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 26, 2014 | 17 Comments
And so we come to Small Farm Future’s 100th blog post. Coincidentally, it’s also the first one to be sent from my new home on the farm, where I’m now living permanently (or at least until my next reckoning with Mendip District Council), using purely renewable energy from our off grid system. Well, when I say ‘purely renewable’ energy, there is of course the small matter of the satellite that spreads my messages of hope to a hungry world. But as I understand it, it was manoeuvred into position using nothing more than the hot air generated by all the blog sites such as this one that it hosts.
Anyway, what with it being my centenary and all, I hope you’ll allow me to indulge myself with a bit of self-publicity. I’ve had a couple of outputs recently that may be of interest to the small farm future fraternity. The first is an essay entitled ‘Farming past, farming future’ which has just come out in Dark Mountain 6 and is reproduced on this blog here. The essay considers the troubled future of our agrarian civilisation and uses the historical examples of Russian and American populism to articulate the social challenges that must be overcome, and the potential of agrarian populist movements to do so. Dark Mountain is an interesting project which is worth taking a look at, and there’s lots of other essays, stories, poems and artwork in Dark Mountain 6 which are almost as good as mine (sorry, I did say I was going to indulge myself today).
The other output is an interview with my good self conducted here at Vallis Veg by Phil and Lauren, globe-trotting permaculturists and sonic wizards of the web. You can hear my thoughts on vegetables, small scale farming, peasants, progress, the Book of Genesis – and other themes perhaps wearily familiar from this blog – filtered through Phil’s microphone, the evening chirruping of insects and, for my part, three glasses of red wine here. Enjoy!
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Well, congrats on the noble achievement of 100 blog posts and on the new semi-official digs. Looking forward to reading the DM piece.
Thanks Brian – do let me have your thoughts on the piece if you’re moved to share them.
Chris,
We are currently reading Steven Stoll’s Larding the Lean Earth: soil and society in nineteenth-century America. This is part of a reading/discussion group of area farmers. It tackles a theme central to what would eventually bedevil the populist movement. That is a question you raise in your Dark Mountain piece: how can a sustainable culture be built in a landscape as abundant as North America. The book does a nice job laying out the dilemma between the “improvers” and the “consumers” of soil. Ultimately the consumers won out, of course.
It would be hard in any circumstances for the agrarian populist vision to win out if paired with a sustainable vision. Particularly since that sustainable vision had a deep seated conservative/elitist bent to it. The loss of cheap labor killed the sustainable movement in the US. How do you keep your farm workers down on the farm when there is cheap land further west?
Which brings me to a question about cheap and free labor supporting our latest incarnation of sustainable farming: Woofing, interns and their ilk help many a small farm achieve a modest financial security. What happens if the Spanish economy recovers enough to employ those fine folks you have been putting to work? What happens to those fine folks if it doesn’t?
These are not criticisms. We are all in-twined in the same conundrum. But I am genuinely concerned that our small farm project or large farm project for that matter will in a peak resource society be one that has an old whiff of a steep pyramid with a broad base of farm laborers with no chance at owning the land they work.
One thing you have touched on, as have your readers, is the possibility of an actual apprentice program or a guild of farm workers. Maybe that is what we need to put into place before we slide into old historical patterns?
Cheers,
Brian
Thanks for those interesting comments, Brian. The Stoll book sounds like yet another one I need to add to the in tray.
I’m interested in your comment that it’s hard to realize agrarian populism when it’s paired with a sustainable vision. I take your point that there are elitist forms of both populism and environmentalism, but I’d argue on the contrary that *only* when populism is paired with a sustainable vision is it likely to succeed, because otherwise it’s overwhelmed by the accumulative urge. For me the availability of cheap land is a condition of possibility for agrarian populism. The reason (or at least a reason) that populism failed in the USA, I’d argue, was not because of the availability of land but because access to the productivity of that land was ultimately channeled by a state-directed process of capitalist development (as per Terence Byres).
Regarding WWOOFers & such like, again interesting points. I feel few qualms about using WWOOF labour, which I don’t see as being intrinsically exploitative, but I agree that it’s not a good basis on which to generalize farm labour. And there are already various internships and so on which are becoming available for people to learn the rudiments of small scale farming. The real problem, I think, again goes back to your main point: access to land, coupled with artificially low food prices. It’s not too hard to find bits of land to rent off people in order to earn a subsistence wage running small farm enterprises, but as you rightly say, this entrenches the access to land of a privileged few and won’t establish a viable small farm future model. I’m interested in the emergence here of groups like Reclaim the Fields and the Landworkers’ Alliance – I think we’ll see pressure over land reform growing globally in the coming years, and a good thing too, but it’ll probably get ugly, unfortunately.
“but it’ll probably get ugly, unfortunately”
Prescient, and so much radical change only comes about with ugliness. Perhaps what will pass for the ugliest to come will be only a sliver of the ugliness that we have foisted on ourselves in the past. One can hope.
Thanks for the mention of Reclaim the Fields… another group I’d not heard of before. I’ve only just looked at some of their rhetoric, so this may be a premature judgment, but their Reclaim the Seed initiative seems to me to be headed off course. I get that I’m not purely unbiased in this matter – but try as I might I still can’t square my experience with some of what they’re saying. Hopefully in the near term I can offer a more complete assessment.
Give me a couple to reply.
Sorry to harsh your buzz but when are we going to have that discussion about sustainable industrial production of nitrogen?
Hi Tom – ‘harsh your buzz’…what a great phrase! Well, I’ve got a veritable grab bag of partly written posts in the pipeline which aim to elucidate the countless confusions of the eco-panglossians, and another crack at the nitrogen issue is definitely wrapped up in all that – probably in the context of the land sharing/sparing debate and the misleading ‘can organic farming feed the world?’ trope. As to when – hmmm, well I’ll aim to start down that track in maybe about three weeks’ time, if you can wait that long? Though I have to write a tricky little article on the social statistics of GM crops in the mean time. And try to do some actual bloody farming at some point if possible. But if you want to lay down some markers here for what you want to talk about, I’d be interested to read them and perhaps try to incorporate into my posts. You may have come across Steve Savage’s take on these things: http://appliedmythology.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/this-is-not-my-grandpas-organic_13.html – interesting, but largely misses the point IMHO. Anyway, do keep reminding me – the more traffic I get on here, the more worthwhile it feels to keep doing it.
cheers
Chris
Off grid? 100 blog posts… approaches to permanence (at the whim of politicians… but then I suppose that includes the rest of us as well). These are fantastic feats – furthering farm futures formidably! [poor Brian might have thought I’d used up my alliterative capacity at his blog earlier]
So congrats. The Dark Mountain piece is at the top of my ‘to read’ list. It is raining here now, so harvest will be delayed (yet again 🙁 ). I’ll have no excuse to limit my response to less than a couple thousand words. [I am kidding]
And on this matter of there being a fraternity here abouts. Will there be a secret handshake??
Nope, just a declaration of acreage!
Seventy acres, balanced between pasture and woods, none of it what you would call strictly flat.
Forty-two acres. Twenty-two tillable (though eight of these in CRP). The CRP piece is flat (creek bottom) – remaining tillable gently rolling. The wooded portion is mixed as well. Roughly a third is along the creek and might pass as a nice woodlot. On the steepest portions of the property the woods are a nasty mix of locust, and invasive honeysuckle. Green ash disappearing rapidly… 🙁 🙁
Locust is about the best fence wood you can buy. And, you have it for free. Lasts for thirty years or more.
Good to know. Had always been partial to cedar while growing up. Know of at least one pasture in S. Illinois that still has the cedar fence posts put there while I was still too small to help [and fortunately or not, that IS more than thirty years].
“Oi’ve got 40 acres and you’ve got 33…lets live together in perfect ‘aaaaaarmony”
I’ll start cutting some locust fence posts. But don’t look for any musical harmony from me… can’t carry a tune in a bucket.
Thanks for the disclosures, guys. You’re both in…just!