Sustainability Pledge | Castor River Habitat & Farm
Introduction
Sustainability is nothing more and nothing less than satisfying the needs of today without compromising the needs of tomorrow. For the sake of this essay let’s focus on the sustainability of one of our most precious resources…LAND. So much is written and talked about within the world of sustainability that many people get lost within it. They don’t remember where they came in and they don’t see clear paths forward. So many data points, numbers, figures and facts get pushed into the conversation that the whole process begins to feel more like a math problem. I look at it differently, I approach sustainability from a more holistic point of view. I see sustainability as a journey which typically leans you towards a “here” to “there” context. I know where “here" is, I can simply look around at my surroundings and see “here”. “There” becomes a different question altogether. What is the goal? Where does this all lead? Where’s the finish line and what does it even look like? How on earth do I get “there”?
We naturally want journeys to have three things, a beginning, a middle and an end. Fortunately or unfortunately sustainability doesn’t adhere to those ways of thinking, for now. Perhaps there will come a day when we as a human race can look at one another and say with absolute certainty “there’s nothing left to improve on”. Until then let’s look at sustainability as a way of being vs. a thing to obtain. My perspective is certainly my own but I don’t claim ownership of it, merely possession. It was given to me by many many people who have honored me with their friendship, mentorship and knowledge. Some I know well and others I have followed from afar. I owe them a debt of gratitude that can only be repaid by helping others as they helped me.
More than anything, I owe the generations of my family that came before me. I owe my father and mother for creating a legacy and entrusting me with it, a debt I can never fully repay.
Conviction I - “The soil is alive, treat it as you would any other living thing.”
Background
We tend to separate ourselves from other living things in a myriad of comparisons but normally revolving around intelligence. We marvel at dolphins that follow human instructions and perform complex tasks, we admire great apes that can learn sign language and show signs of affection that mirror our own. Our level of empathy towards living creatures is usually in direct correlation to how connected we feel to it. Humans typically treat horses differently than rats, dogs are treated differently than porcupines. Regardless of our emotional attachment to a living thing we do, generally speaking, treat living things with respect. It should come as no surprise that modern humans no longer feel attachment, much less kinship, to the soil. It’s mostly viewed as a lifeless brown medium that only exists to serve its masters and can be willed into submission with proper amounts of farm equipment, chemicals and technology. Our disconnect to the soil has come at a steep price. We now live in some of the most abundant times the human race has ever known yet our health as humans is at an all time low. It should not be all that shocking that the health of our soils are in equally bad shape. Consumers have long since prioritized convenience and cost over quality and nutrition. Gone are the days where a family actually knows the who, where and how about their food. Why should we feel connected to the soil? After all, it can't move, it can’t speak, it doesn’t breathe and it can't think intelligently…or can it? Much like the people that are completely dependent on it, soil is made up of trillions of individual microbes, bacterias, and fungi all working in an extremely complex harmony to complete a singular task…to live. 24 hours a day 365 days a year there is a marvelously complicated array of living things right below our feet playing a role in a movie most will never see or even know about. Thanks to marvelous advances in soil science we are just now beginning to understand how complex the soil really is and are also understanding the ramifications of mistreating it. Soils, like humans, need 4 basic things to survive…Food, Water, Shelter and Air. Completely remove just one of these things from either humans or soil and the outcome will eventually result in death.
Conviction: The soil is alive, treat it as you would any other living thing. Think of the soil as you would a loved one, love the soil as you would love a child. The soil needs food, so feed it. The soil needs water, so let it infiltrate. The soil needs shelter, so cover it. The soil needs air, so let it breathe.
Conviction II - “Grow food within an ecosystem, don’t simply have a farm.”
Background
Too often today we think of nature as a standalone landscape where birds, bees, ducks and deer roam at will. When we think of nature we picture unspoiled beauty that is constantly moving and changing with the rhythms of the season. It’s right to picture nature this way, an ecosystem unaffected by the will of man. When we think of farms most people conjure images of tractors, fields, horses and hay. We see men, women and children of different generations all toiling away in the hopes of a bountiful harvest. The truth is today that most farms operate on a size and with a level of sophistication that rivals any other small business in America. Farmers have adopted technologies, crop input strategies and equipment upgrades at an incredible rate much to the pleasure of all the people selling these goods and services. The problem arises when we constantly think of nature being “nature” and a farm being a “farm”. We build walls between these two worlds mostly because modern agriculture focuses on killing things vs. letting in more life. If you have a weed then you should spray it, if you find insects you should spray them, if a disease is present then you should spray. Herbicides, insecticides and fungicides have become the cornerstone of modern farming to the point where we no longer even need to see the thing we want to kill, we will spray as a “preventative” measure. This way of food production has led to numerous problems both in our soils and in the crops we grow. Look no further than the onslaught of herbicide resistant weeds that plague farmers from coast to coast. Glyphosate, long considered to be the “silver bullet” for weed control now possesses only mediocre control of some of the most common weeds in farming, never mind the disturbing side effects to our soil and human health. Many pest insects have developed immunity as well.. Why is it then that “nature” needs no help from man to handle its weed, pest and disease problems? Do things die in nature because of those problems, of course they do, but rarely does nature not deliver its own solution to balance the equation. I’ve spent the last decade learning how to grow food in concert with nature. I have developed an attitude of “let life come in and then let them sort it out”. It's not a sophisticated approach but I’m also not a scientist. I certainly don’t want my crops to die because of these things but it’s been over ten years, I think it would have happened by now if it was going to.
Conviction: Grow food within an ecosystem, don’t simply have a farm. Nature/soil is an extremely complex enterprise that we don’t yet fully understand . Trust that someone or something with far more knowledge than you or I designed this system. It will work… if… you work with it. Let nature back in, she’s not the enemy, she's the solution to so many of our problems.
Conviction III - “Nature/Soil wants and needs diversity, give it to her.”
Background
There’s a satisfaction you get from tilling and plowing land that can be hard for the uninitiated to fully comprehend. Most farm kids first memories are that of them and their father or grandfather on a tractor together working the land. The sights, the sounds and most importantly the smell of the dirt forever gets burned into our memories. I often wonder if most of my earliest pursuits in farming were actually just me chasing that “high” I received so many years ago. Modern farming dictates that to have a successful harvest you must start clean and stay clean all season long. This philosophy encourages farmers to kill or till anything growing in their fields that aren’t a part of the harvest. If we can all agree that we want to work with nature towards a successful harvest then we must approach what grows in our soils differently. Nowhere in nature do you typically find large tracts of land that are growing one singular species of plants. In healthy landscapes you typically find hundreds of different species growing in a harmonious relationship. This should come as no surprise given the diversity of life below the surface of the soil. So why then do we insist on our crop fields to only grow one thing, during one window of time year after year. Till, plant, spray, spray, spray, harvest, till and repeat. This form of crop production is as commonplace as it is detrimental to the health of the soil. It’s like going to a restaurant every day of your life and only being served a cold potato, you wouldn’t look or feel too good after a period of time. The greatest source of energy in our known universe is the sun. Living plants take this unending energy and inject it into the soil through their root system. The sugars, proteins, amino acids, carbohydrates and countless other things they deliver give the soil the nutrients it needs to not only survive but thrive. This process is what feeds the trillions of microorganisms that build complex webs of connections both to each other and to the plant. The realities of farming do however govern some of our activities. The possibilities of successfully harvesting multiple crops at once are currently very limited. What we can do to offset the summer monoculture is to give the soil a diverse winter crop that we plant to simply give back. We call these cover crops. A cover crop gives the soil the chance to regain its strength and resiliency by providing it a diverse buffet of offerings. This crop will not be harvested but rather terminated by various methods the following year and allowed to decompose and recycle the nutrients it obtained during its life. The covers also give the soil the shelter it needs during the wet winter months. Erosion is controlled and water is infiltrated thanks to the miles and miles of roots that are extending deep into the soil profile.
Conviction: Nature/Soil wants and needs diversity, give it to her. Recognize the favor that you ask of the soil by allowing only one thing to grow, repay that favor every single year.
Conviction IV - “Walk the land, your life depends on it.”
Background
We live in fast modern times where everyone and everything is merely a push of a button away. Your entire life can now be found on the internet: cars, vacations, homes, food, clothing and even a future husband or wife. It’s all right there waiting for you. Farmers are not immune to this phenomenon. Cloud based farm management software, satellite crop imaging, crop inputs, land leases, farm equipment and literally anything else that a farmer might need is all online these days. Many farmers now spend a large portion of their time in an office pouring over data that their farm generated and was sold back to them by a tech company. Yield maps, fertility maps, drainage maps, plat maps all overlaid and interconnected to give farmers insights into what is happening on their farm. Some farm management systems even allow the owner to send work orders through an app eliminating the need to communicate with employees. All of these things have been developed in the name of efficiency and to help drive productivity and profits. Farmers are becoming more and more disconnected from the very thing that they depend on every single day. They didn’t dream these things up, someone dreamed it up for them and did a damn good job of selling them on the idea. What many don’t realize is how much pressure the American is chronically under to produce. A brief look at suicide rates among farmers vs others shows that you they are 3.5 times more likely to take their own life. Why? The pressures are almost too numerous to talk about…”How am I gonna pay the bank back? What should I try to do to make more money? Can we really afford to keep going? What would dad think if he saw the shape I’m in? What time was I supposed to be home? How am I going to fix this breakdown? Why won’t it rain? Why won’t it stop raining? Is there gonna be a future here for my children? Did I remember to lock the shop?” The list goes on and on and plays on repeat inside the farmers head all day everyday. It’s the life we chose but it’s certainly not what we signed up for. I began walking the land some time ago and it does something for me…it reconnects me to the thing that I have a close kinship with. After some time walking you begin to notice certain things, you smell things, you find things, you remember things. I need that time out walking the land, to listen to it, to understand it. In another life I too turned to technology to solve my problems. I made it far enough down that path to realize that it only leads to more paths, more opportunities to buy services and products I don’t need from companies that paper up billions of dollars in profits from the American farmer every year. Thankfully, I returned home…I returned to the land.
Conviction: Walk the land, your life depends on it. If you give it the opportunity it will begin to speak to you, trust whatever it says.
Your Friend,
Johnny Hunter II
Conservator, Farmer, and CEO | Castor River, Inc.
