Soil & Bee Hero Stories: Emily
This is Emily Fulstone, she’s a badass lady rancher in Smith, Nevada. We met at the @acresusa soil symposium and became instapals. I spent a couple of days with her last September, a) because she’s awesome and we like to hangout, b) because I have so much to learn about farming and ranching culture before I can come up with a grand scheme to utilize every inch of pasture for bee habitat 😉 and c) because Emily is strong, brave, and brilliant and making some fascinating changes on her family’s ranch including VERMACULTURE!! aka - super serious worm bins. 🐛🦋🐝🐞🐍🕸🐄👩🏼🌾 ⠀
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One of the most exciting pieces of forward momentum on Fulstone Ranch is Emily’s vermaculture system. ⠀
This is how it works: ⠀
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1. A farmer neighbor brings Emily all of their damaged produce and she puts it in this huge, worm filled bin. ⠀
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2. The worms decompose to their heart’s content. (in case you were wondering, it smells really nice in here) 🍇🍒🍎🍊🐛💨 ⠀
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3. Worm castings (aka beneficial biology bombs) fall through the bottom of the bin on the the floor. ⠀
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4. Emily and her team scrape it up, and put the castings into this bio digester with water. Then they turn on the bubbles, which aerates the solution, and takes the mircrobes from 10,000 cfu (colony forming units) of bacteria to 5 million cfu!!! aka aerobic party time 🥳 aka LIFE!! ⠀
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5. Then these armies of life are injected into the irrigation pivots, or directly sprayed onto their alfalfa crops. ⠀
6. AND THEN 👉🏼 beneficial insects, microbes, etc. thrive and keep pests and disease in-check. ⠀
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7. The result 👉🏼 zero need for pesticides, which improves the bottom line for Fulstone Ranch, and decreases toxicity on the landscape (a big win for bees, who pollinate the alfalfa... and frogs, and toads, and snakes, and butterflies, and cows, and farm workers, and you, and me....). ⠀
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The moral of the story is that we can create stronger, better working lands when we base our systems on creating life, not death (relying on practices ending in “cide” 💀). ⠀
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And yes, this is scalable. Fulstone Ranch boasts 5,000 acres 😉 ⠀
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Follow @efulstone on Instagram to be in the inner circle of her badass life. ⠀
