Beginnings and Endings and Beginnings

In business, success and growth are generally synonymous. There’s a generalized feeling that if something isn’t growing it is dying. Think of Amazon, which lost money for nine consecutive years but was growing so fast that investors didn’t care. Or look at the common practice of starting a small business with an exit in view, meaning starting a small business with the express intention of showing enough growth that it can be profitably sold off to a larger company.

Chasing growth makes sense if you have a retail website that you wish to transition from selling books to selling books and spark plugs and approximately ten billion items made out of injection-molded plastic, or if you have an idea for how to take your local chain of cookie stores national. There are a good and bad things about an economic system that encourages the relentless pursuit of growth, and I am not smart enough to balance the pluses and minuses, let alone claim I have a better alternative.

However, I find it strange when this ethic meets the sort of farming I do. Before I get to why I say this, a word about the dominant system of agriculture. Industrial farming, as I’ve argued extensively in other formats, is all about efficiency. And make no mistake, there are tremendous goods that have come from this efficiency. One of the foundational needs of living a free and happy life is having enough food, and industrial agriculture has been instrumental in ensuring that famine is far rarer than it was in centuries past.

But maximizing agricultural efficiency has also come with all the costs to environment, community, the healthfulness of food, and animal welfare that you are likely aware of. My argument is that scale requires comparative efficiency, and that efficiency requires comparative simplicity, and simple systems of agriculture require unfortunate compromises. Complex, pasture-based farming, farming that tries to account for health in the broadest sense of the word, simply doesn’t scale as well as corn, soy, and feedlots.

And this brings me back to the tension between good farming and relentless growth. If you spend much time thinking about a specific piece of land and how to manage it, it is difficult to not see all of the tradeoffs inherent in any decision. Too many animals result overbrowsing and compaction; too few result in the proliferation of less palatable plants, which then require machines and diesel to control. Removing or planting trees radically changes the environmental niches in the ecosystem, and thus which plants and animals will have a suitable home. It’s a dynamic system, and it requires careful observation, observation that cannot be conducted by one person overseeing thousands of acres.

Beyond the material, there is the human cost. Consolidating thirty family dairy farms each with one hundred cows into one mega dairy with three thousand cows changes the nature of work and the economics of farming. I happen to think that the thirty separate farms, though they will be marginally less efficient than the mega dairy, are better. Further, if there was a way to start a family dairy farm and be reasonably confident of making a good livelihood, it would be a far more appealing way of life than being a peon in an industrial farm.

A related issue is welfare. While small farms do not always do a better job than large at caring for animals, there are certain systems of production, specifically the factory farming of pigs and poultry, that have immense suffering as an unavoidable consequence of their design. One place where human and animal welfare intersect is slaughterhouses. Again, there can certainly be bad small slaughterhouses, but as a rule as they grow larger they become more efficient and also more horrific, especially for the people who work in them.

The healthfulness of the food that results from these systems is harder to assess. Despite what you may have read online, translate farming practices to measurable qualities in the foods that they produce, and then proving that those qualities translate to better human health outcomes, is something that has not been done. Life is long, and the effects of diet on health are slow to see and hard to separate from a multitude of other lifestyle factors. Anyone who confidently claims to know how much these matter to human health should be viewed with skepticism.

That said, there are tantalizing bits of evidence, higher Omega 3 fats in grass fed meat, along with higher concentrations of certain other nutrients. And there is clear evidence th Ultra-Processed food is unhealthy, which makes aiming for a diet as far from UPF as possible appealing. I think it’s completely reasonable to prefer local food produced by traditional methods, and I strongly suspect a diet based on such foods is healthier, even if I can’t prove it with ironclad evidence.

Each of these could be explored in much greater detail, but I hope you take the basic point that any farm can only grow to a certain size before it will have to start compromising on one or more of the values that are supposed to differentiate it from conventional agriculture. This is not to suggest smaller is always better; a herd of fifty cows is actually easier to manage well than a herd of five cows, and a farming business can only be sustained if it is profitable, which requires a certain size of operation. There is a balance, and the appropriate scale will depend on the nature of the land and the farm enterprise.

I do not claim to be any sort of paragon of morality. I have felt same pull myself, the same desire the try to grow my business as rapidly as possible. But recent conversations with Alanna and Normandy and Ed, and also with Dave Perozzi, who raises the poultry we sell, have made me think harder than ever before about why I do what I do. In other words, why do I believe the world is better for having Cairncrest Farm in it?

Here are the reasons I’ve come up with, in no particular order. I believe producing healthy, high quality meat using humane practices is a good thing to do. The industrial food system is broken, and I am excited about providing a real alternative. I love the place I live, both the specific farm and the broader community. I feel like I’ve acquired some small measure of insight or perhaps even wisdom about the realities of running a small farm, and I enjoy sharing this with other people who are interested in agriculture. I’m genuinely fascinated with farming, food, and health, and living on a farm gives me insights into all of these, which allows me to write about them from a fresh perspective.

Not one thing on that list would be improved if the farm was ten times larger than it is.

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A few weeks back I wrote about my aim to be more optimistic in these posts, to not just criticize the bad parts of the system but to examine ways the food and farming that sustain us all could be improved. When looking at issues of scale I have a hard time being positive. Farming in America for the past century has been driven by consolidation and increasing industrialization, and this trend shows no sign of abating.

But I think this reflexive negativity is mostly a matter of myopia on my part, a symptom of the very human difficulty of seeing beyond next month or next year. Reading over the list of things small farms can do that industrial farms cannot, I’m heartened by the prospect that the represent goods that are perhaps not universal, but are certainly common. Most people want health, and community, and real food that is produced with care.

Here’s another point — as much stress as today’s small farms are under, they are, on the whole, better than farms of old. We have better tools for grazing. We understand soil health. We pay far more attention to matters of animal welfare. There is no way to go back to farming exactly how we did in 1924, nor would I want to. Building a better foods system will require learning some things from the past, but it is very much a forward looking project. And that, I think, is a real reason for hope