I started filming for a new client in 2010 who was holding a No-Till Farming Conference. The basics of what was being taught was farming without ploughing. For me the concept of NOT ploughing was confusing because that is all we were taught in our formative years at school. Six years later I found myself farming small scale and learning this practice by doing.
One thing spoken about repeatedly over the years was the amount of topsoil lost in rain storms when we do plough. This photograph below is showing the amount of topsoil that came down from our neighbours that plough their fields in a moderate storm. We have debris along fence lines to catch it now.
When I started in 2016 we began by just cutting the weeds and grasses down and leaving them to lie on top of the soil to rot, commonly known as mulching.
We breed top quality show rabbits, I particularly love their manure because it is cold manure it can go straight down onto the soil and does not burn any crops. We also make use of the horse manure we have readily available. Combined, this creates a thick blanket on the soil which retains all the rain when it does fall and develops a beneficial fungus fairly quickly which helps the plants to gain adequate nutrition from the soil.
We have a lot of hay left over from the stables which I love to cover everything with and help to keep the manure cool from the sun, we get hot here in South Africa. A cool root system will mean your plants will grow better. This is what a new area will look like before planting when we create a new vegetable patch.
This is how we plant maize using the equipment we have, in our case a hammer and a stick, making little holes to placing the seeds in the holes and closing them up. You can get subsistence and commercial planters that do the same thing to make life easier. Once the rain falls our germination rate is usually really good.
We plant vegetable seedlings the same way by making the hole big enough for the roots to fit into and just close the holes around the roots.
We are in a high rainfall area and one thing we have noticed is now we do not have to water any crops, even in the winter because when it rains the water goes into the ground for the roots to absorb and very little runs off into the rivers. When we were ploughing we had an enormous amount of run off and were watering every day.
When we stop ploughing and just put mulch down the microbes and insects are able to thrive. We started off with red clay soil and over a 3 year period were able to develop this dark rich layer for the plants to grow.
We are officially in our 6th year of chemical free farming. Our plants are healthy and strong when they grow and have so much flavour. This is one of our cauliflowers from this year next to a milk carton just to show the size. For these types of plants we also follow what the Kenyan folk are doing with capturing rabbit urine in drains and use it as a pesticide for aphids when diluting it down with water.
Just to show you some of our award winning bunnies from a show this year. My personal favourite is the Otter Rex in mini and standard size. South Africa has an import ban so we are unable to bring in new genetics and converse with the British Breeders regularly in order to perfect this colour. Oudshoorn came second on the show, won Best Rex and Best Standard Rex.
This is Kimmy, she won Best Mini Rex and Second Best Rex.
If anyone would like to ask any information about this type of agriculture please feel free to ask. I am passionate about educating on this and before Covid found myself traveling to remote places in Africa to teach this where people are malnourished. July 2018 was the first time I had seen children with #kwashiorkor and that was when I found myself wanting to do more, starvation and malnutrition should not be a thing anyone has to struggle with. I hope you have an awesome day.
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