When living sustainably isn't sustainable.

In my last post, I began to look at some of the differences between rural vs. urban definitions of sustainability in an American context. I drew a comparison between Boston, Massachusetts and Viroqua, Wisconsin - soliciting my friend Lars, a subsistence organic farmer, to help me make my point.

If you ask me, the farm that Lars shares with his wife Corinna and their son Eliot is about as sustainable as it gets. They adhere to a rigid philosophy of minimal disruption to the land - feeding their animals via rotational grazing, avoiding all pesticides and harmful chemicals, and digging up as little ground as possible. They grow virtually all of the food they consume and sell the surplus to their neighbors; what's not eaten fresh is canned, stored, and eaten after the growing season. They compost; they heat their house with renewable energy [wood]; they generate very little waste, use almost no plastic, practically live off the grid.

It's textbook sustainable living. It's the kind of lifestyle that many of us [claim to] aspire to but which, in my opinion, is almost impossible to achieve if you live in the city.

So what's the catch? Well, despite the idyllic ethos employed, the truth is that in today's modern economy, it's pretty difficult for a farm like this one to be sustainable, if financing is the metric by which you're measuring.

Far from financially solvent, running the farm costs thousands of dollars a year, which Lars "subsidizes" [his term] with the income he makes from his other job selling Rotochoppers - a machine that grinds up wood waste to use for mulch. And that doesn't account for the countless hours of work that Lars and Corinna both put in day in and day out - a more-than-full time job with no vacations, no benefits, and no overtime. Besides that, Lars, Corinna, and Eliot, a family of three, live on 100 acres of land. As Lars said himself, if we all lived this way, we'd run out of space pretty quickly.

In some ways it's sad that a place which is, in so many ways, a paramount example of sustainability, isn't actually sustainable at all if you consider pesky realities such as time, or money, or space.

However, as Lars pointed out to me, if you judge by a value system other than money - say, the ability to produce the majority of your own food in a manner that doesn't detract value from the land, and therefore, can be sustained for years to come - then the Bergan farm is doing pretty darn well. Lars and Corinna have also created a market for organic grass-fed pork in the surrounding community, providing a way for other families to have access to high quality meat and to see the way in which it is produced.

If you ask me, it's inspiring to see people who are so committed to their value system, so convinced that what they're trying to do is a good way to live, that they are willing to pursue it no matter what. However, I'm not sure what to make of this case study in terms of contributing to that elusive definition of sustainability.