Animals & the whole farm

Cows, calves, hogs, sheep, and chickens now call our farm home!

Meet this week’s vegetables:

• Cucumbers/eggplant/peppers — Some first samples of these summer crops!
• Basil
• Tomatoes — Just the very first of the tomatoes — we are so grateful to have them after the mishap in our first planting (a disease hit the starts in the greenhouse, setting us back a bit!).
• Green & romano beans
• Beets/chard
• Cut lettuce
• Carrots
• Summer squash
• Sweet onions

One interesting side effect of the “Full Diet” conversation has been hearing CSA members’ thoughts on animal products. A not uncommon response to the Full Diet proposal is that certain members don’t eat animal products (for various reasons) and are under the impression that the price of the Full Diet program would somehow “include” meat in the way that it might be included if one were to fill up a bag of groceries from every department at the store.

It’s been challenging to explain how we don’t see it that way — this idea that the non-animal products might “subsidize” the animal products (a notion we’ve heard a few times) is inconsistent with how we see the farm and the way we think about the Full Diet program. Pondering the difference in viewpoint has been an intriguing mental puzzle over the last few weeks, and I think we finally figured out where and how the paradigms are clashing.

To be clear, I’m not writing about this in order to convince vegetarians to join the Full Diet CSA — by no means!  In fact, we’ve had plenty of interest in the program already (from meat and non-meat eaters alike), and are pretty happy with the projected numbers. So, this is not a sales job at all. But, as we plan to continue the vegetable CSA as well, we do think it’s important and useful to explain the bigger picture of our evolving farm so that all our customers understand where we are headed.

People avoid animal products for a wide range of reasons (ranging from ethics to health), and it’s a very personal decision, often given great thought. We here on the farm have no reservations about supporting people in their diet choices. But, one thing we have learned over the years of farming on our own (and observing farming at large) is that growing crops requires animal inputs for nitrogen fertility … or, if not animal inputs, then chemical ones.

Generally speaking, if you buy food from an organic grower, they have used animal inputs for some of their fertility at some point in the process. Some examples of animal based, organic fertility are: raw or composted manure, feather meal (ground up feathers — a byproduct of the chicken industry), bone meal, blood meal, etc. There are exceptions to this rule — some farmers choose to use composted plant material or straw or a plant-based meal — but these routes are often slower, more expensive, or just as much a product of conventional agriculture. For fertility in the fields and in our starts, our farm has used feather meal and composted organic dairy manure. We also have heavily invested in cover cropping our fields with legumes, which are a fabulous way to enrich the soil using nitrogen-fixing plants (the sun’s power!).

The benefit of these organic animal sources of fertility is that they are “natural” — as in, they are non-synthetic. They require good soil health to turn into plant available nitrogen, and they create more stable soil life. In contrast, the fertility non-organic farmers use is petroleum based and available immediately. To repeat a pretty basic notion of the conventional/organic paradigms: conventional farmers feed their plants, whereas we feed our soil.

To be clear, either way, fertility is not optional on a crop farm. New farmers sometimes think it is, and their crops suffer until they figure it out. Since we harvest our crops and take them off the farm (to feed you!), we are constantly exporting the results of hard-earned fertility, requiring us to have a constant flow back.

Our long-term goal for our farm has always been to provide our own fertility, because off-farm fertility is expensive, often unreliable in its supply, and sometimes from sources inconsistent with our big picture values. At its base source, all fertility comes from the sun, the source of all energy on the planet (even fossil fuels are just very condensed, ancient sun power). We still believe that the best way for us to bring more fertility into our farm’s system is by growing photosynthetic crops: legumes like clover and grasses. In this way, we capture all that energy, and when we work those plants into the soil, that energy works its way into our soil as well.

For this system to supply enough fertility to account for our constant exporting of crops to our community of eaters, we need to allow sufficient time between crops for the fertility to build back up. And, this is where old knowledge of farming systems from prior eras comes in handy — in places where people farmed sustainably for generations (i.e. without depleting soil and water or causing erosion or desertification), they have used roughly two main strategies to keep farmland productive: the application of manures (including human) and crop rotation.

Crop rotation requires time, planning, patience, and space. This is something we’ve been working up to, always keeping at least half our land in a cover crop. But we’ve realized that we need a much longer rotation to actually quit bringing in fertility from off-farm — more like a four-year gap between veggie crops. Certainly, if we were committed to never using animals on our farm, we could just grow clover and a grass for that time and possibly have a great thing going … except, that it starts to feel somewhat wasteful to have such productive ground out of food production for so long. And it feels overly simplistic.

Plant needs are complicated — as a non-scientist, I like to say that I have a basic observational understanding of the macro-level workings on the farm. I understand nitrogen cycles only in the big picture of what I have seen and understood, watching vegetable crops grow before or after cover crops, etc. With his background in biochemistry, Casey has a much more detailed understanding of the process. Either way, we have both come to understand that plant health is complex — yes, plants need NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium), but they also need a large number of micro nutrients, healthy soil microbial and fungal activity, good tilth in which to dig down their roots, and more. What they need is a diverse living ecosystem (the soil) in which to thrive — and diversity of inputs and uses helps foster such a home.

In other words, if we just grew legumes and a grass between veggie crops, the soil would be missing something. Balances might be skewed in one direction. Certain weeds would thrive in the same agricultural setting every year. We would have to continually mow down the crop to “deposit” it on the soil (where some of the nitrogen would inevitably be lost through wilting before it enters the ground — if we really wanted it to enter the soil, we’d also have to continually be working up and resowing too, resulting in a lot of tillage). And, we would be hungry, not being able to eat clovers or grasses ourselves.

Which is where animals come in to our vision of our whole farm system. Yes, we want to grow clovers and grasses and all sorts of beautiful photosynthesizing crops. And, we want to get the power of those crops into the soil as they are growing. And, we’d love to get some nourishment from it as well.

Whether you choose to eat animals or not, here is the magical place for them on the farm — animals eat these crops (i.e. mow!), and they process that sun’s energy into a new more stable form and deposit it on the ground as they graze. Oh, as a side benefit for us omnivores, they also simultaneously provide eggs, milk, or eventually meat (storing sun energy along the way).

In the past, Casey and I have been skeptical as to whether animals contribute more to a farm system than the crops they eat. I think this skepticism came from lack of direct experience and wariness about adding animals to our farm (they’re expensive up-front and yet they can run away or die in dramatic ways! Very different from a packet of lettuce seed!). Now that we’ve watched our animals work through fields of clover, we are amazed how much more can happen on the land if we stack different kinds of life — even though the animals are eating the clover, they are not taking away from the equation of production. It’s easy to fall into a trap of thinking about inputs and outputs as a balanced equation, but clearly there is more mystery to the whole farm system than this would allow.

We’ve watched our clover field regrow three times now, each time providing more food for our animals as they get moved back through again. The animals are growing by the power of the sun, a beautiful miracle to observe. We are milking the cows daily, eagerly anticipate eggs, and look forward to future meat as well. We do bring the cows and chickens food from elsewhere on the farm (oats, vegetables, etc.), but eventually those parts of the farm will also be put into a very active sort of fallow.

We are certainly not at our long-term soil health and fertility goals yet, but we are starting to see the complex moving pieces of a whole farm system come into being. And it is clear to us that animals play an integral role in the production of all our crops. In this way, they are not a luxury to be subsidized but key players in creating balance and health (as well as providing calories and nourishment along the way for those who choose to partake).

I should point out that of course a farm could sway much too far in the other direction though too — a healthy whole farm system, in our minds, can also produce enough food for its own animal component. In contrast, a farm that is importing feed and exporting fertility (in the form of manure) is equally reliant upon off-farm sources. This can certainly go to an unhealthy extreme, with animals eroding the land and polluting groundwater.

But importing feed for animals isn’t in of itself an unhealthy place to be, just as an organic vegetable farm can be healthy without animals as well. These things can be done carefully and well, because farms are part of a larger agricultural community — whose to say that just because we have a border at the edge of our property means that we can’t share resources with other farmers in our region, balancing each other’s needs over time and space?

But Casey and I personally love pursuing the magic of the integrated whole farm, where we can immediately see the parts moving together and have more control over the quality of all of it. Once again, it is such a joy and a gift to be managing so much productive land!

For us, appreciating and embracing the role of animals on our farm has taken time and some paradigm shifts, so we understand that some of our eaters may be slow to warm to the new concept as well. We still have some big questions about long-term situations and how to integrate animals in a way that serves everyone well (including the animals!). I hope it goes without saying that in all things, we here at Oakhill Organics aim to be gentle in our approach to farming, to tending the soil and the animals both.

Thinking about domesticated animals and their role in human history/diets raises so many inevitable questions about who humans are and how we interact with the natural world. Casey and I don’t claim to have answers for these Big Questions, but just as I have gained a non-scientific observational understanding of the macro farm systems, I think that we have also gained a non-philosophical observational understanding of who we are in relation to the natural world around us (in this case, the farm itself).

I don’t even know if I could describe it in clear words, because it is so basic and observational, but we know that tending animals is a challenging but seemingly beneficial addition to our daily farm work. And, we know that the animals have a place here that seems to be part of a bigger history of how humans and animals co-exist in domesticity. It is interesting to be a part of this, not from the vantage point of a book or lecture, but in the real every day world of cow pies, water troughs, growing clover, and electric fences.

Perhaps in a few years, I’ll have more philosophical words, but for now we just wanted to provide some insight into how things are evolving out here and the role animals play today. As always, we welcome dialogue on these subjects, because we think they are fascinating and are always astonished by the experiences and revelations our CSA members share with us. Thank you for being a part of the wider community that sustains this farm venture.

Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Casey & Katie Kulla
… and the rest of the farm crew!

P.S. In case you are wondering, no baby yet! But on that note, last week I mentioned our baby meal registry, but I was mistaken about a search function. You need the exact URL to find it: http://mealbaby.com/viewregistry/14268525

Next week’s veggies (probably!): More of the same, plus sweet corn and eggplant!!!!