Chris and I recently finished a Brookside Farm site map and fertility plan. This is a great thing to do in general, and we were encouraged to get it done now by a local organic certifier, Mendocino Organics. I am glad to report that we passed muster!

The process of making this plan brought to mind some differences between what we are doing at Brookside Farm and your typical local organic farm or backyard gardener with respect to fertility inputs. Brookside Farm is in Little Lake Valley, home to numerous piles of manure of various stripes-horses, sheep, goats, etc. Anyone with a pick up truck can drive a couple of miles and load up with tons of free, aged manure. So why don't we just go ahead and get that stuff? Chris and I spend a lot of time building and monitoring compost piles, and fretting about how we are going to maintain good soil in the future. We could avoid ourselves much hassle with a few pick up truck loads a few times a year.

If you think about it though, where did those animals get the food that created the poop in the first place? If they are pastured some of it certainly has come from Little Lake Valley, but if there are piles of compost lying around this is probably because these animals are in pens much of the time and being fed hay and perhaps supplemented with grains. For example, one local goat dairy farmer had me really interested in the sustainability of his operation when he told me they grow all their own hay. Then he let the other shoe drop-they import about 100 lbs of grain per day and admit they don't have the acreage to grow it themselves.

That goat poop is therefore full of imported fertility.

When we think about local, sustainable agriculture, we have to start working through all our inputs, and many of the inputs to our inputs, and not assume that one bit of organic matter is as good as another. The embedded energy of the giant manure piles in Little Lake Valley don't represent the bounty of local fields alone, and if we want to establish sustainable food systems we need to work towards living within our local carrying capacity.

Some of the details of how to use local carrying capacity are given for Brookside Farm (and we cheat a bit with accepting imported food scraps), but we still don't have a grasp on what that might mean for our little area, let alone the big blue planet.

Our site map and fertility plan is available for download.