On the day of the story, last Monday, the sheep were in the Cross field, possibly slightly disgruntled because they had eaten most everything they like.   I was going to move them back to the barn the next day and was fretting about it.  It's always a bit of a project to do that route because all ten of them have to cross Cross road as a group, trot down Hatchery for a bit, then up our driveway and into the barn, with nobody getting spooked by cars, or distracted by tasty nibbles.  It was late in the afternoon, and I was doing the Monday afternoon food scrap pick up.  I get a text.  It says, "Someone just called and said your sheep were loose and were seen crossing the road back towards your farm.  I thought you should know".  As I mentioned, this kind of looking out for our sheep happens sometimes, although usually, the people stop by our house because they don't have my phone number.  In any case, I responded "Thanks for the heads up" and headed back to the farm to get the sheep (rest of food scrap could be done tomorrow).  After a few minutes, I thought, wait, how did this person know my number?  So I pull over and look at who had texted.  Dave Evers Food Scrap.  Huh.  Maybe he had passed by and seen the sheep?  But no, he said someone else had called.  How did someone think to call Dave, who lives on the other side of the village?  So I text back and ask him.  And guess what, it was the lady who I had talked to a few days before, who figured Dave must have my number because of the food scraps!  

As I said, it takes a village to keep sheep.  

Plus, when I got home, expecting to have to corral a bunch of confused sheep who were scattered all over the place, I found them all together, pretty much by the barn, waiting to be let in.  

These three incredible farmers are out in the front of the regenerative farming (though with typical Brit self-effacement, they call it regen lite themselves), with composting and bokashi; a rich diversity and stacking of farm functions; and the way they raise their livestock and crops.  They have been honing some of these practices for 30 years.  There are many practices of their farm - notably the large livestock and field crops - where my knowledge lagged too far behind theirs to understand fully what they were doing, but there are three that I picked up on.  I want to share them here because they were new to me and may be new to many folks in the northeastern part of the US where I farm.  

Making/expanding their own bokashi grain.

Lower Blakemere farm makes bokashi grain for use on their farm and for Heather’s soil nutrients company Wiggly Wigglers.  As many folks know, bokashi is an anearobic composting process developed in Japan, and regarding soil health it is notable because the compost contains a powerful mix of micro-organisms (lactobacillus bacteria, phototrophic bacteria and yeast) that are particularly beneficial for the soil.

Bokashi grains are made at a commercial scale at Lower Blakemere.  For one batch they mix together the inoculant EM1, water, molasses, and about three tons of wheat bran.  The mixture should be wetted just enough that it balls when pressed together in your hand, but does not release any water.   It is then poured into large, cubic yard black plastic bags which are closed up with giant zip ties.  The bags hang out outside in the sun and all the material ferments inside it to make new bokashi grain.  Phil cut open one of the bags and allowed us to put our hands in and grab a handful. The crumbly, moist mixture had a sweet and slightly beer-like aroma.  Not a strong ferment at all. The household bokashi container that Heather let us smell earlier was much stronger, definitely like sauerkraut.  After a few weeks the fermentation is finished, the grain is laid out and dried, and put into bags to sell to folks as a garden amendment.  

But, is also used in with the livestock to improve the livestock’s deep litter and make a powerful field fertilizer - see next item!

More information about how Lower Blakemere makes their bokashi grain from their website at lowerblakemere.co.uk/making-bokashi-bran-on-lower-blakemere-farm/

And, a small-scale recipe for making bokashi grains to get the ratios of the ingredients here: thecompostess.com/2015/04/22/how-to-make-bokashi/

Fungi-building compost: the Johnson-Su bioreactor.

Another thing that I learned: Phil told me is that fungi can fix nitrogen in combination with certain bacteria in the soil.  So if you can get the right fungi into your soil, you’ll have one more ally in the nitrogen-building strategy (other parts being legumes, manure, and as a last resort, ammonium sulfate).  

They use a a composting system called the Johnson-Su method after its Californian inventors.  It is aerobic, but the key is to give the compost at least 400 days because that is the time needed to get the fungi to start growing mycelium rods.  It’s another small footprint, low-tec, intelligent approach.  

Here is how it works.  Take a metal frame about one meter/yard cubed and put a similar-sized bag inside it made of a porous material.  Phil and Heather use firewood bags.  This simple contraption is the DYI bioreactor.  They fill this bag with a mix of organic stuff they have on their farm - kitchen bokashi, grass clippings, leaves, manure, some soil.. It really does not matter exactly what it is, although more variety is good;  it should be local from the farm; and should have the right mix of green and browns 1:25..  As the bags are getting filled, they insert PVC tubes about 3-4” diameter on a 12” spacing and keep filling up the cube.  The material should be pretty solid and keep its shape because after 2-3 days, the tubes are removed leaving these elongated holes in they compost cube that will allow oxygen to get to all of the material.  The compost initially heats up, and once it cools down add 40-50 earthworms, preferably from your own farm.   Keep the cube moist by sprinkling it daily but not so wet that water drips out of the bottom.

They now let it sit for 400 days (this is England, where there are not 90-120 winter days when it could be brutally cold; in a colder climate people put these cubes in hoop houses).   This is the time needed, as mentioned, for the fungal tubes/mycelium to develop.  The fungi are the critical piece because they are what are going to help fix the nitrogen.

Once finished, the compost is mixed with water (Phil said 10 kilos of compost to 1000 liters of water) to make a tea and this is spread on the fields at a rate of 10 liters per hectare.

Phil mentioned that you can’t use the usual pressure sprinklers for spreading the compost tea because the pressure would destroy the tinny microbial life, including the critical fungi.  He found a medical device for blood circulation in heart lung pattients.  Clearly, here is a neat problem for some clever engineers.  

More information about the Johson-Su composting at Lower Blakemere:.
.lowerblakemere.co.uk/our-diy-johnson-su-bioreactor/
Another in-depth article about the method from the UK Farmers `weekly`; ​www.fwi.co.uk/arable/land-preparation/soils/how-to-build-a-johnson-su-bioreactor-to-produce-your-own-on-farm-biology

Transporting these lessons to our farm

I am very excited to try some of these things are out farm.  It should be easy to start making our own bokashi grains and adding those to our own chicken and sheep deep litter systems.  And I’m all ready to make a Johnson-Su bioreactor on our farm soon after I get back from travels!  
​

In this image, farms are diverse, growing many crops, and on most pieces of land, multiple foods are grown in symbiosis, simultaneously or in sequence.   I’ve read and done and know enough to be confident that it’s not physical or natural constraints that keep us from farming in this way in the real world; it’s our hearts, minds, and social organization.  If we want, we can raise good, healthy food for all with a reasonable amount of labor on much less land and far less industrial input than we currently devote to agriculture.  The key (or the rub!) is to devote a little more human time to growing food than we do now. 
 
David Montgomery in the book Dirt says versions of my image of small farms existed in some places the past, in periods between empires, when farmers owned their land, maintained its fertility, and were able to live a good life from it.  Some writers like Chris Smaje (Small Farm Future) and David Fleming (Surviving the Future) predict a small farm future not long from now - after our current society collapses on itself when the resource base is depleted, and inner social tensions explode.  I sense an eagerness in these predictions.  I find much to like about this future, but it’s not certain it will come to pass; we just don’t know.  It’s clear that we’re eating up our resource base, including soils, destabilizing the climate, and as I write (February, 2025), I feel my (chosen!) country (I too, am an immigrant) is falling apart and I am deeply grieved. Nonetheless, I can’t predict, as Smaje or Fleming, that collapse and rebuild will happen.  Who knows, we may yet salvage our high-tech society as a dystopia or utopia.   But even if that should happen, I would still have hope for small farms.  I would hope that in many corners of the world, disconnected from the general hubbub, farmers would be growing food intensively, regeneratively and intelligently on beautiful farms.  
 
As I’ve explored and learned farming over the past few years (admittedly, a short time), I have come across various productive and regenerative food production systems that give color and shape to that small farm place in my mind.   I’d like to share one of them here – the Three Sisters garden.  Maybe later, I’ll write about another one.   The Three Sisters originated maybe four or five thousand years ago in Meso-America and spread to the Northeast by a thousand or more years ago.  It was the dominant form of staple crop growing for the native Americans here. 
 
The Three Sisters grace a farm with luxuriant, curving leaves on the tall corn stalks; bright colors and luscious shapes of bean flowers attracting hummingbirds; orange rounds of squash peeking through large, dark leaves closer to the ground.  To rest your eyes on such a garden is a balm to the spirit.  The Three Sisters require no tilling or mining of the soil and indeed, can replenish it over time.  The system requires minimal fertilization.  The amount of food produced by multi-cropping flint corn, beans, and squash together is significantly greater than growing these staple crops separately.   One acre of Three Sisters can provide a reasonably balanced, if slightly boring diet for a dozen adults for an entire year.   Working-age adults (half of the population) would only need to spend about 1/10 of their time growing this food for everyone.  It would take a little over half a million acres in Massachusetts to feed our 7 million residents a Three Sisters diet (a little more than today’s actual farmland in this state).   I don't advocate doing it right now, but say in a catastrophe - nice to have the back-up?....
 
For those who are unfamiliar, this is roughly how a Three Sisters garden works.  In Spring, a few weeks before the last frost, corn seeds are planted in clusters of 4-7 seeds on a hexagonal grid about 4 feet apart.    The clusters can be in mounds in wet or flooding soil; bowls in very dry situations.  The mounds or bowls were traditionally made with a hand hoe.  The corn is planted first because it needs a head start on the beans and squash.  Then it has reached 6 inches (others say 24 inches) and danger of frost has passed, as many bean seeds are planted around the corn cluster, and one or two squash to each mound.  As the corn grows, the bean vines climb up this natural trellis and bind the corn stalks together into a sturdy column.  The beans may also provide some nitrogen to the corn.  The squash grows along the ground, keeping the ground cool and the weeds at bay - although before the squash fills in the space entirely, some weeding is necessary.  Each plant supports the other in some way and uses different niches of space which allows for a higher harvest than the three crops planted in monocultures. 
 
As mentioned, the Three Sisters can provide a lot of food on relatively little land with simple tools.   One farmer in Pennsylvania, Erik Koperek, tracked his harvests over a ten-year period. His records are the best I could find, and his numbers are comparable to the spottier records from other sources.  Each year, he planted 4 Floriani Red flint corn seeds on mounds spaced 4’ apart; he added 4 Scarlet Runner bean seeds when the corn was 2’ high, and one Waltham Butternut squash plant per two hills.  He used only hand tools (including a mower).  For fertilizer he used just fish meal (nitrogen) and wood ash (potassium); no pesticides or herbicides.  He managed weeds so that he had a good population of pest predators but at the same time the weeds did not overwhelm his crops.  He had no need of irrigation.  His article is posted in: worldagriculturesolutions.com/tag/floriani-red-flint-corn/
 
This is what he recorded over ten years on his quarter acre:
Corn: Average 750 pounds, varying from 463 to 990 lbs (2998 lbs/acre; or 53.5 bu/acre)
Beans: Average 130 pounds, varying from 84 to 172 lbs (521 lbs/acre)
Squash: Average 1823 pounds, varying from 1353 to 2194 lbs (7294 lbs/acre).
 
 It turns out that, taken together, the harvests he recorded exceeded what one might expect growing corn, beans and squash in monocrops using industrial methods.   Let’s look at the table below.   I’m going to talk about the harvest per acre – Koperek’s plot was ¼ acre, so his actual harvests are multiplied by four to get the per-acre equivalents. 
 
In his Three Sisters garden, Koperek got an average of 54 bushels of flint corn per acre (almost 3000 lbs).  Comparatively, at the University of Vermont in 2023, the average flint corn yield in a conventional field was 57 bushels per acre; and Mt. Pleasant got 52 bushels per acre on her trial plots.  That means the Three Sisters gave about as much corn as you would get growing the corn alone.  The same is basically true for Koperek’s squash yields. The winter squash yields in New England farms from 2019-23 were 7940 lbs per acre harvested; Koperek’s 10-year average was 7294 lbs per acre, or 92 percent of the commercial farms’.  Dried bean harvests from Koperek’s Three Sister plot were significantly lower than the United States average, namely 521 lb per acre vs 1700, or, only 31 percent. 

​We can add up these percentages to see how much land would be required in conventional, monocrop agriculture to get a yield equivalent to Koparek.   The sum is an astounding 2.23: if you can replicate Koperek’s Three Sisters garden, you would use less than half of the land compared to growing the three foods commercially as monocrops!
 
Let’s also add up how many calories are in this harvest per acre to get a sense of the total food value.  We have 3000 lbs of dry flint corn, which has 1600 calories per pound.  This gives 4.8 million calories.  We have 7000 lbs of squash, which has 500 calories per pound, plus about 10 lbs of squash seeds which have 2000 calories per pound.  These give 3.5 million calories together.   The beans come in last, with 500 pounds of beans each giving 1600 calories, for a total of 0.8 million calories.  When we add up the calories in this harvest, it is an average of 9.1 million calories per acre, or more than enough for a dozen adults for an entire year. 
 
On our farm, second year of Three Sisters farming we grew the same amount of beans (per acre equivalent) as Koperek, but had only a fourth of his corn yield, and no squash.  We’re still learning.  And various people I’ve talked to said they tried the Three Sisters but were not successful and gave up.  But I am convinced that it’s not that difficult; it just has to be re-learned.  If we did, we really could grow our own food here in Massachusetts and not break our backs doing it.  We might not want this diet or put in the work, but it’s possible.  That’s amazing.   ​

​We also start the year fielding inquiries about staying with us on the farm for a few weeks or months in the upcoming season, and inevitably, folks ask us, “What are you going to be doing in the month(s) that I was planning to come?” and then, for some reason, my mind goes blank.  Mostly I can remember “Ah, um, chicken and sheep chores”, but for the rest, it’s a wild scramble in my head looking for plans and projects. 
 
So, I thought I would transpose the Scrum Plan into a Seasonal Overview that I can refer people to.  Here it is: