What If? - A Local Food Challenge

It's a common theme that shows up semi-regularly on this blog.  The farmer pushes the concept of local food production in front of your face - over and over and... over again.  Often it sounds like I am bemoaning the current state of things (because I often am).  Sometimes, I give you a look into what it has been like being a producer of food for local consumption.  Always, I wish we would value our food the way we should.

This time, I thought I would take a different approach and advance an idea.  What a novel approach!  Identify a problem and suggest the beginning of a solution!  We can't have that can we?!?

What's the potential?

The Genuine Faux Farm occupies about fifteen (15) acres of land and is surrounded by hundreds of acres of corn and soybean field production (not ours, of course).  On that fifteen acre plot, we have grown as much as 5 acres of uncovered vegetables and two high tunnels worth of covered vegetable crops.  There are some fruit trees and raspberry/blackberry canes to go along with wild plum and mulberry trees.  We have raised 500-600 broiler (meat) chickens, 75 turkeys, and maintained a good sized flock of laying hens most years (and even ducks for a few years).

And, before you think we're milking the land for every drop it is worth, we recognize that we have to pay the rent by maintaining the balance.  We feed the soil, we maintain untilled and wild areas, and we feed the pollinators.

It is safe to say that we were never able to reach the full potential of food production of our farm - for a whole host of reasons we can discuss another day.  But, even with that caveat, we had multiple seasons where we were able to produce 12.5 tons of produce in one year.

Twelve point five TONS of produce - and I am not even counting the two to three tons of poultry and approximately 2 tons of eggs.

So, let's call it 17 tons of food.  On 15 acres.  While still maintaining habitat and soil health.

And, I am NOT counting culls (product that is not high enough quality for marketing).  If we were really hurting for food, there is a LOT on our farm alone that is fed to the poultry or put into the compost.

How much space do we need?

This question can be answered in so many ways, but I will start by approaching it from my perspective - the small-scale farmer looking to produce a diverse set of products.

We just completed our 18th year farming this way - so I think we have enough experience, with plenty of failures and successes, to make a few educated guesses.  First, I've come to the conclusion that this type of farm would benefit from being sized at around fifty acres of land.  Second, these small-scale, diverse farms need to have consistent contact with two to four other farms of a similar scale - preferably close enough where resources could be shared.  And third, the uber-diverse CSA model on a single farm is too inefficient if we're worried about volume of production, just as a monocrop (single crop in a field) system is too restrictive to provide natural insurance and the benefits of nature's services for production.

The other way to answer the question is to ask how much food a person needs in one year.  According to this 2011 NPR story, Americans ate an average of one ton of food in one year.  This, of course, includes estimates for the amount of corn syrup we consume in our softdrinks, for example.  It also is making the point that we consume a LOT more than we need.  Or, if you believe some health sites, the claim is that we need about four pounds of food a day (just under 3/4 ton per year).  That's a great deal of food, either way - and the wide range (.75 ton to 2 tons) tells us that we have choices to make (including how we measure such things) that will change how much food - and thus how much space - we need.

What I do know is this.  At our peak, the Genuine Faux Farm supported 120 farm shares in our CSA.  Many of those farm shares provided produce for multiple families.  So, we estimate that we provided vegetables for about 150 families which totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 people.  Did these people eat as much of these veggies as they should have?  Probably not.  But, it still gives us a measure of exactly how well local production could do if we gave it an honest fighting chance to succeed.

The beginnings of an idea

It seems that we are often stymied by the overwhelming size of the problem.  And, the solutions are often too big for us to actually put the energy into making them happen.  So, here is a thought that might be "bite-sized" enough for us to consider in the state of Iowa.

There are approximately 26.2 million acres dedicated to cropland in Iowa and another 1.3 million dedicated to pasture land.  What would happen if we dedicated just three fifty acre farms per county to some small-scale, diversified farms that we supported collectively?  This would require just under 15,000 acres.  For context, we need to consider that this is about .0005 % of the available farmland in the state.  We're not talking even 1 percent of the land here.  Not even 1% of 1%.  

Each of these farms, if we took the weight of food our little, inefficient, 15 acre farm could produce and apply it to three 50-acre farms, you have an estimate of 168 tons of food per season in one county.  That's well over 16,000 tons for the state - and I believe that number is a very conservative estimate.

Now, if I had asked you first if you thought 1% of all of the tillable land in Iowa was too much to ask for to allow for small-scale, diversified farms on that land, what would you have said?  Probably, "Oh, that's not too much, we could do that."  And yet, people will balk at this ask for .0005%.  Still, for the sake of argument, what if we could identify 1% of the land and put a bunch of 50 acre farms on them?  We would produce about 320,000 tons.    On 1% of its cropland.

And if we dedicated our farmland to real food production?  That would be 32 MILLION tons of food.  In Iowa.

There is always a danger when you take a small sample and simply multiply it out and pretend it gives real results - just as I have here.  But, this is an experiment for us to think just a little harder about what is possible.

What could happen if these farms could be placed next to each other so labor, tools, expertise and support could be more readily shared?  What could happen if these farms could "specialize" their diversity so they could grow twenty crop types instead of the fifty a single-farm CSA often requires?  What could happen if we considered the real value of our food and made sure the good food they produced was being consumed locally?  What could happen if we identified these farms as a key part of our communities so they are supported and able to stabilize and be productive for decades... or for generations?  What could happen if we made it a fact of life that these farms would also support pollinators and wild areas?  

What if?