Against the grind - are diversified organic vegetable farms the ideal model?

This article is written from the perspective of a vegetable farmer and is therefore focused on this realm of agriculture.

The writer of this piece hawking his wares at the farmers’ market, before he’d totally burnt out.

The commitment to crop biodiversity on small-scale, ecologically-driven vegetable farms has been the prevailing methodology for so long now that it is hardly ever questioned or considered a topic worth debating. Attend any major organic farming conference and you will be surrounded by workshops extolling the benefits of cultivating a wide array of cash crops, cover crops, hedgerows, and other interventions. Biodiversity is good for the soil, native insect and animal populations, and a farmer’s quality of life — less monotonous than the job of a commodity crop grower at least. These are the claims put forth in the organic farm industry, and I more or less agree with them as purported benefits.

However, despite the many legitimate reasons a vegetable farmer would want to incorporate plant diversity into their growing systems, there are fundamental downsides to the model for biodiversity most commonly proposed by the organic farming industry. The current paradigm for the small-to-midsize organic vegetable farm is to grow an incredibly wide variety of food crops over the course of a season. This commitment to biodiversity leads to overwork for both farmers and farmworkers, crop de-specialization, and the potential for every new season to feel like a business start-up’s frenzied first year or two of getting off the ground. Instead of the farm settling into consistent production year in and year out, each spring, summer, and fall finds workers scrambling to keep up with an overabundance of crops and systems. 

In many ways, the implicit acceptance of the diversified model as the ideal land management strategy in vegetable farming makes a lot of sense. The modern organic farm movement arose beginning in the 1940s in direct opposition to negative social and ecological side effects  wrought by industrial agriculture. Industrialization led to many rapid transformations in farming, with one of the most noticeable effects being the increased use of monocropping. Farmers were now heavily incentivized to grow only one or a few commodity crops. The introduction of tool mechanization and other modern farm techniques in the last one hundred and fifty years has contributed to our current hyper-uniform agricultural landscape of corn, soy, wheat, and just a few other edible plants. This process of industrialization intensified with the advent of the Green Revolution in the 1950s, which saw the introduction of fertilizer-heavy high-yielding new crop varieties. 

The organic farm movement presented an alternative program for farmers. Adherents were instructed to grow as many different crops on their land as was feasible from a land management and market demand perspective. On the demand end, a small but well-resourced customer base developed to buoy the organic farm’s commitment to crop biodiversity, encouraging growers to cultivate a myriad of plants in order to satisfy the middle class expectations of a bountiful display at the farmers’ market. This consumer push for farms to raise a medley of food crops has been compounded by the community-supported agriculture model (CSA). A CSA-based farm is typically front-loaded with cash at the start of the season through purchasing of farm shares, most commonly redeemed in the form of a weekly pickup of vegetables and other farm products throughout the growing season. Understandably, CSA customer-members expect a diversity of offerings in return for what is often a sizable chunk of change handed over to the farmer. After all, it would not be very satisfying to drop over $900 in the spring just to receive feed corn, soybeans, and wheat for six months. 

I’ve worked on a number of highly diversified vegetable operations. And I have generally enjoyed the work and camaraderie that develops on a farm of this type. I have also witnessed what seems to be an inherent tendency towards overwork and disorganization that arises with maximal crop biodiversity. The tomatoes start coming in right as the summer squash, cucumbers, pole beans, and celery are coming to maturity, and the farmers and farmworkers are left chasing after them to keep them maintained, harvested, processed and sold. Even in the best of times, when production is dialed in to as close to perfection as it can be, it is impossible to synchronize this cacophony of crops into a reasonable growth and ripening schedule. Just as a CSA/market farmer is setting to task on an immaculate bed of arugula, they look over to another section of the field and see the damn carrots are slowly getting taken over by weeds. And who has time to clean that up when the next round of eggplant needs to be started in the seed nursery?

We have an increasingly challenging landscape and climate in which to grow food for human sustenance. Why has the sustainable farm world added even more complications to a task which already seems almost insurmountable? On the average farm today, workers must contend with worsening floods, droughts, extreme heat, and all the attendant pests and disease that accompany these features of our changed climate. To make these matters more difficult, workers on the standard diversified “sustainable”/organic vegetable farm must try to combat and adapt to these ravages of climate change while simultaneously managing the production of upwards of fifty crops at any given time. 

It seems clear enough that agriculture will need to, and is already being forced to, adapt to our warming climate. The industrialization of agriculture arose at a particular historical juncture — during the industrialization of the productive forces in society, writ large. The organic farm movement sprung forth at its own precise moment in time — a reaction to the ecological destruction wrought by large agribusiness. We must now develop an adaptable model of farming for our current era. 

Don’t worry — I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Diversity on a vegetable operation, within measure, is a good thing. From my own experiences working on monocrop-oriented farms, I can confidently say that I prefer the quality of work I have found on diversified farms. While it does really suck to be that farmer who is enjoying a perfect arugula harvest only to catch a glimpse of the next succession of carrots being slowly enveloped by weeds, I’ll still take that over the monotony that comes with only interacting with one or two crop species over the course of a season. 

My main contention with the current model for sustainable agriculture is that it lionizes crop diversity without considering the labor and production inefficiencies that can stem from one farm operation managing such a heavy load. We are constantly told within organic farm circles that plant diversity makes our land and businesses more “resilient.” But how resilient can a polycrop farm be if the workforce is overworked to the point of burnout? And how resilient can a diversified farm business be if a significant percentage of the crops in rotation are suffering due to the deprioritization and despecialization that almost inevitably occurs when we take on more than we can handle? 

We must chart a new course for sustainable agriculture that is informed by a need to revolutionize how labor occurs on the farm. The organic farm movement was correct to point out the ecological deficiencies of a purely monocropped system, and to fight for a more biodiverse model. Where the movement fell short, as is the case for many social justice and environmental movements rooted in the middle class, is in addressing the particular forms of labor exploitation which arose on diversified farm operations which own and manage land privately. In other words, organic crusaders landed at the correct conclusion that growing a wide array of plant species is environmentally preferable to single crop systems, but did not consider the ideal configuration of labor on a diversified farm operation. 

To build an agricultural landscape that is defined by biodiverse cropping systems, but that does not wear down its workforce (who are usually underpaid, in part due to production inefficiencies), we must strike at the causes of this form of labor exploitation — private land ownership and the irrationalities of a free market system. Instead of one individual or family overseeing a multi-crop farm, with farmers and farmworkers running hither and thither trying to keep fifty plant species alive, could we envision something like small bands of workers collectively managing five or six crops on modest acreage within a larger bioregional network of farms? And what would a planned and rational agricultural economy look like, under democratic worker control? Those are questions best answered in a separate post — look out for some musings in the off-season.