Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on April 14, 2013 | 8 Comments
A friend of mine mentioned that this blog is increasingly focusing on the big political picture and getting a bit too distant from the practicalities of small-scale growing. Maybe he’s right. I’ll try to make amends in my next post by writing something about the early progress of my vegetable growing experiment.
But dammit, I just can’t help dwelling on the political side of things when it’s this that’s the main impediment to a just and sustainable food system – and given the upcoming political event on Wednesday, I feel obliged to post something political today. No, no – not that event. I mean the international day of peasant struggle.
It’s a funny coincidence – the present neoliberal era that Margaret Thatcher helped usher in seems about as unpropitious as possible for small-scale farming here in the UK, and just about anywhere else for that matter. Still, the demise of the small farm has long been predicted but remains unrealised, and according to Via Campesina there are still around 2 billion people in the world today making at least part of their living from small scale farming and allied occupations.
There seems to be a fair amount of Thatcher revisionism doing the rounds even in liberal circles at the moment – she was right to take on the miners, British heavy industry was a dead duck etc etc. The tragedy is that, even if that’s so, she had no bigger vision for a sustainable economy, using oil revenues to fund tax cuts and speculative growth, and we’re now reaping the bitter harvest of those policies.
But perhaps therein lie the seeds of a small farm renaissance. Surveying the scene in Britain, there seems to be an ever-smaller proportion of the population in secure employment, the steady dismantling of welfare provision, and the digitally-enhanced atrophy of all sorts of ways that people used to be able to employ their creativity for financial gain. Meanwhile, the Waitrose chief executive is saying that we should brace ourselves for massive food price hikes, the UK is importing wheat and potatoes for the first time in years, allotment gardening has never been so popular, and a dedicated band of British small-scale growers are heading off to the European Via Campesina meeting in an attempt to found a British branch. Small things, I know, but perhaps portents of the increasing impotence of ‘liberal-democratic’ government to deliver what people actually want, and of our own capacity to start rebuilding for those wants ourselves, at home. So perhaps there’s some scope after all for realising a small farm future.
David Runciman recently decried our ‘staid and unadventurous politics’, writing ‘there have got to be better ways of working for a living than we currently manage’. Amen to that – so I think I’ll go and plant out some potatoes. As the daughter of a grocer, a firm advocate of self-reliance and a no-nonsense battler, I’m sure Margaret Thatcher would have approved if only she hadn’t lost her inner peasant somewhere in the corridors of power.
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So – allotment gardens on your side of the pond… they are increasing in popularity, yes? Good. I’m imagining there are at least a few business models for how these are accomplished. Most are year-to-year space rentals by a land owner to prospective gardeners? The degree of infrastucture (irrigation, wildlife exclusion, fertilizer (or compost, manure…), available advice to growers and so forth – these vary with rental rates or business model?
When you have the time – either point to a source that describes the UK picture, or please, paint one yourself.
Hi Clem
Yes, the popularity of vegetable gardening has leaped in recent years here in Britain – it may be just another lifestyle fad, but the way the economy is going as per my blog post perhaps not!
Over here, local governments at town or district level are statutorily obliged to provide allotments for their populations, so most towns have various bits of land set aside and divided up into small plots for people to cultivate for an annual rent – usually they’re managed by the local council, or by a semi-independent allotment association. But often there are long waiting lists to get an allotment and councils don’t accord them much priority. There’s a long history of land access activism over here in which the allotment movement has figured prominently, and local citizens often fiercely cherish allotment land and kick up a big fuss when, as often happens, it’s potentially earmarked for other developments.
We have a National Allotment Society http://www.nsalg.org.uk/ and, here in Frome where I live, a local allotment association that manages the allotment sites here http://fromeallotments.co.uk/?option=com_contact&view=contact&id=1&Itemid=14. I’ve never had an allotment myself so I don’t know the ins and outs of it but as you mention, collective infrastructure – water, fencing etc is often a big issue. People often make their own compost, or import manure, or use synthetic fertiliser. You hear of allotment associations ruling with an iron hand and ejecting people who don’t garden ‘properly’! But of course it can be a great focus for community-building, and a lot of associations lay on gardening courses for beginners. There have been various academic evaluations of allotment growing from an environmental perspective – one I recall reading suggested that the allotments performed pretty well…except that people routinely drove to their allotments individually in their cars, which negated a lot of the advantages!
As the demand for allotments has grown, increasingly there are arrangements between private landowners and would be gardeners. There are also garden share schemes (people who don’t fully use their own domestic gardens allowing other people to grow veg in them) and various community gardening initiatives. These schemes vary from straightforwardly commercial/profit-oriented to entirely charitable/community-building in intent.
For some years now, we’ve let people grow veg on a part of our holding. As community/environmentally-minded private landowners we’ve tended to charge quite a low rent and insist on people doing things like using organic methods and not routinely driving to the site. We have a written agreement that we get plotholders to sign – if you’re interested I can send it to you if you email me via this site’s contact form. Community-wise I’d say the project has been a plus, but to be honest it’s proved quite a headache organisationally at times and I couldn’t really justify it on financial grounds, though I think some landowners – probably harder nosed ones than me – find it worthwhile. We’ve tried to place the onus on the plotholders to form their own association and deal with the issues themselves, minimising our time input as landholders. Making private land available for public use raises a host of interesting issues…perhaps I’ll write a blog post about it some time.
Hope that helps – would be interested to hear people’s views.
Remember Thatcher said there is no more beautiful word in the English language than freeholder. Which of course (if youll forgive the following patronising tone, but im going to say it anyway) led to sub prime mortgages, which led to the present mess.
Good point. Though I suppose if I’m totally honest I may have to get in touch with my inner conservative, or at least my inner Jefferson, and admit that I kind of agree with her. Where I disagree with conservatism is first in its common assumption, represented by Thatcher more than most, that support for private property must imply opposition to collective welfare, and second that being a true ‘freeholder’ involves nothing more than having a mortgage on a house while neoliberal economics lets rip.
If you’ve ever seen Land and Freedom (which is basically George Orwell’s experience of the spanish revolution) you’ll see the peasants’ committee debating whether to divide the land up or collectivise and the peasant proposing the individualist solution is not denounced on the spot as a petit-bourgeois. Its only Marxists that have a problem with left wing individualism, South American small holders know what I’m talking about.
Therefore can I recommend Proudhon and Zapata rather than Jefferson? You can own a little land and still your watchword can be liberty, but not really if you are a slave owner.
Tom,
You certainly may recommend Proudhon over Jefferson. So might one recommend Marx over Lenin. And I for one certainly appreciate your mention of the Frenchman as I’d never heard of him before. And with only a brief look at Proudhon I see you have a fair recommendation to make.
But your portrayal of Jefferson as somehow less worthy because he was a slaveholder is to me a bit too severe. I do not want to seem an apologist for slave holders – quite the contrary. But in the world Jefferson inhabited it was still seen as as legally permissible. So from our safer perch in history we might judge him harshly on that point – but this seems to me throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
From my smallish research on Proudham it appears he was a serious anti-Semite. To many of our fellow travelers today this might be considered as anti-social as being a slave holder. And to lead a defense of Proudhon in a smaller way – he did live in a Europe in a time ripe with anti-Semitic feelings.
My point here being that we should perhaps be open to considering thoughts on the merits of the ideas themselves – and not be too quick to judge the source of the thought lest we mix up aspects of a fellow human’s complex nature.
Thanks for that interesting debate, guys. Yes I very much agree with you Tom about Marxists and left wing individualism – but it’s quite hard to carve out some political space for the latter these days. I’ve been meaning to write something about agrarian populism for ages, so I’ll take your comment as a spur to get to it. As for the other thinkers you and Clem mention, in my student days I did read about all of them but nowadays I remember them mostly in a few little soundbites. Jefferson’s always good for some stirring quotations on the virtues of smallholding, but I agree the slaveholding sours it a bit – not sure where I stand on that in regard to your point Clem, but I see what you’re saying. I can’t remember much about Proudhon other than as the coiner of the famous ‘property is theft’ phrase, which strikes me as a bit problematic. And yes, give me Marx over Lenin. Zapata is a good one – must reacquaint myself with the Mexican revolution. I was in Mexico in 1986 when you could just about still see the traces of the revolution’s agrarian settlement, and back again briefly in 2002 by which time I think NAFTA had pretty much snuffed it out. But there’s still a lot of left wing peasant activism in Latin America, and I believe it’s now official that Via Campesina UK has been endorsed, so perhaps we can bring a bit of (peaceful) Zapatista spirit into our attempts to create a new agrarianism over here.
I had no idea Proudhon was anti-Semitic, but then when I was into reading about long dead French anarchists there was no such thing as Wikipedia to pick such things up. What may interest those who have a socialist political outlook but recognise personal industry and self governance, is his idea of possession and not property. That the land would be owned in common but your bit you can use to benefit yourself. And that applies to industrial capital as well.
He also said “property is freedom”. If you can hold both that and “property is theft” in your head at the same time you’ll get a libertarian socialism of sorts. I feel 25 again, skinny rollup in hand.