The corollary to the “Multiple Functions” principle of Permaculture Design is “Multiple Elements.”  That is, for every critical function on the farm, I should have at least three ways — maybe more like five in this chaotic time — to provide that function.  Having flexibility buffers my farm business in case of problems, and it makes my ability to produce food more reliable.

There is no cost-effective farm insurance for small produce farms like mine, and I’m not sure I would buy it anyway.  However, weather disasters are a fact of life for farmers, and they are one of the many reasons why it’s so hard to make a living farming.  However, the more I can develop intact natural processes on my farm, the more insurance I have.  It may make me less “efficient” in the short term, but over my whole career, it is already clear that it makes my product more consistent.  It’s the difference between maximizing production and optimizing it.

I never thought I would already need the climate adaptation strategies I started implementing 25 years ago.

But here we are.

So, let me describe a couple of examples of my farm’s resilience.  Water is an obvious first need.  My pigs and chickens require about 25 gallons of water a day, regardless if there’s a drought, or the power goes out, or my well pump breaks or there’s a blizzard.  In the winter we stockpile carboys of water in the basement anytime a storm is brewing so that we have at least a day’s backup.  I have an artesian spring that comes out near my house that has been an important emergency backup over the years and, I imagine, was a key asset for the settlers who built my house where they did.  

In the summertime, the vegetable gardens require water.  I hold the snow melt in sunken aisles between the raised beds, and the clay holds this water into June in a good year.  All of my vegetable beds are heavily mulched, which slows down water loss, and most of my plots are no-till.  This means that the fungal network also helps efficiently move moisture to plants.

We’ve had four years of drought now, and I am no longer saving water for the season ahead…. I am saving water for two seasons ahead.  In addition to all the swales and berms that trap snow melt or the increasingly heavy rain events, I have added small ponds around the farm, generally up-slope from gardens so I can gravity feed water to the gardens.  

I have been slowly changing over the dwarf fruit trees in my orchard to the more deeply rooted standard-sized trees.  This is a great example of optimization over maximization.  Are they going to produce fewer apples per acre?  Sure.  Am I going to get some kind of crop most years?  Yup.  Enough for my whole CSA?  Yes.  The concept of “enough” is a blog in its own right.

Let’s take a look at another key need on the farm: insect pest control.  Many years ago, one of my dissertation interviewees casually mentioned that she didn’t know of any organic vegetable farm that didn’t have endemic insect pest issues the older it got.  This left a huge impression on me.  If the organic practices of the day weren’t enough, what was?  I didn’t want to use insecticide sprays, even those approved for organic production.  It’s another input cost to shore up a system out of balance by design.

This changed the direction of my farm completely — I developed small plots of annual vegetables, separated by other plantings, which each had an 8 year rotation of crops.  I even rotate my tomatoes in my hoophouse.  I have so much habitat on my farm that the insect-eating birds are in constant motion.  I have hedges of flowering plants to provide nectar sources for beneficial insects.  

Additionally, the chickens scratch around in some of the garden plots in the early spring and the late fall, eating all the slug eggs.  This saves me several months of needed slug control in the summer.  The pigs nose around the orchard, eating bugs too.  My fruit trees survived the last wave of tent caterpillars because the pigs ate all the caterpillars moving across the ground.

The down-side of all this structural diversity is that, again, I cannot rely on a tractor to cultivate or harvest my crops.  There’s no room.  

However, this leads me to my penultimate example… power.   Farming is backbreaking work.  Tractors make things much easier on your body, and make it possible one person to grow more crops.  But whether the motivation is mitigating climate change, or saving money as fossil fuels and steel machinery become more expensive, or designing a system that doesn’t have to rely on tractors (which can’t move in mud), I am content to produce less — maybe enough is a better word — but to produce reliably over time.  From a business perspective, I am not sure that my net earnings are that much less than a farm that has to continually invest in more tractors and implements, and then the labor to operate, say, a two-person transplanter.  Even organic farmers have been influenced by the get big or get out ethos that still permeates American agriculture from the government policies developed half a century ago.

In place of the fossil fuel power, I have searched out human-powered equipment that makes work easier: carts that can hold a heavy load but still be pulled by one person, siting production so I’m moving less material, and using my pigs and chickens to mow grass.  I have also been paying attention to how traditional cultures do work.

Another heavy influence on my farm design was a farm internship at a homestead that also was a farm.  I have only recently realized how much this changed the focus of my work — to feed my family first, and sell the surplus, rather than thinking of the farm as a factory, which generates revenue, with which I buy groceries.

After 25 years of this, there’s very little we buy… treats like coffee and chocolate.  Avocados.  Nut flour.  And even these are in transition as I trial avocado and carob trees in my greenhouse, and low-tannin oaks in my pastures.  I cannot describe the peace of mind that comes from knowing your food supply is secure.  From this groundedness, I can grow abundance for others.

It's spring, and the CHUM Food Shelf in Duluth is fund-raising for its innovative CSA program.  The food shelf raises money every year to purchase CSA shares from area farmers, and then distributes that produce to families in need.  Let me tell you why this is amazing, and why we can take some hope from farms in these turbulent times.

Having access to healthy food helps reduce stress and fend off all the diet-related health issues that make our life-spans shorter than the last generation of Americans.  Farmers are wired to feed people, but we are generally doing everything with almost nothing, and need partners to help improve our ability to offer food at a price low-income people can pay while we still make a livelihood.

Here's a radical proposal: what if farms were community farms?  What if each community raised the capital to provide a fair living to farmers? (Because that's not the reality in America right now, and which is why HALF of all farm workers are undocumented.). I have spent the last twenty years living on less than a minimum wage because I believe strongly in building food systems for the future, and I have the freedom in my life, by living modestly,  to develop a system that will work.  (More on that in a minute.)  But what if, going forward, food sovereignty and food security were tied to fair trade?  Or, even better, what if food was not a commodity, but a community good?  A right, defended by the economic decisions of each region?

There are great examples of this right now in tribal food sovereignty projects all over the U.S., where the tribes pay farm coordinators to grow the food that is shared in the tribe.  This model should be everywhere and provides a completely alternate system to the U.S. agro-economic industrial formula.

What CHUM in Duluth is doing is the first step towards this kind of future of mutualism.  Farmers are paid for their CSA shares in full, and this gives us the freedom and security to keep experimenting and keep growing. 

Specifically, on my farm, CHUM's support of my CSA, in addition to the support of all my CSA members, has let me focus on three things: solo farming, stability, and stewardship.

I have spent the last two decades developing a model of solo farming where I do all the work.  Over the years I've seen lots of farm workers have a hard time going from the large farms where they learned farming, to figuring out how to start their own farm.  Large farms have a capital overhead that's very challenging to replicate.  We need more models of small farms with easier up-front investment plans.  Additionally, more farm business owners in a region also means more civic engagement -- a more active community that comes to decisions that support everyone in the community.

There are excellent newer models out there that show a modest income on a small scale, but what happens in the next pandemic or other disaster when supply chains are again disrupted and inputs like fertilizer and compost and plastic are less available?  Or floods or droughts threaten production?  I have been working on a model of a low-input small farm that also is diversified enough that nature is my crop insurance.  I talk in other blogs about my interconnected system, and the pieces I still have to figure out.  The main point here is that the CSA model, and CHUM's investment in my farm allow me to keep experimenting with this while growing quality food.

Lastly, CHUM's support of my small farm means I also have the support I need to continue innovating on environmental stewardship.  I have been able to implement no-till practices on most of my farm, preserving soil structure and thus drought tolerance and nutritious veggies.  My farm is a bird sanctuary.  The creek that runs through the corner of my land runs clean.  And pollinators thrive on the range of flowers and insects that live in my production areas.

CHUM's CSA program is the leading edge of what's possible when a community comes together around food access in addition to local self-reliance.  If you would like to support their work, you can donate to them here:  www.chumduluth.org/waystogive

There are some great models out there for a thriving and efficient small farm: The Lean Farm in Indiana, J.M. Fortier's work in Canada, and even Eliot Coleman's long legacy first described in "The New Organic Grower." 

What I want to talk about in some of these blog posts is a little different.  I have been working for the last two decades to build a farm agroecology, where the needs of one crop are met by another component of the farm system.  My design goals have been:
1.  To have as few inputs as possible (though nutrients always have to come in, since nutrients are always leaving the farm as meat, eggs, fruits, and veggies).
2.  To have as diverse a system as manageable: diversity means resilience.
3.  To have nature do as much of the work as possible.
4.  To foster thriving bird and beneficial insect populations, which help with the last point.
5.  To manage all of it as one farmer (I talk more about this in other blogs).

These goals mean that the energy and material flows on my farm are more circular than linear.  I love Ben Hartman's work in The Lean Farm Handbook -- he shows an economically viable small farm system.  But I am less interested in growing a small number of crops with a fair number of inputs and more interested in imagining what it will take to grow food in the future in times of great disruption, uncertain supplies, and extreme weather patterns.  I want to test that now.  It's my conviction that the more intact an ecosystem I have, the more the farm will be able to handle chaos around it.

So, over the last two decades, I have worked to grow as many perennials as possible, to grow annual veggies as efficiently as possible, and to supply pest control and fertility from the farm itself.  Bedding from the chickens and pigs feeds my market gardens.  The pigs mow my orchards and disrupt insect pests.  (They loved the armyworm invasion.  The pigs ate the caterpillars before the insects could get into my fruit trees.) Veggie scraps go back to the pigs and chickens (and sometimes the dog steals a squash.)

I have nearly a full summer's worth of fruits, ripening every week: honeyberries, raspberries, cherries, gooseberries, currants, pears, apples, and elderberries, among others.  My perennial vegetables include asparagus, sorrel, lovage, dock root, Jerusalem artichokes, horseradish, and a few more.  Most of the annual garden plots are no longer tilled, but smothered in the spring with an occultation tarp and then heavily mulched.

The weak link in my system has come down to animal feed.  Half of all my farm expenses is Organic animal feed and the trucking required to get it here.  My pigs and chickens still need some amount of grain.  But this is not land suited to grain production.  So in the last couple of years I have started planting nut trees sourced from Canada... oaks with less tannins, walnuts, and beech.  I've planted nut pines and collected acorns to plant from one zone further south.  While this crop won't be commercially viable for my career, it will be for the next caretakers of this farm.

Twenty years ago I planted my apple orchard with dwarf varieties.  It was a summer of no rain, and I had cracks in my clay down more than a foot.  Most of those trees survived, but they really didn't start thriving until I started rotating my pigs and chickens through the orchard.  The animals provided the needed phosphorus for abundant fruit production and the orchard took off.

Whether it was the animals nosing about or the fact that I live in a frost pocket on the shore of Lake Superior, I have never seen Plum Curculio or Codling Moth in my orchard: two of the banes of Organic production.  There is a little apple maggot on the field edges, and occasional scale.  Small apples go into fruit preserves and fresh cider, while the rest go to my summer and winter CSAs.

Fast forward 20 years and those dwarf trees are at the end of their life cycle.  Many of those varieties proved themselves over the years but I have some new design goals for the replant.  All the new trees are standard rootstock, which should better withstand our now regular droughts, plus the increasingly intense winds we get over the summer and fall.  I am going from about 16 varieties to 40: as a solo farmer, I need a small amount to pick every week for as long a season as I can get.  My CSA members love the diversity of apples, and the more varieties I have, the more likely it is that some of them might get through the increasing late spring freezes.

My orchard is set up so that fruit ripens sequentially from one end of the field to the other, which gives me some management advantages.  I have not mowed the understory in years... the pigs do that in the early season, before they move on to their summer pastures, and they come back in the fall to clean up and mow the pasture down again, and pick up the rare dropped apple.

So, I have apples that ripen from late August until November, and the last of the apples are storage varieties that will keep until February in my passively cooled root cellar for the winter CSA.  Other than the legacy farmstead Duchess, I don't have many baking apples.  Most are heirlooms known for their flavor.

Replanting into the same land is like brain surgery: some of the old trees are still producing, so I need to add trees around the old ones, even as I get ready to replace those.  It's been a process of several years, but I am coming to the end of it, and it gives me a thrill that the trees I am planting now will start to come into full production about the time I am ready to retire.... and they should outlive me by at least a century.

 Happy Lunar New Year!

Winter is a time to review what worked well in the previous year and plan for the upcoming season.  I wanted to share my goals with you folks, because I run a slightly different kind of farm.  Twenty years ago I set out to prove, to myself more than anything, that farming was a viable business.  Spoiler: it's not.  More than 85% of farmers in the U.S. have off-farm income to make ends meet, according to the USDA.  It's not because we don't work hard (we usually work way more than a 40 hour week, with no paid vacation or sick leave).  It's not because we are inefficient (fewer and fewer farms are growing more and more crops, plus the farms grossing the most income per acres are the smallest farms.)  We Americans are deeply steeped in the idea that success is given based on merit, and so it's a common misconception that if you've failed as a farmer, you somehow didn't work hard enough or weren't efficient.

The reality is that the prices of food --and farmer wages -- have not kept up with inflation. In 1900 Americans spent 42% of their household income on food.  Today it's a quarter of that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Yay us!  We got the cheapest food supply on the planet!  (How it's killing us is the topic for another blog).  When I used to go to the farmer's market, I talked to plenty of people holding a $4 latte about why they should pay $1 for a cucumber.  It was a hard sell to some folks.  We wish that our economic system rewarded ecological stewardship and fair trade, but it just doesn't.

To be clear, some people need food assistance.  (In 2024 Elsewhere Farm partnered with CHUM in Duluth and Bad River Food Sovereignty to get food to people who needed it.). Community food assistance should not just be the responsibility of farmers, though, who are themselves generally making less than minimum wage.

But this is not a sob story.  My PhD research looked at how women farmers in the Midwest persisted despite those odds, and my own first farm intership taught me some valuable lessons. 

• Learn to live with less.  Finding fulfillment in consumption is killing the planet anyway.
• Homestead first, and then sell the excess.
• Enjoy other work as a way to add to your income and help manage the stress of running a farm.

These lessons jivved with my upbringing by a former Franciscan Brother, who valued the Franciscan rules of frugality, the creativity of working with your hands, and work as meditation.  So, over the last 20 years, I at first worked insane hours in order to grow my business.  At this point, I am as big a farm as I want to get, and I have increasingly prioritized my well-being.  I have gradually realized that my long term, whole-farm research project is to figure out how one person can have the most resilient small farm possible and make a livelihood if not a living.  The more other owner-operators in the area that I can partner with, the better.  I don't need to get any bigger. And at this point, I am happily living on my small income as a full-time farmer, including saved retirement and a farm with no mortgage.  I also enjoy some academic work to keep things rounded (also, not the big bucks.  Ha!).  I could get bigger, have more income, etc. But I would start down the industrial road, then, sacrificing diversity for production, linearity for an intact agroecosystem, underpaid farm labor, increased use of fossil fuels and plastic..... that's not my direction.  My research goal is to create systems that will work as the industrial system continues to unravel.  And I am privileged to be able to homestsead and farm full time.

Staying small has allowed me to do some incredible things in terms of my farm's interconnected systems, and I will talk more about these in other posts.  Staying small has also allowed me to build production areas where I can plant and harvest no matter what the weather.... no tractors to get stuck in mud, or the decision to weed even though it's too dry and I'll destroy my soil structure.  Staying small has allowed me an incredible diversity of perennial and annual crops plus livestock that all supports each other component in the system.  Less work for me, more balance in terms of pests.

I also saw how quickly supply chains fell apart during the pandemic, so the fewer inputs I need on the farm, the more secure my production is.  There is no affordable crop insurance for farms like mine, and I don't know that I'd want to buy it anyway.  I prefer to trust to nature's resilience and dynamic balance.

So, for this year, my goals aren't to make more money or expand production (much).  Here's what I am doing:

• Continuing to build out a nut orchard.  This is the final leverage point in my intact farm system.  If I can feed nuts to my pigs and chickens for the bulk of their protein and some of their carbs, and they fertilize my market gardens, then I save the vulnerability I now have relying on grain crops that may be flooded or succumb to drought, or that become insanely expensive because global conflicts are destroying global grain trade.  Plus nuts are tasty.
• Continuing to build systems where I can save more of my own seed.  I will expand on this later, but this year the price of seed tripled because of droughts last year.  The more it fits into my existing practice to save seed, the more secure my farm is.  Plus the more I can trade with other farmers and homesteaders in the area to build up a seed supply adapted to this particular place.  This year I'm working on lettuce and squash.  I have an advantage in that I have a winter greenhouse, so biennial crops can be overwintered to go to seed the following year.
• Protect my well-being.  I live in the Lake Superior Watershed!  I take the time to enjoy it, or the rest of it becomes drudgery.  Plus, time with friends is essential.  Game night!  Craft night!  Cooking!  Kayaking!
• Protect my physical body, which is my best tool.  I've learned a lot about muscle rest from listing to professional women soccer players!  Every year I get better at working smarter, not harder.  Last year it was the breakthrough of planting the bulk crops where the pigs wintered, instead of moving tons of mulch to plots where I would plant squash, potatoes, and cabbage.  Duh.  I don't know what will surface this year, but I am attuned to finding out.
• Rebalance the birds.  Since we now have a full summer's rotation of shrub and tree fruit, the bird species have exploded!  (More on my native bird monitoring later).  So, now it's time for some kestrel boxes that might discourage some of the blackbirds and others intent on wiping me out of cherries.

This will be fun!

As we slide to the end of January, here are some of my notes from this month.  There are fewer roots in this winter’s share.  Besides the intense drought this summer, half of my contemporary farmers in the region  have quit in the last couple of years for better pay and health insurance in off-farm jobs.  I used to partner with a variety of growers for parnsips and celeriac, among other crops.  I am shifting my growing plans to have more of these myself in the future, but the loss of farmers is alarming.  Why this is part of a larger trend in American agriculture is a topic for another post, but what I will say here is that Community Supported Agriculture is such an important component of having a viable local food system.  I am full of gratitude for all my CSA members!

Everyone was snug in the cold days, including me.  The chickens have stayed inside their winter coop, where they have a heat lamp and nice lights to mimic daylight.  I used the cold weather to give them some spa time —- extra kelp and hay and lard to snack on, a bucket of cold wood ashes for dust baths, and some extra diatomaceous earth for mite control.  They get hot water twice a day to keep them hydrated.  The pigs stay buried in their hay nests out in the field, with the two boars peaking out to let everyone know when I am coming with food.  We feed them double amounts just once a day so they aren’t spending a lot of time in the cold.  Everyone is pretty happy to keep snoozing and eating their houses.

I used the time to reorganize my craft room, which badly needed it.  For the next cold snap, it will be my workroom in the basement.  It’s nice to finally get a winter cold enough that I can catch up to these tasks!  The real cold kills insect pests also!

I’ve put together my seed order, and boy have the prices jumped.  I expect this will be a trend for the next handful of years.  Luckily I am saving more and more of my own seed.  I will comment more on this in my next post about 2025 goals.  The two challenges that I want to work on next are saving squash, and saving carrots.  The carrots are tricky because they take a full two years to mature, so that bed can’t be used for something else in the second year.  The squash are tricky because some of them cross with my summer squash, or with each other.  I need to grow some of them at our cabin, which is deep in the woods where they won’t cross with a neighbor’s plants. 

What's easier is lettuce.  I used to grow quite a few varieties of head lettuce.   I will be cutting this back to one or two... or three.... gosh, I can't help myself... so that I can save the seed and it won’t cross with itself.  I can keep the populations isolated by time in my intensive rotation.  Because I am such a small farm, I make sure to avoid inbreeding depression by mixing seed from two different years so that I have the necessary genetic diversity.

After about a decade of working on this, about half my seed supply is from my own seed-saving efforts.  This last summer set me back some, with the incredible late summer drought -- I lost two whole bean crops and a number of potatoes among other things.  But I will persist because it seems clear that this practice is foundational to my farm's resilience.  It was also helpful to see which potatoes _did_ do well in such a severe drought.  I did not renew some of the varieties that failed.  Increasingly I have looked to practices of farmers in the high desert out west as we get more extreme droughts generally coupled with cooler temperatures.  This is not getting ready for climate change, this is adapting to climate changed, to borrow a phrase from Dan Egan in his book, "The Death and Life of the Great Lakes."

 These are challenging times.  The Covid-19 virus has shown us just how interconnected we are, from disruptions in supply chains, to the tremors in the global economy, to our inability to stay put.  Yet we ARE interconnected, and as fast as the virus spread, my local region was setting up communications networks, checking on neighbors, and figuring out how to be creative online.  It's an opportunity to revisit how we build resilient local communities, because this is not the last upheaval we will face.  Now, more than ever, we need local food systems, and the training to know what to do with all that food.  We are learning to cook again.  My neighbors and I are having virtual dinners: we cook the same thing and videoconference each other over the meal.  We are lucky in my region that the local phone cooperative had the vision to put in fiber! 

Rather than hoarding toilet paper, we should be hoarding seeds.  Heck, we need to be learning how to garden again. We need to remember how to operate without as much money, how to support local small businesses that are left out of the national aid packages, and squeezed with the quarantines.  Rather than rushing to Amazon, we need to re-learn how to have a full pantry, stocked for several months, with produce we've preserved from our neighboring farms.  And now is a great time for those of us with that knowledge to share it.  A friend of mine said that the word for Crisis in Mandarin included the character for Opportunity.  This is our wakeup call to build resilient systems, rather than simply weathering a virus.  And perhaps we might just use this global mobilization to tackle the climate chaos we've caused.