Vineyard with Chicken Tractor

Modern winemaking has brought many apparent improvements to wine. In the past, while developing a reputation, California tried to emulate French winemaking, which was based largely on time-honored winemaking traditions. But California became a frontier for modern winemaking techniques, and at some point ventured out on its own. Now many wineries worldwide, French wineries included, are adopting modern methods to produce wines different from those of the past, with a taste that many consumers have now come to view as superior. Wine preferences are influenced by many things, and many still debate whether modern wines are superior or whether the popularity of the modern taste is just another wine trend. But one thing is certain—modern winemaking techniques as well as grape growing practices have increased the ecological footprint of a glass of wine.

The Vineyard

Four years ago, I planted an experimental vineyard at Dancing Rabbit with the idea of having a small winery that would make sustainably grown organic wine. I knew it would be a long road to the time when I was able to produce wine for sale. I still have a long way to go, but I’ve learned a lot since then about what I’m up against in trying to grow grapes organically at DR, and in trying to make wine given the limitations placed on our ways of doing things in an ecovillage. It’s good to live in a place with these limitations though, because I would like to make every stage of grape growing and winemaking have as little impact as possible on the environment. Wine was made and enjoyed for thousands of years without the use of fossil fuel. Granted, not all the chemistry of winemaking or of agriculture was understood for the majority of that history, but modern techniques were developed with the crutch of the abundant energy of fossil fuel, and this abundance is not going to be available much longer. By using our understanding of science and technology both past and present, we can develop ways of making wine that are both superior and have less impact on the planet.

The first challenge in turning soil and sunlight into wine is in growing grapes organically. This is not an easy thing to do, especially in our climate. Our covenants require that all agriculture be done organically, and I personally would not want to do it any other way. Wines made from organic grapes are becoming more common on the west coast as even many huge winemakers like Fetzer are pioneering commercial organic viticulture (or rather a return to it). But since you may know nothing about growing wine grapes, I will begin by telling you that the kind of grapes most respected for wine in the world are of the vinifera species, and they thrive in a Mediterranean climate. That means dry and moderate, whereas in Missouri humid summers make it very difficult to grow vinifera grapes without a lot of pesticides to control disease. Vinifera varieties also can’t make it through the cold winters in our part of Missouri. To deal with these difficulties, most wine vineyards in Missouri grow hybrids that are crosses of vinifera and cold hardy American species, and they use synthetic pesticides to control pests and disease. If you are going to grow grapes organically, the best place to start is by planting the varieties that are most disease resistant. I have chosen to grow hybrids as well as American varieties that are both hardy for our area and known to be resistant to the diseases most prevalent here.

The Hybrid Grape Foch

There are many organic vineyard practices I’m learning about and experimenting with. My main focus is on making the soil healthy, so that the plants will be better able to fight off pests and disease. To do this, I’ve amended the soil with organic cow manure, lime, and wood ash, and I plan to add mycorrhizal fungi to the soil, which can improve uptake of nutrients. I’m also running chickens through the vineyard in a mobile coop, or tractor. As they scratch in the vegetation, they deposit fertilizer, and they have the added benefit of providing eggs, the excess of which can be sold here in the village to pay for their food. In this way, I can have fertilizer that helps pay for itself. All of these soil improvement practices will help build the natural microbial life in the soil that would be killed off by the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. This life is essential to the healthy organic growth of plants.

I would like the vineyard to be a more natural setting so that it doesn’t have to be a wildlife dead zone like many agricultural fields. To do this I’m experimenting with maintaining native prairie plants between the rows of grapes. One of the added benefits of this practice is in maintaining a diversity of insect predators, so that pest insect populations can be controlled naturally. This is an experiment for the sake of the wildlife, but it may present a challenge because having more plants around the grapes can sap water from the vines, and if the plants are too tall they restrict air flow and contribute to disease.

Another area where steps can be taken to reduce the impact of a vineyard is in maintenance practices. Currently, I mow around the rows of vines with a scythe, an ancient tool used for mowing grass. It doesn’t require any fuel and though slower than a mower, is efficient in the hands of a strong and skilled user. The scythe allows me to get closer to the vines without worry of damaging them, and can reach the spots under the vines and trellising that the tractor mower cannot reach. Most vineyards use herbicide to control weed competition in the rows of vines, but I simply pile the trimmings from scything around the base of the vine to hold moisture and control weeds. I currently mow with the tractor or scythe about two times a year between the rows to keep the vegetation from getting too high and restricting air flow between rows. The chicken tractor helps keep the vegetation low too because the chickens scratch and stamp the grass down, but it doesn’t make its way through the vineyard quickly enough to do a thorough job, which is why I mow with the tractor.

In the future I would like to graze sheep in the vineyard. Many organic grape growers are using sheep to make the job of mowing easier, because the sheep will do the job without petroleum or human labor. They, like the chickens, also turn vegetation into fertilizer and can provide products like wool, milk, or meat, as an added benefit. Grazing sheep might interfere with the natural balance of the prairie plants between the rows, but they will save labor and petroleum and make a product from the unused space between the vines. The drawback is that organic standards don’t allow livestock to be grazed less than 90 days before harvest, making this a far less viable option for mowing.  I may have to forego becoming certified organic to make my vineyard more sustainable.

Black Locust Post

Water is another resource that is essential to the healthy growth and production of a vineyard. Many vineyards these days use drip irrigation to conserve water and deliver it directly to their vines. I’m in the process of setting up drip irrigation in my vineyard, as well. I hope to eventually catch rainwater off the hoop house located just uphill from the vineyard, but right now I’m using a solar-powered pump to pump water uphill to the hoop house from our swimming pond.

Organic standards also don’t allow the use of treated posts for trellising. The chemicals in treated posts leach into the ground and are nothing I would want around my grapes, so I don’t mind having to pay more for the alternative. For my vineyard, I’m using black locust posts custom cut for me by the folks at Sandhill Farm, an intentional community about three miles away. Black locust is a rot resistant wood that should last about 25 years. We also have osage orange, or hedge post, growing on our land, which lasts as much as 80 years in the ground, but it doesn’t grow nearly as straight as the locust.

Although organic standards are an improvement in farming, I along with many other farmers, feel they don’t go far enough in looking at the system as a whole. I think land should be farmed in a way that is most suitable to its quality and climate, so that it will continue to be productive over the long term. All of Dancing Rabbit’s land is classified by the USDA as highly erodible, and much of its soil eroded away in the past because of unsustainable agricultural practices. The thin soil we have here is the result of row crops being grown on hills that were too steep for bare soil. This adds to the challenge of growing grapes here because they would do much better with a nice, deep topsoil. The great thing about using our land for a vineyard is that grapes are perennial, so the field doesn’t need to be tilled every season and permanent perennial strips can be maintained between the row of vines. For this reason, erosion is far less likely to be a problem and our topsoil can begin to be restored. It seems to me a very suitable and sustainable use of our agricultural land.

In the next article, I’ll talk about my plans to make the winemaking process more sustainable.

As our village grows there are more opportunities for all of you out there to learn from us and at the same time find out more about our ecovillage.  Attend workshops on natural building, dance, food preservation, and sustainable culture leadership, and see first hand how we are creating a model for a more sustainable world. Our workshops are organized by different people at DR, so you’ll have to contact the organizers to find out more about registration,  accommodations, and details about the workshops themselves. See the links below for each workshop category. Hope to see you at Dancing Rabbit this season!

Natural Building

Timber Frame Workshop  June 10-25, 2012

Students will spend 2 full weeks at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage learning the historic craft of timber frame construction using mortise and tenon joinery, as well as experiencing and learning some of the fundamental connections between building structure, design, and sustainable lifestyle alternatives.

Straw Bale Workshops  July 22-August 2, 2012

Students will spend 10 days at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage learning the fundamental craft of straw bale construction, as well as plastering techniques with clay and lime, creating artistic embellishments, and more.

Ecovillage Design

Ecovillage Education US:Sustainable Culture Leadership Training  June 29-August 5, 2012

Ecovillage Education is a 5-week trans-disciplinary, experiential program set within one of the US’ leading ecovillages. Develop your capacity for creating or enhancing communities and projects using social, economic and ecological sustainability lessons learned in the worlds’ most sustainable communities.

Dance

The recently opened Casa de Cultura at Dancing Rabbit is hosting two dance weekend workshops this year.  The first Off-Grid Blues Weekend held last fall was a great way to break in the dance floor at the Casa de Cultura, and it was a blast for participants.  This year there are two dance weekends planned.  Check out the links below for more information on the workshops.

Contra Culture  April 27-29, 2012

“Contra Culture” will be a unique blend of Ecovillage and Contra Dance community cultures.

Off-Grid Blues   September 21-23, 2012

Off Grid Blues is a community-focused dance event. Some of the best dance instructors in the nation will be there to share their knowledge and love of dance with you.

Food Preservation

Putting Up the Harvest – Canning Fruit and Vegetables
Three sessions: July 7th, August 4th, September 15th, 2012

Join us for a food preservation workshop where you’ll get hands-on experience in an atmosphere where questions are encouraged and confidence gained. With a focus on both safety and flavor, we’ll go step by step from beginning to delicious end. Includes six hours of hands-on instruction, lunch, canning tools, recipes and samples to take home and share.

I’ve been wanting to do an article about the many different lifestyle and infrastructure changes we as individuals have made at DR to reduce our impact on the planet.   Fortunately, the Milkweeds wrote just such an article for their blog, Ecovillage Musings.  Like they say in their post, outside of the 6 covenants we live by here at DR,  everyone chooses how far they will go to shrink their footprint.  This is their story, and if I can convince some others to talk about their lives, I will post more stories here.  If you want to find out a little about how Thomas lives, or lived a few years back, check out this video.

Link to the article

Catching up on some reading during low power

Sara Peters contributed this post to the blog in the theme of enriching our lives by living more sustainably. 

It is November 29 and nine days ago I checked the battery voltage for our mini-grid solar power system and AHHHHH!, it was LOW. After running around to the four other houses that are affected when we shut off our system, I switched the inverter off. The weather forecast promised sun in just two short days. We would be back into a voltage range for limited use of lights and computers in no time! Forecasts are educated guesses and no matter how educated the guess, it can still be wrong. 

We had no power the first few days and then turned the inverter on for limited use of computers and internet for two hours a day. Limiting ourselves these ways and a minor input of watts even on gray days helped bring our battery voltage out of the danger zone and keep it out. And on the ninth day the sun is shining! 

One might not think folks at an ecovillage would be very computer reliant. Well you haven’t been to Dancing Rabbit in the last few years. I am guessing here, but likely close to half of our group decisions are made via email. If you want to be in the know about what events are happening, checking email daily or even multiple times a day is the thing to do. Like much of the broader society, folks here connect with friends and family and keep up with current events via email, facebook, twitter, online news sources, etc. In fact, regular facebook users in our midst know far more about what others here are up to than a comparative Luddite like myself can discover from just chatting with folk on the path. 

So when the available power gets low, what do a bunch of internet addicted ecovillagers do? First, we panic. How will we get our work done? (some of us earn our income via the internet.) Committee work can come to a standstill with no way to send out proposals and no one able to  respond to them. And what will some of us do without regular twitter updates on the Occupy Movement?! Then, we light candles, open those books we have been meaning to read, visit with our neighbors, play games and put puzzles together. People host events with acoustic music or gather for low power use events like listening to podcasts and discussion after. We commune with each other. 

Living with an off-grid solar power system can mean some inconveniences at times. It can mean examining, somewhat uncomfortably, how we use technology. It helps open our eyes to unhealthy patterns and gives us renewed appreciation for living in community. It shows us how rich and full life can be without twitter (gasp!). 

NOTE: Change is in our midst. Better Energy for Dancing Rabbit (BEDR), a grid-inter-tie, alternative power cooperative serving Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, has come online. Several buildings including our common house now have far more regularly reliable power. Many buildings still maintain off-grid systems. As our access to regularly available electricity shifts, so too will our culture and our opportunities to re-learn what it is like to be without. I wonder what that will be like?

This is the second of two articles I wrote on sustainable economy at DR about 2 years ago.  Some of the information may be a little outdated, such as the electrical grid references.  We are now hooked up to the power grid (and feeding power back into it), though we are still not on the water or heating grid.  Most information is still relevant though.  If you haven’t read the previous article, look here.  Just a disclaimer–these articles are my thoughts and opinions and do not represent the views of everyone at DR.   My goal is to get people thinking about these things.

While nibbling on some organic crackers recently, I noticed a note on the box stating that the manufacturer buys renewable energy credits. My first thought was “I wonder why they don’t fit their entire production facility to run on renewable energy instead of just buying credits?” Wouldn’t that be a bigger step towards making their business sustainable? Going through the process of planning a sustainable land-based business at DR I’ve been learning the answer to this question.

Nearly every step of every process of production in the global economy is destructive to the planet, and it’s not surprising. The market values profit over sustainability. In our economy, it’s a rare forest that is worth more quietly growing in its ecosystem than cut up into lumber or paved over with a housing development. And often the easiest, most profitable business practices are the most destructive to the environment.

At Dancing Rabbit we follow our covenants and guidelines to reduce our everyday impact on the planet, yet many of us depend on the unsustainable economy outside DR for our income and many of our basic needs. As well, the global economy provides us sustainable technologies that we cannot manufacture ourselves, like solar power systems. Living a sustainable lifestyle as individuals is one step in creating a sustainable society, but building an economy where sustainability comes before profit is vital to our goal of saving the planet. A lot of rabbits, me included, feel that building a sustainable economy means producing our basic necessities locally and if possible within DR. This way we can be certain that the products or goods we are using at least meet our covenants for sustainability. As well, with locally made products the environmental impacts of transportation are eliminated. We can imagine a village much like in the old days with a baker, a cheesemaker, a shoemaker, etc, with our staples produced and traded here. This doesn’t mean we would isolate ourselves from any part of the economy outside our community or that we have to be building our own solar panels, but until the wider economy becomes more sustainable, we should contribute to it as little as possible, unless our contribution is in offering sustainable alternatives.

One major step towards this future is creating viable land-based businesses. Doing this will connect our community and our livelihood to our land, something we should be intimately familiar with if we are to live sustainably. If we build businesses along the same covenants and guidelines that guide our personal lives, we can create a sustainable economy. When we can produce staple products and offer basic services for ourselves using sustainable practices, we will truly be making a difference. By trading or using local currency we can exchange these goods and services independent of the outside, unsustainable economy. We do this now to some degree with Elms, our local currency, but this remains a small trade (in terms of what we consume) in products and services actually produced by those at DR.

In the same way that living sustainably here can be challenging, starting and running a sustainable business at DR presents challenges that businesses in the unsustainable economy do not have to worry about. Running up against these difficulties, I wonder if a truly sustainable production business can be viable here (or anywhere right now in the global economy). For one, building and maintaining simple overhead here is a major investment, even for a very small business. In the unsustainable economy, starting a business might be a matter of renting a space that provides a production area, utilities, customer traffic, etc. It can also involve the purchase of a production facility, but even then, getting power, water, cooking fuel, and climate control is only a matter of plugging into the grid. Here at Dancing Rabbit all these things businesses normally take for granted impart huge start-up costs on the would-be entrepreneur. Granted, after the initial investment businesses would not have to pay a utility bill, only for upkeep of the system, but even over the long term, renewable energy by and large costs much more than energy from fossil fuel. Another factor to consider is that all the things that the larger economy relies on to function, such as electricity and refrigeration, are much more unpredictable at DR. The more predictable you would like them to be, the more it will cost you.

Creating a successful business is hard enough when you have the luxuries of a fossil fuel economy at your disposal. The fact that this kind of overhead is so cheap accounts for the low cost of many products in the global economy. When you invest in sustainable technology and business practices, you have to pass the extra cost on to the consumer. These sustainable practices have to be valued enough by the consumer for them to want to pay extra for them. If that cracker company were to retrofit their production plant to run on renewable energy, it’s possible their products would be priced out of the market, which is why they buy energy credits for a portion of their power needs instead. If its customers were willing to pay more for their product so that the company could run entirely on renewable energy, the company could be more sustainable. In this way sustainability would come before profit. Of course, this outcome is determined by the consumer, not the business.

But creating a sustainable business is not just a matter of replacing unsustainable business practices with sustainable versions of the same practices. There are many things a business just could not do without cheap fossil fuel. Imagine running a facility with several thousand square feet of deep-freeze storage on solar panels. It would simply not be possible. Even running a typical restaurant walk-in cooler would be a major power system investment. An economy adapts to what it has to work with, and ours has adapted to the abundance of fossil fuel. These resources make it possible for the global economy to function on the scale and at the speed at which it functions, but if they were taken away it would crash and burn.

Then there’s the unpredictability factor mentioned earlier, which comes from having your power supply determined by the weather. You can’t just plug into unlimited power or water as you can with the grid. At DR there are times in the year when there is no power left in the village. If you want to be sure you will have a lot of power, you can buy more panels and batteries, or use wind to supplement your solar, but larger capacity means more overhead. And even then, you can run out. One change we have recently decided to make, allowing grid-tie at DR, will pretty much eliminate the unpredictability of power supply (at least outside of the grid going down). Having reliability in water supply, however, is something that can’t be changed if we want to continue to use water in a sustainable manner. Because we try to catch all the water we use from the sky, a drought could limit a business’ ability to produce.

An Example: A tofu business

To give an example of the difficulties in planning a business here, I offer my tofu business idea. Tofu is a vegetable-based protein source a lot of people at DR would like to be able to eat on a regular basis. We don’t have any local source of fresh tofu, though it can be bought at Zimmerman’s for about $2.30 for a pound block in a sealed plastic container. Because tofu is in high demand and short supply and because fresh homemade tofu is far superior to store-bought tofu, I once thought starting a tofu business could be a good idea.

Immediately, I ran up against difficulties. First, making tofu requires a large amount of clean water, not just in the production process, but also in the cleaning of the equipment and production area. Since wells and county water are not as sustainable as rainwater catchment, to get this water I would need a cistern to collect rain, and I would need a roof to direct the rain into the cistern. This roof could be on the top of the production facility, which could be a small structure, but it would have to have a big enough roof to collect enough water to meet the demands of tofu production. I would also need an electric pump.

The tofu making process involves soaking the beans, which obviously requires water. Then the soaked beans are pureed in hot water. Large scale tofu production is made much easier by the use of special equipment that would need a lot of electricity, which would mean investing in a solar or wind power system. Hand grinding that many pounds of soybeans would take all day. The heating of the water and subsequent heating of the soymilk would require some kind of fuel. Here at DR we are allowed to use propane for cooking (but not heating water), but this is a fossil fuel, so ideally I would find another option. Wood cooking is probably the best bet, though I’d have to have a system that would allow me to carefully control the heat since soymilk scorches easily. Wood was likely the fuel used in tofu making for hundreds of years before fossil fuel. It would be possible to build a wood heated steam system such as Sandhill uses for it’s sorghum syrup. And in some countries, people are recapturing methane from landfills or human waste biogas systems. Both of these options would require a major investment in infrastructure. If I wanted to make larger batches at a time, which would be more efficient and reduce labor costs, I could refrigerate the product until it was sold to the consumer, but that would potentially take a major investment in power and refrigeration. I’m sure that by now you get the idea that sustainability offers plenty of challenges. Given the start-up investment I figured I’d have to charge many times more than the going rate.

Other Challenges

There are many other handicaps in establishing a small producer business here, many of them having to do with finding a market. Our location in rural Missouri, far from any metropolis, in many ways limits our market. It’s questionable as to whether we have enough people living at DR to support production businesses right now. Still there are things our small population needs that some new business could be based on. One problem is that many here may see the high price of sustainably produced products as beyond their means. Would people here pay $8 for a pound of tofu? Maybe, if we understood what it means to creating a sustainable economy. I think that by isolating ourselves from the mainstream economy, we will set our own values for products. The value will be based on our need for something, not on the going rate in the unsustainable economy. Why should we be unwilling to pay more for a product that is sustainably produced here just because we can get it cheaper at Wal-mart thanks to fossil fuel and cheap Third World labor? Why shouldn’t we pay $12 for a quart of organic home-canned tomato sauce? On the other hand, products like TVs can be expensive at big box stores, but they have almost no value here at DR. So if our economy values tomato sauce more than TVs people will be more willing to spend the extra money on tomato sauce. The barter economy and local currency would also help establish an alternative system of valuing products and services, by requiring that things be valued by comparison of their necessity here at DR.

Still our population may be too small to support a business and we will have to find customers outside DR. Bringing our products to the larger, unsustainable economy would help make it more sustainable. One way to do this is to bring customers here. Our location has one advantage in that each year people come from all over wanting to find out what we are doing here. This flow of tourists will only increase as we grow and add more attractions, such as a bed and breakfast, a winery, or a natural building school, and will be vital to the building of our economy.

Another option is to distribute our products to the larger market. It’s possible that in the future we could have some cooperative truck for shipping our goods regionally, or we could cooperate with Sandhill, who have a large distribution that carries their products all over the country. Outside of this option we would have to deliver the products ourselves using a DRVC vehicle. To keep the miles off our products it would be ideal to have them travel as little as possible and have our customers travel as little as possible to buy them. But unless we can tap into a larger customer base, our businesses may be limited to a market that is too small to sustain them.

Unfortunately, transportation is not the only difficulty in selling to a larger market. Finding a market outside DR will probably be harder than finding a market within–how can we produce at a price that can compete with products made with unsustainable practices? There is presently a high-end market for organic, sustainably and responsibly produced goods, but products made here would likely be more expensive than these goods because of our added “handicaps”. These “handicaps” could be marketing assets if we can get customers to value them. The question is how far this will get us. Some government grants and tax breaks for sustainable practices could help subsidize new businesses here, but these sources of funding are variable and never something to be counted on. Any way you look at it, high operating expenses are often a reality of sustainable production and if consumers aren’t willing or able to pay them for basic necessities, we won’t be able to build a sustainable economy.

One hope for competing in the global economy is that the rising price of oil will increase food and other product prices such that sustainably-made products can compete. Also likely is that our sustainable economy will adapt to what it has to work with. We will figure out the things we can and can’t do and we will develop new, more efficient and sustainable ways to produce the things we want to produce. One other advantage we have is that we are not as greedy as most entrepreneurs these days who require not just a profitable business, but exorbitant profits for themselves and their stockholders. Though we don’t have the economies of scale, we aren’t greedy so it’s likely we could sell products at more competitive prices than some high-end companies whose products are made with slave labor.

At our retreat this year (two years ago now) it was mentioned that DR will be paying off many of its major debts in the next five years. Besides necessary capital investment in infrastructure such as new common buildings, visitor housing, and roads, we would be wise to invest in our sustainable economy. Offering loans or even grants to DR members to start businesses that provide basic necessary goods and services would be a great way to ease the burden of starting up a business here. Building a business incubator space is another idea for building capacity for small businesses. Another option for reducing the start-up costs of small businesses is to incubate them on the grid in Rutledge and move them to Dancing Rabbit when they have grown enough to afford the capital costs of running the business more sustainably here.

Though often we as environmentalists look askance at the notion of business, our economy provides us the things we need to live. We can’t ignore it. If we don’t embrace it as part of our model for more sustainable living, we will continue to contribute to the unsustainable economy and turn a blind eye to the impact we are having on the planet.

I may be writing more articles on this subject because there are so many facets to living sustainably in which, though it may seem we are giving up something we need, we are actually enriching our lives. I invite others at DR to write their own articles for the blog telling of the ways in which living more simply and more sustainably can make our lives richer while at the same time reduce our impact on the planet.

Many people these days would have a hard time imagining life without refrigeration. No doubt refrigerators can be extremely useful, but somehow people managed, and even thrived, without them in the past. Over the past century, our food systems have come to rely more and more on refrigeration for preserving food, while many long-practiced traditions of food preservation have faded from our culture. Because refrigerated food can be shipped across the world and has made food production on an industrial scale easier, it has contributed to a steep decline in the diversity of unique local foods. With this loss of diversity has come a decline in flavor and nutrition. As well, modern chemical engineering has produced food additives to take the place of old methods of preservation, all part of an effort to extend the shelf life of industrially produced processed foods. Since refrigeration consumes a huge amount of energy, this trend has led to a bigger environmental footprint for our foods.

While reading my home cheesemaking book recently, I was intrigued by a recipe for a sheep’s milk cheese called Tomme d’Arles, which is a perfect example of an incredibly creative food designed by the need to preserve milk abundant during part of the year for times when milk was not available.

Cheese curd for mozzarella

For Tomme d’Arles, lambs were raised on spring milk until they were sent to market in late spring, after which the cheese was made from the milk of still lactating ewes. The cheese was salted, dried, and stored in jute sacks. When you wanted to eat the cheese, you rehydrated it in a marinade of local brandy and bay leaves, then aged it in a cellar for 2-3 weeks before eating. Though the cellar is akin to a refrigerator, it uses the natural temperature of the earth to keep the cheese cool while allowing for the growth of microorganisms that add flavor to it. This cheese’s unique combination of flavors is the result of a cheesemaking practice that in no way requires refrigeration.

I mention Tomme d’Arles because it is an example of how great things can come from trying to accomplish a goal (preserving milk) without the use of fossil fuel or massive energy inputs. Those who invented this cheese, and the many thousands of cheeses in the world, were not consciously avoiding using refrigeration, because it was never available to them. But they were still able to accomplish the same goal, and in the end made a unique product that never would have come about had they been using refrigeration to preserve their milk.

Last year the Milkweed Mercantile hosted a workshop on fermented foods taught by Sandor Katz, author of Wild Fermentation. Attendees, me included, learned about how people extended the life of vegetables, fruit, meat and dairy products without the use of strange chemicals or artificial refrigeration. One of the great things about natural methods of food preservation is that they allow us to make the most of our local foods. Instead of eating “fresh” produce or animal products grown out of season and shipped from across the world, we can eat our own local foods preserved as pickles, salted or smoked, or turned into dairy and meat products.

Tatsoi

This fall I had an abundance of tatsoi, a mustard green, and to preserve it this winter, I’ve fermented it naturally in a brine (salt) solution with garlic, onions, and hot peppers. You just throw all the ingredients in a crock, or in this case a bucket, and let it sit in a cool place. No starter culture is needed as the pickle is fermented by local bacteria. This common Korean pickle, kimchi, is a traditional way of preserving fish (normally an ingredient), but it also uses Chinese cabbages and radishes. It is ready to eat in as little as 3 days, but can be stored in a crock in a root cellar for months. According to my pickling book, kimchi pickles produce bacteriocins, antibiotics that can target harmful bacteria such as listeria and botulism.

Kimchi made from tatsoi

To learn more about unique regional sustainable foods and food politics, I recommend BBC Radio’s Food Programme podcast.  Every time they talk about food, it is with an eye to producing it sustainably.  Though it is about British food, it is still relevant and inspiring in the US.

Who thought the concept of combining human feces and water was a good idea?  Since these two were brought together on a mass scale in the flush toilets of the world, our water has never been the same and our waste has just gone to waste. 

 Alline just posted this great article about composting toilets on her blog Ecovillage Musings.  Check it out.

The Milkweed Mercantile (on Halloween)

Over two years ago now, I wrote two articles exploring economic issues at Dancing Rabbit. They sort of got lost in the March Hare limbo that has existed since then, and now that I am the new MH editor I thought I’d finally let them see the light of day. Actually both of them were posted on my blog a while back so if you ever went there you might have read them. This one is the first. Some basic DR facts may be out of date, but I think the general concepts have not changed much. This one is fairly long, so without further ado…   

The economic system we develop here at DR is vital to the survival and growth of our community. If we are to serve as a model for sustainable societies, it is important that our community be not only ecologically sustainable, but economically sustainable. If we cannot find sustainable ways to meet our basic needs, generate income, and trade and buy goods we will not be a viable model for sustainable living. Though we have in many ways achieved our goal of living more sustainably than most Americans, we are still dependent on the unsustainable global economy for most of our income and livelihood. This dependency contributes greatly to our impact on the planet. Creating a healthy economy based on the same principles of sustainability we employ in our everyday lives at DR will make us an even better model for a new way of living.

But developing a vibrant and ecologically sustainable economy is not easy. Part of the challenge at DR is that we are living in both the sustainable and the unsustainable economy. In our ideal world we would produce everything we consumed, so we had control over our resources and could ensure that production was sustainable. We are far from that and probably will be for the near future. Instead, we bring in resources and money from outside our local economy and we pay out money and resources to the larger economy. We have to have as much coming in from outside as we do going out or we are operating with a deficit. Trade deficits are talked about in the national news, but they can exist on a smaller scale as well. Maintaining a trade deficit will jeopardize the sustainability of our economy. If we can produce something to sell from our domestic resources to offset this deficit we will have a more viable economy. But we have to be careful, because we don’t want to export all our natural resources either.   

Dan raises vegetables throughout the year in his hoop house for sale at DR

To give an example, we could produce our own food here or, to save us the trouble, we could pay local farmers to produce our food for us. A local farmer could grow beans for us, but unless that farmer is buying anything from us and giving back to our community, we will be running a deficit. Our money is going out but not being recirculated in our economy. When someone is growing beans here, the money we pay the grower will likely stay within the community.   

Currently there are many ways we send money out of the community. Health care is a big negative cash flow, though we do provide some of our own care here in the form of home remedies, massage, yoga, etc. However, most of us still go to the local hospital and dentist when we have a major problem. As well, construction-related expenses are a massive flow out of our community, though some members of our community do construction work or sell materials. Other ways we send money out of the community are orders from the natural foods distributor, other groceries, power system components, vehicle-related and other transportation expenses, computers, and entertainment-related expenses. Some people here offset money sent out of the community by bringing in income through their jobs. This positive cash flow is a slightly more complicated matter.   

Presently there are basically three ways money is brought into the community (and these are the three ways most people survive here): by members who come here with an established means of making money; by members who come here with savings that will allow them to live without a stable income for a while until they can find a way to make money; and by businesses started here that have customers from outside DR. I would hazard a guess that most of the positive cash flow into the community comes from the people who arrive with savings or inherit money. A large portion of the non-savings positive cash flow is from web-based businesses that are run by a relatively small number of community members. Some other sources of income for the community are mid-wifery, FIC (Fed. Of Intentional Comm.)work, non-profit consulting and management, and consensus and facilitation training. A small amount is brought in through the visitor program but this does not cover the costs of the program.   

Money brought into the community through outside jobs and savings is then cycled through the economy in the form of construction jobs and the sale of other small scale goods and services provided by community members. DR itself also pays some members for certain jobs. It’s possible for someone to survive here working for other people who have a stable income, and often people with money are looking for help and willing to pay for it. However, right now I would doubt whether we could say we have a thriving economy that could provide income for many people who weren’t already set up in some way. People who come here with ready-made income sources are essential for the existence of our economy in these early stages (and it will always be helpful to have some percentage of our population arrive with income sources). They can keep our economy afloat until it is healthy and diverse enough that it can provide the community’s basic needs.   

When I think about economy at DR, I get a sinking feeling that our economy is not really sustainable (or viable) in that instead of bringing in money from outside the community, we are living largely off savings. Some build their houses with their savings and others pay people to help them build their houses. Savings are a good source of income for DR and there is no doubt that this sector of the economy is vital to new people becoming established here, but it is questionable that it would be sustainable if the flow of new members slowed and everyone was living in largely finished houses. Unless those people who arrive with savings (like me) can find ways to make income here they will eventually run out of money.   

Another nagging doubt about the sustainability of our economy is the question of whether we are really setting an example for sustainability if our economy is based largely on the the internet and member savings. Setting an example to me means having sustainable businesses and trade that prove an economy can be set up from the ground up along principles of sustainability. These businesses and trade would be based on our knowledge and skills, and on land and resources that we control, instead of being based on distant lands and resources, and unsustainable systems. In addition, by creating businesses and trade that go beyond our community we can offer sustainable alternatives to the global economy and bring in income to offset what we are paying out.   

If we can come up with creative ways to generate income and produce our basic needs at DR we can build a more stable economic foundation. Other intentional communities that have been able to survive have had some main cottage industry to generate revenue from outside the community. Twin Oaks makes tofu and hammocks, Acorn has a seed business, East Wind makes nut butters, and Sandhill sells sorghum and honey. We could potentially have many different cottage industries here. A good place to start is with the products people here already buy from outside DR. These are the low hanging fruit and will provide three benefits at once: Someone at DR will have an income source; that money will stay in our economy; and we will not have to go outside DR to meet a basic need. The added benefit is that with our local currency, dollars don’t have to be exchanged at all. Construction is one of the low hanging basic services we are already providing for ourselves, but there are many more potential business ideas. Food is something we spend a lot of money on and since we have plenty of land available for growing food this could be a lucrative means of income for someone or a group of people.   

At Dancing Rabbit we are unique from and have advantages over some other intentional communities because we have a diversity of potential income sources. This makes DR attractive to people who don’t want to be limited in the work they do in their lives. Individuals or groups can start their own businesses that will then eventually provide jobs for others. The Milkweed Mercantile is an example of this kind of business. Ziggy and April’s natural building workshops will build community infrastructure while bringing revenue into our economy and educating others in living more sustainably. There is a lot of expertise here, and a lot of people out there who want to learn from us and would want to buy the things we produce sustainably. We aren’t tapping into this potential nearly enough now, though hopefully as people get more established we will. I hope that we will realize what a resource we are and how many people are willing to support us by paying for what we have to offer. What better way to generate income for our community than by helping others do what we all came here to do– live more sustainably.   

So we need to build our own sustainable businesses at DR to meet our basic needs and offset the flow of money out of our community. That is easier said than done. In the next article I will explore the challenges of starting a sustainable production business here.

Ted and daughter Aurelia bring home the harvest

Written by Ted Sterling
[Recently printed in Communities Magazine, issue #151, Intimacy]

Since first I met Dancing Rabbit founder Tony Sirna at the Communities Conference in Willits, CA in 1998, I have understood that the “village” part of ecovillage here was meant as more than a euphemism. Dancing Rabbit was intended to be more or less like the village of popular conception– small, rural, surrounded and supported by agriculture and practical arts, and made up of villagers whose lives would doubtless be intertwined in many ways.

When I subsequently arrived at Dancing Rabbit for an internship in July 2001, I found a small (at that time, members numbers perhaps 10, and the village hosted upwards of 20 interns over the warm season) group of people with a lot of commitment to a beautiful vision. It was not a village yet. It did feel intimate, in the ways that we all worked together and relied on each other to feed ourselves, survive in our tents, and share very little sheltered space while trying to build some of the first structures. We were pioneering. Intimacy was born out of necessity, though aided by common purpose.

I met my future partner Sara, another intern at the time, that first morning as I reconnoitered the budding village. I had been deeply missing the intimacy of a close relationship prior to my arrival, and felt deep gratitude to the world and to circumstance when I quickly found that intimacy. Within a few weeks we were sharing a tiny tent in a field of tall grass. Within a couple months, I was beginning to think seriously that I might like to spend the rest of my life with her. This July we’ll celebrate 10 years together alongside our five-year-old daughter Aurelia.

At the time of that 1998 conference, I had already lived five years in the student coops in Berkeley, mostly in the coop known as Lothlorien. The intimacy of that setting was like a drug to me; we cooked beautiful vegetarian food for each other, cleaned for each other, created and took part in elaborately prepared social events, sometimes fell in love with our house mates, and even studied together occasionally. It was the parallel education to my academic pursuits, and turned out to be the more important for me. I was hooked on the intimacy with my community mates that came from living in such close proximity and sharing so many events both routine and unusual in one of the most formative moments of our collective lives.

Sadly I began to see that I was facing an end to that particular intimacy; transience is built into the BSC (Berkeley Student Coops) experience, since you must be a student to live in them and are allowed only one grace semester. Lothlorien (my then home) possesses amazing cultural coherence under the circumstances, but at that time I agonized over the loss of important house members every year as they graduated (or moved into private housing, the wisdom of which I thought dubious at best). The pain of it was visceral. The idea of starting my own community, based on good land that I’d never have to leave, offered salvation for my particular torment, and grew deeply rooted in my dreams.

I worked on organic farms, homesteaded for a year, traveled around the world and across the US in search of community in its many forms as my desire for a more permanent home increased. At first that five-month stay in northeast Missouri seemed just another stepping stone to me. I still pictured mountains and forest and perhaps the ocean or a big river looming not far off in the distance when I dreamed about my own community. Sara was more sanguine than I about Dancing Rabbit, but indulged my fantasies so far as to begin looking for land with me in the Appalachians.

Then one day, home alone at our temporary abode in some quiet (and lonely) woods on the Maine coast while Sara was off visiting friends and family for a few weeks (including at Dancing Rabbit), it hit me: I could spend the next 10 years trying to start my own community, hoping I had enough charisma to attract others and instill dreams of community similar to mine in them; or I could give it a go in an existing community where I knew it was possible to do all or most of what I dreamed of, and spend the next 10 years doing instead of trying. Sara already thought Dancing Rabbit was the way to go, and I realized that if I really wanted community to succeed, I ought to support existing communities instead of splintering the energy still further.

We wrote a fateful letter to Dancing Rabbit, and arrived as members in April 2003. In the intervening years I have learned a great deal of intimacy. To be sure, my understanding and experience of closeness in a partnership with one person dwells in a different realm now than it did then. Alongside Sara I have stretched and molded the rudimentary sense of fulfillment in love I began with into a glittering, jeweled orb of deepest intimacy. We have changed each other, grown individually and together, built a house, birthed a child, and much else.

Without the supporting web of context, however, I cannot imagine having traveled so far or with such meaning. Dancing Rabbit and our neighboring communities Sandhill Farm and Red Earth Farms provide that context, and I will likely spend the rest of my life trying to fully appreciate the fathomless depths of intimacy inherent in building a village in all its lurid detail from scratch with 30-1000 friends and acquaintances. Whether by upbringing or predilection, I did not begin with a deep appreciation of intimacy beyond that of family or lover. I always thought of myself as having friends, but in retrospect I hardly understood what friendship really meant.

Friday night community dinner at Dancing Rabbit

In our village I sooner or later see my community mates in nearly every shade of their existence. I do not have to share a bed or income with most of them to see it. We are building a pedestrian-based village whose human zone is “thickly settled”, to borrow a New England term. Between one dwelling and the next a frog often requires no more than a few leaps. In hot summer weather when the barriers between inside and out fade to nothing, I can hear my neighbors snoring, having sex, arguing, cooking, and just about everything else related to the act of living. It is both startling to my staid American sense of propriety and independence, and at the same time deeply humanizing.

These observations are perhaps nothing remarkable to a city dweller, but there is a certain anonymity to city life; the individual typically leaves those unintentional intimacies of home for work, play, commerce, and so on, losing his- or herself in the multitude.

Here at Dancing Rabbit, I share limited space in often-cooperative facilities with my neighbors, and beyond the village are farm fields and forests. I may dine in an eating coop with them, share shower facilities, build compost piles with buckets of their mixed excrement, dive naked into the pond to cool off alongside them, grow, sell, trade, and eat produce with them, share a ride to town with a handful of them, sit through and participate in every conceivable form of meeting with them, find myself in conflict and its resolution with them, quietly lust after them, build a house with them, cry, laugh, run, scream or die with them. I will also just watch them do many of these things. I share myself and so do they. Some more than others, but you cannot really hide from anyone here.

This is not the first time I’ve felt like I was re-learning and experiencing a life that was commonplace to the vast majority of my ancestors in the not-too-distant past. Yet for all that, I never experienced a tenth of it before deciding to embroil myself in the exquisitely mundane daily realities of this particular place and collection of people.

Before living in community, I found it very easy to play the mental game of comparing myself favorably to the blind, benighted masses of the world who didn’t care or didn’t know better about whatever it was I was concerned with (and whom I didn’t know). Since rooting myself in this intimate setting, I have found that game far harder to play, because I daily observe a much broader range of human behaviour and foibles than just my own or my partner’s or child’s examples. I can plainly see, and cannot readily ignore, that my way is only one among many, and that I have a great deal still to learn.

Each time I see and learn, gratitude grows in me for this shared humanity, the vulnerability we each show each other, the gifts of love, time, and energy we daily give and receive, the example we show to every new person that sets foot here, which subsequently seeps out to help change our collective culture.

Despite this undeniable intimacy, we still struggle sometimes with elements of it, particularly in the more intentional forms like friendship. Without the situational closeness I share with all here, I fear I would rarely grow true friendship. I would be far lonelier. But I’m not. I do have this.

My friend Thomas wrote a poem of sorts to each person in the village one year for Validation Day (our version of Valentine’s Day). Most were typical, brilliant Thomas, with deep meaning likely hidden in apparent nonsense if only I was sharp enough to find it. I read mine many times, and have carried it since as encouragement to pursue as many more opportunities as I can to know him more:

two ants
wished to treat
bones here & there
with pond elixir.
welcome spirit
nurtured being
becoming bee.
friends not far?
true joy

Image credit: photos by Ramin Rahimian

How much can I consume while still being socially and ecologically responsible?

How little can I consume and maintain a high quality of life?

In many ways Dancing Rabbit is an experiment built around these questions. So far I believe we have made significant headway.

In the chart below you can find numbers comparing consumption for the average Rabbit to the average American and the results are interesting. We have managed to find a way to reduce our total footprint by 85% compared to the US average while retaining many comforts of modern life. For instance, I am writing this article in my 200 sq. ft. strawbale cabin, powered by a small solar panel system. I have a 200+ acre backyard I share with my friends and it’s a five minute walk to a luxuriously large natural swimming pool, our pond.

Dancing Rabbit has taken important steps towards demonstrating that a high quality of life is possible at much lower levels of consumption than are commonly seen in the Global Northwest. I like to think about this as an example of what economists call Pareto Optimality (or, for the statistically-minded, a power law distribution). This principle holds that 80% of your benefits come from the first 20% of your efforts. The Italian economist Pareto noticed this pattern in many areas of his life: 20% of his work would get 80% of his attention, 20% of his fellow Italians had 80% of the wealth, and 20% of his pea plants produced 80% of his peas.

In our case, I would argue that we get 80% of the fun and 80% of the utility out of modern life with about 15% of the consumption. This also leaves us room for other fine things in life that our more-consumptive counterparts might miss, like watching fireflies, going for a quick swim before dinner, or taking long walks with friends.

Thoughts and reflections on the data:

• Much of our low electricity use comes from a day-to-day lived experience of finite production. If it is cloudy for two days I am likely to read a book instead of watching a movie, and if it is cloudy for four days I might enjoy a candlelight evening with my sweetheart instead of using electric lighting. It is a very visceral and informative experience to live within limits, with real hour-to-hour feedback. I look forward to smart metering options providing the wider public with information like this in the near future.
• Flying is a huge cost, and while many Rabbits avoid flying (some entirely), airplane usage still looms large in our estimated total village footprint.
• We Rabbits still use more than our global share of the earth’s ecosystem, so, in my view, discussions of consumption targets should be paired with discussions of socially conscious ways to hit population targets.
• As our internal village economy matures, we will publish a followup article on production. This will be a step towards judging our progress in attaining production levels that can support our lower levels of consumption in a sustainable way.

If you have any questions or comments or are interested in our

sources, leave a comment below!