The Three Sisters and the Small Farm Future

We grow the traditional Three Sisters, corn, bean, and squash, on a small plot.  It’s lovely, and traditional, we get some awesome dried corn and beans from it.  And it feeds my imagination.
 
The Three Sisters are part of a fertile and beautiful corner of my inner world - a place - or time? - in which people grow good food on family or community farms while regenerating the land, using simple tools, but also with so much intelligence and knowledge that it’s gentle work, and leaves time for other endeavors.  ​

In this image, farms are diverse, growing many crops, and on most pieces of land, multiple foods are grown in symbiosis, simultaneously or in sequence.   I’ve read and done and know enough to be confident that it’s not physical or natural constraints that keep us from farming in this way in the real world; it’s our hearts, minds, and social organization.  If we want, we can raise good, healthy food for all with a reasonable amount of labor on much less land and far less industrial input than we currently devote to agriculture.  The key (or the rub!) is to devote a little more human time to growing food than we do now. 
 
David Montgomery in the book Dirt says versions of my image of small farms existed in some places the past, in periods between empires, when farmers owned their land, maintained its fertility, and were able to live a good life from it.  Some writers like Chris Smaje (Small Farm Future) and David Fleming (Surviving the Future) predict a small farm future not long from now - after our current society collapses on itself when the resource base is depleted, and inner social tensions explode.  I sense an eagerness in these predictions.  I find much to like about this future, but it’s not certain it will come to pass; we just don’t know.  It’s clear that we’re eating up our resource base, including soils, destabilizing the climate, and as I write (February, 2025), I feel my (chosen!) country (I too, am an immigrant) is falling apart and I am deeply grieved. Nonetheless, I can’t predict, as Smaje or Fleming, that collapse and rebuild will happen.  Who knows, we may yet salvage our high-tech society as a dystopia or utopia.   But even if that should happen, I would still have hope for small farms.  I would hope that in many corners of the world, disconnected from the general hubbub, farmers would be growing food intensively, regeneratively and intelligently on beautiful farms.  
 
As I’ve explored and learned farming over the past few years (admittedly, a short time), I have come across various productive and regenerative food production systems that give color and shape to that small farm place in my mind.   I’d like to share one of them here – the Three Sisters garden.  Maybe later, I’ll write about another one.   The Three Sisters originated maybe four or five thousand years ago in Meso-America and spread to the Northeast by a thousand or more years ago.  It was the dominant form of staple crop growing for the native Americans here. 
 
The Three Sisters grace a farm with luxuriant, curving leaves on the tall corn stalks; bright colors and luscious shapes of bean flowers attracting hummingbirds; orange rounds of squash peeking through large, dark leaves closer to the ground.  To rest your eyes on such a garden is a balm to the spirit.  The Three Sisters require no tilling or mining of the soil and indeed, can replenish it over time.  The system requires minimal fertilization.  The amount of food produced by multi-cropping flint corn, beans, and squash together is significantly greater than growing these staple crops separately.   One acre of Three Sisters can provide a reasonably balanced, if slightly boring diet for a dozen adults for an entire year.   Working-age adults (half of the population) would only need to spend about 1/10 of their time growing this food for everyone.  It would take a little over half a million acres in Massachusetts to feed our 7 million residents a Three Sisters diet (a little more than today’s actual farmland in this state).   I don't advocate doing it right now, but say in a catastrophe - nice to have the back-up?....
 
For those who are unfamiliar, this is roughly how a Three Sisters garden works.  In Spring, a few weeks before the last frost, corn seeds are planted in clusters of 4-7 seeds on a hexagonal grid about 4 feet apart.    The clusters can be in mounds in wet or flooding soil; bowls in very dry situations.  The mounds or bowls were traditionally made with a hand hoe.  The corn is planted first because it needs a head start on the beans and squash.  Then it has reached 6 inches (others say 24 inches) and danger of frost has passed, as many bean seeds are planted around the corn cluster, and one or two squash to each mound.  As the corn grows, the bean vines climb up this natural trellis and bind the corn stalks together into a sturdy column.  The beans may also provide some nitrogen to the corn.  The squash grows along the ground, keeping the ground cool and the weeds at bay - although before the squash fills in the space entirely, some weeding is necessary.  Each plant supports the other in some way and uses different niches of space which allows for a higher harvest than the three crops planted in monocultures. 
 
As mentioned, the Three Sisters can provide a lot of food on relatively little land with simple tools.   One farmer in Pennsylvania, Erik Koperek, tracked his harvests over a ten-year period. His records are the best I could find, and his numbers are comparable to the spottier records from other sources.  Each year, he planted 4 Floriani Red flint corn seeds on mounds spaced 4’ apart; he added 4 Scarlet Runner bean seeds when the corn was 2’ high, and one Waltham Butternut squash plant per two hills.  He used only hand tools (including a mower).  For fertilizer he used just fish meal (nitrogen) and wood ash (potassium); no pesticides or herbicides.  He managed weeds so that he had a good population of pest predators but at the same time the weeds did not overwhelm his crops.  He had no need of irrigation.  His article is posted in: worldagriculturesolutions.com/tag/floriani-red-flint-corn/
 
This is what he recorded over ten years on his quarter acre:
Corn: Average 750 pounds, varying from 463 to 990 lbs (2998 lbs/acre; or 53.5 bu/acre)
Beans: Average 130 pounds, varying from 84 to 172 lbs (521 lbs/acre)
Squash: Average 1823 pounds, varying from 1353 to 2194 lbs (7294 lbs/acre).
 
 It turns out that, taken together, the harvests he recorded exceeded what one might expect growing corn, beans and squash in monocrops using industrial methods.   Let’s look at the table below.   I’m going to talk about the harvest per acre – Koperek’s plot was ¼ acre, so his actual harvests are multiplied by four to get the per-acre equivalents. 
 
In his Three Sisters garden, Koperek got an average of 54 bushels of flint corn per acre (almost 3000 lbs).  Comparatively, at the University of Vermont in 2023, the average flint corn yield in a conventional field was 57 bushels per acre; and Mt. Pleasant got 52 bushels per acre on her trial plots.  That means the Three Sisters gave about as much corn as you would get growing the corn alone.  The same is basically true for Koperek’s squash yields. The winter squash yields in New England farms from 2019-23 were 7940 lbs per acre harvested; Koperek’s 10-year average was 7294 lbs per acre, or 92 percent of the commercial farms’.  Dried bean harvests from Koperek’s Three Sister plot were significantly lower than the United States average, namely 521 lb per acre vs 1700, or, only 31 percent. 

Crop	Koperek Three Sisters	Commercial Monocrop	Ratio Koperek: Monocrop
Flint corn	2998 lbs/acre or 54 bushels	UVM: 57 bu/acre Mt. Pleasant*: 52 bu/acre	1.00
Squash	521 lbs/acre	NE 2019-23: 7940 lb/acre	0.92
Beans	7294 lbs/acre	US 2021:1700 lb/acre	0.31
TOTAL			2.23

​We can add up these percentages to see how much land would be required in conventional, monocrop agriculture to get a yield equivalent to Koparek.   The sum is an astounding 2.23: if you can replicate Koperek’s Three Sisters garden, you would use less than half of the land compared to growing the three foods commercially as monocrops!
 
Let’s also add up how many calories are in this harvest per acre to get a sense of the total food value.  We have 3000 lbs of dry flint corn, which has 1600 calories per pound.  This gives 4.8 million calories.  We have 7000 lbs of squash, which has 500 calories per pound, plus about 10 lbs of squash seeds which have 2000 calories per pound.  These give 3.5 million calories together.   The beans come in last, with 500 pounds of beans each giving 1600 calories, for a total of 0.8 million calories.  When we add up the calories in this harvest, it is an average of 9.1 million calories per acre, or more than enough for a dozen adults for an entire year. 
 
On our farm, second year of Three Sisters farming we grew the same amount of beans (per acre equivalent) as Koperek, but had only a fourth of his corn yield, and no squash.  We’re still learning.  And various people I’ve talked to said they tried the Three Sisters but were not successful and gave up.  But I am convinced that it’s not that difficult; it just has to be re-learned.  If we did, we really could grow our own food here in Massachusetts and not break our backs doing it.  We might not want this diet or put in the work, but it’s possible.  That’s amazing.   ​