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The Indiana Daily Student

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Biomimicry techniques offer a better way to farm

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The first thing visitors may notice at Maple Valley Farm is the sound — the mooing, bleating and hoof-beating of sheep, goats and cows as they stampede from one pasture to another for their next meal.

“It’s like an earthquake,” the farm’s owner, Larry Howard, said. “Or like the running of the bulls.”

This time, the herd of 150 sheep, 18 goats, 60 cows and one bull plowed through 1.5 miles to get to the next field, marked off by a mesh wire fence set up by Howard’s 17-year-old son, Ethan. 

Every month or two, the daily migration involves trucking the herds to new fields 7 miles away — a stark contrast to conventional farms where animals spend their entire lives on one patch of grass.

“It takes a lot more manpower than keeping them on one patch from the moment they’re born to when they die, but it’s worth it,” Howard said.

This migration is one way Howard mimics nature on his farm — a practice called biomimicry, which has become a rare experiment on the few farms in the country using the method as an alternative to the industrialized mega-farms that make up most of the U.S. agriculture industry today.

Moving cows from field to field simulates the animals’ natural migration, Howard said. Animals that stay in one place are easy targets for predators and parasites, and migration keeps herds moving away from manure and toward fresh food.

“In nature, everything moves,” he said.


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Larry Howard's 15-year-old daughter, Elena, stands near the refrigerator where Maple Valley Farm keeps eggs. Elena is responsible for taking care of the laying hens.  Christine Fernando


The birth of a movement

From Leonardo da Vinci’s bird-inspired flying machine sketches to the invention of Velcro, scientists and inventors have long looked to nature for inspiration. 

“The best ideas are often borrowed,” said Erin Connelly, director of communications at the Montana-based Biomimicry Institute.

It wasn’t until 1997, when naturalist Janine Benyus coined the term "biomimicry," that the practice shot into the mainstream. Now biomimicry forms the basis of a $1.5 billion industry and crops up in bullet trains inspired by kingfishers, houses modeled after baobab trees and robots mimicking inchworms.

While biomimicry is relatively common in biotechnology and engineering, Arty Mangan, the restorative food systems director of the New Mexico- and California-based science innovation hub Bioneers, said it is a rarity on farms.

Mangan can think of only a couple farms that have successfully integrated biomimicry: farmer and author Joel Salatin’s farm in Staunton, Virginia, and Mark Shepard’s Forest Agriculture Enterprises in Viola, Wisconsin.

“You don’t see it very often,” Mangan said. “It’s not easy to keep up and make money off of.”

Howard hopes to be one of the success stories.

An origin story

Howard was once an engineer with a career that stretched from software development to working on aircraft carriers for the U.S. Department of Defense.

But then Howard realized the mainstream American food system wasn’t getting him, his wife and their three children the healthy, locally-sourced food they needed. Even though he was surrounded by farmland, all the foods he found in grocery stores were shipped from across the country and grown in a way that emphasized efficiency over health.

So Howard put a pause on his engineering career and started looking for ways to produce these foods himself.

He started with sheep in 2003 but quickly found out they needed vaccinations, chemical dewormers and energy supplements. The family spent the next six or so years struggling to care for fragile sheep as they developed diarrhea from parasites and built up fluid in their jaws from worms.

As they watched their sheep die even with the support of pharmaceutical supplements, they realized something was wrong.

“The sheep in the mountains of Turkey don’t need all of this, so why do our sheep?” he said.

After speaking with researchers, veterinary groups and agricultural organizations, Howard concluded it was the setup of farms that kept animals so weak and reliant on chemicals. If farms simulated nature and cut out pharmaceuticals, the sheep would be more resilient and healthier, he said.

Howard began rotating pastures to keep his animals from being easy targets for parasites and from marinating in a slew of manure. He kept animals in multi-species herds to make it more difficult for parasites to jump from one host to another. He also cut out grain from their diets and added grass. For omnivores such as pigs, chickens and turkeys, he used a mixture of grass and insects.

While most feedlots use grain, Howard said a grain diet causes acidosis, which can lead to diarrhea and death. Grass-fed meat also has less fat, more omega-3 fatty acids and more vitamins than grain-fed meat, he said.

Larry Howard’s wife, Tina Howard, said taking away the crutches of pharmaceuticals that had been bred into sheep was a difficult process that resulted in lots of initial losses.

“The animals were bred to be that way,” she said. “They’d lost their natural ability to fight off parasites.”

Though they never tracked mortality rates due to parasites, Howard said lamb mortality rates were high when they first cut out chemical supplements. But the numbers gradually decreased until the sixth year without pharmaceuticals, after which not a single lamb has died from parasites at Maple Valley.

“It was some long nights, some real blood, sweat and tears just to keep these animals alive,” Howard said. “We were willing to do anything to keep them healthy.”

More biomimicry methods

At Maple Valley Farm, each animal has a purpose, just as each species has its own niche in a natural ecosystem.

The herds, which are kept in dense packs to act as herds and flocks, leave droppings and urine on the soil, fertilizing it and providing food for the microbes, earthworms and scavengers. Howard said these small creatures bring life to soil that has been robbed of nutrients from unsustainable corn farms.

Howard and his family help the breeding pigs restore the soil and produce compost by throwing in food scraps from local restaurants, including two barrels overflowing with poppy seed bagels that sat right next to the pigs. 

Chickens and turkeys trail behind cattle, sheep and goats. They eat the flies, larvae and insects left in the herds’ feces, and work the manure into the soil as they trample the fields.

The pigs, which Howard calls nature’s sanitation engineers, fluff up the soil with their snouts to make it easier for soil microbes to eat up carbon-filled materials. They also eat up pests.

“They all have their own job,” Howard said.


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Farmer Larry Howard holds up an egg at Maple Valley Farm. Howard said the farm applies biomimicry to its methods in order to produce eggs and a variety of meats for its partners.  Christine Fernando


The obstacles

At the basis of the U.S. agricultural system are government subsidies based on type of crop. More than 90 percent of subsidies go to the big five crops — wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research and advocacy organization.

Subsidies are also based on how much is produced, so larger farms get larger checks. In fact, the wealthiest farmers each rake in an average of $1 million a year in subsidies, while farmers in the lower 80 percent in terms of farm size collect only $5,000 each, according to the EWG.

Mangan said subsidies favor large corn and soy monocultures, which leaves small farmers like Howard out to dry.

“We’re supporting farmers who are doing the wrong thing when we need to be incentivizing them to do the right thing,” Mangan said. “We need to support farmers who are doing the right thing already, even if it costs more money.”

Mangan said conventional farming is technology-intensive, rather than knowledge-intensive, because farmers are constantly under the gun to do one thing: produce more. 

“Farmers worship more yield,” he said.

As farmers race to produce more, they often don’t have time to catch their breaths, let alone see their farms as natural ecosystems, Mangan said.

“It takes some major cultural shifts and some really creative and innovative farmers who can heal their land and make a living,” Mangan said. “That’s hard to come by.”

Closing down

The Howards faced similar difficulties in keeping their farm running in 2012, when they had to temporarily close up shop.

Tina said their initial farm share program was not profitable enough to sustain the farm and their family. She points to federal regulations limiting the number of chickens that can be processed on farms for part of their profit loss.

Larry said the ethanol subsidies that were driving up the cost of corn and grain contributed to profit losses. He also quickly realized they hadn’t set prices that correlated with the costs of production.

Maple Valley ended up scaling its production back so they had just enough to break even and support the family. Larry went back to work as an engineer.

“It was hard,” Tina said. “It was hard to go through that and realize it wasn’t working.”

Back to Business

The Howards took their four years away from full production to work out the kinks of their business model.

“We needed to stop and see what we could do differently because it wasn’t working in the long-term,” Tina said.

Their new approach was a program that involved partners paying for the animals on the farm and receiving a cut of the products in return. When they first started in 2016, Maple Valley had 13 partners. Now they have 35.

But there’s still a way to go before they reach the 36 partners they need to break even, and the 50 to make the farm operate how they want it to.

One of Maple Valley’s partners, Julia Williams, who is also the director of the Office of Institutional Research at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, said she fell in love with Maple Valley’s methods when she heard about them at the Owen County Farmer’s Market two years ago. She’s been a partner ever since.

Now, for $4,200 a year, she gets an average of two dozen eggs a week, as well as 50 chickens, 80 to 100 pounds of beef, 70 to 80 pounds of pork, one turkey and a pack of lamb each year. 

She visits the farm regularly and takes the food home, where she uses all of it, down to the chicken feet she puts in stock.

She said she can taste the difference between Maple Valley and grocery store food.

Chickens from conventional farms don’t have space to run around and develop muscles like chickens in more natural environments. The result is bland, soft, mushy chicken, rather than the firm, crispy chicken Williams gets from Maple Valley.

Williams said supporting local farms like Maple Valley that create ecosystems rather than feedlots is a major step in building an agricultural system that mirrors the natural world.

Back at Maple Valley, an ewe brayed at her lamb with a low, raspy bellow that cut across the cacophony of moos around her.

“Each mother ewe has its own voice,” Howard said. “Each child knows this voice.”

Howard said the ewes look after their lambs, just like they would naturally, and the animals work with each other and their surroundings as an ecosystem.

“They take care of themselves and each other,” Howard said. “We just need to give them the chance to live like they would naturally and then just take a step back and watch.”

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