Small-Scale Agriculture: Key to Self-Reliance and Family Farms

My partner in revolution, Prairie Roots, continues her thoughtful and substantive look at prairie life with a three-part interview with Rebecca Terk of Flying Tomato Farms in Vermillion. She promotes Community-Supported Agriculture, a concept that ought to catch on like gangbusters in South Dakota, given the self-reliant pioneer spirit that built this state. But Terk notes that self-reliance isn't about retreating to your homestead, growing your own potatoes and ethanol, and never coming to town again. It's about relying on each other as a community, as a state, and making our lives better by living off the resources we have. Those resources include the obvious like our precious topsoil and water (tell me again why we want to endanger those with oil pipelines and refineries?). Those resources also include the knowledge of the people around us: Terk says that asking lots of questions of the other farmers and gardeners around Vermillion, "especially the old timers who can remember when organic was conventional," has played a vital role in making her operation succeed.

Just how successful is Flying Tomato Farms? Well, Terk says growing and selling produce provides only a quarter of her income. But she makes that on one acre, cultivated mostly by hand.

Think about that: one acre produces a quarter of Terk's income. Perhaps I oversimplify, but that suggests four acres could produce her full income. She could live on four acres. How many farmers out there have 640 acres, or 1280, or more, and still have to take jobs in town to round out their income? Following Terk's farming practices, we could take a typical section, plant half of it to shelterbelts and prairie grass for conservation, divide the remaining 320 acres into eighty plots, and see eighty families make a decent living off the land.

Eighty family farms, making a living and using organic methods, where right now one man struggles to get by with industrial monoculture.

Now Terk is a new settler -- she moved here from Middlebury, Vermont, in 1993. (Remember, unless you're Lakota, we're all new settlers here.) But when asked what she likes about South Dakota and what she'd improve, she talks like a true pioneer [following emphasis mine]:

I love South Dakota because I feel like it’s still so wide open—like it’s not all bought up and “taken.” There exist so many possibilities here—especially for young people!...

...It’s just plain perverse when people recognize you’re brilliant and full of energy and will make a difference and they tell you that you ought to leave or your talents will be “wasted.” People with talent ought to be encouraged to use those talents for the betterment of their home and community, and what betters the home and community has a strong tendency to better the self....

...I like to question, and even poke a little fun at, people and organizations in Vermillion and in the state, but it’s because I very deeply care about this community and the organizations here in which I’m involved.

One thing I see in South Dakota that troubles me is that there are many people who are so anxious to get “caught up” with the rest of the country/world that they don’t learn from others’ mistakes. This proposed oil refinery project in Union County is one of those mistakes that we may be very close to making. Sometimes when you live in a place, maybe especially if you’re young, you can only see what you don’t have, not what you do have. I am inspired by those elders who got up at the public hearing on the refinery to talk about the high quality of their way of life, and their desire to preserve the land. It’s not that they don’t want their kids and grandkids to have jobs, it’s that they know the value of what they have, and they want their kids and grandkids to have it, too.

...as much as I have longed for change since I have come to South Dakota, I am starting to see how important it is to preserve and maintain what we have. It’s not that I don’t welcome certain kinds of “progress”—it’s just as easy, maybe easier, to get stuck in the ruts of old ways—but I think change has to be thoughtful and deliberate and has to be considerate of the past.

[Rebecca Terk, interview with Erin Heidelberger, "South Dakota Green Feature: Flying Tomato Farms (Part 3)," Prairie Roots, 2008.02.19]

Now that's the kind of morning reading that can make a guy (and a girl) want to get up and do good for South Dakota.