As was mentioned earlier, all of our producers were motivated to ensure that they were contributing to the overall health of their surrounding environment. This, along with the health of the people in their communities, were the main factors influencing our producers’ growing practices.

P12 mentioned how there has been a "paradigm shift” leading people to “recognize the value of natural resources and to not squander them as well as the value of the plant life and animal life and not to squander them.” He said that “part of that is how you utilize that, all of it, in a sustainable way.” Along the same lines, P13 said that at his farm they were “trying to make our little part of the world better” by “having healthy plants and a healthy ecosystem...knowing we’re not using anything that is toxic.”

For some of our producers, a large part of being sustainable was focused on “conservation of resources" (A1).

This was especially true for P14 who said:

"I think what it means to be a successful farmer is developing practices on a farm that would make a farm a closed system and a living organism in and of itself. Being able to have the amount of land to grow the carbon that you would need to produce your soil...purchase as little as possible, being able to grow out your own seeds and produce that seed and those crops on your farm."

Looking at the bigger picture, for our producers a healthy environment was just one part, albeit an important part, of how growing food made a difference in the world. “There’s so much you can address by growing your own food,” said A3, “Environmental issues, food security issues, oil, wars in Iraq, it goes so far. So I really, I wanna keep doing that, whether it be farming or working on someone else’s farm. I just really wanna keep pursuing that.”