A new year’s resolution: plan for resilience

The new year brings with it a fresh start — an opportunity to reflect on the past year and consider resolutions to change and improve the way we do things. It can be exciting to turn to new, often expensive fixes like better cattle genetics, improved corn hybrids, or a new piece of equipment that promises to make work easier. But this new year also gives us the opportunity to think more broadly and take a step back to look at the big picture.

What can I do to improve my farm’s long-term success? How can I make my system more resilient? In a world entrenched in the constant pursuit of more production, resilience is an overlooked, undervalued, and perhaps misunderstood concept.

What is resilience? Resilience is not just power or toughness or durability. It is the strength of a willow branch, not an iron bar. Resilience is the ability to bend but not break, to endure and bounce back, to adapt and thrive in the face of adversity. If this idea intrigues you, consider attending this year’s GrassWorks Conference where the theme is “Building resilience from the ground up.”

Adversity is standard fare in farming. With multiple, largely uncontrollable risk factors — such as the weather, commodity prices, and the cost of inputs — how we respond to adversity dictates how successful we are as farmers. Having a plan for adversity makes your farm more resilient and better able to withstand extreme weather, low prices, disease outbreaks, and family crises. But how can we plan for events and situations that are unpredictable?

Nature provides us with an excellent model, functioning as an adaptive, integrated system that is extremely resilient. When a disturbance occurs, some components may not survive, but the system itself remains healthy and can return to what ecologists call an equilibrium state. Nature doesn’t maximize productivity or growth. Rather, it optimizes productivity and growth by maximizing stability and efficiency.

In agriculture, resilience is influenced by the interactions between a host of physical, biological, financial, social, and cultural factors. These interacting factors determine how well a system can respond to adversity. As agriculture has become more specialized and less diverse, our farming operations have become less resilient and more vulnerable to disruptions like extreme weather or commodity price swings.

There are many ways to organize your farming operation for greater resilience, but these five facets of resilience can serve as a foundation: sustainability, optimization, diversification, redundancy, and adaptability.

Sustainability: Although the term “regenerative” has largely overtaken the idea of sustainability, sustainability still has relevance within the context of resilience. The most widely accepted definition of sustainability includes economic, environmental, and social aspects.

By setting goals and making decisions that address these parts of our lives and livelihoods, we are more likely to balance financial goals with family, emotional, and mental needs. This balance strengthens us in the face of adversity, allowing us to have the life we seek while protecting the natural resources our farm and family depend on.

Optimization: Many of the people we rely on, like lenders, crop advisers, nutritionists, and input suppliers, are experts in their fields. Because they are specialists, they often encourage us to compartmentalize enterprises and think of each aspect of our operation through a narrow lens.

It’s our job to analyze their suggestions for the sake of our entire system, which may sometimes mean rejecting or modifying their advice. While a specialist’s goal is to improve what they specialize in, yours should be to optimize it with respect to the farm.

For example, your breed association may suggest different criteria for what makes the best bulls compared to what suits your farm's specific needs. Or, against the advice of your veterinarian, you may prefer to cull cows that need to be wormed regularly and focus on breeding a herd that is more resistant to parasites. You may choose a shorter season corn hybrid, sacrificing some yield, to allow for earlier establishment of cover crops that can be grazed in the fall.

By making informed decisions that optimize each aspect of your operation and complement each other, you position your farm for resilience.

Diversification: Diversifying your operation can make management more complex, but diversity and stability go hand in hand. As natural systems move toward a steady state, they become more diverse because diversity optimizes energy use and nutrient cycling.

Within a farming operation, a crop rotation that includes three or more crops has been shown to be more profitable over the long term because it captures both the up cycles and down cycles of multiple commodities, resulting in a more stable income year to year.

A well-established, diverse pasture is more likely to be consistently productive because it includes multiple species that can thrive under a wide range of conditions. If one species winterkills, you won’t lose the whole pasture.

Stacking livestock enterprises allows you to sell multiple products to the same customers. For example, your beef customers are likely to buy pork and poultry from you, maximizing your marketing efforts. Multispecies grazing can also make more efficient use of those diverse pastures and help break up parasite cycles.

These examples of diversification help stabilize production and income from year to year, reducing extremes that interfere with planning and management.

Redundancy: The concept of redundancy may seem counterintuitive and perhaps unprofitable in an agriculture setting, but in the natural world, all stable ecosystems have redundancy. That is, they have multiple components that serve the same or similar functions, so when one part fails, another part fills that role and the system continues to function.

For example, having multiple sources of winter feed available — home-raised forage, feed purchased locally, and feed purchased from out of state — ensures that you’ll have enough to get your herd through the winter.

Having multiple species of legumes in your pasture makes the stand more resilient to weather. Many graziers don’t like alfalfa because cattle tend not to graze it, but in a hot, dry summer, alfalfa will outperform the more palatable red and ladino clovers.

Having more than one piece of equipment that can spread seed or fertilizer, or having a good relationship with a neighbor with such equipment, can help you overcome inevitable breakdowns. And cross-training family members or employees ensures that work can get done and the system can keep functioning even when a key person is away or incapacitated.

Redundancy can be overdone, and too much redundancy can be costly, but making sure key components of your system have backups is a valuable insurance plan for a resilient operation.

Adaptability: Perhaps the most important factor for a resilient system is one’s ability to adapt. Implementing the other four principles enhances our ability to pivot in response to adverse situations. Regardless of what Mother Nature, markets, or life in general throws our way, being adaptable ensures we are more likely to endure those hardships and bounce back.

Adaptability is equal parts mindset and management. Setting up your system for diversity and redundancy ensures that you will have multiple options when your chosen approach isn’t working, but you also need to know when to pivot and be comfortable with deviating from your planned course.

Adaptation involves honing observational skills and monitoring your system for the first signs that something is wrong. Sometimes it means letting go of long-held goals. However, if the goals you and your family have set are realistic and agreed upon by all, they can serve as beacons that will guide you through challenging times and allow you to survive and thrive.

GrassWorks’ 33rd Annual Conference is all about resilience. Held February 1 to 3, 2024, at the Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., the conference will feature over 30 breakout sessions and keynotes on the theme “Building resilience from the ground up.” Topics will include managing pastures for weather extremes, diversifying your operation with sheep or pigs, farm finances, legal best practices, managing stress, and social resilience. The welcoming addresses from GrassWorks president Kevin Mahalko and Hinu Smith of the Ho Chunk Nation Department of Agriculture will begin at 1 p.m. on Thursday, February 1. The conference also includes a trade show, networking opportunities, and locally raised food. We look forward to seeing you there!