Flee to the Fields, part 3: Subsistence farming as safeguarder of the soil (and of everything else)

 This is the third in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

Part 1: Why farming is not a business

Part 2: The case for subsistence farming

"Subsistence Farming means that the farmer grows the greatest practicable variety of crops, with a view to feeding first himself and his family. He sells his surplus, not his substance." ~ Harold Robbins

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Like this one is, my last post was also a reflection on the above quotation from Robbins' essay. But my focus last time was mainly on how our varied enterprises here on the farm (goat herd, hogs, turkeys, garlic, produce, etc.) all complement each other. The livestock provide the manure that enriches the fields, and the unsaleable produce and all of the other superabundance of the fields in turn feeds the stock. Ultimately we ourselves eat from the substance of our stock and whatever else our land yields, and we sell the surplus to meet the cash expenses of our family and our farm. We are, in short, subsistence farmers as Robbins describes the term.

This time I want to focus in greater depth on how growing the greatest practicable variety of crops as Robbins suggests is of benefit to the land and, therefore, to everything that depends on it (all the way up to the farmer, the land's caretaker, and even those who depend on the work of the farmer to eat). In other words, you.

You don't plant the same things in the same place year after year. This, really, is something that most all backyard gardeners know, and that, if they ignore, they eventually learn the hard way. I had somebody send me some pictures of their garlic awhile back. They were at a loss as to why most of their bulbs came out of the ground withered and rotted away to nothing. Were they planting it in too low spot in their garden? The answer was, no. They assured me that they always planted the garlic in that spot. And that was the problem in a nutshell: planting garlic in that spot year after year had led to a buildup of tiny eriophyid mites that fed on the the bulbs. Below the ground the mites leave the bulbs susceptible to rot. In storage, they cause the cloves desiccate, transforming them into wrappers-full of moldy dust. 

Of course, these mites occur naturally, and there should be no illusions that they can be avoided altogether without intense chemical application. So the goal for the gardener who doesn't want to poison his ground -- and the food that he puts on his table -- should be to plant garlic in at least a three-year rotation with other crops so that the mites are never able to congregate in large numbers in a particular location.

What is true of plants in the allium genus is also true of brassicas, cucurbits, nightshades, legumes, and all of the other plant families. Each family attracts its own distinct pests, and each draws on the soil differently. Plant heavy-feeders like cabbage or brussels in the same spot year after year, and you'll deplete your soil of nitrogen. Plant beans, peas, or a clover cover crop after brassicas, and you'll rebuild the nitrogen of your soil. Again, every successful backyard gardener is at least vaguely aware of these indisputable truths.

And yet, I've had an older farmer point out a field and remark to me that it has been planted "corn on corn" for more than twenty years. While he acknowledged that it "not a great practice," he shrugged his shoulders. It's what everybody does these days, he said. So long as you apply the right chemicals and the right pesticides at the right times, you are more than likely to have a yield. In the event of a crop failure, no worries: government subsidies will carry you over financially till next year. In this older farmer's words, "Corn pays."

While corn may pay, nobody -- not even a farmer who has embraced monoculture farming practices -- argues that it's good for the soil. Constantly drawing the same set of nutrients from the soil requires an annual artificial "re-balancing." First these injected nutrients are never truly incorporated into the soil by its organic components because they're so quickly drawn up again. Then the bacteria and fungi in the organic component of the soil are starved and begin to die off, leading to the cascading effect of less and less nutrient and mineral absorption and more and more run-off in the form of macronutrients (think of well water polluted by high phosphorus levels), pesticides (consider the rising incidence of glyphosate-caused cancer), and even the soil itself (basic erosion and farmland loss since dead soil doesn't absorb and hold water as readily as living soil does).

The answer for large-scale, corn-centric farmers is to plant soybeans as a "nitrogen fixer." Which is certainly better than continuous corn-on-corn planting. The irony of soybeans, however, is the same irony that has dogged corn for years: we simply don't need it all. So for corn, we farmers lobby the government to subsidize ethanol to make it financially worthwhile to keep growing corn. We invent ways to put more of it into our foodstuff. While sugar from beets or cane is much easier for us to digest, we instead put corn through a chemical process to make high fructose corn syrup, a sweetener linked to inflammation and, potentially, cancer. We do this not because it's more economical considered in itself, but because it's more economical when government subsidies are factored in. Again, corn pays.

But corn only pays when soy is planted too. So we need to find ways to utilize the glut of soy as well. Seventy-percent of it is fed to animals despite the fact that it causes inflammation in the digestive tracts of pigs and, together with corn, is not a proper feed source at all for forage-loving ruminants like cows. Ever wonder why cows produce so much methane? They'd produce a whole lot less if they were fed a more easily digestible diet! And this doesn't even get into the way that soy has found its way into human consumption (I'm thinking soy milk, despite the fact that the regular consumption of soy is likely linked to hormonal issues for women).

The point is that monoculture "big ag" causes problems at each stage. The mania for corn-soy on a mega-scale leaves us with a glut of product that we don't need at huge expense both to the taxpayers' pocketbooks and health, and certainly to the land itself as well. 

I believe that the solution is the small landholder -- in other words, the subsistence farmer -- who produces what he and his stock need, and who sells from his surplus. As a small landholder, the subsistence farmer grows small amounts of the widest variety of crops in a true rotation. His rotation is not the corn-soybean nitrogen quick-fix and repeat, all the while applying a full range of ever stronger pesticides to keep the ever-present fungi, aphids, and borers at bay. The subsistence farmer can practice a true rotation because of the wide variety of things that he grows in small amounts.

In our own case, we've focused on the allium family (garlic), the cucurbits (zucchini, winter squash), and the brassicas (brussels, cabbage), mixed with a few cover crops (clover to recover nitrogen, mustard to prepare the soil for garlic). Since the brassicas take so much less space than the cucurbits, we're able to add to the mix a small field of wheat for our own use and another small field of corn to fatten our stock. We have a dozen acres in hay as well, and with that we meet all the dietary needs of our small ruminants. Admittedly, we're still a work in progress since we do have to purchase some additional grain for the hogs in the winter and for the turkeys that we raise in through the summer and fall. But we're working toward a rotation that will care of all of our needs -- both human and animal.

And we sell from our surplus, as Robbins says the subsistence farmer should. And my strongly held opinion is that the surplus that we sell from basically matches up, proportionally, to the sorts of things that the outside world needs. Whereas the big row-crop farmer give the world a glut of practically indigestible corn and soy, the subsistence farmer sells the wide array of vegetables, small grains, and pastured meats that the consumer really needs.

What else would we need that the subsistence farmer can't provide? Are we worried that without big-ag we wouldn't be able to feed the world? I have an argument from Flee to the Fields -- for another future post, for sure -- that if all the big farms were eliminated, and if they were replaced by a third of the acreage of small landholdings, we'd be living in a land flowing with milk, honey, and a whole lot of other things preferable to corn, soy, and their ilk. We'd be healthier for it too, as would our animals, and even the land itself.

Flee to the Fields, part 2: The case for subsistence farming

This is the second in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

Part 1: Why farming is not a business

"The Catholic Land Movement proposes Subsistence Farming as the first remedy. This does not mean, as its enemies assume, that the farmer lives on his farm as on a desert island, and sells nothing. Rates and Taxes alone would make this impracticable. Subsistence Farming means that the farmer grows the greatest practicable variety of crops, with a view to feeding first himself and his family. He sells his surplus, not his substance. For the farmer, on the whole, sells wholesale and buys retail. On the economic side alone, any practical diminution of this kind of traffic cannot fail to be a net gain to him." ~ HAROLD ROBBINS

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Reflection

I have a hard time explaining to people exactly what type of farmers we are. It is true that I work part-time from home. Even if farming brought in all of our income needs, I'd still be teaching.  I love teaching for Mother of Divine Grace, the online program directed at Catholic homeschoolers that my own boys are enrolled in. Yet we're hardly homesteaders or mere "hobby" farmers either, as more than half of our income last year derived from our working of the land. So we're not hobbyists, and despite the fact that we're Wisconsinites who milk goats twice a day, and despite the fact that the goats take up a lot of our daily attention here on the farm, I wouldn't dare say that we're dairy farmers either.

Perhaps the strongest case is that we are produce farmers. Last year we made nearly $14,000 off of garlic after expenses. We also grow enough winter squash, brussels, and cabbage to market these crops wholesale through a produce cooperative. But if we're produce farmers, we're awfully distracted produce farmers. We're distracted by the attention we pay to a growing herd of meat goats. We cut and baled nearly two thousand small squares of grassy-alfalfa hay last summer. We process and sell turkeys direct-to-consumer every Thanksgiving. We recently had a few sows farrow, and we have two steers that we're bottle feeding. 

I want to tell people that we're subsistence farmers because, really, that's the most accurate description. But I'm taken aback at how alien the concept is to many folks, even -- and perhaps especially -- the folks involved in agriculture. The concept of subsistence farming conjures up African farmers raising small plots of maize in desert conditions and living on the edge of starvation. Or it brings to mind people who enjoy living off of the land, but who earn the money to pay the bills by employment off of their homestead. Well, I can assure you that we're not starving. And as already noted, more than half of our income derives from our land.

When you talk to older folks, subsistence farming is only a generation or two back in time. The idea had been that you lived off of your land, and you sold things from the farm to pay for the items that you didn't produce for yourself -- new shoes, perhaps, or household luxuries, or the occasional new farm implement . This was the most common form of farming well into the 20th century. Then here in Wisconsin, dairying became a specialty. In other places, it became a cash crop like wheat, cotton, or corn. At some point it became easier simply to focus on the cash crop and to buy everything else ready-made.

And what is wrong with a total focus on a cash crop? Absolutely nothing in a good year, I suppose. But what happens in the year when your cash crop fails? If you are a subsistence farmer, then you don't buy household luxuries or new farm implements that year. You put away vegetables from the garden and butcher a hog. You stack wood in the shed, light a fire, and stay warm and well fed all winter as you plan and pray for a better year next year. If you're not a subsistence farmer, you'd better hope that the government intervenes with a highly subsidized crop insurance program. Seriously, American taxpayers, are you aware that you are paying farmers to focus on their cash crops? Why is that? Why are we paying farmers to produce so much corn that we are depleting our soil and inventing strange new uses for it? 

It's not subsistence farming that's strange, it's the other way around that is strange. Why in the world would a farmer concentrate on a single crop? If I were encouraged to do that, it'd be produce since produce is our major "cash" money maker here on the farm. The first few years I had to purchase fertilizer simply because there was no other option. Also the first year, I had the tough experience of learning that a great deal of produce is deemed unfit for the market due to the most annoying, tiniest of defects. In short, I had additional costs with respect to inputs, and I had product that was unsaleable. I was losing money on both ends of the equation. 

Add in livestock, however, as we gradually have, and loss becomes gain on both ends. After making up a $2,000 investment into an old manure spreader, our growing goat herd began to provide ample fertility for the produce acreage. Outside fertility runs about $700, and for that price you get pelletized chicken manure that can only be used for so many years before you risk the build-up of micronutrients like calcium. In three years we've already made up that investment, and the goats are still there producing more free fertility for the produce operation than ever. On dairies they call manure "liquid gold." For goats it's a little different-- a little dryer and easier to work with -- but just as valuable (and not as unbalanced by excessively high nitrogen).

Add some feeder pigs too, as we also have, and the loss of unsaleable produce becomes the gain on the other end. Last year we sold nearly a thousand pounds of zucchini to our wholesaler, for example. But for every saleable zucchini that is under seven and one half inches and perfectly cylindrical, there's another one that curves slightly or comes in too large or too fat. This past December we processed five feeder pigs that were fed on zucchini through June, July and August; that feasted on winter squash through September and October; and that were finished on brussels stems and leaves and fattening homegrown corn all the way through to their processing date.

It's so hard to account for all the benefits of subsistence farming on the balance sheet. For example, Rosemary objected the other day when I was grumbling about the cost of the goat herd. I pointed out that we'd be $5,000 richer if I sold the hay that the goats are burning through this winter rather than retaining it. I pointed out that we made only a few thousand dollars off of goat sales last spring, and that the herd only produced the equivalent of $700 worth of manure. But then Rosemary reminded me that we processed a number of cull goats and pressure canned their meat to keep our own hungry brood well fed. And depending on the time of year we get half a gallon to two gallons of milk per day. Consider the price of all the milk that the boys go through, and all the cheese that we've made and enjoyed, and Rosemary makes a convincing case that the goats actually turn a small profit. Add to this the fact that the size of the herd -- and therefore the real value of stock on the farm -- continues to increase without any cash inputs (apart from $350 spent on a buck with new bloodlines a year and a half ago).

The point is, subsistence farming doesn't necessarily look good on paper. But I can assure you, we're eating really well, and we stay warm through the winter. We have enough cash to pay the bills, even when things are a little tighter when one of our several cash crops fails, as our squash did the year before last. Which has me thinking that I should also write about Robbins' point in the quote above about growing the greatest practicable variety of crops. But maybe I'll save that for the next post!

Flee to the Fields, part 1: Why farming is not a business

 For years I've been vaguely aware of the Catholic Land Movement that was initiated in England in the interbellum period between the two great world wars. Its promotors included G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, writers whom I've admired for years. Their project, in short, was to foster a return to the land. They saw the rise of industrialism in England -- the self-styled "workshop of the world" -- as being inherently inimical to basic human thriving. Man has "an affinity for reality," one of Land Movement's promotors argued. "The elements of life -- the cleansing earth, the seasons, the contact with primary things -- are necessary to sanity."

The highly idealistic Land Movement sought to train Catholic men in the agricultural arts and settle them on small plots of land, both to farm and to raise their families in small, closely knit, faith-centered communities. Then World War II intervened: the world changed dramatically, many of the most prominent promotors died, and, sadly, the budding movement died out.

But the Land Movement's founding documents endure in a book entitled Flee to the Fields, which Rosemary purchased for me last month as a Christmas present. Having started reading the book just yesterday, I'm only two essays into the slim volume. But I'm so taken by the ideas expressed therein that I'm inspired to restart the old Garlic and Sapphires blog. My intention here is to write a series of posts on particularly pivotal insights that I've come across in my reading. In each entry I'll lay out in the insight in context, and then I'll reflect on it in light of my own farming experience. Perhaps I'll be enthusiastic enough to write daily; perhaps life will distract me, and I'll slow down. 

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The problem of simple versus compound interest

The first essay in Flee to the Fields was composed by Herbert Shove, who was a British naval commander in both world wars as well as a self-taught economic theorist. Among many other insights, Shove notes that modern capitalism thrives off of compound interest. The idea is that profit is calculated from ever-increasing principal balance. With burgeoning enterprises, this makes sense because such businesses have the potential to be ever larger; they are held in check only by the market forces of supply and demand. If there is a demand for flat-screen televisions, then a maker of flat-screen televisions can chart an upward trajectory in production, consistently showing a profit that compounds as the business grows in size. While one may certainly question whether such a trajectory can continue indefinitely, even in industry, that would be a matter for another essay.

What works (at least temporarily) in industry, Shove argues, does not work in agriculture. A farm may briefly take on the trappings of compounding profits by improving its efficiency to squeeze more out of a flock, a herd, or a parcel of land. But eventually the interest stops compounding because nothing more can be squeezed out of what is available without adulterating the quality of whatever is produced. The principal is what the principal is: so many cows produce so many hundredweight of milk per year; so many acres yield so many bushels of wheat per season. There are limits to what the land can produce or the size that an operation can be. Interest in farming is simple, Shrove writes, not compound, because the principal remains constant.

When agriculture is run like an industry and has industrial profits demanded of it, it's quickly run into the ground. Whereas industry turns a profit by "reducing the time cycle of manufacture," agriculture is bound by a "rigid seasonal time factor." Also, both industry and agriculture reduce their wage bill by turning to mechanization. But whereas industry pays for that mechanization by expansion and by diversification into an near endless array of manufactured goods, expansion in agriculture can only go so far because a nation only needs so much milk, so much wheat, and so much corn and soy. 

And thus capitalistic agriculture-as-industry rapidly becomes a dead-end. "The seasonal 'simple interest' return from land must, as the speeding-up process continues, lag ever further behind the cyclic 'compound interest' return from trade or manufacture."

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Reflection

Shove's argument spoke to me because I see the market pressure on farmers all around me here in Wisconsin, the home of a dying dairying culture. It seems that dairy-turned-industry is in the last throes of the dead-end that Shove predicted for industrial agriculture more generally. Farmers were encouraged for years to turn a profit by expansion; for years they looked very much like a burgeoning industry, and they expanded and mechanized accordingly. Now the market is glutted, the milk price has tanked, and farmers are saddled with the debt from facilities they can no longer afford and with more milk than they can sell, at least at a price that off-sets their debt. Ironically the only way out that many farmers are able to see is to produce even more milk. 

The expansion approach may work for a few mega-dairies in the short term. But how long will it be worth it as the profit margin narrows even more? What are independent mega-dairies to do now that Walmart and other major retailers operate their own milk facilities because their loss is less than the commission they'd have to pay to independently owned dairies? Expansion, it seems, is no answer at all in the long run: ultimately mega-dairy agriculture will be swallowed whole by the commerce industry. We know this because it's already happened with poultry farming, and this is exactly the pattern that retailers are following with dairy. Most all of poultry sold in the States is raised under exploitive, non-negotiable contracts with companies like Tyson delivering the birds and the feed and the farmer (contract employee, rather) taking on all of the risk. This is the bleak future for dairy too.

I don't pretend to know the path forward for my fellow farmers who are invested in dairy or poultry. In fact, I don't know what the path forward is for any farmers of any stripe, given that the general presumption is that farming is an industry and therefore must expand in size and scope in order to turn an ever increasing profit. I remember being asked about cashflow by the FSA farming representative last year while applying for a loan for our small, second tractor for our farm. Apparently it was a red flag that so little cash was "flowing" through our farming operation. It was explained to me that, ideally, I'd sign up to grow significantly more produce next year in order to raise the cash flow. It mattered not in the least that it would require me to hire an employee or to further mechanize, or possibly both. Apparently the important thing was that I become larger and therefore have more "profit potential."

The irony seemed lost on the FSA representative that our little farm had made more money for our family that year than many other, far larger farms that had much more "cash flow." We had no employees to pay and (until that second tractor loan came through) no debts to service. We made plenty of money. It's just that our static enterprise was producing simple interest; it was not compounding. 

My resolve then -- now confirmed and strengthened by my reading of Shove's essay -- is that I need to avoid the industrial treadmill in my farming enterprise. Farming for me, ideally, will bring in the "simple interest" of a living income. We do have some growing yet to do as we learn fully to utilize our beautiful plot of land. Indeed, the income will grow together with my growing gaggle of boys; then it'll slowly ebb as they age out and move on to whatever God has in store for them. I have no pretensions to "growing a business." I'll stick to growing squash, brussels, garlic, and cabbage for those few folks who appreciate good food enough to pay what it's worth.