So I think Agroecosystems Management is about the coolest thing ever. Note that I'm living pretty far removed from family and friends (both old and potential new), doing hard work in the cold for little pay, setting out to follow a career path that could leave me both poor and physically beaten, all in the name of Agroecosystems Management. Which ought to tell you something. Maybe it's that I'm crazy.

But how could you not love Agroecosystems Management? Let me be more clear: Sustainable Agroecosystems Management. Irresistable.

Being a good farmer means, in part, keeping track of the soil, water, and "biology" on the farm. It's the complexity of interactions between these that I find so seductive. Soil needs to have healthy levels of various nutrients so crops can grow; it needs a healthy soil ecosystem - a common rule of thumb holds that a billion organisms will live in a teaspoon of soil if it's managed properly; and good structure - those bacteria and fungi need oxygen and water, so the soil needs to have enough tiny spaces for those to be exchanged and absorbed. Then there's water - crops need not too much and not too little; mismanaged water can both leach valuable nutrients or just erode away the soil itself; and driving to plow or plant on wet soil squishes the structure I mentioned earlier.

Then there's the "biology" - all the different living and dead organisms and how they interact. Obviously the crops need to be healthy - they need to be planted at the right time and temperature so that they don't freeze or fail to thrive; they need to be weeded so that they get first choice of the available nutrients, water, and sunlight. They need pollinators, and those bees and flies need habitat themselves, best found at field edges or uncultivated areas.

Maintaining these healthy ecosystems means that a few crop pests - fungal, bacterial - will live in the soil. The trouble with spraying chemical fungicides and insecticides is that they often kill off more than the desired species, and removing species from an ecosystem, even a soil ecosystem, shifts and weakens it. There are several ways of dealing with crop pests while avoiding chemical sprays. You can rotate where you plant your crops so that they're not in the same place year after year. You can study how the pest affects the plant, and avoid the pest - if they only attack older plants, keep planting young ones and ignore or pull out the ones that have succumbed. If it only attacks in late summer, plant earlier in the summer and then stop harvesting. If the damage isn't too severe, you can decide to live with it. But above all: diversify - plant lots of different crops, so that you won't lose the year's work to that one pesky fungus.

So that's the boiled down and simplified version of agroecosystems management. What I love about all of this is that each piece interacts with every other piece, and if you can understand how it all fits together and be smart about management, you can build a glorious whole of a farm that produces amazing food and nurtures life. That's the theory, and the dream. I'll keep you posted on how the reality turns out.