Three principles for the vision of our farm

Gina told me that it was high time for me to start pulling my own weight on the blog….and she was right. 

I am responsible for the production on our farm and it’s important that you better understand what we do, and more importantly, why do we do what we do. 

I feel like the following three principles will help communicate our vision for the farm. 

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE IS: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. 

What we put in our bodies will have a direct impact on how our bodies perform and our general health. 

We all know that if you want to be healthy, then you need to put healthy plants and protein/fat derived from healthy animals in your body. But how do you get a healthy plant or a healthy animal?  That’s where the second principle comes in.

THE SECOND PRINCIPLE IS: YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW. 

If you want wholesome food that promotes good health and body performance, then all of the inputs and farming practices need to be wholesome and healthy in their own right. 

This starts in the soil. 

Healthy soil is high in organic matter and bursting with life.  Walking around a healthy pasture you will have an abundance of life below your feet.  Microbes, fungi, earthworms, beetles, spiders, they all work together to break down the soil and provide the essential nutrients to the plants. 

These nutrients end up in the animals or humans who consume them.  I have spent quite a lot of time learning about the farming practices that will help build our soil, many of which I plan to get into more detail on in future blog posts.

We see our farm as a stewardship.  It is a stewardship in building soil and providing the most nutrient dense food we can for the benefit of your family and ours. 

But not everything done in “modern” agriculture  is working to achieve these same goals.  Which leads us to our final principle. 

THE THIRD PRINCIPLE IS: JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN, DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD. 

We live in an era of modernization and efficiency.  We have technologies that will allow us to do things today that were only dreams a few short years ago. 

In agriculture this has led to plants and animals being grown in monocultures (the cultivation of a single crop in a given area).  As an example think about a field of corn.  It is just corn and anything else growing in that field is considered “undesirable” or even a weed.  It can be very efficient to grow one crop and then work to maximize its yield.  Efficiency is not a bad goal, but it has led modern agriculture to use practices which are not sustainable. 

Healthy soil is made up of organic matter and trillions of living organisms. 

When you till and grow one crop over and over in the same area for years on end you are depleting the soil. In our corn field scenario organic matter is NOT being added back to the soil as quickly as it is being depleted.  We are taking and not giving back. 

Taking and not giving back is the definition of unsustainable. 

It’s sad that currently most of our commercial agriculture lands do not have soil nutrition that will support a crop any longer, so we add chemical fertilizers (derived from petroleum - YIKES) to add the nutrients required to grow the crop. 

We also have chemical herbicides which kill all of the other “undesirable” vegetation.  This will allow us to make a crop, but these chemical fertilizers and herbicides are not friendly to the life in the soil.  So not only are we depleting the organic matter, we are also killing the life in the soil that breaks down to provide the essential nutrients to that plant, and these added chemicals end up in our food - ending up in our bodies (refer back to The First Principle). 

In this system we will need more chemical inputs (fertilizer, herbicide, fungicide) every year and pretty soon the healthy soil of our great grandparents is just dirt used to hold the plant up by its roots. This is the condition our farm was in 10 years ago. 

The grass on the right is where we pasture-raised our chickens and on the left, we raised nothing. Look at the difference - it’s amazing!

Continuous crop farming had depleted the top soil down to just dead, rocky, dirt. But in my ignorance I thought “modern” agriculture was the path to feed a hungry planet.  I admittedly have used chemical fertilizers to help grow crops and herbicides to rid my farm of “undesirable” plants.  I didn’t understand true soil and animal health and it’s results on our health. 

I have come to understand that if we align our farming practices with nature, we can steward our land to heal the soil to produce nutrient dense food. 

I would love to go into greater detail on many of the areas we can improve in “modern” agricultural techniques, but they will have to wait for future blog posts. 

But please understand that our heart and goal is regenerative agriculture, that replenishes what has been lost in our soil, and quite frankly replenishes what has been lost in the food offered to us through “modern” agriculture. 

WE ARE WHAT WE EAT, WE NEED TO CARE ABOUT THE FOOD WE PUT IN OUR BODIES. 

It has a larger impact on the world around us than most of us ever realize. 

Healthy, regenerative, farming can make healthy food, but it also replenishes soil, sequesters carbon, retains more water on the landscape, provides diverse habitats and ecosystems (Polycultures not Monocultures), supports and welcomes  wildlife, the list can go on but I hope you see my point. 

The next time you sit down to a family meal, please think about where the food came from and how it was produced.  Every bite has a story to tell, it is up to us to listen and then take action. 

Let us help feed you and restore the land we live on at the same time.  We want both to be healthy for generations to come. Click here to shop with us.