Experiments and innovative ideas thanks to brilliant minds coming together in Dadu farming on the Ranch. Part 1 of Saten’s notes
When Navina, one of the administrators of one of the Facebook groups, invited the sannyasins to share their experiences during their days at the Oregon Ranch, Saten wrote a series of illustrated and detailed posts about our farming practices. With permission, Osho News is now publishing the series, available for a wider public: Dryland Farming, Tractors and Equipment, Greenhouses, Planting, Irrigation, Rattlesnakes, swans and coyotes.
I am sure there are plenty of compadres out there who could add to the dryland farming portion of the stories.
I mostly worked the actual field cultivation, planting, and harvest of the 2000 acres, which we actively managed around the higher elevations of the Ranch in the west circling around to the top of the Ranch and some fields that were adjacent to the road into the Ranch. I was not involved in all the other activities such as the cattle, horses, fencing, etc. except to the extent that we had frequent planning meetings in the Dadu [farming] office and we got to hear what everybody else was doing in other areas.
I am remembering the times I worked alongside English Veda, American Arpitam, Aussie Kerry (a successful dryland wheat farmer from Western Australia), Aussie Svarga, American Shaky (Shakyamuni), PA (English Premananda) and a cool American dude called Veet. Paramahansa (PH) – the master operator and coordinator of that part of the operation called the shots. He could hop on any new piece of machinery that came onto the Ranch and within a few hours he would be a master of it!
Each day would start with about four or five of us gathering around the old barn in the main yard after a bus ride and a hearty breakfast from Magdalena. A lot of the dryland action happened in the fall, late winter and spring. In the summer the crops grew on their own and there was not too much to be done.
We would usually be all buttoned up in our three layers of thermal clothing with those thick brown coveralls over the top, our cowboy hats firmly planted on top and would wait for Ritama, our ride, who after her breakfast would be gathering lunch and snacks for the day. I remember being introduced to Grateful Dead by Veda Prem and sharing tapes for our Walkmans before we set out.
We each worked very remotely from each other and would spend the whole day by ourselves except for the midday lunch visit and end of day pick up from Ritama. She would be driving a white covered pickup truck and I have a delightful image imbedded in my mind of all those times I would look up from the cloud of dust that surrounded my tractor and see her bouncing over the dirt roads and rough tracks as she sought us out. We loved her light and bubbly energy – especially welcome after day after day alone out in the fields.
Some of the interesting things we did was to research the best cultivation methods and crops to grow that would help restore the land. All of our neighbours would plow their fields as if they were large midwestern fields, that is, with little regard for the geography of the land. As a result, whenever we had rain, they would suffer significant erosion as the rills left behind by their plows would run up and down hills. They looked with disdain at our methods which they couldn’t understand since they differed so much from their own practices.
We had a significant Aussie component in the team and because of the similar dry soils in Australia, there were a lot of innovative practices that could be emulated. The main one was keyline farming, where you plow on the contour and pick your tractor line, so that when you go from the valley to the ridge the furrows run out to the ridge. So, when the rains came, they would be diverted from the wetter valleys out to the dryer ridges. This resulted in much more uniform moisture distribution across our fields and very little soil loss. Of course, to plow this way meant lots of twisting and turning as we carved up the fields to ready them for planting.
My first season was spent pulling two very interesting implements that were designed to remove rocks from our fields. After the fields were plowed by Spring Chisel plows, the rocks would all be upturned and loose. I would then come along with a large slanted raking implement that would spin very rapidly and scoot the rocks off to the edge in windrows.
Once I had completed a field or area, I would pull a large implement that straddled the windrows and would – using windmill type arms – lift the rocks out of the soil into a large bucket at the back. Once the bucket was full, I would pull off to the edge of the field and dump the rocks… thus cleaning the fields for the more delicate final cultivation and planting implements. The neighbors had not seen anything like it, so I often had gawkers along the road as they watched what we were doing.
I remember when I first injured my back, on one of these days. The rocks were often large enough to get stuck in the windmilling arms of the picker, and it was you and the crowbar that stood between a good day’s work and sitting around waiting for help that might not be there till the next day. I wrenched and wrenched on this one rock and got a slight twinge in my back as it broke free. I kept going but then, three days later, I woke up in my trailer down at F site and could not move. I somehow crawled to my pickup and got myself to Pythagoras, where I spent three days laid up, loaded with Valium as the spasms all subsided.
One of the other very innovative things was around cropping – we researched and found something called an “Austrian Winter Pea” which was totally novel to the region. We planted it as a legume that would add nitrogen to the soil but also be a high protein crop to harvest. Interestingly, it is now widely adopted across the US, but not so back then.
Some of the dryland crew in this picture:
PS A postscript on this one… My “bad back” followed me the rest of my life until a chiropractor in San Diego managed to finish the job, in about 2012, after which I could not walk more than a few steps at a time without severe pain and having to kneel down to relieve the pressure… He had managed to push the herniated disk up through the vertebrae above it. I then had urgent back surgery and they cut off the herniated bit, fished it out of the vertebrae above it and tossed it. I went on to never have debilitating back pain again to this day and took up doing dozens of multi-day treks around North America and Australia, where I was able to carry heavy loads without issue….
Answering Navina’s question: “Was this farming mostly to feed the animals – so grain and hay? Did we sell some?”
Saten replied: Yes we did sell grain from the Ranch. The dryland was just a grain operation; haying was only done at Rabiya and Keto from my memory… and it was all for internal dairy herd consumption. Aggie also put in a large silage pit down at the truck farm. He dug a big ditch and brought in loads of freshly-cut pasture grass and rolled it with the tractor as it was deposited until the trench was full. Then it was covered with a big tarpaulin, old tires put on top to weigh it all down, and then it sat for months fermenting – making a wonderful fermented feed that the cows loved!
Svarga added this information: My favorite machine that we used in dryland farming was the D3 Ag Cat. It had a two-cylinder gas pony starter motor and a four-cylinder diesel engine. You had to start the pony motor first and then throw the clutch to start the diesel motor.
I remember starting that thing on cold winter mornings up the back of the Ranch where there was a pine forest that had been logged. When you first threw the clutch to start the diesel, it would emit six-inch smoke rings from the exhaust, which would float straight up into the air, rising as high at 20 feet before they dissipated. Meanwhile the diesel would slowly kick into life, gulp, gulp, gulp, faster and faster, more and more smoke rings, until it started to run smoothly.
These notes were first published as Facebook posts in a closed group for Ranch residents, and are being re-published in Osho News with Saten’s permission. Photos: except for the group photo which Saten had posted on Facebook, all shots in this first part of the series are by Arjava, used with his permission.
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