What a loaded word! Especially when it comes to farming. But what does it mean? At what point is your farm "sustainable"?
Craig and I have had many discussions about this in the past few months. We've come to the conclusion that in farming, the word shouldn't just encompass your growing practices. If you own a farm, you own a business. And while it's great if your business practices support sustainability, your business also needs to sustain you.
Farmers are notorious for having second jobs. Because using best practices to grow food is expensive. Really really expensive. Craig and I experienced this first hand with Wayside Ranch's first venture - ducks.
Let's raise ducks, we said! We'll have delicious organic eggs! We'll get movable coops and fencing so they'll always have fresh pasture!
So we did. Unfortunately, not many people want to pay more than the already steep price of $10 a dozen for our delicious, pastured, organic duck eggs. And they cost us $9.50 a dozen to produce.
Our duck egg business was not sustainable. Yes, we were buying organic. Yes, we were moving them about the pasture so we wouldn't overuse the land...but we also weren't making any money.
When I first started writing this I only wanted to say that we should appreciate the fact that sustainable farming also needs to sustain the farmer, but I realize that it's not really the farmer's fault if it doesn't. The food that small farms produce is rarely (if ever?) subsidized and because of this we can not price our food according to what it cost us to produce. We're competing with subsidized agriculture and there's not a whole lot we can do about it. That being said, next time you go to a farmers' market take a minute to appreciate the low prices our small farms are putting out there for some awesome, sustainable food, and give them best wishes for a good week at their other job.
i credit Steve Gliessman at UCSC for introducing me to the concept of sustainability that i still abide by. it was 2003, so 'sustainable' the word wasn't so widely used, but you could tell it was about to be. and steve could see this too. and even before that, he put sustainability out there as a GOAL, never really to be attained, but always reached for. we can always be more sustainable...but when we say we 'are' we're almost always fudging a bit. i look around at all the plastic irrigation used on organic farms (including my own) and wonder about sustainability's significance with this invaluable use of petroleum (drip irrigation) compared to wasteful sprinklers that are still the status quo....they waste water, but at least a bunch of plastic doesn't go in the trash every year....... so i try to not label my farm as sustainable, but i gladly describe it as moving in the direction of sustainability.
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