THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE ARTICLE ABOUT WHY HOMESTEADING - SMALL FARMING - MICRO FARMING WORKS.

How can micro-farming possibly be as productive as claimed?

Essay by Lion Kuntz, March 21, 2000



I assert that intelligent designs and management practices can allow one

farmworker to provides a balanced diet to 30 CSA subscribers meats, eggs,

fish, vegetables, herbs, and fruits, for a $30K to $35K annual income (after

farm-related expenses are deducted) to the farmworker, on two acres of land.

Many farmers are unable to assure themselves that much dependable income,

and in fact often work at least part time in outside employment because they

cannot obtain the median income despite many acres of land cultivated.



I further assert that about 40 hours weekly is sufficient to manage a well

designed micro-farm, which is another challenge to the credibility of small

farmers who are expecting to give 80 hour work-weeks for more than half of the

year.



Examination of details of a micro-farm system show how productivity of 4 to 12

times the NET productivity (per square foot) of conventional larger mechanized

farms is obtained with so little workload.



First, the micro-farm has to be assembled in stages before the highest levels of

productivity are obtained. Instead of buying a fairly modern tractor (which is not

used on a micro-farm) at a cost of about, say $15K, the micro-farmer makes

an equivalent investment in stages over several years of machinery-free

systems which have predictable lifespans of fifty years. Mostly the micro-farm

worker obtains a wide variety of skills before establishing these permanent

systems and escapes major indebtedness by performing their own labors in

building the needed systems.



Something like a 2 to 4 year transition period is required to bring online the

permanent living systems which will perform much of the labors that other kinds

of farming have to pay expenses to receive. After the living systems have been

matured to stabilizing micro-ecologies of whole food-chain webs the

productivity increases dramatically, while much of the workload is transferred

from the farmworker to the living systems.



Tending livestock to provide weekly two meals of chickens, two meals of rabbit,

two meals of fish, and eggs to feed as many as 30 CSA household buyers

might seem like an impressive task alone, without even counting the growing of

a large variety of green groceries, herbs, and fruits on top of the livestock

chores.



Just looking at some reasonable annual numbers, like 3120 chickens, 3120

rabbits and 3120 big fish, start to look daunting if you do not have a

management plan in mind to produce this plus a lot more. In reality there are

never 3120 rabbits, chickens or harvestable fish on hand at any one time.



There are usually not many more than 800 chickens and rabbits at any one

moment, and the vast majority of them are young chicks and small bunnies.

Fish are there in the many thousands, but the top feeders and bottom feeders

are mostly spawning fish-fry to feed the middle feeders.



It turns out that distributing feed, inspecting the health and conditions, and

cleaning coops and pen areas takes less than a couple of hours, at most, daily.

This is maybe 17 hours per week total. Feeding rabbits means distributing

greens from the garden, alfalfa hay and some mineral supplements to about 80

hutches, which takes maybe 40 minutes. About 25 of the hutches have kits in

the nesting boxes which need to be observed, and a few nesting boxes per day

are removed to disinfectant baths before reuse or cleaned ones inserted for

expectant does. This takes another 25 minutes. This is about 65 minutes daily.

Dumping the manures into carts for removal involves about another 80 minutes



Slaughtering takes practice to become skilled, but it takes somewhat less than 3

minutes apiece for a skilled person to prepare 60 chickens, 60 rabbits and 60

fish for the cooler for CSA orders. This is 9 more hours, to the 17 already

spent in husbandry, for a subtotal of 26 hours.



Chickens free-range and pastured take a few minutes a day to unlock in the

morning and close-up the coops in the evening. Spreading cracked corn and

worms takes minutes. Feeding the fish takes even less time. Collecting eggs

from ducks and hens takes longer than the feeding. Make it an hour a week

combined total maintenance.



Subtotal is now 27 hours, leaving 13 hours to do everything else if a 40 hour

work week goal is to be achieved.



Planting and harvesting from the garden go on simultaneously. Greenhouse

work on the plant starts and transplants is 2 or 3 hours weekly, and whenever

something is harvested out of the gardens, a well-along transplant replaces it in

the vacant soil. Really, putting a few seeds into compartmented trays of potting

soil is trivial, and moving plugs to larger pots takes only moments. A lot can be

accomplished in the time allowed here.



There 10 or 11 hours left in our 40 hour work week.



Cleaning the livestock manures (already accounted for) means feeding the

vermicompost beds which are to become the grow beds, so regular fertilization

of the plants is accounted for in the hours of weekly livestock feeding and care.

Caring for the worms is 1 or 2 hours a week, but they do the digging and tilling

of what is to become the growing beds, so there is never any time spent tilling

the soil. We are now down to between 8 to 11 hours left to do everything else in

the 40 hour work-week ideal goal.



Harvesting, rinsing, and packing the produce for 30 CSA family buyers takes

at least another 8 hours per week, leaving only from 0 to 3 hours weekly for

everything else that has to be done.



Weeding never has to be done as a separate chore. The worm-bins

management program produces ideal weed-free growing soil covered by a

living mulch. There is no time spent cultivating or weeding, nor any time spent

applying herbicides. Such few air-borne seeds as do make it to germination

are casually pulled from the loose friable soil and deposited between rows while

planting and harvesting.



Watering permanent growing beds involves turning on a bank of drip irrigation

hoses and takes literally seconds per day to rotate through all banks of

rotations during the work week. Timers could cut down those seconds to

nothing, but are hardly worth the cost.



With only 0 to 3 hours remaining in our work-week it hardly seems possible to

achieve the steady reliable deliveries and marketing to maintain a base of 30

CSA steady customers, even if they come pickup at the micro-farm. In fact, it

probably is not possible.



Anyone who has ever been involved in anything related to a business or

farming knows that this time budget has not made allowances for the

unexpected (which should be anticipated even if it cannot be precisely

identified), and that everything always takes longer than we allow for. Never-

the-less this exercise has served to illustrate the usual time consumption for

regular maintenance of a micro-farm compared to the time consumptions

expected on a larger "small" farm equipped with all kinds of modern equipment

and conveniences.



Because livestock require care and feeding every single day of the year, one

cannot even plan for a getaway holiday weekend without making provisions for

a substitute helper. Perhaps the neighborhood teenager saving money for

college might be available for weekend livestock feeding chores, or instead of

delivering pizzas might deliver some of the CSA packages. The income

projections allow sufficient funds for a part-time helper as part of the "before

farm-related expenses are deducted" projection for NET income to the farm-

worker.



A potential problem here is that in order to slaughter for market the chickens

the farmer must not have any employees, or else USDA inspection is required.

That could mean trucking birds to a USDA inspected butcher. The rabbits and

fish have local or state regulations to comply with, as does the produce for that

matter.



After all is said and done, this walk through the time allotments for a micro-farm

have not missed the ideal of 40 hour work-weeks by nearly as much as most

other owner-operated farm systems. A family with husband & wife, and maybe

a few kids to help around with the chores can get all this work done in plenty

under 40 hours per week, leaving lots of time for marketing, deliveries,

expanding the customer base, making value-added products, or those

unforeseen emergencies and repairs.



Once the basic living-systems are in place and working as ecological

assemblies, it is easy to expand a little bit to encompass a helper, or part-timer

to off-load the overtime, without too much stress if they quit to go start their own

micro-farm.



Most suburban commuters spend 10 hours a week in traffic on top of their 40-

hour work weeks, so one is probably better off with whatever little bits of

overtime the basic micro-farm asks of the farm-worker above 40-hours.



Those of you with sharp eyes noticed that there was not really sufficient time to

"catch" the fish, clean the chicken roosts, prepare for the mushroom crop, or

rigorously sanitize the butchershop, unless the numbers of animals being

grown and processed is reduced to a smaller number, or overtime is required.

By making the meats, fish and eggs part of an optional deluxe package one

might trim down to no overtime and meet the ideal goal of 40 hour work week, if

only half the CSA customers opt for that higher priced package.



The usual number of animals raised (not the number slaughtered) determines

the manure load feeding the worm bins making the growing soil. Fewer animals

means fewer wormbins are recharged every week. A higher mix of topsoil to

the reduced manure additives is possible, and research has shown the plants

might actually do better with less worm castings than with pure castings

mixtures of ingredients. These are the operational specific details a pool of

experienced micro-farmers could contribute to on-going discussions.



A discussion group might also turn up ideas on improving efficiency in layouts

of systems, or suggestions on neighbor cooperation in production for mutual

benefits, where one is more heavy into livestock and the other more interested

in plant cultivations, together feeding double the CSA customers but each

staying closer to a 40 hour work load weekly. This falls under the category of

"intentional community", a phrase which is not very specific and means many

different things to many different ideologies. If enough micro-farmers were

closely located nearby, they might even be able to afford the $48.50 per hour

for USDA inspectors to watch the butchering, and be able to use part-time help

to keep the animal quarters sparkling clean.



This is getting too close to re-inventing the food industry, rather than finding a

nice cozy niche to enable a low-stress decent-paying healthy outdoors lifestyle

of solitary micro-farming.



One more option for free help in some of the cleaning of the animal quarters is

to advertise manures for sale to gardeners as "you shovel, you load". There is

some nutrient exports in exchange for some weekly time savings. People

already succeed in this aspect to some extent, judging by the testimonials

published on personal webpages.



Selling some bulk "worm manures" this way also lets one get around

restrictions on selling "vermicompost" as "compost". If you haven't screened it

or bagged it, it is not manipulated manures of worms (although it might actually

be worm-manipulated manures of rabbits, fowl, fish and vermiprocessed

garden wastes). A lot of people pay higher prices for worm castings than they

will for composts, and each bin is worth between $100 to over $300 at typical

price variations for bulk worm castings around the country.



One person keeping 90 bins constantly rotating would earn almost $30-$35K

at the lower price of about $50/pickup load (or about $100 per bin.) Under this

scenario there is less than a half an acre for the bins and livestock combined,

but animals would have to be sent to processing plants instead of slaughtered

on the micro-farm. One has to sell 13 or 14 bins contents per week on average,

and be spending their time feeding animals (including worm bins) and clean

animal quarters all the time. I am not partial to that lifestyle, but some people

are doing it now.



Some reduced combinations and variations of all these living systems is bound

to be most satisfying, interesting because of variety, and pleasantly profitable

without being too burdensome in labors. Micro-farming has potential to feed a

large percentage of a balanced diet to America, without driving the micro-

farmer to the poorhouse or crushing him/her with low-paid drudgery. I know

there has to be people with experiences and ideas out there bubbling over with

the urge to discuss micro-farming concepts.



IF you are interested in micro-farming as a lifestyle or

solution to environmental usurpation of biodiversity habitat, THEN we may have

a common interest to communicate about.



My email addresses are: LionKuntz@email.com, LionKuntz@aol.com,

LionKuntz@yahoo.com