Building an earthbag house + farming for agricultural resiliency in Sri Lanka

[yudhanjaya]

Hey, folks. I hope this is the right place in EarthOS to post my adventure log.

In 2019, I embarked on a project to build myself a cottage in the mountains. The location is Kandy, Sri Lanka. The dream was retirement by the age of 30; sans rent, expensive electricity utilities, etc, living simply and focusing on creative work. I found some very fertile land for very cheap (about $5000). I would of course have to build roads and infrastructure, but water was plentiful and the soil and climate were excellent, able to easily survive (+/- 2 degrees Celcius in potential climate-change induced weather systems).

A map here:

In subsequent years, the economic collapse of Sri Lanka pushed me to do research into all sorts of interesting methods, as prices for food, concrete and steel spiraled out of control (see our weekly food price tracker at Watchdog Inflation Visualisation / Ishan Marikar | Observable).

In short, the Sri Lankan state failed almost completely in 2022. A sudden overnight ban on chemical fertilizers nuked the nation’s agricultural output, national bankruptcy took out our ability to import fuel (which in turn took out cooking, transport, and electricity for long periods). The Sri Lankan rupee went from 190 to a dollar to 364 to a dollar, sending prices for everything imported - which is almost everything - further through the roof.

So this is what I’m working on right now: a house built almost entirely with earthbags, using as little concrete as possible. Entirely solar-powered, with energy storage being either entirely Li-ion or lead-acid, depending on cost and repairability.

Alongside the house, a farm, relying on hot and cold organic composts to power permaculture guilds of a broad mix of vegetables, fruits and greens.

Some of you might know I run a small team of oddball journalists, data scientists and software developers called Watchdog . . .because of the interest in this project, and the lack of data around such farming in Sri Lanka, we have set up a unit within the organization that will transition to being farmers.

We have a wiki of seedstock, growable plants, harvest conditions, beneficial interactions with other plants, and invested in other farms around the country with a variety of terrain (from beachside to urban rooftops) to carefully document inputs, outputs and the road to what we think of as “food resilience” - where you can survive supply chain disruptions, and barter tools and knowledge while minimizing use of currency. For example, here is a log of the farm in Arugam Bay, where conditions are very different.

We are now expanding into arming the farms with equipment - lots of DIY stuff, shared makerspaces between farms (starting with carpentry workshops and going up the tech tree from there), even some projects to help with farm monitoring. Some of this is inspired by the Witness project and various self-reliant communities within it that work together to build infrastructure. We call this the Apocalypse Gardens. The full project is not yet public, but will be.

My personal log for my project is here - https://yudhanjaya.com/The-Earthbag-Homestead-eb49ac4995fd4c1f893d91a567941454 - it is “The (Mostly) Benevolent Dictatorship of Wijeratne”, a sort of parody micronation that prides itself on being an extremely petty oligarchy with an inefficient bureaucracy, modelled, of course, on Sri Lanka.

The parody element is just me having fun; the serious part is documenting everything. If anyone’s interested in the project, or has interesting ideas to throw at me, please let me know!

Tagging @alberto (since documentation has now begun) and @hugi (for the spark that took it from ‘writer’s cottage’ to ‘Avantgrid / Assembly lite’)

[hugi]

@yudhanjaya

and @hugi (for the spark that took it from ‘writer’s cottage’ to ‘Avantgrid / Assembly lite’)

Wow, amazing!

@yudhanjaya

If anyone’s interested in the project, or has interesting ideas to throw at me, please let me know!

In my opinion, what you are doing is solar punk research. If you ever find yourself thinking that a part of what you are doing might fit into a non-profit research vehicle that could benefit from being incorporated on more stable ground, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, as we could make that happen through Open Collective Europe - the main thing I am working on these days. For example, if you ever run into foundations or philanthropists that would like to throw some money your way but who can only fund a certified NGO, come knock on my door.

[alberto]

Wow. Amazing. @matthias is going to love this.

I would not presume to give you advice on something like this, I would be way out of my depth, but I am eager to learn more. Many questions!

Is this where you now live? How do you fund the transition period until you are producing your own food? How do you imagine your economy after the transition (I imagine you are not making a completely closed economy…)? How many are you?

[yudhanjaya]

@hugi sounds great! Thanks!
@alberto good question! I’m moving there in March, by which point we’ll have the foundations and hopefully at least 1 room ready. We will rent a place nearby and I will spend most of my time on-site setting up the nursery and basic farm plot + compost while the contractors work on the house . . .

Transition period: I have some extra income from projects related to my work on misinformation + royalties from books. I’ve already got most of the tools I need to repair, maintain, do woodwork, and do extensive garden agriculture.

Economy post-transition: interesting. 2-3 people in my household, plus animals; Navin and wife next door.

Plan is to write full-time and focus on my fiction. Writing is an inherently extremistan affair (see Mediocristan and Extremistan: The Two Categories of Random Events), so my current goals are as follows:

1. Bank 3 million LKR in a fixed deposit (8197.70 $) at ~15% interest, setting up a compound interest hedge that will allow me to take care of dependents (family) in case of emergency.

2. Reduce cost of living to $300 a month by year 2 (farm accounting for ~70% of diet, exempting rice and meat; can do without meat in a pinch, as hens will be providing eggs). We have basic furniture and I can DIY and/or salvage the rest. Electricity is free (solar) and so is water (tube wells) and so is healthcare. I have electric bikes for transport, but the serious hits will come from maintaining a vehicle to get supplies to and fro. I’m going to avoid buying a fuel-guzzler for as long as possible, but we will eventually need something like a secondhand Mahindra Bolero. I’ll save up for it.
   Surplus vegetable and fruit produce from the farm will be traded for labor where needed (and donated anyway when labor is not needed).

3. Write full-time. Even at the low end of advances, a book a year will keep me going; at my current rate, things should be fine. Relying on the whims of publishers, however, is not a very antifragile operation . . . advances plus the standard 7-10% royalties tend to come in large dollops far in between, and are often quite unpredictable. I’ll be investing some more time into building up a series that I publish via KDP/Amazon - 70% royalties, no upfront advance, but a long tail that keeps on giving if done right.

4. Keep bees for honey (saleable, also great, near-permanent store of calories) and brew kombucha (also saleable), both hobbies that require space and time to experiment and setup but relatively little maintenance costs (bees and bacteria like to multiply). Use my space to create a seed bank down the line to supply well-documented seedstock (no idea what the math on this is, but I’ll be building a seed bank for my own purposes anyway).

5. Other plans - varying, from growing bamboo to a few other stuff I have no experience in, but must learn by trying. I also expect I’ll be building up a Youtube channel and, over time, will begin making my own indie games again. These are in the “let’s first get through the first two years and see how we do” range of plans.

[alberto]

Makes complete sense. I’m jealous, even. If this were 20 years ago I’d ask to join.

[yudhanjaya]

I’ll document the whole thing, so if you have ideas down the line you want me to test out, I can!

[nadia]

omg @matthias check this out!

[nadia]

@yudhanjaya

Write full-time

…and the scifiecon thing we discussed! :))

[matthias]

Indeed I love this project and how you are putting together all the loose ends to make something like this work. It’s always a delicate balance to fund and build an alternative system that indeed provides for ones needs; or in other words, it’s hard to find one of the exits from the system (me, still looking for one …). So I wish you all the best success with the transition period!!

I don’t have very specific ideas for your off-grid lifestyle and experimenting … you seem to know how to find all the knowledge you need, anyway. (Still a good spot to plug my Autarky Library of 500 open-access e-books. Quite some about permaculture and homesteading included.)

But still, two things come to mind … maybe one or the other point will be new to you and inspire one or the other experiment:

@yudhanjaya

Keep bees for honey

If you are ready to experiment here as well, check out bottle-to-bottle beekeeping. Controversial, largely unexplored, but promising as it is much simpler than the traditional ways.

@yudhanjaya

We have a wiki of seedstock, growable plants, harvest conditions, beneficial interactions with other plants

This is probably a highly location-specific database for Sri Lanka? Anyway, if you have not seen it already, have a look at the open source Plants for a Future Database. The types of plant data they collect is very extensive (best I’ve seen) and may offer an inspiration for your purposes. Could not find yet if the actual software behind this is open source, though. They have 7000 plants in the database already, I think most from temperate regions … so eventually you and your team probably have a lot to contribute about tropical plants.

@yudhanjaya

we have set up a unit within the organization that will transition to being farmers.

Haha I’d love Edgeryders would decide to follow that route

@yudhanjaya

I also expect I’ll be building up a Youtube channel

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there’s a minor boom of novice homesteaders from across Europe setting up camp in Portugal (and sometimes Spain), buying and reactivating off-grid farms there. Many of them document their adventure on YouTube channels (my fav two examples). Pretty sure you can find some success in that space as well.

Always here if you want to bounce some crazy ideas for off-grid living around (esp. energy and food related). Have not done as much experimenting in practice as I would have liked, but maybe I’ll get a moderate amount of that soon (will try buying a little derelict forest nearby in an auction on Wednesday, to make a food forest out of it).

[yudhanjaya]

This is incredible! Thanks for this massive dump of resources - going through your library now!

[noemi]

Nice to see other aficionados for homestead makers!! Me and @winnieponcelet enjoy watching those too… for a perhaps not so distant future For now they have a dreamy quality to it for those of us never having built anything with their hands.

Congrats @yudhanjaya, reading you from a distance, and thanks for documenting!

[yudhanjaya]

(edited, see Alberto’s comment below)

Update!

The house is finally built. It took an extraordinary amount of time and effort, and we had to ditch the earthbag idea halfway through. Nevertheless, the house is indeed up and running, albeit constructed from concrete and brick.

We moved in at the end of February this year. Over the past few months, we’ve dealt with and overcome various challenges, like getting electricity poles installed and the national grid extended to our location. We also had to sort out the municipal water supply, which involved working with our neighbors to run a few hundred meters of plumbing across their properties to our water tanks due to the limitations of how far the national systems would reach.

We also had to overcome what I think of as “caching” issues. For instance, being so far out on the grid, our electricity supply isn’t always consistent; we experience voltage drops and power losses. To safeguard our electrical equipment, we’ve had to install voltage regulators and UPSs on every major device. Similarly, our water supply is inconsistent because of how high up on a hill we are. The municipal pumping station only achieves the necessary pressure at select times during the night and early morning. Therefore, we store about 4,000 liters of municipal water on the property, plus another 1,000 liters of rainwater collected from the roofs each month. We’ve also dug a well, as we have some minor springs on our land.

Now, we are entering the stage where we’re considering long-term sustainability. On a small scale, we’ve been able to grow a number of plants, including mulberries, guava, pomegranates, and mangoes. Across the entire property, we have jackfruit—what some might know as breadfruit—and its sweeter cousin, waraka. In fact, we have so much that the constantly dropping fruit has destroyed rainwater pipes and become a primary food source for monkeys and deer.

The monkeys, in particular, introduce an interesting challenge: much of the fruit from the trees we plant will be eaten by them. This means we need to plan our garden in stages. We have a zone in our immediate control, right in the kitchen’s vicinity, where we grow leafy greens and other vegetables like carrots, bok choy, potatoes, radishes, beetroot, lemongrass, rosemary, thyme, curry leaves, and a few varieties of chilies. Further out, I have recently planted more guavas and mangoes. We fully expect the monkeys will partake in these, but we hope there will be just enough left over for us to collect each day.

---

Of course, the ultimate goal is to make my life, and our lives in general, more sustainable. For now, my writing income supports all of this, and we have been able to drop our living expenses by a significant degree. In fact, we spend only about LKR 120,000 (around $400 USD) a month on groceries, and we eat very well.

However, this is with only minor support from our small herb garden. We are trying to get to a stage where we are unlocking more nutrition from the land around us, allowing that number to drop even further so I can potentially take a bit of a break. Getting to that stage requires a lot of terracing, which we have now completed. But I’ve learned the hard way that terracing requires constant weeding to prevent elephant grass from taking over. The tropical soil here is so fertile that if you leave it alone, you’ll be five to six feet deep in weeds in no time. This means that anything new we add requires more maintenance.

In all of this, we have to balance speed with intent. I don’t want to pay people for a setup or buy an off-the-shelf garden. Everything in the ground is something we’ve planted ourselves. If our raised beds are a bit misshapen—well, we’re learning.

However, for the big stuff, we do have to spend some money. We hire people from other estates in the region—particularly the tea estates—during their downtime to help us create a garden layout and structure that we can comfortably maintain without breaking our backs.

That is still a difficult balance to figure out. The land has to serve multiple purposes: it must provide us with calories and a balanced diet, but it also has to contribute to our exercise, improve our quality of life, and have ornamental value. Furthermore, we don’t want to completely drive out the local wildlife like the monkeys and deer, even though the monkeys can be a menace.

So, I’m trying to balance all of these competing needs. I don’t know if I have found a good balance yet. I think we have about a couple of years left to figure things out. We’ll see.

I am attaching some photos.

[alberto]

@yudhanjaya

Of course. Here is the entire text corrected for grammar and restructured for better flow, while keeping the original style and tone.

This language smells of AI

[yudhanjaya]

Definitely does! Carpal tunnel and the newly Wolverine’d left hand have led me to use dictation more often for emails and field notes. Let me keep that up.

On Windows, I have this software called SpeechPulse, which runs a Whisper model locally and does a bunch of stuff with a tiny LLM to clean up the noise and detritus and fix basic grammar.

On Linux, sadly, I don’t. I have been working on replicating this program. Unfortunately, with very small local models, they’re simply not as robust of reliable as you expect them to be. This is part of the prompt send to that second local stage - take this messy transcript and clean it up without trying to mess with the tone etc. It runs on my homelab server (refurbished HP Elitedesks, why waste perfectly good silicon) so it always has to stay below a certain size and wattage. Doing that while keeping the transcription ‘live’ (is: a few seconds after speaking, words should start appearing) is tough.

Bit of a pain in the ass. It’s easy to do it using OpenAi APIs or whatever, but it defeats the purpose.

Still better than my first iteration of this, where I had one of those field microphones taped to my cast while I activated using a tiny programmable remote on the other! This one I can talk at while moving around.

[alberto]

Your CAST? What happened to you? Are you all right? You do sound reasonably cheerful.

[yudhanjaya]

Pain is temporary, as is life

This is the 2024 injury, my muscles just freeze sometimes. I did an 80,000 word run recently (novel manuscript complete) and now am paying for my impatience. It’ll be fine, I can cyborg my way out of this!

[alberto]

Whoa. Dictation it is. Be well, my friend!