – or perhaps it would be better to say that many of the patterns here are unfamiliar to me: they are often quite different from other places I have been, and with familiar things (such as where to find pizza) the conventional rules and associations do not always apply. No doubt there are perfectly valid reasons for much of the patterns here – and if I were a Cuban and had lived my life inside this system it would all make perfect sense. But I am not, and so I must reconcile myself to the fact that there are parts of this culture that are impenetrable to me, and I will never understand. It also may just be the craziness of the city (and cities are always crazy if you ask me). In the meantime I will content myself with the search for an Italian restaurant where I can get really good chop suey.


I have just got back from a week in Holguin province in the far east of the country where held the second half of the permaculture design course to a group of participants – the design excercise element. The 10 hour car journey each way was fairly excruciating, mainly because of the bleakness of much of the landscape along the highway. Although I must say that this is probably because a) it is the land closest to access roads and so has probably been cultivated the hardest for the longest, and b) we are just at the end of the dry season and the beginning of the rainy season, the land is burning and suffering and it is painful to see. Literally burning, as in on fire. I know I have mentioned this before, but the sight of large tracts of brown grass or black ash, with patches of dry palms and a few scrubby forest nuclei is the norm.


There is a historical practice of burning off the scrub before the rainy season before the rain so that when it comes the new green shoots spring up fast and the cows get another hit of vegetation, but I am not sure to what degree this is oficially permitted still. It is a pretty poor way to generate biomass, given the tropical forest that was here before it, and nutrients are lost in the burning. I am also told that the old Russian tractors used here do not have spark protection and so often start fires.


We pass several places where the fires have obviously spread to forest patches and tree plantations, and the trunks are black with burns or brown with old wounds. There are dead trees standing. Tree planting is not forest planting, and monoculture timber plantations in neat rows with scrubby grass underneath suffer from the competition of the grass (it exudes tree killing hormones and competes with the trees' surface feeder roots). Such plantations also dry out fast. The forest needs its lower levels of bushes herbs and ground cover, to keep out the strong sunlight and wind, keep hold of water and humidity and cover the soil with a rich mulch (in fact it is through the mulch that the forest makes the soil). Here in the tropics, 80% of the system's nutrients are held in the biomass and leaf litter of the the forest, and only 20% in the soil – it is the other way around in temperate areas, but the spanish brought with them european agriculture and applied it innapropriately to the new world, and 500 years later everybody is still doing it.


To understand the landscape and the agriculture here you need to understand the history of the country.

After the spanish arrived, Cuba was a plantation worked by slaves, growing tabaco, coffee and sugar. This was a period of 400 years, and is deeply etched in the landscape and the psyche of the country. After the revolution, Cuba continued to grow cash crops to sell so that they could buy food, and with the help of Russian agronomists, the 'green revolution' (such a bitter oxymoron: the industrial agriculture package was anything but green) arrived here and stripped the forest back to allow the use of large machinery and chemicals, with disastrous consiquences for the soil. After the collapse of the soviet union and during the 'special period' of the 90's, people really went hungry and the focus was very much on growing as much food as was possible for the population – actually this is still the case. So there has always been a relationship of 'maximum productivity' with the land, and more recently an urgency of the need for increasing short term food yields.


Unlike with indigenous cultures in other parts of latin america there is no mystical or overtly spiritual relationship with the land and the longterm caretaker ethic it often contains. In relation to agriculture, the science of agronomy still is the dominant model: how to extract maximum yields from the land. Cuba's brutal past has robbed it of some of this consciousness in its relationship with nature, but the reality is that the conventional approach is responsible for the increasing processes of desertification.


There is no blame here, or criticism. These people have had to survive through the most terrible hardships that I can only imagine, and the fundamental ethics of the society are really sound – whatever you want to say about the imperfections of the socialist state and its propeganda and control etc, no matter what happens to a cuban family, they will never be kicked out of their house, they will always have free healthcare, they will always be guarenteed a food ration from the state, they will always have access to education. There is clearly some inequality, or perhaps I ought to say hierarchy – the directors of projects or government departments, the army, the tourist industry etc – but it is simply not comparable to the inequality in capitalist societies. In terms of the 3rd ethical principal of permaculture: redistribute surplus – they are doing very well with incredibly scarce resources (I want to reiterate just how scarce some materials are here. I have a friend working in a school in havana where they have to teach through games and workshops because there is almost no paper, and we have had to really ration the flipchart sheets in the course). So 'surplus', or shall we say resources, are directed to people care (2nd ethic of permaculture) but there is a lot of work still to do to direct it to earth care (the 1st ethical principle).


The campesinos (farmers) here are very pround – they are innovative and intelligent, well educated and with a strong sense of community and solidarity. As I think I mentioned in other messages, there have been some really great innovations made to advance a more ecological approach to organic agriculture – work on symbiotic mycorhizzal fungi and partipatory plant breeding for more drought tolerant and locally adapted seeds (if you like, a state funded community seed bank). The farmers I have talked to are very knowledgable about green manures in field rotation and for fodder. But the norm is to still work in open fields with no shade, fed with irrigation over bare soil (and thus lots of evaporation losses), with gardens over there, fruit orchards over there and grazing over there. There is some plant polyculture and associated repellant plants (tagetes/ marigolds with tomatoes etc) and maize alleycropping, but I have seen no use of mulch, and little integration of systems. The Cubans are into lombriculture and compost in a big way – this is fertiliser production. But it is a labour intensive process and where does the material input come from? Cow manure. In many places, agricultural wastes are still scraped off and burned. So there are basic ecological cycles that remain broken across large tracts of the land, and this is a spiral of degradation.


We eventually arrive with numb bottoms at Finca Hato Alegre in Banos, home of Pupo one of the course participants. He is the decendant of Spanish settlers and the family have lived here for 5 generations. This is a family farm, not a state run one, and there is a notable difference, and the family clearly have a deep connection with and love for their land. We have Pupo, his mum and dad, his wife, some young kids who might be his or might belong to his older son Mike, who also lives here with his wife. Introductions are all a bit overwhelming and I am struggling to understand the rapid Holguin dialect (I am relieved when the Havana contingent that have accompanied me later tell me that they can only understand half of what is being said).


Here it feels very different from other places I have been so far - in an inland bay by the north cost, with a beautiful meandering inland tidal mangrove estuary and lots of hills and forest still uncleared around the estuary: the topography and the salt water has kept it safe. This is the largest area of uncultivated land I have yet seen in Cuba, and it feels good to see it. Nature survives.


Pupo's mum is a maestro of food preservation and of all things edible/potable in general. We have some of the most amazing food I have ever eaten (not just in Cuba) here. A lot of it is a testimony to traditional skills and the benefits of a biodiverse farm landscape that borders the sea and a natural system. We have lobster, oysters, crabs, rum with wild fruits preserved in it, all kinds of vegetables (not so much fruit as so many of the trees were lost). Pupo is the master of the giant tomato – a variety he adapted from Bolivian seed, which is the size of a grapefruit and has dense flesh, and tastes AMAZING. It is served with every meal, including breakfast. Being tall and slim, I am targeted for fattening up by the entire family, and, outnumbered and outmanouvered, I am forced to attempt to oblige them. How I suffered. No, no more lobster. Please. I am amazed in fact, by how quickly they have rebuilt after the hurricane and how well stocked their kitchen is. Again, much of it tells of the benefits they recieve from their proximity to healthy natural systems and also their preservation of traditional farm and homesteading skills – the jars of vegetables preserved in rum were kept in the concrete section of the main house and made it through the hurricane. And the garlic and most of the roots crop harvests survived.


Other highlights of my life on the farm include being game for trying everything and anything that the Cubans show me, much to their delight. First is bareback riding – getting bucked straight off by the horse when I jump on, and then, upon remounting, enjoying its spine making regular impact with my coxis as we trot accross the landscape - and shimmying barefoot up a coconut palm to knock down the afternoon snack.


Holguin got really mashed by the hurricane, and Pupo's finca is no exception. The house is situated on the midslope overlooking a marsh filled valley bottom (this farm is very lucky in that it has access to water - 4 good wells and a marshy valley bottom with a river that drains out into the estuary), and the gardens and most of the trees surrounding the house have been ripped away. They have re-roofed the house though. On the farm over 200 royal palms have fallen, all over 70 years, many over 100 years. No shortage of building material now! I see a two huge ancient tamarinds lying where they have smashed through hedges, dying in the sun with their roots exposed. Many of the hundreds of fruit trees that were planted in the previous ten years are just gone. Remaining broadleaves show many shattered amputated limbs. It is all a bit too real for me, and is doubly unfair on these people considering how hard they had worked to plant trees in the preceeding years. So we talk a lot about forest edge profile and windbreak design.


The banana plantation on higher ground in the valley bottom below the marsh got a real pasting too (actually, flattened completely) but is recovering now, many with flowers about to set fruit. They are growing too crowded because the 4 people working this farm have just not had the time to manage them and thin them out, with all the other recovery work, but they represent a good crop of young plants to be planted out in other systems elswhere on the farm. One of the main lessons the hurricane taught us was what survives well: coconut and bamboo especially. They are highly flexible and have very strong lateral root systems, so there will be many windbreaks to come later in the design. Pupo has had a couple of weeks since the last part of the course, and has been doing a lot of thinking.


Many of the lower areas are thick with burrows and holes with small piles of wet clay outside. As you walk up to them there are sounds of squelching and plopping. Blue lobster habitat – they come a long way in land and make their burrows among the bananas, and even right up to the main vegetable garden on the fertile field in the valley bottom below the house just before the marsh. There is very diverse soil accross the site and in the lower parts of the valley there is a heavy white clay prone to compaction. The burrowing of the lobsters and the galleries they make keeps the soil open and helps the roots of the crops penetrate. I have seen my first lobster-banana-palm polyculture -If anyone else has seen one, please let me know! And the lobsters exist here in abundance – Pupo and his family survived on them for weeks after the hurricane had swept away all their small crops, many trees and most of their livestock.


Pupo shows me his vegetable garden, which he rebuilt from scratch after the hurricane. A fertile belt of land at the valley bottom, just before the beginning of the marsh (plans for ponds and aquaculture here). The soil is rich and dark, probably because it contains all the organic matter of the slopes above it which have been very badly eroded. There are alternating rows of very healthy looking peppers, maize, the remains of tomato plants that have just been harvested, some melons and pumpkins, and rows of sorghum that also attract birds. Interplanted with marigolds for nematode protection, and a few young papayas coming up – they lost over 200 plants. There are plans to resow more. Beds are raised banks and the paths allow drainage in the event of flooding from the marsh, and he oxen ploughs them to keep the weeds down. The plants are irrigated from the nearby well using an electric pump (Pupo describes dragging it up the hill to the house with the oncoming hurricane beating at his heels). The soil is dark, but is hard and cracked on the surface. He has been doing a lot of thinking since the last part of the course, and tells me about his plans to adapt things, cut reeds fromt he marsh to use as mulch, replant more trees along the paths for shade and mulch.


Despite the fertile microclimate of the valley bottom, there is bad drought here, and deterioration of the mid to upland slopes, mostly due to extensive grazing with dairy cows (an adapted Cuban version of the Jersey). However, the hilltops are still forested and this gives me great hope – also, it is hard to tell which of the brown and dead patches of the forest are due to the hurricane or the drought – an evening walk reveals whole dead trees exposed lying flat, suspended in the canopy of the living ones, flung up there by the hurricane. One thing is for sure, extensive open pasture here in Holguin (actually, I think in the whole of Cuba) is history. As I mentioned in previously dispatches, we passed hundreds of hectares of fried short brown grass on the journey to Matanzas, and the 10 hour marathon to Holguin was no different, and again we passed many burning areas with plumes of smoke across the horizon.


A complicating factor in all of this – the socio-economic element of design – is that the government guarentees all children a milk ration every day until the age of 7. During the 'special period' after the soviet union's collapse children were at risk of malnutrition and so a drive was made for every child to be able to have milk daily until the age of 7, I suppose for calcium as well as protein and minerals. I did not attempt to engage in the debate about the alternative of high quality calcium and minerals available in organic green vegetables (where do the cows get it from in the first place?).


The result of the rush to dairy was (I was informed by a Cuban permaculturist) increased deforestation, cutting down fruit orchards for dairy cattle. The deforestation (also caused by industrial agriculture, sugar cane and tabacco monocultures) changed the rainfall regime of the country (forests capture and circulate the moisture in incoming air from the ocean) and is now being worsened by the effects of climate change. The result? Crop failures, water shortages and .... nutritional deficiencies. But still, the cultural effect of this historical process is that farmers are obliged to provide milk, and they see it as a social responsibility. Unlike many other parts of latin america, most cows are for dairy, not beef. However in tropical soils with climate change this is a recipe for disaster – when the rains do come, the heavy impact on dry and dusty pasture is inevitable: compaction and erosion. And in any landscape, pasture is about the least efficient use of land compared to the biomass production possible in forests (which we can design to be edible!)


On the design exercise at Pupo's farm, we discussed all of this and one group worked to design up a system for reforesting the rocky midslope pasture using short overlapping swales (for the non-permies amongst you, swales are level water harvesting ditches dug on contour lines with an earth bank on the downhill side), nuclei planting of nitrogen fixing tree, bush and groundcover clusters in and on the swales, and heavy mulching of the trench with all available biomass resources (lots of banana plant trunks brought up from below in the marsh). During this process the area is fenced off to keep stock out and they are fed from crop wastes and other legume crops from another part of the system that the second group was designing. As the feed value of the open pasture was not that high, and the animals expended a lot of energy walking back and forth over it and then back to the watering hole, everyone accepted this was a reasonable trade: the feed value of the crop wastes would make up for the reduced range area and the stock being kept in shade closer to water and moving less would mean they would produce milk more efficiently.


The long term aim of this midslope system is to introduce timber species and also more diverse fruit and native browse trees, and let the stock back in in a managed rotation – the pasture remaining will be in shaded alleys between forest strips and so hopefully will do better. I am hoping that in the meantime the upslope natural forest will creep down in succession as well.


As well as all this, we identified points in the erosion gulleys in the landscape where we could set up check dams – woven hurdle fences stuck across gulleys to catch organic matter, soil and water, gradually building up a terrace behind them. These are then planted up with the same fast growing nitrogen fixing pioneer species nuclei, and in the longer term used for annual crops and more diverse trees (timber and fruit).


Key points were also picked out for the construction of midslope dams in the lower, wider erosion gulleys to make ponds – for livestock to drink from and also to irrigate the surrounding landscape and lower slopes. It is important that we trap the most water by moving the least amount of soil - for the least work: all dams have to be built by hand. Trees can be planted around to minimise evaporation from wind and sun, and also provide leaf browse for stock, taking pressure off the grass – and stock in the shade are less heat stressed and produce more milk.


The idea is to hold up as much water as possible, as high as possible, before it reaches the marsh in the valley bottom - to make water's path out of the landscape as long and as slow as possible, touching as many things as possible. Where there is water, there is life, and the slower it moves, the less erosion damage it can do. And when it rains here, it rains short and hard, and normally rushes off through erosion gulleys and then rapidly evaporates off the exposed and compacted land.


Some real limiting factors here are fencing and earth moving equipment. All ditches, ponds and dam walls will have to be dug by 4 men with picks, shovels and an oxen plough. This is not an easy task, on the stony midslopes or the heavy and compacted white clay of the valley bottom. Where is Geoff Lawton and an excavator when you need them? I have seen excavators here in Cuba, but they are state equipment that is reserved for roadworks and big building project. Until the revolution puts its state recources behind permaculture then we cant rely on these technologies and will have to come up with lighter, more creative solutions.


The other problem here is fencing – to regenerate degraded pasture, we need to keep stock out for a time. This is difficult over large areas where barbed wire is in very short supply and is very expensive. As mentioned above, a solution we considered here was keeping them in a smaller area and feeding them with a higher quality food from the more fertile lower slopes and marsh, but this is only an option here on Pupo's farm where he has this fantastic resource.


A solution presents itself from observation of the site. There are quite a few places in the upslope forest where trees knocked down by the hurricane have fallen down behind and between two trunks of living trees, forming a natural barrier accross slope. Organic matter and soil builds up behind these barriers as it moves downhill from the upland forest, and a natural terrace starts to form, slowing and infiltrating water – it is doing many of the same things as a swale. So we determined that making these sort of arrangements would be a good compliment to swale building, which is pretty heavy going. With these 2 strategies we can make barriers to erosion that follow the contour lines around the landscape, and also link up existing islands of shrubs and trees, linking in with the existing features of the landscape. Into these lines we dig occasional mulch pits to plant our reforestation nuclei of Leucaena, crotelaria, mucuna, cowpea, sessbania and whatever else we can get our hands on – there is no shortage of sweet potato here, and it makes very good ground cover, so we might put some into the mulched planting pits and see how it does.


If the plantings are allowed to grow dense enough, they start to form corridors of hedges that can contain stock animals when we let them back in, which we can divide and manage with a few gates and a little bit of fencing, stakes or wire where we can get it. A real classic in the cuban landscape is the living fence – small pollarded trees with barbed wire strung between them. We discussed also planting spiky hedge plants into the middle of the swale lines to keep the stock from crossing through the hedge lines and over-browsing the legumes. Pupo was not convinced - a risk is increased injury to the animals, particularly in their eyes. A good compromise is 'cardon' a dense fleshy and spineless cactus that is used as a hedge plant here. The only downside with this is that it has a corrosive latex that burns on contact with skin, but it grows thick and well in very dry conditions. Not sure yet what it's properties are as a mulch.


The other exciting possibility that Pupo is talking animatedly about after the course is aquaculture. By building a dam accross a thinner bottleneck in the valley bottom, converting approximately a 3rd of the marsh into an aquaculture pond, we can farm fish – species that we can feed from plants growing around the pond rather than intensive manufactured feed. The borders of the marsh are also used for grazing, and the animal manure enriches the fertility of the pond: another major source of fish food will be insects and their larvae. Really, many of the semiaquatic plant species are already there, and in the stream draining out of the marsh into the river I saw small fish swimming.


This is the realm of the other design group, who also tackle a redesign of the main garden area, which among other things included a mandala garden with a central 'ranchon', a circular thatched structure for holding courses and workshops. I'd like to come back here in a couple of years and see the difference.


Back in noisy, dirty, hectic Havana I miss the smiles of Pupo's farm in the corner of that far flung province, where some seeds of hope for Cuba's future and overcoming its environmental problems are germinating, as usual, at the fertile edges.


Yesterday morning I had a meeting with Roberto Sanchez, the director of FANJ – the main organisation promoting permaculture here in Cuba. We discussed my invlovlement in helping out with the community design of an urban agriculture plot here in Havana in a couple of weeks, which will be my first encounter with urban permaculture in this country. Looking forward to it. Next week I am off to Pinar de Rio in the West, for another design excercise with a group of participants that include a lecturer in agroforestry at the university of Pinar who wants to write his doctorate on food forests! More soon.

Paulo xxx