Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
Posted on January 13, 2023 | 15 Comments
Just thought I’d make a brief appearance here to wish Small Farm Future readers a happy new year, and to thank those of you who kindly contributed to the Small Farm Future Christmas appeal.
Also, my thanks to Simon for publicizing that I was speaking on a panel at the Oxford Real Farming Conference with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Manish Jain and Mika Tsutsumi. Apologies I didn’t do a better job of publicizing it here myself.
In the event my contribution was a bit underwhelming. I was acting as a discussant for the fine new Planet Local film – we’d just got to the bit where Naomi Klein was saying we needed to build more local resilience because we couldn’t rely on networked global infrastructure in the face of proliferating system shocks, when my internet connection went down and mostly stayed down for the rest of the session. It was a good illustration of her point, but suboptimal in terms of my ability to participate in the discussion.
Anyway, in the meantime I’m still busy on my little writing side project that’s keeping me from blogging here, but I’m beginning to see a glimmer of light at the end of that tunnel. I’m hoping to ease myself back with some new content on this site in February. I’ve got a ton of work to do outside too, but it’s proving one of the wetter winters in recent years here, so faced with the choice of standing ankle deep in floodwater full on to the battering southwesterlies or tapping on my keyboard in Small Farm Future HQ it’s a bit of a no brainer.
Anyway, I hope the conversations here will be flowing again soon, but ciao for now.
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS
I’m glad to hear the writing is coming along. The internet outage for the ORFC session is too bad; in the end I couldn’t make it to that one due to some in-person commitments, but I am still hoping to catch up later on YouTube.
This is now my fourth winter at the allotment, and the fourth one in which people have said things like “it doesn’t usually flood this badly” or “we do get flooding every ten years or so, this is the worst I’ve seen” or whatever. It isn’t yet as wet as it was at this point in 2021, I can tell because the floor of the shed is wet but not yet underwater. I have a theory that most people don’t remember weather very well.
My Boddington’s soup peas are still alive despite a low of -10°C in the December cold snap (the London warm microclimate doesn’t apply in the frost pocket of the allotment site), so I might sow some more of those. Broad beans didn’t make it, but there’s still time. And all our previous work digging paths to build up beds and then filling the paths with woodchips means I don’t have to stand ankle-deep in the wet in most bits of the plot. I’m sure when our next drought arrives I’ll be sorry about the distance from the water table, but for now I’m grateful.
A belated happy new year to you as well, since I missed the Christmas post. Thank you for another year of incisive and thoughtful posts, and very much looking forward to the new book project when you can tell us more.
I watched the Planet Local film and found little to disagree with, but I am skeptical that de-urbanization, which is necessary for low-energy localized food production, can be accomplished in the time required even if the policies that promote globalization and industrial agriculture were reversed. And I suspect that it will take a profound failure of existing food networks, and the hunger that failure will produce, to really kickstart the abandonment of cities.
There are a few choice t thoughts here.
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/dusk-of-a-global-empire-47e055c0fa89
Food “could ” brine one of the last things to fail , the powers that be will move heaven and earth to keep pitchforks off the streets , though some cities are emptying now , people moving to towns in the Midwest and down here into TX , property prices are stable here yet falling in other places .One family I talked to were amazed our small town has no street cleaners yet there is no trash on the sidewalks no used syringes or other drug parifinalia . Their main gripe is about people like me who stop in the road and talk to people they know blocking traffic ! Life is far less fraught in a small town .The
The cities are emptying of the people that hold society together, tired of the drugs and violence of cities , tired of the lousy services that hardly function and cost a fortune to run , glad to leave what they call the festering mess , Nike has pulled out of Seattle the latest company that have given up on feral cities , by the time food runs out in the cities the honest decent people will have all ready left .
I think there will still be a lot of “honest and decent” people left in cities, they will just be too poor, old or infirm to leave.
Come now, we might yet get massive depopulation by some contagious illness to bring cities back to a more realistic size for such a transition. I don’t hope for such an outcome, of course, but it still looks well within the realms of possibility from where I’m sitting. But I also wouldn’t be surprised by pretty sharp pockets of urban hunger in the next, say, five years. I can’t feed my household entirely on produce from my allotments, but they do still make a bigger impact on our food resilience (including both security and resilience) than pretty much any other work I could be doing, with the possible exception of certain types of community organising that I am not particularly good at.
(Someone who is a better historian than I am will have to say whether the situation that followed the Black Death — labour shortages, but more food available per worker — set the scene for many of the changes we think of as modernity.)
Meanwhile I found out this winter that I don’t, for whatever reason, absorb folate very well from food… it isn’t a lack of leafy greens in my diet, I can assure you of that, and I eat more liver than the average person too. After several weeks on high dose prescription folic acid tablets, more of my red blood cells are the right shape again and I’m much less exhausted. But let’s say that my interest in the ability to produce concentrated forms of certain nutrients at home has just increased markedly. In industrial society, folic acid is very cheap — the “nominal” prescription fee I paid is probably more than the cost of the medication.
Curious about the post-Black Death food situation in England, I found the paper linked below. After the massive depopulation, wages went up while food prices came down, which seems counterintuitive and implies to me that the non-productive middlemen took some hits. (“These changes represented a major redistribution of wealth.”)
“Historical documents from the post-Black Death period indicated that standards of living improved after the epidemic, at least in some areas of Europe such as England. These changes in standards of living resulted in large part from the massive depopulation caused by the Black Death, which reversed the pre-epidemic conditions of an excess population relative to resources [22].
“After the Black Death, there was a severe shortage of laborers, effectively ending the medieval system of serfdom, and consequently wages improved dramatically while prices for food, goods, and housing fell [23]. These changes represented a major redistribution of wealth. Real wages rose to levels that were not exceeded until the 19th century, which allowed for improvements in housing and diet for people of all social status levels [1], [24]–[28].
“In England, for example, grain prices dropped steeply after 1375 and generally remained low for almost a century and a half thereafter [29]. Though it took several years for real wages to rise in England in the aftermath of the Black Death (in fact, they may have actually dropped in the period immediately after the epidemic), by the late 14th century real wages had risen sharply to their medieval peak [30]. By the late 15th century, real wages were at least three times higher than they had been at the beginning of the 14th century [29].
“The shortage of labor presented new freedoms to workers and placed new pressures on employers. Given that the number of workers was not only smaller than had existed before the Black Death, but that they had new opportunities for mobility and alternative employment if they found existing conditions unsatisfactory, employers increased not only wages but also payments in kind, such as extra food and clothing, to attract workers [23].
“Improvements in diet after the Black Death, and particularly decreases in social inequities in diet that presumably benefitted the majority of the lower status population of England, might have acted to reduce average levels of frailty in the population, perhaps more than any other factor associated with improvements in standards of living. Changes in diet can lead to changes in health because nutritional status strongly influences immune competence [31].
“Following the Black Death, the amount of money spent per capita on food increased, and people ate higher quantities of relatively high-quality wheat bread, meat, and fish, much of which was consumed fresh rather than salted as had been common prior to the epidemic [29]. Such changes probably improved the nutritional quality of the diet [29], and given that the diet of lower classes became more similar to that of high status individuals, a greater proportion of the post-Black Death English population was consuming a nutritious diet than had been true before the epidemic.”
Stress, sex, and plague: Patterns of developmental stress and survival in pre- and post-Black Death London
Sharon N. DeWitte
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajhb.23073
Correction
This is the paper I quoted in my comment above:
Mortality Risk and Survival in the Aftermath of the Medieval Black Death
Sharon N. DeWitte
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0096513
Thanks for this, Steve — this was roughly my impression of what happened.
Of course, the past is not the present, and so far we aren’t looking at anything like the mortality rates of the Black Death (I think some estimates are that it killed something like a third of the population of England over a few decades). And the mediaeval peasants weren’t facing environmental collapse or the impending unavailability of fossil energy. But I wonder, given our current reliance on fossil energy for industrial food production, whether we aren’t ultimately facing a similar shortage of labour.
Agriculturally we have a few things going for us that mediaeval peasants didn’t: a better understanding of soil life, cover crops, improved seed varieties and so on. None of it is 100% protection against flooding, drought or fire.. which I think will exacerbate both precarity of food supply and shortages of labour.
I also read that after the Black Death a ban was introduced to prevents the plebs from wearing/owning ermine. Peasant wage increases ment that ermine became affordable to people other than the nobility/church etc.
Just now watched most of the film. Nothing new here, and those who are moved by the message have already heard it many times. Those who will not hear, will not be affected by the film. Granted, there are many who don’t have the means to react in any substantial way, and I feel bad for them. Our leaders have been coopted by unbridled capitalism and have let them down.
Relocalization is but one aspect of the many changes needed/compelled, but I find it unlikely that any actions will be voluntary and proactive. Transition will be forced, inefficient, and sadly catastrophic. I do see some deurbanization and relocalization happening, but only small and scattered cases.
There will be some “lifeboat” communities established, and the people who see the need are creating/heading toward them. The biggest challenge to transitioning the most land to local sustainable food systems will be land access and governance, which is central to Chris’ pondering here.
I was pleased to hear the rallying cry for creating jobs and keeping livelihoods in the Hungarian countryside that went out on this morning’s farming and the environment hour, along with a call to halt any further development that encroaches into rural areas. But this was really one voice pushing back against a 19-hectare Chinese battery plant being built to make batteries for new BMWs and the like (the rendering of which does include some trees in the parking lot, and is said to create 440 new jobs). Then the news kicked in, with confident predictions of avoiding a recession and knocking the GDP out of the park… so I basically agree with you, Steve.
Anyway – taster content from the new issue of The Land that’s about to, erm, land:
https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/rebooting-reality
Thanks for the link. I’ve followed Chris’ interactions with the ecomodernists/techno-optimists, but had not heard of the replanet org.
Their point about being awash in a sea of uncertainty and no trusted authority is point on. Is it intentional, or simply an emergent condition resulting from infinite soapboxes and unleashed tribalism our internet has enabled? Who knows, once more, no trusted source to provide the answer………..
Desperation, denial, bargaining, etc…. posing as confident answers. I see that GM derived food is one arrow in their quiver. My thoughts on GMOs in general from a few years ago:
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2016/03/genetically-modified-organisms.html
My views haven’t changed much since then.
Thanks Steve. Naturally I share your views on GMOs and your post makes a good companion piece to the Mike Hannis one on (Dear God, the hubris!) ‘rebooting food’. Alas, it appears it’s in our nature to start down this latest twist in the road, never really knowing where we’re headed.
PS Great beets!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-climate-change-have-brought-plague-to-medieval-europe/