Episode #204
Anna Jones-Crabtree at Churchtown: Farming With Nature

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Anna Jones-Crabtree’s talk has been edited for clarity and readability.

Anna Jones-Crabtree delivers her talk “Farming With Nature” to the crowd gathered at Churchtown Dairy on September 28, 2024, for Real Organic: A World Movement:

Anna Jones-Crabtree 0:00
See the solution to grow a more nature based agriculture. I don’t think it’s about changing how farmers farm. I think it’s about bringing the economic life back to every farm. That means our collective work is redirecting our energy and resources that are going into changing farm practices, and I don’t want to say that’s not important work, but we also, at the same time as we’re building biological soil, we have to be building the economic and social soil that truly supports whole farms and whole farmer livelihoods. Nature wants us to be her co conspirators. She knows that not everybody can have their hands in the soil every day, but she also knows that there are lots of other ways that you can support the stewards that are doing that work you Linley,

Linley Dixon 1:04
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m Linley Dixon, co director of the Real Organic Project. We’re a grassroots farmer led movement with an add on organic food label to distinguish organic crops that are grown in healthy soils and organic livestock that is raised on well managed pasture, all without synthetic fertilizers and toxic chemicals.

Linley Dixon 1:23
You just heard from Anna Jones Crabtree, who, along with her husband Doug Crabtree, operates Real Organic Project certified velikas Farms in northern Montana, just south of the Canadian border. They grow grains and legumes alongside hedgerows and many wide strips of pollinator plantings, all within their farm. Unlike the majority of grain farms in our country, valeacas is focused on increasing biodiversity and creating wildlife habitat to help keep their crops healthy, rather than resorting to chemicals, as you’ll hear Anna speak about, this approach of farming with nature isn’t nurtured by our current food system. In Plain and simple, the economics, not the practices, are what need fixing. Here is Anna speaking at our Churchtown dairy event this past September.

Linley Dixon 2:18
Our first speaker back from lunch is Anna Jones-Crabtree. When I first heard about their farm, I there, I had never had a good answer for a study that came out in nature, like one of the biggest scientific journals, saying organic farming is problematic because you get lower yields, and therefore you need more acreage to farm organically, and the world needs to be, you know, re wilded. It’s nonsense, because not only do you farm when you farm with chemicals, you’re not just farming in your little box and somehow, hypothetically preserving nature somewhere else, right? That just doesn’t happen. I wish that did. I wish that all of those farms actually preserved equal acreage into wildlife, but they don’t do that. So it’s just a saying, and then also all of the chemicals run off, right? Anna Jones-Crabtree’s farm, Vilicus Farms is the model that just demonstrates exactly why that thinking is so wrong. So I’ll let her tell it better than I do.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 3:31
A lot of people made it possible for me to be here today, and I’ve traveled here to be with you from a place that I have grown to love, called the Northern Great Plains. The Northern Great Plains is one of the last great temperate grassland regions left on the planet. Our farm is there on the red star, there on Canada. And you think you’re way, way north, and then you realize there is an entire other nation north of you, but our temperate grasslands are one of the Earth’s least protected and most affected altered biomes. It is a ginormous landscape, and you really recognize your humanity when you stand out in it, you can’t help but recognize this ocean of earth and sky.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 4:21
My home, and I swore I was not gonna cry, is a critical breeding area for four of the fastest declining songbirds in North America. Just the east of us is the longest prong horde antelope migration in the US. North of us in Canada is a designated dark sky location, and we are on the western edge of the prairie pothole duck migration. There are less than five people per square mile in our neighborhood. So maybe that’s why I’m a little nervous, because I don’t really hang out with a lot of people. Oh. That doesn’t mean that we are out loud, there are swift foxes, long billed curlews, if you haven’t seen one of them, they’re like right out of Dr Seuss, Swainson hawks, milkweed Badgers, chokecherry, Maximilian sunflowers. And the many, many, many native pollinators that we have as and those are beings we count as friends and neighbors.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 5:21
We have really big tractors, and we have smaller ones. And our immediate farm family includes 22 Highlander cows, three Jack Russell terriers and a team of nine other humans besides Doug and I. When I met Doug, he didn’t have a farm to return to, and Dang it, he gave me this thing that I cannot get rid of, which is, I know I’m a farmer. His family had lost their farm in the crisis of the 80s, and we spent the next 20 years looking for the right opportunity. We really crazy that we are not only do we farm in a place we didn’t grow up, but we became beginning farmers at the age of 40 in 2009 we bought 12 180 acres off the open market at a place that was four and a half hour drive from our two jobs. We had five degrees, no debt other than the mortgage in our house, and we were on daunted. Thank goodness we we could have bought another house for the same $600,000 that we financed our farmland for on a coast that probably would have washed away by now, and there would have been zero questions asked, but because we were buying a farm, unbelievable. Thank the universe.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 6:38
There is a pretty awesome group of organic farmers in Montana and back in 2009 one of those organic farmers up on the High Line happened to be an organic farmer, and he was our USDA loan officer. Had we not had USDA programs for land equipment and a working line of credit, we probably wouldn’t be here today. So we set off with big ideas. Said, yeah, there’s risk, there’s challenges. We can make this happen. Doug took Latin in high school, and he had picked out the name of his farm long ago, and Vallis actually means stewards of the land. So our name reflected our intention, our job henceforth was to do all we could to belong to this community of Earth and use it with love. Fast Forward, 16 years later, we have the privilege and responsibility for CO creating life systems across 12,200 acres. We had zero idea that land was going to not be our most biggest challenge, and that we would have the gift of managing so much. We own 328, of those acres today. We also farm in a place that has 11 to 12 inches of precipitation a year.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 8:06
Our farming system is super complex. We have long term crop rotations. We grow between 15 and 20 things every year, and we’re really embedded in a larger agricultural landscape where the rotation, as Doug likes to refer to it as wheat and not wheat. We seed several 1000 acres of green manures annually, and many of those are multi species mixes that we terminate with grazing. And we have a long standing relationship with another organic farmer 60 miles south of us. They bring their cows up and graze our cover crops, and then our herd of Highlanders goes back south to spend the winter with them. Our farm looks really different from above. Over 25% of our acreage is in non crop conservation so field borders, conservation areas, native range land. We are not the first human beings to take care of this place, and nor will we be the last.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 9:02
So this is a picture of some of our original fields from the sky. A little up closer. Everyone’s got to have the drone shot of our crop. Strips are all 240, feet wide, size to our equipment, and then we have these conservation buffers in there, up close on the ground. This is what it looks like. In a good year, we have been seeding all of those buffer strips to native pollinator habitat. What has been so fascinating is that some of the seed mixes and we have a long standing relationship and partnership with Xerces Society. Check them out. They’ll tell you, as their staff would say, they protect things without back loans. Some of the species that are now starting to appear in our conservation strips were not in our seed mix, and they are native species, pretty powerful. I. Less than one and a half percent of the northern Great Plains eco region is actually managed primarily for biodiversity.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 10:07
So this is just the first step. We did these pollinator strips because we said this will help us with wind erosion, because we have high winds, lighter soils, but we’re taking our strips to the next level, and we actually have a multi year project with Xerces Society and where, last year we actually seeded a half mile of hedgerow. So when water management is everything that you need to pay attention to on a farm like ours, you look for where can you align with the forces of nature? So the one picture there you can see the snow catch that is still hanging out after everything’s melted, because that little bit of grass caught more water. We can see that in the yield monitors on our combine so we said, well, let’s go big, or go home and start planting shrubs. Actually, in some of the acreage that we just transitioned, there were historic hedgerows, and it was unbelievable during our drought years, which I’ll talk about in a bit to see that is where we actually had some crop production. So a lot of work goes into planting trees, but I have 300 miles of these hedgerows. If anybody wants to do a little bit of Plains agroforestry with us.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 11:23
I could spend the rest of this talk like sharing the details of our many adventures of farming with nature, but instead, I really want to let you all in on a secret problem. I’m an engineer, and I love to solve problems, so I’m hoping you can all help me with this. It’s a problem that Doug and I confronted every year we farmed, and it’s a problem that has had significant ripple effects to us and the dung beetles that returned to our farm three years ago when we brought grazing animals back to the land. When you start learning about bugs, you can’t help yourself. Did you know that dung beetles can actually fly 30 miles to go find a pile of poop.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 12:06
This problem is totally distressing and insidious, and many farmers talk to each other about it when we’re in a farmer only group, but we don’t. We don’t really share it in public, because we all want to have bright, fun, shiny pictures. This problem, also, I believe, is a root cause of farmer mental health and a core reason for why we don’t actually have more farmers. So here’s the secret. It’s really about the economics of farming with nature doing ecology right, undeniably works better than the alternative, but it still doesn’t create sustainable livelihoods for the people doing the work, especially now that we’re all living on a planet With an unstable climate. This is our first black beluga lintel harvest, and I think we did a lot of that by hand. My grandfather grew up as the oldest of 11 children in hand County, South Dakota, and then he said, That’s because they did everything by hand. And then he became an engineer, which I followed in his footsteps.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 13:21
So our farm hope was that we could be in a more sane system, way lower inputs, higher crop prices don’t depend on technology, depend on our brains, and there’d be a higher return to us that is much more than what it didn’t manifest the way that we had envisioned. Imagine that, right? Good thing. We were only 40, not 50. Maybe the solution to grow a more nature based agriculture. I don’t think it’s about changing how farmers farm. I think it’s about bringing the economic life back to every farm. That means our collective work is redirecting our energy and resources that are going into changing farm practices. And I don’t want to say that’s not important work, but we also, at the same time as we’re building biological soil, we have to be building the economic and social soil that truly supports whole farms and whole farmer livelihoods.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 14:28
Nature wants us to be her co conspirators. She knows that not everybody can have their hands in the soil every day, but she also knows that there are lots of other ways that you can support the stewards that are doing that work, and farms do so much for us as a society. We’ve talked about this today, clean air, clean water, biodiversity, but you know, farms have to survive through a lot of other four. Resources. And what has happened is that we’re forcing the activities of our cultural harvest, our community harvest, into a system of agribusiness. This is not about a checklist. We ask for a lot from our farmers, and there really aren’t many of us. So I’m going to do the engineering thing and bore you with a few graphs from USDA. This first one talks about how many people are employed in ag and food related industries, only 1.2% of those. So 1.2% of our larger population is attempting to make a living from production agriculture. That’s me and my chem fallow-no till neighbors, it’s easier to work as an ag service provider and then to actually be a farmer, because you get paid no matter what.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 15:58
Here’s another challenge, another USDA slide the Economic Research Service. Check it out. There’s some awesome data. This is how much out of the food dollar actually goes to the farm. And some would say, oh, that’s 14.9% but if you read the fine print, what actually stays on the farm is that 7.9% out of every dollar that we spend. So my question is, those of us that are engaging in much more complex systems, we’re taking the sun and the rain and the soil and we’re doing the largest share of value added work throughout the supply chain. Because if you’re processing conventional, or not even conventional, chemical based lentils, or you’re processing organic lentils, that work is pretty similar. So I think this is out of whack, and we need to figure out how to adjust this.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 17:02
The system really does seem, really does seem, it’s impossible, and it’s misaligned with where nature happens. One more slide the USDA stats on farmer income. Read this closely, like farm income on the far left is negative, has been negative, no surprise, right? But why is it? The Economic Research Service feels that they have to actually report this and include off farm income, right? Like, that’s the second graph. And if, if if you know about this, again, myself and my chemical no till community neighbors that show up when there’s a fire, 84% of us have some off farm job to either help support the farm operation and or provide health insurance. And we are no Doug and I are no different. I had no idea when we started.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 18:05
This was our first crop of rye, long, long ago that finances and economics are going to be woven so much into our story. I i went to school to be an engineer, not a business major, and over 16 seasons this finance question has been the biggest source of stress for us. It Hugh, it’s the it’s embedded in the tension between what we see as possible, the urgency to co create life giving systems, and then have to make choices such as growing more wheat and not doing another diversity crop so that we can stay in business. And for the longest time, I thought this was us. I thought, man, we’re not working hard enough. I’m the daughter of, my, both sets of grandparents, lived through the Depression, you save everything. You just gotta work harder, right? Well, I also thought maybe we’re not doing things right. We haven’t figured it out. And then finally, I realized we’re really stuck inside a system that is impossible.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 19:10
So the work that Doug and I are undertaking now, he wants to really just farm, but what I want to do is push our farm to say, how can we make the impossible possible more visible. So I’m gonna be super courageous and show you our profit and loss numbers from the last six years. I think more farmers really need to give voice to the financial challenges that they face, and it’s kind of scary to share this, because, you know, we don’t really talk about finances in this society, right? Like numbers or these big numbers. And in a way, it feels like we all failed on some account of what actually matters most in our society. But in reflection, you know, doing a little digging into this, you know, we don’t really have an expense problem. Tell me what other farm can run on? About $110 an acre. Expenses. We’re not buying 200 or $300 fungicide per acre, fungicide costs. We’re doing it all on on farm.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 20:13
There’s a total uneven playing field of support for farms like ours, and I sense that all of you probably kind of deeply understood that. But I wanted to give you some data. We also thought, you know, maybe we it’s because we started from nothing, right? So we had to start in the hole to begin with. And then the last three years utter, utter devastation, three years of drought. At the same time, we had had another land owner come to us and say, Would you transition 3000 more acres? Let me tell you trying to do soil drug rehab when it’s a drought and you don’t have any water, that is just like that’s not for the faint of heart.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 20:58
So in June 2021, just a little back story, we we hosted a farm tour Bob, (Bob Quinn – in the audience at Churchtown) was there. We had the best looking crops ever. In June, we were so proud of our team. Everything was in timely. You know, when you get ready for a farm tour, you really clean everything up, because you’re gonna show it so that. That was June. A few weeks later, in July, it was 50 mile an hour winds 90 degrees. And if you’re a little lintel that’s trying to bud out, you’re like, screw this. I can’t do it because the system that surrounds farmers is so extractive.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 21:38
We often end up extracting from ourselves and the land from which we’re caregivers for during this time, moment in time. So how do we close this gap between income and expenses? Well, we went in to the belly of the beast to look deeper. Doug’s like, maybe I’m not using crop insurance, right? We’ve been on this whole farm revenue kick. Let’s see if we can tweak that better. Oh no, go. After hours and hours and hours trying to talk to the adjusters about our 20 different crops, some of them don’t even know what the crops are. Our strips, what a pain in the butt, right? And then we also got told, like, guess what? You’re implementing prohibited farming practices because you’re not maximizing yield, since you have the audacity to inter crop and grow more than one thing in one place.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 22:28
So I said, Okay, I’m daunted, let’s keep checking. Surely there’s an answer here. Surely there’s an answer. We can do this. We’re smart. So I said, ecosystem services. I’ve done a lot of work as an engineer in sustainability and carbon. That’s this whole other world growing up. Let’s make it happen. I followed that rainbow and there was never a pot of gold. I got told, wow, you guys are doing all the right stuff, but you’re way too complex to model. I’m sorry. Isn’t it weird? Isn’t it weird to you guys that there are enough resources to start standing up an entire other industry that’s going to track and monitor carbon when you know everyone else in that system is going to get paid no matter how much it rains. What is that? Okay?

Anna Jones-Crabtree 23:21
Thank you, Scott (Scott Park – in the audience), you stole my Buckminster Fuller quote from yesterday! Our conclusion is we’ve got to come up with a totally new way of building economic soil around farms and farmers. Let’s reimagine our real our economic relationships so much like we focused on the five soil health principles, how about we collectively come up with five economic principles that support farms like ours? So I’m gonna give you, I’m gonna give a shot at these, and these are just what I have started to develop. And I love feedback. So principle number one, fund the work directly. Let’s decenter crops, recenter whole farms and farmers. Kearns is not going to save us. I’ll talk to you about that later. If you really want to know compensating our farmers as the biosphere stewards they are, will we have to decouple the payment for the service work from the payment for the crop.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 24:26
So Doug and I are managing this pretty large natural capital portfolio, and we’re doing it pro bono. So if you think about our land base of 12,200 acres, and we’re not nearly as land expensive as you guys are here in the Midwest. So let’s just say that’s $1,000 an acre. There’s $12,200,000 in assets that were charged with taking care of we’ve had some studies look at the carbon that is sequester. Under our crop land, only our crop land, not the pollinator buffers. And if you price that amount of carbon at $51 a ton, which is the social cost of carbon, that’s worth another $21,600,000 tell me what financial managed portfolio manager who’s managing $34 million is doing it for free. So I must be not right in the head, because we do this work no matter how much it rains. We do this work no matter how much we produce.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 25:41
So I said, Okay, being the one that wants to solve a problem, we had this other idea. I said, let’s, let’s riff on the CSA idea and create a community supported stewardship agriculture program. Let’s see if we can use that to close this gap of 12 to $22 between our income and our expenses. And I said, join us. Join in with us for $100 that’s about what it costs us per acre to manage our farm. You can participate in this community supported stewardship work. This is year three. We have about 65 members. We just took and one of our first buyers has agreed to buy CSSA shares and separate out what they’re paying for the rye flour versus the stewardship. And so we’re trying to look at this because we’ve accumulated some disaster loans over the last three years that I could really use help getting rid of. So next time you get on an airline and they pop up a window that says, hey, buy buy some offsets, think about what farmers you know, is there a way that you could pay someone who’s doing the work directly? Okay?

Anna Jones-Crabtree 27:03
Number two, we need to invest in mutually reciprocal relationships. Reciprocity. Thanks Abby for all the words today. So reciprocity is my word. It’s the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit. So many of our financing arranges don’t actually feel like mutual benefit. They feel a little bit like extraction, which is exactly the opposite of what we need to be doing to take care of the natural systems that take care of all of us. So I’ve been playing around with this too. Oh, sorry I missed my slides, so you may not be able to read this, but basically, here’s, here’s an example of a letter that we got, I don’t know, back in 2022 and we’ve gotten numerous other letters. It’s basically like, hey, the Wall Street Journal increased the prime interest rate, so we’re increasing the interest rate on your loan. And, you know, feel free to call our accounting team. We’re super happy to keep servicing your loan for you. Of course, you’re gonna get paid no matter what. Why wouldn’t you be happy? Right?

Anna Jones-Crabtree 28:06
So what do I do? What do I do as a farmer? Who do I pass that along to? There’s no way I can put a fuel surcharge to my pollinators. Maybe I could, say, write a letter to my pollinators and just tell them, like, sorry, guys, tough times. We’re gonna have to seed more wheat and probably not see any more habitat. And then, oh, by the way, you can call the accounting department. That would be me and my good friend, Megan, who lives in Missouri, who’s been helping us remotely. So we’ve been trying to noodle on this question, and we actually have a nonprofit now, as if we don’t have enough to do, but we’re trying to use the for profit farm as a learning lab and explore how to embed reciprocities into supply relationships. We’re also working with healing soils foundation to understand the capital stack of first generation at scale farmers.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 29:05
Because I think if we can unpack that and understand the crazy making that happens, that we’re going to be able to find some new ways forward that invite many, many, many more people into agriculture. So why are investors guaranteed income, no matter what the production.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 29:24
This is my third principle. Let’s build equity for everyone by sharing risk. So we lease close to 5000 acres from this company, Iroquois Valley. We dated the founder for seven years to try to get him to work with us. And finally, we’ve we we’ve been really engaged in what they do, and they only work with organic farmers, or farmers that are taking on more land and transitioning. They have helped us keep land organic by buying out landowners who wanted an exit after we transitioned a bunch of land. They have worked with us on a job. Adjusting our lease agreements, both in the amount and timing.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 30:03
When in 22 and 23 we said, look, I don’t know how we’re going to make the lease payment, and I think we can adjust. Can we adjust the timing on some of this? And we we did some some heartfelt conversations about understanding what each of us need. We developed an arrangement that shared risk and was better alignment with what the land can actually provide. Iroquois Valley has about 70 farmers in their portfolio, and they’re on a mission to transform agriculture through organic stewardship, and they’re acutely aware of who the caretakers are of the land assets that they hold. And I say we, because I am lucky enough to sit on the board of this company, we’re innovating ways to share risk more equitably with farmers. We want our farmers who are in our portfolio, who are taking care of the land, to actually help build equity. Because first generation farmers, you’re not going to have equity right away unless you have land that is the traditional way. And we have to come up with some new options.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 31:04
Number four, let’s diversify everything in your portfolio. If you have the privilege of having resources, find a way to invest with a farmer, the amount of private investment that is needed is so great you can read the UN report, and we need, we need vastly more investment of private capital in to nature based solutions if we’re going to turn the ship. Our Farm Bill, only 7% of our $428 billion farm bill actually goes to conservation. So through relationships that we’ve had with really creative terms with individuals, we’ve been able to help an employee finance a tiny house that they bill equity on. We finance composting equipment with the opportunity to pay back more if we actually have an income from ecosystem services thanks to the compost.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 32:07
And that lender also said, Hey, if you have a bad drought, just pay the interest. Similar thing with the fuel tanks, which helped us adjust from buying fuel at regular cost to buying tanker trucks of fuel that then significantly reduced our fuel bill. Fossil fuel is one of our biggest off farm inputs, and I would love a way to get out of it, but I’m not going to be buying a bunch of $60,000 Ford lightnings for my crew to drive around. So the last and final, final one, I know I’m going a little long here, is we have to fund for the long run, and we have to cash flow with the rhythm of nature.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 32:44
Farms do not run on quarterly profit reporting cycles, and farms like ours have to have an operating line of credit. We spend all money all season. This is the worst crunch time ever, because money is just like going out the door, payroll, fuel, seed, no income, and it’s really worse when buyers, and I know there are some out here, and I want to be thoughtful, because you are also stuck in a system, but when you don’t take my crop for a year, I am serving as your bank, and that’s not all right.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 33:21
So let’s get creative and help the rest of the world have some patience with payment timing and adjust to the rhythms of nature, which we’re going to have to really figure out soon, because we’re on this wild ride with Climate Change. So there’s so much creative capacity in this room. Let’s not stay stuck. Every one of you can be a beacon of inspiration, making what’s seemingly impossible possible. We don’t have much time to figure this out. Every farm needs a nest of support around them. We created the economic system we have that was a human created thing, and we can, as humans, figure out how to create something different.

Anna Jones-Crabtree 34:01
Don’t assume you know what a farmer needs. Go ask them. Build a relationship, because relationships, that’s what matters. It takes it takes people, critters, patience, a huge amount of food to do what we do, and an awful lot of capital, both natural and financial, and our biggest job is not to is to not. Biggest job isn’t to shift farming systems to be more nature based. That will happen as a result of us building enough soil, economic soil around farms to thrive an economy based on relationships, interdependence and collaboration is the best and most transformative way forward nature works in the service of creating life. Think about all the places that you could create life that may not actually be be you digging in the soil. So nature works this way, and so should we thank you.

Linley Dixon 35:11
Thank you for listening to the Real Organic Podcast. Our movement is growing because you’re subscribing and sharing these podcasts with your friends. So keep it up and leave us a rating and a review as well, so that others can find us. You can find a video version of this interview on our newly designed website, realorganicproject.org, or on our YouTube channel, and you can join us every Thursday for a new episode featuring voices from the organic movement. See you next time you.