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Old November 2, 2017   #120
Redbaron
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Join Date: Sep 2012
Location: Oklahoma
Posts: 4,488
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Originally Posted by bower View Post
I did read this, Scott. These are the same ideas you discussed some time ago about how to scale it up, and makes perfect sense to me.
I thought you had a chance to try out those ideas on the second piece of land, though. Seems you are still hung up on the funding, and I'm sorry to hear it.
Do you think it may be possible to scale up to an acre or even a half, without the big machines? I'm thinking market garden scale where you would at least be able to earn a living from it. The fact that mulch eliminates the weeding work, I would think it could be doable as a one-man operation.

BTW it was really interesting to read about your first experience with the soil there in Oklahoma, and your no-till heavy mulch approach makes even more sense in that context - it couldn't be more different from the soil situation here. But maybe similar enough to farmland right through the prairies. I am surprised that none of the agencies you approached were willing to help with a scaled up trial.
I had the local land grant college offer to help with a double blind control should I happen to get my proof of concept up and running. Just to have confirmed results. And Oklahoma carbon project offered to assign me this county's "demonstration farm" allocation if again, I got the project started. And Nobel foundation offered me a collaboration/cooperator, which gets me advice from dozens of Phd scientists to help out with the project...again once it gets started..... And the land owner across the road offered a free lease for a couple years if I clear it and then offered to make it available for sale to me too.

Pretty much everything is waiting on me being able to afford to clear the scrub and buy miniature versions of the equipment I need to prove it can be mechanized.

The size of the tractor doesn't matter much to any of them. Even a little garden tractor would suffice. Because any farmer could see the demonstration and easily convert his own tractor to do the same thing, only bigger. But they all told me that with the hand planter etc... is fine for proving the biophysical impacts in the soil, but not sufficient to prove it is scale-able as a commercial business.

Multiple people all told me this, and at least to the guys here in Oklahoma it appears to them to be radical enough they want to see it done first before they will help.

Only two of the experts I contacted really believe in it, the rest are more like "show me". A few are downright hostile to the concept for some reason.
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Scott

AKA The Redbaron

"Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted & thoughtless labour; & of looking at plants & animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system."
Bill Mollison
co-founder of permaculture
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