Sustainability by Doing

In our prior post, we talked about how we try to maintain the three pillars of sustainability by NOT doing certain things.  Quick!  What are the three pillars of sustainable farming?  What?!?  You forgot them?  Good thing we're here to remind you:  Environment, Community and Financial (or Economic)

Some folks seem to equate sustainability with only environmental matters, which we understand.  After all, it feels like the environmental cost is too often the one humans are most willing to ignore.  And, of course, the financial costs are the one we are most likely to pay attention to.  The Genuine Faux Farm, if anything, tends to make the mistake of placing the economic factors lowest on the list simply because we ARE trying to make a point.  But, that doesn't mean it doesn't come into play.

In any event, we discussed things we have opted (or are opting) NOT to do and here we thought we'd mention the things we are consciously doing to make our farm more sustainable.

Re-Using and Re-Purposing
The idea of re-using and re-purposing has never been foreign to farming.  The old saw about on the fly farm repairs relying on chewing gum and baling wire is simply a reflection on the necessity of innovating when things break.  On the other hand, there are other ways we can planfully re-use and re-purpose - such as the intentional purchase of seed starting trays that are sturdier and able to last several years.

I know some home gardeners will act like this is a simple thing, but it is not so simple when you are talking about many hundreds of trays being used every season.  We can't spend time being gentle with every tray as we remove plants to be put into the field.  That means they start to show wear as we work with them.  And then there is the matter of cleaning them to prevent the potential spread of pathogens from one planting to the next.  When you have ten to twenty trays, that's no big deal.

Still, we would prefer not to fill our landfill up with single use plastic every season, so we opt for these trays - and they work well for us.  We could move to soil blocks, but our starting system does not support that at this time.  We really need a dedicated seed starting building and then we could move that far.

We also find ourselves re-purposing many items on the farm as our operations changes.  The building at the left was initially purchased several years ago as a semi-portable chicken building  After five or six years of service, the wood frame we put on the bottom started to fall apart and a wind storm bent a couple things up.  We put it in a stationary position and covered it in plastic so it could help with seedling production, but it was a short roof and we had to squat to get in and out of it.

So, now we are working to make it a small seedling building by making it a bit taller and putting semi-permanent sides on it.  This should have been done a month ago - but, that's how things go sometimes.  We still have our hearts in the right place - right? 

We've re-used windows and wood others have discarded.  Useful lumber from old farm buildings that have come down has shown up on hayracks, poultry rooms and other projects.  The hardest part is usually trying to find a balance between working with previously used resources (that take more time and effort) with new resources (when time is short) - all the while having to consider the money factor.  You can argue that time is money all you want, but saving two hours of time on a project doesn't actually result in a check arriving in your mailbox to compensate you directly for that time - no matter how much you might want it to.

Natural Resources
On our farm, we usually get our fair of sunshine and our fair share of wind.  So, we use both.  We like to line dry our laundry so our reliable electric dryer gets a rest through most of the months from April to November.  This is actually a big deal simply because we generate a great deal of laundry for two people.  Farmers sweat.  Farmers get mud and other things on their clothing.  It's normal.  But, we do like to clean up at least a little bit - I am sure you appreciate that.  After all, you all look more attractive when you aren't wrinkling your noses at that smell that seems to be accompanying the farmer today - so I appreciate it too!

We rely on poultry netting that is charged using a solar panels connected to batteries.  We also use shorter netting to protect young plants from rabbits and woodchucks (it works much of the time - but is not foolproof).  We're thrilled with the staying power of the Premiere One fencing as most of our fencing sections have multiple years of use.  We are starting to see some wear on the chargers that is needing more attention and we have been rotating out batteries as they end their useful life.  It's things like this that cause us to keep asking if we are doing the best thing.  Solar sure sounds good, doesn't it?  Yep.  But, how much does this need for new batteries reduce the positives?  Thus far, we'd say it's an overall positive, but we are always watching to see if there is an improvement to be made.


And then there is drip tape.  We like it and we hate it.  It reduces our irrigation water use significantly over delivery systems that spray water over the top of the field.  The water is placed right at the root zones of the plants we are growing and doesn't waste water through evaporation and application to areas where we don't want the water.  But, it only lasts for one season in the field and then we have to throw it away.  In our minds, the net effect is still a positive, but we are looking for alternatives as well.

And, of course, there is the soil.  We compost weeds and cash crop residue along with the manure and bedding from our poultry.  This is the ultimate in re-use and re-purposing - since all of that becomes nutrients we can put back into our soil.   But, that's not all we do for our soil.  We incorporate cover crops into our growing plan and we use a power harrow for most of our tillage instead of a roto-tiller.  We limit our deep tillage to very specific situations where more of our plots might have a deep tillage process once every three or four years if needed.

Balancing Farm Use with Natural Use
We remind ourselves that we need Mother Nature more than she needs us on a daily basis.  So, we do things to invite Mother Nature to be kind and provide us with workers who help us in the long run.  We do not graze or till every square inch of our fifteen acres.  Instead, we try to leave some areas alone to provide habitat for snakes, toads, frogs and other critters that control populations that would like to decimate our vegetables crops.  We want our native bees to have good places to live so they might come and work for us by pollinating our melons and squash. 

We do mow a decent part of the farm, but we actually try to time our mowing to avoid disrupting pollinators and we often leave clover patches un-mowed until they are past peak bloom.  Then, we mow them to encourage another, later bloom.  We leave clover/grass paths between each of our plots and we are happy to have dandelions on the farm.

In the end, we find that nature is supporting our decisions to never use pesticides, herbicides and fungicides by providing some of those services without the help of synthetic chemicals.  It doesn't always work perfectly (from our perspective) but it works better than relying on the chemicals.

We are also big proponents of intercropping and planting annual pollinator crops as part of the intercropping plan.  Not only does it make parts of the farm look nicer, but it provides habitat for beneficial critters that end up working for us. 

Local Sales and Local Connections
Once again, you can see that much of our focus might seem to be on the environmental side of things - even though each has a component for the other two pillars.  That doesn't mean we don't expend effort elsewhere as well.  For example, we have opted for local sales of our product so that we can maintain a positive connection with the surrounding community.  We host visiting groups from area schools, colleges and universities and go to speak to classes about some of the things we try to do.  We do our best to source the things our farm needs from sources closer to home.  For example, we purchase our poultry feed from the Canfield family by Dunkerton and our hen and turkey chicks come from Hoover's Hatchery by Rudd. 

As always, there is more to say on this, but perhaps more words won't make the point any better than spending more time doing.

Charging What Food Is Worth
All of these things are probably worthy of their own post, but sometimes we just do what we have time for! 

The economic factors still come into play because our farm cannot be sustainable if it doesn't make enough money for us to keep doing what we are doing.  One way we work towards sustainability is to be very mindful of what production of the food costs us in terms of time, money and resources so we can charge a fair price that gives the purchaser a good value without requiring a complete sacrifice on our part.  This actually leads us to an interesting result for our farm.  We are certified organic, so we could potentially charge more because we are certified organic assuming we could connect ourselves to the proper markets.  But, we don't do that.  We simply charge what we need to charge.  Sometimes our price is higher, sometimes it is not.

The other components of the financial side of things are producing the product for sale and then making sales (of course).  Neither of us is particularly fond of promoting ourselves, so the latter can be difficult sometimes.  Assuming the weather goes back to something approximating the old 'normal' we think we have a history that shows we can do the former.

Always Looking to Improve
At the end of the day, we feel like we are doing a reasonably good job at maintaining the three pillars of sustainable farming. But, perhaps the most important thing of all is this:

We do not believe we have all of the answers.  We have no illusions that we have found the perfect balance.  Instead, we are still seeking more complete answers and a better balance.  And, perhaps that is how you can identify a truly sustainable operation.