Successful farming depends on healthy soil and water. To keep local farmers in the land, we must reward good practice so that it becomes a competitive advantage for the farmer in the marketplace.

At Five Acre Farms, we work with farms and farmers that embrace such practices and in turn build a better bottom line for their businesses. Our friends at Food Alliance have succinctly listed such measures below:

1. Control and minimize soil erosion by employing practices designed to prevent wind and water from transporting soils away and/or reduce physical and chemical degradation of soil.
2. Identify soil quality indicators that can be used to monitor success in building soil health and productivity. Healthy and productive soils help increase rainfall infiltration and storage in the soil and require fewer imported nutrients.
3. Reduce tillage where possible, rotate crops and recycle organic residues back to the soil. This will enhance soil organic matter levels, help reduce soil compaction, and promote carbon sequestration in soil (which helps counteract atmospheric change due to greenhouse gas emissions).
4. Adopt water-conserving strategies as appropriate. These include new irrigation techniques, mulching, soil moisture monitoring and irrigation scheduling.
5. Protect water quality by soil erosion control; careful management of nutrients, agrochemicals and manures; and the use of landscape features such as buffer strips and riparian habitat.
6. Raise livestock with access to pasture/range when possible, and a system of rotational grazing to prevent overgrazing and erosion.

Five Acre Farms. Positively Local.TM