Elsewhere FARM Agro-ecology

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.