Farming
One core piece of sustainability is to not be complacent about waste, but to use everything for its highest purpose, returning would-be waste to the service of life as quickly as possible.
We garden organically, without leaving herbicide or pesticide residues in the food, on the land, or in the water. We use tractors minimally for cultivation and manure spreading in the garden, preferring to work by hand. Thus we use less petroleum than larger farms. We also do not use black plastic mulch, which is very commonly used on many organic (and conventional) farms, preferring instead to weed by hand. Again, we create less waste and use less petroleum.
Our animals are raised in several ways which promote sustainability. Pigs eat food waste and quite rapidly turn it into meat which we can eat. This is a sustainability practice of turning waste rapidly into usable food. Chickens are allowed free range on grass, turning that vegetation into nutritious eggs which we can eat. This is a sustainability practice because it uses abundant and naturally re-growing resources to produce food without adverse impact on the natural environment.
Our grazing animals move from paddock to paddock every few days, thus allowing the grass in each paddock to rejuvenate before being grazed again. This sustains the pastures and prohibits overuse and “overmanuring” of any one area of the pasture. The animals are fenced away from waterways and the lake, thereby preventing any damage to the aquatic environments. Goats are used to clear brush, work which would often be done with power tools or tractors, thus saving petroleum and creating instead more pounds of goat for milking or meat. This can be done repeatedly if the brush is not grazed too heavily or it can be a practice of land clearing for creating pasture for the grass-preferring cows and sheep.
In every farm construction project, we consider sustainability. We build with locally harvest rough-sawn lumber whenever we can achieve our building goals with that material. That involves less trucking petroleum and when we use trees from our own land, the trucking is almost none. We also use a lot of metal roofing, which lasts a long time and can be reused if buildings are renovated or torn down. It can also be recycled when it becomes un-usable as roofing. This is our preference over asphalt shingles which are made of petroleum, last a shorter time, and go into landfills when their useful life is over. We use pressure treated lumber only when its use will ensure that the lifespan of the building is so greatly extended that the toxins which make the wood rot-resistant appear to be worth using.
We are still making progress towards sustainability in some areas on the farm. We purchase quite a bit of grain, which is raised using petroleum burning tractors and transported long distances. It is organic grain, thus not made with herbicides, pesticides, or commercial fertilizers, but many machines are used to grow it and transport it. We are investigating how to raise our animals with more local food sources. Haying is another activity that requires many tractors and trucks. When we hay at F&W, we use the smallest tractor possible for each task. We are also working on making new hay feeders so the animals will waste less hay and we will therefore need to make less of it, or be able to have more food come out of each bale of hay.
It is necessary to kill in order to live, and the trick of sustainability is to kill as little as possible and attempt to promote life in all of our activities. We are satisfied with our sustainability work in some areas and are working to improve in other areas.
