Agency
A central goal of this project is to maintain the agency of farmers. A local farming community's actions towards sustainability should remain a common, a collective action that is not forced upon them. They should be able to benefit off of this shared action without being indebted to outside organizations and without having to worry about loosing funding for their projects. This tool gives farmers information on how to shift their land management practices towards more environmentally friendly ones without having an outside group taking over their land for an extended amount of time.
Farms run by individual local farmers can easily be made sustainable. Farmers around the world have been shifting their farming practices to become environmentally friendly, finding that working with the land instead of against it has many benefits beyond those having to do with the Earth's health. Better harvests, lowers costs of production, and the ability to farm for longer on the same land can come with sustainable farming. The stories below are all about farmers that made their own changes to their practices, without outside imposition.
Stories of Success
Phub Zam is a sustainable farmer in Bhutan. She grows her crops organically, only using home-made compost to boots the soil's nutrients. The amount of trash her farm produces has drastically diminished because she uses all leftover organic matter in her compost, which she then sells. Zam was taught by a government program how to farm in this way, making all changes to her farm herself. She now makes three times more money than she did before making these changes, the taste and quality of her crops are so superior to imported, chemically-treated crops that people are willing to pay her more for her product.
Oswaldo Flores is a sustainable farmer in Mexico. He uses agroforestry practices to grow his crops instead of clear-cutting forests. Growing crops between trees increases nitrogen in the soil, protects crops from wind and other damaging weather, and provides organic matter from fallen leaves. He plants multiple species that work together to grow, a practice called milpa. This practice increases harvests because each plant benefits another, for example beans increase the amount of nitrogen in the soil and squash leaves keep the soil moist. Intercropping can increase yields up to 50%, while simultaneously improving the soil quality.
Kat Taylor and Wendy Millet are sustainable farmers in the Unites States. They have studied how cattle grazed before human intervention, finding that natural grazing patterns actually increase plant growth as they move through different areas. Taylor and Millet realized that by mimicking migration by herding their cattle from one small pasture to another prevented overgrazing. This keeps the soil healthy and allows the cows to graze year-long, never running out of grass. They do not have to abandon land because it is depleted of nutrients, and can market their beef as grass-fed.