Whole-Farm Planning: Ecological Imperatives, Personal Values, and Economics by Elizabeth Henderson

Author:Elizabeth Henderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2011-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

As this chart suggests, using your future goals for the farm as your guide, it is important to analyze more than just your fixed and variable costs. You need to separate expenses into costs of production and costs of reproduction. The costs of production include both fixed and variable costs involved in producing crops on an annual basis. Reproduction costs are what it takes to keep the farm going into the future: investments for maintenance, funds for improvements and equipment replacement, training for the farmers, children, and employees, planning for transferring the farm to the next generation, and funds set aside for retirement. If farm revenues only cover the annual costs of production, the farm does not have much of a future.

Allan Savory’s holistic management categorizes farm costs in a slightly different way, distinguishing maintenance costs from investments that generate new wealth. Maintenance costs include “all expenses of general administration and other applications that do not directly generate income. Phone bills, office supplies, transport, advertising, supplementary feed, fertilizers, salaries, seasonal help, and your own withdrawings are commonly maintenance costs.”

Among the many vocations that human beings follow, farming involves a special trust because farmers work with the forces of nature to create new social wealth. By growing crops and raising livestock well, we increase the wealth in society while keeping a protective eye on the ecosystems, knowing wealth creation has often been a zero-sum, “We-win-you-lose” game with Nature.

Savory divides human wealth—he nicknames it money—into:

• “mineral dollars” (money derived from “human creativity combined with labor and raw resources—soil, timber, dung used as fuel, water, oil, coal, gas, gold, silver, uranium, etc.”);

• “paper dollars” (money acquired from “human creativity and labor alone,” such as services, financial investing, sports, etc.); and

• “solar dollars,” which are produced when we “generate income from human creativity, labor, and constant sources of energy such as geothermal heat, wind, tides, wave action, falling water, and most of all, the sun.” Ed Martsolf calls farmers “managers of solar conversion.” Creating wealth by the engine of photosynthesis is our very special calling as farmers. By focusing our creativity on how to do this most effectively, we can make our farms economically and ecologically sustainable into the distant future.

So, how do we go about doing financial planning? Top and center, in all your planning and decision making, keep your goals firmly in mind. Then, analyze your farming systems looking for the weak spots. What are the logjams that prevent you from producing more of some crop, or from producing it using less time and energy? Repairing the weak link in your production chain is the first place to spend your time or money. Here are a few examples of weak links. Your crop yields have been low because the plants are not getting enough water. As a short-term solution, you might invest in an irrigation system, while working toward a long-term solution based on increasing the organic matter in your soils through composting and plowing in green manures. If your income from selling crops is

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