You Can Farm, Part II

You Can Farm: the entrepreneur's guide to start and succeed in a farm enterprise, 1998, Polyface, Inc., Swoope, Virginia.





Part I of the review is available in the previous blog post.

Well, the week is up and I've finished the book, despite the frenetic schedule, so here are my thoughts on pp. 208-453. A lot of what what Salatin has to say is "common sense," the sort of things we would have learned in school if our schools had taught us the basics well. For example, Salatin emphasizes the usefulness of brainstorming for problem solving and for reaching our potential and how to prioritize the items in our lists based on critical judgment (Chapter 20). Salatin has a keen sense of what is important and he get's his points across in a memorable way, as in "Señor Salatin, you must poot eet doowwn," which is the 1st rule and most important commandment of accounting (Chapter 32). Perhaps the most important of these chapters for me was the one on creating a good "Filing System" (Chapter 33). There Salatin explains a filing system from his school debate team competition days, one that looks great to me, so good in fact that I'll adopt it this week. I cannot believe I got a PhD and something so basic as a good system for filing escaped me! On the other hand, if you've had as many "communications" and "writing" classes as I've had, you will want to skim or skip Chapter 36 on "Communication."

So far I've only touched on the sections that have to do with running a business. They could be applied with equal impact to any business and to many other aspects of life, not just to farming. And then there are the sections that apply more narrowly to farming: "Grass is the Center" (Chapter 22), "Biodiversity" (Chapter 23), "Water" (Chapter 24), and "Letting Animals Do the Work" (Chapter 25). There are others; these are just examples.

And what would a good review be without at least one significant disagreement between the reviewer and the author? My disagreement with Salatin is about his approach to "Soil Fertility" (Chapter 27; see also Chapter 30, "Reducing Costs"). A summary of my own understanding of soil fertility is available at the main Tumbledown Farm web site. Using Salatin's "debating" analogy, he has taken the affirmative side in this chapter in a debate regarding soil fertility and must offer both a case (what's wrong with the current system) and a plan (a solution). I think Salatin leaves something to be desired in both his case and his plan. First, his case largely dismisses the usefulness of knowing the NPK analysis of one's soil (pp. 326-328). While I agree with Salatin that industrial agriculture has been too narrowly focused on soil chemistry (the problem), I disagree that ignorance of the chemical soil analysis makes any sense as part of a good solution. I do agree that the usual response of a new gardener or farmer to the standard soil analysis is often wrong-headed and expensive--and usually not long lasting. It is wrong for all sorts of reasons (including expense) to pour fertilizers--even organic fertilizers--on the ground in a narrow attempt to address NPK deficiencies and create an "optimal" fertility that is really only a narrow measure of NPK. But knowing (for example) the pH of your soil can help you decide between the various approaches to soil building that are available (including the slow methods advocated by Salatin). There are better and worse ways to build soil, depending on the existing condition of the soil. Adopting a soil-building method that increases the acidity of an already too acid soil would not be wise. Nor would it be wise to plant potassium gobbling crops where you know there is insufficient potassium. At the very least, even if the gardener or farmer does not seek to make rapid improvements in soil condition, whatever steps are taken to build the soil should be informed decisions. And that is where Salatin is most harmful in opinions. He is simply wrong that living organisms can create necessary elements out of nothing. And when you add to this his implicit endorsement of the opinion that classic chemical soil tests are "a scam" (p. 327), you come close to gardening malpractice. Classic chemical soil tests are not as unreliable as Salatin implies and soil chemicals (with the exception of nitrogen) cannot be produced from thin air. Even the release of elements from the soil that are present in forms unusable to plants can take place only in geological time, not human lifetimes.

All that having been said, Salatin's main prescription--lots of carbon material (brown plant material, especially sawdust and wood chips) combined with lots of nitrogen (green plant material and animal urine and manure)--is a winning combination. In a way, he's right even about this: it is simple and relatively inexpensive to grow your soil. NOTE: for a great reminder that humans produce nitrogenous waste too, check out "Yellow is the New Green."

So, to quote Salatin again, why not START NOW! No need to wait another year to begin where I am with what I have. This year we'll add "pastured poultry" (quail) and livestock (pastured rabbits) to our backyard lineup, so that we begin to use those grass strips between the garden rows for something more profitable than a mud-less walking path. (See our garden plan for details.) So, why not check out your own copy of Salatin's "classic" and start your own backyard farm? Why not "Start Now!"?

I checked You Can Farm out of the library, so I have to return it tomorrow, but I know I'll eventually purchase a copy to add it to my library. It is too useful to leave to the vagaries of the recall system. In the meantime, I've already purchased the next book on the reading list...because I cannot get it from the library:

You Can Farm, Part I

You Can Farm: the entrepreneur's guide to start and succeed in a farm enterprise, 1998, Polyface, Inc., Swoope, Virginia.

I couldn't wait another week, by which time I will have devoured the book despite an altogether frenetic schedule, to begin writing the review. I am convinced that Joel Salatin will be my new favorite author, close on the heels of Wendell Berry and Gene Logsdon. Part I of the review will cover chapters 1-19 (pp. 1-207 of 453).

The book reminds me a lot of Harvey W. Wiley's The Lure of the Land: Farming after Fifty, but almost a full century later! But the same sense of sanity and full awareness of the difficulties, and possibilities, of starting in farming are in evidence in both. The great thing about Salatin, of course, is that you do not have worry that the differences are too great between the previous century and this one or that changes have mitigated the usefulness of the advice. The book is full of inspiration and hope...and, have I said it enough? Realism!

Having just read Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose, I was pleased to see a "practical farmer" recognize and prioritize the Vision! You've got to be able to see it and dream it to realize it. Chapter One leads with this theme, followed by the importance of Story (chapter 2) and the Right Philosophy (chapter 3). In business parlance (even the not-for-profit sort that I'm associated with), this is all about Mission and Vision work. Salatin is right to emphasize it, prioritize it, and return to it as a theme throughout the book.

Chapter 4, "Do It Now," has to be my favorite (so far)! The point is not to wait for the perfect opportunity to start farming, because the perfect opportunity never comes. There are corollaries, of course, one of which doesn't show up until Chapter 13 (watch out for the irony), "Acquiring Land." The point of Chapter 13 (and some of Chapter 14) is not to wait until you can acquire land to begin farming. Land acquisition comes after success, as a result of success, not before. As Salatin says (p. 158), "Acquiring wealth...is an offensive posture and is generally best done by renting." Land investments are made by the wealthy in order to preserve wealth, which is a defensive posture. Man does that ever make sense, especially in today's mortgage mess. Much of what Salatin recommends would have been a powerful antidote to the excesses of the past few years and would have saved anyone who followed it from the sorts of financial ruin we are seeing now. At any rate, do not wait until you can purchase the picture perfect farm to begin farming...or you'll never begin. ...and above all, do not mortgage yourself deeply to buy the farm or you'll be back in your (other) day job sooner than you think.

Round these out with chapters on Surveying Your Situation (Chapter 5, something like a SWOT list emerges), along with lists of the worst (Chapter 9) and best (Chapter 10) "centerpiece" agricultural/farming opportunities, and additional advice (Top 10 lists of all sorts), makes the first half of this book indispensable to anyone wanting to farm on any scale.

One of the most sobering aspects, for me, was the straight talk about age and farming (also a big aspect of Wiley's book, as the subtitle suggests). I'm not getting any younger. One thing Salatin is surely saying is that I'll need to find a young partner if I ever entertain the notion of quitting my day job to go into farming full time.

So, why not START NOW! No need to wait another year to begin where I am with what I have. ...but I'll at least wait until I've read the second half of the book! Why not check out your own copy and see if you can beat me to the end?

Planting an Urban Farm: The Time Is Here

There has been an unrelenting flood of news about land prices lately–moving in opposite directions, up and down at the same time–the momentum and tempo of which has been steadily increasing:

1) Foreclosures and property abandonment in cities and suburbs are at an all time high, while prices for development property/lots and single-family housing are falling (Targeted: Housing Blight ; City to develop own plan to revive neighborhoods).

2) The value of farmland is also at an all time high (largest one-year jump in 30 years, Farmland prices continue to rise; from $3500 to $4000 per acre in the past two years, Grain boom may spark rural revival; Rising prices will boost state’s economy, but consumers will have to pay more for goods).

At the same time that the city is asking “What can we do with all those abandoned homes?” (Olgen Williams, Deputy Mayor for Neighborhoods, to Star reporter Ted Evanoff), farmers are looking for land to buy or rent. As the NYTimes reports, there is big competition for new farm acreage at a time when the rest of the economy seems to be in a tail spin: “[a]t a moment when much of the country is contemplating recession, farmers are flourishing.” The 7000 foreclosures and abandonments in the city of Indianapolis alone are resulting in decreased tax base, a shortage of affordable housing (ironically), health and safety issues, crime and squatting. It seems to me that a better quality of life in city neighborhoods could be had by turning abandoned property into farmland and gardens. The good news is that agribusiness will not be able to even park, much less use, the John Deere 630T, 530 hp, with its 330 gallon fuel tank, on a lot of .1 or .3 acres. Using those city lots for urban farms and gardens would require shovels, hoes, rakes and other sustainable equipment. With “inputs” (chemical fertilizers) doubling in cost this past year, there would probably be less temptation to overuse those too.

I think the confluence of these two economic forces presents an opportunity for the niche urban micro farm.

It seems that I am not alone in thinking this is a good solution to some of our most intractable problems. Purdue Extension-Marion County announced in January that it had received a $10,000 grant from the Efroymson Fund, a CICF fund, for a pilot Urban Farm Project. In addition to problems of urban blight, The Urban Farm Project will address food insecurity on the Indianapolis near-east side. (Not far from Tumbledown Farm.) The community that this urban farm project will serve lost its only neighborhood full-service grocery store in the spring of 2007. Area food pantries have been stretched beyond their limit to respond. (As is also the case in Johnson county.) According to the extension newsletter, The Urban Farm Project “will help provide fresh produce by planting chemical-free urban gardens on two or three vacant neareastside lots. The produce generated from these lot gardens will be donated to a nearby food pantry for distribution to the community’s needy.” At the same time, the project “will also be an apprenticeship program for local high school students.” What a combination! (For more info about the Indy Urban Farm, contact Matthew Jose, Urban Garden Program Asst.)

It seems to me that this sort of model might also work in the “for-profit” world. Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, may show us the way with his banker-to-the-poor ideas about doing good by doing well in a distributed, small-scale way.

With food prices rising because of the spike in the cost of agribusiness commodities, I have been thinking about expanding Tumbledown Farm, ever so slightly. There is a little 40X136 lot (oh, about .13 acres, not enough for the big guys to notice, return on investment too small and too slow) about 9 miles from us that is listed with MIBOR for $2500. I bet it could be had for $2,000 in cash, and in three years could be producing $500 per year in filberts. A soil test, a little manual labor, and all the hazelnuts you can eat. (Or, for a little more time and labor, strawberries or raspberries, or vegetables of all sorts.)

What think you? Time for an urban micro farm? Want a share in this little agricultural and sociological experiment?

Tumbledown Farm

Too Dumb to Farm

Is Anyone Today Smart Enough to Farm?

Nobel economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) famously declaimed about an ordinary #2 lead pencil: "Look at this lead pencil. There is not a single person in the world who could make this pencil." (The PBS tv Series, "Free to Choose" [1990, Vol 1 of 5, "The Power of the Market."], available today on YouTube, but who knows for how long. Tumbledown has not quite figured out the relationship of that story to the following: Leaonard E. Read, "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read," December 1958.) Friedman could as easily have said that not a single person in the world today can farm. (Maybe that isn't true world wide, yet, but it is probably safe to say of the U.S.) The extensive, monocrop (or, to be generous, the two-crop rotation) agriculture of today, using genetically modified seed and industrial fertilizers, means that no one person could produce even a corn or soybean crop for two years running without the help of strangers thousands of miles away--and, of course, without the help of the oil-rich. The same can be said of animal raising. No single farmer keeps both boar and gilt, breeds boar to sow, cares for the pregnant pig until she delivers her litter of piglets, farrows, weans, and finishes the litter (much less butchering and preserving the hogs). And absolutely no one raises both crops and animals! That was Friedman's point, of course, that thousands of people across the world had to "cooperate"--but indirectly, with their interactions mediated by a market--to produce a pencil. Friedman celebrated the wondrous ability of the market to enable this faux cooperation (he says we might want to kill the person--of another religion, race, or ethnicity--with whom we cooperate to make a pencil, if we had to work directly with the person).

Tumbledown is not saying that the Nobel winner is wrong. (That would be dumb.) The market is indeed wondrous. But it isn't all good--nor the whole good, nor even the highest good. (See the critiques of Ray and Schaffer, Developing an Alternative to the Chicago School, Daryll E. Ray and Harwood Schaffer, UT, Ag Policy Analysis Center, Org. for Competitive Markets. Kansas City, MO, July 2003.) Markets also allow us to cooperate unwittingly in the creation of world-threatening warming, and to buy oil from the supporters of terrorists.

Just think about it: we can no longer even write--and writing is thinking--without globalization. No local community has the knowledge sufficient to produce it's own writing implements (quill and ink anyone?) much less its own food. Friedman was known as a champion of the individual's freedom to choose.

This is freedom? The dependence on a global market is truly freedom? We supposedly choose, when we are free to do so, what is in our best interest.

So, why will more than 50% of us "choose" to live in cities? According to Steven Johnson, we've gone from 3% of the population in cities (in 1880 at the dawn of the industrial age), to 50% (already, not waiting for 2007). "We are now a 'city planet,'" says Johnson, quoting Stewart Brand.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, why do we (dumb?) city slickers choose to eat fastfood?

And why has the Future Farmers of America become the FFA? (Times Article: Agricultural Mainstay Gets a New, Urban Face.) Because we are too dumb to choose farming. We prefer "agriscience," "biotechnology," and "turf grass management." Call us "farmers" and you may receive an old fashioned haymaker. Friedman was right that the economy is to blame. It is no coincidence that the "FFA" was first formed following the hand wringing of the 1920s to attract and keep farm boys on the farm by countering an inferiority complex. (Logsdon, "Our Hidden Wound," in Living at Nature's Pace, "I'm a hayseed, I'm a hayseed, and my ears are full of pigweed" or the struggle with the romantic opposite in Harvey Wiley's Lure of the Land.) Nor is it any wonder that the FFA name change followed immediately after a time of deep agricultural crisis. (The name changed in 1988; see this economic analysis of the period immediately prior: "Things got much worse when the dollar began to appreciate beginning in 1980. Exports fell in value by nearly one third by 1985, and with high interest rates, land prices could not be sustained. In the ensuing farm financial crisis, supply control interventions and farm program fiscal costs were driven to record levels." "Exchange rate effects on agricultural trade," Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, Aug 2002. by David Orden.)

Maybe no one today is smart enough to live in the country, or free enough, to farm.

But we cannot end this entry on such a sour note. Maybe some of us are beginning to choose well, to live smart--by choosing and buying locally produced food. The NY Times calls the farmers who produce this food "counterculture farmers." So be it. Tumbledown calls them the real farmers. The farmers who say we can too make this pencil. You bet we can grow our own peppers, Milton, without shipping them from South America.

We will learn the utility of making our own pencils, and choosing to grow our own food and fiber.

We city slickers will have brains enough to farm.

I just know we will, Milton. How's that for confidence?

Tumbledown Farm

Farming, a Living or a Lifestyle?

According to the profundities of our agriculture professors, these days you can either have farming as a "way of life" or as a "living"--that is, either as a "lifestyle" or as a "profitable business"--but not as both. (Purdue's Michael Boehlje, "From Tractor Driver to Chief Executive," Indianapolis Star, October 29, 2006) Obviously, things have not always been this way. At the turn of the last century, it was assumed that "to a large extent" a farmer's livelihood--food and fuel, and other necessities for living--were taken directly by the farmer from the farm and not gained derivatively through cash from farming. "The country experience" and "rural values" were a part of the "good living" a farmer made, and "the money," 10%, amounted to a return on the farmer's cash investment (5% actual cash profit, if that). Another assumption was that a "farmer" was anyone who had agriculture as the "chief means of livelihood." ("A Good Living and 10%," How to Do Things, p. 254)

As a result, one of the fundamental rural values of 19th and early 20th century farmers was self sufficiency, another was independence. Those are lost to today's "full-time enterprise farm." As Beohlje says, now farmers--as CEOs of a profitable businesses--are contract suppliers who must follow specific production methods and meet targets and deadlines. Targets? Deadlines? Operating "machinery and equipment 24 hours a day"? Sounds like nothing short of slavery to Tumbledown. All the work and none of the lifestyle? Why not punch a clock or sit in an office, if the object is merely money?

Is it really impossible to earn a full-time living and still keep the farming lifestyle? According to the good professor, the full-time farm comprises "5,000 or more acres or 10,000 or more hogs"--and is "more a business than a way of life." According to the professor, some mid-size farm families "choose" to both farm and have an off-farm job. Even so, it is "technology" that allows these farmers to manage "1,000 acres or more." Tumbledown wonders whether working two jobs really leaves time for the farming lifestyle. And when the second job is a result of the "choice" between losing the farm or adding an off-farm job to support the farming "lifestyle," Tumbledown figures the professor should have said these farmers "are forced" to both farm and work an off-farm job. Even so, these mid-sized farmers do not keep it up long, as their decreasing numbers demonstrate. That leaves the "lifestyle" farmer, whose numbers are growing. Maybe we should call these farmers "farming reenactors," weekend preservers of a "lifestyle" that no longer really exists. Artificial farmers.

Tumbledown suspects that these "lifestyle" farmers sometimes do harbor dreams of farms that "warrant the entire attention of at least one [person]" (another assumption in How to Do Things).

According to the same Star article, "65 percent, or 15 million acres," of Indiana land is dedicated to farming today. At the time of the 1900 census, the number was 21,619,623 (out of the total area of 22,982,400) acres, or 94%. (Cyclopedia of American Agriculture) According to the 2005 USDA stats, the number of farms in Indiana today is 59,000--at the 1900 census it was 221,897. Today the average farm size is 254 acres, then--if Tumbledown's calculator works--it was 97. The only statistic that seems to move in a favorable direction is the total cash value of the "agricultural products"--$5.5 billion last year, $203 million in 1900.

Have we taken the farming "lifestyle" out of farming in favor of cash? Do we really prefer dependent city living as the paradigm and independent country living as the exception?

Tumbledown somehow has the same dream as Harvey Wiley (The Lure of the Land) did:

"Theoretically, my idea of humanity would be a scattered population, all of the productive industries taken out of the cities and place in the country to which they properly belong, and the city left only as a place of exchange. Meanwhile, let us make the best of things as they are. ...intend to be real farmers, to live upon the farm and gain [...] livelihood therefrom,--and by farm I do not mean simply fields of wheat and corn, but I mean orchards and dairies and gardens and forests, in fact all the various activities by means of which Mother Earth yields her treasures of grain and fruit and flowers to her tenants."

Or as Gene Logsdon says (from his lips to God's ears), "The Future: More Farmers, Not Fewer." (Living at Nature's Pace) More real, diversified farms. Don't call what Tumbledown does a hobby; it's a good way of living. Now if he could just make a little cash at it--maybe 10%?

Tumbledown Farm

Will the Real Farmer Please Stand Up?

Tumbledown was incensed again to read Lew Middleton's comment that "Today's farmers are specialists, not generalists." (The Hoosier Farmer, Fall 2006, p. 1) When Middleton went on to claim that such specialization is "all aimed at creating the safest" and "healthiest" environment for the livestock, Tumbledown nearly let loose an expletive. Specialization is driven by corporate insatiability, by the profit motive. Specialization in livestock farming is not "friendly to the environment." It is the most likely source of the E. coli in our spinach, just ask Michael Pollan. (Op ed in today's NYT Magazine, "The Vegetable-Industrial Complex," joined a growing chorus of people who are refusing to ignore the obvious.) Pollan quotes Wendell Berry's old saw that we have taken nature's elegant solution in which "crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops" and, by becoming specialists in either crop production or animal production (but never proficient in both), we have turned nature's solution into two very real problems: "a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot."

The solution that is eventually proposed for our E. coli problem is not likely to be a real solution (that is, a radical solution, that fixes the root problem of specialization) like nature's solution, but a technological quick fix, like the "high-tech" agriculture touted in the most recent Hoosier Farmer. (The irony is, of course, that the magazine cover sported dairy cows on pasture, not beef cattle and sows in confined operations.) At any rate, Pollan is right, look for the politicos and their trough-filling K-street fat cats to start touting programs to irradiate the entire food supply. Don't look anytime soon for a return to real farms where everyone raises, "some corn, some wheat, some soybeans, a few milk cows, a few pigs, maybe some beef cows. And, of course, a big garden to help feed a growing family." (Hoosier Farmer)

Tumbledown did get a little good news this week in the story about Denise O’Brien, the organic farmer and Democratic candidate to become Iowa's secretary of agriculture. Denise is a real farmer. For Iowa's sake, and for ours, Tumbledown is praying that she wins.

Papa's Farm

As a boy of five or six years old, I lived near Papa Walker's "farm"-

-I used the outhouse, helped "slop" the pigs, pumped water from the well. I watched Papa sharpen a hoe and tend a large garden while he sang old gospel songs. I ate the green beans, black-eyed peas, and the tomatoes that grew in that garden, while I sat weary from the heat at a tiny kitchen table next to an enormous window fan. I drank in Papa's values with the cold water he offered from the tin dipper. I want to return there now, but a highway has paved over the place where the sharecropper's house once sat. The terrain is so changed that the exact location is nearly impossible to spot. Corn fields (for fuel?) clothe the landscape with uniformity from ditch to ditch. There are no fence rows, few gardens, no diversity of livestock kept for food. I didn't realize that my childhood eyes were watching the disappearance of that green haven forever.

And if I cannot return, I want to see it again in my mind, clearly, as it was. I want to experience it momentarily, by practicing the skills that made it possible, even in a place as unlike it as night from day.

The farm industry says:

"Keep in mind that on grandpa's farm, the cows and pigs walked in creeks and streams and rain water washed manure off of open lots." (Don Villwock, President, Indiana Farm Bureau, The Hoosier Farmer, Summer 2006)

But I say, "Not on Papa Walker's farm!"

The farm industry says:

"Unfortunately that farm doesn't exist anymore and hasn't for some time." (ibid.)

But I say, "If the way grandpa farmed was harmful, why is its disappearance unfortunate? And if grandpa's way of farming was beneficial, its forced disappearance (by economics) sounds like a capitulation to the worst sort of tyrrany."

Tumbledown Farm is a virtual haven, a place to learn and explore 19th and early 20th century farms. ...a place to sow and grow "contrary" dreams.