| Volume I, Number 4 | September 1996 |
Bob Fogg’s committment to environmental stewardship forms the backbone of his farming system. His organic farm plan describes the cultural practices and inputs he uses to produce food certified by the Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA). This plan reflects Bob’s agreement with the "basic principles" presented in the OCIA standards:
Bob began farming in the mid-seventies, milking cows on a farm not far from the one he grew up on in central Michigan. By the early eighties, he had become very concerned about what conventional farming practices were doing to the environment, and what they might be doing to his health and that of his family. During those same years, his father died, and he started renting land on his parents’ farm. He chose not to continue the family poultry business, and the laying house sat empty.
In 1987 he became a charter member of the Michigan chapter of the OCIA and began producing certified organic crops the following year. His organic farm plan consisted of crop histories for each field and a five-year transition plan outlining how he would bring the entire operation into organic production. Inspectors continue to visit his farm annually, re-certifying crops he has grown before and certifying anything new he’s producing. Producing food that is certified organic is an overarching goal on Bob’s farm, and any actions he takes must comply with OCIA standards.
Within this restriction, however, Bob has been able to make big changes on his farm. In 1993, his wife, JoAnn, got an opportunity to take a full-time off-farm job. She wanted to make this career move, so they sold off the dairy herd. Then they bought the land they had been renting from Bob’s mother, adding 120 acres to their 250, and Bob expanded his clear-hilum soybean production. The soybeans are processed into soymilk by a Michigan company.
Bob had been unable to sell his cows’ milk as organic until quite recently, because there was no certification procedure. The market for organic soymilk, however, already existed, and getting certification for the soybeans was part of the routine inspection. Now about half of the farm’s acreage is in soybeans. The rest is a very diverse mix of crops—barley, corn, oats, rye, two kinds of wheat, hairy vetch, buckwheat, hay, pasture and a few acres of vegetables.
For many years, the Foggs had set up a roadside stand during the late summer and early fall, selling their melons, tomatoes, beans, sweet corn, winter squash and pumpkins. Business was good, and Bob really liked selling directly to the consumer—he made more money and he got to talk to the people who ate his produce.
So when Bob and JoAnn started "tossing around ideas" for the 10,000 square foot laying house, the idea of opening a retail store for their produce seemed like a good fit. Having been involved in the organic movement for so long, Bob feels that he should try to have "a bona fide interface with the consumer," learning and teaching at the same time. He believes he and JoAnn have the knowledge and the expertise needed to run a retail business.
Bob has also found that although he can sell his crops at premium prices, and although the consumer pays more for them, there is a significant gap between his selling price and the retail price. Organic farmers don’t necessarily make more money than conventional farmers, he points out. One of the goals for this new retail market would be to share the retail mark-up with the customers: Bob would make more money, while they paid less than at "health-food" stores in nearby Lansing.
Bob called his county’s development office for some advice. He found out that 140,000 people live within fifteen miles of the farm, and 500,000 within twenty-five miles. He also took into account the average growth in the market for organically-grown food—about 10% per year. When he and JoAnn considered the amount of commuter traffic that passes the farm on the freeway between Lansing and Jackson, they decided to go ahead.
The idea has evolved to include putting some hens back into the building, too, and selling organic eggs. They plan to house about 2,000 hens in the back half of the building. These hens will not live in the cages left over from the old days of egg production; instead, they will live on the floor, and be allowed to range inside and out, as specified in the OCIA production standards.
The rest of the building will contain a sales area, a big walk-in cooler, office space, storage space, an area for cleaning and packaging their produce as well as food bought from other organic farmers, an egg cleaning and packaging area, and a meeting space with a demonstration kitchen called "the Learning Center." Bob hopes to host community meetings, classes in food preservation and preparation, and sessions on economic and health issues involved in food production in the Learning Center.
Construction began in August of 1995, and the store is now open. Most of the customers are local people who have heard about it by word of mouth. There is a full line of groceries, including packaged organic foods, fresh fish and eggs, vegetables, and breads made by a local bakery from Bob’s grain. Bob says he wants to start out slowly and get things working right before he advertises to those 500,000 people. Ironically, JoAnn has now found another career opportunity—on the farm. She will be running the store while Bob continues to raise the crops and manage the laying hens.
The Fogg children, who now help out with the raising and selling of vegetables, can be a part of the future of the farm and market if they want, Bob says. If one of his sons or his daughter wanted to adopt one of the farm’s many enterprises, there would be room. Bob’s not planning for that yet, though. He’s concentrating on integrating the new retail business and the new flock of chickens with ongoing improvement of his cash crops, and a continued committment to caring for his land.
--Jill MacKenzie
The Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) has taken a very positive stance towards comprehensive farm planning, setting up pilot projects in six states. Agency Chief Paul Johnson envisions his organization providing scientific and technical support, helping to educate landowners, and cooperating with other government agencies to help farmers and ranchers come up with whole farm plans. This role is in keeping with the traditions of the NRCS, which for years has encouraged and assisted landowners to "set goals and make decisions about the use of their natural resources in a way that ensures healthy and productive land."
Comprehensive farm plans, Johnson believes, must include a detailed inventory of the soil, water, wildlife and livestock, wild plants and crop plants. With the inventory in hand, and the assistance of farm service providers, farmers will be able to assess the capabilities and needs of their land. NRCS will collaborate with landowners, educating them about their resources, so that they can make informed decisions about land use.
The employees of NRCS will cooperate with the other organizations that work with farmers to design and implement comprehensive farm plans, helping farmers meet legal requirements while enhancing profitability. They will continue to oversee compliance with regulations for which they have traditionally been responsible, and work with other government agencies to diminish the burden of compliance with various regulations, but they won’t assume any other agencies’ responsibilities.
Johnson embraces comprehensive farm planning as a positive step towards "sustaining the natural resources on which all life depends," and the agency is going ahead with pilot projects in six states, including Great Lakes Basin states New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota. The Pennsylvania pilot project is essentially an extension of One Plan, detailed in the May issue. The Minnesota and New York projects are described below.
Farmers in the watershed of the Whitewater River in southeastern Minnesota have been invited to participate in a whole farm planning pilot project. This area was chosen by the NRCS because of high levels of soil erosion on the 230 dairy farms and 550 other farms raising beef, hogs, small grains, hay, forest products, horticultural crops and row crops in the watershed. The program is not part of a total watershed protection plan, however; instead, its goal is to help farmers come up with long-range, holistic, farm-specific plans. Other agencies will cooperate with NRCS, including the state Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the local Soil and Water Conservation District and Cooperative Extension Service, and the Land Stewardship Project, a non-profit organization devoted to sustainable agriculture and caring for rural land.
Representatives from these organizations, along with farmers in the watershed, have been meeting to design a comprehensive farm planning process that farmers will find useful and straightforward. Mark Kunz, NRCS District Conservationist, hopes the project will "provide farmers with the tools to do comprehensive assessments of their natural resources, on their own or with assistance." The pilot project team is developing worksheets that should enable farmers to assess the resource concerns for their cropland, pastures, wetlands, woodlands and wildlife. Once an area of concern has been identified, the worksheets suggest alternative practices that farmers could implement, and recommend agencies that can assist farmers with planning and implementing these practices.
Through this program, farmers will be encouraged to consider the connections between resource protection and productivity, and to set "realistic" production goals. This planning process will help farmers avoid the confusion and costs they might otherwise encounter when planning to conserve natural resources while profiting from their farms.
Another pilot project is shaping up in the Nemadji River watershed in northern Minnesota. NRCS Conservationist Jeff Stewart has held meetings with a team including foresters and wildlife biologists from the Department of Natural Resources, representatives of local Soil and Water Conservation Districts and local Extension personnel. These agencies have agreed to coordinate their efforts while working on whole farm plans for nine area families.
This planning project does not use the worksheet approach worked out by the group in the southern part of the state. Instead, a resource team of two or three professionals from the above agencies visits each farm. The makeup of the team depends on the major land uses and type of farm. Team members work with each farm family to discuss objectives and conservation practices to help achieve the farm’s goals. They walk the property and use maps, soil tests, and records from previous years, along with the farmer’s personal knowledge of the land, to develop the comprehensive farm plan. Using their Field Office Computer System, NRCS personnel will enter information about the farm system as it is, then add conservation practices and plans for desired future conditions. This software can track the implementation of changes and monitor the success of conservation practices over time. Stewart points out that although the information is stored at the NRCS office, the plan belongs to the farmer and is entirely confidential.
The resource team also feels strongly that the success of whole farm plan implementation is tied to comprehensive goal setting by the farm family. "Goals need to be set considering economic, environmental and social issues," says Stewart. To help families get involved in deciding on goals for their farms, the NRCS, Carlton County Soil and Water Conservation District, Minnesota Extension Service and the Northeast Minnesota Sustainable Farming Association have teamed up to sponsor a Holistic Resource Management® workshop.
This pilot project focuses on the sixty farms in the watershed of Skaneateles (skinny-AT-ull-us) Lake, the public water source for the city of Syracuse. In response to the Safe Drinking Water Act of the late eighties, the city began taking steps to ensure the quality of its public water supply. According to project manager Jeff Ten Eyck, the quality of the city’s drinking water has been and still is "excellent," and one of the project’s goals is to keep it that way. The primary concern is that pathogens could enter the lake from animal wastes. Water quality could also be adversely affected by phosporous and sediments from cropland runoff, and by nitrates, pesticides and petroleum products. About half the farms in the area are dairies, a quarter are livestock operations, mostly beef, and a quarter are cash grain farms.
City officials drew on the experiences of New York City, which had considered taking legal action to regulate farming in the watersheds of its reservoirs, but after meeting considerable resistance, turned to a comprehensive farm planning approach. Representatives of Syracuse met with an ad hoc task force of farmers and agency personnel to develop a program that would keep pathogens and toxic chemicals out of the water. The resulting program has been named one of the NRCS pilots.
The Skaneateles watershed farm planning process is a tiered approach, in which each farmer first completes a questionnaire about the farm, identifying areas where farming practices could be detrimental to the environment. Steve Nemec, a cash grain farmer who helped develop this planning program and who currently serves on the whole farm plan review committee, says the questionnaire deals with the most basic farming practices. All the participating farmers answered "yes" to one or more of the questions in tier I, which included, "Do you disturb soil?" and "Do you have livestock?"
The second tier is a set of worksheets that help farmers assess the environmental risks of their farm systems, while suggesting alternatives to higher-risk practices. Nemec says that working on the tier II assessment is an educational process. "Tier II proves that we need to move to tier III."
The third tier is a comprehensive farm plan, devised by a four-person team including the farmer, a Conservationist from the NRCS, a Soil & Water Conservation District Agronomist, and an Extension Farm Business Management Specialist.
The plans are designed to solve water quality issues within the context of the farm business. The teams consider the entire farm operation—the natural resources, crops, livestock, structures and economics—as they come up with solutions to environmental problems. Each plan is reviewed by a committee of seven farmers and two city officials, then by the SWCD. Farmers whose plans are approved and who implement the changes they have planned will be in compliance with all environmental regulations.
And farmers are likely to implement the changes, since the city of Syracuse will pay one hundred percent of the associated costs. According to Ten Eyck, the cost to the city will still be less than half the cost of a filtration plant to treat the water. Farmers have been willing to participate in the project because of the city’s committment to paying for any changes the teams plan.
After the first year and a half of the program’s existence, forty-one farmers, accounting for ninety percent of the farmland in the watershed, are currently participating. These farmers have completed tiers I and II, the questionnaires and environmental assessments, and one by one are working on tier III, the whole farm plans. So far only four plans have been completed, because the process is so time-consuming. But meanwhile, Ten Eyck points out, the farmers who have done the first two tiers have learned about the project, found out about the kinds of changes they may need to make on their farms, and may be coming up with environmental protection ideas on their own.
Nemec and the other farmers who make up the review committee are pleased to have taken an active role in policymaking. "Farmers can’t let engineers and agency people make laws for them," he says. He and the other committee members have worked hard to come up with a program that will achieve the city’s goals for water quality protection while also "helping farmers do a better job."
--Jill MacKenzie
Highlights of two Great Lakes Basin Farm Planning Network Steering Committee members’ activities:
Steve Bonney of Indiana participated recently in SARE Chapter III workshops, sharing his knowledge of whole farm planning processes and outcomes. Chapter III is the education portion of SARE, and the workshops are attended by Extension educators, producers, representatives of non-profits, and employees of other government agencies. At workshops in the North Central Region, which includes Basin states Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, Steve presented "Approaches to Whole Farm Planning." Other sessions included "Finding the balance between systems thinking and farm planning tools," and introductions to Holistic Resource Management® and PLANETOR.
Michelle Miller of Wisconsin, working with Jim Enlow of the NRCS, recently brought together the new Wisconsin Working Group for Whole Farm Planning. Composed of individual producers along with representatives from Extension, DNR, Farm Bureau, NRCS, National Farm Organization, CENEX, county Land Conservation Departments and Land Conservation Committees and World Wildlife Fund, this group will try to link conservation and farm economics, developing information sources and planning tools for Wisconsin farmers.
The working group will produce three briefs on the future of whole farm planning in the state, describing the features and processes of farm planning at the policy level, the watershed or regional level, and the individual farm level. They will also suggest indicators of progress in implementation at each level. Once the reports are finalized, an expanded group will develop an action plan with assignments for each participating organization.
This work is important, Michelle says, because "we have the opportunity to clarify the roles of each organization with a stake in farm planning, and to coordinate our efforts. We can then develop tools to help farmers better manage all the resources available to them human and environmental—to better meet their personal and professional goals."
Even though Michigan was not designated as one of the six pilot project states, NRCS employees there are going ahead with their own approach to comprehensive farm planning. A public meeting was held in November as a first step in creating a farm planning project in the Grand Traverse Bay watershed, as an initial attempt to find out what farmers want to see in a farm planning process. "Some farmers have come to us wanting our help," says Roy Hall, an NRCS Resource Conservationist based in East Lansing. "They want to be proactive and be able to show they are managing their resources in a responsible manner."
"Whole farm planning," Hall explains, "means taking a look at all the resources on your farm from the perspective of this question: Are they sustainable in their present use, or are they contributing to any resource or environmental concern?" He defines sustainable as a way of farming that allows the farmer to continue practices he’s using indefinitely, without causing natural resource destruction or negatively impacting others who share the environment. These ‘others’ might be human neighbors or the plants and animals that populate fields, woodlots and wetlands.
How might this whole farm planning process work? A farmer would work with his district conservationist and evaluate six natural resource components of his farm. SWAPA + H is the NRCS acronym for these components: soil, water, air, plants, animals and humans. There are obviously hundreds of interactions between them. The kind of manure-handling system a dairy farm has, for example, can affect on-farm wetlands, off-farm bodies of water, the farm’s fertilizer bill, its cropping program, downwind odors, the amount of labor required, the ability to achieve quality premiums for producing clean milk, and so on.
Making it all fit together requires expertise from outside the NRCS, says Hall. NRCS wants to work with other agencies, such as the Extension service, to draw in the knowledge to create a sustainable system. The process will require mutual trust.
What’s the payoff? "Relief from environmental fears," Hall says. "A whole farm plan might be fashioned in such a way as to meet all federal, state and local environmental regulations. And it could be built from a basic farm conservation plan, so there would be one plan for the whole farm."
Hall emphasizes that the program will be strictly voluntary, and is intended to be farmer-friendly. "We want to work with farmers who want to identify problems and find ways to mitigate them. This is an initiative on our part. This is not a government program, and there is not a lot of policy, procedure or paperwork."
A comprehensive farm plan is a long-term tool to keep farm operators and landowners focused on the management of their inventoried resources, protecting water and other natural resources from degradation. It includes:
INVENTORY of farm resources, including soil tests and maps, cropping plans, economic data, and farm site information.
GOALS for profitability, pollution prevention, production and long-term ecosystem enhancement.
ANALYSIS of management options, identifying problems and opportunities in the context of regulatory problems.
STRATEGY for putting the plan into action, as well as to monitor and evaluate how the plan is working.
Comprehensive farm planning allows farmers to take a proactive approach to improving farm profitability, environmental health, and quality of life. It will encourage farmers to:
LEARN more about alternatives for protecting health, safety and the environment.
REDUCE environmental liability.
PROTECT and enhance the value of farm assets.
DEMONSTRATE farmers' role as good stewards.
IMPLEMENT cost-effective conservation measures that increase profit.
ADDRESS multiple issues simultaneously, such as productivity, profitability, environmental impact and conservation.
The Minnesota Project
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