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.
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:
This will be fun!
2 Comments
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." |
Details
AuthorDr. Clare Hintz has a B.S. Degree in Biology and Writing, a M.S. in Sustainable Systems with an emphasis in Agroecology, and a Ph.D. in Sustainability Education with a focus on Regenerative Agriculture. She currently teaches agroecological design from her regenerative agriculture farm in northern Wisconsin. She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Sustainability Education, and the board president of Marbleseed, the midwest farmers association. In her spare time she knits, reads feminist science fiction and cooks really good food for friends. Archives
February 2025
Categories |