![]() ![]() ![]() Sustainable Farm: Sometimes considered beyond organic, regenerative agriculture, or a part of permaculture, sustainable agriculture is a farming system that manages plant and animals in an environmentally friendly way, requires low inputs, attempts to be as self-sustaining as possible, and seeks the well-being of animals under its care.Conventional agriculture usually requires lots of land, expensive equipment, and a large infrastructure to be profitable. For animal management, conventional farming typically utilizes Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) where a large number of animals are typically confined in small areas and fed intensively from a single feed source to increase profitability. The crops are usually grown in a monoculture system where one type of crop is grown in a very large area. Conventional Farm: Sometimes called industrial agriculture or commercial farming, conventional farming involves large amounts of inputs including the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers on both genetically modified (GMO) or non-genetically modified crops.Keep in mind that some of these farm types will overlap and I will try to show you why that is the case. Below I hope to define the most common farm types that you have probably heard about. Surprisingly, there are lots of different types of farms. Make sure you are settled on this before you begin. Whatever your reason is for wanting to start a farm will directly affect the type of farm you need to acquire. Working in your backyard farm can be a very life-giving experience. At the bare minimum, most people have at least enough room for a garden and some chickens. There is also a huge movement of people that just want to farm in their backyard and I also think this is awesome. The homesteading movement has grown like crazy over the past 10 years as more and more people are wanting to disconnect from the rat race and live more meaningful lives by being connected to the land they are fed from. Some people want to homestead which means they want to try to be as self-sufficient as possible and live off the land as much as they can. Again, this is good too and my farm falls into this category as well. Others are just interested in starting a small hobby farm for fun or, at the very minimum, to provide good food for their family. I don’t want to deplete the land but, instead, leave the land in better condition than it was when I acquired it. I want to farm in a way that stewards the land well and provides healthy food for the people that are fed from it. This is a question I can’t necessarily answer for you personally because we each have our own ideas, convictions, and desires but I can give you some things to think about.įor me personally, I have convictions about how we are treating the environment and stewarding the land. In order to start a farm from scratch you need to know why you want to start farming in the first place. If I were going to write a book on how to buy a small farm and start farming it, this would be it. I have purchased two different farms over the years and applied these things to my own farms. I learned how to sell your farm goods directly to the consumer using direct the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, farmers markets, and direct sales.Īfter all of this, I took my experience and ran with it. I learned more about gardening in a way that didn’t require synthetic pesticides or other harsh chemicals but instead gave the plants an environment to thrive in an ecosystem where these types of things were not needed. I learned how to manage animals through pasture-based systems that didn’t confine them but let them thrive in nature while eating from the land and giving back to it so it produced more abundant pastures each following year. Best of all, it provided healthy food for the people that were fed from it. It was there that I learned how to farm the land in a way that didn’t deplete the land nor destroy the environment but, instead, stewarded the land well, leaving it in a much better condition than it was before it was acquired. I knew I had to experience this type of farming first-hand to understand exactly how it worked so I decided to intern on a sustainable and organic farm for a year. The more I learned about these the more I wanted to buy my own farm and practice these things with my family. It wasn’t until later in life that I started to learn more about sustainable agriculture, organic agriculture, homesteading, and hobby farming. The idea of having a small farm, however, has always intrigued me. I knew from that experience that I had no interest in that type of farming. That type of farming requires thousands of acres and big expensive machinery to make it successful. I grew up in a agricultural family but only around conventional farming as a kid. ![]()
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