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

**********

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.