Farming the land intensively and prosperously
Extensive or Intensive?
Early on in my farming career, I was able to spend some time with a very successful fruit farmer on the Mission Peninsula, up by Traverse City Michigan. That is about an hour north of where my farm is located. I was relating to him one of my experiences with the USDA. Each year they send a survey to farmers to try to get a feel for what their production was, and on how many acres of land. I had been sending my survey in, but I received a phone call. The woman on the other end of the line wanted to set up a time she could come out and do the survey with me. Well I thought, ok that is fine. She came to the farm and we began filling out the different questions on the survey. She was blown away. You see I was making $40,000 on 1/8th of an acre. Back at the USDA office I am sure they thought there must have been some kind of error on my part filling it out. No. No error. I was just farming in a way that they had never encountered before. What was even more astonishing was the fact I had no debt and my expenses were very minimal. After I showed her everything I was doing and she could see it for herself, she looked at me and said “If I was going to farm, this is the way I would do it!” Why was she so excited about what I was doing? Because all most all the farmers she encounters are deeply in debt, have massive amounts of expenses, and barely making any money. Most have to have another job to support the farm.
After I related this story to the older farmer, he shared something with me that has always stuck with me. I have seen how true it is time and time again. He said, “you can make money at farming, but only two ways. You either have to be very intensive, like you are, or you have to be extremely extensive and farm vast areas of land. Anyone that is trying to make it in the middle is often being crushed by the system.”
The system has been purposely rigged to favor the huge corporate farms. Think in terms of Bill Gates owning more farm land than anyone else. The mantra years ago from the USDA was “Get big or get out!” They wanted people off the farms and in the cities. You can’t so easily control people that are debt free and more self sufficient. There were too many mid sized family farms. The system did everything it could to crush them.
Something you need to realize about farming mono crops on large acreage though. You are creating a situation that is very unusual in living systems. It is very purposeful though. Something that is unhealthy is more profitable. These big Pharma companies have created an agricultural landscape, encouraged by the universities they fund, that is dependent on their inputs. Corn fields of thousands of acres are very dependent on pesticides. They want it this way. Corn grown in my intensive garden doesn’t need any pesticidal crutch. The system cannot make any money off of me.
The massive amount of almond trees in California that flower briefly and bee keepers from all over bring their bees in for pollination. Why do the bees have to be shipped in, sometimes from other places in the world? Because the rest of the year no bees can be sustained by the mono crop. There is no diversity there to help sustain them. If those same trees were planted in thousands of diverse gardens, that people were tending, the pollinators would be there and healthy.
Why is intensive agriculture, like what I am doing, so profitable though? Well it is a lot of manual labor. I don’t use a lot of fossil fuel to produce food. Most of the fuel I use is to run a generator, that runs a water pump, so I can water my plants. Most everything else is hand tools. I have to be highly skilled to do my job well. But also willing to work really hard at times. I save a lot of my own seeds, so even there I hardly spend any money. I have avoided debt, like the plague.
Some of you are still saying though, $40,000 on 1/8th of an acer? When you farm very intensively, you are able to attend to details very closely. It is very hard to be detailed oriented from the seat of a tractor. I am dealing with individual plants. Most farmers never really ever focus on an individual plant, in their vast thousands of acres. Because I am able to focus so intently on quality, I am able to get top dollar for what I produce. At that time pretty much all our produce was going to one Chef in Traverse City. He is very talented and has become very well known. He has specialized in buying from local farms. In fact he was one of the first Chefs in America to focus on local farm to table. He has always paid his local produces really well. He doesn’t care if I grow organically or not. What he wants is flavor. It just so happens that the secret to incredible flavor is mineral dense food, produced on highly biological soil. I will never forget getting a call from him one time and hearing him say “you are out of control!” I was thinking, what? I had just delivered some beets to him and he had cooked up the first batch. He had never tasted anything like it before. The quality of the beets were so good, he went through 8000 pounds in one season. This is one restaurant. The waiters would tell me that the plates would come back like they had been licked clean. Most people are not use to getting food that is mineral dense. It can be near addictive, in a culture where most food is being produced on soil that is mineral depleted. Back in 1940 people were coming before congress warning about how poor the soils in American had become. How many yeas ago was that?!
As I have been teaching my Soilsmith Learning Series, I am not trying to alienate larger producers. A teacher can only rightfully teach what they truly know and have experienced. I have no personal experience with big farming practices. I would point people to Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown if you want to learn about larger models. My mentors have been Eliot Coleman and John Jeavons. Both men that specialize in producing large quantities of food from small growing areas.
I am sure some of you are thinking that the food I am growing is probably expensive. Out of the price range of most people. This has always fascinated me to think about. When I was a finish carpenter, people wouldn’t hesitate to pay me $30-$40 an hour to do high quality trim work. But the same person would choke if they had to pay a farmer the same wage. I did make really good money to produce the high quality food. I had to be very diligent and skilled to do it. You would think that the person that is growing the food that nurtures our bodies would be even more important to pay well. That is not the way people think.
The reality is if you go back several hundred years ago, the only people that would have bought all their food from someone else were very wealthy people. Most people were producing food themselves. How did we go from most everyone producing food to such a small segment of the population doing it now, and barely making any money at it? The industrial revolution, fueled by fossil fuels. I am not anti fossil fuels. But you do need to understand something about them.
When an oil company pulls a barrel of oil out of the ground, they can do it for around $5. That number may have increased some, but just for the sake of argument let’s say the $5 is true. When they refine that 55 gallons of oil into gasoline, they get about 34 gallons of fuel. Now put that 34 gallons of gasoline in the average car. How far can it go? Let’s say around 600 miles. Now this is what is so amazing. The calories of energy in that 34 gallons of gasoline, is the equivalent of twelve strong Amish men working for you 40 hour a week all year. When I first heard that I though, no way! But think about it. How long would it take twelve Amish men to push your car 600 miles? Yup! So the oil company can basically hire twelve men for next to nothing. That is what has allowed almost nobody to grow their own food, yet get the food quite cheap. The problem is the food is substandard. We were more worried about getting cheap food than we were better quality food. People are more worried about fancy trim in their homes than the nutritional quality of their food to support their health.
I am of the belief that more people should be on the land growing high quality food. I personally question just how good the industrial revolution has been for agriculture and this nations soils. I hear all the time we have to have GMO’s and big Ag to feed everyone. Yes if you expect that one percent of the population is going to be the only ones growing food. God designed man to be regenerative. That means he is capable of producing more than he needs. This allows him to be a giver. If 90% of the people were once again involved in producing food, there would be an abundance of food. That is why they have worked so hard to get people off the land. They know if they can control the corporate farms, own the patented seeds, and reduce the number of people that know how to grow food to a fraction of the population, they have you right where they want you. Yes and most everyone has gladly followed along. Farming is just too hard of work for the average person.
So as I continue to go through this Soilsmith Learning Series, just realize I am sharing with you the very refined quality aspects of intensive agriculture. Many of the things I share will not be feasible for someone that is use to doing most everything from the seat of a tractor. I am not seeking to put down the farmer that is growing on vast acres of land. I am seeking to help that 90% to get back in the game. The best way, is to teach them how to be productive, on a very small plot of land. This is one of my favorite quotes from Abraham Lincoln.
“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land”
This I have been doing for the last twenty years. This I feel very qualified to share with other people. God bless everyone’s evening!
From Gab:
https://gab.com/SurvivingToday/posts/113674505213549830
Early on in my farming career, I was able to spend some time with a very successful fruit farmer on the Mission Peninsula, up by Traverse City Michigan. That is about an hour north of where my farm is located. I was relating to him one of my experiences with the USDA. Each year they send a survey to farmers to try to get a feel for what their production was, and on how many acres of land. I had been sending my survey in, but I received a phone call. The woman on the other end of the line wanted to set up a time she could come out and do the survey with me. Well I thought, ok that is fine. She came to the farm and we began filling out the different questions on the survey. She was blown away. You see I was making $40,000 on 1/8th of an acre. Back at the USDA office I am sure they thought there must have been some kind of error on my part filling it out. No. No error. I was just farming in a way that they had never encountered before. What was even more astonishing was the fact I had no debt and my expenses were very minimal. After I showed her everything I was doing and she could see it for herself, she looked at me and said “If I was going to farm, this is the way I would do it!” Why was she so excited about what I was doing? Because all most all the farmers she encounters are deeply in debt, have massive amounts of expenses, and barely making any money. Most have to have another job to support the farm.
After I related this story to the older farmer, he shared something with me that has always stuck with me. I have seen how true it is time and time again. He said, “you can make money at farming, but only two ways. You either have to be very intensive, like you are, or you have to be extremely extensive and farm vast areas of land. Anyone that is trying to make it in the middle is often being crushed by the system.”
The system has been purposely rigged to favor the huge corporate farms. Think in terms of Bill Gates owning more farm land than anyone else. The mantra years ago from the USDA was “Get big or get out!” They wanted people off the farms and in the cities. You can’t so easily control people that are debt free and more self sufficient. There were too many mid sized family farms. The system did everything it could to crush them.
Something you need to realize about farming mono crops on large acreage though. You are creating a situation that is very unusual in living systems. It is very purposeful though. Something that is unhealthy is more profitable. These big Pharma companies have created an agricultural landscape, encouraged by the universities they fund, that is dependent on their inputs. Corn fields of thousands of acres are very dependent on pesticides. They want it this way. Corn grown in my intensive garden doesn’t need any pesticidal crutch. The system cannot make any money off of me.
The massive amount of almond trees in California that flower briefly and bee keepers from all over bring their bees in for pollination. Why do the bees have to be shipped in, sometimes from other places in the world? Because the rest of the year no bees can be sustained by the mono crop. There is no diversity there to help sustain them. If those same trees were planted in thousands of diverse gardens, that people were tending, the pollinators would be there and healthy.
Why is intensive agriculture, like what I am doing, so profitable though? Well it is a lot of manual labor. I don’t use a lot of fossil fuel to produce food. Most of the fuel I use is to run a generator, that runs a water pump, so I can water my plants. Most everything else is hand tools. I have to be highly skilled to do my job well. But also willing to work really hard at times. I save a lot of my own seeds, so even there I hardly spend any money. I have avoided debt, like the plague.
Some of you are still saying though, $40,000 on 1/8th of an acer? When you farm very intensively, you are able to attend to details very closely. It is very hard to be detailed oriented from the seat of a tractor. I am dealing with individual plants. Most farmers never really ever focus on an individual plant, in their vast thousands of acres. Because I am able to focus so intently on quality, I am able to get top dollar for what I produce. At that time pretty much all our produce was going to one Chef in Traverse City. He is very talented and has become very well known. He has specialized in buying from local farms. In fact he was one of the first Chefs in America to focus on local farm to table. He has always paid his local produces really well. He doesn’t care if I grow organically or not. What he wants is flavor. It just so happens that the secret to incredible flavor is mineral dense food, produced on highly biological soil. I will never forget getting a call from him one time and hearing him say “you are out of control!” I was thinking, what? I had just delivered some beets to him and he had cooked up the first batch. He had never tasted anything like it before. The quality of the beets were so good, he went through 8000 pounds in one season. This is one restaurant. The waiters would tell me that the plates would come back like they had been licked clean. Most people are not use to getting food that is mineral dense. It can be near addictive, in a culture where most food is being produced on soil that is mineral depleted. Back in 1940 people were coming before congress warning about how poor the soils in American had become. How many yeas ago was that?!
As I have been teaching my Soilsmith Learning Series, I am not trying to alienate larger producers. A teacher can only rightfully teach what they truly know and have experienced. I have no personal experience with big farming practices. I would point people to Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown if you want to learn about larger models. My mentors have been Eliot Coleman and John Jeavons. Both men that specialize in producing large quantities of food from small growing areas.
I am sure some of you are thinking that the food I am growing is probably expensive. Out of the price range of most people. This has always fascinated me to think about. When I was a finish carpenter, people wouldn’t hesitate to pay me $30-$40 an hour to do high quality trim work. But the same person would choke if they had to pay a farmer the same wage. I did make really good money to produce the high quality food. I had to be very diligent and skilled to do it. You would think that the person that is growing the food that nurtures our bodies would be even more important to pay well. That is not the way people think.
The reality is if you go back several hundred years ago, the only people that would have bought all their food from someone else were very wealthy people. Most people were producing food themselves. How did we go from most everyone producing food to such a small segment of the population doing it now, and barely making any money at it? The industrial revolution, fueled by fossil fuels. I am not anti fossil fuels. But you do need to understand something about them.
When an oil company pulls a barrel of oil out of the ground, they can do it for around $5. That number may have increased some, but just for the sake of argument let’s say the $5 is true. When they refine that 55 gallons of oil into gasoline, they get about 34 gallons of fuel. Now put that 34 gallons of gasoline in the average car. How far can it go? Let’s say around 600 miles. Now this is what is so amazing. The calories of energy in that 34 gallons of gasoline, is the equivalent of twelve strong Amish men working for you 40 hour a week all year. When I first heard that I though, no way! But think about it. How long would it take twelve Amish men to push your car 600 miles? Yup! So the oil company can basically hire twelve men for next to nothing. That is what has allowed almost nobody to grow their own food, yet get the food quite cheap. The problem is the food is substandard. We were more worried about getting cheap food than we were better quality food. People are more worried about fancy trim in their homes than the nutritional quality of their food to support their health.
I am of the belief that more people should be on the land growing high quality food. I personally question just how good the industrial revolution has been for agriculture and this nations soils. I hear all the time we have to have GMO’s and big Ag to feed everyone. Yes if you expect that one percent of the population is going to be the only ones growing food. God designed man to be regenerative. That means he is capable of producing more than he needs. This allows him to be a giver. If 90% of the people were once again involved in producing food, there would be an abundance of food. That is why they have worked so hard to get people off the land. They know if they can control the corporate farms, own the patented seeds, and reduce the number of people that know how to grow food to a fraction of the population, they have you right where they want you. Yes and most everyone has gladly followed along. Farming is just too hard of work for the average person.
So as I continue to go through this Soilsmith Learning Series, just realize I am sharing with you the very refined quality aspects of intensive agriculture. Many of the things I share will not be feasible for someone that is use to doing most everything from the seat of a tractor. I am not seeking to put down the farmer that is growing on vast acres of land. I am seeking to help that 90% to get back in the game. The best way, is to teach them how to be productive, on a very small plot of land. This is one of my favorite quotes from Abraham Lincoln.
“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land”
This I have been doing for the last twenty years. This I feel very qualified to share with other people. God bless everyone’s evening!
From Gab:
https://gab.com/SurvivingToday/posts/113674505213549830
