Talk about a noble cause: at The New Farm, Brent Preston and Gillian Flies are removing the friction from our interaction with the planet itself.
Fifteen years ago, Brent Preston and Gillian Flies were the kind of couple that most of us know and some of us actually are: urban professionals aware of the growing threat of climate change and concerned that their individual efforts (recycling, avoiding plastic bags) weren’t moving any needles and therefore didn’t amount to much more than egoism.
It’s what they decided to do about the quandary that sets them apart: they walked away from successful careers in media and international development to start an organic farm. Preston documented their journey in his remarkably engaging autobiography, The New Farm: Our Ten Years on the Front Lines of the Good Food Revolution. Famed restaurateur Daniel Boulud summarizes the book quite well, calling it, “A must-read story told with honesty, humor, and humility by a passionate farmer who reminds us what our food system can and should be about.”
But the operative words in Boulud’s description are can and should. The problem is that just because we can and should do something doesn’t mean we’re going to do so. Flies gave a TED Talk in late 2018—“We Can Eat Our Way Out of This Mess”—in which she discussed the future of climate and, by extension, humanity itself. Watch that, and you’re likely to find yourself seesawing between hope and despair. Tackling them in reverse order . . .
The sources of despair:
The sources of hope:
Why hasn’t this happened?
Problem #1: Farmers who reduce their inputs and increase their outputs will obviously make more money, but other people will make less money off of that farmer. And the system has been built so that lots of other people profit off of the farmer—makers of pesticides, machinery, and genetically modified seeds.
“The fundamental reason these techniques haven’t been adopted faster and on a larger scale is that they’re inherently low-input systems,” says Preston. “And we’ve got an agricultural system that relies on and profits from selling agricultural inputs. If your future system is one that eliminates the need for those inputs, it’s hard to get anyone with money to start promoting the idea.”
Problem #2: Most farmers are growing the wrong kinds of crops anyway. The majority of industrial farms grow what are called “commodity crops,” the largest of which (in North America) is corn. In a really good year, with cooperative weather (which leads to high yields) and decent prices, a farmer can gross about $750 an acre growing corn.
The New Farm consistently grosses more than $40,000 an acre growing vegetables such as salad greens and cucumbers by hand. “The gross won’t tell you how profitable we are,” says Preston, “but it will tell you a lot about how much money every acre of our farm puts into the local community and how much wealth it’s generating.”
But let’s get back to that part about less work. When they switched from tilling the land to a no-till system, Preston and Flies saw their lettuce yield jump by 25 percent. Not only that, the new crops had far fewer weeds, which meant a further drop in labor.
Problem #3: The way we currently measure the “profitability” of farming is too narrow to tackle a problem of this magnitude. “Money shouldn’t—rather, can’t—be the only currency by which we measure the ‘profitability’ of our land,” says Flies. Some others: soil health, biodiversity, and community.
“We’ve only got about twelve years to start pulling the carbon back out of the atmosphere if we ever hope to survive as a species,” says Flies. “At this point, for farmers, sequestering carbon is more important than growing food.”
The next step for The New Farm is to increase their footprint. Their original idea was to buy nearby farms and start new forward-thinking ventures on the newly acquired acreage. The only problem? Land is expensive.
So instead of buying land, the current plan is to lease it from wealthy weekenders—meaning, urban professionals like the ones Preston and Flies used to be who want to feel like they’re doing something to address the overall climate situation. Better yet, current indications suggest that it won’t necessarily be The New Farm paying landowners to farm on their land, but landowners paying The New Farm to do so.
Their initial plans include a grazing operation that uses regenerative grazing techniques that help sequester carbon—using smaller fields, lots of trees, keeping the animals on the land rather than in feedlots, feeding them grass instead of grain.
So what about the digital revolution? How have organic farmers like The New Farm managed to incorporate digital tools into their operations? Because growing crops is, well, a pretty analog affair.
Here’s what they’ve done:
“It’s time to stop wringing our hands and waiting for the world to end,” Flies says in her TED Talk. “We all have a role to play; it’s not somebody else’s responsibility. The time for sustainability is past. We can regenerate. Let’s eat our way out of this mess.”