What Is Efficient Farming?

on dust storms and happy sheep

In a previous article, I introduced you to the lovely farm in Vietschow, a farm where each sheep is still tenderly called by its name and where you can taste the freshest milk and the best cheese possible (very subjectively speaking). Now I want to take a closer look at the surroundings of this secluded spot in the world, a picturesque region called Mecklenburg. And a place where a hidden drama is taking place. A drama which, I believe, is being replayed in many parts of the world.

Dangers on the road

Imagine a warm summer’s day. You are driving around the countryside, when suddenly, you get caught in a sand storm. A huge cloud of sand envelops you, and you can’t see the road anymore! Luckily, in just a few seconds the storm is over and you drive on… but wait?!? There is no desert within a million miles from where you are, and the Sahara surely hasn’t just moved to your neighbourhood overnight. Where could this cloud of sand have come from?

A similar scenario has played out in Mecklenburg, Northern Germany, in 2011. The huge dust storm tragically ended in a pile-up on the highway. In this multiple collision of 80 cars, 8 people died and more than 100 were injured. But the dust didn’t come from any desert, nor from the nearby coast. It had been stirred up from the huge agricultural fields in the flat, windy area around.

The treasure beneath our feet

This is the drama of the most precious agricultural good we have, our soil. The soil makes it possible to grow food in the first place. But its fertility also guarantees that we will be able to do so in the future, as well. The most fertile component of the soil, humus or soil organic matter, is mostly found in the top layer. And it is precisely this indispensable part of the soil that gets carried away in these “sand storms”. When the wind blows strongly (which happens fairly often in this part of the world) and the fields lay bare, soil erosion is a common scenario. Each spring, when the corn is sown, one can observe the precious top layer getting irretrievably lost under the wind and rain.

Who’s fault is this tragedy?

To make soil erosion possible, a couple of factors must play together. Strong wind or rainfall, large fields that are not covered by any vegetation and slopes in the landscape. The main reason why in this part of the world soil erosion has such a dramatic impact is that the fields are usually huge. Several hundreds of hectares are not a rarity, and often, there are no trees or shrubs in between to slow down the wind. This makes it easy for the wind to pick up momentum. Additionally, farmers very often grow corn, which grows but slowly in the spring and leaves the ground bare for a long period of time. These factors combined make the perfect blend for a tragical loss of precious, fertile topsoil. If such events continue for several years, soil fertility decreases, meaning less yield or eventually no harvests at all.

To make matters worse, a loss of humus from the soil also means a loss of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, since humus stores lots of carbon. Carbon dioxide, in turn, contributes to global warming and climate change. But this implies that the opposite is possible, as well: that the soil can store lots of carbon if it contains humus or soil organic matter. In this way, agriculture can contribute to diminishing climate change by storing carbon, or to making it worse by releasing carbon. The benefits from humus-rich soils are numerous, so we should try to store as much in our soils as possible, right? How can we do so?

Preserving our soil

This is where we are taken back to our little sheep farm in the middle of this wide, beautiful countryside in the North of Germany. Here, about 60 sheep, plus lambs, are grazing on 15 hectares of pastures. Pastures and meadows have the remarkable ability to build up humus in the soil. They do this through a huge network of grassroots, ever growing and dying, from spring to winter, year in and year out. This creates a lot of organic matter in the soil. In this way, pastures can store even more carbon than forests can! The sheep farm in Vietschow, viewed as a whole, actually stores more greenhouse gases (through the carbon in the soil) than it produces (through the animals’ methane emissions and the energy the farm is using).

Fertile landscapes

Knowing all of this transformed my vision of Mecklenburg’s landscape of small villages scattered among the vast fields of corn, and very few pastures… A landscape too familiar in many parts of the world, from the corn belt of the USA, to the endless fields of the Ukraine or Russia. These are all very fertile areas that once used to be wild pastures or prairies. In the Ukraine, erosion has cost the soil approximately half of its humus in the last 100 years. The question is, for how long will these areas remain as fertile? How many sand storms will it take to wipe out the organic matter from the soil?

As always, matters are not that simple. Farmers here have such huge fields because the Communists in Eastern Germany introduced so-called LPGs. These are agricultural enterprises in which several farms were combined into one. The agricultural policy of the European Union also stimulates such large-scale farming through its subsidy system. Farmers are given subsidies based on the amount of hectares they possess. More hectares means more money. And this, in turn, results in fewer farmers working more and more land. It’s not that the farmers are lazy or don’t want to conserve their soil. But time and space dimensions make that an impossible task. In the narrow time frame for sowing, say, cover crops, they cannot possibly work all their fields with the limited workforce appropriately. The typical farming dimensions in Mecklenburg are 4 farmers per 1000 hectares.

That’s “efficient” farming – large fields, few people employed, good harvests, efficient machinery.

But what is efficiency really?

In the case of the sheep farm in Vietschow, two people are working 15 hectares of land, producing 10 000 kg of milk in a year with their 60 sheep. The typical farming dimensions in Mecklenburg are 4 farmers working 1000 hectares. 1000 hectares of corn can feed roughly 1000 cows yearly, each producing 10 000 kg of milk per year. But knowing about the above-mentioned environmental impact of large-scale farming, especially of growing corn, suddenly changes the picture.

So, what is more efficient? While many would belittle these tiny, “inefficient” farms, like the sheep farm in Vietschow, it is interesting to put things into perspective. On average, the sheep farmer needs just 7.5 hectares to make a living, while the large-scale farmer needs 250 hectares to do the same. Added to this comes the environmental balance of both systems, measured in the greenhouse gases they store or produce.

Black or white, or…

I’ve now compared two extreme examples (large-scale versus small-scale farming), to prompt you to overthink what efficient farming really is. But I do not think there is one “right” and one “wrong” way, since life is much too complex for such simplicity… There are so many ways to do farming, so many exciting options for building a sustainable future on the planet.

In many parts of the world, we are now feeding ourselves through intensive, large-scale agriculture. But the price of this kind of agriculture might be too high. It is the price of losing our most precious good, fertile soil and an intact environment. We can do better than that. The farming of the future will definitely have to consider the impact it has on our environment and all of us living on the earth, ultimately. And it will need smart solutions for the problems we are experiencing in the face of an ever-growing population on the planet.

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Through my blog, I hope to inspire this kind of smart, sustainable agriculture. Or, as I like to put it: inspire plentiful lands. There are many ways to support such an agriculture, so stay tuned to find out how!