Sophia Farm Volunteer (2/3)

Welcome back to my second post on my stay at Sophia Farm. Starting out this time, I thought maybe I should give you a short overview of the people that I had the pleasure of working with during my time there. We’ll start with the people who have been there for the longest time and work our way down to the people with the shortest period of stay:

1. Ben Campbell | founder, land owner, crazy cool dude with dreads from America
2. Konomi-san | founder, big boss, Ben’s wife
3. Keiko-san | chef, household taskmaster, tall gentle grandma with western features
4. Reina-chan | teenage girl from the city, adventurous spirit
5. Neo-san | straight from the Matrix, something else entirely, an anomaly
6. Shin-chan | cute little boy, loves looking for rocks in the river and get on people’s nerves
7. Tomoya-san | Japanese chef at an Italian restaurant, reliable power house
8. Noa-chan | frugal boy on his gap year mission in the faraway land of Hokkaido
9. Dom | eeey, that’s me :3
10. Youko | kindhearted oba-san, want’s to work with cows
11. Cheeseman | Brings delicious cheese, always smiles

Everything in order, as you can see. In the back is an office building, which is also made from temporary building blocks, but very livable. I believe here they call these kind of mobile units Purehabu (プレハブ) . Honestly, I would be using one of those for my own permaculture project if only they had a higher ceiling…

The above picture gives you a peak into the plant nursery, where all the transplanting happens and bio-dynamic preparations are added to the soil. The bio-dynamic preparations are made from a wide array of herbs, bone, horn and other farm products. While the seeding will mostly happen in this green house, once the offshoots are healthy enough they are put either into the soil outside or in one of the other green houses.

That’s the farm’s trusty Japanese pickup truck. It’s in heavy use every day going up and down the mountain with loads of feed and water for cows and swine. The property is over 100 ha of green mountainous terrain, hence it’s name “New Scotland.” If you were to walk all the way up to where some of the cows are grazing, you’d probably walk around half an hour. Honestly, I would’ve driven the truck myself, if it wasn’t so damn small. Like, my legs literally didn’t fit under the steering wheel. Just on a side note, the barn, which you can see next to the truck is where the other cows are staying. There’s also a coop with a single well-protected chicken on the right side, and the pig stall between barn and coop.

These must be some rather happy pigs. They get to chill in the sun, run around, and get delicious cooked bean/potato mix twice a day. Still, if it was me, I would have neither pigs nor cows, because the workload is just too much. Also, me being a vegetarian, I really don’t get much out of them. To me it’s mostly downsides. In an ideal world, I’ll have a vegetable garden in line with Masanobu Fukuoka’s Way of Nature (自然の方). The animals can just do their own thing somewhere in the forest. Just me rambling.

If you know your farming, you will immediately notice that these cows still carry their horns. That’s actually a pretty rare thing nowadays, since they are seen as a hindrance in modern agriculture. Demeter farmers, let horns grow, because once they are shed off or when a cow dies, they are used for bio-dynamic fertilization, wherein the preparation is filled inside these horns and buried at the desired spot. From an anthroposophic standpoint, cows are invaluable and a fundamental necessity. On top of the aforementioned use of horns, they also provide the farm with mineral rich dung and delicious Demeter milk. While I won’t go into detail about the Demeter standards, it may be interesting to know that the Demeter/bio-dynamic label is the most difficult agriculture certificate to obtain on the planet – also the most delicious.