Meet the Bioneers: Greg David
Posted: 2:15PM August 5th, 2011 | Comments
[This is the second in a series of 5 profiles. Each week, we will bring you the story of one of our Bioneers to be honored at this year's Badger Bioneers conference. More information about the November conference will be available on our website throughout the summer.]
Greg David - Farmer; Founding Member, Sustain Jefferson
“There’s no such thing as waste,” says farmer Greg David. “It’s just a resource we haven’t quite figured out what to do with.”
Well, almost: David’s found something to do with it.
He beckons around to the side of his outdoor workshop, here in a clearing toward the rear of his lush, 20-acre stead. Baking in the humid summer air, there is a twenty-foot wooden crate filled with warm water, housing long plastic tubes containing… cow poop.
This “anaerobic digester” mimics the actions of intestines; it’s a 100-degree bathtub for creating methane gas that could be used for heating a greenhouse in the winter, or for warming water for farming tilapia.
Today is the digester’s first formal “load,” and David’s excitement is palpable. For perhaps the seventh or eighth time today, he enthusiastically claps his hands together and chirps, “Here’s an interesting thing!” He seems perpetually delighted to have any chance to show off the creations dotting his farm, both natural and man-made.
“I can build pretty much anything I set my mind to,” says David, walking into the shade of the workshop. His small white ball-cap bobs up and down behind giant stacks of boxes and piles of scrap metal, in search of a spare part.
Having spent several decades in construction, he’s probably not being hyperbolic about his construction bona fides. However, on the rest of Prairie Dock Farm, here in northern Jefferson County, David lets nature do the planning.
He has adopted the guiding principles of permaculture, an ethic for approaching the nature as a set of large, interlocking systems, each part of which has intrinsic value beyond mere human utility.
“The usual way of developing agricultural technique is do-this, do-that,” says David, paraphrasing a tenet of one of the Japanese founders of the permaculture movement. “[This] way is about not-doing this, and not-doing that.”
And so the farm’s orchards of plum and hazelnut trees, its frizzy lime-green expanses of asparagus, its wheeled coops for hundreds of free-ranging chickens, and its labyrinthine berms of prairie plants have flourished mainly through not-technology and not-fertilization.
Though David uses draft horses to plow and tow, he also loves YouTube for instant access to like minds (and anaerobic digester tutorials). His iPhone ringer is a remarkably life-like birdcall. He is an autodidact with runaway curiosity, so while he abstains from technologies when interacting with the natural world, he is quick to point out the distinction between technology which liberates and inspires, and that which enslaves or impoverishes.
At this point it’s not too surprising when he comes bounding out of his workshop carrying a giant rusty cylinder. His arms are taut and tan.
“Here’s an interesting thing!”
He fits the cylinder on top of a large, similarly rusty v-shaped base, drops a metal coil in the center, attaches some hoses, and launches into a highly detailed explanation of the thermodynamic principles by which this “rocket stove” may be used to provide high-efficiency, low-emission heat for cooking and for homes.
He’s an excitable mad scientist, with a Sconnie accent. All around, prototypes of stoves and alternative energy generators in various shapes and configurations are sprouting everywhere through the tall grass. David and his friends frequently gather here to weld, cut, and talk about the science of resilience.
Like the hand-made, scrap metal stoves in his backyard, David is a composite of complementary philosophies, soldered together by a commitment to low-impact living. He’s a founding member of Sustain Jefferson; a local leader in the Swedish Natural Step sustainability framework; he’s nonscientist with a passion for mechanics and systems thinking; his farm plays host to annual Lakota sweat lodge ceremonies.
And, of course, there is the Japanese permaculture ethic.
Which is maybe why the bumper sticker on his Honda Insight hybrid car, parked ten yards away from a horse-drawn jitney, reads: “That was Zen, this is Tao.”
