“… we are, after all, striving for a better total-world to live in, and not a better way to kill FAW [fall armyworms], a more effective sampling technique for FAW, a more refined dynamic AT [action threshold] for FAW in CBG [coastal bermudagrass], or a higher quality bale of hay.”
In P. B. Martin et al. 1980. Action Thresholds for Fall Armyworm on Grain Sorghum and Coastal Bermudagrass,” pp. 375-405 Florida Entomologist 63(4)
Twenty (20) minute presentation—Sustainable Livelihoods for Small Family Farmers
“dr. paul bain martin will facilitate learning … about a continuing learning process … for realizing & enhancing sustainable livelihoods on small family farms. paul is/was an agricultural entomologist/agroecologist, biocontrol & IPM researcher (TAMU, UF, UGA, EMBRAPA [OAS]-Brasil), former TDA Sustainable Agriculture Coordinator and a small farmer-stockperson. Moreover, paul was privileged to teach for twenty-two 22 years at Historically Black and Hispanic-Serving St. Philip’s College.”
Poster presentation—Ecological Literacy, Positively Ethical Applied Community Ecology, and a Return to Low Input Sustainable Agriculture
“We need to revisit the scholarly works and guidance of economists like E.F. Schumacher, Texan & Rice University graduate Herman Daly, and ecological systems engineer H.T. Odum as well as study the more recent works of economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. This will help to prepare us for a necessary return to enhanced efforts toward LISA, or Low Input Sustainable Agriculture and socio-ecological justice … while realizing sustainable livelihoods globally and in local/regional foodsheds.”
(I’ll use “PowerPoint Posters on ‘Ecological Literacy’, Andy Wilkinson’s Poem on ‘Mining the Mother Lode’ and ‘Positively Ethical Appllied Community Ecology'”)
Handout Material Used:
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Warming Up—
***What does resilience mean to you in less than six words (6) words (or a very few words)?
Do you harvest nopales, tuna, radishes, greens, Tatume squash, okra, tomatoes and other vegetables, huitlacoche, quelites, lambs quarters, dandelion, purslane, greenbrier, acorns, mesquite wood and beans, pecans, plantain, chapulines, gusanos, caracoles, … ? Do you can and dry meats and other foodstuffs, … ? Do you milk a cow, nanny, ewe, make cottage cheese and butter, harvest venison, wild rabbit, and squirrel, & wild pork, collect eggs from layers, … . … Do you have composting toilets and solar-heated showers? …
Do you believe in robust striving for equity?
Amongst farmers?
For hired farm labor?
Should available labor, food/fibers/shelter, water, even Land & Nature be regarded as “commodities?” “Common goods?” “Human rights?” Discuss very briefly.
***What is your concept of a sustainable livelihood? Be brief?
What is the meaning of life?
Are we responsible for giving to and taking care of the poorest in the world?
Do you spend much time thinking about a sustainable livelihood? Disparity? Overshoot of our carrying capacity? Our destruction of the natural resource base? The Golden Rule? The Precautionary Principle? The 2nd law of Thermodynamics?
Humans /living systems as we know them are dependent on daily solar energy. What are the most efficient and best systems for capturing & transforming daily solar energy over a long haul? Might they be climax ecological communities?
***Absent fossil energy inputs, how long does it take to build topsoil? Maybe hundreds and thousands of years?
Have you heard of “LISA” in a Farm Bill? Discuss.
***What are the three (3) most important policies/plans/actions necessary in order to realize quality of life for all? LIM/GR/EACC
***What are the most important “rules” to follow for a small family farm to be successful and morally & ethically successful? FYPTS,IKISS,WWLEL,LISA,NF,A
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“Sage” Advice from a Generalist Elder (Do Consider the Source)
The source—
2006-23. “Wes Jackson-ish ‘miller’,” “Farmers Union-type agitator” & learner in solidarity w/ all … toward Positively Ethical Applied Community Ecology/PEACE
1986-1992—Texas Dep. of Agriculture in Austin, mostly w/ Commissioner Jim Hightower (Pest Management Specialist & Sustainable Agriculture Coordinator) … & farmer-stockperson
1983—1986 and 1992-2006—High school & community college (Historically-Black & Hispanic-Serving) natural sciences teacher … and diversified small farmer-stockperson (mostly cow-calf)
1977-83—Pasture entomologist (biocontrol/IPM) in Georgia (UGA) & Brasil
1975-77-Fieldman/consultant for small farm crop-contractor
1970-75—Graduate student agricultural entomology (biocontrol, insect ecology), TAMU & UF
1964-69—Undergraduate eventually in agricultural entomology (worked in a cotton insects biocontrol lab), TAMU
1946-1964—Oldest of 5 siblings on a diversified hog farm. Harvester of diversified crops & farm laborer in fields & a feed mill.
1.Follow your passion, talents, skills, knowledge base! … But do have a holistic goal, strategic plan, & process of sensible replanning through monitoring, analysis, & critical thinking.
2. Be wise & keep your operation & life as simple as is feasible.
3. Be prudent & work within your local/global ecological limits.
4. To the extent possible, avoid direct and indirect use of fossil energy & materials.
5. Abide by the Golden Rule, Precautionary Principle, 2nd law of Thermodynamics & the mantra “Less Is More.”
6. Continually learn & wisely do necessary research on the internet & otherwise (e.g., begin w/ discussions w/ neighbors & local experts).
7. Critically think & act and cautiously, in appropriate steps, become involved in local & national/global politics. Efforts
—in solidarity—must be local & global and
toward much more climax ecological community.
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Other Thoughts to Leave with You Family Farmers
“To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”
Wendell Berry
This means:
- A Golden Rule which includes Nature
- PEACEcology (Appropriate continuing learning)
- Less Is More! (More caring AND sharing!!!)
- Today is the 1st day of the rest of your life! (And do listen to &/or make a lot of good music.)
- Mill around (Wes Jackson) & radically think/act out of the box
Never War!!!
Indigenous, Black, Jewish, Asian, Latinx, … cockroaches, careless weeds … all … Lives Matter”
PEACE,
pbm
7 S’s/VV->^^
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Positively Ethical Applied Community Ecology/PEACE – PabloEco3500K (paulpeaceparables.com)
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Introduction for Two Presentations at the SFFFS Conference.
An Effort to Make Connections
Let me take you back to the period of five (5) to 20 years after WWII & say a bit about the life of a young naïve country boy born shortly after his Marine Dad arrived from the Pacific Theater in late 1945. The young fellow grew up on a 5-acre diversified hog farm with a large garden & a cow to milk every morning & evening after he reached 5 years of age. Moreover, he hoed & harvested various crops in the summers during his elementary school years … on farm worker crews of Tony Cruz & Salome Gallegos. (BTW, other than his brother Lawrence, most of his co-workers were Chicanos & Blacks.) In his junior high & early high school years he pitched Black Diamond, Charleston Gray, & Garrisonian watermelons … and a few yellow-“meated” & other varieties.
Later he worked in a feed mill & its store, advised farmer-stockmen on rations, fertilizers, medications, and pesticides to use, and drove a green-bean harvester. … After he got his commercial driver’s license, he regularly took hogs in a bob-tailed truck into the stockyards & Swift & Co. in SA and then drove a semi one summer during his high school years, falling asleep and wrecking ol’ “Bid Red” one night near Freer while deadheading it back to Devine … after delivering a load of fresh green black-eyed peas to a cannery in Brownsville.
This kid also sprayed cattle and other animal- and produce-targets (and himself) with toxaphene and other nasty chlorinated hydrocarbons and toxic biocides. Moreover, while working a feedlot just outside of Devine Texas, among many other feeding & veterinary, loading and unloading, and even castration duties, he implanted diethylstilbestrol in the ears of beeves . Finally, pre-OSHA regulations–and just before heading for his “fish” year at Texas A&M (and then a short time in Naval Air, then UF, UGA, and TDA and so on)—he almost passed under an avalanche of cottonseed hulls in a feed mill accident in 1964.
This young fellow was greatly influenced negatively & positively by all of the above post-WW II agricultural activities in the rural south central Texas town of Devine which bustled with the processing and shipping of watermelons, peanuts, hay, grain, vegetables, & broom corn in the summer months … as well as life-long shaping through Vatican II, the civil rights & ecological movements, & of course the dreadful Vietnam War.
His brother Lawrence was involved in the construction of elevators and infrastructure for the family cattle operations of our SFFFS Conference speaker Fred Morales and his sister Linda knows, & mother knew, the Morales family well (The Morales family moved to Devine about the time our young fellow left Devine.) And the Dad of the young country boy of whom I speak, provided Fred and his brother show-winning pigs for $15-25 /head.
Finally, the young country boy from Devine, Texas became aware of the work of SFFFS Conference keynote speaker, Gary Paul Nabhan (Gary Paul & he share the friendship of the amazing agroecologist, Miguel Altieri) in the 1980s while working for Jim Hightower’s TDA. And later he became enamored with the pragmatic and energetic/smart work in local sustainable agriculture of SFFFS Conference speaker Justin Trammell.
Anyway, all of this is a large part of the why of the mindset and ethos of plain paul (a moniker given to him by LRGV onion & sugarcane farmer Jimmy Carlson of La Villa, Texas).
paul bain martin
7 S’s/VV->^^
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paul bain martin (BS/MS-Texas A&M Univ., Ph.D.-Univ. Florida) was raised in a small 2-bedroom, non-air-conditioned home with 5 younger siblings (and worked with “migrant” labor crews) during the drought of the 1950s on a very small south Texas (hog) farm near Devine, Texas—a farm which always possessed a large garden, fruit trees, chickens and a milk cow. While in Florida during the “Energy Crisis of the 1970’s”, Martin researched population dynamics of natural enemies of key lepidopteran pests in a “model north Florida agroecosystem” (involving vegetable crops and wild hosts, and including studies of Trichogramma and lacewings).
Martin was significantly influenced by ecologists like E.J. Dyksterhuis (TAMU), Archie Carr & H.T. Odum (Univ. Florida) and David Pimentel (Cornell) as well as ecological economist, Herman Daly. Moreover, a considerable amount of applied ecological knowledge was developed in late night sessions with Miguel Altieri (UC Berkeley) and during years as a pasture entomologist in Georgia and Brazil. Martin learned/manipulated to the best of his abilities as sustainable agriculture coordinator in Jim Hightower’s Texas Department Agriculture, and later taught biology/ecology at St. Philip’s College. (Martin has developed numerous research publications, essays, and reports and has a recent book on applied ecology, Games We Play. More Than 200,000 Years of Living Truthfully and 5,000 of Searching for Truth.)
Martin’s wife taught science at Seguin High School and they have been recently or are currently involved with various organizations and efforts toward researching, developing and promoting positively ethical applied community ecology/PEACEmaking(i.e., a quest for ecological communities which are socially just, humane and ecologically sane), including some volunteer work/ecological activities with: Ogallala Commons (with humble collaborations on Lakota reservations, in NM-Pueblos, etc.), Kids On the Land, HEB Foundation Camps, Seguin Outdoor Learning Center, Dos Pueblos-NY/Tipitapa & Episcopalian Latin American veterinary projects and other international programs, & LULAC and local community gardens … and for/with their children and grandchildren on small “family Lands” near Stockdale & Rio Medina, TX.
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“Rollin’ in Sweet Earth’s Arms,” poem by paul bain martin
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“Mining the Mother Lode” poem by Andy Wilkinson
Action Thresholds for Fall Armyworm on Grain Sorghum and Coastal Bermudagrass on JSTOR