1. noun: a financial gain, especially the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent
2. verb : (that’s what’s happening!): obtain a financial advantage or benefit
To this end, the global civilization bubble has ground down the soil, fired up the planet, and made a few shiny-headed innovators enough money to buy their own moons. For me, the prospect of being successful as a soft, middle-aged, wannabe farmer is daunting enough without the present perilism and puerilism of profit. How can we possibly expect to thrive?
What if profit meant something else? One approach that we’ve been considering here at Star & Sparrow is to redefine the terms of our success. We will always need cash flow — we do not expect to attain 100% self-sufficiency and last time I checked, they do not accept property tax payments in the form of surplus eggs. However, having money beyond cash flow needs will not guarantee that we thrive. To thrive, we have to look at what it means to be alive, present, and in solution with a healthy ecosystem. This means starting at a foundation (the soil) and working up to a complex and perpetual system that provides for its whole self.
September
Vs. December
As winter progressed here this season, I was hit with the full force of a reality that I was not fully accepting for our first few months here. A decent portion of our land is emergent wetland and, while it looks like idyllic prime farm land in the summer, it is basically a shallow lake in the winter. This rules out many types of farming on biological principles alone, but also poses a challenge of conscience. Is it right to impose my own aspirations on the land, which clearly has its own ideas about what it should be?
To reconcile our aspirations of farming and the characteristics of the land, we’re going to embrace the growing trends and themes of regenerative agriculture — sequestering carbon, building soil, increasing water holding and filtering capacity of the land, supporting wildlife native to the area and boosting biodiversity to its fullest reasonable extent— all things that wetlands in a natural state excel at. This will be our profit, measured by the extent to which the land thrives. Like a well-managed retirement portfolio, we’ll seek to compound gains and mitigate risk through a complex and highly diversified collection of investments— investments of time, energy, and commitment to the ecology and community that has embraced us.
Once developed and vetted (give us time, this will take years!) we will publicly share our conservation plan and results based on ecological performance because you are shareholders of this planet, and you deserve transparency into the activities of those that act upon it. Our hope is that you will be able to study, critique, learn, and teach from what we share as we strive to thrive— improving the overall condition here and hopefully, spreading those benefits contagiously beyond.