Creating Local Sustainable Farms

People living in the city are hungry for a sense of connection to their food source. They want to know who grows their food, and where, and how. If they have the opportunity to witness farmers acting as true stewards of the land—as Stephen and Gloria Decater do—it is a transformative experience. Once you see that kind of love for the land, it is impossible to see the relationship as a simple market exchange anymore. It is inevitable that we fall in love with them and their work. And what a blessing to reconnect to the source of life!

—Jessica Prentice, Bay Area Chef,
Locavore, Food Activist, and Author

 

If we are to have an ecologically, socially and financially healthy food system, we need to create more sustainable farms. Discussions of sustainability usually center on the important issue of preserving soil fertility. Without caring for the health of the land, farming certainly cannot be sustained over more than a few years. The ecological farming practices we use address not only soil fertility but also energy self-sufficiency through the use of renewable sources and conservation. However, social, cultural and economic viability are equally important but often overlooked topics when discussing how to create sustainable farms.

We believe agriculture must be community-based rather than market-based to be sustainable in the long run. In market-based farming, the farm gets a lower return than a community-based farm on its produce as a result of middle-man expenses. Even when selling at a farmer's market and getting a retail price, the farmer has to absorb the marketing costs of getting the food to the market, spending time selling, taking back what didn't sell, and getting to other markets to have enough sales overall. Additionally, a certain percentage (perhaps up to 20%) of the produce that is not cosmetic, even though it is perfectly good nutritionally, will not sell and will not result in income. A community-based farm, however, plans its production for a specific member community that pays its operating expenses. Thus, the community-based farm is in a position to achieve greater stability and reduced expenses.

Although large, corporate farms are increasingly adopting organic farming practices, we do not believe they will be sustainable ultimately because the economic practices they use are not sustainable. Community-based farms, using associative economic principles, can heal some of the negative social aspects of market-based farming by organizing the farm as a community. In the present market-based relationship, we expect the farmer to invest time and capital to produce a crop for which there are no consumers committed to buy or use the product. Community Sustained Agriculture is an example of an associative relationship between farmer and consumers that better meets the needs of both and will be sustainable. This direct, committed farmer-to-consumer relationship is much stronger than a market-based relationship; farmer and consumers work together to resolve adversities in a way that those in traditional commercial relationships will not.

We may or may not have reached peak oil yet, but at some point the extraction of oil from the earth will reach its peak. We believe that after peak oil, the diminishing availability of fossil energy and the health risks of nuclear and coal will create major challenges to our present farming and food system and at the same time will create a real opportunity to build a truly sustainable system, one that is more local than global. For perspective, it is well to reflect that barely 100 years ago, until the early 1900s, in this country we did have a largely solar-based, localized farming and food system with hundreds of thousands of small horse-powered farms.

The diminishing availability of fossil energy will cause energy prices to rise. That in turn will cause the cost of food produced and distributed with fossil energy and industrial methods to rise also. Transporting farming inputs such as compost, feed, livestock, and energy and farm products to consumers over thousands of miles will no longer be viable. Individual farms will need to generate their inputs from their own land base (see Solar Electric and Horse Power) or in cooperation with adjacent farms, and will need to be located closer to the people consuming their food. Local, nonmechanized organic food production will then become as cost effective as industrialized, fossil energy based organic food.

In creating a more local sustainable agriculture, we will need to plan for an increased land base to create the compost and tillage energy required. This will present a real challenge for supplying urban and suburban communities with food since so much of the farmland close to those urban areas has fallen into the hands of developers over the past 100 years.

To get an idea of the proportions of land base to generation of farming inputs/needs, we can look at the example of Live Power Community Farm, which has approximately 40 acres of arable land and supplies 160 households with part of their food needs. Of the 40 acres:

6 acres of ground are used for vegetable growing
2 acres for feed grain
30 acres for hay and pasture
2 acres are devoted to buildings and orchard

The livestock complement for this land is:

6 herd cows/6 calves
8 ewes/12 lambs
4 draft horses
2 feeder pigs
40 laying hens

The manure from these animals and crop residues generates about 50 tons of compost a year, which are used primarily for maintaining fertility in the vegetable production. Small quantities of oyster shell lime and rock phosphate may need to be imported. The draft horses provide energy for soil tillage, cultivation, and transportation within the farm.

Just as we need a new economic concept such as associative economy to address the long-term economic viability of farms, we also need a new concept of land tenure to address the long-term preservation of good farmland. Historically, we thought of farms as more or less permanent places, where farms passed from one generation to the next. In recent decades, however, the “next” generation began to leave farming because of economic failure and encroaching development. That is a great loss. Farm infrastructure and soil fertility are built up over generations, as is the knowledge passed from one generation to the next. When it became possible to import food from all over the world, perhaps it seemed only sad that local farms were dying. However, with the idea that oil availability has peaked, we now have a new perspective: it is not only sad, but also a problem for our future survival. We need to ensure that the local community-based farms we build now will endure by changing the form of land ownership. With permanent farms, the investment in farming and energy infrastructure is justified since the property will be maintained far into the future as farms, and thus as food-producing resources for local communities.

It is possible to preserve farm properties in active biodynamic or organic farming use by placing all speculative and nonfarming use potentials of the property in the ownership of a qualified 501(c)3 nonprofit land trust, leaving the farming use potential in the hands of the farmer. This can be achieved in two ways, either by (1) placing the farmland in complete nonprofit ownership with a 99-year inheritable lease granted to the farmer, or (2) using a shared equity conservation easement to keep the land in active ecological farming use and limit its resale to its agricultural income potential.

How can we regenerate economically viable local farming? One thing is clear, farmers cannot do it alone, nor can consumers. However, when farmers and concerned consumers come together with a clear vision of a community-based farm and form a core group for a farm, then there is the potential to create and maintain a viable farm. We have seen the following roles develop in our CSA.

Does the core group need to be large?  Not necessarily, especially if the participants share a vision of the underlying principles on which they will organize the farm. We started with 15 founding members that grew to the 160 families that participate in our farm today. Existing CSA farms can mentor the development of core groups and membership for new community farms through workshops, meetings, and publications. Farmers wanting to create a CSA can look for existing communities such as schools, churches, or environmental groups to find initial core group and shareholder members. Our San Francisco community grew out of initial members coming from the Waldorf school there.

A member community of 150 to 200 households can generate an annual operating budget of about $100,000 to $125,000 on the basis of today's organic food prices. As the costs of fossil energy in food production rise, solar-based, sustainable food production costs will remain relatively stable while the food will have an ever-higher monetary value.

Several community-based farms can work in cooperation with each other, serving the same member community with a wider variety of foods. For example, a vegetable/meat farm, a fruit/dairy farm, a grain/beans/seeds/oil and a poultry farm could all supply the same shareholders.

Please read and respond to a Draft Proposal for a Mendocino Community Based Farming Network on the "Reflections from the Fields" page of this website.