We are so thankful for videos like these. My wife and I are building a homestead in northern Maine. Without your wonderful insights we would have struggled alot longer. I can't emphasize enough how these videos help people like us find our dreams. Thank you!
Guys hi! I was looking for that video for a while and I got lucky ! Boy this is very interesting ! Here is another one I found , also very interesting, a guy in Guatemala..I know..... !facebook.com/RobGreenfield/ Enjoy and I hope it helps!
So great to hear like minded modern interpretation of ancient ways of using the land help all to live instead of just living for profits derived from the land. Thank you and keep at the Joy.
I wanna hear about all these veggies for colder climates. I'm always watching channels in the warm climates feeling jealous like I can't grow much here.
I watch a ton of videos and this is one of my favs! I rent in NYC (Brooklyn) and have been looking into buy a homestead in VT near Burlington. I can get a really great place for the price of a 1br apt in NYC. This video just confirmed for me that it is totally doable in VT. Thanks!
I had the same transition mentally. We are in year 2 of a cold climate food forest permaculture at Joshua Zieba channel. I hope to do a nursery/farm to eat healthy and sustainably while quitting my job.
Love it. Organized complexity. Natural hierarchies working at a human scale organically, both in time and in work. Health and culture together. Thank you! You have drawn so much "lost" knowledge back into our awareness.
'The place around you starts to mean more' exactly why I think people should do this themselves, in any capacity. I get why someone might hire a permie designer, but by not doing it yourself, you don't engage with the wonderful living being that is nature. It's healing, cathartic and nothing feels better than that connection.
I love your story. Thank you so much for sharing this. It's extremely inspirational to hear how much you enjoy this more than it's "the right thing to do." Permaculture is a new topic to me, and I'm enjoying learning more about it. I, too, subscribed!
really enjoyed your discovered wisdom...in the seventies returned to the land from the city...hahaha... my world and mind increased a thousand fold and then felt so sorry for my city friends
Hi Tommy! Thanks for your comment! I would suggest you get in touch directly with Ben to inquire about this. Just look up "Whole Systems Design" on the web and you'll find his website and contact info. Best of luck!
It's one thing to look at the energy you spend driving to your local Walmart, but I think one also needs to consider all the energy that went into producing the goods you're going to buy there, vs. growing them yourself on your own land. We live in a society now where we focus so much on the financial benefits of everything, but there are other less measurable, perhaps more important, benefits that come with growing your own food, etc.
These ideas are so awesome! I never heard of permaculture before. I have been kinda doing this already though. I live in the mountains of Japan in a log house. I create almost no waste. Composting is really key. Here on the land, I am trying to plant the same kind of adaptable trees. I have recently planted 5 pawpaw trees and 4 sugar maples. I am keen on greenhouse heat with the compost....great idea! Thanks for the video! Very interesting.
8:30 so well said. MORE HABITAT FOR MORE ANIMALS. We need nature and we have the power to increase nature, rather than being a part of the non sustainable consumer system that we have been born into that robs us of nature.
Your video completely rocks!! Starting a RUclips channel myself and will have a gardening/greenhouse component etc.!! Look forward to see more from you! Enjoy the winter!!
Thanks Jared, I really appreciate your feedback! Maybe in a while once you've set up in Vermont you can share your story with us! :-) Good luck with the move.
Everything you talked about really, strongly resonated with me. I'm slowly but surely on the path to doing more good, and not just "less bad" as you put it... so inspiring. Thank you for the video. It helps keep me on track. :)
Certainly is a lifestyle that a very many people are searching and striving to achieve these days. This whole idea about compost heating is really fantastically affordable though.
Very good video. Curious how you cycle the water from the compost heater and like anything else sustainable, are your costs really high to yield the energy and food vs. if you drove to a local walmart? This is one thing I keep considering before making this move.
The pile is insulated with straw or hay, which will be wet for part of the year. When the pile is constructed, all the materials are thoroughly wetted with a hose (40-50% humidity is ideal), so they really shouldn't dry out. But if they do, he'll see the temperature drop, and might then spray the pile again.
I watched this a long time ago and the idea of heating a greenhouse with compost heat has stuck with me. I live in Eastern Ontario, which is around the same latitude as Vermont so hopefully, I can get the same kind of effect.
Great video . I'm trying to make hot compost to heat my biogas digesters. The digesters make enough biogas to power my small gas generator. My food scraps power things are my house pretty cool.
Thank you Ben. I am very touched by your sincerity, and perspective. Thank you for sharing! Just to share back with you, if you put a walpini style subterrain, 4-9 feet below soil line -dependent upon your zone, the soil stabilizes around 50 degrees all year. You can install fenestrated tubing (to let out the moisture into the soil and limit risk of mold), You can have those fruit trees indoors, with our without heat. Add your passive solar south or west facin g over it, insulate cover it at night, tube in your hot water from your compost if necessary, or add some composting leaves inside.. voile'! you now have a tropical adapted environment for fruit.. Check out Nebraska man grows citrus. Blessings to you and yours
There is no pump between the stove and the water tank. It's a thermo-syphon. As the water in the tank within the stove heats up the water expands, goes up the pipe and into the top of the tank. There may even be some phase change going on. But mostly, it's just thermal expansion. :-)
It's important to also remember that most people live in cities and that if everybody were to leave the cities in order to "homestead" that it would wreck ecological havoc on the earth. Homesteading is a good alternative to suburban living. I don't think anybody should have a house and a plot of land that contributes nothing to nature or human beings other than a green toxic lawn which nothing can live or even step on. The reality however is that homesteading biggest contribution is in returning to rural America the family farm that we have almost lost. The family farm was the cornerstone of every community even the big cities. Having hundreds if not thousands of suburban homestead family farms providing food for towns and cities is the future of the worlds food shortage and learning how to produce more with less while maintaining natures fragile balance will be the key to the survival of the human race on this planet. Kudos to you for taking a monumental step in that direction and don't be afraid to sell your surplus at your local farmers market.
Hi Ben my neighbor to the west of me. My name is Lee and I live next door to you in NH. After the absolute brutal winter we had last year, the worst as far as I had ever seen living in NH since 9 years old, Mass before that and at 43 years old, I've seen a LOT of winter! Last year was the 1st year I lived in a place that had electric heat and saw my electric bill soar! I didn't know it was possible to get that high, omg! Anyway, so AFTER such a year of unimaginable cold for an extended period of time I am very interested in supplementing my sources of heat. Now, at the moment we are SOMEWHAT limited in our scope because we rent 1 side of a duplex, however looking into this composting for free heat and for hot water is something I would LOVE to visit more! Here's the problem I am finding so far though. I don't know if you or anyone else on here knows of a GOOD how to video (series?) that explains ALL the how to of hooking up such a system. I have seen enough videos that take you through the step by step process of building the pile of compost and even running the black water tubing in a circular shape within the pile itself. The problem is, NO ONE that I have seen so far has bother to show how you then connect the water INTO THE HOUSE and connect it to the water heater. Also NO ONE shows how to run heating tubes through that same pile of compost and run heating lines into the house to produce the free heat in the same way a solar heat box would. Will you, CAN you, or anyone reading this PLEASE ... show me a video or video series or point me in the direction of someone, somewhere that shows me these things I need to know. Winter is almost here again and I want to have SOMETHING in place to reduce my electrical dependence for heat and hot water especially. Thank you for your time Ben.
Hi Lee. Another Ben from England. I'm in a similar situation to you, researching this for a couple of years now, and actually planning an off-grid home design right now. One clue is in the way that Ben heats the hot water from his stove, using a continuous convection loop without pumping. All you really need is a hot water tank in your home, where the top level is just below the top level of your heap. The pipe out from the top of the heap will enter the top of your tank. Now, if the colder water from the bottom of the tank feeds out/across to the bottom of the loops in your hot heap, that should feed round and round. Then you'll need a cold tank that tops up the hot tank as the level drops (pretty simple). Ideally, your hot water will leave the hot tank and go round a system (greenhouse loop / radiators) in order to lose heat on its way to the hot heap.
Hi! About the Jean Pain compost pile heating the greenhouse - could it work well without a pump, like the stove/water heater, if the compost pile was downhill/below the greenhouse? Doing the same thermosiphon effect?
Great! Now, how can I get involved in this on a personal level? I had a large (200 ac) farm... But I just did horses. I have some idea of being self sustaining, but really want to make this a dedicated lifestyle.... Are there communities that are welcoming helpers/ apprentices? I'll be sure to watch more of your cool uploads! Thank you :)
+happy vegan You could join the global organisation, become a WWOOFer. "Willing Workers On Organic Farms". Many people from all over the world come to help on all sorts of organic properties here in Tasmania.
"Permaculture: A Designers' Manual" by Bill Mollisson. You could also take PDC course, which should include a more practical way of learning. Oh and check out permies.com - a forum for permaculture/ecological thinkers. If you want to learn a resilient way to grown food, low in maintenance, think like Mother nature. Diversity is strength. Happy growing!
Design and build an insulated and hardened greenhouse. It must contain the crop sectionsm phyto-bioremediation section, pharmaceutical crop section, food crop section, biomass crop section, protective crop section. Use the Jean Pain method inside the greenhouse so as as it ferments it generates both heat to heat the entire greenhouse and carbon dioxide needed to accelerate and increase plant growth-yields.
I thought it was to stop rodents but seems like it's more for prolonging the storage life: www.farmradio.org/radio-resource-packs/package-90/sawdust-prolongs-the-storage-life-of-potatoes/
I have studied composting heat. I thought it was great idea to try but then talking to a local farmer who tried this with a HUGE manure pile. He said that once you start pulling heat from the pile the composting slows, thus stops producing usable heat. Is this true?
Since compost generates heat, it is easy to assume it is also useful to the process, but in this case, they only use some of the heat for the green house, and he says it doesnt even use the full heat circulating in the pipes, so it doesnt "drain " the compost from it.The video was filmed in February, and he read the temperature of the compost at 110F while the green house is in operation. Plus, it is only for winter months, during the rest of the year, 3 seasons, compost can go full speed, and its the longest time of the year.Also If you have a big pile of compost, I guess you can afford to slow down the process a little during the winter as long as it is not drained completely.
In theory, you can regulate the temperature of the pile. Letting it dry out or cool down will slow down microbial activity. Also, if it gets too hot, that will kill off bacteria, resulting in slowdown, thereby acting as a natural upper limit. But many experiments have seen these large piles give off useful heat for 12-18 months, after which they're torn down and re-built. Another great way to regulate a pile is by managing the flow of air, but that requires some kind of forced induction (either pushing or drawing air through the pile). These passive piles don't use that, but there are many industrial examples that do. I'm working on a smaller domestic version of this that will use forced induction.
Also, Ben's pile uses primarily woodchips, probably with up to 30% manure in the mix. The wood chips will decompose more gradually than a pure manure heap, giving off their heat more slowly.
By growing different species of trees from different latitudes from the Arctic, Sub-Arctic, Temperate zone, Tropical zone and from different climate extremes such as cold deserts, hot desets, tropical forests, temperate forests, Arctic forests, Sub-Arctic forests, Desert forests, Coastal forests from all latitudes, etc. One can ensure that regardless of where you are, your plants will survive and you will not run out of resources as long as you know hot to nurture and tend to their needs until they are self-tending and self-regenerating ecosystems producing everything and whatever you need and want.
great video. wow designer. cute and smart.. great home, land . compost in those typez of climate. is great.i live in tennessee love it here. agriculture state. goodluck on your endeavors mc
Ben, I gave you a fine 30” lemon tree at a meeting in White River Junction; you had promised me 5 berry plants but you forgot them. Still haven’t paid up and I’m pissed😉
Your discovery of how man can actually benefit the earth, is the side of the coin that modern education tends to neglect. Our ancestors instinctively knew they would be destroying their own future, if they did not at least maintain their habitat. Our modern way of life and congregating into cities isolates us from this instinctive wisdom. A far better way of educating the next generation would be to give each family or single person a small plot of land on which to learn to sustain themselves, and to positively connect with their neighbors. Yes, it would mean weaning people off handouts, but it's high time we realize the handout society cannot be sustained for long. Yes, it would require a complete restructuring of our society, but every once in a while, social systems have to regroup and restructure themselves.
I totally agree, and I can't think of a better education for young people with behaviour or addiction problems, or for rehabilitating people who have been in trouble with the law.
Greenhouse is the way to go probably the best greenhouse or domes on the market period are the greenhousekits (dot com) geodesic domes with solawrap because they use the german solawrap keder covering and top quality frame. This premiere covering diffuses light and plants gro much better in this spectrum of light, and they burn less etc, big problems with greenhouses. meanwhile light transmission is 83% percent which is very good. The film has been used in european domes for 30 years and still functional. It regulates temperatures better, and has the stongest connection channel of any poly material on the market. It is not carbonate, but ethylene which is recyclable. Best way to heat a dome? use the rocket mass stove. It is easy to build, and use a small fraction of the wood in a conventional wood stove. it extracts every bit of heat from a log and STORES IT to release in your dome up to 48 hours. go to ernie and erica rocket mass stove site to learn about those. piling 2 foot tall dirt mounds over logs and sticks around thee edges (called HUGELCULTURE) means maximum light warms your beds vs using ply raised beds which hogs space and light and wears out, and the wood sponge in permaculture means watering is drammatically reduced. No building needed. When you elect to change out the dirt, you then simply shovel it out vs the problems with emptying containers. With hugelculture, your soil becomes more fertile with the passing of every year climaxing at 5 years vs having to rebuild the soil each year and you increase sq. footage for a given space and exploit airspace. dirt can be piled center of the dome in a tall pyramid shape.
If I'm getting you right, no, paw paw's wouldn't. They need a very long warm season, in fact no winter is best. I've tried in zone 8b and every fall the poor trees stump, below 70 is just too cold for them.
Golighty678, it is possible that your climate is too warm. I found on a random website that that Pawpaw's do best with 400 hours of winter chill, otherwise they might not bear fruit. You are at the southern edge of their zone range, so if you had a mild winter, that might make for too WARM of conditions. Also, they like humidity, so if you are in an area with dry air, that would be hard on the trees as well.
It was thought that Chilean nitrate was the most nutrient dense naturally occurring substance, but it turns out it is actually Ben Falks excrement! It has recently been found that his urine also cures several types of cancer! Thank you Ben Falk with out your high minded work where would the food movement be today!
Why not design a better green house and make a living hydroponic green house. With all new heating and cooling systems? Like solar vacuum tubes to power TEG's to run fans and evaporation absorption refrigeration for cooling? Novartis
LOL Liberal rediscovers his rural roots; and makes it sound like landing on the moon, wood in the stove is a very unsustainable fuel source by the way. This man went to collage to learn what I Grandparents did every day? Amazing...
It doesn't grow back equal to the rate of consumption; if it was in wide spread use, and if your goal is making the world better for everyone... Plus the space it would take to produce such a mass of wood for wide spread use, and the impact on the land from that kind of large scale operation. Is the green movement not about solutions everyone can use? I really like the compost heap, that's awesome.
+Ben Falk I now have land to build on; and I know I want to raise rabbits and direct their massive amounts of waste into a bio digestor. which should give me a little methane gas, I hope its enough to maintain a small natural gas powered fridge. The home will be totally in the ground, to use the insulating properties of earth, and I"m thinking about running pex under the floor and use this guys composter idea to bring in some ambient heat. I want to do wind/solar/ and hydro to charge a battery power system, I have a creek flowing down hill. I probably will have a rocket stove in the green house; but like I said wood is not an answer for the masses, it would deforest the entire country rapidly. I don't know Ben; I really like hydrogen gas and natural gas, but hydrogen has got to be the best. If you can run a car off of it, you could run a house on it, it has 0 pollutions and can be made from water. When used it turns back into water. You might need to have other things pitching in to run the house, but for your big dogs like water heater, furnace, fridge, and cloths dryer a hydrogen generator of some kind could probably maintain these. I know about every car company has a hydrogen prototype. Hell Honda or Hyundai can't remember which brought one to market in the US, but it dissapeared from the TV. The hydrogen could even be produced with a solar farm/ wind farm. All you need is a water source and power source.
This is great stuff. Thank you. The only sore point remains the plastic tubing, which is a concession, let's face it, to the petroleum and petro-plastics interests (at this point in time, in any case). Because their plastics degrade (especially at high heat!) they must be replaced often to avoid toxic contamination of the soil, not to mention breakeage, and hence must be purchased often, and it's still the same corporations that are offering them for sale, kemosabe. So how do permaculturalists, who say that they want to 'do no harm' to the earth and its myriad inhabitants, go about inventing things which seem to dove-tail so well with the petro-monopoly's toxic creations? At the very least, when you are making these videos, you should explain that other forms of non-toxic plant-based plastics are and have been available for use, from hemp and other substances as well, but because of the petroleum monopoly ('Standard Oil') we have not seen them much at all on the marketplace. Hemp as plastic (and as medicine, paper and so many other things) was browbeaten out of contention, by Hearst, Asslicker, Rockfellers, DuPont, Dickweed et al.. and all for personal gain: petroleum and racist bigotry going hand-in-hand down the wedding aisle of destiny..... We could be driving cars which run on hemp oil and are made of hemp plastic (and rubber and steel) but for certain people's actions against our common good.
The best is the enemy of the good. I wanted to heat a greenhouse using a compost pile. I could get a plastic that would not pump as many chemicals into the water and stand up to the heat for about $80. The same amount of metal pipe was going to run me a bit more than ten times that amount, and be too heavy for me to use on my own. Sometimes you need to make compromises to make progress. It's better to use some plastic tubing for a decade than thousands of litres of heating oil. It's better to make strides and progress then to prematurely optimize our solutions.
I get it. The poor love plastic cause it's all we car afford. :) It's the perfect product for crapitalism! :) But I wouldn't call the petro-plastic industry 'the good'. Read up on Standard Oil, Dupont and what they did to derail cannabis hemp. It'll make you cry if you don't know already. Peace!
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Now there is a great human being. World needs more people like Ben Falk.
We are so thankful for videos like these. My wife and I are building a homestead in northern Maine. Without your wonderful insights we would have struggled alot longer. I can't emphasize enough how these videos help people like us find our dreams. Thank you!
Guys hi! I was looking for that video for a while and I got lucky ! Boy this is very interesting !
Here is another one I found , also very interesting, a guy in Guatemala..I know..... !facebook.com/RobGreenfield/
Enjoy and I hope it helps!
So great to hear like minded modern interpretation of ancient ways of using the land help all to live instead of just living for profits derived from the land. Thank you and keep at the Joy.
I wanna hear about all these veggies for colder climates. I'm always watching channels in the warm climates feeling jealous like I can't grow much here.
I watch a ton of videos and this is one of my favs! I rent in NYC (Brooklyn) and have been looking into buy a homestead in VT near Burlington. I can get a really great place for the price of a 1br apt in NYC. This video just confirmed for me that it is totally doable in VT. Thanks!
Looking to do so in Maine. Great stuff!
I had the same transition mentally. We are in year 2 of a cold climate food forest permaculture at Joshua Zieba channel. I hope to do a nursery/farm to eat healthy and sustainably while quitting my job.
Love it. Organized complexity. Natural hierarchies working at a human scale organically, both in time and in work. Health and culture together. Thank you! You have drawn so much "lost" knowledge back into our awareness.
Very well done video. Excellent message presented in a very winsome manner. Thanks for sharing!
'The place around you starts to mean more' exactly why I think people should do this themselves, in any capacity. I get why someone might hire a permie designer, but by not doing it yourself, you don't engage with the wonderful living being that is nature. It's healing, cathartic and nothing feels better than that connection.
I love your story. Thank you so much for sharing this. It's extremely inspirational to hear how much you enjoy this more than it's "the right thing to do." Permaculture is a new topic to me, and I'm enjoying learning more about it. I, too, subscribed!
Very inspiring! You have manifested my dreams! Thanks for sharing!!!
This is so inspiring! I can't wait to start my own off grid permaculture farm!
really enjoyed your discovered wisdom...in the seventies returned to the land from the city...hahaha... my world and mind increased a thousand fold and then felt so sorry for my city friends
Hi Tommy! Thanks for your comment! I would suggest you get in touch directly with Ben to inquire about this. Just look up "Whole Systems Design" on the web and you'll find his website and contact info. Best of luck!
It's one thing to look at the energy you spend driving to your local Walmart, but I think one also needs to consider all the energy that went into producing the goods you're going to buy there, vs. growing them yourself on your own land. We live in a society now where we focus so much on the financial benefits of everything, but there are other less measurable, perhaps more important, benefits that come with growing your own food, etc.
Just featured your channel in my channel. awesome work!
Another great video ! Good going. I really agree with the notion of empowering ones self.
good video. Totally agree that engaging with the land has way more benefits than money.
I just love this guy and his methods!
These ideas are so awesome! I never heard of permaculture before. I have been kinda doing this already though. I live in the mountains of Japan in a log house. I create almost no waste. Composting is really key. Here on the land, I am trying to plant the same kind of adaptable trees. I have recently planted 5 pawpaw trees and 4 sugar maples. I am keen on greenhouse heat with the compost....great idea!
Thanks for the video! Very interesting.
8:30 so well said. MORE HABITAT FOR MORE ANIMALS. We need nature and we have the power to increase nature, rather than being a part of the non sustainable consumer system that we have been born into that robs us of nature.
bravo! a shining example to us all
Your video completely rocks!! Starting a RUclips channel myself and will have a gardening/greenhouse component etc.!! Look forward to see more from you! Enjoy the winter!!
Thanks Jared, I really appreciate your feedback! Maybe in a while once you've set up in Vermont you can share your story with us! :-) Good luck with the move.
Beautiful inspirational videos! Subscribed.
Everything you talked about really, strongly resonated with me. I'm slowly but surely on the path to doing more good, and not just "less bad" as you put it... so inspiring. Thank you for the video. It helps keep me on track. :)
This is incredible. Thanks for sharing!!
Ben...any particular type of saw dust that is preferable? Love the video!
“This is what happens when you garden, you just carry food around all the time...when you don’t expect to.” Ben Falk
Certainly is a lifestyle that a very many people are searching and striving to achieve these days. This whole idea about compost heating is really fantastically affordable though.
Very good video. Curious how you cycle the water from the compost heater and like anything else sustainable, are your costs really high to yield the energy and food vs. if you drove to a local walmart? This is one thing I keep considering before making this move.
Nice video! Great message! Loved the "way" he said it. It was perfect!! :-)
Fantastic. I'm wondering how you control the compost piles as too large a pile could be a fire hazard and too small a pile, not enough heat, etc...
The pile is insulated with straw or hay, which will be wet for part of the year. When the pile is constructed, all the materials are thoroughly wetted with a hose (40-50% humidity is ideal), so they really shouldn't dry out. But if they do, he'll see the temperature drop, and might then spray the pile again.
Great vid, thank you for sharing. How do you store your mushrooms and how long do they keep?
I watched this a long time ago and the idea of heating a greenhouse with compost heat has stuck with me. I live in Eastern Ontario, which is around the same latitude as Vermont so hopefully, I can get the same kind of effect.
Even better, incorporate your greenhouse into your HOUSE, so you're only heating one space instead of two :)
That's true
BrittanyDaine also having the compost pile inside the greenhouse would help also
you could even put the compost pile directly on top of your comforter to keep your bed warm through the winter
Great video . I'm trying to make hot compost to heat my biogas digesters. The digesters make enough biogas to power my small gas generator. My food scraps power things are my house pretty cool.
Thank you Ben. I am very touched by your sincerity, and perspective. Thank you for sharing! Just to share back with you, if you put a walpini style subterrain, 4-9 feet below soil line -dependent upon your zone, the soil stabilizes around 50 degrees all year. You can install fenestrated tubing (to let out the moisture into the soil and limit risk of mold), You can have those fruit trees indoors, with our without heat. Add your passive solar south or west facin g over it, insulate cover it at night, tube in your hot water from your compost if necessary, or add some composting leaves inside.. voile'! you now have a tropical adapted environment for fruit.. Check out Nebraska man grows citrus. Blessings to you and yours
Thanks for sharing and great Ideals.The creator I,m sure is smiling down on you and would like others to be like minded.godbless.
love your vidio I am exploring in using heat from the sun or compost pile to heat my green house great Idea thank you
how can i purchase the brand of wood stove shown in video ? thanks !!
Like the part about sharing…love your water heater system how does the water get up to the tank a pump? Nice framing…
There is no pump between the stove and the water tank. It's a thermo-syphon. As the water in the tank within the stove heats up the water expands, goes up the pipe and into the top of the tank. There may even be some phase change going on. But mostly, it's just thermal expansion. :-)
This is AWESOME. Simply. Awesome.
Where can you pick up large amounts of sawdust for storing? I am in VT, and I want to learn how to put up food for my family through the Winter.
Very cool guy. Much luck going forward. :)
It's important to also remember that most people live in cities and that if everybody were to leave the cities in order to "homestead" that it would wreck ecological havoc on the earth. Homesteading is a good alternative to suburban living. I don't think anybody should have a house and a plot of land that contributes nothing to nature or human beings other than a green toxic lawn which nothing can live or even step on.
The reality however is that homesteading biggest contribution is in returning to rural America the family farm that we have almost lost. The family farm was the cornerstone of every community even the big cities. Having hundreds if not thousands of suburban homestead family farms providing food for towns and cities is the future of the worlds food shortage and learning how to produce more with less while maintaining natures fragile balance will be the key to the survival of the human race on this planet.
Kudos to you for taking a monumental step in that direction and don't be afraid to sell your surplus at your local farmers market.
Hi Ben my neighbor to the west of me. My name is Lee and I live next door to you in NH. After the absolute brutal winter we had last year, the worst as far as I had ever seen living in NH since 9 years old, Mass before that and at 43 years old, I've seen a LOT of winter! Last year was the 1st year I lived in a place that had electric heat and saw my electric bill soar! I didn't know it was possible to get that high, omg!
Anyway, so AFTER such a year of unimaginable cold for an extended period of time I am very interested in supplementing my sources of heat. Now, at the moment we are SOMEWHAT limited in our scope because we rent 1 side of a duplex, however looking into this composting for free heat and for hot water is something I would LOVE to visit more! Here's the problem I am finding so far though. I don't know if you or anyone else on here knows of a GOOD how to video (series?) that explains ALL the how to of hooking up such a system.
I have seen enough videos that take you through the step by step process of building the pile of compost and even running the black water tubing in a circular shape within the pile itself. The problem is, NO ONE that I have seen so far has bother to show how you then connect the water INTO THE HOUSE and connect it to the water heater. Also NO ONE shows how to run heating tubes through that same pile of compost and run heating lines into the house to produce the free heat in the same way a solar heat box would.
Will you, CAN you, or anyone reading this PLEASE ... show me a video or video series or point me in the direction of someone, somewhere that shows me these things I need to know. Winter is almost here again and I want to have SOMETHING in place to reduce my electrical dependence for heat and hot water especially.
Thank you for your time Ben.
Hi Lee. Another Ben from England. I'm in a similar situation to you, researching this for a couple of years now, and actually planning an off-grid home design right now.
One clue is in the way that Ben heats the hot water from his stove, using a continuous convection loop without pumping. All you really need is a hot water tank in your home, where the top level is just below the top level of your heap. The pipe out from the top of the heap will enter the top of your tank.
Now, if the colder water from the bottom of the tank feeds out/across to the bottom of the loops in your hot heap, that should feed round and round.
Then you'll need a cold tank that tops up the hot tank as the level drops (pretty simple). Ideally, your hot water will leave the hot tank and go round a system (greenhouse loop / radiators) in order to lose heat on its way to the hot heap.
earthshipstore.com/index.php?route=common/home for your home
Hi! About the Jean Pain compost pile heating the greenhouse - could it work well without a pump, like the stove/water heater, if the compost pile was downhill/below the greenhouse? Doing the same thermosiphon effect?
Wowowowowow this was awesome... Amazing words
Yes, each one planned and measured, eloquent.
Great! Now, how can I get involved in this on a personal level? I had a large (200 ac) farm... But I just did horses. I have some idea of being self sustaining, but really want to make this a dedicated lifestyle.... Are there communities that are welcoming helpers/ apprentices? I'll be sure to watch more of your cool uploads! Thank you :)
+happy vegan
You could join the global organisation, become a WWOOFer.
"Willing Workers On Organic Farms".
Many people from all over the world come to help on all sorts of organic properties here in Tasmania.
Also check out workaway.info, which has plenty of opportunities to help on organic/green projects round the world.
"Permaculture: A Designers' Manual" by Bill Mollisson. You could also take PDC course, which should include a more practical way of learning. Oh and check out permies.com - a forum for permaculture/ecological thinkers.
If you want to learn a resilient way to grown food, low in maintenance, think like Mother nature. Diversity is strength. Happy growing!
thank you...northeast AZ
Good job !!! .. awesome vid... good vibes..
totally awesome...loved it...
Design and build an insulated and hardened greenhouse. It must contain the crop sectionsm phyto-bioremediation section, pharmaceutical crop section, food crop section, biomass crop section, protective crop section. Use the Jean Pain method inside the greenhouse so as as it ferments it generates both heat to heat the entire greenhouse and carbon dioxide needed to accelerate and increase plant growth-yields.
Good stuff! Thanks for sharing what you know.
What kind of Apple was that? Cabbage in saw dust too! Wow I have always stored potatoes in wood shavings, they keep great!
he should do walloping stuff... underground green house for tropical plants
Clear idea. THX!
Very good. Thanks.
Could you expand on the reason of storing in sawdust?
I thought it was to stop rodents but seems like it's more for prolonging the storage life:
www.farmradio.org/radio-resource-packs/package-90/sawdust-prolongs-the-storage-life-of-potatoes/
Yeah, regulates moisture.
With the greanhouse how long to you run the pump ?
I have studied composting heat. I thought it was great idea to try but then talking to a local farmer who tried this with a HUGE manure pile. He said that once you start pulling heat from the pile the composting slows, thus stops producing usable heat. Is this true?
Since compost generates heat, it is easy to assume it is also useful to the process, but in this case, they only use some of the heat for the green house, and he says it doesnt even use the full heat circulating in the pipes, so it doesnt "drain " the compost from it.The video was filmed in February, and he read the temperature of the compost at 110F while the green house is in operation. Plus, it is only for winter months, during the rest of the year, 3 seasons, compost can go full speed, and its the longest time of the year.Also If you have a big pile of compost, I guess you can afford to slow down the process a little during the winter as long as it is not drained completely.
In theory, you can regulate the temperature of the pile. Letting it dry out or cool down will slow down microbial activity. Also, if it gets too hot, that will kill off bacteria, resulting in slowdown, thereby acting as a natural upper limit. But many experiments have seen these large piles give off useful heat for 12-18 months, after which they're torn down and re-built.
Another great way to regulate a pile is by managing the flow of air, but that requires some kind of forced induction (either pushing or drawing air through the pile). These passive piles don't use that, but there are many industrial examples that do. I'm working on a smaller domestic version of this that will use forced induction.
Also, Ben's pile uses primarily woodchips, probably with up to 30% manure in the mix. The wood chips will decompose more gradually than a pure manure heap, giving off their heat more slowly.
By growing different species of trees from different latitudes from the Arctic, Sub-Arctic, Temperate zone, Tropical zone and from different climate extremes such as cold deserts, hot desets, tropical forests, temperate forests, Arctic forests, Sub-Arctic forests, Desert forests, Coastal forests from all latitudes, etc. One can ensure that regardless of where you are, your plants will survive and you will not run out of resources as long as you know hot to nurture and tend to their needs until they are self-tending and self-regenerating ecosystems producing everything and whatever you need and want.
Awesome!!!
great video. wow designer. cute and smart.. great home, land . compost in those typez of climate. is great.i live in tennessee love it here. agriculture state. goodluck on your endeavors
mc
This is what life's about!
What a cool guy.
this is great .Congratulation.
How do u get the water?
+Brandon Holmes probably rain water
nice! keep learning! hope yea ferment a few of those veggies :)
Awesome philosophy!
Totally makes sense to Me...
Ben, I gave you a fine 30” lemon tree at a meeting in White River Junction; you had promised me 5 berry plants but you forgot them. Still haven’t paid up and I’m pissed😉
Awesome
I love this Video, and would suggest you check out Rocket Mass Heaters if you are looking at permaculture. one would go great in your house.
Keep it up!!
Your discovery of how man can actually benefit the earth, is the side of the coin that modern education tends to neglect.
Our ancestors instinctively knew they would be destroying their own future, if they did not at least maintain their habitat.
Our modern way of life and congregating into cities isolates us from this instinctive wisdom.
A far better way of educating the next generation would be to give each family or single person a small plot of land on which to learn to sustain themselves, and to positively connect with their neighbors. Yes, it would mean weaning people off handouts, but it's high time we realize the handout society cannot be sustained for long. Yes, it would require a complete restructuring of our society, but every once in a while, social systems have to regroup and restructure themselves.
I totally agree, and I can't think of a better education for young people with behaviour or addiction problems, or for rehabilitating people who have been in trouble with the law.
I wish I could meet someone to do t his with
Greenhouse is the way to go probably the best greenhouse or domes on the market period are the greenhousekits (dot com) geodesic domes with solawrap because they use the german solawrap keder covering and top quality frame. This premiere covering diffuses light and plants gro much better in this spectrum of light, and they burn less etc, big problems with greenhouses. meanwhile light transmission is 83% percent which is very good. The film has been used in european domes for 30 years and still functional. It regulates temperatures better, and has the stongest connection channel of any poly material on the market. It is not carbonate, but ethylene which is recyclable. Best way to heat a dome? use the rocket mass stove. It is easy to build, and use a small fraction of the wood in a conventional wood stove. it extracts every bit of heat from a log and STORES IT to release in your dome up to 48 hours. go to ernie and erica rocket mass stove site to learn about those. piling 2 foot tall dirt mounds over logs and sticks around thee edges (called HUGELCULTURE) means maximum light warms your beds vs using ply raised beds which hogs space and light and wears out, and the wood sponge in permaculture means watering is drammatically reduced. No building needed. When you elect to change out the dirt, you then simply shovel it out vs the problems with emptying containers. With hugelculture, your soil becomes more fertile with the passing of every year climaxing at 5 years vs having to rebuild the soil each year and you increase sq. footage for a given space and exploit airspace. dirt can be piled center of the dome in a tall pyramid shape.
well done and to the below comment .. well said
Epic.
I wonder if paw paw trees would hold there!
Why Paw Paw Trees?
They have awesome fruit!
If I'm getting you right, no, paw paw's wouldn't. They need a very long warm season, in fact no winter is best. I've tried in zone 8b and every fall the poor trees stump, below 70 is just too cold for them.
Golighty678, it is possible that your climate is too warm. I found on a random website that that Pawpaw's do best with 400 hours of winter chill, otherwise they might not bear fruit. You are at the southern edge of their zone range, so if you had a mild winter, that might make for too WARM of conditions. Also, they like humidity, so if you are in an area with dry air, that would be hard on the trees as well.
They fruit from Fl to sourthen canada.
It was thought that Chilean nitrate was the most nutrient dense naturally occurring substance, but it turns out it is actually Ben Falks excrement! It has recently been found that his urine also cures several types of cancer! Thank you Ben Falk with out your high minded work where would the food movement be today!
Water comes from the sky!!!
see www.compostpower.org and www.agrilabtech.com for more info about how to make compost heat recovery work. It works!
thermal-siphon heating
Nice life
woah
Why not design a better green house and make a living hydroponic green house. With all new heating and cooling systems? Like solar vacuum tubes to power TEG's to run fans and evaporation absorption refrigeration for cooling? Novartis
Jesuits are worse then Jewish penny pinchers when it comes to money.
Use alien stinger for critical thinking its one big hook up.
I am not has intelligent has you are and I am brain damaged. I am disabled.
@@jimmartin7899 Lol...
LOL Liberal rediscovers his rural roots; and makes it sound like landing on the moon, wood in the stove is a very unsustainable fuel source by the way. This man went to collage to learn what I Grandparents did every day? Amazing...
right.. because wood doesn't grow back.
It doesn't grow back equal to the rate of consumption; if it was in wide spread use, and if your goal is making the world better for everyone... Plus the space it would take to produce such a mass of wood for wide spread use, and the impact on the land from that kind of large scale operation. Is the green movement not about solutions everyone can use? I really like the compost heap, that's awesome.
wildernessshouter
with the ice storm that we had this winter cleaning up and using the natural fell wood is a good thing,you are right though
What are your solutions?
+Ben Falk I now have land to build on; and I know I want to raise rabbits and direct their massive amounts of waste into a bio digestor. which should give me a little methane gas, I hope its enough to maintain a small natural gas powered fridge. The home will be totally in the ground, to use the insulating properties of earth, and I"m thinking about running pex under the floor and use this guys composter idea to bring in some ambient heat. I want to do wind/solar/ and hydro to charge a battery power system, I have a creek flowing down hill. I probably will have a rocket stove in the green house; but like I said wood is not an answer for the masses, it would deforest the entire country rapidly. I don't know Ben; I really like hydrogen gas and natural gas, but hydrogen has got to be the best. If you can run a car off of it, you could run a house on it, it has 0 pollutions and can be made from water. When used it turns back into water. You might need to have other things pitching in to run the house, but for your big dogs like water heater, furnace, fridge, and cloths dryer a hydrogen generator of some kind could probably maintain these. I know about every car company has a hydrogen prototype. Hell Honda or Hyundai can't remember which brought one to market in the US, but it dissapeared from the TV. The hydrogen could even be produced with a solar farm/ wind farm. All you need is a water source and power source.
Help Ukrainians heat their villages now
sd
No.
This is great stuff. Thank you. The only sore point remains the plastic tubing, which is a concession, let's face it, to the petroleum and petro-plastics interests (at this point in time, in any case). Because their plastics degrade (especially at high heat!) they must be replaced often to avoid toxic contamination of the soil, not to mention breakeage, and hence must be purchased often, and it's still the same corporations that are offering them for sale, kemosabe. So how do permaculturalists, who say that they want to 'do no harm' to the earth and its myriad inhabitants, go about inventing things which seem to dove-tail so well with the petro-monopoly's toxic creations? At the very least, when you are making these videos, you should explain that other forms of non-toxic plant-based plastics are and have been available for use, from hemp and other substances as well, but because of the petroleum monopoly ('Standard Oil') we have not seen them much at all on the marketplace. Hemp as plastic (and as medicine, paper and so many other things) was browbeaten out of contention, by Hearst, Asslicker, Rockfellers, DuPont, Dickweed et al.. and all for personal gain: petroleum and racist bigotry going hand-in-hand down the wedding aisle of destiny..... We could be driving cars which run on hemp oil and are made of hemp plastic (and rubber and steel) but for certain people's actions against our common good.
The best is the enemy of the good. I wanted to heat a greenhouse using a compost pile. I could get a plastic that would not pump as many chemicals into the water and stand up to the heat for about $80. The same amount of metal pipe was going to run me a bit more than ten times that amount, and be too heavy for me to use on my own.
Sometimes you need to make compromises to make progress. It's better to use some plastic tubing for a decade than thousands of litres of heating oil. It's better to make strides and progress then to prematurely optimize our solutions.
I get it. The poor love plastic cause it's all we car afford. :) It's the perfect product for crapitalism! :) But I wouldn't call the petro-plastic industry 'the good'. Read up on Standard Oil, Dupont and what they did to derail cannabis hemp. It'll make you cry if you don't know already. Peace!