http://www.amazon.ca/New-Organic-Grower-Techniques-Gardener/dp/093003175X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329023950&sr=1-1
and it's just awesome. it covers polytunnels and other season extension techniques. I've been told this guy:
http://www.amazon.ca/Four-Season-Harvest-Organic-Vegetables/dp/1890132276/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_c
is basically the same thing with some more emphasis on season-extension. I'd definitely spend some time with Coleman's stuff, the guy literally wrote the book on a lot of these techniques. The New Organic Grower has basically a complete system for growing veg basically year-round in a Maine-type climate, and will get you versed in cover crops and how to optimise crop rotations, organic soil amendments, all that good stuff.
10x10 is a pretty good size, but it's small enough that you may want to look into some space-conservation techniques like companion planting that will let you get a lot of species into small beds. Depending on how good the soil is on your allotment you may want to check out raised bed techniques as well.
as far as permaculture stuff goes, my major problems with it stem from (a) some fairly bizarre notions about ecosystem productivity that crop up fairly frequently in the literature and (b) a lot of promotion of unproven techniques that probably no one's ever really tried.
(a) manifests itself in the whole notion of "food forests" or "forest gardening". A lot of the more problematic permies say stuff like "no one needs to fertilise the forest", which is true but has nothing to do with the suitability of forests for producing crops. no one needs to fertilise forests because no one extracts enormous quantities of nutrients from their soil. the productivity of some forests is pretty high, and if you can grow on an alfisol with a thick A horizon you're probably going to get good results, but that alone isn't a reason to prefer a forest-type ecology to a plain-type ecology (a lot of forests have really thin A horizons with poorly developed soils and are really shitty for growing on, for instance).
i actually think this notion cropped up from Fukuoka's farm. my understanding is that some of the forest-gardening folks were strongly influenced by Fukuoka's satsuma orange orchard, where he pretty much just intercropped a bunch of root crops and herbs with his orange trees. that was described by some of the western vagrants who ended up working on his farm as a "food forest", but it's really an intercropped orchard. that's just fine, it's just not the be-all end-all of small scale ag, and some people get really religious about the canopy-level schemas and shit which may or may not be useful in different contexts. ymmv depending on the text you're reading.
anyway the lack of a solid theoretical background among a lot of the authors results in a lot of magical thinking and you get a lot of bourgie western transition-town types who are under the impression that the status quo can be maintained if we just have food forests or whatever. like you get people swearing that they can build soil structure and add nutrients to the soil w/o amendments and all while removing nutrients in the form of food and flushing their shit out to sea (even among permies shit-composting is still pretty rare, which needs to change asap). a little common sense and the principle of conservation of mass will go a long way to sorting the wheat from the chaff here.
(b) happens mostly, I think, because permaculture has built up a lot of buzz around it and now you have "permaculture teachers" with zero theoretical or practical background running around in cities teaching permaculture techniques that are at best unproven. so you end up with shit like, as i mentioned, chicken greenhouses, which might be useful to illustrate concepts like using waste heat and incidental fertilising from animals or whatever but are probably not actually things you want to build
All that said, the permaculture movement is still extremely important right now because they're obsessive about closing loops, minimising inputs etc and there's a lot to be learned from them. i can't comment on the books you're reading as I'm not familiar with Holzer, but glancing at his wiki page it looks like he's doing high-altitude orchard stuff. if you're in a substantially different ecological niche, the techniques in there might not be super useful. local growers are always going to be a more valuable source of information about specific techniques than books, so it's great you've got help from some local permies.
as a final note, if you're just getting started i'd probably stay away from exotics for the first season, it'll be a lot of hassle and if you're still getting the tunnel set up and figuring out what's going on with the soil it could be more a pain in the ass than it's worth
thanks! i read some his articles + downloaded 'four season harvest'; he seems a smart guy & a fantastic resource
"10x10 is a pretty good size, but it's small enough that you may want to look into some space-conservation techniques like companion planting that will let you get a lot of species into small beds. Depending on how good the soil is on your allotment you may want to check out raised bed techniques as well. "
yeah companion planting & raised beds is my plan atm...
raised beds filled with wood provide years of healthy growing, i read recently; theres a wood i pass thru on the way to the allotment so ill have a source to try that
"All that said, the permaculture movement is still extremely important right now because they're obsessive about closing loops, minimising inputs etc and there's a lot to be learned from them. i can't comment on the books you're reading as I'm not familiar with Holzer, but glancing at his wiki page it looks like he's doing high-altitude orchard stuff. if you're in a substantially different ecological niche, the techniques in there might not be super useful. local growers are always going to be a more valuable source of information about specific techniques than books, so it's great you've got help from some local permies."
ya i met a few of em last night; they were complaining about how underdeveloped GIY & permaculture thinking is here...
theyre cool people tho and im really lucky that i live close to some of em and can get not just verbal advice but also on site help
"as a final note, if you're just getting started i'd probably stay away from exotics for the first season, it'll be a lot of hassle and if you're still getting the tunnel set up and figuring out what's going on with the soil it could be more a pain in the ass than it's worth"
yeah youre right; maybe section off a lil area for experimental growing tho?
but definately overall just get a feel for the basics without it becoming a massive timesink would be great
do you grow anything yourself atm?
xipe posted:
raised beds filled with wood provide years of healthy growing, i read recently; theres a wood i pass thru on the way to the allotment so ill have a source to try that
you mean like chipped wood or something? i'm not familiar with that technique, most of the raised beds i've seen have been solely soil/compost mixtures. i don't see any reason why you couldn't use wood to bulk up the beds, although i'm not sure if one species might be better than another. probably best to avoid oily or dense woods, i reckon.
ya i met a few of em last night; they were complaining about how underdeveloped GIY & permaculture thinking is here...
theyre cool people tho and im really lucky that i live close to some of em and can get not just verbal advice but also on site help
that sounds ideal. it's good that they're thinking along the lines of developing local methods and permaculture techniques.
yeah youre right; maybe section off a lil area for experimental growing tho?
that's probably fine, you just don't want to get discouraged because your pepper vines are dying or whatever.
do you grow anything yourself atm?
not much at the moment. i live in a concrete apartment lo-rise built in 1914 so i don't even have a balcony (and the super won't let me on the roof lol). i've been growing with the campus ag folks at the university im at right now, which has been sort of hit and miss, having a bunch of people working on the same gardens piecemeal in their spare time doesn't always work. i put in a bunch of leafy green successions this fall on a rooftop garden that was supposed to be getting a hoop house but i don't know if the hoop house ever went in, and i don't have access to the roof w/o the program coordinator, etc etc. i was also supposed to be working on refurbishing an old greenhouse but that project got taken over from some idiots from the environmental science department who think "zero nutrient food systems" are an actual thing and not a violation of conservation of mass (the system will provide!! it has fish!!). it's pretty frustrating, but i'm leaving the city next year and will have lots of growing to do, so thats something to look forward to, anyway.
shennong posted:
jesus christ, im sorry for all those words. just grab one of the coleman books from your library lol
i almost downvoted this post b/c no apology should ever be made for shennongwords. ultimately i was not able to pull the trigger but if you value your rep you should consider yourself warned!!!!
stegosaurus posted:
because of this thread I nerded out on my cambodian roommate tonight when she started talking about cassava dishes.
what kinda dishes?
shennong posted:stegosaurus posted:
because of this thread I nerded out on my cambodian roommate tonight when she started talking about cassava dishes.what kinda dishes?
it was fried tilapia and fried cassava and some other stuff. it wasnt very exciting
shennong posted:
you mean like chipped wood or something? i'm not familiar with that technique, most of the raised beds i've seen have been solely soil/compost mixtures. i don't see any reason why you couldn't use wood to bulk up the beds, although i'm not sure if one species might be better than another. probably best to avoid oily or dense woods, i reckon.
somethign like this: http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/
once again, really gratefl for the general & specific info uve given here; im just listening to people like u and doing what they say so i dont think i can respond too much!
ps - in other news youre interested in timebanks etc? a guy i know is doing some software for it; the pilot'll be next month, will i let you know when its available?
stegosaurus posted:shennong posted:stegosaurus posted:
because of this thread I nerded out on my cambodian roommate tonight when she started talking about cassava dishes.what kinda dishes?
it was fried tilapia and fried cassava and some other stuff. it wasnt very exciting
that sounds about right. SEA has been on the forefront of urban aquaculture as well, the Vietnamese have been doing some crazy shit with using sewage to feed tilapia ponds. tilapia's sort of boring i guess but it's easy as hell to culture. if there were an "escape aquaculture" it would be tilapia, catfish, stuff like that
xipe posted:
somethign like this: http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/
once again, really gratefl for the general & specific info uve given here; im just listening to people like u and doing what they say so i dont think i can respond too much!
ps - in other news youre interested in timebanks etc? a guy i know is doing some software for it; the pilot'll be next month, will i let you know when its available?
that's cool, let us know how your beds turn out! also the timebanking stuff, yeah, let me know about that as well. a friend in the states is running one right now, using the timebanking USA software (proprietary). apparently TBUSA subcontracted some idiots to write the new version of the software, they botched it badly, blamed the users, and then decided to charge for fixes, so there are a lot of time banks looking for open-source/non-proprietary stuff.
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying: 'There will be periods of turbulence in which the one who sits will be better than the one who stands, the one who stands better than the one who walks, and the one who walks better than the one who runs. He who contemplates them will be drawn by them, so he who finds a refuge or shelter should go to it.'
Abu Sa'id reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying: 'A Muslim's best property will soon be his sheep which he will take to the tops of the mountains and the places where the rain falls, fleeing with his Deen from civil strife.' Bukhari transmitted this.
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, as saying: 'When time is contracted, knowledge will be withdrawn, civil war will appear, meanness will be cast into people's hearts, and harj will be prevalent.' He was asked the meaning of harj and said it meant rioting.
stegosaurus posted:
because of this thread I nerded out on my cambodian roommate tonight when she started talking about cassava dishes.
please stop oppressing the poor woman
xipe posted:
ya i met a few of em last night; they were complaining about how underdeveloped GIY & permaculture thinking is here...
btw xipe I forgot to mention, if you want to get a good grounding in the sort of classic texts of permaculture, a really good place to start is FH King's Farmers of Forty Centuries, he talks about how agricultural/waste systems were integrated in East Asia. Albert Howard's An Agricultural Testament may be of interest as well, his experience is mostly in India, and he has some pretty trenchant criticism of the way agricultural science was practiced that are still relevant today:
Howard posted:
The insistence on quantitative results is another of the weaknesses in scientific investigation. It has profoundly influenced agricultural research. In chemistry and physics, for example, accurate records are everything: these subjects lend themselves to exact determinations which can be recorded numerically. But the growing of crops and the raising of live stock belong to biology, a domain where everything is alive and which is poles asunder from chemistry and physics. Many of the things that matter on the land, such as soil fertility, tilth, soil management, the quality of produce, the bloom and health of animals, the general management of live stock, the working relations between master and man, the esprit de corps of the farm as a whole, cannot be weighed or measured. Nevertheless their presence is everything: their absence spells failure. Why, therefore, in a subject like this should there be so much insistence on weights and measures and on the statistical interpretation of figures? Are not the means (quantitative results and statistical methods) and the subject investigated (the growth of a crop or the raising of live stock) entirely out of relation the one to the other? Can the operations of agriculture ever be carried out, even on an experiment station, so that the investigator is sure that everything possible has been done for the crop and for the animal? Can a mutually interacting system, like the crop and the soil, for example, dependent on a multitude of factors which are changing from week to week and year to year, ever be made to yield quantitative results which correspond with the precision of mathematics?
The invasion of economics into agricultural research naturally followed the use of quantitative methods. It was an imitation of the successful application of costings to the operations of the factory and the general store. In a factory making nails, for example, it is possible, indeed eminently desirable, to compare the cost of the raw material and the operations of manufacture, including labour, fuel, overhead expenses, wear and tear and so forth, with the output, and to ascertain how and where savings in cost and general speeding up can be achieved. Raw materials, output, and stocks can all be accurately determined. In a very short time a manufacturer with brains and energy will know the cost of every step in the process to the fourth place of decimals. This is because everything is computable. In a similar manner the operations of the general store can be reduced to figures and squared paper. The men in the counting-house can follow the least falling-off in efficiency and in the winning of profit. How very natural it was some thirty years ago to apply these principles to Mother earth and to the farmer! The result has been a deluge of costings and of agricultural economics largely based on guesswork, because the machinery of the soil will always remain a closed book. Mother earth does not keep a pass-book. Almost every operation in agriculture adds or subtracts an unknown quantity to or from the capital of the soil -- fertility -- another unknown quantity. Any experimental result such as a crop is almost certain to be partly due to the transfer of some of the soil's capital to the profit and loss account of the farmer. The economics of such operations must therefore be based on the purest of guesswork. The results can hardly be worth the paper they are written on. The only things that matter on a farm are these: the credit of the farmer -- that is to say what other people, including his labour force and his bank manager, think of him; the total annual expenditure; the total annual income and the annual valuation -- the condition of the land and of the live and dead stock at the end of the year. If all these things are satisfactory nothing else matters. If they are not, no amount of costings will avail. Why, therefore, trouble about anything beyond these essentials?
But economics has done a much greater disservice to agriculture than the collection of useless data. Farming has come to be looked at as if it were a factory. Agriculture is regarded as a commercial enterprise; far too much emphasis has been laid on profit. But the purpose of agriculture is quite different from that of a factory. It has to provide food in order that the race may flourish and persist. The best results are obtained if the food is fresh and the soil is fertile. Quality is more important than weight of produce. Farming is therefore a vital matter for the population and ranks with the supply of drinking water, fresh air, and protection from the weather. Our water supplies do not always pay their way; the provision of green belts and open spaces does not yield a profit; our housing schemes are frequently uneconomic. Why, then, should the quality of the food on which still more depends than water, oxygen, or warmth be looked at in a different way? The people must be fed whatever happens. Why not, then, make a supreme effort to see that they are properly fed? Why neglect the very foundation-stone of our efficiency as a nation? The nation's food in the nature of things must always take the first place. The financial system, after all, is but a secondary matter. Economics therefore, in failing to insist on these elementary truths, has been guilty of a grave error of judgement.
In allowing science to be used to wring the last ounce from the soil by new varieties of crops, cheaper and more stimulating manures, deeper and more thorough cultivating machines, hens which lay themselves to death, and cows which perish in an ocean of milk, something more than a want of judgement on the part of the organization is involved. Agricultural research has been misused to make the farmer, not a better producer of food, but a more expert bandit. He has been taught how to profiteer at the expense of posterity -- how to transfer capital in the shape of soil fertility and the reserves of his live stock to his profit and loss account. In business such practices end in bankruptcy; in agricultural research they lead to temporary success. All goes well as long as the soil can be made to yield a crop. But soil fertility does not last for ever; eventually the land is worn out; real farming dies.
Edited by shennong ()
pangobear posted:
i dont post or anything but i just wanted to say thanks for shennong for making this thread it was so great and interesting !!
you're welcome but you should post so i have more stuff to click + or - on like a colobus monkey on a cocaine drip
so if the goal is to move people towards this way of farming then how are we going to pry them away from the idea that if they work hard enough they can be rich and anything they want, or deal with the fact that they have been totally socialized by now and they exist in a world where going to do hard labor for any of the reasons we think they should seems just utterly absurd
a lot of them might like the idea of it, they might even come to understand the reasons for it but farming is hard work and how would we communicate this idea to them in a way where they could possibly see that this is not only a good idea but something that deep down they would want to work within and be a part of. i can see populating the initial movement with people who are far enough removed from the american way of thinking as well as disenfranchised farmers and their children but at a certain point you come to the problem of how goddamn alluring it is to sell your crop and have stuff once you become successful enough.
the obvious answer is wait for dystopia but i dont feel like thats an acceptable answer. i could be operating on some wrong assumptions though as i dont have a super in depth understanding of all this stuff.
shennong posted:discipline posted:
Isn't cassava filled with cyanide tho??!?cyanogenic glycosides, yeah. you have to prepare it properly to eat it (like fava beans, sorghum etc), it often times just gets ground up as flour.
what's going to happen to the people who have an amalgam of food ailments?
like i was reading some gluten-free forum and there are people that have allergies to every single type of food derived from a crop, and most other processed foods containing preservatives. the only types of food these people could eat were essentially meats, though that doesn't look like a possibility in the distance future with rising input costs to manufacturing of agriculture.
i just want to know if death by gluten will be a reality - because i really hope so.
AmericanNazbro posted:
Well, there are Gluten-free alternatives to lots of crops, stuff like Amaranth ( which actually is more nutritious compared to most other crops) that right now only have a small share on The Market. Amaranth especially used to be one of the prime suppliers of food in the ancient American civilizations except the stinky spanish didn't like seeing it used in rituals sooo they put a death sentence on growing it and caused a bunch of famines and thats why it's somewhat unknown to this day :F
I can't talk for other countries but in Germany, the country of bread, at least, gluten-free alternatives have become a 'bigger thing' lately
shennong posted:
thats a really hard question but its an important one and i need to think about it some
i feel like this is really what any constructed alternative to the status quo rests upon and its probably the hardest question we as people who stand in opposition to it face, its been a more or less universal problem since the beginning of class stratification
AmericanNazbro posted:shennong posted:discipline posted:
Isn't cassava filled with cyanide tho??!?cyanogenic glycosides, yeah. you have to prepare it properly to eat it (like fava beans, sorghum etc), it often times just gets ground up as flour.
what's going to happen to the people who have an amalgam of food ailments?
like i was reading some gluten-free forum and there are people that have allergies to every single type of food derived from a crop, and most other processed foods containing preservatives. the only types of food these people could eat were essentially meats, though that doesn't look like a possibility in the distance future with rising input costs to manufacturing of agriculture.
i just want to know if death by gluten will be a reality - because i really hope so.
yeah, that could be a problem if we revert to primarily grain-based ag in state space and you have a bunch of kids with gluten allergies or something. i don't know that the etiology of food allergies is well understood but i think the conditions that result in everyone being allergic to everything are probably going to pass over the next couple of generations, assuming something like the hygiene hypothesis or the idea that antigens on fine carbonaceous particulates from combustion engines + industry cause allergies or whatever is true. i kind of suspect that a lot of these people are going to find out that their food allergies are actually copeable, tho
noavbazzer posted:shennong posted:
thats a really hard question but its an important one and i need to think about it somei feel like this is really what any constructed alternative to the status quo rests upon and its probably the hardest question we as people who stand in opposition to it face, its been a more or less universal problem since the beginning of class stratification
yeah, i think you're right. i don't think i have any good answers for this at all but maybe i can just jot down some general notes and maybe talk about my personal-local plans a bit to give an idea of how i'm trying to apply this to my own life, and we can shoot the shit about that a bit
-as far as class goes, i think we can expect the urban upper class and most of the bourgeois to cling to what they have now. providing some kind of "escape" outlet for the urban working class, lumpens, and declasse bourgies so they can avoid becoming debt serfs (which will happen long before any kind of dystopia/collapse scenario sets in) seems at least plausible to me. i don't have a clear idea of what's going to happen with the rural poor and rural rich, but for this to succeed at all the rural poor need to be on board with whatever's happening and not be threatened by it (potentially a problem if you're talking about declasse bourgies buying up farmland or whatever)
-i think probably the biggest problem to getting people involved in their subsistence routines again is that there's close to no opportunities for most of the non-rich to do so on their own terms. in other words short of being a seasonal worker or whatever, it's really fucking difficult for most people to get any kind of land or equipment or other capital w/o going into massive debt. if we don't get some kind of land reform program going, all of this gets much harder, and even if we do somehow transition to legitimately sustainable ag we're probably looking at the wealthy accruing most of the benefits again anyway
-long term unemployed are going to be (already are in some places) a big pool of people who are willing to consider just about anything to put food on the table, and a lot of them have important skills for this kind of transition (machinists, construction workers, healthcare workers, scientists, etc)
-the Cuban model is again something to look at in terms of getting people's minds wrapped around this stuff. the Cubans were massively successful at making agronomy & growing a highly prestigious, respected vocation that is seen as skilled and necessary. i think even stuff like their slogans can teach us something about how to communicate this kind of message, this is my favourite one:
Produce while learning, teach while producing, learn while teaching.
-building some kind of culture that's resilient to cooption is important. i don't know what this might involve, but elements of monasticism (things have to be framed in teleogical/religious/moral terms i think), voluntary poverty, disdain for profligates etc, i dunno
-the economic aspects of the early part of the transition really need to be carefully considered. it's got to be largely independent of the corporate cash economy, period. this is part of why i'm interested in time banking etc. a good chunk of the reason why farming is perceived as such hard work is because we have a few people feeding like 98% of the rest of us. if we have some way to provide the basics for a group of people who are ok with not having all the modern conveniences, they don't need to be working 12 hour days for everyone to get fed. 5 or 10 acres of veg is a full time job for several people, but if it's done well it can feed a hundred or more. if those hundred people are all chipping in with different things, the workload gets a lot lighter, and if they can spend the rest of their time working on other things the community needs, they can specialise in things they're interested in, whether its repairing tractors or building houses or weaving or experimenting w/ crops or tending sheep or breeding dogs or growing mushrooms or whatever. total self-sufficiency isn't possible, you'd need some people working outside, but if you can cut out most of the cashflow requirements and reduce the "shitty job"/hard labour workload to a few hours a day, i think it becomes a much more attractive proposition. the other things to keep in mind w/ respect to this are that we're going to have a MASSIVE reserve of labour as mentioned above, and that agronomy has advanced a quite a bit in the last hundred years, so productivity is definitely improved since the bad ol days
-ultimately i don't think we're going to get a lot of people investing their lives in this kind of effort in the short term, but if we can get to the point where we've got enough of a movement going that it's seen as an alternative idea for arranging society, there's a good chance it's going to be picked up by more and more people as things get more and more desperate. so i think getting demonstration farms/communities going in the short term is absolutely critical. these communities also need to have a quiet sideline in developing the escape ag techniques described here so that those can be quickly promulgated if necessary
as far as my personal situation goes, i'm surrounded by intelligent, diligent, observant biologists (plant & animal) with good intuition for natural systems who have zero job prospects (as well as a number of engineers, mechanics etc who are interested in helping to one extent or another). to me this is the best possible recruiting pool for members of a demonstration-type community like i described above. my partner and i have been very lucky in that unlike most of our colleagues we're not totally debt-saddled and can plausibly get our hands on a decent-sized smallholding, so my plan is to do that and try to piece together a community that will have enough labour to feed itself and meet most of its basic requirements (ideally i would like to have a food surplus and to use this to feed the local poor and if they want invite them to the farm), enough scientific skills to develop techniques appropriate for the local area in terms of food, energy, shelter from local materials, etc, and enough sideline skills to grow/make things for sale and do things outside the community to bring in cash to cover other requirements. i have no idea it's going to work, but the worst case scenario is that i end up holed up in a house in the woods somewhere living out my mad max nightmare fantasies so i'm ok with that too
animedad posted:
have you studied any similar experiments in the US? im always fascinated by that sort of thing
not as much as i should have at this point, to be honest. one thing i'm really interested in is the back-to-the-land movement of the 60s, which was large enough to cause measurable demographic shifts in the urban-rural divide in the US.
my personal experience with that movement is mostly Americans who decamped for the area where i was born, which is a small island with very poor soil. my ancestors arrived there as peasants kicked off their (communal) land and offered (individual freehold) land in the New World. they ended up leading an absolutely miserable existence scraping potatoes out of a couple of inches of soil over rock for a generation or two before going off to work in steel mills, coal mines, post offices, etc. the Americans coming up had much the same experience, most of their farms failed completely and the ones that succeeded did so by virtue of secondary income streams (small publishing houses, B&Bs, that kind of thing).
generally speaking i think the movement actually was a partial success in that it laid the groundwork for a lot of the organic agriculture practices I've been talking about (Eliot Coleman was a back-to-the-lander, for instance), as well as the development of appropriate tech in developed-world contexts. the remnants are still scattered around mostly as old timer organic farmers. as a movement i think it petered out basically in tandem with the 60s counterculture, and particularly after the oil crises abated and capitalism seemed to be ascendant again i think the urgency went out of it.
i haven't really drawn any Big Picture movement lessons from this, but it's really obvious that siting farms that are going to be involved in this kind of activity is absolutely critical. it's possible to build up shitty soil but if you're looking at a few inches of soil on bedrock you need to move on. that leads me to believe that a lot of the sites which have good soil but short growing seasons right now which are going to get somewhat warmer should be scouted. i might do a lil' writeup on general considerations for siting growing sites, actually, since it applies to both sedentary as well as escape agriculture.
aside from the back-to-the-landers there's any number of experimental communes and anarchist enclaves that are still functioning in various places in North America, although it's not really clear to me that they offer much more in the way of example than, say, the hutterites or mennonites do