sustainable agriculture

When I go to see my grandma I gain a lot of weight
With her dear hands she gives me plate after plate.
She cans the pickles, sweet & dill
She cans the songs of the whippoorwill
And the morning dew and the evening moon
'N' I really got to go see her pretty soon
'Cause these canned goods I buy at the store
Ain't got the summer in them anymore.

-Greg Brown, Canned Goods

There were hot August and September evenings in the kitchen over a hot stove top ‘preserving the harvest’ from the farmer’s market, CSA, and home garden. The gardens are now frozen and farmer’s markets are closed, so I am starting to look at the cupboard (in my case the cupboard is a collection of boxes pushed to a remote corner of the kitchen) with thoughts of how and when to pop open those time capsules - bundles of joy and summer.

 

The food in those jars is no longer simple sustenance. There is a story in each jar: the place the food was bought or grown, the family or friends who helped, and the weather on that day. It is a splinter of life intersecting with produce in a deeply personal way that food from the grocery store never can never match.

 

This home food preservation isn’t logical; it doesn’t fit into any mainstream economic theory. I spent seven hours one evening on seven quarts of canned tomato sauce. This was not hard labor throughout the process, but I was mindful of the canning throughout that long summer evening. At any reasonable rate of return on my labor, they were wasted hours that could have been spent creating value in other pursuits. What happened to that core tenant of capitalism: specialization?

 

This irrationality is one of the reasons that we are still canning at home and more people try it each year. It is seen as old-fashioned, anachronistic. It doesn’t make sense – it is something that you can’t discuss in mixed company or at the office unless you are willing to brave a long explanations and puzzled stares.

 

“Let me get this straight: you made your own pickles? Out of cucumbers?”

 

But as you know it is a testament to experimental cooking, the bounty of summer, and your own resourcefulness. It is anti-economic; not necessarily against modern society, but a way of running parallel. It is quiet, messy, and the opposite of fast food. 

 

Now theory ends – you’ve put in the time over your boiling-water canner and it is time to collect on debts and eat that home canned food. Here are some suggestions on how to eat it all; just don’t be shy. That food is for eatin’, not just for lookin’.

 

1. Alone
   Hoard the hard-earned food for just yourself. Tell your friends and family that they should have accepted the invitation to your canning party if they wanted to get in on the end product.
2. “Meet the foodies”
   Invite neighbors and coworkers over to an “informal” winter dinner. As they walk in the door hand each guest a menu which lists each dish along with the date the food was preserved, from what farm the produce was purchased, and to really elicit the desired effect attach all recipes so your guests know exactly how long you slaved over the stove for each dish.
3. With closed eyes
   Eat peach butter straight from the jar with a spoon with closed eyes. Imagine the steps from bud growth in the spring to that moment. Be surprised to see snow falling outside when you open your eyes.
4. Reverently
   Leave each jar on the counter for a few days before a planned usage. Delight in how the winter sun glints on your little piece of summer, then cook and eat the meal with a touch of sadness.
5. Gift-it
   Preserved food is a perfect antidote to the January Blues, so give the gift of summer this Christmas.
6. In your sleep
   Who here can say they haven’t ever woken up with an empty jar of bread and butter pickles laying on the bed next to them?
7. With friends
   A friend of mine loves the pickled okra I have made the last few years, so I always save a few bottles for his enjoyment.
8. Feverishly
   If you find applesauce running down your shirt or drinking the pickle juice at the end of the container, you may be suffering from eating style #8.
9. Over-planned
   In August, plan out your meals for the whole winter down to the last jar of tomato sauce. Pick a weeknight as the night of preservation and choose a recipe from the list for each week December to March.

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Small Farm Central bridges the gap between technology and agriculture by providing web services to direct marketing small farms across the country. We help farms reach their marketing potential with inexpensive, professional websites that any farmer can use. Come get a free demo today.

What will the next generation of farmers look like?Where will your organic, micro, local, sustainable, raw, wild lettuce come from in 20 years? By definition of the small farm movement, we want farmers who cultivate small acreage, can talk engagingly about the food they produce and how to prepare it, and guarantee their economic success so they can afford to bring those vegetables to you throughout the years.

Let me brainstorm a few of the skills that it takes to bring the meat, vegetables, honey, etc to market:

• mechanical genius to keep stringing along that mid 20th century tractor and the innumerable pieces of equipment that makes a farm run
  
• micro-meterologist to consume multiple weather reports and parse them to form a prediction for each micro-climate on the farm
• production botanist (or animal husbandry expert) to be able to draw in the advice of experts on disease and production and apply them to specific problems on the farm
• breeder: continually hone seedstock or breeding pool for maximum effectiveness
• human resources development: get the right amount of able hands on the farm at the exact time to make harvest happen
• human resources management: ensure that those hands to keep hoeing in the same direction to make harvest happen
• marketing: hone your message to maximize sales to any or all of the following groups: the general public, restaurants, wholesalers, fellow farmers
  
• public relations: tell the farm story every day to all stakeholders and make sure employees can tell the story as well
• business manager: record sales, pay taxes, manage equipment purchases, pay wages, etc
  

(And what else? Leave more skills in comments.)

How many people or families have the ability to assimilate all these absolutely necessary skills and then bring a saleable product to market each year and then, the final key, make enough money to justify another year of farming. If you know Salatin's admirable sustainable grazing program, you know that it can take a lifetime to learn the system on top of all of the skills listed above.

Many smart, able people exist that can to perform the mental acrobatics and are committed to a lifetime of learning, but small are the number that are insane enough to start farming. Besides plentiful sunshine, exercise, and a feeling of accomplishment not matched in any other field, what does a farmer earn at the end of the year. $30,000? $50,000?

It takes a lot of care, knowledge, and passion to bring another apple into the world. Balanced with quality of life issues, that level of compensation might be commensurate to the skills required if not for the extremely high entry costs and risks. Reasonably fertile land within a half-day drive of a metropolitan area (to sell the produce) in addition to equipment must cost at least $500,000 if not double or triple that figure in some areas. So to summarize the journey to starting a farm: spend around a million dollars up front; master 10-15 high level skills; work long, physical hours for the rest of your life; try to avoid a "natural" crop failure:  freeze, flood, or drought; and hope that you have enough left at the end of the day to pay back the loan and muster a middle-class income. Or... take those skills and join the traditional workforce and earn six-figures without any upfront costs.

I hope I don't sound too pessimistic because I love agriculture: the growing, the marketing, and the work. It's just that this disconnect worries me as a younger person who has enough experience in growing to want to do it on my own. But as I think I have ably demonstrated above: it is an completely insane thing to do. Sure there are alternatives: innovative land access with trust, SPIN farming, or Farming the Concrete Jungle. Also, the market is growing for authentic food and small farms that can find a niche in the marketplace can be successful. I know it is possible, but how does a new farmer justify the risk?

Maybe there are simple brute economic forces acting on the market: people want adjective-laden food (micro, local, sustainable, et al) instead of chemical-laden food, but it takes extra care and smaller scale to bring these products to the marketplace. Small farms are well suited to the task of producing high-quality food, but the costs are higher. Will Americans pay the extra price that sustainable, small-scale production requires? If not, can farmers find a way to bring down the price to point that the general public can pay? Or failing the first two options, will farmers be forced to scale up to survive? I have a strong feeling that we will either need to learn to work together as a movement and make small farming more economically feasible -- a mix of government incentives, land-use agreements as linked above, equipment sharing, sensible market incentives for sustainable operations, and more -- or go back to a system that resembles what we had before this movement started, albeit with less chemicals.

I know that plenty of young people are making the choice to farm on a small scale. But can they farm at the right scale with enough commitment and business skills to be on the land in 20 years? My contribution to this question and problem, at this point in my life, is to cross one skill set off that long list above: web designer/developer. Like this project, Small Farm Central, attempts, we need to find ways to work together as a community of small farmers and harness our collective power and knowledge to strengthen the group. This will not be an easy task for such a geographically disparate group that is inherently independent, but as I said in my last post, for survival we need to find a way to work together without compromising the individuality of each farm. I believe that I am doing my small part and I'm sure each of us are to an extent, but will it be enough?

I'd love to hear your comments on this topic. How you have dealt with it in your life and farming career? Are there any opportunities we should take as a community?

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