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 October 9, 2013 | 18 Comments
A brief post this week on the bugs and the bees – well actually, mostly bugs. In fact, not really bugs either, strictly defined. Hell, I’ll just get on with it.
Like most growers, I keep a keen eye out for certain insect pests that tend to plague the crops at predictable times of the year, like flea beetle, carrot fly, aphids and cabbage whites. But I’ve also noticed over the years cycles of various other insects and invertebrates that don’t impinge so directly on the crops.
Early in the spring, the garden beds are rife with small wolf spiders (useful little critters) and the air is filled – briefly – with hawthorn flies (aka Bibio marci, named after St Mark’s day when the adults emerge – apparently they’re potentially useful pollinators). Later in the summer it’s the turn of the cardinal beetles, Pyrochroa serraticornis – predators of flying insects, so also potentially useful. And pretty little things to boot, as you can see.
In the autumn, the orb web spiders seem to come to the fore – or is it just that their webs are more noticeable in the dewy mornings? Voraciously insectivorous things – how useful!
This autumn I’ve also witnessed huge numbers of crane flies (Tipulidae spp), whose larvae – leatherjackets – eat crop roots, so definitely not useful. And then just recently as the crane flies have dropped off, a plethora of harvestmen – also generally insectivorous, and therefore useful.
Whether these species consider me to be useful in turn is something I have been unable to ascertain, although I suspect that the leatherjackets are keen followers of my horticultural activities.
This year there were far fewer hawthorn flies around than usual, but far more crane flies and harvestmen, which I hadn’t noticed en masse previously. Presumably, most of them only make themselves noticeable to me when they’re putting themselves about in the mating season – that’s certainly the case with the hawthorn flies, but I’m not so sure about the others. Amazing really how little most of us know about the things going on under our noses.
Having observed our Vallis Veg site (albeit not very systematically or actively) over the past ten years, it does seem to me that it’s getting more insect-rich as we’ve diversified it and indeed left quite large parts of it pretty much alone – on a hot summer’s day there’s certainly an audible buzz as you enter the site that you just don’t hear in the surrounding fields of arable and ryegrass. Of course, there are extensive ecological debates about this sort of thing, including the so-called ‘land sparing vs land sharing debate’ which until recently seemed to come down against the view that any kind of farmland was of much ecological use, fuelling the notion that we need intensive industrial arable farming and then as much undisturbed wilderness as possible. Quite why people think that intensive industrial arable ‘spares’ land is beyond me, particularly when about 40% of the calories it produces go for stock feed and biofuels – but it doesn’t stop the New Scientist printing pictures of giant American combine harvesters under headlines stating that this is the greenest way to farm. Anyway, some recent research suggests that agro-ecosystems may not be so ecologically useless after all. The studies referred to tropical agroforestry systems, but I wonder if it may also prove to be true of temperate mixed farming or agroecology. Not really, according to an interesting talk I attended by David Bohan: small islands of biodiversity in a sea of monoculture have no effect (though it may be otherwise if everyone started farming agroecologically).
Ah well, what do I know, I’m just a bloody peasant (…on which topic, more soon). Objections to our recent planning application included the comments that our activities had made the site both unkempt and bad for wildlife. But I kinda like our mix of hedgerows, trees, wild tussocky grass, weeds and the odd kempt bit. And, though I can’t really tell, I think the wildlife does too.
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“Quite why people think that intensive industrial arable ‘spares’ land is beyond me, particularly when about 40% of the calories it produces go for stock feed and biofuels” –
You’ll need to convince me these two items are logically matched. Intensive industrial arable may currently allow mankind the luxury of diverting calories to other than direct human food use, but I’m not seeing it cause that outcome. Indeed, if fewer calories are produced by less intensive means (and I’ll allow that is an arguable point in and of itself) then more pressure is exerted on the overall environment.
So I for one will continue to argue that intensive production produces calories that ultimately allows less productive (or less profitable, or more difficult, or fill in your own less desirable attribute here: _____) land to be avoided. That looks to me like sparing.
Within the range of this topic one should be keen to argue whether any individual ‘intensive’ practice is pulling its weight – or whether further improvements might well be necessary. Factoring in externalities that are typically left aside is important. The Cassidy et al. paper you cite is a good one (and thanks, BTW, for pointing it out) – but whether you account for tonnes per hectare or people nourished per hectare, you still have a need to make the most of the effort expended.
Hi Clem, I take your point(s), and you’re right that productivity and downstream use needn’t be connected logically – on the other hand, they *are* connected in practice as a result of the social ecology of agriculture as it were, and I think we do need to take this into account. Given the large inefficiencies involved with stock feed and biofuels and also food waste I guess I’d argue that there’s a large cushion there that really ought to be addressed before we start talking about sparing more land from agriculture. And, as you say, the productivity of different agricultures is debatable – I’m not wholly convinced that large-scale mechanised arable farming is more productive than small-scale labour intensive mixed farming on any measure other than yield per unit labour input, which is something that in turn I’m not convinced we really should be maximising (I suppose the word ‘intensive’ can mislead – there are few things more intensive than a market garden or a peasant farm). But it’s an interesting debate – perhaps I’ll try to confront it more directly in another post soon. I agree with you that it’s important to factor in externalities, but also to make the most of inputs – of course part of the debate turns on different people’s perspectives on what ‘making the most of’ means.
Efficiency per unit input of labor (sorry – I’m a Yank – we dropped the ‘u’ in labour …) could almost be the whole rationale for agriculture in the beginning. And long before humankind had any worries about sparing land, agriculture allowed for sparing time and moderating risks. One person’s labor producing food fed more in a predictable fashion. Hunting and gathering risks were avoided. Specialization in pursuits outside food procurement could occur, and now we have technologies that allow us to toss folks to the moon and bring them back alive.
So that is the past. You’re interested in the small farm future. Steve asked you recently what percentage of the work force would be needed to work in production ag in your view of the future. Indeed this takes us backward on and efficiency per unit labor metric… but perhaps that isn’t such a terrible thing. Unemployment is very high and with robots taking over so many production tasks there may well come a time when our excess human labor is more a curse than a benefit. On this I sense we’re in agreement.
Because there are some very real differences between the types of crops being produced by large-scale arable and the smaller scale fruits and vege farms, I think some of the debate suffers. How much wheat would you grow on your holding, and how would you rationalize the price difference between your cost of production and the local market price? Would you consider the wheat grown on your farm somehow different than wheat grown across the road on a large scale farm?
And you put the letter z in -ise. *shudders*.
Guilty. Hope it doesn’t inflict too much pain.
My car doesn’t have a boot; and we have (to my ear at least) a friendlier way of pronouncing ‘aluminum’… but I will say I prefer your use of ‘lift’ over our use of elevator…
I’ve watched so many American youtube videos I now pronounce compost in my head – “compoest”. Back in the eighties we used -ize and -ise (I believe based on words being derived from greek or latin, but I can’t really remember). I have a feeling the almost universal use of -ise in Britain may be a way of distancing ourselves from “international” English.
Oh alright i’ll join the debate instead of slagging off your charming use of English. Chris are you not impressed with all the sustainable developments in agriculture that do use modern machinery? I was watching a youtube vid of a farmer scratching up some clover with something that is dragged behind a tractor but isn’t a pl*ough*. They knocked back the clover before growing big brassicas and then the clover recovered. It had shades of Fukouka (a permaculture hero) but scaled up with machinery.
Is getting people back on the land the point at all? Has it the potential to be a bit workfare? Are we buying into the peak oil disaster movie that much of the green movement think is going to happen but won’t?
A ‘back-to-the-land’ movement might be more than I want to advocate – but I would like to assist activities that get the masses more tuned in to where their food comes from, what it takes to grow (or raise) various foods/animals, and develop more of a food empathy as it were. When you ask someone where hamburger comes from, and they reply ‘the local supermarket’ … the disconnect is clear and likely responsible for many other social ills.
Plowed right through your comment without catching the plough spelling first time. Hmmmm….
Crikey, just been out selling a few veg boxes, only to come back and find a full-scale debate raging here at Small Farm Future. Marvellous. More like this will encourage me to keep plugging away at this darned blog.
Though having said that, the focus of the debate is some distance from the topic of the original post so I’d prefer to hold fire on some of the points at issue and plow into them more directly in some future colorful posts.
But until then, perhaps I should just lay down a few markers:
– one view indeed is that agricultural origins were all about increased labour efficiency, but there’s also an influential view (the Boserup model) that holds precisely the opposite: agricultural growth stemmed from diminishing marginal returns to labour input (I touched on this briefly a while back here: https://chrissmaje.com/?p=166). So that’s something worth looking at again more closely.
– in my opinion it’s good to debate the balance between human labour and machinery in farming, but bad to project that debate onto history and particularly onto notions of historical ‘progress’: it’s not a matter of going ‘forwards’ or ‘backwards’, it’s a matter of devising farming systems in the here and now that do what we want and need of them.
– on the technical question of the labour/machinery balance we have a wide range of choices between, say, current US/UK norms of around 1% in farming and, say, Rwanda or Nepal norms of around 90% in farming. The alternative to large-scale industrial agriculture is not hand-tool subsistence farming. The fact that I think 1% is too low doesn’t necessarily mean that I think we should go with the Rwandan model. My answer to Steve Savage’s query was 12% – how about that for an opening bid?
– but yes, I’d love to stick a clover-botherer rather than a power harrow behind my tractor. If there’s one available at a decent price for a 45hp tractor I’d jump at the chance…
– Clem, I’m far too embarrassed to tell you how much wheat I’ve grown this year and what its market price would be. Then again, I’m quite proud that I’ve grown any wheat at all. I agree that crop mixes and staple production on small farms need looking at – but we’re way, way too reliant globally on wheat, rice, maize and soya, and the fact that small commercial farmers in the USA or the UK don’t presently grow cereals doesn’t necessarily mean that they couldn’t do so effectively, especially when you consider the environmental externalities of current global grain production.
– on the social question of the labour/machinery balance, no I’m not into a workfare type approach. But I’m very much into land reform, petty proprietorship and the sort of reconnection with farming, food and nature to which Clem refers. Not something that’s going to happen overnight, but certainly a vision for the future. The flip side of the coin is the rampant land-grabbing going on in many parts of the world in which peasant farmers are being cleared out to the benefit of agribusiness, cheap labour in world market factories and the ranks of underemployed slum dwellers. These are all things I’m very much not into.
– on peak oil, though I agree that the disaster movie scenarios are sometimes a little overplayed I don’t share your confidence Tom that there won’t be a disaster movie (perhaps not Towering Inferno, maybe just Imposing Conflagration) – there doesn’t have to be, but unless people and more importantly governments start thinking properly about future energy scenarios then I can’t see how anybody can rule out bad future energy scenarios. And of course there’s already a bad energy scenario inasmuch as most of the energy (and food) goes to the wealthy, something that needs changing.
Anyway, thanks guys for giving me all this material for future posts. Next week: nematodes, a misunderstood minority?
I’ve just been shown an electric car that is stylish and quick. Once oil gets too expensive we will choose to use them with electricity generated by nuclear power and renewables. We wil fill up halfway down the motorway no doubt by swapping battery cassettes. Capitalism will not collapse, it will adapt with the help of the state.
But this is business as usual, as we know. A crisis of capitalism is no more likely in the future as it was when we the left were banging on about it in the 80s and 90s.
Can’t say I much agree with any of that, except possibly that capitalism will adapt with the help of the state, which is what it’s always done.
Yeah, maybe we’ll sort out limitless clean energy and maybe we won’t – nobody can tell. Energy is a big problem for sure, but it’s not the only one, and it may be one of the easier ones to resolve.
There have been plenty of crises of capitalism in the past, there’s one now, and I suspect there’ll be more in the future. A ‘crisis’ can be interpreted in different ways. What happens in the future will obviously grow out of what’s happening now, but there’s no such thing as ‘business as usual’ in my book; capitalism or any other social system is not foreordained – it has emerged from specific sets of circumstances, and it will ultimately change into something entirely different. Still, I guess I have to accept that we’re currently living through a tedious period of capitalist triumphalism which is unable to entertain alternatives to its Whiggish view that all preceding human history was mere prelude to the wonders of watching Miley Cyrus on wireless broadband.
In the mean time, if anyone has anything to say about cardinal beetles or harvestmen I’d be delighted…
Cardinal beetles… don’t know any personally. Sorry.
Here in the States, in baseball, we have a little tournament going on now – shamelessly called the World Series. So all the baseball teams in Cuba, Dominican Republic, Japan, and other baseball hotbeds get to watch and wonder about the name. But I digress. This year the feature event is about to get underway between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox. The St Louis club famously had a squirrel participate in a playoff game last year. Perhaps some Cardinal Beetles will show up this year. John, Paul, George, or Ringo??
Sorry.
Perhaps to make up for putting you through that, I might pose this question. Have you ever run across the work of Philip McMichael of Cornell? He is publishing some thoughts on corporate land grabs and as I stumbled upon it I thought of you immediately.
I didn’t say it was going to be fun or desirable. But this is why quite a few states are rushing for nuclear power. They are preparing for energy security just not in the way that we would like them to. My point was that both the old left and the new greens are/were warning of cataclysmic collapses that would change everything and I’m saying it really isn’t likely. We short change the public with this stuff.
As you know im urban in outlook and my sustainable gardening is sort of transistion town-sy. There is no place here for chemical inputs and there is a place for renewable energy. But even though we aim to help urban dwellers develop the skills to grow their own food with few inputs and green up their environment we still need the town – jobs, infrastructure, electricity, buses and yes cars. There is mass consent for this. A lot of transistion and permaculture people think it is all going to collapse due to peak oil, which it is not. As it gets more expensive to leach out the oil, states and capitalists will invest in alternatives – which is what the current fighting over fracking, wind farms and nuclear power plants is all about.
Hope you don’t mind a bit of debate, but there you go.
Hi Tom (am I right in assuming that urban in outlook transition town-sy Tom is different from electric car Tom??) No I absolutely don’t mind a bit of debate, and I always welcome your thoughtful comments. The debate isn’t quite what I bargained for when I wrote about insects, but it’s certainly an interesting one and you just never know where the blogosphere will take you…
I think I’ll try to pick up on these points in some future posts rather than dwelling on them here. I partially agree with you about urbanism, though I think it gets a very easy ride in contemporary thought and there’s a real need for some well-considered ruralism as a corrective (case in point: my spellchecker is happy with urbanism but not ruralism). I think your take on energy may prove correct but it’s a pretty sanguine view of a process that has other dimensions and other possible endpoints. But thanks for posting on this – I’ll come to it more directly soon.
If we take a local british perspective rural land use is more than a little mad, but I feel some things are changing. I mentioned the clover bothering earlier, and there is lots of development in sustainable food growing. But I think this is market led, ie nitrogen fertiliser is now too expensive and *causes* problems in the field. Instead of npk and rye grass as grazing for livestock some farmers are using clovers or vetches for nitrogen fixing in a polyculture of coltsfoot, herbs and chicory. It’s cheaper, the livestock are happier (healthier) and it goes on sustainably for years. They sound like us permaculturists without the doom-laden millennialism.
Some things aren’t changing, the countryside is full of golf courses and horses, neither of which are useful (and have class privilege issues, too). For this reason I am reluctant to use horse manure on my gardens because I don’t want to participate in this – the horse’s grain is grown on one bit of land using oil industry fertilisers to shit and trot on another bit of land to support some good fertility on my allotment. Sustainable it is not.
I feel that land should be strictly used for food or other useful human need (like minerals – oops there goes my credibility). Because I am on the humanist left I would favour small proprietorship of the land (in the same way I am for allotments over community gardens), but others wouldn’t, even on the left.
Nice post Tom. This time I agree entirely – though I’m possibly more of a doom-laden millennialist than you. Actually, that’s an interesting point because I do think there’s an element of misplaced religious millennialism in aspects of the green movement, but there’s also an element of misplaced religious Panglossianism amongst the business-as-usual ‘eco-pragmatist’ brigade. That topic is definitely worth a post.
Good on you for refusing horse manure. I generally avoid imported manures for various reasons, including the huge fossil fuel costs of transporting them, but despite grumblings over horseyculture in the alternative farming movement I don’t think I’ve heard anyone articulate that reason for not using it before. I like Simon Fairlie’s suggestion in ‘The Land’ magazine that anybody with a horse should be forbidden from owning a car or a tractor.
There’s another great article in ‘The Land’ 14 by Simon ‘In praise of quarries’ which picks up on your mineral issue – I think your credibility is intact.
But yes, class privilege in the countryside – very evident during my planning appeal process (must post on that). And also a dislike of proprietorship and entrepreneurship on the left (Blairism excepted – but maybe Blairism doesn’t count as leftism?)…actually, there’s a dislike of it on the right too other than as a sop to petty interests in the face of corporate monopoly capital.
uh…*shame*…I did use horse manure this year but I hate myself for it. The moment I actually get the closed loop system I want (damn you Martin Crawford and your excellent books) is the moment I stop with the manure. I also supplemented my regime with bedding straw from a pet shop, doing a ruth stout and heavily mulching in early autumn on some empty beds. I smelt the delicious and long remembered bouquet of Golden Virginia transporting me instantly to my grandparents house in the 80s. Is this the nicotinoid insecticide much in the news re bees? See, insects we’re back on topic.
Thanks for bringing it full circle, Tom – nice closure.