Are small farms the answer to sustainability?

Small farms should comprise the biofuel industry:

As mentioned in some of my previous posts, large-scale industrial biofuel cultivation is likely to be harmful environmentally and even socially, but what can we do instead?

The alternative is small-scale farms, such as family-managed farms. These were found to actually be more efficient than large-scale ones enviornmentally, economically and in terms of the amount of output produced, according to the study by Petersen (1997). The social benefit is derived by supporting the activities of smallholders, as has been successfully done in Brazil; smallholders also tend not to indulge in the environmentally-harmful activities of industrial-scale biofuel cultivators, such as peatland drainage. As well as being too expensive for smallholders to adopt in the case of peatland drainage, the degrading activities are not beneficial for the farmers, who strongly depend on the environment around them in the long-term, meaning that it is not in their interest to degrade it. This usually results in far fewer environmental problems such as synthetic fertilizer over-application, soil degradation and large-scale deforestation. These farms are also more likely to have greater biodiversity.

There is a blog-like feature, providing a detailed account of small farms, which you may find interesting to read: Journey to Forever: Small Farms.

How can biofuels increase the sustainability of food agriculture?

Butterworth (2008) goes further suggesting that to make biofuel cultivation sustainable, it must not only comprise of small farms, but should also be integrated with food production. The Bates Farm in Northern Lincolnshire is provided as an example of this (Butterworth, 2008), where it combines food production with biofuel cultivation in a 9: 1 ratio, which produces enough biofuel to sustain the family’s domestic activities as well as to meet all the energy and fertilizer demands of the food cultivation. Additionally, such a farm allows for greater biodiversity than the industrial-scale monoculture farms, making it highly sustainable.

However, while this meets the energy demands of the farmer and his family, I am not sure there will be enough leftover to provide the rest of the world with biofuel like this. Nonetheless, approaching this idea in a different way, it shows how biofuels can help make food agriculture more sustainable, contributing a potential solution to the question explored in the  post in the Feasting on Natural Resources blog.