We often see photos of large herds of a couple of thousand cows and ask, “What are we even doing? How can we compete with this?”
The short answer is we can’t. When competing strictly on efficiency and low cost, the sheer scale of the 3000-cow dairy means that they will always be more efficient and lower cost than our 60-cow dairy. The message that we should “get big or get out” pervades all corners of the agriculture industry.
But what if farming weren’t just about efficiency? What if ethics, sustainability, or other values were measured? How would that tilt the scale?
First, let’s discuss efficiency-
Big farms are technically efficient because market efficiencies assume that there are no externalities or costs (or benefits) to an outside party. Degradation of the environment is just one example of a negative externality of our current efficiency-obsessed system. Efficiency does not guarantee equity. So we have to ask ourselves- is efficiency really what we want, or are there other values we should prioritize?
If we valued sustainability or ethics- small farms would always beat out large farms. In college, we learned the three-legged stool analogy of sustainability, where environmental practices, social equity, and economic stability are the three legs that support a future that is as good or better than the present. To condense a semester into a sentence, the point of the analogy is to teach us to pay careful attention so that we don’t over-focus on one metric and cause the stool to topple over.
Sustainability is as simple as balancing the stool. The more complicated the systems - the more land a farm covers, the more farm workers a farm oversees, and the more variables that need to be controlled - the taller and more unwieldy the stool becomes. For us, and for our sustainably-minded farm friends, the key to building sustainable systems has been to take our cues from the land, to figure out how to cultivate the bounty that nature already provides, and to know when to work hard and when to rest.
Sustainability is about monitoring our impact on the environment’s resources. We have to constantly ask ourselves if we causing irreversible harm and degrading resources like clean air and soil fertility that will compromise our farm’s ability “to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
To learn more about small farms' efficiency and sustainability: