Economics and organic agriculture. Can you make money as an organic farmer? One might as well ask if you can make money as a conventional farmer? Can you make money as a conventional farmer without relying on government subsidies, crop insurance, and existing in a constant state of indebtedness? Based on the conventional farms in our area I think I know what the answer to that one is, but let’s stick to organics for the moment. What does it take to earn a living as an organic farmer?
Of course, the objective of every farm is to increase outputs for economic gain. Charles Walters, the late editor of Acres, USA, and a leading proponent of raw materials economics, said that the only way to create new sources of money starts with the sun. Being a farmer this puts you in the center of it all, but it takes knowhow and an ability to adapt to turn that sunlight into economic gain. You have to be canny, an adventurer, and it would help to be a polymath as well, as diversity is crucial to survival. Annual vegetable crops, perennial fruit crops, annual and perennial flowers, perennial herbs, eggs, meat, and a bit of wild crafting. Your eyes need to always be open for opportunities. A planting that started out as a crop may become a trap crop midseason, thanks to an overwhelming infestation of flea beetles. It will be better for the farm in the long run. Plants in a fencerow that seem to serve no economic purpose may produce fascinating seed pods in autumn, and be just what they want at the local florist shop. Take in the entire landscape with this in mind. Green beans, black walnut trees, pussy willows, water cress, zinnias. They occupy different areas of the farm and make different demands on your time and money, but they can all be used to your advantage when it comes to making a living.
Another part of your livelihood as a farmer is reducing off-farm inputs as much as possible. This is where being organic is a help as the road to organic often leads to an integrated farm with animals and crops of many sorts. Producing your own fertilizers to build a healthy soil (one of the main tenets of organic agriculture) frees you from a cycle of buying chemical fertilizers to apply to crops that will have no chance of yielding as they stand in a soil with a total lack of health. Your farm is a complete cycle with no “waste.” Crops that fail to be up to standards for human use can go to the animals, the animals produce manure, the soil uses the manure and in turn produces another crop that benefits man, animals and the soil.
A lot of the benefits of organic farming do not involve “quick returns.” Just as a well balanced meal composed of your produce requires forethought and planning, so does your farm and crops. Food is more than just something to satiate hunger, and organic farming is more than a way to produce crops. It produces healthy crops, healthy soils that will produce more crops in the future, reduces harm to the natural environment (even enhances it with fencerows and flower plantings to foster insect and bird populations), and produces healthy people. People who have crunched the numbers have discovered that the cost of conventionally raised food is greater than the price tag that appears on the superstore shelf. The aforementioned government subsidies, though dealt with at tax time, are still a cost to be paid. As are any environmental issues that may be created by unsustainable farming practices. Not to mention the overtime paid to county employees to clear away snow drifts after it blows across a bare 160 acre field and stops in the road, the first “fence row” it found. And where did all of the honeybees go, anyway? Additional costs are to be paid to the nation’s gargantuan health (or called by some “lack of health”) care system. No planning ahead, no nutritious food and no health except of a sort sustained by a diet of pills and medicines. And in parallel, no sustainable farming system, no thought of long term effects to the environment and all of its animals (including humans), no hope of producing healthy foods, or any crop at all without the constant utilization of strong chemical fertilizers and renewed debts. These are the “gains” we can expect if organic agriculture is not given a larger place in the economy.
Author: Jessie Smith is a Michigan State alumna (B.S., Crop and Soil Sciences; M.S. Entomology) and a MOFFA member. She works at Nodding Thistle, her family’s farm, that has a history of organic gardening and farm marketing since 1984.
Source: MI Organic Food & Farm Alliance