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CONVERSATIONS WITH New YoRK Commodity FArmers
RECLAIMING A PartneRSHIP With the soil
Photo courtesy of Cover Crop Strategies
By now we have all seen the documentaries narrated by celebrity activists, elevating to rock star status once conventional commodity farmers who seem to have followed a clearly marked roadmap to wealth and chemical-free farming by adopting soil health practices like no-till, cover-cropping, and "planting green."
Often they will encounter steep and costly learning curves, and even the disapproval and skepticism of peers, employees, neighbors, and even family members. It’s a special breed of farmer who can persevere through those setbacks, uncertainties, and societal pressures, and who are prepared to juggle the sometimes conflicting needs to be economically viable and to steward their land.
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Meanwhile we continue to buy into the simple polarizing narratives. Surely farmers can smoothly transition their soil into chemical-free biodiversity paradises teaming with beneficial microbes that enable them to boost both yields and profits. If they can’t, we want to know, why not? Jay Goldmark, an organic grain farmer in the Hudson Valley who grew up on a large-scale conventional farm, says it’s time to stop asking farmers to pass purity-tests.“It's exhausting to try and continually define ourselves,” he says. “You’re a regenerative farmer here, you're an organic, regenerative farmer there, or you're a conventional farmer over there, what's the point? Feels like you have to have a special credit card to get into a club somewhere." He says the real litmus test is to ask are you farming in such a way that the next generation will be grateful for their inheritance?
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The truth is no rulebook or formula exists for a farmer who wants to work in partnership with the soil. As American Farmland Trust Agricultural Specialist Aaron Ristow reports, "every farm is unique, every soil is different, every year there's a different weather event." The stories here of New York commodity farmers like Forrest Watson of Mulligan Farm, John Macauley of Macauley Farm, and Jay Goldmark of Stone House Farm bear this out.
Watson and Macauley are participating in American Farmland Trust’s New York Farm Demonstration Network. Both have adopted no-till, cover-cropping, and planting green practices, in some years improving bottom line results, in some years not. Both continue to use, to varying degrees, synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, but strive to reduce their use.
As an organic farmer, Jay Goldmark is working to prove that its possible to give the soil "a sabbatical" by no-tilling through a succession of crop rotations and plant greening without any synthetic inputs. He says he hasn't quite cracked the code but is energized by the challenge.
All three farmers are cultivating a way of farming that stretches their creativity and resourcefulness and they are in it for the long haul. Working increasingly as collaborators with the soil, they are embracing the complexity and the rewards of farming as both an art and a vocation.
Bianca Moebius-Clune, director of American Farmland Trust's Soil Health Initiative notes that “everyone” has a role to play in supporting these efforts to help farmers take care of their farms, their families and ultimately their communities and the agroecological systems we all depend on. We all have a role to play in helping to overhaul a system that has been dominated by chemical agriculture, and to give farmers the breathing space to reclaim a partnership with the soil and the satisfactions that go with it. We hope these stories will shine a light on the complexities of the challenges they face.
The reality is that most farmers are likely to experience significant challenges when they attempt to break out of old agricultural models heavily dependent on synthetic inputs. There is no "plug and play."
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