ABOUT
Sophia Farms
About
At Sophia Farms we believe there’s a better way to do agriculture that yields a better ROI and lifestyle for the farmer and rancher, produces a better product for the consumer, and which is sustainable in the sense that it requires minimal inputs (including labor) and leaves the land in better condition than when we started.
We’re obviously not alone in this belief; permaculture, sustainable agriculture, and restoration agriculture are all familiar concepts. What sets us apart is our environment. Located in the Sierra Valley, at the confluence of the Sierra and Cascade ranges and the Great Basin, Sophia Farms is set in high desert, with average precipitation equivalent to 20 inches of rain, most of it arriving in the form of snow.
Our growing seasons are short, snow in June is not unheard of, and we receive most of our annual moisture between the middle of January and early March. This is all in contrast to the environments where permaculture is typically practiced, but it affords us an opportunity to research solutions suitable to desert settings that minimize water and labor inputs, something of growing importance with our changing climate.
Research is all well and good, but it’s meaningless if we don’t convey the results of our work and encourage adoption. There’s all manner of well-intentioned people who are happy to tell you how they believe you should approach farming, but we’re well aware that the third- or fourth-generation farmer who is busting ass trying to hold their farm together is going to be loath to change their approach just because someone tells them they should.
As such, Sophia Farms serves not just to research and to educate, but also to demonstrate. It’s a lot easier for people to risk change if they can see an existence proof of something working.
The Farm
Sophia is comprised of several hundred acres of mixed fields, scrub (mostly sage, rabbitbrush and bitterbrush), and conifer woodlots. The property was heavily logged in the 1920s, then transitioned to running cattle in the “dump them out in the spring and collect them in the fall” tradition. Soils are predominantly clay (the Sierra Valley is an ancient lake; Sophia sits atop about 1000 feet of lake bottom sediment), with a significant alkali component to most of the open fields.
Much of the property has an underlying hardpan/caliche layer which is largely
impervious to both water and roots. A few seasonal creeks cross parts of the property;
beyond precipitation there is a single well for both domestic and agricultural purposes that
delivers less than six gallons per minute of water high in iron, manganese, and sulfur (largely in the form of hydrogen sulfide).
It is an interesting environment in which to conduct agriculture. The same piece of soil that supports camas and yampa in the spring can be hard as concrete by mid-summer, and yet it harbors a rich diversity of native plants. The combination of low-quality soils, the better part of a century of neglect, limited precipitation (that arrives well outside the growing season), and a short growing season make this an ideal environment to research sustainable agriculture under conditions that are anything but ideal.
The People
Sophia Farms start life as an abstract concept in the mind of Jennifer Kennedy, a botanist and permaculture designer with a specific passion for malus, who was left somewhat unimpressed by how most sustainable agriculture takes place in areas with long growing seasons and ample amounts of rainfall.
While refining the concept, several years were spent examining properties
suitable for use in her research, ranging from Washington to New Mexico, until one day, after a particularly heavy winter the phone rang, with her father on the other end of the line asking, “Do you want to buy this place?” A deal was struck, and she along with her husband, Chris, and their three children, became the next generation of stewards for property originally purchased by her grandfather in 1944 – a legacy which provides a significant leg-up in understanding the behavior of the land, as well as changes in weather patterns over the past seven decades an change.
After attending to utterly reshaping the house in which she grew up, in 2010 her attentions turned, with the help of Chris, to experimenting with approaches to sustainable agriculture suitable for the dryland environment.
While Jen represents the fourth generation of her family to reside in the Sierra Valley, Chris is a product of the San Francisco bay area. Having spent the better part of four decades doing applied research on trusted computing, distributed computing, and artificial intelligence, he now leads an international team that applies technology to problems of the human condition, such as artificial intelligence-based electronic assistants for small-hold farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, or recognizing abnormal consumption patterns in domestic water systems.
He takes perhaps too much pleasure in observing that he “...earned a Ph.D. in order to be a chicken farmer...”, although in truth he very much enjoys solving the unique sorts of problems encountered as part of our work at Sophia.
We’re fortunate enough to be supported in our efforts by competent and dedicated assistants, researchers, collaborators, and students.
Research
At Sophia we’re seeking to understand what sustainable, minimal input techniques can yield maximum ROI for small- and medium-sized agricultural efforts in suboptimal environments and in the face of changing climate. In concrete terms this means:
• Minimizing all inputs, including water and, notably, labor. For smaller operations the latter is often a major factor but is often ignored when evaluating alternate approaches to a problem. In our estimation an approach that requires an army of labor (paid or otherwise), or which demands ten-hour (or longer) days on a regular basis is as unsustainable as one that demands massive inputs of control agents or synthetic fertilizers.
• With the possible exception of orcharding operations, small-to-medium sized enterprises are typically characterized by multiple crops, the presence of some farm animals, and minimal mechanization. This isn’t a place where six-figure, GPS guided machinery makes sense, and rotating single crop approaches rarely produce a good ROI when conducted on a smaller scale.
• In our specific circumstance, water capture and system restoration are significant concerns.
• Identifying (or creating) markets for the end product is arguably as important as actually getting mud on one’s boots. Maximizing ROI requires both minimizing costs as well as maximizing income; the latter demands good market intelligence, and, in some cases, a different view of what products one should be producing.
These beliefs largely bound the universe of approaches we’re willing to explore; it seems pointless to invest in solutions that aren’t going to be meaningful to our target audience. In all of this we’re reminded that our impetus for undertaking this project was that most of the cookbook recipes for sustainability found elsewhere were not entirely (or utterly not) appropriate for our conditions, or those experienced by other dryland farmers. As such you won’t find us pontificating on The One True Way, but rather our sharing lessons of what has worked, what hasn’t, and our analysis of why. We invite you to take what works for you and
discard the rest!
Technology
At Sophia we embrace the pragmatic use of technology in order of maximizing our goal of producing solutions that maximize ROI for the farmer while minimizing inputs. While there is a homesteading aspect to our activities, we don’t eschew labor- and time-saving technology that is appropriate to the small-to-medium sized farms that we’re targeting. Granted there’s a certain appeal to using a working horse team rather than a small tractor, but the horse team is in some respects as inaccessible to most as the proverbial six-figure tractor -- and if you really want to rock a misery whip rather than a chainsaw we’ll appreciate your dedication, but it’s not something that’s consistent with our current design parameters. Similarly, we’re not afraid to make use of fossil fuels, particularly when used in a larger context that is carbon neutral or negative.
With that disclaimer out of the way, our research into and applications of technology are centered on:
• Season extension
• Shelter for animals and feed
• Water capture, use minimization, and reuse
• Soil improvement
• Energy production
• The use of cheap and ubiquitous computing to produce roll-you-own IoT solutions for monitoring, control, and automation. As we’re coming out of our initial research phase and moving into an operational footing we’ll be sharing much of this on GitHub for others to play with, and, ideally, form a community that will embrace our approach of sharing our accomplishments and failures (the latter frequently being more important than the former).
As ever, it’s our hope that you’ll take what works for you, ignore the rest, and perhaps share your own solutions as part of our community.
Research. Educate. Demonstrate. Help others.
It’s the Sophia Farms mission, and if nothing else we hope to inspire you to do the same in whatever fashion you choose.