When I brainstorm my dream farm I oscillate between ambition and a daunted daze. 'So, we're going to grow apples and keep honey bees which will pollinate the apple blossoms and of course we'll want bread so we'll have to grow wheat and we'll need to grow some dry beans and of course we need...
Uh oh. This farm is getting out of hand.'
When deflated and overwhelmed I often take a trip over to my bookshelf, to scan the colorful spines that make a diverse farm seem achievable. The sight of books like The Apple Grower, Natural Beekeeping, and Small-scale Grain Raising all lined up in a row launch me out of my discouraged quagmire and back to rambling 'Okay, so we've got to grow quinoa and...''
I can always turn to one of author Lynn Byczynski's eminently functional publications for further inspiration. In her books Market Farming Success and The Flower Farmer, and as the editor of the monthly newsletter Growing for Market, Byczynski demystifies a wide range of practical topics like how to prepare for a marketing meeting with a chef or how to convert an air-conditioner into a cooler compressor. Whereas Byczynski is a farmer, her neighbor on the farming how-to shelf, author Vernon Grubinger, is a research scientist. His book Sustainable Vegetable Production from Start-Up to Market is a good resource for technical details on topics like irrigation system design, using soil test recommendations and how different pesticides work.
When you choose a profession that society has branded a relic of the past, like small-scale organic farming, you need advice from contemporaries to know that what you are doing is still doable. No author is as effective as Lynn Miller at taking systems commonly retired to the archives of farm nostalgia and presenting them as twenty-first century opportunities. I am, I'm sure, one of many who walked away from reading Buying and Setting up Your Small Farm or Ranch suddenly pumped up to buy a team of mules.
While I swear by these contemporary guides and countless others, farmers need more than practical management lessons to become intelligent harbingers of a new agriculture. In our unique time, dominant methods of food production change so rapidly that landscapes are unrecognizable from one decade to the next. In order to understand where we are and where we should go, farmers need historical context.
For this reason I trudged through A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis by Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart. I cursed their run-on sentences as I plodded along in agreement with Mazoyer and Roudart that a theory of agrarian systems is an essential intellectual tool. These French agronomists formulate a vision of agricultural history as an evolution of agrarian systems, each successively meeting the limits of its ability to produce sufficient biomass for the population from available fertility.
With this book under my belt (phew!) I feel more competent to choose effective systems for my farm. Knowing how, thousands of years ago, slash-and-burn farmers encountered the necessity for allowing sufficient fertility restoration periods between forest cultivations helped me recognize the brilliance of the modern system presented by Dave Jacke in Edible Forest Gardens: Ecological Vision and Theory for Temperate Climate Permaculture. Jacke addresses this limitation in forest farming by proposing a forest system that requires neither clearing nor idling, but rather relies on human design to create perennial, edible polycultures.
As an intern I received some firm advice from a very experienced farmer, “Always cover crop half your land! If you keep it all in cash crops, don't cry to me in three years when your soil is spent.” With land prices what they are, I am often tempted to ignore this advice but what I learned in A History of World Agriculture will tether me to the cover crop forever.
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, due to changes in technology and landownership, European farmers began to rotate cereals with cover crops. This practice increased harvests per year as well as yields due to increased soil organic matter, reduction in leaching and erosion, and improved soil fertility and structure. Cover cropping was sufficiently advantageous to support 'the first agricultural revolution of modern times' and to feed an exploding population.
Lamentably, this innovation is often ignored in favor of less sustainable innovations made during 'the second agricultural revolution of modern times' (you can find out just how lamentable this is if you make it to the last chapter of A History of World Agriculture titled 'Agrarian Crisis and General Crisis'). The U.S. government spends a lot of money subsidizing chemical and GMO based monoculture and the agronomic research that propels it. Luckily, there are also programs that explore sustainable systems. One such program is the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program (SARE) which has turned a scientific lens on the potential of cover crops in the publication Managing Cover Crops Profitably. This essential resource contains readable charts and narratives to guide the selection and use of cover crops.
In Building Sustainable Places, authors Krome, Maurer and Wied describe federal programs like SARE that are relevant to sustainable agriculture. This organized publication is like an aspirin for small farmers wading through bureaucratic hoopla in search of existent opportunity within federal programs.
Another opportunity available to modern farmers that is more reliable than federal programs is our unprecedented ability to communicate on a global scale, allowing us to combine different indigenous knowledge systems into modern innovations. One of the first people to write about this opportunity was F.H. King in his seminal work Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea and Japan. Faced with already rapid American soil degradation at the turn of the twentieth century, King, a former U.S. Department of Agriculture official, traveled to Asia to discover how farmers there had maintained healthy soils over time. Farmers of Forty Centuries sheds light on practical topics like how to use humanure and the ashes of burnt plant fuel as fertilizers.
King asserts that countries' need for military expenditures would be reduced if we increased our usefulness to one another through international information exchange, viewing one another as educational opportunities rather than foes. Farmer/author/photographer Michael Ableman's book From the Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World is a true gift toward this effort, presenting stunning visual lessons about how farming is done.
Although I love Ableman's images I do not agree with how he organizes them. The chapter 'Into the Past' takes us to farms in Burma, Burundi, Sicily, Peru, and China while the chapter 'Stepping Stones to Renewal' depicts small farms in the U.S. and western Europe. Imagining that the people and practices of developing nations are behind those of developed nations in a progressive lineage is misleading. However, I forgive Ableman because his photographs are stronger fodder for connection than his chapter organization is for cultural arrogance. I only hope that international farmer communication continues to widen and deepen over time.
Ableman's chapter 'Fire on the Horizon' depicts stark images of early 1990s industrial agriculture with its miles of exposed soil, reminding me of the vivid imagery of destroyed 1930s soils in The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck recounts how monocropped cotton and farmer debt led to a mass, hungry exodus from barren land; “The houses were left vacant on the land, and the land was left vacant because of this” (Pg 148).
These words rang in my ears this fall as I listened to the audio version of The Grapes of Wrath while weeding rhubarb. I paused to look down the valley toward miles of uncovered twenty-first century farm fields. But for the prickles of neatly spaced, three-inch high corn stalk remnants, they were as bare as Steinbeck's or Ableman's- vacant.
I often listen to audiobooks while I farm. Nothing goes better with eight hours of hoeing than eight hours of being read to. Two of last year's picks were The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell, a humorous, informative account of the Plymouth Colony settlers and The Hemmingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Ried a telling of the lives of the slave family that lived with Thomas Jefferson. It was a potent experience to hoe American soil with my hands while confronting the reality of Native American land theft and slave labor with my mind.
With such a heritage, Americans are all the more called on to be judicious students, comparing the implications different systems on the tangled web of socio-economic and environmental concerns. A growing movement of farmers and consumers is taking a compassionate, long-term, connection-based approach: combining scientific and indigenous knowledge in conscientious ways and searching out the best farming models for our time. I have barely scratched the surface of the bountiful array of books useful as tools for this bountiful new agriculture, leaving many doors yet to be opened.
