I’m a dork and like to relax by doing back of the napkin calculations, trying to cost out things like our farm’s impact on community food supply, or how many calories we grow out relative to calories inputted to run our farm, or the exact weight of plastic we use in our production per person we serve (check back in the next month for this followup, since I know a lot of folks out there are wondering the same!). The answers on these three are: a lot of people if you count based on value or nutrition over calories; about even since except for potatoes, veggies are so low calorie; and on the plastic, both more than I want but way less than I thought! What frustrates me on the back of these napkins and in the rhetoric from the world around us is that we measure efficiency and economic viability against standards that don’t take into account the environment or communities or all sorts of other external and internal values. Even putting aside organics, a farmer with a thousand acres running a grass-fed regenerative beef operation on paper might appear less efficient next to a thousand acre farm growing corn. The beef farm needs more people to manage things, gets less calories an acre, and has to deal with the costly and expensive hassle of a long processing chain, while the corn producer has a more efficient system set up to handle their product, right up to commodity subsidies. Yet there are all sorts of intangibles—from locking up carbon in the pastures to building up soil through intensive grazing, that don’t show up in the our current system’s accounting of the two operations. It costs a bit more to do things “right” by the environment, and our country has historically measured value, efficiency, and productivity by terms that don’t put much weight on environmental or climatic quality. When we build soil or trap carbon as small farmers, a lot of these costs are almost considered worthless in economic terms (except for their crop yield increases).