How do you measure a farm like ours?

This weekend I mentioned to our food forest workshop participants that I’ve been moving away from measuring our outputs, or proving our productivity. This time of year, with thirteen baby goats and the beginning of the spring wave of life, with vegetables and animals all our around us, people from our community flowing through to learn and grow, and our kids and parents intertwined with the life of the farm, it feels self-evident.

Ian, who has spent a career in monitoring and evaluation, pushed back in his kind, wise way. He suggested that quantifying is an essential part of presenting an argument to a government that doesn’t want South Africa to be a “nation of peasants.”

I think Ian is right, and I’ve been thinking of that phrase “nation of peasants”, and how we should grapple with that. How we should consider the wisdom of those who came before us in a way that feels forward-looking? Numbers are a mechanism for funding and the allocation of resources. What isn’t counted can become invisible. So the question is less about whether we measure, but rather what we measure and why.

How might we tell our stories so that they aren’t forced to fit a narrative that wasn’t built for us, a narrative that (as per the Wendell Berry poem above) focuses on the market and doesn’t pay enough attention to externalised costs to the environment, or to communities?

What you measure is what you value

The challenge with an overly simple productivity measure is that one can become focused on a measure at the expense of the people, the community, and the land. For example, if the measure is in cabbages, a project plants a whole field of cabbages and is hugely productive on those terms. Yet the cabbages flood a local market all at one time, and the farmer often ends up with neither money nor food.

Our measures tend to be focused on a set of questions that are important to get to grips with, but difficult to neatly compartmentalise. Some are obvious, but the answers are often less obvious:

• Input costs: Both time and money. This calculus helped us to realise that our propagating all our own stock for our nursery was ultimately unsustainable.

• Yield: Not only what primary product will be produced and how quickly, but also what secondary and tertiary products might be created. For example, our goats milk and cheese are important yields, but the compost, baby goats, learning, joy, port jackson consumed, wood chips as a side product, mean that our goats are exponentially higher yielding than they might initially seem.

• Waste: what is going to animals that should feed humans? How can we slow the flow of energy and make the best use of it?

• Food consumed, and by whom?: As a subsistence-first operation, we are the perfect market for our own food, and the benefits to consuming as much of what we grow as possible is hard to quantify but hugely significant. At the same time, supplying at least some food to our immediate community covers our input costs, and keeps the farm sustainable.

• How does something fit in a bigger picture? How does this impact our community, and how might we do a little better in the next 6 months? For example, our farm provides increasing responsibility and progressive growth for our kids. A product that they have a hand in creating doesn’t need to be super profitable to be worth the effort. In earlier years I would sometimes project the time and money we might otherwise spend on fuel, schools, after-school activities, but nowadays I focus on intuition.

These questions can be a lot deeper than “did we make money?” or “are we self-sufficient” or “are we certified organic?”

Complicated questions have answers. Complex ones have to be lived

Measures tend to fail us because we’re measuring the wrong kind of thing. A complex problem has too many moving variables to ever be “solved”, in the same way that raising our kids can never be “solved”. Food, from the soil to the way it behaves in our bodies and how we relate around the table, is complex. Yet we tend to see food security as a problem to be solved through top-down policy, targets or tonnage. In these terms, progress seems impossible.

Broken into tiny parts, it begins to untangle. Enough spinach seedlings to start a new garden in Masi or Fishhoek, seeds saved from one carrot to grow carrots for one year, one month’s meals for one set of pre-school kids. One workshop a month. One hundred fruit trees multiplied by ten years is suddenly a substantial contribution, but it doesn’t require a large grant. Good policy is still important, but we don’t need to sit around waiting. We can build from the ground up.

What a small farm produces: what is counted and what is not.

Many of the things we do are quantifiable, and if you’re a regular reader I’ve probably subjected you to some of the numbers in painful detail! For example, we receive over a ton of waste most weeks, we produce millions of calories a year, our finances do balance, we have hundreds of people visit each year. But there are many things that are impossible to measure: one person who is influenced by the farm and in turn positively impacts their own community. The health of our family, and the way that our health might influence other people towards better or deeper health. A farm that only produces what can be measured is a much poorer farm.

A not wanting “a nation of peasants”

The phrase carries the old assumption that growing to feed yourself first is backward or unproductive, and something that a modernising country should grow out of.

But I’d argue that the opposite is true. Growing for subsistence first isn’t the primitive option. It’s actually more resilient. We plant first for our family’s consumption, so something is always available to eat, and then we plant more than we need. When things go well, we have plenty to sell to our neighbours, at much more than the wholesale prices. It creates much better market access because there’s a steady supply of food, so the community always has something to buy. It smoothes out income and leaves it in the control of the producer, and focuses on year-round resilience rather than a “headline” yield.

So… Measuring our farm

We basically try to measure some things, but we’re less inclined to focus on one value, even though our calorie production is very good. I don’t want to be defined in terms of calorie production or even business success, because those are not the best measures of impact, nor are they the most scalable or replicable parts of what we do.

What we’re trying to figure out is whether or not we are growing in the direction of our values, and if we are including other people in our journey. It’s our level of inclusion and access that multiplies our impact, and also the length of time that we spend compounding our skills, our soil, and our production.

I’d love to hear from you what you measure, what you don’t measure, and how your rubric has shifted over time.

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