October 2024

Another trip around the sun and this time I’ve got four bottles of shoyu to show for it. 

The first one I started in September of last year. I grew the magic, fuzzy, white koji mould on cooked soybeans, fretting over it for almost fifty hours while it sat and quietly did its mould thing. The worry was pointless, it was either going to work or not; I’d carefully followed instructions to a T, not just from bookmarked fermenting bibles but also from a fellow fermenting enthusiast friend who’d meticulously documented and shared with me her adventures in a detailed excel spreadsheet.

If you’ve followed the instructions then your work is mostly done, the rest is up to the mould and whether it’s happy with the environmental conditions you’ve set up for it.  It doesn’t stop the worrying though, a first-timer has no experiential mental notes on how the finished product should look or smell. The books can certainly be helpful but certainly don’t stop the fretful speculation of how mouldy or smelly it should get. Throwing internet searches into the mix causes even more anxiety, there’s a reason why I call it the shitternet nowadays; browsing something like Reddit’s fermentation forums with its contrasting creative brilliance of ideas and its overcautious helpfulness causes me a small existential dilemma (“Mould? Throw it out, it’ll kill you!).

By the time I called it quits at 49 hours, the beans were a fuzzy, green tinge with a strong ammonia smell (It’s ruined!”, “It’s gone too long!”, “It’ll ruin your shoyu!”). So much time and effort invested already, may as well finish the process and chalk the whole thing up to a learning experience. One year later, ignored for the most part on an out-of-the-way bench in our pantry, it has finally matured into a flavour-punching pale amber liquid.  A small dropper bottle of this shoyu will accompany us on our occasional visits to the Japanese restaurant in town.

Shoyu (Soy Sauce). The leftover dregs I’ve dried and powderised and we keep it next to the stovetop to add to dishes, it’s basically MSG.

For the last five years, more or less, I’ve been a catastrophist.

I’ve fallen down rabbit holes of terrible news, anxiety-inducing internet forums and worrying articles. I allowed my emotions, actions and life to be shaped and moulded according to what I agreed and disagreed with. I’ve let it influence my decision making, my motivations, long term life plans, financial plans, and it’s occupied far too much of my daily and nightly thinking.  All while trying to not talk about it.

I got a shitload done though. I look back at the last 5 years now as some sort of manic hive of activity that I no longer can subscribe to.  I just don’t have the energy anymore and have this year, finally managed to calm the fuck down.

I’d wake up most mornings highly thankful to see another sunrise.  

I’ve spent a lot of the last year or so questioning why I had been behaving this way and where my “beliefs” had come from. How much of what I believe is really me being a critical-thinking human and how much of it is my emotions and anxieties being pushed, pulled and played upon by the media.

Since leaving my childhood home I’ve never owned a TV. In another time, before being connected to the internet was a “normal” thing, I was always very sensitive and aware of media influence, news and advertising on my emotions and attention. 

Fast forward three decades and who needs a TV? I’ve got the world inside a device that fits in my hand. It’s insidiously crept further and further into my life; ideas of privacy and peace of mind given up long ago in return for instant dopamine hits and keeping up to date with all the news I have no need for. Much like the advertising industry helping you to shop for shit you don’t need.

So a big thing for me this past year has been attempting to return my cell phone to a tool that I use, rather than the other way round. Learning again how to resist being a tool for the attention economy.  Getting back some piece of mind and quietness, getting that attention span limbered up again.  It was getting so bad for me that I was walking into a room and forgetting why I was there. I’ll talk about this later, as you’re probably not here to listen to me rant on about phones, you’re probably here for farm stuff. But it’s all very much related and I’ll get back to it.

It’s been another year of things to be very thankful for.

If you’ve read my previous updates you’ll know I’ve worried about the dwindling population of fireflies on our property. But then this happened in early December. It was like all my Christmases had come at once.

Fireflies. Not as easy as I’d imagined to photograph.

This was on a Banaba tree, a tree native to the Philippines that produces beautiful purple blossoms during the summer.  I can only hope it happens again this Christmas, but you know, it’s been a different year, an El Nino, with a really long hot, dry spell. Surprisingly though our insect numbers were fantastic this year, butterflies aplenty and the dragonflies were out again in force. Moths scattering away as I walked through the early morning damp grasses.

We also had a bit of a monkey misadventure too. 

We’ve always known they’re about but rarely had sightings of them. The two dogs, misfits that they are, run off pretty much everyday down the river to cool off and do god knows what (by the smell of them it sometimes includes rolling around in dead stuff). One afternoon I could hear them barking near the house in the wild area, in the sort of tone in which they’re trying to get my attention. I know this dog voice well, it usually means they’ve chased a rat into a tree and want me to shake it out. When I wander over, the dogs are both looking really guilty and slink away. My heart sinks as I realise; shit they’ve killed a baby monkey.

Before I can get too angry at the dogs, the baby monkey opens its eyes right up wide and for a few minutes you can see its brain slowly piecing together the fact that it’s no longer clutching its mother’s back and no longer safe up in the trees.  I call Monica to come over and by the time she arrives the monkey has completely regained its senses. In an instant, before Monica can even assess the situation she’s been invited into, baby monkey jumps onto Monica’s leg and holds on for dear life. Of course Monica screams like crazy in surprise and naturally shakes the fuck out of her leg to get it off. The agility of these creatures is incredible; in another instant it had pounced from her leg onto the trunk of the closest tree and scrambled up it in less than a heartbeat.¹

Finally we could identify the language the monkeys used. We’d been hearing it for years but when it’s mixed in with all the bird calls and cicada chirps we’d just assumed it was another bird. For the next hour or so we could hear what was probably Mama monkey and the rest of the troop calling to her baby who was restlessly pacing about in the branches of the trees near the house. The cliff edge, which borders the north side of the land, is a steep slope down to the Malitlit river and so has luckily mostly remained an unmanaged, wild area filled with large trees and vines. It’s only about fifty metres from the house but it took a few hours for baby to get the confidence to start swinging over there via the wild tree branches that span the distance.

The dogs continue to go on their daily adventures down the river and for a while I was concerned whether they’d keep the monkeys away. A few times I’ve headed to the cliff area when I’ve heard the dogs barking and been able to observe the monkeys slowly swinging out of sight only when I arrived. So it seems they’re pretty used to the dogs that are plentiful in our area and more concerned by humans. Understandably so.

I don’t know how anyone that has an encounter like this can come away unmoved and with a deep sense of responsibility of looking after what’s left of their homeland. 

We had family come and stay for much of December, my folks and my sister and her family. This had originally been planned for about four years ago but the pandemic nixed those plans and funnily enough it also reared its nasty head during this occasion, each of us succumbing to it one by one over the weeks.  It had been six years since I’ve last seen everyone and so it was a lovely catch up filled with lots of board game playing, lots of awesome food and trips down to the river.

The farm was its usual palette while the family were here,

a bright green beautiful mess, but as soon as they left, the El Nino dry season hit with four months of almost no rain.

Now I know four months without rain is nothing for a lot of folks but for my extremely limited tropical farming experience it was quite a head spin.

All the forage trees I’d planted over the last couple of years had always seemed like a wasted effort; the cow and sheep had never shown an inkling of interest in. They now became prime eating as all our grass disappeared. Every morning the three of them would also search out all the nutritious seed pods fallen overnight from our largest akaysa trees. My mulberry trees were also a favourite target and I’ve had to fence off a bunch of them just for us humans to get a chance to enjoy. 

I now wish I’d taken more photos of the state of the place. It was bizarre to see so much brown. I think I may have been in a little bit of a mental state; the heat definitely dumbs you down a lot. But through all of these dry, hot days, I never felt the need to water anything.  In the early years, after three weeks of dry I’d get the hose out and give the young trees a drink (and many would still perish, regardless) but by now our place seems a bit more tolerant. This time, I think after about 10 weeks of hot, dry days I pulled the hose out and gave everything a drink because I felt a little sorry for them, but they certainly didn’t look needy for it.²

I was also trying to get rid of, or at least draw down on our stored rainwater.  As I’ve mentioned before I am a big fan of using rain water. The heat dynamics of the planet depend more on water than CO2, there’s something that I can believe in.

But when I designed our rainwater cistern before we moved here, I had more money than sense and zero knowledge on how much water a farm of our size might use. Originally I had big dreams of starting a small market garden and so expected a lot of water use, however certain events tempered my expectations and well, here we are, with a shitload of stored rainwater and not as much use for it as originally intended. Rather than pumps, pipes and sprinkler systems I chose mulch, constant ground cover and big trees. So even less need for the water. Three months into the summer season and my tank was still 80% full.

So I need ways to distribute the water around the property and hydrate as much of the land as possible. This was inspired by the work of Stephen Boniwell who uses bunyip pumps to hydrate sloped land.

The first pond I built was just to capture the overflow from the rainwater cistern, and as the tank is nearly full for most of the year, this overflow pond has water for most of the year.  This summer I also dug more of it out, it’s probably double the size now, maybe almost 20 cubic metres, large enough that the dogs need to tread water to get across it. 

So this summer, with not much else to do except to avoid as much of the heat as possible, I dug a new pond.  It took me all of four years to pick a spot, it was an area that always seemed quite stagnant and damp during the wet season, all the trees I planted were stunted in growth and lacked any vigour.

The birth of a pond. The bottom photo is after Typhoon Kristine took a swipe at us.

Every morning at dawn I’d dig about 10 wheelbarrow loads, each load being walked upland through the food forest and dumped along the driveway; the highest spot on the property (later I planted pumpkins, ginger and gabi in it). Ten wheelbarrow loads only because from experience I know that any more and I risk doing my back in and by that stage I’m also so wet with sweat that it makes everything more difficult.

The dogs sometimes helped and sometimes just lay on the cool damp freshly dug soil. There’s something about holes in the ground, if you’re a fan of Murakami you’ll know what I mean.

Someone asked me whether the pond was hand dug.  Fuck no, I used a shovel. My next door neighbour offered me the use of his front end loader (as well as any other help I should ever need, which I’ve always thanked him profusely for and politely declined. I’m terrible at asking for help.) but I would have had to remove a lot of established trees to get it in there, and I think things would have moved far too quickly for my way of working/thinking/assessing.

By the time I got finished it wasn’t long until the dry season broke with the biggest rains we’ve had so far. The equivalent of 5 months of rain dumped over two days (typhoon Aghon with almost 32cm)

These ponds are not sealed in any way, they’re leaky. But they’re slow enough leaking such that they’ll hold plenty of water for about 9 months of the year with regular downpours filling them up. However, since the whole idea was to utilise more of my stored rainwater, I top them up from the cistern every week.  The caveat for all this though, is if I wasn’t on solar panels, the cost of doing all this pumping would be ridiculous.

The new pond seems to have a good effect on the surrounding area. During last year’s wet season we cleared an area of about 300m² downslope from where the pond was going to be dug. We named it the “Wasteland” because it now looked like one and at the time the girls were enamoured by Colin Meloy’s “Wildwood” books.  Like I mentioned, this area had seen really poor tree health; anything I planted really struggled to develop. The large trees surrounding the area; mostly opportunistic akasya trees (Samanea saman), were heavily pruned to let light in and all the branches and leaves were laid out on contour in the wasteland. We planted a variety of Philippine native trees (shout out to the fantastic TreeBu nursery, here in Lipa) and planted them in the windrows.

After a year, including what should have been a hellish four month summer for new saplings, I have a 95% survival rate for these trees, something I’ve never come close to. They only got one drink during the four-month dry and some now, are close to 3 times my height.  I’d say a big part of this success was the health of the saplings when I bought them, most of them were well developed already but not root bound, so they got off to a very good start. Buy good seedlings, people!  Of course the best is to plant from seed in place but I’ve had terrible success at that (too lazy to mark locations, animals grazing on them, cut them down with the scythe like the tree version of a grim reaper, etc).

Speaking of mulch; on the wishlist of most people doing these sorts of agroforestry projects is a mulcher. I originally also wanted one but have found it to be highly beneficial to not have one. Mulches break down extremely fast here; I’ve found that keeping a lot of larger branches and sticks in the mulch holds it in place and less gets washed away in any flooding rains. Large branches, logs, trunks of trees, they all hold onto lots of moisture, provide homes for animals and fungi and of course slow any soil erosion.  The usual caveat applies of course, context is everything and if you’re in a dry, brittle environment, leaving a lot of kindling around poses more of a fire risk. Speaking of which, I feel it won’t be long till we see bush fires here during the dry spells; the locals have never had to be cautious about leaving burning piles of trash unmonitored, but I can see that changing soon.

This place is always a mess,

it’s a Sisyphean task to manage it and this year has been even worse. I spent a good part of the summer unable to do anything due to a self-inflicted injury. It took me five weeks to be able to walk up and down the stairs unassisted.  An embarrassing accident but as usual one that happened at the end of a job when I was already tired, sweaty and less focussed.  Lets just say, when the old guy says to “think before you cut”, listen.

I’ve often joked to other farming friends that we should have a gallery of the various injuries we’ve caused ourselves. I’m well aware this is probably a male-thing and how ridiculous it is, especially from someone whose previous working lives were ultra-safety focussed.  But living away from the western world’s nanny-state focus on safety for long enough, one can certainly become a bit complacent. Think thongs (flip flops) and a chainsaw sort-of-thing.

I’ve had a number of close calls. When I turned 30, my Mum and Dad expressed their surprise and relief that I’d survived that far.  I’ve always considered myself “lucky”.  Recently because of my injury, I failed to get my leg over the fence of the cow shed and ended up lying in the muck. Nothing quite as humbling as being covered in cow shit and suddenly understanding your place in the universe.  I’ve now come to the conclusion, which I’m sure others have long left unsaid, that I’m not lucky, just accident-prone.  I think it's ego to think I have all these “close calls” because of my lifestyle. Let's call it what it is Leon, you’re a walking accident waiting to happen.

When I visit my local hospital’s E.R. I nod along as the doctor reels off what they're going to do; an X-ray, a tetanus shot and antibiotics. I’ve learnt it well.

Instead of injuries, here’s my list of painful experiences from the past few years, in some sort of an order:

Putting on shorts that an itchy caterpillar has been in.  This is far worse than cutting up chilis and forgetting that you’ve just been cutting up chilis while going to the toilet.

Ants ants ants. Of course bull ant and fire ant bites are the worst, but those encounters I can count on one hand. Weaver ants are tolerable, just annoying, but when a whole nest climbs on to you, annoyance quickly escalates. Those tiny black ants are similar, one or two biting as they climb your legs can be dealt with easily, but a swarm of them needs more attention. When they manage to climb, unnoticed, all the way up to your genitals, that’s a lot of fun. I can imagine the little buggers, resisting taking a bite on the way up, delayed gratification, knowing there’s that holy grail of sensitive parts dangling above.

Similarly, getting a whole swarm of the tiny ants all over you as you pull vines out of trees can be interesting. If you accidently squash one near your eye it’s like getting acid in your eye. The next few minutes are spent stumbling around the food forest all teary eyed, seeking out the nearest water tap to flush it out.

This is nothing compared to the juice from an exploding hot cashew on the side of your face and eye. Oh boy.  That one felt like I was going to be scarred, it took days for the burning to subside.  No wonder they’re expensive.

Bee stings, not so bad, depending on whether you can scrape the stinger out. Wasps tend to actually take a small chunk of meat out of you, plus they come back for seconds. At least they give a warning fly by buzz and if you’re not lost in your thoughts you can get out of there quick.

Accidentally brushing up against the leaf of a young Lipa tree, a type of nettle. By the time I had run back to the house I was screaming to Monica for help. The burn was still hot after three days.

The hand and wrist pain caused by using a 12-year old laptop with the entire QWERTY line of keys not working. Instead I had to hold down the function key and type the replacement letters using the number keys; this stretch of the hand while typing eventually caused me so much pain I couldn’t clench my grip. Yet it took me a good while to learn what was causing the pain. My good friend Ed kindly offered to replace my laptop but I refused and solved the problem with a $5 external keyboard.

The dogs get super excited when I start running, can’t remember the reason I ran, and can’t remember the reason I came to a sudden stop, but I do remember the crack of my knee as the 30kg dog went from full throttle to full stop, the full stop being his skull against my knee. We both hit the dirt.

During COVID lockdowns, which seemed endless here, lots of people suffered with cracked teeth and other dental problems. I happened to develop TMJ (temporomandibular joint) which tops this list as the most painful experience I’ve ever had. Just the idea of eating, which usually enters someone’s consciousness about an hour or so before mealtimes, would have me lying on the floor in pain. It’s the first time I’ve had the sort of pain in which I couldn’t remain standing. At night if my jaw came unclenched during sleep I’d wake up in agony. I ended up wrapping my entire head in bandages to keep my mouth shut, though this didn’t help.

One time, my youngest daughter, who at that time was unfortunately the same height as my elbow, called my attention; me turning around gave her an elbow in the face and before she could even register the pain, I was already crying from preempting her response.

This went on for about two weeks. It’s the only time that pain has messed my mental state so badly that the only solution seemed to be to end my life. Lucky for me, the lockdowns were starting to be relaxed and I managed to see our dentist, who just happened to be a TMJ expert. She couldn’t do anything immediately but sent me home with painkillers. A few days later, she sent me home again with much stronger painkillers after I spent a good ten minutes in her dentist chair bawling my eyes out. When she asked me my pain level (“9”) she asked why I hadn’t said 10 … “Ten, I’d be dead”, I said. 

The next visit, with my jaw finally a little more malleable and deadened with drugs, her solution was so simple it was laughable. Simply pushing my lower jaw a few millimetres back while closing my mouth was all that was needed. A custom mouth guard was prescribed and I’ve been pain-free ever since. 

While I was writing this, the slow moving giant that was typhoon Kristine (Trami) was pounding us with strong winds and rain for well over two days.

She knocked down many more of my trees. Not many of those native tree I mentioned earlier remain upright. Any bananas that were left after the first typhoon in May were finished off by Kristine. But the roof is still on the house and we’re still dry and safe, most of the animals were huddled in the very damp cow shed but at least they were out of the elements. 

In our province of Batangas, just 30km away, landslides buried homes and the devastation has left many dead.³ The lake surrounding our local volcano had storm surges that washed away many homes.

And here I am talking about losing some trees.

Sometimes it feels like I’m going backwards with my land management, but I have to have a bit of faith and patience in the process.

There’s an abandoned lot along the road in our barangay, a couple of hectares that’s been left completely unmanaged since we started living here. It’s been interesting seeing it develop, in comparison with our land, with pretty much no intervention. Should I instead use the language of Progress which would probably call it “regressing” into an “untamed” landscape?  The local families let their cows loose inside the lot but because the cows don’t eat certain weeds and no one comes in to cut back those weeds then any edible grasses are long shaded out and the cows remain the typical skin and bones, ribs protruding, that is common to our area. 

The abandoned lot is now quite dense with tree cover, most of these are native trees local to our area, I can see tibig and igyo, some isis but not much else. There’s not a lot of variety. They have plenty of biomass in there but not much biodiversity.  I whizz past in the car so have no idea of the animal life inside.

If I’d thrown my hands up in defeat after the first typhoon hit us in the early years, I imagine our place would be similar.

Earlier in the year, we managed to put our hands up fast enough that we were gifted a new government-issued calf. 

We named her Calachuchi.⁴ With the dry season in full swing and not enough feed to sustain two cows, the hard decision of sending Sunflower off to slaughter was made. Monica and I had some tears, as she was loaded into a trike, confused and scared, and driven away from her home of two years. Look at us heartless bastards, bartering over the price we will be paid for sending what was pretty much a pet, off for meat. Our somewhat paltry attempts at economically trying to make this “farming” work are still failing. Even our coconut harvest this year, although bountiful, left us with no income after the guy harvesting them declared a medical emergency and never delivered payment. 

Top: Sunflower. Bottom: Calachuchi, Jethro and Edna

Sunflower is missed. She was very spirited compared to Calachuchi who’s more docile in nature but still very sweet. If you’ve never seen a cow do zoomies like a dog, it’s quite a thing. There's always a nerve-wracking moment of suspense as she runs full throttle across the yard towards you for a rub behind the ears; is she going to be able to stop in time?

Getting a cow harness on her after a year or so of being free range was a bad idea, doing it alone and almost losing fingers when the rope almost pinched my fingers off. Finding a willing person to do it with me would have been difficult. When I invited the cow buyers over to inspect her, they cowered behind me; they could see she wasn’t harnessed and she was the biggest heifer they’d seen. They said cows can smell the fear (from the other cows they’ve been transporting) and so can be quite unpredictable towards them. So turns out you don’t need much security out here in the boondocks, just a couple of dogs and a free range cow.  

My first night away from the farm in five years and I spent it only 7 miles away.

My eldest daughter and I hiked with four others up Mount Manabu, one of a series of peaks that overlooks our farm. The mountain range, Malepunyo, dominates our northern view, it gives me my bearings, and it is the source of the cool river water that flows at the bottom of our land.  It was also one of the most heavily bombed areas during the second world war and possibly home to Yamashita’s gold.

It’s a beautiful area that’s sadly lacking in any sort of visible environmental protection. There’s quarrying going on for the road and housing developments nearby, whilst “eco” parks are opened to disguise the fairly obvious pillaging. An abandoned highway project from Marcos Sr’s presidency slices through the area. There’s barbed wire fences across hiking trails that were once free to roam for the public. 

It’s hard to object to any of this in a country where so many activists, farmers, journalists and anyone who makes too much noise about the injustices of this system have been “disappeared” or permanently silenced.

In the morning from our tent, I watched for a time the clouds form on the windward tip of the higher peaks and drift across the rest of the range. For a time they also drifted over us, requiring us to suddenly don all the extra clothing layers we’d brought … and it’s the tropics!

The river that borders the north side of our property, at the bottom of a forty metre ravine, runs year-round and the difference it makes to our comfort is noticeable, especially in the mornings. I went down there towards the end of the long, hot, dry season and it was as if the river hadn’t received the memo that it’s summer already. 

The river runs less clear this year though and it seems more rubbish litters it banks; plastic coke bottles, single use washing detergent sachets, animal feed and cement sacks add some contrasting colours to the mess of green that’s everywhere down here.  A lot of it is from the new highway construction that now cuts a path from our closest city of Lipa to a barangay not far from us.  It bridges our river at least twice and obviously became a useful dumping ground for whatever waste the builders generated. We were lucky, it passes a mile away from our farm. A new friend I met in the next barangay had his property split in two. What was once a scenic, quiet weekend retreat and future retirement home now has a 6-lane highway running through the middle of it. The cloistered nuns next door to him have a bit of a dilemma as this is no longer the quiet rural retreat they had first come to.

The new highway will reduce our fortnightly, hour-long drive into town for supplies into a 20 minute trip.  The old hour long trip, which is only 10.5 miles but involves more speed humps than one can count (and it’s like they’re breeding!) and winds through several barangays, a slow drive that often involves getting stuck behind a jeepney or trike, or worse a large truck moving soil from the new highway project.  I can finish listening to an entire music album⁵ in this time and the slowness now no longer bothers me like it did five years ago.

Six lanes of highway cutting through what was mostly forested land is an enormous amount of concrete. The slow road into town required an ongoing continual repair because of the heavy construction trucks, full of mountain soil to be used in other building projects. Overall it’s probably a fantastic success for the GDP, all this job creation and the countless new home developments that will be built in what was once farmland. Is there any wonder that we are the largest importer of rice in the world, more than the behemoth that is China?⁶   Is the concreted road to riches found by buying a concrete business in a third world country?

“This is a world where exploitation passes for innovation, where daylight robbery passes for business.”⁷

On the drive to Manila, there is a property visible from the road, must be a good 30 hectares, in which the bulldozers have come in and removed soil for building projects. The ground level of this entire property has been lowered by about two metres, several million cubic metres of soil removed and trucked away.

Gawd I’m sounding like a cynical, miserable realist⁸. I said to myself before I started this essay, “Leon you have to cut out this ranting shit” but look, I’m doing it again.  Once you start seeing this sort of thing it’s very hard to not see it. This robbing Peter to pay Paul sort of thing.

The new road will be brilliant. So speedy.  The girls will be able to do driving lessons along it, it’s so wide. And I’m sure the girls, as they get older and maybe tired of the quiet country life they’ll want to move to the city. They won’t need to anymore, the city is coming to us. Yay!

Anxiety medication might help. Most of my younger friends are on some sort of anti-anxiety medication. How to stay sane in such an insane world?

On the hike down from the mountain we passed a brutal reminder of what often passes for land stewardship here; an ex-army colonel had cleared several hectares of land on the steep side of the mountain in order to build a chicken farm. My daughter, who at ten seems to have more sense than most people multiple times older than her, made the astute observation that the chickens would have been far happier scratching in the fallen leaves and weeds littered below the remaining forest. But chickens that scratch around on the forest floor and eat bugs have their own ideas about when they should lay eggs, and goddamnit, don’t we all want our eggs every day all year?

I can climb to the top of our water tank tower, it’s 12 metres I think. I’m too scared to go all the way up, but even close to the top it affords a birds’ eye view of the surrounding landscape. At that height, I’m with the sparrows that nest in the neighbour’s bamboo grove and just below the murder of crows that come feed on our ripe fruits. Amongst the trees below I can spot the smaller birds, the bright yellow flashes of colour that are the orioles, the stunning blue vested kingfishers and bee eaters.

It was from here, perched upon high, that we watched as Taal, the volcano twenty miles to the east, erupt back in 2020⁹. 

If I take the binoculars up with me and direct my gaze towards the mountain, I can spot the slowly increasing bare patches in the forest’s tree cover. Farmers; landless¹⁰, living on the edges of financial security, move in to make charcoal out of the trees they’ve cleared. If they can afford it, a cow is grazed or bananas are planted. The charcoal feeds the ever growing needs of the cities nearby where workers, no time to cook for themselves anymore, feed on pork bbq on a stick, chicken inasal and other street foods between their long working hours and long commutes.

Every year I can spot a few more lights on the mountain where there had once been darkness.

The narrative tells us that working hard will get you up that ladder and hopefully you’ll be eligible to get some credit and bury yourself in even more debt. As long as the GDP graph keeps pointing upwards that we will all be better off, myths propagated by economists whose divorce from reality is so utterly complete that it is celebrated with Nobel prizes.¹¹  

Imagine if they spent a good chunk of school time teaching kids about compound interest and the exponential function. I think it would collapse the economy.  Some say “you can’t fix stupid” but I reckon you can educate the fuck out of them.¹²  

The two girls are currently learning Greek mythology and they’re loving it. I believe the stories we tell ourselves are vital for our future. At the moment we are living in a wrong story. We need new stories. Monica handles all the girl’s schooling but I’ve been tasked with teaching the girls guitar. It’s going much better than my failed attempts at piano lessons.  They’ve always had this amazing way with melodies and so it’s been a real treat watching them go from initial reluctance and refusing to practicing a few chords, to nowadays; picking the guitar up most afternoons and belting out a few tunes. So often I’ve had to ask them if that’s a song they’ve been listening to or is it something they just made up. It’s more often the latter.

A friend was around a few weeks back and the topic of music came up and he asked them if they liked Taylor Swift. Their blank faces said it all and he high fived me: “You’ve raised them well”.

I had planned to write a lot more but this is already too long, if you’ve stuck around this far, thank you. I’ll try to follow up soon about more things we’ve been up to.

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I also want to thank all those that have gifted me substack subscriptions over the last few years, it’s very much appreciated and I hope I can return that generosity in some way soon. There’s more than just these three.

1. Ken Fornataro has been using koji for decades and the Cultures Group that he runs has so many good videos, from so many of the fermenting rockstars including himself of course. You won’t find a lot of this info anywhere else. It’s been an inspiring help on my own fermenting journey.

2. Kirsten Shockey is the author of a few of the fermenting bibles. If you’re new to fermenting her books are the first I would recommend. They also have beavers!

3. Dougald’s work has helped my sanity over the last couple of years and kept my “To Read” list overflowing.

1. Failing to video capture my wife shaking a baby monkey off her leg will be a regret I’ll probably talk about on my deathbed.

2. Which seems to be contradictory to what these scientists are saying: Carbon restoration potential on global land under water resource constraints | Nature Water. But since these days everything is locked up behind fucking paywalls it’s impossible for me to say for sure what those scientists are saying (another good reason to get off the internet).

3. Town in the shadow of Taal volcano in Batangas is hit by landslides it never expected

4. Yes it was as simple as that. I wasn’t exactly impressed; couldn’t we have had some sort of coin toss, paper-rock-scissors or essay writing competition on the joys of a cow? It must be said though, the Ag department staff did make a visit out to our farm to check that we had enough land/feed/forage.

5. I refuse to let my music listening be mediated by an algorithm.

6. Apparently rice production in the Philippines hasn’t got much to do with corrupt politics, bad agricultural policies, and laziness … it’s just geography: Why Does the Philippines Import Rice? Meeting the challenge of trade liberalization.

7. Welcome to Hell - by Rachel Donald - Planet: Critical

8. A whiny foreigner.

9. Something I’ll never forget. I used to wonder why the hell people choose to live so close to an active volcano. But the soil is so amazing and the chances of it erupting during a lifetime probably make it worth it. We were extremely lucky that winds weren’t blowing towards us, we got a dusting of ash over everything and sore throats from the air.  Being an erupting volcano first timer (although I did see Mayon lava flow) left us debating whether we should leave the property but the realisation that if things did get that bad, we’d probably die in a traffic jam nearby rather than in our comfort of our own home. 

10. 7 out of 10 farmers in the Philippines don’t own land.

11. Jason Hickel is a good read regarding this, one of his latest paper’s especially: How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis

12.  Zach Stein is a good read regarding this