Building Resilience: Better Farms, Better Farmers

A diverse mixture of winter wheat, rapeseed, and radishes on springtime fields in Kent County, Maryland. This mixture provides forage for pollinators while absorbing rainfall and keeping soils in place, good for the fields, and good for the environment.

Modern farming has three goals: to be productive, to be efficient, to be profitable. In the traditional, heritage model of farming, one where learned skills and techniques are handed down from one generation to another, we’ve used that knowledge to refine the process, the crops, the approach in order to maximize efficiency and production. Tended by machines, our farms have become less natural and more industrial, with one clear way of doing things in order to turn a profit.

Somewhere along the way we lost a crucial element of farming, and perhaps the most incredible, intuitive aspect of it—our land sense. As farmers, in our pursuit of increased yield and decreased costs, we stopped responding to our fields and our regional environment. Instead, we’ve controlled it. That control—of nutrients, of water, of problematic insects and weeds—has stripped away some of our most basic understanding of Mother Nature’s nuances. We no longer follow her lead—she follows ours.

But if there’s anything we’ve learned in the last ten years, that sense of control is mistaken. More than ever, we’re experiencing hotter, drier summers and cooler, wetter winters, and a rigid approach to farming can’t adapt accordingly. We’re losing topsoil to erosion, and below the ground, our fields are barren, stripped of nutrients. We’re spending more time and money to do things the way we always have, but this is not the environment or climate past generations would have recognized. The world has changed. More than ever, it’s time to innovate.

There can be a different way. One that honors the farming knowledge accrued over generations in the interest of production, efficiency and profit, but revives that dormant sense of the land. It’s an approach that takes its cues from Mother Nature and provides solutions for problems we’ve never attempted to address through farming—things like reducing carbon emissions, boosting pollinator species and biodiversity, and improving water quality. It’s been called climate smart farming, but I think it’s more accurate to say its climate resilient. It’s a way of using cover crops creatively, combined with no-till methods, to design a farm responsively for the environmental factors—or the world—we’re experiencing now.

At Harborview Farms, climate resilient farming means following Mother Nature’s lead, mimicking what happens naturally—plant growth—when I’m not growing food. Rather than empty fields from fall through spring, my farm is always green with cover crops. I use a diverse mixture for my cover crops, things that flower and benefit birds, insects and pollinators while they help to hold the soil in place in the wetter months. The cover crops absorb runoff, reducing erosion and minimizing nutrient pollution, and they also help to fix nitrogen, improving and enriching my soil.

Planting cover crops and avoiding tilling can help to fix and reduce atmospheric carbon— a big global benefit for a simple change in modern farming practices.

Planting cover crops also does double duty for carbon emissions. Having hairy vetch or rye growing in normally fallow seasons means that for more months out of the year, there are plants actively using photosynthesis to take CO2 from the atmosphere and put it into the soil.

And by avoiding tilling or plowing your fields in favor of cover crops, carbon remains safely fixed in the soil. Locked underground, it’s prevented from exposure to oxygen in the atmosphere that would transform it to planet-warming carbon dioxide.

There are other, real benefits to climate resilient farming. For me, one of the most important has been a reconnection to my land and my passion for farming.

With climate resilient farming, my fields are better able to thrive in severe weather, my soils are richer and more productive, and I’m bettering the environment. But there are other, more personal benefits.  By being open to change and adaptation—observing and taking my cues from nature—I’m getting back to the roots of farming. Getting the shovel out and seeing the earthworms thrive in my living fields has reawakened a sense of not just how but why we farm. It’s something my father knew, but one that my generation of farmers has been disconnected from in our modern, fully-mechanized farming environment.

I’m only now learning about the natural ecosystem on my own farm, but I’m not alone. Many farmers of my generation have lost touch with their land sense. But it isn’t too late to reconnect. By introducing cover crops and flowers, I’ve not just improved my farm, I’ve reinvigorated my passion for farming. As humans, we have farmed for millennia—motivated not just by the need for food but by the process of growing it, and the reward of watching Mother Nature grow what we’ve planted. It’s not just about hopping on a tractor to see how many acres we can get done in a day. For me, climate resilient farming is about reconnecting with the fundamental enjoyment of watching the bees and the birds and feeling the soil.

It’s about becoming, like my father and grandfather, a resilient farmer working with nature—and rekindling my joy in a way of life lived close to the land.