51
Georgi Afanasyev: A farmer bit me.
The British diplomat Earl Amherst (1773-1857) said that “there are three easy ways to go broke: the quickest is horse racing, the most pleasant is women, and the most reliable is agriculture.” Nevertheless, farming is quite an attractive niche, including for “third-party” people. About how to become farmers, and what ideas new farmers are trying to implement, we found out on a specific example – in an interview with the owner of the farm “Forest Gardens”, the head of the Expert club of industry and energy Georgy Afanasyev.
How did you come to become a farmer?
I can joke that I was bitten once by a farmer. But the process of becoming a farmer did not happen immediately: the “bite virus” penetrated gradually. For seven years now, I have been blogging Megapolis and Village. In it, in the form of a set of posts, all the metamorphoses of my public, meaningful immersion in the topic of agriculture are reflected. But since I am a rather cautious person and I prepare for any business in advance, the blog was initially closed and existed only on my computer. For a year, I wrote blogger notes “on the table”, and only then went to the public network.
At some point, I realized that as I continued to live a normal life, doing consulting and entrepreneurship, I began to make slightly different decisions. In the end, this led to me having a 124-hectare land, and I had a mooing-screaming farm, staff, machinery. The gap between a rather philosophical urban dweller and a farmer who is optimistic about moving to his land has disappeared.
The ultimate challenge for me is to take the territory in a rather neglected state and bring it to the desired appearance. The image of what a territory should look like when it is completed is very important to me and is related to the concept of creative territory that I introduced. The term “creative territory” is commonly confused with the term “creative city” as defined by Charles Landry. In introducing his performance, Landry focused on the exact opposite of what I was focusing on. When the concept of “creative city” was introduced, the emphasis was placed on the creative class, on creative professions, on their diversity, on a free way of life and thought. I, working on the concept of “creative territory”, based on the idea that the territory is possible not only processes of resource use, but also resource generation, which we often do not pay attention to. This is how most activities work: resources are taken from outside the activity, products are fixed, waste is thrown somewhere outside. Creative territory is a territory that gathers within itself the processes that generate resources, and not only use them and transform them. By the way, the cities that surround us today and urban technologies are machines for the destruction of resources.
I look at territorial complexes in terms of how much of the processes that generate resources, water, energy, food, even man, can be placed in parallel. There is a statistically validated view that cities are designed in such a way that their fertility declines. Outside the city it is high, and in the cities it is low. The conclusion is as follows: this is a specially created space in which fertility decreases. Maybe they didn’t want to get this effect initially, but it appeared and was fixed. In my view, such a territory cannot claim the status of creative, even if there is a creative class, because the basic reproduction here is disturbed. An example from biology: many animals do not reproduce in cells, some do not reproduce in narrow cells, fish in small aquariums.
- What were you based on when you set up a farm?
My view of creative territories is to highlight processes that increase in value, develop the ability to place them in this territory and the ability to transfer resources from one such process to another.
Most economists work with discounting and in 99% of cases it is negative discounting. They say, "Yes, we have some value, but it will decline over time." It has nothing to do with creative territory. The object placed in it will grow in value every year as good wine, cheese or wood. I was faced with the fact that the ability to see the processes of increasing value and to collect them territorially together, uniting, was not mastered by our generation. Evaluation of performance today is based on the analysis of a short period of time: if at the beginning of the journey you spent money, and at the end you received more than spent - everything is fine, a positive economic effect has been formed. It turns out to be such an absolutely pretentious economic view. The assessment will be positive, even if during this period you have snatched everything that was in the territory, all its basic resources, which can not even be reimbursed from your profits.
“Only on cultivated soil do other arts flourish. Farmers are therefore the founders of civilization.” Daniel Webster, American politician.
When designing creative territories, I move from the interests of the territory. I plan from the point of view of increasing its fertility as a basic value of this territory. The initial price per hectare is known. As soon as I did something right, the price went up. Not every action on the territory increases its value. Some build a house on their territory, but in the end can not sell it taking into account the invested value. Because in such a set and in such an architecture, nobody needs it.
In each area, its bioproductivity can be calculated. For example, on a conventional hectare of land you can grow 10 centners of biomass. We take some action, we change the design of the biocenosis, and the territory starts to create 50 centners. We do the same with other resources, such as water. Most areas are water-deficient, they take it either from non-renewable artesian wells or from water intakes of large rivers. By a certain design of the water system, it is possible to transfer territories that are scarce for water resources into surplus ones.
For almost 5 years, we have been looking for a territory that combines several factors. It was very important for me to have an asphalt entrance - I am a city resident, I drive a city car. For 200 meters along the territory there is a road, and in depth the territory of my land goes several kilometers into the forest. The forest closes from the north, skirting large fields. This is an important point because the edge of the forest is always richer than the depth of the forest, and it is a well-lit place. The whole territory is made up of irregularities: descents and ascents. Due to this, there are streams here, water does not collect, as, for example, in the lowland. This is the source.
- What processes have already been launched on the territory?
We use the concept of controlled agrobiocenosis and supplement it with the prefix “antropo-”. An obligatory element of the processes of agriculture, the creation of a creative territory is the person himself, “a person within a specific territory.” The lands that we are transforming were previously deserted, they were cultivated by state farm workers. My contention is that the farmland support program cannot be successful because it prohibits the peasant from living on his land. Today it is illegal to live on agricultural land. And in my view, a person, only living on his land, begins to truly care for it. For example, if my children run on the ground, they become hostages of the situation, and I am guaranteed not to use pesticides on this land. Just because they can hurt the kids, my dog, myself. You need to live in the center of your territory, walk around it, creating “circles of attention”, because if you do not see something personally, it is not subject to your management and correction.
Previously, these were territories used monoculturally. We are restoring grazing agriculture in an area that has been used only for cereals for many years. The fertility of the territory depends on whether animals walk on it. What we inherited - chernozems, serozems - was created by animals roaming the steppes, who, eating grass, left improved traces of this grass. Animals are machines for creating humus. Considering the options, we abandoned stall cattle breeding in favor of grazing. We have calculated how many animals can feed on our land and improve it accordingly. For example, one cow per 1.5 hectares; although the area required by one cow can graze 6 sheep. In Egypt, in Seqem, there is an eco-village organized according to Steiner’s principles. They keep cows to produce manure. They hardly drink milk, and their manure is used to expand the area of Szekem. Buying adjacent areas of the desert, the first thing they do is lay it with manure. Then they plant grasses, then shrubs, then large trees, and then everything grows in the shade of trees. But it starts with the cow, because it turns out to be the machine that converts cellulose into fertilizer. No machine created by human hands can do that.
Health is a key function of the territory. If you move correctly, along a properly organized trajectory, you accumulate health as a type of resource.
We design the necessary territories unions of organisms. We rely on the idea of unions of living organisms, communities, mutually supportive mechanisms, allelopathy. Plant unions help each other, so you need to create them on the territory. You don't have to grow one thing.
Instead of the “normal” fields that we remember — flat to the horizon, without any separation, we are now forming what is described as agroforestry. Agroforestry is a combination of agricultural and forestry technologies. Along the fields, we plant energy willow (in strips 4 meters wide), which performs dozens of biocenous functions. We have very strong winds in the west-east direction, these strips protect against the wind and make agriculture possible in this area: if there were no barriers, the plants would dry out. In this landing nesting birds: singing, migratory. Birds eat insects, and we don't need to use pesticides. Moulded willow yields a huge amount of renewable biomaterial. Europeans mow it every 7 years, replace the plantation, and in general, it can renew itself up to 21 years. The best hybrids in energy werehing they give 115 tons per hectare of raw weight, 35 tons of dry weight. On such a fantastic volume, a chip boiler can work for a year, heating several buildings. I saw this example in Austria. Three independent buildings, far apart from each other, are powered by a single boiler running on chips, a renewable resource, they have no gas. We also allocated a part of the territory for this case. The country can and should produce energy. Europeans now allocate 5% of the territory for power plantations, they want to bring the norm to 7%. They calculated that this was enough to meet the energy needs of the economy.
As a rule, energy willow is harvested by mowing and grinding. Usually two cars work in a pair. One cuts and grinds branches, and the second substitutes the body to collect chips. The harvest is harvested every few years, giving the plant to grow up to 4-6 meters. In the photo: the assembly of an energy beam in the United States.
- How deep is the ecological chain going from very large organisms to very small ones?
Planting a plant is not enough, you also need to have symbiotic microorganisms that will enter the root, create a seal and will fix nitrogen in the air. Instead of tens of tons of fertilizer for the entire area, you can use special bacterial fertilizers. They treat seeds. We mainly use root fertilizers, for example, in India there are free-living nitrogen-fixing fertilizers that can exist for several years in the soil outside of the plant, performing nitrogen fixation.
I am interested in the lower bound of the study of the phenomenon of life itself. We all know the process of photosynthesis, where life is created by green leaf. But about the effect of chemosynthesis, which was discovered by the Russian scientist-microbiologist Vinogradsky, say little, and many even forget about it. This phenomenon is a mirror image of what is done in photosynthesis in a green leaf. This is the use of complex chemical bonds by microorganisms, when the breakdown of chemical bonds takes energy without any sunlight and creates a protein - in fact, the body of the microorganism itself. This is one of the alternative versions of hydrocarbon formation. Yes, some sulfate bonds are destroyed, and this energy is enough to create life without any light. So, by the way, there are a lot of conclusions. For example, this type of life can create fertilizers right in the soil, by splitting sublayer rocks. That is, if you did not kill these microorganisms in various ways or were able to bring them, then a significant amount of fertilizers, the necessary trace elements, can be created directly in the soil due to cleavage. There's a whole lot of research showing how plants help do this. Plants are proactive in their behavior. It is known that plants send to the roots and throw into the root space carbohydrates produced in photosynthesis, carbohydrates multiply a certain type of microorganisms necessary for plants. That is, before pulling something in, the plant first gives. Plants in the root layer always have a large number of symbionts, and that's what fertility looks like. When we talk about the growth of biomass, only the part obtained as a result of photosynthesis is considered, and chemosynthesis is forgotten.
One of the most famous symbioses that can be successfully used in farming is the symbiotic association of the mycelium of fungi with the roots of higher plants, or simply “mycorrhiza”. The fungus receives carbohydrates, amino acids and phytohormones from the tree, and itself makes water and minerals available for absorption and absorption by the plant, primarily phosphorus compounds. In addition, the fungus provides the tree with a larger suction surface, which is especially important when it grows on poor soil. The phenomenon of mycorrhiza was first described in 1879-1881 by the Russian botanist Franz Kamensky.
- Tell me about the project you started on the farm.
We took up the farm involuntarily. The starting point of the project was the desire to grow a full range of products for your family. We set a rule for ourselves that we produce 50 kinds of basic products. With this volume, there are consumers for all waste: for plant residues that can be fed to animals, for manure, which goes like a beautiful fertilizer, there is a complete closure of the chain. Let me give you an example that will clarify everything. In our family, the number of people corresponds to the number of chickens that are set aside on the farm for our family. A chicken lays one egg a day – a person eats about one egg a day. A person produces 120 grams of kitchen food waste per day (skins, pruning) – the chicken eats them. They are perfect creatures for each other. As many as there are billions of people in the world, the same number of chickens are constantly maintained.
In order to cultivate the land, to support animals and bees, we needed additional consumers of our products. So the idea was to share the costs with other citizens. And we came up with this deal: we grow quality food for our family, but we grow it with the expectation that 1,000 more people will get it. This approach will allow our family to get it all. Then the question arose: how to arrange relations with citizens? Economic relations around food, formed through wholesale and retail networks, could not help here. Therefore, we entered into a direct relationship – contract production, namely, pre-order with payment. Legally, the scheme is as follows: as a service center, I serve the order of a citizen to produce food for him, for his money, on my territory, using my resources. The first conclusion of this scheme: I have no right to produce what I have not ordered. Usually produce something that can grow better here, which will give the maximum volume, and this should not be. The second takeaway from this scheme is that I don't need to produce much. We've set the bar of 1,000 people -- that's how many people we're calculating can feed from this land without violating the principles of its use.
Products are formed into baskets that are delivered weekly. A weekly basket looks something like this: 10 kilograms of products, including meat, eggs, dairy products, a balanced set of vegetables, fruits, greens. The type of meat alternates: poultry, quail, lamb, beef. We have meat all year round - there is no problem with this today. As for vegetables, many of them are stored for a long time, and are stored without any bells and whistles, according to old technologies - in burts. In the ground, a long trench with a depth of 1-1.5 meters is pulled out to protect against frost; vegetables are folded neatly into it without breaking. It's all closing from above. In winter and spring we have fresh vegetables. There are, of course, new technologies – special storage facilities with air conditioning or even gas-altered composition, where there is more nitrogen and carbon dioxide.
All this is put together in a common concept – food forest. I like the idea of organizing communities in forest-like areas, which are productive but without much human intervention. This community is initially artificial, but then naturalized to such a state in which it is able to live independently for a long time: the principles of alternation and mutual assistance inherent in it work without human participation. And the name of our farm - "Forest Gardens" - just reflects the idea of food forest.
- From a business perspective, how profitable is it?
Our project is easy to count. The cost of an annual subscription of 59 thousand rubles, we have a thousand customers is a turnover of 59 million. From the point of view of the old economic assessment in the first two years, this business is unprofitable, that is, much is financed out of pocket. In fact, we do not pay the marketing agency, but immediately pay the consumer for his trust in our project. Citizens who joined the Forest Gardens cooperative get cheaper food of a quality that cannot be bought at all in stores. As if to buy their loyalty, transferring a valuable product cheaper than it costs.
When the infrastructure of the farm is fully formed, it should be possible to allocate 30% of the budget for development: to collect the best genes on its territory. If we talk about the role of man in nature, it is, in my opinion, quite simple. There's not much a man can do. But a person can collect the best genes of animals, insects, microorganisms, trees, herbs. It depends on the farmer whether there will be something mediocre or better in his genetic representation. It's like the difference between a sour apple and antonovka. A tree can occupy the same place, but it will provide different resources.
- Is the activity you are doing scalable, replicable?
The way it is now invented is not scalable, but replicable. If the number of subscribers exceeds the allowable norm, then another similar territory will be required. And I can act as a technology holder, a consultant, in transferring, transferring this technology, in training.
I'll explain with a simple example: a person eats a kilogram of food a day, and it doesn't scale. You can make him eat one and a half, two, but it won't last long. In this sense, the food business is doomed to be redistributed. Today, there is a redistribution with the shift of the consumer from industrially produced nutrient masses to organically created food.
- What do you think is the future of the food market?
My premonition is that the bright future lies in the closest possible production of food to the place of permanent residence. Food production in the city is urban farming. Urban farming in new, green cities, where there is no question that you can't eat berries grown by the road or in the yard. It's kind of an anti-trend to what I'm doing right now. But I want to build a system so that we can support this future cycle of the food industry, because we need the transfer of knowledge, the transfer of elite material, the transfer of a complex of technologies.
P.S. And remember, just by changing our consumption – together we change the world!
Source: erazvitie.org/article/mnja_ukusil_fermer
How did you come to become a farmer?
I can joke that I was bitten once by a farmer. But the process of becoming a farmer did not happen immediately: the “bite virus” penetrated gradually. For seven years now, I have been blogging Megapolis and Village. In it, in the form of a set of posts, all the metamorphoses of my public, meaningful immersion in the topic of agriculture are reflected. But since I am a rather cautious person and I prepare for any business in advance, the blog was initially closed and existed only on my computer. For a year, I wrote blogger notes “on the table”, and only then went to the public network.
At some point, I realized that as I continued to live a normal life, doing consulting and entrepreneurship, I began to make slightly different decisions. In the end, this led to me having a 124-hectare land, and I had a mooing-screaming farm, staff, machinery. The gap between a rather philosophical urban dweller and a farmer who is optimistic about moving to his land has disappeared.
The ultimate challenge for me is to take the territory in a rather neglected state and bring it to the desired appearance. The image of what a territory should look like when it is completed is very important to me and is related to the concept of creative territory that I introduced. The term “creative territory” is commonly confused with the term “creative city” as defined by Charles Landry. In introducing his performance, Landry focused on the exact opposite of what I was focusing on. When the concept of “creative city” was introduced, the emphasis was placed on the creative class, on creative professions, on their diversity, on a free way of life and thought. I, working on the concept of “creative territory”, based on the idea that the territory is possible not only processes of resource use, but also resource generation, which we often do not pay attention to. This is how most activities work: resources are taken from outside the activity, products are fixed, waste is thrown somewhere outside. Creative territory is a territory that gathers within itself the processes that generate resources, and not only use them and transform them. By the way, the cities that surround us today and urban technologies are machines for the destruction of resources.
I look at territorial complexes in terms of how much of the processes that generate resources, water, energy, food, even man, can be placed in parallel. There is a statistically validated view that cities are designed in such a way that their fertility declines. Outside the city it is high, and in the cities it is low. The conclusion is as follows: this is a specially created space in which fertility decreases. Maybe they didn’t want to get this effect initially, but it appeared and was fixed. In my view, such a territory cannot claim the status of creative, even if there is a creative class, because the basic reproduction here is disturbed. An example from biology: many animals do not reproduce in cells, some do not reproduce in narrow cells, fish in small aquariums.
- What were you based on when you set up a farm?
My view of creative territories is to highlight processes that increase in value, develop the ability to place them in this territory and the ability to transfer resources from one such process to another.
Most economists work with discounting and in 99% of cases it is negative discounting. They say, "Yes, we have some value, but it will decline over time." It has nothing to do with creative territory. The object placed in it will grow in value every year as good wine, cheese or wood. I was faced with the fact that the ability to see the processes of increasing value and to collect them territorially together, uniting, was not mastered by our generation. Evaluation of performance today is based on the analysis of a short period of time: if at the beginning of the journey you spent money, and at the end you received more than spent - everything is fine, a positive economic effect has been formed. It turns out to be such an absolutely pretentious economic view. The assessment will be positive, even if during this period you have snatched everything that was in the territory, all its basic resources, which can not even be reimbursed from your profits.
“Only on cultivated soil do other arts flourish. Farmers are therefore the founders of civilization.” Daniel Webster, American politician.
When designing creative territories, I move from the interests of the territory. I plan from the point of view of increasing its fertility as a basic value of this territory. The initial price per hectare is known. As soon as I did something right, the price went up. Not every action on the territory increases its value. Some build a house on their territory, but in the end can not sell it taking into account the invested value. Because in such a set and in such an architecture, nobody needs it.
In each area, its bioproductivity can be calculated. For example, on a conventional hectare of land you can grow 10 centners of biomass. We take some action, we change the design of the biocenosis, and the territory starts to create 50 centners. We do the same with other resources, such as water. Most areas are water-deficient, they take it either from non-renewable artesian wells or from water intakes of large rivers. By a certain design of the water system, it is possible to transfer territories that are scarce for water resources into surplus ones.
For almost 5 years, we have been looking for a territory that combines several factors. It was very important for me to have an asphalt entrance - I am a city resident, I drive a city car. For 200 meters along the territory there is a road, and in depth the territory of my land goes several kilometers into the forest. The forest closes from the north, skirting large fields. This is an important point because the edge of the forest is always richer than the depth of the forest, and it is a well-lit place. The whole territory is made up of irregularities: descents and ascents. Due to this, there are streams here, water does not collect, as, for example, in the lowland. This is the source.
- What processes have already been launched on the territory?
We use the concept of controlled agrobiocenosis and supplement it with the prefix “antropo-”. An obligatory element of the processes of agriculture, the creation of a creative territory is the person himself, “a person within a specific territory.” The lands that we are transforming were previously deserted, they were cultivated by state farm workers. My contention is that the farmland support program cannot be successful because it prohibits the peasant from living on his land. Today it is illegal to live on agricultural land. And in my view, a person, only living on his land, begins to truly care for it. For example, if my children run on the ground, they become hostages of the situation, and I am guaranteed not to use pesticides on this land. Just because they can hurt the kids, my dog, myself. You need to live in the center of your territory, walk around it, creating “circles of attention”, because if you do not see something personally, it is not subject to your management and correction.
Previously, these were territories used monoculturally. We are restoring grazing agriculture in an area that has been used only for cereals for many years. The fertility of the territory depends on whether animals walk on it. What we inherited - chernozems, serozems - was created by animals roaming the steppes, who, eating grass, left improved traces of this grass. Animals are machines for creating humus. Considering the options, we abandoned stall cattle breeding in favor of grazing. We have calculated how many animals can feed on our land and improve it accordingly. For example, one cow per 1.5 hectares; although the area required by one cow can graze 6 sheep. In Egypt, in Seqem, there is an eco-village organized according to Steiner’s principles. They keep cows to produce manure. They hardly drink milk, and their manure is used to expand the area of Szekem. Buying adjacent areas of the desert, the first thing they do is lay it with manure. Then they plant grasses, then shrubs, then large trees, and then everything grows in the shade of trees. But it starts with the cow, because it turns out to be the machine that converts cellulose into fertilizer. No machine created by human hands can do that.
Health is a key function of the territory. If you move correctly, along a properly organized trajectory, you accumulate health as a type of resource.
We design the necessary territories unions of organisms. We rely on the idea of unions of living organisms, communities, mutually supportive mechanisms, allelopathy. Plant unions help each other, so you need to create them on the territory. You don't have to grow one thing.
Instead of the “normal” fields that we remember — flat to the horizon, without any separation, we are now forming what is described as agroforestry. Agroforestry is a combination of agricultural and forestry technologies. Along the fields, we plant energy willow (in strips 4 meters wide), which performs dozens of biocenous functions. We have very strong winds in the west-east direction, these strips protect against the wind and make agriculture possible in this area: if there were no barriers, the plants would dry out. In this landing nesting birds: singing, migratory. Birds eat insects, and we don't need to use pesticides. Moulded willow yields a huge amount of renewable biomaterial. Europeans mow it every 7 years, replace the plantation, and in general, it can renew itself up to 21 years. The best hybrids in energy werehing they give 115 tons per hectare of raw weight, 35 tons of dry weight. On such a fantastic volume, a chip boiler can work for a year, heating several buildings. I saw this example in Austria. Three independent buildings, far apart from each other, are powered by a single boiler running on chips, a renewable resource, they have no gas. We also allocated a part of the territory for this case. The country can and should produce energy. Europeans now allocate 5% of the territory for power plantations, they want to bring the norm to 7%. They calculated that this was enough to meet the energy needs of the economy.
As a rule, energy willow is harvested by mowing and grinding. Usually two cars work in a pair. One cuts and grinds branches, and the second substitutes the body to collect chips. The harvest is harvested every few years, giving the plant to grow up to 4-6 meters. In the photo: the assembly of an energy beam in the United States.
- How deep is the ecological chain going from very large organisms to very small ones?
Planting a plant is not enough, you also need to have symbiotic microorganisms that will enter the root, create a seal and will fix nitrogen in the air. Instead of tens of tons of fertilizer for the entire area, you can use special bacterial fertilizers. They treat seeds. We mainly use root fertilizers, for example, in India there are free-living nitrogen-fixing fertilizers that can exist for several years in the soil outside of the plant, performing nitrogen fixation.
I am interested in the lower bound of the study of the phenomenon of life itself. We all know the process of photosynthesis, where life is created by green leaf. But about the effect of chemosynthesis, which was discovered by the Russian scientist-microbiologist Vinogradsky, say little, and many even forget about it. This phenomenon is a mirror image of what is done in photosynthesis in a green leaf. This is the use of complex chemical bonds by microorganisms, when the breakdown of chemical bonds takes energy without any sunlight and creates a protein - in fact, the body of the microorganism itself. This is one of the alternative versions of hydrocarbon formation. Yes, some sulfate bonds are destroyed, and this energy is enough to create life without any light. So, by the way, there are a lot of conclusions. For example, this type of life can create fertilizers right in the soil, by splitting sublayer rocks. That is, if you did not kill these microorganisms in various ways or were able to bring them, then a significant amount of fertilizers, the necessary trace elements, can be created directly in the soil due to cleavage. There's a whole lot of research showing how plants help do this. Plants are proactive in their behavior. It is known that plants send to the roots and throw into the root space carbohydrates produced in photosynthesis, carbohydrates multiply a certain type of microorganisms necessary for plants. That is, before pulling something in, the plant first gives. Plants in the root layer always have a large number of symbionts, and that's what fertility looks like. When we talk about the growth of biomass, only the part obtained as a result of photosynthesis is considered, and chemosynthesis is forgotten.
One of the most famous symbioses that can be successfully used in farming is the symbiotic association of the mycelium of fungi with the roots of higher plants, or simply “mycorrhiza”. The fungus receives carbohydrates, amino acids and phytohormones from the tree, and itself makes water and minerals available for absorption and absorption by the plant, primarily phosphorus compounds. In addition, the fungus provides the tree with a larger suction surface, which is especially important when it grows on poor soil. The phenomenon of mycorrhiza was first described in 1879-1881 by the Russian botanist Franz Kamensky.
- Tell me about the project you started on the farm.
We took up the farm involuntarily. The starting point of the project was the desire to grow a full range of products for your family. We set a rule for ourselves that we produce 50 kinds of basic products. With this volume, there are consumers for all waste: for plant residues that can be fed to animals, for manure, which goes like a beautiful fertilizer, there is a complete closure of the chain. Let me give you an example that will clarify everything. In our family, the number of people corresponds to the number of chickens that are set aside on the farm for our family. A chicken lays one egg a day – a person eats about one egg a day. A person produces 120 grams of kitchen food waste per day (skins, pruning) – the chicken eats them. They are perfect creatures for each other. As many as there are billions of people in the world, the same number of chickens are constantly maintained.
In order to cultivate the land, to support animals and bees, we needed additional consumers of our products. So the idea was to share the costs with other citizens. And we came up with this deal: we grow quality food for our family, but we grow it with the expectation that 1,000 more people will get it. This approach will allow our family to get it all. Then the question arose: how to arrange relations with citizens? Economic relations around food, formed through wholesale and retail networks, could not help here. Therefore, we entered into a direct relationship – contract production, namely, pre-order with payment. Legally, the scheme is as follows: as a service center, I serve the order of a citizen to produce food for him, for his money, on my territory, using my resources. The first conclusion of this scheme: I have no right to produce what I have not ordered. Usually produce something that can grow better here, which will give the maximum volume, and this should not be. The second takeaway from this scheme is that I don't need to produce much. We've set the bar of 1,000 people -- that's how many people we're calculating can feed from this land without violating the principles of its use.
Products are formed into baskets that are delivered weekly. A weekly basket looks something like this: 10 kilograms of products, including meat, eggs, dairy products, a balanced set of vegetables, fruits, greens. The type of meat alternates: poultry, quail, lamb, beef. We have meat all year round - there is no problem with this today. As for vegetables, many of them are stored for a long time, and are stored without any bells and whistles, according to old technologies - in burts. In the ground, a long trench with a depth of 1-1.5 meters is pulled out to protect against frost; vegetables are folded neatly into it without breaking. It's all closing from above. In winter and spring we have fresh vegetables. There are, of course, new technologies – special storage facilities with air conditioning or even gas-altered composition, where there is more nitrogen and carbon dioxide.
All this is put together in a common concept – food forest. I like the idea of organizing communities in forest-like areas, which are productive but without much human intervention. This community is initially artificial, but then naturalized to such a state in which it is able to live independently for a long time: the principles of alternation and mutual assistance inherent in it work without human participation. And the name of our farm - "Forest Gardens" - just reflects the idea of food forest.
- From a business perspective, how profitable is it?
Our project is easy to count. The cost of an annual subscription of 59 thousand rubles, we have a thousand customers is a turnover of 59 million. From the point of view of the old economic assessment in the first two years, this business is unprofitable, that is, much is financed out of pocket. In fact, we do not pay the marketing agency, but immediately pay the consumer for his trust in our project. Citizens who joined the Forest Gardens cooperative get cheaper food of a quality that cannot be bought at all in stores. As if to buy their loyalty, transferring a valuable product cheaper than it costs.
When the infrastructure of the farm is fully formed, it should be possible to allocate 30% of the budget for development: to collect the best genes on its territory. If we talk about the role of man in nature, it is, in my opinion, quite simple. There's not much a man can do. But a person can collect the best genes of animals, insects, microorganisms, trees, herbs. It depends on the farmer whether there will be something mediocre or better in his genetic representation. It's like the difference between a sour apple and antonovka. A tree can occupy the same place, but it will provide different resources.
- Is the activity you are doing scalable, replicable?
The way it is now invented is not scalable, but replicable. If the number of subscribers exceeds the allowable norm, then another similar territory will be required. And I can act as a technology holder, a consultant, in transferring, transferring this technology, in training.
I'll explain with a simple example: a person eats a kilogram of food a day, and it doesn't scale. You can make him eat one and a half, two, but it won't last long. In this sense, the food business is doomed to be redistributed. Today, there is a redistribution with the shift of the consumer from industrially produced nutrient masses to organically created food.
- What do you think is the future of the food market?
My premonition is that the bright future lies in the closest possible production of food to the place of permanent residence. Food production in the city is urban farming. Urban farming in new, green cities, where there is no question that you can't eat berries grown by the road or in the yard. It's kind of an anti-trend to what I'm doing right now. But I want to build a system so that we can support this future cycle of the food industry, because we need the transfer of knowledge, the transfer of elite material, the transfer of a complex of technologies.
P.S. And remember, just by changing our consumption – together we change the world!
Source: erazvitie.org/article/mnja_ukusil_fermer
