AGRICULTURE

 Learning from Rashid Nuri

About Growing Food Naturally - The Basics   

 

The soil is life. The soil is health. The soil is wealth. You have to build the soil and not with chemicals. If you have a strong soil, it creates a strong plant; strong plants make for healthy food and healthy food makes for healthy people.

Rashid Nuri   

 

  

Edited Transcribed Interview - Learning from Rashid Nuri

About Growing Food Naturally - The Basics   

     

My philosophy is that I don't even try to grow food.
God grows the food. I build the soil.

Rashid Nuri

Heather Gray - The other day I went over to your garden and I actually saw a chicken. So you're going to have animals at your site?

 

Rashid Nuri - Yes, we have also bees brought out this week, and now we're growing black flies that will be food for the chickens. And we had one chicken out this past week.

 

We were very fortunate. We had Atlanta City Councilman Kwanza Hall and Congressman John Lewis come out for a visit last week. And it was Kwanza's idea to bring the chicken out to show John Lewis. So we had a photo op with one chicken.

 

Heather - Well, John's from rural Alabama - he knows a bit about chickens.

 

Rashid - And we do intend to have more chickens at the garden.

 

Heather - Now Rashid, in all of your four gardens in the City of Atlanta, you grow organically.

 

Rashid - We like the term "naturally."

 

Heather - You grow "naturally". Now, one of the things you said in our last interview is that you got your masters degree at the University of Massachusetts in soil science. Please tell is about that degree - quickly. You don't have to go into a lot of detail about it, but tell us about that degree.

 

Rashid - I did get a degree in Plant and Soil Science from the University of Massachusetts because I am quintessentially an urban man and I needed to learn the nomenclature and etiology of agriculture. I didn't know anything about it.

 

So I needed to get a basic background about it so I could talk the language.

 

Heather - One of the things you also said is that while you learned at the University of Massachusetts, you then said that in order to do the work that you've subsequently started doing in producing vegetables and herbs "naturally," that you had to "unlearn" what you learned at the University. Is that correct?

 

Rashid - That's correct. But what they teach you at the university, back at that time in the early 70's, was based on standard commercial agriculture - chemical agriculture, hybridization was part of the process, and how to grow on big farms. Family farms were diminishing. Large agriculture conglomerates were increasing and what they taught you in school fit you into that niche, so you could get a job on one of those big farms and that was not what I was interested in doing.

 

Heather - What do you mean by hybridization?

 

At Fernbank Forest, Atlanta - unhybridized Photo: Heather Gray

Rashid - Hybridization is a process of plant genetics. Historically, a farmer would plant a crop. He would then save some of that seed and plant it again the next year. That's where the concept of tithing comes from - from the church. You plant ten seeds and you save one and you give 10% back to the church.

 

What happens with the plants in hybridization is that the plant geneticists began a process of cross breeding plants. So they might take what's called an F-1 generation - that are the parents - and cross breed the F-1 into the seed to make the seed that you then might purchase to plant.

 

The problem with this is you cannot save and re-plant that hybridized seed as you have normally done with seeds that were not hybridized. Historically, if you plant a seed, you expect the get the same thing back that you planted the previous year but you can't do that with hybridized seed. Rather than saving the seeds, you have to buy the seeds again from the seed company.

 

With hybridization you're going to get a different trait that has been inserted into the seed. The kinds of traits that could be crossed bred are perhaps a trait for height; it may be for the change in the quality of the fruits; or for a particular color; or for disease resistance. Some of the seeds are resistant to a particular bacteria, or a particular fungi (or, say, resistant to the round-up pesticide). There are a lot of different traits that the scientists are able to hybridize or cross breed into a seed for a plant to perform.

 

So what happens if you collect those seeds, as you have always done, and plant them back again you're going to get either the parent's or the grandparent's traits that are going to come out. It's highly unlikely you will get exactly what it is you think you planted. So, therefore, this means to be consistent and ,if you want to grow that same crop again the next year, you have to go back to the seed company to buy seeds from them. This gives seed companies tremendous control over that genetic material.

 

And whoever controls your food controls you!

 

So, the fact is that if you have to go buy your seeds from somebody else you don't have food security.

 

Heather - What else did you have to sort of unlearn?

 

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Rashid - I think probably one of the most fundamental things is that plant geneticists and soil scientists are not smarter than God. The idea of commercial agriculture is to use the soil to support the roots of the plant rather than acknowledging that the soil is the source of life itself. So, most commercial farmers use chemicals they put into the ground to feed the plants - to make the plants grow and get big, and this means that they don't actually feed the soil itself and the use of chemicals pollutes the soil.

 

The soil is life. The soil is health. The soil is wealth. You have to build the soil and not with chemicals. If you have a strong soil, it creates a strong plant; strong plants make for healthy food and healthy food makes for healthy people.

 

And so the orientation, the thought process, has to be reversed. Rather than looking at what you want to get out of the ground, you feed the ground itself and see what comes.

 

My philosophy is that I don't even try to grow food. God grows the food. I build the soil.

 

Heather - So, what you're saying that was being taught at the University of Massachusetts is basically been the trend of American agriculture in much of the 20 ^th century.

 

Rashid - For much of it, yeah. It particularly accelerated after the Second World War. It was the work of Norman Borlaug and Henry Wallace, who was the Secretary of Agriculture. And Norman Borlaug is the man who is credited with the "Green Revolution" for which he received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for hybridizing wheat, rice and corn - increasing the yields of corn. He doubled or tripled the yields of corn. And it was a formula that was basically simple - nitrogen fertilizer, and water, and hybrid seeds, and you get tremendous quantities of food that come out of the ground. The question is the "quality" of the production.

 

Heather - Getting back to your urban agriculture work - rather than calling it "organic" you prefer to use the term "natural" production. So Rashid, what do you mean by "natural" agriculture?

 

Rashid - Well, I want to emulate nature as much as possible. When I'm giving a talk about food production I like being being able to look out the window and see a forest or a grove of trees. And, you can notice that in the natural cycle trees grow, they drop their leaves, the leaves break down and they feed the tree and the tree continues to grow. It's the wheel of life and cycle that takes place and it works.

 

If you turn over that leave mold, underneath the tree you'll find all kinds of life. You'll find earthworms. You'll find mycelium. And that leaf mold, the little white stuff that's on the back of leaves that is rotting, is one of the most important things you're going to find in the garden. The garden communicates with itself. It sends signals across the garden. You'll find rolly pollies, millipedes and all that incredible life that's within the soil. It's very important. It is that sizable complex life in the soil that breaks down the leaves. It breaks down the grass that appears around it. And then it feeds it back up into the tree and the tree then continues to grow.

 

You don't see anybody going out in the natural woods - the old growth forests - taking soil tests, putting plant food out there to feed those trees. They do just fine.

 

I like to look at pictures of the giant Sequoias. Those trees are so big. They are the dinosaurs of trees. They live 3,000 - 5,000 years. I've seen a couple of them that actually have roads through them - 2 lane highways through these trees - they're so huge. And nobody's feeding them. Nobody's doing any soil testing. Those trees are doing just fine. So I figure if I can tap into that source that is making these trees grow, that's what I need to do.

There's that old growth forest that you see up in north Georgia. How did those trees get there? There are no extension agents going out there and telling people what to do. No tractors going through there putting sprays and all that stuff on them - and they're doing just fine. I figure if that works, why don't I try that in my own garden.

 

So, rather than using the label "organic" I just want to be "natural" and do that natural process - the one that God has created for us to be able to grow food.

 

Heather - Now, I know that in a lot of the gardens you have around the city you have raised beds. So my question is, how do you grow your food naturally by using the raised beds?

 

Rashid - Compost, compost, compost. We use copious amounts of compost in our work.

Heather - What is compost? How is that made?

 

Rashid - Well, there are a number of ways that compost can be made. Compost is really just a decomposition of organic material whether it's grass clippings, leaves, newspaper, table scraps, all of the things that you can get you mix together with a ratio of about 3 to 1 of the browns and the greens and let it sit and it breaks down into dirt.

 

If you think about it, it you have a pile of grass that you cut and stack it up and see how it shrinks down and starts breaking down. It's the same as the leaves that you have in your garden. You collect your leaves and you have a big pile but it begins to disintegrate and break down and overtime it breaks right down to become soil again. The insects will get in there to help to digest it. The inside of the pile will heat up and break down the natural components back into compost, which is basically dirt.

 

If you come out to our site and look, we have compost in various stages of decomposition as well as some that's finished and finished compost looks like it's just fine soil that you're going to be able to put back in the ground. But it's full of nutrients and, most importantly, it's full of life.

 

Heather - So, this is basically what happens in the forest?

 

Rashid - Exactly. That's why it's the emulation of nature. I don't use any chemical fertilizers or any chemicals or pesticides, or that kind of thing at all. If we do add some supplements to the soil they're going to be natural or plant based or animal based one way or the other.

 

Heather - Animal based? What's an example of that?

 

Rashid - Fish fertilizer. Fishing motion. We've got a greenhouse full of plants that will be ready quite soon. When you start your plants in a tray, we have a formula for making a planting mixture. But the trays drain very quickly and you have to water the plants at least once a day, if not more often. So in order to get sufficient food, I'll add fishing motion to the water and feed them with that which is high in nitrogen.

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Heather - Rashid, I'm curious. When you are building compost. How long does it take to become that fine soil that you're talking about with those nutrients?

 

Rashid - It's completely dependent upon what you do. You can just pile it up and let it sit in the corner and it will be ready in six months to a year.

 

If you turn it over often, what happens is that the air that gets mixed in there starts a spontaneous combustion which heats up the pile and helps it to break down more quickly. So one of the techniques one can employ is to turn it over which opens it up, gets some air in there...raises the temperature back up in the pile so it can continue to break down. We use that technique for the compost we have in the garden. It's made from vegetable scraps that come from the curb market. And after just a month it is broken down considerably. I figure by 60 to 90 days it will be perfect.

 

Nadia - Let me ask you, Rashid - talking about gardening naturally here in Georgia - and for those in Georgia who might want to have a garden in their own backyard...when I was a good bit younger, my mother and I tried to garden here in Georgia and what we had to work with was Georgia red clay. What would you recommend for gardening with Georgia red clay? How do you do that?

 

Rashid - Well, Nadia, it depends on who it is I'm speaking to. If someone is somewhat experienced, they will probably already know that Georgia red clay is a phenomenal soil. Some of that stuff is so thick and heavy you can mold it just like you would do potting clay. And yet the red clay is a very difficult thing to work with.

 

You can try to plow it if it rains...I can remember down in South Georgia where if you go out into the fields after it rains, you can get 2 inches of mud on your boots because it's so thick, and it takes a long time to dry out. You could actually mold it and make pots and things out of it. So when you have a soil that's that heavy it needs to be amended one way or the other to grow naturally, and you do that by adding compost.

 

But what I would recommend for many people here in the city, particularly those who are novices at this craft, is rather than digging down into that soil to go up and make a raised bed. Then you have complete control over your environment.

 

There are a number of techniques you can employ, but basically you put some cardboard or some newspaper right on the ground and on top of that create a raised bed either with lumber or bricks - whatever you want to use. You then add good topsoil and compost and then plant right in that raised bed, rather then trying to break down that red clay.

 

Consequently, overtime, that clay beneath your raised bed will open up and break down and you'll be amazed at what can grow in that red clay because the soil itself is very rich in nutrients. The clay holds a lot of the micro-nutrients that you need to grow good stuff. It's just getting to it in such a way so that it doesn't break your back.

 

Nadia - How high would you need to raise your bed?

 

Rashid - If you make a raised bed of 2 by 12's you'll be quite satisfied. This is actually 2 inches thick and it's only 11 ½ inches tall. And you put that on top of the ground to hold your dirt and just fill it up. So, call it a foot that you're building up. You can do less than that, but a good raised bed will be about a foot tall.

 

My work is primarily to help beginners in the urban production. We are urban agriculturalists and part of our philosophy is to grow where you are. We think people can grow on their patios, on their balconies, they can grow in their back yard, grow in their front yard.

 

We want to create edible landscaping as much as possible. If you're going to grow a tree to make shade, why not have a tree that you can eat from. It's still going to give you shade as well as give you material to compost that can be put back into the ground.

Nadia - And where do the chickens come in?

 

Rashid - There's a term that's often called bio-dynamic and/or organic. And I like to use the term organic to mean whole and complete. And the first livestock you always want to have on the farm is earthworms - particularly in the city. Earthworms are so important. Earthworms are the clearest indicators of the quality of soil and it's the number of earthworms that you will find in there that determines the quality.

 

You asked about the chickens. Chickens perform a remarkable contribution. Even if you're a strict vegan, a chicken in the garden can be a very good thing if you understand the cycle and are able to control it. The chicken will eat all the garbage that's in the garden. It will eat any bugs. It will eat the bad bugs and, because it will eat worms, some of the good bugs too. It scratches the soil to loosen it up and if you ever noticed how a chicken eats it scratches and then it backs up. It's like a good tractor. And then they'll leave their droppings. Chicken manure is very hot. It's very high in nitrogen. If you put it directly on to a plant, it will kill it real quick because the manure is just too hot. But with the chicken scratching in the yard, overtime the soil will break down because the chicken's got to move around in the area. There will be droppings here and there and it will dry up and make the soil that much richer.

 

If you want some good compost to put into your garden, you want to get what has been dropped around the chicken coop. Regardless of what you think, chickens are good.

 

Heather - Let's talk about the bees for a moment. Bees I know are good for pollination. Is there something else?

 

Rashid - Some people describe farming as one big sex orgy. But the bees, they do pollinate the trees and the flowers, and the fruit also has to be pollinated. It's just like all of nature. You've got eggs and you've got seeds and they have to be joined together to make something grow. Whether it's human life, or animal life or plant life, and the bees perform that function. As they fly around they're taking pollen from one plant and putting into another and performing that process. It has to be done.

 

Other animals do the same thing. I just learned recently that when okra first grows sometimes there's a little sap that you see on it and the ants love to crawl up the okra plant. I didn't know what that was until somebody finally explained to me that the ants are pollinating the okra. I hadn't gotten that before.

 

I had this young man tell me recently that he just started learning this craft and he wanted to master it in 4 years. So I said, that's your first mistake, cause you're never going to master this thing. There's always more to learn. If you think you've mastered it you're in a problem area.

 

Heather - We're hearing all over the world that we're losing bees. You haven't had this as a problem?

 

Rashid - They made this big to do last year about the bees dying. And it's true - they were dying. But you've got to understand, there's a bee industry. People put bees in the back of tractor-trailer trucks and move them around the country to pollinate the fruit trees, the nut trees, the orange groves, the citrus trees. And while moving the bees around, they are feeding them sugar water. The bees are not getting their own natural honey to eat.

 

NATURE | Silence of the Bees | Inside the Hive | PBS

They're feeding them sugar water. They're parking these trucks next to fields where all the chemicals are being sprayed so the bees are exposed to these chemicals also and it's killing them. It's unnatural how they're handling these bees.

 

I have the bees in the garden. We took a little honey out of the hive while checking it out a few weeks ago, and the honey is absolutely exquisitely delicious. But that's not the reason we have them out there. The reason we have the bees around is to pollinate, so we get better yields out of our crop.

 

So the bees that are being lost. And this bee death syndrome, or whatever is the name that the scientists are putting on the phenomenon, has been created by the man and they can't figure out a way to take care of it. It's really a creation of men doing things that they shouldn't be doing, or I would rather they wouldn't be doing, with this production process. And the consequences of that chemical based production is that these bees are losing their bee hives.

 

Heather - Rashid, when you were talking about the raised beds you were talking about using bricks or wood, putting down paper or cardboard underneath and then including topsoil in the raised bed. What's the difference between topsoil and compost?

 

Rashid - The difference is the quantity of the organic material that it contains. A good topsoil will have a nice structure to it, and smell and taste to it. It will be loose and not tight like the Georgia clay. And it's not going to be completely sandy like you would find at the beach. It's going to be somewhere in the middle. However, it may not have all that organic material that you would like to have in your soil.

 

Compost is fresh stuff. That's the stuff that you're going to find on the very top in the woods and topsoil is going to be somewhat of a lesser quality but still good to grow in.

 

Heather - It's interesting that in the last agriculture census we found that organic production is one of the fastest growing sectors in American agriculture.

 

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Rashid - Yes, that's true, but what's happened, though, is that people are becoming more interested in the quality of the food and who grows their food and where it comes from. And this is why you've had for a while a lot of the commercial farms getting into the organic agriculture. It's organic production, not as a way of life, but as a market niche. So with this you would have commercially grown food right next to food that's organically grown. They're using the same production techniques but not using the chemicals per se for the organic production but the same tractors. The methodologies are just the same.

 

There are some compromises in my opinion that take place in this process. But what happens today is that there are also some politics involved. You'll find there are a lot of commercial folks who were doing this - growing organic food - who are now going back to only commercial production and the reason for this is that the price for the food around the world has skyrocketed over the last year. So the margin - the difference between organic and commercial - has narrowed. So folks are saying they don't want to do it anymore because the market niche is not there.

 

And there's some world politics that goes into that also. Food prices have gone up all over the world and that's why you see a lot of the turmoil, particularly in the Middle East right now. It's because of the price of food.

 

Heather - Rashid, we do have a caller.

 

Caller (1) - I'm calling to ask Rashid to comment on whether he has to rotate his crops in his raised beds or if his soil helps to avoid that process.

 

Rashid - The answer is "yes" to both. Let me try and explain. I'm coming to realize that the definition people have of crop rotation don't actually quite understand what the purpose of that is. The reason that you don't want to plant the same thing in the same spot year after year is because you mine the soil of the specific nutrients that the plant uptakes. Individual plants take certain nutrients out of the soil and if you keep planting the same plant in the same spot you're mining that nutrient out of there. Compost helps to mitigate that. And crop rotation is also necessary. With crop rotation of a garden it means that you don't plant tomatoes in the same spot that you did last year. Put the tomato plant some place else.

And if you have a limited area where you're not able to move things any distance at all. then it's even more important to be sure you add copious amounts of compost material to your soil. If you have a raised bed go to a bait shop and get some worms to put in there. You want to make sure the leaf mold is in there also such as the mycelium - the funguses - so you can start to proliferate what you grow within your garden.

 

So, the reason I answered about the rotation being "yes" to both questions, is that you do want to move things around in the garden and you can help fix any problems that might occur but adding lots of compost.

 

Heather - Rashid, you were talking about the increase of prices of food all over the world. I think you might have said it has something to do with the price of oil as well.

 

Rashid - That's one of the factors. Most commercial agriculture production is based upon petroleum. You've got petroleum that goes into making machines and running the machines and the chemicals that go into the ground are all made from petroleum. So if the price of oil goes up, the price of inputs for production also goes up. But specifically what you're having, as incomes rise in some places around the world, is that people are able to afford more and better and greater qualities of food. So the demand increases as the wealth of the economy goes up.

 

And, today, the biggest buyer of all agricultural commodities is the Chinese. And by God's grace, the way this planet works there are more Chinese than anybody else. So they are the largest producer of cotton as well as the largest importer of cotton. They're also importing a lot of corn.

 

Then, last summer you had a major, major drought in the Soviet Union. So they became a big buyer in the commodity market for food. This raised the prices up.

 

So what's happened, and this is very specific in the Middle East, is there are a lot of young people who didn't have jobs, and they didn't have much food. Then when the prices of food go up they get mad and go shouting at their governments.

 

That is a fundamental aspect of why there are some of the concerns and revolts as in the Middle East. It's food prices. People are hungry.

 

Heather - So, here we are talking about naturally grown food and about the challenge of what you learned at the University of Massachusetts and what was happening in the 20 ^th century - particularly up until after the Second World War. But growing naturally is the way human beings have mostly done this, right? It's largely the way we humans have historically grown our food.

 

Rashid - Well, up until that time (WWII), yes. But you can also trace the migration of western society to the urban areas. Remember America and much of Europe are urban societies. 80% of the people in the United States live in cities. So as folks are more drawn to the city and the country becomes more industrial, fewer and fewer people are engaged in the production of food.

 

Agriculture is the basis of civilization. When man stopped hunting and gathering and settled in one spot he began raising food in that one spot. And then you are able to have other aspects of community begin to develop.

 

It goes like this - if you're going to teach my children, I need to grow the food to feed you. If you're going to treat my health as a doctor, and health of the community, someone's got to feed the doctor.

 

So we've become more and more specialized, withdrawn from the countryside, and there are fewer and fewer people who are engaged in the actual production. How we have dealt with that is by adding more mechanisms to it. More oil production and more oil going into the production. So we've gotten away from those traditional methods and techniques that kept us alive for thousands of years.

 

It used to be everybody grew their own food. But it's just not that way anymore.

 

Caller (2) - I love this information. I love this interview tonight. I makes we want to cry. I'm from a generation who remembers my grandparents gardening and I know where food comes from and, in fact, I am blessed with herbs around me. I have earthworms just beautifully and I had forgotten about rolly pollies and it's so beautiful and it's also so simple on one hand.

 

And, thank you brother for reminding me as one listener. You know the value of what you are saying is just so...I can't even describe it.

 

I will contact you, I hope. I have land in front of me and I need help. I'm a procrastinator. I've had a vision for years. I'm going to ask for help.

 

I'm so blessed to be a part of WRFG (radio station where the interview took place). It's such a gift. And anybody who is a part of WRFG is so blessed.

 

I've thought about a garden - OK. I also think about a crisis. What if the grocery store shuts down for whatever reason, and that's one reason why I do want to plant some food. Is there food in particular that would be most beneficial to plant in the event of a crisis? But I guess it depends on the season the crisis happens. So I know greens are valuable and I think about planting potatoes.

Rashid - Let me help you. One of my experiences is that the answer is right there in the question and you did answer it. What you grow depends upon the season. And here in Atlanta we are quite blessed. You can grow food year round.

 

We're in our sixth season now with Truly Living Well in the metropolitan Atlanta area and we have missed our weekly farmer's market only one time. And that was about a month and a half ago when we all got frozen in. Otherwise we have food all year round.

 

So what you need to know is the seasonality. What grows in what seasons. To make it very simple, we have three, really, crops seasons. You have the spring and fall crops, which are basically the same plants, and then you have your summer crops.

 

The summer crops are those that can withstand the heat, such as tomatoes, okra, beans, corn. These are crops that have the seeds in them.

 

Spring and fall you have your root crops and the green leafy crops. Those are the things that like the cool weather.

 

As far as is the store closing down, that's one of the questions that I pose to people. If they close Kroger you can't go across the street to Publix either because it will also be closed. They all get their food from the same places.

 

So the key in that question is going to be how to grow food and establishing that food self-sufficiency and the food sovereignty. If you have the skills and understand the processes, such a how all the dots connect and understand as many of the dots as you can that connect in nature, you can then go most places on this planet and grow food. You'd have trouble in the Arctic and the Antarctic. But most other places you could get things grown.

 

Caller (2) - I just want to salute you and thank you for a very "nutritious" show. I don't usually hear that element that much and I think it offers us the very elements to life. How to feed yourself! And I salute you and thank you for the information.

 

Rashid - Thank you, sir.

 

Heather - At the beginning of our show we always play "Revolution" by Arrested Development and you have always told me that what you do is quite revolutionary. Why is what you're doing revolutionary?

 

Rashid - We're taking back control of our own food. We're doing for self. I think this is a very important concept. I don't often talk about my work as being revolutionary, although I know it is because most people can't grow food. Most people don't know where their food comes from. So, if we're able to help people get this knowledge, we're helping people to create non-violent social change by getting them out from underneath the yokes of the corporations that dominate our lives these days. And we are helping people get their own food sovereignty.

 

The saying goes that if I control your food. I control you.

 

Heather - Why is that?

 

Rashid - Because I decide when you're going to eat. I decide if you live or die, if I control your food. If I take back the right of growing food out of someone else's hands, then that's a tremendous amount of freedom that exists within my living space.

 

Heather - This wonderful woman who called earlier, she was saying she was practically in tears just hearing some of this from you. You hear this from people some, do you?

 

Rashid - Yeah, I do. This is my work. This is what I do and try to do - to be of service and help people. And if I can help people to re-establish the connection that they have with the land - that's the oldest connection we as humans have had. The man/land connection is the beginning of civilization. If I'm able to help people reconnect in their minds, reconnect in their bodies, reconnect physically with their ancestors with this process of growing food, then, by God's grace, I've made a contribution.

 

Heather - Once again, thank you so much Rashid.

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