In the last century, Gandhi was recognized as the leader of swadeshi as a challenge to invading colonials. Swadeshi is a Sanskrit word for economic self-reliance. Vinay and Lindsay are now building Global Swadeshi - a social network, mainly engineers, working on global economic self-reliance as part and parcel of political autonomy.
Global Swadeshi is almost a contradiction in terms - but it captures the meaning of networked self-sufficiency. It applies on a global scale and is for everybody - beyond the fears of the Dark Ages.
I look at self-sufficiency - or lack of it - as the root cause for human suffering. People say, ‘It’s the power structure,’ ‘It’s the corporations,’ ‘it’s greed and human nature,’ and so on.
I say - can you point to one tragic human event in history that did not have self-sufficiency as its underlying cause? Look at colonialism. Look at Iraq - we go and plunder because we don’t have enough oil for ourselves. Or: global power brokers fund World War II so they can cash in. This is just a fear-based reversion to abuse of others so that the perpetrators could meet their own needs - as they are not sufficient in themselves. You get the picture.
In a culture beyond the Dark Ages, economic self-sufficiency is perhaps the most important goal that should be achieved, if peace and prosperity for all are the goals.
The good news is that we can be materially self sufficient - in more ways than we think. For example, people laugh at me when I talk of extracting aluminum from abundant local clays (aluminosilicates). But to me, it’s a natural part of industrial swadeshi. It’s only that we’re still wallowing in the dark ages of industry, in general - so this type of thinking is forbidden. But - just like self-sufficiency in food, fuel, or energy - industrial swadeshi is around the corner if we want it.
Today I had an interesting conversation with Fabio Barone, a Master’s of Science student in Holistic Science at Schumacher College. We discussed bioproducts - biofuels, bioplastics, and others - which are one of the keys to localization and the Global Village Construction Set. He is writing his thesis on bioproducts - within the context of sustainable communities and open source development - which is much needed discussion. I look forward to seeing his conclusions.
I suggested to Fabio that perhaps evaluating the real story behind biofuels could be an interesting exploration in his thesis. By biofuels, I mean root crops or fruit - and in particular, Jerusalem artichokes - which are my favorite because they are self-seeding. When you harvest the crop, a full crop always comes up the year after from little pieces of root left behind. You can harvest with a potato harvester. This is as easy and ecological as it gets, it seems.
Point is, the calculation remains - and you should go through the math yourself - the area similar to the area of any city is required to grow all the fuel for the city’s cars. That means land requirements are not high (unlike corn alcohol). Jerusalem artichoke tuber yields are typically 15 tons per acre! This is similar to other root crops - but I know of no other suitable perennials.
Thus, why hasn’t such a means of production proliferated all over the world? Or, even more simply, why have I not heard of at least one person harvesting such Jerusalem artichoke alcohol biofuel successfully on a small scale? This is one of those questions that are pressing for me - and this should be a disturbing question for anyone interested in localization. We are going to find out in the next 2 or so years for ourselves. Any comments from anyone in the know on the topic?
I understand that the sugar in Jerusalem artichokes is not readily accessible, but that is not difficult to overcome - such as by preheating the fermentation mix with solar energy.
Sometimes I regret that Yama will never be a mother. She loves babies.
Every visitor and newcomer receives a warm welcome from Yama, but babies receive a special whimper of pure eagerness. For example, when we brought home
ducklings , Yama was pure bliss, whimpering before they even emerged from the car. Their chirps through the door were enough to solicit a whimper.
So, when I heard Yama whimper like she had just seen a baby, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the baby goats had been born. Nacha had been bred in the beginning of November and again in early December. Goats have a five month gestation period, so when she didn’t give birth in April, I figured she would kid in early May.
I ran to the goat pen and my expectations were well met. Two beautiful baby goats. A white female and black male. (Figure that one out: the mama and papa were both nearly pure white!) As I watched them stand up, stretch out, and get licked, I too wanted to whimper with delight. I could have watched them grow all day.
But farm life called. So we started planting out hazelnuts.
These are seedlings we grew from 10 pounds of seeds of “unknown” quality. We bought those at the same time that we bought ten wimpy-looking hazelnut seedlings from Badgersett Nursery for the same price. (We didn’t know that they would look so puny at the time.) Surely, of the 1000 seeds, 10 will grow into productive plants. And the “unproductive” ones will make a nice hedgerow for the wildlife. (This method does however, require a bit more labor!)
While we planted, I heard Yama start whimpering like she’d seen another baby. Certainly not in awe of the newly planted hazelnuts. Rather, she was sniffing, digging, and whimpering at a pile of brush, so I investigated.
We are proposing the creation of Global Villages that contain: (1), permanent agriculture, (2) 100% renewable and local energy production, (3), biofuel production, and (4), permafacture.
For the permanent agriculture side a good example for our land would be a plot with hazelnuts and chestnuts as the staples, plus walnuts - all intercropped with wheat, plus free-range chickens in an orchard, small fruit, goats, garden, and greenhouse. Combined with a food processing facility, this could provide a 100% local diet, and if combined with sustainable forestry and fuel crop, could provide 100% fuel (especially with 250 mpg cars as in yesterday’s blog entry) - not to mention building material such as lumber and bricks from the Compressed Earth Block press. Imagine if any new residential development contained an agricultural manager – plus community supported manufacturing manager, and a large portion of needs could be met for the local community. This is a feasible alternative to global supply chains that we are exploring. See our presentation from an earlier blog entry for more about this concept.
On the permaculture side, here is how to graft walnuts. We have a number of established wild black walnuts at Factor e, and we’re grafting Carpathian walnuts and other named black walnut varieties on them. Here is a 6 minute video on grafting from the Missouri Nut Growers Association meeting yesterday. Missouri is the world’s largest black walnut producer. Thevideo shows how to graft a small branch from a desired walnut variety onto a much larger tree. Using this method, one could start getting nut production in as little as 2 years, whereas it would take 7 or more years if one started from seed.
I was looking for a one cylinder diesel engine today for our new Troy-Bilt Horse rototiller. It appears that the Horse model is the simplest, longest-lasting rototiller of all tillers - so we snatched one up. It was made in the 70’s, and it didn’t have an engine.
In my engine search, I ran into Volkswagen’s 250 mile per gallon car - also a one cylinder diesel. Wow.
I’ve been asked a number of times about the progress on the CEB press. The best answer is that we’re in a fertile birthing period.
If you went through the presentation in yesterday’s blog - you know that we decided to build our own tractor with loader and rototiller for powering up the CEB press and for soil preparation. That is exciting - real life Erector Set construction in action. Here is a picture of the metal as it starts to constitute the frame:
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I just scored a 55 hp Deutz diesel engine for the tractor at $550 - new ones cost $7k. The set of 4 hydraulic motors , $250 each at Surplus Center, just came in the mail, and I got 4 truck wheels for the tractor.
In about a month, we’ll be starting to build - now with reliable equipment. We’re still aiming for production of CEB presses in October, after getting up the computer controlled torch cutting table for rapid fabrication in our off-grid facility.
By the way, goat Nacha also had a fertile birthing period. She just produced two babies. Check out how she’s cleaning them right after they popped out:
Last week we spoke at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
The topic was the Global Village Construction Set: Open Source Engineering for Sustainable Living. I focused on the construction of economies that utilize local resources. I proposed the route of open source, flexible fabrication - applied to Community Supported Manufacturing – as a viable route to an industrialsystem free of geopolitical compromise.
In order to build with the Compressed Earth Block press, and in order to produce these machines at Factor e, we need a certain level of infrastructure. Here is what we are doing:
Say you want to fabricate CEB presses. Start with a facility: CEB walls and living roof, where 1000 square feet may do for 1-machine per day production with 4 people. Give the facility some juice: 2 kW peak solar cells from Ersol will do to get you entirely off-grid. If you are off-grid, add a GNB 20 kWhr forklift battery packfor storage - it lasts one full day at average wasteful American household usage. Put in a large, 10 kW inverter if you want to run heavy duty electric equipment. Drop in a 3 kW Lister engine generator for backup, if the sun does not shine for long periods. You can run a good welder, like the Millermatic 200 MIG welder, with the inverter - but only from the beefy battery storage which can run up to 2 of these welders at one time. If you want to pop out one CEB per day, you might want to add in a CNC acetylene torch table to slice up your working metal like butter, at the tap of a button from your desktop computer and open source LinuxCNC software. A LifeTrac open source tractor will help you power the PTO generator if you need 20 kW more industrial power. It will also do the soil preparation: soil digging with the loader, and mixing with a rototiller. The latter will be open source production as well. LifeTrac is designed to run 6 Liberator 1 CEB machines at a time. We will have two Liberators by the time we start building here.
How robust is the technology package above? Let’s go through an analysis of expected maintenance costs. First, the building will be made of CEBs. We built the PTO generator, so it is essentially good for life. The Lister, off-shelf, is supposed to last 100 years. The batteries are heavy duty forklift flooded lead acid, 25 year lifetime. The welder was chosen as a proven, long-lasting one - Sweiger Shop told me that the Millermatic 200s just keep running without problems for many years - they use 8 of them - while the newer Millermatics are already having problems. The CNC torch table is designed to last, and we decided to build the open source, articulated tractor because we want reliability and we are tired of $2k/year maintenance costs on the other tractors. That in itself makes a good story - and I’ll blog about this more later.
Essentially, the package is sound from maintenance cost perspectives of low overhead - perhaps $500/year costs for the entire facility! That includes utilities and all equipment. This is prime neosubsistence in action. To me, it is absolutely exciting - this is the only off-grid industrial facility that I know of that is being built on this planet. Please let me know if you know of others.
The solar cells and inverter are the weak links. If they break, we just end up replacing them. We won’t touch OS solar cell production yet - that will be forthcoming in about 1-2 years. I will, however, touch on OS inverters. That’s something we can do now, as we had 2 of them break already. If anyone in the audience can help or provide leads on designing a scalable, stackable power inverter - scalable in, say, 1 kW units - let us know. Is this by any chance where field-programmable gate arrays are capable of providing the circuit logic? The high-power inverter is a good candidate for open-sourcing, as the commercial 10kW equivalent is about US$10k, and we should be able to reduce the cost by Factor 10.
Got to go. I’m going to build me a tractor frame today.
Yes, really. The frame is xyz-bolt together construction (one of the icons in the Open Source Technology Pattern Language) - truly the modular and lifetime Design for Disassembly (DfD). We are using sizeable 4×4x1/4 inch square steel tube and 3/4″ bolts. Easy to build, easy to take apart. This type of design, of course, is something you will never learn about in college. They say it’s too pedestrian. I call it Design for Freedom (DfF) - and douse myself with sweet thoughts of a liberated world beyond scarcity. It’s one piece of the puzzle, but surely a great leap towards the Global Village Construction Set.
Did you ever wonder what would happen if things lasted a lifetime? Mix this question with the concept that your cost of living is the cost of the technology that you use: houses, cars, etc.
Things don’t last a lifetime, and they are lasting shorter and shorter with planned obsolescence: read this article about open source as a cure for this ill. Our digital camera just broke, so we have to shell out more hard-earned nuggets to get a new one. Please let us know - of recommendations for a good, low-cost brand; if you know of any open source digital camera projects, or if you have a camera for sale. I won’t be taking any pictures today.
Time is a marvelous means for putting things into perspective. Your most embarrassing moment as a seven-year-old becomes the funniest story of the evening twenty years later. And likewise, those hilarious jokes at two in the morning, produce puzzled looks by noon the next day.
And while “Just Tools for Life” didn’t fall flat on its face immediately, it has slowly fallen out of favor. Primarily, the problem lies in the word “just”. Besides the nice justice connotation, it also heavily bears the meaning “only”.
This works well for the “Just Apples” brand of applesauce that uses organic (justice implication) apples and no additives (only apples).
However, for Open Source Ecology at Factor E Farm, “just” is too limiting. We are in no sense only about tools.
Take a glimpse of the life at Factor E Farm: Cook up breakfast (eggs and bread) for the ducklings. Don’t forget to add the eggshells for calcium. Mix up a quick bread to cook on the wood stove before the fire dies down. And feed the goats and chickens. Meanwhile, Marcin is drawing out an Open Source Tractor. But not for too long because he needs to find pipe for the well rig. We want to drill down another 30 feet and we’re determined to find it locally. (Rockmaster, the drill rig company, is not known for expedient shipping). And when the chores are done and breakfast has been eaten, one of many tasks lies ahead. Today it was fixing the busted water pipes; Yesterday we gave the grain bin a face lift; Tomorrow back to digging the well; and soon thereafter comes biodiesel. In the spare moments we find room to plant garden veggies and propagate nursery crops. Not to mention the solar cells arrived a day ago … we’ll need to make a panel for mounting them before we can use them. Marcin talks to people about design details; and Brittany, don’t forget to blog about it!
We have not been blogging much lately, because spring is here and we’re on the land. When spring hits, the sparks start flying with action outside. We’re building Sanctuary, aka Factor e Farm.
The last week we’ve been drilling our well using a basic drilling rig from Rockmaster. On the Third Day, we hit water.
The drilling rig is called a rotary hydraulic drilling rig, which is the most common method for drilling deep wells. The drilling method is like an oversized power drill a rotating bit at the end of a pipe drills into the ground. The difference is that water is also pumped forcefully through the 1″ drill pipe down the bore hole, in order to soften the ground, cool the drill bit, and send drilling tailings up to the surface.
The video shows the water pump, the drill bit spinning, and water coming out of the bore hole. The tailings settle in a settling pond, and water is recirculated from the settling pond to the drill bit with a 50 psi, large volume pump.
Drilling a well is quite an experience. Several points are worth sharing.First, it should be pointed out that clean water is crucial for any community. We are sharing this experience in order to help the prospective builder of communities to understand what it really takes to drill a well. When we were researching small-scale, mechanical well-drilling over a year ago, we found very little useful information - so we are writing our experience with a hope that it provides at least some of the powerful insights regarding this very important topic.
Factor E Farm. We are not a factory farm. Agricola sum. We are farmer scientists. Our life is an experiment: living sustainably, high appropriate tech, on the cheap. Why e? It is a transcendental number. We aim to transcend. We push towards open source. Factor 10 reduction in price. Or at least e. Ten times cheaper means ten times the freedom. Evolve to freedom.
In these pages you will find the unfolding story of how we started with raw land, and what we are up to on an ongoing basis. This is the first experiment of Open Source Ecology. The challenge is to see how far we can reach into human prosperity on a small scale. Can we create advanced, largely self-sufficient civilization on the scale of a farm? What else is needed?
More pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/11113094@N03/
