Caroline Lepczyk
Friday, May 24th
Today we went to Table Top Farm, an organic farm a few miles outside of Nevada Iowa. The farm is run by two young married couples and good friends; the Corbins and the Grans. Chris Corbin and Sally Gran both work full time as farmers at Tabletop, while their spouses work full time at other jobs. Kim Corbin is Chris Corbin’s ‘sugar momma’ who works full time as the Marketing Manager at Wheatsfield Co-op, a local whole foods and organic grocery. She is also a graphic designer and designed both the website for the farm and pamphlet. Luke Gran is Sally Grans husband who works full time at Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI). He also keeps the books for the farm and manages the business plan and payroll. On our visit we were able to meet with all of the owners except for Kim Corbin.
Although the entire tour was very interesting and fun (especially because we were allowed to take an amazingly large amount of kale and other greens home) I found the business practices according to Chris Corbin to be the most interesting. Table Top has a new tractor, which is used for planting and tilling, which I found to be surprising, as I had thought that most organic farming would be done by hand. Chris explained that the reason that they had purchased and were using the tractor was because it greatly decreased the amount of time that was necessary to both till and plant the plots, and time is important because if they are paying their workers to painstakingly plant the crops row by row, it will take many expensive hours and prevent them from moving on to other important things. However, the most interesting thing by far was when one of the other students, Kyle asked if he would stay in the organic farming profession even if it was going to be something where he would make a good profit. Chris answered that no he would not, explaining that if there is not a profit to be made, it is simply not reasonable to stay in a profession. In an ideal world he would like to continue to keep his farm organic to reduce his carbon footprint and keep his workers safe, but if it doesn’t pay, it would not make any sense. This realism is very important in agriculture, although as Brent Friest would say, we would all like to live in our ‘fairy-dream-worlds,’ this is simply not reasonable. Chris is well aware that without his machine, crops would be very expensive, maybe $7 or $8 per pound for potatoes, and there would not be enough of a market to support the farm. We have heard, over and over again, how in order for a farm to be environmentally sustainable, it must first be economically sustainable. Although in our ‘fairy-dream-worlds,’ we would all like to eat fresh, in-season food hand planted and picked straight from the dirt every day this is simply not economically sustainable for most people, and until it is, we will just have to accept the small shortcuts which get us closer to our dreams than we would otherwise be.