small scale agriculture

We Could Feed the World With Low-Input Agriculture. But Will We?

sastyk — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 09:38:35 +0000

We Could Feed the World With Low-Input Agriculture. But Will We?

In January of 2007, Aaron Newton, my friend and co-author of A Nation of Farmers came to Albany for four days of intense work on our book. We barely ate, slept or left the house, since we knew it would be the only chance the two of us had to hash everything out. Perhaps the single most intense moment for me, at least, was the conversation Aaron and I had about the central chapter of the book - the one that answered the question "Can we actually feed the 9+ billion people expected to live on this planet without lots of fossil fueled inputs?" This was the question answered by Tuesday's release of the UN Special Report on the Right to Food, to much public discussion.

The report is a good one, and an important one. Among other things, it is perhaps the first major report in UN history to take peak oil seriously - it is mostly implicit, rather than explicit, whereas climate change is an explicit driver, but the report presumes that we cannot go on using fossil fuels in agriculture as we have been.

When Aaron and I set out to answer the "can low input agriculture on small farms using people power feed us...since it will have to? question, the conventional wisdom was no, but there were contrary studies to consider. We knew both that fossil energies were bound to decline, leaving gaps, but also that small scale, human powered agriculture had potentials that were underappreciated. We didn't know the answer, and were determined not to prejudge it - to be emotionally and intellectually prepared to write that hunger and death were a likely consequence of all our best efforts. We spent the next months reading, researching and writing, and came out in 2008, at the height of the food crisis, with a very simple answer. Yes, the evidence is overwhelming that we can feed the world in a purely technical sense. We wrote:

It is a commonplace to assume that organic agriculture yields less tahn conventional agriculture and that we would have to endure enormous losses in yield were we to give up chemical inputs. The yield increases of the Green Revolution are commonly articulated in isolation, without discussion of organic yields. To determine how important the Green Revolution was, then, we need to go through the outputs of the Green Revolution and ask whether increased agricultural yields actually depend on using Green Revolution techniques. If, for example, agricultural yields depended on mechanization, we would expect mechanized agriculture to consistently out-yield hand labor. If they depend upon chemical inputs, we would expect organic agriculture to be heavily outyielded by conventional industrial agriculture. And if they depend on plant breeding, we would expect older varieties to be universally outyielded by newer ones.

These were the questions we set out to answer, and we found the same thing that the UN report also found - that these things were not, in fact, true, or not uniformly true.
In fact there was ample evidence that small farm yields were in many cases higher per acre, and that the lowered cost of agriculture inputs often meant more food security for the world's farmer even when their yields were slightly lower. Even more importantly, organic agricultural yields might have been slightly lower on the average in many cases, but they were better in years of extreme weather, suggesting that organic agriculture was more likely to endure climate change better.

We found that wider application of techniques like SSRI in rice fields and integrated polycultures - precisely the same things being lauded by the UN Report, could match projected yields for best outcomes of chemical agriculture. We followed the research of Peter Rosset and Jules Pretty and others who have done international studies showing the increased productivity of small scale, human powered, low input agriculture. We tracked the UN's own observation that in the 1990s, 2 billion people were being fed entirely by organic, low input agriculture - simply because they couldn't afford chemical inputs - usually on marginal land that they'd been pushed onto by industrial production. We asked the question - what could those two billion do with better land access and more justice?

Exactly like the UN report, we found that we had been focusing on the wrong things - despite the best intentions in the world, many millions of dollars spent on breeding GMO crops for conditions in Africa would have been better spent simply bringing the best farming techniques, better basic seed stock and better land access to Africa. The emphasis on pushing hard for small percentage increases in grain production in the global north - in countries that already had higher production than they could possibly need, did not, in fact, 'feed the world" but resulted in more corn and soy surpluses mostly going into livestock and meat for developed world consumption. We'd have done better to reduce specialization and encourage farmers in the Global South to grow the food they needed to eat.

The information was out there, and of course, much of it was extremely old. In 1986, for example, the UN FAO was forced to admit by researches that where you grow the food matters - that increasing the world's total food stocks doesn't result in reduced world hunger. This research has been going on for decades, but it was reassuring and fascinating to see the entire body of it laid out in front of me, just as it is good and valuable to have the UN report validate and publicize the literature review and analysis Aaron and I did four years ago. Hopefully a lot more people will read this than read _A Nation of Farmers_ ;-). Perhaps we can begin to discard the old saws about organic agriculture condemning us all to starvation.

This is not all the truth that ever was - if the world population does not stabilize around 9 billion, or in any number of climate and other disastrous scenarios, we could fail to produce enough food to feed the world. That, however, is not an inevitable outcome - if we were determined enough to ensure human well being long enough to stabilize the population and have it begin to decline overall, we could expect not to see the kind of massive starvation that many people have anticipated as a consequence of peak oil and climate change, and that is good news indeed.

As the newspapers trumpet this bit of news, however, it is useful to meditate on the second part of Aaron's and my conclusion, which is partly evident in the UN report, but less explicit - not just whether it is technically feasible to feed 9 billion people, but more importantly, will we? This is the $64 billion dollar question, isn't it? Because we presently produce enough food to feed every man, woman and child in the world about twice as many calories as their bodies require. In 2008, when our book came out and the number of the world's hungry skyrocketed to above 1 billion people, we had record harvests. Yes, there were floods and fires that year, but the the aggregate remained - there was more food than had ever been produced on earth before - and we still had one out of every 6.7 people going hungry.

The question is simply one of equity - as the UN report observes as one of its central premises:

To achieve this, however, pouring money into agriculture will not be sufficient;
what is most important is to take steps that facilitate the transition towards a low-carbon,
resource-preserving type of agriculture that benefits the poorest farmers. This will not
happen by chance. It can only happen by design, through strategies and programmes backed by strong political will, and informed by a right-to-food approach.

Unless we are as a world committed to the idea of food justice, we will not mend this issue, no matter how we improve yields. Unless those of us who have them put our world's resources in the right places (Remember those promises industrial nations made for food aid and agricultural support during the food crisis in 2008...billions pledged, yadda, yadda? Nope, they never paid up.) Unless we are prepared in the interest of equity to give up some of our consumption of meat and biofuels, it won't happen. You can double yields, or triple or quadruple them (ok, you probably can't, but I'm being rhetorical) - it doesn't matter how much food there is, it matters how we distribute and share it.

That is a much bigger project even that conversion to small farms and agro-ecology. That requires that we care about other people enough to make changes and sacrifices, that we take the right to food seriously. That could happen - it is possible that we could become a world people that does care about others like that. There is precedent - Aaron and I talk about the campaign in the US to go back on food rationing due to the starvation in Europe and Asia that followed World War II. Overwhelmingly American actually supported rationing their own food to feed the hungry in Europe - and more than a third of them would have rationed their own food to feed the starving Japanese, our worst enemies. We are not incapable of that kind of change. But it is a big project.

Aaron and I wrote about that too - we began our chapter quoting Mark Twain, who said "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It is what you know for sure that just ain't so." That, I think is the story of our food future, and so we wrote that what frustrated us most was the fact that what many people are sure they know reinforces the status quo, renders it natural and inevitable, when it is not:

We concluded, in the end, that the greatest barriers to feeding the world had less to do with agriculture and more to do with politics than anything else, as is always the case. Now the UN confirms what we have argued - we could do it. But in order to do so, we must place food justice at the center of our worldview. Will we do this? Perhaps not. But I do not acknowledge that it is impossible, simply because that erases the responsibility to work your damnedest to make it so. And since my children will live in this world, and other people's children who they love as I love mine will live in it, I cannot think of a more useful thing to do in the world than to try.

Sharon

sastyk Thu, 03/10/2011 - 04:38

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food crisis

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small scale agriculture

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Not for the first time, I could use more specific recommendations for legislation you or others would favor. Examples: "Food justice" without specifics is terribly fuzzy for me. I doubt food rationing is in the cards. "give up some of our consumption of meat and biofuels" - how do you want to accomplish that?
Pointing out that a few individuals can do these things out of goodness doesn't mean that is a practical solution. That you personally can use 80% less energy will not make even a tiny blip. Missionary work is good, but overharping personal virtue can be a distraction from the politics. I'll still conserve energy, plant the garden, pick the berries and kill some deer (tons near me), but my neighbors need coercion. Probably monetary pressures are needed.

I was a tiny bit surprised you didn't reference Mark Bittman's op ed column this week in the NYT;

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/

I was a tiny bit surprised he didn't reference YOU, either. :-)

Anyway; the 270-some comments there are an excellent education for any just getting into this discussion, and illustrate the extent of ignorance, miscomprehensions, name-calling, and rancor that have to be dealt with. Too many, too much, all around.

sigh. (oh, yeah, and the Spock to McCoy ratio in the comments is around 1 to 90, or so...)

:-)

I think that in general our species reacts to both largesse and scarcity with scarcity-minded strategies, choosing in-groups with whom to share and out-groups with whom to compete. When an economy or empire is expanding, unions, nonprofit ventures, and revolutionaries stand to gain, and when an empire or economy contracts, unions, NGOs and revolutionaries lose (and the rich win, but only in the relatively short term). It's nice to be right, but Ugo Bardi has named his new blog well. Or that's how I'm feeling today, after a whole series of entropic life events...

9+ billion people on this planet sounds like an eco-catastrophe. Lets hope it never happens.

risa b.,

I tend to think that it is our decadent social structure that reacts with scarcity-minded strategies, and not our species. The fact that we raise our children to the same decadent lessons our parents were taught doesn't mean that we are incapable of the selflessness and wisdom of the very brightest points in human history.

We are surrounded by people of faith, of heart and honor, and of wisdom, do we but recognize them. There are some few in government itself, I have to believe, though I couldn't at this moment name one with such a great spirit; more, though, aspire.

Notice though, that Sharon's call for human power actually addresses several problems. I agree that the world would be a sorry place if a majority of nine billion people waited for food. But if most are engaged in providing food - then most aren't available for mischief or indolence. The other lacking resource is community, of awareness of our neighbors and earning their respect. That seems to happen more, for those with their hands touching the earth that sustains us, in gardening, agribusiness, and each shading from one to the other.

I am of mixed thoughts about abandoning meat for a regular diet. At least at present, the energy and resources to move grain to the table is daunting and a problem for large numbers of servings. Meat is more compact, and potentially able to convey more useful calories for the same shipping weight. Especially if we go back to driving the cow, the pig, and the goat to the corner butcher.

But first we have to restore the grain storehouse at the village and community level, we must restore the number of butchers. Heck, we have to make the needed hoe handles and shovels and spades - and divert and train the people needed to begin scratching the soil, planting the seed, and raising their children to love the soil well.

The thought of over 9 billion people on the planet is staggering. We have the capability of feeding people as the population of the U.S. can attest to by our largeness.

Hello. What is food justice for the North?
Thank you,
claude

Until there are legislators who are not scientific illiterates and whose major goal is reelection, no political help is likely . Unfortunately, scientific literacy is declining among the American population, so the representatives do actually represent the views of their constituents.

ever notice there is NEVER A SHORTAGE OF STARVING CHILDREN in impoverished areas?

We could feed everyone if that didn't lead to those irresposible illiterates procreating more of their little garbage disposlas

Not to be calloues but I agree with glenp. Why is 9 billion a magic number. Why not 10, 12 or 20. If there is a maximum global population that can be sustained by the sun's energy
then what? Obviously it would be self limiting and if left to play out naturally, not a very civilized scenerio. So why focus on just feeding the population and not controlling it?

Jeff, I'm not at all sure it is possible to agree with GlenP's framing and not be callous ;-), but we'll try. 9 billion is the mid-range projection for population - a peak at around 2050, with a gradual decline after that if the conditions for demographic transition continue. So as you can see, population is hardly out of the equation - the problem is that the 9 billion people are already written - the growing generation that will come of age and having children in the coming decades will already be having dramatically fewer children than their parents - but they will have children. Demographic shifts take time - literally generations. In the meantime, unless they all die horribly, you have to feed people.

As for the GlenP's framing, which is ignorant at best, the problem is distribution - we produce enough food right now to feed everyone double the calories they need. We could, with fair distribution, feed 9 billion *now* - today. We grow enough food worldwide to do it. The issues are equity - and those "little illiterates" don't actually do most of the consuming Glen and Jeff and I do. Our cars eat more grain than those children. We eat more in the form of meat. Most nations with starving populations don't have shortages of food - they have equity and distribution problems. Ethiopia, for example, during the famous "famine" in the 1980s was exporting grain.

The average American kid consumes 30xs more resources than the average Kenyan kid. The average Kenyan has 5 children. All their kids together contribute 1/6 of 1 American child's impact. It is, of course, convenient, to put the blame on the poor, far away, non-white and illiterate. It is not, however, remotely accurate.

Sharon

Sharon, Aaron, and the UN are 100% right- the problem is not ( yet ) one of production, but rather distribution. "Food justice" has a nice ring to it, but is non-specific to the point of meaninglessness. Remember, the most deadly genocides in human history were committed by the Soviets and Maoist China in the name of food justice, when they collectivized agriculture. The deadly error is to assume that centralized, command and control authority can create prosperity, when every single example proves the contrary. Look at every place poverty is endemic, and you will find either dictatorships or chaos- either way, individuals are unable to act freely in their own best interests. What farmer will spend a season laboring in the field, knowing that all he produces will be seized, or he and his family killed or exiled? Poverty exists in places where human liberty is denied. When people are free, they tend not to be poor for long. It is fashionable for experts to draw sharp distinctions between rich and poor nations ( ie,"Global North" vs. "Global South"; "developed nations" vs. "developing nations" ) as if wealth was just a randomy occurring characteristic, not the result of political realities. Freedom- in the personal, political, and economic sense- everywhere exists in inverse proportion to poverty.

While we in the industrialized world need to change our ways to reflect the reality of the earth's finite resources, this article points out that starvation is a separate, though related, issue. Me skipping a meal doesn't mean another person on the other side of the world will get a meal. When people are free, they will be able to feed themselves.

Sharon, I agree with your statement except for the population projection. Stating the future as fact ("the growing generation that will come of age and having children in the coming decades will already be having dramatically fewer children than their parents") is naive.

New stumbler here. This is an excellent article, and I shall definitely be seeking out a copy of the book. The issue of sustainable food production is an issue close to my own heart, and to my livelihood as a small farmer.

Therefore, I have to say that there was one sentence that jarred (out of all the many others that made sense), and it was this one:

"Unless we are prepared in the interest of equity to give up some of our consumption of meat ... it won't happen."

I definitely do not see how this conclusion follows from the arguments that have been made above.

Animals are an essential element in the make-up of any fully long-term sustainable, biodiversity-promoting, soil-building, polyculture system. Animals effectively transform many of the more inedible parts of the biosphere - grass, bio-wastes, etc, - and often on marginal lands - into both soil-building manures, and into human-edible nutrients. I cannot imagine how any sustainable agro-ecology could be built without them, either as participants or as food (not to speak of the possible future necessity of re-introducing animal labour to replace that of machines).

Scotlyn - I think you'll get little argument on that from the folks here. I thnk the "reduce" point has to do with the current excessively high production coming from CAFOs, and the subsequent high consumption. That, we could do without.

I agree with your statement except for the population projection. Stating the future as fact ("the growing generation that will come of age and having children in the coming decades will already be having dramatically fewer children than their parents") is naive.

This statement

In 2006, the United Nations stated that the rate of population growth is diminishing due to the demographic transition. If this trend continues, the rate of growth may diminish to zero, concurrent with a world population plateau of 9.2 billion, in 2050. However, this is only one of many estimates published by the UN. In 2009, UN projections for 2050 range from about 8 billion to 10.5 billion.

would seem to make the figure of 9 billion a reasonable working assumption. Hardly naive.

Remember; the most deadly genocides in human history were committed by the Soviets and Maoist China in the name of food justice; when they collectivized agriculture... The deadly error is to assume that centralized, command and control authority can create prosperity, when every single example proves the contrary. Look at every place poverty is endemic, and you will find either dictatorships or chaos-either way, individuals are unable to act freely in their own best interests...

we have to restore the grain storehouse at the village and community level, we must restore the number of butchers. Heck, we have to make the needed hoe handles and shovels and spades - and divert and train the people needed to begin scratching the soil, planting the seed, and raising their children to love the soil well.

Putting Me in My Place

sastyk — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:35:03 +0000

Putting Me in My Place

The first thing you need to know about my farm is that it is huge. I mean enormous - by world standards. The vast majority of the world's farms - more than 80%, are very small farms, of less than 2 hectares (about 5 acres), and they produce the majority of the world's staple crops and calories.

I suspect most folks in most of the Global North will find that a little surprising. The term "farm" in the US tends be applied most often to very large farms. We have a strong internal sense that small scale agriculture is particularly unsuited to growing staples. Most small farms in the US concentrate on smaller or specialty markets - the fact that the majority of the world's rice, for example, is grown on farms of less than five acres is probably startling to most people.

If you take out my 19 acres of woodland, the proportions get closer, but that 19 acres represents an indescribable wealth for the nearly 1 billion small producers who live in areas that are seriously deforested, and who struggle to get firewood, building materials and other forest products readily available to me. Moreover, although we preserve and protect our woodlands and wetlands, we also derive both household and economic benefit from them - from wood we burn to mushrooms we harvest to food we forage and the wetland plants I specialize in. So we should start with the reality that not only am I, like most Americans, quite rich by global standards, but by global agricultural standards, this is a vast spread

In US terms, of course, I have a very small farm. Very small farms in the US are defined as less than 50 acres, and I'd need another 973 acres to make it to large (not going to happen). In the US, very small farms have been growing, but small to mid-sized American farms are disappearing as the trend towards larger and larger scale farm production increases. While there are more farms like mine - under 50 acres - we are still producing on the tiniest fraction of the food consumed in the US. Moreover, in some ways the growth of very small farms has concealed, as the above link shows, the continuing consolidation of agriculture, the elimination of the once-vast agricultural middle that mostly fed the nation until very recently.

There is a tendency to dismiss very small scale agriculture in the US as not serious. And if "serious" is defined as producing primary calorie crops - those staple grains and roots that are the basis of our diets, there's a case to be made. Most very small farms deal in small markets and high value, labor intensive crops where small production and a lot of attention can make their products stand out. And most very small farmers find that it is simply not viable economically to produce staple crops - we found that during the period we ran our CSA. We can and did grow grinding corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes, as well as smaller quantities of other staples. But we also realized pretty quickly that a population accustomed to paying $6 a lb for organic tomatoes won't pay that for potatoes or cornmeal.

So like most small farms, we found ourselves pushed towards high value crops. We were also shaped by our choice of farm - by amount of land and kind of land. If we take serious to mean "feeds the most people and livestock the most grain" very small farms in the US are not very serious. On the other hand, if we talk about the value of crops produced there per acre, and about what crops are not generally produced on a large scale, on large farms - or aren't produced as well there because of realities of centralization and shipping, then smaller farms become very important indeed. Moreover, the world example should point out to us that it is not necessarily the case that small farms will never have a substantive role in producing our primary calories.

When we looked at land we considered several farms, including a couple of 80ish acre river bottomland or river plateau pieces, in areas much better suited to field production than our current place. But we wanted something that would operate mostly on a human powered scale - at the time, we wanted neither draft labor nor a tractor.

While our goal was to reduce fossil fueled inputs, we didn't reject the tractor primarily for that reason - I consider agricultural production to be one of the better uses of oil, and wouldn't have had any problem using one. But what kept me from getting one was my observation of other farmers - barring those who could afford the best equipment most spent many long days tinkering with their tractors. Most of them liked the work, but I don't, and neither does Eric. We had doubts about our ability to do good maintenence, and about our ability to deal with the frustration. We also realized that we could hire a good bit of tractor power for short stretches for the cost of one tractor, or even a walk-behind.

We considered draft animals more seriously - I am not a horsey person, but I do love draft horses, their calm, quiet size appeals to me deeply, and I have fond childhood memories of holding reins behind a family member. I like oxen too, and have friends who would have taught me the tricks of using either. But at the time I had a nursing 15 month old and was pregnant with my second son.

Almost thirty years ago, Judith Brown wrote a short essay "Notes on the Division of Labor by Sex" that pointed out what should have been blindingly obvious, had not historians and anthropologists largely ignored women's work - that whether or not communities or households can rely upon women to do the work of providing depends "on the compatibility of this pursuit with the demands of child care." Since pregnancy and the nursing period could easily last four year per child in most societies (the worldwide average age of weaning is four even now), the work women do must be compatible with the realities of children.

That is, it must be safe to take babies with you and do it while carrying one on your back or front, they are easily interruptable to meet children's needs, they do not place mobile children in danger, and they do not require your whole attention. Working with draft horses or oxen meets none of these requirements. So to make good use of the horses must have been Eric's business, and Eric does not love draft animals as I do.

Because I am the primary farmer on our farm, and we were facing at least three more years of pregnancy and my nursing (it turned out to be six more, actually) we chose a smaller farm. My being the chief of agricultural operations here (to put it pretentiously) puts me largely in sync with most of the world - the majority of the farmer's in the world are women.

This is one of the reason the world's farms, despite enormous effort to expand, consolidate and mechanize them, are mostly small, and probably always will be. Because the vast majority of agrarian women in the world, just like me, must do their farmwork with their babies on their heels and their children or grandchildren interrupting them to ask questions. To get bigger, a farm must be able to support two farmers - one to do the local work - to manage those animals kept close to the house, to tend those fields that can be handled with a hoe or a digging stick, to tend the household garden, and one to do the work with draft animals or tractors and other dangerous tools, further away from the home, while the home-farmer guards and watches the children.

But just as my family cannot live entirely on its agricultural income, most farm families in the US and in the world, do not live entirely on their farm income any longer. Indeed, as Peter Rosset writes in _Food is Different_ the whole world effectively benefits from the fact that even when it isn't economically remunerative, farmers essentially subsidize their own agricultural production with off-farm labor. And this is one common ground that ties me to much larger farms, as well as the substantially smaller ones - all of us have trouble making ends meet without non-farm labor. Whether big or small, the majority of the world's farmers rely on either additional outside work by the farmers themselves, or by family members.

Farmers drive trucks and substitute teach in the winter, or one partner in a farming household works full time off farm for things like health insurance and a stable income. In the Global South, it is common to send daughters to the factories in some countries, or sons to the US to work construction or do other labor and send back money to keep the family farm afloat. Rosset documents that farming truly is a way of life, rather than simply a job, because even when the off-farm work is more remunerative than the farm work *and* the opportunity exists for the farmers to give up farming altogether, they often don't, but persist in agricultural pursuits, while working longer and harder outside in order to support the practice of feeding others.

For a long time in American history, it was possible for a small-to-mid-sized farm to support two adults working full time on the land at agricultural pursuits, broadly and not always accurately divided into "housewifery and husbandry" - that is, to divide agricultural production into field-scale agriculture done with draft animals, usually by a man (although women certainly worked in the fields more often than they are credited with), and home scale agriculture - dairying, poultry keeping, gardening, small field crop tending - along with childcare, usually done by a woman.

This fact of history means that we have developed the underlying assumption that a farmer is a man, and his adjunct is "the farmer's wife." And in a society, if such a society could ever exist, that gave full credit to women and housewifery, this tragedy of labelling might be less unfortunate. But the difficulty of the "farmer's wife" assumption is that it erases women from agriculture - millions and millions of them. Indeed, we can see this erasure particularly in Africa, where for more than half a century development dollars in agriculture have overwhelmingly gone to men who may own the land - but don't farm it. More than 80% of African farmers are women, and it is only in the last two decades that efforts to address agricultural difficulties in many African countries have even fully recognized who was doing the farming.

More directly, in my life, the farmer's wife syndrome erases me - even though I'm the primary farmer. Don't get me wrong - on a farm, everyone farms in some measure, and Eric and I are full partners - but the reality is that the farm is driven by me. And yet, almost monthly someone comes to the farm to make a delivery, to make a purchase, or for whatever purpose and immediately assumes that Eric is the person to talk to. Eric is extremely good at fending this off - I remember how appreciative I felt when our real estate agent, taking us around to view these farms, immediately assumed that I would be more interested in the house, and Eric would take charge of viewing the barn. Instead, Eric very calmly observed that he was going to take Eli to look at the house, leaving me to evaluate the barn, as I was better qualified than he. The agent looked stunned, but gamely turned back to me. Some variation on this scene gets played out regularly here.

The other way that we are rather more than less like the world norm is in the quality of our farmland. Frankly, ours is dreadful, and I say that fondly - I love my terrible soil. Indeed, most of the places we could afford that wouldn't have involved a 45 minute or longer commute for Eric were pretty awful in some way - either the house was a wreck, or the barns were, or the soil was - or occasionally all of the above.

This too is typical of the world scene. The trend towards agricultural consolidation has not just shaped America - all over the world, much of the best land has been shifted to export crops and larger farms, where more and more of the 2.5 billion pastoralists, very small farmers, fisherpeople and the remaining hunter-gatherers have been pushed onto ever more marginal land and water.

In our case, we weren't pushed - we wanted our land - it was the best of an imperfect lot of choices. We knew that we'd be dependent on Eric's faculty job, and didn't want to substitute small inputs on the farm for large ones spent in gas. We knew of people to carpool with in this area. Moreover, I didn't really want to devote myself full time to making the house habitable, or trying to prop up a collapsing barn. This place had a decent house, although one that needed work, and several functionalish outbuildings. It had a size and scale within my capacities and our reality.

Its vast disadvantage was that the topsoil had been strip mined - quite literally, the place was a sod farm for decades and most of the never-deep topsoil was cut up and removed and sent to people who couldn't wait for grass to grow - it still grew grass fairly well. It had ample water, and soil for vegetables, I reasoned, could be built.

And we did build it - it was deeply labor intensive and a long process, but we managed to run, with almost no fossil fuel inputs, using only hand labor. The vast majority of it was done by a woman laboring under the constraints of traditional women's work - toddlers, babies, pregnancies and all. In the end we accomplished a CSA that eventually rose to have 22 members and provided a huge basket of vegetables to each household for 20 weeks a year.

It took us a while to figure out that what we needed most was more livestock. As David Montgomery, author of the superb _Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations_ observes, land is rapidly exhausted of topsoil if organic material is not replaced. It is hard to produce such organic material entirely using vegetable means. We were enthusiastic replacers with all we had - but we raised only poultry for the first 5 years of the farm.

We raised a lot of pastured poultry - turkeys, chickens and ducks - but the pasturing meant that half the manure was going back to our grasslands - good for them, but not available to the garden. The remaining half, their night droppings, mixed with bedding, were not enough. We got manures from neighbors - from the alpaca farmers, the horse people and a nearby dairy farm, but we needed more, and more directly.

In both our predecessors' stripping of soils and our own failure to immediately remediate as powerfully as needed, we were following an American tradition, if an appalling one. Disregard of soil, the idea that you can always move on to better land - this was reported by many agricultural observers who deplored the way that American farmers misused and depleted their ground, and were astonished by the fact that Americans, particularly southern farmers, did not manure their fields.

George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton "It must be obvious to every man, who considers the agriculture of this country how miserably defective we are in the management of our lands...A few more years of increased sterility will drive the Inhabitants of the Atlantic States westward for support; whereas if they were taught how to improve the old, instead of going in pursuit of new and productive soils, they would make these acres which now scarcely yild them any thing, turn out beneficial to themselves." He was prescient, Washington. But some of us stayed - my ancestors among them, staying in place in the cold rocky northeast, and I think some of that remains in my blood, the desire to take the imperfect land and claim it and make it all it can be.

We did not move fast enough initially in soil restoration, but we have improved since, adding more livestock to our land. We have taken up the project, partly from necessity, since we cannot afford the best land, but also partly from desire to restore marginal land to productivity. We have shuttered our CSA, I think for good - I loved doing it, but I know that the river bottomland below us will always produce better, faster vegetables than we will, with less cost to the soil. We will always be 10 days later to market with our tomatoes and our sweet corn. So it is enough to me that we begin from our subsistence, and produce those things only for our family, some friends and the food pantry.

And in that too, there is a real resemblance to the world's average farm. The average farmer and small agricultural producer feeds themselves first, and then sells extra produce, or high value items for cash. This model of prioritizing subsistence production over maximum cash production was the norm even in the Global North for most of human history, before it was replaced here by the idea that even farmers should produce food only for cash, and then purchase their meals at the same supermarkets everyone else shops at.

We, like everyone, have our cash crops - but they are for the most part, overages - and they follow on top of our prioritizing our getting our own food from our own land. We are not doctinaire about this - I have grown small grains, but don't grow much of them. Instead, we grow lots of potatoes and sweet potatoes and substitute these for some of our grains, while buying our other staples sustainably from small producers in bulk. There are some crops I don't grow - because I save seed, I grow only one crop of sweet corn, and we happily devour the stuff from the farmstand in the valley. I eat their tomatoes for a couple of weeks before mine are ripe. I get peaches from a farmer down the hill in a warmer place than mine. We are hardly perfectly consistent.

And yet we produce all the milk we drink, except during the goats' dry spell (and next year we'll have staggered breeding and won't have one) and many of our other dairy products (we still buy ice cream occasionally and butter locally) and all the eggs. We raise the vast majority of our meat, the vast majority of our vegetables, about half our fruit and about 1/3 of our staple foods. We do this not only during the growing season, but by preserving our food for winter and using season extension, also through winter.

Meanwhile, the crops we specialize in are ones that our land does best, or that we can do better than others. Pastured poultry, goat, lamb and eggs. Healthy livestock, raised for small scale production. Herbs and salad greens for the off season. Seeds we save. Native wetland plants for land restoration. Garden plants for other people's gardens. Medicinal plants and dried herbs, produced in small batches with high quality. We are able to also experiment with other crops - with tree crops for winter feed, and with unusual fruits for making jams, juices and syrups, and new fiber crops. We can experiment with fertility improvement and soil building. We can do whatever we want within the real constraints of the land we have, the people and time we have, the tools we are willing to use, the money we have and the realities of agriculture. As my son Simon once wrote on a homemade pencil sign for our farm "Glenings (sp..actually Gleanings) Farm: Flora, Fauna and Food. That's pretty much it.

I put myself in place here not to make any grand point - it is not that my farm magically duplicates the realities of small farms in the Global South - it doesn't. It isn't that my farm is just like the big farms only smaller - it isn't. And yet, I like to think it is not only pretense that ties me both to larger and smaller farmers - because they too are bound by the realities that bind me - that the land and the life shape and control things in ways hard to explain to someone who has never done it. I do not think I fully realized, when I began to farm, how much the farm would decide about the shape of my life, or how much, in picking a place, a piece of land, I had determined my own future, the kind of farmer I would be, and the kind of person that farming would make me into.

sastyk Mon, 07/19/2010 - 02:35

Categories

Social Sciences

This is fascinating to me. I don't know anything about farming, but I dream of being able to grow more of my own food one day. It's really hard to grow enough for more than a meal or two in my apartment, but maybe one day I will be able to afford land. I think there is a lot I'll have to learn before being able to choose a good spot.

I am more or less a gardening dilettante; I've had little enthusiasm or persistence in food preservation or feeding myself 12 or even 6 months of the year. But this time of year I greatly appreciate the wonderful meals that have been coming from my 12'X 20' garden.

Thoughtful comments, Sharon. I'm retired and run a substantial garden by hand (using a rototiller only in the spring on certain beds). It's a good-sized garden, about 50x60 feet, that I'm developing, with several apple trees, blueberries, raspberries, and rotated, mixed crops. And this year a small group of chickens. I'm a long way from having a finished garden, but my goal is to produce much (most?) of the food that my wife and I eat.

I've come to think of it as a micro-farm and myself as a (peasant) farmer. I'm focused on producing for us, not for the market, though maybe in the future that might happen, but then only the overage of what we produce. But the true focus of any farmer/gardener must be building up the soil. We are not vegetable or livestock farmers, but "soil farmers", for a healthy soil is the essential prerequisite for healthy crops and animals. [Or as Joel Salatin said, he calls himself a grass farmer.] And building up or restoring the topsoil can be done much more quickly than most people realize (see for example the classic example of Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farm).

Indeed, could we insist that to be a farmer means to be "one who builds up the soil"? Hmmm, I wonder what that definition would do to all the industrial, factory "farmers" out there?

I've definitely got the agrarian bug, about 40 years too late, sad to say. But I'm working at developing a meaningful rotation and getting the legumes and cover crops into the rotation, along with my compost and purchased manure. A lot of work, but all great fun. But unlike teaching (which I did for 30+ years) which is just a big production line, farming is work where you can see that you have actually produced something useful at the end.

Sharon,

ditto what DennisP wrote.

Thanks for putting your farm and farming into perspective. The quarter acre (including woods' edge) I am using and plan to use for food and medicinals keeps my hands full - my main limit is my own energy, as I am my labor force. For the gardens, I use hand tools. Read S L O W.

The ducks are part of the garden, and I am building their infrastructure from the ground up this year. Incorporating them into the garden rotations is taking some time, but it has been rewarding. We now have all the eggs we can eat, and plenty to give.

Applying permaculture principles as I go along has made this quite the exercise of my mind, too. All those decisions, every day, about how to do it now, how to set it up to do it better next time . . .

Thanks for opening this world up for so many.

Many years ago we farmed about 12 acres with a team. When we realized we were mostly raising feed for the team, we turned the fields back to pasture and sold the team.

I see what you're saying- although I was naive enough to believe the farmers of Africa were mainly the men!
In recent years I have been quite concerned that the planet has been outbreeding the ability of the diminishing agricultural land to feed it. Like everyone I have witnessed continuing humanitarian "disasters" from war, climate creep (eg. expansion of the Shara), hurricanes, earthquakes, eruptions and diseases (eg. ebola in Ruanda). Every time the "ordinary citizen" starves and runs out of water and mostly a Western relief organisation comes in and tries to feed people. At the same time, we have these secular trends of less viable farmland and countries no longer feeding themselves and becoming dependent on places with which they are not very friendly!
Seriously- I would like to see the figures on total planet productivity in terms of "feed one human for a year" portions- those wheat-laden trains I see in the Australian countryside surely cannot provide enough high-protein bread to feed those BILLIONS of people out there sitting in refugee camps, unable to produce a thing (except a bit of fertiliser!)??
In Australia, we still take a lot of migrants each year in comparison with our ability to provide cheap housing, jobs, free & adequate health care and extra land to grow food for them- yet apparently our acceptance of migrants is quite small on a world scale. If the scale is much larger in other places, have those countries worked out their ability to feed, house and care for this continuing stream of humanity?
And then there is "climate change"- will there be enough extra well-watered land created somewhere to compensate for all the marginal drought-affected crops that will inevitably cease to be produced??
I'm all questions!

It's funny how similar your farm is to ours. We have more acreage, but lots of hills so that the huge wooded portion probably does less duty than yours does. We ran a CSA (smaller than yours) for a year, before deciding it just wasn't cost effective and that we wanted to primarily feed ourselves. I'm the primary gardener, and our fourth farming year (this year), soil fertility has suddenly seemed like a huge deal. Maybe we'll expand into livestock beyond poultry yet... :-)

Yup, microfarm here too (1 acre), woman as primary farmer (me), DH supplements with mushrooms, some processing, and physical infrastructure work when I can persuade him of the need. I thought your article hit just about all the relevant points about who farms and how they farm. Just one tiny addition: women farmers may be caregiving elderly relatives along with, or instead of, caring for children. Again the farm needs to be small in that case, so they aren't far from the person they care for when that person needs care. I see this in my future within a decade, maybe sooner.

I appreciate your point about needing to build soil. Even though I am lucky to have good soil, it won't stay good (and it could stand some improvement) if I don't take good care of it. I produce and add compost but don't think I am adding quite enough for long-term good maintenance. Humans are animals too, so we could use our own manures to build soil. But one can't sell the food if it's raised using humanure - not only from a legal standpoint, but unless people have read Joe Jenkins, they will think contamination as soon as they hear that humanure was used. Humanure, used improperly, does pose a big health risk, so it is absolutely necessary to do it right. And yet, humanure is a huge resource that is currently only a problem once it gets mixed with miscellaneous industrial waste (sewage sludge) or household chemicals (septic tank sludge). Sooner or later, we're going to have to use humanure to improve fertility, and use it right so we don't make ourselves sick in the process. Might be better to learn to do it sooner rather than later.

I'm not an animal person so I have not added any animals beyond earthworms in a worm bin to our microfarm, but I am an animal so I could use humanure, along with compost, rotation, and cover cropping to build soil. Next year's goal is to set up a humanure collection and composting facility. Since I won't be able to sell anything from humanure fertilized beds, my goal will then be to produce not just our veggies but grow a substantial portion of the calorie component too. I already grow potatoes, popcorn, and dry beans and will be adding wheat this year as well as considering an expansion of the calorie beds as I refine my gardening system. Our chestnut trees are producing their first nuts this year and at some point the young pecans and hickories will bear. Maybe the squirrels will leave me a few nuts. Or maybe we'll eat nut-fed squirrel. We'll see how things go.

If I can get over my worries about not providing adequate care to small animals and get myself prepared to slaughter and eat the animals, I am considering adding rabbits and either ducks or chickens. But I can see that adding to my workload as well, so I will have to rethink various other activities I am currently engaged in - an ongoing process that I suspect will bring considerable change to my life over the next few years.

To support your understanding of the wife's place on the ranch: from, I suppose, when mother became pregnant with me, until I was about three years old, my father hired a full-time hand to live on the place and do some of her work. I presume you keep the books and write the checks. My mother had to sign my father's name because women couldn't have bank accounts at the time.

Wonderful essay, Sharon. I wish my wife were more into the farming thing, though she is coming around, slowly. We have 1.65 mostly wooded acres here in south Mississippi. Most of what we can do involved me figuring out which spots got the most sunlight, as the enormous pines (the ones that survived the tornadoes spawned by Katrina) dominate the landscape. We are very fortunate to have good acidic soil, which is great for blueberries and figs and thornless blackberry. More "traditional" vegetables are a challenge, but thanks to the huge quantities of pine straw mulch, we have a good base to work from; and our small flock of Dominique pulletss contribute a small but growing!) bit of magic to the mix.

I was wondering: what part of the country are you and your husband in? Your mentioning native wetland plants, for use in land restoration, is intriguing. (I assume you are somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon, since your neighbor has a peach tree.) The land at the bottom of our hill gets treated to regular overflows during heavy rain, which seems to remove good topsoil as it is created, leaving the area of little use for usual methods of agriculture. This, despite the goodly number of water oaks, sweet gum, and bay trees.

Anyway, keep up the good work, and I hope your farm year is successful!

we also have a small farm and I enjoy reading your posts. we have some good pics. at SPRING BAY FARM on Facebook

I love this post, because through its details it illustrates several principles, at least some of which are:

each farm, or large garden, or urban homestead, has its own peculiarities which will shape you and what you end up 'succeeding' with on the place.

you will learn as you go, and change and adapt.

even though your place is different from everyone else's, you will encounter the same general issues, of soil fertility, dealing with insect 'pests', dealing with critters which want to eat what you grow, water availability, labor availability, etc.

There are probably more, here, but I don't have time to re-read.

Thanks, Sharon, for a great article laying out what really happens on a real farmstead.

I have no excuse for making this comment except that I love this story, and it seems to have been lost to the public. And you did bring up soil fertility. Years ago I was part of a group that was given a private, night-time tour of Mt. Vernon, George Washington's farm. One of the Ladies told us this story.

George was indeed highly concerned about the fertility of the soil, and looked for novel ways to restore and improve it. One day, it struck him, possibly while crabbing on the Potomac; that the bottom of the river was- black muck. He put his slaves to work dredging up black river muck; and had them spread it, about 6 inches deep if I remember correctly, on top of 4 acres of his land.

It poisoned and sterilized the soil there for decades. The Potomac river muck, it turns out, is full of lead; leached from the rocks of West Virginia, naturally.

I've often thought that failures are more educational than successes; we should perhaps have publications like "The Journal of Agricultural Failures".

Apparently George did not brag about his failed experiment; but I think he should have.

As a small farmer considering farm size in industrial farming I too am deeply concerned about the way we deplete our soil using so called modern farming practices. The art of rotating crops and allowing fallow years is all but lost here in Ct. We are all under the economic gun to produce more and say the hell with worrying about the future of soil productivity. There also is a saying here in CT. that N.Y. farmers waste more land than we use. I wish I had that luxury.

Chris, actually I'm in rural Central NY, west of Albany. Peach trees do grow this far north, though, although they have to be coddled.

Sharon

A bit of thread necromancy on my part here, but I had to comment because I love this post.

Not all farms in America are strip-mining the soil; here in Minnesota, I think all of the farmers know about using manure, rotating crops (soy, sorghum, corn is a typical rotation), letting fields lie fallow some years, and use of low-till methods to reduce erosion. There are a few smaller farms not far from where I live (I'm in suburbia, so farm size is limited) and you can certainly tell when they fertilize; it's carried on the breeze. ;-)

But what I really like is watching the small farms at work. We have a large Hmong population here in the Twin Cities. Back in Laos and Vietnam, they were traditionally farmers, and they have kept that here. Those who have managed to continue farming seem to be the most stable as well, with fewest children being lost to gangs and other plights of immigrant communities in strange new lands. There are several areas where they farm, and they do their work almost entirely by hand. No draft animals. They do not live on the land, or even own it -- they rent it. The way it all works for them is very much like what you describe above. Extended families live together; the elderly provide child care, most of the able-bodied adults and many of the older children provide manual labor in the fields and sell the produce in farmer's markets, and one or two family members get a full-time job. In the winter, the farming family members may get a seasonal job, or will do handiwork for later sale. (Traditionally, the women will spend the winter doing needlework, which will be sold the next summer.) I'm sure they eat some of their produce, but they actually sell most of it, and it's impressive how much they are able to produce without any machinery or draft animals. It always pains me when I hear someone call the Hmong lazy; they have no idea.

The big key that they have which other small farmers in America do not have is the clan family structure. As long as we insist on believing in the nuclear family as the appropriate group to dwell under a single roof, small-scale farming will remain impractical for supplying the bulk of our needs. This is not because small farms are bad, but because the larger family group provides built-in child-care and the ability to weather catastrophes.