How Do You Measure the Impact of a Small Urban Farm?
Food, health, planetary health, justice.
This weekend I told our food forest workshop participants that I have been moving away from measuring our outputs and proving our productivity. Ian, who has spent a career in monitoring and evaluation, pushed back in his kind, wise way. Quantifying, he said, is an essential part of making an argument to a government that does not want South Africa to be a "nation of peasants". I think he is right. Numbers are how resources get allocated, and what is not counted can become invisible. So the real question is not whether we measure, but what we measure, and why.
What you measure is what you value
The trouble with a single productivity measure is that you can end up serving the measure at the expense of the people, the community and the land. If the measure is cabbages, a project plants a whole field of cabbages, floods the local market all at once, and the farmer is left with neither money nor food. Our own measures sit across a set of questions that are harder to compartmentalise:
Input costs, in time and money. This is what helped us see that propagating all of our own nursery stock had become unsustainable.
Yield, including the secondary and tertiary kind. Our goats give milk and cheese, but also compost, kids, wood chips, cleared Port Jackson, learning and joy, which makes them far higher-yielding than they first appear.
Waste. What is going to animals that could feed people, and how do we make the best use of every flow of energy?
Food consumed, and by whom. As a subsistence-first farm we are our own best market, and supplying some food to our immediate community covers our costs and keeps us sustainable.
The bigger picture. How does this serve our community, our children, and what could we do a little better in the next six months?
These questions go much deeper than "did we make money?", "are we self-sufficient?" or "are we certified organic?"
Complicated questions have answers. Complex ones have to be lived
Measures tend to fail us because we are measuring the wrong kind of thing. A complex problem has too many moving variables to ever be solved, in the same way that raising children is never solved. Food is complex, yet we keep treating food security as a problem to be fixed by top-down policy, targets and tonnage, and in those terms progress feels impossible. Broken into tiny parts, it begins to untangle: enough spinach seedlings to start a garden in Masiphumelele or Fish Hoek, seed saved from one carrot, a month of meals for one set of pre-school children, one workshop a month. One hundred fruit trees multiplied by ten years becomes a substantial contribution, and it never required a large grant. (I have written more about this in complex versus complicated problems.)
What a small farm produces, counted and uncounted
Plenty of what we do is countable, and regular readers have suffered the numbers in detail: we receive over a ton of waste most weeks, produce millions of calories a year, balance our finances, and host hundreds of visitors. But much of what matters cannot be measured. One person influenced by the farm who goes on to lift their own community. The health of our family, and the way it might ripple outward. A farm that produces only what can be measured is a much poorer farm.
On not wanting a "nation of peasants"
That phrase carries an old assumption, that growing to feed yourself first is backward, and something a modernising country should grow out of. I would argue the opposite. Growing for subsistence first is not primitive, it is more resilient. We plant first for our family, so something is always ready to eat, and then we plant more than we need. When the season goes well we have plenty to sell to neighbours at well above wholesale prices. It creates better market access through steady supply, smooths out income, keeps it in the hands of the producer, and builds year-round resilience rather than a headline yield. (More on this in growing for subsistence versus market.)
So, how do we measure our farm?
We still measure some things, but we try not to be defined by any single value, even though our calorie production is good. What we are really trying to work out is whether we are growing in the direction of our values, and whether we are including other people in the journey. It is our level of inclusion and access that multiplies our impact, along with the years we spend compounding our skills, our soil and our production. This is the same case we brought to the national food inquiry.
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