by Matthew Lynch, Sustainable [R]evolution collaborator
You should try gardening here. -40 C winters, ancient beach sand for soil, super short growing season, and little access to water. Some co-operatives are watering 20 plus acres by hand; apart from that the locals don’t even like to eat vegetables – they’ve never had the luxury of choosing to be vegetarian.
Welcome to Mongolia, once the center of history’s largest land-based empire, founded by Ghengis Khan in 1206, and stretching from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the western shores of the Pacific Ocean. The Mongolia of today is one of the most sparsely populated areas of land on the planet, with a population of around 3 million people spread across 1.5 million km2 or so of steppe – a land with neither enough rainfall, nor enough fertility to support a forest ecosystem.
Over thousands of years, Mongolian culture has adapted to their land in a way that has, in turn, reshaped their landscape. The nomads’ herds have gradually nibbled away at the edges of the conifer forests that at one time would have covered the endless hills, until the trees at last retreated to their remaining, precarious holds of today: mostly along the steeper erosion gullies, where animals cannot easily graze. As you drive through the landscape, it feels as though you are tearing around a giant golfcourse, complete with massive sand bunkers and epic water hazards.
However, what looks to be an immaculately manicured golf green from a distance, is in fact an optical illusion of hardy grasses, herbs, and the occasional shrub growing at arm’s length from each other in the sandy beige soils; anywhere the pasture loses its grip on the land, it is likely to be washed away with the next heavy rain. These pastures of the steppe cling tightly to the sandy soil, and as you move further up into the foothills, erosion gulllies twist and wind their way down to the river flats, cutting wide sandy banks that look like beach sand dunes, revealing just how precarious their grip on the landscape really is.
This is the delicate balance of the steppe: any manures of the roaming herds which are not harvested by humans for winter fuel provide the nutrient to maintain just enough fertility for the hardy grasses to grow.
Everything about the herding, nomadic way of life is adapted to surviving the harsh extremes of climate here. Take, for example, the traditional Mongolian form of housing known as the ger. More commonly known in the west as the yurt, this iconic symbol evokes every romantic notion of said lifestyle – living in harmony with the land, leaving no trace behind, being able to pack up all of your belongings on a couple of horses – and is found in sustainability developments and counterculture housing projects everywhere from Kauai to Costa Rica, despite its lack of suitability to conditions other than those which forged its design.
Herd animals are the perfect energy store for the long, cold winters. You have a better chance of keeping your herd alive long enough to feed your family, than of growing enough vegetables in the short-lived spring and summer seasons to last all winter. Families find a sheltered place to hunker down and stay warm through the cold season, then move on to [literally] greener pastures during the warmer months for their herds to reproduce, rear their young, and fatten up enough to survive next year’s winter freeze.
However, grazing patterns thousands of years old are no longer viable due to changing weather patterns. Entire herds are literally freezing to death in their winter shelters, and sometimes, the nomadic family watching over these herds freeze to death right along side of them. Like all cultures, this one must adapt with the changing times, or become extinct.
Suvraga Aguyt Vegetable Gowing Co-Operative, was established in 2010 as a permaculture demonstration and education site, when it hosted Mongolia’s first-ever Permaculture Design Course [PDC], taught by Rick Coleman, who in his 18+ years teaching permaculture has worked on every continent [except Antarctica], in some of the harshest conditions, and with some of the poorest people in the world.
“I believe that permaculture has a major role to play on the world stage,” says Coleman. “As a design system, permaculture has so much potential to positively impact on aid and development projects around the globe. Not only does it address issues of depleting soil, water and energy, it also creates empowered communities who can become more self reliant, less dependant upon aid, and more able to direct what aid they do receive into positive capacity building projects.”
Two weeks were spent travelling the countryside with Tileuybek [Bek] Ye, the project’s Mongolian-born Food Security Director, who served as both guide, translator, and assistant instructor while the team visited the other half-dozen or so vegetable growing co-operatives in the area [distance in Mongolia is relative; approximately XXX kilometers were covered over 14 days]. Obervations were made from tours of the sites and surrounding landscape, and from conversations with co-operative leaders, in order to understand the conditions, challenges, and best practices that each group had developed. A wide range of crop-growing knowledge was shown to be present in the region: some co-operatives were watering 20+ acres by watering can, even as streams meandered slowly by just outside the perimeter of their growing plots, while others had developed complex irrigation systems which successfully diverted and harnessed available water from nearby waterways.
A short course was designed and held at each site to address each group’s immediate concerns, with practical solutions that could be implemented immediately. Each co-operative then sent key members, along with their leaders to attend the customized two-week PDC held at Suvraga Aguyt in Tosontsengel. 
“Mongolians have almost zero crop-growing experience,” says Bek as he gnaws on the bones of a traditional meal of organ meat, meat broth, and the remaining carcass of a slaughtered sheep. “In the 1930s, during the Socialist era, the Soviet Union started developing state farms to grow hay – to feed the livestock – but before that, Mongolians had no need to learn how to grow vegetables.”
However, there exists a vast well of knowledge about animal husbandry, and appropriate traditional building techniques, which the Suvraga Aguyt project taps into and draws from: Mongolians could be said to be the original organic animal farmers. Some co-operative members still graze their family’s surviving herds on the pasture land surrounding the soum[ii], while growing potatoes, raddishes, carrots, cabbages, tomatoes, and cucmbers on-site to supplement their primarily meat-based diet. As yields increase, the co-operative will have a surplus crop to barter or sell– and be able to offer the community a much higher quality product than the sometimes mouldy, often half-rotten imported produce which pass for vegetables currently sitting on the store shelves of the soum.
“Designing a replicable permacultural system builds from existing strengths and cultural knowledge, and looks at designing for the extremes,” says Rick. “Especially when working in aid, we design first for Survival, then Subsistence, then Self-Sufficiency, and then Abundance of Harvest – where crops can be bartered or given away. Finally, we can move on to Commercial production.”
Animal shelters too, are being redesigned from a permacultural perspective, to more aerodynamic, yurt-like shapes, insulated with animal furs and fleeces not high-quality enough for human use [previously thrown away], and heated biologically by building hot compost heaps inside the shelters. Abandoned Soviet-era buildings within Suvraga Aguyt’s hasha[iii] walls are being adapted and re-used as passive solar greenhouses, taking advantage of the significant thermal mass provided by the thick concrete walls, to soak up the heat which is captured and trapped by double and triple-insulated layers of glass and plastic sheeting, converting the abundant daylight[iv] into heat, storing this energy to be radiated back out during the night. Coldframes for seedlings are built inside these greenhouses, further extending the short growing season in a place where every additional growing day increases your chances for surviving the cold winter always just around the corner.
Seeds are being saved and selected from the hardiest plants in their crops, and within a few growing seasons Mongolia will be well on its way towards developing its own crop varieties, better adapted to the short growing season and harsh conditions. There are no heirloom varities here, the vegetable growing co-operatives of Zavkhan province are developing the region’s heirloom seedbank even as we speak.
Nitrogen-fixing species growing wild in the fields were identified for use as green manures in the broadacre production occuring in remote areas, and petrol pumps previously considered to be high-valued assets, when viewed from a permacultural perspective, were re-classified by the nomads as inefficient and wasteful liabilities, to be replaced instead by RAM pumps[v]. Planting guilds are being designed and tested to increase resilience, resistance to pests, and overall yields, while suitable native species of tree and shrub have been identified to be planted as windbreaks, living fences, and for future coppicing.
Ghengis Khan himself, better known as Chinggis to locals, once decreed a law that for every tree that is cut down, ten should be planted in it’s place – upon penalty of death. There are tales passed down through the centuries, of how Chinggis inspired his troops to win hopelessly outnumbered battles, by telling stories he made from observing nature: “Chinggis told his army to flow down from the hills upon the enemy as the yellow waters[vi] roar down the hills with the snow melt,” recounts Bek. “Perhaps Chinggis was the world’s first permaculturist?”
Coleman chimes in: “Permaculture is not about passive solar greenhouses or water management systems. These are techniques applied to solve specific problems. Permaculture is about design systems thinking. If we can introduce this methodology, we leave behind an empowered group able to design their own solutions.”
“Permaculture is information and imagination intensive, lending itself to be followed up even from a distance, by email or internet. If we design well enough we create spare time and energy. When communities have those, they then have the ability to adapt quickly.”
The warm hugs, joyous tears, countless photos taken with the team, and rousing spontaneous renditions of traditional Mongolian folk music shared at the conclusion of the course by all the graduates of Mongolia’s Inaugural Graduating PDC class of 2010 seemed to suggest that permaculture had indeed, captured the imagination of everyone in attendance. Suvraga Aguyt is a beacon of hope for an ancient culture struggling to adapt and survive in a modern world, and a living example of the valuable role that permaculture can play in achieving Sustainable Overseas Aid and Development.
“As change is forced upon the world at an unwelcome rate, it will be crucial to have successful models on the ground,” says Rick. “Through implementing permaculture, aided communities of today have the potential to become the models for sustainable practices of tomorrow.”
[i] dzud: extreme winters in which there is either too much snow for grazing animals to reach their food (white dzud), or temperatures so low that rainfall simply freezes over the land (black dzud).
[ii] soum: village or rural settlement.
[iii] hasha: family compound.
[iv] Mongolia experiences an average of 256 days of sunlight per year.
[v] RAM pumps have only two moving parts, and harness the energy of a flowing river to move water.
[vi] yellow waters: traditional reference to the massive, potentially destructive spring floods formed by melting snow each year.
