The Small Farm Future Blog

Farming, technology and the Amish

Posted on March 18, 2013 | No Comments

Here’s a few brief thoughts on farming and technological progress, prompted to some degree by my recent blog wars on GM crops but not really about GM crops as such.

The original context was Mark Lynas’s notorious speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, which I really don’t want to dwell on too much more (for now anyway…) except to mention his comment that the Amish in Pennsylvania “froze their technology with the horse and cart in 1850”. Now, I know very little about the Amish, other than thrilling to the will-they-won’t-they romance of Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis in Witness as a young man – surely the truest picture of Amish social mores ever committed to celluloid in a Hollywood movie of 1985 – and also reading an interesting essay on Amish farming by Wendell Berry in his fascinating book The Gift of Good Land. Perhaps it was the latter that had led me to realise the Amish did not in fact freeze their technology in the 1850s, but instead chose actively which technologies they wished to embrace – a point I made in my post on GM when I said that maybe we have something to learn from cultures that deliberate about which technologies to use, rather than simply assuming that any new technology is for the best, as in our addled modern ideology of ‘progress’.

I already knew, for example, that the Amish used synthetic fertiliser, but not tractors or computers. It turns out that they also use certain GM crops, at least according to GM enthusiast Graham Strouts. I don’t doubt he’s right, and it’s not very surprising. While I don’t necessarily agree with the particular choices the Amish have made, I like the fact that they are making such choices. If nothing else, their actions undermine the simplistic conflations of the ‘eco-pragmatists’ and techno-fixers of the form ‘GM crops = science = progress: anti-GM crops = anti-science = reactionary’.

What the Amish seem to be doing is asking first what kind of society they wish to inhabit – their answer being a land-based, localised, small farm one. Then they ask which technologies can help them deliver their vision, and which are inimical to it. I think us non-Amish ‘westerners’ would do well to follow their example. We might then realise that ‘science’ or ‘efficiency’ are not ends in themselves but means to ends, and we might then spend more time thinking about what we actually want our societies to look like rather than simply assuming that science and efficiency will deliver it. So ironically the Amish’s decision to use GM crops, but not other modern technologies, tends to confirm the distinctions I was making in my earlier post (and also in this letter in the New Scientist) between social and technological progress, and between ‘science’ understood as an epistemological practice and ‘scientism’ deployed as a social ideology. These subtleties seem lost on the ‘eco-pragmatists’, who are far too mired in sanctifying technological development as an end in itself, an embodiment of the Good, to ask complex questions about the relationship between modern technology, farming, sustainability and a globally just society. Still, one can but try.

The cheerleaders for biotechnology are quick to oppose the romanticisation of peasant life, but equally quick to replace it with a romanticisation of urban slums as the route out of poverty for the global poor (if you don’t know what I mean, take a look at Chapters 2 and 3 of Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline… “Let no one romanticize what the slum conditions are….but the squatter cities are vibrant”). I plan to post more on this in the future, but I suspect for most people in most places this peasant to slum route out of poverty will ultimately prove illusory. So instead of enthusiastically sounding the death knell for small farmers globally and wishing them into a new life as landless slum-dwelling proletarians, I think we’d do better to ask what innovations would help improve the lives of the world’s 1.5 billion peasants on the ground, doing what they’re doing, which is farming – a point that I’ve argued in greater detail here. Biotechnology has a role here, to be sure. So do other high tech, but rather less heralded innovations, such as mobile phones (thanks to my friend Emily for this link). However, I suspect the most important innovations by far are people-focused: agricultural extension, security of tenure, education for children, especially girls, simple improvements in rural infrastructure. They’re the kind of things development specialists have been banging on about for decades, but they rarely figure in eco-pragmatist treatises since the latter are really more interested in painting techno-utopias than seriously addressing global social problems.

Be all that as it may, figuring out exactly how to ask these grand questions about what kind of society we want (or, more to the point, what kind we can realistically have) is a puzzle. It’s relatively easy for self-isolating groups like the Amish with strong religious convictions and hierarchies, but what about the rest of us? Those of us living in the western democracies would have to overcome the Panglossian tendency in modern politics in which our leaders use the palpably fraying dividends of oil and accumulated postcolonial power to convince us that we’ll keep getting richer. The eco-pragmatists merely sing the same song for the whole world, with sustainability thrown in as an extra bargain.

But supposing we wake from that dream, what then? In his utopian vision for a sustainable farm community of the future (‘Outside the solar village’ in New Roots For Agriculture) Wes Jackson discusses a land trust system in which a board of retired farmer-elders prevents misuse of the land. Well, I agree that it’s worth paying more attention to what old farmers have to say, but I’m not sure that the rule of village elders has a great track record – whether we’re talking about tribal councils in Afghanistan or Mendip District Council here in Somerset. Somehow, we need to find ways of asking sharper civilizational questions about farming, technology and society – which, to his credit, Jackson tries to do – and then find the political institutions to make them work on the ground. But these are generalities. I have to admit I’m a bit stumped when it comes to the details. I don’t feel the need to apologise, because it’s plain enough that existing political systems have failed to ask these questions too, let alone to answer them. But it’s something we do need to do, so I’d like to reflect on this further. I’ll be writing some posts shortly on agrarian populism and twentieth century politics as a way of doing so, but the path remains elusive so I’d welcome any thoughts…