With a 25 year old roof on our house, and a record-strength El Nino winter on the way, my wife and I decided it was time for a new one. The roofing crews showed up this week. First, one crew tore off the old roof and hauled it away. Today, a second crew arrived with a specialized truck to unload all the materials onto the roof. Tomorrow, a third crew will come to install the tar paper and shingles. Last, a fourth crew will hang the new gutters. It’s impressive to watch how quickly and efficiently the whole process works: we’ll have a new roof in just a few days.
Of course this type of specialization is not limited to roofing, but is how all construction now happens. And it’s not just construction: our entire economy is built on breaking down big jobs into specialized tasks that can done with as little wasted time and energy as possible. For the most part, agriculture is no different. All around our farm right now, commodity crops are being harvested at an almost-impossible to imagine pace and scale. Yesterday I passed an almond orchard where 6 harvesting machines were running simultaneously. In processing tomato fields, the harvesters drive so fast that the semi-trucks they are filling with fruit can barely keep up. Each truck carrying 80 tons of tomatoes is filled in less than 5 minutes.
The term “Small Farm” is not really about size anymore. We have farmer neighbors who have less land than we do at Terra Firma, but it is planted to commodity crops grown under contract with large, highly efficient growers. They harvest the crop mechanically and deliver it to large processors. All the machinery involved must be used on hundreds if not thousands of acres and thousands of tons of crop to amortize the capital expense.
Our current food system has created an enormous chasm between farmers and the people who eat. Most farmers are growing crops, not food. Meanwhile, consumers shop with their eyes and pay as little as possible. Most Americans have no idea what a good peach or strawberry tastes like. But no matter how expensive food gets in the store or restaurant, farmers receive only a few pennies of every dollar paid for it. They certainly aren’t paid extra if it tastes better.
The real “Small Farms” are left farming the crops that have not yet been highly mechanized, mostly fresh fruit and vegetables that are generally hand-harvested. That’s why I tell people that Terra Firma is a very large Small Farm. While we farm over 200 acres in total, we grow dozens of different crops on a small scale: multiple successions of each over the course of a year. The largest plantings of any crop on our farm are less ten acres, and most are around one acre.
While what we do overall is clearly inefficient compared to our farming neighbors, or the roofing crew working on my house right now, we do try to find ways to manage that. For example, because we plant multiple crops every week, we can use relatively large and fast equipment to prepare our fields. And we use the same containers — reusable plastic bins that hold roughly 500 lbs. — to harvest and store crops as varied as potatoes, carrots, watermelons, broccoli, cabbage, winter squash, onions, garlic and oranges. Our irrigation systems, while complicated, are also fairly efficient since we are watering a fairly large amount of acreage every day.
Importantly, though, we don’t take shortcuts that truly large farms take. We don’t sacrifice quality for yield, ever. We choose crop varieties based on flavor, not just on how much they produce or how well they hold up during shipping. But unlike most agricultural producers, we are both held accountable AND rewarded for this — by our customers. And we feel a deep obligation to you that most other farmers will never understand. I hope this shows in the fruits and vegetables we deliver to you each week.
Small and sustainable farmers lost our unofficial poet laureate this week with the death of writer and activist Wendell Berry. Over his long career, he wrote far more eloquently than I about the contrasts between small farms and industrial agriculture in poems, novels and non-fiction. His work is so far out of synch with modern realities that it could almost be considered anachronistic, except that the truths he spoke even 50 years remain as true as ever. If you find yourself needing a mental refuge from your 21st century life, try reading one of his poems or short essays.
Thanks,
Pablito