Red Baron Farms
Overview of My Research
A Little About Me
I grew up on a small homestead type farm. We grew a 1/2 acre garden, a small orchard with cherries, peaches and apples, a milk goat named Sally, 200+ chickens, and a whole bunch of rabbits, 3 beef cows, strawberry patch etc… You get the idea. All us kids were active in Scouts and 4H. Pretty typical rural US childhood. And this little homestead was right square in the middle of a huge commercial farmer’s corn field. Across the road was another slightly smaller commercial farmer, who also grew corn etc… But just enough to feed his pastured pig and beef cow operation. As soon as I could work I was working on those neighbors’ farms.
So I literally grew up seeing first hand and understanding all scales of farming here in US, from the tiny small family farm to the large commercial operations and everything in between. I even took a job at the seed company next town over for summer work and learned corporate farming and seed research, building and documenting test plots with controls, running and training an agricultural labor crew etc… too.
My family ended up losing the farm and for a while I worked as a merchant marine engineer. I learned to view the world differently after seeing many countries and their impacts on the environment. Most impactful of all was seeing the environmental and human quality of life devastation that occurred in Haiti when agriculture collapsed there.
I am now retired from the Merchant Marine and have started my Red Baron Project which will become my ultimate life's work and legacy. My small help in fixing huge problems facing future generations if we don't make our systems sustainable.
My Research
From Theory to Reality
I am interested in studying the natural systems which shape and guide the ecosystem services of the natural world, then to mimic them with a new model of agricultural systems that function in similar ways.
For my project I am using various principles:
Principle 1: No till and/or minimal till with mulches used for weed control
Principle 2: Minimal external inputs
Principle 3: Living mulches to maintain biodiversity
Principle 4: Companion planting
Principle 5: The ability to integrate carefully controlled modern animal husbandry (optional)
Principle 6: Capability to be mechanized for large scale or low labor for smaller scale
Principle 7: As organic as possible, while maintaining flexibility to allow non-organic growers to use the methods
Principle 8: Portable and flexible enough to be used on a wide variety of crops in many areas of the world
Principle 9: Sustainable ie. beneficial to the ecology and wildlife
Principle 10: Profitable ie. Must yield higher net profits than industrial high input Ag with all its synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to compete successfully.
My long-term goal is to identify and characterize the scientific mechanisms specific to my principal areas of research; Carbon sequestration in the soil, Interactions between companion plants in a permaculture guild, and Organic no till; and then build a demonstration farm to fork business model to advance these breakthroughs world wide. This way they can be used to mitigate Global Warming while benefiting rural communities and building food security for everyone. Read more about these projects below.
Red Baron Project
July 1, 2013
Building upon work done by the giants in organic agriculture that preceded me, I attempted to combine the pasture cropping work of Colin Seis, the living mulch research of Helen Atthowe and the No till mulch system of Ruth Stout.
Large scale organic no till
April 12, 2013
No one had managed to solve the problem of a scale-able no till mulching technique capable of being fully mechanized so as to be available to commercial growers.
The key breakthrough came when I realized I could borrow the hay unrolling machinery ranchers use to feed cows and simply add paper under the hay also being unrolled at the same time.
There is no need to use a herbicide or to plow up soil to hold the edges of plastic mulch down.
For the first time we could allow the full biodiversity of a healthy perennial grassland biome between the rows of a produce truck farm.
The soil comes alive
April 12, 2015
By 2015 I already was seeing massive changes in the soil. Careful research of other cropping systems led me to believe that it was possible to sequester between 5 and 20 tonnes CO2 equivalent per hectare per year. If this rate could hold up over a wide variety of methods and crops, then I had a legit plan to mitigate global warming at the same time as securing a sustainable food supply well into the future.
To provide the necessary evidence I am using crowdfunding at https://experiment.com/
