Surya carring corn stalks to his water buffalo. Corn creates a huge amount of biomass in addition to the corn itself. The stalks will be converted to valuable manure, urine and milk plus work energy.

This way of raising food might seem revolutionary but it isn’t new by any means. It was practiced for eons and is still practiced in native cultures like that of the Sequoia people who live on the upper reaches of the Amazon River in Ecuador. It’s the earliest form of agriculture and where the vast knowledge employed in our present day, "modern" agriculture evolved from.

One last thing about annual plants versus perennial plants. One of the regular meals we had during the conference was buckwheat pancakes made from freshly harvested buckwheat and hand ground into flour (really yummy) that were served with a tomato sauce that was spicey hot and adictively delicious. After asking some questions about the tomatoes in Nepal and going to the gardens to look, to my delight and surprise, I discovered these were perennial tomatoes! They’re small like Mexican tomatillos, and tart, and very, very tasty.