Project Summary

The goal of this three year project is to identify, promote, and assist farmers in adopting integrated crop and livestock farming systems that reduce costs, increase market opportunities and increase profits for small and mid-size family farms. Working with 40 cooperating farms, the project will use a holistic systems approach that incorporates research, education, and extension activities to evaluate six inter-related outcome elements: economic impact, marketing opportunities, community impact, ecosystem impact, farmer adoption, and information transfer.

Need for this project

Modern-day farms have been moving towards specialization and away from integrated farming systems that raised animals and crops together. These integrated systems required fewer external inputs, conserved resources and tightened nutrient cycles to maximize efficiency. Cover crops and manure fertilized fields and crop rotations, cultivation and companion planting minimized pest and weed damage. The diversity of crops, markets and products reduced risks. These techniques have been, for the most part, lost to the current generation of farmers.

In the current farming system, farmers purchase chemical fertilizers and pesticides and focus their production on a few commodities. This specialized production  may be profitable for some farmers in the short run, but it erodes farm communities (Goldschmidt; Lobao) and farm ecosystems (Altieri; Lowrance et. al.; Soule and Piper). It forces farmers to continually pursue new forms of specialized technology to remain ahead of their counterparts in the rush for increased revenue and economies of scale. Farmers who do not keep up lose out to their neighbors. The result is a decreased number of farms (Cochrane; Levins and Cochrane) which in turn results in a diminished farming community and farm infrastructure.

This project builds on research and real farm experience that suggest that spatially integrated crops and livestock production can promote economically viable farms (Dobbs and Cole; Files; Marra), healthier farm communities (Files and Smith; Flora et al.) and healthier farm ecosystems (Edens et al.; Paoletti et al.) Spatial integration involves crops and livestock that are produced in close proximity where feed and manure can be exchanged with minimal off-farm transport. In contrast, specialized commodity production systems are integrated through markets, but generally not across space. This project comprehensively evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of new, spatially integrated cropping/livestock systems and compares these with the more conventional, segregated cropping/livestock systems. The integrated system may comprise within-farm diversification or cross-farm cooperation where farmers with individual crop and livestock enterprises share a land base, labor, equipment or other capital, and exchange plant nutrients, primarily animal manure, for feed crops. Its success will provide new opportunities for a substantial number of small and mid-size farms that are losing out with specialized production systems.