The Closed System

Entropy increases over time within a closed system. But this is where your garden is an exception. Your garden is an open system which can receive more energy every season. If this weren’t possible, every field on earth would become barren quickly. The universe as a whole may be a “closed” system in which total useful energy is always on the decline, but Earth in relation to the Sun is no such thing. The Earth is constantly supplied with far more energy than it needs. The only question is whether or not we can receive and utilize the inflowing energy.. There is no such thing as a “closed” farm system, nor can there ever be. Even the most self-sufficient farm must depend on energy from space to grow next year’s crop. The only question is whether we have the practical knowledge to harvest all of this precious sunlight and produce new organic matter on our farms.

You can try this yourself, imagining yourself to be a “closed” system, but why would you not avail yourself of the energy of others and the fruits of their experience? Some people promise the moon, but we only promise the better use of the sun. As the stars are the source of all fertility, we want to share our knowledge with you so that you too can become an oases in the age of climate chaos.

The Living Farm Organism

In the beginning, as Rudolf Steiner puts it, a child is virtually a pure “sense organ”, which is to say, all it can do is absorb from the environment: food, water, impressions from people, etc. During this stage, an infant is pretty helpless. It needs constant tending and more concentrated direct attention than it will probably ever receive again. The same is true for the farm organism. As Bill Mollison liked to advise people: spent the first year doing nothing but observing. Just witness the cycles of nature on the farm. What plants grow in different areas? What are your weed problems? What patches of soil dry out? What areas get water-logged?

Initially, all the farm can do is “take” from the farmers, from the environment, and it gobbles up time, energy, and resources like a voracious child. It takes a number of years for this infant farm organism to really begin to be able to sustain itself and at least be able to take care of itself in a basic way. Expect the farm to take for the first seven years. Such a farm isn’t even (so to speak) “potty trained.” You wouldn’t expect an infant to help you set the table, so be careful not to expect too much from your farm too soon. Trying to force the farm to “grow up” too quickly is also inadvisable, because it develops hardened and set patterns too early. If you want to change those habits and optimize the farm later, it is much harder to undo bad habits than it is to learn new good habits.

Rather than pushing your farm too quickly or leaving it to trial-and-error, it helps to enlist the wisdom of elders. The hierarchy of experience is all we as human beings have. If you want advise on parenting, it’s worth speaking to parents. If you want advice on farming, it’s worth speaking to farmers. It’s as simple as that. If we can help you avoid some of our own errors, that’s how we make a better world. The value of avoiding decades of mistakes is priceless. How do we put a price tag on something priceless? When a small piece of advice, gained by years of struggling, can save you hundreds of dollars every year for the rest of the life of the farm? How can someone charge the real value of something like? We can’t! So we charge based on what we now feel our time is worth. If we take our time away from farming or teaching, we need to be able to earn as much as we would doing these other tasks. We don’t charge you what our time is worth or charge you for how much time we save you, because that’s priceless.