Spring is a busy time in all of our lives. I think we carry with us the legacy of ancient cultivations: ancestors all across the globe spent eons with hoes, picks, and shovels, and springtime certainly is the focal point of that energy. Right now, at Oliview, we are preparing the ground for early summer and autumn crops: Pedro spends mornings weeding and cultivating, ensuring that the soil tilth welcomes the new roots. He does all of this by hand, which is incredibly rare these days. Working by hand empowers him with intimate knowledge of our soil and the population of worms and other subterranean fauna. It is also quiet, and allows thinking, listening to podcasts or music, or just being with others in the garden. It also provides a measure of fitness, and of the strength that comes from doing your own work.

There are many reasons to embrace hard work, but also many reasons to innovate around it: how many of us would cook nearly as much if we had to stoke our own cookstove with hand-chopped wood? And would we stay up nearly as late if we still had to dip our own candles? While the consequences of innovation are not always – nor completely – positive, humans are excellent at figuring out ways to avoid work.

Avoiding work may be natural, but it always has consequences. In economic terms, these can be called externalities. Externalities are the effects of an action or product – usually commercial – that are imposed on third parties who have not agreed to those effects or been compensated for them. Effects can be positive (such a beekeeper’s honeybees pollinating a neighbor’s orchard) or negative (such as the carbon release of burning gasoline on a trip to grandma’s house).

To be clear, I understand the tradeoffs that come with innovation and the commercial pressure to do more, faster, better, and with greater flair. That pressure has gotten us into the mess of climate change, of 55% of our state being in poverty, and the fact that small scale farmers can’t make a living farming any more.

The commercial pressure to produce more, and do it cheaply and reliably – with as little labor and time as possible – means that innovations have come into small scale agriculture, as well.

So, if Pedro wanted to produce more food, more reliably, and be able to do it all himself AND cook me dinner every night, what would he do? The trend in small scale farming right now is plastic, plastic, plastic:

Plastic hoop houses mimic the old glass greenhouses, and provide temporary and inexpensive (again, consider externalities) shelter and warmth for small plants, as well as protecting those plants from bugs;
Plastic “mulch” covers the ground to prevent weeds, keep the ground warm, and limit water transfer; and
Plastics are even intentionally added to soils in fertilizers and seed coatings.

This is a photo of the trials garden at LSU, but it is not unlike commercial agriculture of ALL sizes: plastic coating the growing rows, with holes punched (often with fire or heat) for the plants to grow through. The plants are watered with drip lines underneath the plastic (and sometimes underneath the soil).

And this is just the beginning of the story (you can read more in this very thorough and shocking Civil Eats article). When these plastics break down and become part of the soil – which they inevitably do naturally, through sun exposure, burning, and other aging/disposal processes – they have extreme effects on our soils. They clog soil pores and don’t allow water to naturally or adequately infiltrate. Plastic particles attract heavy metals, adding to the concentration of things like lead, mercury, or cadmium in soils. The microplastics are actually taken up by plants, affecting their growth and production.

This is a new area of study and the full impacts are unknown (despite plastics having been with us for OVER 100 YEARS!), but numerous studies have shown negative effects on many aspects of soil and plant life. What plastics do to us, the natural world, soil, the oceans, and pretty much everything in the world we know and love is truly horrendous and we have no idea of the full extent of the damage.

So why not take these shortcuts to avoid weeding or add permanent soil fertilization, making money on our farm? From a moral perspective we just can’t. That doesn’t mean we have NO plastic on Oliview – we’re working to get it totally out of the system, but it’s a major challenge on many fronts! – but it does mean that we end up doing more physical labor like weeding and digging; taking more time with our soil and plants, like hand watering and increasing soil tilth with hand tools; having more irregular produce because we don’t use plastic to protect the plants; and having to work with, and understand better, the natural world, because our plants aren’t protected from heat and cold.

Pedro loves to talk about the garden and the amazing results of a holistic approach - look at those cosmos and Mexican torch sunflowers!

The upside of this system is, of course, limited plastic contributions to our soil! Also, though, plants grown this way have been shown to be higher in nutrients, antioxidants, and overall health. We, here on the farm, are healthier for the good work we put in, and our piece of the ecosystem at Oliview is healthier for the lack of additives, too.

However, downsides include increased need for farm labor, including hired help, and less economic opportunity because of decreased production and often uncontrollable effects of weather. This is a hard bargain, and most of us have to compromise at some point in our lives, about something. But is the soil and water, the very food that we eat and the living things with whom we share this earth… are these what we’re willing to compromise on? I’m not sure that’s a bargain I’m interested in. While we don’t have kids ourselves, we want to leave this world better than we found it. We want the raccoons, butterflies, worms, frogs, and finches to feel welcome and whole on our farm. Oliview Farm, like most family farms in America, is powered by off-farm income.

So what is the solution? There are as many solutions as there are individuals, but some of what we’ve thought about include:

Universal Basic Income would take economic pressure off of farmers, increase the public’s ability to pay for local food, and level the playing field when it comes to food access, encouraging farmers to farm more responsibly;
Encouraging (mandating?) local grocery stores to stock local food would increase the customer market, and getting rid of aesthetic and uniformity standards would greatly increase the amount of local food that could be brought to market at a reasonable rate to the farmer and – bonus! – decrease food waste overall; and
Collaborative, collective, or co-op farming would spread the responsibility, bring in more skillsets and areas of expertise/interest, and allow us to take a few days off every once in a while (Sylvanaqua has a great concept they’ve put into action on the east coast).

We only have control over our own actions. We (try to!) only judge our own actions. We will continue to try to de-plasticize our lives… AND we’re really-really-really interested in doing more collaboration, more community innovation, and more cooperative actions. Hey, maybe we could collaborate with YOU! We’d love that! Because we can’t tackle the plastics issue by ourselves. Or the climate crisis. Or community poverty. We need you. And you need us. Come on out to the farm – we think you’ll like it!

Love, good health, and deep thinking to you,

Elizabeth