Farms that Succeed Using LISA

Many people wonder whether commercial scale farms can succeed financially while farming with low-input sustainable agricultural (LISA) systems. (See Part V, Chapter 3.)

Dozens of successful cases have been documented, although many other farms have failed financially or have suffered major losses during their efforts to reduce the use of purchased inputs.

How does a farmer succeed in adopting LISA farming practices? Three essential steps are to: overcome prejudices against such methods, avoid the lethal pitfalls, and build a gradual transition strategy.

Overcoming Prejudices

Because "organic farming" became popular in the counter-culture movement of the 1960's, many farmers equate any effort to reduce the use of purchased impacts with "hippies," and impoverished back-to-the-earth groupies. Farmers who are good managers (that is, the ones who are still in business) are not easily taken in by grateful testimonials of "true believers" who claim that all you have to do is stop using purchased inputs such as chemicals go cold turkey.

While a healthy skepticism is a good device against fantasy, a totally closed mind is a barrier to progress. If a farmer firmly believes that low-input methods are impractical and inherently unprofitable, this belief can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. An increasing number of main-line, commercial-scale farmers are adopting low-input farming methods.

In recent years, credible success stories have appeared in the agricultural press, such as Farm Journal, The Furrow, AgriData News, and the Landowner. Such respected publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Des Moines Register, Newsweek, and The Economist have carried stories describing farms that have operated profitably for many years with little or no use of agricultural chemicals. And while stories such as these do not provide scientific proof or a guarantee of success, they do illustrate interesting possibilities.

As noted by the U.S. Senate in its 1988 appropriations bill for LISA pro-grams, "A growing number of farmers are now looking for reliable information on reduced input farming systems." The key is "reliable" information.

Avoiding Mistakes

Realizing the risks and difficulties of making a transition from chemical-intensive to low-input farming systems, a number of private and public organizations offer guidance on management mistakes that should be avoided. Many publications and conferences are being offered by sources such as the Institute for Alternative Agriculture in Greenbelt, MD; the Leopold Center in Ames, IA; the Rodale Institute's New Farm magazine; the Extension System; the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society in Windsor, ND; the Kansas Rural Center in Witing, KS; the Land Stewardship Project in Stillwater, MN; the International Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture in St. Paul, MN; California's Committee for Sustainable Agriculture in Colfax, CA; and the Alternative Energy Resources Organization in Helena, MT.

For example, Fred Kirschenmann's report, "Switching to a Sustainable System," published by the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society, draws on his own farming experiences and those of other farmers who have struggled through the transition. His advice:

Don't move too fast. Changes take time. Give the soil time to regenerate itself.

Don't just stop using chemicals. A sustainable system has more to do with what you put into place than it does with what you stop doing. To just stop using chemicals without putting a regenerative system into place is a guaranteed prescription for disaster.

Don't go cold turkey. Try out sustainable strategies on a small scale, monitor the results, make adjustments, then try them again on a larger scale. A big mistake on a small number of acres turns out to be a small mistake. A small mistake on a large number of acres turns out to be a big mistake.

Don't continue monocropping. Monocropping can be maintained only through large infusions of fertilizers and pesticides. In order fora sustainable system to work, it needs the diversity of a good crop rotation system.

Low-input farming practices have many applications. This Nebraska farmland is planted with soybeans and wheat, two crops that overlap In growth cycles. This method reduces land Preparation costs, saves water, and provides a 90 percent wheat crop and 50-70 percent soybean crop all in one year. (University of Nebraska photo by C.A. Francis)

Don't start with more acres than you can afford to risk. Changing systems always involves some risks. Switching to a sustainable system is no exception. No matter how successful your neighbor's sustainable system may be, yours might need to be different. Every farm is unique. Every farmer is unique. The grower and the land need to discover each other and together they need to find ways to care for each other and sustain each other. This is part of the joy and the challenge of sustainable farming.

Kirschenmann's report offers sage advice for all farmers planning to start a transition to low-input sustainable systems, with special relevance to dryland grain and livestock farms in the Great Plains. Innovative farmers with other types of farms in different climate and soil conditions have developed their own lists of mistakes to avoid. One of these mistakes is producing crops for which there is little or no market, or relying on a premium price for "chemical free" produce in small local markets that are easily saturated.

Another common mistake is going deeply into debt. An example of essentially debt-free farming is given in one of several case studies presented by the Kansas Rural Center. Between 1983 and 1987, Rick Busch and his wife Nancy Vogelsberg-Busch accumulated a $55,000 increase in net worth on their 400-acre, crop-livestock farm, without incurring any liabilities other than some small, short-term loans for equipment.

There is no magic formula or "silver bullet" for adoption of low-input methods. Methods that work on some farms may fail on others, for a lot of reasons. For example, Rich Theiltges, a Montana farmer characterized as "sympathetic with the organic movement," has nonetheless expressed skepticism about many regenerative agriculture methods being promoted today. In two out of three years, he has had difficulty establishing sweet clover as a green manure crop (a crop that is planted specifically to be disked under to add organic matter and nitrogen to the soil). He is also discouraged with the legume black medic as a green manure crop, because of the small amount of biomass it produces in competition with a winter wheat crop. "I just can't see that it's going to take over conventional farming," he said.

In contrast, in an economic comparison of conventional and low-input cropping systems in Washington State, researchers developed a very promising crop rotation with black medic, peas, and wheat. When crops were valued at current market prices (ignoring Government deficiency payments) this low-input rotation was estimated to be more profitable than a conventional rotation that incurs a 4.8 times higher cost for chemical fertilizers and pesticides a net return of $61 versus $47 per acre. When deficiency payments were included in the prices of the wheat barley, however, the conventional rotation became the most profitable method.

A common mistake is to draw causal but faulty conclusions from direct on-farm experience. For example, suppose a farmer abruptly changes his or her method of pest control on the entire farm from one year to the next, and a major pest problem is vastly improved. Lacking any comparison plots on the farm (where alternative treatments including last year's methods are tested) the farmer may conclude that the improvement is entirely the result of the new method. While this conclusion may be correct in some circumstances, it is very likely that other factors, such as a year-to-year change in weather and the resulting increase in the population of a natural enemy of the pest, may be the major cause for the improvement. Dick and Sharon Thompson avoid this common mistake on their 320-acre Iowa farm by always using comparison strip plots when innovative methods are tried.