Tuesday, September 3, 2013

1. My Pun Pun Farm Experience

Pun Pun ("Thousand Varieties") Farm 

http://www.punpunthailand.org


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I signed up for 6-month internship at an organic farm in Northern Thailand to learn about all things to do with a self-sustaining way of life. The farm was started by Jon Jandai (Jo), a farmer from Yasothorn Province in Northeast Thailand with his partner Peggy Reents, a native of Colorado,  USA, in 2003. 


Jo was interested in buying land to work on earthen building techniques and growing food to sustain life. The land they bought was in horrible condition. The farmers who sold the land to them first cut down all the trees on the land and tilled the soil to grow corn. The farming method used to produce cash crops in Thailand is the slash and burn method - this is a method where after harvesting the crops, farmers cut down the remaining plants and burn them, thus producing ash which is mixed with commercial chemical fertilizers and pesticides to start the next year's crop. Over time, however, the soil quality becomes so poor nothing grows anymore.  All the top soil washes away and the land is left barren. This was what they purchased: a desolate hilly field with nothing but clay and rocks.

Initially, Jo read books on how to get the soil into some shape to grow things. Following the textbooks, he planted bananas. They all perished. A professor from the local agriculture university suggested he grow beans, another textbook method to rejuvenate the soil. He bought 13 kilograms of beans and planted the entire plot with them. After several months, only five percent of the beans survived, yielding a palmful of beans after harvest. Not such a good return on investment. 

Then Jo looked around the land and noticed two types of weed that were starting to grow, one a grass-like weed the local Thai farmers called "communist grass"- a throwback to the days in Thailand when the communist party spread uncontrollably. 

Communist Grass
The other a weed is one that when you touch the leaves, it curls up. 

Open

Closed

Thai farmers hate both these weeds because once they take, it is hard to get rid of them

Jo thought that if this sort of weed grows here naturally, it can't be a bad thing. So, he planted these two weeds on purpose. They only grew to a very short height, the soil was so bad the roots could not penetrate the clay and rock. After about 15 days, he cut the weeds to half height, maybe only the length of a finger, and just left the cuttings on the ground. In 15 more days, he cut them again, and noticed the weeds started to sprout quicker and grew taller. The cuttings acted as a mulch, protecting water evaporation and giving back nutrients to the very poor quality soil. He cut the weeds every 15 days for three months, and by the end of that period he planted bananas again. This time they took. In only three month of planting weeds, he was able to get the soil into a condition to start growing food. 

Jo then had a vision: to rekindle an interest in traditional Thai plants and methods on how to grow, harvest, and prepare meals with them - a lost art in today's commercial farming practice. Thai farmers, only 50 years ago,  had a wealth of knowledge on agricultural diversity handed down to them over centuries, but today's farmers have lost that knowledge (art!) because of commercial and economic pressures.  He set out to rekindle the knowledge of his heritage and experiment with a wide variety of traditional Thai plants to learn their secrets and gain knowledge to show Thai farmers the lost art of agricultural production.

Today, ten years later, the land supports a cornucopia of trees, fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers in a lush tropical setting. The entire community at Pun Pun, comprised mostly of Thais who come to learn about Jo's methods, lives entirely off the food produced on this once barren hillside. 




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The journey I am on is to learn as much as I can about how to grow food in a natural way to sustain life and not be dependent on commercial food sources, for who really knows what goes into producing them. 

My interest started, I suppose, in the late 70s when I became aware of the foods we eat. A good friend of mine had an operation on his spine which wouldn't heal, and he was at his wit's end on how to get well. He had to walk around with a small bowl, or sitz bath, and every few hours had to sit and soak the wound on his behind. It was pretty miserable.  In a desperate attempt to heal himself, he heard of a naturopath who prescribed a diet according to blood type. To support my friend, I went with him to this naturopath and it turned out I was the same blood type as him, A positive, which meant we should not eat meat. It came as a relief to me because I really never liked the taste of meat. I ate it because that's what was served at home and force of habit. Besides, what else was there to eat?!  I was aware I always felt heavy after eating meat, had lots of mucus buildup, and had a propensity to be overweight, even though I was athletic in those days, I still didn't feel so good. 

After three months on the diet, I dropped about 6 kilograms and felt full of energy. It was an amazing feeling free from eating all that meat. Over a period of a year, the stuff that came out of my body was... well, I don't need to get gross about it.  I started to feel really good and more conscious about food and nutrition. I tried all sorts of experiments on myself. I calculated exactly how much food I needed to eat to walk to university, do my classes and study, then walk home again for dinner. If I walked another 100 meters, I would collapse! So, I really had a good idea of what I needed to sustain life. My thinking was that why not try to see what this body is made from and how it works, since we only have this body for a short time. Why not try to get to know it more? This was my mission. 

I tried several types of diets over the years: macrobiotics, vegan, fructarian, mono-diets. I combined eating with cleansing fasts and colonics. I fasted one time for 21 days, just drinking water. I learned a lot about the body and its needs, but such a singular focus on my body became a bit too obsessive. So, instead of looking inward I thought I would travel and see the world. I went to Paris, France  with $100 in my pocket and I ended up living there for two years, where I worked making tofu at a Japanese macrobiotic restaurant. If you were in Paris between 1983 and 1985 and ate tofu, you were eating my tofu. I made it for the entire city of Paris. 

My interests in traveling started from living in Paris. Since then I've been bit by the travel bug to such an extent that I changed my entire career to travel: I was a filmmaker/photographer/ artist before the travel bug hit. I was in Mexico in 1988 on holiday at the beach thinking, "How can I travel the world and make money doing it?" - and then I had a flash: teach English! So I went back to school to get my teaching papers. Since then I've lived and worked in many places: Japan, Hong Kong, the United States, Thailand, and most recently Qatar. At every holiday break, I traveled around the world. I change jobs and locations very frequently, but one thing has remained: a concern for eating healthy food. 

In the late 90s, I visited a friend in Costa Rica who started a farm based on Permaculture. Permaculture had its start in 1971 by Bill Mollison, an Australian who coined the term, a combination of permanent + agriculture, with the theory that once you observe the land as it is, and give some design to it, the land will become self-sustainable with little need for human intervention. The objective in permaculture is to create food forests that will endure. 

My friend in Costa Rica had no real knowledge of how to grow anything; he had a theoretical knowledge from reading a permaculture book, and although the land was lush, I noticed he still depended on the local farmers for his day to day food. His farm was not really all that successful, but the idea of permaculture stuck in my mind.

In 2006, I did a web search and found a Permaculture Design Course offered in Thailand. I love Thailand, and this course on learning how to grow organic food in a sustainable way was exactly what I was looking for.  I obtained the 70-hour Permaculture Design Certificate and was ready to apply the knowledge in some way. But where? And how? I also needed to make money again, so I returned to teaching and writing materials for English as a Second Language. I put my interests in sustainable agriculture aside. 

Some tragic events occurred in my life in 2006. I broke both my arms in a bicycle accident and had to give up my job writing the TOEFL test at Educational Testing Services in Princeton, New Jersey. What to do? Where to go?

It was a hidden blessing, for my mother in Ottawa, Canada, developed lung cancer around the same time I broke my arms,  so I had the good fortune to return to her house, recuperate, and take care of her. I did that for three years until she passed away. A week later, I was on an airplane and landed in Doha, Qatar, where I worked for three and a half years in the desert. 

That experience was one of the worst in my life. They say that when you work in the Middle East, you are given two buckets: one for the crap you have to put up with, the other for the crazy money you get. When one of the buckets fills up first, then it is time to leave. Since in this day and age you can never have enough money, I left after I could bear no more of the crap in December, 2012.

Since then I was looking for a place to live and grow. I tried Cambodia, Malaysia, and Bali, but I kept coming back to Thailand. Thailand has always been a special place for me since I first visited in 1990. I have vacationed in Thailand almost every year since then, even lived and worked in Thailand for two years. I know its highs and its lows. I've had my money stolen, I've been injured, duped, swindled, cheated, scorned, and  suffered heartbreak,  but  I also discovered  Buddhism and the heart and mind of the teachings in Thailand. I've spent time living amongst Thai monks in forest monasteries, even considering renouncing the world and becoming a monk. So I feel something for Thailand and the people. 

In winter, 2013,  I was in a crisis about what to do, so I decided to rekindle my interests in health and nutrition. I checked in to do a cleansing fast at the Spa Resort near Chiang Mai, , and an opportunity arose: I bought a freestanding townhouse on the property and decided this is where I would make my home. 

But what about sustainable agriculture? What should I do about my interests in that? 

I remembered there was an experimental/experiential sustainable farming project right next door to where I did the permaculture certificate. I went on the web and found Pun Pun. I read they were offering a 6-month internship to learn about everything to do with sustainable agriculture. 

And so, this is where I am.

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Over the course of next six months, I will be posting my observations at Pun Pun Farm: what I learn, the people I meet, the methods and techniques taught, and how life is unfolding in the rural north of Thailand as a simple farmer who knows how to make the land a garden of Eden.





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