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Commit To Resiliency In 2024
With a hopeful eye toward the spring of 2024, now is a good time for landowners and farmers to give some thought to building resiliency into their land stewardship.
Resiliency can encompass a wide range of concepts and practices. For this week, I would like to highlight just three that could meaningfully improve the long-run resiliency of our farmland in the next 12 to 18 months.
Top of my list for addressing resiliency on our farms is relationships between those that own the land, their heirs, and those that farm and care for the land. Stewardship is not a 12-month proposition. If investments and commitments to land protection and improvements are to translate into greater resilience, the landowner, their heirs, and the farmer (since the person who owns the land often does not farm it) must come to an understanding of the long-run goals and balance short-term economic realities with the potential benefits and mitigation of risk that comes with improving the farm’s resiliency.
Second is investments in farm infrastructure, especially water access and water retention. This coming year will be another year with significant financial assistance being available from the Natural Bridge Soil and Water Conservation District and private entities like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for landowners wishing to invest in such infrastructure. This means landowners investing their own funds to improve and sustain good quality perimeter fences. This accomplished, the landowner can leverage public or private funds to help improve interior fences, install multiple watering points, and strategically plant trees to provide livestock shade and slow the movement of water across the landscape.
The economics of hayonly production farms with no fences or livestock gets worse every year. This is an arrangement where a farmer tenant carries away a hay crop annually and may or may not replace the mined nutrients with purchased fertilizer. Increasing equipment and labor costs make this historic farming arrangement less and less attractive. More profitable farming systems for our region are emerging that entail livestock being kept at lower stocking rates, maintaining greater quantities of vegetative cover on pastures, and allowing selected fields to stockpile for livestock to harvest their own winter feed. Shade and water retention can greatly enhance these systems.
The third resiliency strategy is establishing legumes in pure stands or in mixes with grasses. Legumes are plants like clover and alfalfa that have the capacity to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and consequently do not need supplemental nitrogen fertilizer. Legumes still rely on good soil fertility with adequate levels of phosphorus and potassium but, unlike grasses, do not require nitrogen fertilizers to realize high production. Nitrogen fertilizers can volatilize and function as a potent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Legumes foster robust livestock production while pulling nitrogen out of the atmosphere.
For assistance enhancing resiliency on your farm, contact me, Tom Stanley, through the Rockbridge County Extension Office at (540) 463-4734 or [email protected].
