Emily Wright picks flowers growing safely in a garden tunnel on September 17 at Three Creeks Farm and Forest in Ashland. Wright saves the tunnels for high-value crops such as these flowers, tomatoes and peppers, which are watered via drip irrigation and micro overhead sprinklers. (Cory W. MacNeil/Columbia Missourian)
On harvest days at Three Creeks Farm and Forest in the Missouri River valley, farm owner Emily Wright and her staff gather three types of leafy greens from the field.
“We really can’t grow enough,” she said. “We try to have a consistent supply throughout the season, which basically runs from April to December, but it is difficult to keep up.”
Two employees cut the lettuce close to the root, fan the leaves over their hands and check for insects or wilt, then toss them into a bright orange basket. From there, the vegetables are washed, packaged and driven into town for delivery to local restaurants and supermarkets.
Wright co-owns and manages the farm with her partner Paul Weber, who performs as a touring musician. They have been growing fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers for nine seasons in a diversified horticultural-style farm in the hills of the Missouri River. In addition, two-thirds of their 15 hectare farm consists of forest.
“I think of it as kind of my long-term outdoor ecological experiment,” she said.
Wright and Weber plant perennials such as fiddlehead ferns and wild leeks throughout the forest. They also grow native trees, including paw paws, along the forest edge, allowing them to pollinate and protect the more mature trees.
Wright called the abundance of vegetables, fruits, shrubs and trees at Three Creeks Farm and Forest “complex and chaotic” and said the crops benefit from growing among each other.
“I feel like I’ve witnessed an explosion of biodiversity in recent years,” says Wright. “I see it mainly in insect populations, but I also feel like I’ve noticed new bird species and a lot more amphibians and reptiles and generally a lot of life in this valley.”
Operating a farm within its natural ecosystem is a tenet of regenerative agriculture – a movement that aims to revitalize farmland soils and, by extension, diverse farms and rural communities.
As climate change threatens farmland and the agricultural economy, people are looking to regenerative agriculture as a new way forward, specifically using perennial crops that do not require the intensive annual tillage, planting, fertilization and harvesting of conventional commodities.
Tim Crews is chief scientist at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and said many of the staple crops we eat — corn, rice, barley, oats — are annuals.
“Annuals require the termination of all vegetation in the landscape to have a chance,” he said. “If you do that year after year after year on vast landscapes, you get soil degradation.”
Land Institute scientists have been working for decades to research and educate on sustainable agriculture in the Midwest and Great Plains. They develop perennial grains that are not as damaging to the environment as annual grains. Crews said row crops take a toll on the environment over time.
“They have no capacity to retain nutrients. Their microbial communities are much less functional than those in mature grasslands or forests,” Crews said. “It’s such a compromised ecosystem.”
But if more perennial crops existed, he said, they could break the food system’s dependence on annual crops and transform farms into something more like a natural ecosystem, like a forest.
Regenerative agriculture aims to breathe life into depleted soils, partly through perennial plants, while reducing the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which can have negative impacts on the environment.
“The regenerative capacity of perennials is unparalleled… there are economic benefits, there are lifestyle benefits, there are wildlife benefits,” Crews said.
Combination of farm and forest
There is a lot to harvest from trees and shrubs, such as nuts or berries, and there are many benefits to soil health and the ecosystem from having them on the farm.
“Agroforestry essentially provides a kind of toolbox that allows you to integrate some of that ecological design into a landscape,” says Zack Miller, Conservation Engagement Manager at The Nature Conservancy in Missouri.
The organization conducts ecosystem restoration across the state. Miller is coordinating a 164-acre agroforestry demonstration project at the Missouri River Center – the former site of Katfish Katy’s riverfront bar and restaurant.
The project’s long-term goal is to connect people to the Missouri River and its ecosystems and to serve as a living agroforestry laboratory to “demonstrate what these systems could look like and be able to sustain their economic returns show how farmers might be able to implement different strategies,” said Miller.
Trees, shrubs and perennials can be sporadically integrated into conventional farms through alley cultivation, prairie strips, windbreaks, hedges and more. But for agroforestry to be successful, Miller said we need to get used to a messier kind of farm.
“When we look across landscapes and see how we’ve divided it up: this piece is for growing this one plant, this piece is for growing something else,” he said. “But of course that’s not how ecosystems function. There are no clear boundaries.”
Three Creeks Farm and Forest intentionally planted perennials with culinary or floral purposes that allowed them to sell berries, nuts and fresh cut flowers to groceries and restaurants. Wright also planted a row of smokebush, a perennial shrub, with a dual purpose: windbreak: blocking dust kicked up from their gravel road.
Wright said she sees plenty of opportunity in the Midwest for conventional farms to incorporate more diverse products into their operations.
“Just cutting out those odd corners that don’t fit the giant industrial tractors and… converting those to vegetable production would have a huge impact on the amount of food delivered locally,” she said.
Miller said that because of the amount of inputs needed — fertilizer, fuel and equipment — the farming of Midwestern crops that made Midwestern agriculture so plentiful no longer works.
Biodiversity has plummeted, and so has the ability to sustain agriculture, Miller said.
“It’s very simple to say, but the answer to many of our problems is diversity,” he said.
Wright understands how some farmers, under pressure from policy and markets, become stuck in a rigid structure.
“There’s not a lot of room for experimentation or adjustment,” she said.
But running a small, diverse business like Three Creeks Farm and Forest means experimentation and adaptation never stop. Wright and Weber recently added a fermentation facility to the farm, allowing them to offer sauerkraut, pickles and okra to local restaurants.
“One of the reasons that farming is really attractive and exciting to me is that the learning curve never decreases,” Wright said. “It’s like, as soon as we get the hang of things and it gets even a little bit boring, we add something.”
Diversification has helped Wright’s farm not only environmentally, but also economically.
“We don’t really qualify for crop insurance programs, so diversification is a kind of insurance because we deal with crop failures every year,” she said.
“We basically just accept that while one thing may go wrong, another will prosper, and both our livelihoods and morale will be maintained.”
This article is republished from the Columbia Missourian. Read the original article here.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES IN YOUR INBOX
