Fossil fuel free farming takes root in Vermont
Green Mountain College junior Ryan Dixon guides oxen while junior Casey Martin drives a cutting machines (GMC photo)
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff
Many people I know are attempting to reduce their carbon footprint when it comes to food. A few try to only buy locally grown vegetables to avoid emissions from transporting their salad ingredients from far away. An acquaintance has given up beef because its production gives off more greenhouse gases than chicken. A few people I’ve met are actually trying to grow all their own food.
Green Mountain College in Poultney Vermont, is taking it all a step further – attempting to see if its 24-acre Cerridwen Farm organic operations – from potato picking to cow milking – can be done with no reliance on fossil fuels whatsoever.
The four-year liberal arts college has given up tractors in favor of oxen to plow and hay. It’s installed solar collectors atop a barn roof to heat water for its two-cow dairy operation. Carbon dioxide emitted from the metabolisms of 80 chickens is shared with a next door greenhouse where CO2 levels can dip during the winter.
And the farm – through an intensive new Farm Life Ecology summer class that includes students from other colleges – has an influx of manual labor which doesn’t use fossil fuels at all.
“Modern agriculture is heavily reliant on oil and other fossil energy sources – it’s extremely inefficient, with more than 20 calories required to produce and deliver one food calorie to a consumer’s plate,’’ said farm manager and ecology economist Kenneth Mulder. The college's effort is helped in large part from a $110,000 grant from the Jensen/Hinman Family Fund.
Mulder doesn’t have any expectation that the nation's farms will go fossil free. He even still has to use a bit to power the barn lights and a rototiller.
But if future farming is to be more local and sustainable, he believes students should be exploring organic growing in the context of traditional farming practices. It also gives students a more “intimate relationship” with the farm.
But most of all, in an age of factory farming Mulder says, “it shows it can be done.”
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What a great program!
This is the wave of the future .. or would that be present? Some say peak oil has come, i.e. that we have reached our peak amount of oil production in the world. This means that everyone is going to have to begin learning to live without fossil fuel. Someday, they say, it will be gone and we will have no choice. Many towns are doing it, which can be seen if you look into the concept of Transition Towns. Check out YouTube for Rob Hopkins' work and look into Transition Towns in your own area.
Type your comment here...GREAT IDEA
Hello........ This version was tried like 200 hundred years ago before we invented the tractor. How can anyone claim this to be "PROGRESS"? Yeah why dont we just go and farm like they do in the third world I hear their farming techniques are far superior and more efficient than how we do it here it the United States. This is as backwards as lightin gcandles and turning out the lights for earth day to prove how progressive you are.
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“Modern agriculture is heavily reliant on oil and other fossil energy sources – it’s extremely inefficient, with more than 20 calories required to produce and deliver one food calorie to a consumer’s plate,’’ said farm manager and ecology economist Kenneth Mulder. The college's effort is helped in large part from a $110,000 grant from the Jensen/Hinman Family Fund.
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If this was true professor then why do we have the highest output in the entire developed world, only with machinery have been able to accomplish this. Its so plain to see why in the world would you go back to human labor on a farm?
Why can't they use biodiesel, that isn't "fossil fuel"
so what do cows run on? and oxen? sunlight?
isn't grass a carbon based fuel?
don't these beasts emit methane?
wanna see some more of this?
go live in the 17th century. Can these people possibly be more stupid?
Inefficient by current standards, these skills will be invaluable when Monsanto & cronies' created scarcity hits home.
Cows have a big carbon footprint. Bio diesel, electric, and other more efficient fuels are the wave of the future -- people are not going to give up their technology on a global scale, so the best way to impact change is to update the technology.
I worked on 3 (small but financially surviving) farms for 4 years, and we used hardly any fossil fuel, and we didn't plow with animals either. We used biointensive methods-using our own hands, arms, legs and energy to be as gentle on the soil as possible (lifting the soil, not plowing) and get better yields than conventional farms. Yes, it's work, but I sure was in better shape than any other time in my life. Biodiesel is interesting, but the pollution level is a worry (depending on how the source of biodiesel was made) and the weeds and non-food parts of plants are needed to make compost to keep soil healthy.
This blogger might want to review your comment before posting it.
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