Chapter 1: The Vision
Introduction
Welcome to my stream of consciousness blog book. Poorly proofed but hopefully entertaining and informative.
Chapter 1: The Vision
Farms likely began as one person’s dream. In between two rivers one person finally got tired of chasing, moving, hunting, scavenging, gathering and continuing the prehistoric rat race to survive. So one night as he lay under the stars he likely thought, “Hey, why don’t I plant my own food and raise my own animals to eat!” Agriculture was born and it remained an integral part of daily life for thousands of years until right now.
In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s our food changed completely. Who was growing our food changed. How and where they were growing our food changed. What they were doing to our food before we ate it was changed. Everything changed. [Another interesting thing in the 1970s changed. Epidurals emerged as a treatment for easing the pain of childbirth. Pretty interesting that the unraveling of the allegory of Genesis 3 has similar roots. Pesticides alleviated the toil of the men in the fields to produce food and epidurals alleviated the pain of childbirth.]
The green/organic/healthy food movement is a comfortable protest by the masses to express our new found displeasure about these changes. What if we went back and reinserted ourselves into the food production cycle?
Full disclosure and feel free to quit reading now if I’m not diehard enough for you. But, I love my primary profession as a physician and plan on part-time farming. Not only do I love my job but I need the revenue and benefits in order to truly enjoy having a farm. My ultimate goal has nothing to do with revenue.
My real, stream of consciousness dream is:
[Insert your dream here]
My dream is relevant to me. What does your dream look like? I like outlines and organization as much as the next person but sometimes it is helpful to write down a day of the dream. Write it down.
Now for the organized version of the dream and of course an acronym:
FARMERS
Functional
Affordable
Responsive
Modular
Ecologically engineered
Resilient
Sustainable
The big picture dream is important. I want to do things the right way but completely realize that I have limited expertise farming. That is why I’m not making goals like I want to produce 10 gallons of milk a day, produce 100 bars of goat’s milk soap a week, sell $1000 worth of broilers a month, net $10,000 worth of cattle sales a year, and sell $100,000 produce an acre. I’m a very goal driven person but those particular types of goals can come later. For right now I want to figure out what is important to me on a farm.
The first thing is functionality. I grew up on and around a recreational farm in. We lived on the farm for about a year when we were renovating our house in town. I was young and still remember fishing before school and playing in the afternoons. It was awesome. When I was a teenager my dad decided he was going to start breeding quarter horses. I loved the horses but I just didn’t get the point. What was the point of spending over $10,000 a month to ride horses in a small circle. I began to have the same feeling about recreational trophy hunting and really quit hunting for a long time. What was the point of killing a deer if you were not going to use the meat?
What my teenage years working on the farm did teach me was the value of hard work. Clearing fences, stringing barbed wire, running the bush-hog, cleaning the horse stalls, and the other myriad of jobs on a farm taught me lessons that I still draw upon today. I’ve used bulldozers, excavators, front end loaders, tillers, planters, augers, trenchers, chainsaws, and a ton of other farm tools. But what my previous life experience taught me the most was that for me to do all the work on a farm it really needs to be functional.
Provides an invaluable education for my children
Promotes stewardship with the environment
Provides understanding about food production
Provides
Food
Income
Recreation
Enjoyment
I like this FIRE movement more than the financial independence retire early movement! More filling and fulfilling!
Flashback: Written October 10, 2015
The farm also needs to be affordable. A major pitfall I want to avoid is overextending myself financially so that I can have a fun little hobby farm. Right now in my life I have no money and nothing seems affordable. Aside, I started writing this on October 10, 2015. I lived on one acre with 6 people, 2 dogs, 5 Rhode Island Red Chickens, and a small garden/orchard. I hope that this book becomes alive as I work closer toward my dream farm.
Responsive. Myself, my family, the land, the animals, and the entire farm need to be responsive to a changing world. If my financial situation changes or if the climate changes or if the land simply will not support what I am trying to accomplish then we must change. Part of being responsive is also creating a modular farm. I want to start small, slowly add on, be able to scale back easily, and create a responsive/modular farm environment that can rapidly adjust to change.
Modular: The cool thing about organic no-till is that the basic principle is the same on 10x10 garden, 1 acre, 100 acres, or a thousand acres. Any well designed system can be scaled up or down.
Ecologically engineered. So I struggled a little bit on the E in this acronym. Should I use efficient, educational, extraordinary, ecological, engineered? The others all sound better because there is something about the word engineered. It sounds cold, calculated, and inorganic. Those three characteristics are not exactly what I am going for on The Farm. I like google’s definition of engineered- skillfully and artfully arranged for a situation to occur. That is what I’m looking for! In surgery we often talk about an artistic surgeon. He or she has an economy of motion with no wasted movements and they make everything look effortless. The fascinating thing about surgeons (I’m sure the same thing is true with farmers) is that there are no savants who know how to take out a brain tumor at 12 years old. It requires a lifetime of study, practice, planning, and skill to become a great surgeon. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule is true because it takes a lot of time in order to have a lot of success and a lot of failure to really become great. Engineering a complex, multidimensional farm environment with thousands of “moving pieces” is a 10,000 hour undertaking. Now ecologically engineered softens that inorganic feel and really gets to the soul of what I’m trying to accomplish. How do you create a rigorous, productive modern system that supports nature, is environmentally and ecologically sound, builds soil, supports the microbiome, reduces emissions, and yet provides more food per hectacre than the current petrochemical system?
That is the very reason I’m writing this book. I want to minimize my failures and maximize my success. Avoiding failure entirely is not possible and you actually learn more from 1 failure than 1,000 successes. I am going to work especially hard on the reference section of this book and compile a comprehensive online list of valuable resources.
Engineering Principles
Animals and Plants- ‘Fertigation’ and Water management
Berms, ponds, wells, and streams
Maximum Outputs for Minimum Inputs- Smarter Not Harder
Build Soil (Subsoil, Atmosphere, Water, Sun, Nutrients (compost), Tools)
Create Soil Sample Map
Management Intensive Grazing (MIG)
Silviculture/Permaculture
Dwelling Efficiency and multiuse spaces
No-till- this a polarizing word but it does highlight the importance of minimizing soil disturbance.
Both resiliency and sustainability are the byproduct of the previous 5 principles being upheld. A well engineered, functional, affordable, modular farm that is responsive to a variety of outside pressures has the ability to be resilient in the face of short term change and can have long term sustainability. The goal of any person is to live a life that matters and create a lasting influence. That is why it is sad to see a beautiful property sold and subdivided by the children of a dead farmer. Short term financial gain at the expense of unnecessary urbanization and habitat destruction.
The great paradox of the last 200 years is that we are destroying our own habitat in order to create more habitations. Weird.
So how do we create a resilient and sustainable farm?
