The Self-Land-Community Framework for Diversified Farms
Self, Land, and Community are the foundational elements of your farm business.
Taking time to understand each of these three aspects and their relationship to the whole of your work is essential to your success.
Before I started my farm, I wrote a traditional business plan, just as I had been taught through my MBA coursework.
In the first few years, I discovered how unique agricultural enterprises are. In some respects, our work is like any other main-street business, but in critical ways, it’s completely different.
While I started my farm by myself, I realized quickly that I had a very active business partner: Nature. My farm ecosystem was calling many of the shots, and there was no board meeting I could attend to find out what she was up to.
I created the Self-Land-Community framework to better understand and leverage the most important relationships in agricultural operations. I then shared it with beginning farmers so that they could use it as a tool that acknowledges the important differences between farms and other businesses.
Your primary job as a steward of your farm is aligning Self, Land, and Community in powerful ways which leverage strengths and ensure the viability of your operation. The Self-Land-Community framework pinpoints these strengths and interconnections.
At any point along your journey, you may use the tenets of this framework to remind yourself of where you are, where you wish to go, and importantly, support you in your efforts to get there.
The “there” is that wonderful place where all three elements overlap in a way specifically tailored to you and your dreams.
This sweet spot is the place where you are using your natural talents and strengths in partnership with the inherent gifts of the land to provide for and restore the vitality of both your farm and your community.
The April Joy Farm Story: Why I created my own Self-Land-Community Framework
When I developed the Self-Land-Community framework I modeled it after the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Lee Shulman's three teaching habits. He wrote that there are three essential habits to developing new teaching practices.
Habits of mind: knowing
Habits of practice: doing
Habits of heart: trusting - the human beings we trust to benefit our community, and society
These 3 habits form the basis of my Self-Land-Community framework, with particular emphasis on habits of practice and heart.
Habits of Mind
In today’s digital world, we farmers have easy access to research and technical support for our farms.
There is much support for those who wish to develop the habits of the mind.
Habits of Practice and Habits of Heart
I crafted the Self-Land-Community framework because I am particularly interested in helping to develop and advocate for the habits of practice and the habits of heart— those habits which become instilled in us by the doing, and which are a natural extension of our beliefs, passions, and ethics.
Farming is a habit of the heart, and crafting goals that come from your heart is essential to your success.
As my brother-in-law and farm mentor Doug Crabtree writes,
Organic farming is a complex production system, based on the farmer’s knowledge of and relationship with the soil and nature of the farm ecosystem. Such a system cannot be prescribed or replicated, but must be designed in place. This system grows in complexity as the farmer grows in knowledge and experience. The farmer is an integral part of the nature that encompasses the farm.
It took me the first five years of my farming career to recognize the importance of the relationships between myself, my land, and my community.
I made mistakes, taking on work that I didn’t care for, pushing my land to produce in ways that didn’t suit it and attempting to serve my community in as many ways as I could.
At one point, I was selling produce to restaurants, grocers, and direct to over 60 families.
I was also attempting to produce and sell 4 tons of wine grapes to a vintner and raising and butchering 12-20 heritage pigs and 50 chickens for meat every year.
I’d drive miles through heavy traffic to deliver small orders to high-end chefs. I couldn’t say no for fear I’d miss an opportunity.
I thought my small accounts would eventually turn into big accounts. But they didn’t. All these small sacrifices I made in the name of “growing” my business really just made me tired and discouraged.
I felt like I was subsidizing too much to meet market demands. Increasingly, I was left with weedy fields, over-grazed pastures and a growing sadness that all my efforts as well as the risks and sacrifice I was taking were not translating into the abundance and prosperity I desired for my land and for myself.
I didn’t have the perspective of the Self-Land-Community framework, nor did I understand the importance to my health and wellbeing of keeping these three elements balanced.
Too often I sacrificed or ignored the needs of one of the three elements to serve or satisfy the desires of another element.
By sharing this framework, I hope to save you a lot of struggle. I want you to find and cultivate your “sweet spot” from day one.
Take time to uncover exactly who you are, how to support the gifts of your land, and engage an authentic community around your farm.
Create your own Self-Land-Community Framework
By creating your own Self-Land-Community framework, you’ll avoid many business pitfalls. The framework helps you create a path aligned with your vision and thus keeps you focused on what is meaningful.
We all have many assumptions, motivations and visions for our work. This process exposes these assumptions to the light of day.
What is it that makes you feel successful?
What does your land need to regenerate and sustain its fundamental fertility?
How do you define your community and what does that community need?
The Self-Land-Community framework ensures that your farm business is a true value add to our world and to your life.
Exercise: Circling Your Vision - the 6 Steps to building your own Self-Land-Community framework from scratch.
1. Gather your materials and set aside at least 1 distraction-free hour
Use paper and pen or type in a Google/Word doc. I prefer writing things down on paper first so I have unrestricted room to sketch and brainstorm. Keep a separate sheet of paper to jot down things you want to research later.
2. Create working descriptions for each element of the Self-Land-Community framework
Think about each element individually to create a working description:
Self: There are many reasons for working in the field of sustainable agriculture. Define your reason.
Why do you feel called to this work?
Do you have specific objectives or measures of success?
Make sure to consider your financial needs, business and/or family partnerships.
Jot down a brief description of what your farmer dream looks like, from a personal standpoint.
I’ve kept this quote on my fridge for many, many years:
Find out who you are and do it on purpose.
~Dolly Parton
Land: Think about the particular place you intend to farm.
What is the land base you have to work with and what is your relationship to it?
Are you renting or do you own your land?
How has it historically been used and what condition is it currently in?
Do you have neighbor relationships of significant importance?
Write a brief description of the size, topography, micro-climate and any other important elements. Print out an aerial photograph and soil maps, too.
Community: In the context of your farm business, what does community mean to you?
How do you define the size, scale, and demographics of the community you wish to serve?
3. Dig Deeper with a SWOT analysis
After you’ve created working descriptions, take the time to develop a SWOT analysis for each element.
SWOT stands for:
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Challenges
Here are several useful resources with instructions to help you develop your own SWOT analysis:
SWOT for Your Self
Ask yourself:
What I do I excel at?
What parts of my farm operation do I really love – where I feel like I’m in the zone?
Who do I love serving?
Identify your strengths, weaknesses, first, then think about your motivations and worries. Excavating these assumptions and concerns can help you complete your Opportunities and Threats section.
I can’t emphasize enough the need to understand your true self and your motivations. If you don’t know succinctly why you want to pursue farming, you’ll have a difficult time setting benchmarks for success.
Spend time thinking about what scale feels right for you.
It would stress me out to no end if I had to harvest hundreds of acres of hay each summer, worry about the weather, and manage a big crew.
But I feel a real sense of accomplishment and pride each summer when I gather my family and friends and together and we bring in three acres of hay.
Don’t fall into the trap of letting others’ perceptions and stereotypical attitudes about farming define success or failure.
What is it that YOU hope to gain from a farming career? Keep it simple and clear.
I wanted a higher quality of life, to care for my land, and to deepen my connection to my community.
SWOT for Your Land
You can do a SWOT analysis for your land. Start by asking yourself:
What soil characteristics lend themselves?
What is the capacity of your land?
What does it “naturally” want to do and what plants, animals are easily sustained on it?
Identify your (ideal) land’s strengths, needs, and natural tendencies.
What natural relationships and/or cycles are currently in place?
What is the climate suited for?
When I started my farm, I researched many hours about potential high value crops. I discovered that seedless table grapes are in great demand, and yet there were no market growers of sizable scale in my area. I learned that my climate is well suited to grapes. I also had existing grapes on the land I had purchased that were evidence of their hardiness and adaptability to my farm.
SWOT for Your Community
Assess your community however you define it - by size, location, how you want to help your community, its market needs, and more.
Start by identifying the geography and demographics of your community. Then think about already existing infrastructure that is valuable for farmers.
Is there an existing food hub?
An active farmer organization?
Access to commercial kitchens for value added product processing?
Alternatively, what do you wish existed in your community that doesn’t?
Is there a lack of local butchers or mobile slaughter units?
What about grain storage and cleaning facilities?
Think through all the steps of production and distribution for any product and market channels you’re considering.
I define my community as the county my farm resides in, because I feel a sense of pride in building up the local region I call home. I serve my community by providing 75 community supported agriculture shares (CSA) to local residents.
I have no real interest in getting bigger, commodifying my products or serving so many customers that I can’t know them and their families.
For other producers, serving a local community may be too small a pond to play in, either because they don’t have a dense population, or because their personality is such that they feel the most impactful when they are growing at a bigger scale.
The only right and wrong answers are how you feel and how you respect and understand the resources at hand.
What is the right scale for you?
It’s the scale that makes you feel happy and challenged and where you’re making a meaningful impact - in whatever way you define meaningful impact.
Think about your community, then ask yourself:
What does it need?
What does it lack?
What infrastructure is in place to support your potential products?
What will you need to build/network?
Does doing so interest you? If not, why pursue it?
Finally, think about your community’s strengths, needs, and opportunities. Is there a market for the gifts you and your land are intent on producing?
Once you’ve completed your initial SWOT, consider all the elements in relation to each other.
I have come to understand that while many others can play in big ponds and make massive change on a far-reaching scale, I can't do it.
I can't do it because it's just not me. I am overwhelmed when I think of the magnitude of the problem and I don't like having to make big- one-size -fits all decisions.
My Self-Land-Community Framework has helped me realize and embrace the idea that I am more successful and happier swimming in a small pond. And that it is entirely ok!
I feel powerless when I think about how to alleviate poverty and food insecurity for everyone, but I feel totally bright and shiny when I think about providing twenty low income families with good food for 23 weeks.
I want to cry when I see the broad scale development of tract houses on prime farmland in my community, but I feel hopeful when I think of my work as a board member on a local conservation district focused on supporting area farmers.
Know who you are, know your land, and know the size of the community that will allow you to be successful.
Embrace it.
4. Put it all together: How are the 3 SWOT analyses connected?
Lay your three Self-Land-Community SWOT analyses side by side.
Take out a new sheet of paper and use each SWOT analysis to fill in the blanks:
Here are the 3 Important Relationships & Connections
Land — Community
The Land - Community relationship at April Joy Farm: My farm is located eight miles from one of the fasted growing towns in the state of Washington.
Community — Self
The Community to Self relationship at April Joy Farm: Agricultural illiteracy is very high in my community. Very few families have any connection to a farm or understand how our food system works. By sharing the stories of my farm with my community I hope to both educate and inspire.
Self — Land
The Self-Land relationship at April Joy Farm: I am at my healthiest when I maintain an active and direct relationship with my land. Physically working outside to produce food is very important to me.
Now it’s your turn, write down the relationships and connections for you and your farm.
Land — Community
Community — Self
Self — Land
5. Draw a Self-Land-Community Venn diagram.
Make a visual representation of your ideal business setup using a Venn diagram.
Unlike most Venn diagrams, the size of the circles of your diagram representing each element and the overlap will depend on the importance of the element, your farming knowledge and experience, the location of your farm and more. Before creating your own, view the examples below.
If you have not yet started your agricultural enterprise, your Self-Land-Community framework may look something like this at first:
Before the establishment of your farm enterprise, you will not have a direct business relationship with your community, which overlaps and relies on the land base for all its basic needs and services.
The size and relative overlap of all three elements describes many attributes about your particular system.
The following diagram might be appropriate for an urban-based farm, with a dense population and a small availability of land base. In such an example, the farm might be a postage size city lot operated by one or two individuals.
The bright yellow star represents the place where the needs and goals of your community, yourself and your land have a common connection.
This is your ultimate goal: to pursue a strategy that aligns strengths and provides support for each of the three elements.
It’s important to note that the goal is not to develop a system in which all three elements are exactly equal in size and overlap exactly by the same amount.
Such a perfect overlap is not representative of reality much like writing a ‘perfect’ business plan is unattainable.
Below are three unique agricultural systems visualized in Venn Diagrams – Unique just like the farmers who steward them!
Develop your own Venn diagram by asking yourself these questions
What are the primary strengths of
Self
Land
Community
Opportunities
How do the opportunities of your SWOT analyses align with fulfilling a market need from a business perspective?
What about from the perspective of using your own strengths?
Required Support & Connection
How will you specifically connect Self-Land-Community to reduce the risk of identified threats?
6. Understand that this framework is part of a farm business plan, not a replacement for it.
The Self-Land-Community framework is not a replacement for writing a farm business plan, but rather a valuable visual method for gaining clarity and focus about who you are, what you want to do, and how your land and community relationships can work together to create value for farm work.
Creating a Self-Land-Community framework to help you establish your farm goals takes time and patience.
The framework isn’t set in stone either. Remember, every year, you can reevaluate it based on what you’ve learned about yourself, your land and your community.
That’s the beauty and the joy of creating your own agriculture enterprise and the frameworks and roadmaps that guide it.
You get to lead the way!