Linda Illsley, local chef and owner of Cocina Linda, once asked me why I farm. I couldn’t come up with an immediate answer. There are a million ethical reasons to be a small-time, diverse farmer.  The veggies at the grocery store are laden with systemic pesticides, fungicides, antibiotics, herbicides and fertilizers, the land they are grown on is eroded, low in fertility and biodiversity, the watershed is contaminated with nitrogen run-off and pesticides, the farm workers may not be fairly treated, and most of the money I spend at the grocery store disappears from the local economy.

Unfortunately, trying to make a living farming on a ¾ acre plot to avoid supporting conventional agriculture is not very practical. The hours are long, the work is backbreaking, the money is pocket change and you are tied to the land every singe day. We’ve invented machines to do these things, right? So why aren’t I using them?  Do I have some sort of masochistic pre-combustion engine nostalgia? I don’t think so. There are very good reasons why sustainable farmers often keep things small and diverse, but they are complex. Machinery used in conventional agriculture is specialized, requiring farmers to grow one crop in order to make back their capital investment. Often only one crop cultivar can be grown, chosen for mechanized growing (for characteristics such as uniform ripening, the ability to withstand mechanical harvest and shipping, i.e. tough skin and no flavor). To put it simply, you have to grow in large monocultures to grow enough to make back the cost of production. Large monocultures require chemical inputs to withstand disease, insect and weed pressure. Plain and simple, it just doesn’t work to be pesticide-free while growing a single variety of a single crop.Unfortunately, the USDA organic standards allow for monoculture organic farming by allowing “naturally occurring” but toxic pesticides and insecticides such as copper, sulfur, neem, pyrethrum, Bt and many more. In my opinion, an organic farmer should be required to be highly diverse because farm diversity reduces disease and pest pressure mitigating the need for chemical inputs. Diverse farms act more like naturally occurring ecosystems. If pests or diseases were to escalate naturally, the loss of a few crops or cultivars in a given season would not cause the farmer to resort to chemicals to make ends meet. In my mind, organic farming, diversity and the idea of small must go together.

Still, these environmental and ethical reasons do not answer Linda’s question: why do I farm? I guess the best answer is that it is just in me. This is what I was born to do. Hard as small-scale, diverse farming is, I’m not happy doing anything else.  Despite the difficulties, I just can’t help myself!