Strategy

Prioritise natural techniques for farming, building and living.

• Kawaguchi believes relying on government handouts is undesirable, because if it's removed his project might collapse.
• By using natural farming and building techniques, as well as simple kitchen tools with homemade ingredients (eg soy sauce, miso, dashi), almost any task is solveable with skills in the community and resources on the land. This aligns with what I saw at Pedesaan farm.

Community is important.

• Sharing ideas and techniques goes a long way.
• One year, your harvest will likely fail. Having people to support you with food in this event is crucial if you're remote or unable to access alternative food.

Practical

Questions

1. Kris mentioned that irrigated (ie rice) fields are sometimes dug up and have a layer of natural substance lined at the bottom to reduce water drainage. What is this substance?
2. What soil type is suitable to irrigated fields and trenching?
3. What is the optimal spacing for rice saplings?

Tools.

• You only require:
  1. A saw sickle
  2. A hoe
  3. A shovel
• Prefer cast iron over stainless steel.
  • Stainless is hard to cut with and easily bent.
  • Iron is heavy and durable, even if it rusts. You can more easily scrub off rust and sharpen iron than you can correct stainless steel.
• Saw sickle technique. Trim weeds by grabbing the roots with your thumb down, permitting a more accurate cut. Harvest stalks by grabbing the plants with your thumb up, making it easier to gather multiple cuts' worth into one hand.

Naturally irrigated fields.

• For rice, wheat, barley, etc.
• You want water to retain in the trenches (aka furrows) and fields between them. You could use running water, but rice requires a particular water temperature to produce optimal yields. Running water is too cold for rice, and is not always available.
  • I wonder if you can grow plants on the surface of trench water to prevent its evaporation.
• Assuming you have amenable (clay??) soil, you can create a water-retaining field by digging about 0.5m deep and lining the bottom with some natural water-blocking material.
• The field contained between the trenches can be up to 4m wide and as long as you like to permit sufficient hydration.
• You can create gated irrigation by setting a 30-40cm diameter pipe into the ground between channels. Then you can stuff this with a sandbag to close it.^[1]
• Trench maintenance.
  • If your trenches leak water, your plants will be sad and you'll need to use a lot more water. If your farm is healthy, it will likely attract thicc earthworms or moles who will try to laser holes in your trench walls.
  • Natural rice farmers in Mie prefecture, Japan will leisurely check and reinforce their trenches in March or April before they plant saplings in June.
  • Pressure. Your irrigated field is likely not perfectly level. The taller sides will be low pressure, the lowest sides will be high pressure, and the others are medium pressure. You probably don't even need to check your low pressure sides for holes all the way along. You should definitely check your medium pressure sides with the slice check. You should perhaps just reinforce your high pressure sides every year, though you can just do the slice check.
  • Slice check.
    1. Use a shovel to slice parallel to the edge of the trench about 20cm into the external soil (ie, on the outside of the trench, not the field side, silly). Pry the soil back and see if you can spot any holes or water leaking through.
    2. Perform this all the way along your trench wall.
    3. If there are no holes, you can use the shovel's to close the gap again.
  • Reinforcement.
    • Potentially a two day process.
    1. Ensure the trenches are full and still.
    2. Cut away the wall to reinforce about 30-40 cm worth. Just the top 40cm or so will do.
    3. Break up the broken mud with the adjacent water and leave it to soak until it's pliable but not dissolved, about 5-10 minutes.
    4. Pull the pliable mud on top of the remaining barrier, leaving it in a loose heap.
    5. Wait until the sun has dried out the pliable mud until you can scrape it without it sliding back into the water. You want a cement-like texture. This may take between a few hours to a day, obviously less time for environments with hotter drier faster air.
    6. If any mud has slipped back into the trench, move it back on top.
    7. Sculpt the mud into a triangle or more ideally a trapezium, in which case you can shallowly plant any kind of beans to be opportunistic and promote stabilising root systems.

Rice planting.

• Half your yield is determined by having good quality saplings.
• Grow your saplings in a small area 1/50th the size of the field itself.
  1. Dig a 20cm wide trench around the sapling area to guard it against moles which may remove the soil beneath the sapling roots. Cut the to-be-trenched soil into large chunks and leave them beside the trench so that you can easily fill in the trench later, without disrupting the soil and insects too much. Larger chunks of displaced mud will survive better.
  2. Plant rice seeds by hand, pushing them into the soil. Plant 3cm (a ¥500 coin) apart.
  3. Place branches over the top of the sapling area to prevent birds from getting in and pecking out the seeds.
  4. After 2-3 weeks, weed carefully. Be sure to study plants that look similar to rice saplings.
  5. After about 2 months, when the saplings are 20-30cm tall, water the field 2-3 hours before planting to make the soil pliable enough to plant efficiently but stable enough to hold you.
  6. Ideally harvest the preceeding crop in this field now (ie wheat or barley).
  7. When the soil is ready for planting, cut the saplings soil about 3-4cm deep and transplant the saplings to the rest of the field.
  8. Plant the rice saplings on the optimal grid (find this in Kawaguchi's rice book). The rice saplings should be planted at the same depth they were in before transplanting. It pays to plant as close to orthogonally as you can, because
     1. when you weed, it'll be easier to know what's rice and what's not
     2. rice yield is increased by the individual stalks multiplying, which they can do well with sufficient distance between them
  9. After planting, ensure the water in the trench is high to keep the rice well hydrated.

Other grains.

• Hadakemugi. Harvest by hand by pinching grains. If you cut the whole straw, the grains might fall. You can harvest when there's just a little purple left in the grain.
• Komugi (wheat). Continues to ripen after harvest.

Mulching in grain fields.

• For rice -> wheat, return the straw to the field and broadseed wheat seeds.
• For wheat -> rice, do not return the straw. Simply leave the ground cover in place and transplant the saplings. Saplings do not need the obfuscation of mulch against birds.