Polyculture. Or How I Stopped Worrying and Now Embrace the Unpredictable

“At its best, life is completely unpredictable.” – Christopher Walken

Our number one vegetable crop is tomatoes. In fact, we grow more than 30 different fruit and vegetable crops, and tomatoes typically account for more sales than our bottom 20 crops combined.

When you grow so many types of varieties of crops, it’s known as polyculture. In a polyculture system, you can usually expect one or two crops to fail each year because of variance in weather, rainfall, pest pressure, wildlife damage (you never know what random year deer will decide they like to eat all your pepper plants), soilborne plant disease, or even staffing issues. You just hope its chard that fails, and not your best seller.

Every year, I explain the above to our interns, who come to White Violet to learn about small-scale sustainable growing. I want them to know that it’s OK when not everything goes according to plan. But, I also always joke that I can accept some occasional failures, as long as it’s not tomatoes. The truth is, that’s not a joke. It’s always been a worry in the back of my mind. What happens the year tomatoes fail?

Well, 2025 was that year. A confluence of extraordinarily hot and humid weather (especially the overnight temperatures) which caused blossom drop (which is when the tomato plant sheds its flowers due to heat stress – no flowers means no fruit), and a family of deer figuring out how to enter our high tunnels and feasting on our tomato plants, meant that our tomato production was down more than 80 percent year-over-year for most of the summer.

Production bounced back somewhat starting in late August, when temperatures returned to normal and we put up new fencing to keep the deer out of the high tunnels, but the damage was done.

To add insult to injury, we kept hearing from folks at market that they were hoping to buy our tomatoes because their own backyard ones weren’t producing (they were obviously experiencing the same weather-related issues that we were).

Just when our supply was tanking, our demand was growing. Economics can be heartless sometimes.

But, polyculture is also insurance. You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket (not that we had issues with our chickens this year, thankfully). Polyculture provides us with resilience.

In a year where tomatoes let us down, we were swimming in a sea of cucumbers. Our flowers were flying off the shelves. Early season conditions were ideal for potatoes. By the time the soil settled on most of the 2025 season, we were nearly as productive as the previous year.

Imagine if we only grew tomatoes. Our end results would have been much grimmer. That’s the chance you take with monoculture, which is growing just one crop. It’s not a natural system. Nature doesn’t like growing just one thing. It prefers a complicated mesh of dozens, or even hundreds of different flora, all doing their best, and some thriving in certain years where others perish.

A successful and sustainable agricultural system needs to mimic nature. It is protection. It is abundant. It is beautiful.

So now I know what will happen if our number one crop fails. We’ll just keep going. We’ll just keep growing. We’ll be fine. I don’t have to worry about the “what if?” anymore. It happened, and our resilience was on display.