Designing Sustainable Small Farms

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Give some thought to protecting your crop, too: Solar-powered elec tric fences or browse-resistant hedgerows may be needed to deter deer or other wildlife.

[2] Market gardens. When selecting species for the market garden,' you'll want to consider various crop rotations, successional planting schemes for continuous yield, local market demand for specific crops, and fertility maintenance. You may reject some crops as too labor intensive and others on the basis of your soil and climate. (Remember, though, that by using cloches, plastic mulches, and slit row covers, you can extend the growing season for those slow-growing species.)

[3] New crops. You may want to try some uncommon crops as a long term investment. Working with unfamiliar species does involve risks: In many cases, the cultural requirements have not been clearly defined, susceptibility to insects and disease is unknown, yield data may be sketchy, and the markets are uncertain. However, new crops are successfully introduced all the time, and folks who harvest a crop of the potential money-makers first tend to realize the most profit. For example, farmers who planted kiwi fruit in New Zealand in the mid70's have made higher earnings than their more cautious neighbors.

Some current candidates for such "stock market plantings" could include mulberries (Photo 22), juneberries, hardy kiwi, persimmons, nut trees, papaw, bamboo, paulownia, nut pines, truffles, ginseng, wild rice, and water chestnuts.

Management constraints. You may include many different species and cultivars in your design, add several ponds and a mix of livestock, and end up with a farm plan that includes a bit of everything. But a good design minimizes management requirements ... and such a diversified small farm may fail simply because the plan's too complicated to coordinate. So as you're selecting species, ask yourself. Can you realistically manage all the species of fruit trees, the diverse market garden, chickens, ducks, geese, sheep, honeybees, pastures, and hedges you may have included? If the answer's no, then simplify the design.

In general, a homestead can be more diverse than a commercial farm operation. However, there is one possible exception. If applying ecological principles and common sense in a farm-scale design leads you inexorably to a diverse and complex design, then you may want to incorporate management by a community of farmers. Because the components on any farm are linked by flows of energy, nutrients, and materials, managing such a system will demand close cooperation from the individuals involved. The orchardist and beekeeper, for instance, must cooperate so that noncrop nectar and pollen plants don't compete with fruit trees for the honeybees' services ... the shepherd and orchardist must coordinate grazing schemes so that sheep aren't introduced into the orchard until the trees are large enough to escape browse damage ... and so on. In essence, the large, diverse situation creates an ecological argument for community farming, with cooperation among farmers demanded by the inherent characteristics of the landscape.

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