F.A. Farm

Our farm is in a rural farming county in NW Washington, but a lot of the farmland near us has been taken up by McMansions. There are a few beef south of us and a seed potato producer half a mile away. He uses the usual huge tractors, herbicides and chemical fertilizers, as well as irrigation. This farmer is trying to do the best he can, but he is locked into a mechanical/chemical paradigm. He rotates his crops, alternating potatoes with either corn or wheat. Nevertheless he is paving the soil and you can see much more standing water in his fields than mine over the course of a wet winter. He is renting, so perhaps he doesn't care. This is far different from my attempts to build up my soil and increase fertility, biomass, and microbial action. By increasing the organic matter in the soil, I can lock up more soil moisture and I am hoping to irrigate less this year, especially since I am widening the distance between my rows - going from a 30" center to 36". This will also allow me to use my BCS 26" wide tiller to cultivate between rows, rather than the one-speed slow tiller I have been using.

Two different styles of farming - one chemical, the other organic. Yet we are both on the same continuum. We are both producing food, whether it is seed potatoes and forage, or produce to sell directly to the customer. We are both creating new wealth from the soil and we both can be measured through a simple calculation of inputs and outputs. Yet there is a big difference in outlook. My neighbor is using the soil as a factory and carefully calculating how much diesel, manpower, seed, fertilizer and herbicides he can put into his "factory" to pay for his inputs and hopefully give him a profit. What I am doing is looking at the soil as a series of nested ecosystems and feeding the soil to build it up for future generations. I turn a small profit but that is not the main driver. My calculations are how much labor I can put into the system without making mistakes from sheer exhaustion and how I can get by using minimal fossil fuel inputs. The paradigm of feeding the soil instead of feeding the plants is a big difference, yet we are on the same continuum. How do we differentiate? After all, the game is stacked in favor of my neighbor. There is a huge cultural input emphasizing "big is better" and "tractors are cool." All the marketing, all the retailing and all the subsidies favor a farmer who can utilize cheap petroleum products to farm a lot of acres. In order to change the narrative, I have to differentiate between my way of farming and his. Trying to make an absolute distinction is not only negative in estranging my neighbor and 90% of the American populace, but it also flies in the face of a continuum based on new wealth generation. Differentiating on the basis of two distinct continuums, in other words, is bound to fail.

However, let's look at some soil and microbial processes for a clue. When I don't use chemical fertilizers and follow proper organic practices, I work towards balance in the nested ecosystems. The little wheel I work with helps nudge the big wheel all around us. The result is that my plants are healthier and have fewer pest problems. I had late blight in my tomatoes in 2008 (partly my fault with watering), yet I still had a good year overall because I have a diversity of crops that compensate for the individual crop failure. I get some aphids and flea beetles, but they don't take much. My slugs are controllable by some tillage in the wintertime. This exposes their eggs to the cold and to the predators. During the summer, they are easy to pick. The point here is that by being totally organic (even beyond organic because I have a low carbon footprint), I let my ecosystem defend itself through a balance of prey and predators. If I use even one chemical spray, I might imperil the balance I have in the little wheel - sort of like putting the lead weights on the wrong side of my truck tire when the wheel is balanced. This argues for  a clear distinction between halfway organic measures and being on either the chemical side or the organic side of the continuum. In short, there is a tipping point between the two poles of the continuum. You can lower your chemical use, such as the no-till farmers in the Palouse are doing. [I discussed this in one of my earlier blogs.] However, you are still on the chemical side of the continuum. If you make the transition to organic, however, you have passed the tipping point and crossed the Rubicon, so to speak.

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 chemical                       tipping point                             organic

You can get problems as you approach the tipping point. From the chemical side, you get an increased incidence of pests if you just stop using so much chemicals, or even don't increase chemical use each year. This is a treadmill that drives mainstream farmers out of business as surely as the higher price of oil and the lower price of commodities. In other words, you have to pass the tipping point. You have to actually cross the Rubicon and commit to using NO chemical fertilizers AND use different cropping techniques. The value of the feed the soil paradigm, once you have crossed the Rubicon, is that you have a different way of looking and modeling the problem, so you can devise solutions that are adapted to your own soil and climate. As an example, I have a slug problem, so doing a little bit of winter tillage helps keep down their reproductive success. This solution is not applicable to a farmer in Michigan, for instance, because slugs are not a problem there. Another example is that I have a nice silt loam soil, with clay underneath. I can till deeper and not worry about depleting my groundwater reserves as much as a farmer on sandy soil in Ohio.

Approaching the tipping point from the organic side is also problematic. I often hear people say, "I am mostly organic, but I use a little chemical spray if I need to." This approach runs the risk of unintended consequences that are negative. Not only do you give up your beneficial unintended consequences (i.e. being in balance gives you beneficial unintended consequences), you also may kill some beneficial predators along with the pest. Sprays in general are a macro effect, when what we want are individualistic micro effects (the garter snake eats the slugs one at a time rather than killing ALL the slugs with a dose of some chemical). Not to put too fine a point on it, but you get "plus" aspects of a total ecosystems approach. Running down to zero means you lose something on the plus side. Going even further into the "minus" aspect by using a chemical that degrades the ecosystem means you lose doubly. One might even say that you lose benefits exponentially by using even one chemical spray in an otherwise balanced ecosystem.

The bottom line is the commitment to go organic. This means solving your problems using an ecosystem approach rather than focusing on one pest or chemical imbalance and forgetting how it affects the rest of the system. The paradigm itself, feed the soil instead of feeding the plants, is the key.