Here's a sampler of some things that might reverse that tide and make them a stable, multi-generation way of life again:
"The aim is Joy"; Family; Soil; "Permanence";
Soil cement; Sea minerals; Ramial chipped wood; Sprouted seed; Chickens and livestock belong; Permanent pasture and perrenials; Earthworms and bugs belong;
Principles
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"The aim is Joy"; Family; Soil; "Permanence";
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"The aim is Joy"; Family; Soil; "Permanence";
"The aim is Joy"..
This phrase sums up what should be the whole expectation of a small farm (to the extent you consciously have one), because Joy is easily a small farm's most reliable and largest value crop. I first encountered this notion and phrase in books by Gene Logsdon, who says it better than I can with every paragraph he writes..
I can't explain, to those as yet unrooted, why it is possible for me to walk over our little farm each day and never cease to draw keen pleasure from it. I always see something new, or something old that has changed in a new light, or something old that has not changed, which is the greatest thrill of all.
"Joy" here is not the same as prosperity, or even happyness as it is under-understood, but something closer to a deep contentedness and peace. It doesn't (always) pay the bills, it is the reason you keep paying them. It's so much more connected to Who you are that the How can exist in a wholely different (and much shabbier) box.
It's not about mere sustainability - The small farm is also not a closed-loop perpetual motion machine (though I must confess, it's jolly fun to scheme away "on paper" at making it one). Still less is it a useful engine to "make-a-difference!" in society. If a thorough and honest ledger were kept it's my guess that all columns would end up in the red without the addition of the "joy-derived, resource-spent" factors.
How does this help.. Inevitably, black moments come where you tally all your (Grossly obvious and easily measured) inputs; look for the same type of outputs to compare them with; and conclude something like "I've just spent 6 months and $100k for nothing."
Family
Family and farm go together, they just do. In a sense there's nothing novel about this idea. However, family as being essential to breaking-through to a critical mass of viability may be.
All farms need lots of labor; in the long run, the only kind you can afford (or perhaps should even want) is the kind provided by the labor-of-love; this labor is only possible from a sense of belonging.
All hands on deck
Each season has its special tasks that would grind and break an ordinary person if they were left alone to do it all. Also enormous jobs come up from time to time where each additional person isn't merely an addition to the workforce, their mere presence can be a force multiplier. Think of barn-raisings.
Specialists
Certainly the great bulk of day-in day-out labor must be provided by individuals going about their chores in a way that's regular as clockwork, especially if it's dull as dishwater. Or maybe not. One of the key strategic tasks on a farm is finding out who like's to do what, and more importantly cultivating the who's-good-at-what. You need someone with a green thumb tending the garden and someone with a head for numbers tending the books.
Soil-Health
Produce has been bred with attention given only to its money generating capacity (bulk bushels from neglected soils) for much too long with too much "success".
Buyers will soon pay a premium for artisan produce grown on carefully re-mineralized soil (over and above what they now pay for merely organically grown). Enough to give a competitive advantage to the small farm operation. Enough perhaps to break up some of the several hundred thousand acre food factories into a several thousand small farms.
Health
Understand this; you can grow modest volumes of the tender-tasty old fashioned varieties in the old ways, but you can grow inhuman volumes of modern hybrids with the addition of commercial NPK. However, the same volume of nutrition will be concentrated (or dilluted) throughout each. But buyers can only objectively measure bulk volume (and semi-objectively measure aesthetics) This has resulted in stocky vege's full of water and tough fibre (for bulk yield, machine harvesting, and shippability) cereals full of empty calories, and bulky diseased meat full of fat.
Now there's nothing wrong with profit, bulk, and calories (they're the first part of keeping body and soul together) but a body which has to sift 3000 calories to mine out the nutrients which should have come in 1700 lives poorly and dies worse.
Soil
Rain has been washing through the land for thousands upon thousands of years. Most of your land's water soluble nutrients are now elsewhere. Compounding this millennia old natural process, many (if not most) modern agricultural practices have further ruined huge acreages of land. Everything depends on the health of your soil. Everything. Fortunately Your dirt (like everyone else's) has immense room for improvement.
Permanence
Don't make it a way of life to rebuild/rebuy /replant every year what you could build up to doing just once.
Only Beauty endures..
A thriftiness that saves/uses trash rather than saving pennies and making something you're proud of isn't helpful.
Debt=Death
Nature grows at her own rate which is never as much the interest rate, which makes borrowing money equate to paying someone to take ownership of your farm.
So..
Build sketchy/re-build increasingly permanent -
(figure things out with the best organic goods (not plastic) but always building towards Stone, Soil cement, papercrete, metal, & glass
Things
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Soil cement; Sea minerals; Ramial chipped wood; Sprouted seed; Chickens and livestock belong; Permanent pasture, and perrenials; Earthworms, and bugs belong;
You need a good bulk building material on a farm. The ideal material would be dirt cheap, rot-proof, fire-proof, plastic (formable), good looking, maintenance free, and already on your building site. Soil cement is all these things.
Soil cement is the mixture of subsoil (dirt) and varying quantities of a binder, cement usually but also lime depending on the characteristics needed. This mix is poured into strong forms and then usually compressed.
This is not a featherweight material, but with the ability to make custom forms/blocks during downtime on the farm and stockpile them
Wikipedia article
How-to article from Mother Earth News
Homebuilder/experiment site
Sea minerals (trace elements)
Distilled water has been dissolving and carrying elements into the ocean for millenia.
I began my research 35 years ago because I felt that we should put all of the elements back into the soil in the same proportions that they are found in the sea. I felt strongly that the plants should have the opportunity to take up any element they might need. - Maynard MurrayCertainly, sea salts can't be used in large enough doses to resupply your mega-nutrients (for those see below), but for a pretty well researched/documented covers-all-the-bases chicken soup for the soil, sea minerals (tested first in pots>plots>fields) on your land is a justifiable expense.
Ramial chipped wood
(images, links, and possibilities)
Earthworms, and bugs
(images, links, and possibilities)
Whole, Sprouted seed
(images, links, and possibilities)
Earthworms, and bugs
(images, links, and possibilities)
Chickens and livestock belong
(images, links, and possibilities)
Earthworms, and bugs
(images, links, and possibilities)
Permanent pasture, perennials
(images, links, and possibilities)
Earthworms, and bugs
(images, links, and possibilities)
Earthworms and bugs belong
(images, links, and possibilities)
Earthworms, and bugs
(images, links, and possibilities)
Include the following?:
Understanding; remineralizarition; growth; testing
Plant nutrients are made water soluble by living organisms in the dirt. The are then held in play by being in living organisms in the dirt.
Understanding
Whatever you're growing has:
- ideal nutrient ratios + levels (at which point they're almost bullet-proof, and confer this health on their consumers)
-adequate levels (a much much broader range at which they break-even and keep body and soul together in their consumers)(this is where the best organic producers who sell at a premium are)
-inadequate levels (at which, even if they look fat and healthy [which they can] they slowly ruin both the farmer and those who consume them)(And this is where the overwhelming majority of producers are)
Testing
Get close with a few professional tests, but lean to fine tune based on what your crops say.
Restoration
Family
see above..
(images, links, and possibilities)
The idea of raising a family on a small farm is not new. Some folks aspire to life there just as a means to keep kids healthy happy and relatively safe. But just as thinking of a farm as a reliable 9 to 5 cash cow replacement is a mistake, approaching it as though its main job was as a nursery to pamper your young'ns is unrealistic.
**Also, whether or not our starry-eyed vision of "a small farm" looks anything like a real small farm is highly debatable. A visionary might be wise to carefully consider the etymology of the word "hogwash" and the following before going any further..
* hard hard hard hard hard hard hard work;
* low $value put on food-labor;
* illusive agribuisiness advantage from specialization-expansion-competition-domination-monopolization and economy of (larger and larger) scale
Principles
- "The aim is Joy"
- Family
- Soil
- Permanence
Things*
- Soil cement
- Sea minerals
- Ramial chipped wood
- Sprouted seed
- Chickens and livestock belong
- Permanent pasture, and perrenials
- Earthworms, and bugs belong
*These are all things that my research over the past few years points at. Don't "bet the farm" until you've gotten actual results from trials on your land.
It's not about profit - The small farm is never going to reliably produce wealth, but that's not what attracts most people to it, quite the opposite. Often it's as much a refuge-from fast-lane cares (like the management of daunting sums of money) as anything else. Debt, compound interest,
Eternity and rootedness.. - An ancient curse was to be disposessed and perpetually wander, homeless and aimless. This is a modern lifestyle, to habitually move to a new area where resources are perceived to be rich and prior reputation of us low. But this short-circuits the growth of somethings fundamental to being human. The sticking with something through thick and thin, of finding our identity by identifying with an other for better or worse.
You have to add a column in your ledger for things like these:
