Groundswell Blog: Growing for Market

Welcome to Groundswell

Groundswell’s mission is to help youth and adult learners develop the skills and knowledge they need to build sustainable local food systems. Our focus is providing hands-on, experiential learning opportunities with real working farms and food businesses in the Ithaca area. Through collaboration with area schools, colleges and universities, Groundswell offers programs of study for beginning farmers, students, community members, and professionals.

Groundswell is an initiative of the EcoVillage Center for Sustainability Education in Ithaca, NY, which is a project of the Center for Transformative Action. Visit the Groundswell website to learn more about our programs, initiatives and resources.

Friday, June 24

Dynamic Equilibrium as a Farm Goal

Elizabeth Henderson, farmer of Peacework Organic Farm, ag justice champion and regional organic/CSA pioneer, wrote this piece back in 2002 for Growing for Market. We wanted to share it with beginning farmers who are seeking balance in their lives on the farm.

Running a Resilient Farm Business
by Elizabeth Henderson

For several years, I followed the engaging saga of the Arnosky’s farm in this magazine (Growing for Market). They added more flowers, more acres, more greenhouses, more employees. Then they added vegetables. And then they announced that they had no more time to write for Growing for Market, an activity they had seemed to enjoy. While creative and adventurous in their farming techniques, the Arnosky’s turned out to be orthodox true believers in their business strategy. The sign over the door of US business reads: “if you aren’t growing, you’re dying.” The ag. establishment bullies farms with the demand: “get bigger or get out.” Are these good mantras for sustainable farm businesses? Wouldn’t “resilience,” and ”dynamic equilibrium” be healthier goals to guide us in developing our farms?

Achieving dynamic equilibrium or dynamic stability means finding a way to run your farm so that it does not run you into the ground. Designing your farm for maximum resilience means that you can withstand the shocks of bad weather, business cycles, and the fragility of human existence. Most of us who are doing market farming chose this path because growing vegetables or flowers or tending livestock is something we love to do. We get satisfaction from living close to the earth, working outdoors, planting and seeing things grow, nurturing living creatures, using our bodies as well as our minds. We can imagine small-scale farming as a wonderful style of life for ourselves and future generations. The trick is to design our farms so that we do not destroy our love. That means we have to find the right scale of activities, the number of acres we can handle, the optimum amount of equipment, the fairest markets, and the financial goals that will make our farming socially as well as environmentally sustainable.