The good news is that a new class of small-scale farmers are showing that things don’t have to continue in this vein. They are reintroducing diversity to their operations. They are raising their animals in a more natural system that allows each critter to express its unique personality and character while eliminating or minimizing the use of synthetic hormones, antibiotics, and other technological quick fixes. They’re learning that different methods of operating can reduce their costs while improving the environment. And they are learning to recapture some of the lost share of the consumer’s dollar.
Figure 1.2. Change in farm numbers (1910–1992). Although land under production has held relatively steady during this period, farm numbers have continued to drop.
(Data from USDA/Economic Research Service reports.)
Though some of these small-scale farmers come from the traditional family-farm sector, many are new to agriculture. They bring with them a willingness to try new things and a commitment to farm in harmony with nature.
Small scale is hard to define. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce define it as an operation with more than $1,000 of gross receipts per year from farming and farm-related industries; they define large scale as any farm with more than $100,000 of gross receipts. Then there are those who would define small scale based on some number of acres — 100, 500, or 5,000 (41, 203, 2,024 ha, respectively). I don’t know where the magic cutoff should be placed. Ten thousand acres of prime corn ground in Iowa probably is large, but 10,000 acres (4,050 ha) of rangeland in the West isn’t necessarily big.
Of the farmers and ranchers I highlight throughout this book, several would meet the USDA’s $100,000 definition. Several control land in excess of 5,000 acres (2,024 ha). At the other end of the spectrum are the folks who use less than 30 acres (12.2 ha), or those whose farming operations gross far less than $10,000 per year. (And sometimes you wouldn’t be able to guess which was which.)
I take a slightly different view: Small scale may be any operation, whether 1 acre (0.4 ha) on the edge of town that only supplies the family with a regular portion of its own food, or thousands of acres in a rural area that is owned and operated as a commercial operation that provides a family’s main livelihood. In my mind, the key criteria that separate the small-scale farm from the large one are based on the labor used in the operation, and on attitude. Small-scale farms and ranches are those where the family is involved equally in management and operation. Although they may have some hired help (or interns), they don’t sit in an air-conditioned office in clean chinos and a sports shirt directing the efforts of dispensable employees. If they do have employees, those employees are part of their team, included in planning and decision making, and the family’s labor is applied to day-to-day operations.
Success is also hard to define. The simplistic view of success currently permeating American thought is based almost exclusively on money, or perhaps more specifically on consumptive power. In my eyes, to be deemed successful, an agricultural endeavor must be not only financially profitable but also ecologically and socially profitable. Making money while destroying the land (which is the basis of all wealth) isn’t successful, and making money while destroying the local community isn’t successful either.
The farmers I have highlighted here have certain things in common. Their philosophies of profit are a little different from those of the people who think profit is simply a number reported on the bottom line of an accounting form. Although they are all profit motivated, they aim for a profit that is both financial and spiritual. The profit equation for these folks balances money with quality of life, with humane treatment of their animals, with support for their communities, and with fostering a healthy environment.
There are lots of reasons for small-scale farmers to include livestock in their operations:
You can become an active participant in the food chain, converting solar energy to grass, and grass to high-quality protein.
The meat that comes from your own animals is usually far superior to anything you can buy at the grocery store, and at less cost. And you know how your animals were raised (no growth hormones or routine antibiotics, for instance).
Livestock provides an opportunity for your family to learn about life, both its joys and its heartaches. Raising animals teaches children to be responsible for other creatures.
Livestock can help you make profits from your land. When used for livestock, marginal land can provide a profit that it’s less likely to provide with crops.
Livestock can provide valuable nutrients for your soil. Manure is a fine fertilizer, and livestock not only provides it but can also incorporate it.
When properly managed (and this is the key), livestock is beneficial to the environment. Converting croplands, particularly highly erodible croplands, to permanent pastures improves water infiltration into the soil and water uptake by plants, thereby reducing runoff and erosion. Wetlands that are grazed via managed grazing show improvements in bank structure, increased variety of plants and animals, and more consistent water flows.
Having livestock around is fun! Watching a hen scratch for bugs, seeing a group of calves running across a field with their tails held high, or being nuzzled by a new lamb provides great entertainment and good feelings that you just don’t get watching a plant grow. Let’s face it, the refrain from “Old McDonald’s Farm” doesn’t run, “With a corn, corn here and a corn, corn there.”
Still, despite all the good things to be said about livestock for the small-scale farmer, there are some drawbacks. Livestock ties you down; your animals’ lives depend on you, so you can’t just take off for two weeks and forget about them. There is some heartbreak when raising livestock; critters get sick and sometimes they die. But most of the time, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
The main qualification for being a successful small-scale livestock farmer is having a deep love and appreciation of animals. If you don’t really like animals, look at other aspects of small-scale farming, like market gardening. Do not go into livestock raising just because you think it will make your operation profitable: If you don’t honestly care for your animals, almost to the point of obsessiveness, they won’t make your operation profitable. But if you think you have the heart for it, read on!
FARMER PROFILE
Todd Lein and Annie Klawiter
Neither Todd nor Annie grew up on farms. Todd was raised in a small town in rural Minnesota, but he did have some experience with livestock: His dad raised occasional feeder pigs or calves in the backyard. The experience was a good one and left Todd with a desire to work with livestock. Annie grew up in Sioux Falls, a small midwestern city.
In 1994, Todd and Annie began farming on 37 acres of land they purchased, and 30 more they rented, near Northfield, Minnesota. Over the ensuing years, their operation has solidified into a profitable small-scale farm.
“Starting out was scary, but we started small and grew the operation as our experience grew,” Todd explained. “We avoid debt, and though we have some outside income, we expect the farm to pay its own way!”
Todd and Annie’s operation is centered on pastured poultry, but they also background replacement dairy heifers for a local dairy farmer, sell hay, and work in a cooperative agreement with three market gardeners who operate a Consumer Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription garden on their farm. In each case, they have looked for unique approaches that minimize their expenses and the need for high dollar capital, while returning some profit.
“Backgrounding” of livestock refers to the practice of taking care of someone else’s animals for a specific period of time. The practice is most often associated with the dairy industry, as many dairy farmers are happy to pay someone to take care of their young heifers for them. For Todd and Annie, the backgrounding operation works well, because they don’t have to purchase the heifers. The dairy farmer they work with brings the heifers over in spring and picks them up in late summer or fal
l, depending on how long the grass lasts. He pays Todd and Annie rent, based on how many head they feed per month. Todd and Annie feed the heifers on rotated pastures and keep water and trace minerals available.
Excess hay is sold to another area farmer, who pays for the hay in the field. “The neighbor purchases the hay, but he has to cut it, bale it, and get it out of the field. We could possibly make a little more off the crop if we sold bales, but when you figure the expenses of owning and operating the equipment, and the labor involved in putting up hay, it wouldn’t be worth it for us.” By selling the hay as grass in the field, they don’t have to worry about the weather; if the hay gets rained on, it’s the neighbor’s problem.
The concept of a CSA garden was interesting to Todd and Annie because they saw it as a way to bring local customers to their farm, but they were more interested in animal agriculture than gardening. By teaming up with three avid gardeners who didn’t have enough land of their own to do market gardening, Todd and Annie were able to meet their own goals while helping the other three growers meet theirs. “The CSA is kind of a joint venture. The gardeners pay us rent, and it ultimately provides us with a customer base for our poultry.”
Fifty area families purchase membership in the CSA at the beginning of each year. Their membership entitles them to shares of all the produce from the gardens, and they come out regularly to pick up their shares. The CSA also hosts some social events at the farm each year. “The best thing about ‘hosting’ the CSA is that it has created a marketing program that brings people out to our farm. When it’s time to sell our chickens, we have a built-in customer base.”
Todd works as an organizer for a nonprofit organization and Annie teaches at a charter school, but the farm provides succor and sustenance to both their bodies and their spirits. “The benefits of running our farm come from the things we can’t go to town and buy. It fulfills our need to not only live in the country but also work the land, and grow in our understanding of what it means to be connected to a piece of land.”
CHAPTER 2
Livestock & the Environment
When I arrived, I found a dozen teenagers, some in dreadlocks and nose rings, others wearing skateboard shorts and backwards hats. All were obviously as bored with sitting through a program on environmentally benign ranching as they would have been listening to a medley of Lawrence Welk’s greatest hits. . . .
The first few images [slides] were what everyone expected: landscapes stripped bare of everything that wasn’t too tough or too prickly to eat. Everyone sat there, arms crossed. They’d seen it before. Then came a photograph that created enough of a stir that even those who were sleeping woke up. It showed a riparian area with grasses and rushes and saplings of cottonwood and willow bordering a clear stream that was almost lost among the greenery. The vegetation was so lush it looked unreal, but it was real all right.
“Where’s that?” several of the students exclaimed in honest surprise.
“Phil Knight’s Date Creek Ranch, not very far south of here,” I answered. “There were 500 cows in this very place two months before I took this picture. It’s grazed five months out of every year.”
— Dan Dagget, writing about a presentation he made to a high school class, from Beyond the Rangeland Conflict
FOR YEARS, MANY FOLKS within the environmental movement have blamed a wide variety of environmental woes on domestic animals and the farmers and ranchers who raise them. At best, this oversimplifies matters: It’s a method of shrugging off the blame from our society’s shoulders, where it truly must rest. In fact, it’s not the animals that have caused the problems but how we have raised them; and how we have raised them is largely driven by our economy, our history and culture, our government’s cheap-food policies, and our oligarchic (large corporate) food system. Farmers and ranchers can raise animals in a way that is actually beneficial to the environment, and many do!
In the winter of 1997–1998, Ken and I traveled around the country on vacation. We had more than 15 years of farming under our belts. During our travels, we studied the agricultural landscape with eyes that had learned to appreciate the nuances of the land, and generally what we saw on land with no livestock was as scary as what we saw where there was livestock. Human management of our natural resources was the problem — not domestic animals.
The issue of livestock and its negative impact on the environment, particularly its impact on public lands, is hardly a new one. In the early years of the twentieth century, as the national forest system was being developed, noted naturalist John Muir fought to keep livestock out of the new forests. He called cattle “Hooved Locusts.” The main method available to farmers and ranchers who don’t want hooved locusts is managed grazing. (You may also hear any of the following terms used for the concept, more or less synonymously: intensive grazing, rotational grazing, planned grazing, and management-intensive grazing.)
Managing for the Whole
Managed grazing, as I apply the term, is really just part of a broader approach to agriculture. This approach calls for looking at your farm as a whole, and attempting to manage for that whole. The whole you manage for is based on your family’s quality-of-life goals, production goals, and goals about how you want your piece of land to “look” in the future — in other words, your environmental goals. Each farm family must define the goals for its own operation and land. When the family works toward these well-defined goals, its members are able to become more than just stewards of the land; they are able to become healers.
The idea of managing for the whole is often referred to as “whole-farm planning,” of which there are many different models. Ken and I have been most influenced by the holistic management model developed by Allan Savory of the Center for Holistic Management in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We think it best meets the needs of livestock farmers. Chapter 3 reviews the holistic management model.
In some areas of the country, groups of farmers and ranchers are getting together with bureaucrats, environmentalists, and other interested citizens to manage whole regions with this approach. These groups often form around a given watershed or other geological feature where group efforts make sense.
Working with Nature
When managing for the whole, a farmer or rancher begins to look at how he or she can work with natural processes, instead of trying to control them. Nature is usually fairly effective in establishing balance, if given the chance. Patience is truly a virtue in these endeavors.
The pigeons that inhabited the haymow in our Minnesota barn are a good example of natural balancing. When we purchased the farm, there was a small flock of pigeons living there. Shortly after we moved in, one of our neighbors came over and told Ken he should shoot those pigeons: “Pigeons are dirty, they carry every disease known to mankind, and your animals will all get sick and die if you let them live in your barn,” Joe said. This was common wisdom in our area. We chose to ignore this particular wisdom; for one thing, we enjoyed listening to the gentle coos of our resident flock.
After about four years, our flock had grown from six or seven birds to more than fifty. We began talking about shooting some of them to thin the population; after all, when a population becomes too large, disease can become a problem. Despite our talk, we didn’t get around to shooting any; it was spring calving and lambing time, and we were busy milking cows. Then, around the beginning of July, we noticed that the pigeon flock seemed to be shrinking: First it was down to thirty birds, then twenty, then fifteen. It was a real puzzle; we didn’t see signs of dead birds, so we didn’t think that they were dying of a disease. Finally, on a very cloudy and overcast afternoon, Ken noticed a great horned owl sitting in the middle of the barnyard. It looked as though he was clutching something in his talons. When he started to fly away, we saw he had a pigeon (Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1. When natural processes, such as the food chain, are working well, nature keeps populations in balance. Predators like the great horned owl are critical to balance in nature. An owl in ou
r Minnesota farm kept pigeon numbers at a healthy level.
The pigeon flock had grown to the point of being very easy prey. The owl stayed in our woodlot for a couple of months that summer, picking away at the pigeons. By fall, there were about eight pigeons left to begin rebuilding the resident flock. Balance was restored.
Ecosystem Processes
To begin managing for your family’s environmental goal, an understanding of nature’s regularly occurring processes is helpful. Our natural world is a complex system, but it can be viewed in terms of community dynamics (living organisms), the energy cycle, the water cycle, and the mineral cycle. These four processes are the foundation upon which the ecosystem functions. They are all dynamic and interdependent, and in the healthiest environment each one is operating at its maximum efficiency.
Community dynamics can be thought of as the way living communities of organisms move toward complexity in a healthy environment. (As I discuss these processes, think of all living organisms: plants, animals, insects, bacteria, fungi, and viruses.) Depending on the type of environment you live in, the dynamics might lead to a hardwood forest or a grassland, but given favorable circumstances, they will always lead to a climax state that is both complex and stable. (Depending on your goals, you’ll probably maintain your farm at some level below a climax state.)
An example is what takes place in an abandoned farm field. First annual grasses and “weeds” invade the field. During this early period, the most troublesome weeds in the area (thistles, mustard, bindweed) take over the fields. Some birds will begin coming to feed on insects, which also proliferate at first. Small animals start moving in. In the ensuing years, perennial grasses and scrub plants move in. More birds and animals, including ground-nesting birds, come to the area. Trees begin to grow, and soon shade out the grasses. Larger animals begin inhabiting the area. From farm field to forest takes only 20 years in some areas of the United States.
Small-Scale Livestock Farming Page 2
