TEDxBratislava - Mind Wide Open
www.tedxbratislava.com
The Chinese have a saying:
“If you want to be happy for an hour,
get drunk on wine.
If you want to be happy for a day, get married.
And if you want to be happy for life, be a gardener.”
I became a gardener after I graduated from college, but working as a vegetable producer
in a local cooperative somehow didn’t make me happy.
First I thought it’s because I’m not a Chinese, but rather an eastern Slovak.
When I was losing hope and faith in Chinese wisdom and truthfulness of that saying,
the system changed in our country.
Thanks to that system change I gained access to information
that besides the agro-industrial farming there is also a so called ecological or bio farming.
It was then when I realized that for Europeans
or rather representatives of the western civilization the saying should rather say:
“If you want to be happy for life, you have to be a bio vegetable farmer.”
And for the past 20 years I have followed the goal
of becoming a happy gardener that would ecologically grow vegetable.
After those 20 years the ecological farming has become institutionalized
and that previous video just confirmed
what I had inherently felt – we should beware of institutions.
In Slovakia, like in whole Europe, the ecological farming is institutionalized,
but there is one interesting aspect –
even though vegetable is the most sought-after product
of ecological farming
in reality the portion of ecologically farmed land in which it is produced is the smallest.
The problem is people.
And the problem is also the remote control, because I don’t know how to switch it.
The problem is that our general notion of how the farming should be physically done
is set in two extremes.
The first is an esoteric-romantic approach
that doesn’t respect physical limits and the objective reality.
I’ve met lots and lots of nice people
who spoke with such an enthusiasm in their eyes
about how we should become one with nature,
cause no harm and be at peace with everyone.
But as soon as they had to actually take care of having a place to sleep at night,
they turned out to be impractical people living in the fifth dimension,
without being able to cope with the third, yet desiring to tell others how to exist.
This is the esoteric-romantic approach indeed disrespecting physical limits and reality.
The other approach is the one I have 10 years of first-hand experience with –
the technocratic-bureaucratic approach that doesn’t respect the "bio-logic" of life.
My idea of how to become a happy gardener looks like this –
after 20 years
of developing a system I called "AgroKruh" or AgroCircle.
AgroCircle is a vegetable production and distribution system
with an emphasis on sustainable development principles.
Sustainable development is a generally recognized term
and I don’t have time to explain things
that are theoretically very well defined.
That’s why I'd like to focus on explaining what AgroCircle is all about.
or the happy gardener
to be happy whole his life
he cannot be neither an esoteric romantic nor a technocratic bureaucrat –
he must be a person who deals with a situation here and now,
by means available to him and his sympathizers
In my case it meant changing 90% of what I had known.
First of all, if I wanted to come up
with a sustainable vegetable farming system, I had to forget
about long straight fields.
The long straight fields nowadays considered normal
basically emerged in the period
when oxen were introduced as draft animals
to make the agricultural work easier.
Oxen, due to their enormous physical power
had one problem though:
They were extremely difficult to turn.
So, to make it somehow work, long and straight fields emerged,
requiring perhaps only three turns a day.
I suppose, today nobody makes themselves an ox,
but fields continue to be straight and long
and people consider it normal.
I definitely don’t make an ox of myself
and I found out that long and straight fields are a problem -
if I ever wanted to be a happy gardener, I had to change my approach.
I discovered a new approach by a coincidence:
A travelogue from Ladakh showed
what a pernicious influence Western civilization had on the self-supply
and existence of communities that had been self-reliant for millennia.
That sort of woke me up.
There I saw a scene with a stake in the middle of the square,
and an ox tied to the stake by a rope –
well, a yak rather than an ox. These oxen somehow keep appearing in one's life –
There was corn spread on the floor and the yak
absolutely refused to evenly trash the corn with his hoofs
as the villagers wanted it
ut since he was tied to that stake,
the rope prevented him to go where he wanted.
But by wanting to go where he did, i.e. places other than where he was to work,
that vector, the physics forced him to walk forward,
turn round and round
and with the rope winding around the stake the yak was forced
to hoof the entire crop, centimeter by centimeter.
That’s when I realized:"You ox!
Change the long fields to circular and all technical problems disapear.
I don’t have to worry if four satellites can correctly position my machine
without rolling over my neighbor’s plot or my property.
A spiral-shaped line would allow me to
easily automate 70% of the physically straining work
in connection with alleviating the consequences of
prior brutal land use.
Considering the limitations of my physical abilities and
and money that I had available
I designed the machine you see here.
It’s an automated machine
that works on circular plots,
produces spiral-shaped lines,
is powered by an electric motor and therefore there is no engine roar, no diesel stench,
and it can work in an automated mode.
Based on practically verified experience
I can say that Sod’s Law works
and all possibilities you try out first do not work.
Only then, if you learn from your past mistakes
and add to it what you thing is good
you come up with a solution that actually works.
What happened to me after 20 years of my work was
that I ended up moving from the very east of Slovakia
to the very west
and thanks to a lucky coincidence,
after my lawsuits and problems here in Slovakia,
I was offered money from Japan and a land owner donated a piece of property
to build a model farm by which I scientifically prove
that the vegetables
we give to our children
to be as healthy as possible
can be widely available throughout the year for standard prices to anyone interested.
My biggest problem
with the institutionalized ecological agriculture is
that the organic quality is considered a higher quality
or which consumers should willingly pay a higher price.
The problem with vegetable is that it includes 52 botanical species
within which there are 2180 varieties
on the list of permitted varieties in Slovakia alone.
It’s such a broad range
that it’s practically impossible to scientifically prove the organic quality as defined by law.
That’s only possible based on a personal contact -
when the farmer meets with the consumer,
looks him in the eye and says:
“I have used nothing ...
and I try to hurt the environment as little as possible because
I consider myself part of that environment.
At the same time, however,
the consumer has to be accommodating
and understand that the farmer works under open sky
and he has no control over anything there
but himself,
and even that only to a limited extent.
Based on that, after 3 years we managed to build a model farm
that started to produce vegetables first time this year
for anyone interested, until the produce lasts.
Due to time constraints I’m not going to go into details,
but what we are trying to do is to create a network of consumers
who define their needs
and based on their number persuade farmers
to take this new approach.
A new approach to relation to soil,
a new approach to relations to people
and a new approach to being as such.
So, that’s it.
Since the issue is quite broad ranging,
let me end up by emphasizing
what ancient Romans used to say:
“Vegetable
produced on foreign soil
by the hands of a slave
is not good for your health.”
Thank you