Early in 1982, a young Yale graduate with a family and an ambitious plan purchased a rustic, wooded hillside property with a large shelf in rural Willits, California. It was a perfect site for building a secluded country home with a commanding view of the valley.
But John Jeavons had a very different idea. After being inspired and mentored by Alan Chadwick, a transplanted English horticulturalist and renowned small garden developer at the University of California in Santa Cruz, Jeavons spent the next several years in nearby Palo Alto developing and testing a much-improved version of an ancient (4,000 years old) Chinese method of mini-farming, nowadays generally known as “biointensive.” The results were spectacular, and he soon had a following.
When Jeavons was eventually forced to leave his borrowed Palo Alto site (the host company wanted to build a new parking lot), he decided to establish a permanent research and training facility and chose an unlikely hillside location in Willits. The soil on his property was rated only “fair” for grazing, with just a few inches of topsoil, well below the quality typically needed for agriculture. But Jeavons had confidence that his new method was ideally-suited for such a difficult farming challenge – and much more. The word “revolutionary” is not an exaggeration. One of his long-time fans is the famed Chez Panisse restaurant owner Alice Waters: “John’s methods are nothing short of miraculous. He has shown…that astonishing quantities of high-quality produce can be grown on even the most devastated land.”
Jeavons’ unique method (which he has trademarked as “Grow Biointensive”) is really a complete growing system. It can yield 2-6 times more produce per acre (or sometimes more) than conventional row agriculture, while using only 30 percent (or less) of irrigation water, little or no fossil fuels, and minimal soil amendments, or none. And it’s done with simple hand tools and modest skills, so it requires very little capital investment. Over time, you can even create new topsoil at a rate that is at least 60 times faster than in the natural world, if you do it right, because half or more of what you grow will be “carbon crops” that are turned into compost to “feed” the soil as well as people. (Another advantage of the biointensive method is that it sequesters lots of C02 in the soil, which benefits the climate.)
How to Feed the World in the Age of Climate Change
The answer may lie in a modernized version of an ancient method.
By Dr. Peter A. Corning