One Unit of Production for 9 Units of Consumption

Only about 10 percent of Vermont is composed of “agricultural” land. The vast majority of the state is too wet, dry, steep, shallow-soiled, or infertile to reliably support conventional field-based crop production, though it has been tried before.  Vermonters once farmed much of the state’s non-‘ag’ land, clearing about three quarters of Vermont’s land base by the mid 1800s, mostly for pasture and potash.  Devastating soil erosion ensued, along with rapidly decreasing yields and migration to the deeper, then-intact soils of the Midwest.     

Ben Falk.

As we enter the 21st century, land that is still clear of forest represents Vermont’s most forgiving landscape – generally low-angle slopes with deep, well-drained soils supporting (usually via constant inputs) pasture and annual row crops such as corn and grass for hay.  Currently, nearly all of Vermont’s food production is derived from about one-tenth of its land base, upon which the capacity for future yields shrinks in both area and productivity each year.  “Prime soil” lands, having been abused for nearly two centuries, continue to lose capacity each year as mechanized, tillage-based farming compacts soil structure, exposes the soil to erosion, and damages soil health through continual inputs of liquid fertilizer. The actual acreage of “prime soil” land also shrinks yearly due to suburban sprawl and transportation developments.     

In a future of diminishing energy resources and increasing challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss (read pollinator failure), socio-political instability, and economic insolvency, we will need to generate value regeneratively on the majority of our landscape, without relying upon one unit of input-based production to sustain nine units of consumption.  A solarized, more reliable food and fuel system requires agriculture as diverse and sophisticated as the landscape itself. In Vermont, that means gleaning value from the hills, forests, wet fields, and rocky, infertile lands – those same lands that failed a century or two ago – without incurring further damage.    

This means enhancing their biological capital by doing the opposite of what was done before: building soil and increasing biodiversity while they are worked.  Truly sustainable land use will engage us simultaneously in land conservation, land repair, and “working” the land – in one cohesive process. Land conservation, currently practiced in Vermont, is a luxury of the oil age: an attempt to protect certain areas by using them lightly (or not at all) while we use other areas sub-optimally.  Though we don’t often acknowledge it, our verdant hills are made possible by razed, eroding hillsides in other parts of the world. A more localized and resilient economy will require us to use our land base with greater skill, skill, intensity, and diversity.

Mending the landscape, diversifying our use

We already have a diversified landscape, but those diverse characteristics are largely negative: rocky areas; droughty (parched) areas; areas with poor drainage; areas with degraded, infertile soils. How do we produce lasting value in conditions like these?   

Fortunately, such challenges have been confronted for millennia, in many parts of the world. Degraded and inherently challenging landscapes can be regenerated and maintained as highly productive, low-input, no-till, perennial agricultural systems, yielding fruits, nuts, fiber, fuel, meat, milk and even perennial grains and vegetables.   

In Vermont, we have few examples of such systems and need to look elsewhere to find truly sustainable cold-climate models. Permaculture, with its emphasis on low-input, self-fertilizing crop arrangements (guilds) and no-till approach, is particularly suited to producing food and fuel crops on degraded and sensitive landscapes that fail under large-scale, mechanized, input-dependent, soil-exposing, tillage agriculture. Successful versions of “agriculture for the hills” from elsewhere – such as the oak, walnut, and chestnut pasture agroforestry practiced in the Mediterranean – are not likely to succeed by simply replicate them here.     

Vermont’s climate, soils, and culture are unique and require equally unique land-use systems. Establishing a reliable, sustaining, and regionalized food system here will be an innovative process that has only just begun. We know how to degrade our soils yet still produce surprisingly high yields with off-farm inputs in open fields, but we have to build, from the ground up, land-use systems that can function durably across the majority of our landscape.  This means developing a “new-old” hybrid agriculture for forested, rocky, thin, infertile, seasonally inundated land.     

Here are a few strategies we could employ:

1.    Select for and develop new plant and animal varieties (and revive formerly used heirloom varieties) optimal for the diverse conditions of Vermont’s landscape. A heartnut (sweet walnut variety) bearing 500 pounds of nuts per year on well-drained soils in Weybridge may not produce a single nut in the wetter, cooler highlands of Roxbury.  Currants, gooseberries and elderberries are a staple at homesteads on moist, shady sites, replacing the blueberries of sunnier, better-drained locations.             

Many useful species originating from other areas of the world (like most of our current crops such as corn, squash, tomato, etc.) that are not grown here yet should be developed for this region and its specific climate and soil challenges. Seaberry, for example, has been grown from Western Europe to Eastern Asia for decades at abandoned mine sites, and is suitable for the droughty, thin slopes our predecessors have left us with their thousands of hill farms. They present options for developing a more productive relationship with an increasingly adverse environment. Food and fuel species need to adapt and continually change, as the challenges we face change from year to year.  By evolving resource systems in this way we can lengthen the growing season, improve resiliency to pests and climate extremes, and increase the diversity and density of our nutrition and energy sources – all fundamental needs in the transition from the oil age to the soil age.

2.    Develop cultivation techniques, such as contour swale-mound planting, that help buffer both droughty and inundated land conditions to allow production of a wider array of plants than would otherwise be possible in the same location.  German-named hugelkulture techniques of planting on biomass mounds has allowed durable agriculture in wet areas for thousands of years across many regions of the globe.

3.    Change the scale and mechanics of our production systems from large to small, from mechanized to human- and animal-powered, and further adapt practices to achieve successful production on our various land types without damaging them further.  

Farming “special-needs” landscapes

Relocalization in Vermont will necessitate skillful use of the incredible diversity that our landscape contains – from the acidic conditions of a pine plantation, to the anoxic clay soils of a wet, abandoned field, to the thin, dry, dead soils of an abandoned steep pasture.     

Utilizing marginal lands requires more skill and care than “prime” agricultural lands, with erosion, infertility or lack of production resulting from their mistreatment.  “Marginal” lands represent some of the most important and sensitive ecosystems on the planet, but can also produce some of the highest crop yields anywhere (the largest food staple in the world is rice, grown in poorly drained wet soils). Use of these landscapes must be undertaken with considerable planning and great understanding of the opportunities and challenges of the site.     

It is possible to glean agricultural yields from these ecosystems in ways that promote the health of the ecosystem and offer human yields as well.  Appropriate agriculture for marginal lands must be flexible and diverse; farming landscapes other than typical “prime-ag” stereotype requires that humans work in synergy with the ecosystem, seeing themselves as members of the site’s living community and supporting continual fertility development and long-term yields.  Below are some suggested approaches to challenging but commonly found conditions.    

Droughty and rocky land

Land that is dry and sloped presents an interesting challenge for agriculture. Strategies for dealing successfully with these conditions involve:

•    Species selections for plants that can not only handle, but actually thrive, in dry, poor soil, and improve the soil for future plantings. Rocky soils are most suited to a perennial-focused agriculture.  Example species include sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides), black locust, (Robinia pseudoacacia), buffaloberry (Shepherdia argentia) and various other berry and nut shrubs and trees.  These species are nitrogen-fixing, land-healing plants.

•    Earthworks such as on-contour swaling, where ditches are dug along contour to slow and trap water as it travels across the slope.  This allows water infiltration into the soil horizon where it irrigates deepening plant roots and delivers oxygen and nutrients. Both the swales/ditches and the mounds below are planted with nitrogen-fixing plants and dynamic accumulators, helping to build soil structure and soil biology and creating conditions that eventually enable a larger array of plants to thrive in the same location.   After an initial establishment period with “heavy giving” plants (as opposed to “heavy feeding” plants), species that would otherwise fail on such sites can thrive.  These include more sensitive fruit trees, berries, and other multi-use food and fuel trees and shrubs.

•    Mulching with fungi-inoculated woodchips helps keep soil moisture optimal, build healthy soil biology and suppress weeds.

•    Drip irrigation systems, which allow a very small amount of water and energy to be applied precisely across a landscape at timely intervals. Such systems can support the successful introduction of plants that would otherwise be unable to establish themselves.

Seasonally inundated land

An enormous amount of Vermont’s landscape is underutilized due to parched water tables and/or low-angle slopes underlain by poorly drained clay soils. Useful responses to such conditions involve similar approaches to those for rocky, dry land (above).

•    Selecting species that are well suited to perennial or seasonally wet conditions, or to inundated conditions.  Species particularly well adapted to wet conditions include currants and gooseberries (Ribes spp.), elderberries (Sambucus canadensis), cranberries (Vaccinium spp.) and highbush cranberries (Viburnum spp.), chokecherry (Aronia spp.), willow (salix spp.) and alder (alnus spp.) for fuelwood and craft wood, and many others.   Other useful strategies include grafting non-wet-tolerant species onto wet-tolerant rootstock, such as pears onto hawthorn or quince.

•    On-contour swales and island mounds that simultaneously lower the water table in the immediate area of a crop plant while raising up the plant itself.  Systems in Europe have practiced tree-based agriculture in wetlands for thousands of years, utilizing woody debris to help form the raised planting mounds.  Gradually the woody material breaks down into soil, feeding the plant over time while catching leaves and other nutrient-rich debris that circulates via wind currents in the area.

Ben Falk grows food and fuel in the lower Mad River Valley, and develops post-petroleum human habitats with Whole Systems Design, LLC.