Multiple Elements

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.