Hi folks,
Would you please let us know your thoughts?
Us, Postfire
Our org, Life's Collective, has a purpose of helping life thrive to the best of our ability. We have a >40
acre hilly, 2-20% slope, farm/property... and a 1 acre, flat garden-becoming-a-farm in central Mendocino county, California. The big farm burned completely in October in the regional firestorm, this killed about 80% of the mixed:
madrone>fir>valley oak>manzanita>black oak>toyon>pine>guardian oak>
soap root>baytree... woodlands and it burnt almost all soil nitrogen and killed most of the non-meadow area's
seed banks. Our folks survived but not all our neighbors did. RIP J, S, K, K. The turkys mostly survived, only saw one dead. Some
deer survived, seems like there are less. The animals are short on food
I would like to do regenerative, broad-acre agro-ecology... efficiently - on both farms. We don't have much money anymore. We have decent credit and ok income from cannabis. We can get funding if its needed, worth it and if it will make a huge difference. My team will follow a regenerative approach if it is realistic this year, postfire, with limited labor, limited expertise and we can afford it or its worth funding. Otherwise my team will want us to focus on stupider, more capitalistic cannabis farming while we recover financially from most our stuff burning down. There are a lot of permies all around my region, many whom we know well
enough that they'd help us. Our current skills are: some ag, some
permaculture, some nature connection, a lot of cannabis chemistry, some science+tech, and a lot of cannabis farming.
We don't own any heavy equipment which didn't burn... except that most of our diesel dump-bed flat-bed 3500 4x4 didnt burn

. Our friends will loan us just about any heavy equipment we might need. (dozers, a skid steer, a backhoe, a grader, a
skip loader, excavator). We actively make a lot of
compost tea. We have 1000sqft of radiant heated
greenhouse nursery and 4000 sqft of unheated
greenhouse at a leased flat
land. We've been erosion seeding the burnt property with
native grasses and wildflowers so far.
Regen Plan 1.0a
Pattern Recognition Josh's + my idea is we yoeman keyline plow almost on contour, all over the big burnt farm. While doing so - we
compost tea inject and seed directly into the keyline. We also plant a variety of
trees into the keyline. At some point we chop over ~85% of the fully dead trees on contour as bioswales next to the keylines. Leave some dead trees for bird condos. In areas the tree's *roots* also seem dead too we may terrace it with a dozer and bioswale with the dead trees. Fall 2018 - intending to switch the radiant heated
greenhouse nursery tables from propane to
compost heating; with the compost being made out of burnt tree parts and..._______? (insert good idea for green matter?).
Questions
Your thoughts?
What would you recommend we do?
Want to come out here and show us?
Who has a yeoman in norcal I can get access to?
Otherwise, would our dozer driving buddy with his rippers work ok or would the heavy dozer compact too much?
Any ecology suggestions? I was planning on doing mostly native crops and a lot of synergistic-guild planting.
Thank you,
Efren