Regenerative agriculture, food forests, and the ancient redwoods of Nevada

I'm starting an agricultural collective in desert land in Nevada to employ people as co-owners of a business that will grow a wide variety of food inside and outside of greenhouses using the principles of regenerative agriculture and dryland farming. We will get the water we need by saving 95% of it from escaping in the greenhouses, and rainfall on the greenhouses gets added to the total, so if the land we buy is half greenhouse, we've effectively doubled the rainfall on the other half.

With that extra water, and since the part of desert I've built my tinyhouse in is only desert because the water flows away too quickly and the water table is quite close to the surface, I will replant the redwood forests that flourished here before the uplift of the Sierra Nevadas 5 million years ago. The current sagebrush habitat will not be supplanted, but enriched, getting 25% more water due to the redwood forests preventing evaporation losses alone, and more diverse animals and plants creating better soils. Plenty of carbon will also be stored in the redwood forests themselves, which will be kept thin enough to allow every level of the forest to get sufficient light to bloom.

With a setup like that, this collective will practice the principles of Cuban farm forestry, seeking to get as many different types of crops out of the forest as possible. Diversity of supply guarantees quantity of supply in the long run, as a wider variety of insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals can find something edible in a diverse ecosystem than in a monoculture, in turn contributing to the increased diversity of supply with their own decomposing waste and edibility. Instead of getting a single crop of maize or soybeans out of an acre of land every year, we will get one hundred different crops for every level of forest. The canopy trees will shed firewood and, in the case of locust beans, fodder. Smaller fruit trees will take up the middle and lower layer of the forest heights, and a vining layer will grow up all of those trees, with walkways built up the sides to make it easier to collect both fruits and vine crops. The forest floor will have three sisters-style agriculture, with companion planting increasing crop diversity. Taller plants will be interspersed with shorter plants that need less light, and mushrooms that need no light at all will be planted below those. Rhizomal plants like beans and legumes will be everywhere to feed nitrogen into the soil. Cover crops that are equally thickly interspersed will replace them whenever necessary, and those cover crops and other crop waste will be fed to rabbits, turkeys, and chickens, to turn these crops into usable food and fertilizer. A tiny portion of the fruit harvest left outdoors for bats to encourage them to turn it and spare insects into fertilizer. The crops will be watered by artificial channels where we will plant diverse freshwater ecosystems of fish, clams, oysters, and the like, all self-contained so it doesn't spill out into any other freshwater ecosystems, because the state is rightly sensitive about that.

A single portion of land could easily have a crop of firewood or fodder, two fruits, four vining crops, a tall annual, a short annual, a mushroom, three or four types of seafood, plus whatever hunted migratory or penned animals all that cropwaste feeds, all growing at the same exact time. That's roughly fifteen crops at once, and different parts of an acre can be planted in different sorts, or they can all just commingle within their respective preferred soil types (acidic, alkaline) like they would in a real forest, so you could easily have a hundred different usable crops for every harvest on a single acre. If multiple crops can be grown or harvested a year on that land via greenhouses and additional winter light, just multiply one hundred by the number of harvests. Three are possible, sometimes four with enough light.

The largest single crop could end up being soil itself. Processing crop waste and animal waste into worm castings in which other things can now also grow will be a carbon sink in its own right, one that will let us expand the ancient redwood biome of Nevada quickly. All of this closely-managed forest species diversity will maximize the carbon absorption of every single acre in a way only comparable to rainforests or coral reefs, or the pre-Columbian Native American food forests. It may be even better than that in the long run.

We are doing this work because it and other projects like it in desert scrublands is the only realistic way for the working class to defeat the bourgeois climate catastrophe in our lifetimes, as it involves technologies we have ready and inexpensive access to. It also provides the only realistic way of providing a living and honest work for the billions who will be made refugees by the bourgeois climate catastrophe.