Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] The Small Scale Integrated Farmstead - A Model for Sustainable Agriculture

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Small Scale Integrated Farmstead - A Model for Sustainable Agriculture
  • Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 23:41:18 -0600



The Small Scale Integrated Farmstead - A Model for Sustainable Agriculture
by Karl North, Northland Sheep Dairy, Marathon, NY
http://www.geocities.com/northsheep/ssif.html

As more people begin to adopt the idea of sustainability as a way of thinking
about farming and about the future of our civilization, we who are directly
concerned with organic farming need to develop and refine our idea of
sustainability in order to say clearly what direction we think farming must
take in the future. To this end I offer these thoughts on a general model in
the hope of advancing or at least provoking the necessary debate.

As benchmarks of sustainability I'll discuss the need for several types of
integration, most notably animal husbandry with plant growing as an essential
step away from monoculture, and the integration of the farm with its local
consumer market. And I'll argue that small scale is essential to
sustainability for reasons that are not only agricultural, but ecological,
economic, social, and even political. Any general model for organic farming
must also be a model for success in an extremely difficult economic
environment. Ever since the rise of urban civilization, rural people
everywhere have been subject in varying degrees to what Wendell Berry calls a
colonial economy. The colonial economy subverts and eventually destroys the
economy of local self-sufficiency, replacing it everywhere with an
exploitation based on export of cheap raw materials and cheap labor, and
import of expensive manufactures. This process, far from being an exclusively
Third World disease, is actually more advanced in Nebraska than in Namibia.
In the belief that the small scale integrated farmstead (SSIF) is the best
defense against that colonialism, I will be describing it as a series of
strategies for outwitting or bypassing the colonial economy. The way of
farming described here takes as its point of departure the old general farm,
a system that has been maturing for ten thousand years.

At the outset I should reveal a bias with respect to some basic values in
which I think the larger culture has become deficient:

1. Our extreme materialism has eclipsed other values. We need to value people
more than things and quality more than quantity.

2. Our extreme individualism has destroyed faith in the success of serious
cooperation among equals. The success of corporate imperialism has shrunk the
population of self-employed individuals and families until most people know
how to cooperate in their working lives only as cogs in an employee hierarchy.

3. Our tendency to analytically reduce the world to separate things grossly
distorts reality. We need to stress wholes and relations among things, so as
to treat things as primarily parts of whole systems.

4. Our lingering puritan heritage combines with the increasingly sheltered
and synthetic environ-ment of urban childhood to keep most people literally
out of touch with their true physical nature and the nature of the ecosystem.
We need to loosen up to move to the natural rhythms we begin to hear in
ourselves and in the great dance of the natural world around us.

***********

Respect for Nature's Models

One of Wendell Berry's themes that most appeals to me is respect for nature's
models. He argues that the experiments at domestication that we call
agriculture are best limited to careful refinements on these models. Building
viability through diversity is a lesson from nature that farmers have taken
to heart for ages, although it has been under attack in the last few decades
by the apostles of industrial farming. Monoculture was more labor-efficient,
so the argument went, and labor was becoming scarce on the farm. But the
ecological problems of monoculture combined with the financial insecurity of
putting all one's eggs in one basket has addicted a generation of farmers to
the crutch of production credit financing, and its long-run viability is
doubtful. The rural manpower problem is a fact of life, but it is due partly
to pressure from the colonial economy on farmers to expand beyond the
financial and manpower limits of the farm family. If the scale of the farm
operation can be reduced, there will be time to develop a diversity of
products, along with some of the processing and direct marketing that returns
their full value to the farmer.

The farm's products must be carefully chosen to fit tight summer schedules or
to spread the work over the seasons. At Northland Sheep Dairy for example, we
limit vegetable production for market since it would overburden a summer
season already filled with haying, milking, and cheese-making. Instead we
gain diversity by making the most of all the sheep products, processing milk,
meat, wool and skins into finished retail items. Lambing is scheduled for
Spring, and the peak marketing effort for Fall. We retail the orchard harvest
as cider along with the sheep products in the Fall farmers' market.

Since much of monoculture and indoor animal husbandry has so deviated from
nature's model as to appear unsustainable, I feel we must push in the other
direction. At our farm all fields are in perennial swards of mixed grasses,
legumes and other plants chosen for diversity and for permanence in our soil
and climate, rather than for maximum yield. In this way we not only reduce
animal housing and forage storage costs, but also much of the cost of the
constant harvesting, plowdown, and reseeding attendant to alfalfa and corn,
which are the conventional monoculture forages in our area. Alfalfa can be
very profitable in the right environment, but experts are gradually admitting
what good farmers always knew: that ordinary native grasses like orchard
grass, harvested/grazed at the right stage of growth, compare well with the
alfalfa in protein and other nutrients. In fact, orchard grass and other
grasses that remain green and vegetative under snow cover retain these high
nutrient levels in winter like vegetables in a freezer, so they can be
harvested by the animals themselves year-round. Sheep, for example, will
thrive grazing through up to a foot of snow when there is good pasture
underneath.

In the end, a mix of near-permanent forage is better for the soil (following
nature's idea of. constant cover), better for the plants (less disease than
alfalfa or corn), and better for the animals that feed on it. After all, the
animals did not evolve on a forage of monoculture.

After years of studying his cows' forage preferences, the British dairyman
Newman Turner concluded that "unlike humans whose palates are so perverted
that we cannot rely on taste to decide what is good for us," ruminants,
especially the more rustic varieties, are still the best judge of their right
diet. His cows' top choices in forage plants, in order of preference: Sheep's
Parsley, Plaintain, Chicory, Salad Burnet, Kidney Vetch, Trefoil, and Alsike
Clover. He found that when he expanded cows' forage diet from the usual two
or three high yielding (but less sought after) grasses and 1egumes to include
a sufficient quantity and diversity of the preferred species, the remarkable
gain in the health of his dairy herd outweighed in economic value any loss in
pasture or hay yield.

Similarly, on our sheep dairy we have been hesitant to do much plowdown
renovation of forage fields where long abandon has allowed a species
diversity to creep in that would be diffi-cult to match with a new seeding.
Instead we have overseeded existing sod with the lower yielding but
relatively permanent Trefoil and Puna Chicory. And when the legumes and the
native clovers, favored by lime, manure, and management have beefed up
(sheeped up, rather) the soil quality, higher yielding timothy and orchard
grass have spread in of their own accord from neighbors' fields to replace
the poorer native' grasses.

Animal housing has been overdone, at great cost to the farmer. It may be more
convenient at times to keep our sheep and draft animals inside, but it is
healthier for them outside. Draft animals, for example, kept in a stable are
always ready to use, but only on pasture will they get the variety of forage,
the exercise, and that daily good roll in the dirt that their health
requires. All our barns are open-sided and the pasture gate is always open in
winter. The sheep often like to go out when they have finished their hay, and
the mules and horses have always preferred to be out even in ice storms.

Taking one's cue from nature's models should not be confused with a
laissez-faire approach. Managing a forage field to maximize quality and
growth, and also preserve the desired mix of plant species, is a difficult
art; the farmer must keep a sharp eye on what is happening out in the fields.

Symbiosis of Plant and Animal Systems

Wendell Berry says, "Put Nature to work, she works for a minimum wage."
Nature has long ago proven that using plants and animals to feed each other
is the most fertile, sustainable system going. Now Francis Moore Lappé, Peter
Singer and many others have eloquently denounced our overly carnivorous diet
for the waste, the extravagance, and (from a Third World standpoint) the
imperial exploitation that it provokes. And I join with these vegetarians in
their critique of the largely feedlot agriculture that has developed to
nourish our carnivorous excesses. But I feel that we need to do better than
the vegetarian alternative in developing a model for a sustainable
agriculture. That need may not yet be apparent in North America where we have
enjoyed the luxuries of cheap land, cheap energy and low population pressure
on the land.

In much of Western Europe and the Far East high population density forces
farming toward the upper limit of the land's capacity to provide food, so I
look to these regions for models of efficiency. Chemical monoculture has of
course made deep inroads in these areas of the world, but high land prices
and high transport and other energy costs have exposed its underlying
inefficiency and have allowed the small diversified farm sector a competitive
edge. In the last fifty years, while in North America the small diversified
farm and all its support system have declined and are considered outdated,
many West European and Japanese farmers have become expert at producing high
yields on small acreages for local markets. Their methods, knowledge, and
appropriate technology have advanced apace and are now state-of-the-art, but
one of the keys to their success is still the integration of livestock to
maximize fertility. European prosperity obscures the fact that the first
function of livestock in the long view is manure, not food, production. But
in regions that face the added constraint of a generally lower living
standard, either as it affects the consumer considering the high cost of
meat, or as it affects the farmer considering the high cost of fertilizer,
the primary function of livestock is clear.The Chinese hoard their manure;
they traffic in it. Even in Japan urban landlords give rent rebates to
tenants with large families because of their higher yield of very marketable
nightsoil.

We are suggesting that in a truly sustainable farm economy the primary
function of livestock is to cheaply convert grass into fertilizer; fur, wool,
leather, milk, and meat are important, but secondary. And manure, especially
ruminant manure, is not ordinary fertilizer. Correctly handled and composted,
it far outperforms vegetable compost, both in terms of soil nutrition and
bio-activation.

The livestock integrated farm in our model will be the opposite of a feedlot
operation. A system of controlled, intensive, extended season grazing is
needed to maximize forage production, and therefore manure production, per
acre. Then the excess manure will feed vegetable or fruit growing. Such a
farm is an extremely flexible no-waste proposition. Manure is a primary
product, like energy. Primary farm products like manure and fuelwood are
crucial to the survival of the enterprise because of the way they liberate it
from the crush of market forces. They are inputs in their own right that can
replace cash inputs like electricity or fertilizer as the latter become less
cost-effective. They lend a flexibility to secondary production that permits
us to outwit the market. Just as we can use the wood pile to warm the house,
cook the food, boil maple syrup, or put hot water in the milk house, or
simply accumulate as equity like money in the bank, so the manure pile can go
to produce vegetables or forage as the need varies, and if the market for the
harvest is poor it can be fed to the chickens, pigs or, sheep. And if the
market for these is poor, the manure can feed the soil, building equity for
another day. Pigs, incidentally, are perhaps the ultimate in versatility: as
omnivores they can be raised by feeding them any other farm products that
don't bring a profit in a given market, and they will plow under their own
manure.

The logic that stresses primary production on the farm extends to the
production of horsepower. The small farm that already manages its complement
of livestock can incorporate draft animals with little extra cost. The
cost-efficiency of tractor agriculture, like that of much of the rest of
conventional agriculture, has been exaggerated by ignoring hidden costs and
by focusing exclusively on efficiency per man-hour. A focus on energy costs
per calorie produced, or on investment costs, provides a different picture.
Tractors are a good part of the reason it takes 40 calories of non-renewable
energy to grow one calorie of corn in Kansas, while the ratio is inverted for
the ox-powered rice paddy in Vietnam, where one calorie of fossil fuel grows
at least 40 calories of rice.

In sum, animals seem as essential to farm ecosystems as they are to wild
ecosystems. If sustainable agriculture needs livestock to build and maintain
soil, then it appears that vegetarian agriculture is not an ideal model of
sustainability. Anyone who has tried to build healthy soil exclusively with
vegetable compost knows what a slow process that is.

Pushed to its logical conclusion, our argument says that a five-acre organic
vegetable farm is a contradiction in terms. It's not sustainable agriculture.
Neither is a farm devoted exclusively to livestock. Ideally maybe 3-5 acres
of ruminants, say sheep, should sustain one acre of say, cabbages, assuming
controlled grazing. Eliot Coleman in The New Organic Grower figures a draft
team makes 30 tons of manure. That's enough to maintain both their own 2
acres of forage plus one acre of vegetables or fruit, at his suggested
maintenance rate of 10 tons of manure per acre. On the other hand an acre of
orchard, may well contain enough of its own forage, if managed properly, to
be nearly self-sustaining. The point here is to advocate, not hard and fast
ratios, but a way of thinking about sustainability, one that finds an echo,
incidentally, in the restriction in biodynamic farming on the fraction of
total annual organic matter production that can be removed from the farm.

Self-sufficiency and Market Farming

Self-sufficiency has been scorned as "home-steading" but has always been a
first line of defense against the colonial economy. The trick is to integrate
market farming with a core of self-sufficiency without letting the tail wag
the dog.

So the production of inputs is a first order of business. In addition to
fertilizer and energy already mentioned, feed, wood for fences and buildings,
and the skills necessary to construct and maintain the farm are often so
costly in the market that the time taken to produce them on the farm become a
highly profitable activity. As in the Third World there is an argument to be
made on the SSIF for sometimes restricting technology to a level appropriate
to one's building and maintenance skills. Regarding energy for example, the
cost of living in and working around the average New York farmhouse is
extravagant. Where I live the typical farmhouse is a bare bump on a bare
hill; energy use can be greatly reduced by simply planting wind protection:
fast growing evergreens or the Lombardy poplars Europeans put in hedgerows to
reduce windchill on their field crops. The typical farmer/handyman is skilled
enough to use low-tech passive solar designs to build or renovate barn and
farmhouse to capture and conserve the sun's energy. In my experience it is
easy to reduce annual farmhouse energy use to below three cords of fuelwood
and $300 of electricity, with no loss of comfort.

The farm that integrates plant and animal systems can easily attain a degree
of self-sufficiency in regard to food for the farmer and feed for the
livestock, but at some point the pursuit begins to yield diminishing returns.
One becomes a jack of all trades but master of none. At this point the farmer
either falls prey to the colonial economy or, as the Amish have done, raises
the pursuit of self-sufficiency to the level of the local community. Then the
pursuit of community takes on major economic importance.

In Dundee, N.Y. the Amish had managed to grow to perhaps a dozen
horse-powered farms, an enviable community from my point of view. But when I
visited I was told they were leaving one by one. For although there was
plenty of cheap good land, their population had not been able to reach the
critical mass necessary to support the smithy, the sawyer, the schoolmaster
and the other institutions and cottage industries they considered essential
to a viable agricultural community. If there is a lesson to be learned here,
it is a shocking one: let the farmer beware of hoping to build sustainability
in the isolated splendor of his farmstead.

There is of course more than pure economics at work here. Through
restrictions on technology intended to limit farm size, the Amish have
expressed a deliberate preference for people over cows or cornfields, however
profitable the latter may be. The form of Amish agriculture expresses one of
their highest values, the value of a community of neighbors.

But the purely economic success of what has been called the "economics of
brotherly love" speaks favorably not only for the priority the Amish put on
community, but also for the form of small scale mixed agriculture they
practice. The typical Amish farm mixes livestock, vegetables, grain, and
forage on less than 100 acres. The number of such Amish farms has steadily
increased over the last hundred years as the general farm population has
sharply declined. and they succeed with one hand tied behind their back, as
it were, for the Amish cling to patriarchal values that severely limit the
status and roles allowed the female half of their population, especially
regarding leadership and decision-making in the community and on the farm.

In sum, maintaining a balance between self-sufficiency and market farming is
crucial. The smaller market production needed to sustain a farm that produces
many of its own inputs not only liberates the SSIF from the market but gives
the farmer more power over the market when he/she does enter it. A smaller
harvest to sell opens up more options, including direct marketing.

Sustainable Marketing: the Custom Producer and the Loyal Consumer

If by exporting raw materials and importing expensive manufactures the
colonial economy siphons off to the city the wealth of the countryside, the
SSIF avoids this exploitation partly through self-sufficiency of inputs, as
previously described, but also and most importantly by direct-retailing
finished goods At our farm we sell freezer-ready lamb at a return of 2X the
value of live lambs and processing, dyed yarn at nearly 3X the value of the
grease wool and processing, and tanned skins at 2X the value of the raw pelts
and processing. And the consumer gains the advantage of obtaining quality
organic goods at everyday prices. Much of the farm's output is sold direct at
a weekly farmers' market (April-December) or by mail or telephone order.

By obtaining the full value of its labor the SSIF not only can afford to
remain small, but has a unique opportunity to build a consumer clientele
whose loyalty partially protect the farm from market forces, especially from
competition from industrial agriculture. Furthermore, if the farmsteader can
use this special relationship to narrow the yawning gap in culture and
consciousness between rural producers and urban consumers, then that can lead
to important political progress.

The Bottom Line: a Balance Sheet of one SSIF

The ratio of gross to net income on the farm balance sheet is probably the
clearest expression of its degree of emancipation from the colonial economy.
According to a recent Cornell Extension Bulletin, a typical New York dairy
farm, in order to provide a family income of $20,000, needs 100 cows
producing a gross of nearly $300,000, or 15X net income. Such a farm family
is usually too overworked to be able to make good use of the farm's own
resources to supplement their cash income. And there may be a stress factor
provoking compensatory cash consumption, so they may well need $20,000 in
family income. On our farm we found a net cash income of about $10,000 let us
live well, with maybe another $5,000 in non-cash income derived from
self-sufficiency. But the most striking difference, as our balance sheet
shows, is how a gross of less than 2X net is needed to provide this family
income. If we can continue to hold the gross/net ratio this low, I think we
will have steered clear of the colonial economy.

Why Small?

So far we have tried to show how smallness of scale, on-farm input
production, on-farm processing, a diversity of output, and direct marketing
are an interdependent system of elements, each needing and making possible
the others. But there are many other arguments favoring the small farm as the
most sustainable agriculture in the long run.

Ecology. The small farmer typically owns the land, identifies with it, and is
more likely to care for it. Management can be good because the
"eyes-to-acres" ratio is good. The smaller the farm is, the lower the density
of animals and harvested crops and therefore the lower the concentration of
manure, insects, disease, dust, humidity, odor, and other pollutions. Small
scale handling and processing uses less complicated more easily sanitized
equipment. In our dairy, for example, the milk touches no long pipelines,
valves, pumps, or tanks that are common in the large dairy, and difficult to
keep clean.

Economics. Even by short term economic criteria small farms come out ahead:
they generally get more crop per dollar invested, and more crop per acre.
Economists typically ignore efficiencies small farmers achieve by being
closer to the land, able to concentrate management energies on fewer acres
and buildings, and on less equipment.

Debt increases with farm size, the USDA re-ported during the farm crisis of
the 1980's, saying 20% of the debt that was unlikely to be paid was held by
the top 0.2% of farms as ranked by annual crop sales. Often banks cannot
afford to foreclose on the larger farms, thus fostering the illusion of
prosperity and strength in bigness. But the illusion has been shattered for
me time and again during recent decades, in the discovery that neighbors
whose big dairies looked so good from the road were slowly strangling on
interest payments. We chose to build our farm to its present cash investment
level of over $50,000 a different way. It took ten years to make the farm pay
us a living, but we owe no mortgage or other interest. And by having to
invest slowly we could see how each new building or other investment worked
before adding the next, and so better integrate each new addition into the
geography and the developing economy of the farm.

Community. Once the family farm was the foundation of rural American
community. Its stability over generations depended on the congruency of the
economic and social institutions that came together on the farm. As the farm
outgrew the family it destabilized both the family and the rural communities
built on farm families. Ultimately it destroys the community by depopulation,
replacing people with cows and corn, forcing the people, often against their
will, into already overpopulated urban areas. As far as rural community is
concerned, small is beautiful, or was while it lasted.

Politics. Ultimately the issue is one of land tenure and political power, as
a new feudalism overtakes rural America (as it did urban America long ago)
and reduces to a nation of hirelings a country whose democratic foundation
was, in Jefferson's vision, a citizenry of economically independent farmers,
craftsmen, tradesmen, and other smallholders. As the conditions for realizing
Jefferson's ideal have evaporated, leaving political power largely
concentrated in the hands of large corporations, the small farmer still
stands for that ideal, and enjoys the satisfactions of political independence.

Aesthetics. To American travelers from bigger-is-better land, a first visit
to old Europe can be like entering a fairy tale. The permanence of stone and
the human scale of the architecture offer a cozy, comforting security.
Narrow, winding streets of old quarters broken by attractive little squares,
and whole villages nestled naturally into the countryside are a consequence
of a long process of adaptation whereby human habitat finds its best "fit"
both to the lay of' the land and to the aesthetic needs of the inhabitants.
The planner of a small farm has an opportunity that is unusual in our
industrial age to design both an enterprise and a habitat that is
satisfyingly human in scale. A farmhouse, barns, and farm-stead layout built
to complement and celebrate the natural beauty of the spot rather than
conquer it, are a joy to live and work in, and an attractive expression, to
the visitor from the city, of other values.

Conclusion

If the outlook for the proliferation of small scale integrated farmsteads on
a national scale is bleak, each SSIF is nevertheless a free-standing
political statement, an example of the ability of ordinary people to gain a
measure of economic independence, of control over the resources of the nation
and over the decisions that affect their lives. And it is a radical
statement, for were it to spread, so that in one way or another the great
majority were to gain even this small share in the decisions that affect
their lives, it would profoundly subvert the established political order.
This is not to argue that the SSIF is the only road to empowerment, or that
it is useless to go out and organize to change the politics of the nation,
but only to point out, to use Lynn Miller's elegant words, that "if our
choice is to stay here and do good work on our farms and to believe in what
we truly know, that's not retreat. It is a gracious act of defiance."






Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page