THE FARM HEAD'S ZERO IMPACT FARMING EXPLORATION
WRITER: Pang, Yiu Kai (彭耀階) HONG KONG
Jan, 2020.
At first The writer’s
plan was to develop an ecovillage only, but he thought that he should develop
the necessary skills first, especially farming, so he started doing some organic
farming and bee keeping in 2003 inside a certain valleys in the Lotus Mountain
Range in South Guangdong province of China. In 2006 he realized after 3 years of
practice that even organic farming and bee keeping do exert some harm to the
local and global ecological environment as stated in his
The Urgent Need To Look
For Ultimate Farming Solution article. He also realized that bee keeping’s
ecological impact can be far easier to overcome, so the writer set out to
develop zero impact bee keeping in 2006. At first the practice was stationary
local bee swarms in very biodiverse vegetation cover Lotus Mountain Valleys. It
worked and became a success. The honey could be sold to Hong Kong’s brandname
stores even though the bee farm location was stated very clearly on the honey
bottle’s label that it is inside China. But the problem with this kind of
practice is that such biodiverse montane forests are getting rarer and rarer,
such method is difficult to be employed by bee farmers widely in future. So
since 2013 he changed the operation to mobile local bee swarms stationing one to
three months in nector abundant mountain valleys or abandoned nector flowing
orchards. Such method can be used widely, since most wild places have nector
abundant seasons, not only so, it can even have better honey harvest than the
stationary ones, since the bee
keeper can have honey harvest all year round by moving to other far away nector
flowing valleys and can thus skip the low to no harvest seasons of stationary
swarms.
So happen the valley
above the writer’s stationary bee farm has quite some wild banana thickets
growing naturally along the stream bank mudflats. The writer takes this as a
very enlightening discovery. It tells us that most stream bank mudflats do not
have banana thickets only because such mini habitats have been isolated by human
establishments, farmlands, villages and towns etc. which prevent bananas from
spreading to those small and isolated natural locations suitable for it’s
growth. Therefore if we can have suitable knowledge and take enough care, we
should be able to implant banana thickets onto the mudflat without impacting it,
since doing so in a suitable manner, such as implanting one seedling every
10 meters away
right beside the waterfront to leave room for other species to move in, is
nothing more than species restoration for the mudflat community, while the exact
subspecies may be taken as within the range allowed by chance. In 2015 the
writer could find two parallel lower course streams saperated by a 20 to
50 meter wide
mudflat on Lantau Island of Hong Kong, and the two far left and right sides of
the two streams also had mudflats. Altogether there were three belt shape stream
bank mudflats seperated by two parallel running streams. The mudflats were used
as farmland which had been abandoned for some years with some sparsely growing
shrubs and 3 year or older pioneer trees, an ideal place for zero impact banana
implanting. In 2015 the land belonged to Yi O Village and had been leased out to
the Yi O farm. So the writer discussed with Yi O farm to use the mudflats as a
Zero Impact Farming Experimental Zone. The farm’s managing director, Alan Wong,
found the idea worth trying and agreed at once after seeking approval from the
Yi O Village head and the experimental zone started to run in late 2015. So the
experimental zone is a joint venture held by the writer’s voluntary Zero Impact Forest Farm (Formerly
Lotus Valley Ecoop Farm)
and Yi O Farm. Yi O farm provides the stream bank mudflat land located at the
north of their padi field and
Zero Impact Forest Farm provides the
idea and technical know how. The experiment has been developing smoothly even
though in 2018 the category 5 super typhoon Mangkhut’s eye passed by Yi O only a
few tens of Km away, which blew down one third of all banana trees. Even so, the
loss was not too serious. As the super typhoon hit Hong Kong in September,
already late season for banana harvest, the blown down trees could also quickly
re-grow a new seedling from their trunk base and next year could bear banana
again.
Some other questions
that come with such planting arise:
Where comes the nutrient? If we fertilize the soil, we change the soil texture
after some time, this is an impact. But if we don’t, after a few years each
thicket will have far less banana bearing trees and each tree will bear far less
bananas. However, such worry is unnecessary. The stream water is mineral rich,
it infiltrates the mudflat soil and replenishes it with minerals. Interactions
among living creatures in the mudflat community above and inside the mudflat
supply the mud with suitable organic matter. The natural process in the local
ecosystem allows a certain nutrients to go to the fruit and then be taken away,
so long as such nutrient give away don’t exceed it’s upper limit set by the
water flow and the interaction among living creatures inside the mudflat
community. Nature will regulate all these, the size of the banana thickets, how
far they can grow away from the water front, what percent of trees in each
thicket can bear bananas, and how many bunches can be hanged on one banana
bearing tree, etc., are regulating factors, provided humans exert no impact to
the community except cutting down the fruit bearing tree and taking the bananas
away. The fallen tree will be attacked by bacteria and fungi, decomposed into simple organic
matter, and return as nutrient into the soil. Very soon young seedling will come
out from the remaining trunk base, and will grow into an adult tree in less than
a year’s time.
Farmers usually hold
such concept that the surrounding weed compete for nutrient, so they must be
cleared. But this banana restoration is different. Banana roots grow at a level
lower than those of the weed and thrub, their nutrients come much more from
underground animal activities and water infiltration from water front, not so
much is from top soil. So the weed not only dosen’t compete for nutrient with
banana trees, it’s fallen leaves and stems even add more organic matter and nutrient into the soil,
making the banana root level soil even more
fertile than without weed.
To ensure the banana
implanting exerts no impact to the mudflat community, a general survey of
vegetation cover is done yearly for the experimental zone, until now nothing
unusual has been found, the succession process is heading towards secondary wild
young tree forest stage with turn-in-the-wind tree as the dominant species,
Chinese wax tree the next.