Mikaela Martinez Dettinger - Tender Carnivore and The Biggest Little Farm

     The documentary The Biggest Little Farm is the story of a couple who decided to farm in a traditional manner. They defined traditional farming as being in harmony with nature. With the guidance of an expert on traditional farming they created a landscape in the hills of California with a plethora of biotic diversity. Their crops and animals included a grove of over 70 types of fruit trees, chickens, pigs, bulls, sheep, goats, ducks, and more. Watching this documentary in my Environmental Leadership class while covering Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game in this class drew some important connections for me. One of the most striking parts of the documentary for me was when the farm faced a plague of snails on their fruit trees. To give some background, in order to replenish the arid soil on the land they bought, the farm owners took multiple steps tp replace the nutrients. One of these steps was to plant cover crops such as wild grasses in the orchard in order to maintain a healthy nutrient cycle in the soil. Snails thought this was a great idea. Snails, apparently, thrive in the perennial grasses and enjoyed the acres of snack-able fruit trees. They ate the leaves and fruit of the trees which damaged the health of the trees and the amount of fruit that was able to be sold. This really harmed the economic function of the farm as the fruit was their biggest seller at farmer's markets. This was a large scale problem because there were thousands upon thousands of snails and the owners did not want to use pesticides. As a solution, the farm owners moved their duck population to the orchard. The ducks absolutely went to town on the snails. The documentary states that in a single season the 100 ducks devoured over 90,000 snails! Even more amazing, the plenty of the fruit trees increased even more than expected because the ducks turned the snails into natural fertilizer for the trees!

    In The Tender Carnivore and The Sacred Game Paul Shepard argues that the downfall of an ecosystem is due to agricultural practices that disrupt the natural cycles present in the environment. He states: 

        A forest may remain a forest, or grassland remain grassland, yet be drastically altered in richness, productivity, resistance, and soil-building ability. Changes in composition are brought about directly by overgrazing and indirectly by the cultivation of surrounding lands; they are invisible to most people, even cattlemen and other pastoralists. (24) 

But what of the traditional agriculture style used by the owners of Apricot Lane Farms in the documentary? They are not hunter gatherers, and yet they have created a flourishing ecosystem that yields crops, replenishes the soil, and even has served as a sanctuary for wildlife all while working with the natural cycles of the land. Surely, this style of agriculture is much larger than subsistence agriculture that Shepard argues maintained the connection between humankind and the land. In his derision of agriculture, he specifically calls out cereal agriculture as a culprit. Does his skepticism of agriculture not expand then to the type of agriculture that focuses on the interconnectedness of nature as that of Apricot Lane Farms does?