ACHIEVING GREATER FOOD INDEPENDENCE: THE ADVANCED GROWERS' FALL SEMINAR PRESENTER, HARVEY USSERYBy Mindy Harris, Public Relations Coordinator Harvey Ussery, a serious homesteader and author will be appearing as the guest presenter at the NOFA/Mass Advanced Growers' Fall Seminar, on November 4th and 5th in Barre, MA. In 1984, Harvey and his wife, Ellen, moved to a homestead they call "Boxwood" on 3 acres of land in Northern Virginia. Harvey was working for the US Postal Service at the time, and they both were looking for a change of lifestyle. So Harvey put in for a transfer, and off they went into the realm of homesteading adventure. After 27 years, Harvey now "gets to do full time what he once did on the weekends"; raising his own food and livestock to support his family, though he retired from his rural postal job over a decade ago. He doesn't sell products commercially, but by many indicators, Harvey's knowledge of animal husbandry, soil fertility, and holistic growing principles equals even the most sophisticated agriculturalists. To Harvey, what makes a homestead the most sustainable (and by extension, modern) is its ability to function as a closed circle; to support itself. At the core of Ussery's growing philosophy is a deep commitment to food independence. He wants folks, even organic growers, to get away from dependence on purchased inputs, machinery, and disruption of the soil. He believes that nature has models to help maximize fertility, production, soil health, insect management and growing delicious, healthy food that we can emulate. It's the grower's job to observe natural processes and try to emulate them closely, taking a broad view of the garden or farm as an integrated system, where each part supports the next. Harvey bemoans the general agricultural practice of targeting specific problems with narrow solutions (frequently involving inputs), rather than taking larger strategies of finding ways to improve the system as a whole. At the Advanced Growers' Fall Seminar, one of the topics Ussery will address will be livestock husbandry: how to incorporate animals on your homestead as a means of maximizing soil fertility and improving the ecology of the land and nutrition in food. He encourages poultry producers, for example, not to just "stick chickens in a corner as egg producers," away from the rest of a homestead or farm operation. Rather, he encourages farmers to think about integrating chickens in a rotational grazing system by which the chicken manure adds nitrogen to the soil. According to Ussery, chickens also benefit vegetable and fruit production if they are allowed to free range because they keep down harmful insect populations, which in turn decreases reliance upon pesticides or other methods of insect control. His book, The Small Scale Poultry Flock, published by Chelsea Green, is a thorough account of Ussery's almost 3 decades of work with multiple poultry varieties on his homestead. One of the poultry management techniques Harvey talks about in depth is a deep-litter chicken manure approach. Like Joel Salatin (who wrote the foreward to Harvey's book), Ussery believes that foul-smelling and disease harboring livestock waste is actually manure "mis-management." A deep layered, high-carbon poultry house litter, which is churned over by chicken scratching, is a recipe for fine compost. The recipe also makes entering the hen house a pleasant prospect for bipedal managers. The chickens also consume various organisms that grow in the compost, which in turn transfer nutrients like Vitamin B12 and K. This is "magic" Ussery proclaims with gusto. Harvey clearly delights in the natural processes which take place on an organic homestead, and is looking forward to be sharing his approach with us in November.
This page was last modified on October 19, 2011 at 8:17:14 AM.
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