Berea farmer revives the land
By Susan Smith-DurisekContributing Garden Writer
Susana Lein's bountiful harvest this year was gathered from her gardens and fields at Salamander Springs Farm, in the mountains south of Berea.
Through sustainable agricultural practices, this ridgetop farm flourishes on marginal land that had been depleted of topsoil and had no existing infrastructure.
Since 2001, Lein has used the principles of permaculture to build the farm and buildings from scratch and produce non-mechanized, no-till corn for ground corn meal, popcorn, dry beans (pinto and black turtle), and a diverse supply of local and organic produce including garlic, onions, squash, herbs, flowers, and year-round greens and root crops.
Lein grew up on a small farm in Iowa in the 1960s and '70s before the farm crisis changed the agricultural landscape.
"The farm community in which I grew up no longer exists," she said. "Huge-scale production of commodity corn and soybeans, and enormous hog factories have replaced smaller, diversified farms. Semi-trailers and giant machinery dominate the landscape. Former farmers now drive miles to work in 'rural development' factories. I was one of a new category of exports of the early '80s — our educated young."
After college, Lein worked almost seven years as a landscape architect and planner in Boston. She began to manage large projects for her firm.
"I recognized my role in paving over the land with unsustainable development and realized that my work in life must support my spiritual values and not be separate from it," she said.
After that, she spent weekends learning about permaculture and sustainable design at the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod, Mass., and reading works by E.F. Schumacher, Helen and Scott Nearing, and Wendell Berry that agreed with her new philosophy.
Wanting to use her skills to serve others, she left Boston in 1991 and lived seven years in Guatemala, where she worked with a non-profit organization, Altertec, helping campesino farmers implement permaculture practices while building well pumps, wood-cooking stoves, composting latrines and other technologies.
"I learned the joy of living more simply with less resources," she said. "My life was enriched by people grounded in the land. I saw how their poverty and oppression stem from the economic system we support here in America with our dollars.
"We've removed ourselves from the responsibility for how and where our food and resources come to us — and at what cost."
Lein returned to the States to work toward change at the source of the problem. A change from petroleum-based agriculture, she says, is imminent.
"The food Americans eat uses more petroleum to produce and get to their table than it takes to run their cars or heat their houses," she said.
Combining "permanent" and "agriculture," permaculture employs principles and methods to develop systems that mimic patterns and relationships found in nature to yield food, fiber, housing and energy for local needs.
Natural ecosystems serve as models, teaching how to develop energy-sustaining connections between resources and users.
Salamander Springs Farm mimics natural systems by not tilling but building the soil up with compost, cover crops and mulch. The soil is kept covered to protect organic matter from erosion and discourages weeds from doing that job. Earthworms improve soil structure and make tilling unnecessary.
Diverse crops are grown intensively, unlike large mono cultures with rows of bare soil. Water, energy and nutrients are recycled. Crops and elements of the farm perform multiple functions and create symbiotic relationships: In Lein's orchard, the tap roots of comfrey, an herb used in salves, loosen clay soil while creating a weed barrier around the root zones of fruit trees.
Lein walks her talk. With limited financial resources, she has made marginal land into a thriving ecosystem and has moved from a tent into a solar-powered, spring water-fed home.
The home and outbuildings were built using recycled and salvaged materials and wood from the farm that was logged with human and horse power. Solar power is used for drying and home energy, and water is supplied from a natural spring box via a gravity-fed water line, and it's supplemented by roof-water collection systems.
Lein's no-till dry bean field was inspired by Japanese rice farmer Masanobu Fukuoka's book, The Natural Way of Farming. Bean production per acre is more than twice that of a conventional field, which requires wide rows for tractor tillage. Garlic and onion production is almost four times that of conventional fields, with no petroleum consumed, she said.
Lein teaches at seminars across the country and at the farm through workshops and apprenticeship programs.
She sees two kinds of poverty in the world, she said, and she works to alleviate both. The first, she said, is economic poverty. The second is a poverty of spirit, a deep longing in people who have access to resources but want to reconnect with the source of our sustenance.
"We lost our commitment to creation," she said. "We need to become partners and work to become closer to the land."
I had the pleasure of visiting Susana a couple of years ago -- what an inspiration she is.
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