by Paula Manalo
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So often we choose measures of success based on what can be counted or quantified, and not on what our inner knowing tells us is important.
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Well, guess what? The recession set in. Prices crashed. And it’s rained barely three inches since June. The conservative crop yields we’d used to estimate cash flows for our business plan turned out to be bumper-crops predictions compared to what actually grew. Our equipment repair and maintenance costs were twice what we’d estimated. By all traditional measures of success, we had a terrible year. Make any money? Nope. High crop yields? Nope. Frankly, when we thought about our dream — this farm enterprise — instead of being inspired and energized, we both felt a bit worn out. And now we were hanging out in what we called the Land of the Unknown.
What really happens when you can’t make any of the payments the first year? Maybe everyone else, including Farm Credit Services (the people we mistakenly thought provided credit services to farmers), were right. Dryland farm, eh? Eyebrows lifted.
But what really is success? Yes, we actually had a crop. Only seven months after signing all the loan documentation and starting virtually from scratch, we had something to harvest. In retrospect, I knew the goal of our farming adventure was never just about dollar signs. But that doesn’t make it any easier to live in a society in which collectively our only goal is to make money in the short term. That’s the problem we have with so many of our current systems.
And therein lies the huge challenge. Our personal farming goals — where we’re striving toward diversity, resilience, ecological symbiosis, and fun, along with financial stability — don’t measure up next to the larger food (that is, commodity) production system where the only goal is to make a buck.
Think about all the repercussions that stem from our hunger for the dollar. What if, as Sandra Steingraber, the acclaimed author and ecologist, has written, instead of all the economic bailouts, we actually tried to figure out what constituted an ecological bailout? I bet our five-year rotation with a minimum of ten crops (unheard of in a dryland grain system), organic production methods, and soil-building regimen might measure up better. Darn the system whose only measure is successful economics.
So we’ll have a chat with our beginning-farmer loan officer. We’ll grin and bear the conversation about how we didn’t measure up based on traditional gauges of financial success. Maybe we’ll get a loan deferment. Maybe we’ll ask for more support from our already giving-tree family. They understand that the numbers aren’t always what are important.
So often we choose measures of success based on what can be counted or quantified, and not on what our inner knowing tells us is important. I know deep down that we’ll be able to make it work one more year. We both have off-farm salaries and health insurance. Most people would be satisfied with that life alone.
We signed up as beginning farmers right before both of us turned forty. We didn’t want to wait this long to start. We tried multiple beginning-farmer/retiring-farmer match programs. The agreements were insular at best: “Work forever without management input and maybe we’ll sell some of the farm business to you.”
Instead, we crafted a plan to start on our own. We turned our retirement — twenty years of savings and good credit — into more than a million dollars of debt. We bought twelve hundred and eighty acres of wide-open land under the big sky of the Northern Plains. (Never mind that the closest land that could produce a cash flow was 480 miles round-trip from the “paying” jobs.) We procured from all ends of the earth a fleet of aged iron to which we’ve assigned names and personalities.
All this, to get to today, pulling flax straw one gloved handful at a time, out of Ernie. I say to Doug: “Maybe next year we need to find a way to collect this stuff. It’d be great cob-building material for the farm cabin.” He laughs and says my brain is hilarious — it’s always thinking.
I smile and say: “This is only season number one.” And then I think about all we invested to get to today — our time, our financial well-being, basically our whole selves — for the opportunity to grow healthy food and model some new ideas about true working-lands stewardship.
In return we got to spend a lot of time outside, watching the raptors hunt mice after our tillage. We both lost weight. We found a great vet after the two young terriers each took an end of a porcupine in the middle of barley harvest. We saw full fields of peas and flax in bloom. We absorbed stories from our eighty-some-year-old neighbor about his father planting flax. We learned you must chain down the disk drill when using the transport. We took one step on a long journey of building, not depleting, our soil. We discovered the collective support of lots of others in the world who share a vision of agriculture as being part of and not separate from a fully functioning ecological system. And we learned that we have a lot more to learn.
In Praise of Off-Farm Employment
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BY CASEY O’LEARY
The owner of Earthly Delights Farm, a human- and bicycle-powered urban farm in Boise, Casey O’Leary also runs Earthly Delights Sustainable Landscaping, which focuses on native, drought-tolerant, and edible landscapes. She is writing an erotic novel set on a farm in Oregon. Yee-haw!
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I didn’t grow up farming. I found it through a long snake of a city road that began when I was a latchkey kid learning life lessons from Zach Morris and Jessi Spano on Saved by the Bell and brawling with my brother over the last bowl of Fruity Pebbles. That road wound me through suicidal depression, dropping out of college, drug-laced hippie festivals, Green Party activism, radical feminism, and finally, thank God, to Wendell Berry. At the height of my man-hater phase, I met Marty, who, despite his unfortunate genitalia, abhorred the establishment as much as I did, and together we birthed our farm as a big, giant F-You to The Man. And so we embarked on, in Marty’s words, “the greatest, grandest adventure of our lives.”
Throughout the last six seasons, my life has grown richer, my spirit more rooted, and my mind more creatively engaged than I ever thought possible. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many other people who, by equally circuitous roads, found themselves drawn to the demanding and rewarding profession of sustainable small-acreage farming and ranching. I have a friend who left a high-paying fashion design job in L.A. to farm, another friend whose youthful train-hopping days are now memorialized in tattoos down her arms as she tends her diversified cut-flower farm. Marty’s path took him through a Mormon upbringing, a stint in the Navy, a job teaching English in Korea, and a short real-estate career in Phoenix.
Although two such volatile souls as he and I are could make a go of farming together for just two seasons, we’ve both continued to run successful farms separately ever since. My new farming partner, Lori, left her job as a second-grade teacher (her second career) to farm.
Regardless of the individual paths we’ve all taken to get where we are, the thing we have in common is that we run our farms while simultaneously holding down other jobs to make ends meet.
If you had asked me several years ago, I would have been ashamed that I had another job besides my farm. I would have told you I wasn’t a “real” farmer, cringing at the words hobby farmer and, worse, gentleman farmer. I marveled at articles I read in magazines about young farmers making a good living, supporting families even, from their small organic farms. What was I doing wrong? A survey of even our cherished mentor farmers and ranchers in and around Boise, Idaho, confirmed that I was not alone. Not a single one was making his or her sole income off the farm. All had other jobs or partners who earned off-farm income. Additional insight came when I began to notice themes in the locations of these miracle farms I was reading about: East Coast, southern Oregon, northern California — areas either heavily populated with millions of potential customers nearby or in the most progressive pockets in the nation. Places that leftie Boiseans jokingly refer to as Mecca.
The very real truth began to sink in: Our city, like countless other communities ac
ross America, demanded that we small farmers play by a different set of rules. After all, we were already proudly acknowledging that every plot of land is unique, each has its own challenges and abundance. Why should our farm models be any different?
The most obvious challenge I identified in our city, which may parallel your city, is that there’s not enough demand for local food to support even the tiny number of people who’d like to make a living growing it. Boise can feel like a sprawling, box store–lined pit-stop along a good-ol’-boy freeway of right-to-work Wal-Mart worshippers. Or maybe, in kinder words, we’re slow to catch on. Buying local food isn’t hip here yet. It isn’t even on most folks’ radar, so we small farmers compete for this tiny, shiny, enlightened segment of our population — people who are largely ostracized by the rest of the city — simultaneously trying to educate the public in the hopes of creating a bigger market. And we do this while farming and holding down other part-time or full-time jobs to keep our farms alive.
More subtly, land in the city is disproportionately priced. You can’t pay a rent or make a mortgage payment on a piece of land with the money you can make selling the food you grew on it, which means that any land used to grow food will require additional income to pay for it. So — and this is a huge so — whether or not a person is farming on land she already owns is a big factor in how her farm will look. Young farmers with secure land and capital will choose farm models different from those without. In a culture in which honesty about resources is in short supply, this honest difference is something rarely discussed in glossy-magazine articles about sexy young farmers, and can easily send a land-insecure farmer into comparative self-doubt.
In the interest of full disclosure, I took a long, hard look at the model I had built for myself that would enable me to farm while affording to live in my hometown, near my family. I farm small urban plots near my one-third-acre homestead, part time, transporting myself and my produce by bicycle. Lori and I train six apprentices a year on how to run a part-time urban CSA farm. We offer on-farm workshops and tours, speak to public schools and community groups about food and small-scale sustainable agriculture. We visit other, more progressive places and attempt to bring the wisdom of their models back to our slow-to-catch-up corner of the earth.
The rest of the time, I run a sustainable landscaping business where I have the opportunity to educate people about organic gardening, permaculture techniques, and responsible land use, right in their own backyards. The more I examined it, the more grateful for my other part-time job I became.
In two days a week of landscaping, I earn enough income to fill in the gaps in my farm’s economic self-sufficiency. Over the years, these two seemingly separate businesses have melded more and more to create a unified whole that is not unlike the many disparate but interconnected elements on my farm: vegetables, fruits, herbs, chickens, bees, flowers, seeds. This partnership has proved useful for several other reasons as well.
Crossover clientele. My landscaping business reaches potential CSA subscribers and the CSA often sparks people’s interest in better utilizing their own yards. The fact that I do each of these things gives me credibility in both — that is, landscaping clients seek me out because I’m a farmer and vice versa. Marty achieves this through part-time work at restaurants and doing flower delivery, opening him up to additional markets for his produce and flowers, in addition to doing some residential home gardening. My friend who left the fashion industry to farm does it by making farm bags from reclaimed fabrics and selling them to farms and health food stores whose managers love knowing that they’re supporting a farmer while getting a professional-quality product their customers love. We all use our unique skills on and off our farms to weave our livelihoods.
Stability through diversification. Greater diversity in income streams provides greater resilience during tough times.
More opportunities for education. Although our farm trains just six apprentices a year, I’m reaching dozens more through my landscaping business. And more than anything, it’s education we need in order to create more demand for local food in our city.
Long-term sustainability. I live an abundant but thrifty life, as do all small farmers. With the substantial additional income from my off-farm employment, I’m able to save money for accidents, retirement, and possibly a piece of farmland of my own.
I used to believe I wasn’t a “real” farmer because I didn’t survive on my farm income alone. But looking at it now, beginning my seventh season, I realize that the fact that my farm has been able to make it through the past six while so many others have sprouted and died around me — precisely because I haven’t relied on it for my sole income — makes me feel proud. I didn’t quit farming because I couldn’t make a full-time living at it. Instead, I embraced the part-time nature of it, then watched my farm income go from around four dollars an hour to about nine dollars an hour by actually walking away from the farm at the end of the day, instead of pouring every ounce of my heart, soul, and energy into it. My relationships with my lover, friends, and family have improved because of my ability to keep the farm in a part-time box. I work an average of twenty-five hours a week on my farm — much more in spring, much less in winter — which is a new guilt-ridden challenge to admit. Here goes: “Yes, I don’t work at it every waking hour of every day and I’m still a ‘real’ farmer.”
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My relationships with my lover, friends, and family have improved because of my ability to keep my farm in a part-time box.
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I wiggled around to make room for everything I love, including people and activities away from my farm, and my business has become more interconnected because of it. My farm has touched the lives of hundreds of people in the community over the years, many of whom grew up just like me and who have found local food through outreach that I or my fellow farmers have done. Now that I’ve assumed the role of “successful farmer” in my community, I make a point of sharing this personal brainstorm and having this conversation with anyone I know who’s trying to make it here in Idaho.
Josh Volk, consultant to small farmers, contributing writer to Growing for Market, and owner of Slow Hand Farm, inspired me last year when I met him at a Farmer-to-Farmer conference. He actually bragged about being able to run his farm on two days a week, touting the viability of the model for a wide variety of people. I agree with him that this part-farmer, part-X model is a crucial one for the future of sustainable agriculture, especially in urban areas. It can provide the wholesome satisfaction and greater reverence and responsibility that come from an agrarian lifestyle, still leaving room for the economic realities individuals may face. The last thing we in the cult of organic agriculture want to do is to discourage more people from becoming farmers, from learning the intricacies and crucial skills of this vital profession, simply because their desire or situation doesn’t allow them to make a full-time living from their farms.
So what’s a “real” farmer? I offer this definition: someone who’s scrappy, who can piece together a satisfying livelihood while lovingly tending a plot of land; someone who advocates for a sustainable, food-based economy and who actively works to create such a thing within the greater context of her own unique circumstances and place on earth; someone who can wiggle. Someone who loves to wiggle.
Fear of Debt: Should I Finance My Dream?
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BY COURTNEY LOWERY COWGILL
A writer, editor, and farmer based in central Montana, Courtney Lowery Cowgill is the cofounder of the online magazine New West and a columnist for the journal The Daily Yonder. She and her husband run Prairie Heritage Farm, where they raise vegetables, pastured turkeys, ancient and heritage grains, and sometimes a little ruckus.
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As a farmer, most of my days are filled with the tangible: the green shoots of seedlings, the softness of a tomato ready to be harvested, the cackle of a flock of turkeys roosting where they shouldn’t.
But farming is as much about t
he intangible — things like cash flow and balance sheets. It’s about your dreams, and when to take on debt to finance them. So, when my husband and I were first planning our farm, we were sure to make the cash flow just as much a priority as the crop rotation.
We were watching the local-food movement sweep across the country, and we were inspired. We thought such an idea could work at home, too. So, two years ago, we packed up our life in Missoula, I quit my job as the editor of the online magazine New West, and we moved back home to rural Montana to farm.
We had no money and no assets to leverage. What we did have was a whole lot of people pulling for us. We asked a handful of friends and family for a loan. We said we would pay them back in three years with 3 percent interest. It was more than they could earn in, say, a CD, and we would be paying less for the loan than we would if we’d gone to a bank. Plus, we would have a group of investors to advise us, support us, and cheer us on.
We started with a community-supported agriculture model, which means we have sixty people “subscribe” to our harvest: They pay us in the spring for a weekly share of the bounty. That works well, because it gives us start-up capital each spring for seed, poults, irrigation equipment, and the like.
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I grew up on a wheat-and-barley farm that trudged through the farm crisis of the 1980s. For a majority of my childhood, the kitchen table was buried in bills.
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