permaculture

[neshura <neshura@gmail.com>]

Wonderful post! Philpott's writing is very engaging. I had already
planned a CSA share this year, but I hadn't really considered what
that up-front capital really means to a farmer. The inherent qualities
of Nature make agriculture a chance game where the rules of the house
are always changing. If 400 families each take a tiny share in that
risk, the weight of chance is much less of a burden on the shoulders
of the farmer(s).

On 1/16/07, Saor Stetler <saor@ycbtal.net> wrote:
>   Risky Business
>
>
>     Thoughts from a small farm during the midwinter lull
>
> By Tom Philpott
> 10 Jan 2007
> Before I became a farmer three growing seasons ago, I lived in Brooklyn,
> N.Y., and reveled in the array of top-flight local produce available
> from mid-spring to late fall. Long about January, though, a kind of
> local-food withdrawal would set in.
>
> Winter on the farm.
> Frosty, with a chance of failure.
> Photo: iStockphoto
> By this time of year, the legendary produce aisle of the Park Slope Food
> Co-op <http://foodcoop.com/> would be given over mainly to dull
> vegetables trucked in from the mega-organic farms of California,
> Arizona, and Mexico. My beloved Clinton Hill CSA
> <http://clintonhillcsa.org/?page_id=3> -- which introduced me to the
> community-supported agriculture model
> <http://www.localharvest.org/csa.jsp> now in use at my own Maverick
> Farms <http://maverickfarms.org/> -- was hibernating. And the usually
> bustling Grand Army Plaza Green Market
> <http://www.prospectpark.org/dest/main.cfm?target=gree> would be
> operating in shell form, frequented by shivering diehards like me and a
> few dairy, meat, apple, and egg vendors.
>
> I have to admit, while tending my winter braises and pining for spicy
> salad greens, I gave little thought to what was actually happening on
> the farms that sustained me during the growing season.
>
> Now I know: Winter is the planning season on a small-scale farm, the
> time to sort out budgets, seed orders, and marketing plans, and figure
> out who's going to do what and when. Recently, while engaged in that
> process, I've been pondering lessons I've learned since coming to the
> farm that I wish I had known back when I was an urban local-food
> enthusiast.
>
> One lesson I've learned viscerally: Small-scale farming is an inherently
> fragile process. In the summer months, farmers' markets across the
> nation bustle with vendors selling gorgeous produce at prices well above
> the factory-farmed wares sold at supermarkets. Surveying these vivid and
> life-affirming scenes, it's easy to assume that here in the U.S. we've
> managed to create a robust economic model for small-scale farming.
>
> In reality, the economics of small-scale farming -- even close to
> booming markets like New York City -- are dismal. Large-scale industrial
> farming replaces human labor with energy-intensive machinery and
> health-destroying chemicals; the small-scale farms that supply the
> nation's burgeoning green market scene generally reject those methods,
> and are much more labor intensive. That means that the premium you pay
> for an heirloom tomato might not be covering its real cost of production.
>
> Anecdotally, I know that the great bulk of small-scale farms operate on
> the following model: One spouse runs the farm, while the other one holds
> a full-time off-farm job, securing such luxuries as health care and
> retirement benefits and anchoring family finances. In my area, the
> off-farm spouse typically works in the public school system; in New York
> state's Finger Lakes district, which supplies New York City with some of
> the finest produce available there, the state prison system supplies
> farm families with gainful employment as guards.
>
> USDA numbers back up my observation: According to a report
> <http://gristmill.grist.org/images/user/2988/EB6.pdf> [PDF] issued early
> in 2006, the average farm with annual sales between $10,000 and $99,000
> -- which describes the great bulk of farms geared toward local markets
> -- had an operating profit margin of negative 24.8 percent in 2003.
> Off-farm work -- whether as a schoolteacher, a prison guard, or a weekly
> food-politics columnist -- papers over the difference.
>
>
>       Big Risks, Small Rewards
>
>
> Before I get a spate of triumphant emails claiming that small-scale
> farming doesn't work
> <http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2007/01/03/economist/> because it's
> an economic disaster, and should thus be scrapped, consider this:
> Farming has always been an economically vexed activity. Every spring
> since the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago, farmers have deposited
> little pellets in the ground and crossed their fingers. You never really
> know what's going to come up -- or whether flood, pestilence, drought,
> or some other calamity is going to wipe out your efforts.
>
> As Richard Manning shows in his Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has
> Hijacked Civilization
> <http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2004/05/27/Nijhuis-agriculture/>,
> human history since agriculture's emergence has been regularly marked by
> famine, or periods when the economics of farming collapse and people
> starve.
>
> According to one comforting fantasy, large-scale, chemical-intensive
> farming -- which has been providing a steady supply of cheap food for as
> long as most people can remember -- has resolved agriculture's economic
> dilemmas.
>
> There are at least two problems with that statement. First, in
> historical terms, industrial agriculture was born yesterday. For just
> five decades now, we've devoted the great bulk of our arable land to an
> agriculture that supercharges yields not by carefully building fertile
> soil, but by dousing it with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides while
> relying on an ever-narrowing genetic basis of plant and animal
> varieties. There's absolutely no reason to believe such practices can
> sustain themselves over time.
>
> Secondly, farmers' earnings have plummeted since industrial
> agriculture's rise. Surging yields have meant steadily dwindling prices
> for farm goods, forcing farmers to "get big or get out," in the
> notorious phrase of Richard Nixon's USDA secretary, Earl "Rusty" Butz.
> But to "get big" and get outfitted with the latest yield-boosting
> technologies proffered by seed and equipment conglomerates, farmers have
> to take on ruinous debt loads and watch their profit margins plunge.
>
> If small-scale farm operations look mainly to off-farm work to
> supplement incomes, their large-scale counterparts look to Washington,
> D.C. The government doles out about $20 billion per year in farm
> subsidies; the largest operations, which according to
> industrial-agriculture dogma are the most efficient, capture nearly all
> <http://www.ewg.org:16080/farm/progdetail.php?fips=00000&yr=2004&progcode=total&page=conc>
> of that money.
>
> So let's be straight: Agriculture is and always has been a tough racket.
> Societies support it because people like to eat.
>
> The question is how to support it. The new Congress will soon begin
> cobbling together the next farm bill, the five-year plan that dictates
> federal food and agricultural policy. I'll turn my attention to that
> topic soon.
>
> For now, as farmers and consumers await the next growing season,
> remember that while all farming is economically precarious, small-scale
> farmers operate without much of a safety net at all. They're subsidized
> not by the government but rather by their own and their families'
> off-farm labor.
>
> How can you help? One way is to join a CSA
> <http://www.localharvest.org/>. By buying a share in a farm's harvest
> now, you're injecting cash into a farm at a time of year when little
> other money is coming in and seeds need to be bought. And you're sharing
> in the inherent risk that farmers take every time they drop little
> pellets into a field and cross their fingers.
>
>
>
> Got a question about where your last supper came from? Fork it over.
> <mailto:victuals@grist.org>
>
> - - - - - - - - - -
>
> Grist contributing writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms
> <http://maverickfarms.org/>, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and
> small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
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