As a farming family we’re really not that different. We worked in town and farmed as an avocation for seven years after we bought the farm and then left the town job and shifted our focus, full time, to the farm. We began direct marketing, developed a base of return customers who looked for our label in the grocery stores and even had many who came directly to the farm. We were modestly diversified, not certified organic, but in looking back, we were oriented toward deep sustainable agriculture and earnestly tried to develop the natural systems on the farm to work cooperatively. We had never read anything by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson or Gene Logsdon, we simply farmed from our heart the best way we knew how.

There may be some who might suggest that this is a result of large farm size and economies of scale. While the big farms are huge farms, the data shows that fully half (54%) of all United States farmers who depend on their practice of agriculture for the livelihood do so on 179 acres or less and even half of those (27%) are farming 49 acres or less. Contrary to much of the popular sentiment, it’s the farmers who are proving that small farms can be just as viable in sustaining agrarian livelihoods as large farms and perhaps more so.

While some farmers curse and spit when the USDA is mentioned, there are others who offer thanks. I am neither of these. For myself I have had two significant, yet very polar experiences with direct participation with the USDA. The real question, at least for me, is why those experiences were so different; and what determines the outcome when farmers and the USDA come together?

We are presently seeing data coming out of the United States Census of Agriculture that is showing that we are in the midst of another major back to the land movement. Good people are returning to farming as their primary occupation and the data is showing that, contrary to some opinions, it is the number of farms of modest acreage, those under 180 acres, which are growing. In fact, you’ll notice that small farms are the only U.S. farm sector seeing any real increase in the numbers of farms and of course farmers.

The historic problem has been the short window of time in which fields must be worked and planted and then later harvested. A large labor force was needed, but only seasonally. The persistent problem was then and still is that there is really no livelihood for the farm laborer, without migrating. An agriculture which allowed the general society to settle and build urban centers still required a farm labor force to migrate to sustain a livelihood.

“The longer you are in farming the more you begin to realize just how inter-related everything is to each other. The real challenge is trying to get things right, nudging little bits of nature here and there so that they work in harmony, like getting the animals and the grass to work together, with as little effort on their part as possible. Like growing turnips and letting the sheep harvest them for their own feed. It is the harmony of getting all these different aspects to work together.”

The honey bee is arguably the weakest link in the U.S. food supply chain and on this tenuous link is born the heaviest burden. Fully 40% of what we eat, to one degree or other pivots on the work of bees. Along with honey, most of our fruit, fruit juices and wines, as well as our nuts, berries and vegetables depend of bees. While not the primary pollinator of alfalfa, honey bees do contribute to its pollination. To a lesser degree the livestock that eat alfalfa; our milk, beef, sheep, goats and even chickens all depend on the honey bee. Imagine dinner time without honey bees; our diet would be so uninspiring that it would take the joy out of a pleasant meal at the end of the day.