Micro-Agriculture Part II

*Read part 1 of Michael Foley’s post on Micro-Agriculture here *

Making Micro-Agriculture Work

I recently made the economic case for micro-agriculture, farming on three acres or less.  A handful of farmers in Mendocino County are showing that very small-scale farming can produce a respectable income; and farmers around the country, including some well-known farmer-authors, are generating impressive income on as little as an acre and a half.

But how is it done?  The approaches to micro-agriculture are as diverse as the farmers, but they have much in common.  I want to highlight the most important elements of a successful micro-farm, including intensive planting; care for the soil; careful management at all levels; appropriate technology (i.e., tools); specialty crops; and the “eco-system services” that the larger farm provides.

Intensive Planting

High income on small acreage depends crucially on intensive planting.  Both John Jeavons and Eliot Coleman show how it can be done, and both are drawing on the techniques of the Parisian market gardeners of the nineteenth century, who fed a teeming metropolis on shrinking acreage inside the city limits.  Two secrets, and some variations, inform this approach.  First, close spacing of plants in fertile soil.  Coleman uses the 6 row precision seeder he developed (available from Johnny’s Seeds) to plant carrots an inch apart, two inches between rows, in twelve rows on a 32 inch bed.  That’s intensive!  And his salad mix seeding is equally close.

Jeavons, following his mentor Alan Chadwick and the French intensive method Chadwick brought to the United States, advocates transplanting everything but spacing as closely as possible, using a triangular grid to minimize the distances between plants while giving each room to grow.  Close spacing not only gives superior yields in the experience of these authors and many farmers who follow their lead; it also minimizes weed competition.

But (the second secret) intensive planting also means maintaining a crop in the ground throughout the growing season, and even throughout the year.  And that means rapid successions.  Singing Frogs Farm has a stop-motion video showing three workers harvesting, working, and replanting three beds all in one hour.  To give their plants a head start, the Kaisers also use strong, well-developed transplants.  Intensively planted farms use their space carefully and continuously.  Surprisingly, this can be compatible with the second requisite, care for the soil, without which such intensive planting would be impossible.

Care for the Soil

Organic gardeners like to say that their first task is to nurture the soil, so the soil will take care of the plants.  Intensive production like that described above depends upon a constant effort to build the soil.  All of these farmers depend upon compost to replenish nutrients taken up by the crop; none of them use soil depleting artificial fertilizers.  Most of them practice no till agriculture.  They have given up tractors for cultivating the soil or use them very sparingly.  Instead they prefer to use hand tools to prepare and harvest permanent beds without major disruption to the soil structure or the micro-organisms in the soil.  As the farmers at Neversink Farm explain it, “Tilling destroys soils and burns up organic matter,” a conclusion supported by recent USDA studies.

Permanent beds, minimally tilled, are one part of this paradigm.  Another is heavy application of compost.  Eliot Coleman applies about an inch of compost to each bed as it is cleared for the next crop.  At Singing Frog Farm the application of compost has declined from three to four inches to less today as beds have become deep and loamy.  As a part of streamlining production and reducing tasks, Ben Hartman and his wife apply all the compost at the beginning of the season, laying on as much as eight inches of compost and planting into it directly.

Some of these farmers are careful to leave as much organic matter in the soil as possible.  Those who still till are apt to turn into the soil that portion of the crop remaining after harvest.  Others plant a “green manure” or cover crop and turn that in.  The problem with these approaches is that the four to six weeks it takes for this material to break down in the soil is time lost for another planting.  Eliot Coleman has given up green manures.  Instead, he clips the roots close to the ground and leaves them to decompose there while the new crop grows up.  The Kaisers do the same.  One major advantage of this approach is that it leaves the soil organisms that provide most of the nutrients to plants in the ground and thriving.  And it allows for the carbon sequestered by those organisms along the plants’ roots to stay in the ground.

Intensive Planning and Management

Jean-Martin Fortier writes that “although persistence, determination and hard work are all key ingredients for successful farming, these qualities on their own are not enough.  Careful planning and design, good management practices, and appropriate choices of equipment are all essential….”  Ben Hartman’s The Lean Farm is a handbook for careful planning, design and redesign, and good management practices.  Both farms are laid out so as to maximize ease of access from field and greenhouse to packing shed and storage.  And Hartman’s book showed me how to redesign work flow on a farm whose space was developed fairly haphazardly.

Both farmers emphasize repeated monitoring of processes, crops, production, and marketing with an eye to increasing efficiency, improving crop production, and getting as many dollars out of a square foot of planted space as possible.  Taking Hartman’s methods seriously takes record keeping, probably more record keeping than most farmers are willing to do.  But the main ingredient is awareness and responsiveness to what we see.  And all of us know how important it can be to know what crop we need to start when in order to have a harvest down the line.  Successful micro-agriculture depends on an intensive version of this, just as it depends upon intensive planting.  Reliable production is as important as continuous production, something the Kaisers have turned into an art.

And it’s not always a matter of maintaining a rigid schedule of successions.  John Richardson, a veteran Mendocino County market gardener, has taught that, for many crops, planting long-season crops at the same time as short season ones can produce a continuous harvest.  A sixty-day cabbage planted in July will provide a harvest in September and October, while a ninety-day cabbage planted at the same time will begin to appear at market about the time the earlier variety runs out.  And the ninety-day variety is likely to be a good storage cabbage as well, carrying over into the winter months.

Appropriate Technology

As we saw many of these farmers have given up tractors or use them for special tasks like managing compost.  At this scale tractors are less likely to be useful, and may even be an obstacle to intensive cultivation.  As Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer, two French farmers who have pioneered micro-agriculture in their country, put it “Manual cultivation allows the accomplishment of tasks for which mechanization is less well adapted: taking extreme care of the soil, intensifying crops, companion planting.”

The preferred tools for these farms are hand tools, like the broadfork (grelinette) that gives the Fortiers’ farm its name (Les Jardins de la Grelinette).  But that does not mean that these tools are not sophisticated or that the work is necessarily “back-breaking”.  Conor Crickmore at Niversink Farm notes of his mainly hand cultivation methods, “That is the biggest misconception, that we must be breaking our backs.  We farm this way because it is much easier, more efficient and much more profitable for us.”

Eliot Coleman has spent a lifetime developing hand tools that enable farmers to work efficiently without doing long-term damage to their bodies.  Ergonomically perfect hoes, precision seeders, a simple seed bed preparation device, and many more tools have come from his workshop into the hands of farmers working on a small scale.  For some of these farmers, the smart phone has become an essential management tool, with apps designed for farmers to record and organize orders, maintain records necessary for organic certification, monitor production, and more.  And key to winter production for many of them is the hoop house, heated or unheated, to protect crops through the winter and extend production of summer crops well into the fall.

Specialty Crops

Many, but not all, of these farms depend upon specialty crops for an extra boost of income.  In the nomenclature of the USDA and California Department of Food and Agriculture, “specialty crops” are anything but the big commodity grains, beans, cotton, tobacco, sugar beets (which also could be known as the “subsidized crops”).  Here we’re talking about niche crops within the market garden.  One profitable crop that provides extra cash through the winter months is microgreens, plants grown only to the cotyledon or first leaf, then cut as a garnish or salad ingredient.  Grown in trays microgreens can be raised in modestly heated hoop houses over the winter and command a high price.

Salad mix is another common specialty crop on micro-farms.  Suited to high production in small spaces and usually harvested at the baby leaf stage, salad mix also commands a high price in the market, the higher the quality, the higher price.  Intensive cultivation and direct market sales are the hallmarks of the micro-farm and can make for high quality salad mix.

With the summer glut of tomatoes, some market gardeners have sought even higher value crops for their hoop houses and turned to fresh ginger and turmeric as an option.  Others simply try to find ways to produce crops at a time when they are not otherwise available locally.  Eliot Coleman pioneered winter mini-carrots – baby carrots grown to winter over and acquire the intense sweetness of carrots subjected to really cold weather.

The Larger Farm

Finally, it would be misleading to imagine that the market gardens that provide the cash for a micro-farm stand alone.  At a minimum the compost that sustains soils subject to this sort of intensive production has to come from somewhere.  While some farmers enjoy reliable sources of good compost, many of us do not.  We have to make our own, and that requires organic matter beyond the kitchen wastes that suburbanites use as the basis for their backyard compost efforts.  The larger farm can provide the raw materials, whether as an intentionally grown “compost crop” such as those John Jeavons recommends, or in the form of spent hay and manure from the barn.  To the extent market gardeners can draw upon these resources, they save money spent on commercial compose or the money and time that would go into sourcing raw materials.

Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer go further, emphasizing that the market garden is just the beginning of a diversified farm that provides a gracious living to farm family and workers.  Their vision is founded in permaculture and agroecology:

“The intensification of market crops allows the agricultural space to be freed up for other uses: meadow-orchard, small animal-raising, forest garden, fruiting hedges, berries, ponds… In the same amount of area (on the order of 1 to 2 hectares [2.5 to 5 acres]) occupied by a conventional approach to diversified market-gardening, the farm can offer a greater diversity of production, better autonomy in organic matter, increased biodiversity, as well as a probably more pleasant way of life.”

I’ll have more to say about their vision, and the larger significance of micro-agriculture, in my next post.

Author: Michael Foley