Big Piece of the Grape

I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma and came across a part that discussed the biological relationships on a small-scale sustainable farm.  The owner was talking about how there was certainly a high demand for chickens and eggs, and that he could increase production by adding to his flock, but at a certain point he would destroy the quality of his product. 

This is the flaw of the industrialized farm.  Everyone is working for a little piece of the watermelon and forget that sometimes it's better to have a big piece of the grape.  If you grow too large to support your ecosystem within the confines of your farm, you become a part of the "system" that everyone came to you to escape from in the first place.  So you have to accept that you will not make billions of dollars - unless you want to become part of that which you were avoiding to begin with.

We are already running into this balance on our ranch.  I have a HUGE demand for chicken and duck eggs.  I can fill most of the chicken egg orders, if not with my own chickens, with our neighbors.  But the duck eggs are another story.  I get two dozen a month, if that.  And I have a demand for at least four dozen.  So we added ducklings this year.  They won't be able to lay until the fall, but at some point they will add to the duck egg collection.  In addition, we will have a total of 36 layers by the end of the summer.  That way we can wean ourselves off of the neighbor's eggs and sell our own completely instead.

We see this with the pork as well.  We could've sold our first butcher pig four times over...and we really didn't plan to sell any at all.  So we've added a couple more weaners to the farm.  These two will be sold by the pound.

But the issue comes with space.  We have the space to house all of these new creatures, but we want to make sure that we are not crowding them.  We need to make sure that the chickens are happy, that the ducks have enough water to swim and play, and that the pigs can run and wallow without bumping into each other all the time.  Not only that, but we want to be able to recycle their waste products into our garden.  If we have too many animals on the farm, we create a problem instead of a -self-contained solution.  Our farm ecosystem needs to stay balanced.

So we won't add more ducks.  We won't add more chickens.  We won't add more pigs.  We will feel out the balance we have now and see what the farm can handle.  If we find that our ecosystem can support more, we will look at what kind of animal will fill that niche.

Are we going to lose sales?  Probably.  I can't sell eggs I don't have.  But the point of being a small local farm isn't to supply everyone in the country with eggs.  It's to help the local community by supplying a portion with local harvest.  And we cannot do it alone.  So maybe more people will start to look at a big piece of the grape as something they could be happy with...and they can quit worrying about the watermelon.