Barrier to Entry for Natural Food Production is High

New Garden Bed

After a season of working relatively seriously on the garden and trying to produce food on a smaller scale, it's apparent that the barrier to entry for commercial scale natural food production is really high. It takes a lot of general and theoretical knowledge, plus a lot of site specific knowledge that's only acquired through hands on work and study over time. It also takes a lot of hard physical labor, because initially in the early learning stages, buying machines to do the work would be an enormous waste of money and material. Furthermore, continuing to produce food with "imported" materials and machines implies you're going to do that year after year, and probably never turn a profit.

Starting from scratch is difficult and requires a huge investment of time and labor, and probably minimal capital investment.

"Wild" Apple Trees

We've been working hard to get some fruit trees to grow, be healthy, and start to produce some food. Meanwhile, these apple trees do it without any intervention. There are a handful of trees in the woods that are either leftovers from an old orchard or are volunteers from seeds, which is even more incredible, that produce a lot of fruit in spite of no human hand tending them.

Iterative Adjustments

The image at the left is a patch of foxglove beardtongue wildflowers in the woods. This area is near the top of Big Creek's drainage system. It's pretty flat and there is a lot of impermeable blue-gray clay relatively near the surface.

All through this patch of the woods, maple trees have no problem starting to grow, but the soil is too wet for them to thrive, so they can only get to a certain age and size, then die.

I imagine what happens is they struggle through many seasons establishing their root systems and then either drown in an unusually wet stretch of days or keel over when the ground pulls up. When they die and collapse, they either create a little mound of new soil at the base of their roots or fall into the wet swampy ground and rot away into new soil.

It's surprising swamp-tolerant trees don't take over, but in this location the Maples are the most common tree and even in sub-optimal conditions for them, they seem to out compete other trees, but since they're small and stunted or ailing, light manages to get to the forest floor so undergrowth thrives and there are lots of salamanders and other critters that enjoy the conditions.

In the woods--really any natural area--what we see at our historical moment is the result of countless years of iterative adjustments and survival through many random extreme events: extremely heavy rains, extremely dry summers, high winds, extreme cold, and so on. The combination of plants and animals that could persist in all those conditions on this particular piece of land are what we see today.

It's probably a good lesson to take to heart--and is quite a different lesson from the panacea gardening methods preachers you find on youtube. It's a hard earned skill to imagine how a wide range of conditions will impact a new garden or orchard you plop down in the landscape.