Hello again, this is Michael Heller. I'm glad to be back with you.
What I'd like to do this session is talk a little bit about the criteria that
we've developed on the farm from the experiences of the farm over the last
many years. And, we've come up with six basic
criteria we use in our decision making. And I should mention that when I say we,
I farm with a young farm couple that is absolutely wonderful, and together we've
developed this criteria over time. One of the first criteria for us is
something that I got from Gideon Stoltzfus, a friend who asked me to visit
his farm in Lancaster County. Gideon is part of the Amish community in
Lancaster. When I was visiting him I was asking,
well, how do you decide as a community whether you're going to adopt certain
pesticides or certain technologies. He said, well, you know, it's very
interesting. We have one major criterion that we use
and that is, does this decision or this adoption of, of a certain technology,
does it build community, or does it weaken community? That is our key
criterion, and we have adopted that for our farm because we do believe it is
extremely important. and this becomes particularly important
as we think about marketing because marketing is one way that we very much
interact with the community of consumers. However, we don't limit it to our
marketing. When we talk about community, we are also
talking very much about the farm community.
In here, you see Carrie, who is part of the young farm couple that I work with.
and we try to make sure that everything we do builds the, our own little farm
community on the farm. During the summer months, we have
additional people who work with us, particularly in the vegetables, so our
community becomes about seven people. And, so decisions become very important
and we try to make decisions collectively.
That community also includes the animals on the farm.
And, so we hold discussions with them frequently.
And when we talk about the animals on the farm, we would also include wildlife.
They become one of the elements of community that we try to be sure that
we're building. A second criterion is economics.
And this of course is an essential one and the only problem people generally
have with using economics as a criterion is sometimes it becomes the dominant, and
in some cases the domineering criterion. This can lead to problems.
So, economic sustainability is essential in all of our decisions.
We weight it along with the other criteria that we have.
A third key criterion for us is, does this decision or this adoption of a new
technology, does it give us, the farmer, more control or less control of what we
are doing? It may not sound like an obvious one, but I'll use the example
here of a good friend of mine who's a poultry farmer. And she made the decision
to get into poultry farming because of economics.
Promised a lot of money by a large poultry processor. And what she's found,
after investing in a house that cost about $125,000 and houses about 25,000
chickens, which are grown from start to finish in about a 7 week period,
she has very little control over any of her decisions.
The company tells her how much feed to give, when to open the shades on the side
of the building, when to turn on the ventilation, how much water should be
going through the watering system. She has very, very little decision making
to do on her own. We don't want that on our farm.
So, control for the farmer is a key element.
Another criterion is control for the consumer.
Do the things that we're choosing to do through our marketing allow the consumer
more choices or fewer? For instance, we sell our vegetables through a CSA, which
I will talk about in the next session. But shareholders come and pick up their
vegetables on the farm. These share holders tell us what they
like about the shares and what they don't like.
So, we modify our shares very much based upon the input we get from the
shareholders who really are a partner in the farm operation with us.
So, giving consumers more of a choice and more control of their own decision making
is critical. Another key question we always ask
ourselves is, does it use more energy or does it use less energy? It may not seem
like a big one, and often, it is an overlooked one.
We could harvest most of the feed for our animals and feed them in the barn.
Much better for us to let the cows do the harvesting.
They also spread the manure for us, for the most part.
This is key. This fall, as I record this, I have a
decision to make right now. It's a very, very dry time for us.
I'm getting ready to cut hay. This is our third cutting of hay.
This is hay that normally, when I bail it, I would sell it to some of the people
in the local area who have horses. This year, because it is so dry, the hay
is not grown very well. And, I think what we will choose to do is
take the time and energy to put up some electric fence around the hay fields and
let the cows harvest it for us. Because to drive the tractor across the
fields, mowing the hay, tethering the hay, raking the hay and baling the hay
will take a lot more energy and will not be warranted in the big picture of all
the other criteria including economics. So, when we weigh all the criteria, the
energy one suggests this year we probably aren't going to cut hay.
So, when we weigh the energy criterion along with the others, it suggest that
this year, this fall, because of the drought we probably won't cut hay.
We'll let the cows do the work for us. And our sixth criterion, if I've counted
them right, I'm not certain about that, is working with ecological systems.
So, looking at ecological evironmental questions, this is talking about soil
building. Are we building soil or are we depleting
soil? Water quality, are what we, is what we're doing affecting water quality in a
positive or negative way? Here, you see the cover crops that we're
growing in the field of broccoli. These cover crops are using natural
processes of nitrogen fixation to build the soil, and it allows us not to use
commercial fertilizers. So, it's protecting the water quality because
synthetic fertilizers leech much more readily than the biologically fixed
nitrogen which is stored in organic matter.
So, the six criterion being ecological environmental processes, are we working
with ecological processes or are we fighting against them, is a key element
in our decision making. Collectively this six get us to what we
hope is working more and more towards what will be a sustainable farming system
on our farm. It's not a finished process, it's always
a work in progress.
Keeve Nachman, PhD, MHSAssistant Professor, Environmental Health Sciences
Robert S. Lawrence, MDProfessor, Department of Environmental Health Sciences
Pamela Rhubart BergFood Systems Education Program Manager
