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Posted on September 4, 2013 | 6 Comments
September greetings to you all, as Small Farm Future returns from its summer recess and gets ready to unveil its autumn programme of blogs to an expectant world.
But first a breaking news flash – we’ve just heard that we’ve won our appeal for a temporary residence to support our small-scale farming business. More on that soon. Spudman, my planning appeal fighting superhero alter ego who regular readers will know well from this blog, has now retired to tend his potato patch, exhausted but content. However, he’s enlisted one of his pals to take up the cudgels from now on. Expect to hear from The Broccolator soon.
Meanwhile, to break itself back into regular blogging gently, this week the Small Farm Future team is simply going to refer you on to another article prepared by our Editor-in-Chief, Chris Smaje, and published here on the Statistics Views website. The article is about the great quinoa controversy that’s been raging on the blogosphere this year, and though it has a somewhat statistical angle in view of its target audience, it’s highly relevant to the general themes of this blog. Re-reading it, I’m not sure the arguments at the end are quite as clear as they should be (same goes for the beginning and the middle, says a troubling inner voice). To restate it briefly, I think that economists and business analysts have a bad habit of equating increased social welfare with increased fiscal income even though they claim to be much more sophisticated – and the implications of that for a just and sustainable farming system are considerable. Anyway, I shall expand on that and many other things in future posts.
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Congratulations Chris. That’s wonderful news.
Thanks Patrick – and thanks for your help with the application!
“temporary residence” – what’s that, a caravan? Congrats, by the way.
Your article – I had no idea you were a clever interlexyouwell and someone who is trying to put their principles into practical use as well – kudos! Anyway, consider also why urban folk have hated farmers on and off for that last 300 years (present company excepted, of course). Farmers actively try to make as much money as they can from their produce. Oh my god, I hear you say, what calumny is this? Well, as shocking as it sounds you me and everyone else can get greedy. This is why we need reform: price controls, laws, international treaties and not free markets so society can stop us from feathering our nests at the expense of the misery of millions. We do need markets, but not the hideously vile ideology of free markets.
I fully expect those Andean farmers are rubbing their hands with glee, reassuring themselves that it is not their fault that their neighbours in their nearest town can no longer afford to eat quinoa, but a political problem for politicians, which will be small comfort, I’m sure.
So, what do we do about it? Until we get quinoa in the quantocks we can do eff all about it. Don’t buy quinoa, grow it yourself, encourage somerset veg box growers to grow it, lobby your politicians to spout guff about it. Very depressing.
Thanks for your posts, Tom. Yes…home for 3 yrs will pretty much be a glorified caravan. I’ll post some more about it as our plans develop.
And also yes, I very much agree with your quinoa comments. Which raises troubling questions in relation to my ‘small farm future’ schtick really, since getting the economics around that right is crucial and also pretty difficult. I think there’s sometimes a too easy assumption in the alternative (farming) movement that people are basically nice and community-minded, so once all the evil corporates have been defeated everyone can live convivially…but it’s clear enough even from my very local experience of running a community-minded small business that things fall apart if you don’t get the base economic incentives right (and indeed, it’s not so much that people involved in corporate capitalism are evil as that the system in which they must operate gives them few options but to make decisions with evil consequences for others). So long as the alternative farming movement is just a few nutters like me selling veg we can kid ourselves that our niceness will prevail, but really we need to think the economics through a little more rigorously. Which hopefully I’ll try to engage with in some future posts. The history of the organic movement is something of a cautionary tale in this respect.
Ah, my comment has a tone, when rereading, I didn’t intend. I clearly haven’t mastered nuance over the interweb. My point was – more soberly – when there is opportunity self interest will take over unless it is tempered by society, ie regulation of markets. It is probably ok (politically) to allow individualists to get on with exploiting markets as long as we, as a democratic (choke!, cough!) society think about what the impact of that exploitation will be and whether we want that.
In my defence I have recently been watching Chomsky on the net and systematically trawled *every* link on Wikipedia concerning the English civil war / Revolution so I claim diminished responsibility….