Sustainability discussions in the dark

This is the second time in a week I've seen an article discussing the foci of sustainable ag in the wrong order. It seems for many folks sustainable ag still means organic, while others want to use sustainability as a marketing tool (way more on that later!) and promote the environmental components first and foremost in selling to gullible consumers.

Today's Rodale Institute newsletter contains a review of Farming in the Dark by Rhonda Janke, a former research director at Rodale, now an associate professor at Kansas State University. Her specialties are actually very similar to mine -- soil and water quality, medicinal herbs and alternative crops sustainable cropping systems. Her book, though based on interviews of a small and admittedly unrepresentative sample of "even sustainable farmers", supposedly reveals why sustainability is not emerging "as a parallel movement to a large, centralized, corporate system." She asks why sustainable ag hasn't solved the problem of farmers needing to take day jobs to pay the bills, obtain health insurance and support the family while farming into the night, and then finds a group of "speakers who are able to eloquently capture and debate the attitudes within the movement".

That's where our interests diverge. First, it's not hard to support a conclusion if you hand-pick your sample. It's not good science, but that's what happens when you try to support a movement. All of the agricultural enterprises equated with sustainability - direct marketing, niche/value-added marketing, specialty crops and "all the latest innovations" - are not in and of themselves sustainable. They are products and processes that innovative farmers can use to create economically viable farm businesses (note that none of them address the environmental constraints of sustainability, mostly the economic and in a small way the social). Those that use them successfully, as in all businesses, succeed and sustain their livelihoods AND their families. Those without the entrepreneurial skills to grow and sell products, in whatever form, do not survive.

Sustaining any small business takes work. Sustaining agricultural businesses takes a lot of work, hard and long hours, well before sunrise and long into the night. Yes, in the dark!